"Prophet without honor" award to George A. Romero for his 1973 no-budget movie The Crazies. He lives in Pittsburgh and doesn't have Hollywood smoothies vetting his pictures so he gets to say anything he wants. The premise of this one: plane carrying US government-developed bioweapon crashes near a small Pennsylvania town. The pathogen--an "encephalitic mutation"--causes insanity that either comes on full strength or appears intermittently but eventually results in death, after several days. The bug gets into the town's water supply. The government is late on the scene and the best it can hope to do is declare martial law, round up all the citizens, and contain them in the local high school gym while searching for an antidote or an immune person. The Army, wearing hazmat suits, enters into pitched battles with the locals, crazy and not crazy, many of whom are armed and don't want to be "rounded up."
The main protagonists are a group of sympathetic townspeople, including two firemen who are 'Nam vets, who don't know the full symptoms of the virus or which of them might be infected but attempt to blow town. If they succeed, it means "breaching the perimeter" and spreading the infection to other cities. Suffice it to say, in a packed 90 minutes, everything that can go wrong does go wrong and the film is nonstop strife and carnage--but funny, too, that's Romero's gift. The main "villain" is the bumbling ineptitude of the Army and the utter callousness of the government towards the townspeople.
What seemed like overwrought science fiction in the '70s has become all too familiar in the '00s with the neglect that led to 9/11, the government's abandonment of New Orleans to chaos, the Washington sniper, anthrax, and the devastation in Iraq. What The Crazies does is wrap all this horror in one explosive package. A movie like this still could never be made in Hollywood--we have to look back 30 years for an unflinching portrait of our own present.
hey tom moody. i like your blog. been reading it for the past few months.
as i'm sure you know, hr 5122, the 'john warner authorization bill' or whatever it's euphemistically called, effectively guts the posse comitas act by giving the executive branch, with 'the decider' at its head, control over state national guard units. whether this has been done to make it easier to deploy those units abroad remains to be seen, but together with the recent legal death of habeas corpus and the internet rumors of kbr detention centers being built in this land . . . well, the possibility of martial law seems about to pass from paranoid theory and cinematic fiction to a completely possible reality. what sort of events would trigger the imposition of such a regime? i'm trying not to think about it . . . with little sucess.
keep up the good work.
kbr detention centers
Yeah, Romero wasn't even thinking as far ahead as "private police forces" to do all the coercion and detaining. He still had faith that we'd have a regular army in the employ of a civilian government. For a dark vision of a country run by private security in a network of "company towns" you'd have to look to Octavia Butler's Earthseed stories (The Parable of the Sower and the The Parable of the Talents).
This is an oblique answer to your question, but what I wonder is--where the hell is the white militia movement? They would put be putting some of these new powers to the test if they were as active as they were under Clinton. If Mr and Mrs Corn Fed With Guns were being rounded up, then we might get some court cases and some outrage.
I believe they are not active because they do not fear Bush having these powers--because they think he is "godly" and will protect them from the brown hordes.
I think the root of the apathy about Bush's enlargement of powers is good old American racism. Muslims aren't a race, but they are an incomprehensible Other to most Americans, already mostly out of sight and out of mind. Depends on where you live, of course--where I am if the Pakistani grocery suddenly closed people would want to know where the owner was, because the store is a community center--but if a motel clerk outside Waxahachie TX disappeared no one would notice.
As for the Doomsday scenario, I guess the question is whether some scary incident in a US city would be enough to revive the public's faith in Bush and Cheney. And the other question is, once they're gone (a big if) would a Democratic administration be able to tell Halliburton to stop building detention centers?
hey tom moody.
you are undoubtedly correct with the racial angle. i've been pondering similar thoughts these past few years. it will take some heavy economic shit going down to bring it about, but white 'middle-class' america will get behind any program up to and possibly include ethnic cleansing to protect their entitlements. all it will take is a neo-volkish 'blood and soil' style ad campaign, with a peculiarly american gloss, that appeals to the right-wing base. it'll turn most other people into emotionally unhinged, completely unreasonable lunatics. they'll go along to get along.
which brings me back around to a doomsday scenario . . . i don't think it needs to be something so apocalyptically violent; it will probably come, as i alluded to above, as some sort of deep economic downturn. you needn't be a peak-oil fanatic to imagine how something like energy prices or housing values can incrementally change people's attitudes about their status. this is, after all, how things have been proceeding since the destruction of the american manufacturing base that began in the '70s. the network of company towns octavia butler describes falls into place quite neatly when the foreclosures begin, and properties are bought up by corporate entities for pennies (if that) on the dollar. maybe the detention centers are for the deadbeats?
this leads me to consider the 'f' word. if mussolini was correct in asserting that fascism should properly be called corporatism, well then . . . he had his blackshirts, and now they've got their own private paramilitary force called blackwater. if you're paranoid, you can see where this ends. if you're not, then who would've thought that we'd have seen the evisceration of the fourth amendment only a few short weeks ago? i'm starting to ramble, and i'm being highly specualtive and jsut a little rhetorical, but none of this shit seems to bode well. elections won't change much. they'll probably just either hasten the slide, or block what seems inevitable for a bit longer. i fear the american middle class is finished, but its demise is something that began years and years ago. argentina and chile are the models from the '70s, and are the ones that are probably being used now, too, but for us, with the rigged elections and the ridiculous debt. let's just skip the disappearances and the death squads, please.
Steve Gilliard addresses some of these concerns:
Martial law.
It's very simple. This is a country of 300m people. Most of the Army is deployed overseas. The Army wants nothing to do with civil law enforcement, not in Iraq or New Orleans.
There is no national police force, which is essential for creating martial law.
During the LA riots, it took the LAPD, an LAV Battalion from the Marines and a brigade of the National Guard to calm things down. That's a lot of people for a city of three million, where maybe 100,000 were in the rioting area.
Local law enforcement detests the FBI, which only has 13,000 agents, half assigned to counter intelligence duty.
Bush could declare it from the Oval Office, but he would have an extremely difficult time enforcing it, especially with so many Iraq war vets in the ranks.
|
"Prophet without honor" award to George A. Romero for his 1973 no-budget movie The Crazies. He lives in Pittsburgh and doesn't have Hollywood smoothies vetting his pictures so he gets to say anything he wants. The premise of this one: plane carrying US government-developed bioweapon crashes near a small Pennsylvania town. The pathogen--an "encephalitic mutation"--causes insanity that either comes on full strength or appears intermittently but eventually results in death, after several days. The bug gets into the town's water supply. The government is late on the scene and the best it can hope to do is declare martial law, round up all the citizens, and contain them in the local high school gym while searching for an antidote or an immune person. The Army, wearing hazmat suits, enters into pitched battles with the locals, crazy and not crazy, many of whom are armed and don't want to be "rounded up."
The main protagonists are a group of sympathetic townspeople, including two firemen who are 'Nam vets, who don't know the full symptoms of the virus or which of them might be infected but attempt to blow town. If they succeed, it means "breaching the perimeter" and spreading the infection to other cities. Suffice it to say, in a packed 90 minutes, everything that can go wrong does go wrong and the film is nonstop strife and carnage--but funny, too, that's Romero's gift. The main "villain" is the bumbling ineptitude of the Army and the utter callousness of the government towards the townspeople.
What seemed like overwrought science fiction in the '70s has become all too familiar in the '00s with the neglect that led to 9/11, the government's abandonment of New Orleans to chaos, the Washington sniper, anthrax, and the devastation in Iraq. What The Crazies does is wrap all this horror in one explosive package. A movie like this still could never be made in Hollywood--we have to look back 30 years for an unflinching portrait of our own present.
- tom moody 10-29-2006 1:10 am
hey tom moody. i like your blog. been reading it for the past few months.
as i'm sure you know, hr 5122, the 'john warner authorization bill' or whatever it's euphemistically called, effectively guts the posse comitas act by giving the executive branch, with 'the decider' at its head, control over state national guard units. whether this has been done to make it easier to deploy those units abroad remains to be seen, but together with the recent legal death of habeas corpus and the internet rumors of kbr detention centers being built in this land . . . well, the possibility of martial law seems about to pass from paranoid theory and cinematic fiction to a completely possible reality. what sort of events would trigger the imposition of such a regime? i'm trying not to think about it . . . with little sucess.
keep up the good work.
- anonymous (guest) 10-29-2006 2:08 pm
kbr detention centers
- dave 10-29-2006 4:22 pm
Yeah, Romero wasn't even thinking as far ahead as "private police forces" to do all the coercion and detaining. He still had faith that we'd have a regular army in the employ of a civilian government. For a dark vision of a country run by private security in a network of "company towns" you'd have to look to Octavia Butler's Earthseed stories (The Parable of the Sower and the The Parable of the Talents).
This is an oblique answer to your question, but what I wonder is--where the hell is the white militia movement? They would put be putting some of these new powers to the test if they were as active as they were under Clinton. If Mr and Mrs Corn Fed With Guns were being rounded up, then we might get some court cases and some outrage.
I believe they are not active because they do not fear Bush having these powers--because they think he is "godly" and will protect them from the brown hordes.
I think the root of the apathy about Bush's enlargement of powers is good old American racism. Muslims aren't a race, but they are an incomprehensible Other to most Americans, already mostly out of sight and out of mind. Depends on where you live, of course--where I am if the Pakistani grocery suddenly closed people would want to know where the owner was, because the store is a community center--but if a motel clerk outside Waxahachie TX disappeared no one would notice.
As for the Doomsday scenario, I guess the question is whether some scary incident in a US city would be enough to revive the public's faith in Bush and Cheney. And the other question is, once they're gone (a big if) would a Democratic administration be able to tell Halliburton to stop building detention centers?
- tom moody 10-29-2006 7:18 pm
hey tom moody.
you are undoubtedly correct with the racial angle. i've been pondering similar thoughts these past few years. it will take some heavy economic shit going down to bring it about, but white 'middle-class' america will get behind any program up to and possibly include ethnic cleansing to protect their entitlements. all it will take is a neo-volkish 'blood and soil' style ad campaign, with a peculiarly american gloss, that appeals to the right-wing base. it'll turn most other people into emotionally unhinged, completely unreasonable lunatics. they'll go along to get along.
which brings me back around to a doomsday scenario . . . i don't think it needs to be something so apocalyptically violent; it will probably come, as i alluded to above, as some sort of deep economic downturn. you needn't be a peak-oil fanatic to imagine how something like energy prices or housing values can incrementally change people's attitudes about their status. this is, after all, how things have been proceeding since the destruction of the american manufacturing base that began in the '70s. the network of company towns octavia butler describes falls into place quite neatly when the foreclosures begin, and properties are bought up by corporate entities for pennies (if that) on the dollar. maybe the detention centers are for the deadbeats?
this leads me to consider the 'f' word. if mussolini was correct in asserting that fascism should properly be called corporatism, well then . . . he had his blackshirts, and now they've got their own private paramilitary force called blackwater. if you're paranoid, you can see where this ends. if you're not, then who would've thought that we'd have seen the evisceration of the fourth amendment only a few short weeks ago? i'm starting to ramble, and i'm being highly specualtive and jsut a little rhetorical, but none of this shit seems to bode well. elections won't change much. they'll probably just either hasten the slide, or block what seems inevitable for a bit longer. i fear the american middle class is finished, but its demise is something that began years and years ago. argentina and chile are the models from the '70s, and are the ones that are probably being used now, too, but for us, with the rigged elections and the ridiculous debt. let's just skip the disappearances and the death squads, please.
- anonymous (guest) 10-30-2006 6:01 am
Steve Gilliard addresses some of these concerns:
- tom moody 10-31-2006 7:22 pm