The Press: Too Much With Us
Powers, Thomas
generally liberal orientation of the "professional" church community. We can see this in the way ministers in Congress vote on issues considered important by three church lobbies--Network, an...
...The first thing one might say about them is that they are . . . impressionable...
...I hope the CBS news executives have asked themselves a question or two about that...
...There were quite a lot of children, four or five, and although one of them had been shot--as were the womenuthe rest were killed in a more brutal fashion...
...She reminded the interviewer of the crime of which the Hanafis had been the victims a year or so earlier...
...It doesn't change from one country, period or script to another...
...Duffey, Mahony, Lally, Dunn, Candon, Mongiardo, Field, Gray and Guthrie are all regarded as liberals...
...I've still got them...
...When he resigned from .the California Agriculture Relations Board, Mahony reflected that his tenure had been "good for the Church and good for" California...
...It was one thing to let children read comics which were actually comic . . . but these . . . horrors . . . . This protective instinct is no doubt as old as the human family, but I never felt its tug until I had children of my own...
...Now Hector Olivera's Rebellion in Patagonia follows in this tradition...
...His comrades all arrested and shot, his popular front and general strikes smashed, Antonio is in the end lucky to escape over the border into Chile with his life...
...And the most ambitious film Eisenstein ever undertook, Ivan the Terrible is about . . . well, Ivan the Terrible, of all people...
...His sag at the moment of death was certainly vivid, but I do not think the scene should have been cut from the film...
...3. The scenarios for all left-wing films are a good deal like conversion literature...
...They had been drowned in a bathtub...
...You cannot help but remember...
...THOMAS POWERS THE CULT OF PERSONALITY 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Left-wing filmmaking is like an ideology...
...with Bread for the World on five of six and with FCNL, 12 of 13...
...Some of the reporting which lets us know where we are may seem superficial at first glance...
...Perhaps you have forgotten the details of that crime...
...Of the religious outside of Congress, Hesburgh is a major figure in the liberal establishment...
...BFW, 5 of 6; FCNL, 4 of 13...
...CostaGavrhs's State ol Siege is about a C.I.A...
...We can see this in the way ministers in Congress vote on issues considered important by three church lobbies--Network, an organization of nuns and others lobbying on social justice issues...
...He urged the Church to "get involved in the hard, rough work" of implementing social change...
...Her mother had been sternly protective...
...I do not know what the four girls listening to this recital carried to bed with them that night, but surely it was something dark and indigestible and lingering, something they didn't need to know...
...He knew where to put the teeth, the patches of hair and slimy secretions...
...At first I only half-listened to the announcer as he described the incident in a brisk, interested voice, as if he were thinking, Boy, here's o n e . . . . The young mother had no money...
...Somewhere between the second and third of the three episodes in Humberto Solas's Lucia, Castro has appeared in Cuban history and staged his revolution...
...When we make the Gospel present in the wilderness of politics," she said, "we bring hope to the poor, the weak, the powerless, the voiceless---to those without political clout and professional lobbies...
...There is something troubling about this business of _9 . . news . . . . It sweeps too clean, scooping up everything, passing it through a coarse net which seems to hold onto everything violent, ugly, bizarre, disordered and mean...
...But more often it is the world which is at fault, and the fact that none of its corners is too remote to be noticed...
...To the end of The Battle ol Algiers is appended an epilogue informing us tersely that everything Ali seemed to have died for in vain came to pass a few years later...
...Made in Argentina a few years ago between right-wing dictatorships, and about labor strife in a rural Argentinian province in the 1920s, Olivera's film adheres to the three-point program pretty faithfully...
...No "Katzenjammer Kids" or "Bringing Up Father" for her daughters...
...Edgar: Network, 13 of 13...
...Young: Network, 11 of 11...
...Before the Sunday papers were admitted the comics were removed and destroyed...
...She was articulate and bitter...
...This, after all, is the way the world is...
...I reached to turn off the radio for the simple reason that I didn't want my daughter to hear that...
...She brought her baby home to an empty apartment--n0 furniture, no food, nothing but her hungry dog and a blanket the hospital had given her in which to take the baby home...
...agent in State ol Siege, he is a family man and so human a figure...
...As the evening television news began, the girls came downstairs, fresh from their bath in their nighties, wet hair brushed neatly back...
...Another generalization is that Catholic religious in politics seem to be more introspective about their involvement, more inclined to develop rationales for their work, than Protestants...
...Sister Dunn told a Network seminar last June, "I can say, without exaggeration, that the poor are despised in the (Arizona) legislature...
...Just as the dictatorship of the proletariat has often--in Stalinist Russia, in Cuba and in China--turned into a dictatorship of one man indistinguishable from Fascism, so Commonweal: 403...
...I don't wish to belittle the quandary in which Rebellion in Patagonia ends, for it is a well and earnestly made film...
...There the...
...Ponte-Corvo's Burn...
...That makes them sound harmless and silly, but a BEM genius like Wood knew something 24 June 1977:400 about the human fear of snakes, spiders, rats, squids, centipedes...
...Among other things, they introduced me to the darker side of the human imagination...
...This struck me as a misunderstanding of what the news is for...
...Political leaders carry their personal histories with them...
...He's a committed radical and leader of the masses who is brought down by the Right...
...A lot of what the Washington papers publish seems politically idle and prurient, but in fact it tells people where they are, and where everybody else is...
...They were both, although the experts all warned that what they taught was better never learned...
...the faces of witnesses at the 24 June 1977:402 Watergate hearings, at once haughty and cringing...
...The media, and newspapers in particular, fail us when we are surprised by the headlines...
...It commits a peculiar kind of political error...
...My Mother worried that she had been cajoled too far in the other direction...
...Talking of his work on the board, he said, "The important lesson for me, and maybe for the Church, has been, in this particular case, that when the Church not only says that workers have rights, but is willing to get in and help do the work of implementing and protecting the guarantees of those rights---I think that is a tremendous witness to the world...
...terrible things happen, but not every day...
...This is true from the shooting of Valkulinchuk as he leads the mutiny aboard Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin to the execution of All la Pointe during Ponte-Corvo's The Battle ol Algiers, or the assassination of Deputy Lambrakis in Costa-Gavras's Z. 2. The corollary of 1. is that the villain is always a hero of sorts...
...But I am thinking of something quite different when I speak of the preoccupation of the press with the violent, ugly, bizarre, disordered and mean...
...agent training South American police in torture...
...When someone has a serious interest in the business of the government he ought to know who to send his letters to, who counts and who doesn't, where the decisions which affect him are actually made, and what they are likely to be...
...More than the equal of the fall guy, he is a figure of fascination and often the central character of the film...
...When the press is attacked for its preoccupation with bad news it is this sort of thing which is generally meant...
...The labor organizing done by Antonio and the others is succeeding until Zavala begins his second campaign and is able to take advantage of their initial trust of him to decimate their ranks...
...The woman describing their murder was quite explicit, not failing to cite their soaked bodies, their blue lips, the bubbles of froth at their mouths...
...Like the C.I.A...
...Gaines later made himself rich if not immortal by creating Mad, nuttily brilliant as a comic book but an ugly, brutish piece of work after it became a magazine, or so it seemed to me...
...BFW 6-6...
...even Danforth is regarded as a liberal Republican...
...The fact that some people would disagree with that message does not make it unimportant...
...Bread for the World (BFW), which focuses on domestic and world hunger issues, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which focuses on foreign affairs, defense and human rights areas...
...It is because he has it that the course of the rebellion is reversed...
...In doing that, they also send out the message that the political process is not without hope and dignity...
...Though I may not be able to use Gospel language when I denounce sinful and oppressive structures on the House floor or in my committee meetings when I suggest that the State can and must intervene in the economic order to protect those living a marginal existence," she said, "I am nonetheless making the Church's teaching present and striving for the reconciliation it seeks to promote by reordering relationships and structures...
...The hero, Antonio Soto (Luis Brandoni), commits himself totally to fomenting rebellion against Patagonia's rancher-capitalists, and he loses almost everything he commits...
...is about a similar counter-insurgency expert hired by British sugar planters in the Caribbean 100 years earlier...
...a photo of a naked prisoner in Uruguay with a sack over his head, _9 obtained and published by Amnesty International...
...It falls victim to what might quite rightly be called the cult of personality...
...the endless lists of names of political prisoners who have disappeared in Chile...
...A SALT negotiating position written by the Pentagon instead of the Arms Control Agency would say something about the Pentagon's power, the prospect for disarmament, the military thinking of the White House...
...Late last August we drove back to New York after a summer in Vermont and by the time we were in sight of the hot, yellow air hanging over the city we were tired and silent...
...CorneU: Network, 12 of 13...
...My daughters Amanda and Susan were sitting next to me on the front seat, looking straight ahead with empty, car-weary faces...
...BFW, 5 of 6; FCNL, 12 of 13...
...found some women and childen, whom they murdered...
...Zavala is really the most important character in the film since its central issue is the question of why he has this change of heart...
...It is not idle curiosity alone which notes the President's Commonweal: 401 dinner partners, or which thinks twice when Senators ride on corporate planes, or which wonders just who, exactly, got those checks drawn on Korean funds and made out to cash...
...Yet he turns into a murderous beast...
...The film even follows the model of conversion literature when it shows Zavala inexplicably turning against the workers after his first campaign in Patagonia ends with him in complete sympathy with them and playing the role of peace-maker...
...The announcer moved to another item...
...His BEMs stayed with you and visited your dreams...
...Inevitably, a lot of the news about who is behind what is bad, and thus sounds at times like carping...
...We are speaking here simply of the way the world is...
...The word "partially" has a certain lingering quality_9 By that time I was listening...
...No prescription follows, nor do I intend anything like blame...
...The central character in Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes is a gunslinger employed by the Brazilian ranchers to shoot cangaceiros, that in Alea's Memories ol Underdevelopment is a bourgeois wastrel at loose ends after Castro has come to power...
...the Vietcong captive with a pistol bullet exploding through his head during the Tet offensive...
...It's absolute...
...The Vault o] Horror, Frontline Combat, Weird Science Fantasy, Shock Suspenstories and half a dozen others---they were well-written and beautifully illustrated...
...Two examples will help give a feeling for the way these people see themeslves...
...Concentrating then on Zavala's key role in history, the film begins with his assassination after the rebellion and ends with a victory dinner the ranchers hold in his honor just before his assassination...
...That, in theory at least, is supposed to inform us of the ins and outs of the world in sufficient depth and detail to let us know where we are...
...FCNL, 12 of 13...
...A good many adults were about, drinking margaritas and talking about . . . whatever...
...When she returned she found her child dead, partially eaten...
...For 1976: --Drinan voted with Network on 13 of 13 issues...
...When the community is larger and the factgathering more efficient, the news darkens, a fact which perhaps has something to do with the bleaker vision of men who live in cities...
...It's an invariable three-point program: 1. The hero is always the fall guy of history...
...Mathieu, as it is about Ali and the F.L.N...
...Buchanan: Network, 5 of 10...
...Not long ago PBS broadcast a British documentary about Idi Amin...
...Amanda was nearly six, Susan four...
...It was the comic books I loved, kept and reread long after the titles died in the early 1950s...
...If he had not acted with this inconsistency, the film implies, the rebellion might well have succeeded and all subsequent Argentinian history might have been different...
...The most conservative major religious figure in politics is likely to be Hatch, who is a Reagan Republican...
...Do you remember the mercury-poisoned bodies of Japanese children at Minimata, the coal-mine sludge which engulfed a school at Aberfan in Wales, the acre of coffins from the 747 crash at Tenerife, the photo of Robert McNamara in a flight helmet on the deck of an aircraft carder in the Tonkin Gulf, evoked so eerily by the recent pictures of President Carter at the periscope of a nuclear submarine...
...But then I thought I'd only be drawing attention to the story, and left the radio on...
...Catholic priests and nuns in politics, then, see their work largely as a "witness" that the Church will work actively in this world to achieve justice and to protect the fights of the poor...
...In like manner, conditions in left-wing movies get worse and worse until, all at once, the revolution has succeeded...
...My Mother worried that she was derelict in her duty as a parent for allowing these things into the house...
...They sat unnoticed in front of the television set, faces perfectly blank as they watched a newsman interview a Hanafi woman about the reason for the takeover...
...We sh~w that there are those who care about the powerless where decisions are made that affect the quality of their lives, who believe they are not expendable and their rights barterable...
...The Battle ol Algiers is at least as much about the legionnaire, Col...
...My point is that we all--not just children u a r e impressionable, and that we carry such images with us from what we have seen or read in the media, and that it is doing something to us...
...The artists' names are with me stillmHarvey Kurtzman, John Severin, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, the brilliant B. Kriegstein whose drawings had the bleak intensity of Goya or Kathe Kolwitz...
...BFW, 6 of 6; FNCL, 12 of 13...
...Perhaps you remember the story...
...But I think it suffers the failure that a good many left-wing films do, and that left-wing ideology itself often does for that matter...
...Recently I heard a magazine editor say that he hoped reporting about the Carter administration would avoid the obsessive gossiping of the press during the Nixon era, when every nuance in the bureaucratic battles between Kissinger and Schlesinger, for example, was chronicled with such minute fidelity_9 He hoped there would be less preoccupation with exactly who authored this or that position paper as Carter shaped his foreign policy, and more about what the policy was and meant...
...My daughters showed no sign of having heard, asked no questions, only stared ahead into the darkening city...
...But as I say, no prescription follows...
...We might make a list of such images--the naked girl, burned with napalm, running down a road in Vietnam...
...Things had been quite different when she was a girl...
...In the latter the apostate comes to doubt more and moremas Newman does, for instance, in Apologia pro Vita Sua--until, suddenly, we turn the page and learn that now he's a Catholic...
...This preoccupation is generally taken to be something of an anomaly, a tendency incidental to the gathering of the real news...
...My Mother didn't like them...
...It is not hard to persuade people of ",his where children are concerned...
...an almost comically puzzled A1lende in his helmet, minutes before his murder----one might free associate a history of the times from these bits and pieces of half-remembered horrors...
...Included was footage in color of an execution...
...None of us had been covering the Hanafi takeover so we weren't paying much attention, but the girls were fascinated...
...She had a few dollars somewhere and went to get it, leaving the baby behind on the floor...
...It is as if the filmmaker were trying literally to peer inside the man, still unable to understand him and more absorbed in doing so than in the character of any of the film's heroes...
...A deeper social pathology is at work, one which has to do with the hugeness of the net, the coarseness of its weave, and the fact that it is cast every day over the whole world...
...Earlier this spring I happened to be staying with friends in Washington when the Hanafi Muslims took over two buildings and a lot of hostages and demanded stern justice for those who had perpetrated a certain crime against them...
...it makes a difference who writes the papers...
...As a child I loved comic books, especially those published by William Gaines under the "EC" imprint, which in the copyright notice was variously described as Entertaining Comics or Educational Comics, Inc...
...Occasionally the media are guilty of something unconscionable and inexcusable, as CBS was the night of the helicopter accident on top of the Pan Am building, when the New York station interrupted the Muppet Show--the Muppet Show!!.--to describe the victims cut in half by a flying rotor blade...
...A rival faction of Muslims had sent a team of killers to one of the Hanafis' communal homes...
...One of the victims was naked, clear enough on the screen so that one might note he was uncircumcized...
...I can remember her picking one up from time to time, glancing at a story about an ax murder, say, or a "Ghastly" Graham Ingalls drawing of a withered old crone rising from the grave with lips hanging in shreds around long-rooted teeth, or Wally Wood's version of a spaceship crew's destruction by extra-terrestial BEMs, an acronym standing for bug-eyed monsters...
...It is one thing to live in a small town and hear its bad news over the years...
...Moreover, while Antonio is the hero, the central character of the film is his nemesis, Commander Zavala (Hector Alterio), who leads the military mission sent to put down the workers' rebellion...
...Every man a Daniel Boone in the bureaucratic wilderness...
...There was an item about a woman whose week-old baby had been eaten by her dog, a half-starved German shepherd...
...As we passed through the outer reaches of the Bronx with its burned-out buildings and trash-lined streets the news began...
...The radio was on...
...At the end of the ]ast scene as he stands to accept an ovation from the ranchers, Zavala scowls into the future, into posterity, and the camera moves in for a tight close-up of his face and finally just his eyes...
...Assassinations and earthquakes are impossible to foresee, perhaps, but the great events of the world--the fall of Saigon, the resignation of Nixon, long slides in the stock market, war between the Arabs and Israelis, big bankruptcies, the decline of the pound sterling--do not catch attentive readers unaware when the newspapers have been doing their job...
...Leaving his apartment at the beginning a few minutes before he's killed, he plays with his daughter...
...When the community is the whole world, with its crime, pestilence, war, famine and corruption, the imaginations of those who listen to its news, even with only half an ear, must inevitably be prompted in the direction of gloom and silence...
...The two friends I was staying with had, between them, four daughters ranging in age from seven to 10...
...The net of the press is huge, its weave is coarse, it is cast every day over the whole worM, and it is doing something to us...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 13
