We Must Win the Struggle Between Memory and Forgetting
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
It was a cold and rainy afternoon, so I ducked into the great old Coolidge Corner Cinema, one of the last moviehouses left with an actual personality, and I watched The Report, Scott Z. Burns’s exceptional film about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s attempt to put together a report about how the CIA tortured people in the years after the 9/11 attacks. As a political thriller, it’s not Z, but, then again, almost nothing is. But considering it's a thriller about people gathering data, it’s a remarkable achievement.
The thriller aspect, of course, comes in the fight that Senate investigator Daniel Jones—played by Adam Driver, who, I believe, is in 297 movies this fall—has not merely with the spooks at Langley, but also against government inertia and, sadly, against an Obama administration frozen in its own post-partisan timidity. The depictions of what happened in our name in the black sites overseas are stark and brutal, but not so much that they overwhelm the action back in Washington, where CIA operatives do a black-bag job on Jones’s team, and where Senator Dianne Feinstein, played by Annette Bening, afflicted by ambivalence but not overcome by it, finally decides to release a 500-page summary of the 7,000-page report.
It is a victory for the rule of law but not an unalloyed one, in that none of the criminals who tortured in our name ever will see the inside of a jail cell. For example, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two quack psychologists who sold the Bush Administration on “enhanced interrogation” techniques that did not work, are last seen flying off in the private jet they bought with some of the $80 million they scarfed from the U.S. Treasury. John Yoo gets a cameo in which he explains his now infamous constitutional theory of crushing a child’s testicles. Yoo is now in a comfy billet teaching law at the University of California. In one scene, Driver is in a bar watching television and Marc Thiessen, then a White House aide, comes on and starts spouting all sorts of nonsense about the mass attacks that were thwarted because we tortured Abu Zubaydah into insanity. Thiessen now gets paid some nice bank writing columns in the Washington Post.
And that, perhaps, is the cautionary tale for our times in this film. We cannot let the crimes of this Republican president* go down the memory hole the way we allowed the crimes of the last Republican president to do so. This is not merely a caution against entirely rehabilitating George W. Bush. (In fact, this film is vague about Bush’s actual involvement in the torture program.) It also is a caution against looking forward, and not back. And, to be honest, there’s a bit of a warning in it to be wary of the support you might be getting from people against whom you previously campaigned.
I have been a bit of a wet blanket on the subject of Never Trumpers. Any voice against this administration* is welcome, but, as The Report reminds us, an awful lot of our newfound allies were involved in the administration that made us a nation that tortures. When you see David Frum, or Nicolle Wallace, pronouncing themselves amazed that the Republicans are going along with the obvious grift from this White House, do not fully credit their surprise. If the House Republicans are complicit in this administration*’s crimes because they’ve done nothing to stop them, then former Bush aides are complicit in torture because they didn’t do anything to stop that. When you see John Brennan expressing his concern about the damage this president* is doing to the rule of law, ask yourself why Brennan wasn’t so tender about the rule of law when he was trying to bury the torture report as director of the CIA.
All through the film, I found echoing in my head the quote from Milan Kundera that David Remnick used as an epigram in Lenin’s Tomb, his stellar account of the days when the Soviet Union was coming apart.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Whenever this nightmare is over, we should try to win that struggle this time around.
Well, it seems that Lindsey Graham is going to send the Senate Judiciary Committee on a snipe hunt through the evil weeds in the garden of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago's mind. From CNN:
In a letter dated Thursday, Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, requesting documents from the State Department of Joe Biden's phone calls with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in February and March 2016 -- including whether there was any mention of the country's investigation into the business activities of Mykola Zlochevsky, who owned the natural gas company, Burisma Holdings.
President Donald Trump and his allies have pushed allegations that Joe Biden improperly pressured the Ukrainian government to fire former Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in efforts to stop an investigation into Burisma Holdings, which Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens. Graham also requested documents related to a March 2, 2016, meeting between Devon Archer, a business partner of Hunter Biden, and then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
This is Benghazi, BENGHAZI, BENGHAZI! all over again. It’s everything Graham learned in the pursuit of Bill Clinton in 1998, with the weight of an important congressional committee behind him. Let’s dig up Vince Foster again and see what we can find out. Let’s all meet in the lounge of the Mena Airport for happy hour.
It’s no longer profitable to wonder why Lindsey Graham has decided to be the lead barnacle on this listing hulk of a plague ship. (Although, apparently, Joe Biden was willing to speculate on what it might be.) He has made defending this president* the defining act of his time in government. Leave why he did it to the historians. We all have to live with the fact that he’s doing it, and giving cover to the enemies of democracy as part of the bargain. Seriously, to hell with this guy.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “No Star” (Deltaphonics)—Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: There’s not much point in going anywhere on November 22 than to the section of the archives devoted to the murder of John F. Kennedy. Here’s a bedside interview with Governor John Connally from Parkland Hospital a little less than a week later. I would note that, in his account, Connally says that both he and Jacqueline Kennedy reacted by saying “they” were doing the shooting. That remains the strangest weekend of my life, especially watching Lee Harvey Oswald get shot—lynched, really—on live TV while Washington was bedecked in black crepe and solemnity.
Senator Professor Warren had an interesting evening at Clark Atlanta University on Thursday night. Her speech was interrupted by protestors from something called Powerful Parents Network, an alleged charter school movement. (Warren is opposed to for-profit charters, and would limit federal funding for charter school expansion.) Rep. Ayanna Pressley stepped in to handle the protestors and did a superb job. Of course, the grassroots movement in question is funded by the Walton Foundation, so I’m sure they’re only in it for The Kids, and not against Warren’s idea of a wealth tax.
News From The Church Of The Poisoned Minds: in case it had escaped your attention, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, is a disgrace to government service. This is what she threw up on the electric Twitter machine on Friday:
Vindictive Vindman is the “whistleblower’s” handler.
I don’t know what’s more pathetic. The fifth-grade invective. The quotes around “whistleblower” as though there’s any doubt outside of Blackburn’s misfiring synapses that the person exists. Or that fact that, in the year of our Lord 2019, this is the way a United States Senator publicly refers to a decorated military veteran. These really are the fcking mole people.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, CNN? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
This is the first time scientists have ever found evidence that dinosaurs used feathers in extreme climates like the southern polar circle, according to the study, which was published this week in the journal Gondwana Research. A team of international scientists examined a collection of 118-year-old fossils that were found in Koonwarra, Australia, but that had accumulated in sediment at the bottom of a lake close to the South Pole millennia ago. The collection included dinosaur bones and "proto-feathers from meat-eating dinosaurs," said a press release from Sweden's Uppsala University, which contributed to the study.
I’m still wrestling with the idea of the whole feathers thing, but I refuse to call any dinosaur “fluffy,” not even as a nickname. But I’m sure that toddlers will love the whole notion and, after all, dinosaurs lived then to make toddlers happy now, too.
Top Commenter Tom Klee had an interesting perspective on the testimony of Dr. Fiona Hill on Thursday. The Committee agreed with it and awarded him 80.11 Beckhams in return as Top Commenter Of The Week.
Somebody is going to have to sweep up the accumulation of Republican balls laying on the floor after taking on Dr. Hill.
At least we’ll know where they are.
I’ll be back on Monday after a weekend in New Hampshire seeing what’s going on with the campaign. You remember the campaign, right? The campaign? The presidential campaign? Hello? Is this on? Testing, Hello? Anyway, be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and thank your lucky stars you’re not Lindsey Graham.
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