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4 May 2011  | PART TWO

Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Second Edition, by Joseph McBride, originally published 1997, University Press of Mississippi, second edition 2011

I RECENTLY SPOKE to film historian Joseph McBride about the second edition of his critical study and biography of American film director Steven Spielberg, published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Spielberg is one of the most prominent American filmmakers of the past several decades, responsible for some of the greatest commercial successes in movie history―Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park and others―as well as works more highly regarded for their artistic merit and social insight, including The Sugarland Express, Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can and Munich. The Color Purple and Amistad, although both seriously flawed, in my view, were ambitious efforts.

Spielberg is a complex figure, whose career reflects some of the intense contradictions of American society and cultural life in the recent period. On the one hand, Spielberg is obviously a genuinely gifted―and humane―filmmaker, with a remarkable technical grasp and intuitive feeling for the medium and its vast possibilities; on the other, his work has been markedly weakened by the generally stagnant climate in which he and others have worked, reflected in the complacency, conformism and shallowness of too much of his filmmaking.

Spielberg’s weakest side finds consummate expression in his role as a major champion and fundraiser for the Democratic Party and highly visible supporter of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

These are not individual difficulties. As a whole, American filmmaking in the past third of a century has failed to hold a mirror up to society in a meaningful manner. Hollywood has always been a business, but directors, writers and producers in an earlier day felt some responsibility to reflect on the way people lived and their difficulties. There was a closer resemblance between life for the vast majority and the best movies.

The long-term consequences of the purge of left-wing elements in Hollywood; the concentration of the entertainment industry in the hands of a few conglomerates who must obsessively pursue the “blockbuster” hit; the enrichment and shift to the right by considerable sections of the upper middle class “protest” generation; the growing indifference of the latter to matters of social class and the generalized fate of the population, in favor of issues of gender and race―all of this has helped shape the circumstances in which Spielberg has functioned and, in fact, to a certain extent helped create.

It must be said to Spielberg’s credit that he has attempted to reflect on large social problems, usually in a historical setting, more than nearly any other major Hollywood film director.

About Joseph McBride

Joseph McBride, who worked as a journalist and screenwriter in Hollywood for years, is the author of numerous works, including Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992, 2000), Searching for John Ford (2001) and What Ever to Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (2006). He is Associate Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University. [See Part 1 and Part 2 of a 2009 interview with David Walsh]

The updated edition of the Spielberg biography includes four new chapters, taking the filmmaker’s career up to 2010.

The book is meticulous, perceptive and honest. One of the best contemporary writers on film and film history, a writer from whom one actually learns something, McBride effectively and engagingly brings together a wealth of material, intertwining biographical details and informed comments on Spielberg’s numerous and varied film projects. The author is unusual in the current intellectual and academic atmosphere for the seriousness with which he treats both his chosen subject and his audience. This is a writer who strives to make complex artistic and social processes comprehensible.

The newly expanded work is invaluable for anyone seeking to make sense of Spielberg’s own development, and more generally, American filmmaking over the past 30 years or so.

Having said that, as the previous comments and following conversation make clear, I differ sharply with some of McBride’s overall conclusions about Spielberg’s artistic significance. He terms Spielberg a “great popular artist” and argues that he is the most important figure in American film over the past several decades, and that if the filmmaker “were to stop tomorrow, his career would stand as one of the most important in the history of film.”

What this leaves out of account, in my opinion, is the actual character and achievements of American film over the past 30 years in particular. Spielberg may be the most important mainstream figure in recent decades, but, one is obliged to ask, what have those recent decades produced? In our view, the last 30 years have been the weakest in the history of cinema, for definite social and historical reasons. American filmmaking in particular has undergone a deep degeneration.

Popular resistance to the current war on the conditions and lives of the working population, a new optimism among the best artists about the possibility of altering the world, a spirit of irreconcilable opposition to the artistic and political status quo, these will contribute to the rejuvenation of American and global cinema.

In any event, the following, posted in two parts, is a record of the substance of our discussion.

* * * * *

David Walsh: I think the book is quite extraordinary in many ways. It’s deeply honest, meticulously researched―I do believe you spoke to 327 people at least, as well as apparently read every article ever written about Steven Spielberg.

Joseph McBride: That’s the great fun of writing a biography, talking to the people, and the hard work is the writing part. In this case, it was particularly entertaining because of all these interesting people. Before I came along writing biographies of filmmakers, hardly anyone ever spoke to “ordinary” people, they only spoke to movie stars and such. I make a point of interviewing everybody who knew the person, going way back―if I can find them. So Spielberg’s friends and schoolmates and neighbors, and people like that, were the most fascinating interviews I did.

DW: It’s an educational book, about the period, the film industry and Spielberg personally. I must say I have a somewhat more sympathetic view, more all-rounded view of him and his dilemmas as a result of reading it.

When I pay tribute to the book I’m not simply or primarily flattering you, I’m encouraging readers to read it and think about the issues the book raises, and also encouraging critics to adopt an equally serious tone and approach. It’s much easier, and more common at this point, to issue sweeping and facile statements. It’s time-consuming to watch a body of films and to examine them, film by film, and work through the implications of each one. That’s an enormous mental and physical labor.

JM: The new edition was challenging because Spielberg has been involved in innumerable projects in recent years, being both a studio “mogul” as well as a filmmaker. I had to cope with this dual story of an individual running what you could call a “studio” [DreamWorks] ―perhaps more of a boutique operation now―and directing his own films. Spielberg has also been in countless documentaries, mostly about his own work―he’s everywhere. So, in addition to everything else, I had to sit through a lot of generally terrible DreamWorks productions―and the occasional good one.

One thing I wrote in the first edition of the book, and it remains true, is that Spielberg’s record as a producer is mainly deplorable, compared with his record as a director, which I think is very admirable, by and large.

DW: Let me plunge in. How did the idea for the book originate?

JM: It goes back to 1982 and Spielberg’s E.T.[:The Extra-Terrestrial]

The first biography I wrote―actually it’s hardly a biography, more of a critical study and portrait―was a little book on Kirk Douglas that came out in 1976 [Kirk Douglas, Pyramid Books]. It got my feet wet.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I started thinking about writing lengthier biographies in the early 1980s. I thought it might be interesting, and Steven Spielberg was one of the people who occurred to me. I had liked his work since 1972, when I first encountered his television movie Something Evil, which has a visually brilliant and flamboyant opening. I immediately recognized that this was an exceptionally talented filmmaker, and I was aware that he was very young. Back in those days it was extremely unusual in Hollywood for someone in his twenties to be making films.

When E.T. came out, I thought: There has never been a full-length, seriously researched critical study of Spielberg, and little serious thought has been applied to his body of work. And I thought as well, this is a director who has already made some great films―Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977] is still perhaps my favorite of his films.

It is a very personal film, which only Spielberg could have made. Schindler’s List [1993] is a remarkable film, but other people might have been able to make a film of comparable quality on this subject, such as Roman Polanski or Martin Scorsese, who were considered at different times. But no one else in the world could have made Close Encounters.

However, Spielberg was only 35 at the time I started considering him as a subject, and I thought he was too young for a biography. I put it in the back of my mind, and then I wrote the Frank Capra biography and that occupied me for seven and a half years. By the end of that time there still hadn’t been anything important written about Spielberg, so I thought it was a major gap in American film historiography. I was also becoming angry that he was being maligned by a lot of people.

John Ford

In that regard, there’s a quote from John Ford I like very much. Ford was asked by an interviewer, Emanuel Eisenberg from New Theatre, in 1936, “Then you do believe, as a director, in including your point of view in a picture about things that bother you?” Ford replied, “What the hell else does a man live for?”

That’s my credo as a biographer too. In other words, I need to get angry about or bothered by something to write a biography, a project that involves a considerable effort. I need to feel passionate about something that’s been neglected or some injustice that’s been done, either toward some person or toward the truth.

In the case of Capra, a director I admire, his life story was falsely portrayed by him in his autobiography, The Name Above the Title [1971]. An engaging book, but I’d call it a novel about Hollywood. Writing the Capra biography was a depressing undertaking, because it’s a tragic story, although it was creatively stimulating enough to work on.

So I wanted a happier story to work on for my next biography. I also wrote a biography of John Ford. Only after writing all three did I realize why I had chosen them as subjects. Each involves someone who, how shall I put this? It has to do with ethnicity, origins.

I had a bit of a complex when I was growing up, being from Wisconsin, oddly enough. Many people on the two Coasts condescend to people from Wisconsin and the Midwest, they call it “flyover country,” as you know. I internalized some of that because I had a desire to do something in the wider world, and yet I was being patronized because I was a kid from Milwaukee.

Frank Capra

So I started feeling ashamed of that. It sounds kind of silly, in a way, but I guess Spielberg had the same problem with his Jewish identity, and Capra had the same with being an immigrant from Sicily; Ford had some of that being an Irish-American kid growing up in a WASP [white Anglo-Saxon Protestant]-dominated city in Maine.

They all dealt with it in different ways. That intrigued me. Ford became defiantly proud of his roots at a time when that was not fashionable.

Capra dealt with it by becoming a reactionary and a terrible bigot himself. He was anti-Semitic, he was anti-black, he was anti-his own people, he was hostile to just about every group you could imagine.

Spielberg’s evolution was the opposite of that, in my view, in that he became more generous toward others as the result of his problems. I found out that as a teenager in the early 1960s Spielberg and a friend of his cared very passionately about the Civil Rights movement, and they both decided they wanted to be black. It was not a stretch for Spielberg to make films such as The Color Purple [1985] and Amistad [1997]. A lot of critics mistakenly derided him for those efforts.

DW: Could you perhaps summarize Spielberg’s background and indicate what impact that had on him?

JM: The biography was a challenging research project, partly because Spielberg grew up in several different places, but that made it interesting. I had to interview five sets of people. He was born in Cincinnati in 1946, then the family moved to suburban New Jersey, then to Phoenix, Arizona, then he moved to northern California and wound up in Los Angeles.

Spielberg first lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Cincinnati called Avondale, which is now predominantly African American. It was a very settled, prosperous Jewish neighborhood when he was growing up. He was only there for three years. The family lived right across the street from the synagogue, which is still there, but it’s a Protestant church now. His first memory is of a red light burning before the ark of the Torah inside the synagogue, which is interesting, because this image brings to mind his films.

Then the Spielberg family moved to Haddon Township, New Jersey [near Philadelphia], which is a pleasant suburban area. Steven had to adapt to being a Jewish kid in a more gentile area. His father was upwardly mobile, a successful postwar person. He is a computer genius, a fabulous man. I got to interview Arnold Spielberg, one of the most fascinating parts of my research. He helped invent computers, so he moved his family in line with the needs of the computer industry.

The Spielberg family then relocated to Phoenix. Steven remembers being the only Jewish kid in the neighborhood. Actually there was a Jewish family right behind the Spielbergs, but he suffered some real bigotry growing up there from kids who were anti-Semites. But that reached its worst point in Saratoga, California, which is a posh community in northern California. Spielberg was beaten up by some kids one weekend, and kids in the school hallway would throw pennies on the floor in front of him when he passed, and they would cough “Ahh-Jew,” as he walked by. He was very unhappy there. I did find someone who witnessed such things, and Spielberg himself wrote to the local newspaper about it in later years. That was traumatic for him.

Then Steven moved to Los Angeles and got in with the film community there. He had his well-documented problems with his family breaking up, which I don’t think he will ever get over. It’s his perpetual subject for filmmaking: the divorce of his parents, which happened in the mid-1960s. Of course, he blamed his father for the divorce for many years. They only reconciled after my book came out in 1997, and I was pleased that the book may have played a role in their reconciliation.

Catch Me If You Can

Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can [2002] has autobiographical overtones, although it’s someone else’s life story [con man Frank Abagnale, Jr.]. It’s the story of an individual who has problems more with his mother than his father. At the time of the Spielbergs’s divorce, however, as I was told by someone close to Steven, he was really angry at his mother. He goes back and forth in his work between dealing with irresponsible father and mother figures.

His mother, Leah, is a wonderful woman, something of a bohemian. She was a pianist, an artist, she was eccentric and very funny. She didn’t care what people thought of them, she allowed Steven to cut school and allowed him to turn their house into a film studio.

Spielberg told his mother not to talk to me; I guess your mother knows the really bad stories about you. She was quoted a lot in other interviews, so I was able to use that material. The father had never been interviewed, though, and I was very fortunate to speak to him.

DW: In the book you debunk some of the mythology Spielberg has spread about his sneaking on the Universal lot as a young person. It’s not entirely clear to me even why he maintains some of this.

JM: I think he believes it by now. Let me make a comment on the mythmaking, because as a film biographer it’s an interesting thing I run into. Part of my raison d’être as a biographer is to debunk falsehoods of various kinds. That’s one of the reasons I became a writer, because I get very impatient and angry about all the lying and hypocrisy that surrounds us. I greatly value honesty in people.

But when you deal with these kinds of legendary figures, they’ve often created a mythical persona that you then have to sort out. Some of these myths really die hard. Directors are prone to this, because that’s their job, after all, creating imaginative stories. Most directors have a creation myth about their origins as filmmakers.

Frank Capra, for example, claimed that he was offered a job making a film in San Francisco in 1921 by an entrepreneur, and that he had never made a film and knew nothing about filmmaking. He was such a genius, the story goes, that he was able to master the craft without any training, which is complete poppycock. I found out, in fact, that he had been working in films for about six years by then, in all different capacities.

In Steven Spielberg’s case, the story is that he walked into an empty office at Universal Studios, set up an office for himself, and crashed the gate every day. I knew from my experience in Hollywood in the 1970s that the Universal lot was very hard to get into. It was very regimented, like a prison or something. You couldn’t just walk past those guards. I knew there was something fishy about Spielberg’s story.

In reality, Spielberg’s father knew the guy in charge of computers at Universal and asked him to help Steven get some kind of entrée there. This individual put Steven’s father in touch with Chuck Silvers, the head of the film library―a wonderful man, he became Steven’s true mentor―who was smart enough to recognize immediately that this was a talented young kid with a great passion for film.

Spielberg, contrary to myth, didn’t have his own office, he had a chair in Silvers’s office, working with a lady named Julie Raymond, for whom Steven worked as an assistant. Steven would run errands for her. I interviewed her, and she said Spielberg’s story about the empty office and so on was a lot of “horseshit,” in her succinct description.

From the creative point of view what’s important is that Spielberg, I think, actually believes that story now. When he made Catch Me If You Can, he said the story appealed to him because he himself had conned his way onto the Universal lot. Actually, Steven is conning us about this and evidently himself as well. That’s his real con that he still won’t or can’t admit.

The training Spielberg received at Universal was unorthodox, but in those days there was no organized way to break into the industry. The Directors Guild later had a program for assistant directors, which I tried to get into, and couldn’t. But if you were accepted in that program, you’d wind up being an assistant director for the rest of your life. Back in those days, they were trying to exclude people from the industry.

Almost the only way you could break into the industry was to go to USC [University of Southern California] film school and, ironically, Spielberg was rejected by USC because of his poor grades in high school. UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] also rejected him. He went to Cal State Long Beach, and they didn’t have much of a film program, and he was a half-hearted student. He went to college to avoid the draft, Spielberg said in an early interview. He was more candid in those days.

Spielberg was going to Universal every day, which was an extraordinary opportunity, to hang around film and television sets, and meet people. He had a lot of chutzpah as a kid. He would walk up to Cary Grant on the studio street and say, “Hi, could I have lunch with you?” Grant, Rock Hudson and people like that had lunch with him. Charlton Heston was another, and, by the way, Spielberg felt Heston was very pompous. Many years later, Heston wanted to play the police chief in Jaws [1975], and Spielberg had the pleasure of rejecting him.

John Cassavetes befriended Spielberg when he met him on the set of some television show, and Steven got to be a production assistant on Faces [1968], which was a remarkable experience, a very different kind of filmmaking from what they did at Universal. Universal was very much an old-fashioned factory. It was not the most progressive studio by a long shot. It was a television factory for the most part, producing formulaic material, as well as Airport [1970] and films such as that.

Spielberg was able to take advantage at Universal of some of the vestiges of the Hollywood studio system, which was crumbling at the time. They had excellent craft departments. Universal was still a functioning major studio, and there were not many of them left at the time. As for disadvantages, if you see Spielberg as too conventional, you could say he started out in a conventional environment, but I don’t particularly believe in that criticism of him.

DW: I wanted to raise something you’ve already referred to tangentially, Spielberg’s concern with irresponsible mothers and fathers, his coming to terms with his Jewish roots, and so on―in other words, to what extent can one identify such interests with the emergence of the general phenomenon of “identity politics” in the US in the 1970s?

JM: Yes, I think he was influenced by it, but one of the things about Spielberg is that he was not an academic. He was only in school because he had to be, so he sort of avoided or escaped the influence of film schools. Film schools were getting very involved with identity politics in that period. But living in the culture you can’t avoid getting affected by certain trends.

DW: It was a mood within certain social layers, it’s not a matter of his conscious participation in a movement, or his attendance at a university or not.

JM: Yes, but I was referring to the degree to which he was conscious of such influences. I don’t think he was. Roots of course had a big impact at the time. It was a popular success as a book and then an unexpected success as a television miniseries in 1977. It made being proud of your ethnic background fashionable for many millions of people. Spielberg must have been influenced by that.

His interest in the fate of minorities obviously expressed itself in the making of The Color Purple, for which he was vehemently attacked by certain people. Alice Walker, the author of the book, suggested that the subtext of this was, “What makes this Jewish boy think he can direct a movie about black people?” And this is one of negative features of identity politics, that only certain people are allowed to make films about certain questions or certain groups.

When I teach films, I include films, for example, by African Americans as part of the general subject, not some subdivision. It’s part of the overall history of filmmaking.

DW: A radical approach these days.

JM: There are people who object to a white professor teaching a course about a black subject, although I personally haven’t experienced this. To me, that is very limiting, because we should all be interested.

When I went to a synagogue in West LA to talk about Schindler’s List, there was a very nice audience, but one person put up her hand and asked, “Why are you as a gentile interested in the Holocaust?”

I was somewhat flabbergasted by the question. Why wouldn’t I be? I said to her, “This was the most horrible event of the 20th Century, obviously we should all be deeply concerned by it.” I’ve studied the Holocaust since I was a teenager and I still read books about it. It’s part of the fabric of our world, unhappily. You don’t have to be Jewish to care about the Holocaust.

I ran into the same question when I originally wrote the book about Spielberg. “Why are you as a gentile interested in Steven Spielberg?” and even, from some people, “What right as a gentile do you have to write a biography of Steven Spielberg?”

I found those questions a little flabbergasting too.

DW: That stuff is simply horrible. On that basis, one could eliminate much of world literature. How did Shakespeare dare write The Merchant of Venice, or Othello, or Julius Caesar, for that matter?

JM: When I was a screenwriter in Hollywood and writing a lot of parts for women, some people would ask the same thing: “Who are you to write about women?” I would say, “Didn’t Tolstoy write a book entitled Anna Karenina?”

Spielberg has been pilloried for his films about black people. To his credit, he continues making the films he thinks are important. He’s going ahead with his film about Abraham Lincoln, which everyone assumes will be a commercial flop. “Why bother making it, blah, blah, blah?” Tony Kushner wrote the script, who wrote Munich [2005].

It’s sad. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood made films about that sort of subject, great historical events and personalities, and today it’s assumed that the target audience, which is subteens to twenty-five, doesn’t care or know anything about a Lincoln. That’s part of the decline of our educational system, if that’s true. But Spielberg plows ahead. One of the virtues of his commercial success is that he’s able to make that type of film, and not worry it will fail at the box office.

To be continued

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ARCHIVES: Articles you should have read but missed

By Daniel Denvir, AlterNet

“You looking for Hollywood? Come on in!”

I walked into a small but packed room at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for a primer on entering show business stage right. It was the panel’s second year at the annual convention, and the young people gathered were planning to skip the D.C. internships and look for jobs in film, music and television.

The movement is shifting away from the outright opposition to popular culture that defined the culture wars of the 1990s. They have embraced a two-pronged strategy to get their message out: making their own films and music, and using Tea Party or church networks to distribute them; and working inside the mainstream entertainment industry to release films and other products with movement themes into the mass market.

The prospect of political action and personal fame proves alluring for a generation where online celebrity meshes easily with real-world political power. A young man canvassed the room–“who does video?”–saying that he helps young videographers plug into local campaigns as he passed out his business card. Young men discussed their Twitter feeds, and two others tried to understand Obama through the prism of Star Wars.

Larry O’Connor, editor-in-chief at Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart.tv (of ACORN and Shirley Sherrod political character assassination fame), delivered an insider account. Before coming to the right-wing web-o-sphere, O’Connor worked as a production manager on Broadway and in Los Angeles. Wearing square-frame glasses, with untucked dress shirt, jacket, and jeans, salt and pepper stubble, and a proclivity to strike a sardonic tone, I would have easily mistaken him for a liberal.

“If you’re thinking about coming to Washington to be in politics or you’re thinking of working for some congressperson and be their aide,” an animated O’Connor told the room, “there are a hell of a lot of people who can do that already…We need conservatives in Hollywood…The culture and what happens in Hollywood and in the entertainment industry is a driving factor for what happens in our country and, frankly, for what happens in Washington.”

“Politics is downstream of popular culture,” moderator Kevin McKeever chimed in. “That’s one of the reasons why we do this panel.”

Presenters encouraged the eager young attendees to paddle upstream. One suggested that young conservatives become “sleeper agents” in the entertainment world: establish yourself doing high quality but conventional work as an actor, agent or producer. Keep quiet on politics until you have established influence and power.

Remarkably, John Nolte, editor-in-chief of Big Hollywood (another Breitbart enterprise), pointed to the gay rights movement as an example of the power of (what conservatives tend to call) “the culture.”

“Look at the issue of gay marriage,” he said, arguing that it was an important case study whatever your position was. (This was itself supporting evidence for his argument, as his comments reflected an important shift: gay rights have become a seriously contested issue at CPAC and throughout the conservative movement.) “Look how far we’ve come on gay marriage in 10 years. In the ’90s, we were saying ‘are we gonna’ do civil unions, are we okay with that as a country?’ Now we’re one vote away probably from legalizing gay marriage throughout the country. And that’s not politics. That’s the culture. That’s television, and movies, and music changing the way we think, and changing what we believe.”

The new conservative film movement has two main currents: the political documentary and the Christian moral narrative.Fahrenheit 9/11 was a wake-up call for right-wing documentarians eager to match the power of progressive documentary. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ sent the opposite message to conservatives and to Hollywood at large: we have a market.

The Passion of Christ made over $370 million domestically and over $241 million worldwide, aggressively reaching out to churches nation-wide, a readymade publicity channel for religious right films. The 2009 film The Blind Side won an Oscar, made over $255 domestically, and simultaneously hit a number of right-wing sweet spots: Sandra Bullock is a Southern Christian lady who saves a black boy from the black ghetto, “shedding nuance and complication in favor of maximum uplift” over “vague stories meant…to conjure a world of violence, dysfunction and despair.”

In popular culture as in politics, conservatives don’t openly defend the oppressor against the oppressed. They deny that any such injustice exists–particularly when it comes to race. The overall goal is simple: more movies with clearly defined good and evil. Less moral ambiguity.

Producer Ralph Winter, who made The Fantastic Four and the X-Men trilogy, is an evangelical. He also produced the film versions of the best-selling “Left Behind” book series–the plot of which is: what happens when Jesus comes back? He throws all the non- or wrong-believers into a lake of fire. He has also made a number of “small-budget, direct-to-video movies based on popular Christian novels.”

“I think things are changing in Hollywood,” said Nolte. “You do have a better environment to walk into than there was five years ago. Andrew Breitbart has a lot to do with that…For your country, I think it’s a very patriotic thing to be willing to go in there.”

Megachurches are also tapping their substantial resources to produce sophisticated media in-house. Evangelical producer Dallas Jenkins, the son of one of the “Left Behind” series’ two authors, is now director of visual media at Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago and is planning to produce feature films directly out of the church. This is a remarkable feat of vertical integration.

The Chronicles of Narnia and even Lord of the Rings strike religious notes in the guise of fantasy. One Baptist writer, though acknowledging that the “Hobbit habit of ingesting mushrooms and smoking ‘pipe weed” got translated into drug use for counter-culture readers,’ was pleased that the Christian J.R.R. Tolkien had set out “the reality of evil and the task to struggle against it.”

After a major delay caused by Chapter 11, MGM is planning to release its remake of the Cold War classic Red Dawn. The original Soviet invasion of the U.S. will be Chinese in the new version.

The biggest, most recent and utterly surprising coup for the religious right is the 3-D “documentary” of tween idol Justin Bieber, whose mother is a devout evangelical Christian. Paramount has a Christian outreach plan with special church screenings, which a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article calls “a page torn from the Passion of the Christ marketing playbook.” (Though Wonkette notes that Focus on the Family is worried that Bieber has fallen prey to an “entertainment industry [that] is a sexual and political minefield” thanks to an ambiguous comment about pre-marital sex.

Hollywood is a complicated thing for the right, which hates it for sex and moral ambiguity but celebrates or declines comment on the glorification of war and crass commercialism. And they blame liberals for everything, including stuff that most liberals dislike. Left-wing forces cannot be held responsible for the music video of 17-year-old pop star Miley Cyrus writhing on a bed in her underwear. The conservative hysterics about Hollywood ignore the role big business plays in keeping the system conservatives so cherish up and running.

Stephen Baldwin, the youngest Baldwin brother and a born-again Christian who was supposed to speak at CPAC but had something else come up, actually got an “HM” tattoo in honor of Hannah Montana after Cyrus promised that if he did, Baldwin would get a cameo appearance on the show. He never appeared.

Though his most recent hit was a stint on Celebrity Big Brother, his Web site refers to him as “one of the most sought-after male talents in film and television today” and “one of the few Hollywood actors versatile enough for key roles in everything from The Usual Suspects to Bio-Dome.”

Other efforts are also frustrated. According to the Washington Post, the new film “Atlas Shrugged was supposed to star Angelina Jolie or Charlize Theron; instead, the long-awaited adaptation of Ayn Rand’s freedom-loving tract has come to the big screen with actors you’ve never heard of and no distribution deal.”

And there is no small amount of jealously over the skills on display in liberal Hollywood, including one presenter’s embarrassed compliment for the narrative structure of James Cameron’s Terminator–embarrassed, because Cameron also made the anti-war and environmentalist Avatar. The pro-charter school polemic Waiting for Superman was the subject of unqualified support. As I wrote at In These Times “Superman, directed by An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim, was panned by many education scholars. But for many conservatives, the film’s success was proof that conservative ideas can win ground on the left, especially when they’re dressed up as a story of poor people of color fighting for justice.”

One young filmmaker at the Hollywood panel expressed his annoyance that festivals would not accept his films, though he suggested that revenge was possible: he claimed that he is chairman of the Mississippi International Film Festival screening committee. “All the liberal documentaries that came through, I shut those down fast,” he declared. (The Mississippi Film Institute says that the speaker was not the chairman of the screening committee but rather a volunteer, and that films were never rejected because of their political content.)

One man was upset that no one was interested in his film, Fear of a Black Republican, “the movie that neither political party wants you to see.” He, like everyone in the room, was by all appearances a white Republican.

Yet B-list actors can make Grade A politicians. For Ronald Reagan, thoroughly lionized at CPAC or any conservative gathering, the invocation and performance of heroic virtues first tried out in Hollywood made a presidency. Reagan is now the stock character for a new generation of political thespians. The drumbeat about manliness, character, virtue and resolve was deafening at CPAC. For all their bluster, it is the conservative movement that brought Hollywood values and a silver screen sensibility to Washington.

Citizen’s United: More than a horrible Supreme Court decision

“Don’t wait for Godot!” Kevin McKeever implored the crowd. He told the audience to steel itself for the rigors of the industry. “It could be that you’re just selling the DVDs out of the trunk of your car. That’s how MC Hammer started!”

While the creatives burrow into Hollywood, the explicitly political new media is bypassing the mainstream. In doing so, they cut out the middleman and directly reach out to their base. Counterintuitively, this strategy also increases pressure on mainstream media to reflect their viewpoint: Breitbart.tv promotes video hatchet jobs; conservative radio and cable news then hector the mainstream media into picking up a fabricated “story” with their perspective baked in; and, finally, the mainstream media succumb to the pressure and oblige.

Citizens United is best known as the plaintiff in the 2010 Supreme Court case that overturned the McCain-Feingold law, obliterating campaign finance restrictions. One might have forgotten that Citizens United is also one of the most important media organizations on the political right. The group put on a constantly running film festival at CPAC, presenting the torrent of documentaries they have produced in recent years attacking President Obama and Hillary Clinton, celebrating Bachmann and Palin, opposing immigration and the ACLU.

The Supreme Court decision, over whether the attack film Hillary constituted a campaign advertisement, was a victory for the entire corporate-funded right. It was also a very particular victory for Citizens United, enabling the organization to pour additional dollars into their films. And in a little discussed June 2010 ruling, the FEC declared Citizens United to be a media organization, which means they do not have to disclose donors or expenditures as it pertains to their films. Citizens United is also a Political Action Committee (PAC) and donates money directly to political campaigns.

“We won,” Citizens United president David Bossie said, according to an article by Slate’s David Weigel. “And we want to make use of that.”

Citizens United films premier at major conservative events, and are screened by Tea Party groups around the country. Taking a cue from liberal groups like MoveOn and Brave New Films, they encourage activists to buy DVDs and screen them at house parties. The Tea Party tribute and anti-Obama screed Battle for America was used as a get-out-the-vote tool in the 2010 midterm elections.

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was a defining moment for movement conservatives. Ironically, it was Citizen’s United that in 2004 petitioned the FEC to declare Fahrenheit 9/11 commercials political ads and thus illegal to air in the lead up to elections–taking advantage of the very same laws they would challenge with Hillary four years later.

Citizens United has closely studied the left, releasing their first full-length documentary just months after Fahrenheit 9/11:Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die.

Brave New Films president Robert Greenwald says his organization and MoveOn pioneered the alternative distribution method that Citizens United is using. Brave New Films has produced dozens of videos organized around political efforts, from full-length documentaries like Outfoxed to short and timely commercials like the 2008 bit pillorying John McCain for being unable to recall how many homes he owned (the answer was 10).

“I assume they watch and read and follow what we do,” Greenwald wrote in an email, though he pointed out that conservatives already control a sprawling communications network of their own. “Conservatives have talk radio, so they don’t need film/video the way progressives do.”

They may not need it. But they plan on taking it. And unlike Brave New Films, Move On or Michael Moore, they are seamlessly integrated into a political party and movement flush with corporate dollars.

Citizens United president David Bossie illustrates the close ties between the GOP establishment and movement new media. A young Bossie was involved with Citizens United in 1988 when it made the infamous Willy Horton ad suggesting that Michael Dukakis, if elected president, would let dangerous (and black) felons onto the streets. In the 1990s, he moved to Capitol Hill, where he was the top aid on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigating everything about Bill Clinton and a zealous promoter of White Water and other pseudo-scandals.

At CPAC, Bossie basked in the glow of television cameras and wide-eyed young conservatives, an institution builder at the nexus of media and politics. Taking the stage at the Citizens United bloggers lunch, he gave a shoutout to Breitbart and Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller in the same breath, before praising his friend and former colleague Michael Chertoff for the Homeland Security chief’s role in extraordinary renditions and Guantanamo. And he effusively thanked Newt Gingrich, who has taken a lead role at the organization.

Gingrich and his third wife Callista’s Gingrich Productions have now “co-produced” six films with Citizens United. Gingrich converted to Callista’s Catholicism after first dating her during his previous marriage, and while he was Speaker of the House. Energized by his newfound faith, the Gingriches have produced a film celebrating Pope John Paul II’s role in felling communism, a move transparently intended to deflect growing criticism of a church mired in scandals over child sexual abuse.

Gingrich has been busy: hinting and hinting at a 2012 presidential run, starting a “solutions” oriented think tank and “tri-partisan citizen action network” (which claims a hard-to-believe 1.5 million members on its Web site), aggressively hawking his historical fiction, and giving lectures with titles like “America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan.” It is significant that Citizens United has become a Gingrich vehicle.

There are other independent offerings, too. The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 911 Attacks, produced by anti-mosque mouthpiece Pam Geller, premiered at CPAC in attempt to revive a controversy that has long since flagged.

Rock & Roll: Saving Souls, Fighting Big Government Control

Lisa Mei Norton has no big designs on New York/Hollywood polish. She proudly represents the movement’s DIY arm. The conservative singer-songwriter and former air force sergeant created a webpage in the MySpace aesthetic (and this is not a good thing) for like-minded musicians called Big Dawg Music Mafia. She emphasizes the non-standard spelling of “Dawg” through her street-sense delivery: this is how conservatives roll now, people. She’s part of a growing number of musicians who tour Tea Party rallies around the country, and the composer of one very heartfelt tribute to Sarah Palin’s fairy tale life called “Thank God You’re a Woman.”

Norton is also a member of an organization called Oathkeepers, made up former and active duty soldiers and police who pledge to take on the federal government should it be necessary. Like everything at CPAC, the fringe right mingles easily with the Republican establishment.

Jon David is one of the most famous of the Tea Party musicians, and you have probably never heard of him.

David wears a trucker hat and lives in Los Angeles and takes on a singer-songwriter posture at the microphone. He headlined CPAC’s Friday night banquet, and has opened for Sarah Palin and Tea Party rallies nationwide. Jon David is not his real name. He told the Wall Street Journal that he was worried about losing work in liberal Hollywood. Jonathan Kahn is now out of the closet: the persecuted conservative bravely announces his faith before the heathen powers that be, prepared for martyrdom should it come to that.

The core of David’s appeal is a catchy and deeply maudlin song called “American Heart.” He played it right before Phyllis Schlafly was presented with the lifetime “Courage Under Fire” award for leading the successful fight against the Equal Rights Amendment and other such nefarious liberalisms.

The song is very catchy, and the video deftly if manipulatively uses a montage of historical images to elicit an emotional response: victorious USA Olympic teams; soldiers on patrol abroad; that photo of construction workers eating lunch at the top of a skyscraper. That nearly all of the half-dozen black people pictured were firmly on the left–Martin Luther King, who called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” or Muhammad Ali, who resisted the draft to Vietnam–fades into a mush of soft-focus patriotism.

It is the perfect soundtrack for a movement that glorifies the idea of history but rejects knowledge of its substance.

If you can’t beat em, join ’em

The right is increasingly hostile to political compromise. But in the realm of pop culture, they’ve taken a “if you can’t beat em, join em” approach.

In 2006, the National Review published a “50 Greatest American Rock Songs,” unapologetically co-opting songs that have been traditionally identified with the left.

“According to everyone on the left, we are all 91-year-old white bald men in this room right now,” Stephen Kruiser, a comedian and Fox News commentator, told the large crowd gathered for “Engaging America through Conservative Pop Culture.” “You know that right?…Pop culture, the use of it, opens up the avenues of bringing in a new audience..I am going to steal pop culture from the lefties.”

The panels continually returned to a deep anxiety on the right: conservatives still don’t know what to make of the modern world. They embrace the internal combustion engine and nuclear power while rejecting the theory of evolution and the science of global warming; puzzling over the depravity of “Jersey Shore,” they daydream about small-town geniality from the confines of the sprawling rec room of an exurban McMansion.

“It might seem ridiculous,” wrote pop culture scholar Mike Spencer, “for conservative forces to indoctrinate rock music, a popular culture form which they have historically derided and which they recognized as a cause of a variety of social problems (juvenile delinquency, race mixing, Communist subversion, etc.).”

But as cultural theorist Frederick Jameson notes, the passage of time has always allowed for the cooptation of music and art that is “ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive and generally ‘anti-social,'” making it into something safe for civilization.

Often, the appeals fall flat, like Michael Steele’s infamous promise to bring an “off the hook” GOP to “urban, suburban hip-hop settings.” And rock stars have protested the appropriation of their music for conservative political campaigns. In 2008, members of Heart told Sarah Palin to stop playing their hit song “Barracuda”:

“Sarah Palin’s views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song ‘Barracuda’ no longer be used to promote her image. The song ‘Barracuda’ was written in the late ’70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women. (The ‘barracuda’ represented the business.) While Heart did not and would not authorize the use of their song at the RNC, there’s irony in Republican strategists’ choice to make use of it there.”

That working-class bard Bruce Springsteen is a liberal clearly bothers conservatives. In 2009, the Boss turned down New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s request that he play at his inauguration. Glenn Beck attacked Born in the USA as “anti-American” during a show where he also put forth his dumbfounded realization that “This Land is Your Land” was critical of capitalism. Yet Springsteen still commands the image of salt-of-the-earth Americana. (I’m not aware of a situation in which a group or candidate on the left has been criticized for appropriating a conservative musician.)

The Decline of Frumpy Censors

“People are always trying to play Shakira before I speak,” complained one of a handful of Latinos at CPAC, rushing up to speak to members of a panel called “Pop Culture: An Influence or a Mirror?” as they left the stage. She was desperately seeking a family values Latin pop star. “Shakira is a liberal!”

There are still old-line conservatives who pass their days worrying about Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. But as the New York Times noted in an October article on the Parents Television Council, “These are difficult days for the decency police.”

The (bi-partisan) Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), formed in response to Prince’s Purple Rain’s lyrics about sex and masturbation no longer exists. Failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s writing in 1996 that “difficult to convey just how debased rap is,” now seems, well, quaint.

During the Hollywood panel, O’Connor of Breitbart.tv made fun of the Family Research Council, apologizing only when an evangelical in the back of the room meekly protested. The most provocative new conservative mediamakers are shedding the baggage of culture war hangups, freeing up time and energy to attack the left and President Obama. That night, Breitbart threw a party for GOProud and passed out stickers that read, “Our gays are more macho than their straights!”

Breitbart and others know that playing at cool while outlawing fun is a hard thing to do. But much of the new conservative media is just more of the same old fear and loathing, however more licentious. That, unfortunately, is something America has always provided a market for.

Correction: This article originally stated that a chairman of the Mississippi International Film Festival screening committee said they had blocked entry of liberal films to the festival. AlterNet has since learned from the Mississippi Film Institute that the man was not the chairman of the screening committee but a member. This article has been corrected to reflect this.

Daniel Denvir is a journalist in Philadelphia.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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SPECIAL—

When Animals Resist
Let Us Now Praise Infamous Animals

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR | Counterpunch.org
Thank you, Jeffrey St. Clair

In the spring of 1457, a gruesome murder took place in the French village of Savigny-sur-Etang. A five-year-old boy had been killed and his body partially consumed. A local family was accused of this frightful crime by local residents who claimed to have witnessed the murder. The seven suspects, a mother and her six children, were soon tracked down by local authorities, who discovered them still stained by the boy’s blood. They were arrested, indicted on charges of infanticide and held in the local jail for trial.

The defendants were indigent and the court appointed a lawyer to represent them. A few weeks later a trial was convened in Savigny’s seigneurial court. Before a crowded room, witnesses were called. Evidence was presented and legal arguments hotly debated. The justices considered the facts and the law and rendered a verdict and a sentence. The mother was pronounced guilty and ordered to be hanged to death by her legs from the limb of the gallows tree. Her six children, however, received a judicial pardon. The court accepted the defense lawyer’s argument that the youngsters lacked the mental competence to have committed a crime in the eyes of the law. The orphaned children were sent into custodial care at the expense of the state.

This is an interesting case to be sure, featuring important lessons about the legal rights of the poor and the historic roots of juvenile justice in western jurisprudence, lessons that seem entirely lost on our current “tradition-obsessed” Supreme Court. But here’s the kicker: the defendants in these proceedings were not members of our species. They were, it must be said, a family of pigs.

The Savigny murder case, even in its ghastly particulars, was unexceptional. In medieval Europe (and even colonial America) thousands of animals were summoned to court and put on trial for a variety of offenses, ranging from trespassing, thievery and vandalism to rape, assault and murder. The defendants included cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, slugs, swallows, oxen, horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, wolves, bears, bees, weevils, and termites. These tribunals were not show trials or strange festivals like Fools Day. The tribunals were taken seriously by both the courts and the community.

Though now largely lost to history, these trials followed the same convoluted rules of legal procedure used in cases involving humans. Indeed, as detailed in E. P. Evans’ remarkable book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), humans and animals were frequently tried together in the same courtroom as co-conspirators, especially in cases of bestiality. The animal defendants were appointed their own lawyers at public expense. Animals enjoyed appeal rights and there are several instances when convictions were overturned and sentences reduced or commuted entirely. Sometimes, particularly in cases involving pigs, the animal defendants were dressed in human clothes during court proceedings and at executions.

Animal trials were held in two distinct settings: ecclesiastical courts and secular courts. Ecclesiastical courts were the venue of choice for cases involving the destruction of public resources, such as crops, or in crimes involving the corruption of public morals, such as witchcraft or sexual congress between humans and beasts. The secular and royal courts claimed jurisdiction over cases where animals were accused of causing bodily harm or death to humans or, in some instances, other animals.

When guilty verdicts were issued and a death sentence imposed, a professional executioner was commissioned for the lethal task. Animals were subjected to the same ghastly forms of torture and execution as were condemned humans. Convicted animals were lashed, put to the rack, hanged, beheaded, burned at the stake, buried alive, stoned to death and drawn-and-quartered. In 14th century Sardinia, trespassing livestock had an ear cut-off for each offense. In an early application of the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule, the third conviction resulted in immediate execution.

The flesh of executed animals was never eaten. Instead, the corpses of the condemned were either burned, dumped in rivers or buried next to human convicts in graveyards set aside for criminals and heretics. The heads of the condemned, especially in cases of bestiality, were often displayed on pikes in the town square adjacent to the heads of their human co-conspirators.

The first recorded murder trial involving an animal took place in 1266 at Fontenay-aux-Roses (birthplace of the painter Pierre Bonnard) on the outskirts of Paris. The case involved a murder of an infant girl. The defendant was a pig. Though the records have been lost, similar trials almost certainly date back to classical Greece, where, according to Aristotle, secular trials of animals were regularly held in the great Prytaneum of Athens.

Interestingly, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, written in 1269, is in part an attack on Aristotle’s ideas and his “radical acolytes” who had infiltrated the universities of thirteenth century Europe. In the Summa, Aquinas laboriously tried to explain the theological basis for the trials of animals.

While most of the animal trials, according the records unearthed by Evans, appear to have taken place in France, Germany and Italy, nearly every country in Europe seems to have put beasts on trial, including Russia, Poland, Romania, Spain, Scotland and Ireland. Anglophiles have long claimed that England alone resisted the idea of hauling cows, dogs and pigs before the royal courts. But Shakespeare suggests otherwise. In “The Merchant of Venice,” Portia’s friend, the young and impetuous Gratiano, abuses Shylock, comparing him to a wolf that had been tried and hanged for murder:

Thy currish spirit
Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unhallow’d dam,
Infus’d itself in thee..

Even colonial Brazil got in on the act. In 1713 a rectory at the Franciscan monastery in Piedade no Maranhão collapsed, its foundation ravaged by termites. The friars lodged charges against the termites and an ecclesiastical inquest soon issued a summons demanding that the ravenous insects appear before the court to confront the allegations against their conduct. Often in such cases, the animals who failed to heed the warrant were summarily convicted in default judgments. But these termites had a crafty lawyer. He argued that the termites were industrious creatures, worked hard and enjoyed a God-given right to feed themselves. Moreover, the lawyer declared, the slothful habits of the friars had likely contributed to the disrepair of the monastery. The monks, the defense lawyer argued, were merely using the local termite community as an excuse for their own negligence. The judge returned to his chambers, contemplated the facts presented him and returned with a Solomonic ruling. The friars were compelled to provide a woodpile for the termites to dine at and the insects were commanded to leave the monastery and confine their eating to their new feedlot.

A similar case unfolded in the province of Savoy, France in 1575. The weevils of Saint Julien, a tiny hamlet in the Rhone Alps, were indicted for the crime of destroying the famous vineyards on the flanks of Mount Cenis. A lawyer, Pierre Rembaud, was appointed as defense counsel for the accused. Rembaud wasted no time in filing a motion for summary judgment, arguing that the weevils had every right to consume the grape leaves. Indeed, Rembaud asserted, the weevils enjoyed a prior claim to the vegetation on Mount Cenis, since, as detailed in the Book of Genesis, the Supreme Deity had created animals before he fashioned humans and God had promised animals all of the grasses, leaves and green herbs for their sustenance. Rembaud’s argument stumped the court. As the judges deliberated, the villagers of Saint Julien seemed swayed by the lawyer’s legal reasoning. Perhaps the bugs had legitimate grievances. The townsfolk scrambled to set aside a patch of open land away from the vineyards as a foraging ground for the weevils. The land was surveyed. Deeds were drawn up and the property was shown to counselor Rembaud for his inspection and approval. They called the weevil reserve La Grand Feisse. Rembaud walked the site, investigating the plant communities with the eyes of a seasoned botanist. Finally, he shook his head. No deal. The land was rocky and had obviously been overgrazed for decades. La Grand Feisse was wholly unsuitable for the discriminating palates of his clients. If only John Walker Lindh had been appointed so resolute an advocate!

The Perry Mason of animal defense lawyers was an acclaimed French jurist named Bartholomew Chassenée, who later became a chief justice in the French provincial courts and a preeminent legal theorist. One of Chassenée’s most intriguing essays, the sixteenth-century equivalent of a law review article, was titled De Excommunicatore Animalium Insectorium. In another legal mongraph, Chassenée argued with persuasive force that local animals, both wild and domesticated, should be considered lay members of the parish community. In other words, the rights of animals were similar in kind to the rights of the people at large.

In the summer of 1522, Chassenée was called to the ancient village of Autun in Burgundy. The old town, founded during the reign of Augustus, had been recently overrun by rats. French maidens had been frightened, the barley crop destroyed, the vineyards placed in peril. The town crier issued a summons for the rats to appear before the court. None showed. The judge asked Chassenée why he should not find his clients guilty in absentia. The lawyer argued that the rat population was dispersed through the countryside and that his clients were almost certainly unaware of the charges pending against them. The judge agreed. The town crier was dispatched into the fields to repeat his urgent notice. Yet still the rats failed to appear at trial. Once again Chassenée jumped into action. Showing tactical skills that should impress Gerry Spence, Chassenée shifted his strategy. Now he passionately explained to the court that the rats remained hidden in their rural nests, paralyzed by the prospect of making a journey past the cats of Autun, who were well-known for their ferocious animosity toward rodents.

In the end, the rats were spared execution. The judge sternly ordered them to vacate the fields of Autun within six days. If the rats failed to heed this injunction, the animals would be duly anathematized, condemned to eternal torment. This sentence of damnation would be imposed, the court warned, regardless of any rodent infirmities or pregnancies.

Few animal trials were prosecuted as vigorously as those involving allegations of bestiality. In 1565, a man was indicted for engaging in sexual relations with a mule in the French city of Montpelier. The mule was also charged. Both stood trial together. They were duly convicted and sentenced to death at the stake. Because of the mule’s angry disposition, the animal was subjected to additional torments. His feet were chopped off before the poor beast was pitched into the fire.

In 1598, the suspected sorceress Françoise Secretain was brought before the inquisitional court at St. Claude in the Jura Mountains of Burgundy to face charges of witchcraft and bestiality. Secretain was accused of communing with the devil and having sex with a dog, a cat and a rooster. The blood-curdling case is described in detail by her prosecutor, the Grand Justice Henri Boguet, in his strange memoir Discours des Sorciers. Secretain was stripped naked her cell, as the fanatical Boguet inspected her for the mark of Satan. The animals were shaved and plucked for similar examinations. Secretain and her pets were put to various tortures, including having a hot poker plunged down their throats to see if they shed tears, for, as Boguet noted in his memoir:

“All the sorcerers whom I have examined in quality of Judge have never shed tears in my presence: or, indeed, if they have shed them it has been so parsimoniously that no notice was taken of them. I say this with regard to those who seemed to weep, but I doubt if their tears were not feigned. I am at least well assured that those tears were wrung from them with the greatest efforts. This was shown by the efforts which the accused made to weep, and by the small number of tears which they shed.”

Alas, the poor woman and her animals did not weep. They perished together in flames at the stake.

In 1642 a teenage boy named Thomas Graunger stood accused of committing, in the unforgettable phrase of Cotton Mather, “infandous Buggeries” with farm animals in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Young master Graunger was hauled before an austere tribunal of Puritans headed by Gov. William Bradford. There he stood trial beside his co-defendants, a mare, a cow, two goats, four sheep, two calves and a turkey. All were found guilty. They were publicly tortured and executed. Their bodies were burned on a pyre, their ashes buried in a mass grave. Graunger was the first juvenile to be executed in colonial America.

In 1750, a French farmer named Jacques Ferron was espied sodomizing a female donkey in a field. Man and beast were arrested and hauled before a tribunal in the commune of Vanves near Paris. After a day-long trial, Ferron was convicted and sentenced to be burned at the stake. But the donkey’s lawyers argued that their client was innocent. The defense maintained that the illicit acts were not consensual. The donkey, the defense pleaded, was a victim of rape and not a willing participant in carnal congress with Ferron. Character witnesses were called to testify on the donkey’s behalf. Affidavits calling for mercy were filed with the court by several leading citizens of the town, including the head abbot at the local priory, attesting to the benign nature and good moral character of the animal. The abbot wrote that the four-year-old donkey was “in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honorable creature.” Here the court was compelled to evaluate matters of volition, free will and resistance. In short, did the donkey say no? After an intense deliberation, the court announced its verdict. The donkey was acquitted and duly released back to its pasture.

What are we to make of all this? Why did both the secular and religious courts of Europe devote so much time and money to these elaborate trials of troublesome animals? Some scholars, such as James Frazer, argue that the trials performed the function of the ancient rituals of sacrifice and atonement. Others, such as the legal theorist Hans Kelsen, view the cases as the last gasp of the animistic religions. Some have offered an economic explanation suggesting that animals were tried and executed during times of glut or seized in times of economic plight as property by the Church or Crown through the rule of deodand or “giving unto God.” Still others have suggested that the trials and executions served a public health function, culling populations of farm animals and rodents that might contribute to the spread of infectious diseases.

Our interest here, however, is not with the social purpose of the trials, but in the qualities and rights the so-called medieval mind ascribed to the defendants: rationality, premeditation, free will, moral agency, calculation and motivation. In other words, it was presumed that animals acted with intention, that they could be driven by greed, jealousy and revenge. Thus the people of the Middle Ages, dismissed as primitives in many modernist quarters, were actually open to a truly radical idea: animal consciousness. As demonstrated in these trials, animals could be found to have mens rea, a guilty mind. But the courts also seriously considered exculpatory evidence aimed at proving that the actions of the accused, including murder, were justifiable owing to a long train of abuses. In other words, if animals could commit crimes, then crimes could also be committed against them.

The animal trials peaked in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, then faded away. They came to be viewed through the lens of modern historians as comical curiosities, grotesquely odd relics of the Dark Ages. The legal scholar W. W. Hyde succinctly summed up the smug, self-aggrandizing view of the legal scholars of the 20th century: “the savage in his rage at an animal’s misdeeds obliterates all distinctions between man and beast, and treats the latter in all respects as the former.”

Of course, the phasing out of animal trials didn’t mean that the cruel treatment of domesticated animals improved or that problematic beasts stopped being put to death in public extravaganzas. While the trials ceased, the executions increased.

Recall the death warrant issued in 1903 against Topsy the Elephant, star of the Forepaugh Circus at Coney Island’s Luna Park. Topsy had killed three handlers in a three-year period. One of her trainers was a sadist, who tortured the elephant by beating her with clubs, stabbing her with pikes and feeding her lit cigarettes.

Tospy was ordered to be hanged, but then Thomas Edison showed up and offered to electrocute Topsy. She was shackled, fed carrots laced with potassium cyanide and jolted with 6,600 volts of alternating current. Before a crowd of 1,500 onlookers, Topsy shivered, toppled and died in a cloud of dust. Edison filmed the entire event. He titled his documentary short, “Electrocuting the Elephant.”

Topsy received no trial. It was not even imagined that she had grievances, a justification for her violent actions. Topsy was killed because she’d become a liability. Her death was a business decision, pure and simple.

So what happened? How did animals come to be viewed as mindless commodities? One explanation is that modernity rudely intruded in the rather frail form of René Descartes. The great Cartesian disconnect not only cleaved mind from body, but also severed humans from the natural world. Descartes postulated that animals were mere physical automatons. They were biological machines whose actions were driven solely by bio-physical instincts. Animals lacked the power of cognition, the ability to think and reason. They had a brain but no mind.At Port-Royal the Cartesians cut up living creatures with fervor, and in the words of one of Descartes’ biographers, “kicked about their dogs and dissected their cats without mercy, laughing at any compassion for them and calling their screams the noise of breaking machinery.” Across the Channel Francis Bacon declared in the “Novum Organum” that the proper aim of science was to restore the divinely ordained dominance of man over nature, “to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man and so to endow him with “infinite commodities.” Bacon’s doctor, William Harvey, was a diligent vivisector of living animals.

Thus did the great sages of the Enlightenment assert humanity’s ruthless primacy over the Animal Kingdom. The materialistic view of history, and the fearsome economic and technological pistons driving it, left no room for either the souls or consciousness of animals. They were no longer our fellow beings. They had been rendered philosophically and literally in resources for guiltless exploitation, turned into objects of commerce, labor, entertainment and food.

Conveniently for humans, the philosophers of the Industrial Age declared that animal had no sense of their miserable condition. They could not understand abuse, they had no conception of suffering, they could not feel pain. When captive animals bit, trampled or killed their human captors, it wasn’t an act of rebellion against abusive treatment but merely a reflex. There was no need, therefore, to investigate the motivations behind these violent encounters because there could be no premeditation at all on the animal’s part. The confrontations could not be crimes. They were mere accidents, nothing more.

One wonders what Descartes would have made of the group of orangutans, who stole crowbars and screwdrivers from zookeepers in San Diego to repeatedly break out of their enclosures? How’s that for cognition, cooperation and tool use, Monsieur Descartes?

In 1668, Jean Racine, a playwright not known for his facility with farce, wrote a comedy satirizing the trials of animals. Written eighteen years after the death of Descartes, Les Plaideurs (The Litigants) tells the story of a senile old man obsessed with judging, who eventually places the family dog on trial for stealing a capon from the kitchen table. The mutt is convicted and sentenced to death. Then the condemned canine’s lawyer makes a last minute plea for mercy and reveals a litter of puppies before the judge. The old man is moved and the harsh hand of justice is stayed.

Racine’s comedy, loosely based on Aristophanes’ The Wasps, bombed, playing only two nights before closing, perhaps because the public had not yet been convinced by the solons of Europe to fully renounce their kinship with natural creatures. Revealingly, the play was resurrected a century later by the Comedie-Française to packed houses. By then public attitudes toward animals had shifted decisively in favor of human exceptionalism. According some accounts, the play has now become the most frequently performed French comedy, having been presented in more than 1,400 different productions.

Contrast Descartes sterile, homocentric view with that of a much great intellect, Michel Montaigne. Writing a mere fifty years before Descartes, Montaigne, the most gifted French prose stylist, declared: “We understand them no more than they us. By the same token they may as well esteem us beasts as we them.” Famously, he wrote in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”, “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”. Montaigne was distressed by the barbarous treatment of animals: “If I see but a chicken’s neck pulled off or a pig sticked, I cannot choose but grieve; and I cannot well endure a silly dew-bedabbled hare to groan when she is seized upon by the hounds.”

But the materialists held sway. Descartes was backed up the grim John Calvin, who proclaimed that the natural world was a merely a material resource to be exploited for the benefit of humanity, “True it is that God hath given us the birds for our food,” Calvin declared. “We know he hath made the whole world for us.”

John Locke, the father of modern liberal thinking, described animals as “perfect machines” available for unregulated use by man. The animals could be sent to the slaughterhouse with no right of appeal. In Locke’s coldly utilitarian view, cows, goats, chickens and sheep were simply meat on feet.

Thus was the Great Chain of Being ruthlessly transmuted into an iron chain with a manacle clasped round the legs and throats of animals, hauling them off to zoos, circuses, bull rings and abattoirs.

Perhaps as a result of its antiquated super-humanism, the Marxian view of animals is the great blind (and shameful) spot in a philosophy dedicated to universal liberation and justice.

Karl Marx, that supreme materialist, ridiculed the Romantic poets for their “deification of Nature” and chastised Darwin for his “natural, zoological way of thinking.” Unfortunately, Marx’s great intellect was not empathetic enough to extend his concepts of division of labor, alienation and worker revolt to the animals harnessed into grim service by the lords of capital. By the 1930s, so Matt Cartmill writes in his excellent history of hunting, “A View to a Death in the Morning”, “some Marxist thinkers… urged that it was time to put an end to nature and that animals and plants that serve no human purpose ought to be exterminated.”

Marx liked to disparage his enemies by calling them baboons. But what would Marx have made of the baboons of northern Africa, hunted down by animal traders, who slaughtered nursing mother baboons and stole their babies for American zoos and medical research labs. The baboon communities violently resisted this risible enterprise, chasing the captors through the wilderness all the way to the train station. Some of the baboons even followed the train for more than a hundred miles and at distant stations launched raids on the cars in an attempt to free the captives. How’s that for fearless solidarity?

Fidel Castro, one of Marx’s most ardent political practitioners, reinvented himself in his 80s as a kind of eco-guerilla, decrying the threat of global warming and advocating green revolutions. Yet Castro likes nothing more than to take visiting journalists to the Acuario Nacional de la Habana to watch captive dolphins perform tricks. The cetaceans are kept in wretched conditions, often trapped in waters so saturated with chlorine that it burns ulcers in the skin and peels the corneas off the eyeballs. Cuba captures and breeds dolphins for touring exhibitions and for sale to notoriously noxious aquatic parks throughout South America. The captive dolphins in Havana are trained by Celia Guevara, daughter of Che. There, as in other dolphin parks, food is used as a weapon in the pitiless reconditioning of the brainy sea mammals. Do the trick right or you don’t get fed. Is it any wonder then that many captive dolphins have chosen to bite the hand that starves them?

In this respect, at least, Adam Smith comes out a little more humane than the Marxists. Although he viewed animals as property, Smith recoiled at the sight of the abattoir: “The trade of a butcher is a brutal and odious business.”

Through the ages, it’s been the poets who have largely held firm in their affinity with the natural world. Consider the Metamorphoses composed by the Roman poet and political dissident Ovid around the time of Christ’s birth. In the final book of this epic, where humans are routinely transformed into animals, Ovid summons the spirit of Pythagoras. The great sage of Samos, whom Aristotle hailed as the father of philosophy, gives the most important speech in the poem. But the author of the famous Theorem forsakes the opportunity to proclaim that mathematics is the foundation of nature. Instead, Ovid’s Pythagoras denounces the killing of animals for food and asserts the sanctity of all life forms.

“What evil they contrive, how impiously they prepare to shed human blood itself, who rip at a calf’s throat with the knife, and listen unmoved to its bleating, or can kill a kid goat to eat, that cries like a child, or feed on a bird, that they themselves have fed! How far does that fall short of actual murder? Where does the way lead on from there?”

Where indeed. To hell, perhaps? That’s what John Milton thought. Milton’s God advises Adam that animals have the power of cognition and indeed they “reason not contemptibly.”

Crusty Robert Burns tells a frightened field mouse:

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed similar fraternal sentiments to a donkey chained in a field:

Poor Ass! thy master should have learnt to show
Pity –
best taught by fellowship of Woe!

For much I fear me that He lives like thee,

Half famished in a land of Luxury!

How askingly its footsteps hither bend!

It seems to say, “And have I then one friend?”

Innocent foal! thou poor despised forlorn!

I hail thee Brother — spite of the fool’s scorn!

And fain would take thee with me, in the Dell

Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell …

Lord Byron objected to angling, saying it inflicted unnecessary pain on trout, and ridiculed Izaak Walton for debasing poetry in promotion of this “cruel” hobby. His Lordship would, no doubt, have been outraged by the inane past-time of “catch-and-release” fishing.

Byron’s arch-nemesis William Wordsworth wrote a stunning poem titled “Hart-Leap Well,” tracking the last moments in the life a mighty stag chased “for thirteen hours” to its death by a horse-riding knight and his hounds. The ballad closes with a stark denunciation of hunting for sport:

“This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell;
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

“The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
…
“One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she [ie. Nature’ shows, and what conceals;
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”

The great, though mad, naturalist-poet John Clare openly worshipped “the religion of the fields,” while William Blake, the poet of revolution, simply said:

“For every thing that lives is Holy,
Life delights in life.”

And, finally, there is the glorious precedent of Geoffrey Chaucer, who reveals himself to be an animal liberationist. In the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes the Prioress as a woman who cannot abide the abuse of animals.

But for to speken of hir conscience,
She was so charitable and so pious
She wolde wepe, if that she sawe a mous
Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde.
Of smaule houndes hadde she that she fedde
With rosted flessh, or milk and wastel-breed.
But soore wepte she if oon of hem were deed,
Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte;
And al was conscience and tender herte.

Later in the remarkable Tale of the Manciple, Chaucer goes all the way, arguing forcefully against the caging of wild songbirds. The English language’s first great poet concludes that no matter how well you treat the captives, the birds desire their freedom:

“Taak any bryd, and put it in a cage,
And do al thyn entente and thy corage
To fostre it tendrely with mete and drynke,
Of alle deyntees that thou kanst bithynke;
And keepe it al so clenly as thou may,
Although his cage of gold be nevere so gay,
Yet hath this bryd, by twenty thousand foold,
Levere in a forest that is rude and coold
Goon ete wormes, and swich wrecchednesse;
For evere this bryd wol doon his bisynesse
To escape out of his cage, whan he may.
His libertee this brid desireth ay.”

It would take the philosophers nearly six hundred years to catch up with Chaucer’s enlightened sentiments. In 1975, the Australian Peter Singer published his revolutionary book Animal Liberation. Singer demolished the Cartesian model that treated animals as mere machines. Blending science and ethics, Singer asserted that most animals are sentient beings, capable of feeling pain. The infliction of pain was both unethical and immoral. He argued that the progressive credo of providing “the greatest good for the greatest number” should be extended to animals and that animals should be liberated from their servitude in scientific labs, factory farms, circuses and zoos.

A quarter century after the publication of Animal Liberation, Peter Singer revisited the great taboo of bestiality in an essay titled “Heavy Petting.” Expressing sentiments that would have shocked Grand Inquisitor Boguet, Singer argued that sexual relations between humans and animals should not automatically be considered acts of abuse. According to Singer, it all comes down to the issue of harm. In some cases, Singer suggested, animals might actually feel excitement and pleasure in such inter-species couplings. Even for the most devoted animal rights advocates this might be taking E. O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia a little too literally.

In Fear of the Animal Planet, historian Jason Hribal takes a radical, but logical, step beyond Singer. Hribal reverses the perspective and tells the story of liberation from the animals’ points-of-view. This is history written from the end of the chain, from inside the cage, from the depths of the tank. Hribal’s chilling investigation travels much further than Singer dared to go. For Hribal, the issue isn’t merely harm and pain, but consent. The confined animals haven’t given their permission to be held captive, forced to work, fondled or publicly displayed for profit.

Hribal skillfully excavates the hidden history of captive animals as active agents in their own liberation. His book is a harrowing, and curiously uplifting, chronicle of resistance against some of the cruelest forms of torture and oppression this side of Abu Ghraib prison.

Hribal takes us behind the scenes of circus and the animal park, exposing methods of training involving sadistic forms of discipline and punishment, where elephants and chimps are routinely beaten and terrorized into submission.

We witness from the animals’ perspective the tyrannical trainers, creepy dealers in exotic species, arrogant zookeepers and sinister hunters, who slaughtered the parents of young elephants and apes in front of their young before they captured them. We are taken inside the cages, tents and tanks, where captive elephants, apes and sea mammals are confined in wretched conditions with little medical care.

All of this is big business, naturally. Each performing dolphin can generate more than a million dollars a year in revenue, while orcas can produce twenty times that much.

This is a history of violent resistance to such abuses. Here are stories of escapes, subterfuges, work stoppages, gorings, rampages, bitings, and, yes, revenge killings. Each trampling of a brutal handler with a bull-hook, each mauling of a taunting visitor, each drowning of a tormenting trainer is a crack in the old order that treats animals as property, as engines of profit, as mindless objects of exploitation and abuse. The animal rebels are making their own history and Jason Hribal serves as their Michelet.

Hribal’s heroic profiles in animal courage show how most of these violent acts of resistance were motivated by their abusive treatment and the miserable conditions of their confinement. These animals are far from mindless. Their actions reveal memory not mere conditioning, contemplation not instinct, and, most compellingly, discrimination not blind rage. Again and again, the animals are shown to target only their abusers, often taking pains to avoid trampling bystanders. Animals, in other words, acting with a moral conscience.

So let us now praise infamous animals.

Consider the case of Jumbo the Elephant, the world’s most famous animal. Captured in eastern Africa in 1865, Jumbo would become the star attraction of P.T. Barnums’ Circus. Jumbo earned millions for his owners, but he was treated abysmally for most of his brief life. The giant pachyderm was confined to a small compartment with a concrete floor that damaged his feet and caused his joints to become arthritic. He was trained using unspeakably brutal methods, he was shackled in leg-chains, jabbed with a lance, beaten with ax handles, drugged and fed beer to the point of intoxication. He was endlessly shipped back-and-forth across the country on the circuses train and made to perform two shows a day, six days a week. At the age of 24 Jumbo was finally fed up. He could tolerate it no more. On a September night in Ontario, Jumbo and his sidekick, the small elephant called Thom Thumb, broke free from their handlers and wondered away from the tent and towards the train tracks. As P.T. Barnum later told the story, Jumbo pushed his pal Thom Thumb safely off the tracks and tried to ram an oncoming train. After Jumbo died an autopsy was performed. He stomach contents reviled numerous metallic objects that he had been fed over the years, including keys, screws, bolts, pennies and nickels—his reward for entertain hundreds of thousands of people.

Tatiana the Tiger, confined for years in a small enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo, finally reached her limit after being tormented by three teenaged boys on Christmas day 2006. She leapt the twelve-foot high wall, snatched one of the lads in her paws and eviscerated him. She stalked the zoo grounds for the next half-hour, by-passing many other visitors, until she tracked down the two other culprits and mauled them both before being gunned down by police.

There is Ken the Orangutan who pelted an intrusive TV news crew with his own shit from his enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.

Moe the Chimpanzee, an unpaid Hollywood actor who, when he wasn’t working, was locked in a tiny cage in West Covina. Moe made multiple escapes and fiercely resisted his recapture. He bit four people and punched at least one police officer. After his escape, he was sent off to a miserable confinement at a dreary place called Jungle Exotics. Moe escaped again, this time into the San Bernadino Mountains, where’s he’s never been heard from since.

Speaking of Hollywood, let’s toast the memory of Buddha the Orangutan (aka Clyde), who co-starred with Clint Eastwood in the movie Every Which Way But Loose. On the set, Buddha simply stopped working one day. He refused to perform his silly routines any more and his trainer repeatedly clubbed him in the head with a hard cane in front of the crew. One day near the end of filming Buddha, like that dog in Racine’s play, snatched some doughnuts from a table on the set. The ape was seized by his irate keeper, taken back his cage and beaten to death with an ax handle. Buddha’s name was not listed in the film’s credits.

Tyke the Elephant was captured in the savannahs of Zimbabwe and shipped to the United States to work in a traveling circus, where she was routinely disciplined with a sharp hook called an ankus. After 20 years of captivity and torture, Tyke reached her tipping point one day in Honolulu. During the elephant routine under the Big Top, Tyke made her break. She smashed through the railings of the ring and dashed for the exits. She chased after circus clowns and handlers, over-turned cars, busted through a gate and ran onto the streets of Honolulu. She was gunned down, while still wearing her rhinestone tiara.

Then there is the story of Tilikum the orca. When he was two, Tilikum was rudely seized from the frigid waters of the North Atlantic off the coast of Iceland. The young killer whale was shipped to Vancouver Island, where he was forced to perform tricks at an aquatic theme park called Sealand. Tilikum was also pressed into service as a stud, siring numerous calves for exploitation by his captors. Tilikum shared his small tank with two other orcas, Nootka and Haida. In February 1991, the whales’ female trainer slipped and fell into the tank. The whales wasted no time. The woman grabbed, submerged repeatedly, and tossed her back and forth between the three whales until she drowned. At the time of the killing, Haida was pregnant with a calf sired by Tilikum

Eight years later, a 27-year-old man broke into the aquatic park, stripped off his clothes and jumped into the tank with Tilikum. The orca seized the man, bit him sharply and flung him around. He was found floating dead in the pool the next morning. The authorities claimed the man died of hypothermia.

In 2010, Tilikum was a star attraction at Sea World in Orlando. During an event called “Dining With Shamu,” Tilikum snatched his trainer, Dawn Brancheau, and dragged her into the pool, where, in front of horrified patrons, he pinned her to the bottom until she drowned to death. The whale had delivered his third urgent message.

Tilikum is the Nat Turner of the captives of Sea World. He has struck courageous blows against the enslavement of wild creatures. Now it is up to us to act on his thrust for liberation and build a global movement to smash forever these aquatic gulags from the face of the Earth.

This essay is the introduction to Fear of the Animal Planet by Jason Hribal.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is published by AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

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Boguet, Henri. An Examen of Witches. Trans. E.A. Ashwin. Portrayer Pub. (2002)

Castillo, Hugo P. “Captive Marine Mammals in South America,” Whales Alive!, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1998)

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Tales of Canterbury. Ed. Robert Pratt. Houghton Mifflin. (1974)

Coe, Sue and Cockburn, Alexander. Dead Meat. Running Press. (1996)

Cohen, Esther. Law, Folklore and Animal Lore. Past and Present 110. (1986)

Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. Penguin. (1985)

Davis, Susan. Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience. University of California. (1997)

Dubois-Desaulle, Gaston. Bestiality: an Historical, Medical, Legal and Literary Study. Panurge. (1933)

Evans, E. P. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animal. Faber and Faber. (1987)

Ferrero, William. “Crime Among Animals.” Forum, 20. (1895)

Finkelstein, J.J. “The Ox That Gored.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 71. (1981)

Frazer, James G. Folklore in the Old Testament. Tudor. (1923)

Girgen, Jen. “The Historical and Contemporary Prosecution of Animals.” Animal Law. Vol. 9:97. (2003)

Humphrey, Nicholas. The Mind Made Flesh. Oxford University Press, (2002)

Hyde, W. W. “The Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 64, 7, 690-730. (1914)

Lovejoy, Arthur. The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea. Harvard University Press. (1936)

Ovid. The Metamorphosis. Trans. Charles Martin. Norton. (2005)

Peterson, Dale and Goodall, Jane. Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and Humans. University of Georgia Press. (1993)

Salisbury, Joyce. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. Routeledge. (1994)

Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals. Oxford University Press. (1986)

Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: a New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Random House. (1975)

–. “Heavy Petting.” Nerve. (2001)

Tester, Keith. Animals and Society: the Humanity of Animal Rights. Routledge. (1991)

Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World. Oxford University Press. (1983)

–. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Oxford University Press. (1970)

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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Conservative huckster Glenn Beck is packing up his white board and floppy clown shoes and heading to Jerusalem, where he hopes to inspire the world to join him in scuttling any hope of a two-state solution to the 60-year-old Israel-Palestine conflict.

Of late, Beck has been making some mention of Israel on his show every day. He just returned from a “fact-finding” trip to the Holy Land, he’s reportedly making a movie about the Jewish state, and this week he announced that he’ll be holding a “restoring courage” rally in Jerusalem this summer, where he hopes his legion of devoted fans will take few days out of their retirements to join him.

Beck “thinks disaster is imminent for Israel, because of a ‘two state solution that cuts off Jerusalem’ from the world.” “God is involved in man’s affairs, but so is the force of darkness,” he continued. “I believe I’ve been asked to stand in Jerusalem. Many in the history of man have had the opportunity to stand with the Jewish people…and they have failed.”

But Beck will succeed, because what the Middle East really needs is more slavish tribalism.

It’s the stuff of comedy – Loathsome American Protagonist Saves the Holy Land! – but Beck’s newfound adoration for Israel represents a convergence of right-wing ideologies that is in fact quite dangerous. Beck’s trying to turn an audience of very low-information viewers into hawkish “pro-Israel” hardliners who will “stand with Israel” even against long-standing US foreign policy — they’ll support more settlements and oppose the “roadmap” if their beloved leader tells them to. And the region already has ample rejectionists on both sides.

In one sense, Beck is trying to undo some of the damage after his relentless, anti-Semitic-tinged attacks on George Soros were condemned by observers across the political spectrum. As Anthea Butler noted, Beck’s “obsessions with Jews, from his attacks on George Soros, to his statement that Reform Judaism was like radical Islam, have brought the religious huckster condemnation and scorn,” and he now “wants to prove himself a true ‘friend’ of Israel with this rally.”

But Beck is also jumping on what has become an almost fetishistic “support” for Israel among much of the American Right in recent years. This is generally ascribed to conservative evangelists’ end-times theology, and indeed Beck is going to be the keynote speaker for this year’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI) summit in Washington, DC. CUFI is the brainchild of televangelist John Hagee, who has emerged as the most visible face of the conservative Christian faction of the “Israel lobby.”

Beck is a Mormon, and as Joanna Brooks wrote at Religion Dispatches, “Mormons may diverge from Hagee on some details of the last days (Mormon theology is usually characterized as premillenialist) but we do read the Book of Revelation.”

And in Mormon end-times scenarios, we don’t call them “witnesses”: they are described as apostles, or even prophets. Invading armies of Gentiles bent on the destruction of Israel will kill the two apostles, and their murdered bodies will lie dead in the streets of Jerusalem for three days without a decent burial. And then the Mount of Olives will split open. And then Jesus will return. That’s how Beck’s guru, the LDS ultra-conservative Cleon Skousen described it in 1972.

But appeals to the rapture-ready don’t tell the whole story. According to years of opinion polls, Americans don’t follow foreign affairs closely (three years after our invasion of Iraq, two-thirds of young people couldn’t find the country on a map), yet Gallup tells us the partisan gap between Americans whose sympathies rest with the Israelis or the Palestinians is at an all-time high.

Taken together, it appears that one’s “support for Israel” is becoming a proxy in our own nasty political divide. If Democrats, the international community and old-school Republican moderates favor a negotiated settlement to the dispute, it must be anti-American. Such is the Right’s own brand of tribalism – and Beck has become a trusted touchstone for his millions of followers.

But it’s important to understand that claiming to support Israel and actually doing so are two entirely separate things. Led by one of the most right-wing governments in its young history, Israel is isolating itself on the world stage with its intransigence over settlements and hard-line resistance to the international “peace process” (whatever that may be worth at this point). Supporting that stance is like giving your alcoholic friend a bottle of hooch – he or she may feel supported, but it’s not in their best interest over the long term.

As MJ Rosenberg notes, “There is hardly a mainstream political figure in Israel, dead or living (including current Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert), who hasn’t evinced the belief that Israel cannot survive if it maintains the occupation of the lands taken in 1967.”

But that is the policy supported by right-wingers like Beck. They don’t admire Israel because of its intrinsic qualities but because they view it as fighting the good fight against the people they most despise: Arabs and Muslims. They will happily fight to the last Israeli in a struggle they view as part of the “War on Terror.” If Israel is sacrificed in the name of that goal, so what? There are more important things to the right than the survival of one little Jewish country….

For Beck, what’s really important is his $40 million annual take and fledgling media empire. Forbes just ranked the former rodeo clown as its 30th most powerful celebrity.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

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David Kirby, author of Animal Factory, The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, tells story after story in his book of factory farms discharging waste irresponsibly — sometimes on purpose, and sometimes not. As Karen Hudson, whose story is told in the book, says, “Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters.”

The simple fact is that factory farms produce over 100 times more waste than all American humans produce combined. In the past, a pastured cow might disperse waste over an acre or more; how can farmers responsibly deal with the waste of 1,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 or more animals when they are crammed in tightly together? And, unfortunately for the farmers, they are often working under contract for major meat or dairy conglomerates who own the animals and leave the farmer with a tiny profit margin (or none at all) — plus all of the liability, dead animals and manure. Therefore, in addition to simply disposing of manure responsibly, they also need to dispose of it cheaply if they are to stay in business.

In Karen’s story, the CAFO in question perhaps did not intend to discharge manure. The farmer, if given the choice, may not have decided to apply for a permit. In February 2001, heavy rains coupled with melting snow and ice raised the levels of the nearby megadairy’s manure lagoon to just inches below the rim. Panicking, the farmer, David Inskeep, decided not to hire tankers to haul away his cows’ waste, as investigators had ordered him to do. Instead he ran hoses from the lagoon to a nearby ravine over a mile away and pumped two million gallons of “a foamy, brown-yellow stew” into it. The 10-foot-high berm that dammed the ravine gave way, and the result was “the worst livestock spill in Illinois history.”

The permits in question in the recently decided case would require farmers like Inskeep to make a plan for how to handle animal waste, and to follow that plan or face penalties. A version of this law has been in place for decades, but the details of the law have changed several times in the last few years. The major question of the case is: Can a CAFO be held liable for failing to apply for a permit?

Under a 1976 rule, all large CAFOs (those with more than 1,000 cattle or equivalent amounts of other species) and some medium-sized CAFOs were required to have permits to discharge waste. If a CAFO discharged waste without a permit, it faced civil or criminal penalties. The only permissible, unregulated pollution was “agricultural stormwater discharges,” when a storm carried animal waste into navigable rivers.

This changed in 2003, when a new rule required all CAFOs to apply for permits or to ask the EPA for a “no potential to discharge” determination to become exempt from needing a permit. Additionally, the 2003 rule required all CAFOs to design and implement a “Nutrient Management Plan” (i.e. a plan to responsibly deal with animal waste). So long as the farmer followed his or her Nutrient Management Plan, any pollution of waterways was to be included in the “agricultural stormwater discharges” exemption.

After some legal wrangling, both by industrial farming interests and by environmental groups, the rules were changed again in 2008. The 2008 rule only requires CAFOs to apply for a permit if they are “designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge.” Unless a CAFO can prove it does not meet that criteria (and thus does not need a permit), a discharge of manure would result in penalties both for the discharge itself and for failure to have a permit.

The recent court decision ruled that the EPA has no right to require CAFOs to apply for permits unless they actually discharge waste. Once a CAFO discharges waste, however, the court decided that the EPA can then require it to apply for a permit.

The industrial farming groups — the National Pork Producers Council, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Oklahoma Pork Council, United Egg Producers, the North Carolina Pork Council, the National Chicken Council, the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, Dairy Business Association Inc., and the National Milk Producers Federation — also challenged the EPA’s right to force CAFOs to design and implement Nutrient Management Plans and to penalize them if the plans are not followed and waste is discharged into waterways. On this issue, the court sided with the EPA.

What is the impact of this decision? Could it perhaps have no impact at all, as the CAFOs exempted from applying for permits are those that are not polluting? Sadly, this is likely not the case. By forcing CAFOs to apply for a permit, the EPA was forcing them to create a plan to manage the large amounts of waste their animals would inevitably generate. Without planning ahead for responsibly disposing of manure, how many CAFOs will wait until the last minute, like Inskeep, and then dump millions of gallons of manure into the environment? Even though the EPA will still be able to penalize them once they do, the damage to the environment will already be done.

These are not hypothetical scenarios. Just ask Rick Dove, an ex-Marine who serves as a Riverkeeper on his beloved Neuse River in North Carolina. After retiring from the Marines, he lived his dream of becoming a small-scale commercial fisherman on the river briefly — until enormous hog operations moved in, each producing as much waste as a town of 20,000 people, and their waste killed the fish.

Dove has seen hog farmers oversaturating their “sprayfields” — cropland intended to absorb the unfathomable amount of manure generated by the hogs — resulting in contamination of local waterways, but he has also seen the farmers illegally dumping the manure directly into the rivers. And then he’s seen the Neuse turn red, green, yellow, orange, and black with various types of algae blooms that precede fish kills that kill millions or even a billion fish at a time.

In addition to irresponsible spraying or dumping of manure, there are the many lagoon spills that occur. In these cases, farmers likely have no intention of dumping manure into the environment, but it happens all the same. Kirby says that when writing his book, “there were so many lagoon spills that my editor had me take some out.” And because such spills are accidents, farmers won’t necessarily apply for permits ahead of time, since they don’t intend to discharge manure.

The losers in this story are not just “tree-hugging” environmentalists or even fishermen. In far too many cases, the losers are drinkers of water — which is all of us.

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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