It happened here.

Sometimes the shortest blog entries are the most effective. This isn't going to be one of those, though. But an example of the "briefer is better" dictum can be seen at Couch Pundit. At first, it looks like you could just brush it off as another one of those "Bush makes another funny face" items, but then there's that clever juxtaposition of a quote and a rather malicious misspelling of "Il Duce." The quote: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."

And it comes from Benito Mussolini. That throws another angle on the relatively recent Nettime list "Fascism in the USA?" thread and is perhaps the strongest argument yet against my own inclination that the term "fascism" is the signpost to be following in pursuit of an understanding of what's going on. The "empire" buzzword has always seemed to me to provide the more likely clue. Either way, no term with so much historical baggage will cough up a key that'll fit perfectly in the jammed lock of the present.

Now that we're slipping into hot, lazy peak of summer, it's easy to let complacency set in, and frankly, in part, somewhat deserved. It's been a rather strenuous 21st century so far. But the emotional trauma of 9/11 has eased off, Iraq is receding from the headlines and, as long as it's still to early to apply the word "quagmire" in earnest, may even slip from the front pages. Ask any stranger you bump into, and I'd wager he'll have completely forgotten that there was a war in Afghanistan in between. But as the cover package of this week's LA Weekly reminds, something's still going on: our civil liberties are slipping. For now, it's a quiet, seeping sort of slippage, but just imagine how it might switch to a torrent if the suicide bomber or dirty bomb some experts have predicted actually materialize.

It's not an unhealthy time to take a look at the sort of films Doug Cummings or J. Hoberman have been watching lately. The first of three films Doug reviews at filmjourney.org is Edward Dmytryk's Christ in Concrete, "notable for two reasons: it was a movie produced by filmmakers blacklisted during the 1950s, and it's a vivid representation of the socio-economic impossibility of the American Dream for many people living in the US."

In other words, this 1949 film conjures two elements - a clampdown on free speech (Doug points to a backgrounder on the blacklist) and economic hard times during which the rich accumulate more while the poor scramble in silence - that are not only a nasty and potentially combustible combo but also have a certain present-day resonance.

The exhibition "Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting," co-curated by J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler revisits the blacklist as well and reminds us that it was a helluva lot more far-reaching than just the Hollywood Ten. Tellingly, what began as a purely political frenzy quickly turned anti-Semitic, the whole point of fighting the Good War just won be damned. In other words, when people dust off buzzwords that may seem a bit extreme and you think, Couldn't happen here, don't forget: To one extent or another, at various points throughout the history we're all set to celebrate this weekend, it already has.

At least once, J. Hoberman has also spent nearly six hours with a film "meant to evoke the unfamiliar sensation of revolutionary euphoria, of living - and dying - in a sacred time." That film is La Commune, the film Hoberman pronounced the best of last year and directed by Peter Watkins, who made the legendary pseudo-doc The War Game in 1965 and appeared a year later in another what-if horror flick, It Happened Here. War Game, which picked up an Oscar for Best Documentary even though it wasn't one, depicted an English town in the radioactive aftermath of the nuclear holocaust we were so close to at the time, while Happened portrayed an England under a fascist regime it may have been closer to than we'd care to imagine.

As for Watkins's latest, Dave Kehr, writing in the New York Times, is diplomatic: "In these risk-averse times, it is a pleasure to see a film that fails by attempting too much." Armond White is decidedly not, lobbing a barely disguised salvo from one competing New York alternative weekly to another: "The only viewers likely to be impressed with La Commune are die-hard lefties nostalgic for revolution."

If it weren't White stooping so low, you could dismiss that as just another bitter New York Press slur meant to smudge the Village Voice (which the Voice, as nearly always, is in a position to simply ignore), but a provocation from White is never simply blunt or dumb. Myself, I don't always agree with him, but I do always read him.

If you're already packing for long weekend, one more thing before you go. What sort of worries are best to have grinding away at your head and gut: fears that the country you're living in could slip into some form of totalitarianism or that revolution could break out? We've had the first sort of fear often enough. As for whether the second scenario could ever actually happen here, well, many worried quite a bit about it in the 60s. Because, of course, it had happened before. In 1776.



Posted by dwhudson at July 3, 2003 7:33 AM