I finally got a chance to sit down and watch M.A. Littler’s latest movie, The Kingdom of Survival recently. I was a hugely impressed by his last film The Folksinger, a meditation on country music, making art when you ain’t millionaire, and the America that I love but can’t always define; the one that’s getting run over by globalization, mall culture, and our ever-expanding security state.

In many ways The Kingdom of Survival is a similar meditation, but this time on American skepticism. And not the self-indulgent, anti-religious kind which passes for free thinking among the left these days. (I tend to think that the main reason folks on the left love to rail against religion so much is because they understand there’s nothing at stake in doing so.)

No, this is the kind that takes aim squarely at what’s taken for granted in the mainstream. The kind, for instance, given us by Noam Chomsky, who opens the film by reminding us that hierarchy and governmental control should never be considered self-justifying. And that the argument usually given in support of centralized government — because that’s the way its always been — is no argument at all. After all, up until only a few decades ago it had “always been” in most places that women were considered property of their husbands or fathers.

And then there’s Joe Bageant. Anybody who’s talked to me in the last month knows how obsessed I am with Bageant right now. Deer Hunting with Jesus is one of the best books I’ve read in years, and Bageant doesn’t disappoint here. The first words out of his mouth are:

I don’t like middle-class people very much. I just don’t like ‘em. And it’s because of my background. They tend to get smug really fast.  Their 401ks are on the backs of my brothers and my father and people like that, is the reason they make money in the stock market. Because these people suck shit and beat themselves into the ground every day to make value that other people keep.

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have said that better if I had ten years and ten thousand words. I never knew Bageant, but, man, I can feel the hole in the fucking world left by his recent passing. He wrote the kind of shit I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to read.

The movie ain’t all politics, though. Some of the most poignant stuff comes from folksinger Willy Tea, and his ruminations on baseball and living outside the mainstream. I kept being reminded of Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture and Hakim Bey’s concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, both of which I’ve been thinking hard about for my almost-completed second novel.

As with The Folksinger, The Kingdom of Survival is an honest consideration of its subjects, if you know what I mean. I found Ramsey Kanaan’s arguments against capitalism and for anarchism just about as compelling as it gets. And I found Sasha Lilly’s arguments against individualism less so. Though I get they’re the natural conclusion of much that I liked about Kanaan’s. And I’m self-aware enough to understand my dedication to individualism verges on the pathological.

Meaning only that it’s a jumbled up thing, and I have no fucking idea how to answer most of the questions raised by this movie, questions that often seem to boil down to one: how in the hell can one be free in a country that consumes and co-opts everything? Is skepticism enough? That’s a question that’s at the heart of most of my thinking these days. And I don’t have any more answers now than I had when I first started asking it.

But when I come across a work like this one I’m incredibly thankful. It’s the kind of thing you almost think can’t exist until you see it: a rich and beautiful movie that leaves you satisfied, without ever trying to give cheap answers to the unanswerable. Unlike The Folksinger, it didn’t make me want to jump up and give testament to the instant fellowship I felt; it made me want to take a walk in the mountains and maybe try to stare a fencepost down. Which is to say, I loved it.

But you should decide for yourself. So here’s the trailer and some clips.

The trailer:

Noam Chomsky:

Joe Bageant:

Ramsey Kanaan:

Will “The Bull” Taylor:

I also find it interesting that so much of the left has chosen to focus on the Tea Party movement instead of, say, Obama’s two wars, his unwavering support for Israel, and his continuation of George Bush’s civil rights policies. It’s nice that the left is so concerned with protecting Obama from protest, but one has to wonder . . . why?

Anyway, Noam Chomsky in In These Times, writing about the Tea Party movement and Joe Stack.

On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.

Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart of what was once a great industrial center.

His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was the “widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.

The rest.

And, of course, there’s the depressing reality that nothing has changed under Obama. Actually, media hype aside, Obama is worse on the issue of settlements than Bush I.

The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement. In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders — with “minor and mutual modifications,” to adopt official U.S. terminology before Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s.

The basic principles have been accepted by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states (who go on to call for full normalization of relations), the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran), and relevant non-state actors (including Hamas). A settlement along these lines was first proposed at the U.N. Security Council in January 1976 by the major Arab states. Israel refused to attend the session. The U.S. vetoed the resolution, and did so again in 1980. The record at the General Assembly since is similar.

There was one important and revealing break in U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. After the failed Camp David agreements in 2000, President Clinton recognized that the terms he and Israel had proposed were unacceptable to any Palestinians. That December, he proposed his “parameters”: imprecise, but more forthcoming. He then stated that both sides had accepted the parameters, while expressing reservations.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 to resolve the differences and were making considerable progress. In their final press conference, they reported that, with a little more time, they could probably have reached full agreement. Israel called off the negotiations prematurely, however, and official progress then terminated, though informal discussions at a high level continued leading to the Geneva Accord, rejected by Israel and ignored by the U.S.

A good deal has happened since, but a settlement along those lines is still not out of reach — if, of course, Washington is once again willing to accept it. Unfortunately, there is little sign of that.

Substantial mythology has been created about the entire record, but the basic facts are clear enough and quite well documented.

The U.S. and Israel have been acting in tandem to extend and deepen the occupation. In 2005, recognizing that it was pointless to subsidize a few thousand Israeli settlers in Gaza, who were appropriating substantial resources and protected by a large part of the Israeli army, the government of Ariel Sharon decided to move them to the much more valuable West Bank and Golan Heights.

Instead of carrying out the operation straightforwardly, as would have been easy enough, the government decided to stage a “national trauma,” which virtually duplicated the farce accompanying the withdrawal from the Sinai desert after the Camp David agreements of 1978-79. In each case, the withdrawal permitted the cry of “Never Again,” which meant in practice: we cannot abandon an inch of the Palestinian territories that we want to take in violation of international law. This farce played very well in the West, though it was ridiculed by more astute Israeli commentators, among them that country’s prominent sociologist the late Baruch Kimmerling.

After its formal withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Israel never actually relinquished its total control over the territory, often described realistically as “the world’s largest prison.” In January 2006, a few months after the withdrawal, Palestine had an election that was recognized as free and fair by international observers. Palestinians, however, voted “the wrong way,” electing Hamas. Instantly, the U.S. and Israel intensified their assault against Gazans as punishment for this misdeed. The facts and the reasoning were not concealed; rather, they were openly published alongside reverential commentary on Washington’s sincere dedication to democracy. The U.S.-backed Israeli assault against the Gazans has only been intensified since, thanks to violence and economic strangulation, increasingly savage.

Meanwhile in the West Bank, always with firm U.S. backing, Israel has been carrying forward longstanding programs to take the valuable land and resources of the Palestinians and leave them in unviable cantons, mostly out of sight. Israeli commentators frankly refer to these goals as “neocolonial.” Ariel Sharon, the main architect of the settlement programs, called these cantons “Bantustans,” though the term is misleading: South Africa needed the majority black work force, while Israel would be happy if the Palestinians disappeared, and its policies are directed to that end.

The rest.

• Giving up on authenticity.
• “Sorry for painting the word twat on your garage door.”
• Noam Chomsky remembers Howard Zinn.
• “‘She stared right into the camera with that baleful glare,’ Crews said. ‘Break your back with that stare.’”
• Camille Rose Garcia and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
• “I shot him in the nuts with bird-shot because he was beating my daughter.”
• Fuck the Olympics. (I have no idea what it is. I just Googled “Fuck the Olympics” and it was the first thing that came up.)

Update: Daniel Ellsberg: A Memory of Howard Zinn.

I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the release in Boston February of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.”

Just weeks ago after watching the film on December 7, I woke up the next morning thinking that I had never told him how much he meant to me. For once in my life, I acted on that thought in a timely way. I sent him an e-mail in which I said, among other things, what I had often told others about him: that he was,” in my opinion, the best human being I’ve ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life.”

Update II: It’s worth remembering that Howard Zinn was one of the first scholars to come out in support of Ward Churchill during our fair state’s latest round of neo-Stalinist witchhunts. This was his statement:

I have declared my support of Ward Churchill because to defend him is to defend the principle of academic freedom, the idea that no one should lose his or her job or status in education because of factors outside of teaching and scholarship.  Those factors — political, ideological — are evident in his case, and they are joined by a mean-spiritedness which does not belong in an academic or any other environment.  The attack on Ward Churchill comes at a time in our nation’s history when constitutional rights are under attack by the national government, when war threatens the lives and well-being of all,  and therefore we need the marketplace of  ideas to be as open as possible.  If we want to live in a democracy we must protect that openness. That is why defending Ward Churchill has an importance far beyond his particular situation.

I don’t think I can overstate how refreshing it was to see academics like Zinn and Chomsky jump into the fray, while the vast majority of academics, especially locally, were scattering as quickly as they could.

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA’s “torture paradigm,” developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury’s penetrating study of the U.S. torture record: Truth, Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang’s descent into the global sewers lament that “in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way.”