Forward Backward Thinking

The many fans of writer extraordinaire Aaron Sorkin’s TV fantasy of the presidency, The West Wing, were able to luxuriate in nostalgia this week.

In support of Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote, a non-partisan (Note: Ahem) organization that seeks to encourage voting in groups that too often sit out elections (e.g. young people, communities of color), HBO Max presented a staged reading, with the original cast, of Sorkin’s favorite WW episode — season 3’s Hartfield’s Landing.

This is where senior White House staff obsess about what the first reported presidential primary vote will be in a fictional 48-person New Hampshire town. After all, the results will dominate the news all day and, if it goes well for the POTUS, it will set a positive tone for all the hoped for favorable press their boss will receive.

And, as we all now know, there is nothing more urgent than setting an upbeat tone in order to win the White House. Right?

Well, history turns on a dime and what seemed urgent in 2002 and then became just plain silly in light of 2016 could easily, once again, become necessary in 2020. Right?

Sure! As I explained to my students this week online via Zoom, because there’s been a deadly pandemic going on for the last eight months and we couldn’t possibly all be in the same room or breathe the same air, history swings like a pendulum – from left to right and back again.

To which one of them blurted out:

So, when IS it going to swing back?

I, of course, immediately blurted back that they had to go out to the streets and, while safely socially distanced, swing it back the way they wanted. Until I realized this was not only likely impossible but sounded like a Grade C imitation of the response Sorkin himself would give.

Nor do I even believe it in the darker days of 2020. Which, I confess, is most all of them.

Still, when you live in a purported democracy that’s about all you have, isn’t it? It’s really just in how inspiring a way you can express it.

Like a bad haircut, maybe it just needs time.

Well, Mr. Sorkin’s once again done an excellent job on that score as both writer and director in his latest film, The Trial of the Chicago 7. (Note…. the segue).

Dropping on Netflix just one day after the gauzy West Wing redux, his new Netflix offering (Note: Because, well, our pandemic politics has shuttered most movie theatres and shoved this planned major theatrical release from Paramount right into your home stream) is anything but delicate.

Instead, it’s a theatrically cynical look back into history when the U.S. government was intent on using politics and every piece of the legal system, whether illegally or not, to punish and jail those who dare to take their protests onto the streets.

Side Note: It seems particularly fitting it dropped after a week of Senate hearings aimed at putting arch Conservative (and self-possessed handmaid) Judge Amy Coney Barrett on the US Supreme Court. When asked this week by a Republican senator to name the five freedoms the Bill or Rights guarantees for all Americans, Ms. Barrett could only think of four – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.

The one freedom that stumped her?

The right to petition the government for redress of grievances, OR, freedom to protest.

Fittingly enough, the clairvoyant Mr. Sorkin’s new legal drama takes us back in time to the late sixties, when this very issue was very, very VERY publicly spotlighted. This was a time when the federal government, newly controlled by the uber conservative and freedom of protest loathing Richard Nixon, decided to charge a group of young and somewhat renowned and popular anti- Vietnam War protestors for conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intent to incite riots at the site of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Take the antics of this cross-section of long and short-haired, hippie and preppy, respectful and comically stoned and disrespectful young people – and mix it with a real-life first amendment-hating and often blatantly racist judge tasked with carrying out those charges by newly installed and diabolically fascist federally empowered Nixon flunkies and, well, you can see where hilarity and mass national conflicts could ensue.

And where the comparable present-day hyperbole might begin.

It’s not a particularly pretty story to look back on, even with the much hoped for and very pithily delivered Sorkin bon mots. But even if you don’t love Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat movies or his borderline irredeemable prankster antics, you couldn’t experience anyone better portraying the late Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, who famously feasted on yanking the chain of the establishment and even of his co-defendant Tom Hayden, the more straight-laced founder of Students for a Democratic Society so well evoked by Eddie Redmayne.

Ditto for so many others, including Frank Langella’s racist persecutor/Judge Hoffman, whose shared last name with Abbie is an ongoing joke, as well as a brief but memorable appearance by Michael Keaton as Ramsey Clarke, the much more liberal former attorney general from the previous Johnson administration.

It is the shifting of the pendulum of justice between left and right, liberal and conservative, and everything in between that gives the story of this Trial of the Chicago 7 its present day resonance. At least for those of us hoping that this Election Day is about to once again cause a major shift back to what we used to think of as American sanity.

Yet at the same time it’s also this very issue that makes this movie inescapably scary. As one watches the absolute conviction a single judge, backed by a new presidential administration, has towards enforcing racist and regressive views, and notes how willing both are to twist or even ignore the very laws it’s charged with enforcing in order to permanently silence those who oppose them, one can’t help but wonder — how many times CAN the pendulum shift back and forth before it all together cracks apart?

Sorkin’s courtroom antics and filmmaking dexterity do a great job of zeroing in on the core issues at stake and give us a happy ending from five decades ago that ensures American democracy will continue.

But this week’s US Supreme Court hearing, the one that will very likely (and somewhat dubiously) enshrine perhaps the most conservative judge in American history onto OUR Supreme Court, combined with the challenge for the umpteenth time of once again shifting the American presidency away from, well, fascism (Note: Fascism being the kind word), is a very steep, real life, hill to climb.

Holding on tight to that last shred of hope

Especially in the middle of a global pandemic.

Where our ability, and even right to vote as we can, is being challenged at every turn.

Sorkin has written and imagined the way forward for us by going back in time. But we now have to figure how to carry it out.

Another pat answer from me that borders on the cliché.

Still, life’s never been quite as efficient, or satisfying, as any one Sorkin movie or TV series, much as we all (Note: Well, the majority of us), would like to continue to pretend it to be.

Bob Marley – “Get Up Stand Up”

07.10.16

by notesfromachair

What Do We Do Now?

At the end of the iconic film of American electoral politics – The Candidate – blonde, handsome and iconically American Robert Redford sits blankly confused after winning his unlikely maiden bid to the U.S. Senate and famously asks the smarmily savvy political consultant who got him there:

What do we do now?

Almost half a century later, it’s still an apt question.

Two more comparatively young Black men were shot and killed by police this week in what can best and most generously be described as grievous mistakes in the line of duty and at worst would be called racist executions by white guys in law enforcement uniforms.

Still, we should all think long and hard after we listen and speak to as many people as possible on questions such as the above one. Because before those two deaths had even sunk in, a cock-eyed retaliation took place from an angry, unbalanced decision-maker that had worldwide reverberations. This would be the murderous rampage via an assault-like rifle and handgun from a single shooter into a crowd of Dallas police officers and demonstrators that managed to murder five white cops as well as injure seven other people.

too many headlines

Oh yes. The execution of the police was done by a 25 year-old African-American veteran of our seldom-mentioned U.S. war in Afghanistan in retaliation for the aforementioned shooting of the two Black men at the hands of the police. Though what the shooter didn’t know is one of the men in blue that he killed was a young American war veteran himself.

The Candidate was released in 1972 but reflects what seemed like the ripping apart of the social fabric of America at the time. Race riots nationally in 1967, the Chicago police beating the crap out of demonstrators at the Democratic presidential convention in 1968 and the murder of four at Kent State University in 1970 when members of the National Guard decided to shoot into a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War with a couple of rocks and beer cans. Though in fact, two of the dead were simply walking by on the way to class.

Pres. Obama said in a speech this week in Poland that what is going on now is different from the civil unrest in 1960s America and that today we are a country more unified. This is why he is a leader and the president of the U.S. That’s what great leaders attempt to do – unify.

Also this

Me, I’m not so sure. I tend to think of it more like the writer and journalist James C. Moore (“Bush’s Brain”) observed several days ago. He opined that the angry rhetoric of the far right has released an ugliness into the country that began to bubble to the surface once the majority of us elected our first African American president almost eight years ago. And that this ugliness has morphed into a righteous anger on the part of many whites who are now rallying behind a Republican nominee who periodically releases coded racial dog whistles that flame their anger and more than imply a good old-fashioned American retaliation (nee violence?) to protestors or those deviating from their “values” is more than acceptable.

It is interesting to note that part of what angered young Americans in the late sixties and early seventies was not only the Vietnam War but the election of Richard Nixon, who famously campaigned as the law and order candidate who represented the silent majority. It might not be as currently catchy as Make America Great Again or Take Back America but it served its purpose. He did win. Twice. Though never mind he was forced to resign midway through his second term in order to avoid what was a likely impeachment due to the dirty tricks with which he willingly engaged in order to be re-elected to the White House. #Watergate (Note: Look it up).

… or watch any of these movies

Of course, if you’ve watched any news report in the last several months where either of the nominees speaks or is spoken about it is impossible to not hear accusations of dirty tricks, double-dealings, sketchy email servers, shady real estate dealings or crooked something or others – from both sides.

Still, in 1968 it was at the Democratic convention in Chicago that the Democratic mayor Richard Daley unleashed his police force to rough up protestors that he believed were behaving in an “un-American way.” This time it is only when we watch the Republican nominee speak and a protestor is present do we invariably hear said nominee bellowing from the podium – “Get’em Out! Get ’Em Out” – usually amid roars of approval from his apoplectically cheering crowd as the would-be insurgent is dragged, often literally, out of the arena and away not only from earshot but from his sight line.

Sure, history might repeat itself but certainly never in exactly the same way and usually not by the same crowd in question. Nevertheless, there’s a tediousness to it all, isn’t there? You’d think we adults would have learned something by now.

a bloody mess

Tediousness is, of course, a highly inappropriate term to use when the deaths of loved ones and social injustice are involved. But when you watch Pres. Obama – arguably one of the most even-handed statesmen the country has ever wrought –once again stand at a podium and try to speak about race relations, gun violence and what does indeed make America great amid all the carnage, you can still see the weariness in his eyes.

It’s like a tired, spent parent having to correct his disobedient child for the 1700^th time. You know he simply wants to shake the kid and say, “don’t you get it, yet?? What the “f” is wrong with you??” But instead, like all good parents, or teachers for that matter, he bears down and tries to phrase the lesson in yet another way so the youngster might, just might, understand.

and when in doubt…

This is in sharp contrast to what anyone else is doing at the moment. So even though I might sometimes disagree with his tactics or phrasings, in the end I have to admit that I almost always agree with the message Pres. Obama is trying, against the greatest of odds, to get across. Perhaps, this is because he is equal parts Black and White. Though I’m sure some would say that’s far too easy of an answer.

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: 1968 Chicago

Forward Backward Thinking

What Do We Do Now?