A couple blocks from my home, a nice brick house with an elaborate two-story masonry garage flies two flags: one of them is an American flag that is displayed upside-down; over the backdoor, the homeowner flies a blue and white Trump flag. Across the street, a few concrete garden gnomes and a fishing boy sit among the bushes under the eaves of the house, impervious, it seems, to the political messages nearby. This homeowner displays an American flag and a Trump banner on the same flagpole. Old Glory is above the Trump banner but also inverted. A large banner is tacked to this man's garage; it reads Fuck Biden! Not my President! -- the colors of that banner are blue with white stripes. I am told that flying an American flag upside-down is disrespectful and condoned only when the banner is signaling "extreme distress" -- that is, the flag used as a banner to signal that someone is in need of rescue. Across the street f rom the house with fishing boy and the gnomes and the various flags, someone has raised a flag with rainbow colors -- not red, white, and blue but rather a spectrum as light might cast passing through a prism.
History presupposes certain events as solutions to problems posed by the past. Most history is teleological -- that is, it is written or presented with a certain end in mind. But, of course, life is lived without future outcomes known. But the comforting sense provided by history is that everything was leading to a certain foregone conclusion and that no other outcome was possible. But this is not how we experience the present. The future looms before us vast, dark, and unknowable. The past is a inscrutable avalanche of coincidences and accumulated circumstances that all lead to my own present consciousness -- but I don't know what that consciousness means in, and for, itself and can't reliably predict the future. I don't know what, if anything, the warring flags displayed on the three houses in my neighborhood mean. I note them as data, but what, ultimately, will come from this present moment of divisiveness and conflict can't be known.
American Insurrection is a Frontline documentary aired on PBS in mid-April and directed by Richard Rowley, The program attempts to make sense of the assault on the Capitol mounted by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. The documentary is 1 hour and 24 minutes long and traces one narrow trajectory through the underbrush of rumor, polemic, and opinion that has grown up around this event. To someone living in this moment, the documentary seems feeble in its pretense to explicate the event. However, perhaps, this is a measure of the documentary's authenticity and honesty -- a definitive account of the so-called "insurrection" will have to await the verdict of history several generations from today, if, in fact, any reliable verdict is ever achieved. Obviously, the documentary began in a different form, as an exploration of various paramilitaries that seem to have been galvanized into action by Trump's presidency and, perhaps, the Covid 19 pandemic. Most of the film was shot and edited before the attack on the Capitol and, so, it's pretty clear that much of the footage has been repurposed to interpret the so-called insurrection. The result is not particularly convincing and the documentary is more than a little blurred by the compromise between it's original intentions and the way that these objectives have become more or less relevant in light of the Capitol insurrection. The program as it now stands is not particularly persuasive -- and, I think, it would have been better if the documentary had adhered to its original theme, apparently, presenting a study of the fascistic paramilitaries that have arisen on the Far Right after the "Unite the Right" street fighting Charlottesville, Virginia, an event that occurred only about seven months into Trump's presidency. Of course, when most of the footage was filmed no one anticipated that the climax of the documentary would be an attack on the American Capitol and much of the best material in the documentary really can't be construed as entirely relevant to what happened on January 6, 2021.
Briefly stated, the documentary tracks an intrepid reporter who seeks to uncover the truth about far Right militia groups. The reporter is a man named A. C. Thompson. Thompson is wholly inexpressive. He has a bald shaved head and little black eyes and you can't tell how he is reacting to the material that he gathers and the interviews that he conducts. Thompson seems to be successful in persuading suspicious Far Right militia-members and their affiliates to speak with him. He's the sort of cipher onto which people can project their own emotions -- there's a powerful "negative capability" about the guy that allows him to be a screen for the views of the people that he interviews. Thompson's guise of semi-autistic dispassion is convincing and, perhaps, not, even, strategic -- in another interview on You-Tube, we learn that he is a product of the Punk Rock scene and, when interviewed by a fraternal fellow-traveler, seems equally nonplussed and strangely without emotion. Perhaps, the man is simply monstrously disciplined -- he never smiles, never argues or refutes, and never abandons his somewhat stiff poker-face. When someone says something particularly outrageous, Thompson mutters "Oh wow!" but without any affect at all -- his "oh wow!" lacks my exclamation point and doesn't seem any more or less inflected than a grunted "Uh-huh."
The thesis of the documentary is that, after the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" debacle, Right wing radicals moved away from neo-Nazi or White Suprematicist ideologies, adopting instead the weirdly nihilistic and apocalyptic activism of the Boogaloo Bois, the Proud Boys, and other allied groups -- most notably the Wolverine militia in Michigan that plotted to kidnap and, presumably, execute the State's governor, Gretchen Whitmer. Although the documentary doesn't explicitly make this connection, these Right Wing paramilitaries seems to be organizing so as to mirror their Antifa adversaries on the Far Left. Neither Antifa nor the Boogaloo Bois, for instance, are hierarchically organized -- these groups operate as loose confederations of disaffected young men; they are non-ideological in that they have no vision for a better future. Instead, these groups are opportunistic and, essentially, non-political -- they aren't fighting for a better future or the survival of the White race or the destruction of Communism: instead they react to ideological conflict by simply sowing chaos and discord. They revolt for the sake of revolting and not with any particular political objective in mind. Loose confederacies like the Boogaloo Bois hope to foment a violent civil war -- but to what end? The closest thing to an ideology expressed in the show is a dictim by a very young Boogaloo boi (Matthew Dunn, just 20 years old) to the effect that he is prepared to fight to keep people from telling him what to do -- Dunn knows that the "Storm" is coming but he can't say why or what it means. Thompson gets Dunn to talk and the chubby boy is quite articulate, but he can't express in any rational way what he and his allies are attempting to achieve. Furthermore, these Right Wing militias have Black members and seem to have appropriated many of the slogans and, even, tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement. In one startling scene, Thompson knocks on the door of a home owned by a militia-member. The house is hidden in the backwoods somewhere defended by overgrown weeds and bushes. Children's toys in disrepair are strewn all around and all sorts of road-forage is pushed up against the walls of the house. A tattered rebel flag dangles down from a pole. The militia-man isn't at home, but his scrawny, blonde wife answers the door and, after announcing that she has nothing to say, apparently talks at length with the reporter. I was startled when she says that the militia are enemies of police tyranny that has put a knee on the neck of the citizenry -- obviously invoking the homicide involving George Floyd. (The film mentions Ivan Hunter, the Boogaloo Boi who shot up the 3rd Precinct station in Minneapolis in retaliation for Floyd's killing -- the screen flashes his picture: the avenger is a red-headed White kid.).
American Insurrection begins with certain liberal Left gestures that will be off-putting to some people. The program is a co-production with PBS, Pro Publica, and the Berkeley Journalism Project and, so, the liberal credentials of the film-makers are on display. Certain aspects of the documentary are pretentious. There are Bresson-style shots of Thompson's feet as he doggedly walks from interview to interview -- it's just filler but annoying. Similarly, there are many shots of Thompson scribbling notes during filmed interviews -- why is he writing these notes? Can't he rely on the visual record created by his camera crew? This is B-roll stuff but it's weirdly inconsistent with the post-punk attitude of the film-makers. (It's like Matt Drudge affecting a fedora after the fashion of a nineteen-forties newspaper reporter.) There are many possible constructions to be applied to this material: the documentarian could blame Trump for the mayhem, or Qanon and conspiracy theory, or the media which operates 24-7 to stoke hysteria or, even, radical factionalism in Congress -- the picture glances at only one of these exegetical narratives, blaming Trump a little for the uptick in political violence, although this is obligatory and not really developed. The sequences showing the "American insurrection" at the Capitol are very effectively edited and, although the footage will be well-known to anyone who has watched TV, the documentary presents the assault as having a sort of churning, sickening inevitability. The film is most interesting in its parts relating to Steve Carrillo. Carrrillo is a terrorist who sprayed AK-15 fire into a sentry booth where a man was guarding the Oakland Federal Building. The cop was killed. Carrililli set off some pipe bombs, got into a shoot-out with the G-men, and ended up bleeding-out on street where some passerbys had jumped him -- Carrillo tried to detonate a pipe bomb but failed. He used the blood gushing out his belly to scribble "Boog" and "I became unreasonable" on the pavement, thereby identifying his affiliation with the Boogaloo Bois. Casrrullo survived and refused to talk to anyone except a single attractive Latina working the Berkeley Journalism Project. The documentary doesn't explain why he chose to speak with that journalist. Carrillo justified his violence with the notion that the police were like rabid dogs on a leash held by the government -- the only way to deal with rabid dogs is to kill them. Predictably, Trump claimed Carrillo was AntiFa -- in fact, he was a Right-Wing Boog and a supporter of the President. The show doesn't complicate its narrative by telling viewers much about Carrillo's background. The man is the son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant who apparently abused Carrillo's White mother. The relationship was so bad that Carrillo grew up on a farm in the Mexican State of Jalisco, cared for by his paternal grandparents. He came back to the US as a young man and joined the Air Force. (The filmmakers purport to be astonished that significant numbers of the U.S. military and police force espouse Fascist ideology -- who would have thunk it?) Carrillo's interview with the Latina reporter was conducted half in Spanish and half in English -- this explains why he chose to talk to her. Carrillo is a fascinating fearsome figure; he inhabits a twilight netherworld that American journalism can't penetrate -- his story requires someone like Dostoevsky as his chronicler.
No comments:
Post a Comment