Anne Heche contemplates being the meat in a Legend Sandwich…

Conflation Nation.

“Of course there’s a war – I saw it on TV.”
–Robert De Niro, WAG THE DOG.

War is only real if you let them get away with it. As George Carlin used to say, “Why do the troops keep turning up?” But even if the troops didn’t turn up for active duty, WAG THE DOG is an example of what the government can do with a little false-flag media.

WAG THE DOG is only a movie. It’s ostensibly a “satire” but as Roger Ebert insightfully observes, “It is getting harder for satire to stay ahead of reality.”

The U.S. President in a sex scandal. What can the American government do to atone for it? Not apologize to the public, or make amends, or even try to make the president a better man – but manufacture a fake war to take the focus off him, just two weeks before an election.

He’s termed a government spin doctor in the junkets, but Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) is what mobsters would call a “cleaner.” (And isn’t the government just a legalized form of thug life?) He makes problems go away. He and the White House PR aide (Anne Heche) manufacture the “war” with Albania (“because no one knows where it is or what’s happening there”) with the help of a Hollywood producer, Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman, channeling Robert Evans).

Aided by Denis Leary (facilitator) and Willie Nelson (composing a theme song for the conflict); bringing home a fake war vet, who happens to be PTSD to the gills (Woody Harrelson), and tailed by William H. Macy (CIA).

I’m biting my tongue here on the real life parallels of American government. WAG THE DOG is an allegory of this Orwellian society sometimes called America, where government manufactures crises in order to solve them and pretend efficiency. Like the bailout crisis of 2008; like the debt ceiling crisis of 2011. Who caused them? Not us. Who “solved” them? Not us. But the taxes and fortunes of the oblivious American people were raided by the American government as excuse for the quelling of those crises.

So the uncomfortable dichotomy in WAG THE DOG is its biting humor (for the audacity of the liars in this story) tempered with outrage (for the audacity of the liars in real life that this story bases itself on).

Movie brings together acting legends De Niro and Hoffman, cheekily playing off each other like a devil against an atheist; De Niro’s diabolical twinkle in his eye says, ‘Do right by me or you will burn in a lake of fire’ and Hoffman’s cute obliviousness doesn’t truly believe a lake of fire exists unless he produces the movie about it.

Flooding the media with war images produced by Motss, Brean can safely proclaim to his CIA questioners who doubt the veracity of the war, “Of course there’s a war – I saw it on TV!”

And our minds again wander to the terrifying reality of Orwell’s America: how the Bush admin flooded the media with “news conferences” that they engineered themselves as propaganda to showcase their murderous policies like Shock and Awe, and nonsensical programs like No Child Left Behind; to check off their ever-moving benchmarks in the fake War On Terror; to “prove” their transparency (ironically, by being duplicitous!). It’s not just the felons in the Bush administration; every government finagles the media, but the Bush Klan were so hamhanded and arrogant that they blew it for everyone. Now we know it is common practice to hire PR companies like Burson-Marsteller to “re-brand” activities, entities, corporations, even policies, to repackage lies and malfeasance.

“… the administration’s ambitions to manage the news knew no bounds…”
–Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, writing about Condi Rice’s attempt to keep bin Laden videos out of the media.

In WAG THE DOG, as in real life, they plant “reporters” in press conferences to ask questions that they answer with their spin; they disallow legitimate investigative reporters into their midst for fear of diluting the message; they preclude unfavorable coverage by threatening the news networks with lack of access (i.e. either report the lies or report nothing at all; any “news” is better than no news)…

Released in 1997 (when Clinton was prosecuting his own underhanded wars with little or no media coverage), whether this movie is satire or fact, it is undeniably prophetic, because in 2011, this is exactly how “war” is being prosecuted in America – via the media. Yes, there are ground troops and people dying in Iraq and Afghanistan (what Dubya liked to call “over there”) but it’s less than 1% of the American population who are involved or who know people involved in this political skirmish that has no reason and no goal. America is not “at war” – there are no bombers droning overhead, no blackouts, no rationing, and the only ruined streets and bridges are those that the local governments choose to ignore, choosing to funnel that taxpayer money into their own pockets. For America, war is an entertainment diversion; it only exists on TV.

(On the day I was writing this article, political commentator Lawrence O’Donnell made an observation about how the majority of America doesn’t even realize it is at war: “…a nation where it is impossible to in any way experience a country at war, a nation where not a single deprivation has been suffered because the country has been at war for a decade; a nation where no one has to wait in line for bread or fuel or anything else in short supply because of war…” Full disclosure: it was in a different context, but it corroborates everything I stated above.)

If you plop a person anywhere in America with no access to media, they could live out their life oblivious to America supposedly involved in “two wars” and innumerable illegal skirmishes ‘pon de side. If you did not turn on the news, would you ever know about drone attacks in Libya, or Yemen, or Pakistan? It’s just a frivolous game that politicians think it’s their job to play. Assholes. As Keith Olbermann used to say, “George W. Bush is having a war in Iraq – for the sake of having a war in Iraq.”

As Brean and his associates escalate the “war,” they escalate the lies to unimaginably audacious proportions, the aide constantly wondering if the lies will “take” with the public. Of course they do. When TV talks, people listen.

How many citizens of the indoctrinated United States of America will come away from WAG THE DOG knowing that it was a riotous satire once upon a short time ago, but has turned into a depiction of unethical real life political engineering? Only much tamer.

END

Terminator Salvation.

Today is a good day to die.
— attributed to Crazy Horse at the Battle of Little Bighorn

Every day above ground is just another day above ground.
— Poffy The Cucumber

Idiot Sarah Palin might be inclined to call him a “Death Panel.” Doctor Jack Kevorkian. If you know the name, you know the game: euthanasia, assisted suicide, mercy killing. And your mind is set one way or the other. This movie won’t change it, whichever side of the razorwire fence you’re on.

YOU DON’T KNOW JACK features Al Pacino as the good doctor (pathologist, painter, inventor, musician), detailing his right-to-life activism from his first assisted suicide patient to his eventual incarceration in Michigan in 1999.

Known as “Doctor Death” (an epithet which Kevorkian humorously embraces) Kevorkian’s credo was that he was not causing death, but ending suffering. Patients who were terminally ill or who suffered chronic pain and who REQUESTED TO COMMIT SUICIDE WITH HIS AID were compassionately helped by Kevorkian to end their suffering. If Kevorkian assessed that someone was merely clinically depressed, he declined to assist them in their requested deaths. It’s as simple as that.

Every time the phrase “saving a life” is used, we imagine it is tantamount to “preserving” that life, but Kevorkian forced modern society to raise the question, “What is life except the quality of it?”

Al Pacino gives the Armenian-American Kevorkian an accent like Frances McDormand in FARGO, but he brings his A-game, so we don’t snigger too loudly into our palms. He is aided by like-minded individuals, his sister Margo Janus (Brenda Vaccaro), civil rights activist Janet Good (Susan Sarandon) and medical lab technician Neal Nicol (John Goodman).

Danny Huston plays Kevorkian’s power lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, who won trials for Kevorkian and kept him out of jail from 1994, when he first started representing him pro bono. There is a terrifying subtext to this movie: as soon as Jack fired Fieger and tried to represent himself with a timid court-appointed attorney, he went directly to jail for eight years on second-degree murder. What does that say about the legal system that is supposedly meting out “justice”?

Written by Adam Mazer (BREACH, 2007), directed by the great Barry Levinson (whose recent work has been shaky, starting with ENVY, 2004), YOU DON’T KNOW JACK adopts a brave stance in sympathizing with Kevorkian – because an issue like euthanasia is bound to draw inculcated, ignorant and fanatic detractors.

Detractors abound in the movie, once again throwing up straw man arguments (“Are you going to kill everyone in a wheelchair?”) and irrelevancies (“Have you no religion? Have you no god?”).

Firstly, Kevorkian was not on a crusade to kill disabled people, or people who did not subscribe to his ideology (unlike the Christian Inquisition or the Christian Crusaders or the Christian Vatican), and he lamented the media and activist groups “keeping death alive” by vilifying him so simplistically; secondly, his aid to people who were cognizant of their agony had nothing to do with the mysticism of religion.

The paradox is (as Bill Maher also notes): the “christians” who supposedly believe that paradise awaits on the other side of death are the most vociferous in their attacks on the good doctor who is sending “souls” to this purported paradise. They say clinging to life is the “christian” thing to do; they say “suicide” is frowned upon by their deity; they will do anything – financially, medically, psychologically – to stay alive even though their professed “belief” is that life is merely transitionary. Shouldn’t their vitriol against Kevorkian, suicide and even murderers be negated in light of their “belief”? Yet their damnation of Kevorkian conclusively proves that at their core – none of them believe.

Either that or these snide christians just cannot abide anyone making it to paradise while they’re still stuck in this wretched existence. Which is also a case for not being very christian at all, innit? Brings another dimension to “misery loves company.”

Fieger could arrogantly keep Jack out of jail because of the technicality of how Jack performed his assisted suicides: with the patient wearing a breath mask leading to a canister of poison gas, the patient would be the person who performed the final action of opening the tube to inhale the poison gas.

Fieger even made a deal with a new D.A. – that Jack would not be bothered by the law if Jack kept a low profile. That wasn’t enough for Jack. He wanted his medical policies respected and incorporated into state laws. Not for money – he did most of his work for free. We might say, Let well enough alone – but whenever anyone is made to feel like a second class citizen, when their rights are denied, when they are shunted into darkness, when their sense of integrity is impugned, their outrage is fully justified. It’s what makes America great; so say all those who would be the first to deny inalienable rights and free speech…

Then Jack made his fatal mistake. We might think that mistake was in filming himself giving a lethal injection to a patient and then publicizing that video. Whereas previously, his hand was not the final stroke in a patient’s death, now it was – and it was on film. Courts regarded it as evidence of murder, not assisted suicide. But though that was an inadvisable action, it was not Jack’s biggest mistake. The thing that eventually got him convicted was getting rid of his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger.

For some reason Jack believed he could represent himself in court, that he could “put the system on trial” if they could only hear his case directly from him. Apparently, he believed the only way to take the issue to the Supreme Court was to get convicted and then appeal. Canny prosecutors promptly crucified Jack Kevorkian, while Fieger watched from the sidelines, fuming and helpless.

So if you think Kevorkian’s euthanasia clashes with The Law were about actual ethics and morality and religion and humanity, instead of the juvenile stupidity of legal technicalities… you don’t know jack.

END

“Stiller, I think your dweebyness is starting to rub off on me!”

Poo-sillanimous.

Nick Vanderpark’s empire is built on poo.

In Barry Levinson‘s ENVY, corporate peon and shiftless dreamer, Vanderpark (an uncharacteristically reined-in Jack Black) invents a spray which vaporizes doggy-doo, appropriately named “Va-poo-rize.” His pragmatic neighbor, Tim Dingman (Ben Stiller, in characteristic nebbish idiom), who is also Vanderpark’s co-worker and best friend, is the character to whom the movie’s title pertains. Though he was initially invited to invest in Vanderpark’s invention, Dingman poo-poohed the concept, and watching Vanderpark’s riches grow to maddening proportions drives him to deeds of dastardly dander…

Hard to pinpoint why ENVY is such a fartistic failure. The ingredients were ripe: two brilliant comic actors (Jack Black and Ben Stiller), great supporting wives (Rachel Weisz and Amy Poehler), one off-the-can comic actor (Christopher Walken), a reasonably loo-cid storyline, a recurring song evoking a Farrelly Brothers’ taint, and a scatological script – always good for a flushing laugh.

99 minutes of comedic diarrhea later, Vanderpark’s very invention leaves him neck-deep in political poo, finding the two friends on the same stool again. And us on the pot.

It might have been a commentary on class warfare, on separation anxiety, on jealousy or even, uh, envy, but with Levinson’s loose direction (from a story by Steve Adams) and constipated performances, ENVY fails to make a splash. Like Vanderpark’s empire, this movie was unfortunately also built on poo.

END