Eventually, I learned the joys of killing. But I’m skipping ahead of myself. I landed for my first stint in Iraq in November 2004 armed with a video camera instead of a weapon.
In my former life I was Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh’s agent and manager. I co-owned a prosperous talent management firm, Relativity Management, lived in a four-story mansion, and somehow successfully stumbled (often drunk and stoned) through the whorehouse called Hollywood. I was an indoctrinated hardcore liberal. If you think I’m a spoiled dick and you hate me, then we’re on the right track. But having a child 10 years ago changed my thinking. It gave me a certain respect for capitalism and even corporate America.
When I bought a new Hummer H2 back in 2002, I ordered a custom license plate that read U.S. WINS. I got it because I believed in the message. I wanted people to have a reaction to the plate, usually negative, and then examine their thinking. Would it be so bad to win this war? Plus, I knew it would fucking piss everyone in the city off because it was Los Angeles.
I could give two fucks about WMDs. There were much more important reasons to topple Saddam—terrorism being one of them. The root causes of terrorism are the lack of capitalism, the lack of democracy, and the lack of modern education. What has stood in the way of those things has primarily been the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and Syria. We just got one of them out of the way.
Jesus, Soderbergh must be proud of his previous association with this thug. What sort of person was cheering for war in 2002? Am I out of line in assuming
The plus is that Dollard can actually write, and he vividly captures the grueling conditions under which the IED patrols operate under as they troll the gauntlet of Baghdad alleys in their cramped, vulnerable "pigs". Even on missions where everyone returns unscathed, it's dangerous, nasty work under the worst of conditions, and whatever they're getting paid, it's not enough.
However, just as Dollard oversimplifies a geopolitical situation that was dealt with cynically and incompetently, so does he seem to relish the hellish violence the soldiers are put through. The civilians, he clearly couldn't care less; they are simply woggy totems to affirm Dollard's self-styled superiority.
The fear of random explosions was perfectly relentless. We all imagined things like being covered in diesel, burning, screaming from shrapnel sticking out of our eyes. The fact that I often sat over the fuel tank and one of the corporals referred to me as “the cooked chicken” only further fried my brain. I thought of my dick. I thought about the types of rounds and shrapnel that could pierce the pig’s skin. I cataloged every bolt and bullet in my vicinity just to understand what would pierce my body should bad luck and ballistics conspire against me. These are the thoughts of the average marine’s and this civilian’s mind when out on the roads of Iraq. This was a war with no lulls; it just kept going and, therefore, eating at the mind. As one anonymous marine put it, “When I get home I’m going to be just like a dog who was locked in a small cage and constantly stabbed with a sharp stick.” There are a lot of guys who will come back feeling the same way, and they might never change.
That he is somehow unable to square that plaintive quote with his earlier "we gotta win this Risk game, man" exhortations gives you an idea of what's going on here. For once, here's a cheerleader who is manifestly not the usual member of the 82nd Chairborne; Dollard indeed actually went, and can't wait to go back. Which itself is an insight into the mental processes and motives here.
My soon-to-be fourth ex-wife and I are in a legal battle over visitation rights for our daughter. I know I can’t take care of my kid; I’m going back to Ramadi as soon as possible. It’s terrifying to go there. There’s a 10 percent chance you’re going to die, there’s a 30 percent chance you’re going to be wounded, and there’s a 100 percent chance that hot metal will go flying near your body.
....
Getting at the root of terror is clear: topple these regimes and then bring democracy, capitalism, and education to the Islamic world. Let them have the hot wife [or, you know, the hot fourth ex-wife -- ed.], the Bimmer, and kids to live for. America has to lift them up, not because we are a country of great guys, but to keep them from growing into lost killer boys with the U.S. in their sights.
If you want to export "democracy, capitalism, and education to the Islamic world", then you do those things. We have done the opposite; the substantial educated class of Iraqis has long fled the country -- those that weren't smithereened or power-drilled to death by their neighbors, or perforated at a checkpoint by someone felt he was "just like a dog who was locked in a small cage and constantly stabbed with a sharp stick".
The biggest, most relentless lie about this war is not about the WMDs, or Saddam being in cahoots with Osama, or the drone planes that were forty-five minutes from visiting death on Wichita. The most persistent lie is the idea that we're being fed too much "bad news". That is utter nonsense. We have been insulated, protected from the worst news. We get solemn daily updates to the body counts, interspersed with celebrity ass-sniffing and mindless pæans to The Greatest Generation Ever To Walk The Face Of The Planet, aka the network anchors' parents. (They project their daddy issues too, just as people like Surnow and Dollard are compelled, albeit in a more innocuous fashion.) We get very little besides the latest nugget from the embed in the Green Zone, and we deliberately get absolutely no scenes whatsoever of death, of carnage, of blood and violence. We don't get things like this in the corporate media at all, period.
Feb. 12:
We were asked to send the next of kin to whom the remains of my nephew, killed on Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be handed over. The young men of the family, as was customary, rose to go.
NO! cried his mother. Isnt my son enough?? Must we lose more of our youth?? You know there are unknowns who wait at the Morgue to either kill or kidnap the men who dare reach its doors. I will go.
So we went, his mum, his other aunt and I.
I was praying all the way there.
I never thought a day would come when it was the women of the family, who would be safer on the roads. All the men are potential terrorists it seems, and are therefore to be cut down on sight. This is the logic of today, is it not? To kill evil before it even has a chance to take root.
When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were. From the waist down was all they could give us. We identified him by the cell phone in his pants pocket. If you want the rest, you will just have to look for yourselves. We dont know what he looks like.
Now begins a horror that surpasses anything I could have possibly envisioned . We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I retched. With no more warning we came to a clearing that was probably an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all around were human bodies. On this side; complete bodies; on that side halves; and EVERYWHERE body parts.
We were asked what we were looking for, upper half replied my companion, for I was rendered speechless. Over there. We looked for our boys broken body between tens of other boys remains; with our bare hands sifting them and turning them.
We found him millennia later, took both parts home, and began the mourning ceremony.
Okay? That's what this war is, at the end of the day. While poseur cock-jockeys like Joel Surnow and Pat
But it's just amazingly troubling that such a clearly over-the-top piece of pulp like 24 could become the template -- inadvertently or not -- for perpetuating one of the most needless cycles of carnage, in an era already overpopulated with such nightmarish things.
The common thread between people such as Surnow and Dollard is their voiced feelings of displacement, anger, and inchoate contrarianism, not unlike your average eight-year-old acting out.
Roger Director, a television producer and longtime friend, said that he “loves” Surnow. But, he went on, “He feels looked down upon by the world, and that kind of emotional dynamic underpins a lot of things. It’s kind of ‘Joel against the world.’ It’s as if he feels, I had to fight and claw for everything I got. It’s a tough world, and no one’s looking out for you.” As a result, Director said, “Joel’s not sentimental. He has a hard-hearted thing.”
Surnow’s parents were F.D.R. Democrats. He recalled, “It was just assumed, especially in the Jewish community”—to which his family belonged. “But when you grow up you start to challenge your parents’ assumptions. ‘Am I Jewish? Am I a Democrat?’ ” Many of his peers at the University of California at Berkeley, where he attended college, were liberals or radicals. “They were all socialists and Marxists, but living off their family money,” he recalled. “It seemed to me there was some obvious hypocrisy here. It was absurd.” Although he wasn’t consciously political, he said, “I felt like I wasn’t like these people.” In 1985, he divorced his wife, a medical student, who was Jewish, and with whom he has two daughters. (His relationships with them are strained.) Four years later, he remarried. His wife, who used to work in film development, is Catholic; they have three daughters, whom they send to Catholic schools. He likes to bring his girls to the set and rushes home for his wife’s pork-chop dinners. “I got to know who I was and who I wasn’t,” he said. “I wasn’t the perfect Jewish kid who is married, with a Jewish family.” Instead, he said, “I decided I like Catholics. They’re so grounded. I sort of reoriented myself.”
....
During three decades as a journeyman screenwriter, Surnow grew increasingly conservative. He “hated welfare,” which he saw as government handouts. Liberal courts also angered him. He loved Ronald Reagan’s “strength” and disdained Jimmy Carter’s “belief that people would be nice to us just because we were humane. That never works.” He said of Reagan, “I can hardly think of him without breaking into tears. I just felt Ronald Reagan was the father that this country needed. . . . He made me feel good that I was in his family.”
Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. “Hollywood under Clinton—it was like he was their guy,” he said. “He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to.” During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. “My feeling is that the liberals’ ideas are wrong,” he said. “But they think I’m evil.” Last year, he contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania’s hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he “liked his position on immigration.” His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.”
Although he is a supporter of President Bush—he told me that “America is in its glory days”—Surnow is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted. An “isolationist” with “no faith in nation-building,” he thinks that “we could have been out of this thing three years ago.” After deposing Saddam Hussein, he argued, America should have “just handed it to the Baathists and . . . put in some other monster who’s going to keep these people in line but who’s not going to be aggressive to us.” In his view, America “is sort of the parent of the world, so we have to be stern but fair to people who are rebellious to us. We don’t spoil them. That’s not to say you abuse them, either. But you have to know who the adult in the room is.”
I'm trying to think of how he could be any more condescending and patronizing without actually lapsing into racial epithets. While I agree with the basic premise that, human nature and the nation-state paradigm being what it is at this point in history, there is going to be either a hegemon, or competing hegemons. That happens to be the most efficient way of mobilizing force and capital for expansion, and as such, if someone has to be the big dog, it should be us, parochial as it sounds. That doesn't mean we need to be dicks about it.
What's most troubling about Surnow's discursive thesis, aside from its twee (and perhaps offensive to the other 95% of the planet) "parent" analogy, is that he enjoys it. He gets off on it. He's still trying to get back at all those rich asshole classmates who took limos to the prom and fucked cheerleaders who would never give Surnow the time of day, while he had to wait for Dad to come home from slinging carpet in Compton to see if they would have to move or not.
I despise entitled trust-fund assholes also, but somehow I manage to keep it from circumscribing my entire world-view (except, you know, the class warfare part we were talking about in a recent post. But even a small 2-3% redistributive tax would be an acceptable start there. It would also help inculcate something of a work ethic among the upper crust parasites, which seems to be part of Surnow's beef with them.).
And while Dollard may not have the conservatard connections that Surnow has cultivated, according to Jeff Wells, he does have even more issues, and pretty scary ones at that:
[Dollard's] time self-embedded in Iraq has become Young Americans, the trailer of which plays like Jackass goes to War, and includes footage of a Marine raising a severed Iraqi head to the camera to a thrashing soundtrack of "If you don't like it you can suck my dick!"
Dollard is profiled in the March Vanity Fair - the longest profile in the magazine's history - and when asked about the footage he laughs: "The true savagery in this war is being committed by the American left on the minds of the young men and women serving over there by repeatedly telling them that their cause is lost. My goal is to de-sensitize young people to violence." He calls liberals "nihilistic."
Tony Snow describes Dollard as a "true believer," while a 17-year old high school student writes that "the clips I've seen of Young Americans are an inspiration and its time someone tells the truth. Thanks for putting your life on the line for the better of the country."
But there's much more to Dollard. He's also a meth addict, an alcoholic and serial user and abuser of weaker hearts and minds. He screens for Vanity Fair's Evan Wright a documentary he'd just finished called Three Days, starring himself; a young Latino named Josiah Dollard whom he met in rehab and took in (initially, supposedly, to help remain sober and later to help score drugs), who is variously described as his "lieutenant," "houseboy" and "bitch"; and the love of Josiah's life, a former girlfriend whom Wright identifies only as "Sunshine" who unfortunately chanced to visit their house. The film's scenes of degradation, humiliation and boundary defiance make it sound like a madman's Salo. Or perhaps Paul Bernardo brought up short.
The face of a girl with long black hair fills the screen. Sunshine. Though she is of legal age, she speaks in a child's voice, plaintive and quavering, as Dollard, still offscreen, barks at her, "What's your job on the team?" She giggles. "To sexually satisfy you and clean the house."
Dollard enters the frame, totally nude, a decrepit satyr. A montage ensues of him performing various sex acts with her, intercut with close-ups of the girl smoking a glass pipe. There is unintended comedy: while Dollard is having sex with her on the couch, it catches fire, and the two fail to notice until flames engulf their feet. There is intended comedy: Dollard performs anal sex with her while simultaneously talking on the phone with an agent at William Morris.
In the film, Josiah, who serves as cameraman, does not have sex with Sunshine.... His most significant on-screen presence is to lean close to her and offer encouragements: "What's his name? Say Pat. You're fucking a rich man with accomplishments, not a fucking loser."
...
The film fades to black. Jim Morrison comes across the loudspeakers singing "The End." Dollard narrates in the background about immortality, death, and the horrors he witnessed in Iraq. It cuts to Dollard readying to make his money shot on Sunshine."
...
He turns to Josiah, speaking excitedly. "You love this girl, Josiah. But you know what? You wandered off into a room by yourself to fucking jerk off to a tape of her fucking somebody else. That's who we are. That's who people are! They're scumbags!"
"This is so fucked up," Josiah shouts, "but I like it."
"Exactly, dude!" Dollard claps his hands, like a teacher whose pupil is about to achieve satori. "That's what I told you! That's the whole point to everything around here, with this whole thing, all of it, beyond! It's what everything in my life is about. It's about finding all those truths and those fucking experiences that other people just don't get."
Josiah seems paralyzed, staring at the screen, his huge eyes unblinking. "This is so fucked up," he repeats.
"That's what we do here," Dollard says, pounding the editing table. "We take everything to its furthest limits. We go out. We get in cars. We fucking kill people."
Radar Online has still more on this goofball [emphases mine]:
For the past two years, Dollard's been working on a film called Young Americans, a music video-style documentary explicitly intended to glorify U.S. troops and the violence they deploy in battle. "The message of my movie is simple: If you're a young person in America, the coolest, fucking most badass and most noble thing you can be today is a combat Marine," he tells Evan Wright. "My goal is to de-sensitize young people to violence. I want kids to watch my film and understand that brutality is the fucking appropriate response to a brutal enemy." Hence the footage of a mosque being destroyed and a Marine hoisting a severed Iraqi head before the camera.
Though now beloved by such archconservatives as Ann Coulter and Roger Ailes, who hold him up as an example of liberal Hollywood degeneracy made good, Dollard's political conversion didn't exactly bring about a change in his personal habits. While in Iraq, reports Wright, Dollard robbed a pharmacy at gunpoint, bringing back liquid Valium to share with the troops in "his" unit. He later invited the same unit to snort lines of coke off an armored vehicle. (Dollard tells Radar he's now attending AA and has been sober since September 11, 2006.)
After returning from his first trip to Iraq, Dollard's behavior grew more erratic. According to Wright, Dollard had his roommate, a convicted felon and sometime meth abuser, film him having sex with the man's girlfriend, then considered sending the video to Sheila Nevins, head of HBO's documentary division. Later in the piece, he asks Wright to buy him guns and a ticket to Kuwait, talks about starting an "anti-jihadi action cell," and even registers the domain name jihadikiller.com. "If I could, I'd kill jihadis with my bare hands," he tells Wright.
Not surprisingly, several of the people Wright interviewed express the opinion that Dollard is, clinically speaking, out of his fucking gourd. But Dollard disagrees. "I have often asked myself the question, 'Am I a psychopath?'" he says. "But it just doesn't add up. I can be one of the sanest people I know."
Yeah, he's really got ya there. I mean, when a guy can't go on a crank bender and film himself fucking his roomie's girlfriend in the ass, or hold up a pharmacy and do lines off an armored vehicle in the middle of a combat zone, what the fuck has this world come to? People are just so judgmental.
As much these weirdos try to characterize themselves as some mystic breed of heroic contrarians, sticking it to the fag pussies who've watered down Hollywood, man, the truth seems more sinister. Their public manifestos bespeak quite clearly a jumble of projected insecurities, revenge fantasies, daddy issues, and in the case of Dollard, a borderline psychopath with a serious substance abuse problem. When people are watching the vicarious torture-porn of 24, or the thrill-kill montage of Young Americans, they're only seeing one side of some creepy fuckers. And maybe they view it with some distance as warped but harmless escapism, or perhaps such things affirm their own projected neuroses.
And some propagandists prefer to be less in-your-face, more sotto voce about the matter, clouding the issues (whether deliberately or ineptly) when possible. The next post will take a look at such a porous yellow fellow.
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