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Today's
Stories
January 17 / 18, 2003
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
January 12, 2004
Ben Tripp
No Stan
for the Kurds
Norman Solomon
The
Dixie Trap: Democrats and the South
Mike Whitney
O'Neill's Revenge
Jason Leopold
From the Very First Instant It Was About Iraq
Uri Avnery
Syria's
Peace Proposal
January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
January 9, 2004
David Lindorff
The
Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses
Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's
Non-existent WMDs
Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail
Lenni Brenner
Dr.
Dean and the Godhead
Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium
Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad
January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
Uncharitable
Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads
Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A Record
to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
Cuban Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
January 17 / 18, 2004
Making War, Making
Movies
The
Collaboration of Robert S. McNamara and Errol Morris on Fog of
War
By BRUCE JACKSON
"I can't help but admire Robert
McNamara," Errol Morris said recently. "Whether it's
futile, misguided, self-serving, here is a man who devoted himself
to trying to mitigate or prevent war, a man who was involved
in creating the limited test ban treaty, a man who has advocated
the creation of an international court to adjudicate war crimes.
I really admire him."
Fortunately, not a bit of that is in
Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,
Morris's film about the man who was secretary of defense from
1961 through 1968 for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McNamara
diligently executed the Vietnam war for both of them, though
he seems to have developed doubts about it as time went by. When
he became too vocal in private meetings about his reservations,
Johnson banished him in the presidency of the World Bank.
Postmodern documentary
The film is gorgeous and the editing
usually seamless. Images slide in and out and though you can
tell the difference in what is staged and what isn't, it makes
no difference because the elements are all there as part of Morris's
construct. No documentary filmmaker is more adept than Morris
at dissolving the line between totally fabricated and reconstructed.
He is the perfect post-modern filmmaker; by comparison, he makes
Frederic Wiseman look didactic.
Few filmmakers are as skilled as Morris
at visualizing other people's abstractions and ideas, which is
why he has been so successful doing major commercials for Apple,
Coors, Adidas, 7-Eleven and other such companies. He is brilliant
at illustrating possibility. He managed to make a fascinating
film out of Stephen Hawking's book on quantum theory and relativity,
A Brief History of Time (1992). His film about the wrongful murder
conviction of Randall Adams in Texas, Thin Blue Line, dramatizes
every theory about how that murder happened but the one that
in all likelihood did happen.
Fog of War is organized into chapters
built around pithy things McNamara says--"Believing and
seeing are both often wrong." "Rationality will not
save us." "Empathize with your enemy." "In
order to do good you have to be willing to do evil."--but
it's the lugubrious and insistent score by Philip Glass that
glues the whole thing together. It is not unlike the lugubrious
and insistent score Glass did for Thin Blue Line. Any time there's
any doubt about how you might regard an image--light or heavy?
peripheral or central?--Glass's music is there to lead you by
the ear.
Sometimes McNamara is dead center in
the frame; sometimes the frame is tilted right or left and he's
moved to the side of the frame. Verticals on the backdrop accentuate
the skews. It's a matter of visual variety; there's no connection
with substance when the tilts happen. Sometimes bombs fall; sometimes
animated names of cities and numbers of dead fall. There's no
difference in the film as perhaps there is no difference from
the high altitude cockpits and bombardiers' scopes, and surely
none at all from the distant desks and plotting boards of the
theorists putting it all into motion. That's what McNamara was
in WWII , a theorist who he helped plan the firebombing of 67
Japanese cities, including Tokyo, where 100,000 civilians were
burned to death.
Confusion and accountability
The film's title comes from McNamara's
assertion that the human mind cannot at once contain all the
variables in war, that understanding is possible only later,
if ever. That post-modern theory of warfare is not merely an
insight achieved. It is also, and more importantly, an excuse
given. If you believe in the fog of war theory, then anyone has
a perfect excuse after the fog clears. "Oh, I did that when
the fog was heavy." Some--not McNamara--argue that the people
we empower to kill virtually at will should be held to a higher
standard of clarity than that: if you can't see through the fog,
don't kill anybody, at least not until the light gets better
and you have some idea what you're really doing.
In the film, McNamara never seems to
consider his own accountability for anything. Morris asks him
who is responsible for war and without apparent hesitation McNamara
says "The president." It seems never to have occurred
to him that he could have stepped up to a microphone and said,
"This war is wrong and those people are dying and getting
maimed for nothing," though he apparently knew and believed
both statements to be true. Morris gently nudges him there, but
there he will not go. How can he?
McNamara admits to errors. Everyone,
he says, commits errors in war. That is part of the nature of
war. What he never talks about is the moral core of war. He talks
about the efficiency of this or that (firebombing Japan, say)
and about the legal culpability of losers. He talks about the
potential price of error in the nuclear age ("We were that
close," he says--holding thumb and forefinger a millimeter
apart--to nuclear war with Russia over the Cuban missile crisis).
But he says nothing about good or evil,
having done (as opposed to having been) right or wrong. There's
a world of difference in doing right or wrong and being right
or wrong. The latter is determined only by the final score; the
former is determined by values with which the final score may
have nothing at all to do. McNamara, even now, approaching the
end, is either deaf and blind to the difference or sees no use
to himself in considering them.
Justifying a life
He seems particularly proud of having
been at Ford Motor Company when the seatbelt was developed, of
his management team having scored higher or better or more appropriately
on Ford's aptitude tests than anybody else's management team,
and of having been the first president of Ford who was not a
member of the founder's family. He also talks a lot about how
well he did at grade school and in college. Morris shot 20 hours
of McNamara talking and the entire film is 97 minutes long. McNamara
talks through most, but by no means all of it. We don't know
what questions Morris asked, if any, to get him talking about
those matters and what level of detail he indicated he wanted.
The fact that McNamara spends a lot of time in the film talking
about his successes at Ford and in school is at least as much
a trope of Morris as a brag by McNamara.
Much of what McNamara says here is in
his 1995 book In Retrospect. When that was published, critics
wondered, "Why now?" Was he trying to set his life
in order? Justify himself to himself? He was never the kind of
career-rewriting fabricator Kissinger was and is. Not that he
didn't care what people thought, but the people whose thoughts
he cared about weren't the general public.
Robert McNamara is perhaps Earl Morris's
perfect subject. There is no truth in McNamara, only the purported
recollection and recomposition of facts. McNamara, in a phrase
that was a cliche in New York prisons a few years back, "is
what he is." We come away from the film with as many questions
as before it began, perhaps more. What does he really reveal
of himself? How much can we know when all we know is what we
see, and all we see here is an old man staring into a camera
and dramatizations of the old man's words or brilliant combinations
of archival footage and animations by Error Morris?
We'll never know why he chose to expose
himself to Errol Morris or what part of himself he exposed and
what part he hid. We have what we have; the film is what it is.
You know character, said Aristotle in "Poetics," by
the choices a person makes. This film is an old man talking about
another time, a time when he was hugely powerful and was responsible
for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths.
It may well be that McNamara is a man
of less guile than recent experience has gotten us to expect
of public servants. He may really think that what he did, how
he did it, and his recounting now of what he wants to remember
as having happened are all one needs to know to understand these
matters. Which is, in itself, perhaps one of the real reasons
the Vietnam War happened, why it went on so long, why it was
so vicious, and why we have now in the White House and Pentagon
a president and secretary of defense who seem, in all regards,
to have learned nothing from it.
It doesn't take any brains or guts to
admit now that the US fucked up big in Vietnam. A modern-day
politician who said we were right to go in there, that we killed
3.5 million Vietnamese for good reason, that we got those 58,000Americans
killed for good reason, and that we maimed and mutilated millions
of others for good reason, would be hooted off the stage. Perhaps
the only bearable posture is the one McNamara assumes: that we
were wrong for the right reasons. He and nobody in the Kennedy
or Johnson administrations knew that China and Vietnam were traditional
enemies in a way that transcended the Red Menace, you see, and
there was all that fog of war.
Made things and collaborators
Documentaries aren't facts; they're not
even made of facts. They're made of film and tape that may or
may not be of or about things that really happened. "I think
in all of my films," Morris told an interviewer, "there
are these questions of how we know what we know and our illusions
of certainty, when in fact, we possess no such certainty, at
all. There are certainly moments in all my films that deal with
that very question, even in The Fog of War, McNamara asks the
question, 'Are we omniscient?' And you hear this exchange of
the commanders in the Gulf of Tonkin, where they talk about,
'Are you certain these events occurred?' and he concludes, "'Of
course, I'm certain. I think.'"
Documentaries are made things, not found
things. Every documentary has an author. Some have more than
one author. Usually, the authors are behind the cameras and editing
machines, mostly invisible.
But sometimes--as in The Fog of War--one
is behind the camera and one is in front of it and the two work
as a team. Errol Morris shot and edited the film, but he had
a collaborator--Robert Strange McNamara-- whose name could have
gone on the director's line with his and perhaps should have.
Because McNamara is obviously directing himself and acting his
own lines through all of this. He is playing a character with
his body and name, but a character in a film it is nonetheless.
There are shots of him in his car that are posed. Shots of him
walking that are posed. Shots of him looking into the camera
and talking directly to it that are posed. Shots of him looking
into the camera in silence, hardly blinking, that if not posed
are surely aware of what it will look like from our side of the
lens.
Bad teeth
During those closeups I kept thinking,
"What lousy teeth he has. Why does a guy with so much money
have such lousy teeth? What's he trying to prove?" In the
earlier photographs, they're just crooked. By the time of the
interview (two years ago, when McNamara was 85), the teeth in
front are crooked and several of the teeth on the side have been
replaced by metal substitutes or caps, none of which seem aimed
in quite the right direction. Maybe he just never had time to
get his teeth fixed right once he got rich in his years at Ford.
When he was a kid, there wasn't money
for teeth. There doesn't seem to have been much money for anything.
McNamara won a scholarship to Stanford but the family didn't
have enough money to make up the difference so he went to Berkeley
instead. He talks warmly of having taken there courses in philosophy
and logic. It's the latter that seems to have made the greater
impression on him, though Morris several times imagizes both
with closeups of words on a page and flowing logical symbols.
During the Vietnam War years, when I
was one of the many demonstrating against McNamara whenever I
got a chance, including once on the porch under his Pentagon
office window in October 1967, I wondered if he was really the
cold, clinical bastard he seemed to be on tv or if it was merely
the effect of the slicked back from the forehead way he did his
hair and the no-nonsense wire-rim glasses that had none of cool
of the wire-rims worn by John Lennon. After listening to him
talk in so warmly in The Fog of War about his course in logic
I think he probably was exactly what he seemed to be.
It's good to remember that logic has
no content; there is no good or bad in logic, no better or worse,
no value of any kind. It is entirely a matter of process. And
that's what McNamara comes back to again and again: process.
He was, and remains, a manager.
He became, it is said, one of the few
in the Johnson administration who turned against the war, and
said so. Never publicly, but in cabinet meetings and in private
meetings with JFK and LBJ. Fog of War has several scenes using
a trope Morris perfected in Thin Blue Line: the turning reels
of a tape recorder, the clicking dial of the recorder's counter,
unseen voices talking. Implied is a real thing, back in some
real time. For those objective evaluations, Johnson banished
Robert Strange McNamara. He gave McNamara the National Medal
of Freedom in a ceremony I remember well: McNamara stood at the
lectern and said he was incapable of speaking, that his remarks
would have to wait for another time.
Once I thought he meant that he was thinking
that it was absurd to have received a medal for all that squandering
of human life and national treasure. How could a medal and however
much pomp wash away the blood, and how could one say that in
a few words at a lectern in the White House with the president
at his side? Later, when there was time and a more suitable forum,
he'd say what must be said. But in The Fog of War he seems to
be saying that he was silent that day simply because he was choked
up with emotion at the honor. And by saying all this in The Fog
of War we understand that there has finally come a time when
it is appropriate to say these things.
If he means that, then what a poor dumb
bastard he finally is. If not, what a mendacious, manipulative
sonofabitch he's been all along. We'll never know which it is.
Maybe not even Robert S. McNamara knows which it is. All we have
is McNamara's book and this film made by Robert S. McNamara and
Errol Morris. Just because you read something in a book or see
and hear something in a documentary doesn't mean it's true. It
means only that you read it in a book or saw and heard it in
a documentary.
The excellence of
uncertainty
We cannot know the past; we can only
think about it. We cannot know another person's heart; we can
only make assumptions about it. Our most profound and useful
act of thinking is asking questions, not delivering answers.
And therein lies the brilliance of this
film. Errol Morris had his own personal belief about Robert S.
McNamara, but the film, as I said before, imposes none of that.
The film lets McNamara present himself, and it offers images
and sounds that may or may not reflect what McNamara or Morris
is really thinking. The lugubrious Philip Glass musical track
may be didactic, and then again it may be leadenly ironic, thick
and heavy because only thick and heavy goes with this particular
stew.
Errol Morris provides no answers to anything
in Fog of War. Instead, he gives us images and sounds that allow
us to formulate difficult questions that we can't possibly answer
either. That incapacity of resolution does not mean we are not
obliged to wrestle with them. The appearance of fog does not
free any of us of the obligation of trying to see. There is not
much more we could ask of a documentary or any other kind of
film.
Bruce Jackson,
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo, edits the web journal
BuffaloReport.com.
His most recent book is Emile
de Antonio in Buffalo (Center Working Papers). Jackson
is also a contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
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