Crashing The Oscars
I finally got to see the movie Crash. I had unfairly criticized it last week without having seen it. Now, having seen it, I can fairly say it is, indeed, a pretentious and ultimately meaningless muddle.
As I earlier predicted (based at the time only on what I read) this ahighly contrived flick made by and for guilty white liberals. With its underlying message that we are all, alas, racist but also alll capable of some good, what better Saturday night fare for Westside couples who had a tough week managing those cantankerous nannies and maids and now want to spend a couple of hours feeling good about themselves?
Clearly inspired by smart ensemble movies like Magnolia and Short Cuts, this film comes off more like a mix of Fallen and Grand Canyon (two of the real stinkers of the 90’s).It’s too bad because Crash has some great performances: notably from Matt Dillon and Don Cheadle. It’s also the first film I’ve ever seen in which I liked Sandra Bullock’s acting. Then again, playing an imperious, self-absorbed Brentwood bitch probably wasn’t much of a stretch for her.The story — several interwoven plot lines -- renders an overallpicture of Los Angeles that I frankly do not and cannot recognize. It’s all about as plausible as a snowstorm on Mulholland Drive: A pair of black carjackers who speak like philosophers; a tattooed Latino locksmith with the insight of Aesop; a millionaire black TV director who (apparently having missed the O.J. trial) feels powerless to lodge a complaint against an abusive LAPD cop; a mid-level black LAPD officer who believes he cannot advance up the ladder (even if the LAPD has had two recent black Chiefs); a Persian shopkeeper who is, well, a psychotic; and the usual quota of out-of-touch white people including one who angelically redeems himself and another who becomes a monster.
Writer/Director Paul Haggis’ basic premise isn’t that far off. Most people are racists at some level or another, their heads full of tribal prejudice and bigotry. Where he gets wrong is how this actually plays out in a mega-city of Los Angeles, fifty years after the burgeoning of the civil rights movement. More than wrong, Haggis gets it backward. While we all harbor less than impure thoughts, we have learned to control and suppress the little voices in our head precisely so we can more or less harmoniously make it through the day. We do so for a combination of reasons: ranging from compassion to hypocrisy. But so what? It works. And very very few of us go around ethnically or racially insulting each other. In fact, most people I run into during the day seem to be on their best behavior, trying, sometimes straining to remain civil to all.Haggis’ characters, by contrast, seem to all be suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome — uninhibitedly spitting out their most provocative inner thoughts to the first hapless Jew, Honky, Nigger, Towelhead, Camel-jockey, Beaner who traipses by.
Really, Los Angeles is an odd place where mixtures of race create some rather surreal juxtapositions. We see them everyday. At least I do: mornings on the Malibu pier were good-old boys in plaid hunting jackets depend on Mexican gardeners for bait who in turn are learning to fish from some Vietnamese grandpas. Or a recent afternoon at the ball park where even free-flowing beer and the emotions of the game fail to set one or another racial group against each other: all of them at least temporarily united in support of Dodger Blue.
Los Angeles is not for the meek nor for the ultra-needy. Butwe deserve a better portrayal than this well-intentioned but ultimately botchedfilm offers us.
I also re-direct you via this link to last summer's piece by Joe Hicks. Matt Welch also got it right.
March 4th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
I’m just glad King Kong wasn’t nominated because it was a dishonest portrayal of life in New York City.
March 4th, 2006 at 6:42 pm
But seriously, my take on this year’s Oscar ceremony is that John Stewart might make it worth a watch, but given the gravity and earnestness of each and every one of the Best Picture nominees, they should have considered choosing their host from worthies at the Lehrer Newshour.
March 4th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
“I take this occasion to reproduce here a posting I put up in July after I saw the film”
Small point of information. I remember distincty that you originally posted this BEFORE you saw the film
March 4th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
“Or trying to watch, as this year’s nominees do little to excite me.”
Marc this is usaully the case with most Oscars but are you kidding me. Did you not see brokeback mountain and copote, both of whch are far superior to, say, the grossly overated million dollar baby.
March 4th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Agree on that at least. I was in Magnolia which was as bizarre an experience as I’ve had in Hollywood films. Well with the exception of Being John Malkovich which took the cake. Crash seems ill-contrived if not stolen from Lawrence Kasdan who made the same points with class in Grand Canyon. I don’t see that kind of prejudice and hatred in LA. Often indifference in a large hard place, but that’s about it.
March 4th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
This is a comment I posted on Matt Welch’s blog that might be of interest on this subject:
Well, you know, it’s funny, I had a real “crash†experience a couple of weeks ago. You know that story people tell, “I was driving along and all of a sudden this crazy guy goes through the red light right in front of me� Well, I was the crazy guy. It was the intersection of 8th and Crenshaw in Koreatown (or as I like to think of it, Han Kook Park), and I somehow got the idea the light had changed when it hadn’t. Anyway, I get centerpunched by one car, pushed into another, and a couple of others got scraped avoiding the melee, nobody injured thank God. It was a real rainbow coalition there, white, black, Asian, Latino. The poor sod who hit me was a bit miffed, having gotten the scare of his life and had his nice late model car messed up by an idiot, but took it fairly well under the circumstances. It was perfectly calm and cheerful, everybody patiently getting my information, seeing as how I was going to be fixing all their cars. The weird thing is, all the bystanders were unified in commiserating with me and blaming the poor sod, who happened to be Korean. Now, people were no doubt misled by the fact that my car had been the one that was hit, but though there was absolutely no question that it was entirely my fault, nevertheless the whole tenor of the thing was, you know, “those crazy Korean drivers.†Angelenos of all races and creeds are united against them.
March 4th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
“It’s also the first film I’ve ever seen in which I liked Sandra Bullock’s acting. Then again, playing an imperious, self-absorbed Brentwood bitch probably wasn’t much of a stretch for her.â€
Bullock’s rendering of a self-absorbed affluent bitch was perfect—I think each portrayal in the film was meant to be a “charactertureâ€â€”
An over-the- top rendition–the director is under the impression that the message must be bludgeoned —like a bat swung over your head or a hand slapped against your face in order for the audience to grasp the meaning.
That’s the problem with most American movies produced today they lack subtlety—directors are under the false impression that adult audience goers are “morons†and if there is no car chase; or mafia shooting scene; or kung fu fighting scenes or exploitative pornographic sex scenes—how will the public possibly know the movie’s message.
My god, even “Brokeback Mountain’s†last scene had the male lover’s shirt hanging in a small closet—symbolically stating that a homosexual relationship in the 1960’s could never come out of the closet.
So maybe “Crash†says more about how Hollywood views the intelligence of the average American and maybe that is also why revenues are down. Most of the films distributed today, are geared for pre-teen boys who need 3d special effects and amusement ride entertainment—adult men and women are left to search through the meager offerings in hopes of finding an intelligent well-written movie.
Reg—I thought King Kong was a perfect rendition of Mayor Bloomberg during the NYC subway strike.
March 4th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
Besides some sterling performances, Marc, as you have rightly noted, what Crash has going for it is a sharp sceenplay and tight, agressive direction. Stuff keeps happening; you can’t take a phone call nor cut cheese for your nachos withut loosing the thread. (Who goes to the theater anymore?)
I can’t speak for L.A., but I do claim a close knowledge of New York and Atlanta and Mississippi and Chicago.
I didn’t recognize my fellow Americans in this movie. I did, however, recognize a prevalent fantasy shared by rich Americans in the symbol manipulation industry who claim to be “Liberal” — that America is a seething cauldron of racial fear and resentment.
Compared to what? The demographic facts are irrefutable. Americans associate and intermarry across racial and religious lines at a rate unmatched in the history of the world.
(Note to America-hating bigots of any and all stripes: go ahead and refute this fact. Got any science?)
This means that Americans are, can, do and will hold themselves to the highest account. Good!
March 4th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
http://mister-don.livejournal.com/89313.html#cutid1
For those who want to read the Brokeback short story. I zeroed in on the inaccurate screed under Welch’s at the LA TImes link from Valdes claiming Ennis was Hispanic as written. Definitely not.
March 4th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
I don’t know why, but I always watch the Oscars, even if I haven’t seen a single one of the nominated movies.
This year in particular I’ll be interested, with Jon Stewart doing the MC duties.
March 4th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
> a mix of Fallen and Grand Canyon
I think you mean *Falling Down* here.
I wonder if filmmakers like Haggis ever get the inkling that they’ve revealed way more about their own superficial, paranoid, out-of-touch view of Los Angeles than they have about Los Angeles as it is actually lived by people who aren’t them. I wonder if the members of the Academy who nominated his film ever get that inkling, too. Probably not.
March 5th, 2006 at 2:54 am
Anyone concerned with the distorted depiction of Los Angeles in film should seek out Thom Anderson’s wonderful documentary, “Los Angeles Plays Itself.” It is both a smart tribute to the city and a polemic against the ways in which it has been depicted by Hollywood.
March 5th, 2006 at 10:01 am
My fiance and I were laughing out loud HARD during Crash’s oh-the-humanity-apex when the Arab shop owner is about to shoot the dignified proletarian locksmith. Laughing.
I though the film was unintersting and trite and really just an ABC afterschool special with some arty farty structural gimmicks.
But my bigger beef with this year’s Oscars is this: Why the hell was Warner Herzog’s fabulous documentary The Grizzly Man not nominated?
March 5th, 2006 at 10:26 am
MC: “…Sunday’s Oscars. I’ll be home like everyone else watching on the tube.
Not everyone. In large part, because of the bad, in-your-face, left-wing politics of the participants, the Oscar ratings are worse than Bush’s–and, more deserved.
March 5th, 2006 at 10:43 am
the oscars were watchable when marlon brando refused to show up and dustin hoffman poked everyone in the eye with his speech about the little guys in hollywood that are never famous or never make it. probably no less self-congratulatory or narcissistic – but much more entertaining.
i’ll skip the awards show and watch one of my all time favorite movies again: Unforgiven.
March 5th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Woody – Yup, those left wing millionaire actors working for huge multinational corporations. Entertainment is our number 1 export at the moment guy. It is all business and if you take political views of actors seriously, than I pity you. They are about as superficial as it gets, but NOT any worse than Fox News or Right Wing talk radio. You have your own set of celebrities with bad politics. YOu actually take them seriously. How sad.
I won’t watch it because the movies are shit. Let middle aged female philistines stay glued to the tube.
March 5th, 2006 at 11:23 am
It’s a narcissitic business, but it goes with the territory of Art.
March 5th, 2006 at 11:45 am
Yeah, Woody, I know what you mean.
It’s a real bitch when a fag movie is up for a bunch of awards, and a well-known Communist and supporter of terrorists is hosting the show.
March 5th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
* Damu Smith, founder of Black Voices for Peace and executive director of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. For more than three decades, Damu has worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the anti-war and environmental justice movements.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: Damu Smith, I want to bring you back into the conversation. I met you some, I don’t know, 15 years ago, I think it was, in Baton Rouge at an Environmental Justice conference. Now it may be that people, a lot of people don’t even know that term, “environmental justice,” or “environmental racism.” Can you talk about it and then apply it to what we’re seeing today?
DAMU SMITH: Well, between Baton Rouge, which is north of Louisiana — north of New Orleans, and New Orleans itself, there are scores of polluting facilities lining the Mississippi River on both sides of the river. You’re talking about numerous petrochemical plants, plastic production facilities and other heavy industries that are contributing to the pollution flowing into the Mississippi River. Now, near these facilities, in the shadow of these plants, are scores of African American communities, mostly African American impoverished communities. People, black and white and Latino, who live in these areas, are exposed to a toxic soup of chemicals regularly released into the air, into the soil, into the water.
Now, one of the things I want to add to this discussion, Amy, is that within New Orleans itself, there are a number of superfund toxic sites in neighborhoods. The Agricultural Street Landfill superfund site has been one of the most controversial sites in the city of New Orleans. We have been working with Elodia Blanco and her group, Concerned Citizens of Agriculture Street. I spoke to Ms. Blanco as she was hurriedly trying to get her invalid father and her daughter out of the house on Sunday in preparation for the hit by the storm. It’s impossible to reach any of them now because the phone services are down. But I’m just imagining the water, if the water is flooding her neighborhood, and I’m imagining that it is, all of those toxic chemicals below their homes have come up. And the water that we see in the footage coming through the television footage contains all of these toxic chemicals. So we’re not just talking about fireflies and ants that we’re hearing in the major media. We’re talking about serious chemicals that are a threat to human health. And now all of this is in the water and being washed into people’s homes and is contaminating the water.
St. Charles parish, just north of New Orleans, has the Shell Norco chemical plant and numerous other polluting facilities. It’s not clear what’s happening in that parish but I would imagine that St. Charles parish has also been hit. East New Orleans has been hard hit. I’ve been to East New Orleans, there are a number of toxic sites in that area right near poor and African American communities. So this is a disaster, not only in terms of the flooding that’s going on, the long-term economic consequences, but it is also an environmental disaster.
One more thing I would like to add, Amy, is that this issue of climate change is very, very serious, as our other guest has stated. The Gulf waters have been very warm, and the warming of the waters contributes to the power and the force of these hurricanes. So while we know hurricanes are indeed a natural disaster, manmade industrial processes are contributing to the enhancement of the power and destruction of hurricanes because of global warming. So this is a critical issue that we have to face as we move into this century. But we also have to face the fact that the infrastructure deficit in New Orleans has also contributed to this disaster. I believe that had — we’re not just talking about poor planning. We’re not just talking about the issues of planning, but we’re talking about issues of investment in the infrastructure necessity that are needed to protect the people of New Orleans from this kind of disaster. And that obviously did not occur.
AMY GOODMAN: Damu, the last time we had you on, we were talking about your own battle right now, your battle against fourth stage colon cancer. And I’m wondering how you’re doing. We also talked about the issue of health and racism within the medical system.
DAMU SMITH: Well, Amy, I’m feeling fine. I’m still battling stage four colon cancer and liver cancer. And thanks to all of the prayers and support of many, many people, my tumors have reduced significantly. I’m still battling. I’m fighting the good fight. And I’m just happy to be here, alive this morning to be on this program. And thanks for keeping me in mind when you have these topics to discuss.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, thank you very much for joining us. I want to thank Damu Smith for being there and today on the show, founder of Black Voices for Peace. Look forward to having you on again soon on these and other issues. David Helvarg, thank you for joining us. Final comments as you watch this storm from your vantage point in Hawaii?
DAVID HELVARG: Well, flying back here, it was interesting from a distance. The coverage as the storm swamped Louisiana was obviously less intense here. People are isolated. And yet, so many of the same issues, wherever you go. I mean, people are at war here over coastal development and loss of traditional peoples’ access to the shoreline. And there’s concerns over energy and how to move off their dependence on fossil fuels and the sense of being an island, which is dependent and at risk.
We’re all on an island. And it’s a planetary island, and we’re putting it at tremendous risk. We aren’t, actually; very specific and identifiable special interests are. And I think, you know, we the people have to organize to be able to live with the natural world and deal with its consequences in more sensible and productive ways. And in the next months it’s just a question of paying attention, I think after, pay attention to what the E.P.A. tells us in what’s really happening in those waters, and with the kind of support that the victims of this receive and the relative support of well-to-do beach homeowners versus poorer communities that are impacted. It’s an ongoing struggle. And hopefully we learn some lessons from disasters like this and just don’t let them keep repeating themselves.
AMY GOODMAN: David Helvarg, President of the Blue Frontier Campaign, his book, Blue Frontier; and Robert Shimek, thanks so much for being with us, Special Projects Coordinator of the Indigenous Environmental Network, the other end of the Mississippi at the Headwaters.
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March 5th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
FBI Whistleblower: White Supremacists Are Major Domestic Terrorist Threat
Democracy Now!
Monday 13 June 2005
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/061405H.shtml
While terrorism in the U.S has been synonymous with Al Qaeda, for most of this country’s history, domestic white supremacist organizations like the Klu Klux Klan were the greatest terrorism threat. Some believe they still may be today. Today, In Mississippi, the trial begins of Edgar Ray Killen in connection to the murder of three civil rights workers 41 years ago. Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney – were shot dead allegedly by the Ku Klux Klan. And in Washington, the Senate is scheduled to vote today on a resolution to apologize for its failure to enact anti-lynching legislation. An estimated 4,700 people – mostly African-Americans – were lynched between 1882 and 1968.
Another whistleblower just took on the FBI’s approach to domestic terrorism. Mike German worked for the agency for more than 15 years and quit last year. On June 5th, he wrote an editorial in the Washington Post advocating that law enforcement pay more attention to organizations that produce so-called lone wolf extremists like Timothy McVeigh who was executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and Eric Rudolph who planted bombs at the Atlanta Olympics, abortion clinics and a gay nightclub. German writes that “lone extremists pose a challenge for law enforcement because they are difficult to predict. It’s like searching every haystack for a needle. Perhaps we’d have better luck if we paid more attention to the needle factories.”
Mike German, ex-FBI agent who resigned from the agency last year in protest of what he saw as continuing failures in the FBI counter terrorism program. German had worked for years going under cover to infiltrate domestic terrorist organizations like white supremacist skinhead groups and anti-government militias.
Amy Goodman: Today, we’re joined by an ex-F.B.I. agent, Mike German, a whistleblower. He resigned from the agency last year in protest of what he saw as continuing failures in the F.B.I. counterterrorism program. German had worked for years going undercover to infiltrate domestic terrorist organizations like white supremacist skinhead groups and anti-government militias. On June 5, he wrote an editorial in The Washington Post advocating law enforcement pay more attention to groups that produce so-called lone wolf extremists like Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, and Eric Rudolph who planted the bombs at the Atlanta Olympics and women’s health clinics, a gay night club, as well. German writes, (quote), “Lone extremists pose a challenge for law enforcement because they’re difficult to predict. It’s like searching every haystack for a needle. Perhaps we’d have better luck if we paid more attention to the needle factories.” He joins us now in our D.C. studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
Mike German: Thank you, Amy. How are you?
Amy Goodman: It’s very good to have you with us. Well, can you talk first about why you quit and what you see as the great domestic threats today, terroristic threats in this country?
Mike German: Well, I was – had been involved in counterterrorism operations for about a dozen years. And after 9/11, of course, the public became aware of how dysfunctional the counterterrorism program was, but there were problems that I knew about for years, so when things weren’t changing and the F.B.I. wasn’t fixing the internal problems that were causing the breakdowns in communication that actually led to 9/11, if you read the 9/11 Commission Report, I felt it was my obligation to come forward and report that there were continuing failures.
Amy Goodman: Mike German, can you talk specifically about what you wanted changed?
Mike German: Well, I was involved in specific investigations, and I’m not allowed to talk about those investigations, particularly, but basically, if you look at the 9/11 Commission Report, kind of the diversion was that it was a problem of intelligence, but it really wasn’t a problem of intelligence. You had agents in Phoenix who gathered the intelligence, who were aware of one portion of the plot. You had agents in Minneapolis who were aware of another portion of the plot. You had agents in New York who were aware of another portion of the plot. And they all wanted to continue their investigation. The agents on the street are doing their job, they’re collecting the information. It’s when they report that information to headquarters and request authority to continue their investigation, and that’s where the breakdown was. And basically, that was happening in my post-9/11 cases is that that same mid-level bureaucracy was hampering counterterrorism efforts. So that’s why I reported it to Congress.
Amy Goodman: Can you talk about the groups that you think need to be watched in this country? And if you can give us a thumbnail sketch of the domestic terrorism attacks most famous one, of course, Oklahoma City bombing, 1995, Timothy McVeigh.
Mike German: Right. Basically 19 – that was actually in 1995, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City. And, you know, what that was was their demonstration of the abilities that they had, and clearly, they can do a lot damage in this country. Any extremist group can do damage. And I think that a lot of the problem right now is we’re in this kind of area where we’re categorizing who’s the greater threat. Well, to me, the guy with the bomb today is the greatest threat, and whether he is a white supremacist terrorist, an Islamic terrorist or an eco-terrorist doesn’t really matter to me. My job as a criminal investigator out on the street is to try to stop the threat that’s there today. And if we do this sort of ranking where we’re only going to pay attention to eco-terrorists because they’re the number one threat or Islamic terrorists because they’re the bigger threat, we’re probably going to drop the ball in one of the other areas. So I think that the mission is let the agents on the street find out what’s happening, but we have to fix that mid-level management area so we can manage the information that they’re providing.
Amy Goodman: How do you infiltrate a group? Can you talk about your – what you can talk about, your own history?
Mike German: Well, I was involved in a case in Los Angeles in 1992, and in that case, there was a cooperating witness that introduced me into the group. And then I was involved in a second case in northwest Washington in 1996, and that also involved a different cooperating witness, but it was introductions into the group through public citizens, citizens who saw a problem and wanted to help law enforcement protect the community. And once they introduced me in, then it was up to me to try to figure out what – who the criminals were within the group and what the criminal activity was, and gather evidence of that criminal activity.
Amy Goodman: Can you talk more specifically, like Los Angeles, what exactly what that group was doing?
Mike German: Well, in Los Angeles there were actually a number of different groups that we had had gotten into, and they were white supremacist groups. Los Angeles in 1992, of course, the community was suffering after – the aftermath of the racial unrest following the Rodney King police beating, so there was a lot of racial animosity in the city. And the white supremacist groups were attempting to take advantage of that situation to spark a race war. So they were preparing for the race war by manufacturing machine guns and explosives, and one of the cells that we got into was actually already involved in a bombing campaign, and we were able to solve those bombings and recover more explosive devices and stop ongoing conspiracies to bomb synagogues and churches that were attended prominently by African Americans.
Amy Goodman: Looking at the piece that you did in The Washington Post, “Behind the Lone Terrorist, a Pack Mentality,” you talk about every once in a while, a follower of these movements bursts violently into our world with deadly consequences. McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Buford Furrow, Jr., Paul Hill, to name just a few, all convicted murderers, identified as lone extremists, the most difficult terrorists to stop, because they act independently from any organization. Or do they? You write, “Tim McVeigh seemed able to find a militia meeting wherever he went. He was linked to militia groups in Arizona and Michigan, white supremacist groups in Oklahoma and Missouri, and at gun shows he sold copies of The Turner Diaries, the racist novel written by the founder of a neo-Nazi organization. No one finds such groups by accident.” You talk about Eric Rudolph who planted the bombs at the Atlanta Olympics, two abortion clinics, gay nightclub, grew up in the Christian Identity Movement, which identifies whites as God’s chosen people and encourages the faithful to follow the Biblical example of Phineas, by becoming instruments of God’s vengeance. Aryan Nations, formerly of Hayden Lake, Idaho, was the center of Christian Identity thought. Not incidentally, Buford Furrow worked there as a security guard before going on a shooting rampage at a Jewish day care center in Southern California. And you talk about Paul Hill, wrote of the need to take Phineas actions to prevent abortions and was so well known that the news media used to – used him to speak in support of Michael Griffin’s killing of abortion doctor, David Gunn, that Hill later shot an abortion provider himself should have surprised no one. Give us the landscape of these groups. They’re well known.
Mike German: Sure, they’re well known. And they’re very well organized, and they’re very smart. They understand criminal conspiracy laws. They understand the First Amendment. And they take advantage of those in training their operatives to go out and do these activities. And the point I was trying to make is – is that we can’t look at these as isolated instances. It would be as if we were investigating the mafia and looking at every mafia hitman as a lone assassin and not looking at the underlying organization that was producing these murders, you know. And these people are careful, the leadership are careful about separating themselves from the actual criminal conspiracy, you know. But they do set the motive. They set the method that’s used, and I believe that makes them part of the conspiracy. Now, I’m not saying necessarily you can make a criminal case against them, but all I’m saying is if we’re – if our number one priority is to prevent acts of terrorism, we have to pay attention to these needle factories, because that’s what they’re producing is these lone extremist terrorists. And it’s not just random violence that occurs once in a while, it’s an organized pattern of activity.
Amy Goodman: I remember during President Bush, the first’s presidency, Planned Parenthood trying to get the administration to talk about the whole movement of burning, bombing, attacking women’s health clinics as a conspiracy, because the same kinds of things were happening around the country, not to mention the targeting of women’s health professionals, and doctors who performed abortions. They could hardly get an audience with the Justice Department at the time, and the administration was adamant about not talking about conspiracy of these groups. What is the significance of this?
Mike German: Well, I think the problem is if you blind yourself to the conspiracy, then the chances of them being successful in their next act of lone extremist terrorism is more likely. So, you know, again I’m not saying that we could necessarily take these leaders into court and convict them, because the whole purpose of their methodology is to separate themselves from the actual criminal activity, but what I’m saying is if we don’t pay attention to those leaders, you’re going to insure that the next group is successful, just as if we were only investigating the mafia one murder at a time and not looking at the underlying organization. And frankly, you know, these groups, like the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, have rich criminal histories just as deep as the Italian mafia does, yet, you know, we tend to give them a political status that I don’t think is necessarily deserved.
Now, one thing to keep in mind, there are political groups within this movement. It’s a huge community. Like any community, there’s a division of labor, and these – you know, there are completely law-abiding people within these groups, and as a criminal investigator, when I went undercover, one of my – one of the things that I had to do was separate those two out, because there are people who have very strong white supremacist beliefs but would never, ever engage in violence. And my role as a criminal investigator, I was there to gather evidence of criminal activity. So I had no interest in talking to those people. I had to try to find who were the criminals. And I mean, that’s the part – the hard part about law enforcement in a democratic society, but it’s something that has to be done. And, you know, in my cases, it was done very effectively and, you know, I believe the F.B.I. should have replicated those cases more than they did.
Amy Goodman: You write in your piece in The Washington Post of last week, that just six weeks ago, self-avowed white supremacist, Sean Gillespie, was convicted of firebombing an Oklahoma City synagogue. According to a CNN report, Gillespie said he once had been a member of the white supremacist group, Aryan Nations. He later left the group. At the time of his arrest, he told authorities he was a racist skinhead acting on his own. But before the attack, he videotaped himself stating, “I will film it for your viewing enjoyment, my kindred white power.” If he’s all alone, who are his “kindred”? “Neo-Nazi ideology is also a leading influence in rising school violence,” you write. “The March 21 shooting at Minnesota’s Red Lake High School was carried out by a Native American teen who praised Adolf Hitler, used the name ‘Native Nazi’ in internet chat rooms, and the shooters at Colorado’s Columbine High School reportedly greeted each other with Nazi salutes and chose Hitler’s birthday as the date of their attack. But you rarely hear these incidents described as acts of domestic terrorism.” Who defines whether it’s terrorism or not?
Mike German: Well, that’s a big part of the problem, and you know, any time they come up with numbers of terrorist attacks, you have got to realize that there’s a reporting problem there. You know, a white man beats a black man on the street, is that just a random assault or is that a hate crime, or is that an act of domestic terrorism, or is it nothing? Does it not get reported at all? So, any time that the government talks about numbers of terrorism attacks, what they’re talking about is the number of attacks that were reported as acts of terrorism. And like the school violence, sometimes it’s not even thought of as domestic terrorism, but if neo-Nazi influence is influencing these kids to act out violently, I would argue that that’s part of the terrorist movement, and that that, by paying attention to the neo-Nazi groups that are producing that literature and those websites, we might have a better idea of who might be the next lone extremist, so that we can stop him.
Amy Goodman: With people like Paul Hill, the abortion doctor killer, the whole violent attack on women’s health movement, is it also that the administration with a very anti-choice point of view, brings politics into defining who they will go after and who they don’t? Is that fair to say?
Mike German: No, I really don’t think so. In my experience, the agents on the street have really never let politics get involved, really are very apolitical.
Amy Goodman: Not the agents on the street, but at the top.
Mike German: Except that that’s who actually does the investigation. So, you know, I mean, kind of one of the misnomers about all this talk of reforming the government for counterterrorism, it’s not as if the director could say, ‘Hey, agent in Des Moines, find me a domestic terrorist case today.’ You know, he can only deal with what’s on the street in front of him. So, cases actually get reported up from the street. And, you know, the agents on the street are the ones that are actually making the cases, and where – like what I said before, where it breaks down is when it gets through management. And I don’t believe politics really plays a point in that. I – you know, whether politics plays a point in these kind of rankings of what terrorist groups are most dangerous right now, that very well may be, but my whole point is that you can’t really rank these guys based on their ideology. You have to worry about who has got the bomb today.
Amy Goodman: Where are the white militia groups centered today in this country, and how hard is it to infiltrate?
Mike German: You know, they’re everywhere. I think that one of the big misperceptions about these groups is that they’re only out West. They’re only up in the Northwest. You know, once you’re kind of attuned to their language and their codes and their symbols, I see that kind of stuff everywhere I go. I have, you know, traveled all over the United States and have been able to find something that gives me an indication that there’s a community there. When a community gets leafleted, typically that’s a sign that there is a group that is at least trying to start operating in that community. And if you, you know, look at these groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, they keep track of this kind of information, you will see that they’re spread out everywhere, and keep in mind that they’re clandestine groups, so they do their best to hide. So of the ones we know about, there’s probably – you know, that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. There’s probably, you know, two or three times that many that nobody has ever heard of. When I was working undercover in the Los Angeles case, the one group that we found that was actually involved in the bombing campaign, nobody even knew about them. You know, the Huntington Beach Police Department had done a very nice job helping – assisting us in that case, in identifying some of these young people, but it was basically a group that was operating completely under the radar.
March 5th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
This is a really important contribution to antiracism disucssions in the US, it should be read IN FULL.
AMY GOODMAN: We continue a discussion about race and the response to Hurricane Katrina with Curtis Muhammad, co-founder of the New Orleans-based organization Community Labor United, joining us from Jackson, Mississippi. We’re also joined in New York by David Gladstone, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the University of New Orleans. And on the phone, Beverly Wright, founder and director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at the University of – in New Orleans. Three people displaced from New Orleans right now. David Gladstone, you are here in our studio. Tell us what happened to you, how you got out of New Orleans?
DAVID GLADSTONE: Well, I live and work out at the lakefront, and on Sunday morning, I realized I couldn’t stay there. So, I went – I don’t own a car and lost my last chance to leave with friends, so I checked into a hotel in the downtown area, which a lot of New Orleanians do during hurricanes, because they are old buildings and they have weathered many storms. This storm, unfortunately, was unlike any other we have had in the city. I was able to get a hotel room, and I did weather the hurricane itself on Sunday night. Monday morning, it was clear that help wasn’t coming anytime soon, people really weren’t sure what was happening. They didn’t have information. They couldn’t go back to their homes. I tried to go back to mine, but the streets were flooded. So, I decided to stay another night in the central business district.
By Tuesday morning, the streets were flooded. My hotel had diesel fumes, diesel fuel floating in about two feet of water in the lobby. It was a chaotic situation, and I realized I had to leave the hotel, as many other people were doing, because of fire hazard. So I found myself on the street with really nowhere to go. I had a couple of bags. I was wandering around Canal Street observing – observing looting and other things in the downtown area. I made my way to one of the residential neighborhoods adjacent to the French Quarter, Faubourg Mariné, where I was able to find some cold beer. New Orleans is New Orleans, after all. And I met some people with a car, and I helped them get it out of the city. And we left sometime Tuesday night.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened when you were walking by a car with military or whoever walking by?
DAVID GLADSTONE: The person I was with had driven with me back to the central business district to find some people he had offered a ride out of the city to, as well, and while he was in waist-deep water looking for them, I was standing by the car when some official people on a Caterpillar tractor pulled up to me and were screaming at me to move the car, even though they could get around it. I yelled back that I — that it wasn’t my car, and I didn’t have the keys. And I was yelling for the owner of the car to come back and move it, and in the yelling and screaming, at one point, the officer removed his gun from his holster and pointed it right at me and then another one jumped off the Caterpillar and butted me up against the side of a building with his – what looked like an M-16 rifle or something like that. And it was really at that point I realized that social order, at least as I knew it, had broken down in the city, and that I had to get out. Fortunately, I was able to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: What about these descriptions of looting? The now famous contrast of pictures, A.P. showing a black person carrying a bag, saying “one of the looters,†and then A.F.P., Agence France Presse showing two white people, saying they had taken food and water, you know, to survive?
DAVID GLADSTONE: I think it’s really a shame that we have been hearing so many reports in the media linking looting with race. To begin with, most of the looting I observed on Canal Street and in the French Quarter was – consisted basically of people taking necessities, like food and water. Anything they could eat, like candy, because most people felt – most people I spoke with felt that they were on their own, that they were not – whether it was well-founded or not, they believed that they were on their own and that they had to survive. I saw some people – I did see some people taking clothes and things like that, but by far, most of the people I observed looting in shops were taking necessities.
AMY GOODMAN: Beverly Wright also with us, Founder and Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Where are you now?
BEVERLY WRIGHT: I’m in Atlanta, Georgia.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re still in Atlanta?
BEVERLY WRIGHT: Still in Atlanta.
AMY GOODMAN: What about this discussion of: ‘Will New Orleans be rebuilt?’ I thought about after 2001, the attacks, if anyone said, ‘Will New York be rebuilt?’ That was not the question. It was how it will be rebuilt, but there is this question: Will it even be? Almost a sense of ‘Is it worth rebuilding?’ Your response?
BEVERLY WRIGHT: Yes. I believe that New Orleans will be rebuilt, because New Orleans is a world class city. I believe, however, that these questions are posed because of the way that New Orleans is being perceived at the present moment. And that is that it is a city that had a majority African American population, and that that population is acting in a way that’s – that we shouldn’t – less civilized than what we should be acting under these times of duress, so people are saying, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t build it.’
On the other hand, I really believe that developers, some of them, are doing a break dance at this moment as they watch so many African Americans being removed from the city, of course, because of these circumstances, because now they will have a chance to rebuild it the way that they would like to build it, and that is without us. You hear people say that the city of New Orleans will be bigger, it will be better, it will be stronger. And we also know that the plan is for it to be whiter. And that is one of the reasons that those of us who are scattered all over do plan to return. We are in the process of trying to organize in some way that we will be at the table for the rebuilding of our particular community, but what is happening in New Orleans and the way some of it is being reported is no different from the way we were being reported before the hurricane. And so, you basically have all of the prejudice and racist kinds of feelings that people have about us being played out in the media now.
I just have to say that some of the coverage has been absolutely extraordinary. I have seen reporters absolutely say that it is really a disgrace that some of the pictures are being shown over and over again because what they really see are people trying to survive. As a sociologist, you know, we were taught in introductory sociology about what happens when you have a breakdown of norms where everything is chaotic. The behavior that we are seeing in New Orleans is very similar to what you would see anyplace in the world under these conditions. And I believe that we were ill-prepared for this storm. I believe that our government was very late in stepping in. And a lot of what is happening is predictable, absolutely predictable based on human nature, and we have not received what I consider to be the appropriate reaction by our government in a timely manner. I can’t speak for what’s happening now.
I think that because so much attention has been given to this city, and the elderly and the children and then the violence that we are getting a very strong response from the government at this point. But I have to tell you, I have friends who went back into my community the day before yesterday; and I live in what’s called New Orleans East, which is predominantly African American and middle to upper class people. And he had a big truck, and he said he had to drive on the opposite side of the interstate, and that there were thousands of people still sitting on the interstate trying to get out of the lower ninth ward.
I do agree with Dr. Gladstone that there is a lot of looting, that there is – at night especially, people have guns, and they’re taking whatever they need, and if you have it, they will take it from you. Because it is desperate feeling that a lot of people are having, and you have to remember that we had a serious crime problem in our city before the hurricane, so those people are still there, and you can expect that they’re going to act the way they have always acted.
AMY GOODMAN: Curtis Muhammad is also on the line with us. He is from New Orleans, right now in Jackson, Mississippi, former S.N.C.C organizer, Co-founder of Community Labor United in New Orleans. Curtis, this weekend there will be a meeting in Baton Rouge of black leaders talking about rebuilding New Orleans. As we observe that this question is being asked right now: Will New Orleans be rebuilt, as opposed to how will it be rebuilt, but can you talk about how this whole hurricane is being framed and who will be involved in the rebuilding?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: How are you?
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: And hi, Beverly.
BEVERLY WRIGHT: Hi. How are you?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Well, I think there are two things where we started this process of talking to our people about how to move. First of all, that’s what we do. We have been doing community forums for about eight or nine years in New Orleans under something we call Community Labor United, a coalition of progressive organizations. So, when this happened and we found ourselves scattered everywhere, and we were all watching the news, and we realized that we had our people just all over the South, North, flying them all over the country, so we began to try to gather ourselves and talk about what we needed.
And one consensus emerged out of those phone calls and emails. And that is, we could not depend on our local, state, or national government for our future, that it was very clear that without the people standing and demanding something in a real serious way that we would not get our due. Now, this thing was so blatant, this thing was just so blatant, and there’s been so much skating and sliding around the facts of this thing, and we are looking at it on TV. And that’s what makes it so hard for me.
I mean, I saw T.D. Jakes on the – being interviewed, and I’ve forgotten who interviewed him. It was on CNN, I think, and the interviewer just tried to push him, said, “Reverend Jakes, just tell me how you feel in your gut. Just in your heart. Was this racism?†And he just kept running from that issue. It’s very few people who have really walked into that piece. I mean, here we are watching this thing happen, hearing the reporters talk about ambulances picking up people from the mostly predominantly white and upper middle class hospital at Tulane University, picking people up to evacuate them, and going right past the Charity Hospital where most of the Blacks were. And we had these reports of nurses using pumps by hand to keep people alive and stashing the dead in the staircase, and yet they were going uptown to empty out the predominantly white and middle class hospitals. And we were still skating.
Now, that convinced us that we had no caretakers. You know, those — the Mayor at one point goes into the Superdome and goes into the Convention Center, and says, “Just go walk. Don’t wait for help. Just get on the highway and walk out of here.†That actually happened. And they stopped them. They set up checkpoints and would not let the people leave the city for fear they were going to loot the dry towns, white towns, Kenner, Metairie up the road. And they started locking these shelters at night so people could not sneak away. And no help was still coming. Now, somebody break into place and get water and food, and we call it looting. And people are dying.
And Bush, the President, finally shows up six days later, and he says, “Zero tolerance for people who break into places to get food and water,†that that’s the same as looting. How can you call looting when the whole town almost is under water and people are starving and nobody has been to see about them for six days? And those people are being criminalized and thrown in jail as we speak. So, when we gathered our forces, we began to travel through the shelters so that we could locate. We couldn’t get cooperation from the government of where they were taking our people. But we just started going city to city up the highway, and every city, as we went out on 10 West, we traveled all the way to Houston. We started at Baton Rouge. Everything was filled. Churches, gymnasiums, civic centers, dormitories of college campuses where the students had brought the families into their dormitories.
But when we would go to the public shelters, they were almost like prisons. You could hardly get in. There was all kind of criteria for how you could get in to see the people that was almost like visiting somebody in prison. The people didn’t have access to the world around them for fear, again, because on TV they had been criminalized already. So, though the communities were willing to accept them, they were not willing for these people to walk the streets of their town. They were eating sweets and Cokes, still, to the day – I came to this studio this morning having driven from Houston. Every little town between Baton Rouge and Houston had shelters with our people. And they were all managed by FEMA and Homeland Security and soldiers and National Guards, and the ability to go visit these people was like tremendously hard work.
By the time we got to Houston, we had learned a little lesson. We learned if we took our already white volunteer as our leader to the shelters, we could enter without any problem, without any red tape. We were allowed to enter. So, we are convinced that the racism about the New Orleans black population, the black poor population, is so tremendous and so negligent and we don’t know the reasons. And maybe so all black people. Maybe that’s just – we just have this tremendous universal hatred for dark skin. I don’t know what it is. But we watched blatant racism, blatant racism.
We watched our government, whether it’s local, state or national, and I would rather say state or national because the local government has no National Guard. It has no helicopters. It has no big boats. It doesn’t have the wherewithal to have moved 150,000 people trapped in New Orleans underwater. The state and the feds are the culprits, and though they have not joined the International Court, there must be a people’s court somewhere that can charge wrongful death, that can charge murder. Because that’s what we have witnessed.
AMY GOODMAN: Curtis Muhammad is with Community Labor United; David Gladstone, in the studio with us, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at University of New Orleans; Beverly Wright on the line from Atlanta, Xavier University in New Orleans. All three from New Orleans, all three in diaspora right now. David Gladstone, this rebuilding issue of who gets to decide.
DAVID GLADSTONE: Well, I think when we talk about rebuilding the city, the first major issue that comes to my mind is the – some of the environment problems that undoubtedly will arise now, that most of the city was flooded under water. New Orleans has many Brownfield sites and at least one Superfund site, a 46-acre Agriculture Street landfill site which I believe is submerged or was submerged under water. I think the city will need a lot of remediation. I’m not an expert in that area, so I can’t comment on whether or not the extent of it or what is needed there, but my feeling is that that will be a first order of business. Now, provided that the – provided that environmental conditions are sound and people can return there, I think the city will need to do two things: One will be to convince the people who left to come back. I think that New Orleans without the people who left is just simply not the same city.
AMY GOODMAN: Some are talking about it as a New Orleans of casinos and oil.
DAVID GLADSTONE: Well, –
AMY GOODMAN: Without the people who live there.
DAVID GLADSTONE: In my experience, the culture of New Orleans is sold in the French Quarter, but it’s produced elsewhere in many of the neighborhoods that have been devastated by the storm and flooding. And in order to get the real cultural producers back in the city, I think they need to – we’ll need to feel safe that this won’t happen again, and they’ll also need to have adequate housing, which raises a big issue in my mind, because most people in New Orleans are renters. And most of the people who are poor and African American are renters. And the private sector cannot come back in and build housing and charge market rates and have people afford it, able to afford it. So there’s going to be – need to be a rather large-scale public – either public works program in New Orleans or some kind of subsidies. I hear companies like Bank of America advertise that they have three quarters of a trillion dollars that they want to invest in struggling communities. Well, why not in New Orleans?
AMY GOODMAN: Curtis Muhammad, we just have a few more seconds. Your final comment, and tell us where the meeting is this weekend?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: The meeting will be at the Southern University in Baton Rouge. And on this rebuilding question, the – right as we speak, monies – these $10 billion that has been approved, they have already subsidized oil drilling rigs. They have already subsidized the casinos. This city is intended without the people’s input to go forward with the casinos, with the condominiums, with the Garden District, with the French Quarter. While I agree with the young man who spoke, I don’t think that there is a desire of the leadership of this Project New Orleans to bring those poor people back. They’re scattering them as far as California. 300 have arrived in a school, a former teacher of mine. They are all the way up in D.C. These are poor people.
If they find a way to live, they are going to stay there. If the people rise up, which we are pushing for, this is part of what our meeting is about, if the people demand oversight and transparency of all funds collected on their behalf and make priority the reintegration and the construction of places to live for displaced people, rather than casinos and hotels and condominiums, the people will come back.
AMY GOODMAN: Curtis Muhammad, I want to thank you for being with us, and we’ll continue to talk to you, the Community Labor United from New Orleans, now in Jackson, Mississippi; Beverly Wright, of Xavier University in New Orleans, now in Atlanta; and David Gladstone, the University of New Orleans, Professor of Urban Planning, now in New Jersey.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.
March 5th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Actors’ voices are prominent in debates on policies mainly because that’s about the only way left perspectives on much of anything get more than a moment’s attention. during antiwar protests, the best way to get attention, if not the only way, is to have celebrities making public statements. it’s not like the media is going to give much time to phyllis bennis or noam chomsky or bill fletcher…
well,then again, they will give attention to prowar leftists like gitlin, maybe my theory is wrong after all.
March 5th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Hmmm, in spite of josh’s faux populism im going to my oscar party tonight with no shame
March 5th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Gitlin opposed the war in Iraq. He’s also just as obscure as the other folk you mention. I’ve seen Chomsky on C-span more often than I’ve seen Gitlin anywhere in the media.
You’re grinding so many niche axes that it’s just fucking ridiculous. Also, take it from an inveterate windbag. A long series of Amy Goodman transcripts aren’t gonna get read. A few judicious quotes or a single piece that’s framed so I might care would have a much better chance.
Woody, on average eight to ten million more people watch the Oscars than watch the curerent hot item, American Idol. As usual, you’re acting like a parrot for morons like Sean Hannity and O’Reilly in comparing the popularity of the Academy Awards to the freefall of your Incompetent In Chief. About two and a half million people watch telephone sex guy, Bill O’Reilly on a typical night- far fewer than one tenth the Oscar audience. Closer to 5%. That’s down about a million this year compared to an earlier figure of three and a half million I got from one of your favorite fair’nbalanced sources Newsmax, which called those numbers evidence that O’Reilly’s ratings were “skyrocketing”. If three and a half million viewers are evidence of a “skyrocket” by a right-wing blowhard – regardless of his precipitous decline in the year since – I guess forty-two million or so viewers for an evening of left-wing rants is a signal that you should clear out some space under your bed to hide in a fetal position until things settle down.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Gitlin obscure, are you joking? NPR adores him, everytime they need someone from their idea of the left to trash the antiwar movement, organizers, to show support for invasions, bombing campaigns, etc. they trot out Gitlin. Ditto the NYT. He is hardly obscure. Him n’ Hitch were eading ‘left’ interviewees in the runup to the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to their leftism we have more warlordism in Afghanistan and even more warlordism in Iraq! Or is it the other way around?
http://www.startribune.com/462/story/266514.html
March 5th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
And I disagree about the interivews on racism and Katrina or other areas. This is an interview that frankly should be read ONLY IN FULL:
AMY GOODMAN: We will be joined by Professor Marable in just a moment, but first we begin with Malcolm X himself in words recorded just a months before he was assassinated. It was January 1965, he gave this speech entitled “Prospects for Freedom.”
MALCOLM X: When this country here was first being founded, there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation. So some of them stood up and said, liberty or death. I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan. The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington – wasn’t nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington. Liberty or death was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why, they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days, they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful, the sun would never set on it. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire, liberty or death. And here you have 22 million Afro- Americans, black people today, catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I’m here to tell you, in case you don’t know it, that you got a new – you got a new generation of black people in this country, who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No. This is a new generation. If they’re going to draft these young black men and send them over to Korea or South Vietnam, to face 800 million Chinese. If you are not afraid of those odds, you shouldn’t be afraid of these odds.
AMY GOODMAN: Malcolm X, a month before he was assassinated. It was January 1965 at a speech he gave in New York, sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum. This is Democracy Now! We’re joined by Professor Manning Marable, one of America’s most influential and widely read scholars, professor of history and African American Studies at Columbia University, founding director of the Institute for Research in African American studies, again working on a new biography of Malcolm X. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MANNING MARABLE: Thank you. It’s always great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: It is great to be with you. Why don’t you summarize for us – I mean, you have been studying Malcolm X for more than a decade now – what you think are the most explosive findings and then throughout the hour, we will tease them out and talk about them.
MANNING MARABLE: I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by Black America in the 20th century. That’s a heavy statement, but I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective. He shared with Marcus Garvey a commitment to building strong black institutions. He shared with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a commitment to peace and the freedom of racialized minorities. He was the first prominent American to attack and to criticize the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, and he came out four-square against the Vietnam War in 1964, long before the vast majority of Americans did. So that Malcolm X represents the cutting edge of a kind of critique of globalization in the 21st century. In fact, Malcolm, if anything, was far ahead of the curve in so many ways.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then when we come back, we are a going to talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the missing chapters, and where they are, which you have got a chance to see excerpts of.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about how the autobiography was written, and the F.B.I., their relationship with Alex Haley. We will talk about these things and more in just a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We spend the hour today on Malcolm X, today the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Our guest is Columbia University Professor Manning Marable, writing a biography of Malcolm X, and also the editor of the magazine Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. The winter 2005 issue, photograph of Malcolm X on the cover, and that’s what the whole issue is devoted to, with a major article by Professor Marable. Let’s talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
MANNING MARABLE: Okay. The — most people who read the autobiography perceive the narrative as a story that now millions of people know, and it was — it’s a story of human transformation, the powerful epiphany, Malcolm’s journey to Mecca, his renunciation of the Nation of Islam’s racial separatism, his embrace of universal humanity, of humanism that was articulated through Sunni Islam. Well, that’s the story everybody knows. But there’s a hidden history. You see, Malcolm and Haley collaborated to produce a magnificent narrative about the life of Malcolm X, but the two men had very different motives in coming together. Malcolm did — what Malcolm did not know is that back in 1962, a collaborator of Alex Haley, fellow named — a journalist named Alfred Balk had approached the F.B.I. regarding an article that he and Haley were writing together for The Saturday Evening Post, and the F.B.I. had an interest in castigating the Nation of Islam, and isolating it from the mainstream of Negro civil rights activity. So consequently, a deal was struck between Balk, Haley and the F.B.I. that the F.B.I. provided information to Balk and Haley in the construction of their article, and Balk was — Balk was really the interlocutor between the F.B.I. and the two writers in putting a spin on the article. The F.B.I. was very happy with the article they produced, which was entitled, “The Black Merchants of Hate,” that came out in early 1963. What’s significant about that piece is that that became the template for what evolved into the basic narrative structure of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
AMY GOODMAN: Did Alex Haley know about this relationship?
MANNING MARABLE: There is no direct evidence that Haley sat down with the F.B.I. Nevertheless, since Balk was the co-author of the piece and it was Balk who talked directly with the F.B.I. –
AMY GOODMAN: Did Haley know –
MANNING MARABLE: One can assume that Haley was involved in it.
AMY GOODMAN: Did Haley at least talk to Balk about — did he know about Balk’s relationship with the F.B.I.?
MANNING MARABLE: One can assume that Haley did because Haley and Balk co-authored the piece, traveled throughout the United States together and collected material together to form an article that they co- authored. It would be highly unlikely that Haley did not know.
AMY GOODMAN: Then the writing of the autobiography, Alex Haley and Malcolm X’s relationship. How did they do it?
MANNING MARABLE: Over a period of –
AMY GOODMAN: And why did Malcolm X choose him?
MANNING MARABLE: Over a period of about year-and-a- half, Malcolm and Haley agreed to work with each other. They met usually after a long business day that Malcolm put in very tired. He would get there at about — either at Haley’s apartment or they would meet at then Idlewild Airport at a hotel, and Malcolm would be debriefed by Haley. He would talk, Haley would take notes. Malcolm had a habit of scribbling notes in small pieces of paper that Haley would surreptitiously pick up at the end of their discussions. Malcolm’s objective was actually to reingratiate himself within the Nation of Islam, that because he had emerged by the early 1960s as a very prominent figure outside of the N.O.I., there were critics within the organization that were saying to the patriarch of the N.O.I., the Honorable Elijah Mohammad, that Malcolm planned to take over the organization, which was not true. But nevertheless, Malcolm felt that if he could make a public — a prominent public statement to show his fidelity to the Honorable Elijah Mohammad that that might win him back in the good graces of the organization. But there were internal critics, sharp critics, who were very opposed to him, and who were very — some of them were members of Elijah Mohammad’s family, such as Herbert Mohammad, Raymond Shareef, who was the head of the Fruit of Islam, the brother-in-law of — the son-in-law of Elijah Mohammad. They isolated Malcolm X and kept him out of the newspaper of the organization Mohammad Speaks for over a year, which is kind of curious. He was the national spokesperson of the N.O.I., and he wasn’t represented in their own newspaper for over a year. Haley’s objective was quite different. Haley was a republican. He was an integrationist. He was very opposed to black nationalism. His objective was to illustrate that the racial separatism of the N.O.I. was a kind of pathological or a kind of — it was the logical culmination of separatism and racial isolationism and exclusion. He wanted to show the negative aspects of the N.O.I.’s ideology, Yacub’s history, and all of the ramifications of racial separatism that he felt were negative, and that Malcolm, being as charismatic as he was, a very attractive figure, nevertheless, he embodied these kind of negative traits. Haley felt he could make a solid case in favor of racial integration by showing what was — to white America — what was the consequence of their support for racial separatism that would end up producing a kind of hate, the hate that hate produced, to use the phrase that Mike Wallace used in his 1959 documentary on the Nation of Islam. So, the two men for very different reasons came together. What is striking is that from almost from the very beginning of certainly by September and October of 1963, as the book was being constructed, that Haley was vetting — asking questions to the publisher and to the publisher’s attorney regarding many of the things that Malcolm was saying. He was worried that he would not have a book that would have the kind of sting that he wanted. He was also concerned, to use Haley’s phrase, about the purported anti-Semitism of Malcolm X, and so he began to rewrite words or passages in the book without Malcolm’s knowledge. And Haley, in his own — this is prior to emails — Haley had a tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to paper in his own books. So that one finds in Haley’s archives, or the archives of Anne Romaine, who was going to be his biographer until her tragic death in 1995, one finds a copious series of notes from Haley to his editors and attorneys regarding the construction of the autobiography itself. He wanted to steer the book to accomplish his political goals, as well as Malcolm’s goals.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Professor Marable, you went to the Haley collection.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that experience and how difficult it is, really, to get original information about Malcolm X, and the Haley example is just one.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. One of the striking things about doing research on Malcolm X, and I believe that most Malcolm X researchers could tell you their own stories, is that there’s this paradox of the absence of critical information. Malcolm X is a person who has inspired — he has been the muse of several generations of black cultural workers, artists, poets, playwrights. There are literally a thousand works with the title Malcolm X in them. There are over 350 films and over 320 web-based educational resources with the title Malcolm X, yet the vast majority of them are based on secondary literatures, that is, not on primary source material. In the case of Alex Haley, Haley’s material is located at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, primarily. But there are a whole series of elaborate steps that one has to — has to encounter in order to even begin to do research. There’s an attorney. If you want to photocopy material from that archive, you have to get permission from the attorney beforehand. You have to name the exact pages you want to photocopy before you can photocopy them. So that there are a whole series of steps. You can only use a pencil rather than a pen to copy down material, etc. It’s a laborious process, and it takes a long time just to do a small amount of research. Fortunately, Anne Romaine, who was appointed by Haley just before his death to be his own biographer –
AMY GOODMAN: She was a folk singer?
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. A folk singer and a skillful historian, even though she was not formally trained in the field. She collected her own parallel archive to Haley, and without Anne Romaine’s archive, which is also at the University of Tennessee – well, I should — let me put it in a positive light, with that archive, we have gained extensive knowledge about how Haley and Malcolm actually worked and how the book, the autobiography, was constructed. The raw material for chapter 16, a lot of that material, is actually in Romaine’s archives, not in Haley’s, which is interesting.
AMY GOODMAN: Hmm.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. But what is most interesting about the book is that as I have read it over the years, something — something was odd to me. It’s like — you know, Malcolm broke with the N.O.I. in March 1964, and in that last 11 chaotic months, he spent most of the time outside of the United States. Nevertheless, he built two organizations in the spring of 1964. First, Muslim Mosque Incorporated, which was a religious organization that was largely based on members of the N.O.I. who left with him. It was spearheaded by James 67X or James Shabazz, who was his chief of staff. Then secondly was the Organization of Afro-American Unity. This was an organization that was a secular group. It largely consisted of people that we would later call several years later Black Powerites, Black nationalists, progressives coming out of the Black freedom struggle, the northern students’ movement, people — students, young people, professionals, workers, who were dedicated to Black activism and militancy, but outside of the context of Islam. There were tensions between these two organizations, and Malcolm had to negotiate between them and since he was out of the country a great deal of the time, it was rather difficult for him to do so. It seemed rather odd that there’s only a fleeting reference to the OAAU inside of the book that’s supposed to be his political testament. I wondered about this. It seemed like something was missing. Well, as a matter of fact, there is. Three chapters. Those three chapters really represent a kind of political testament that are outlined by Malcolm X, and to make a long story short, they’re in a safe of a Detroit attorney by the name of Greg Reed. He purchased these chapters in a sale of the Haley Estate in late 1992 for the sum of $100,000. Since that time, no historian, or at least I suppose I’m the exception, very few people have actually had a chance to see the raw material that was going to comprise these three chapters. The missing political testament that should have been in the autobiography, but isn’t.
AMY GOODMAN: And what is he doing with them?
MANNING MARABLE: Well, they’re sitting in his safe. And, I guess the conundrum — I’m not an attorney or a person who does intellectual property — but my understanding of the situation is that he owns the property, but he doesn’t own — he owns the physical texts of these chapters, but Mr. Reed does not own the intellectual property, the content of these chapters, so he cannot publish them.
AMY GOODMAN: Is this the same attorney Reed who is involved with, perhaps, a lawsuit to do with Rosa Parks?
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. It’s the same one, with the trial with the hip-hop group that’s based in Atlanta, and Gregory Reed –.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Outkast?
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right, with Outkast. In fact, I was even — I think even Reed sent something to me asking me to be a — to give testimony in this trial, which I promptly said, thanks, but no thanks.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s because Outkast used in their music, they use Rosa Parks’s words, her own voice?
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: How does the family of Rosa Parks feel about this?
MANNING MARABLE: I cannot really say. I just know what I have seep on the media. I know that they weren’t very happy about this.
AMY GOODMAN: Happy about –
MANNING MARABLE: About Greg Reed’s representation, but –
AMY GOODMAN: So, he’s not representing them.
MANNING MARABLE: Well, again, I cannot really characterize what is going on with that lawsuit, because I’m not really a party to it.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you are the only historian who has seen excerpts of the attorney Reed, the three chapters that he has in his safe?
MANNING MARABLE: I cannot say that for certain.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the few.
MANNING MARABLE: One of — I could say that very few people have seen it. Reed, after a series of conversations — Reed said he would allow me to see this. This was about two years ago. I flew out to Detroit. I asked when could I come over to the office, and he said, no, let’s meet at a restaurant, which struck me as rather odd. We met at a restaurant. He came with a briefcase, and he opened the briefcase and he showed me the manuscripts. He said, I’ll let you take a look at this for about 15 minutes. Well, that wasn’t very much time. I was deeply disappointed, nevertheless, in that 15 minute time, looking at the content, because I’m so familiar with what Malcolm wrote at certain stages of his own life and development, it became very clear that there’s a high probability he wrote this material sometime between August or September 1963 to about January 1964. Now, this is a critical moment in his development. In November 1963, he gives his famous message to the grassroots address in Detroit, which really kind of marks off the real turning point in his own development. But I would argue that equally important is a brilliant address he gives in Harlem in mid-August of 1963, which actually is one of my favorite addresses by Malcolm, which actually is superior in my judgment to the message to the grassroots address, where he lays into a critique of what then is being mobilized, the march on Washington, D.C., the pinnacle of the civil rights movement. Malcolm envisions a broad-based pluralistic united front, which is spearheaded by the Nation of Islam, but mobilizing integrationist organizations, non-political organizations, civic groups, all under the banner of building black empowerment, human dignity, economic development, political mobilization. He’s already envisioning the N.O.I. playing a role cooperatively with integrationist organizations. I believe that if we could see the chapters that are missing from the book, we would gain an understanding as to why perhaps — perhaps — the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the New York Police Department and others in law enforcement greatly feared what Malcolm X was about, because he was trying to build a broad — an unprecedented black coalition across the lines of black nationalism and integration. And in way, it presages 30 years ahead of time, the Million Man March.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Marable, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask more about the chapters and also about the assassination of Malcolm X, 40 years ago today.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University, and long time now writing the biography of Malcolm X, which I see has just been bought by a publisher, and is going to be coming out in few years.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right, with Viking Penguin. That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: More on these three chapters, what you saw in the restaurant, and then let’s talk about the assassination of Malcolm X.
MANNING MARABLE: Alright. I think that Malcolm was envisioning, even while he was in the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist progressive strategy toward uniting black people across ideological, class lines, denominational religious lines, Christians, as well as Muslims, to build a strong movement for justice and for empowerment. And I think that that is what frightened the FBI, and that is what frightened the CIA. That is what they had to stop, and if one thinks about it, those listeners and our viewers who know the history of COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program of the FBI that occurred in the 1960s and 70s, that in 1965 or 6, that J. Edgar Hoover wrote an infamous memo called the Black Messiah Memo. He said, “We must stop the rise of a black messiah.” That was the concern that the FBI had more than anything else. Either Malcolm or Martin could have played the role of a unifier, but it was — Malcolm as long as he remained within the Nation of Islam, talking to the converted, he did not represent a fundamental threat to the American government. But when he began to talk about uniting the very fractious civil rights movement, when he talked — when he began to negotiate with people like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and Martin and others, keep in mind that several weeks before Malcolm’s assassination, he went to Selma, Alabama. Dr. King was imprisoned during the mobilization. He went to Mrs. King, and he told Coretta that, you know, that even though we’re very different people, that we’re really about the business of the same struggle. We just use different tactics. And I want you to understand, and I want you to convey to your husband that I deeply respect what he is doing. So, Malcolm had a clear vision and an understanding that we were — that he was a part of a broad freedom struggle. As his vision became more internationalist and pan-African, as he began, especially in 1964, after seeing the example of anti-colonial revolutions abroad and began to articulate and incorporate a socialist analysis economically into his program, he clearly became a threat to the US state.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain how events led to this day, 40 years ago, the assassination of Malcolm X.
MANNING MARABLE: I believe that the evidence will show that there was not so much a conspiracy, but a convergence of interests with three different groups that had an interest in eliminating his voice and his vision. The first group, obviously, is the NYPD, the New York Police Department. They had their own red squad, which was called BOSS, the Bureau of Special Services. They had managed to infiltrate Malcolm’s organization and the nation of Islam. And, of course, the FBI. There were over 40,000 pages of FBI documents of which only about half are currently available to scholars and researchers. I think that this 40th anniversary of the assassination is a good opportunity for us to say that now is the time to declassify all FBI material on Malcolm X. There really is a need for us to challenge the US government for its refusal to open up its own archives 40 years after the death of Malcolm. All of that material should be made available to all researchers and all scholars and to the family of Malcolm X. So that — I believe that the FBI clearly was concerned, wanted to monitor and disrupt Malcolm wherever possible. Gene Roberts, one of Malcolm’s chiefs of security, was an NYPD undercover cop. He later went on to bigger things by being a disruptive force inside of the Black Panther Party. So, that’s one element. A second element was the Nation of Islam. Lynwood X, who was one of the leaders of the New Jersey mosques of the Nation of Islam, was at the Audubon Ballroom sitting on the first row. He came in early to observe the events on the 21st of February. He was taken aside by Benjamin 2X, close associate of Malcolm and also Ruben X, Ruben X Francis, who was the chief of security. Lynwood said he just wanted to check out what Malcolm had to say. But my sense is that perhaps his role was more complicated than simply that of a bystander. We know from Talmadge Hayer, one of the men who carried out the assassination, who was shot by Ruben X as he tried to flee the Audubon after shooting Malcolm X, we know that Hayer confessed years later to his Imam in prison that there had been a walk-through a week prior to February 21st at the Audubon Ballroom. So, there was deep knowledge on the part of members of the Nation of Islam regarding the planning, in sight of the OAAU and the Muslim Mosque Incorporated regarding the events at the Audubon. They knew when they were going to be there, they knew what the schedules were. How did they know this? Well, in part because they had informants inside of the organization, and in part because, obviously, they had information that hardly anybody else had. They also knew something else clearly, that on the day of the assassination, and here we get to the third group — I think the third group are elements within Malcolm’s own entourage. Elements within Malcolm’s own entourage, some of them were very angry with some of the changes that had occurred with Malcolm. One source of anger, curiously enough, was that — was the tension between MMI and OAAU, that the MMI, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated, these were women and men who had left the Nation of Islam out of loyalty to Malcolm, but then Malcolm continued to evolve rapidly. He never renounced and never stepped away from a strong commitment to black nationalism and black self-determination. That’s absolutely clear if you do any analysis of his speeches. But what is clear is that he incorporated within the framework of black nationalism a pan-Africanist and internationalist perspective. In doing so, he began to reassess radically earlier positions sexism and patriarchy. He began to break with notions of sexism that he had long held as a member of the Nation of Islam, and began to advance and push forward women leadership in the OAAU. MMI brothers were very resistant to women such as Lynn Shiflet and others who emerged as leaders within the OAAU, so one of the tensions that occurred was around gender equality and gender leadership inside of Malcolm’s entourage.
AMY GOODMAN: Then, that day, there was the presence, or lack of presence, of the NYPD.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. The NYPD was ubiquitous. They were always around Malcolm. Whenever Malcolm spoke, there would be one or two dozen cops all over the place. On this day, the cops were nowhere to be seen. The cops later explained that they had been pulled off the Audubon in order to go across the street. Normally, they were in a command center on the second floor adjacent to the large ballroom in the building. On this day, there were only two cops at moment of the shooting inside of the building, but they were as far away as possible from the site of the ballroom. The man who actually apprehended Talmadge Hayer, the only shooter who was shot at the site, Thomas Hoy, was actually driving by by accident. So, clearly, they had been pulled off the case.
AMY GOODMAN: He was an off duty cop.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. Why did the cops disappear quite literally? Then there were other kind of curious things. There was a complete failure of protection of the principal. The MMI brothers, who provided security for Malcolm had been trained by Malcolm himself that inside of the Nation of Islam, whenever there is a diversion, you protect the principal. The principal, in this case Malcolm, clearly was not protected on February 21st. First off, nobody was checked for weapons as they came in. Now, of course, people know that over the last several months prior to February 21st, 1965, the OAAU and MMI tried to get away from the old practices of checking people at the door for weapons. They wanted people to feel more comfortable. But the guards themselves did not carry weapons. Now, Malcolm’s home had just been firebombed a week before. The guards didn’t carry weapons. Malcolm had insisted that the guards not carry firearms that day. I have asked James Shabazz, I’ve asked other people who are members of the OAAU, Herman Ferguson and others, what led to that disastrous decision? James Shabazz said to me with a shrug, you just didn’t know Malcolm. Malcolm was adamant, and that whatever Malcolm wanted, that’s what we just did. But I said, this is highly irresponsible considering that there were death threats that were constant, that there was FBI surveillance and disruption, and that none of you carried weapons? Well, that’s not quite true, because we later learned from unredacted FBI files, that we have discovered and that we have archived in the municipal archives here in the city of New York, that there were at least, according to the district attorney, at least three undercover cops who were at the ballroom that day. We know one of their names. We know that -
AMY GOODMAN: What’s his name?
MANNING MARABLE: Well, we know that Gene Roberts, who was depicted giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to Malcolm -
AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute.
MANNING MARABLE: Was an undercover cop, but who were the others? Two of the three men, who were imprisoned, Norman Butler and Robert 15x Johnson, convicted and given life sentences, I’m absolutely convinced were innocent. The real murderers of Malcolm X have not been caught or punished. I think that now is the moment for us to rededicate ourselves to learning the truth about what happened on February 21st. The place to begin is to make all evidence public, and we have to begin with the federal government, and the FBI.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Manning Marable, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
MANNING MARABLE: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Marable is writing a biography of Malcolm X that will come out in a few years, has a major piece in his magazine, Souls, a critical journal of black politics, culture and society. Tonight, we’ll be at Columbia University talking more about his investigation. Thank you very much.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Fred – Get some meds for gods sake.
Ahmed – Well I am glad that you can confirm your bad taste. Let me know what is up with Brad and Angelina will ya?
March 5th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
josh, you get some meds, your attacks against Americans who march in protests against war indicate high degrees of paranoia.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
damn!
March 5th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
Woodys back—I thought he had bid this site a permanent farewell, after someone used the words semen and Christ in one sentence.
Woody don’t fret, liberal Hollywood celebrities won’t cause a leftist revolution—chaos would make it impossible for celebrities to get massages after they finish working out with their personal trainers.
And how could they possible book Botox or collagen injections if there is a revolution going on in the streets—it’s all so unsettling.
Enjoy the Oscars for what they are—escapist fluff; like all main stream entertainment, a little mindless narcotic.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
This is a great tribute to an actor who was critical in the antiracism struggles in Imperial Amerikkka
Don’t KILL the messenger!!!
Read this IN FULL as it was meant to be:!
Actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis died Friday in Miami Beach. He was 87 years old. For half a century, Davis led a distinguished career as an actor, playwright and director. Along with his wife, Ruby Dee, he was a renowned civil rights activist and an unforgettable figure in the African American struggle for equality. We spend the hour remembering Ossie Davis: From his eulogies to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to his opposition to the war in Iraq. We hear from actor Danny Glover and journalist Herb Boyd and we play a commentary by death row prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal.
Actor and civil rights activist, Ossie Davis has died. He was found in a hotel room in Miami Beach Friday, where he was making a movie. He was 87 years old.
For five decades, Ossie Davis had a distinguished career as an actor, playwright and director. Along with his wife, Ruby Dee, he was a renowned civil rights activist and an unforgettable figure in the African American struggle for equality.
He performed in some 80 movies, including six with director Spike Lee. Two months ago, he and Ruby Dee, were honored at the Kennedy Center for their lifelong contributions to theater, television and film, as well as for being models of courage and grace in the long struggle for equality in the United States.
Ossie Davis was born Dec. 18, 1917, in Cogdell, Georgia. His given name was meant to be Raiford Chatman Davis, but the registrar of births recorded what were supposed to be the initials, “R.C.,†as “Ossie†and it remained his name ever since.
He grew up in the segregated south amid racism and the Ku Klux Klan. As a young man, he hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard University. He dropped out at the end of his junior year and moved to Harlem in New York City. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army where he spent much of World War II as a surgical technician in an Army hospital in Liberia.
After his discharge in 1945, he began career on the stage in New York where he met fellow actor, Ruby Dee. They married in December 1948 and were inseparable for the next 56 years.
In addition to their acting careers, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee had prominent roles on the nation’s political stages. They participated in marches for racial equality throughout the South and participated in the 1963 March on Washington.
After Malcolm X was assassinated at a Harlem rally in 1965, Ossie Davis wrote and delivered a eulogy at his funeral. In 1968, he eulogized the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.
Despite being blacklisted briefly in the 1950s McCarthyism era, Davis often traveled to Washington to speak before congressional committees about the arts or about opportunities for people of color in Hollywood.
In 1992, Davis wrote a novel and in 1998 published an autobiography with his wife titled, “With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together.†Davis continued his activism up until his death, most recently protesting the war in Iraq.
LISTis
March 5th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
“I won’t watch it because the movies are shit.”
Although there’s nothing that stands out as a masterpiece a la Raging Bull on this list, IMO , this strikes me as collectively one of the highest quality crop of Best Picture nominees in memory. I mean, compare any of these pix to former winners like Ben-Hur, Titanic, Shakespeare In Love, Forrest Gump, The English Patient or Gladiator. Last year “Aviator” – truly a piece of crap despite the Scorcese pedigree – was among the nominees. Nothing there this round that’s truly embarrassing or pure Pop. I mean, this is an award once won by “The Greatest Show On Earth”. On balance, I think it’s recovered rather well since then. And there were a fair number of good films like Hustle and Flow, Cinderella Man and Walk The Line that weren’t nominated but wouldn’t have dragged the category down had they been. Obviously, this is largely a matter of taste – I wouldn’t consider going to see the Ring films or Narnia and although I enjoyed it, I certainly wouldn’t nominate King Kong for Best Picture, while some folks think Narnia wuz robbed or that King Kong is what the movies are about. But all in all, I think 2005 wasn’t a bad year for the movies from a variety of perspectives and tastes. (I’m so middle-brow – or less – that I can’t wait to see the new flick with Bruce Willis and Mos Def.)
March 5th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Josh, anyone who doesn’t think that interview should be read IN FULL!! is barking up the wrong tree.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
TH e COnstant Gardener is the best film against imperialism this year.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
“The Constant Gardener†begins with a strong, angry story, and peoples it with actors who let it happen to them, instead of rushing ahead to check off the surprises. It seems solidly grounded in its Kenyan locations; like “City of God,†it feels organically rooted. Like many Le Carre stories, it begins with grief and proceeds with sadness toward horror. Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not. This is one of the year’s best films.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
“Ahmed – Well I am glad that you can confirm your bad taste. Let me know what is up with Brad and Angelina will ya?”
Sure no problem. The last i heard they are considering having a kid.
Fred Phelps-its hard to follow the discussion here when people send long tracnsripts, be it from democracy now (which i like) or anything else
Reg-I find it hard to believe you’ve got much use for gitlin’;s increasingly unctuous, cranky prose but tho ech his own
March 5th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
ps..i agree with reg, the overall quality of the films nominated this year, with the exception of spielberg’s rather clumsy munich, are pretty high
March 5th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
“TH e COnstant Gardener is the best film against imperialism this year. ”
The best film against imperialism, is that a category this year?
March 5th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
ahmed, no problem i usually have a hard time following much of any discussion on this website, i’ll try not to overpost too much. i’m following the paul from minneapolis self-restraint on web discussion lists philosophy.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
This is one of the best interivews on RACISM in Amerika. right after New Orleans
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we’ll spend the hour hearing the testimony at the commission. But first we’re joined in our studio by one of those who spoke before the tribunal. Malik Rahim, veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans. For decades he’s worked as an organizer of public housing tenants both there, as well as in San Francisco. He recently ran for New Orleans City Council on the Green Party ticket. We welcome you to Democracy Now!
MALIK RAHIM: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us.
MALIK RAHIM: It’s always a pleasure to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: I last saw you in New Orleans, in Algiers. Here you are today. What are you calling for? What is your demand? Why did you speak before the tribunal?
MALIK RAHIM: During the aftermath, directly after the flooding, in New Orleans hunting season began on young African American men. In Algiers, I believe, approximately around 18 African American males were killed. No one really know what’s the overall count. And it was basically murder. It was murder by either the police or by vigilantes that was allowed to run amok. If it would have been — if these roles would have been reversed, right now it would be an investigation. Someone would have to pay. But now, because it’s African Americans, and we’re talking about in the Deep South, where racism have always existed, there’s no care. We had young African American men that were slaughtered on I-10. They said they had weapons. But at the same time, vigilantes was able — white vigilante groups was able to ride unchecked by anyone.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know they were killed there on the highway?
MALIK RAHIM: Because it was broadcast. And one thing about — that I found in tragedies, that words spreads like wildfire, and especially when such dastardly deeds are done. These young men was killed. They say they had weapons. But if they did, I mean, why the double standard? Why bodies was allowed to lay out in Algiers until they fester and rot?
AMY GOODMAN: I want to stop you at that point. Listeners and viewers may remember when we went down to New Orleans and Algiers, Malik Rahim took us around the corner to a community health center, a multi-service center, and he showed us a body. We’re going to go back to that day and, well, as you showed us the body, a number of different levels of law enforcement went by. Let’s go back.
MALIK RAHIM: You could basically smell it from right here. You know, and the police, they pass by. They look at it, and they ain’t gonna do nothing, you know, to pick it up.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
PART TWO
AMY GOODMAN: Malik, do you know who this person is?
MALIK RAHIM: No. But regardless of who it is, I wouldn’t care if it’s Saddam Hussein or bin Laden. Nobody deserve to be left here, and the kids pass by here and they are seeing it. I mean, the elderly, this is what is frightening a lot of people into leaving. We don’t know if he’s a victim of vigilantes or what. But that’s all we know is that his body had been allowed to remain out here for over two weeks.
AMY GOODMAN: We are standing right outside the health clinic. Its doors are chained. The building is not seriously damaged. Have you reached people there? What authorities have you talked to to pick up this body?
MALIK RAHIM: We done talked to everyone from the Army to the New Orleans Police to the State Troopers to – I mean, we done talked to everybody who we can. I even talked to Oliver Thomas, who is the Councilman-at-Large yesterday about this body. He said he was surprised to see that this body is still there. But it’s two weeks, two weeks that this man been just laying here.
AMY GOODMAN: As Malik Raheem was speaking, as if on cue, every level of authority he mentioned drove by. There’s a dead body right here. Is — who are you with?
SOLDIER: We’re with Bravo 15.
AMY GOODMAN: Which is?
SOLDIER: The cav.
AMY GOODMAN: Army?
SOLDIER: Army, yes. Regular army.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s a dead body right here. Can you guys pick it up?
SOLDIER: I don’t think we can pick it up, but we can call the local authorities to come pick it up.
AMY GOODMAN: This gentleman who lives in the neighborhood said that they have been trying to get — here, let me ask these guys, too. Excuse me. Excuse me. Hi. There’s a dead body right here. Can Louisiana State Troopers, can you pick it up?
LOUISIANA STATE TROOPER: You need to talk to our public information officer, Ma’am.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s been here for two weeks. We have filmed it last week, and gentleman over here said he has been trying to get it picked up for two weeks. And Louisiana State Troopers, the Police, the Army, no one has responded. We’re looking right over at it right there.
LOUISIANA STATE TROOPER: You need to talk to the public information officer and contact him at the troop.
AMY GOODMAN: Your name is?
LOUISIANA STATE TROOPER: You need to talk to our public information officer.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you know about the body?
LOUISIANA STATE TROOPER: You need to talk to our public information officer.
AMY GOODMAN: Sir, do you know about the body over there?
LOUISIANA STATE TROOPER: Ma’am, you talk with our public information officer.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you know what they should do to get this body removed?
ROBERT GONZALEZ: I have no idea. I can’t tell you. I don’t know. There’s been several people over here looking at it.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Homeland Security that just went by. Sir, what were you saying?
ROBERT GONZALEZ: There’s been several people over here looking at it, but, you know, like I said, I haven’t seen anybody take it.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Constant Gardner was disappointing only because the same director’s City of God was such an extraordinary film and set such a high standard. But it was pretty good LaCarre with some superb performances. More evidence that, unless you’re boycotting the theaters until another Bergman comes round the corner, there were some good, solid entertaining-slash-thoughtful films out this year. Not to mention those penguins, who I have enormous admiration for.
For “social issue” films, Smartest Guys in the Room was a good one, and I would recommend “Why We Fight” as a political tract that’s far more canny than most. This is a film that will appeal even to disaffected Republicans to help them to rethink the context of stuff like the Iraq war. Unlike Michael Moore, it doesn’t come across as smart alec or a lampoon, but plays it straight down the middle, using figures like Eisenhower against Bush and the neo-cons. I’m not sure how Brokeback is playing in Kansas, but the rightwing really does have something to fear if this one makes it out into the hinterland.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
phelps youre woefully off topic, please stop now
March 5th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
Moore didn’t really come off as a smart alek at all. That is how he was smeared by people who detest his politics, but in fact there was little of the ‘smart alek’ in his recent film F911. I was amazed at how much people like Cooper were just making up crap when they attacked Moore for such ‘smart alekness’ in F911.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
I’m trying my best to stick to the Paul from Minneapolis philosophy of self-restraint. Really, I’m trying very very hard.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Ahmed, I wasn’t making a judgement of Gitlin other than that he was clearly against the war in Iraq and that he’s not – like Hitchens – being ceaselessy promoted or self-promoting. I’d argue that he’s more obscure than Chomsky, but it’s pretty much splitting hairs when you’re out on that left limb debating relative celebrity.
For the record, I find Gitlin pompous but sensible.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
and effort merits rewards, just ask Paul!
March 5th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Gitlin wasn’t against the war, in fact he supports more troops for more occupation now and labels anyone who doesn’t go along with that DLC line as a lunatic.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
as i remember he supported Cllinton’s unnecessary and deadly desert storm bombing campaign and the invasions of Iraqi airspace after Clinton pulled out the inspectors.
March 5th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Fred, you’re full of it. Unhinged, ill-informed and sounding quite mad the more you rant. Really. Gitlin wasn’t standing next to you cheering Brian Becker, but he was against the war. You’re the kind of dogmatic purist who will guarantee that the “Left” perpetually commits political, intellectual and moral suicide.
March 5th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
“Gitlin wasn’t against the war, in fact he supports more troops for more occupation now and labels anyone who doesn’t go along with that DLC line as a lunatic.”
Phelps im hardly a fan of gitlin, i find him rather irrelevant and can hardly stad the granfatherly scolding mode he employs agisnt those to his left. for that matter i ahte how he premises so many of his pointa by stating he was the president of sds more than thirty years ago. but, surely you can come up with a more sophisticated critique than that. Youre sounding exactly like the dogmatic, unthinking purist reg correctly accuses you of being
March 5th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
hmmm where’s our host, marc cooper, and regulars like rosedog (we miss ya)
March 5th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
he was a leader of the sds and then decided that everyone on the left who disagreed with his liberal orientation was a member of the Weathermen. nowadays he’s just a shill for the DLC, ready to attack the left [whether it's brian becker or some granny marching in an antiwar march] for being too ‘radical’ for not supporting Clinton’s bombing campaigns against Iraq or for not supporting extended occupation in Iraq today.
But hey, come on ahmed, since when does it matter if one is rational or not, cooper’ll attack ya for being crazy if you suggest anything as a left critique of his arguments. on this discussion list one is supposed to be rational? good golly miss molly.
March 5th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
hey reg, don’t worry, I am a cruise missile leftist who supports the immediate bombing of Cuba to prove we are against irrational expressions of socialism, ok?
March 5th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
It’s great to know racism doesn’t matter anymore
Politically expedient� dump sites in Black communities
By Jimmie Briggs
Updated Feb 16, 2006, 11:21 am
NEW YORK (NNPA) – The Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx is notorious for its exhaust-filled air and industrial pollution from power plants and incinerators. The residents are predominantly Black and Latino, many of whom have children battling environmentally-related asthma.
�You have these politically expedient places to dump; places that wealthy people avoid,� observes Majora Carter, a Hunts Point resident and founder of a community-based organization, Sustainable South Bronx. �It�s a policy that no one talks about.�
Recently, the Associated Press wire service released the results of a national investigative study echoing what activists such as Majora Carter and others have been saying for years, that Blacks are overwhelmingly more likely to live in areas with high air pollution, twice more than their White counterparts, in 19 states.
Published on Dec. 13, the study was based on a scoring system that measures air pollution and health effects by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the demographic patterns from the 2000 national census. Seen in light of other reports done on the local level, a picture of an environmental crisis for marginalized, poor Blacks emerges.
�The [AP] study comes at a critical time in our movement,� explains Robert Bullard, founder of the 12-year-old Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark-Atlanta University and the author of books on the environment such as �Dumping Dixie� and �Politics of Pollution.�
�It makes a lot of sense to have a well-respected, White news organization basically saying the same things myself and a number of other researchers have been saying the last two decades,� he continues. �The [AP] study only looked at air pollution, but if you overlay hazards such as lead poisoning and dangerous utilities, you get this piling on effect. The EPA has done a lousy job in terms of enforcing air quality standards.�
Numerous Black areas across the country are enduring the poisonous legacies of environmental pollution in their communities. According to state agencies in Louisiana, New Orleans faced the cleanup of 22 million tons of trash after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Combined with the floating sewage and human waste, the city�s residents are facing what researchers widely describe as a �toxic stew,� hazardous to the health of returning residents.
Other communities not affected by Hurricane Katrina are also facing challenges. A study done by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health last June revealed that in Maryland, the higher the poverty and Black population in a community, the greater the risk of cancer attributable to air pollution.
Citizens in Mossville, La., went so far as to file a human rights petition with the Washington-based Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., in March for the government�s authorization of hazardous industrial sites near predominantly non-White communities such as Mossville.
�There�s been tremendous progress on air pollution,� argues Granta Nakayama, EPA assistant administrator. �The number of air pollutants has dropped by 54 percent since 1970. We�re trying to make the air cleaner for everybody, it doesn�t matter what community you live in.�
The same year the Environmental Justice Resource Center was founded in Atlanta, then-president Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12989 ordering federal agencies to ensure equal protection from environmental pollution for all communities. That meant agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency were to increase their aggressiveness in protecting non-White, economically depressed areas from disproportionate exposure to environmental toxins.
A decade later, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission published �Not In Our Backyard,� an investigative report essentially concluding that there hadn�t been full compliance with the decree. This conclusion was echoed in 2004 by the EPA inspector general.
For communities of color saddled with disproportionate environmental pollutants, the health consequences are varied, and severe.
A study done six years ago by the American Lung Association discovered that the majority of Black, Latino and Asian children live in areas of high atmospheric ozone exposure, while only half of White children do. Ozone is a carcinogen known to cause skin cancer. Reproductive health issues such as decreased fertility, birth defects and spontaneous abortion are also tied to prolonged exposure to environmental pollutants.
Environmental activists, such as Majora Carter, see the lasting victories being 10 to 20 years away. Last year, her organization, Sustainable South Bronx, launched a feasibility study of a �green roof� project in her community. It was the first step in putting plants, trees and flowers on the rooftops of notoriously desolate buildings.
�There�s often no kind of recourse for the community that�s been taken advantage of,� she says. �It took a long time for our communities to get as devastated as they are, so it�s going to take a long time to clean up.�
.com
March 5th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
And there’s like no effect of race and income?
New Budget Benefits Wealthy, Poor Left Out
The Final Call, News Report, Askia Muhammad, Feb 08, 2006
THE WHITE HOUSE (FinalCall.com) – The Bush administration launched an all-out effort in late January to put a smiling face on what it considers to be its economic accomplishments, despite loud complaints from people stuck on the lower end of the economic ladder that the economic life is actually worse and not better. Literally dozens of administration economic officials went all around the country to say to the American people that Pres. Bush’s economic policies have created jobs and boosted economic growth.
In one week, the Commerce Secretary went to Rockford, Ill., and New Orleans. La.; the Energy Secretary hosted a day-long forum in Tunica, Miss.; the Treasury Secretary hosted a day-long round of radio interviews in Washington; and Pres. Bush made an economic speech in Sterling, Va., and devoted his weekly radio address to the economy.
“Unfortunately, just as we are seeing how our tax cuts have created jobs and opportunity, some in Washington want to repeal the tax relief. Others want to just let it expire in a few years,†Pres. Bush said in his radio address Jan. 21.
Speaking on tax cuts, energy costs and the rise in cost of health care, he took partial credit for the current upswing in the U.S. economy and urged the Congress to make the tax cuts permanent. According to the President, the tax cuts would help small businesses.
Not everyone agrees with his rosy scenario.
“He worships at the altar of tax cuts,†Dr. David Bositis, senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told The Final Call. “Despite all his religiosity, he’s like a pagan with regard to talking about tax cuts.
“Except for the sort of hard-core free market people, small government people, there just aren’t that many people who really think that the tax cuts have been all that much of a benefit. And face it, tax cuts are not going to Blue Collar workers,†he continued.
Democrats have been hammering away at the tax cut theme of the White House, trying to drive home the point that tax cuts are only for the wealthy five percent of taxpayers, and that the middle class hardly benefits. “Doesn’t the President know that real wages are actually falling?†asked Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), according to a published report.
“Bush and his people can say that the economy is doing great all they want, and trot out macro-economic statistics, but the fact is most people don’t feel that the economy is great,†Dr. Bositis asserted. “Almost every one of Bush’s tax cuts you look at, the percentage of the money goes to the top one percent, to the top five percent, the top 10 percent of people with wealth in this country. It’s not going to people who are poor.â€
Without the money in its coffers that are being paid to the wealthiest Americans, drastic cuts have been made to programs that benefit the poor, he further pointed out.
“Look at the debates they’re having now about cutting back on Medicaid; on cutting back on welfare; on cutting back on student aid; on cutting back on Section 8 vouchers. There are lots of things ordinary people, and especially poor people, are paying for. Somebody has to pay for Bush’s tax cuts,†Dr. Bositis continued. “Some of it’s being paid for with borrowed money. And other things are being paid for by poor people.â€
The “borrowed money†comes in the form of larger and larger budget deficits. “There will come a time when deficits are going to hurt,†he explained. “They haven’t hurt yet, but there will come a time when deficits are seriously going to hurt people. Once the tax cuts are permanent, it’s going to be really tough to undo that, because it’s a lot easier to stop things from happening in Congress than it is to reverse them,†he said.
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March 5th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
fred: i would like to be the first to recommend that you start up your own blog. with so much to say, and such a unique perspective on the issues, you should have your own forum of ideas and opinions, as opposed to hanging around and posting at coop’s place. besides, if you aren’t careful, he’ll end up stealing your ideas.
March 5th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
The presenters of the Oscars are getting gift bags worth over $100,000—not bad for a brief speech– among the bundles of gifts coming their way are: laser eye surgery; dog biscuits in the form of Oscar statuettes, anti-aging cream; Swarovski crystal-encrusted Palm Treo smartphone; diamond rings; cameras monogrammed in diamonds; custom-tailored Hugo Boss suits; a voucher for 20,000 dollars worth of cosmetic surgery; a set of pearls; a 27,000 dollar weekend in a five star hotel. One gift basket that will go to a selected star is a 52,000-dollar “Everyone Wins at the Oscars” hamper.
What do you give someone who has everything a $52,000 hamper—do you throw your dirty laundry in it or just the skeletons from your closet?
p.s I liked Ben Hur.
March 5th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
It’s the type of thing when you have it just keeps raining on down. Getting in is tough though. Everybody can’t do it.
March 5th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
And they say professional athletes are over-payed.
March 5th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
reg Says:
March 4th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
I’m just glad King Kong wasn’t nominated because it was a dishonest portrayal of life in New York City.
——————————
Now that was hilarious!
March 5th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
Free market baby! Your worth what you can get.
March 5th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
Marc,
You must be bummed. Crash won What a surprise!
I guess the Academy found a way to quit Brokeback Mountain.
I’m just glad King Kong wasn’t nominated because it was a dishonest portrayal of life in New York City.
To say nothing of Skull Island.
March 5th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
Surprise. The cliched fake crap one.
March 5th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
It was a surprise for me. I actually thought real art would win. Well at least some of it did .
March 5th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
NOOOOOOO. This was like being a Red Sox fan in 86 and staying up all night to watch Buckner miss an easy grounder.
March 5th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
There is something bizarre about giving Best Director to the film that is not Best Picture.
March 5th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
“I actually thought real art would win”
hmm i wouldnt have thought the author of “against a current” would be much of an authority on real art. form the sounds of it the pale offering represented a full frontal assault the written word
March 6th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Well since you have no idea what my written words are how would you know? Screw yourself. Every mention of my books, which are off topic, will constitute such a response. You can’t even read the title correctly a whole chapter is out of the question. Talk about lack of qualifications. It requires literacy.
March 6th, 2006 at 11:18 pm
And nobody thought my comment comparing Major Bloomberg during the NYC Transit Strike with King Kong–was humorous? I’m devastated!
March 7th, 2006 at 12:42 am
Academy-members were happy to give the “Brokeback Mountain” its due, as long as the message was not legitimized in any way. Thank goodness, we can still offer gratuitous, contrived, button-pushers like ‘Crash’, otherwise all the closeted actors, producers, directors, managers, agents, and studio execs would have had to vote for Capote (‘yeeccch’), and then come out. Safe and sound in the closet for one more year, phew.
March 10th, 2006 at 7:09 am
Marc, you didn’t like Capote? I was amazed by that movie.
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