Wednesday, October 30, 2024
PBS FRONTLINE Documentary "American Voices 2024" Shows That the Division Between Americans Doesn't Always Work Out the Way You'd Think
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Last Tuesday, October 29, KPBS showed a Frontline presentation called “American Voices 2024,” which had an interesting derivation. The original “American Voices: A Nation in Turmoil” was made by filmmakers and journalists Mike Shum, Qinling Li and Arthur Nazaryan and shown just before the 2020 election. The 2020 version focused on the COVID-19 pandemic; the surge of “Black Lives Matter” protests following the murder of unarmed African-American George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin; and the Presidential election between then-incumbent Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden. According to Mike Shum (who’s credited as director, while Li and Nazaryan are two of the four credited producers), the 2024 incarnation came about as a result of a conversation with two other members of the team in which they said, “[W]hat if we revisited each of the people we had been following in 2020 for this coming election? And, for me at least, it was a natural ‘yes.’ There was a natural curiosity about where everyone was at. To be able to engage with them in this capacity was something that I was very much interested in doing. It just flows with the mission and the mandate that we started with of creating this wider tapestry of individuals across the country facing a collective unknown.”
The team had recruited a fascinatingly diverse group of people in various locations for the 2020 original, including Cary K. Gordon, senior pastor of the Cornerstone World Outreach mega-church in Sioux City, Iowa; Bryant Moore, African-American barber from Portland, Oregon; Rod and Rosie Borba, co-owners of a flower shop in Cool, California; Carran Lewis, a Black woman community activist from North Chesterfield, Virginia; Amy Garner from Utah, whose brother committed suicide in the early days of COVID-19; Dr. Christine Eady Mann, a family practitioner in Cedar Park, Texas; Mayra Ramirez from Chicago, an early victim of COVID-19 who went through two lung transplants in an effort to keep her alive; Tayo Daniel, Black activist from South Minneapolis, Minnesota, who helped organize protests against the police over the George Floyd killing; Royce White, an African-American pro-Trump U.S. Senate candidate in Minnesota; Mark Curtis, construction company owner and father of four in Richmond, Virginia; and Jason Tolentino and his Asian-born wife Jaime, co-owners of a beauty parlor in Oakland, California. If there’s a message in this show, it’s that the divisions within America’s electorate don’t always shake out the way you’d think they would. Rosie Borba said in 2020 that her feeling about the Black Lives Matter movement was, “All lives matter. Not just Black, not pink, white or purple. It's not just one race.” “All lives matter” had become a talking point among American Rightists who wanted to diminish the significance of centuries of slavery, segregation and violence against African-Americans. But Rosie immediately insisted that that wasn’t her intent at all; she added, “I think it's wrong, basically, what the officer did. I think he should pay a price for what he did. But I look back in history. I had a great-great-grandfather that helped with the slaves. He helped run the Underground Railroad. He was ambushed by white people who felt the slaves should stay slaves. So when they sit there and say every white person is racist or bad, I'm not racist. I'm not bad. I'm a human being. I respect them, I expect to be respected back.”
Rosie Barba was also expressing doubts about Joe Biden’s age in 2020, before he took office and well before his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, 2024 that led to a groundswell of opposition within the Democratic Party that ultimately drove him from the Presidential race four weeks later. (It still strikes me as odd that people dwell on Biden’s age but not on Trump’s; Trump is just three years younger and his increasingly incoherent public statements are raising doubts in the reality-based community about his level of cognition and sanity.) Mark Curtis, who in many ways was the most interesting of their interviewees, is shown becoming gradually more disillusioned with America’s political system and the choices it offers. In 2024 he decided to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate rather than either Trump or Biden and said, “I'm tired of people voting for the lesser of two evils—voting Democrat because it's not Trump or voting Republican because it's not Biden. Wouldn't really matter who got into office, I feel like they're one and the same. I think our culture’s going to stay divided. The division that has been created here recently is something that we've regressed to that’s going to take generations to recover. I think our culture is going to be horribly scarred by this. And I don’t know what it’s going to be blamed on in the end or how it's going to be spun, but I think that our culture on the whole has gone down a deep, dark hole.” Pastor Cary Gordon, who in 2020 was sounding off against “Marxists” and their growing influence in American politics, also decided that he could not in good conscience vote for either Biden or Trump. “I will sleep good tonight because someday, as a Christian, I believe Christ will return and all wrongs will be righted and justice will prevail,” Gordon told his parishioners. “And my job is to keep speaking the truth as a minister.” The Tolentinos were ambiguous as to whom they voted for in 2020; Jason said, “I would rather not say who I voted for. I just want everything to come back to normal, that's all I'm praying for, really. People will be surprised, but I don't want to say who I voted for.” Jaime said, “I just vote for myself. Or I vote for the lady. No, I vote for the lady! I don't know who she is, but it seems like she's the only lady, so I vote for the lady. I vote for the woman!” – which led me to guess that in 2020 Jason voted for Trump and Jaime for Biden because he’d put Kamala Harris on his ticket.
Dr. Christine Mann, who seemed to have been radicalized by the Right-wing opposition to common-sense public-health measures to deal with COVID-19, said her first choice for President in 2020 had been Kamala Harris, “who thankfully is the vice presidential candidate, soon to be the vice president.” In 2024 she’s shown walking her precinct for the Harris-Walz ticket and encountering scads of Trump yard signs as she goes through her neighborhood. Mark Curtis is shown in a video with his son Hudson, who’d just joined Junior ROTC, but his pride in his son is tempered by his growing disillusionment with politics in general. “There's a bit of inner turmoil with Hudson being in the JROTC program as well as my distrust in the government,” Curtis said. “I love the values that he's going to learn going through this program, as well as the values that he could be taught in the military. I think he wants to follow in the footsteps of people who've done great things for our country, for our freedoms. I very much worry that he has great potential of being in the military and being pulled into an endless war that costs American lives, costs billions of American dollars, and to what gain?” The filmmakers organized a watch party with some of the interviewees for the September 10, 2024 debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and when Trump made his now-infamous statement about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio – “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the pets. They're eating – They're eating the pets of the people that live there” – Black activist Tayo Daniel said, “Now, that’s bullshit.” Jason Tolentino said, “I just can’t believe he said that thing about the dogs. [Laughs] They’re eating dogs. I don't know what to believe, honestly, on that one.”
At the same time, Mark Curtis expressed outrage at Harris’s proposals for tax credits for new mothers and small-business startups, “So we're giving away more money,” he said. “When do I get that $50,000 for having a small business?” When Trump made his bizarre claim that “under Roe v. Wade you could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month and probably after birth,” Dr. Mann said, “Why is he such a liar?” And when Harris said that “people start leaving [Trump’s] rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Amy Garner’s husband Matthew said, “That’s rich for her to say that,” which made me wonder if he’s one of the Right-wing space cases who believes the photos of Harris’s rallies were created with artificial intelligence. As I’ve been pointing out regularly in my journal, the statement Lawrence O’Donnell keeps quoting from his former boss, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), that “everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own set of facts,” is no longer true. Today the media landscape is so fragmented that everyone is entitled to their own set of facts. Those of us on the Left side of the political spectrum flock to media outlets like MS-NBC (while lamenting that as a part of the corporate media, it isn’t and can’t be even remotely as progressive as we’d like), while people on the Right watch Fox News or even more radical-Right Web sites like Newsmax and One America News. And the basically decent people who were interviewed for American Voices both in 2020 and 2024 – the only people who didn’t make the cut were Mayra Ramirez, who died of long-term complications from COVID-19 in 2022, and Rod and Rosie Borba; since Rod died in 2023, Rosie sold their flower shop and moved to parts unknown – are caught in the middle and lament that their own goals for themselves and their society don’t always fit neatly into the prescribed “Left” and “Right” categories or the choices America’s increasingly dysfunctional political system gives them for who should lead the nation.
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
"Downwinders and the Radioactive West," a 2022 Documentary from PBS Utah, Shows How Little Power Americans Have to Keep Their Government from Poisoning Them
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Last night (Monday, October 21) I watched a quite challenging documentary on PBS, Downwinders and the Radioactive West, made by PBS Utah in 2022 and focused on the effect America’s above-ground nuclear tests from 1951 to 1963 and the underground tests that continued there until 1992 had on the surrounding populations. Narrated by Peter Coyote (whose smooth voice graces most of Ken Burns’s recent documentaries as well) and produced by John Howe (a filmmaker I can’t find a listing for on imdb.com; there are two people named John Howe listed, a director who died in 2008 and an art director/production designer on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings cycle and King Kong), Downwinders and the Radioactive West tells a chilling tale of how Americans were used by their own government as unwitting guinea pigs in a social experiment to determine just how much atomic radiation people could stand. The documentary includes a thumbnail sketch of America’s history with atomic weapons, which began with Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt on August 2, 1939 warning that recent experiments in splitting uranium atoms could pose a threat to the U.S.’s national security because “this new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs.” Einstein was picked to write this letter, based on the researches of physicist Leo Szilard and others, because as the only nuclear physicist most Americans had actually heard of, his name on the letter would garner the best chance of a reaction in the upper levels of U.S. power. In 1942 the U.S. Congress authorized a program called the Manhattan Engineering District, whose actual purpose – to design and create an atomic bomb – was carefully concealed from virtually everyone, including Roosevelt’s last Vice-President, Harry S. Truman. Truman succeeded Roosevelt when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and only then did Secretary of War Harry Stimson tell him that the U.S. had an A-bomb which they would test in three months’ time. (Truman was so appalled at how little he had been told about basic government functions, especially regarding the war, that he started the tradition of having the candidates for President in the next election receiving secret briefings about the major issues that would face them if they got elected.)
When the first explosion of an atomic weapon – the Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 – occurred, Truman was in Potsdam, Germany, meeting with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill (who in the middle of the conference lost his election and was replaced by his successor, Clement Attlee), anxiously awaiting word of the bomb test. The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities – Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later – and Japan surrendered on August 15. For the rest of the 1940’s the U.S. continued to stage atomic bomb tests on atolls in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. They relocated the indigenous inhabitants of the Marshalls but allowed them to come back to their former homes – at least the ones that still existed on islands that hadn’t been utterly destroyed, like Elugelab in the Enewetak chain, site of the world’s first hydrogen bomb test on November 1, 1952 – with the result that a lot of them got cancer and other diseases due to the lingering effects of radiation and fallout (solid material made radioactive, left behind by the tests and carried by wind through the air). In November 1950, out of fear that such a remote testing location could be the subject of espionage, President Truman ordered the creation of the Nevada Test Site in the southeastern corner of Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles from Las Vegas. (Las Vegas casino-hotels often advertised themselves as safe places from which tourists and locals could watch the A-bomb blasts.) In a 1951 test called “Operation Buster-Jangle” (the cutesy-poo names of the tests are among the weirdest aspects of the story), the U.S. Army anesthetized dogs and put them in the middle of the blast to see what would happen to them.
On May 19, 1953 a test called “Upshot Knothole Harry” created havoc when the winds shifted and blew the fallout in a different direction from the one the people in charge of the test had predicted. It was the first of many tests that would drench the small town of St. George, Utah in radioactive waste and fallout. The residents of St. George first noticed the effects when the sheep they raised started getting sick and dying en masse. “I remember handling them in the corrals,” said sheepherder Mel Clark. “You'd grab hold of one to pull it into the corral or move it into a little pen, and their hide, the wool, the skin, everything just pulled right off from them.” Then they gradually noticed the effect on the human population as well. Mary Dickson, who became a playwright and wrote a play called Exposed about the plight of the Downwinders (as they came to call themselves), got thyroid cancer at age 29. Various populations in the St. George area showed much higher rates of cancer than epidemiologists expected. So did U.S. soldiers who were ordered to march into radioactive test sites, dig trenches and prepare for combat in hopes that the U.S. could use so-called “tactical nuclear weapons” in battle. And so, in one of the weirdest twists of this bizarre story, did the makers of the 1955 film The Conqueror, produced by Howard Hughes for RKO and starring John Wayne as Mongol leader Genghis Khan. To stand in for the Mongolian desert, producer Hughes and director Dick Powell picked a location near the Nevada Test Site – with the result that two-thirds of the people involved in making the movie, including director Powell and the four major stars (John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz and Agnes Moorehead), died of cancer.
Among the interviewees on the show was Jon Huntsman, son of a former Utah Governor from the 1950’s who himself was elected Governor from 2005 to 2009. “When my dad was governor and he got more and more evidence about the incidence of cancer deaths in Southern Utah being so high, that really piqued his interest,” Huntsman said. “As governor, he was part of an effort to get a lot of documents declassified at the Pentagon. The importance of that was those documents indicated that the government only did the testing when the wind blew the fallout to the least populated direction which was Southern Utah. So in the 1950’s the government said, don’t worry, this is all safe. But the release of these documents in the Pentagon show that the government actually knew there was risk. And that’s why they had the testing take place, only when it blew in Southern Utah.” By 1955 the Downwinders started seeking redress in the courts, but they faced three major obstacles. One was the widespread belief, fostered by decades of government propaganda, that the atomic bomb tests were “necessary” for “national security,” and therefore whatever health effects they were facing were for the greater good. Another was the scientific near-impossibility of proving that any particular case of cancer was caused by a particular sort of exposure to carcinogens. Epidemiologists can and do say that a particular cluster of cancer cases, in numbers well above what would be expected in that population from normal exposure, indicates an environmental factor that raises the risk of people in that area getting cancer, but not that a particular case of cancer came from that exposure. The third obstacle was the old doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which states that the government can basically do whatever it wants to its citizens and they have no legal recourse in the courts.
The first legal action was brought by the sheep ranchers in 1956 and was heard by Judge Benjamin Christensen, who found for the government. Later, in 1982, he re-heard the case and this time found for the plaintiffs after newly declassified government documents revealed that the government had known all along that fallout posed a risk to the sheep. “I think the stories about the impact on sheep from the nuclear fallout are quite compelling,” said Judge Christensen. “The courts found that there was a connection between the fallout and the damage to the sheep herds. And I think that was the right outcome.” But later he was reversed by the Court of Appeals. A much larger case dealing with the human cost of the tests was heard by Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in 1979. The case was brought by Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under President John F. Kennedy, who brought suit on behalf not only of the Downwinders but the Navajo miners who had dug for the uranium needed to produce America’s atomic arsenal in the first place. Judge Jenkins found for the plaintiffs, but like Judge Christensen, his ruling was reversed by the Court of Appeals. “Sorry I'm saying it, [but] it came with the discretion of the function on the part of the United States to do what they did,” Judge Jenkins said of the Court of Appeals’ ruling. He called it “a fairly shallow opinion,” and the show’s narration noted that it did not dispute Judge Jenkins’s findings of fact in the case.
In 1990 Congress passed a law, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), sponsored by then-Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Representative Wayne Owens (R-Utah) that set up a fund for partial compensation for the Downwinders: $50,000 to individuals with disease who resided near the Nevada test site or worked there, $75,000 is defined for test site workers, and $100,000 for uranium miners. In the documentary, Mary Dickson denounced the paltriness of the awards: “My dad’s life is worth so much more than $50,000. It was the only thing, tangible thing, that I could get back a little bit from what they had taken away from me.” And in 2022 RECA was scheduled to expire anyway, leading one Downwinder to complain in the documentary that the government is just waiting for them all to die. Watching this documentary in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which one of the major-party candidates, himself a former President, is declaring near-authoritarian powers to destroy media outlets that publish stories that displease him and pledging to be “a dictator on day one” to enact a draconian anti-immigration policy and plunder the environment for increased energy production, proved especially timely. The fact is that even in a country that loudly proclaims itself to be a “democracy” (which it isn’t, and never has been; the framers of the U.S. Constitution deliberately created a republic, not a democracy, and were quite explicit about the difference), the government can do pretty much whatever it wants, including poisoning large numbers of its citizens, and there’s no way to hold it to account.
Last night (Monday, October 21) I watched a quite challenging documentary on PBS, Downwinders and the Radioactive West, made by PBS Utah in 2022 and focused on the effect America’s above-ground nuclear tests from 1951 to 1963 and the underground tests that continued there until 1992 had on the surrounding populations. Narrated by Peter Coyote (whose smooth voice graces most of Ken Burns’s recent documentaries as well) and produced by John Howe (a filmmaker I can’t find a listing for on imdb.com; there are two people named John Howe listed, a director who died in 2008 and an art director/production designer on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings cycle and King Kong), Downwinders and the Radioactive West tells a chilling tale of how Americans were used by their own government as unwitting guinea pigs in a social experiment to determine just how much atomic radiation people could stand. The documentary includes a thumbnail sketch of America’s history with atomic weapons, which began with Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt on August 2, 1939 warning that recent experiments in splitting uranium atoms could pose a threat to the U.S.’s national security because “this new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs.” Einstein was picked to write this letter, based on the researches of physicist Leo Szilard and others, because as the only nuclear physicist most Americans had actually heard of, his name on the letter would garner the best chance of a reaction in the upper levels of U.S. power. In 1942 the U.S. Congress authorized a program called the Manhattan Engineering District, whose actual purpose – to design and create an atomic bomb – was carefully concealed from virtually everyone, including Roosevelt’s last Vice-President, Harry S. Truman. Truman succeeded Roosevelt when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and only then did Secretary of War Harry Stimson tell him that the U.S. had an A-bomb which they would test in three months’ time. (Truman was so appalled at how little he had been told about basic government functions, especially regarding the war, that he started the tradition of having the candidates for President in the next election receiving secret briefings about the major issues that would face them if they got elected.)
When the first explosion of an atomic weapon – the Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 – occurred, Truman was in Potsdam, Germany, meeting with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill (who in the middle of the conference lost his election and was replaced by his successor, Clement Attlee), anxiously awaiting word of the bomb test. The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities – Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later – and Japan surrendered on August 15. For the rest of the 1940’s the U.S. continued to stage atomic bomb tests on atolls in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. They relocated the indigenous inhabitants of the Marshalls but allowed them to come back to their former homes – at least the ones that still existed on islands that hadn’t been utterly destroyed, like Elugelab in the Enewetak chain, site of the world’s first hydrogen bomb test on November 1, 1952 – with the result that a lot of them got cancer and other diseases due to the lingering effects of radiation and fallout (solid material made radioactive, left behind by the tests and carried by wind through the air). In November 1950, out of fear that such a remote testing location could be the subject of espionage, President Truman ordered the creation of the Nevada Test Site in the southeastern corner of Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles from Las Vegas. (Las Vegas casino-hotels often advertised themselves as safe places from which tourists and locals could watch the A-bomb blasts.) In a 1951 test called “Operation Buster-Jangle” (the cutesy-poo names of the tests are among the weirdest aspects of the story), the U.S. Army anesthetized dogs and put them in the middle of the blast to see what would happen to them.
On May 19, 1953 a test called “Upshot Knothole Harry” created havoc when the winds shifted and blew the fallout in a different direction from the one the people in charge of the test had predicted. It was the first of many tests that would drench the small town of St. George, Utah in radioactive waste and fallout. The residents of St. George first noticed the effects when the sheep they raised started getting sick and dying en masse. “I remember handling them in the corrals,” said sheepherder Mel Clark. “You'd grab hold of one to pull it into the corral or move it into a little pen, and their hide, the wool, the skin, everything just pulled right off from them.” Then they gradually noticed the effect on the human population as well. Mary Dickson, who became a playwright and wrote a play called Exposed about the plight of the Downwinders (as they came to call themselves), got thyroid cancer at age 29. Various populations in the St. George area showed much higher rates of cancer than epidemiologists expected. So did U.S. soldiers who were ordered to march into radioactive test sites, dig trenches and prepare for combat in hopes that the U.S. could use so-called “tactical nuclear weapons” in battle. And so, in one of the weirdest twists of this bizarre story, did the makers of the 1955 film The Conqueror, produced by Howard Hughes for RKO and starring John Wayne as Mongol leader Genghis Khan. To stand in for the Mongolian desert, producer Hughes and director Dick Powell picked a location near the Nevada Test Site – with the result that two-thirds of the people involved in making the movie, including director Powell and the four major stars (John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz and Agnes Moorehead), died of cancer.
Among the interviewees on the show was Jon Huntsman, son of a former Utah Governor from the 1950’s who himself was elected Governor from 2005 to 2009. “When my dad was governor and he got more and more evidence about the incidence of cancer deaths in Southern Utah being so high, that really piqued his interest,” Huntsman said. “As governor, he was part of an effort to get a lot of documents declassified at the Pentagon. The importance of that was those documents indicated that the government only did the testing when the wind blew the fallout to the least populated direction which was Southern Utah. So in the 1950’s the government said, don’t worry, this is all safe. But the release of these documents in the Pentagon show that the government actually knew there was risk. And that’s why they had the testing take place, only when it blew in Southern Utah.” By 1955 the Downwinders started seeking redress in the courts, but they faced three major obstacles. One was the widespread belief, fostered by decades of government propaganda, that the atomic bomb tests were “necessary” for “national security,” and therefore whatever health effects they were facing were for the greater good. Another was the scientific near-impossibility of proving that any particular case of cancer was caused by a particular sort of exposure to carcinogens. Epidemiologists can and do say that a particular cluster of cancer cases, in numbers well above what would be expected in that population from normal exposure, indicates an environmental factor that raises the risk of people in that area getting cancer, but not that a particular case of cancer came from that exposure. The third obstacle was the old doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which states that the government can basically do whatever it wants to its citizens and they have no legal recourse in the courts.
The first legal action was brought by the sheep ranchers in 1956 and was heard by Judge Benjamin Christensen, who found for the government. Later, in 1982, he re-heard the case and this time found for the plaintiffs after newly declassified government documents revealed that the government had known all along that fallout posed a risk to the sheep. “I think the stories about the impact on sheep from the nuclear fallout are quite compelling,” said Judge Christensen. “The courts found that there was a connection between the fallout and the damage to the sheep herds. And I think that was the right outcome.” But later he was reversed by the Court of Appeals. A much larger case dealing with the human cost of the tests was heard by Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in 1979. The case was brought by Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under President John F. Kennedy, who brought suit on behalf not only of the Downwinders but the Navajo miners who had dug for the uranium needed to produce America’s atomic arsenal in the first place. Judge Jenkins found for the plaintiffs, but like Judge Christensen, his ruling was reversed by the Court of Appeals. “Sorry I'm saying it, [but] it came with the discretion of the function on the part of the United States to do what they did,” Judge Jenkins said of the Court of Appeals’ ruling. He called it “a fairly shallow opinion,” and the show’s narration noted that it did not dispute Judge Jenkins’s findings of fact in the case.
In 1990 Congress passed a law, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), sponsored by then-Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Representative Wayne Owens (R-Utah) that set up a fund for partial compensation for the Downwinders: $50,000 to individuals with disease who resided near the Nevada test site or worked there, $75,000 is defined for test site workers, and $100,000 for uranium miners. In the documentary, Mary Dickson denounced the paltriness of the awards: “My dad’s life is worth so much more than $50,000. It was the only thing, tangible thing, that I could get back a little bit from what they had taken away from me.” And in 2022 RECA was scheduled to expire anyway, leading one Downwinder to complain in the documentary that the government is just waiting for them all to die. Watching this documentary in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which one of the major-party candidates, himself a former President, is declaring near-authoritarian powers to destroy media outlets that publish stories that displease him and pledging to be “a dictator on day one” to enact a draconian anti-immigration policy and plunder the environment for increased energy production, proved especially timely. The fact is that even in a country that loudly proclaims itself to be a “democracy” (which it isn’t, and never has been; the framers of the U.S. Constitution deliberately created a republic, not a democracy, and were quite explicit about the difference), the government can do pretty much whatever it wants, including poisoning large numbers of its citizens, and there’s no way to hold it to account.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
New PBS FRONTLINE Documentary "A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians" Captures the True Horror of Hamas's October 7, 2023 Attack and Israel's Genocidal Response
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The complete Frontline documentary A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians can be viewed online at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/a-year-of-war-israelis-and-palestinians/
Last night (Wednesday, October 15) I watched a quite good documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline series to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the disgusting Hamas attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and the massive retaliation ordered by the Israeli government and its Trump-like prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The show was called A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians, though the title was a bit ironic because there have been literally thousands of years of war between the Israelites and whoever else happened to be occupying that narrow strip of land on the Eastern Mediterranean. I was reminded of this when I recently reviewed a new recording of Georg Friedrich Handel’s last oratorio, Jephtha (1751), about an incident in Chapter 11 of the Book of Judges depicting a war between the Israelites and the Ammonites in which Jephtha promises God to sacrifice the first being he sees when he returns victorious – only the first person he sees when he gets back is his own daughter. A Year of War was produced, directed and photographed by Robin Barnwell – whose Web site doesn’t specify their gender, but who has an impressive list of credits including a film about the Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol which he happened to be shooting when the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas happened. Barnwell gave an interview for the PBS Web site at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/year-of-war-filmmaker-humanity-israelis-palestinians/ in which he said that as soon as he heard of the attacks, “I wanted to tell the stories of the Oct. 7 victims, to document the savagery of the event and to give a voice to those affected,” Barnwell said. “The last year has been the most violent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it felt right to feature victims of the war on both sides and to reflect a range of views. The film took around seven months to make — interviewing people and gathering footage in Israel and Gaza.”
Barnwell made a couple of basic decisions early on that ensured he would end up with a great and genuinely emotionally moving film. First, he decided not to use a narrator – “The people in it are ordinary victims who have been deeply emotionally impacted by events,” he said in the PBS interview – and second, he decided not to shoot in Gaza due to the Israeli governments’ severe restrictions on foreign journalists attempting to cover their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere). “[M]ore than one year into the war, there is still no free and unfettered access inside Gaza for foreign media,” Barnwell explained. “Given the extreme dangers of filming in Gaza and the high number of deaths of local journalists, we decided to look for Gazan contributors who had already been recording their lives during the war instead of commissioning people. The first challenge was to find potential contributors and camera people who had already filmed footage that was mostly unseen. Gaza currently has weak Internet, so we had to conduct searches online from the U.K. to identify potential candidates, so that our local producers could then meet them in person. We, of course, spent a lot of time vetting the footage and making sure the contributors were telling the truth and had no hidden agendas. We selected a group of participants whose wide range of experiences accurately reflect the intensity and horror of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the hostage crisis, and the ongoing war in Gaza. These Israeli and Palestinian victims have collectively suffered terror, loss, detention, displacement and mental anguish; some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict.”
Barnwell mostly achieved his goal of being even-handed to both sides – an extraordinarily difficult task given the intensity of feeling on both ends of the conflict and the bizarre competing victim narratives of both Israelis and Palestinians (for Israelis it’s the Holocaust and for Palestinians it’s the Nakba, the forced removal from their homes to make room for Jewish settlers after World War II and the formal creation of the state of Israel) – and among other things his film is a testament to the fundamental evil of war itself. Through most of human history war was something that involved only a handful of professional soldiers on both sides, and most people weren’t directly involved until the war ended, one way or the other, and they had to figure out how to live with the outcome. There were exceptions, of course, and many of them involved the ancestors of modern-day Jews; the Old Testament is full of genocidal wars fought by the Israelites against their real or perceived enemies, and God Himself keeps giving the Israelites permission for their genocidal activities. But it was only with the development of modern-day weapons – first the long-range cannons of the 19th century, then machine guns and airplanes capable of dropping bombs on large numbers of people at once in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and guided missiles in the mid-20th century – that war became a total assault on an enemy’s population and the line between “military” and “civilian” first became blurred and then ended completely.
Also, one of the regrettable results of both the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on southern Israel and the resulting Israeli overreaction has been it’s hardened attitudes on both sides and made people who previously supported peaceful solutions to the Israel/Palestine crisis much more bitter. Barnwell’s rather anodyne statement that “some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict” is rather at odds with the actual content of the film. People, both Israelis and Palestinians, who once supported a two-state solution have backed away from that, and in particular Palestinians who once prided themselves on being able to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Israelis now proudly proclaim themselves not only anti-Israeli but anti-Jewish. At the same time the film also underlines the absurdity of Zionism, and particularly their belief that by plunking themselves into the middle of an already occupied country and displacing its inhabitants by force, they could create a “safe space” for the world’s Jews to come together and avoid being the victims of another Holocaust. A heavy-set woman named Gali told Barnwell’s interviewers that both her father and grandmother were Holocaust survivors, and she had settled in Israel precisely because she and her family saw it as a “safe space” – only her husband Tsachi was captured by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and their teenage daughter Ma’ayan was killed. Not surprisingly, Gali said the experience of her family’s victimization has turned her against the two-state solution and hardened her heart against all Palestinians – just as the Palestinians whom Barnwell included in his film, including a quite compelling young man named Ibrahim and Dr. Mohammed El-Ran, who worked at the Indonesian Hospital and then at another medical facility until both were destroyed by Israeli bombing raids, are far more bitter against Israelis and Jews in general than they used to be.
It’s the sort of thing that leads to decades – or even centuries – of war, especially when the atrocities committed against both sides lead to eons of bitterness between them. One recalls grimly how long (30 years) the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland continued – and that was between two groups who shared a similar ethnic and cultural background and were of different sects within the same religion. Some of the Palestinian interviewees recall joining in the cheers in the streets of Gaza’s cities after the Hamas attacks, often before the true horror of what Hamas’s fighters had done reached them, and one young Palestinian noted that since Hamas took control of Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal of military occupation in 2005 (in a free and fair election, by the way, though in the nearly two decades since they haven’t allowed another one that might vote them out of power), they’ve set up a dictatorship of their own in which no public criticism of Hamas, its leaders or its policies, has been allowed. It also remains maddeningly unclear just why Hamas ordered the attacks on Israel when they did and what they hoped to achieve by them (just as the world, or at least this individual in it, remains stumped by what Osama bin Laden and his minions at al-Qaeda hoped to accomplish with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon).
I suspect that part of the motivation was the leaders of Hamas were worried that as more and more Arab countries normalized relations with Israel and signed the so-called “Abraham Accords,” the Palestinian cause would lose support from moderate Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves would be left without any allies in the region (aside from Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and the Hezbollah militia in northern Palestine and southern Lebanon which the Israelis are also now targeting). So they staged the attacks on the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War (Muslim terrorists in particular are big on anniversaries; the September 11, 2001 attacks took place on the anniversary of an earlier terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 which failed dismally) to get the world to take notice and say, “We are still here.” Along with Barnwell’s interview, another article on the PBS Web site by Patrice Taddonio (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/gaza-israel-october-7-israeli-palestinian-hamas-war-documentary-excerpt/) uses material from the film to profile two young women caught up in the conflict on each side. “I’ve forgotten who Ghada was and how I used to live,” says a 23-year-old Palestinian woman named Ghada. “If I want to remind myself, I go back to my phone and look at photos. My dream was to start a solar energy company. To be honest, my dream now is for my family and I to make it out alive.” Another woman, a 17-year-old Israeli hostage named Agam, said, “I can only remember a sort of sigh of relief as I was about to die. After five hours of being scared to death, it’s finally happening. I certainly didn’t think they would kidnap us. It didn’t cross my mind. … I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my life is now in the hands of a terrorist organization: From now on, I have to rely on Hamas. Of course, I didn’t trust them. I was dying from fear. Their control over me was total.” Agam told Taddonio, “I thought, in another universe, we might live together,” but now she believes “the gap is so deep” and “the opportunity is gone.” Likewise Ghada said, “My family, or I, could die at any moment. There’s no future at all.”
The complete Frontline documentary A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians can be viewed online at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/a-year-of-war-israelis-and-palestinians/
Last night (Wednesday, October 15) I watched a quite good documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline series to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the disgusting Hamas attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and the massive retaliation ordered by the Israeli government and its Trump-like prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The show was called A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians, though the title was a bit ironic because there have been literally thousands of years of war between the Israelites and whoever else happened to be occupying that narrow strip of land on the Eastern Mediterranean. I was reminded of this when I recently reviewed a new recording of Georg Friedrich Handel’s last oratorio, Jephtha (1751), about an incident in Chapter 11 of the Book of Judges depicting a war between the Israelites and the Ammonites in which Jephtha promises God to sacrifice the first being he sees when he returns victorious – only the first person he sees when he gets back is his own daughter. A Year of War was produced, directed and photographed by Robin Barnwell – whose Web site doesn’t specify their gender, but who has an impressive list of credits including a film about the Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol which he happened to be shooting when the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas happened. Barnwell gave an interview for the PBS Web site at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/year-of-war-filmmaker-humanity-israelis-palestinians/ in which he said that as soon as he heard of the attacks, “I wanted to tell the stories of the Oct. 7 victims, to document the savagery of the event and to give a voice to those affected,” Barnwell said. “The last year has been the most violent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it felt right to feature victims of the war on both sides and to reflect a range of views. The film took around seven months to make — interviewing people and gathering footage in Israel and Gaza.”
Barnwell made a couple of basic decisions early on that ensured he would end up with a great and genuinely emotionally moving film. First, he decided not to use a narrator – “The people in it are ordinary victims who have been deeply emotionally impacted by events,” he said in the PBS interview – and second, he decided not to shoot in Gaza due to the Israeli governments’ severe restrictions on foreign journalists attempting to cover their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere). “[M]ore than one year into the war, there is still no free and unfettered access inside Gaza for foreign media,” Barnwell explained. “Given the extreme dangers of filming in Gaza and the high number of deaths of local journalists, we decided to look for Gazan contributors who had already been recording their lives during the war instead of commissioning people. The first challenge was to find potential contributors and camera people who had already filmed footage that was mostly unseen. Gaza currently has weak Internet, so we had to conduct searches online from the U.K. to identify potential candidates, so that our local producers could then meet them in person. We, of course, spent a lot of time vetting the footage and making sure the contributors were telling the truth and had no hidden agendas. We selected a group of participants whose wide range of experiences accurately reflect the intensity and horror of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the hostage crisis, and the ongoing war in Gaza. These Israeli and Palestinian victims have collectively suffered terror, loss, detention, displacement and mental anguish; some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict.”
Barnwell mostly achieved his goal of being even-handed to both sides – an extraordinarily difficult task given the intensity of feeling on both ends of the conflict and the bizarre competing victim narratives of both Israelis and Palestinians (for Israelis it’s the Holocaust and for Palestinians it’s the Nakba, the forced removal from their homes to make room for Jewish settlers after World War II and the formal creation of the state of Israel) – and among other things his film is a testament to the fundamental evil of war itself. Through most of human history war was something that involved only a handful of professional soldiers on both sides, and most people weren’t directly involved until the war ended, one way or the other, and they had to figure out how to live with the outcome. There were exceptions, of course, and many of them involved the ancestors of modern-day Jews; the Old Testament is full of genocidal wars fought by the Israelites against their real or perceived enemies, and God Himself keeps giving the Israelites permission for their genocidal activities. But it was only with the development of modern-day weapons – first the long-range cannons of the 19th century, then machine guns and airplanes capable of dropping bombs on large numbers of people at once in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and guided missiles in the mid-20th century – that war became a total assault on an enemy’s population and the line between “military” and “civilian” first became blurred and then ended completely.
Also, one of the regrettable results of both the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on southern Israel and the resulting Israeli overreaction has been it’s hardened attitudes on both sides and made people who previously supported peaceful solutions to the Israel/Palestine crisis much more bitter. Barnwell’s rather anodyne statement that “some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict” is rather at odds with the actual content of the film. People, both Israelis and Palestinians, who once supported a two-state solution have backed away from that, and in particular Palestinians who once prided themselves on being able to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Israelis now proudly proclaim themselves not only anti-Israeli but anti-Jewish. At the same time the film also underlines the absurdity of Zionism, and particularly their belief that by plunking themselves into the middle of an already occupied country and displacing its inhabitants by force, they could create a “safe space” for the world’s Jews to come together and avoid being the victims of another Holocaust. A heavy-set woman named Gali told Barnwell’s interviewers that both her father and grandmother were Holocaust survivors, and she had settled in Israel precisely because she and her family saw it as a “safe space” – only her husband Tsachi was captured by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and their teenage daughter Ma’ayan was killed. Not surprisingly, Gali said the experience of her family’s victimization has turned her against the two-state solution and hardened her heart against all Palestinians – just as the Palestinians whom Barnwell included in his film, including a quite compelling young man named Ibrahim and Dr. Mohammed El-Ran, who worked at the Indonesian Hospital and then at another medical facility until both were destroyed by Israeli bombing raids, are far more bitter against Israelis and Jews in general than they used to be.
It’s the sort of thing that leads to decades – or even centuries – of war, especially when the atrocities committed against both sides lead to eons of bitterness between them. One recalls grimly how long (30 years) the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland continued – and that was between two groups who shared a similar ethnic and cultural background and were of different sects within the same religion. Some of the Palestinian interviewees recall joining in the cheers in the streets of Gaza’s cities after the Hamas attacks, often before the true horror of what Hamas’s fighters had done reached them, and one young Palestinian noted that since Hamas took control of Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal of military occupation in 2005 (in a free and fair election, by the way, though in the nearly two decades since they haven’t allowed another one that might vote them out of power), they’ve set up a dictatorship of their own in which no public criticism of Hamas, its leaders or its policies, has been allowed. It also remains maddeningly unclear just why Hamas ordered the attacks on Israel when they did and what they hoped to achieve by them (just as the world, or at least this individual in it, remains stumped by what Osama bin Laden and his minions at al-Qaeda hoped to accomplish with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon).
I suspect that part of the motivation was the leaders of Hamas were worried that as more and more Arab countries normalized relations with Israel and signed the so-called “Abraham Accords,” the Palestinian cause would lose support from moderate Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves would be left without any allies in the region (aside from Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and the Hezbollah militia in northern Palestine and southern Lebanon which the Israelis are also now targeting). So they staged the attacks on the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War (Muslim terrorists in particular are big on anniversaries; the September 11, 2001 attacks took place on the anniversary of an earlier terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 which failed dismally) to get the world to take notice and say, “We are still here.” Along with Barnwell’s interview, another article on the PBS Web site by Patrice Taddonio (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/gaza-israel-october-7-israeli-palestinian-hamas-war-documentary-excerpt/) uses material from the film to profile two young women caught up in the conflict on each side. “I’ve forgotten who Ghada was and how I used to live,” says a 23-year-old Palestinian woman named Ghada. “If I want to remind myself, I go back to my phone and look at photos. My dream was to start a solar energy company. To be honest, my dream now is for my family and I to make it out alive.” Another woman, a 17-year-old Israeli hostage named Agam, said, “I can only remember a sort of sigh of relief as I was about to die. After five hours of being scared to death, it’s finally happening. I certainly didn’t think they would kidnap us. It didn’t cross my mind. … I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my life is now in the hands of a terrorist organization: From now on, I have to rely on Hamas. Of course, I didn’t trust them. I was dying from fear. Their control over me was total.” Agam told Taddonio, “I thought, in another universe, we might live together,” but now she believes “the gap is so deep” and “the opportunity is gone.” Likewise Ghada said, “My family, or I, could die at any moment. There’s no future at all.”
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
J. D. Vance, Tim Walz Vice-Presidential Debate a Draw
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
I started writing this just after I watched the October 1 debate between the two major-party candidates for Vice-President, Senator J. D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Governor Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), held at CBS Television Center in New York City with Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan as moderators. If the first Presidential debate this year on June 27 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was a clear victory for Trump – so much so that within a month Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats, ended his campaign for re-election and endorsed his sitting Vice-President, Kamala Harris, instead – and the second between Trump and Harris September 10 was an equally clear win for Harris, the Vance-Walz debate turned out to be a draw.
The J. D. Vance who showed up wasn’t the crazy we’ve been hearing about in scattered news reports, the one who said the Democratic Party was run by “childless cat ladies” and the only reason post-menopausal women exist is to take care of their grandchildren. (Vance himself was raised by his grandmother after his mom flamed out on drugs, and he credits his grandma – whom he calls by the bizarrely infantilizing nickname “Mamaw,” pronounced “ma’am-awe” – with saving his life.) Nor was it the acolyte of Silicon Valley multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, who’s publicly questioned whether America should remain a republic and has given money to the man Vance names as his intellectual mentor, Curtis Yarvin, who has openly proclaimed that Americans need to get over their “dictator phobia” and accept one-man rule.
It was Vance, not Walz, who used the word “weird” in the debate (twice). Though Walz became known throughout America for having described the ideas and behavior of Trump and Vance as “weird,” he kept that statement in his sheath. For the most part, Vance and Walz came off as two well-meaning politicians who both want what is best for this country. There were a few fireworks, notably about women’s right to reproductive choice – on which Vance has definitively (at least for now) abandoned his former support for a nationwide ban on abortion and adopted Trump’s position that abortion legislation should be left to individual states – as well as on the Right’s allegation that Left-leaning Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are censoring Right-wing voices on social media.
One thing Vance did that was very savvy was blame Kamala Harris for every thing he thinks is wrong about the Biden administration and its policies. To hear Vance tell it, it was Harris who personally canceled all of Trump’s restrictions on immigration and opened the border to 25 million “illegal aliens.” It was Harris who made possible the explosion of fentanyl in the U.S. It was Harris who single-handedly drove up the price of housing in America by letting in all those “illegals” whom he and Trump will save the nation by deporting en masse. It was Harris who canceled Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” energy policy (even though the U.S. is producing and exporting more fossil fuels than at any time in its history, as Walz correctly pointed out) and thereby drove up the cost of everything in the U.S.
Vance ably zeroed in on one of the bizarre weaknesses of Harris’s candidacy. Like Hubert Humphrey, who ran for the Presidency in 1968 after unpopular incumbent Lyndon Johnson withdrew from his re-election bid, as the sitting Vice-President Harris has had to answer for everything Americans don’t like about the current administration while having had virtually no power to change it. Vance said time and time again that if Harris were really concerned about all the issues she’s been raising on the campaign trail, she could have been working on them from day one.
That ignores the fact that, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once put it, the Vice-President of the United States has only one real function: to wait for the President of the United States to die. The first Vice-President, John Adams, called it “the most insignificant office the mind of man has ever created.” Whether they’re Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore or Kamala Harris, Vice-Presidents who run for the Presidency immediately to succeed the President they served under have the dual burden of being blamed for everything the people don’t like about the current administration while not being credited for the things people do like. (There’s a reason no sitting Vice-President won a Presidential election between Van Buren in 1836 and the first Bush in 1988.)
Vice-Presidents have only as much authority as the Presidents they serve under give them – as George W. Bush did with Dick Cheney or Barack Obama did with Biden. Absent a major grant of power from their President, a Vice-President has no independent authority at all – though in the first two years of Biden’s Presidency, with the U.S. Senate equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, Harris had to cast more tie-breaking votes on major pieces of legislation than any Vice-President in U.S. history. Republicans like to blame Harris for the situation on the U.S. border; they claim that Biden made Harris the “border czar,” and Harris blew the job.
Biden actually gave Harris far less authority on border issues than that. He tasked her with going to Latin American countries that send a lot of immigrants to the U.S. and doing what she could to discourage them from doing that. There’s some room for debate as to whether she did a good job even with that limited authority. The recent PBS Frontline documentary on Harris and Trump showed footage of an embarrassing speech Harris gave in Guatemala telling would-be immigrants, “Do not come,” and an even lamer interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt in which he cross-examined her about whether she’d ever visited the U.S.-Mexico border. (She hadn’t, but she’s been there since, most recently on a September 27, 2024 campaign stop in Arizona.) But it wasn’t the sweeping power to allow or block all immigration that Republicans have claimed Biden gave her.
As for Walz, he reminded me uncomfortably of fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey in more ways than one. In his book The Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinniss wrote about Humphrey (I’m quoting from memory here), “His excesses – he talked too loud and too fervently – were just annoying in person but became fatal on TV. A person on TV is a guest in your home. It is impolite for him to shout. Humphrey vomited on the rug.” Though Walz didn’t do quite as badly as that, there were still all too many portions of the debate where Vance kept his cool, while Walz at times visibly lost his temper and screeched at the audience.
Instead of the affable high-school teacher and football coach that’s come through in his social-media posts and the public speeches and TV appearances he gives alone, Walz came off as querulous, impatient, almost angry. If the purpose of a Vice-Presidential debate is to showcase which of these people should American voters trust if they have to take over the Presidency if the incumbent dies (a bigger risk with Vance than with Walz because Donald Trump is visibly old and infirm, as well as showing increasing signs of mental derangement), frankly Vance did a much better job on that score than Walz. That’s true even though Walz actually has executive experience as the governor of Minnesota and Vance, who’s been a U.S. Senator for less than two years, does not.
Walz was able to parry at least some of Vance’s most effective thrusts. When Vance claimed that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and former Hawai’i Congressmember Tulsi Gabbard had endorsed Trump, Walz came back with a list of Harris’s endorsers that ranged from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney – and threw in Taylor Swift’s name for good measure. (Swift posted her endorsement of Harris on social media and signed it, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”)
Rachel Maddow’s Quite Different J. D. Vance Story
The J. D. Vance who appeared at the October 1 Vice-Presidential debate was a quite different character than the one MS-NBC host Rachel Maddow had profiled the night before on her regular weekly program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVhHNSe9Ks). She began her story, after an apologia explaining that she hadn’t been sure she wanted to do it at all but decided to go with it on the eve of the debate with Walz, with one of her long introductions about Charles Walgreen, founder of the Walgreens’ drugstore chain, who in 1934 became convinced that the University of Chicago, where his daughter was a student, was indoctrinating her in Communism and “free love.” He launched a campaign to defund the university, and got a hearing before the Illinois legislature where his principal witness against the university was Right-wing author Elizabeth Dilling. Dilling went around the country in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s denouncing various public universities as hotbeds of Communism and free love, and according to Maddow her rhetoric lives on in Vance’s.
Maddow’s main source for Vance’s real views was a September 17, 2021 interview Vance gave to Right-wing podcaster Jack Murphy, whose full black beard makes him look like a malevolent Santa Claus. Vance told Murphy, “Our leaders now are so corrupt, so vile, that if you assimilate into their culture, you’re assimilating into garbage liberal culture. You’re not assimilating into traditional American culture. … You can’t teach that we live in a great country if the leaders are actively aligned against it. … Step one in the process is to totally replace – rip out, like a tumor – the American leadership class, and then reinstall a sense of an American political religion.”
“You said something that I should like to zero in on,” Murphy responded. “How do we effectively rip out the disgusting leadership class? … Because let me expand on that just for a second. It’s not just – obviously, elections. That’s one thing. But unfortunately, this evil leadership class has already taken over all of our institutions. … Aside from elections, how do we rip out this leadership class? If these institutions are rotted and corrupted to the core, this elite ideology is everywhere and in all these things, what other options do we have besides voting them out, which we’re seeing is ineffectual?”
Vance answered, “This is a tough question, but it is maybe the question that confronts us right now.” He mentions Curtis Yarvin, anti-democratic Right-wing author and blogger, as his inspiration. Maddow then cuts to a clip of Yarvin himself giving a speech in front of a banner reading “RAGE” – which he explains is an acronym for “Retire All Government Employees.” As he mentions what RAGE means, his audience laughs approvingly.
“The problem with this is, why have you never heard of this before?” Yarvin says, “Why has no one suggested this before? … You have a government in Washington. You’re either for it or against it. And what is a government? A government is just a corporation running a country, nothing more, nothing less. It just so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed, and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what all corporations have found. We simply delete them. We haven’t been able to do that for over 200 years. So it’s gotten a little bit stale.”
Yarvin went on to explain, “The other thing about getting rid of your government is you can’t say the limits of the government are the limits of the formal government. You have to say, well, what is the system, actually? And it includes a lot of things, including things that are called universities, that are funded by the state. It’s a very, very large system, and it also must be destroyed. Fortunately, there are a lot of very talented Americans who actually know how to run things and make things work, and they are generalists. You need to get these people, put them in a position of responsibility, and have them do their thing. And finally, you need a CEO, and a national CEO is what is called a dictator. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they have to get over their dictator phobia.”
The world heard that argument before in the 1930’s, when ideologues on both the Right and the Left claimed that democracy had reached the limits of its political capability and the future belonged to dictators: Hitler and Mussolini on the Right, Stalin on the Left. It seemed to have ended with the Allied victory in World War II – though in order to achieve that, the republics of Great Britain and the United States had to ally themselves with the Left-wing dictatorship of Stalin to beat the Right-wing dictatorship of Hitler. But as capitalist democracy reaches its limits, and as societies all over the world seemingly inexorably move towards a redistribution of wealth and income in favor of the already-haves over the have-nots, more and more people throughout the world are being seduced by the arguments of phony “populists” like Donald Trump, J. D. Vance and their counterparts in other countries that the “elites” are out to get them and only by smashing the system and substituting absolute one-man rule can their lives be made better.
America Gets Affable Vance, Not Dictator-Loving Vance
But the J. D. Vance (or “JD Vance,” as he rather oddly spells his name, evoking the old 1950’s and 1960’s abbreviation for “juvenile delinquent”) America got to see on October 1 was not the acolyte of fascist-loving Curtis Yarvin. It was the affable author of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir that got seized on by much of America’s liberal community in search of explanations for how Donald Trump had been able to win the Presidency. Vance did a much better job of keeping his cool than Walz did, though there were a few issues on which the fangs got bared.
One was the now-notorious story both Trump and Vance have told on the campaign trail of how Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are allegedly stealing people’s pet dogs and cats so they can eat them. On a previous appearance with Dana Bash on CNN, Vance had given a bizarre defense of this story that more or less acknowledged it wasn’t true but said it was necessary to make up stories like that to get the media to cover the “suffering” of the American people. When Vance brought that up, CBS’s co-moderator, Margaret Brennan, explained that the Haitians in Springfield were here legally under so-called “temporary protected status,” thanks to a program enacted and signed into law in 1990 by Republican President George H. W. Bush.
Vance immediately reacted as if Brennan had slapped him. He accused Brennan of violating the agreed-upon rule that the moderators would not “fact-check” the candidates. That was a rule put into place at the Republican Party’s insistence after the Trump-Harris debate, at which Trump claimed it had been “three against one” because the moderators were calling him on some of his lies and therefore, in Trump’s mind, joining Harris on the attack against him. Brennan called her remark a “clarification” rather than a “fact-check,” and for the only time all evening, the moderators used their agreed-upon power to cut off the candidates’ microphones, essentially telling the candidates to stop talking because nobody could hear them. Only we could still hear them, albeit with echo and at a lower volume, lending an oddly surreal touch to the moment.
Vance also claimed that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. “Obamacare,” had been failing when Trump took over and he “rescued” it. Walz correctly pointed out that Trump had promised to repeal the ACA on day one of his Presidency. He’d even signed an executive order to that effect, though the courts struck it down. Walz also described the dramatic moment when one of the many Republican attempts to repeal the ACA went down to defeat on the Senate floor after the late John McCain (R-Arizona) cast his famous thumbs-down vote against it. (This was the so-called “skinny repeal,” a bill no one – including the people who voted for it – wanted to become law. Its only objective was to get the issue before a so-called “conference committee,” in which House and Senate Republicans could have quietly negotiated a bill to take the ACA’s place.)
One of the most bizarre moments of the debate was when Vance claimed that Harris’s alleged “open border” policies had led Mexican drug cartels to make money by selling illegal guns to the United States. “Thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel … then the amount of illegal guns in our country is higher today than it was three and a half years ago,” Vance said.
The truth, as is well known by people who’ve actually studied the issue, is the other way around. Mexican drug cartels routinely send their hit people across the border into the U.S. to buy guns and other weapons because Mexico has common-sense gun regulations and the U.S. doesn’t. As Michael Williams of CNN explained in a post-debate fact check, “An estimated 200,000 guns are trafficked from the U.S. into Mexico each year, the Mexican Foreign Ministry has said — an average of nearly 550 per day. In 2021, Mexico sued several U.S.-based gun manufacturers, claiming they ‘design, market, distribute and sell guns in ways’ that arm cartels in Mexico. Mexico strictly controls the sale of firearms. There is only one gun store in Mexico, and it’s controlled by the army. That makes the large-scale smuggling of guns from Mexico into the U.S., where laws are laxer and gun stores plentiful, unfeasible.”
Walz did step in it a few times during the debate. In explaining why he changed his position on a ban on AR-15’s, AK-47’s and other so-called “assault weapons” often used by mass shooters in the U.S., he said he had met with family members of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting and they had convinced him to support a ban on these weapons. But he misspoke and said he had “befriended school shooters” – and Trump seized on his gaffe in posts to his social-media site, Truth Social. Walz also said he’d been in Hong Kong when the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tienanmen Square in Beijing happened. He wasn’t, though he visited China in August 1989, two months after the protests and their brutal suppression by the Chinese military.
Mostly, though, the debate went surprisingly smoothly, especially given the rancor of the previous debates that included Donald Trump. Vance and Walz not only made a point of shaking hands at the start – something Trump hadn’t wanted to do before his debate with Harris, only she basically forced him into it – but did so at the finish. They even introduced their wives to each other at the end of the debate. The instant polls taken after the debate indicated that both men’s favorability ratings went up, and one online commentator called the debate refreshingly “normal” – to the extent that any event involving the Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, especially with a part-Black, part-Asian woman running against him, could be “normal.”
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