the buck stops where?

Yesterday, I saw a documentary called Gunner Palace about the daily lives of soldiers living out of one of Uday Hussein's palaces in Baghdad. It's a great movie and I hope it gets wide distribution. The strength of the film is that it takes its time to capture the texture of daily life for the soliders -- patrolling the streets during the day, night raids looking for suspected terrorists, partying by the pool, rapping, playing guitar, training the Iraqi Civil Defense forces, interacting with Iraqi translators and civilians. It gets you into the rhythm of life there and also keeps you attuned to the length of time that the soliders have in their tours of duty. Titles on the screen announce how long each individual has left in Baghdad: 300 days, 200 days... The movie is funny and full of attitude (it takes its cues mostly from the soldiers themselves). It has a great soundtrack, too, featuring lots of rap and freestyling performed by the servicemen. In fact, the picture of war it shows is remarkbly like David O. Russell's Three Kings, a movie that, though fictionalized, seems with each passing year more perceptive, more accurate, more amazingly ahead of its time.

In an effort to demonstrate that this film is not Farenheit 9/11, the marketing for Gunner Palace emphasizes that it's the soliders own stories, told by them, with "no politics" and "no B.S." What they mean I think is that the film is not about partisanship, though it does confront tough issues. In one of the most powerful moments, right at the end, a solider says, "I don't think that, in the history of the world, a person has ever killed another persona and something good came out of it."

Watching it in a dowtown New York movie theater (the Angelika) with an audience that was almost certainly made up of anti-war liberals was an interesting experience. Very few people responded vocally (though I laughed quite a lot myself). It's not an agitational piece like Michael Moore's film; it won't leave you shaken in quite the same way that most of us were after watching Lila Lipscombe's grief. In fact, the soliders continually express their perception that, unless he or shew has a family member in the service, the average American isn't really thinking about what's going on in Iraq.

I think that's true. It's certainly been my experience, despite the fact that my unlce, a retired Marine, is over in Baghdad right now. For most of 2004 I followed casualty reports in the New York Times with a self-satisfied sense of indignation that fuelled my opposition to Bush. Since the Iraqi election, there has been far less coverage of the war on the front pages (it has fallen off the radar screen much in the way that the Afghan campaign has). Instead, I get worked up about things like Bush's Social Security and Medicaid proposals. How have we forgotten so easily when it seemed like we cared so much?

Opposition to this war offers a fascinating case study of how our society has changed since the 1960s. Yes, the anti-war campaigns that began in 2003 as the war was being planned did seem to signal a widespread re-invigoration of protest culture. Everyone wore buttons and went to marches. Everyone posted their favorite anti-Bush cartoons on their refrigerators. This was especially true in New York over the summer: during the buildup to the Republican National Convention protest became the "new black." Oppostion to the ruling party was a fashion statement. Time Out New York offered a guide to protest activity, along with its club and restaurant listings, recognizing that marching would be the "in" thing to do for the month of August. But it now seems like it was a second-rate, knockoff version of dissent. Did society ever come to a halt? Was anything really disrupted at all?

People got worked up about protesting because of media saturation, but the commitment didn't run deep. Once the news cycle was over, the population at large moved on. Include myself in this assessment: when I get emails now from the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition about marches on Washington, I tend to delete them. I feel bad about it, but somehow it all seems irrelevant, ineffective.

Part of the superficiality of the 2004 protest fad was that it got entangled to our cult of personality. Bush became a figure to rage against, a stock enemy. We were busy focusing on him rather than on the issues. Much of the progressive rhetoric in 2004 never got beyond "Bush is stupid," "Bush is a hypocrite" or "Bush is a Christian fundamentalist." Opposition to Vietnam transcended party lines: the war was waged by Johnson and Nixon. What would we be saying if it were Kerry (who voted for the war) in the White House now? Would things really be any different? Farenheit 9/11, powerful and funny as it was, contributed to this failing. I can see that now after watching Gunner Palace. It muddied its critique with too many clips of Bush gaffes to make us feel satisfied that we on the East Coast were smarter than the man in charge.

What we needed was something to challenge us, to make us ask if we are not equally responsible for allowing all of this to happen (and to continue to happen), for continuing to pay taxes, continuing to support a tepidly oppositional Democratic party. That's tough stuff and I certianly don't think that I'm able to dish it out, given the level of apathy and political inconsistency that I've fallen into recently. But that's the conversation we need to start.

The politics of blame allow everyone to be comfortable. The politics of collective responsibility force us to admit that as long as our nation continues to wage unjust war, torture detainees, or to target the poor and the marginalized, each one of us is morally diminished.