Newspeak 2020: Slavery = Freedom!

By Scott Ross

Anyone who believes that satire is either dead or redundant has probably been reading the nation’s corporate press, especially that slowly imploding and entirely irrelevant yellow press scandal-sheet known as the New York Times. Less amusingly for adherents to the concept of liberty, American style, the great Gray Lady (surely a desiccated and toothless bald-headed crone by this time) has been throughout the ginned-up COVID-19 “crisis” the nation’s biggest and loudest cheerleader for Orwellian Newspeak and Doublethink. There is not a contradiction or an oxymoron the paper cannot, in its ceaseless effort to propagandize, embrace, seemingly — although God alone knoweth how — with a straight face.

Case in point: The 17 October 2020 editorial by Michael Tomasky assuring the Times’ dwindling band of devoted readers that being forced to plaster cloth across our faces actually signifies our freedom.

You think I’m joking?

There is indeed. It’s “obedience” — the word fascists like best.

Tomasky begins with an outraged (and, supposedly, outrageous) bit of intelligence concerning President Trump’s campaign rallies. These events, where American citizens (gasp!) actually appear with their faces shockingly and obscenely naked(!!) he says, “look awfully irresponsible to most of us,” adding the (to him) encouraging data that “some polls show that as many as 92 percent of Americans typically wear masks when they go out.” Nowhere in this statement does Tomasky acknowledge that, in most places in The Land of the Free these days, mask-wearing is mandated. Extra-legally and with totalitarian glee, perhaps, but even those not thoroughly brainwashed do not wish to, as I have reported elsewhere, be screamed at when we go to buy a loaf of bread. In his second paragraph, Tomasky, typical of his breed and type, immediately resorts to juvenile name-calling, first noting “Trumpworld sees these things differently,” quoting the admittedly loathsome Mike Pence’s otherwise sane (if rather unbelievable) characterization of his running-mate’s campaign as being “about freedom and respecting the freedom of the American people” and then contrasting this with that serial criminal Kamala Harris’ smirking contention that “lying to the American people about the severity of the virus hardly counts as ‘respect.’”

Who’s been lying about the “severity of the virus,” Tomasky? A virus which, whatever its suspicious origins (USbioweaponslabs) has targeted largely the very old and the very ill and which has a survivability rate of between 99.4 and 99.6%? A virus which, while certainly of concern to the population most at risk and assuredly no joke to those who’ve gotten it, in no way justified the complete destruction of millions of jobs, businesses and lives and whose economic fall-out we have not begun, even eight months after these draconian measures were adopted on a heretofore unimaginable scale, to fathom and which could well lead to a worldwide depression which could conceivably dwarf everything that’s come before, including the crash of 1929? A virus which countless research studies have shown is not and cannot be stopped from spreading by the foolish expedient of wearing cloth masks designed to stop bacteria (considerably larger than viruses) and then over a relatively short period? Someone has certainly been lying, Tomasky.

What really galls the author of this appalling piece of fascist tripe, however, is what he sees (and what liberals in general have seen for decades) as the unconscionable co-opting by the right of a single word. “Freedom,” Tomasky sniffs, “emphatically does not include the freedom to get someone else sick. It does not include the freedom to refuse to wear a mask in the grocery store, [or?] sneeze on someone in the produce section and give him the virus. That’s not freedom for the person who is sneezed upon. For that person, the first person’s ‘freedom’ means chains — potential illness and even perhaps a death sentence. No society can function on that definition of freedom.” And no society can entertain a serious notion of liberty if such meretricious and reductive thinking (to ennoble with hyperbole what Tomasky does with that blob of jelly in his head) holds sway.

It gets worse. Tomasky then quotes the man my friend and colleague Eliot M. Camarena hilariously refers to as “Old Blank Joe,” to wit: “I view wearing this mask not so much protecting me, but as a patriotic responsibility [emphasis mine.]” Bad enough to be lectured by the likes of Tomasky. Now I must also take civics lessons from a corrupt, mean-spirited alte kaker in the obvious throes of early-onset dementia, whose avaricious family (and party) are engaged in one of the most monstrous public displays of elder abuse the country has ever seen? As if that weren’t nauseating enough, Tomasky then trots out this howler: “There are certain words in our political lexicon that ‘belong’ to this side or the other. ‘Fairness’ is a liberal word. [Emphasis his.] You rarely hear conservatives talking about fairness.” I presume he means the endless capacity of liberals now to squeal, “That’s not fair!” like a mass gathering of Lucy Van Pelts at any and every challenge to their endless need to feel good about themselves.

Poster art by MackAndCo

And now we reach the crux of Tomasky’s argument, and the best evidence of his raving fascism: “’Freedom’,” he writes, “belongs almost wholly to the right. They talk about it incessantly…” A terrible thing, that. How dare they defend, and discuss, liberty in a supposed democracy? Perhaps because liberals no longer believe in it, if they ever did? (Dear Christ! This asshole actually has me defending conservatives, a thing I never thought I’d have cause to do!) And who is to blame, not for the insistence that the insatiably corrupt Democrat party is the arbiter of all liberty and the dictator (a word I choose with care) of what must, will and should constitute freedom of speech, but for ceding the word “freedom” to the right? Tomasky’s own fellow (neo)liberals. “[T]he broad left in America,” he accuses, “has let all this go unchallenged for decades, to the point that today’s right wing — and it is important to call it that and not conservative, which it is not — can defend spreading disease, potentially killing other people, as freedom. It is madness.” Someone is mad, all right. Methinks it is the author. Opposing fascist, extra-legal “mandates” by power-mad demagogues is slavery, wearing a cloth over your face freedom. And if you think I am exaggerating, here is Tomasky’s final, rather typically imperious, order to his liberal readership: “Say this: Freedom means the freedom not to get infected by the idiot who refuses to mask up.”

Your freedom from a manufactured disease not appreciably worse than any other influenza virus in any other year, in other words, is directly tied to my being forced, at the risk of arrest in many cases, to slap a useless bloody mask over my mouth.

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Tomasky, by the way, is editor in chief of something called, presumably with a straight face, Democracy which, according to the vaunted Wikipedia is “a quarterly journal of progressive and liberal politics.” With the likes of Tomasky in positions to influence it, need we ask why liberalism is a hiss and a byword and even progressivism earns little more these days than an ironic smirk? “Progressives” now are best represented by the likes of the once amusing and somewhat perspicacious Jimmy Dore screeching back in the spring that, merely because he expressed the quite reasonable desire to see primary voters able to exercise the franchise in person, Bernie Sanders was guilty of trying to “murder” millions of Americans. Dore, in common with most progressives, has apparently never given two minutes’ thought to the patently obvious absurdity of what we were told would be a six-week “lockdown” (more on that insidious terminology anon) now entering its ninth month. Yet somehow feckless (to use a favorite Dore word… although he has admitted he doesn’t really know what it means…) old Bernie Sanders is endangering the very life of the nation?

And then there is this, from Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General of the United States:

Smothering our faces in cloth is freedom! And note that Adams cutely suggests the forced wearing of masks in nearly every state in the Union is, somehow, a thing we choose to do. Sure. I choose to put a mask on when I go shopping… because they won’t let me in the fucking door if I don’t. I choose to slap an ineffective and likely dangerous piece of cloth over my nose and mouth when I go into my office… because even though I am working among at best a mere skeleton crew of co-workers — a few dozen people in an otherwise eerily underpopulated five-story building — if I don’t wear it whenever I step out of my cubicle and into a “public space,” my employer will tell me to go home and not come back. Choice, Adams? Choice? Freedom? Is that what your parents marched for? The inalienable right to breathe their own CO₂ all day long? Is this what many of their generation were beaten, attacked by police dogs, hosed down in the streets, threatened, lynched and otherwise murdered to achieve? The “freedom” never to leave their homes without masks plastered over their faces?

And then there is this, from a Politico “tweet”: “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to [not ‘onto,’ which would have been correct, but Politico clearly has bigger fish to fry than engaging in proper written grammar] a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son [emphasis mine; the evidence suggests this is far more than simply an “allegation”] ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.'” Bearing in mind that all “intelligence” officials and employees lie for a living — which, indeed, is the point of my citing this specious letter to begin with — John Ratcliffe, the current Director of National Intelligence, has said unequivocally that the Biden emails are not part of a “Russian disinformation campaign,” and has publicly wondered as well why the FBI held onto Hunter Biden’s laptop for two years while neither leaking its contents, investigating them or charging either Biden officially, particularly when bringing the emails forward in 2019 would have ended the absurd and patently false and wasteful impeachment proceedings against Trump before they began. (And yes, I fully appreciate the irony of not only having to defend the often indefensible Donald Trump but being compelled to cite sources like FOX News and the New York Post because the overwhelming rest of corporate news refuses to do its basic job of checking the abuse of power by elected officials.)

Of course, Ratcliffe is being coy; he presumably knows very well that the FBI is itself a disinformation clearing house and contract killing bureau roughly equivalent to the KGB at its pre-Glasnost height. Its agents’ brief, at least since Hoover’s blackmailing by the Mafia in the 1940s, has been to persecute (if not assassinate) citizens and to protect organized criminals… especially when it comes to the abuse and trafficking for sexual purposes of the under-aged, of both sexes. (You don’t have to believe me on this; the indefatigable Whitney Webb, among others, has already traced, with the sort of dedicated investigative zeal we used to expect as a matter of course from reporters but which has largely disappeared from corporate media, the sick and sordid history many of us suspected for decades Hoover and his successors were aiding and abetting.)

The point of my citing the Politico “tweet” is simply to illustrate how desperate these people are to resurrect the now completely debunked, Hillary Clinton-created accusation that Donald Trump “conspired with Russia” to win the 2016 election, a campaign lost to Clinton the moment she announced her candidacy. I could as easily have shown you the recent idiot New York Times headline, written with the assurance of a practiced con artist and asking whether the Trump campaign is “colluding with Russia again.” Again? When, outside the jumble of Hillary Clinton’s disordered fantasies, was the first instance? (“When did you stop beating your wife?”) Or take the equally bald, and equally phony, statement by that smug sociopath Chuck Schumer that unnamed “intelligence officials” have confirmed for him that the revelation of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop is a Russian operation. They simply cannot let the entirely cooked-up Russia narrative die. Worse, they cannot let the Cold War, alternately fought or worried over by their parents and grandparents when there was still a Soviet Union to make up stories about, recede into history.

This, too, is part of the New Newspeak: The eye-rollingly predictable cries of, “Look! Over there! Russians!” while we are pushed incrementally closer to total fascism. (We were nearly there already; the COVID-1984 “crisis” was simply the irresistible opportunity necessary to speed up the process.) Joseph McCarthy, John Rankin, J. Parnell Thomas and their sinister ilk perfected the American version of an old European tactic 70 years ago: Make Americans fear what they cannot see, feel or touch, and they will not only fold, and obey unquestioningly (just like those mindless Russians are said to do…) but turn on their friends, family, colleagues, lovers and neighbors. Are the children next door playing outside without masks? Report them! Is the man in the apartment next door sneezing? Call the police! “See Something, Say Something” may be further altered to “Hear Something, Say Something” with no concomitant loss of decency, sense or legitimacy.

Speaking of legitimacy: Until last spring, “lock-down” was a term I had never heard outside of a prison movie or a school shooting incident. And although the professional masters of Doublethink / Newspeak nomenclature initially tried out the more anemic phrases “Stay-at-home order” and “Shelter-in-place,” they soon gave up on the euphemisms. “Lockdown” is now the term of choice. For whatever the actual origins of the COVID-19 virus, or the reasons for what the World Economic Forum relentlessly tells us is the “Great Reset,” the people behind this manufactured crisis understood two things: a) That if they repeated their big lies often enough, most of you, because you either lack or have lost the ability to think independently and reason or research for yourself, would believe them; and b) that they could get you to turn on each other in time.

To “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” then, let us then add, to the delight of Michael Tomaskys everywhere, our own motto:

“MASKS ARE LIBERTY.”

Somewhere in literary Valhalla, Big Brother is smiling.

Text copyright 2020 by Scott Ross

Honor among thieves: “Pickup on South Street” (1953)

By Scott Ross

Few filmmakers reveal the general paucity of critical ideas and vocabulary more than Samuel Fuller — or inspire more overuse of verbal cliché. Scan nearly any positive piece on Fuller’s movies and, however laudatory the perspective, the words “crude” and “blunt” are virtually guaranteed to appear, sooner rather than later. The irony could not be starker, or more risible: That a man whose work so assiduously avoided cliché should find his adherents so giddily besotted with it.

Sam Fuller, with typical cigar, around the time of Pickup on South Street.

What, on an admittedly limited viewing basis, seems perfectly obvious to me about Sam Fuller was an integrity, almost singular among his colleagues, whose hallmark is originality. As a former tabloid journalist — at 17, the youngest crime reporter in the country — and a survivor of a series of devastating land battles during World War II, Fuller understood to his bones the importance of grabbing the reader from the first sentence. Or (to put it in cinematic terms) as a writer/director, of engaging the viewer from the opening frames. Why, then, is his very avoidance of the obvious, his refusal to resort to rote exposition, a cudgel with which to limit him? His acolytes mean it as a tribute when they burble about Fuller’s bluntness.* Perhaps it says more about them than about him, but such by-the-numbers critical verbiage may scare off more readers than it invites. It certainly helped put me off Fuller, for far too long.

Richard Widmark rifles through Jean Peters’ purse under her very nose in the masterful opening sequence of Pickup on South Street.

In Pickup on South Street, Fuller begins his narrative with a beautifully staged, virtually wordless sequence in a New York subway car. Without resort to boring dialogue or explicit voice-over, he presents a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) plying his trade in his natural milieu. I know of no other movie of the period that gets the details so right: The way habitual underground passengers stare at nothing to avoid eye contact, leaving themselves open, as Jean Peters does here, to larceny by men they resolutely refuse to let into their self-consciously narrowed viewpoint. (Not incidentally, Fuller was virtually alone in depicting his New York as integrated; while no black characters of note appear in the movie, black extras dot the streets and subways liberally… just as they did in life. Gee. Fancy that. There’s a difference right there: Almost any white filmmaker of the time would have needed his deficiency in this area pointed out by a third party; Fuller wouldn’t have thought any other way.)†

Only once Widmark’s Skip has left the train with his swag does Fuller let us in on the set-up: Peters’ Candy is being tailed by a pair of FBI agents and what Skip has absconded with are the microfilmed secrets she was (unwittingly, as it turns out) carrying. Billy Wilder, another of the era’s important writer/directors, would call this The Wienie; Hitchcock, The MacGuffin. It’s also known as The Hook — that central, irresistible (if sometimes mystifying) conflict that drives an entire picture. If this is “bluntness,” I’ll take it, and like it.

In Fuller’s world, the details that accrete to the story support, and enrich, it. Skip’s waterfront shack, perfectly limned by the movie’s art director, Lyle Wheeler (and its cinematographer, Joseph MacDonald) provides the requisite darkness the plot demands and a splendid curlicue: The winch and pulley system Skip rigs both to keep his beer cooled in the river and to hide the loot, protected by oilcloth, he’s pocketed. It’s the single, obvious, place no one — not Peters, the cops, or the Communist agents who are soon on Skips’ trail — ever thinks to search.

The rather unsavory Captain Tiger (Murvyn Vye) with Skip, his perennial bête noire.

For Fuller, those “Commies,” as they’re often referred to, are not, as in every other movie of the period that depicts them, the point. Candy’s one-time paramour Joey (a very young, and very effective, Richard Kiley) would sell anything to anyone. He’s an agent, motivated not by ideology but by cash… like Skip, and like Moe (Thelma Ritter) the professional stool-pigeon whose informing on him Skip not only doesn’t resent, but accepts. The T-men push Skip with the usual, pat patriotic line, to which he refreshingly responds, “Are you waving the flag at me?” (A response J. Edgar Hoover personally took the expected exception to but which, to his credit, Fox production chief Darryl Zanuck refused to make Fuller edit out.)

Skip with Moe, the movie’s tattered mother figure whose informing sets up a deadly chain of events but whose motives the pickpocket doesn’t so much forgive as shrug off.

The movie’s love-match begins with the man slugging the woman on the jaw, progresses to brittle comradeship, nearly founders on the rocks of mutual disgust, and finally blossoms through a brutal beating and attempted murder. Fuller’s startling approach to his material doesn’t end with his disdain of knee-jerk patriotism; his heart is with the petty thief, the stained B-girl and the decrepit stoolie. If there is honor in Pickup on South Street, then, it’s exclusively among thieves.

An unlikely pairing: Candy and Skip share a rare moment of tenderness. Two cynics who find common ground.

In a taut, 80-minute running time, Fuller somewhat miraculously finds the leisure to stage what, to my mind, is the single most moving sequence of the period: The resigned death of Moe. We tend to think of Thelma Ritter as the era’s quintessential all-purpose comedian, the wisecracking side-kick whose only coeval is the equally witty but somehow more patrician Eve Arden: As the mordant Sadie Dugan of A Letter to Three Wives, the acerbic Birdie of All About Eve, the philosophical Stella of Rear Window. But despite her six Oscar nominations — that she never won the award says a great deal about that tarnished icon — we don’t necessarily remember her as an actor. Seeing her final, quietly anguished, scene in Pickup on South Street will dispel that misapprehension in your mind forever. The tearful but never maudlin resilience with which she accepts her imminent murder, the tremble of her chin, and the despairing resignation of her final words (“Mister, I’m so tired you’d be doing me a favor if you blew my head off.”) are profoundly, disturbingly, almost unbearably poignant.

Moe confronts Joey in the movie’s most deeply affecting scene.

While hack critics and auteurists (and that’s most of them, it would seem) reach for the hoary word “blunt” to describe a movie this visceral and artistically fresh, is it just possible that “honest” is a more appropriate alternative?

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*A modest proposal: Are they confusing the man, with his ever-present stogie and emphatic, idiosyncratic proclamations, with his work?

†One suspects the omission of black extras, except as maids and shoeshine boys, was simply an ingrained habit of the time at the studios. Someone in the head office, seeing black faces in the background, might have at one time said, “Hey — white Americans don’t wanna see those people on the screen” and it would have become, like L.B. Mayer’s fetish over reflective floor surfaces, company policy, un-articulated and simply second-nature to everyone who worked there.

Text copyright 2014 by Scott Ross

Rough beast: “Nixon” (1995)

By Scott Ross

JFK made an almost infinitely greater amount of money and received far more press, but Nixon is, to my eyes and ears, Oliver Stone’s masterpiece: A sharp, sprawling, shockingly fulsome character portrait of Shakespearean depth and tragic overtone. Stone and his co-scenarists, Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, offer a remarkably supple and surprisingly sympathetic characterization of the 20th century’s American Richard III, evoking a strange pity even in those, like this writer, who despise our 38th President in nearly every way. Stone and his collaborators are abetted enormously by the central performance by Anthony Hopkins, which is remarkable on any number of levels, not the least of which is his intelligent eschewing of either direct imitation or prosthetics. Joan Allen gives a transcendent performance as Pat Nixon, and Mary Steenburgen’s steely presence as Nixon’s immovable mother Hannah offers you a stunning understanding of just how searing it must have been to the man’s psyche to have that women — whom he repeatedly, and one feels, reflexively and guiltily, referred to as “a saint” — for a mother. The supporting cast is uniformly splendid: David Hyde Pierce as John Dean, Paul Sorvino as Kissinger, Madeline Kahn as Martha Mitchell, Ed Harris as E. Howard Hunt, Bob Hoskins as J. Edgar Hoover, and especially James Woods as H.R. Haldeman. Powers Boothe, E.G. Marshall, David Paymer, the late J.T. Walsh, Brian Bedford, Tony Goldwyn, Edward Herrmann, Fyvush Finkel, Larry Hagman, John Cunningham, George Plimpton and James Karen also appear. John Williams wrote a spectacularly successful score, and the hyper-kinetic editing is by Brian Berdan and Hank Corwin.

The DVD “Director’s Cut” is worth watching for a chilling sequence, unfortunately deleted from the theatrical release, between Nixon and Sam Waterson as the then-CIA director Richard Helms that makes all too clear that our Presidents serve at the pleasure of the Shadow Government and not, as is so often assumed, vice-versa. The only embarrassing moments are those concerning Hoskins’ Hoover, all too winkingly informed by Stone’s Monday morning political quarterbacking; if you know anything about Hoover’s circumspection, you can only roll your eyes as he cruises Marine guards at Tricia Nixon’s wedding.

The box-office failure of a picture as intelligent and impassioned as Nixon brings into broad relief the difficulty of — and Hollywood’s sadly justifiable resistance to — creating smart, rigorous political movies. Americans do not like their history unless it is burnished by celebratory whitewashing, but only a fool, or a rank hypocrite, would subject Richard Milhous Nixon to cinematic hagiography.

Text copyright 2013 by Scott Ross