“I’m Not There,” a film by Todd Haynes

“I accept chaos. Does chaos accept me?” 

I’m Not There, a film by Todd Haynes

Guest reviewer, our friend, John Haas 

Blame it, I suppose, on Orson Wells. 

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“Citizen Kane” (1941) has burned an insatiable hunger for that “Rosebud moment” onto the mental retinas of subsequent reviewers and audiences.  All “biopics” of artists, musicians, or writers (fictional or real) must have it, and any film that doesn’t is a failure.  (There’s no escaping this demand, by the way–not wanting to be a biopic in the first place is no excuse for these viewers.  In such cases the movie gets dismissed as “incomprehensible.”) 

Art isn’t enough for these people.  They want to know where it came from, what makes the artist tick.  They want illumination, revelation, the secret sources of the great man’s inspiration laid out on the table, cut open, dissected, the organs labeled and the pathologies identified.  They want to know the secret, and, by definition, the secret must be tawdry, Freudian, some ancient Arthurian wound that drives the artist to heal himself by healing the world.  In the end, their admiration for the artist is more than equal parts jealousy:  “Why couldn’t I create that?” knocks around in the back of their skull for decades, and what they want is to be shown how lucky they are not to be so gifted.  The “Rosebud moment” reveals the great man to be, at best, nothing but a scared little boy, at worst, a Humbert Humbert.

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Never has any film flaunted its refusal to play this sordid ghoulish game as much as Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There.”  The title, it seems safe to say, wasn’t chosen at random.  Obsession being what it is, however, reviewers breeze right by it, waving their search-warrants around and, finding nothing to satisfy them, go negative.  One complains, for example, that the movie isn’t “Walk the Line,” or “Ray.”  “I felt that by the end I didn’t even know what the movie was about, or even if it had anything to do with Bob Dylan at all,” he says.  “I feel that Haynes should have at least given some insight into why this particular man became a legend as opposed to say, a truck driver.”  Clearly, he wants his Rosebud, and hints that what’s ultimately wrong with Haynes’s film is that it was made by Haynes, and not himself:  “I am a musician and a huge Dylan fan . . . a Dylan evangelist . . . true Dylan fans do, in fact, understand Dylan . . . it’s only the people who would never and will never understand Dylan that this movie was made for.”

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You get the idea.  This species of Dylan-fan has been around for ages.  They, and they alone, know and appreciate the man.  They, and they alone, see into his essence.  They, and they alone, have divined the true meaning of his songs.  Creepy and boring all at once, a hipster-nemesis that haunts a million parties in a million guises, seeking victims too polite to tell him to take his stupid rant and stuff it.  For myself, I don’t claim to understand Dylan, but I know one thing:  He would absolutely hate this guy.

The smarter reviewers have learned to hide their obsession.  “So what if nothing is revealed,” shrugs Peter Travers in Rolling Stone, as if he’s fooling anyone.  “But does the film help us get closer to Dylan?” Jean Bethke Elshtain demands, eyes widening and voice rising, in Books & Culture.  Realizing that her desire to “get closer,” besides being intellectually dubious, also borders on creepdom, she immediately back-pedals:  “Does it draw us closer to the sources of his inspiration?”  Oh, you just want to know the sources, you good dispassionate scholar you!  Someone please give the poor thing a copy of Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.”

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Several reviewers have confessed to knowing nothing about Dylan but loving this movie anyway.  These people are, invariably, well-versed in film history, and given that Haynes is not only constructing a kaleidescopic meditation on the artist in question, but does so while simultaneously paying brilliant and witty respect to some of the 1960s’ most singular directors, that makes sense.  In other words, while the film is gorgeous at numerous levels, and can be enjoyed at several of them, you do need to know something–about Dylan, as well as the art and politics of the sixties–to really get it.

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Do you need to “get it” to make it worth it?  I don’t know.  It is beautiful.  The look is so lush, your senses just dissolve and merge with the images of trees, roads, corn, vines, light (natural and artificial), pottery, the city, cars (in primary colors in one striking scene), fashion, art and so on.  Then there’s the music, of course.  Much of it is covers, most just fine (and John Doe’s surprisingly passionate version of the born-again classic, “Pressing On,” is amazing) but Haynes, like Dylan himself, seems to love “that thin, that wild, mercury sound” captured only once, on 1966’s “Blonde on Blonde,” and the most leisurely and arresting musical moments are when “Memphis Blues Again,” “I Want You,” “Temporary Like Achilles,” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” each shove the imagery aside and take your ears and mind hostage for a few minutes of aural ecstasy.

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Visually, Haynes has done his homework brilliantly.  There are dozens, hundreds, of references major and minor to the iconography of the sixties (especially):  the Paris peace talks, the death of hippie (child of media), LBJ mouthing the lines “death to all those who would whimper and cry . . . the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken” (we knew it was him all along), a tarantula crawling around on the walls (reminding you of Andy Warhol’s Factory “happenings” with movies projected on the walls and the party-goers, and also of Dylan’s mid-sixties novel, Tarantula–the first novel to ever be bootlegged), and on and on, but he also recreates the fashion, faces, make-up, expressions, etc., of the numerous nobodies that populated the photography of LIFE and other venues.  It’s all very rich, surprising, and even overwhelming.  These references feel less like the “how-cool-am-I?” indulgences of the cognoscenti than merely, and honestly, affectionate. 

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Still, these details are indeed very cool, in the best sense of the word.  Pastor Jack/Dylan has stepped right off the stage of Saturday Night Live in 1979, capturing perfectly the weird, shuffling, unshaven, eye-avoiding insecurity of the original down to the bizarre polyester K-Mart jacket.  Haynes even knows that it was the monster Memphis session man, Spooner Oldham, who was playing keyboards in that band, and he finds an actor who not only looks like him but apes that musician’s famously laconic neuroses, too.  I didn’t get the sense Haynes was trying to impress me, so much as entertain me.  Cynics will have a different view, I’ll bet.  But if you know your “Renaldo & Clara” you’ll note the angle of the horse’s head in the “Mr. B.” scene (as well as B.’s dog, which resembles one of Dylan’s); if you know “Eat the Document,” “Masked & Anonymous,” and the 1965 San Francisco Press Conference and the bootlegged out-takes of Dylan and John Lennon in a London limo, you’ll see all those and much more (the infamous vomit scene from the latter out-take gets merged with George H. W. Bush’s episode in Japan–if you know what I’m talking about, you can guess what happens).

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The important women in Dylan’s life–Joan Baez, Edie Sedgwick, Sara Lowndes–aren’t neglected.  The Joan Baez character (played knowingly by Julianne Moore) drops in straight out of No Direction Homecalling Dylan a “twerp” and a “toad” and you see and hear the amazement, resentment, and gratitude mixed up in her reaction to his song-writing skills.  Lines are lifted from classic and little-known interviews, from the early sixties to the (again, bootlegged) 2001 Rome interview.  Liner notes, too–”Eleven Outlined Epitaphs,” anyone?–get their due.  None of this came across as forced or artificial to me.  That it all flows, and reasonably coherently, is an impressive achievement in itself.  I sincerely doubt I got them all; I know I didn’t get all the film references.  The Fellini homage is obvious, appropriate, and very funny.  I think I got the French New Wave.  And then–one wants to say “of course!”–there’s a crucial invocation to that most “sixties” of sixties movies.  Amazingly, no one seems to have noticed it yet.

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Roger Ebert has been trashing Dylan for decades.  He’s confessed his animus derives from a personal dislike for the top-of-the-world-24-year-old-millionaire-beatnik-idol-terrorist of Don’t Look Back.  (Dylan was such a famously difficult interview in those days that TIME Magazine sent a reporter whose credits included having interviewed Adolf Hitler.  Dylan was worse.)  Ebert confesses he had a “conversion” watching No Direction Home,which is nice, but his years in the wilderness have left him with debilitating lacunae.  He confesses, for example, to being “baffled by the Richard Gere cowboy sequence, which doesn’t seem to know its purpose.” 

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Um, not exactly.  Had Ebert known, for example, that “I’m Not There” (the song) is among the obscurest of out-takes from the already uber-obscure un-released songs associated with the ”Basement Tapes” . . .

 

. . . (the indescribable–Greil Marcus has tried and come as close as prose can, though it took him an entire book–recordings made by Dylan and the Band in Woodstock, NY, in 1967 as he recovered–from his motorcycle accident, from what he had become, from “the sixties” of Sedgwick, Warhol, Lennon, LBJ and all the rest) he might have picked up on the fact that this scene has “Basement Tapes” written all over it, and hence, might be, you know, kind of critical to our understanding of the whole film.

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I first heard of “I’m Not There (1956)” long before I actually heard it, and that despite having been familiar with the unreleased music that would come to be known as “the basement tapes” long before they were so known.  (Warning:  We need to get down in the weeds for awhile here.)  These recordings were taped on a reel-to-reel by Dylan and his band largely for their own use.  They saw light in 1969 as the first ever rock n’ roll bootleg, “Great White Wonder,” which featured twelve (out of the original 120 or so) songs offered as demos intended for other artists to record (they did:  the Byrds and Manfred Mann had hits with several).  The record hit #1, despite its illegality, in several critics polls, and in 1975 Dylan allowed them to be paired with music made by the Band for its unreleased first record, all of it officially seeing the light of Colombia Records’ day in a double album, “The Basement Tapes.” 

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The artwork showed Dylan and his mates looking like psychedelicized river-boat gamblers cavorting with a host of circus-show freaks and oddities, all very redolent of that certain moment in the sixties when art spelled freedom from war and death and the soul-sickness that was permeating America, seeming to promise an exit, a way out to . . . well, the precise destination was a problem, fair point, but everyone knew what they wanted to “get away from.”  Thousands of young malcontents began digging beneath the floorboards of American culture, discovering a whole menagerie of neglected insights and figures and philosophies.  Individuals and groups started mining these veins, hoping for a motherload (of what?  redemption?  transcendence?  love?  meaning?  yes, all of that, and more–that was the sixties, after all) and discovering each other along the way, conspiring, retreating, huddling, betraying–all the usual things humans do in community.  And yes, the cover-art of the “Basement Tapes” says all that.  Trust me.

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If you look for “I’m Not There (1956)” on the officially released Basement Tapes–you should have guessed this by now–it’s not there.  Despite the official release, there was bootlegging yet to be done in those hills.  Over the years, several more collections of songs appeared, some, a return to traditional folk songs, Child ballads, country songs, doo wop, others new compositions by Dylan, many of which can only be described as supremely unhinged.  Some of these songs are intensely personal and touching, a few are lame or boring, many are experimental or crazy or just plain stoned out of their gourds (it was the sixties, after all). 

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And one or two of them leaps into the great beyond.  You don’t talk about those:  you listen, you watch them soar, you gasp.  These only saw the light decades after they were recorded, and are still only available on bootleg.  One of them, “Sign on the Cross,” is essential for any nosy spelunker intent on exploring the depths of Dylan’s religious formation. 

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The other gives its title to this movie.

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Paraphrasing now from Brian Morton’s novel, The Dylanist:  She had come to the party and, as always, looked for an unattractive, over-weight guy to talk with, so she wouldn’t have to worry about any complications.  These men were always amazed at her attention to them, which made them excited and voluble.  This one was describing his research in new more efficient desalinization techniques when the song on the stereo caught her ear.  “Listen,” she said, touching his arm and stopping him mid-lecture.  “This is the most beautiful song ever recorded.” 

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That’s the first time I heard of “I’m Not There (1956).”  You can hear it in the movie. 

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Back to that cowboy scene Ebert’s baffled by.  It’s the center of the film, and though the Blanchett/Jude Quinn/1966/Warhol/Beatles scenes are more entertaining, this is more important.  Gere is “Mr. B.” (as in Bonney, William–as in Billie the Kid) and he’s taken a proprietary interest in the town of Riddle, where, not coincidentally, all the residents look like refugees from the cover of the “Basement Tapes” and signs proclaim Biblical texts and Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic is undoubtedly the town charter.  Of course, B. doesn’t live in Riddle.  (Why “of course”?  Another obscure reference explains it.  Dylan, in concert on June 14, 1999 in Eugene Oregon:  “Hello Eugene,  I’d like to say hi to some of the old hippies, I’ve never been one myself, but I’m kind of an honorary hippie.”) 

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But B.’s old nemesis has it in for Riddle.  He’s putting a six lane highway right over it, and everyone has to clear out.  This nemesis is the hectoring, badgering, hollow-man persecuting reporter of 1966, now morphed into an aged, crippled Pat Garrett.  OK, we get it:  Media, business, criminality–posing as “the law,” crushing all that is romantic, child-like, authentic, human.  It’s all quite conspiratorial in a typically sixtiesh-going-on-seventies, “Three Days of the Condor,” sort of way.  In “Masked & Anonymous” the obnoxious reporter is killed with Blind Lemon Jefferson’s guitar (and Jack Fate/Dylan is framed for the crime).  Here, more realistically, the reporter/Garrett/power-that-is/establishment wins.  Riddle is plowed under.  Somewhere in the distance, Ronald Reagan slouches toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the scalps of napalmed Vietnamese children dangling from his saddle.  (For the actual tale behind all this, see Robert Shelton’s report of Dylan’s discussions with Al Aronowitz in the early ’70s, their fear of Nixon, and Dylan’s intentions to spark a counter-cultural resistance with his “Rolling Thunder Review.”  It was on that tour that Dylan first wore white-face, which appears in the Riddle scene when a band sings “Going to Acapulco”–also from the “Basement Tapes.”  Gere and Garret, by the way, are made up to look like they stepped out of Dylan’s Civil War-”Gods and Generals” video, highlighting the seriousness of the contest between the two men, while the hippies around them remain flummoxed and naive.  Maybe.)

Haynes doesn’t play this morality tale straight, however.  The scene begins with Mr. B. being awakened by his barking dog.  He steps outside, the light is ominous and grey, the wind blows, leaves float, there’s something mysterious and ominous going on, something hostile (or is it just a child playing Indian?) is in the woods, but it slinks from view as soon as you see it, and you realize, I’ve been here before.  A garden, a crime, a murder plot.  No, not Eden (though yes!, that too). 

 

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It’s Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” that most “sixties” of sixties movies (released in 1966, the year of the Jude Quinn segment and the screams of “Judas!”) that’s being paid homage to now.  If ever there was a movie that was itself a riddle, “Blow-Up” is it.  (And by referencing such an ambiguous story–is there a crime or is he just paranoid?–Haynes removes his story from simple Noam Chomsky-ism.)

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You never knew, in “Blow-Up,” if there really was a crime or if it was all in the photographer’s head.  David Hemmings thinks he sees something in his picture, but as he enlarges it, what he thought he saw disappears into the grain of the photo.  The closer he looks, the more indistinct it becomes, until the crime, the image, the answer he’s looking for–even the original self that embarked on this quest–is no longer there. 

 

(Hemmings disappears–literally–in the final shot of the film; earlier, he walks past a poster in a club with a drawing of a tombstone that reads: “Here lies Bob Dylan Passed Away Royal Albert Hall 27 May 1966 R.I.P.”)

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Hemmings’ mod/mad photographer (before he’s no longer there, that is) is a very different person for having embarked on his quest, even if he has no answers in the end.  So, Haynes seems to be saying, is Dylan, and so is anyone who’s been drawn into his art and found themselves in Riddle as a result–the larger Republic of Riddle, that is, not just its momentary reflection in the USA of the 1960s.  Did you really think you’d find the answers to any questions worth asking in a movie about Bob Dylan?  As if, somewhere in a basement in Hibbing someone was tossing a map showing the way to the New Jerusalem in a furnace?  Or, maybe you’re not that naive.  Maybe you just want to “get closer” to Bob Dylan.  If so, this movie has a question for you:  Why?

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I haven’t mentioned much the actors, acting, plots (such as they are), etc., but suffice it to say, they all work fine, and Cate Blanchett is everything they say she is.  See this movie on the big screen, if at all possible.  It’s a triumph.

File Under “Galloping Idiocy”

I’m listening to npr, and they’re discussing the foreign policy challenges facing the next president, whoever that may be.

A question arose about Obama’s statement that he’ll talk to regime’s we’re not particularly fond of.  And Peter Brooks, of the Heritage Foundation, opines that this would be disastrous.  We need, he says, to be very wary of “conferring legitimacy” on “rogue states.”

One has to wonder what planet the Heritage Foundation rents real estate on.

The one where our refusal to “confer legitimacy” on Castro has finally brought him down after–ahem–forty-nine years?  Or perhaps they’re living on the planet where our support for Musharraf has worked so wonderfully to stabilize Pakistan?  Or is it where Ronald Reagan refused to be fooled by Gorbachev’s so-called reforms, and gave him the cold shoulder?

My goodness. 

How’s This for Perspective?

  Last December (as in 2007) an interesting milestone of modernity was passed.  Actually, it was a certain individual who did the passing.  To wit (via USA Today):

J. Russell Coffey, the oldest known surviving U.S. veteran of World War I, has died. The retired teacher, one of only three U.S. veterans from the “war to end all wars,” was 109. More than 4.7 million Americans joined the military from 1917-1918.

Mr. Coffey lived a full, rich, and needless to say long life.  If he had his druthers–and he doesn’t–none of us do–he’d be remembered as a father, teacher, and community member, not someone who happened to spend a few months in boot camp in the fall of 1918.  But those months made him a WWI veteran, and so he gets remembered.

My father (b. 1920) saw Civil War veterans marching in parades when he was a boy.  I often tell my students that we distort history when we insist on dividing it up into decades.  Those little slices of time exaggerate difference over continuity, and lead us into silly journalistic conceits such as “What will the nineties be like?  Will we reject the greed and conformity of the Reagan era, and return to the dissent and commitment of the 1960s?”  Perhaps you recall those musings from the tail end of the eighties.

Instead, we should think in terms of generations (not cohorts, such as “boomers” and “millenials”–another ignorant journalistic conceit that precludes understanding and tries to make news where there is none) and lifetimes.  When we do so, time collapses.  My father speaks with men who have living memories of Gettysburg and Antietam and the Grant administration, and a new writer named Mark Twain everyone was excited about, and who lived when the idea of human beings flying was just science fiction and for whom the very idea of dropping a bomb from 30,000 feet in the air on a city filled with civilians and old folk and infants suckling and children and their pets would be unimaginable,  a sign that the society doing so was in the grip of a barbarism so elemental and disturbing as to escape the limits of description.  And my father tells me, and I tell my students, and they, in turn, are merely a couple of lifetimes from the Civil War.

Mr. Coffey was 109 years old when he died in December.  He was born in 1898, the year of Teddy Roosevelt’s Cuban escapades.  Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, and Adolf Hitler were all unknown in the US.  People owned horses.  Many had their own cows for milk.  There was no such organization as the NAACP, the frontier–or should we say the Indian Wars–had ended that decade.  The population of the United States was a little more than 76 million people.  Coffey would have known dozens, if not hundreds, of people who had seen Abraham Lincoln, heard him speak, shaken his hand.

Let’s speculate.  Imagine that, as Mr. Coffey was being born in 1898, another 109 year old American was passing away somewhere.  That American would have been born in 1789.  The ratification of the Constitution.  George Washington becomes the first president of the new nation.  The Mexicans in California, the Sioux on the plains, and countless others go about their business and live their entire lives without giving a thought to the restless, aggressive people even now gathering strength to the East.  It is the year of a revolution in France.  No one speaks of “terror” yet, at least as an “ism.”

1789.  Two lifetimes–long ones, granted–ago.

“Amazing Grace”: The Consolations of Musicology?

These are my cranky, perhaps inappropriately negative, thoughts about this Wintley Phipps video that’s making the rounds on YouTube:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMF_24cQqT0

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If you’re not in the mood for some cranky, perhaps inappropriately negative, thoughts, don’t read on.  It’s not my intention to force them on anyone.

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I love “Amazing Grace,” of course, and that’s an interesting conjecture from Mr. Phipps.

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Some things about it–the entire presentation, not the conjecture–bother me, though.  It’s a nice story and the overall intent is, I’m sure, innocent and edifying.  So I’m not sure how I feel about my being bothered.

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I don’t know enough about music (the technical aspects) to even begin to judge if it might be true.  I’ve read a lot about black music, however, and do know that I’ve never heard the precise term “slave scale” before. 

Maybe that’s a deficiency in my reading.  Googling it didn’t bring up much, either, beyond links to this video.

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Certainly it is true that there was a lot of sharing and influence going back and forth as a result of the slave trade.  Usually it’s all but impossible to nail them down, however–the trail of specific tunes just goes cold before you get to the point of origination.

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It is the entire presentation here made me just a bit uncomfortable.

 

Maybe I’ve been ruined by the all the close readings folk were doing of black mannerisms back in the ’60s–most famously, the contrasts between, say, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis and the personas they adopted before the audience:  Armstrong with his eyes rolling, eyebrows arched in amusement, smiling broadly all the time–almost “step-an’-fetch-it”; Davis with his perpetual scowl, eyes hidden behind shades, mouth expressionless, often turning his back to the audience–but seeing a black man before a largely white audience doing all those “I’m a happy, harmless negro” things–shaking his head, grinning, etc.,  . . . well, I won’t say it actually bothers me.  But it reminds me of those ’60s conversations and it makes me wonder if I should be bothered?  Or should I just let it go?  People have a right to make whatever faces they want, right?

I don’t know.

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But there’s several other things.  The name-dropping–”I went to the Library of Congress”–as if a copy of the sheet music to the song there is somehow more authentic and telling than one you’d find elswhere.  It strikes me as something close to a con.

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Then there’s this:  stanza 6, the “When we’ve been there a thousand years” verse was not written by Newton, but was added later.  This is pretty common knowledge (most hymnals indicate as much) so it’s rather odd for someone to say he’s going to sing it as Newton heard it coming up out of the belly of the ship.  Obviously, this is no big crime–most people think of the verse as integral to the hymn, so maybe he just sang it so as not to leave the audience hanging.  But it makes me wonder.

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Then, in the actual performance, we get those warm, swelling synthesizers–I’m pretty sure that’s how Newton heard it!–and everything about the sound says, “This performance has been crafted for you, my audience–it’s designed to please you.”

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And that strikes me as symptomatic of the whole thing.  In the end it’s a warm, consoling tale–a white man, taking inspiration from an African melody, the moans of the slaves redeemed by their being embedded in this wonderful hymn that’s done so much good in the world.  “Everything’s alright,” the lecture, the performance, the gestures and the instrumentation seem to be saying.

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And, in the very end of ends–when the Lamb that was slain gathers His Jewels and lays out the wedding banquet for the Bride–everything will be alright, so, again, I wonder if it’s right to question this, but, given the magnitude of the crime, of the suffering and, too, of the sacrifice Christ made to pay for Newton’s sins and all the others–it just seems premature to wrap it all up in a nice, comforting package such as this.

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Contrast that with Bob Dylan’s meditation on slavery and the music made by one descendent of slaves, the blues singer “Blind Willie McTell” (that’s the name of the song, too.)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8-eo_Czyhw&feature=related

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It begins

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Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem.”

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It highlights the consequences–judgment–that sin calls down.  Beginning this way, Dylan insists you don’t think about these things at all unless you recognize the basic fact of GUILT.  The inclusion of “Jerusalem” of course removes the suspicion that this is just another anti-American spasm–sin and guilt know no national boundaries.

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In more recent performances Dylan sings “to New Jerusalem,” which raises some interesting theological issues.  You want to say, “wait a second, Bob, the guilt and condemnation doesn’t reach to NEW Jerusalem,” and that’s right.  Though it may not be what Dylan’s trying to say, either.  Maybe he’s just nodding at the fact that while every tear will be wiped away, the tears are there, just as Christ’s risen body still bears the marks of the crucifixion.  In other words, while sin is forgiven, it isn’t as if it never happened.

Skipping over the intertwined sories of McTell’s career and American slavery, we come to the last stanza.

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So far, the song has raised the very question that arises from watching the Phipps video:  yes, there was all that suffering, but since it gave us the blues–and gospel–and so much else, maybe it’s alright for us to look on the bright side and see a kind of historical redemption occuring here?  Maybe it’s all part of the plan?

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The last verse  doesn’t exactly say no.  Dylan doesn’t answer the question the song poses.  He just ends with this:

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Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

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If there’s more to say than that, Dylan’s not saying it.  Why not?  Maybe it’s not because there isn’t an answer, but because we don’t have a right to it, or its consolations, whatever they may be, even if there is.

Close the Border?

What follows is a guest posting from a friend, Keith Bowden, who teaches English at Laredo Community College, in Laredo, Texas.  Bowden not only lives on the border, he’s travelled the entire Rio Grande (by raft and canoe) between Mexico and Texas.  You can read about that journey in his book, The Tecate Journals (Mountaineers Press, 2007). 

 

Here Bowden reflects on the oft-heard promises to “seal the border.”

Every time I hear a candidate promise to “seal the border” I cringe. 

I used to live in Santiago, Chile during the Pinochet years, which included several states of siege during my tenure there. The police and military presences during these states of siege alarmed me at first, but I got used to them. In one way, I’m glad I did because four years later I moved to Laredo, Texas, on the U.S./Mexico border, where I feel as though I’ve been living in a police state ever since, not much unlike Pinochet’s Chile.

For those of you who don’t live on the border, consider that we have Customs, Immigration, Border Patrol, National Guard, city police, county sheriffs, DEA, school district police, and college & university police. Every time we leave Laredo, we must go through an Immigration checkpoint where our vehicles are subject to inspection and where we are frequently asked to prove our right to be in the U.S.

One would guess that these checkpoints and this tremendous presence of law enforcement in our city would be effective at reducing crime and illegal immigration, but despite the annual increase in Border Patrol agents and budgets of the multiple law enforcement agencies, I see no progress in their fight to “seal the border.” Now the federal government wants to erect a “wall” or “border fence.” Yikes!

Americans should consider two things about “sealing the border”: one, if you don’t want illegal drugs entering our country through our southern border, stop buying them; and, two, if you don’t want Mexicans or other Latin Americans entering our southern border for the purpose of working in the U.S., stop hiring them.

The current housing crisis in our country has done far more to stem the tide of illegal immigration than the Border Patrol, National Guard, and all components of Homeland Security ever has.  With the resulting slowdown in construction jobs, the numbers of Mexicans who have attempted to enter the U.S. illegally has fallen sharply.

A couple of years ago I was on the riverbank here in Laredo with another Anglo. We stood and watched as a coyote pushed two inner tubes, each loaded with a woman coming to the U.S. to work, across the Rio Grande. When he and his cargo reached the U.S. side of the river, the women fled on foot up the bank and into the streets of Laredo. I was surprised at how brazen the coyote was. After all, my friend and I could have been law enforcement officers.

But then he did something that I think speaks a lot about the effectiveness of the Border Patrol. Instead of retreating to the Mexican shore with his inner tubes, he got out of the water and came over to talk to us. He asked me in Spanish, “You’re Border Patrol, aren’t you?”

When I insisted I wasn’t, he posed the same question to my friend, who similarly answered no. The coyote wasn’t convinced. He seemed quite certain that we were there to count the number of people he crossed so that he would then have to pay the requisite bribe to a crooked Border Patrol agent or agents.

We never did convince him that we were just two writers looking for a story. Disappointed, he swam back to Mexico with his inner tubes in tow. He seemed frustrated that our presence on the riverbank had made him question the rules of a system that had been making both him and the Border Patrol a lot of money.

Boys In Boats

The news from the Persian Gulf about the interchange between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the US Navy stirred some memories.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll recall the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964.  US Navy patrols were subjected, we were told, to open aggression on the high seas; ie, North Vietnam’s Navy fired on one destroyer and later supposedly targeted them with torpedoes that missed.

LBJ, heading into an election and challenged by Goldwater for not being tough enough with Communists, struck back, and also received a resolution in Congress giving him a free hand in Vietnam.  This became the legal basis of the Vietnam War.

Later it was learned that the torpedoes never happened.  And that we weren’t on the high seas, but in waters the North Vietnamese claimed.  And that we were there providing intelligence support to the South Vietnamese Navy that was conducting sabotage.

But that only came out later.  At the time it seemed to fit a familiar narrative:  The US, minding its own business, is suddenly and without provocation attacked by a hostile nation.  Why?  Because they’re violent.  Irrational.  Savage.  They’re Asian (remember Pearl Harbor?)  They’re Communists (remember Korea?)

We seem to always be on the receiving end of these behaviors.  It’s deep in our DNA as a nation:  Remember all those years, peacefully settling the frontier, and all those crazy Indians who came swooping down tomahawking farmers and their families?

Of course, from the Indian perspective, these settlers were the avant guard of a threatening empire.  Unlike the Spanish–who sent in the military to subdue the Indians and then followed with settlers–and unlike the French–who found a way to cooperate with the Indians–the English and then the US sent out settlers.  When tensions over land, or game, or whatever finally exploded, we then went out and exterminated them.

On several occasions the US has managed to arrange events to fit this narrative, thus making the people more amenable to whatever war ensued.  There was WWI, where American merchants continued to trade with the British and French, leading to submarine warfare from the Germans. 

Prior to the War with Mexico, Polk–who had promised to get California and resolve the Texas issue one way or another–sent troops to the “border” (again, on land Mexico claimed as its territory).  Mexico, fearing an invasion, sent its own troops.  And there, stumbling around, afraid, anxious, hot-headed, the predictable happened:  young men with guns sometimes fire them.  An American was killed.  Polk was outraged at this unprovoked aggression.  He had his war.

Now we have three carrier groups–each about 15 vessels–buzzing around in the Persian Gulf.  Opportunities for incidents abound.  Should be fun.

What Worries Me: The Hillary File

I’m not a Hillary-hater.  I’m not a huge fan, either, but that’s more because I’m just not a big fan of big political ambitions.  So, most anyone who desperately yearns to be president worries me.  That means any candidate makes me nervous. 

But I do worry, not so much about Hillary per se, but about how the nation will react to President Hillary Clinton.  Hillary is hated–seriously hated–with a depth, breadth, and ferocity that makes Bill’s negatives pale in comparison.  And, while the 1990s may look halcyon from the perspective of a decade later, it wasn’t fun.

Remember the various patriot, militia, and Aryan-supremacy groups?  Black helicopters?  Jesse Helms?  Newt Gingrich?  Government shut-down?

The day after Bill’s election, I had a neighbor at my door, handing me a three-dollar bill with Bill’s face on it.  “He’s not really president,” she said.  “He only won 43% of the vote.  You don’t owe him your loyalty.”

If Hillary is elected, the country will go nuts, lurching to the right in a kind of Newtonian reaction.  Bush will immediately become less than a memory.  The Republicans will gain in Congress in 2010, and the country will be ungovernable.  It won’t be Hillary’s fault, but it will happen, just the same.

 And we can’t afford that, frankly.  The times are too dire. 

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