Before the Hamptons Film Festival this weekend, I wrote a post about The End of America, a documentary based on Naomi Wolf’s book of the same name, which I was interested in not least because of its unusual distribution strategy: it will premiere on SnagFilms tomorrow, before debuting theatrically in New York in December before becoming available on DVD in January. I’ll have a more review-y take on the film tomorrow. In the meantime, an anonymous (but angry!) SpoutBlog reader commented on his/her experience at the film’s first screening in the Hamptons:
First, the film was late to arrive and so we sat for an hour listening to live commentary from Alec Baldwin and Naomi “Preach to You” Watts [sic]. Then the film played and we had to hear it all over again. Naomi is out for one thing… to sell books.
I can’t speak to the motives of Naomi Wolf *or* Naomi Watts, but I can confirm that some aspect of this comment is accurate: the screening did start late, because there was an accident on the highway between Manhattan and East Hampton, and the master tape was stuck in traffic with co-director Annie Sundberg. But most of those in attendance seemed to get some value out the improvised program which preceded the movie, in which Alec Baldwin moderated a conversation about The End of America’s themes with Wolf, co-director Ricki Stern, and ACLU rep Jameel Jaffer. I was there, and I recorded the bulk of the conversation and had it transcribed. That transcript, edited for clarity, can be found after the jump.
Jameel Jaffer, ACLU: The country has really changed in fundamental ways. As the film, I think, really makes quite compelling. The country increasingly is shifting from an open society into one that’s closed and is based on fear. I’m not sure that I would go as far as to say that it is a closed society. One thing that American’s have that is denied to most people in closed societies is the right to vote. Obviously that’s of special importance right now. And if I could say a brief plug for an ACLU campaign, you’ll all get gift bags after the film. And in the gift bag - it’s not an ordinary gift bag. There’s no aftershave or things like that. There’s a Constitution in there. It’s a pocket constitution. And there’s some information about the ACLU’s Constitution Voter Campaign.
Alec Baldwin: There is cologne in the gift bag. “Habeas Corpus.” For men. [As if saying, "But seriously, folks..."] No.
Now we have a situation where [with] domestic eavesdropping, you’ve got the government listening to hundreds of thousands of phone calls a month, and breaking into hundreds of thousands of computers and emails a month. I’d like your opinion about what is that going to do for people’s legal rights in this country in terms of illegally obtained evidence.
Someone was telling me - this is completely speculation, I don’t know if this is true. Eliot Spitzer — and I’m not trying to take the heat of Spitzer and his behavior — but Spitzer, oddly enough, was someone who was drafting memos - this I do know as a fact - that Spitzer really was on the mortgage crisis scenario two weeks prior to him going down. Two weeks prior to them busting Spitzer, he was drafting all these memos and he was going to hold a press conference. He was totally onto the mortgage crisis and what needed to be done about it. But as a result of the Patriot Act, and act of legislation, they were reading his bank records.
I believe, people ever so slightly become more politically sophisticated, but more politically inactive as they get older. So it’s your kids on a college campus that’ll wind up being booked as terrorists for their activity if you’re not careful. Your kid’s going to end up going to prison for something like attending a meeting. So I want you to make a comment about what you think are the imminent dangers now.
Naomi Wolf, Author, The End of America: First, I want to respectfully challenge you [Jamaal] before I answer your [Baldwin's] question. It’s very tempting for us to delay. This, I have to say respectfully, maybe from the point of law you can have that sense of certainty, but from my perspective as a cultural critic, this is delusional. I’m not singling you out. I’m just cautioning you all against this state of mind.
I’ve read many memoirs of sophisticated, educated Germans in 1930, 1931, 1932. And they were writing to each other, “We’re a humane society. We’re the home of Goethe. We are the home of opera and the classical novel. We are the most civilized nation. These thugs are going to come and go. This is going to be a flash in the pan. It can’t get worse. These people are ridiculous. Let’s just laugh at them.”
Again and again and again: “It cannot happen here,” they said in Germany in the early 1930s. And let me just tell you something about how quickly ideals can be extinguished. The founders knew this. They wrote the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in a state of fear. They didn’t have our sense of certainty that we’re different. They categorically wrote that Constitution and set up the system of checks and balances certain that a day like this would arrive in America. They categorically knew that a would-be dictator would arise in America to oppress Americans.
And I just want to say about America, I too believed at the beginning of my journey, well, surely the American people won’t stand for the state legalizing torture. Surely, the American people won’t tolerate the state listening in on their intimate phone conversations this way, describing personal conversations between soldiers in Iraq and their loved ones at home. Surely Americans won’t tolerate a situation where Congress is saying, “We’re subpoenaing Josh Bolton and Harriet Miers for wrongdoing,” and the White House says, “Whatever.”
I’m sorry to tell you, the American people stood for it. And this is how fragile democracy is. There is nothing sacred. We’re going to have to get over this American exceptionalism, that somehow “God just likes us better.” And we’re just special and we’re never going to go the way of Germany or any of those Latin American countries, or Pakistan.
And I can also tell you that historically when there are boots on the ground - and there are now with the deployment of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division - you can have the most sophisticated, civilized society and the minute people start getting hurt, everyone goes quiet.
Jameel: I actually agree with everything you just said. I didn’t mean to suggest that we weren’t in a situation akin to the situation that those countries found themselves in at some point. I just meant to say that we weren’t Germany in 1938-39, and I don’t think you were saying that either.
The other thing, this issue of torture. I think, Alec, your question about what the most urgent issues are right now. The administration right now is arguing that people held at Guantanamo Bay can be tried on the basis of evidence that was obtained through waterboarding, which the administration argues is not torture. There are trials going on in Guantanamo in the name of Americans in which people are going to be in some cases imprisoned for the rest of their lives, and in some cases even put to death on the basis of information that was literally beat out of other people. So I think that that’s a fairly urgent issue.
Alec: It makes you look at that idea: do we care what the government is doing that’s stripping away the rights of people that aren’t Americans. That’s been a big, big part of this administration, is they believe you don’t care because it’s not Americans.
And that’s a really, really profound idea. I’ve always had one motto or one perspective that was leant to me, which is that America is special and America is different, but only in direct proportion to us doing great things and us doing good things. We live in an age now where you have a very tired, wheezing group of people who keep wanting to tell you, “America’s great. America’s great,” regardless of what we do. We just have to keep telling ourselves we’re great and we can go out there and torture people and do these horrible things.
Do you think this is the new reality? Or do you think that a new administration, an administration that ends with a vowel [pause for laughter], would be able to turn this stuff back and change things?
Naomi: Just before I answer that, the most important issue is these boots on the ground. And I should explain what that is, because the next president will have to deal with that.
The 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division has been deployed by George Bush to somewhere in the United States of America. So, that’s 3, 000 or 4, 000 warriors. And they aren’t answerable to Congress, they’re not answerable to the American people, they’re answerable to President Bush. Again from my study, this is never a good sign.
Alec: Where are they now?
Naomi: Nobody knows. I had the surreal experience of being on the “Today Show” this morning and having the “Today Show” give me a great big sound bite from their commander saying, “They’re here to save lives.” And they challenged me as if I was a fear-monger and a dangerous radical for raising the questions about them. And no one, including NBC, knows where they are.
Alec: They’re on 27 Highway, that’s why the tape isn’t here.
Naomi: Who are they and what are they doing? They are battle-hardened soldiers. They’ve spent two tours in Iraq. They were responsible for crowd control in Fallujah. And their original mandate according to the Army Times was crowd control here. They’ve got tasers, they’ve got rubber bullets. They’ve got tanks capable of killing 300 people. They’re armed. And I guess looking at what’s happening around the world in closed-in societies or in weak democracies, soldiers are often sent to monitor elections. Especially contested elections.
So, I don’t like them being here. And by the way, it violates 200 years of the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus, which kept us safe. And why did people around the world envy us? Because we’re safe from soldiers policing our streets. We have civilian police.
Audience member calling out: Why have we not read about it?
Naomi: That is really a very good question. I was just on the phone with a friend from the New York Times saying, “When are you guys going to run the story about where the 1st Brigade is and what they’re doing?” [He said] “It’s classified.”
Jameel: We just filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, I guess this morning, asking for more information about this. But, they’ve only had a few hours to respond and they haven’t come up with a response yet. They may yet come back and say that the information is classified.
Naomi: And if is classified, none of us will ever be able to know, and if you know and tell us, they can prosecute you for a 10-year jail sentence. So this sucks.
[Audience laughs]
Alec: [Motioning to side of the room] Where are you? Ricki, come out for a second. Come and sit with me on my luxury bench here
[Baldwin moves over to the side of the piano bench on which he's sitting. Ricki Stern, the co-director of the film, comes and sits next to him]
Alec: We’re just going to take another quick minute. I think one of the greatest things about when I come to these events, not just this film festival, but any great film festival, and see great narrative and documentary films, is this idea that this is the democracy in action that, I think, is really withering in the country that we live in right now. The corporate media assumes that people don’t want their day to be ruined. I’m somebody that used to read the New York Times every day, and basically watch morning news shows every day. I haven’t watched a morning news show in five years. And I might read the New York Times if I pick it up in somebody’s office while I’m waiting for them to finish on the phone. I get my news online, from other sources that I have more faith in.
This war is, in terms of how it was prosecuted, the worst thing this country has ever done. Vietnam fell and it did not make a bit of difference in anybody’s life here at all. All those [American] men who died were brave soldiers, and they should have not have been treated the way that they were treated when they came home, but in terms of Vietnam falling, in terms of our political stability and our economic stability, that meant nothing. It meant nothing. Now we go ahead and have this war that we have now, where is the protest against this war? Something tells me that there have been a lot of protests, but you just don’t see it on TV. It’s not covered by the media, because the media assumes that the lion’s share of Americans would rather watch Deal or No Deal.
So what was it that led you to make this film?
Ricki: Honestly we were asked. We met with Naomi and Avram Ludwig, the producer of this film, and some of the other people who were involved. They asked us if we would be interested in making it. I think probably from our other films that we had made. And when we met with Naomi early on she thought that it would translate well into a film because the images and the visual comparisons that you see in the film are ones that you don’t need words. They just resonate alone, just by seeing the comparisons. We tried to take her lecture of the book and put it into pictures.
Naomi: What got you interested in this, Alec?
Alec: I’ve said this before and it may seem modest to everybody here, but Bloomberg and the Republican convention really burned my ass. I mean, I was so upset that that happened in the city of New York that they weren’t going to have any protests allowed, it just really kind of drove me almost crazy.
I think both people running for president today - I think presidential candidates are like luggage in some old movie, with all those big stickers on them. Paris. Lisbon. Kyoto. Venice. Presidential candidates are owned by someone. But you still have to ask yourself, in this election, who’s the person who is going to turn back this assault? Who do we have the best chance of turning back this assault of our freedoms in this country? I still believe that the bulk of Americans are hard-working people. They work too hard, as a matter of fact. They pay a lot of money in taxes, and they want to be left alone and they want to live their lives in peace. They don’t need to be monitored by the National Security Agency on an ongoing basis.
Naomi: Alec, there is a question of who’s going to fix it. And I’m trying to tell you that if Barack Obama is elected by a miracle in a transparent, accountable election, we are not out of the woods.
It’s a better outcome because at least we are avoiding the wholesale dismantling of out checks and balances, the further of establishment of police state basics that I’ve argued you’re going to see in a Palin presidency. I’m not too concerned about John McCain, but I’m very, very concerned about Palin being surrounded by Rove advisors and Rove speech writers. And in a closed-in society, you often see a telegenic, not-very-bright figurehead selected by the same group of criminals who intend to be the powers behind the throne in the next regime. They love elections. They hold elections all the time. They just make sure their elections are corrupted and that the figurehead that’s on their team gets in. So if we elect Obama, it’ll stabilize things long enough for what’s necessary for a real citizen’s revolution, a grassroots American democracy movement.
We’ve started one, and you can sign up for it with that piece of paper, that you’ll be able to. And you can go to MyAmericanProject.org. It’s going to be millions and millions of Americans. We have almost five million in the American People Campaign’s partner organizations.
But, here’s what I mean. Barack Obama may want to do all the right things to restore the Constitution. I believe he does sincerely. But many corporations are making trillions of dollars in shredding the Constitution. It’s not cost-effective to stand up for the Constitution. It’s true. Here’s what I mean, you’ll see this in the movie. At the end of the Cold War, the third of the economy making Cold War weapon systems needed to find another global enemy. And so they found the “War on Terror.” And now they’ve switched to surveillance and security technologies.
So, why did [Obama] cave on FISA? Because AT&T is going to make a bundle turning us into the enemy. They’re trading shares on Wall Street for technologies to spy on the Chinese. We are not out of the woods. Barack Obama cannot restore the Constitution without us holding our feet to the fire.
Alec: I have a friend of mine who’s a reservist, and he says we don’t have protests because we don’t have a draft, and people don’t have as much at stake.
Audience member calling out: Is there any evidence of that?
Alec: I don’t know. I’m not a sociologist and I don’t study that problem. [But] a friend of mine who’s a reservist, a guy I know from another field in my business, in the film and television business, who is a pretty right-wing guy. He’s a GI Joe, this guy, all the way. And he said the military, the last thing they want is a draft. He said the military doesn’t want a draft. They love a professional army. They love an army where everybody’s getting paid, you’ve got o bribe everybody to come and pay them more. With a draft, the fees go down, the prices go down, that the politics goes out. The Pentagon, the draft is anathema to them because then the public becomes engaged when their kids may die.
Naomi: I’ve got a chapter on protests in the new book, and what I discovered really surprised me. Basically over the last 30 years, there’s been a process of over-permitization that I believe is deliberate to make sure that our protest in America is pointless and puerile.
I studied what kind of protests bring down tyrannical regimes, and they’re the kind of protests that brought down the Berlin Wall and restored the people’s power in the Philippines, and liberated Estonia. They’re illegal in the United States now. I tried to stage a rally in Union Square for the Constitution. There I was with my bullhorn and two people and I was told 10 minutes in that it was illegal, because it’s illegal to use a bullhorn in Union Square without a permit. And I found out the permit process is set up to frustrate you and make you impotent, essentially, as citizens. You go to these marches and you go from here to there and you feel like that didn’t change anything. Well, guess what? It didn’t.
The kinds of the protests that change the outcome of history stop traffic. They bring everything to a halt. That’s what you had in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. That kind of protest is illegal now. The other reason people are staying home has to do with the militarization of the police forces. I was in my stroller - I was a hippie baby, I grew up in Haight-Ashbury. I was in my stroller with my mom or dad, against the bomb and against this and against that. When I take my kids to protests now, Homeland Security is sending millions of dollars to police departments, training them, giving them new lethal technologies, and paying in advance for the lawsuits that the ACLU is going to represent citizens for when they’ve been beaten or assaulted. So those are two reasons.
Jameel: I think that the question goes back to something that Alec was saying earlier, which is that people don’t care about these things because they’re not happening to them. They’re happening to non-citizens. And it’s true that when these policies were first instituted that they were being applied to non-citizens. The people held at Guantanamo are non-citizens. The people who were being wire-tapped around 9/11 were noncitizens.
But it’s increasingly true that all of these policies are being applied to Americans. Some of the people who are being held as enemy combatants are Americans. We now represent somebody who is a US resident, he was studying at Peoria, Illinois when he was picked up.
He’s held still as an enemy combatant. And also the NSA stuff is happening to people who are citizens too.
Naomi: The movie’s here, so I’m supposed to wrap it up. But I just want to say thank you so much for your patience. And before you go into this dark journey, I just want to say, history categorically shows that when we all work together we can reverse this and come out stronger. Thank you all so much.
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth