He was never that clever, to begin with. Just a smartass in a nation festering with idiotized publics. It’s a disgrace that comics like Stewart should be regarded by many as legitimate journalists. —Eds

Jon Stewart is known among his fans for speaking truth to power — see his dismantling of the CNN show “Crossfire,” for instance, or his criticism of President George W. Bush and the “Mess O’Potamia” in Iraq on “The Daily Show.” However, his recent work may have turned some liberals against him.

Stewart defended present-day cinema punching bag “Zero Dark Thirty” as having not been made in cooperation with the government and said the torture it depicts is “difficult,” raising the ire of liberals across the blogosphere. (Andrew Sullivan wrote [3] that “this subject is too important for equivocation or the ‘I’m just a comedian’ cop-out.”)

Then came Stewart’s smug dismissal of the “trillion-dollar coin” idea floated in order to stop the debate debacle in Congress. While the idea was not tenable for many reasons (including optics), Stewart’s open mockery and suggestion of alternatives got him in hot water with Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist.

“Stewart seems weirdly unaware that there’s more to fiscal policy than balancing the budget,” wrote Krugman [4]. “But in this case, he also seems unaware that the president can’t just decide unilaterally to spend 40 percent less.”

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine wrote [5] that the Comedy Central host “flunks econ” and is operating under a premise about economics that was “completely uninformed.” Chait told Salon that he generally agrees with Stewart’s arguments but that the host’s “homespun Hooverism” tends to “dovetail a little bit with elite moderate liberal sentiment. Keynesian economics is not intuitive.”

The root of that so-called Hooverism (“Hoover” as in Herbert, the failed president who presided over the 1929 stock market crash) may stem from an enlightened desire to weigh both sides of every argument equally. “One of the habits he has,” said Chait, a fan of Stewart’s, “is to want to be bipartisan and value that — but sometimes he misunderstands the way he needs to do that. Basically, you’ll have Republicans in Congress do something objectionable, and the Democrats won’t agree to it. Then he’ll blame it on ‘Congress.’ It’s not fair to criticize both parties in Congress when one side is doing something objectionable.”

Leslie Savan, a blogger for The Nation, has long taken issue with Stewart’s equivalency between two sides, citing the 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which equally criticized activists on the far right (including birthers) and the far left (including groups like CODEPINK, who called George W. Bush a war criminal). “He’s so stuck on tone,” said Savan. “If somebody looks silly, it’s like waving a cape before his comic bull. And, in a way, that came out in this thing with the coin — ‘what a silly, crazy, nutty idea.’ But it was sane compared to what could happen if the House Republicans don’t raise the debt ceiling.”

Stewart has consistently exculpated himself from serious scrutiny by declaring that he’s simply a comedian, but both Chait and Savan declared that he’s more powerful than he lets on, or perhaps knows. “He’s influential in how people process information,” said Chait, and he deserves to be influential.”

Savan stated that Stewart is able to turn his viewers against loopy-seeming but perhaps useful arguments simply with a baleful look or silly accent, cuing the audience to laugh. “If he attaches that mugging look, they start laughing, no matter who the target is. He’s cruel and he doesn’t even know it. He’s a bully! … I think he wants to deny [that he’s anything more than a comedian] so he can maintain that perch of seeing everyone else as being goofy.”

Not every one of his targets, though, is quite so unhappy with their coverage. Ed Needham, a member of Occupy Wall Street’s press relations working group, told Salon that the group hadn’t minded “The Daily Show’s” attempt to paint them as a self-satisfied mix of “moochers” and “Ivy League assholes.”

“We’re certainly worthy of criticism from time to time. There’s gonna be disagreements. There’s certainly no animosity. I think he’s someone who speaks truth to power.”

Indeed, Stewart will always have his fan base, and it’s not just made up of liberals. Afteropening the floor to commenters [6] who took a less dim view of Stewart’s remarks on “Zero Dark Thirty,” Andrew Sullivan emailed Salon: “I don’t consider myself a liberal critic of Stewart; I consider myself a conservative admirer.”

See more stories tagged with:
jon stewart [7],
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/jon-stewart-alienating-his-fanbase
Links:
[1] http://www.salon.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/daniel-daddario
[3] http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2013/01/jon-stewart-on-zero-dark-thirty.html
[4] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/lazy-jon-stewart/
[5] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/jon-stewart-flunks-econ.html
[6] http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2013/01/jon-stewart-on-zero-dark-thirty-ctd.html
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/jon-stewart
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/daily-show
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

By Laurie Endicott Thomas

Comedian Ron White warns people not to marry somebody who is beautiful but stupid. He explains that a plastic surgeon can fix ugly, but “you can’t fix stupid.” The audience laughs. Who hasn’t had a painfully frustrating experience with an annoyingly stupid person?

However, I think that Ron is wrong. You can fix stupid. The problem is that stupid doesn’t fix itself. Philosophy and education were developed specifically for the purpose of fixing stupid. If people are still stupid even though they’ve been through school, then their school needs to be fixed.

What is stupidity, and how can it be fixed? In the dictionary, stupid has several definitions. The first three refer to stupid people. According to the first definition, a stupid person is “slow of mind.” However, slowness by itself isn’t necessarily a problem. Slow but steady sometimes wins the race. A person who is slow of mind may simply need a bit more time to think things through or a bit more coaching and practice to develop a particular skill. Coaching and practice are particularly important for developing skills in mathematics or music.

The second definition of stupid links stupidity to carelessness: “given to unintelligent decisions or acts : acting in an unintelligent or careless manner.” That kind of stupidity could result from a character flaw, rather than from a defective brain.

The third definition of stupid is “lacking intelligence or reason.” What is reason? The dictionary says that reason is “(1) the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence (2) : proper exercise of the mind.” Thus, stupidity can be the result of a lack of mental discipline. If so, then education can “fix stupid” by helping people develop the proper kinds of mental discipline. I believe that “fixing stupid” ought to be the main purpose of schooling.

Stupidity is an age-old problem. To solve it, human societies developed philosophy, which means love of wisdom. The ancient Athenians developed a seven-course curriculum for teaching wisdom: grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music. The purpose of Athenian education was to develop a boy’s mind and character so that he would become a good citizen of the Athenian democracy in peace as well as war. The ancient Romans embraced this Athenian curriculum. The Romans called these studies the liberal arts because they considered them appropriate for freeborn men, as opposed to slaves.

The liberal arts have always been valued in societies with a democratic or republican form of government. These arts have always been taught to children who were expected to grow up to be somebody. They have always been withheld from children whose participation in political decision-making was unwanted. That explains why white girls and black boys and girls in the United States weren’t allowed to go to the schools for the rich white boys.

Interest in the liberal arts waned during the Dark Ages but was revived during the High Middle Ages, with the rise of the first universities in Europe. In Northern Italy during the Renaissance, wealthy families also cultivated a curriculum that they called the humanities. It included such subjects as literature, philosophy, and history. Like the liberal arts, these studies were intended to promote pleasant and productive political discussions within the ruling class. Nowadays, people must also understand a lot about science before they can play a productive role in politics.

The liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences provide the kinds of skills and knowledge that one needs in order to participate meaningfully in a democracy. In fact, the word civility, which most people use to mean good manners, originally meant training in the liberal arts. Unfortunately, the liberal arts have been deliberately suppressed in public schools in the United States. In particular, language arts teachers have been pressured to stop teaching grammar. Yet grammar provides the basic concepts that you need in order to start studying logic. Without skills in logic, you cannot reason. If you cannot reason, you are unreasonable.

Stupid doesn’t fix itself because people who have poor thinking skills are unaware that their thinking skills are poor (a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect). People with poor thinking skills don’t notice that they make mistakes in thinking. After their thinking skills improve, they develop the ability to judge their level of skill; but by that point, they are no longer stupid.

Stupidity can be fixed through an education that places a heavy emphasis on literacy, the liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences. Unfortunately, “progressive” educators such as John Dewey promoted ineffective methods of reading instruction and then deliberately suppressed training in the liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences.

As a result, even many people who have been to college “don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology.” Worse yet, their lack of training in the liberal arts has left them unable to reason and unable to notice that they are unreasonable.

The solution to this problem is simple. First, we must teach reading; then, we must teach the liberal arts, the humanities, and the sciences.

http://www.nottrivial.blogspot.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurie has worked as a medical editor and writer for many years. She is the author of the upcoming book Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free, which is being published by Freedom of Speech Publishing.

Patrice Greanville

TOM HOOPER’s bombastic and heavily publicized Les Miserables —”les miseraps” to many an Anglo ear—has finally hit the cinemas in the USA,  just in time for the Oscars and, for the most part, critics and audiences have given the movie a warm welcome. Some, however (including your humble servant, and no less a heavyweight than The New Yorker‘s David Denby) have found the film a complete misfire, an incoherent, overlong, self-indulgent mess without true artistic center that seems far more concerned with reenacting clichés about French life in the post-Napoleonic era than instructive narrative. (Which begs an explanation why the actors use such heavy handed British accents!). That said, Hooper’s production is so good that it makes the film’s failure in its overall conception all the more painful.  His craftmanship in replicating the period reminds us here of the days when Ridley Scott was still a cinematic artist, delivering masterpieces like The Duellists, a perfect reconstruction of the Napoleonic era (instead of incoherent, ahistorical nonsense like Gladiator),  and with dramatic punch to match. My disgust is well summed up by Alastair Harkness:

“the film is yet another example of an inexplicably successful property that’s been turned into a punishing piece of cinema to which millions will undoubtedly flock because millions are clearly suckers for event entertainment in which relentless spectacle no longer has to be tethered to a compellingly told story…”

As probably just about everyone knows by now, Hugo’s grand tale of  injustice and redemption has been taken to the screen a number of times, and several national cinemas, aside from Hollywood’s three or four licks (most recent, in 1998, starring Liam Neesom in the lead role) have taken the plunge with varying degrees of success. Mexico has done its gallant part and naturally so has France (the latest attempt, a 2002 miniseries, had Gerard Depardieu as the redoubtable forzat, while John Malkovich his nemesis, Javert). Then came Hooper.

Curiously and perhaps ironically, it was in the anglophone world where the novel first attained the status of a modern pop phenomenon with the enormous success of the Broadway musical Les Misérables (affectionately known as Les Miz). The show debuted in 1985.  As some critics have noted, a bit somberly, Les Miz is now the object of a transgenerational cult which seems immune to  commercial failure, this despite its being something of an infantilized, masscult caricature of the original work, a circumstance shared by Disney’s La Belle et La Bete (did anyone at Disney ever heard of Cocteau’s 1946 classic with Jean Marais?).  Broadway seems adept at this sort of transmutation, but not everything is piffle. There have been terrific, memorable “inculturations”, ambitious xenografts that improbably captured the spirit of the mother culture with a panache that took just about everyone by surprise.  Who could have thought that the Yanks of all people, a nation of committed pragmatists, would produce the greatest contemporary homage to Cervantes’ idealist knight with Man of La Mancha, or a Briton, Andrew Lloyd Weber- a nationality antagonistically embedded in the history of Argentina–would put the saga of Evita Perón, and even Che, on the mindscape of millions in America?

The forgotten Miz

For my money, I continue to believe that one of the best screen versions of Hugo’s masterwork was attained in 1958 by director Jean Paul Le Chanois (né Jean-Paul Étienne Dreyfus). A Franco-Italian production, the movie was a huge financial risk in its time, one of the first European blockbusters. Despite its popularity in France and Italy, in America the film remained unknown for decades. The Wikipedia has a useful entry on this topic:

It did not premiere in New York until July 1989, when it ran to coincide with the celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution.

Blier (l) as Javert, with Gabin as the persecuted Valjean.

Yes, Le Chanois had the good sense to anchor the production in Gabin, but the rest of the cast —the flower of French cinema at the time—was also exceptional, and to many cognoscenti of film, they continue to own those roles. Thus Javert was played with fierce sullenness by Bernard Blier, while the criminal opportunist Thénardier (who fittingly ends his life in the book as a slave merchant in the US) was given life by Bourvil, a beloved chansonnier. In slightly lesser roles, Giani Esposito incarnated Marius, while Serge Reggiani was Enjolras, the leader of the anti-monarchist revolt.

Bourvil (left) trying to ensnare Gabin, in his role as Thénardier.

Montfort

But of all the supporting actors no one stamped her role with the passion of Sylvia Montfort, the one and always Eponine. By then the companion of Le Chanois, Montfort, born in 1923 in the bosom of Paris’ artistic community (her father was noted sculptor Charles Favre-Bertin), was also a precocious author, primary force behind the TNP (Théâtre National Populaire) and onetime anti-Nazi maquisard who helped to liberate Paris. She possessed a type of face created to play Eponine: a woman of strange, forceful physiognomy, the kind of face admired in grown-up France, where the Barbie doll model is thankfully regarded as just one type of feminine beauty, and not the superior one at that. Yves Montand, himself a “handsome-ugly” type once said that Montfort’s face reminded him of a high-wire balancing act between ineffable beauty and defiant ugliness. We don’t know if Montfort ever formally replied, but it’s possible that this being France, she took it as a compliment.

(The accompanying photos appear on a French blog dedicated to Les Miserables, and if you can muster a little French, take a look.)

For many years no DVD edition was available of this film. Now, an edition on the French market (sadly produced in Korea!) is the only version with the original French dialogue intact (Shame! Where’s the national pride?) The DVD’s circulating in America are mostly English dubs, like the one we found on YouTube. While it would be simply grand to find a French subtitled version online, it’s still good to be able to find this film at all. Below we present one of the dubs we deem of acceptable quality. Hope you enjoy this version, played of course with no singing at all. Once you watch it, try to answer this question: Was Tom Hooper right?

Patrice Greanville is editor in chief of The Greanville Post. He also serves as publisher for Cyrano’s Journal Today.

________________________________

Exit Free

From the Book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War

By William T. Hathaway
Like the abolitionists of yore, these people seek to abolish service to unjust and immoral causes. This pits them against the greatest superpower in history.

The following report was contributed by Naomi Golner, one of the founders of Exit Free, a collective in the USA that helps women leave the military by discharge or desertion.

I’ve become a criminal for peace. How I got there is a complicated story, beginning when the community college where I teach reduced most of its humanities faculty to adjunct status. It saved them a bundle on salaries. We now teach a maximum of three courses per semester, for a really miserable hourly wage with no benefits. They brought in other part-timers to fill the gaps. So the faculty are now mostly freelancers. I ended up with a lot less money but a lot more time.

Several other women I knew were also broke — laid off or dropped out of the McJob economy. We decided to share the misery and formed a collective to make ends meet. One of us had a big empty-nester house from her divorce settlement, so we all moved in. We buy food in bulk, share two cars, planted a big garden, help each other with the things each of us is good at, sometimes quarrel and cry, but mostly we like being together. We feel stronger now than before when it was each of us alone against the neo-con world.

We decided to do something useful with all our free time: make trouble. There’s a military base nearby, and several of us knew soldiers there. The stories they told us about how they were treated made us mad. The things they were being sent overseas to do made us even madder. A lot of them told us they wanted very much to get out of the military, so we decided to help.

We chose the name Exit Free because it applies to our military work and also to our escaping from our own job prisons as much as possible. Exit Free has been around for three years now. We’ve got four women out of the war as COs, one as a refuser (but she’s still in prison), and nine as deserters. None of the deserters has been caught. We’re trying to get more staff so we can open it up to men.

The program starts with encouraging the soldiers to tell what they’ve been through, to get it off their chests. A lot of women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are traumatized by their experiences there. The brutality they were a part of is a continuing pain on their hearts. Some of them are filled with self-loathing even if they didn’t personally do anything horrible. They know they were part of a death factory. And they know how much they were hated by the people there. Plus a lot of them were abused by the male GIs. Those guys do things over there they’d never do at home. It’s like they got a license to act out their monster fantasies.

Our psychologist runs a therapy group for these women that helps them come to terms with what they’ve gone through. It’s not that they leave it behind. This stuff goes too deep for that. But they can understand the whole thing better, get some perspective, some psychological distance from it.

A lot of other women are terrified of being sent over there. They’ve heard the stories, they’ve seen comrades come back wounded mentally and physically. They don’t want to hurt other people, and they don’t want to be hurt themselves.

Exit Free’s program begins with our psychologist helping them understand why they joined in the first place. There are the surface reasons, like job training or getting away from a bad situation at home. But usually there are also deeper psychological motives, and the women need to confront those before they can really be free of it.

As they dig into this stuff, most of them discover that by joining the military they were unconsciously trying to become what their father wanted them to be: a son rather than a daughter. Becoming a soldier is usually one of a long series of attempts to win the old man’s acceptance. Some of them have been so busy doing that for years that they don’t know who they really are. Their selves have got lost in trying to conform to another person’s expectations. Wending their way out of this and recovering their real identity is very difficult.

Rejecting the military can be the first assertion of their authentic personality. It’s therapeutic — but painful.

Our patriarchal culture has really mangled us all. But once we’ve taken a stand against patriarchy and are willing to pay the price of opposing it, in other words, once we’ve given up on pleasing daddy and put that part of us to rest, then we come into a new sense of personal power. All sorts of possibilities open for us. We can become an Amazon warrior … an earth mother … a philosopher … an artist. We can encompass all of that. But it starts by breaking free, and that’s what we’re helping the soldiers to do. And ourselves too.

Most of the women have learned first hand the futility of violence. They’ve seen how it just produces more violence, more broken bodies, broken families, more hatred and revenge. They don’t want anything to do with war. Since they’ve become true conscientious objectors, they have a legal right to be discharged as that, but the military makes it very difficult.

CO applications for religious reasons have the best chance. Fortunately the local Episcopal priest is a pacifist. She works with soldiers to deepen their spiritual understanding of nonviolence, helps them prepare their applications, writes attesting documents for them, and role-plays interviews with them with the sort of questions the board will ask.

Most of the applications still get rejected, but Jane has got several soldiers free, and that has caused her problems at church. It turns out that the commanding general of the base is a member of the parish. He doesn’t attend regularly and wasn’t aware that the priest does outreach ministry at Exit Free, but when it finally came to his attention, he got quite upset. First he tried to persuade her to stop, saying she should stick to religion and “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” He explained that what she was doing was unpatriotic, it was damaging the effectiveness of our fighting forces, and surely she didn’t want to do that.

Jane resisted her impulse to tell him that was exactly what she wanted to do, and instead talked about the sincerity of the applicants and how they really did meet the requirements for a CO discharge. She tried to persuade him to get the board to lighten up on its requirements. She invited him to meet with the soldiers and hear their stories first hand. He declined and left.

Afterwards she told us that underneath his condescending paternalism he was clearly a very dangerous man.

The next round got uglier. Suddenly many of the military families canceled their pledges of financial support for the church. Not all, though. A few actually increased their pledges but asked that it be kept quiet.

An article appeared in the local paper about the priest’s anti-military activities, and Jane started getting hate calls. Conservative civilians in the parish canceled their pledges, then took out an ad in the paper with the headline, “We support our troops, not our priest.”

It totally polarized the congregation, and the financial effects were disastrous. Church income fell by a third. Attendance dropped. People accused Jane of destroying the church.

A delegation of “concerned Christians” tried to convince the bishop to fire her or transfer her to a church with no military facilities nearby — “in the interests of fairness.” This priest was clearly prejudiced against the military, and the church shouldn’t support prejudice.

Fortunately the bishop is a brave man. He refused and said if they were dissatisfied with Jane, they’d have to convince the vestry, a governing board of lay people elected by the congregation, to cancel her contract.

With that began the battle of the vestry. Serving on a vestry is one of those volunteer activities that appeal only to committed church members — lots of work for no pay. The vestry has to work closely with the priest, so the only people who want the job tend to be those who like the priest. Of the four vestry members, only one wanted her replaced. Another didn’t approve of her CO activities but felt she had a right to do them. Two shared her pacifist sentiments. (Take a guess what the gender distribution was on this issue. You got it, two and two, men and women.)

Vestry elections were a few months away. The anti-Jane members of the congregation recruited a slate of candidates to “save the church.” The pro-Jane members supported the incumbents and other candidates who wanted to keep their priest. The congregation seemed to be about equally divided, so both groups became seized with evangelical fervor and began recruiting new members. Many people associated with Exit Free attended the church already (Jane has a spiritual presence about her that inspires people), but now almost all of us found the Lord and showed up in the pews, some in military uniform. I joined myself — even though I’m really Jewish.

We won the election hands down. Seeing that there were actually more of us than of them was one of the great moments of my life. It filled me with hope. We can change this country.

Since then the general hasn’t been to church.

Soldiers whose CO applications get turned down have three options, all of them terrible. They can try to get a psycho discharge, but it’s very hard to act convincingly crazy when they’ve never felt more sane in their lives. Plus the military can lock them in its own mental hospitals and fill them full of drugs, so if they weren’t crazy beforehand, they will be afterwards.

They can refuse to obey orders. If so, they’ll be jailed for months, court martialed, then sent to military prison for a year or so, and at the end of the sentence they’re given a less-than-honorable discharge.

For people with great inner strength, that can be the right path. They are taking a clear moral stand. But the price they have to pay for that can be crushing. Prisons are terrible places that destroy human beings. It’s very easy to get in trouble there and get your sentence extended. Some people never get out. Others emerge broken and embittered.

They can desert. If they’re caught, they’ll usually get a longer prison sentence than a refuser would. They can reduce the risk of arrest if they leave the country and don’t return for many years. At some point after a war, congress usually passes an amnesty allowing deserters to return. But that can be a long wait, separated from their family and cultural roots. It’s also difficult to find a country that will grant asylum to a deserter. Traditionally Canada and Sweden have sheltered US deserters, but lately Canada has become less willing to displease Washington. They sometimes send people back to be arrested. Sweden is a long ways away, a strange language, a difficult climate.

Fortunately a new possibility has opened up. We’ve been able to get several Spanish-speaking deserters into Venezuela. The government there isn’t afraid to defy Washington. They’re showing great courage in standing up to a massive, multi-level attack by the USA and the old Venezuelan elite who want their power back.

One woman’s story, Deeana’s, is particularly interesting. She was born in New Jersey, but her family was originally from Puerto Rico. She came to us wanting help with a sexual harassment issue. Her sergeant was hitting on her. When she turned him down, he was convinced that just meant she wanted to be conquered, so he stepped up the pressure to show her his manly strength. He would brush up against her in the hall or touch her at her desk, but he was always careful that no one else could see.

Deeana eventually broke down and told him he was repulsive and disgusting, but rather than chasing him away, that turned him into an enemy. A powerful enemy. He started giving her all the worst work details and inventing reasons to write up disciplinary reports on her. But he made it clear that if she gave in, he would “treat her good.” He was really enjoying the whole thing — a sadist. Plus it made his pathetic life less boring.

When she still wouldn’t put out, he accused her of having an affair with a woman sergeant in the same company who was pretty clearly lesbian. Deeana didn’t even bother to deny it, just walked away.

Then something weird happened. The woman sergeant actually did start hitting on her. She said she knew what the guy was up to and since she was a rank higher than he, she could protect Deeana from him … if Deeana was nice to her.

Deeana felt like she was going crazy. But at least the woman didn’t actually grope her. The psychological pressure Deeana was under was enormous. She said it was like being in prison where she had to be somebody’s punk just to be protected.

Finally she couldn’t stand being grabbed by the man and filed a sexual harassment complaint. At the hearing, his military lawyer pointed out that she had no witnesses to back up any of her claims. He listed all the disciplinary reports the sergeant had filed on her and said her harassment complaint was just her way of getting even with him for reporting her bad behavior.

The board denied her complaint but said they would transfer her to separate the two of them. Deeana got orders for Iraq.

Even if there had been time to file a CO application, it would’ve almost certainly been denied. Jane made a few calls to ecumenical colleagues in the Catholic Church in Venezuela. Deeana went on leave to Mexico and never came back.

We got a letter for her recently saying she likes Venezuela. She’s working as a desk clerk at an international hotel and is glad to be free.

#

“Exit Free” is a chapter from Radical Peace: People Refusing War, which presents the experiences of peace activists who have moved beyond petitions and demonstrations into direct action: helping soldiers to desert, destroying computer systems, trashing recruiting offices, burning military equipment, and sabotaging defense contractors. Chapters are posted on a page of the publisher’s website at http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace.William T. Hathaway is a Special Forces combat veteran turned peace activist and is currently an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His first book, A World of Hurt, won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the psychological roots of war: the emotional blockage and need for patriarchal approval that draw men to the military. He is also the author of Summer Snow, the story of an American warrior in Central Asia who falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her that higher consciousness is more effective than violence. Chapters are available at www.peacewriter.org.

By Phillip Guelpa and Julien Kiemle, wsws.org
Directed by Gus Van Sant, written by Dave Eggers, Matt Damon and John Krasinski

Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant and co-written and featuring Matt Damon, portrays the conflict between a fictional energy company and residents of a small Pennsylvania town over whether “fracking” will be allowed in their community.

People living in various parts of the US, including many rural areas in decline for decades, have been assaulted in recent years by energy companies seeking to extract natural gas and oil using the process known as high volume hydraulic fracturing—or simply “fracking.”

Using a combination of technologies, immense quantities of natural gas can be extracted from bedrock formations hitherto effectively inaccessible to conventional techniques. The process has severe environmental and health consequences, and the long-term economic benefits are largely illusory.

In order to gain access for drilling, energy companies have mounted concerted campaigns to exploit the desperate conditions of small farmers and associated populations pushed to the edge of financial ruin, or beyond. Promised Land’s screenplay was co-written by Damon and John Krasinski, one of the lead actors in television’s The Office. The two play the principal protagonists as well. The film also stars Frances McDormand as Damon’s associate. Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, To Die For, Elephant) previously directed Damon in Good Will Hunting (which the latter also co-wrote).

Steve Butler (Damon), an up-and-coming field representative of Global Crosspower Solutions, along with his side-kick Sue Thomason (McDormand), is dispatched to a town in Pennsylvania to secure gas drilling leases from the locals—an assignment the pair has carried out many times before. Steve grew up on a farm and uses his “down home” credentials to build rapport with the residents. He feels he is offering them a way out of conditions he experienced first-hand as a child, when the Caterpillar plant in his hometown closed and left the community devastated.

Initially, everything goes as planned. The first people to meet Butler and Thomason have apparently heard of the lucky individuals whose homes sat on rich deposits of natural gas. “You could be a millionaire,” Butler tells them as they eagerly sign away their property for low prices and the promise of a percentage of future profits.

Steve is so successful at closing such deals that he has just been promoted to a senior corporate position at Global. His certainty in the uprightness of his actions is apparently unshaken by the tools of his trade: dishonesty, coercion and bribery of local officials. He is, however, taken aback when he meets significant opposition at a town meeting, especially after having bought the cooperation of the head of the town council for $30,000.

The resistance is led by elderly science teacher Frank Yates (Hal Holbrook). The latter, who turns out to be a retired Boeing engineer, has done his homework and is quite knowledgeable about the harmful effects of fracking. Many of those in attendance at the meeting share his views. Steve, the veteran of many such campaigns, is left somewhat unexpectedly speechless at encountering sophisticated opposition.

At Yates’ urging, the town decides to delay a vote on the issue for a few weeks so that the residents can educate themselves on the matter without being pushed into a decision by a corporate salesman.

Soon thereafter, environmentalist Dustin Noble (John Krasinski) rolls into town. He inflames local opinion against Global with horror stories about the consequences of fracking. As more and more of the residents start to resent the energy firm’s plans and Butler’s small-town charm falls away, his job suddenly becomes much more difficult.

That a major plot twist is coming can certainly be sensed by the viewer, although its exact nature isn’t clear. While that twist tends to stretch credulity, a larger issue is Butler’s easily anticipated reaction.
In any event, Promised Land unquestionably has its strong points. Damon and Krasinski have written and acted with noticeable intelligence and sensitivity. The film doesn’t pander to banalities and clichés in a manner one has come to expect recently from Hollywood creations.

The filmmakers obviously have an affinity, which informs the movie’s entire approach, for the rustic lifestyle of the town’s inhabitants. This has led them to attempt a nuanced and realistic portrayal of the Pennsylvania locals. The latter are not bumpkins, there are real divisions among them and the viewer has some basis for understanding both sides of the argument.

Moments in the film suggest the pressing realities. In a barroom confrontation, Steve tells several local farmers that he’s offering enough money so that whatever life throws at them, they can tell the world “fuck you.” He gets a punch in the face for his trouble. The farmers are insulted that Steve thinks their way of life is for sale and consider that he, coming from a farm family, has betrayed his heritage.

One leaves the film with the impression that whatever the town’s final decision, the possible consequences of fracking are serious enough to be debated in a thorough and democratic fashion.

Promised Land has significant weaknesses, however. The film is ostensibly about the conflict between the prospect of easy money held out by the energy companies and the potential damage caused by hydrofracking. But the presentation of both the economic plight of the local people and the dangers of fracking to their health and environment is too superficial. Perhaps Damon and Krasinski assumed that audiences would already be familiar with the arguments. In their attempt to avoid moralizing or didacticism, they end up only alluding in passing to the underlying issues.

As a consequence, the work leaves the impression that the clash is primarily between greed, treated abstractly, and an idyllic way of life. By the film’s own tacit admission, however, the latter is doomed, having been crushed by agribusiness and the effects of the current economic crisis, which hit just as the fracking boom was getting under way.

As it stands, the same impulse that led the filmmakers to not caricature the town’s dwellers in a negative fashion at their moment of truth leads to the opposite result by Promised Land’s conclusion: the ennobling idealization of people who resist greed and send an energy giant packing.

While one does not wish for a heavy-handed polemic, a greater involvement with the real dilemmas faced by such rural communities would be necessary for a more emotionally and intellectually satisfying film.

Much valuable time is also wasted on the obligatory Hollywood love story—a rivalry over a local girl between Steve and an environmental activist. In the end, this accomplishes nothing except to weaken the film’s impact.

Ultimately, we are left with the personal epiphany of Steve, who, with growing qualms about the morality of what he is doing, is pushed over the edge by an unscrupulous maneuver on the part of his employer. Promised Land raises complex issues that it cannot follow through on satisfactorily. It is a well-intentioned, but fairly shallow treatment of the real economic and environmental crisis facing many rural communities across the US. Having made a strong case that such communities are in terminal decline, the film’s ending is too narrow and limited to bear the weight of its criticisms.