Newt Bless the Child Who’s Got His/Her Own

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich hands out cash at a DC school, May 16 1995

Candidate Gingrich’s recent suggestion that urban school kids would make swell janitors took me back to a May afternoon in 1995. I was a photographer at US News, blessed with the task of trailing the Speaker to a school in DC that was implementing his “Earning by Learning” program.

The event was as bizarre as it was distasteful — Gingrich bending over to hand cash to black elementary schoolers for reading books as dozens of cameras rolled and snapped.

Gingrich described the program in a speech that Connie Bruck quoted in her brilliant opus Newtus, “The Politics of Perception,” which appeared in the October 9, 1995 issue of the New Yorker. “It’s very simple; no bureaucracy, very voluntaristic. We go into public housing projects, we pay little kids — second and third graders — two dollars for every book they read…. The only money in the program goes to the child, so for a thousand dollars you have five hundred books read.”

Newt’s questionable pedagogy aside, there was another conspicuous problem with his statement: The money didn’t just go to the kiddies. Phil Kuntz of the Wall Street Journal revealed that $30,000 of the program’s $62,000 endowment went to Mel Steely, the nonchild who ran it — and who happened to be Gingrich’s authorized biographer. Gingrich was either lying or using Beltway math.

Gingrich called the article “malicious” in an interview with Bruck, another attack by the liberal media “designed to cause us pain.”

Sound familiar?

Bruck had the Speaker’s number all those years ago:

What is remarkable about Gingrich in the end is not the degree to which he dissembles but the theatricality of his outrage when he is charged with dissembling, and the self-righteous force of his counterattack. He is, of course, not original in this—history offers plentiful examples of leaders who intimidated their critics (especially the press) by charging them with bias, and these precedents are not pretty—but Gingrich is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of this particular skill. His opponents are chameleons and demagogues, his critics are cynics and liars: it is a feat of projection amazing in its transparency, and yet, probably because it is so daring, it works.

Roughly 17 years later, Gingrich is playing the same game with the national news media, with near impunity.

A useful link from the in-laws-to-be

Jim and Janis in Blaine, WA, sent me this link to an open letter to GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum written by prominent Catholic leaders.

Here’s the letter in full. Click above to see the signatories.

An Open Letter to Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum

As Catholic leaders who recognize that the moral scandals of racism and poverty remain a blemish on the American soul, we challenge our fellow Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail. Mr. Gingrich has frequently attacked President Obama as a “food stamp president” and claimed that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Santorum remarked: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Labeling our nation’s first African-American president with a title that evokes the past myth of “welfare queens” and inflaming other racist caricatures is irresponsible, immoral and unworthy of political leaders.

Some presidential candidates now courting “values voters” seem to have forgotten that defending human life and dignity does not stop with protecting the unborn. We remind Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum that Catholic bishops describe racism as an “intrinsic evil” and consistently defend vital government programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits that help struggling Americans. At a time when nearly 1 in 6 Americans live in poverty, charities and the free market alone can’t address the urgent needs of our most vulnerable neighbors. And while jobseekers outnumber job openings 4-to-1, suggesting that the unemployed would rather collect benefits than work is misleading and insulting.

As the South Carolina primary approaches, we urge Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Santorum and all presidential candidates to reject the politics of racial division, refrain from offensive rhetoric and unite behind an agenda that promotes racial and economic justice.

Can I get an Amen?

I crossed paths with Rachel Maddow today

Really.

I was bursting through the opening doors of an R train as Maddow walked toward the subway car. Like any smart and mindful commuter, she approached at a sharp angle to avoid the stream of agitated New Yorkers exploding from the train, of which, I will say proudly, I was at the head.

I was moving like a man with a double shot of espresso under his belt, which is precisely the man I was, so I didn’t have time to register much, only her furrowed brow, horn rims, and a scarf (tartan or checked?).

I climbed the stairway to Broadway imagining what I might have said to Maddow — not that I would have said anything even if I had been less caffeinated. Chatting up high-wattage celebs, even fellow journos, feels to me like star-slurping, more commonly known as brown-nosing. I’m too proud, and I doubt Maddow would have been especially inclined to spend quality time in conversation with a random subway rider.

But had I found the combination of gumption and humility to bust such a move, I might have hopped back on the train, gently introduced myself to her, and then posed a few polite and sagacious questions — with an eye toward, say, an invitation to appear on the show.

“Ms. Maddow, may I ask whether you’ll be discussing former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s smackdown of Juan Williams, to the cheers of the South Carolinian audience, at last night’s debate?”

That was an absolutely arresting moment, one I’ll point to if someone tells me that the Republican presidential race is not, at least in part (a huge part), about Barack Obama’s race. Williams could have called the former Speaker’s race-card bluff, his claim that Obama is the “food-stamp president” with facts, but he didn’t.

Participation rates in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, the name for the Federal food stamp program since 2008, rose seven out of the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency. And, according to the Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, “the large increase in the number of participants was likely attributable to the deterioration of the economy, expansions in SNAP eligibility, and continued outreach efforts.” (Be warned: This SNAP link leads to a PDF.) At the very least, this gives us two food-stamp presidents, the first who hobbled the economy by launching two wars and handing out tax cuts to the one percent, and the second who inherited those wars and has kept one going at full steam.

I might also have asked her whether she’d be tackling Rick Perry’s doubling down on his criticism of President Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and others in the administration for condemning the acts depicted in the infamous scout-sniper urinating video.

“When the secretary of defense calls that a despicable act, when he calls that utterly despicable,” Perry charged, “let me tell you what is utterly despicable: cutting Danny Pearl’s head off and showing the video, hanging our contractors from bridges, that’s utterly despicable. For our president, for the secretary of state, for the Department of Defense secretary to make those kinds of statements about those young marines, yes they need to be punished, but when you see this president with that type of disdain for our country, taking a trillion dollars out of our defense budget, a hundred thousand of our military off of our front lines? I lived through a reduction of forces once and I saw the results of it in the sands of Iran in 1979.”

First of all: Daniel Pearl and murdered military contractors? To appropriate these tragedies for his own political point-scoring is a desecration.

Secondly, “disdain for our country?” Slam Obama’s policies, but to attack his loyalty to America is simply cowardly and deceitful. The esteemed journalists on the debate panel could have reality- or morality-checked Perry. But they didn’t. And they didn’t challenge him on the facts, either.

“Adjusting for inflation, the level of funding proposed for the base defense budget in the FY 2012 request is the highest level since World War II, surpassing the Cold War peak of $531 billion (in FY 2012 dollars) reached in FY 1985.” That’s according to CSBA, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. What the administration’s 2012 budget proposes to cut, too timidly and gently in my view, is the growth rate of our alarmingly bloated military spending, which peaked in 2007, and funds spent on war, war, war.

The media inquisitors also might have quoted General James Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps, on the incident behind Perry’s initial smear.

“I have viewed an internet video that depicts Marines desecrating several dead Taliban in Afghanistan. I want to be clear and unambiguous, the behavior depicted in the video is wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history.”

Note the verb the general, the highest-ranking US Marine, uses to characterize the actions.

Amos continues: “Rest assured that the institution of the Marine Corps will not rest until the allegations and the events surrounding them have been resolved. We remain fully committed to upholding the Geneva Convention, the Laws of War, and our own core values.”

High standards and values. The presidential candidates and the journalists ostensibly covering them would benefit from a helping of both.

I’m not sure I would have impressed Maddow, but I would have unburdened myself of this maddening, absurd, and frightening stuff. For the moment, at least.

Product placement of rodneys?

Detail from a movie ad, 14th Street F train station, downtown platform:

The engraving on Kate Beckinsale’s weapon has most likely been altered to remove the name of the manufacturer, Beretta, and to scramble other information. However, the film’s PR people included the model number, 92FS, so you can Google your way to a new 9mm just like Beckinsale’s avenging Underworld character Selene totes (extra-large clip available elsewhere). So helpful!

Beckinsale’s Beretta FS is apparently a modification of the off-the-shelf model, which might explain why the posterized version isn’t an exact match of the website models.

The Italian version

Beretta 92FS Type M9A1, available in the U.S.

Selene packed a Beretta “fitted with compensators and modified to fire full auto” in the first Underworld, according to imfdb.org, a site that lovingly catalogs firearms featured in movies.

What grabbed my attention was, of course, the size of Beckinsale’s piece — my grandfather, an NYPD officer from 1936 to 1956, would have called it a “rod” or “rodney” — as it’s rendered in the ad. I just finished reading an advanced copy of Glock: The Rise of The American Gun by Paul M. Barrett, a Businessweek editor. It’s an engaging and shocking account — absolutely no hyperbole here — of the infiltration of this Austrian pistol into U.S. gun culture and its eventual domination of the market. “Approximately 65% of police departments in America already put a GLOCK in between them and the problem,” says the arms maker’s U.S. website.

(FYI: Paul Barrett will be speaking at Brooklyn’s Book Court on January 10.)

Glock also conquered Hollywood. Detective Sonny Crockett, the pastel-outfitted TV cop played by Don Johnson in Miami Vice, was the first American character to carry one on screen, says imfdb. That series ended in 1990. More recently, 50 Cent rocked a Glock in the film Twelve. Mr. Cent’s particular model: the Glock 17.

My F train encounter with Selene’s elephantine rodney was simply the most recent catalyst to ignite my interest in movie guns. While reporting for a Fortune magazine story on product placement in 1998, I tried to get gun company PR flacks to cop to paying movie studios for placement of their firearms in films, because it seemed to me that certain guns kept popping up on the silver screen. (As fate would have it, the movie gun that grabbed my attention back then was a Beretta 92FS sported by Chow Yun Fat in The Replacement Killers. I didn’t remember this until today.)

Back then I wrote:

For instance, Smith & Wesson used a product-placement firm, International Promotions, to put its wares in the hands of stars. The company scored with the TV show Brooklyn South and the film For Richer or Poorer, but fearing bad press, S&W severed the relationship, says Ken Jorgensen, the gunmaker’s public relations manager. “It was just pretty much a consensus that it wasn’t something we wanted to do,” he says, “and when it expired, it was gone.”

I wonder if product placement of guns is back? Anyone?

Iraqi Army barracks tour and Omar & Bravo Part 2

This video is an assemblage of three clips from 2006 that we couldn’t fit into the doc.

The first two are segments of a tour Iraqi Army soldiers gave me of their quarters at 1/2 Charlie Company’s Firm Base 1.

Number three is a second scene from 1/2 Bravo’s encounter with the Anbari college student Omar. In this one, they discuss (American) popular music.

The grunts, IAs, and Omar are clearly consciousness of me and my camera. They perform, as many (all?) of us do when there’s a lens trained on us. This camera consciousness made me uncomfortable as I screened the videotape the first half dozen times, but I realized that such performances were as meaningful as the candid moments — or moments in which folks appeared to be unaware of the video camera but could very well have been calculating and acting.

The IAs direct their mordant jokes and complaints at me and through me to the presumed American audience. Omar and the boys of Bravo are ostensibly communicating among themselves, but they too are calibrating their statements for the “reporter guy” and the people in the U.S. who will see the video. There’s a heap of subtext the men dance around, under, and on top of — the issue of race springs to mind. This verbal shimmying and jiving is funny, ironic, absurd, poignant, and telling.

Agree? Disagree? Weigh in with a comment below!

AND: This will be my final prodding. Voting for Best of Doc 2011 ends in two days. Please cast your final digi-ballots for Full Disclosure!

1/2 Charlie Co. & Chicken Lady

This sequence, edited by Rachel Shuman and Adam Bolt, was built from footage I shot on one of the first patrols I videotaped. Of all the scenes we had to cut, I was saddest to lose this one. It captures, from a boots-in-the-mud perspective, the perpetual miscommunication between our troops and Iraqi civilians and the general absurdity of the mission.

First Battalion/Second Marine Regiment was nearing the end of its 2004-05 deployment to northern Babil province. Iraq’s first national election since Saddam Hussein’s toppling was two weeks away. Anti-US forces, particularly Sunni militant groups like Hizb al Awda and Ansar al Sunna, had promised violence. “This ain’t the fucking Republicans and Democrats,” Col. Ron Johnson, commander of 1/2′s parent unit, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, remarked in his characteristically colorful style about the growing Sunni-Shia conflict during a briefing for me and two other journalists.

Days after 1/2 left Babil—and before the unit had even shipped out from Kuwait—a car bomb rocked Musayyib Hospital. Eighteen people were killed. The patrol base Bravo Company set up for the election had been next door, in the Musayyib Police Station.

Less than six months later, a suicide-bomb blast in Musayyib (also rendered as Mussayab or Mussaib) killed more than a 100 people, all Iraqi.

“I knew the spot, an intersection in the city’s center,” I wrote in a 2005 blog post. “I had walked or driven through it a dozen times with grunts… There’s a beautiful mosque right at the crossroads.” The bomb had been planted in a fuel tanker nearby. “The blast ignited the fuel inside the truck, turning what might have been a sadly typical tragedy into mass slaughter.

“In November 2005, bombers attacked the same mosque, killing 20 and wounding 64.”

And so on through the years: December 18, 2011: “A sticky bomb attached to a car exploded when the driver entered a bus terminal…”

I can’t say with any assurance what life is like in Musayyib now. Just as it was in 2005, finding stories about the city (in English) that aren’t about violence and death is very difficult.

“Warrior Transition” and some PTSD notes

The Navy’s combat stress video was part of its “Warrior Transition” process for troops returning to the US from the Iraq theater. In February 2006, tired but relieved marines from 1/2 Charlie Company slouched on plywood benches watching the image of a robotic American naval psychiatrist—she probably doesn’t do a whole lot of on-camera work, to be fair—describe what the men had just lived and were trying to forget.

Also part of the redeployment program: an extended and far more energetic reenlistment session that featured animated testimonials from junior and senior marines who had committed to reupping for another hitch in the Corps.

Various studies have estimated a post-traumatic stress disorder rate of between 10-18% for US troops returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom and the US political-military enterprise in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom. (The prevalence of PTSD among reservists and members of the National Guard rates is higher.) But none of these studies presents a comprehensive picture of the condition. So much is still unknown. (The Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD is a clearing house for studies and PTSD info.)

Regarding Iraqis, who are not normally regarded substantively in our media accounts, the situation is undoubtedly worse. Michael Reschen, an MD of general medicine in the UK, wrote way back in 2006 that it “seems likely that the nation of
 Iraq may suffer a double blow, firstly by losing a sizeable proportion of
 its working population and secondly by the significant consequences of 
people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. This may also be 
compounded by cultural barriers which prevent people from seeking
 psychological help.” (To access the article at the British Medical Journal, you must give them serious £. This quote come from a response Reschen wrote to another MD commenting on his original BMJ article.)

You knew this was coming: Vote for Full Disclosure!

Here’s the combat stress video:

“If we occupied you…?”

Below is a short clip that I shot during a 2006 operation in Anbar with Bravo Company, First Battalion/Second Marine Regiment. During a sweep for illegal weapons and anti-US forces outside the city of Hit, 3rd Platoon encountered a young, English-speaking Iraqi man named Omar, who asked them, among others things, “If we occupied you, what is your reaction?”

It’s an amazing exchange that’s part of a surreal conversation, which touched on American pop music, from Britney to Kanye West, Shakespeare, and the politics of race in the US. More to come…

The next video I’ll upload is a US Navy “Combat Stress” video that I watched with troops at al Asad airbase, also in 2006, as 1/2 was preparing to redeploy from Iraq to the US. I obtained a copy through the Freedom of Information Act.

And may I also add: Please keep voting for Full Disclosure as one the Documentary Channel’s Best Docs of 2011.

Finally: Reidar Veisser, one of the sharpest Iraq analysts writing in English, describes the state of the State of Iraq on the eve of the US military pullout in an NY Times opinion piece. It’s worth a read.

Danielle Howle’s Unadorned Heart

Almost 20 years ago, I was living in DC, working as a staff photographer for US News and World Report and spending entirely too much time at the Clinton White House and on Newt Gingrich’s Capitol Hill. On a whim—and a desperate need to get out of my District of Corruption rut—I veered away from my usual watering holes to hear some live music by Ani DiFranco, a performer I’d heard some buzz about. I knew little about her, only that her style might challenge my taste for world music, noisy stuff (from X and, I must admit, Pantera), and (intelligent) hiphop. I knew absolutely nothing about the opening act, a young lady called Danielle Howle.

A waifish, unglamorous, unaccessorized Howle stepped into the tiny pool of light in the dark space, started strumming her guitar, and sang. Her voice was powerful, soulful, and countrified in an honest, not affected way. Howle’s songs were rich—but not sweet—and even old-fashioned, in spirit, though not in style. Howle could sound hurt in a song, but never victimized; there’s wound-licking, but no supplication or defeat. She was rock, C&W, folk, gospel, and it all sounded organic.

Howle told funny, sometimes self-deprecating stories between songs. The audience laughed. I laughed. But mostly I smiled, throughout the set, and as I walked home—no disrespect to Ani, but I left before she and her band hit their stride—less beered-up than usual and so much happier. Howle was a rarity—musically gifted, humorous and humble, plus ground-truth, open-your-heart-to-strangers real.

She played a few gigs in NYC, at CMJ and in East Village clubs. Howle was dead last on a lineup of young indy singers at the Fez, a performance space under the long-gone Time Café on Lafayette Street. It was a Sunday night. The show was running annoyingly late. I watched the crowd. More than a few people glanced at their watches, polished off their drinks, and started toward the door. Howle took the stage, opened her mouth. Music came out; they stopped in their tracks. I knew this would happen.

I met Howle a few times, even asked her to write some songs for my documentary. That didn’t work out because her music was too good—and by “good” I mean the opposite of evil, bleak, hopeless, which is how Iraq made me feel, how coming home to political posturing and saber-rattling made me feel, how turning on my computer and reading about dead and wounded made me feel. At the time, I believed that such goodness and soulfulness had no place in my film. I didn’t have a whole lot of space in me for it.

We lost touch, but she’s still making music, laughing, and being poetically nuts. She’s nurturing up-and-comers, living and making music sustainably (look here to see what I mean). I just watched a video of Howle singing about the Lake Murray Dam while strolling along a highway and playing her guitar. A couple of speed-walking ladies taking care of some cardio business dip into the roadway to make a wide loop around her. A motorcycle, most likely a Harley, rumbles and farts in the background. And Danielle sings. It’s all of a piece, and she’s the heart of it.

Listen and watch when you have a few moments.

Organized labor demonstration for jobs and fairness, Union Square, December 1, 2011

Union members—teachers, electricians, building cleaners, and many others—plus supporters, and hangers-on marched from Herald Square at 34th Street down Broadway to Union Square. The New York City Central Labor Council, an umbrella group, called for the Occupy Wall Street-inspired rally, “The March for Jobs and Economic Fairness.” The objective: “Fill the street from curb to curb so government and big business get our message: enough is enough,” said the press release. “It’s time to end the unfair economic policies in this country that benefit too few, and leave everyone else behind.”

And fill the streets they did, blocking traffic at one point. From what I saw at Union Square, though, it was a supremely orderly and low-key affair. After marchers flowed into the area around Union Square Park, some waving placards and banners, things kind of went coffee-klatchy, at least from my vantage points. Folks gathered in clusters and chatted. Sporadic, low-volume chanting emanated from the odd clump of people. The ubiquitous drum circle—sigh—did its percussive thing in one corner of the square. I did observe one less-than-low-key moment: a gentleman with unruly gray hair harangued a Fox News TV camera for the network’s anti-union bias. “They’re the worst!” he shouted, among other unkind things. Problem: there was no one behind or in front of the camera, only the lonely high technology device sitting atop a tripod. I assume the man was rehearsing for the arrival of the Foxians.

The rally also offered a boost to members of 32BJ SEIU, which voted today to give a bargaining committee strike authority. The union represents 22,000 office cleaners and commercial building workers who are resisting property owners’ conditions for a new contract. The union is negotiating with the Real Estate Advisory Board on Labor Relations, which represents commercial building owners and big cleaning companies, says 32BJ is asking for unrealistic wage hikes. Follow the links to read both sides of the conflict.

Union members march on Union Square

James, a retired union worker, at the end of the march. Tired.

"Rough on Rats"

Traffic, pedestrians, and union bagpipers