Reading From Left to Right

Jonah Turns 25

by Joe Auciello

Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard called them “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.”

They were the generation of ’68 who tried to overthrow the government of Charles DeGaulle in France, demanding “All Power to the Imagination!” May and June were the rebellion’s high points — when the Latin Quarter swelled with thousands, and barricades were built with stones and cars. In July hopes of revolution faded after the special police with clubs and tear gas pushed the students off the streets. In August Paris was quiet.

In Czechoslovakia, though,Soviet tanks rolled over “socialism with a human face”; in Chicago Mayor Daley’s finest beat demonstrators and reporters at the Democratic Party convention. That January the National Liberation Front’s Tet offensive had opened a window onto the future and showed that imperialism could lose. Nonetheless, throughout 1968, Vietnam staggered and burned, month after brutal month, punished by U.S. bombs and napalm. For those who had come alive in May, it seemed, in the months after, that loss followed loss.

Imagination, by its nature, is resilient. It can endure setbacks and even grow in defeats. This was the generation that hurled a promise into the teeth of reaction when the movement crested and rolled back. “La Lutte Continue,” they said. “The Struggle Continues.”

What happened to this generation as the years wore on, as “normal life” once again got the upper hand, and dull conformity smothered rebellion, creativity and exuberance? How did those militants of ’68, those poets of class struggle, adapt to life in the prosaic 1970s? How, exactly, did la lutte continue?

Alain Tanner, a Swiss filmmaker active in the May-June explosion, posed these questions in his 1975 film, “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000.” New Yorker Video has made it available again. “Jonah” is in print and easily available from amazon.com. We can watch the story once more on our VCRs, machines that we won’t see in the film itself.

When the film was released in the U.S., Cinéaste magazine called it “an intelligent delight… a tale with politics and characters who are intriguing fictional figures as well as symbols for the life most of us lead.”

In an interview with Cinéaste (Vol. VII, No. 4, Winter 1976–1977), Tanner explained that in his film he hoped “to establish a dialogue with the audience” by modifying traditional narrative technique. “We decided to make a sort of comedy,” Tanner said. “I’m aware of the dangers of humor, the dual nature of irony, but everyone works with contradictions, that’s how things move forward. I like to create situations where that contradiction is built-in…That’s something I’ve learned from Brecht — to say something serious in a funny situation, or the other way around.”

An informative interview with John Berger, Tanner’s co-writer, is included in the book, The Cinéaste Interviews.

Cinéaste itself is alive and well, still providing political analysis of film in North America and the world four times a year. Their latest issue includes articles on the film “Gods and Monsters” and “The State of Asian American Cinema” as well as interviews with John Sayles and Bernardo Bertolucci. Forthcoming issues will include excerpts from a biography of Gillo Pontecorvo, director of “Battle of Algiers,” and a less well-known but wonderful movie, “Burn!” (This film was released on Key Video in 1984 and rereleased in 1991. It’s well worth looking for to rent or purchase. Both of Pontecorvo’s films are available for sale on video.)

A copy of the current issue of Cinéaste can be most easily found (sorry to say) at a Borders Bookstore. The magazine’s web site (<www.cineaste.com/>) features a sampling of their current issue.

U.S. subscriptions are $20 for four issues. The subscription address is: P.O. Box 2242, New York, NY 10009-8917.

As for Jonah, he’s probably pursuing post-graduate studies in New York. He wears an earring but is carefully indifferent to fashion. He marches for Mumia, fights for the environment, doesn’t trust NATO, and protests the WTO.

His parents are proud of him.

Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears

The problem with the mainstream news media is not that they lie, but that their bias affects everything they report. What gets lost is not the “big event” (however badly it might be presented), but the reality of day-to-day life and what that life consists of for most people.

Consider the following contrast: the September-October 1999 issue of this magazine ran as its opening story an article by Bill Onasch documenting the woeful state of health care in the U.S. That article was featured on the magazine’s cover.

On the other hand, a study titled “Living and Dying in the USA,” released by the University of Colorado at Boulder, received scant attention in large daily newspapers. It took up only five brief paragraphs of a Reuters account and was tucked away on page 14.

The findings of the study deserve to be more widely known. According to its authors, “Adults younger than 65 who lacked private health insurance were 35 percent more likely to die between 1986 and 1995 than similar adults who did have insurance…

“The high mortality of individuals without health insurance” was likely due to “socioeconomic factors such as unemployment or a lack of education, said the study.”

Being poor and undereducated “might be more important than behavioral risk factors such as smoking or not exercising.”

One of the researchers concluded, “All of these factors are important, but money may make a bigger difference.”

In a better world, this information and that quote would have been on the front page of your daily newspaper. News that people need to know should have been prominently reported. The Reuters piece did not mention that the number of people in the U.S. who lack private health insurance now numbers between 43 and 44 million, and that 11 million of them are children. Nor did the article consider the racial aspect of these numbers. If it had, it would have reported that Black and Hispanics suffer disproportionately.

The federal government requires cigarette manufacturers to carry the Surgeon General’s warning about smoking on every pack they sell — “Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.” It would be more helpful and honest to say that lack of money in an oppressive class society is a serious risk to your health. Sure, it’s good to eat right and keep fit, but it’s probably money that is more important for the quality of your life. Bias prevents those conclusions from being reported — a newspaper would fire the writers who told the truth so frankly. A society based on acquiring money can’t stand to hear such talk.

Bob Dylan said it a long time ago: “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

The Truth Will Out or, A Foul Odor of Mendacity

The American ruling class, its politicians, courts, and media, do not form one homogeneous whole. Their efforts are not secretly organized in one, grand conspiracy. Life is not so simple. Like every class, American rulers contend with divergent interests, rivalry, political differences, etc. A newspaper, for instance, may publish material that increases its circulation at the expense of the political career of a powerful politician, even a president, or even at the expense of the presidency as an institution. Think of the New York Times and the Pentagon Papers or the Washington Post and Watergate.

Newspaper reporters, like their owners, broadly support capitalism, but newspapers and reporters also compete against each other. They will gladly detail capitalism’s flaws if that effort will lead to a good story and generate more profit. Naturally such articles, no matter how critical or revealing, will keep their conclusions within acceptable political limits. Typically, individuals instead of institutions will be criticized, or institutions will be faulted only to highlight the need for reform. Revolutionary ideas and solutions are strictly out of bounds. In this way success is secured and careers are advanced.

Such are the larger conclusions to be drawn from reading a four part series, “Environmental Injustice,” published last November in the Boston Globe.

The series begins with a strong and amply documented assertion:

The United States Government, which acts as steward and protector of the nation’s environment, is itself the worst polluter in the land.

 Federal agencies have contaminated more than 60,000 sites across the country and the cost of cleaning up the worst sites is officially expected to approach $300 billion, nearly five times the price of similar destruction caused by private companies.

In addition to causing pollution, the government’s Environmental Protection Agency is failing in its job:

Enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws is often haphazard and lax, creating a system where major polluters can operate with little fear of being caught and punished…

 While the Clinton administration has promoted the notion of an environment-friendly presidency… some enforcement officials on the front line say they are losing the battle.

 “The Clinton people have gutted environmental enforcement,” said…a federal prosecutor in Cleveland with 13 years of experience pursuing polluters…

 Larger companies, particularly those with political muscle, are often treated differently than smaller businesses that lack legal resources and clout…

The entire series is available on the Globe Online at http://www.boston.com. Use the keyword: Pollution.

Joseph Heller

I heard it first on the evening news and then went to the Internet for more information. MSNBC.com, in its “Living” section, announced, “Novelist Joseph Heller dead at 76.” He was a man who would have enjoyed the irony.

Heller’s obituary on the MSNBC web site was titled, “Catch-22 caught cynical age.” Well, yes, but only, as a friend once remarked, if you think of cynicism as an early warning system of reality. Published in 1961, Heller’s comic novel foretold life in America during the Vietnam era, when “men went mad and were rewarded with medals.” Heller, too, knew how “to say something serious in a funny situation.”

But Catch-22, as Heller himself noted, is really about life in peace time. “Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts,” Heller said, “and the question is: what does a sane man do in an insane society?”

It was Heller’s unique achievement to frame the essential question which confronted the generation of ’68.

All of the obituaries defined the term “catch-22” as it is first explained in the novel, by Yossarian’s conversation with Doc Daneeka. Yossarian, a reluctant pilot, hopes to avoid military duty by claiming insanity. He discovers he can’t be grounded from flying combat missions for reasons of insanity because, “Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.” He can only be grounded if he requests it, but if he requests it he can’t be grounded. As the novel says, “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22.”

Later in the book a more sinister definition is given. “Catch-22,” a character warns, means they have the right to do anything they can get away with. In writing these words Heller provided the idea that illuminates modern history.

Has any novelist anywhere ever written a better brief definition of the bourgeois mind? This is the false consciousness — the right to do anything they can get away with — that sent Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, that kept Johnson and Nixon there, that sent Reagan into Grenada, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, that sent Bush and then Clinton into Iraq. It’s the consciousness of every fatcat CEO in corporate America who lays off workers and rewards himself with a pay raise and stock options.

Catch-22 defines the 20th century better than any other American novel. Not surprisingly, it has gone on to sell 10 million copies in the United States and has even been required reading at the U.S. Air Force Academy. It should also be required reading for anyone who has ever had an unauthorized thought and believed that “they” really should not be able to do anything they can get away with.

Let’s remember and celebrate an author (whose best known character wanted to live forever or die trying) by returning to his books for pleasure, wisdom, and an enduring spirit of rebellion.