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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- * For Those Who Wish to Dissent: Speech, Silence and Patriotism by Sara Paretsky (Published on Sunday, September 21, 2003 by the Chicago Tribune)* Masked and Anonymous: Bob Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America by David Vest (Published by CounterPunch, September 20, 2003) ========== For Those Who Wish to Dissent: Speech, Silence and Patriotism by Sara Paretsky Published on Sunday, September 21, 2003 by the Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped/chi-0309210497sep21,1,3039846.story A cloud of unknowing surrounds St. Johns College in Santa Fe, Andrew O'Connor and his long interrogation by Albuquerque police and the Secret Service in February 2003. O'Connor was removed from the college library by police after he made negative comments about President Bush in an online chat room. But since he was ultimately released without being charged, he clearly had not threatened the president's life. What he said, how the police and Secret Service knew he said it, and the gag order on the college to keep people from talking about his arrest, are all shrouded in silence. Similarly, we don't know what a New Jersey library user was reading the day another patron called the police to report that the man was looking at a foreign-language Web page. But the man was hauled off for questioning, held without being allowed to call his home or a lawyer, and then released without being charged. We also don't know why the FBI arrived at a California student's home hours after she talked on the phone about bomb icons in a video game she was playing. The only thing we do know is that all these acts by police and FBI are legal under the USA Patriot Act. A few years ago, I was almost arrested in the middle of the night. The police stopped a hit man just before he reached his target. The hit man had a card with my name and the title of one of my books on the seat next to him, and the police were sure I was involved. But they had to get a warrant, and the assistant state's attorney wouldn't issue it. Today, though, the cops could just come and get me. And U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft thinks that's fine. In fact, as Ashcroft has taken his dog-and-pony show on the road, he's been saying that not only is it good for the police to arrest me, or library patrons, or college students, without needing to show probable cause, they should have even more power. They should be able to search all our records, and to hold us without bail when they do arrest us. He says those of us objecting are "raising the phantom of lost liberty," and we're giving "ammunition to America's enemies." I grew up in Kansas during the shadow of the Cold War, when religion and patriotism were conflated and we attended daylong revivals of religion and daylong lectures on patriotism. The local paper pilloried my parents for questioning the revivals, printing their phone number and urging readers to call them-- which happened for some months, usually in the middle of the night. A popular high school teacher had to resign because he was doing a PhD in Russian history--and only a communist would study Russia. In the larger society, Martin Luther King Jr. was hounded with lies claiming he was a communist, and Dashiell Hammett, who wrote "The Maltese Falcon," spent six months in prison for refusing to name names to the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. Hammett's publishers even bowed to pressure from the House and briefly took his books out of print. These days, the chill-silencing winds of my childhood are starting to blow at gale force again. I am a frightened citizen right now, more scared than I've been since the first few weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. The situation in post-war Iraq seems to be creating, not eliminating, new sources of terror, while the nation's worst blackout on Aug. 14 shows how vulnerable we are. And Ashcroft's response is to say that any questions about his policies, any questions about governmental lies, secrets or silences, is tantamount to treason. When I started writing my most recent book, "Blacklist," it was under the shadow of the attack on the Twin Towers. I started writing it soon after Sept. 11--maybe too soon, when I was still feeling numbed and shocked. I started with my detective, V.I. Warshawski, in that state-- it was the only way I could write, by having her express the reality of my feelings--the feelings we all had two years ago. During the 18 months it took me to write the book, the powers of the Patriot Act and the actions of the U.S. attorney general began frightening me almost as much as Al Qaeda. Silence and speech are the hallmarks of my work: who can speak, what can they say, who will listen to them? In "Blacklist," V.I. gets penned into a smaller and smaller space by an array of business and political leaders who call on the power of the Patriot Act to silence her. She finally figures out a strategy to wriggle out of danger. But in the real world today, I don't know how someone would evade the police and political forces V.I. faces--I don't know how I would. I think of Patrick Henry's cry to the Burgesses, "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" and William Lloyd Garrison's cry to slavery forces, "I am in earnest. I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard." I don't want ever to face the choice the U.S. Congress gave Dashiell Hammett: choose between prison and betraying my friends. I don't want to be pilloried in the papers, as my parents were, or have my books blacklisted. But even more, I hope if I am put to the test for my beliefs, I will be strong enough to stand with our true patriots, with Patrick Henry and William Lloyd Garrison, with Dashiell Hammett--and my parents. Sara Paretsky is a mystery novelist ========== Masked and Anonymous Bob Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America By David Vest http://www.counterpunch.org/vest09202003.html Bob Dylan's new film, "Masked and Anonymous," has met with almost universal condemnation (or worse, condescension) from critics in the corporate media. According to most reviewers, in lieu of a plot the film offers "rambling incoherence" and "incomprehensible dialogue." It is "an exercise in self-indulgence." Several reviewers have actually worried in print that Dylan made the movie in order to have some kind of joke at their expense. Dylan's character, Jack Fate, has little or nothing to say, we are repeatedly told, and more or less just "sits there like a toad," in the words of Roger Ebert, who should be the last person to accuse anyone of that. Could the movie really be this bad? It wouldn't matter if it were equal to "The Tempest" or "Julius Caesar," it has already been pronounced D.O.A. Anytime the nation's media are this unanimous about anything, one would do well to be suspicious. After all, President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in search of "weapons of mass destruction" was met not with skepticism but with near-unanimous cheerleading and boosterizing in the corporate media. Reviewers had already effectively killed Dylan's film by the time it arrived in Portland, Oregon for a perfunctory one-week run. Although attendance grew steadily during the week, it started sparse and grew toward respectable. Not ten minutes after the opening credits I could see why the film had been marked for assassination by big newspaper media critics. They are the villains of the piece! "Masked and Anonymous" portrays the reporters who wrote the bad reviews as people who have to wear ankle monitors. Editors hold the keys that control them. Who owns the editors is pretty clear, too. The sight of superstar critic and Sixties specialist "Tom Friend" (Jeff Bridges) being beaten to death with Blind Lemon Jefferson's guitar must have been too much for them. "Friend," obsessed with his own memories of the Sixties but oblivious to what is going on outside the window, never seems to notice that Fate, his quarry, answers none of his questions. Officials of the "network" televising the "benefit" on which Fate is to appear see him as self-indulgent, too. They want him to sing "Jailhouse Rock," "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Revolution -- the slow version." He gives them "Dixie." The infamous "rambling and incomprehensible" plot is in fact rather well-constructed and makes abundant sense. Although the project could have used some tighter editing and more attention to minor issues of continuity, anyone who couldn't follow this movie probably couldn't be trusted with a comic book. The storyline is no more "obscure" or "disjointed" than "A Hard Day's Night." But it hits a great deal harder. When the camera pans slowly down a desolate L.A. avenue, and Dylan is heard singing "Seen the arrow on the doorpost, saying This Land is Condemned, all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem," try to keep tears from welling. (Or sit there like a toad eating popcorn and stuff the feeling, it's your call.) Whereas the concert finale of "A Hard Day's Night" is witnessed by screaming teenagers and an adoring TV audience, the concert performed by Fate in "Masked and Anonymous" is seen by no one except stage hands and extras because it is pre-empted by a presidential speech and interrupted by guns and bayonets. In spite of what you may have read, the film is not "set in some imaginary third-world country at some point in the future," anymore than King Lear is about prehistoric England. Failure to recognize the true setting should immediately disqualify any reviewer. "Masked and Anonymous" is a spot-on accurate portrayal of what is going on RIGHT NOW, seen through the eyes of someone with vision and not just eyesight, someone who has looked through the eyes not only of Charley Patton and Elizabeth Cotton but also of Emmett Miller and even Daniel Decatur Emmett. All America's chicken-hawk foreign wars have come home to roost. The horrors once visited upon El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Somalia and Iraq are now rolling through the streets of California. All the electoral disgrace of recent campaigns has been compressed into one presidential speech. As for the major media as portrayed in this film, it is impossible not to think of Christiane Amanpour's recent admission that CNN "was intimidated" by the Bush administration and operated in a "climate of fear and self-censorship" during the invasion of Iraq. When the new president (Mickey Roarke) concludes his "war-is-peace" oration at the end of the film with the sarcastic words "May God help you all," it is merely what anyone with a perceptive imagination can hear Bush or Cheney saying when they conclude their speeches with the formulaic "God Bless America." Certainly the administration portrayed in "Masked and Anonymous" is no more thuggish than the one currently rooting at the trough in Washington. Or, as Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) puts it, "It's the dark princes, the democratic republicans, working for a barbarian who can scarcely spell his own name." When a soldier (Giovanni Ribisi) tells Fate of fighting first with the rebels, then with the counter-insurgents, then with the Government, then with the rebels again, only to discover that some of the rebels are in fact funded by the very Government they're supposed to be opposing, how strange does that seem to anyone familiar with the betrayals and capitulations of contemporary politics, especially movement politics? It's like finding out who sponsors "Earth Day." My favorite exchange: "I'm trying to be on your side, Jack," says Uncle Sweetheart, the promoter who is, naturally, "only trying to help." "You have to be born on my side, Sweetheart," says Fate. To be on the side of workers, of animals, of oppressed people, of love, of the truth is to court destruction. Before singing his final song and meeting his own fate, Jack Fate experiences a visitation by his ghostly forerunner, Oscar Vogel (Ed Harris), a banjo-playing entertainer who worked in blackface and who disappeared after raising his voice against the times. When Fate looks back to catch a last glimpse of Vogel, the vaudevillian has been replaced by a young Black man who could be a janitor, a Reggae artist or a rising Hip-Hop truth teller, next in the line of destiny, or line of fire. This film isn't perfect. I have read the original screenplay and far too much has been cut out of it to try to make it acceptable to people who would have had none of it under any circumstances. But it is the only motion picture I have seen so far in this millennium that seems to have a clue about what is going on in America. Moviegoers will get it or they won't. Great pains have been taken to ensure that they won't even see it. It is a tale of almost unbearable sadness and loss. When Dylan sings "I'll Remember You," as electrifying a performance as has ever been caught on camera (all the songs are performed live, there's no lip- synching in this movie) you feel that he may well be singing not merely about a person but also about that "lost America of love" that Ginsberg mourned in "A Supermarket in California," a work that in its visionary aspect and intensity "Masked and Anonymous" resembles. (Its ultimate antecedents are of course Shakespeare's history plays.) When Dylan's character, Fate, is reunited with his lost/doomed love (Angela Bassett, magnificent in the role), she endeavors with great tenderness to console him for his losses, and without a word Dylan manages to convey that Fate's grief is inconsolable. It is a scene of considerable beauty and delicacy. Dylan's performance has been called "inscrutable." But who else could have played this role? There are people who find his songs inscrutable as well, and I suppose arguing with them would be as pointless as trying to answer "Tom Friend's" interview questions. (These days, anything an idiot can't or won't bother to understand is "incomprehensible" and "inscrutable.") The most daring (and intriguing) line in the film slips by almost unnoticed: moments after Jack Fate is arrested for a sudden act of violence committed by his sidekick Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson), he thinks to himself, "Sometimes it's not enough to know the meaning of things. Sometimes we have to know what things don't mean as well. Like, what does it mean to not know what the person you love is capable of?" Unlike D. A. Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back," which showed a young Dylan eating dumb but presumptuous critics alive, "Masked and Anonymous" depicts an aging Jack Fate with nothing whatever to say to them. "I was always a singer and maybe no more than that," he says. So much for "self-indulgence." David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band, The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way Down Here. He can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com ========== __________________________________________________________________ McAfee VirusScan Online from the Netscape Network. Comprehensive protection for your entire computer. Get your free trial today! http://channels.netscape.com/ns/computing/mcafee/index.jsp?promo=393397 Get AOL Instant Messenger 5.1 free of charge. Download Now! http://aim.aol.com/aimnew/Aim/register.adp?promo=380455 portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. 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