Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush

Agnieszka Holland's Burning Bush, which is currently playing at Film Forum, takes place in the aftermath of Prague Spring when Russian tanks invaded and repressed the Czech revolution.
The movie, originally produced as a TV mini-series, is not a philosophical mediation like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (which was filmed by Philip Kaufman), but more a political thriller in the style of Costa-Gravas Z or Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. The title of the film comes from the biblical miracle that's echoed in the image of Jan Palach’s self-immolation with the conceit lying in the fact that while the body might have died his spirit lived on. Twenty years after his death came the Velvet Revolution of l989 in which Communism was finally overthrown. Apparently, the biblical metaphor still remains relevant. In a flagrant slap in the face to post-modernism with its promise of non-ideological drives in an equally  non-Manichean universe, what was deemed unthinkable in our day and age, occurred only weeks ago in the Crimea. Burning Bush splices real life footage as well as characters into its partially fictionalized narrative and the central figure is the real life figure of Dagmar Buresova (Tatiana Pauhofova), a lawyer who brings libel charges against a party apparachnik named Novy (Martin Huba) who had claimed that Jan Palach’s death was the result of a reactionary conspiracy. Novy claims Palach’s act was intended as a circus trick, “cold fire” in which the illusion of burning is created. The conspiracy theory derives from the notion that the Russians would be provoked into a full out annexation of Czechoslovakia if the ante were raised--something which those who preferred a veneer of autonomy to the truth of subjugation were out to forestall.The leitmotif of appearance and reality actually inserts itself from the beginning of the film when the iconic burning scene, which also recalls the Buddhist monks in Vietnam in a similar period, is reflected in a ticket kiosk and a number of other mirrored surfaces, mimicking the distancing effect the mind creates to protect itself from traumatic perception. Kafka’s cockroach, an honorary citizen of Prague, makes a cameo appearance in Holland’s film and he's neither killed nor freed from the box in which he’s kept as food for a lizard, which is one way to view the geopolitics of Eastern Europe at the time. Political films tend to create a black and white universe and Burning Bush is rescued from being a lives of the saints, employing the Czech penchant for ambivalence and irony, which serve to broaden its moral spectrum

15 Seconds to Infamy

Ubiquity is not tantamount to notoriety. In fact, it may be a recipe for anonymity. Due to Big Data, everyone has less than Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. In fact, 15 minutes of fame in our current technocracy is enough to create a hagiography since it’s such an anomaly. The bar has dropped in terms of fame, but the mass of men who live Thoreau's "lives of quiet desperation" exhale just a breath, a small cry which is quickly swallowed up by the next bottom feeder, with the food chain itself growing larger and more desperate at the bottom and increasingly rarified at the top. This is the essence of  Facebook whose narcotic is the enticement of a validation that’s quickly flushed into oblivion. It’s almost a paradigm of addiction with hope spiking a high, followed by the come down and the need for another dose of fleeting attention. Evanescence is the constant in this equation. And yes, it’s very much like flushing the toilet. You go on FB and flush your exultation into a chorus of wails and cheers. And here is the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics. The loudness and frequency of the cry (the number of flushes) is inversely proportionate to the amount of attention you will receive. So if you want to half your infamy, respond to "What’s on your mind?" on your Facebook homepage twice as frequently. It’s like the lynching victim whose cries for mercy only whet the appetite of the mob. We are all on our way to being silenced. Once you’re born you begin to die. But in the current environment naked attention seeking is a recipe for obsolescence. Indifference is a swarm of cyber bees attacking with their own poisonous bytes.

International Relations 101: Checkers or Chess?

Illustration of the Red King Snoring from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

The United States has to stop playing checkers and start playing chess. The kind of transparency that Snowden and Wikileaks have championed is a nice ideal, but it leaves casualties in its wake when you are playing the board game known as international relations. In checkers you take the man in front of you, but when you play chess you learn that you might have to sacrifice a pawn to spare a more powerful piece. We must return to the world of Machiavelli and realpolitik which is chess in political terms and we may have to learn how to play from those who we’d like to hate. Vladimir Putin is a great chess player who's a master of the art of brinkmanship. He lined up all his ducks in the Crimea and then simply walked away (instead playing The Terminator), coming out the victor though the move might not have seemed economically expedient, in terms of Russia’s relationship to the EU. He called in an IOU with his Syrian client during the chemical weapons crisis and at least for the moment seemed to be ready to step into his adversary’s shoes. Imagine Vladimir Putin claiming the Nobel prize for Peace! For a moment it didn’t seem like a far flung idea. Perhaps Putinism with a human face is what America needs to strive for. It’s nice to have the power to bully and repel bullies in a darkened schoolyard. But like in a computer game with its garish cast of hellions, there’s always going to be someone bigger, stronger, more deadly. Lots of intelligence, in both the real and metaphorical meanings of the word, less carpet bombing and an occasional drone may sound like an uglymix, but these might be the only cocktail that leads to peace, anywhere.

The Kurd is the Word

Kurdiah-occupied area generated by C.I.A. (1992)

The Times reported on Robert Kagan’s New Republic piece, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire” (5/26/14), (“Events in Iraq Open Door for Interventionist Revival, Historian Says” NYT, 6/15/14). The New Republic cover story has struck a chord, with ISIS on the outskirts of Baghdad. The Times commented “To Mr. Kagan, American action to stop the militants is imperative, but a continued military presence in Iraq and action in Syria would have avert the crisis. ‘It’s striking how two policies driven by the same desire to avoid the use of a military are now converging to create this burgeoning disaster,’ Mr. Kagan said in an interview.” But hindsight is always 20/20 and who is to say that the presence of US troops would have turned out to be anything more than an embarrassment, as it has been in Afghanistan, where all gains seem to be Pyrrhic and where the American military’s struggle against the Taliban can only be described as Sisyphean? Yes today everyone is crying for more troops and more bombs, but when we supplied troops and bombs and were getting no leverage in reforming al-Maliki’s partisan politics there was an outcry for an end to a struggle which was costing the US both lives and money. Have we forgotten the lesson of Vietnam? Every time we consider the use of force we seem to be on the event horizon of the black hole of interventionism. The US is out of touch and our real weakness is intelligence. It’s as true now as it was back in 9/11. The lack of intelligence concerning the latest ISIS surge is what the real problem seems to be and it’s truly confounding. Is a Johnny-come- lately employing airstrikes and drones going to weaken the impact of the writing of Sayyid Qutb the ideologist of pan-Islamism? What’s needed is not force, but thought. In this case clandestine intelligence, the kind that had proven so deadly to US Foreign policy in the overthrow of Mossadegh in l952, might be turned to our advantage if we place our bets on the right horse--and that horse might very well be Iraqi Kurdistan.

Pornosophy: The Strong Silent Type

Wyatt Earp

A reader of this blog recently wrote in to ask why in the old days, at the turn of the last century men were so quiet and women so garrulous (and serious)? Talk about emotions, back in them days men never talked about their emotions. But there was a reason for it and it was not because it made them more vulnerable or less masculine. Back in the year l900 families were much larger and it was not unusual to have a brood of nine or more children. Most of the discussion of family life in that era centers around how hard this was for women. However, it was an even larger burden for the men. The turn of the last century was approximately a hundred years before the advent of internet pornography and in the days of the horse and buggy sex was real work. Men were more quiet because they had to spend much of their day conjuring up fantasies which would facilitate all the sex that was necessary to produce nine or more children. Today your average millennial just hangs out on a site for a few minutes, indulging his favorite fetish (whether it’s exhibitionism, voyeurism, lingerie, flagellation, bukkake, bestiality, forced feminization, gagging, suffocation, humiliation, coprophilia, Greek or golden showers) and he's ready to rock. And the same goes for his or her female counterpart. More importantly no social stigma is attached to having a family with just one two children. Yet before the miracle of modern cyberporn, men were forced to think up all manner of sexy scenarios just to make sure they could keep up with the Joneses. Take out one of your old family albums, the ones with the yellowing black and white photos held onto the page with little corner stickers. If you look into the eyes of your forebears, you'll see that behind these strong silent types was depravity. Most of the men stare out from these pictures like desperate trapped animals. They know that once the festivity, at which all the picture taking occurred, was over, they would be chased around their bedrooms by demanding wives, whose fecundity was on the line.