While the Right has been busy taking the White House, the Left has been marching on the English department. ―Todd Gitlin (1943–2022), "The Twilight of Common Dreams" (1995), quoted by E.J. Dionne, Todd Gitlin and the radicalism of small-d democracy, Washington Post, February 12, 2022
Greetings from the Far Left Coast, where we've had a few lovely days scattered among the many cold, gray, drizzly ones. In other words, February.
On Sunday I donated blood for the first time since the pandemic hit. This is one thing most of us can do that we know will help someone. It was way past due on my part. Time to make it a regular feature of the routine again.
This is the time of year when in years past I would wax rhapsodic about the upcoming Portland International Film Festival. The 2020 festival ended prematurely when the pandemic hit and everything shut down. Last year's festival was a hybrid of drive-in screenings and online streaming as the NW Film Center crew made the best of difficult circumstances. In spite of less than optimal conditions I saw some fine films at both festivals.
The Whitsell Auditorium at the Portland Art Museum, which closed with the 2020 festival, is at long last scheduled to reopen February 26 with Not Content To Be Contained: Work by the Cinema Unbound Awardees 2022. The future of the film festival appears to be in limbo.
As the Film Center and Museum continue to recover from the effects of the pandemic, and to allow time to re-imagine the event to match a new era and mission, the 2022 Portland International Film Festival is being postponed. The Festival, which usually takes place in March, will be re-envisioned for 2023 to broaden its cinematic reach in film, animation, multimedia and artistic storytelling of all forms. (NW Film Center reopens Whitsell Auditorium with matinees celebrating Cinema Unbound Awards honorees, February 9, 2022)
The theme of re-envisioning the film center emerged at the beginning of Amy Dotson's tenure as director in September 2019 with an accent placed on multimedia and artistic storytelling, alternative ways of viewing content such as social media and streaming on computers and phone screens, etc., while to my mind the traditional experience of film on a big screen in a large dark room was downplayed.
Dotson and her staff may sincerely believe that a NW Film, Multimedia, and Artistic Storytelling Center will appeal to a more diverse audience than largely college educated, middle- and upper-class members of the generation to which your oft humbled scribe belongs, albeit as something of an outlier. (Many years ago a friend told me I could not be bourgeois if I tried. I cherish the compliment.) Reaching out to communities of artists and audiences not previously cultivated and opening up experience of that art to the rest of us is commendable. My concern is whether the program aims to supplement and enrich tradition or push it aside.
I try to hope for the best. Wonderful films, perhaps even great ones, are still being made by filmmakers I first encountered through the NW Film Center. Shirin Neshat, Jafir Panahi, Hong Sang-soo, Christian Petzold, and Chloé Zhao are a few who come readily to mind. Over the past two years I have taken in some of their films at home on the computer. That is better than not at all, but it is a lesser experience than the theater by an order of magnitude than defies calculation.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is fund-raising off the faux threat posed by Nancy Pelosi's Gazpacho police. Greene is the gift that keeps giving to those of us who cannot bring ourselves to just dislike blockheads out on the far right lunatic fringe a little less, to paraphrase Sarah Palin's lawyer.
Speaking of blockheads and stuff you would be hard-pressed to make up: The blockbuster trade between the Brooklyn Nets and Philadelphia 76ers that saw James Harden and Ben Simmons change teams came with all sorts of bizarre sidebars.
The Simmons story has played out all season with the young Australian star just entering his prime apparently willing to sit out the remainder of his career rather than suit up again for the Sixers. That's a whole strange other story I won't get into here.
In Brooklyn, under my radar until the trade, it seems that Harden and fellow star Kyrie Irving could not stand each other. Among other things, Harden was ticked off by Irving's refusal to get a Covid vaccination, which prevented him from playing in Brooklyn's home games because of New York vaccination requirements. This development plus a recent injury to Kevin Durant, the team's third star, turned Brooklyn from a title contender into a middling team hovering barely above the .500 mark.
Then came the sage incident. In Cleveland on January 17 Irving performed a Native American ritual that involved burning sage in the locker room to cleanse negative energy that apparently lingers from the time he played in Cleveland. "Harden, according to sources who were in the room when it happened, was seated in front of his locker, watching Irving, and looked at Kyrie like he had three heads" (Brad Botkin, James Harden looked at Kyrie Irving 'like he had three heads' as he burned sage in Cleveland, per report, CBS Sports, February 10, 2022).
Last summer a friend charged me with providing cover for Joe Biden after I wrote about the Afghanistan debacle in a piece titled Biden Awry. I thought and still think the piece was fairly critical of Biden while trying to provide context around a mess he inherited. My friend saw it differently. By her own admission afflicted with BDS (Biden Derangement Syndrome), she zeroed in on where Biden went wrong, while my focus was too much on two decades of misadventure that left him with no good option. Even the less bad options were awful.
My assessment of last summer's withdrawal grew more critical in the months that followed. A new article by George Packer in the March issue of The Atlantic prompts me to wonder if I was still too easy on Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. The Betrayal is heart-wrenching and nothing short of damning.
Packer duly notes that it took four presidencies, two Republican, two Democratic, for America to finish abandoning Afghanistan.
George W. Bush's attention wandered off soon after American Special Forces rode horseback through the northern mountains and the first schoolgirls gathered in freezing classrooms. Barack Obama, after studying the problem for months, poured in troops and pulled them out in a single ambivalent gesture whose goal was to keep the war on page A13. Donald Trump cut a deal with the Taliban that left the future of the Afghan government, Afghan women, and al-Qaeda to fate. By then most Americans were barely aware that the war was still going on. It fell to Joe Biden to complete the task.
He documents the blockhead Stephen Miller's long-term project to destroy the Special Immigrant Visa program created by Congress in 2009 to recognize the service of qualified Afghans who had aided American forces by bringing them to safety in the US. The program was from the outset "chronically underfunded and clogged with bureaucratic choke points across multiple agencies, [it] seemed designed to reject people." Miller and his allies "added so many requirements that amid the pandemic the program nearly came to a halt." By the end of 2019 only a skeletal staff was left working on the visas part time.
After the U.S. and the Taliban signed their agreement in Doha in February 2020, attacks against Americans stopped—but hundreds of Afghans in civil society, especially women, were targeted in a terrifying campaign of assassinations that shattered what was left of public trust in the Afghan government and seemed to show what lay in store after the Americans left.
The Biden administration studied the problem, studied some more, strategized, dithered. Packer quotes Becca Heller, cofounder and executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP): "Studying a problem for too long is an excuse for doing nothing. You don't study a problem in an emergency."
Americans who had served in Afghanistan worked through diplomatic channels and personal contacts on behalf of Afghans they knew to be at risk of Taliban vengeance. Sixteen members of the House of Representatives—ten Democrats, six Republicans, led by Jason Crow (D-CO) and Seth Moulton (D-MA)—formed the Honoring Our Promises Working Group whose purpose was to offer bipartisan support for bringing Afghan allies to safety. IRAP and other groups created a coalition of veteran, humanitarian, and religious organizations called Evacuate Our Allies.
These groups lobbied the White House. They proposed courses of action such as evacuating Afghans to Guam while their visa applications were processed for immigration to the US. The White House dithered on, in part out of political considerations, concerned that conservatives would paint Aghan evacuees as an immigration disaster and haunted by the specter of the evacuation of Saigon.
In 2010 Richard Holbrooke spoke to Biden about the situation of Afghan women. Biden responded that he was not sending his boy (son Beau, who had been deployed to Iraq) back there to risk his life on behalf of women's rights.
When Holbrooke asked about the obligation to people who had trusted the U.S. government, Biden said, "Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger got away with it." During the 2020 campaign, an interviewer repeated some of these quotes to Biden and asked if he believed he would bear responsibility for harm to Afghan women after a troop withdrawal and the return of the Taliban. Biden bristled and his eyes narrowed. "No, I don’t!" he snapped, and put his thumb and index finger together. "Zero responsibility."
This is what we would expect from Donald Trump. We should demand better of Joe Biden.
His Eminence the Very Reverend Al Sharpton calls for Mayor Eric Adams to get tough on crime:
“In fairness to Eric, he’s only been mayor five weeks…But even as a fan of him: Eric, they’re locking up my toothpaste.”
Sharpton’s comment referred to reports that New York-area pharmacies and convenience stores have begun to place low-cost items, even toothpaste, in locked cases to prevent theft…
“There is debate in the criminal justice system. There are those that are concerned, including me, about overloading the system and the jails with petty crime…But at the same time, you cannot have a culture where people are just, at random, robbing and stealing.” (Samuel Benson, Sharpton assails NYC’s crime spike: 'They’re locking up my toothpaste,' Politico, February 9, 2022
Russia, Ukraine. Anne Applebaum is a hardliner on Putin and Russia. I tend to agree with her.
Now we are on the brink of what could be a catastrophic conflict. American, British, and European embassies in Ukraine are evacuating; citizens have been warned to leave. But this terrible moment represents not just a failure of diplomacy; it also reflects a failure of the Western imagination, a generation-long refusal, on the part of diplomats, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to understand what kind of state Russia was becoming and to prepare accordingly. We have refused to see the representatives of this state for what they are. We have refused to speak to them in a way that might have mattered. Now it might be too late. (Why the West’s Diplomacy With Russia Keeps Failing, The Atlantic, February 12, 2022}
Keep the faith.
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One new blog post: The Surrealist Life of Leonora Carrington, February 6, 2022. Leonora Carrington's name was at best vaguely familiar, I may have come across her in museums or books here and there, but I knew nothing about her before reading Desmond Morris's book Lives of the Surrealists (2018) a few years ago. Morris's biographical sketches introduced me to women associated with the Surrealist Movement in Paris in the 1920s and '30s who were every bit as talented and outrageous as their male counterparts…read more>>
Pictured below: SE Salmon & 58th, two blocks west of Mt. Tabor Park, Portland. February 12, 2022
