The Fog of Political War
There’s a good movie premiering next week at the Toronto Film Festival and opening nationwide on October 1st. No doubt you’ll hear something about it in the mainstream media, probably that the film is fairly effective, but merely another polemic, a political ad for John Kerry and therefore not to be taken too seriously. Many in the punditocracy will dismiss it as just more propaganda propelled onto the battlefield of the nasty presidential election war. That’s too bad, because “Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry” is a powerful and worthy movie. Yes, you could say it works as a long campaign commercial, but it’s a documentary, not a polemic. “Going Upriver” uses vast amounts of archival footage of the Vietnam War and anti-war protests, some of it previously unseen. For those undecided voters who may be lost in the fog of charges and counter-charges that the Republicans have used to obscure basic truths, this film may throw a little water in their faces and wake them up to reality. The question is, will they see it?
I viewed an almost-finished version of “Going Upriver” at a screening in New York on Thursday. The movie is largely based on Douglas Brinkley’s book, Tour of Duty, and is directed by Kerry friend George Butler who directed “Pumping Iron” (at the time Butler didn’t know he was doing a political biography) and “Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.” Aside from the Kerry focus, the movie is a potent document of just how fevered and volatile the times were. In terms of the current political battle over Kerry’s service and his anti-war actions, the film made me want to scream about the utter absurdity of the debate. The footage and interviews absoutely put the lie to suggestions that Kerry wasn’t under fire or that his anti-war protests represented a “flip-flop” or that they were politically opportunistic. “Up the River” vividly portrays the horrors that John Kerry and the Swift Boats faced on the Mekong River and how Kerry earned his Silver and Bronze stars. As you witness the bullets whizzing by, the hidden dangers along the river banks, the dead and dying, the phony body counts and the lies perpetrated by our leaders, you see Kerry’s evolution to anti-war leader as both inexorable and admirable. Another piercing section of the movie puts you in the hotel room in Detroit where the Winter Soldiers testified to atrocities in Vietnam. Looking at their faces and hearing their voices, a reasonable person would have difficulty questioning their motives or credibility. The anti-war John Kerry shown in “Up the River” is clear in his convictions, passionate but cool-headed, and a moderating influence on some of his fellow protestors. And when you see the turmoil in the streets of the nation’s capital, it’s hard to conclude Kerry made a calculation that his leadership in the protest movement would be good for his political career.
Will Americans see this true picture of John Kerry or the one the Republicans are painting in abstract impressionistic tones? Unfortunately, for many voters, it’s easy to be blinded by the fog of political war. It must be said, as Frank Rich suggested in his column today, that Kerry has helped obscure the personal qualities on display in the film with his less-than-clear and less-than-clearly-stated views on the Iraq war. Now is the time for Kerry to find his voice and cut through the fog.
Even if Kerry sharpens his message, it won’t be easy, of course, to penetrate the media fog machine being powered by a steady diet of irrelevant details. In the end, does it really matter so much whether or not the CBS documents on Bush’s National Guard service are authentic? Doesn’t the argument obscure what by now is an obvious truth - that Bush got into the “champagne unit” of the Guard because of family connections and that he didn’t show up for a significant portion of his obligation? Isn’t it an obvious truth that Kerry had the guts to go to war, and when he saw it was wrong, the courage to lead in the protests.
There are too many realities being obscured by a mainstream media that is content to do play-by-play commentary on the campaign. The daily blow-by-blows are easier to cover and more susceptible to spin than the rapid deterioration of the US effort in Iraq. In the mainstream media, especially on TV, Americans hear much more about the latest poll numbers than the loss of the Sunni triangle. Usually the only way Iraq gets on the front pages or in the mouths of the cable anchors is when a lot of Americans get killed in one day or very occasionally when an enormous number of Iraqis lose their lives in an attack. Meanwhile, post-GOP convention Time and CNN polls and subsequent headlines made it appear Kerry was suddenly bleeding voters. No matter that many experts were highly skeptical that the “headline” numbers were accurate or valuable in predicting a trend (see Ruy Teixeira ’s excellent analysis on this) or that the election dynamics had changed among key groups of voters. No, the cable blowhards and headline writers would rather blather on about Kerry’s “bad month” than about the bad situations in Afghanistan or Fallujah or North Korea.
Here’s another question for the esteemed members of a free and vigorous press: where is their in-depth coverage of the serious allegations made by Senator Bob Graham concerning an administration cover-up of official Saudi connections to Al Qaeda? Oh, it must be lost in the fog of the political war. So, if you want some real reporting on the Saudi connection, you’ll have to go to Greg Palast, an investigative reporter who writes for Britain’s The Observer.
Today’s Worth Checking Out
This is kinda fun - a BBC reporter’s new book says that Colin Powell called the neocons “fucking crazies.”
Media Matters for America has some good analysis of the CBS documents controvery.
New Yorker editor David Remnick has an interesting piece on Al Gore that provides some insight into his utterly strange circumstances.