Oedipus Wrecks: Perspective in the Wake of Bin Laden's Death

Upon learning of the news of the killing of Osama Bin Laden (I learned via text – I was at a concert of my brother's), and then, listening to President Obama's recap of the events in his radio address as we drove home, I was struck by quite a few thoughts and emotions, a process of visceral relief followed by rationality of a cold, detached, and wise disposition that quickly erased any positivity of the evening's breaking news.

The result of exhaustive planning and intelligence gathering, the Bin Laden killing can be applauded for, if anything, the tactic and bravery of the military's actions. As a typically excellent NPR report described it, the soldiers involved in the raid knew every square inch of the Bin Laden mansion, so extensive was their research and briefing of the premises. And the fact that not a single US soldier was, as we're told at least, killed in the raid? Impressive, courageous, and hella ballsy, and I say that as someone who is fervently anti-war.

And I admit, I felt a definite sense of relief when I learned of Bin Laden's fate. I live quite close to the third largest city in the United States, and quite a few family and friends are scattered amongst its vast sprawl. Although I despise the way we are relentlessly slaughtered with information on the probabilities of terrorist attacks (indeed, Barry Glassner has been covering this process for years, where the public is constantly terrorized – and that is the accurate verb – and motivated to do nothing but consume), the chance of another terror attack on US soil remains inevitable, and while I never considered that reality on a day-to-day basis, it was always a reality I had to accept.

But even with that admission, there are some deeply unsettling details about the Bin Laden slaying that I have been unable to shake, even if, as Glenn Greenwald forcefully points out, it is the "un-American" thing to do.

One, we need to admit the obvious: Osama Bin Laden was a wealthy, intelligent man, one who deeply understood the consequences of his radicalism and took every precaution in preparing for his inevitable death. As Dina Temple-Raston explored on today's "All Things Considered" (seriously, check out NPR's entire coverage of the event; it's quite detailed and informative), Bin Laden had begun choosing his successors more than 10 years ago, and now that he's dead, there are a number of al-Qaida operatives who are expected to take his place, marque among them Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian who is currently plugged as the no. 2 man of the operation. Basically, the current al-Qaida apparatus is simply too well-funded and too spread out for Bin Laden's death to have any impact on their operations, and the terrorist plots currently being planned in Yemen have undeniably continued today, even with the events of May 1. Now if only we had killed Bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in 2003...that would be a different narrative altogether.

Two, what the death of Osama Bin Laden cannot do is erase the substantial evils the United States unleashed following the bombings of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Here is a criminally brief synopses of some of those evils:

• Two unnecessary wars (one of which was blatantly illegal by international law – and fixed via false intelligence), which have contributed to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of human beings. Since 2006, nearly 10,000 Afghans have been killed. 4700 American troops have died in combat, between the two wars. And, worst of all, as many as 1.5 million Iraqis have died, with another 4-5 million being displaced. Look at this astounding map assembled by the Guardian, based on a customarily revelatory dump of documents from Wikileaks, and try to reconcile those numbers with the war currently taking place. And I haven't even mentioned the cost.

• An unparalleled abuse of civil liberties in the 21st century, beginning with the complete demolition of the Bill of Rights, followed by breathtakingly broad invasions of privacy via illegal wiretapping and electronic surveillance of millions of American citizens, the suspension of habeas corpus, the abduction, rendition, and torture of hundreds of innocent people (some of whom DIED during interrogation), the jailing and continued torture of hundreds more without the right to an attorney, and, probably my favorite of them all, the insistence by the US Justice Department that all actions taken were beyond the rule of law. 

• And again, that is a Mickey Mouse summarization of all that has happened – and I fear, with considerable degree, that the death of Bin Laden will now be used to justify all that has happened and the countless crimes that were committed. After all, we got our man, right?

And three, perhaps most haunting of all, is the profoundly uncomfortable realization that Bin Laden accomplished everything he set out to do with the attacks of 9/11, and that his death could not be of any less significance for him and his followers. Here is Bin Laden, in one of his more famous quotes,

"America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and a wide-ranging economy, but all this is built on an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its obvious weak spots. If America is hit in one hundredth of these weak spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership."

The brilliance of Bin Laden's plan – and yes, we can call it that, as it was a plan of immense foresight – was exploiting the very arrogance and bravado of the American system. He knew he could never poison the essence of American politics, as he so desired, by attacking America head on. As the US proved in World War II, no country on Earth is remotely capable of the resources and sheer numbers of the United States war economy, least of all a Muslim radical with a scant number of devoted followers.

So instead, Bin Laden went for the spectacle, harming the US in the most public and bombastic manner possible, shaming and frightening an entire nation in the process. And we behaved exactly as he expected us to, flashing our misguided power, committing vast resources to fruitless campaigns and heartless excursions of sheer military chest-thumping, and, in the process, crippling the very infrastructure on which our country sat, all while Bin Laden relaxed in Pakistan. In the end, he won, and that is the most haunting detail of the entire Bin Laden saga.

To be clear, we cannot lay credit for all of America's problems on Bin Laden's 9/11 attacks. The financial crisis would have happened with or without 9/11. Alan Greenspan dramatically slashed interest rates following the collapse of the NASDAQ, and Bill Clinton signed critical deregulatory legislation in 1999 and 2000, thereby setting the table for the reckless borrowing, lending, and leveraging that would bring the world economic foundation to its knees.

But aside from that, Bin Laden and al-Qaida directly inspired a series of events that plunged the United States into an abyss, one rife with darkness, evil, and neglect. As Norman Mailer so perfectly phrased it, in an extraordinary interview with the vacuous Charlie Rose, we embarked on a crusade of intolerance that changed the face of American Democracy for the worst – and we will never recover from it.

When I drove to work earlier today, I listened to Eric Dolphy's 1964 masterpiece "Out to Lunch!" Never before have the disjointed rhythms and howling syncopations of Dolphy sounded more at home, cruising down the freeway in the fractured and desolate land of the free, home of the brave:






(Flickr photo courtesy of norbert_blech)

The best argument against nuclear weapons (and warfare)

Read these passages from John Hersey's seminal Hiroshima – which chronicles the hardships of six Hiroshima residents following the US' dropping of the atomic bomb – and tell me that a justifiable reason for using nuclear weapons exists. For clarification, the first passage centers on the efforts of Mr. Tanimoto, a pastor, to help the countless wounded by ferrying them to a safety zone:

"Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment."

"By nightfall, ten thousand victims of the explosion had invaded the Red Cross Hospital, and Dr. Sasaki, worn out, was moving aimlessly and dully up and down the stinking corridors ... Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses."

I always find two interesting nuances in our usage of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first is its relationship with the War in which it was deployed. World War II was, for all intents and purposes the last "good" war the US ever fought, a war with cleanly delineated lines of good and evil and little ambiguity regarding who was on the right side of the battlefront. For World War II, there was no question of our goodness, no question of the purity of the mission, no draft boards, no widespread protests, no PTSD. Only absolute commitment to the cause: stopping Hitler and the Axis powers.

Yet, it was within that war, that good, clean war of honor and privilege, and the US committed the ultimate war crime. More than 100,000 people died in the bombing of Hiroshima, and approximately 80,000 died in Nagasaki. Their skin was burned horribly, beyond imagination. Faces were melted. Women's breasts were seared off their bodies. Clothing disintegrated, and thousands of people, weak and helpless from radiation sickness, were left in the open air to die, their bodies blotched in sickening rainbows of red and yellow. Thousands more were indoors when the bombs dropped, and they too died slowly, painfully, crushed under the weight of their homes, desperately crying for help that never arrived.

Which brings me to nuance number two, which is the relative ease in which so many of us support the notions of war and absolute force.

It's always stupendously easier to support those actions when the empirical, micro details of such decisions are ignored, isn't it? When we remain ignorant of the pain and suffering they cause, pain and suffering that reaches levels of such acuity that they approach wondrous light? As long as we can delude ourselves with the propaganda of the mission, and effectively block the horrors that journalists such as Hersey chronicle, we're peachy creamy.

If, however, we were to actually consider the consequences of our country's actions – to legitimately THINK about the indefatigable amount of lives that are demolished by the politically and ideological decisions of one power hungry, supremely delusional superpower – we may actually achieve an ounce of skepticism the next time the powers that be attempt to convince us of a new military conflict.

Not that it would matter, in the end, but at least we'd have a sense of empathy. And THAT is why journalism – great, effective journalism that is rife with passion and devoid of soulless objectivity – will always provide the finest argument against warfare and absolute force. Journalism exposes, whether we like it or not, the results of such actions, and renders obsolete the perverted worldview that so many of us use to justify military conflicts.

(Flickr design courtesy of Simon Strandgaard)

Dinah Sings

I saw my brother's superlative jazz band play tonight, and, like the last time I watched their joyous exultation of spontaneous combustion, I left thinking of this number by the great Dinah Washington. It could simply be the fact that two of the band's numbers featured a singer, a cute pixie type with a voice of peppermint that somewhat resembled the vicious assault of Dinah. But regardless of the reason, that jazz concert, like every other concert I've attended, was a vital, surging experience, as it reminded me of the vigor and brilliance of musical performance.


But anyway, back to Dinah. There's much to be said about the woman, who seemed to deliberately embody the mass wave of contradictions that encompassed American jazz in its '50s heyday. Here was a woman who could sing the blues better than Bessie Smith, draw you in with her infectious swing phrasing, and effortlessly pull off even the most wretched of pop affairs – and at the same time, here was a woman who was married a whopping eight times (divorced seven times), whose swagger and attitude nearly overshadowed her considerable talents, and whose death at the age of 39, due to an insane combination of secobarbital and amobarbital, only seemed proper, given the ramshackle approach Dinah seemed to take with everything.


But god could the woman sing, and maybe it was precisely because of her erratic nature that her performances had such a brilliant immediacy. Sure, Dinah could be sweet and sincere, her tone edging on playfulness, but her true brilliance lied in her blues and ballads, where her CUTCO voice slashed and burned the material in ways the composer never imagined – and made the song all the more brilliant as a result. The woman simply smoldered, delivering her lines with a depth and passion that I don't think we'll ever see again, given the overwhelming perfectionism of digital recording technology.


The blues must be messy; it must be ugly; it must be tarnished, in some way or another, by the central fact that it highlights the absolute base level of human suffering. How is that essence remotely possible, given the advances of recording technology? How can something be raw and immaculately recorded at the same time? It's a perversion of nature, a reversal of truth, a bastardization of an art form born out of decades of pain and anguish. To digitally record the blues with modern technology is to cage a Siberian Tiger.


So listen to Dinah; pending the crash of financial derivatives and the resulting implosion of the American empire, we may never hear another like her.

(Flickr photo by marysecasol.com)

Topsy Turvidom

On Tuesday, after nearly a decade out of print, "Topsy Turvy" got the Criterion treatment, with the noted Collection releasing a superlative two-disc issue of the film.

It would seem like a match made in purgatory – Mike Leigh, the infinitely brilliant director of such grisly portraits of modernity as "Naked" and "High Hopes," directing a film about light opera titans W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, chronicling the creative and personal conflicts of the men with a touch worthy of Fosse and a lushness indicative of Ophuls, as they struggle to reconcile their considerable talents (and egos) in the creation of "The Mikado," their most famous and lasting work.

What's missing from that rather glib comparison, though, is Leigh's true intentions in making "Topsy Turvy" — "I'm not given to making films about filmmakers or artists," Leigh says in an essay accompanying the Criterion DVD, "But I decided that it would be good to make a film about what we do, what we all go through" – and "Topsy Turvy" is, if anything, a love letter to artistic creation, a detailed examination of genius and the fickle, schizophrenic bitch that is creativity.

And indeed, Leigh may have very well created the ultimate document of the creative process, keenly showing its joys, sorrows, and humility ("There's something inherently disappointing about success," Jim Broadbent's Gilbert remarks, after the premiere of "The Mikado" at the film's close). "Topsy Turvy," in fact, is one of the main reasons for my rather devastating dislike for "Black Swan." Sure, "Black Swan" featured many admirable qualities, paramount among them a tortured performance from Natalie Portman and the graceful, meticulously choreographed cinematography during the dancing sequences. However, the actual creative process, or, the exhaustive series of events in which performing genius resides, is all but ignored in Aronofsky's film, which would rather focus on backstage drama bordering on exploitation.

By contrast, EVERYTHING is examined in "Topsy Turvy": the creation of the words and music; the costumes and sets; the exhaustive rehearsals of the actors and singers; and the dry test runs of the show, as every last detail is ironed out. Hell, Leigh is so committed to his purpose that he'll devote a full six minutes of screen time to showing how the famed "Three Little Maids" sequence came to accurately reflect the "Japanese" style – that's six minutes for what amounts to a roughly 90-second song. Where is that patience in "Black Swan"? Hell, where is that patience in ANY American film?

I suppose my true reason for loving "Topsy Turvy" as I do – aside from the gorgeous camerawork of Dick Pope, the exquisite sets, unbelievably compelling performances (Broadbent threatens the swallow the movie whole, such is his charisma), or the film's script, which borders on supernatural with its delectable wit and impeccable composition – is how decidedly un-American a film it truly is. Not un-American in its attitudes or rhetoric, of course, but un-American in how just about every nuance of the film is removed from everything we Yanks seem to expect out of a modern motion picture. And that sense of discovery, the realization that there is a world outside of the American cinema, is breathtaking.

On the Wundervoll World of Bailouts

I was listening to NPR earlier this week, and the station was airing the third and final part of a "Planet Money" segment that chronicled the ever-evolving role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the U.S. real estate industry.

All three segments are worth a serious listen – the origin of Fannie and Freddie's quasi-public status, which the first segment deals with, is particularly fascinating* — but what I found interesting about the stories, though, was the utter seriousness in which NPR and its sources treated the quantitative nature of the Fannie/Freddie bailout.

Now, don't get me wrong, a billion dollars (that's a thousand million) is a gargantuan sum of money, and the taxpayer cost of the Fannie/Freddie bailout currently stands at a whopping $130 billion (and don't worry, kiddies, the sum will only rise higher); however, in the wundervoll world of bailouts, $130 billion is not so much minuscule as it is chump change.

Courtesy of a recent audit of the Federal Reserve's balance sheets (we can thank Bernie Sanders, one of the seven honest men working on Congress, for that), we now know what had been suspected for quite some time: that the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve dropped TRILLIONS of taxpayer funds from helicopters in a desperate attempt to shore up the world financial markets after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

For instance, according to the data that Sanders uncovered, Goldman Sachs received just under $600 billion in bailout funds; Morgan Stanley? nearly $2 trillion; Bear Stearns? the first mega-bank to collapse? nearly $1 trillion; Citigroup? the ultimate zombie bank that is still on the verge of collapse? $1.8 trillion; and Merrill Lynch? which failed and was absorbed by Bank of America? $1.5 trillion. In case you weren't counting, that's just shy of $6 trillion. And while we're on the topic of bailouts, we should be equal-opportunity corporatists — GE, McDonald's, Caterpillar, Harley Davidson, Toyota, and Verizon also received bailout funds.

A billion's not cool. You know what's cool? A trillion.

The true costs of the bailouts are anybody's guess, but there are brave individuals who have made substantiated estimates at where the totals lie. Neil Barofsky — who was, until his resignation, the Inspector General of TARP — estimated that the bailouts could total as much as $23.7 trillion, while Nomi Prin, one of the most savvy financial journalists working today, has exhaustively chronicled all known guarantees by the government. She places the bailout sum at a more manageable $14.6 trillion.

What Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did was reprehensible. They took advantage of their public/private stature, a privilege unmatched in the financial sector, and made substantial risks on the taxpayer's expense. But it's beyond naive to act as if the $130 billion needed to support Fannie and Freddie represents some kind of grotesquery, especially in light of the stratospheric sums our government has already provided to a myriad of companies.

The Thing(s) about Libya

The president's speech on Libya just concluded, and I'll admit first and foremost that I did not watch it. I was far too busy baking a superlative batch of chocolate chip cookies. But seriously, what's the point – when you actually view politics with the omniscience of experience – in even bothering to follow what the president says, or what barbs are exchanged during press briefings, or what story Brian Williams decides to open "Evening News" with. All of them, regardless of their medium or message, communicate the same basic subservient attitude regarding Washington policy, particularly when the issues of warfare are concerned. That's one of the main reasons that I am wholly apathetic regarding the erection of the Times' pay wall. Why would I care about a supposed block to the news of a rapidly deteriorating news corps?

But anyway, back to Libya – the content of the speech, so far as I can tell, is nothing new. America is special, we're defined by certain rights and privileges, and we'll defend those at all costs. Thank you sir, may I have another? When will we finally begin looking through all this rhetoric and see those kinds of messages for the muddled, hypocritical rhetoric that they are? The US is not content watching the poor citizens of oil-rich Libya die at the hands of their lunatic leader, but we're perfectly content stationing our Fifth Fleet on the docks of Bahrain, a country that recently sniped peaceful protestors from rooftops.

Go down the line of US foreign conflicts, and you find similarly jarring contradictions. We invaded Iraq because Saddam killed his own people, even though we actively supported those efforts in the '80s, and, even worse, completely ignored a Shia uprising in Basra following the Gulf War, an uprising that Saddam Hussein brutally quashed with helicopter fire, killing of Shias. The people of Iraq are not stupid. The people of Bahrain are not stupid. They know full well the extent of American privilege, and the sad truth that, given the circumstances of their violent repressions, neither country presented a valid enough reason for the US to dirty its hands with the cruel dictators of their world. And we Americans seem to be ignorant to realities of these issues.

Chris Hedges has said that one of the reasons that so many Americans can flippantly disregard foreign losses in American conflicts is because they have not, as he has, stood over the piles of bodies that result from such squabbles. Naturally, he's right (Hedges is among the more brilliant men of his generation), just as Adorno and Horkheimer were right 70 years ago. We are enshrined in a culture of illusion that is far too potent to think otherwise, a culture where spectacle and greed far outweigh substance and empathy.

And there seems to be no way out.

The Wonders of Inexplicable Mathematics

Don't look at me for an explanation. I loved mathematics in high school, if only because the controlled atmosphere of finding one correct answer (as opposed to all my AP English and history courses, where interpretation and originality were continuously insisted) was both calming and empowering. That does not, however, make an image such as this check any less hysterical!