MORE CARNIVAL

From a week before the Super Bowl, Chewbacchus:

Happy Mardi Gras!

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CARNIVAL 

From a couple of weeks before the Super Bowl, Krewe du Vieux:

More tomorrow!

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Kick That Can

New Krugman:

This really isn’t a debatable proposition at this point. The contractionary effects of fiscal austerity have been demonstrated by study after study and overwhelmingly confirmed by recent experience — for example, by the severe and continuing slump in Ireland, which was for a while touted as a shining example of responsible policy, or by the way the Cameron government’s turn to austerity derailed recovery in Britain. 

Even Republicans admit, albeit selectively, that spending cuts hurt employment. Thus John McCain warned earlier this week that the defense cuts scheduled to happen under the budget sequester would cause the loss of a million jobs. It’s true that Republicans often seem to believe in “weaponized Keynesianism,” a doctrine under which military spending, and only military spending, creates jobs. But that is, of course, nonsense. By talking about job losses from defense cuts, the G.O.P. has already conceded the principle of the thing. 

More here.

As long as I can remember, Republicans and conservatives have had a reputation for being responsible with money, for being the smart guys, the ones who understand how dollars flow, and how to use cash wisely.  Liberals and Democrats, on the other hand, have always been the irresponsible "tax and spend" people, short-sighted do-gooders with a suburban teenager's conceptualization of money, not really knowing where it comes from, but being always ready to throw it around lavishly.  It's taken a long time and a lot of reading, but I no longer believe the hype.  The conservative reputation for being good economic stewards is a bunch of crap, and it's probably always been a bunch of crap.  Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that liberals are necessarily good with money, either, but the notion that conservatives know what they're doing on economics is just a flat out lie.

Case in point: the deficit and spending cuts.

For years now, essentially going back to when Obama took office, conservatives have been droning on and on about how the federal deficit is going to cause all kinds of problems, inflation, or high interest rates, which will kill the economy.  As a digression, it is interesting to note that this kind of rhetoric didn't exist when Bush was in office, and the Republican Congress was spending like drunken sailors in a whorehouse.  No, this attack only started up again when a Democrat took office.  But I digress.  The point is that they've been going on about imminent disaster coming from the deficit for years, but none of their predictions have come to pass.  Interest rates continue to be extraordinarily low to non-existent.  Inflation is also historically low.  The economy is sluggish, to be sure, but it doesn't have a damned thing to do with the deficit.  

That is, the conservatives are just plain wrong.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  But their reputation for being money wizards allows them to push their crackpot views.  And people listen because they think they're listening to smart people, which makes prospects for the economy even worse.

That is, conservative fear mongering over the deficit creates a context where all the key players, news media, politicians, and business leaders, conclude that we need to cut lots of government spending right now or we're all going to die.  Seriously, the entire freaking establishment is in hysterics over something that is a long term problem, not at all imminent.  But get this.  To cut the federal budget as much as the conservatives want is to essentially take hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy.  Poof!  Gone.  And no, all that money will NOT be spent better in the hands of the rich taxpayers who would benefit most from such spending cuts.  The vast majority of that money would be hoarded by the rich, who just can't possibly be the equivalent of millions of consumers: the wealthy would most likely stick it into savings accounts, where it would sit and rot, according to several economic studies of how tax cuts for the rich actually work in the real world.   So cutting government spending means pulling money out of the economy, not freeing it up for the magical wonders of capitalism to do its thing.

The real losers in this scenario would be rank and file Americans.  Spending cuts means job losses, huge amounts of job losses, teachers, firemen, scientists, construction workers, and on and on.  And this has a ripple effect.  When lots of people lose their jobs, they're not spending money, which makes businesses suffer, who then lay off their workers in response, which increases unemployment even more.  Now get this.  When you create high unemployment you NECESSARILY cut deeply into tax revenue; fewer paychecks for fewer employees means fewer people are paying taxes.  All of which makes the deficit WORSE.  Not better.  That is, the conservative solution to a problem that doesn't even need to be solved right now is to make the problem a whole lot worse.  It makes no sense.  It's crazy.  But for some reason it's the conventional wisdom.  Probably because people prefer to buy the hype about the wise conservatives instead of actually thinking it through.

I've had enough of this.  Liberals may very well not be geniuses with money, but then neither are conservatives.  Actually, given that the conservatives want us to increase unemployment, depress the economy, and greatly increase the deficit, I'd say that conservatives are not only not geniuses with money, but that they're also total morons.

We would do well to completely ignore any and all advice they have for us on matters pertaining to the economy.  We'd be better off getting recommendations from a preschool class of four year old children.

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Tennessee ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill Now Requires Teachers To Inform Parents If Their Child Is Gay

From Think Progress, courtesy of AlterNet:

The bill, SB 234, still bars Tennessee teachers from discussing any facet of “non-heterosexual” sexuality with children in grades K-8. But the newest iteration also includes a provision requiring teachers or counselors to inform the parents of some students who identify themselves as LGBT. State Sen. Stacey Campfield (R), who authored the bill the first time around and again introduced it this time, calls out students who might be “at risk,” but leaves the interpretation of that behavior to the teacher

More here.

This is totally awful for all sorts of reasons, with the suicide factor, as observed by the article, being only one of many.  But the thing that occurs to me first is how I might deal with this bullshit if I was still teaching.  Okay, I was teaching in Texas, not Tennessee, but Texas gets loopy like this, too, so it's worth considering.  Especially because I really am thinking of returning to teaching in the Lone Star State in a year or so.

So how would I handle this?

For starters, back in the day, I made some effort to make my classroom gay friendly.  This was mostly in the form of rhetoric, hassling people with misconceptions, going after people who said "fag" and the like with venom in their voices, but I also had a poster or two up on the walls with some out gay celebrity of some sort.  So that's the context in which I would have to handle this, one where I'm already known as someone who strongly supports gay rights.  And given such a persona, I would have to put my money where my mouth is.

First thing I would do is warn all my students.  I would tell them about the law, and assert that they cannot trust anyone in the schools with any institutional power.  Just don't talk about it.  If you need counseling, find somebody outside the schools to do it.  Maybe I would make some literature with information about this available, or maybe just post links to websites.  But overall, I would do my damnedest to let my kids know that they cannot trust any school authority, that school authority is required by the law to rat them out to their families.

Of course, there's also the matter of the law itself and my own personal relationship with it as a teacher.  But that's easy.  Given my firm belief that sexuality is fluid, and that everyone is potentially gay, or, at least, bisexual, given the circumstances of their lives, I would feel duty-bound to report every single one of my students to their parents.  All of them.  Hopefully this would not only allow me to stay within the letter of the law, but it would also give some cover to students who are actually actively exploring their sexual orientations--if everyone is guilty, then everyone is innocent, right?  And, ideally, it would make the law look like the bullshit it is.

Would they fire me over this?  Maybe, but not without a lot of trouble and unwanted attention.  I mean, like I said, such action would keep me within the letter of the law, and my employers would be hard pressed to get the necessary paperwork together to get me ousted.  At least, on this.  Sure, I wouldn't be making any friends in the administration, but why should I when they're enforcing a heinous and potentially deadly fucked up redneck homophobic law?  They should squirm.  It's what they get.  No sympathy from me on this.

Actually, this kind of has me raring to get back into the classroom.  Got to fight the good fight.

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Straight Men Who Watch More Porn Are More Supportive Of Same-Sex Marriage: Research

From the Huffington Post:

Why? Exposure to porn may cause heterosexual men to be more accepting of "non-traditional sexual situations." As Wright explained to the Examiner, if people think "individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to have same-sex sex, they will also think that individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to get married to a partner of the same-sex."

The theory that porn causes men to favor marriage equality was also recently argued by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus, who gained notoriety in 2012 for a now widely denounced study that found children of gay parents were worse off than those of straight parents.

Part of Regnerus' argument was that porn disassociates sex from procreation. "[A]dd to the sharing of bodies temporarily and nonexclusively a significant dose of alternative forms of sexual activity -- positions, roles, genders, and numbers -- and that's basically where porn presses its consumers today: away from sex as having anything approaching a 'marital meaning,'" he wrote.

More here.

Well, whaddaya know?  Porn is good for more than just getting off.  Probably.

I think the notorious Dr. Regnerus is probably not a sex-positive liberal, given that he assumes a link between marriage and sex: after all, marriage has been historically far more about property and controlling women than it has been about sex per se--the whorehouse, the mistress, and the concubine are just about as ancient as heterosexual marriage is, which makes Regnerus' assumption problematic, at the very least.  But he's got a good point, I think.  Porn shows people doing all kinds of crazy shit that you don't see walking down the street.  If you accept what you see on screen in the porn you're watching, it's only a hop, skip, and jump to conclude that you should accept gay people getting it on with each other, too.  And once you've done that, anti-gay marriage arguments become strictly academic, rather than burning with puritanical fury and irrationality.  

It's hard to say for sure, but I think my own porn consumption has played a role in my acceptance of gay people, too.  Of course, it's all a rich tapestry.  I got thrown directly into gay culture when I decided to study theater in college, and that probably had more of an effect than anything else.  But porn was there, too, and looking back, it's not easy to rule it out as the influence these researchers are saying it might have been for me.  I think they're definitely onto something here.

That is, watch more porn!  It makes you a better person.

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Super Bowl Is Single Largest Human Trafficking Incident In U.S.: Attorney General

From Huffington Post:

When it came time for the Super Bowl, Clemmie Greenlee was expected to sleep with anywhere from 25 to 50 men a day. It’s a staggering figure, but it doesn’t shock advocates who say that the sporting event attracts more traffickers than any other in the U.S.

"The Super Bowl is the greatest show on Earth, but it also has an ugly underbelly," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told USA Today in 2011 when his state was gearing up to host the event. "It's commonly known as the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States." 

The influx of fans fosters the optimal breeding ground for pimps looking to boost their profits. Experts say that the sheer number of men looking to pay for sex substantially increases demand and the massive crowds allow for pimps and victims to essentially go unnoticed, newsnet5.com reports.

More here. 

Okay, just now, actually about thirty or forty five minutes ago when I read the article, I finally resolved my feelings about prostitution.  I've been sitting on the fence about it for many years.  I've probably been a weak supporter of legalization and regulation for libertarian and harm reduction reasons, but it's never been something for which I've wanted to advocate.  I have a problem with treating sex as a commodity.  Sure, I fully support the notion of "free love," and I believe that between two consenting adults, or more, anything goes.  But weird things happen when you throw commerce into the mix.  The greatest thing ever, sexuality, becomes cheapened when you put a dollar value on it.  It is no longer a gift human beings give one another for mutual uplift.  It becomes a thing, a product like soap or cars or toilet paper or meat, rather than something that is deep and mysterious and essentially human--you see a similar dynamic in pornography to a much smaller extent, but at least that's dealing with imagery instead of sex itself.  That is, selling sex, as a philosophical notion, ruins everything about it that's good.  

So it's tough for me to get behind legalizing prostitution.

But this Super Bowl story just drives home how enormously huge as an enterprise prostitution has become, and the vast majority of women involved have virtually no control over the circumstances of their work.  It's a labor nightmare.  Indeed, for many, it's slavery, as the "human trafficking" label attests.  Throw that together with the recent news that slavery, worldwide, is now practiced more than ever in human history, and we have a global catastrophe on our hands.  Clearly, we can't wipe it out.  It's already illegal.  But we can minimize its worst aspects once we've ended the black market.  We can put the prostitutes in charge.  We can make their working conditions safer.  We can make sure that they get the majority of the money they make.  We can make sure that it's not slavery.

Whatever any of us think about sexuality and sex, the only decent thing to do is to legalize and regulate prostitution, whether it feels moral or not.  Indeed, it's the only moral course we can take.  I'm not on the fence about this anymore.

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Friends of Fraud

New Krugman on Republican efforts to obstruct or neuter the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

How can the G.O.P. be so determined to make America safe for financial fraud, with the 2008 crisis still so fresh in our memory? In part it’s because Republicans are deep in denial about what actually happened to our financial system and economy. On the right, it’s now complete orthodoxy that do-gooder liberals, especially former Representative Barney Frank, somehow caused the financial disaster by forcing helpless bankers to lend to Those People.

In reality, this is a nonsense story that has been extensively refuted; I’ve always been struck in particular by the notion that a Congressional Democrat, holding office at a time when Republicans ruled the House with an iron first, somehow had the mystical power to distort our whole banking system. But it’s a story conservatives much prefer to the awkward reality that their faith in the perfection of free markets was proved false. 

And

But let’s try not to let this one fall through the cracks: just four years after runaway bankers brought the world economy to its knees, Senate Republicans are using every means at their disposal, violating all the usual norms of politics in the process, in an attempt to give the bankers a chance to do it all over again.

More here.

Right.  The amount of money loaned out in the program Krugman says is the GOP whipping boy for the financial crisis is only a fraction of the loans that ended up as the toxic waste CDOs that actually brought down Wall Street.  It's an impossible scenario from the get-go.  Just not enough money to do what the Republicans say it did.  

But no matter; this is only part of a much bigger picture.  They're doing this all over the place these days, blatantly denying reality, crafting ludicrous alternate realities which they then push aggressively, and freaking out and getting in your face when you call them on their bullshit.  It's as though the asshole jock who bullied you in middle school had become a major sector of the establishment.

It's becoming clearer and clearer that we ought to do with the GOP what you should do with a bully: take him out in front of his girlfriend with a really devastating punch to the face.  You know, broken nose, blood, maybe some pansy-ass crying.  That ought to do it.  Alas, the news media and the Democrats are such big pussies, this isn't likely to happen.  The bully will continue to lord over us simply because we let them.

It's a shame.

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Ten years later, still fighting over Powell’s WMD speech

From the Washington Post:

On Feb. 5, 2003, at the request of President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations and made the case that Iraq possessed and was concealing weapons of mass destruction. Though it soon became clear that the speech was deeply flawed, Powell and other members of the Bush team still spar over how it came to be and who is to blame.

Click here for contradictory, backbiting excerpts from the their memoirs.

Ten years later, I'm still infuriated.

In March of 2003, we invaded Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts that the desert nation had weapons of mass destruction, and that there was a very good chance their dictator Saddam Hussein was going to give those weapons to terrorists.  As we all now know at this point, that turned out not to be true.

And what pisses me off the most was that this was known at the time.  It was known by UN weapons inspectors.  It was known by the IAEA.  It was known by British intelligence.  It was even known by US intelligence, but the verdict is still out about whether this information was consciously suppressed in order to craft lies, or if it was willfully ignored because all the important Bush administration players had made up their minds about Saddam's WMD, and evidence be damned.  Even worse, all these contrary views made it into the press, on the front page outside the US, and on the interior pages in the US.  But the info was out there for anybody who knew how to use Google.

Alas, most Americans chose not to do any research on this most important of topics, and patriotically lined up in support of the invasion, which was illegal whether Saddam had WMD or not.  But what the hell, 'Merica's the greatest mf'ing country in the world, and when we go to war, we're always right!  Dissenters such as myself were branded as anti-American, or unpatriotic, or worse, traitors.  Evidence didn't matter in the White House, and it didn't matter in the streets.

It was all pretty sick and disgusting in retrospect.  Washington failed spectacularly to do its job, and the American public cheered them on.  Indeed, the whole country failed.  And all I could do was watch what became a slow motion train wreck.  Do you know how depressingly weird it is for everybody to believe something you KNOW isn't true?  And that people will die as a consequence?  And then to watch as people die, thousands of them, because virtually everybody believes something that ISN'T TRUE?!? 

So yeah, I'm still infuriated a decade later.  The Bush administration, supported by the Congress and the public, either lied about WMD, or was too incompetent to understand that gut instincts don't trump facts.  Either way, it's the biggest national failure of my lifetime.  Maybe the worst in American history.  And people were big dicks about it, both while it was happening, and for years afterward.  When does this country start to look at itself in the mirror again? 

My best bet is that we put Iraq into the Native American genocide and Jim Crow file; that is, we just won't think about it.  It's the American way, after all.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Noam Chomsky: Obama Would Have Been Called a ‘Moderate Republican’ in Recent Decades

From AlterNet:

Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at MIT, and one of the nation's leading intellectual critics of the US political, corporate and national security apparatus. In this long interview, Cenk Uygur of TYT and Professor Chomsky discuss President Obama, the rightward shift of US politics over the past few decades, drone strikes, the labor movement, Aaron Swartz, the role of the media and what hope we have for the future.

In the interview, Chomsky argues that the country's political shift toward corporate and business interests in recent decades reflects a "realignment" of the economy.

Click here for the interview.

Chomsky is at his best, I think, in the interview format.  He's a lot less academic, a lot more conversational, and interviewers generally tend to keep him focused the stuff regular people like you and me need to know.  And this one is particularly good.  He lays it all out, how money tends to take over the democratic process, how far the political establishment, which is not to be confused with the population, has moved toward the concerns of big business, the limited successes the US has seen over the decades in undermining this rightward dynamic, and how we can undermine it now.

If you've never read any Chomsky before, it may very well be like he's describing a parallel universe, similar to the one we read about in, say, the New York Times, but radically different in a number of key ways.  You may even start to reject his assertions immediately based on your understanding of how the world works.  But if that's your urge, you really ought to ask yourself, "Do I really know that the mainstream media's narrative account of reality is correct?  And how do I know that I know?"  Chomsky is almost religious in his documentation and usage of facts.  He's not lying, not making shit up, not engaging in conspiracy theory.  He simply weaves the facts together in a different way, assigning different, and, I might add, more plausible, motivations to the big shots who run the world.  

Really, the MSM's Israel/Palestine narrative is so incoherent that I didn't truly understand the depths of depravity involved in the situation there until I started reading Chomsky.  In the end, he's the guy who makes the most sense.  I have never heard a compelling refutation of his overall understanding of how power functions in the modern world.  Ever.  I mean, sure, I've heard people trashing him on multiple occasions, but it's almost always along the lines of weird hysterical contradiction without any real argument: "everybody KNOWS the world is like this, so Chomsky just CAN'T be right."  And that's not really terribly compelling, just saying he's wrong.

If you listen to any interview at all over the next week or so, make it this one.  You'll be wiser for the effort.

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Incestuous Amplification, Economics Edition

From Paul Krugman's blog, courtesy of Hullabaloo:

Which brings me to the fiscal debate, characterized by the particular form of incestuous amplification Greg Sargent calls the Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop. I’ve already blogged about my Morning Joe appearance and Scarborough’s reaction, which was to insist that almost no mainstream economists share my view that deficit fear is vastly overblown. As Joe Weisenthal points out, the reality is that among those who have expressed views very similar to mine are the chief economist of Goldman Sachs; the former Treasury secretary and head of the National Economic Council; the former deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve; and the economics editor of the Financial Times. The point isn’t that these people are necessarily right (although they are), it is that Scarborough’s attempt at argument through authority is easily refuted by even a casual stroll through recent economic punditry.

But these people aren’t part of the in-group, and if they do make it into the in-group’s conversation at all, it’s only by blurring their message sufficiently that the in-group doesn’t understand it.

More here.

Krugman is referring to a recent appearance on MSNBC where he was trashed by mainstream media types for pushing the view, widely believed among economists, that the deficit problem isn't nearly as big of a deal as the Washington establishment makes it out to be.  And, of course, he's absolutely right; the deficit isn't that big of a deal, especially not right now.

But I've gone on and on about the specifics of the big deficit debate numerous times here at Real Art.  What's fascinating to me at the moment is the human phenomenon of lots of people believing things that aren't true, in spite of perfectly good evidence to the contrary.  There's a lot going on contributing to the deficit hysteria.  Inside-the-beltway groupthink for one.  There's also this great Upton Sinclair quote: "'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."  That is, most of these media types are very white collar, and the ones on television generally make a lot of money.  The banking and corporate sectors all want deficit reduction right now, whether it's good for the overall economy or not, and because Big Media on-camera professionals as well as their celebrity print journalist counterparts all see themselves as having their fates and incomes tied to big business, they necessarily reflect the views of big business.  Cementing it all together is confirmation bias, which shreds logic and reasonable thought.  Thus, we have the mainstream media obsessed with an issue that ought not be an obsession.

It's truly a big mess, one that I have absolutely no idea how to clean up.  

But one thing is certain.  In our democracy we debate and debate and debate, as though all the participants are rational creatures.  Rationality, however, takes not only conscious effort, but also self-reflection, deep examination of one's own personal motives mixed with genuine attempts to see reality from others' perspectives, whether we agree with them or not.  This does not come easy, even when you try.  Right now, though, Big Media professionals don't seem even to realize that they should try.

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Conservatives Have Their Worst Week Ever

From Rolling Stone, the current holder of the Hunter S. Thompson Chair for Gonzo Journalism, Matt Taibbi:

Have Republicans, and the right wing in general, ever been more disjointed? More confused? More incapable of getting out of their own way?

Watching America's political conservatives try to counter-maneuver opposite Barack Obama's re-inauguration over the course of the last week has been an incredible comedy – like watching the Three Stooges try to perform a liver transplant on roller skates.

Let's review the basic timeline. First, Political Media, a conservative action group, decided to try to make an appeal to win the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere by declaring January 19th – previously known as Martin Luther King Day, to the rest of us – to be "Gun Appreciation Day."

More here.

The vast majority of the post is about right-wing missteps in the gun control debate, but it does serve as yet another comprehensive example of how the conservatives are in a total tailspin.  With foundational philosophical ideas that are increasingly understood by the American public to be demonstrably false, with a large racist and xenophobic faction that just can't seem to STFU, with a bizarre hatred for the poor, and for women, which also continues to spill through the cracks, and on and on, conservatives appear no longer to be the dominant force they once were on the American political scene. 

Actually, scratch that last bit.  Conservatism has so resoundingly defeated liberalism in the US that the ostensibly liberal Democrats are now effectively a conservative party, leaving those who actually continue to self-identify with the term "conservative" to wander around in the political wilderness wearing tin foil hats while shaking their fists at clouds in the sky.  That is, conservatives have been trapped by their own overwhelming success.  The American political establishment is so amazingly conservative that there is no longer any use for the far right-wing psychos who cling to their guns and religion.  They want America to be a conservative country, but they apparently don't realize that, at least as far as our leaders are concerned, we already are.

So they look like fools, over and over again.

Go check out Taibbi's essay.  As usual, it's very funny, and quite poignant.

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WE WON'T HAVE PALIN TO KICK AROUND ANYMORE

A Washington Post blogger muses on the meaning of the Sarah Palin phenomenon now that Fox News has allowed her contract to expire:

The net effect was that Palin’s support got deeper — those people who loved Palin wound up loving her even more — but it also narrowed significantly. She became the nichest of niche politicians — someone whose support was a mile deep and an inch wide.

And so, by the time she had to make up her mind about whether to run for president in 2012, the decision was, in many ways, already made for her. Had she run, she would have been a sideshow, not a central player. She seemed to sense that and stayed out.

The Palin story is, in the end, one of tremendous talent misused. Like any number of playground greats who never make the NBA or, when they do, wind up disappointing, Palin had as much natural ability as anyone this side of Barack Obama or John Edwards, but was unable to translate that talent into results once the bright lights came on. That she never made good on her remarkable natural talents is a sign of how the political process can chew up and spit out those who aren’t ready for it.

More here.

I neither love nor hate Sarah Palin: from the moment I first encountered her when she gave her incoherent nomination acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, I never took her seriously as a political figure. Rather, I saw her as the necessary end result of the celebritization of politics, and have always been fascinated by her from that perspective. She's been the Kim Kardashian of the inside-the-beltway set, always a joke, but a pretty funny one, worth some attention.

I guess we won't have her to kick around anymore. Of course, that's what Nixon said about himself when he retired from politics after getting his butt kicked by Jerry Brown's dad in the 1962 California gubernatorial race. Maybe America's favorite hockey mom will be back for more fun and games some day. I sure hope so.

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SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S STRIKE

From Wikipedia:

Strike (Russian: Стачка, translit. Stachka) is a 1925 silent film made in the Soviet Union by Sergei Eisenstein. It was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film, and he would go on to make The Battleship Potemkin later that year. It was acted by the Proletcult Theatre, and composed of six parts. It was in turn, intended to be one part of a seven-part series, entitled Towards Dictatorship (of the proletariat), that was left unfinished. Eisenstein's influential essay, Montage of Attractions was written between Strike's production and premiere.

The film depicts a strike in 1903 by the workers of a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia, and their subsequent suppression. The film is most famous for a sequence near the end in which the violent suppression of the strike is cross-cut with footage of cattle being slaughtered, although there are several other points in the movie where animals are used as metaphors for the conditions of various individuals. Another theme in the film is collectivism in opposition to individualism which was viewed as a convention of western film. Collective efforts and collectivization of characters were central to both Strike and Battleship Potemkin.

More here.

I do so love the internet era.

I saw Strike long ago in a film and video theory class I took at the University of Texas.  At the time, I was really grooving on the revolutionary aspect of it all, the oppressive capitalists being fought by the working class, all the rhetoric, all the uplifting vibes.  I mean, of course, I was studying it for Eisenstein's startlingly advanced cinematic technique, but I was newly liberal at that point, and, in spite of my problems with how the Russian Revolution turned out, I loved, and continue to love, the Revolution's goals, and this movie creates a pure picture of what those goals were.  Exciting then, just as it is now.

Anyway, a buddy of mine, Matt Impelluso, who hosts the War Zone pod cast show on which I occasionally appear, posted on facebook that he was going to watch communist movies for some reason.  Inspired, I did a quick search and found Strike, in its entirety, on YouTube.  I watched part one and was blown away by how the movie stands up, not just as a cool movie, but as a blow-you-away movie.  Eisenstein was so advanced in terms of film narrative that few film makers have even come close to doing what he did nearly a hundred years ago.  He understood, probably better than anybody else, how to tell a story visually.  And his editing!  Suffice it to say that nobody since him has mastered the notion of juxtaposition of visual ideas in order to achieve meaning as well as Eisenstein.  Every single moment, every second, is packed with story and symbol.  There is not a wasted frame with Eisenstein, who, for my money, may very well have been the greatest movie maker of all time.

Check it out.  It's in nine parts.  Here's the first, and the link to each successive part ought to come up on the screen, in the upper left hand corner, when you get to the end of each part.  Did that even make sense?  You'll figure it out.  Fucking great movie!

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