Clooney: Moderates are Evil

Via Libertas and IMDB, we learn today that activist and sometimes-actor George Clooney has recommended that his fellow celebrities refrain from political commentary.

Ocean's Eleven star George Clooney is urging his fellow Hollywood stars to keep quiet when it comes to politics, because he fears celebrity endorsements could wreck their favorite candidates' chances of victory.

Our jubilation was short-lived, however, as Clooney quickly followed his admonition to keep quiet about politics the only way he knows how... by talking about politics.

"My father ran for Congress last year. I couldn’t campaign for him and I knew I couldn’t, because I’d hurt him. They tried to get me to get on the John Kerry train and I said, ‘We’ll hurt him. They’ll use us as ‘liberal’.’ Now, I would argue that (throughout) American history, it’s pretty hard to find a time when liberals were on the wrong side of an issue. We thought that the conservative view was, ‘Witches should be burned at the stake.’ Moderate view was: ‘Well, just in case,’ and the liberal view was, ‘There’s no such thing as witches.’ We thought women should be able to vote and blacks should be allowed to sit at the front of the bus and Vietnam was wrong. We haven’t really been on a lot of wrong sides for us to be sort of used as this bad word. But we hurt candidates right now, so we can do fundraisers quietly and make some money. But I think it’s dangerous to get up and talk about it."

Ah yes, there's the smug know-it-all attitude we look for in our A-listers! I'm not naive enough to think that Clooney is interested in facts, but he should know that the Salem trials took place in 1692 - almost a century before America became a nation, and before the modern political distinctions between liberalism and conservatism had even emerged. Without getting into an extended discussion of the Vietnam War (suffice to say, I regard it as being somewhat more complex than the simple axiom it has become), he may wish to recall that it was none other than "icon of liberalism" John F. Kennedy that began America's involvement, and his Democrat Vice-President who pursued it; not until the next Republican president adopted a policy of disengagement did it come to an end. Uncomfortable as it may be for Clooney to hear, the Democrats filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which outlawed discrimination against women and minorities) for 83 days after the Republicans introduced it to Congress, and then proceeded to pass it 153-96 (61.4%) to the Republicans' 138-34 (80.2%). Notably, Al Gore's father was among those who voted against. And as for his contention regarding moderates, there's a reason why "elections are won and lost in the centre" - because most people are moderates, they just tend not to be so self-obsessed as to think that anyone gives a damn.

When you start shoehorning clumsy political rhetoric into poorly-written children's fantasies, when you turn War of the Worlds into an allegory for US imperialism and let Tim Robbins write his own lines, when you make 'timely' and 'important' films about McCarthyism as a precursor of the PATRIOT Act (that is, the PATRIOT Act as a nebulous scare-word, without specifying any actual objections to it), when you make innuendo-laden 'thrillers' about the American government conspiring with oil corporations to redraw national borders in the Middle East for greater profiteering, and especially when you make such bald-faced I-am-virtue-you-are-glue statements as the one above, only sheer self-absorbed delusion could lead you to believe that people won't resent your condescending attempts to "educate" them in The One Truth(c). But they don't bristle because you come across as "liberal", George. They bristle because you come across as a total asshole.

UPDATE: HIRED GOON 9:23pm THURSDAY OCTOBER 06th 2005

A commenter notes something which I should have addressed in the initial post. Warning: major spoilers for the film "Syriana" follow.

Syriana is purportedly based on a true story - namely, that of ex-CIA operative Robert Baer, as published in his professional autobiography "See No Evil". First of all, I must make clear that I haven't read this book. However, every quote, summary, blurb, review and discussion I've seen describes it as a critique (or rather, indictment) of the increasing bureaucratic paralysis inflicted upon the CIA by the White House, primarily during the Clinton years. From the preface:

This book is a memoir of one foot soldier's career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks... This memoir, I hope, will show the reader how spying is supposed to work, where the CIA lost its way, and how we can bring it back again. But I hope this book will accomplish one more purpose as well: I hope it will show why I am angry about what happened to the CIA. And I want to show why every American and everyone who cares about the preservation of this country should be angry and alarmed, too. The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead.

How, then, have Clooney & Co managed to turn a book about the CIA being reigned in, "scrubbed clean" and emasculated, into a thriller about an all-encompassing CIA's shadowy involvement in a plot to reshape the entire Middle East? A rather comprehensive review of the book reveals no trace of any story with even a passing resemblance. The first chapter laments the encroaching culture of enervation in the agency, describing Baer's incredulity at being interrogated on trumped-up charges for simply meeting with, and requesting support for, dissident factions in the Iraqi military. Elsewhere, he discusses the prevailing attitudes at the CIA since the mid-nineties:

For almost a decade now the CIA put a low priority on recruiting human sources abroad. The CIA was more concerned about being politically correct, getting along in Washington and not causing waves. Don't forget that in the 1990's the Clinton White House only cared about the economy. The last thing it wanted was for the CIA to be mucking around abroad and damaging U.S. business relations.

And yet, from this, we seemingly end up with a movie featuring a muscular intelligence network conspiring with various oil multinationals to effect massive political change in several countries which are closely associated with US business interests. Did the makers deliberately set out to create a film that's diametrically opposed to their source material? Because on that note, I also highly doubt that the book features a subplot about an affair between Miss USA and a prominent Saudi oil magnate. Clooney's patent lack of interest in factual accuracy reaches its climax when he, as Baer, is killed by an American missile fired into the motorcade of a liberal reformist Saudi Prince (naturally) while trying to save him. Which, I'd imagine, would make it rather difficult for him to write the book on which the movie is 'based' a decade later. The filmmakers have no desire to translate the historical record to the screen; they wish only to concoct a series of iconic images designed to leave a particular impression in the minds of the audience. To them, the facts are of minimal importance. Fiction, hearsay, supposition and innuendo are their tools.

This hypocrisy is brought into even sharper focus when one discovers some of the book's other contents:

The cost of this is painfully clear in Baer's chapter on the failed 1995 coup in Iraq. Baer... was approached by an Iraqi general who had defected and was representing a group of military officers who planned to use their forces to oust the dictator. Baer was also in touch with a Kurdish leader who was willing to join in the attack, but both men wanted Washington's blessing, if not outright assistance. Baer['s]... many urgent pleas to Washington went completely ignored - until the very eve of the intended coup, when he was ordered by National Security Advisor Anthony Lake to tell the rebels that they were on their own. Baer never offers an explanation for Lake's decision... he simply calls it a "failure of nerve... the only beacon I had to go by was what I understood American policy to be: that we would support any serious movement to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Those were my orders as I understood them." Naturally, he encouraged the conspirators. To his mind, "faced with a choice between sins of commission or omission, Washington had chosen the latter and left good and brave men twisting in the wind."

Is it just me, or is this one of the most perfect potential film adaptations ever? And one which bears immense relevance to the situation currently facing the US in Iraq? If the filmmakers wanted to make a taut Middle-East thriller with 'important present-day parallels', why not choose one which actually existed in their source material?

It would appear that Syriana employs the same trick as the recent film, "Domino"; it takes an interesting premise based on a real-life figure (model-turned bounty hunter, disenchanted CIA officer), catches the audience's attention with its intriguing one-line pitch, and then constructs a series of entirely fictitious events around it. At least in Domino's case, the makers were honest enough to shoot a trailer featuring the slogan "Based on a True Story... Sort Of." If, as seems likely, Clooney et al have used Robert Baer's name and book to lend the film a veneer of authority - and then completely ignored its content, in favour of a plot which better serves their own agenda - then their efforts are rendered even more disingenuous. If your goal, as Clooney claims, is to "raise debate", shouldn't reality take precedence?

UPDATE: HIRED GOON 4:26pm FRIDAY OCTOBER 07th 2005

We have confirmation. The trailer states that the film was "Suggested By the book entitled 'See No Evil' by Robert Baer." See also this screen grab from the end of the trailer, which gives a telling insight into the nuanced, near-unfathomable complexities of the film's political message.

UPDATE: HIRED GOON 6:43pm SATURDAY DECEMBER 24th 2005

Richard Cohen pens an incisive review in the Washington Post:

You will not be surprised to learn that the locus for all this "oil, terrorism, money and power" is the United States, which is up to no good. With the exception of the Clooney character, everyone is corrupt, including, of course, the CIA. The agency not only sets up one of its own, Clooney, but it assassinates a perfectly nice Middle Eastern potentate to ensure that his oil remains in friendly hands. This sort of thing is distinctly against the law, a true career-ender at the CIA and elsewhere, but never mind. A movie does not have to stick to the facts.

Still, if it is going to say anything, then it ought to say something smart and timely. But, the cynicism of "Syriana" is out of time and place, a homage to John le Carre, who himself is dated. To read George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate" is to be reminded that the Iraq war is not the product of oil avarice, or CIA evil, but of a surfeit of altruism, a naive compulsion to do good. That entire collection of neo- and retro-conservatives -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and particularly Paul Wolfowitz -- made war not for oil or for empire but to end the horror of Saddam Hussein and, yes, reorder the Middle East.

They were inept. They were duplicitous. They were awesomely incompetent, and, in the case of Bush, they were monumentally ignorant and incurious, but they did not give a damn for oil or empire. This is why so many liberals, myself included, originally supported the war. It engaged us emotionally. It seemed... well, right -- a just cause.

It would be nice if Hollywood understood that. It would be nice if those who agree with Hollywood -- who think, as Gaghan does, that this is a brave, speaking-truth-to-power movie when it's really just an outdated cliche -- could release their fervid grip on old-left bromides about Big Oil, Big Business, Big Government and the inherent evil of George Bush, and come up with something new and relevant. I say that because something new and relevant is desperately needed. Neoconservatism crashed and burned in Iraq, but liberalism never even showed up. The left's criticism of the war from the very start was too often a porridge of inanities about oil or empire or Halliburton -- or isolationism by another name. It was childish and ultimately ineffective. The war came and Bush was reelected. How's that for a clean whiff?

And, in keeping with the perception-trumps-reality thesis, we note that Daily Kos have started carrying ads highlighting the true "price of oil", as shown by Syriana. Let me guess: fake, but accurate?