A NEWSLETTER FROM DAVID CORN |
A NEWSLETTER FROM DAVID CORN |
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Is It Getting Harder to Enjoy Action Thrillers? |
By David Corn January 21, 2023 |
Michael Kelly and John Krasinski in the latest season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Courtesy Amazon Prime |
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I recently was laid low for several days by a medical matter—I’m fine now, thanks—and spent much time in bed watching TV and movies. When contending with pain and discomfort, I tend to look for non-challenging fare. I’m not in the mood for subtitles or entertainment that compels much intellectual exertion. Consequently, popcorn movies and action thrillers move to the top of the list. Recuperating is a good excuse to Die Hard-out. But this time, I found it difficult to fully enjoy my choices.
I started with the third season of Amazon’s Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Clancy was a Ronald Reagan-loving cold warrior who created the Ryan character, a whip-smart CIA analyst turned field officer, for his hawkish-minded bestselling novels that often pitted the good guys of the USA against the baddies of the Soviet Union. With the Cold War long behind us and Clancy dead for a decade, Ryan, reborn in the Amazon series, has had other concerns than the goons of the Kremlin. In the first season, he pursued a Yemeni terrorist who was plotting a diabolical attack on the United States. In the second, Ryan contended with assorted intrigue in Venezuela. The latest installment brings him back to Russia.
Ryan discovers that a cabal of Kremlin hardliners is planning to use a mini-nuke to help trigger a war between East and West that they hope will restore Russia to imperial glory. Of course, at first, no one in the Deep State believes Ryan, so he must once more lone-wolf it. That is, go rogue, which, by now, should be listed on his résumé as a top skill. Once again, John Krasinski ably plays the hero, and Wendell Pierce, one of our premier actors, puts in a fine performance as his CIA colleague and ally James Greer. Also along for the ride is Michael Kelly (best known as the maniacal chief of staff on House of Cards) as Mike November, a former CIA officer who’s now a private, in-it-for-the-money security contractor (with a heart of gold). Kelly, too, classes up the joint.
Here's the problem with this season: geopolitics. For years, popular culture demonized the Soviet Union, and that made it easy to generate enemies for American movies and books. Yet now with Russia in the hands of the villainous and genocidal Vladimir Putin, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan portrays its fictional Russian president and Kremlin as mostly reasonable realpolitik-ians. They’re not the issue; it’s this band of scheming revanchists who are trying to start what might be a nuclear conflict. There is no reference to Ukraine and the horrific war.
This is understandable. The series was filmed in 2021 before Putin invaded Ukraine. Still, watching this season produced cognitive dissonance. The Russian president, a top Russian intelligence officer, and others connected to the state are kind of good guys, too. (They also don’t want a nuclear holocaust.) You can’t blame the series’ producers for getting caught flat-footed. But a good action thriller of this sort usually has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. This time, Ryan is stuck in an alternative universe with a moderate Russian leader and no war in Ukraine. It seems too quaint. Imagine a movie in 1940 in which the German government is not that bad. Alas, not even Jack Ryan could escape this turn of (real-world) events.
Next, I moved on to Apple TV+’s Echo 3. The show was created by Mark Boal, a former journalist who wrote and produced The Hurt Locker and the controversial Zero Dark Thirty, which wrongly suggested that torture was a necessary tool in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The set-up is straightforward: Amber Chesborough is an American scientist who treks to the Colombian rain forest to research psychedelics that could be useful in treating addiction. She is kidnapped by anti-government militants who don’t know her husband and her brother served in the same special forces unit. (Her husband also happens to be the son of the CEO of a major defense firm, which comes in quite handy.) This leads to a 10-episode search-and-rescue mission, with plenty of near-wins and discouraging setbacks. Husband and brother, naturally, have a backstory brimming with conflict. And Amber has a secret that complicates matters. Plus, the kidnapping and possible rescue becomes embroiled in larger US security concerns that are not noble.
The series is exquisitely written and acted. (Three cheers for Jessica Ann Collins who plays Amber.) It was shot largely on location and conveys an authentic sense of atmosphere. There are twists and surprises. I was enjoying it…until the final episodes that featured battle scenes involving our would-be heroes, rebels, drug cartel soldiers, and the Venezuelan military. Boal and his collaborators tried hard to make all this come across as real. But watching the white gringos gun down gads of brown people—including many poor SOBs just in the line of fire—caused me to blanch. This was video game war porn. (The rescuers have high-tech automatic rifles that make eerily quiet pops as they kill one target after another.) Gun fights are a big part of such movies. But the fetishistic details of the slaughter were overwhelming. Perhaps I’m getting too sensitive. At the end, the show does comment on all the white-on-brown bloodshed, but I still felt guilt, not guilty pleasure, for watching.
Finally, I turned to Avatar: The Way of Water. No, I didn’t crawl to a movie theater. As a member of the Writers Guild of America, I receive screeners from studios hoping that I will vote for their films in the WGA awards. Thus, I was able to recline through the three hours and 12 minutes of James Cameron’s sequel to his 2009 blockbuster. There are plenty of fight scenes, as humans in the year 2168 return to planet Pandora to colonize and extract resources, once again placing them in conflict with the indigenous blue and 10-feet-tall Na’vi, who live in harmony with the life force of the planet and its other species.
The movie is yet another stunning feat of cinema from Cameron. Much of it takes place underwater, and I marveled at the creation of this oceanic world. Cameron’s team invented scores—hundreds?—of realistic sea creatures. This was an amazing accomplishment. The technical features of the film are worthy of accolades. The plot is somewhat expectable. Jake Scully (Sam Worthington), the ex-Marine who turned into a Na’vi at the end of the first film, is now leader of his tribe. He mated with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and they have a brood of young ‘uns, who—believe it or not—can be pains in the backside. (Apparently, teens are a problem everywhere in the universe.) When the humans, who Scully helped repel 14 years earlier, return, he finds himself in a war against his old Marine comrade and foe, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who was killed by Neytiri years earlier but who has been reborn into a Na’vi body and is now leading the counterinsurgency. Priority one: get Scully.
There’s no big secret here. Cameron is telling a story about the evils of colonial conquest. In 2012, he called the first Avatar a “science fiction retelling of the history of North and South America in the early colonial period.” There also are hints of Vietnam and other misguided American wars in Avatar: The Way of Water. His message is basic and progressive: don’t exploit, not planets or people. But despite Cameron’s intentions—or because of them—the film has received flak for being culturally insensitive to indigenous people and for not escaping racist tropes. As I watched, at times mesmerized by the spectacle of the film, I did wonder if he was playing too much into the Noble Savage myth and perpetuating a stereotype. I’ll leave it to others to debate this point. But it did undermine the experience for me.
In pondering these productions, I thought about the recent Tom Cruise hit, Top Gun: Maverick, which I watched months ago. Crowds loved this classic military buddy film, where the old, independent-minded salt hooks up with a young buck (who blames him for his dad’s death) to defeat evildoers overseas. The filmmakers made sure not to identify the bad guys. The mission is to blow up an unsanctioned uranium enrichment facility before it can churn out material for nukes. But we’re never told which country the target is in. Presumably, it’s Iran. But in this flick, the enemy is just a generic, far-away place. I suppose this was to prevent criticism and remove any cultural (or geostrategic) baggage from the narrative. For me, it rendered the movie sterile. Top Gun: Maverick was action in a vacuum. What a safe choice. I’m not looking for more of that.
So is nothing simple these days? Not even big-budget action thrillers? That might not be so bad. Maybe a critical look at such mainstays of popular culture will lead to better popcorn movies that can still distract, entertain, and wow us but also offer slightly higher levels of nutrition. Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com. |
Santos and a Big-Money Con |
A lot of the bizarre George Santos story is about how he hornswoggled voters and fellow Republicans with a vast array of lies. He was a champion volleyballer. His family fled the Holocaust. He was a financial wizard who had worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. He was of Jewish ancestry. He ran a charity for dogs. All BS. But a significant part of his tale—perhaps the most important—concerns money. Santos claims he made between $3.5 million and $11.5 million in dividends and income from a company he set up in May 2021, after the firm where he had been working was accused by the SEC of running a Ponzi scheme. But there is no public evidence of Santos’ company engaging in any commerce, certainly not enough to have dumped that much moolah into his pockets. And this mystery seems tied to another: What was the source of the $705,000 he loaned his winning campaign in last year’s election?
Digging into all of this, my colleagues Dan Friedman and Noah Lanard and I produced a neat scoop this week, revealing that Santos persuaded Andrew Intrater, a prominent GOP donor and investment fund manager who is the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, to invest $625,000 in Harbor City Capital, the Florida company that allegedly operated the Ponzi scheme. And even after the SEC exposed the purported flim-flam, Intrater and his domestic partner gave tens of thousands to Santos and political entities backing him, becoming one of his most generous financial angels. Intrater, we reported, has told folks that he was conned by Santos, who claimed that he had put millions into Harbor City Capital and had also been victimized. So, Intrater’s story is that Santos first got $625,000 out of Intrater for a bad investment in Harbor City Capital, which went belly-up after the Ponzi scheme allegations, and then, after that firm crashed, Intrater and his girlfriend still handed Santos over $100,000 in political donations. That is, this savvy investor was twice tricked by Santos. My hunch is there’s more to the Intrater-Santos episode than we have excavated. But check it out here. (The New York Times did a follow-up that contained more details about the puzzling Intrater-Santos affair.)
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Dumbass Comment of the Week |
There are lots of runners-up this week. Let’s start with a MAGA pastor named Hank Kunneman, who claims that President Joe Biden has been replaced by a…demon. In an interview, he claims the images he sees of Biden these days look “nothing like the guy who is Joe Biden.” And, Kunneman points out, he should know: “I am a cartoonist... I also am a portrait artist. I recognize features.” He says that on November 4, 2020, God said, “46 doesn’t exist” and that on that day he had dream: “I saw what looked like the face of what we would call Joe Biden and the voice of the devil spoke… I don’t know what was going on with his face, but it wasn’t him.” Kunneman wants you know that he realizes this “sounds like a conspiracy,” and he adds, “I don’t listen to any of that stuff. I don’t even listen to the news.” So he “went out and researched it myself… For one, the one Biden for all these years had bluish green eyes. This new thing has brown eyes. Let’s be honest, I think we’re being played.”
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I’m guessing that if Satan replaced Joe Biden with a demon, he would probably get Biden’s eyes right. Then again, Kunneman did research it for himself.
Back on Planet Earth, veteran GOP windbag Newt Gingrich had a more mundane observation about Biden: “The Bidens are just a Delaware version of the sopranos.” |
I imagine the former disgraced House speaker thought he was being culturally clever with this tweet. Yet last time the judges checked, the only White House inhabitant whose company and whose top business aide were convicted of tax fraud is Donald Trump, the fellow Gingrich ceaselessly hails. And here’s a pop quiz: How much was the ethics violation fine Gingrich had to pay when he was in the Hosue? Just a measly $300,000 in 1997.
GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a more dangerous dumbass remark this week. He falsely claimed that people who get the Covid-19 bivalent booster are “more likely to get infected.” |
DeSantis has long been on the cutting edge of Covid disinformation, and, as he ponders a 2024 presidential bid, he’s not getting off this crazy train.
Tucker Carlson let loose a profoundly ignorant aside, saying that the criminal justice code of the United States has “never” been “race-specific.” |
Carlson forgot to add, “Except for slavery and Jim Crow.” It seems that he’s a good candidate for the AP African American Studies course that DeSantis’ administration has banned.
This week’s prize goes to a fellow who’s not unfamiliar with the winner’s circle: Donald Trump Jr. On social media, he posted an image of the Family Guy, a cartoon character, in the electric chair with this message: “Me getting executed in 2030 for being straight.” |
There was much agreement—too much?—with the recent issue on Trump Derangement Syndrome on the right. Michael Hale wrote:
Your recent column on TFG Derangement Syndrome on the right was fabulous. Your admission that you don’t know what leads to this disease was well beyond disappointing. I’ve been searching for that particular grail since 2016 with little success. What do far right (Trumpist) Republicans want? Is it just about power? Are they on a crusade to rebuild America in some Eisenhower administration, Leave It To Beaver nirvana that never existed in the first place? Is it just about the money and an attempt to keep as much of it as possible in the pockets of those who will pay big bucks to maintain the status quo?
…If you have any theories re what the nutjob faction of the GOP (aka the folks currently in charge) want maybe you could devote a column to answering that question. It would probably at least provoke a lively correspondence.
I keep thinking about what causes Trump Derangement Syndrome on the right, particularly among prominent conservatives. I recently asked someone who has personally witnessed this phenomenon to explain it. The response: “It's a combination of narcissism, Stockholm Syndrome, a refusal to admit error, and fear of facing reality.”
Lew Woodard posed this question:
How did a phony on the scale of George Santos manage to survive an election against any Democrat? Were the NY Dems so focused on developing a campaign by some outdated template that they completely failed to address the lies and falsifications of this poser? I don't get it. He should have been clobbered in the election, assuming this mess had been revealed during the campaign.
The New York Times had a solid account of what happened. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unearthed some disturbing facts about Santos and produced an 87-page opposition research book. But it had dozens of candidates to scrutinize and could not follow through on many leads. As the Times reports, “Mr. Santos’s 2022 opponent, Robert Zimmerman, got hold of the research book in late August, right after he won a competitive and costly Democratic primary. He decided not to spend what would have likely been tens of thousands of dollars to do more rigorous outside research… Strapped for time and cash, Mr. Zimmerman concluded that his money would be better spent on advertising and canvassing operations. And he believed that the campaign committee’s report as well as Mr. Santos’s far-right views on abortion and Jan. 6 — two of the year’s most prominent campaign themes — gave him powerful campaign fodder.” The Zimmerman campaign did try to encourage reporters at local and national media outlets to investigate Santos. But there were no takers. (They did not ask me!) “The response we got back pretty universally was they just didn’t have the personnel, the time or the money to do it,” Zimmerman told the newspaper. “One person said to me, there are 60 to 80 crazy people running, we can’t investigate them all.”
Anna Roma asked: Why isn’t more being said by the media about the huge debt increase during the Trump administration?
I think there’s been coverage of this. But if you want a good accounting, check out ProPublica’s take, headlined, “Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years.” Several readers wrote in to comment on my article explaining why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may want to sit out a battle with Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Richard Knabel emailed:
First, I want to thank you for writing American Psychosis. Having lived through the past 60-years as an adult, and been through all the Nixon, Reagan, Bush (both), Trump disasters, I can say you have done history a favor for chronicling how the Republicans have been tethered to the extreme right all along. You’ve exposed how the present isn’t so different from the past, except the racism and fascism are now explicit. No more dog-whistles or veneers of collegiality/bipartisanship. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the book very much, and bought a few for friends.
I agree with your analysis of Trump’s recent, and probable future behavior, but time is definitely not on his side. The forces against him within the now-MAGA party are getting stronger, or at least somewhat louder, and he will rage around the ring like an aged prize fighter with bad footwork. But he may not be able to land a solid punch any longer. We’ll soon find out. Of course, he’ll try to rerun the 2016 primary circus, as you described, and all that goes with it. Will he leave the whole Republican shitshow in tatters? I certainly hope so.
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“So did you hear about this new congressman who allegedly took $3,000 from a dying dog’s GoFundMe account?”
“Yes, Moxie, I did. But, you know, I just reported that he may have swindled a GOP donor out of $625,000. And I’ve also reported on the mystery surrounding millions of dollars he claims to have earned.” “Tell me more about the dog.” |
Read Recent Issues of Our Land
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January 18, 2023: Trump Derangement Syndrome on the right; nominating Navalny; the weirdness and ghostliness of Tar.
January 14, 2023: Why Ron DeSantis shouldn’t—or won’t—run for president; the many faces of the George Santos scandal; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Ryan Zinke); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more. January 10, 2023: Our split-screen America; Wakanda Forever and Babylon (thumbs down) and The Fabelmans and Armageddon Time (thumbs up); and more.
January 7, 2023: The other GOP civil war; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Glenn Greenwald); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
January 4, 2023: The House GOP and a year of hope or horror; a noirish novel of the East Village in the 1990s; Brian Ray and the “coolest” song of 2022; and more.
December 23, 2022: The connection between Trump’s taxes and the January 6 report; the weirdest congressional scandal in a long time; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Sen. Josh Hawley)—and Year (Donald Trump); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
December 20, 2022: Have a merry (cracked) Christmas—a playlist; and more.
December 17, 2022: The GOP: still crazy after all these midterm elections; Mark Meadows’ lies; Elon Musk and the latest Big Lie of the right; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Shane Vaughn); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
December 13, 2022: Rachel Maddow and the rhymes of history; Amazon Prime’s The Peripheral does justice to William Gibson’s novel; twangy Americana from a new duo called Plains; and more.
December 10, 2022: Why the GOP establishment cannot save the GOP from Trump; Michael Pertschuk, thank you and RIP; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Rep. Paul Gosar); the Mailbag, MoxieCam™. December 6, 2022: How Trump-Russia denialism lead to Elon Musk’s dangerous #TwitterFiles failure; a Twitter exit strategy; Sonic Youth’s “Superstar”; and more. |
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Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com. |
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