THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 24, ISSUE 42
AMERICA’S PETER PRINCIPLE
by Malik Isasis
On June 28, 1980 the late, great film critic Pauline Kael wrote a scathing essay simply called, “Why Movies are Bad?” in which she eloquently listed eighteen systemic reasons why Hollywood films are bad. Even twenty-eight years ago, Kael had the foresight to see where Hollywood was going.
In the opening paragraph she says, “The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience — they're inheriting an audience.”
During the 1960s and 70s social upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Movement, Gay Rights Movement, Vietnam protestations, and the legalization of abortion were all backdrops to the era.
While Hollywood was creating Elvis Presley musicals, other Hollywood musicals and comedies, a loose collection of French filmmakers known as the French New Wave in 1950s and 60s were rejecting classical cinematic form and told stories that aimed to raise consciousness making American cinema look childish, out of touch and very antiquated.
When studio execs finally began awakening they began creating such works as Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Enter the Dragon, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, The Conversation, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Alien and Rocky. There were a lot of black folk in the movies too. The genre known as Blaxploitation, wasn’t a exploitation at all. Black artists were working creating films like Penitentiary, Black Belt Jones, Blacula, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Sparkle, Welfare, Cornbread, Coffy (all of Pam Grier’s films) the list goes on.
Two films that were also part of the 70s movement were Jaws and Star Wars, two exceptional films that also begun the decline of cinema. Jaws and Star Wars started the movie-event, blockbuster films.
“When Alien opened "big," Alan Ladd, Jr., president of the pictures division of Twentieth Century Fox, was regarded as a demigod; it's the same way that Fred Silverman was a demigod. It has nothing to do with quality, only with the numbers. (Ladd and his team weren't admired for the small pictures they took chances on and the artists they stuck by.) The media now echo the kind of thinking that goes on in Hollywood, and spread it wide. Movie critics on TV discuss the relative grosses of the new releases; the grosses at this point relative to previous hits; which pictures win pass the others in a few weeks. It's like the Olympics — which will be the winners?”
The decline of films anticipated by Kael was related to what she theorized as the lack of risk studio executives were willing to take. Shitty films still made lots of money, so their risk-assessment was validated at the box-office.
”The studios no longer make movies primarily to attract and please moviegoers; they make movies in such a way as to get as much as possible from prearranged and anticipated deals… There is an even grimmer side to all this: because the studios have discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking, they don't want to make any movies that they can't protect themselves on.”
The Peter Principle
There is an interesting parallel in Kael’s essay to the decline politics of the last generation. During Bush’s 8 years we still have a gaping hole in the ground where the Twin Towers once stood; New Orleans still lay in ruins after Hurricane Katrina with a rebuild of the same failed levee system. Many of the country’s infrastructures lay in disrepair and on the verge of a catastrophe.
Politicians have developed a strong reptilian brain, that is, self-interest, self-preservation and the maintenance of power by all means necessary including starting wars in the case of the Republicans, and going along with them, in the case of the Democrats.
How did we get to this place? Why are politicians so bad?
The Peter Principle states that a person will be promoted to the highest level of his/or her competence and eventually advance to a level of incompetence. I believe the level of incompetence in our politicians began with the advent of corporate lobbyists and political consultants who advise and coach politicians during campaigns. As a result we began getting politicians both Republican and Democrat who are interchangeable, both offering an equal amount of nothingness, just hackneyed slogans.
The modern Republican Party overrun with neocons, and religious fanatics has made the party an unsustainable movement. The country needs more than Laissez faire tax cuts, fear and Jesus to remain a viable power in the world. Maybe it’s their political DNA, which tends toward fascism upon reaching the pinnacles of power. What is clear though, is throughout the 20th century; the Republicans have wrought disaster after disaster. During the 1920s there were three consecutive Republican Presidencies: Warren Harding (1920-1923), Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) and Herbert Hoover (1929-1933). What we are seeing with Bush, and what we have seen with his father’s Administration and the Reagan Administration has all been seen before, but the American people treat history as if it were disposable. Political consultants understand this, which is why Republicans every election cycle are able to rise like the Phoenix to repeat the same mistakes.
Why should politicians change when they are rewarded for their incompetent governance? Bush was rewarded with a second term after a disastrous first term. We don’t expect much from the people we elect, and they in turn don’t expect much from us. Our leadership is a symptom of our failure, our lack of critical thinking, our ability to be easily frightened, easily manipulated and managed by superficial distractions, and easily misinformed. We are who we elect, right?
On October 29, 2007 Zogby Poll released a poll that showed that 52% of Americans would support a strike against Iran. Is it that an obtuse American populace had suddenly and carefully read up on the region thoughtfully and had come to a reasonable conclusion, or was it a sales job by corporate [media] propagandists with their hands up Republicans’ and Democrats’ asses pushing for another oil grab?
Corporations and its news subsidiaries along with politicians have convinced Americans that they have choices and through those choices, power. Evidence A: the election of the Democratic Party in 2006 to take over Congress. What have the Democratic Party done besides aid and abet the Republicans and corporatists?
False Choices
In Americans’ lifetime they will have watched 3 years worth of commercials. While Americans have a plethora of choices, those choices are consumer choices rather than political choices. Notice how corporate pundits are touting Vice Presidential choices? The media’s vice presidential candidates are insiders, corporate Democrats and Republicans. If Obama were to choose someone outside of this list—say a real progressive, his candidacy would surely be targeted as too much of a risk. Obama understands this threat and will pick someone safe like Evan Byah, a conservative, corporate Democrat who will fight to maintain the status quo. Consumer choice and political choice are not the same.
While we are distracted with all of the consumer choices, corporate raiders are treating the federal government like a buffet. No-bid contracts and cronyism has fueled the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, and the health care industrial complex. These industries have created and worsen the very problems they claim to correct. The United States has the highest incarceration rate out of the Western world; the United States has been in a perpetual war for 57 years beginning with the Korean War; and the United States’ health care system exacerbates sickness and indebtedness. Who besides corporations, benefits when the federal government is privatized?
Building Consent
Corporations manufacture need and exploit the American people with constant fear of death, disease, Arabs, Mexicans and black people. Fear is how the corporate raiders build consent. Most Americans don’t know better because they are bombarded with misinformation. For instance the corporate media giant NBC according to Corporate Watch was rewarded with 2.2 billion dollars in defense contracts in 2005. Before the Iraq war and subsequent occupation, NBC and MSNBC all but saluted Bush and his build up to war and promoting it without question. Now we know the silence was worth 2.2 billion dollars.
As media critic Ben Bagdikian noted in his book The Media Monopoly, "At issue is the possession of power to surround almost every man, woman and child in the country with controlled images and words, to socialize each new generation of Americans, to alter the political agenda of the country" (Bagdikian, IX).
Under this new imperial paradigm, corporate expansionism, and acquisition and ownership of mass media by industrial corporations such as newspapers, book publishing, magazines, broadcast and cable news has allowed these corporations to exercise unprecedented influence over national legislation and government agencies. Uninformed Americans are clay to be molded as the corporate raiders see fit. The decay critical thinking will continue to rot our democracy from inside out.
AMERICA’S PETER PRINCIPLE
by Malik Isasis
On June 28, 1980 the late, great film critic Pauline Kael wrote a scathing essay simply called, “Why Movies are Bad?” in which she eloquently listed eighteen systemic reasons why Hollywood films are bad. Even twenty-eight years ago, Kael had the foresight to see where Hollywood was going.
In the opening paragraph she says, “The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience — they're inheriting an audience.”
During the 1960s and 70s social upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Movement, Gay Rights Movement, Vietnam protestations, and the legalization of abortion were all backdrops to the era.
While Hollywood was creating Elvis Presley musicals, other Hollywood musicals and comedies, a loose collection of French filmmakers known as the French New Wave in 1950s and 60s were rejecting classical cinematic form and told stories that aimed to raise consciousness making American cinema look childish, out of touch and very antiquated.
When studio execs finally began awakening they began creating such works as Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Enter the Dragon, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, The Conversation, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Alien and Rocky. There were a lot of black folk in the movies too. The genre known as Blaxploitation, wasn’t a exploitation at all. Black artists were working creating films like Penitentiary, Black Belt Jones, Blacula, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Sparkle, Welfare, Cornbread, Coffy (all of Pam Grier’s films) the list goes on.
Two films that were also part of the 70s movement were Jaws and Star Wars, two exceptional films that also begun the decline of cinema. Jaws and Star Wars started the movie-event, blockbuster films.
“When Alien opened "big," Alan Ladd, Jr., president of the pictures division of Twentieth Century Fox, was regarded as a demigod; it's the same way that Fred Silverman was a demigod. It has nothing to do with quality, only with the numbers. (Ladd and his team weren't admired for the small pictures they took chances on and the artists they stuck by.) The media now echo the kind of thinking that goes on in Hollywood, and spread it wide. Movie critics on TV discuss the relative grosses of the new releases; the grosses at this point relative to previous hits; which pictures win pass the others in a few weeks. It's like the Olympics — which will be the winners?”
The decline of films anticipated by Kael was related to what she theorized as the lack of risk studio executives were willing to take. Shitty films still made lots of money, so their risk-assessment was validated at the box-office.
”The studios no longer make movies primarily to attract and please moviegoers; they make movies in such a way as to get as much as possible from prearranged and anticipated deals… There is an even grimmer side to all this: because the studios have discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking, they don't want to make any movies that they can't protect themselves on.”
The Peter Principle
There is an interesting parallel in Kael’s essay to the decline politics of the last generation. During Bush’s 8 years we still have a gaping hole in the ground where the Twin Towers once stood; New Orleans still lay in ruins after Hurricane Katrina with a rebuild of the same failed levee system. Many of the country’s infrastructures lay in disrepair and on the verge of a catastrophe.
Politicians have developed a strong reptilian brain, that is, self-interest, self-preservation and the maintenance of power by all means necessary including starting wars in the case of the Republicans, and going along with them, in the case of the Democrats.
How did we get to this place? Why are politicians so bad?
The Peter Principle states that a person will be promoted to the highest level of his/or her competence and eventually advance to a level of incompetence. I believe the level of incompetence in our politicians began with the advent of corporate lobbyists and political consultants who advise and coach politicians during campaigns. As a result we began getting politicians both Republican and Democrat who are interchangeable, both offering an equal amount of nothingness, just hackneyed slogans.
The modern Republican Party overrun with neocons, and religious fanatics has made the party an unsustainable movement. The country needs more than Laissez faire tax cuts, fear and Jesus to remain a viable power in the world. Maybe it’s their political DNA, which tends toward fascism upon reaching the pinnacles of power. What is clear though, is throughout the 20th century; the Republicans have wrought disaster after disaster. During the 1920s there were three consecutive Republican Presidencies: Warren Harding (1920-1923), Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) and Herbert Hoover (1929-1933). What we are seeing with Bush, and what we have seen with his father’s Administration and the Reagan Administration has all been seen before, but the American people treat history as if it were disposable. Political consultants understand this, which is why Republicans every election cycle are able to rise like the Phoenix to repeat the same mistakes.
Why should politicians change when they are rewarded for their incompetent governance? Bush was rewarded with a second term after a disastrous first term. We don’t expect much from the people we elect, and they in turn don’t expect much from us. Our leadership is a symptom of our failure, our lack of critical thinking, our ability to be easily frightened, easily manipulated and managed by superficial distractions, and easily misinformed. We are who we elect, right?
On October 29, 2007 Zogby Poll released a poll that showed that 52% of Americans would support a strike against Iran. Is it that an obtuse American populace had suddenly and carefully read up on the region thoughtfully and had come to a reasonable conclusion, or was it a sales job by corporate [media] propagandists with their hands up Republicans’ and Democrats’ asses pushing for another oil grab?
Corporations and its news subsidiaries along with politicians have convinced Americans that they have choices and through those choices, power. Evidence A: the election of the Democratic Party in 2006 to take over Congress. What have the Democratic Party done besides aid and abet the Republicans and corporatists?
False Choices
In Americans’ lifetime they will have watched 3 years worth of commercials. While Americans have a plethora of choices, those choices are consumer choices rather than political choices. Notice how corporate pundits are touting Vice Presidential choices? The media’s vice presidential candidates are insiders, corporate Democrats and Republicans. If Obama were to choose someone outside of this list—say a real progressive, his candidacy would surely be targeted as too much of a risk. Obama understands this threat and will pick someone safe like Evan Byah, a conservative, corporate Democrat who will fight to maintain the status quo. Consumer choice and political choice are not the same.
While we are distracted with all of the consumer choices, corporate raiders are treating the federal government like a buffet. No-bid contracts and cronyism has fueled the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, and the health care industrial complex. These industries have created and worsen the very problems they claim to correct. The United States has the highest incarceration rate out of the Western world; the United States has been in a perpetual war for 57 years beginning with the Korean War; and the United States’ health care system exacerbates sickness and indebtedness. Who besides corporations, benefits when the federal government is privatized?
Building Consent
Corporations manufacture need and exploit the American people with constant fear of death, disease, Arabs, Mexicans and black people. Fear is how the corporate raiders build consent. Most Americans don’t know better because they are bombarded with misinformation. For instance the corporate media giant NBC according to Corporate Watch was rewarded with 2.2 billion dollars in defense contracts in 2005. Before the Iraq war and subsequent occupation, NBC and MSNBC all but saluted Bush and his build up to war and promoting it without question. Now we know the silence was worth 2.2 billion dollars.
As media critic Ben Bagdikian noted in his book The Media Monopoly, "At issue is the possession of power to surround almost every man, woman and child in the country with controlled images and words, to socialize each new generation of Americans, to alter the political agenda of the country" (Bagdikian, IX).
Under this new imperial paradigm, corporate expansionism, and acquisition and ownership of mass media by industrial corporations such as newspapers, book publishing, magazines, broadcast and cable news has allowed these corporations to exercise unprecedented influence over national legislation and government agencies. Uninformed Americans are clay to be molded as the corporate raiders see fit. The decay critical thinking will continue to rot our democracy from inside out.
posted by Malik Isasis at
3:24 PM
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