One of my problems with Larry Johnson's No Quarter is that he attacks Obama for the sake of attacking. The posts on his site will slash from the right one day, from the left the next. Granted, this schizophrenia stems, in part, from the fact that he employs multiple writers. Still, consider this piece. LisaB approvingly quotes a Washington Post article which, in turn, disapprovingly quotes these words from Mr. O's speech:

“You will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime. In fact, the recovery plan provides a tax cut . . . and these checks are on the way.”

To which the Post responds:

So much for summoning the country to sacrifice. Obama has been no more willing to ask average Americans to pitch in, even once the recession is over, than Bush.

(The WP meant to write "than Bush was." A major newspaper should take greater care.)

Lisa, it seems, agrees with the WP's contention that Obama should demand greater sacrifice. And I presume that Johnson agrees with Lisa.

So where does this stance leave us? We find ourselves in a classic damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation:

1. If Obama does lower taxes, NQ will say that he is "unwilling to ask for sacrifice."

2. If Obama had asked for higher taxes, NQ would have called him a socialist.

In fact, Johnson's site has damned the President as a socialist on previous occasions, as have plenty of other blogs. Thus, No Quarter offers both Option 1 attacks and Option 2 attacks, even though the two options are mutually contradictory.

Oh, but it gets worse: LisaB makes a head-snapping ideological switch within the same post. She goes on to quote (again, approvingly) Forbes:

Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks. All three used to insist that Obama was some species of centrist or moderate. Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic, each has recognized that just conceivably he might have been mistaken.

Okay, now we have Bam-Bam the bolshie, hoisting the red flag while working through a rap version of The Internationale. Just a paragraph ago, he was insufficiently FDR-ish; now he's gone beyond FDR-land and on into Marxville.

Which is it?

Before you say it: I am not getting soft on Obama. I am asking for political consistency, of the sort that one finds on (for example) The Confluence, a site which has always criticized our president from a left-ish perspective. That's my perspective as well, and I really cannot give even a tenth of a damn about anything David Brooks has to say.

To my way of thinking, Obama's stimulus package will probably fail because it is not sufficiently aggressive, and because Geithner favors the interests of the Wall Street crowd over the interests of the average citizen. In my view, Obama should nationalize the banks outright, offer HOLC-style relief to homeowners, and initiate massive government jobs programs. The problem is not that Obama has resurrected the Keynes/FDR legacy; the problem is his betrayal of that legacy.

I'm troubled by those who assail half-measures as extremism. I'm also troubled by irresponsible bloggers who try to squish together a left-wing and a right-wing critique. The two viewpoints are distinct and cannot intertwine.

I ask, in short, for consistency.

Yes, Tabatha? I see your hand raised. You have something to contribute...?

Ah. No, Tabatha: Emerson did not say "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." That is a commonly heard misquotation. He said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." In the hobgoblin hierarchy, a foolish inconsistency can be even more dangerous. Permalink

Living in this town allows one to catch the occasional piece of scuttlebutt.

I met someone who has had a few chats with Thomas Tull -- a name that probably does not ring any bells for you. Those bells will ring when you learn that Tull was the Executive Producer of The Watchmen, The Dark Knight and 300.

Tull, I am told, expects the success of the film version of The Watchmen to put his personal fortune over the billion dollar mark.

Please understand that nothing I say here should be construed as an attack on the man. I have no reason to believe that he is anything but a fine fellow who has worked hard for his rewards.

(Side note: David Geffen, they say, was the first person in the entertainment industry to make a billion dollars. I'm not sure if Tull is the second, the third, the tenth, or what. Such things occur outside my frame of reference.)

Still, I think it is interesting, and perhaps instructive, to keep that billion-dollar figure in mind while contemplating the views of Alan Moore, the man who created The Watchmen for DC comics back in the mid 1980s. Moore says that DC Comics (a subsidiary of Warners) "had stolen Watchmen and V for Vendetta from me in the first place, way back in the 80s."

The following quotes come from his 2007 "Exit Interview" (a very long interview, published as a book which you really ought to buy), conducted by Bill Baker:

Back then, I had gone into my relationship with them in good faith, and I think that they had done quite well out of it. And when they suggested that I might want to create something that could be creator-owned under this wonderful new contract they'd got, which would mean that as soon as the book went out of print it would return to the ownership of the creators, then I was very glad to enter into that. And, in fact, it was me who suggested to Dave Lloyd that, since this was such a good deal, we might was well let DC publish V for Vendetta, as well as Watchmen.

(Lloyd was the artist for V, which was originally published in the U.K.) The contract had one snag: Watchmen never went out of print -- an unprecedented situation. In the mid-1980s, no-one could have foreseen that a comic book would stay in print for a quarter century.

I was reshaping the market in a way that was very favorable to DC, and to comics in general. And then we were told that no, there wouldn't be any redrafting of the contract, and that, yeah, they did own this stuff forever.

Moore left DC and created projects for a smaller competitor. DC bought out the smaller company, apparently to secure the rights to Moore's work. Thus was born the not-very-good film version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I'd never really been interested in having my work adapted for film. So I decided that the only thing I could do that would be taking the high ground on the issue would be to refuse any future payments for films that were made of my work. This is for the films such as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, things that were owned by companies and which I no longer owned, and where I didn't have a say whether they were filmed or not. In the instance where they were filmed, I would not be accepting money for them, and I would be asking for my name in consequence to be taken off of the films.

I also decided that, with the books that I did own, but where I'd co-authored them with an artist, it wouldn't really be fair of me to deny the artist the chance to make the money if that's what they wanted. So I said that, in those cases, the film people could talk to the artist. I would not be accepting any of the money, and I would not want my name upon the film...

It's the artist and writers who are responsible for every comic book which you've ever enjoyed. And, in most cases, it's the artists and writers who have died distressed and penniless, or alcoholics, or suicidal; whereas, the people at the companies have tended to do rather well, and to have suffered a lot less stress in their dealings with the business.

It isn't right. And I can't really look at comics these days without seeing the immense line of cheated ghosts standing behind every colorful superhero character.

I wouldn't worry too much about Moore financially; I'm sure he still receives royalties on the Watchmen book, on sale right now at Target and other fine venues. He may, in fact, be one of the few occultists who dies with a certain degree of economic security.

But the fact is that he did not want the film to exist. Perhaps he would have felt differently if granted script approval; I have no way of knowing.

His larger point about the "cheated ghosts" is, of course, quite true. Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster sold the rights to Superman for $130. (They made rather more, after a lengthy court case, for the rights to Superboy.) Bob Kane, co-creator of Batman (and one of the worst artists in history), did rather well for himself, since he was related to a lawyer. Bill Finger, now acknowledged as the character's co-creator, got nothing. He was fired when he asked for health benefits. Finger also wrote the first story featuring the Joker, the main attraction in The Dark Knight.

Jack Kirby, who helped to create the Fantastic Four, X-Men, The Hulk, Thor, Captain America and a vast number of other characters, worked for a page rate -- and kept working hard well into his 70s, even after he began to lose his sight. Marvel, the company he had helped to build, did not provide health insurance.

Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, walked away from the book in the 1960s. I don't know how much, if anything, he has received from the Spider-Man films. Any money he is getting probably stems from corporate generosity or fear of bad publicity, not from the dictates of his original contract with Marvel. I understand that he had lived penuriously for a number of years.

Ditko also created a faceless character called The Question, who functioned as a vehicle for the man's Ayn Rand-ian philosophy. Rorschach of The Watchmen is Moore's answer to Ditko's character.

Alan Moore's final word:

Yeah, there's one really, really important lesson that I've learned from this, and that is: "Don't trust Whitey."

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I have nothing but contempt for Alex Jones, but I must admit -- this is one canny piece of marketing. (He says, having spent many a year in the evil trade of advertising.) I may offer a precis of what the Great ConspiraTard has to say, as soon as I find out what it is.

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Here is an interesting analysis of our financial woes. A very large and complex chart drives home a fact which we already knew: America does not make anything any more.

The same situation exists today that existed in 1929. There has been no cause for our GDP to expand since 2000. We grew based on increased debt-financed spending, overvalued homes, and derivatives thereof. But there was little additional real wealth produced, other than homes. And the artificially created over-demand for homes caused more to be produced than there was any wage/income-financed demand for.

Thus, the writer (unlawflcombatnt) predicts that the Depression (may we use the D-word?) will be long, very long.

So once again, what do these "experts" think is going to bring us out of this recession? What new source of demand will come along? What new product or industry...

Okay, here comes the part that no-one has dared to mention:

The truth is that the we ALREADY have a source of demand to start the recovery. That source is our trade deficit. It is the demand we lose by purchasing imports, instead of domestic production. But we can only tap this source if we re-channel import purchases into domestic purchases.

Though we can do little in the short-term about our ~$300 billion in oil & energy imports, there is plenty we can do about our ~$400 billion in non-energy imports. We can immediately raise TARIFFS, adding the expense of tariffs to the price of foreign imports. This would reduce the quantity demand for imports, and increase the demand for American products to replace them...

And, in case it isn't already obvious, TARIFFS bring in additional Federal revenue, instead of spending Federal revenue. Our budget deficit and national debt would fall (or rise less), and there would be more funds available for either tax cuts, increased government spending, or both.

The concept is simple. America does not make anything any longer because imports are cheap. Make imports more expensive and we go back to work.

Can anyone see the big problem with this suggestion? China. The Chinese fund our debt. (Not alone, of course, but to no small degree.) They do so not for altruistic reasons but because their economy depends on us buying their crap. If we stop buying their crap they have little motive to buy our crappy debt.

The other problem, of course, is Obama. He told the great NAFTA fib, as documented in a previous post (of which I remain proud). NAFTA is not the real issue, since the cheap imports come from outside North America. But Obama's deception on that score indicates his true economic thinking -- and his reliance on economic advisers who remain wedded to the theory of free trade.

I mean, so what if an American engineer produces a car that runs on seawater? So what if an American invents anti-gravity shoes? So what if an American invents a TV screen that can be painted on walls? Within a year, we'll be importing those products, and our situation will have improved not one whit.

How to disguise a rise in tarrifs: Play the terrorism card. We need to protect our ports. We need to hire a whole bunch more people to inspect with care each and every container that comes in. This approach translates import fees directly into jobs. Permalink

Is Obama Bush II? Glenn Greenwald seems to think that he's heading in that direction.

Two lawyers want to bring suit against the government because their privileged phone conversations with their clients were intercepted. The Obama of Kossack hallucination would have supported this cause. But the Obama of reality is doing everything it can to fight it.

As Marcy Wheeler documents in detail, the Obama DOJ is now spouting the Cheney/Addington view of government in its purest and most radical expression.

Here's Marcy:

But why the fuck would an Executive Order--which is not a law but, as the term implies, an Executive Order--bind a non-Executive entity regarding information it created? This whole passage, read in the context of the wholesale rollback on Executive claims to have exclusive control over classified information just reeks of desperation. Not to mention an acceptance of Cheney's contention that we have fewer than one--or even two--branches of government.

Back to Greenwald:

There is only one branch with the power to decide if these documents can be used in this Article III court proceeding: The Executive. What the President decides is final. His decision is unreviewable. It's beyond the reach of the law. No court has the authority to second-guess it or to direct the President to comply with a disclosure order.

Big laffs: Here's a typical Kossack reaction...

Maybe the Obama justice department is pursuing this case precisely so it will be ruled against and establish a badly-needed precedent.

Have been wondering that myself...so far, it's the only idea that makes the bizarre continuation of BushCo policies make sense.

Obama and Holder are no fools. And I can't believe that they would protect Bush policies that are anathema to the rule of law. They can't tip their hand, but I'm convinced that whatever they're up to, it's going to work out to be the right thing to do to help root out the abuse.

Oh jeez. Oh jeez. This is painful.

As I write, someone is sleeping in the next room, so I can't laugh out loud. But man-o-man -- holding it in is tough. These delusional rationalizations have me visualizing a housewife who tells herself that her husband is faithful even after he shuffles home at 5 a.m. with lipstick stains on his underwear.

On a related note: Obama says, vis-a-vis a proposed inquiry into the Bush/Cheney crimes, that he is "more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards." I knew that he would say those words -- those exact words -- six months before the election. That's why he received the backing that he received.

Elsewhere in the news...

Rush: He's still an idiot, but making him the center of the national debate will one day be regarded as a really, really, really dumb move.

By the way, he recently referred to Talking Points Memo as a "far left blog." Wow. What does that make Cannonfire?

Single Payer: Barack Obama is having a big health care party and Single Payer is not invited. hipparchia at Corrente wants to do something about that situation.

Watchmen: Okay, I'm stumped. I'm furious about the way Alan Moore has been treated. My sense of authorial rights tells me that if he did not want the film to be, it should not be. Yet I want to see it. Should I? Permalink

The sites relating this story may strike you as rather dodgy, or at least unfamiliar. (Here, for example.) Still, the news is striking:

According to a CIA study currently being shown to selected staff members on the US Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Israel's survival in its present form beyond the next 20 years is doubtful.

The Report predicts "an inexorable movement away from a Two State to a One State solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region."

If a one-state solution is implemented, some two million Israelis will head to the United States.

The Report claims that, “Alongside a decline in Jewish births and a rise in Palestinian fertility, approximately 1.6 million Israelis are likely to return to their forefather’s lands in Russia and Eastern and Western Europe with scores of thousands electing to stay, depending on the nature of the transition.”

Or so says the report. Problem: I can't find any verification of the existence of this CIA study, beyond one article by Franklin Lamb. On February 21, that same article appeared in lots of places -- at the above-linked site, in Countercurrents, the Seoul Times and elsewhere.

Who is Franklin Lamb? Wikipedia says he is a researcher at the American University and author of the book Hezbollah: A Brief Guide for Beginners. He also wrote a book called The price we pay: a quarter-century of Israel's use of American weapons against civilians in Lebanon (1978-2006). (See here.) In 1984, he wrote Israel's War in Lebanon. He was a witness at the Kahan Commission Inquiry into the Sabra-Shatilla massacre (the subject of yet another of his books).

There is an interview with him here. This site paints him as something of a mystery man. He seems to have developed excellent sources and has written a number of good pieces on Lebanon and Israel.

So yeah, it's possible that this guy could have found out about a CIA report that remains unknown to all other journalists. Perhaps a Senate or House staffer sneaked him a copy...? I can't see any previous indications that the man has ever trafficked in (or fallen for) a forgery.

Interesting. Why isn't anyone else talking about this report? Why is so much attention suddenly being paid to Rush Limbaugh and not to this? A CIA prediction of Israel's demise certainly qualifies as news in my judgment. Permalink

Yeah, I know. This is the third post (probably two more than you wanted to read) devoted to an email exchange published in Liberal Rapture. The previous installments can be found here and here.

The exchange was between a well-known writer who supports Obama and a black female Democratic activist who got to know the real Barack Obama, and who now has some very critical things to say about Our Dear Leader. Since LR hid the names of both correspondents, some of my readers suspected forgery.

We now know that the exchange is real. Cannonfire readers, especially our resident linguistic analyst G, identified the pro-O writer as James Kunstler. (See comments here.) Kunstler, best-known for his books The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere, keeps a web page here and a blog somewhere else. He has admitted to G that the emails are no forgery. (Thanks, G!)

Is the matter important? That all depends on how much value you place on the delicious first-hand observations offered by Kunstler's anti-O correspondent, whom we will re-christen "Fredricka." (My deepest apologies for first using the code-name "Fred.") To recap (and remember, this is all vis-a-vis Obi):

I have found him to be a rather deceitful person who, certainly, is smart enough but whose vaunted intelligence is vastly overrated - his judgment even more so.

Moreover, I haven't found his writing (which has only been about himself) or his post-graduate career to be anything that would lend me to think more highly of his intelligence.

He skims the surface of issues and problems. In fact, his remarks, when not prepared come across as vapid. He repeats, like rote, tired democratic tropes. (And frankly many Republican ones. He truly does admire Reagan and not just because Reagan won elections).

He seems to have spent little to no time in deep introspection about any particular area of policy. He spent very little time at his actual job in the Senate or doing any substantive work - which was similar to his time in the IL State Senate.

He certainly...seems to at bottom be relatively incurious about geopolitics. And, he would get a glazed look in his eyes and look about for someone else to move on to when I raised questions about how he would address the looming US financial crisis I could see on the horizon.

I can also say how shocked I became at the really dishonest tactics he used, from race-baiting to caucus fraud to paying cyber stalkers to terrorize pro-Clinton writers and website owners.

For goodness sake, the man broke virtually every important promise he made during the primary campaign as soon as it was over, and he's busy continuing this trend now that he's president.

And, he was certainly fairly animated when talking about his "life" and "his story which could only have happened in the U.S." (tell that to all my relatives and friends in the UK and Germany who are biracial with one African parent) and how he went into politics "for his girls future" and when asking us to reach deep in our pockets to help him succeed. It was only when he was pressed to delve deeply into significant policy issues that he became uninterested, bored and fidgety.

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Okay, so I'm half-watching The Ring on TV. Naomi Watts gets pushed into a well and falls, what, maybe 70 feet. At the bottom, she hits about three feet of water. And yet she's all right. Not a bone broken. Apparently, three feet of water was enough to break her fall.

You know, at one time I would have thought that a thing like that might hurt someone. Permalink

In case you have not seen it elsewhere, this two-part video presentation does a marvelous job of explaining the hows and whys of the economic collapse. After watching, perhaps you will be able to come up with a video explaining how to solve the problem.





The guy below goes over much of the same territory, with far fewer visual aids. (Hats. He uses hats.) But he turns out to be really funny, so give it a try.

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I have to ask (briefly): Why is Obama pushing so hard for Social Security reform now? The Democratic party is resisting him -- yes, resisting the Blessed One. So why not wait until after the midterms, when the Republicans will have greater numbers, and may in fact be in the majority?

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(This blog occasionally addresses non-political subjects on the weekends. As I write, it is still Sunday.)

I've never before used this humble column to present a film review. A movie most of you will never see has prompted me to take up the evil habit. I do so in order to segue into the larger topic of film's relationship to religion and history. Some of you may interpret the last half of this post as anti-Semitic. It is not, but if you choose to misread my words in that fashion, don't expect me to pretend to give even a quarter-damn.

(Warning: You may encounter spoilers. I don't consider them major -- certainly not when dealing with a film which focuses more on atmosphere and theme than on narrative.)

Abel Ferrara's 2005 independent production Mary stars Forest Whitaker as a father, Matthew Modine as a son, and Juliette Binoche as a holy ghost. Modine plays a foul-mouthed, somewhat self-centered director -- modeled, perhaps, on Ferrera himself (best known for the excellent Bad Lieutenant). He has just directed, and starred in, a controversial film called This is My Blood, about Guess Who. Binoche plays his Mary Magdalene. Whitaker plays a "serious" television interviewer of the Bill Moyers type; his shows often feature religious scholars, even though he is of uncertain faith.

After completion of filming, Binoche becomes so obsessed -- or possessed -- by the Magdalene that she begins to relive, mentally, the disciple's life. She flies off to Israel, pretty much intending to come down with a case of Jerusalem syndrome. Dramatizations of the non-canonical (and very incomplete) Gospel of Mary punctuate the film, and we are not told if these segments represent Modine's film or Binoche's trance-fantasies. Probably both.

Let's get the Consumer Reports aspect of this review out of the way quickly. The film fails.

It fails honorably, because Ferrara has made a well-crafted, well-acted attempt to deal with serious matters. Nevertheless, it is muddled. It does not move us when it intends to leave us shattered. It concentrates on establishing a spooky-spooky mood while neglecting clear exposition and other basic narrative chores. It seems fearful of its most interesting ideas, retreating, in the end, to a comfortable schoolboy Catholicism. It keeps well-educated characters inarticulate when you most want them to make incisive comments.

The greatest disappointment is Binoche's character, who may or may not provide a voice for the Magdalene's ghost. A fascinating premise, that. Alas, Ferrara refuses to do much with it. The character has no arc; in the first ten minutes of the film, she does pretty much everything she's ever going to do. Toward the end of the story, she gives counsel to a man in spiritual crisis, and her message (in essence) is pray. Well, if MM has nothing more interesting to say after her 2000-year journey through time, she need not have made the trip.

The man in crisis is Whittaker, who cheats on his pregnant wife. He develops a major case of the guilties when premature labor endangers the child.

For some reason, his interview subjects tend to be experts on the gnostic gospels. One wonders why Whitaker seems so fascinated by those texts, since neither he nor Ferrera understands them. Although many variants of gnosticism existed, most gnostics disdained monotheism and considered the material world beyond redemption -- or rotten, to use the technical term. The creator god of the Jews was the gnostic equivalent of Satan -- after all, the SOB made this place, didn't he?

To the gnostics, bringing an innocent child into this corrupt and corrupting world is a crime graver than abortion. A truly gnostic Magdalene would have told Whitaker: "Your baby may die? He's lucky." Granted, she would probably have phrased the thought in a nicer way.

Instead, a soul-torn Whitaker retreats into the familiar mythos: God is one, God is love; his world is inherently good, and people are inherently bad; repent, ye sinner, repent! This, I suspect, is all that Ferrara knows or ever will allow himself to know of religion. He comprehends nothing beyond that which the penguins forced into his cranium during catechism class.

The ignorance is catching. Elaine Pagels (author of the seminal The Gnostic Gospels) appears on Whitaker's program and proceeds to make an extraordinary blunder: She claims that the Gospel of Mary was found in 1946 at Nag Hamadi along with the gospels of Thomas and Philip. Not true. The book (or the few pages left of it) was included in the Akhmim Codex, purchased in Cairo in 1896. If someone like Pagels can screw up like that (and she seems to be speaking extemporaneously), one can't blame a layman like Ferrara for flailing.

The most interesting -- and most muddled -- of the film's three intertwining plots concerns the director played by Matthew Modine, who functions as Ferrara's alter ego. His movie-within-the-movie strikes me as both deeply-felt and well-done, yet everyone (onscreen and off) hates both the project and its creator. His colleagues hate him, the reviewers of Mary hate him, and even Abel Ferrara seems to hate him. I may be the only person who does not consider Modine's character a monster.

True, the director who cast himself Jesus does tend to drop a lot of F-bombs once the cameras stop rolling, but a lot of people in the industry are like that. Yes, Modine commits the "sin" of trying to market his movie, but he does so because film-makers have an obligation to their backers. Ferrara wants us to view the man as a gauche huckster. I can't go along. In fact, Modine seems more sinned against than sinning, especially when Whitaker interrupts the man's every attempt to explain himself.

At first, we are led to believe that the people assailing This is My Blood are fundamentalist Protestants annoyed by the inclusion of heretical material. Even Whitaker accuses the director of insulting Jesus. Yet he does nothing of the sort. No part of the movie-within-the-movie conveys heresy or defamation -- indeed, we see no offensive material of any kind. As noted above, some episodes dramatize the Gospel of Mary. Strange as that text may be, the portions enacted on screen are not notably unorthodox or blasphemous. It's hard to understand what the fuss is supposed to be about.

As the film heads toward the finale, we learn that the folks most incensed by This is My Blood are not evangelicals. They're Jews.

The picketers dress in concentration camp uniforms. They decry the movie as anti-Semitic. A bomb threat (perhaps meant to mirror a suicide bombing in Israel, as seen earlier in the story) empties out the theater. A Jewish demonstrator tells a television reporter: "This lie inspired the murder of millions of my people over the centuries! This lie inspired the Holocaust itself!"

Yet we see no evidence of actual anti-Semitism in This is My Blood. So what is Ferrara trying to tell us?

At this point, we must zoom out and address a subject larger than this one film.

The apocalyptic ending of Mary -- unlike much of what precedes it -- rings true. The demonstrators target This is My Blood not because it ignores the canonical works but because it tells their story.

Hollywood has always feared the passions aroused by the Passion. The C.B. DeMille silent version of King of Kings includes a hilarious title card in which a post-crucifixion Caiaphas makes sure that we understand that the blame for everything belongs to him, to Caiaphas alone, not to anyone else, just him him him. (I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the original title card really is that obvious.) The Robe, which premiered in 1953, gives the Romans full blame for the death of Jesus. We catch no whiff of opposition by any Jewish priest -- in fact, every non-Roman in Jerusalem just loves the guy. The tribune even provides the 30 pieces of silver!

(Was it Dwight MacDonald or Stanley Kauffman who made the crack about Richard Burton playing the "fall goy"?)

I can understand Jewish sensitivity over the issue -- to a point. But the outcries which attend every Jesus movie have taken on a ritualistic quality, and the rite has become tiresome. I'm reminded of the shouts of "Racism!" which we heard throughout 2008 every time someone suggested that Barack Obama might not be the best Democratic nominee. After a while, transparent attempts to manipulate emotions can become annoying, ineffective and downright infuriating.

I didn't much care for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (the target of my second-greatest prank). Still, some of the Jews who over-reacted to that movie pretty much made clear that they would be offended by any attempt to tell the Jesus story. Some insist that the Gospels themselves are inherently racist. As this news article put it, "Jewish groups, notably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the United States, worry that the film's very fidelity to the Bible texts is going to make it anti-Semitic."

The Anti-Defamation League said that Gibson's film portrays Jews as uniquely "blood-thirsty, sadistic and money-hungry," a bullshit claim that will persuade only those who have never seen the movie (or who insist on "seeing" the film they've read about, as opposed to the one on screen). The ADL also averred that the film depicts "the high priest's control of Pontius Pilate" as well as a "cross built in the Temple at the direction of Jewish religious officials." In short, the ADL saw many things in the script and/or the finished product that were invisible to non-insane viewers. No, I will not apologize for the previous sentence.

I've read the Gospels with care, as most Jews (and many Christians) have not. I do not view those texts as inherently racist. Perhaps the author of John does occasionally bitch and complain about his fellow Jews (and it is obvious to me that he, whoever he was, was Jewish), but his attitude mirrors the way I bitch and complain about my fellow Americans. Any writer who does not lambaste his countrymen is a thug.

We still often hear the nonsensical assertion that the Gospels caused the Holocaust. In fact, Hitler always made very clear that his murderous racism was based on biology, not religion. He never cared for Christianity. To him, a baptized Jew was just as odious as any other variety.

In the wake of the Gibson film, a South African rabbi said (vis-a-vis the ADL's leader) that "what he is saying is that the only way to escape the wrath of Foxman is to repudiate your faith." I agree. Moreover, I think that this message became standardized well before Mel Gibson directed his first movie in 1993, and well before Abraham Foxman started heading up the ADL in 1987.

From Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry:

By the 1970s, anti-Semitism was no longer a salient feature of American life. Nonetheless, Jewish leaders started sounding alarm bells that American Jewry was threatened by a virulent "new anti-Semitism." The main exhibits of a prominent ADL study ("for those who have died because they were Jews") included the Broadway show Jesus Christ Superstar and a counterculture tabloid that "portrayed Kissinger as a fawning sycophant, coward, bully, flatterer, tyrant, social climber, evil manipulator, insecure snob, unprincipled seeker after power" - in the event, an understatement.

I recall reading, back in the early 1970s, a particularly over-the-top Jewish condemnation of the film version of Superstar, a work which most people find offensive only on musical grounds. The author of that screed, if sincere, was paranoid; if insincere, calculating.

Back to Finkelstein:

For organized American Jewry, this contrived hysteria over a new anti-Semitism served multiple purposes. It boosted Israel's stock as the refuge of last resort if and when American Jews needed one.

Moreover, the fund-raising appeals of Jewish organizations purportedly combating anti-Semitism fell on more receptive ears. "The anti-Semite is in the unhappy position," Sartre once observed, "of having a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy." For these Jewish organizations the reverse is equally true. With anti-Semitism in short supply, a cutthroat rivalry between major Jewish "defense" organizations - in particular, the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center - has erupted in recent years.

The main ulterior motive for sounding the anti-Semitism alarm bells, however, lay elsewhere. As American Jews enjoyed greater secular success, they moved steadily to the right politically.

Just as organized Jewry remembered The Holocaust when Israeli power peaked, so it remembered The Holocaust when American Jewish power peaked. The pretense, however, was that, there and here, Jews faced an imminent "second Holocaust." Thus American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses as they indulged in cowardly bullying.

"Bullying" is, I think, a good word to describe some (hardly all) of the Jewish reaction to Gibson's movie, to Andrew Lloyd Weber's noisy operetta, toScorcese's fine movie (whose critics, most now forget, were not all fundamentalist silly-billies) and even to the beloved miniseries created by Zeferelli and Burgess.

And what has been the result of all this hysteria? Few in Hollywood would now dare to make a film about Jesus. (The last attempt was the insipid The Nativity.) More than that: Few would dare to make a film touching on Christianity in any way, however obliquely. That's why the brief image of Christ in Bad Lieutenant shocks us more than does the brief glimpse of Havey Keitel's peepee. There are taboos, and then there are taboos.

In the so-called Golden Age, it used to be said that religion in Hollywood amounted to Jews selling Catholicism to a nation of Protestants. (Think Bells of St. Mary, Song of Bernadette, Keys of the Kingdom...) Now, religion plays almost no role in studio-produced films -- except, arguably, for the Holocaust-themed films. Jews selling Judaism to Jews. Such films should exist, but must they be the only films touching on questions of faith?

Of course, in the alternate reality of the fundamentalist "marketplace," many movies do serve to sledgehammer Jayzuss into the brains of the faithful. These productions -- artless, unsubtle, propagandistic and trite -- exist within a ghetto. They will never mean a thing to anyone who lives outside that ghetto, to anyone who doesn't also think that George Dubya was a really good president. I suspect that within the studios there are plenty of people who want to address religious themes, directly or indirectly, in a serious and artistically satisfying way. Some of them want to ask questions about faith, which the ghetto-dwelling fundies never do.

Would a movie of that sort have an audience? Of course. Unfortunately, the protestors -- Christian fanatics and Jewish fanatics -- have made the production of such films difficult, if not impossible.

And that's why, in the end, I respect what Ferrara has done. Yeah, his movie is a mess. But at least he made an honest mess. A brave mess. He confronts themes that most American film-makers have learned to avoid.

By the way: Throughout Mary, Forest Whitaker compulsively watches televised footage of violence in the Middle East. The viewer longs to hear the ghost of Mary Magdalene say a few words about all of that. (I mean something aside from a generalized statement about peace being good and war being bad.) Alas, not even Ferrara has the balls to venture into that territory. Permalink