Year: 2013

Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh has devoted his career to documenting the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. His newest documentary, The Missing Picture, takes an inspired approach to a dearth of visual evidence from that period (1975-79), when all existing photos and films were created by Pol Pot’s propaganda machine:

To make up for the pictures we don’t have, Panh uses small clay figurines, hundreds of them, painted, clothed, with individual expressions on their faces, and placed in meticulously detailed dioramas that he seems to have reconstructed from the memories of his youth.

Among the first of these is a figure of Panh’s father, an official in the Ministry of Education in a white suit and dark tie who, in what Panh eventually came to see as a heroic act of resistance, starved himself to death rather than allowing himself to be treated as a farm animal by Cambodia’s rulers. There are scenes of Khmer Rouge hospitals where patients lay on beds of wooden planks. And, then there’s the scene in a village, again recreated with clay figurines, in which a nine year-old child who denounces his mother for eating a mango, an act of selfish individualism. Afterwards she is led into the forest and never returns.

These clay statuettes, never before used by Panh in any of his earlier work, cannot, of course, fully depict the horror of the Khmer Rouge story. They are necessarily silent, immobile, and therefore devoid of the intensity of those moments in other Panh films where his camera bores in on the face of a witness and lingers there as he remembers what happened, or what he did. But as Panh’s narration in the new film proceeds, the statuettes take on a reality of their own, a voodoo-like power, their individual features an aid to avoiding what might otherwise be a kind of depersonalizing abstraction.

The Act of Killing is another critically acclaimed film this year to delve into the representations of genocide, in this case the Indonesian mass killings of the Suharto regime. The Dish covered that film here.

A reader writes:

There may be something to Fleming’s argument; I know of at least one cycling activist in Chapel Hill, NC who’s against bike lanes altogether on the ground that motorists need to accept that cyclists have an equal right to the road.  But there are other issues with bike barriers.  Here in Nashville, bike lanes have been slowly installed on existing streets, but they begin and end arbitrarily and are designed to accommodate both traffic and parking.  I have bike lanes on my home street, but three blocks down from me is a sizable university and restaurant district, where double-parking in the lanes (including by semis) is rife, and the university administration is more concerned with pressuring the city to provide on-street parking than it is with bike safety.   Politically, barriers are nonstarters here.

I’d also add that the bike lane failed to prevent me from nearly getting killed four years ago when a motorist made a left turn right into me.  As I understand it, most car-bike collisions result from cars turning across the lane at intersections or coming off a side street; barriers would do nothing to prevent those.

Read here for a good illustration of that point.  Another reader:

I’m an avid user of New York City’s new CitiBike bike-share program. For two decades, my perhaps wild-eyed theory about city cycling was that it’s considerably safer than cycling in the suburbs or in rural locations: despite the menace of getting doored, urban traffic tends to be slow and relatively predictable compared with cycling in settings where you literally never know what could come zooming around a bend.

But I must admit that a couple of months on CitiBikes has shaken my faith in my urban-cycling theory.

The problem isn’t taxis and trucks. It’s pedestrians and other cyclists. Pedestrians aren’t yet conditioned to look for thousands of additional bikes before stepping off the curb – I’ve had to scream at (and terrify) a few people to prevent either of us getting killed. Even worse are cyclists who “salmon” – riding the wrong way on one-way lanes. Store messengers are bad enough, but they ride very carefully. The real threat is other Citibikers, who I often see blithely riding in the wrong direction, without helmets, and with earbuds plugged in. They seem to believe they’re not riding actual bicycles in the middle of an actual city. They also happen to be breaking the law, and I really wish New York City’s police would ticket them. A week of tickets and the bike lanes would become a lot safer.

Earlier this week, Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar unveiled his new media venture headlined by Glenn. Jack Shafer deduces its goals:

Omidyar’s first-round hiring of Greenwald, Scahill, and Poitras — who hail from the rich tradition of partisan American journalism — speaks to his idealism. Where Bezos is banking on an institution and its brand value, Omidyar is making his first-round investment in individual journalists whose work he admires. Like Hearst, who preached in favor of the “journalism of action” that battled corruption and incompetence, and got things done, I assume Omidyar has world-changing on his mind.

Jay Rosen talked to Omidyar by phone about the specifics:

NewCo is a new venture— a company not a charity. It is not a project of Omidyar Network. It is separate from his philanthropy, he said. He said he will be putting a good deal of his time, as well as his capital, into it. I asked how large a commitment he was prepared to make in dollars. For starters: the $250 million it would have taken to buy the Washington Post. … the business model isn’t fully worked out yet, but this much is known: all proceeds from NewCo will be reinvested in the journalism. Also: there is no print product planned.

Henry Farrell believes the new venture will deeply affect the relationship between information technology and politics:

It will likely shape up as a serious journalistic enterprise. Capital of USD $250 million can hire some very good people. The venture has the potential to become the kind of news source that can turn information into knowledge. Yet it doesn’t sound as if it’ll be bound by the kinds of political relationships that most newspapers are embedded in. The Columbia Journalism Review gets this best when it describes the venture as I.F. Stone’s Weekly, if it had been lavishly funded by a friendly billionaire.

If this works, it is likely to change the relationship between information, knowledge and politics in some very interesting ways. Most obviously, it will make it even harder for the U.S. government to control the politics of leaks by pressuring newspapers not to publish stories that it thinks hurt the national interest.

Mark Coddington rounds up other responses to the news.

A reader writes:

One of the repeating themes in your commentary about the mess that is the GOP is that the region most responsible is the South. I’ve always thought you significantly overplayed that theme. My concern isn’t to defend the South, but to see the problem as it is, rather than through historical assumptions.

You posted this map a few weeks ago, showing the districts of the 80 Republican congressmen who signed a letter asking Boehner to defund Obamacare by threatening to shut down the government:

You can see that this nonsense isn’t just a regionalized phenomenon. It has hotbeds scattered all over the country, from Arizona to Pennsylvania, and Florida to Idaho, with more support in Michigan, Indiana, and western Ohio than in Alabama, Mississippi, and western Tennessee. Insofar as any region stands out at all, it’s Appalachia, not the former Confederacy. Even to say it’s Appalachian, though, is misleading. There’s more Tea Party support in Kansas than there is in West Virginia, for example. A more accurate description might be that Tea Party support generally tracks cultural Appalachia, but even that would have major exceptions.

On the whole, like racism, Tea Party support is ultimately much more age- and class-based than it is regional. Your emphasis on the old Confederacy confuses more than it clarifies.

I’d say it may confuse as well as clarify. I was too lazily reductionist and apologize for the confusion part. Nonetheless, even though the subculture may have spread beyond the South to much of rural, white America, you can still see the themes of nullification, secession, and states’ rights throughout the Obama opposition. They have a history.  Another reader is much more blunt:

I believe “The Tea Party As A Religion” is a very intemperate and inflammatory piece. If your goal is sensationalism to fire up your readership and improve your commercial success, then I believe it’s probably well done. If your goal is dialogue that tries to get at the truth of things and advance our common interest, then it is rather poorly done. You, for one, blast charges of racism against anyone that opposes Obama’s policies, with absolutely zero evidence for racism. It’s an incredible non-sequitur. Obama is black, I oppose Obama’s policies, therefore I am a racist. This is the worst kind of political arguing, gets us nowhere, and only leads to more enmity.

Indeed it is. But that is not what I wrote. The analysis in the post of the Tea Party deals with middle-class economic stagnation, bewildering changes in the culture (from a future majority-minority country to gay marriage), the decline of mainline Protestantism, the rise of modern fundamentalism, and the psychological need for total certainty in very unsettling times. It’s a very complex analysis, and it is elaborated at length in The Conservative Soul without any reference to race at all.

But to leave race out of it seems equally wrong to me.

Of course, opposition to Obama’s policies is not reducible to racism. But the fervor of the opposition, the personal contempt for and condescension toward the president, the rhetoric about his “otherness”, the refusal to believe he was born in America and is a Christian: these are all driven by some racial attitudes. They are part of the very complex mix. My goal is to try to capture reality – even if that might offend some of those I need to persuade. But for me, as a writer, I’ve long put understanding things as they are above any regard for my own influence. That doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten things very wrong. It just means that I’m trying to get things right. From the too-easy narrative about Matthew Shepard to the genetic aspects of race, from insisting on the fact of American torture to the reality of future crippling debt, I try to get things right.

Race in America still matters in complex ways. When Tea Party protestors wave the Confederate flag outside a White House occupied by an African-American, I’d be negligent for not addressing it.

Julia Ioffe describes last weekend’s violence in Moscow:

[Russia is] second only to the U.S. in the number of illegal migrants, except that it is far worse at counting them and, unlike the U.S., does not even try to keep them out. They too live abysmal, perilous lives, and they too cause tensions with the local population. And, like in the U.S., the law of the land is far, far behind the reality. In fact, it doesn’t address it at all, leaving the more extreme elements in the country to take action themselves—kind of like in the U.S. (See: Arizona.)

But the problem in Russia is that, for the local population, the tension is not an economic one, but an overtly racial one. To wit: many of the migrants from the North Caucasus are Russian citizens because the North Caucasus is part of the Russian Federation. (They are  illegal because they don’t have the special permits required to live in Moscow.) The problem with people from the North Caucasus is that they are Muslim and have dark hair and dark complexions; that is, they stand out from the Christian Slavic part of the population. On good days, people from the North Caucasus or from former Soviet republics in Central Asia inspire derision and nasty, racist slurs. On bad days, it’s really, really bad.

Daniel McCarthy examines the self-delusion of the Republican base:

[A]nyone who is psychologically satisfied by actions that in fact cost taxpayers additional money, and that are counterproductive in the public arena, really an opponent of big government? A feeling of courageous satisfaction here is perverse: it subverts the principle it’s supposed to support.

Imagine what the Tea Party would accomplish if this incident became paradigmatic: government would grow, anti-government sentiment would be discredited, and the people responsible for both would continue to applaud themselves as the only true champions of limited-government principle.

The self-defeating emotionalism of Ted Cruz’s admirers won’t allow them to think through this problem. Instead they present themselves with a false dilemma between Cruz’s counterproductive incompetence and RINO liberalism. That there could be a more intelligent strategy for limited government than merely doing what feels good never occurs to them—it’s too painful to contemplate.

Larison chimes in:

Because small-government conservatism is a harder sell than many of the alternatives, it is especially important for its advocates to make good judgments about what is possible and to make sound decisions that prove that they are capable of running a government of reduced and limited powers. Neither of these has been on display in the last few weeks, everyone can see it, and it would be senseless for anyone to offer up spin to the contrary.