why you don't want american airport security to be more like israeli airport security

The TSA has been in the news a bit lately, what with their new naked-body-scan-or-groping policy, implemented just in time to be tested by on the bajillion people traveling over the holiday season.  The conspiracy-inclined might infer that the timing had little to do with actual threats of holiday-themed terrorism and everything to do with the fact that people are less likely to stick up for their civil liberties when airports are crowded and travelers are preoccupied with holiday stresses.

Then along comes this guy, an anonymous pilot who seems genuinely concerned about airline security, who points out some glaring and obvious security flaws at SFO.  Of course for doing this he had to be punished by the TSA.  But the real reason he's getting a security-state smackdown is not for posting potentially exploitable information on Youtube, but for reminding us that US airport security is a ludicrous dog-and-pony show.

Airport security in the US is mostly for show, and a little bit for profit.  Its primary purpose is to remind everyone flying on a plane to be scared of Terrorism, while making a big performance of examining your liquids and genitals, to promote the idea that the government is Doing Something about it.  Its secondary purpose is to serve as one of the leading edges of the security state, a mass social experiment in conformity, where Americans can practice quietly and uncomplainingly submitting to authority figures who do things like frisk small children.  And of course, the security industry is big big money for some people, like the companies who make those naked body scanners, who, you can bet, have friends and lobbyists in Washington.

In discussion of airport security and Doing Something About Terrorism, it's never too long before someone says the word "Israel."  Israelis, we are told, enjoy effective and efficient airport security despite the fact that their country is menaced by Terrorists all the time.  We should be doing it more like them.  Having recently flown out of Israel's Ben Gurion Airport, perhaps I can give you a picture of what Israeli security looks like up close.

There is a widely-believed myth that since Israel has spent more than sixty years waging a counterinsurgency campaign against the indigenous people they have dispossessed and held under military rule to create their country, Israelis must be really smart when it comes to anything involving security.  This is not actually true--although plenty of former Israeli soldiers and secret police officers have built profitable careers as "security experts" by claiming it is.  Israeli security personnel aren't smarter.  They're just more brazen and less apologetic about what they're doing.

The system of racial profiling at Ben Gurion Airport is so naked it makes the US's "random checks" look sophisticated and subtle by comparison.  Of the three people of color arriving with our Interfaith Peace-Builders delegation, all were tagged by security.  One was intercepted by a plainclothes officer as we left the jetway; the other two were flagged for interrogation at passport control, along with one white dude who made the mistake of visiting the Terrorist Nation of Sudan to work on a documentary film project.

Leaving the airport, there's a different routine (maybe to keep people on their toes?) that involves a number-based profiling system.  After a few initial questions at a security checkpoint outside the main terminal building, a profiler (yes, they call themselves that) slaps a little sticker on your passport and luggage, with a number from 1 to 6, which determines how much shit you have to go through before boarding your plane.  1 is safe (Israeli, Jewish, white); 6 is ZOMG TERRORIST (person of color; anyone looking remotely like they could be Arab or Muslim; "suspicious" internationals).  Yes, it's really that obvious.  No, I'm not making this up.

When I departed Israel via Ben Gurion Airport in August, I got a 5 at security on sight, just based on the fact that I was a young international traveling alone, without an obviously Jewish surname.  Once I got inside the terminal, the woman at the second security checkpoint ran my passport through their computers, at which point (I presume) some kind of security flag popped up, probably owing to the fact that I had been interrogated by Israeli security at a different border crossing a few days prior.  After running my name, Profiler #2 promptly upgraded me to a 6, the highest security threat.  I resigned myself to a strip-search and possibly more questioning.  As it turned out, I got away with "only" a closed-door pat-down with clothes on and a thorough bag search.  The security personnel I interacted with at the airport were not hostile and even seemed somewhat apologetic for the delay.  But far more aggressive treatment by Israeli security is commonplace if you're Palestinian, Arab or Muslim.  If anything, this just reveals the racism of the whole system.

Of course, this system is just as dumb as any other system of profiling you can come up with, because it relies on over-generalizations of "suspicious" behavior and persons--definitions which are of course written by the state based on its own prejudices.  This creates a circular logic as perfect as that found in any dictatorship.  You are suspicious because we define you as such.  I'd argue that the US has already gone pretty far down the road of Israelification, adopting practices of racial profiling that Israel has been deploying with impunity for decades.  In Israel we can see the grotesque spectacle of this system in its fully developed form.  It should be a cautionary tale, not an example to emulate.

blog identity crisis

I started Laura on the Left Coast in 2008 as I was planning to move across the country, from New York and the East Coast where I'd lived my whole life, to Los Angeles, a city I didn't even visit before being accepted to grad school there.  (Good thing too, or I might have gotten cold feet.)

If you'd asked me two and a half years ago, I would never have predicted the turns my life would take: life changes, renewed political involvement, travel to amazing places, and along the way an attempt at increasing self-definition as an artist.  As I've evolved, so has this blog.  It's been extremely helpful for working some of those things out, even if I didn't necessarily recognize the revelations in the moment.  It is valuable to me if only as a record of the evolution of my artistic and political thought over the past two and a half years.

The problem now is that I'm not entirely sure where to go.  My life is sort of undefined at the moment--and not in a carefree hippie way, or a filled-with-terrifying-but-exhilarating-possibilities way.  More in a morass-of-gnawing-uncertainty-and-economic-peril way.  As my work on the two projects I was lucky to be involved in right after graduation is coming to a close--at least for the moment--and I'm facing the prospect of looking for a real-person job in the worst economy since the Great Depression, with a hundred thousand dollars more debt that I had two years ago, I am most likely to be filled at any given moment with a vague sense of exhaustion and dread.  This makes it hard to focus on anything creative, even blog posts.

I have a list of posts I still want to write, but lately I haven't had much energy to write them.  And, as this blog has become increasingly politically focused, I've also felt some pressure to make every post "count" by writing about something deep or urgent or particularly relevant to the moment; to make every post have a point and a well-articulated argument.  This pressure is, of course, entirely self-imposed, but this is me acknowledging its presence.

This isn't meant to say that Laura on the Left (Coast) is heading for blog retirement or even hiatus.  For all I know I'll become completely unblocked over the holidays...or once I move to my new apartment...or once I get a job...and start writing up a storm again.  It is simply to admit confusion, and a bit of fatigue.  The past two and a half years have encompassed five moves (with a sixth on the horizon), four international trips, five feature scripts, a pilot and a TV spec.  Oh, and two Harry Potter movies.  And while I've had incredible, life-changing experiences that I wouldn't trade for anything in the world, it can get a bit draining as well.  So don't be surprised if this blog wanders or goes relatively quiet for a while, while I figure out the next part of my life.

today in "j.k. rowling is a total f*cking genius"

This post contains minor spoilers for the second half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

As was probably to be expected, watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 made me want to do nothing more than go back and read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Although I had re-read some of my favorite sections, I had consciously avoided re-reading Deathly Hallows from start to finish since I blazed through it in about 48 hours on midnight release weekend in 2007.  It's just so good that I knew once I started it, I was going to have to re-read the whole damn thing.  So I did.

The Harry Potter books are symmetrical in many ways.  Reading the scene in which Harry, Ron and Hermione (disguised as Bellatrix Lestrange) navigate Diagon Alley on their way to break into Gringotts makes one inevitably think of that other trip to Diagon Alley, in the very first book.  (And in case we forget, Rowling reminds us through Harry's own memory.)  It made me want to go back and read that chapter in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, at which point I found this:

"Why would you be mad to try and rob Gringotts?" Harry asked.

"Spells--enchantments," said Hagrid, unfolding his newspaper as he spoke.  "They say there's dragons guardin' the high security vaults." (SS p. 64)

Did she know, then, that some 4,000 pages later our heroes would be doing exactly the thing that Hagrid said was so mad, and escaping on the back of a dragon?  Surely she must have, to plant the information so subtly.  Rowling frequently uses the trick of introducing an important piece of information in a comedic, whimsical or character-quirk moment.  (Perhaps the best example of this is the way Expelliarmus, arguably the most important spell in the entire series, is introduced in a scene played mostly for laughs in Book 2.)

Rowling also uses symmetry to draw contrast.  Compare that wide-eyed, sparkly, Chris-Columbus-friendly walk down Diagon Alley in the first book with the downright chilling scene in Book 7, when Hermione-as-Bellatrix is accosted by a maimed, wandless wizard begging for the whereabouts of his disappeared children.  Way to suck the childlike wonder out of that one, Jo.

But that is part of the genius of Harry Potter, too.  Rowling introduces this world that's beautiful and magical and clever and breathtaking and funny and surprising.  She makes us fall in love with it.  And then she very nearly destroys it.  I can think of few writers with the guts to build a world so detailed and complex, and then inflict such total--sometimes irreversible--damage upon it.  It's a stroke of brilliance on Rowling's part, to spend the time setting up the normal routines of this world--magical though it is--to make it familiar to us, so that when nearly everything is eclipsed by the shadow of dictatorship and war, it feels like this could be our world, and we care.  It's one of the things that makes the series, for all its dragons and broomsticks and magic wands, seem incredibly real.

no thank yous

I went to a play tonight called ReEntry, based on interviews with US Marines returning from Iraq.  The play was decent, quite compelling at points, if politically safe.*  The audience talkback afterward was infuriating.

There is a section in the play where soldiers talk about how they feel when random people come up and thank them for their service.  It's actually a pretty interesting part of the play.  But for some reason the discussion got on this track where people were talking about saying thank you to soldiers and how words weren't enough to express their gratitude.

Out of nowhere, I started to get viscerally angry.  I mean really, deeply furious, in that way that makes you afraid to speak up because you're not sure what will come out.  I was trying really hard to form a coherent thought so I could raise my hand, but the talkback was short, and before I could get my shit together, it was over.  Then I was just more angry at myself for being unable to articulate what was pissing me off.

The play, honestly, was good.  But the perspective in the discussion was so limited.  I am all for the voices of US soldiers getting heard--I'm writing a screenplay about one--but let's be honest.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not natural disasters that US soldiers happen to have survived.  They are military occupations, and the soldiers who carry them out are occupiers.  They are also brutal counterinsurgency campaigns--the type of war that virtually guarantees torture, military terror, and the slaughter of lots and lots of civilians.  That doesn't mean we can't sympathize with US soldiers and try to understand their experiences.  Nor does it mean we should let the war criminals who call themselves our government off the hook--they are ultimately responsible.  But the least--the very least--we owe to anyone who's suffered because of these wars is to face the truth about what they are.  They are massive crimes, organized by our government, but carried out on the ground by thousands of working class men and women, who are made into perpetrators in a war they have no interest in and then abandoned to deal with the consequences by a government who doesn't give a shit about them.

I understand why, if you participated in one of these wars, this position might be a hard one to adopt.  It's not easy to admit you risked your life, and possibly killed people, for a swindle, a crime, a lie.  It is much, much easier not to question, and the US government relies on that.  It's much easier to be proud, to say you were defending your country or even just your comrades-in-arms, to believe you did your job and conducted yourself honorably, than to face the truth that there is no honorable way to conduct yourself while forcing your government's will on other people at gunpoint.

And what about those other people--the Iraqis, in this case, who were completely absent from the discussion that followed?  I know the play was about US soldiers, but the discussion could have been about anything.  And yet to hear these people talk, the Iraqis didn't even exist.  The war was all about us Americans--our experiences, our suffering, our trauma.  By the end of the discussion I was fairly disgusted.  No, alienated.  Alienated is the right word.  Because I realized how differently I see war from most Americans.

I now know a substantial number of people who've lived--and continue to live--through wars and military occupations as civilians.  I've traveled to places that are occupied and places that have been recently bombed.  I've had a few brushes with occupying soldiers myself.  And even those small, temporary experiences have profoundly altered the way I look at war.  I know enough people on the other side of the guns--some who've lived their whole lives there--that I can't not see that part of the picture.  And, on the whole, I find it much easier to identify with those people than with the ones doing the occupying.

In talking to a US soldier, I might say "I'm glad you survived."  Or "I hope you didn't see or do too many things that will damage you for the rest of your life."  Or even "I'm sorry that I and the antiwar movement I'm part of have not yet been able to stop our government from sending you over there to kill people who never did anything to either of us."  But I'd never, ever say "thank you" to someone for occupying someone else's country.

And, while I generally defend Americans as victims of the unfortunate circumstance of living in a superpower, moments like this talkbalk sometimes fill me with despair, because my worldview has been shaped by direct experience that I know not everyone can have, and at times the gap between my view of the world and that of those around me seems like a chasm.  I've dedicated a substantial portion of my life to bridging that gap using both art and activism, but at times it just feels unbridgable.  (Those are the times I dream about moving out of the US, despite the fact that that feels like giving up.)

Watching ReEntry, I couldn't help thinking of the brilliant play Aftermath, also based on interviews, but this time with Iraqi refugees who had lived through the war as civilians.  I remembered their anger--so intense, boiling off the stage, that it made some people in the theater uncomfortable.  As it should.  Americans get off the hook far too easily when it comes to reckoning with the unsanitized reality of war and the grief and anger of its victims.  I would love to see these two productions staged back-to-back.  I wonder what the talkbacks would be like after that.

On a side note: The play was underwritten by Northrop Grumman--that's right--a weapons manufacturer that makes, among other things, the B-2 bomber, F-35 fighter jet, and a variety of drones, missiles, and other killing machines.  They had a full-page ad "saluting the troops" on the back of the program and were mentioned in the opening announcements.  I know funding theater ain't easy, but this seems deeply unethical to me on the part of the theater, the playwrights and anyone else involved in making the decision.

*Side note #2: ReEntry is a perfect example of how trying "not to have a political agenda" is a political decision in itself, usually in favor of the status quo.  Talking about how we all support and honor the troops--and agreeing to be sponsored by a weapons company--are not neutral, apolitical positions.  As I've argued before, you can't make an apolitical piece of art/media about war, so why delude yourself into trying?  Take a stand and be honest about it.

harry potter and the deathly hallows, part 1: initial reactions

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

I saw Deathly Hallows on Friday night in IMAX.  My initial reaction was along the lines of HOLY CRAP THAT WAS AWESOME.  Or possibly something like AGAIN, AGAIN!  I really wasn't surprised--Hallows is my favorite book of the series, Yates is my favorite director of the franchise, and the actors, production values and effects get better with each film.

These are some initial, loosely collected reactions from a first viewing.  I'm sure I'll see it at least once more in theaters, so I may write more as more thoughts occur to me.

LOVED IT
1. The Tale of the Three Brothers.  Beautiful, fluid and poignant, this unexpected delight of an animated sequence in the middle of two and a half hours of grim live action should win some sort of prize.

2. The Trio's acting skills.  It's sometimes easy to forget how far Dan, Rupert and Emma have come in ten years.  As late as Phoenix, they still felt like child actors with a stiff moment here and there.  Not so here.  All three deliver seamless performances without a false note among them.  They don't act; they inhabit their characters.  Most importantly, they finally capture the chemistry that's held these three friends together through what must be a very statistically unlikely number of near-death experiences even in the wizarding world.

Dan Radcliffe is the only 20-year-old I can think of who can look like a teenager one moment and an old man the next.  Some of his best moments are when he isn't doing anything at all, just sitting, feeling the weight of the wizarding world on his shoulders and knowing that is doesn't matter whether he thinks he is up to the mission he's been given, because there isn't any choice.

Emma Watson's Hermione blossoms into a quick-thinking, logical, hard-nosed survivor, proving her book learning can be put to practical use and demonstrating just as much Gryffindor courage (and considerably more emotional maturity) than the boys she heads into battle with.

Ron has been the most underwritten of the Trio in the films, and sometimes it's hard to see his appeal.  Yet here some combination of writer, director and actor magic gives his comic-relief moments enough genuine sweetness to feel like a vital asset in dark times.  In the post-Horcrux-destruction scenes, Rupert and Dan feel like real buddies in a way they haven't since Chamber of Secrets.

3. Everything in the Voldemortized Ministry of Magic.  This is when we see most clearly what a world run by Voldemort would look like, and it's a brutal, ruthless, terrifying place--a wizard police state that echoes all the worst dictatorships of the 20th century, yet somehow feels totally authentic to J.K. Rowling's world.  Add to that the fact that I wanted to pause the film every five seconds so I could look at everything--the propaganda pamphlets, the files in Umbridge's desk, the Magic Is Might statue, the emergency lockdown system you never knew the Floo Network had.  Just one of a million examples of the unbelievable production design that breezes by in an imagined world this rich.

4. Wizard combat.  I knew we were in for a treat when I saw how Yates handled the Department of Mysteries battle at the end of Phoenix.  Long gone are the ridiculously stagey duels of Chamber of Secrets days.  The filmmakers have figured out how to make wizard fights feel lightning-fast and deadly.

5. Rhys Ifans as Xenophilius Lovegood.  He's got two scenes in the whole movie and he fucking owns them.  His fear and desperation when Luna is kidnapped is heartbreaking and shows the price the whole wizarding world is paying under Voldemort.

6. Harry and Hermione's dance.  It was sweet and tender and a little silly.  It didn't seem out of character for two people who probably feel like the loneliest people in the world at that moment.  It worked.  I loved it.

NICE SAVE, DAVID YATES
1. "Hi, I'm Bill Weasley."  None of the other films bothered to introduce me, and I'm about to get married to someone you saw for five minutes in Goblet of Fire, but in my three seconds of screen time I still manage to sound like a werewolf-battling badass.

2. Dobby's reintroduction at Grimmauld Place.  I was pretty sure they were going to do something like this, since we hadn't seen Dobby at all since film #2.  They pulled it off smartly, Dobby was relatively un-annoying, and we got what we needed for an important moment later in the film.

REALLY HOPE THEY'RE SAVING THIS FOR PART 2
1. Wandlore.  Pretty sure the necessary exposition is going to be in there, but otherwise non-book-readers will sure be scratching their heads about why Harry's wand acted on its own back in that Seven Potter chase.

2. Dumbledore's backstory.  The thing is, I could see the plot working with most of Dumbledore's mysterious past omitted.  But we'd really be losing something thematically.  So I'm just going to tell myself that Harry didn't hear those tidbits about Dumbledore at the wedding and Hermione didn't pick up that copy of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore for no reason and hope, somehow, Yates & Co have something awesome up their sleeve on this one.

3. An explanation of Harry's magic mirror fragment.  Hey look, an important prop that was never introduced at all!  I am really curious to see how they solve this one, because I'm sure non-book-readers have no fucking clue what that business is about.

4. The Harry/Lupin parenting fight.  This could so easily be worked into the scene when Lupin drops by Shell Cottage to announce Teddy's birth...a scene I'm pretty sure they have to have...a scene I'll be really friggin' pissed if they don't have...no, what am I talking about, they have to show that.  Right?

5. Clues to what the other Horcruxes might be.  Cause right now we have none, nada, zero, zilch, and the one important clue about the Lestranges' vault didn't exactly make it into the Malfoy Manor sequence.  Which leads me to...

ABOUT THE MALFOY MANOR SEQUENCE
When I walked out of the theater last night, I really thought I had no complaints about this movie at all.  Overall it was an enormously enjoyable viewing experience.  But no complaints?  Come on, you knew that wasn't going to last.  And so we come to Malfoy Manor.

There are many, many frightening moments in Deathly Hallows, the book, but the sequence in which Harry, Ron and Hermione are held prisoner at Malfoy Manor just blows them all out of the water.  It is goddamn bloody terrifying.  Voldemort isn't even there.  It's just Bellatrix, running the show and being her batshit crazy torture-loving self.

There's a moment, when Harry and Ron are locked in the cellar, listening to Hermione being tortured in the room above them, that is one of the scariest in the whole series.  This is a moment that could have come straight out of any real-world torture survivor's testimony.  It's so horrific precisely because J.K. Rowling knows what the scariest position in this scene is: not the person who's being hurt, but the person who's trapped, helpless, while someone they love is screaming in pain.

In the film, the Malfoy Manor sequence is all right.  But it's not the drawn-out, bloodcurdling horror show that J.K. Rowling delivers for us in the book.  It goes by far too quickly and frankly, Helena Bonham Carter's ability to play a total psychopath is just not used to its full advantage.  I think one of two things happened.  Either the movie was running too long and this scene got sliced and diced for time.  Or the filmmakers put together something as spectacularly sadistic as what's in the book and decided it was too scary for the film's desired PG-13 rating.

The problem, of course, is that the Harry Potter stories left PG-13 territory some time ago.  By the time Hallows opens we are most decidedly in an adult world.  And, much as I love so many things David Yates has done with the series, there are moments when he backs away from some of the very darkest material of the series.  (Dumbledore drinking the potion in the cave at the end of Half-Blood Prince was another scene I thought could have been pushed further into creepytown.)  One thing that can't be denied about J.K. Rowling: she respects her audience enough to take us right up to the precipice of terror without backing away.  I only hope that when it comes to the final conflict coming in Part 2, the filmmakers have the guts and the wisdom to deliver.

Update, 11/23: Second viewing tonight.  Malfoy Manor seemed a bit scarier this time, perhaps because my brain wasn't completely overwhelmed by the visual onslaught coming from the giant giant IMAX screen.  And Bellatrix does mention the vault.  Once.

movie review: 127 hours

The best thing about writing a review of 127 Hours is that I don't have to include a spoiler warning.  If you're going to see the movie, based on the true-life survival story of climber Aron Ralston, you probably already know that it involves watching a dude amputate his own arm after five days pinned under a boulder at the bottom of a canyon.

The clever thing about the movie is that it uses this foreknowledge to its advantage.  In the film's opening montage, completely quotidian snippets of Ralston's pre-hiking routine--filling a water bottle, fumbling around for a Swiss Army knife--vibrate with tension, because we know what's coming.  In the first act, director Danny Boyle (who has hereby redeemed himself from the spectacularly improbable and wildly overrated Slumdog Millionaire) plays with this tension with an almost sadistic glee, faking us out with trips and spills until we reach the final, fateful slot canyon in which man and boulder meet.

A movie where the protagonist spends two-thirds of his screen time alone, immobilized, in a single location, is the kind of thing that tends to get described as "unfilmable."  And yet 127 Hours doesn't have a slow microsecond in it.  If the movie were a person, it would have 0% body fat.  The film zips through its hour-and-forty-minute running time with a frenetic energy that mirrors its protagonist, a happy-go-lucky daredevil so overconfident, or self-absorbed, that he thought nothing of going on a solo hike in a remote area without telling anyone where he was going to be.

Much of the credit for keeping the film moving goes to James Franco's exceptional performance, and the smart, deftly-written script he has to work with.  In the middle of a landscape of epic proportions, his character's journey is really all interior, and he takes us through it with a naturalistic performance that never feels overwrought in the most dramatic of circumstances.  But equally important is Boyle's willingness to slip effortlessly between reality and Aron's thoughts, dreams, memories, fantasies and hallucinations, creating a highly subjective landscape in which we're maybe as close to being inside someone's head as you can get in a movie.  Never again will you take things like water and sunlight for granted in quite the same way.

After hearing all the hype about the amputation scene, I was bracing for something stomach-churning.  While it's certainly very bloody, I didn't feel it was unnecessarily drawn-out.  It's true that I have a fairly high tolerance for gore, but honestly, there was never a moment I wanted to look away--because the filmmakers had successfully made me care enough about the character that I wanted to see if he could do it.  I think this is a very important point about showing any kind of violence or pain on screen: the more invested we are in the characters, the more likely it is to feel earned and not gratuitous.  I kept watching because I was rooting for him, and I wasn't the only one.  When the amputation is complete and Ralston finds himself suddenly, finally, separated from the boulder that's been his nemesis for the past five days, the audience in the screening I went to cheered.  It wasn't the reaction I was expecting, but it was pretty awesome.

In fact, the dominant feeling the film leaves you with is one of euphoria, the pure joy of seeing someone triumph in a seemingly impossible situation and get another chance at life.  Here we have a perpetual limit-pusher, an adrenaline junkie who is always flirting with the prospect of death until the day a real life-or-death scenario meets him smack in the face.  And, when push comes to shove, he finds himself not only equal to the challenge, but humbler and wiser for it.  Even if you're the kind of movie-goer who's not sure you can handle the arm-severing scene, this is one that's worth pushing your own limits for.

oh yeah. i live in new york city now.

I moved back to New York last week, after two years and two months away.  It's fucking sweet.  I haven't even been doing anything all that spectacular: hanging out with friends I haven't seen in a while, eating yummy food (although in moderation, as I am rather poor at the moment), knowing I can get anywhere on my own at any time of day/night.  But sometimes I'll catch myself walking down the street with a little smile on my face, just basking in the awesomeness: the city's energy, its pace, its diversity, the way it can seem tough and welcoming at the same time.  What more can I say?  New York is my home.

I'm going to write more about my new temporary neighborhood, Washington Heights.  But for now, in celebration of my return, I give you a pitch-perfect New Yorker post from the Village Voice, 50 Reasons to Be Pretty Damn Euphoric You Live in New York City.

UPDATE!  The 50 reasons have a follow-up post, which is almost as awesome.

notes from joe sacco at nyu

Joe Sacco is one of my artistic and literary heroes.  Although my work tends more toward historical fiction and his toward journalism, if I had to make a list of influences he would definitely be near the top.  So when I found out that he was speaking at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, I was there.

I hope that excerpts of the conversation between Sacco and NYU professor Zachary Lockman will be up on the Primary Sources website soon.  The interview was fascinating and could have gone on longer, and the questions from the standing-room-only audience were sophisticated and thoughtful.  In the meantime here are some notes I took from the event:

- Sacco considers himself "a cartoonist who works in the medium of journalism"

- He talked a bunch about growing up in Australia (where he lived from age one to age twelve) among a mishmash of European refugees in the '60s.  His parents had lived through the bombing and siege of Malta.  Everyone around him talked about the war.  When friends got together they would tell stories about living through World War II.  "War didn't seem like such a foreign idea; it seemed like something that could happen in people's lives."  He contrasted this to the US, where war is a distant and totally abstract idea to a large percentage of the population.  "The US is fighting two wars right now, but you'd never know it, unless you know someone who is over there."

- Questioning mainstream/corporate journalism and learning about Palestine went hand in hand.  Once Sacco realized the only thing he'd ever heard about Palestinians was "terrorist," he started becoming seriously disillusioned with the US mainstream media.  "This [journalism] was what I had studied, but it didn't give me what I needed" to understand the world.

- He hates the concept of "objectivity" as it's frequently talked about in mainstream journalism and said he prefers to strive for honesty instead.  He talks more about this idea here, and his good friend Chris Hedges elaborates on the theme here.

- He said that he did not always enjoy drawing Footnotes in Gaza.  He found drawing some of the scenes of violence "repellent," and says he may step away from war comics for a while in the future.  At the same time, he discovered that no one had really investigated the massacres described in Footnotes, and felt that if someone didn't record the stories of the now-elderly survivors soon, they were at risk of disappearing from the historical record forever.

- He had a very insightful thing to say about drawing versus photography.  He talked about how the best images from photojournalism are arresting because they capture the action at the exact right moment.  (He mentioned this photo specifically.)  Well, in comics, every image can be at the "exact right moment," because you're drawing it.  He said that this is a powerful tool and that you can overuse it, that you can "bludgeon" the audience with it if you use it too much.

- I asked why he so frequently draws Israeli soldiers from a perspective where we can't see their faces.  I had kind of assumed this was a conscious choice, a la The Battle of Algiers, to tilt our sympathies toward the humanity of the occupied people.  But his answer somehow managed to be both more interesting and more humane.  Referring to Footnotes in Gaza, which depicts two massacres of large numbers of civilians, he said he couldn't actually imagine what was going through the minds of the soldiers at the moment they pulled the trigger.  "I couldn't draw their faces because I didn't know what they were thinking, and I didn't want to assume anything."  Other than "a few sadists, who always come to the fore in situations like this...these were ordinary men."  And, since this was 1956, it's very likely that some of these soldiers were themselves refugees, survivors of occupation and genocide.  He said after drawing Footnotes, he realized this was something he needed to understand, and is "working on a project now" that will help him get more insight into this particular element.

- As you might have guessed from his self-depiction in his comic books, Joe Sacco is really self-deprecating, humble and approachable in person.  He signed and drew something for everyone who brought a book, and when I mentioned I was writing a film about Gaza he asked questions about it and wrote "Good luck with your work" when he signed my copy of Palestine.  Which means he was actually listening to my somewhat nervous babbling instead of just pretending to listen while he drew something.

haifa, part 1

I have a few half-completed posts from my trip to Palestine with IFPB that I'm trying to turn into completed posts.  Here's the first one.

The day after I was interrogated at the Allenby Bridge, I got up at the crack of dawn to go to Haifa.  It was the end of a three-week trip and I was pretty exhausted.  But we hadn't been anywhere in the north of Israel, my friend M wanted to go with me, and more than anything I wanted to talk to M about what had happened at the bridge, because she's Palestinian and has been interrogated many times by Israeli border officials.  So I dragged my luggage up the Old City steps and onto a bus.

She asked me how I was, meaning were there any lingering effects from my border adventure the previous day.  I told her I was fine.  Of course I was.  They'd let me in, right?  They hadn't hurt me or anything, and I had never been worried that they would.  I knew it wasn't that kind of situation.  The worst they were going to do was try to scare me.  And in the grand scheme of Israeli repression, what was a little psychological roughing-up, really?  It was nothing, I said.

Really, I wanted desperately to talk about it, to pour out the whole story, every detail.  I wanted someone to commiserate, to tell me I'd made the right choices, to say, "those bastards," with the shake of the head and the wry half-smile that says, "I've been there."  But she said we should be careful what we talked about on the bus, so I held in the story and we talked about other things.

I spent most of the day in a haze of cognitive dissonance, wandering through the stunning ordinariness of Haifa.  I got out most of the salient details over coffee in a shopping area that felt oppressively normal.  I kept thinking about that quote from Joe Sacco's Palestine:

"Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there's parallel universes.  Here?  On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards...And over the wall behind closed doors, other things--people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss...other things happening for reasons of national security."

Okay, yeah, my experience wasn't nearly that dramatic.  But still.  I'd spent a few hours in that other world--or at least in the first circle of it--and today the ordinariness of the normal world that covered it up seemed unbearably criminal and sick.

Throughout the day, little things kept setting me on edge.  The soldiers that seemed to be on every bus.  A woman's voice with a particular accent.  The bag search at the bus stop, which two days ago would have been a minor annoyance, but today felt invasive and icky.

By lunchtime there was a cold twisty knot of anxiety in my stomach, almost enough to keep me from eating.  This wasn't a final-exam or a night-before-the-big-pitchfest nervousness, but something deeply wired into my body's emergency response system, an elemental fear.  It wasn't the kind you could channel into a burst of adrenaline and focus, but the kind that paralyzed, the kind that made you want to curl up in a ball and hide somewhere.  I realized the source of this fear was the thought of going through another Israeli-controlled border terminal (Ben Gurion Airport) in less than 24 hours.  I had to do it because I had to get on the plane to go home, but I really, deeply did not want to.

I realized maybe I was not as fine as I'd said I was.

Then I started to get angry.  I was angry at them for having so much control over me, and angry at myself for letting them.  It felt like something that had been done against my will, this installation of fear.  No matter how many times I told myself I wasn't afraid of them, that they didn't intimidate me, that my non-Palestinian identity kept me safe from actual physical harm, it didn't matter.  My emergency responses were doing something else.

I was ashamed, too, at the thought that I'd let them get to me.  I felt I wasn't living up to the Palestinian standard of toughness.  Because what they did to me was so minor, really.  Barely a blip on the radar compared to the repression they dish out against Palestinians.  But it had still left a mark.

I also felt a kind of backhanded awe for the enormity of the oppressive power Palestinians have to face every day.  And I realized why everyone always says they're fine.  Because there's always someone who has a worse story.  Because everyone feels a responsibility to be tough for everyone else, to shrug it off with a defiant grin and a flash of bravado.  Because you don't want to admit how much of a hold they have on you, because if you admit it you might never get out.

I admitted to M that I was feeling really nervous about the airport.  "It's helpful to prepare for the worst," she said.  This didn't seem like very comforting advice at the time, but it actually turned out to be quite useful.  After preparing myself for a strip search and more questioning, the quick bag check and pat down with clothes on, and the fact that the airport security people were merely bored and not hostile, felt like a gift.  But that made me a little angry too.  Because being only mildly harassed by airport security shouldn't feel like a fucking gift.

movie review: budrus

Sometimes I forget that the Palestine I know and love is so very different from the view of Palestine and Palestinians that gets presented in the mainstream media and is absorbed more or less uncontested by most Americans.  Anyone who wants to see my Palestine--the real Palestine--should watch Budrus.

Budrus is a good documentary by any standard, but as an education tool it is simply superb.  It shoots down so many myths about Palestine and Palestinians all at once--that Palestinians are unreasoning violent terrorists; that Israel is just defending itself; that there is too much ingrained hatred for Palestinians and Israelis to ever live and work together; that Palestinian women and girls are meek and submissive and play no role in the struggle.  All these stereotypes and more are soundly demolished in the film's slight one hour and eighteen minute running time.

When the residents of the West Bank town after which the film is named learn that Israel's apartheid wall will slice through their town's land, cutting through the cemetery and separating villagers from most of their agricultural land, they decide to resist, using classic tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience.  The Israeli army, predictably, responds with disproportionate, punitive violence.  The struggle unites local activists from Fatah and Hamas, men and women, young and old, Palestinians, internationals and Israelis.  Lead organizer Ayed Morrar's teenage daughter Iltezam is a force unto herself.

The scenes of Palestinian and Israeli activists defending each other against the army are some of the most inspiring moments in the film.  You can see two groups of people learning to trust and care about each other like family.  "They don't all hate us," realizes Iltezam Morrar, speaking about her new Israeli friends, which is striking because it's usually framed the other way around.  You can see the change in the Israeli activists too, how someone from an oppressor settler-colonial society can be transformed by switching sides and throwing their lot in with the oppressed.  In those moments, you can see how the whole apartheid system could collapse.

For those already familiar with the history of unarmed resistance in Palestine, Budrus won't present tons of new information.  Visitors to the Occupied Palestinian Territories now have the choice of attending one of a dozen or so protests of the type seen in Budrus on any given Friday.  What the film does do is tell the story of nonviolent resistance in one West Bank village incredibly well.  The filmmakers were there at the right time, and in the right places, and they reveal the transformation of the village through struggle in such an uncomplicated, straightforward way that the film's power doesn't really hit you until some time after you've left the theater.

Budrus is currently playing in film festivals and limited release around the world.  Look for a screening near you here.

writing is a job

If I haven't been writing here so much in the past month, it is only because I am busy writing other things.  I'm working on two feature scripts in collaboration with other people, plus some of my own stuff, plus organizing a move back to NYC for next month (yay!).

I do have several unfinished posts from my trip to Palestine that I want to get up in the next few weeks, and as November 19 approaches you know you can expect some posts of the wizard inclination.  But if I am not writing here so regularly, fear not.  I'll be back soon.

movie review: lebanon

Spoiler alert.  Actually I'm pretty much going to destroy this movie, so...fair warning.

Samuel Maoz's highly praised film Lebanon is the perfect crystallization of the Israeli national tendency to want to be both victim and oppressor.  Set during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (in which Maoz was a participant), the film follows four young soldiers who drive a tank into a Lebanese town, then seem genuinely surprised to find themselves attacked while invading someone else's country.

Visually, the film is quite amazing.  Staged almost entirely inside the belly of the tank, our only glimpse of the outside world is through the cross-hairs of the gunner's sights.  The visual trick of being able to zoom in on a target leads to some breathtaking moments early in the film as victims of the war stare straight into the camera at us.  Unfortunately, this slender thread of human connection is broken the moment the tank is hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.  From then on in, the film becomes increasingly preoccupied with the fears and suffering of our protagonists embedded in their rolling fortress.

The film's visual style is an unintentional (I think) metaphor for Maoz's country.  Encased in iron, carrying weapons of mass destruction, the guys in the tank are virtually indestructible.  But they are still terrified.  Believing themselves to be surrounded by enemies, they react with hysterical, disproportionate violence, and in doing so make their worst fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Sealed into a permanent war machine, their only view of the outside world is through a gun sight.  And if you view the world through a gun sight, it's not too long before every human starts to look like a target.

The soldiers spend most of the film in various states of mortal terror.  Okay, I get it.  War is scary.  But in the back of my mind, there's a little voice that can't help saying, "Dude.  You're in a fucking TANK."  Imagine how scary that war would be if you didn't have an enormous white-phosphorus-shooting tin can to protect yourself with.

Many a glowing review has used words like "searing," "harrowing" and "sobering" to describe the violent things the characters see and do.  And yes, these soldiers kill civilians--but only under carefully pre-selected conditions.  There are two instances of fairly graphic carnage right in the beginning of the film.  In one incident, the tank opens fire on an old man driving a chicken truck.  This is the second car to come down the road that the tank is blocking--after a car carrying gun-wielding militants, who have the audacity to kill an invading Israeli soldier.  In the second incident, the tank crew blows away a family in a half-destroyed apartment--but only because gun-wielding militants (again) are using the mother as a human shield.  Said mother then has the temerity to ask the Israeli soldiers what happened to her daughter (who's dead) and freak out when a soldier rips off her nightgown, which has caught on fire (he was protecting her, see.)

In each incident, the violence of the Israelis is only a reaction--a hesitant, guilt-riddled reaction--to the true initiators of violence, who everyone knows are Arabs.  Keffiyah-swathed, nameless, Kalashnikov-wielding Arabs who use women and children as human shields.  (Sound familiar?)  So you see?  The tender young Israeli soldiers didn't want to kill civilians.  The terrorists made them do it.  Compared with this display of hand-wringing and self-pity, there seems to be something refreshingly honest about folks like the Wikileaks Apache helicopter crew, laughing as they mow down Iraqi civilians like targets in a first-person-shooter game.  At least those guys aren't pretending to have any conscience left.

Lebanon shares strategy and tactics with another highly-praised war movie to which it's been compared, The Hurt Locker.  Both films achieve the sleight-of-hand of making the invaders look morally superior while showing Arabs as victims of other Arabs.  Of course, no attempt is made to explain any of the complexities of a war that had already been going on for seven years before Israeli planes and tanks came smashing in.

The leering Phalange militiamen who show up halfway through the film are appropriately creepy, but they're also a foil--the Israelis look downright civilized compared to those gap-toothed, swaggering butchers.  The Israelis even protect their Syrian prisoner, the same guy who fucked up their tank.  Like the guys in The Hurt Locker who risk their lives to defuse a poor helpless sop of a suicide bomber, these soldiers are so noble they go out of their way to protect some Arabs from the other Arabs who want to kill them.

Of course, the war in Lebanon was a civil war, so Arabs did kill other Arabs, in large numbers.  As for the fact that the war's most notorious massacre, the slaughter in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, was carried out with Israel's knowledge, aid, and encouragement, by those Arabs who happened to be their allies...well, this isn't a movie about that, right?  Let's just focus on the guys in the tank.

And here we come to another element that Lebanon and The Hurt Locker have in common.  By insisting on such a narrow, intensely subjective perspective, the film scrubs away all context for the war.  Like in The Hurt Locker, the war is just a setting--devoid of cause, history, and power dynamics--a neutral backdrop for the characters' moral dilemmas.  Civilians and even The Enemy pop up like video game characters and disappear just as quickly, nameless extras in the Real Story, which is about how traumatic this all is--for the perpetrators.

This is the problem with this kind of intense soldier's-eye-view movies.  By stripping away all context, you also remove responsibility.  The fact that our heroes are invaders, occupiers, and would-be conquerors gets pushed out of the picture.  They're just guys doing their job.  We're supposed to feel for them and with them, and forget to ask whether their job is justified in the first place.

Lebanon has generally gotten rave reviews from US critics--it had an 87% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes when I last checked.  Perhaps this is because Americans have been making this very same type of war movie for at least fifty years, albeit with slightly less pathos.  (Americans proactively shoulder the burden of protecting the free world without complaint, while Israelis are only fighting because everyone's out to get them--a small but crucial difference in national mythology.)

Of course the vast majority of American war movies are from the invading perspective--we're usually the ones doing the invading, after all.  It has become so natural for us to privilege the perspective of occupier over that of defender or civilian that we don't even think about it--we just assume that's how war movies are supposed to work.

Perspective is powerful.  It tells us whom we are supposed to identify with, whose emotional experience we are supposed to be sharing.  What unconscious effect does it have to be constantly looking over the shoulder of an invading soldier in our war movies, to be looking through the rifle sights instead of into the barrel as it's pointed at us?  I think it just reinforces an already strongly-held American assumption, that war is something that happens in other places and to other people.  It's never our homes, our neighborhoods, our families under the bombs.  That fate is for other, unluckier people who have nothing in common with us.

i love you, new york

Photo credit: AP

Thousands in New York rallied in defense of the proposed Park51 community center, for religious freedom and against Islamophobia. NY1 is reporting five thousand. Estimates from friends who were there ranged between 3,000 and 7,000, versus about 750-1,000 assorted bigots on the other side. The rally on our side sounded beautiful.

Dear New York. You may smell bad and be prohibitively expensive, but you come through when it counts.

a 9/11 post

In the seven years I lived in New York after September 11, 2001, I kind of got over 9/11 tributes. Many a September 11th passed without my feeling a particular need to memorialize, and I think plenty of New Yorkers felt the same. Not those who lost loved ones or suffered trauma, but the vast majority of us who were just there in the city on that surreal day of blue skies and ash-white smoke. We were around for the main event. Calling it up year after year seemed unnecessary.

But this seems to be the year that some people want to remember 9/11, and for very particular reasons. People who insist on a particular meaning for that event, slave graves and other inconvenient truths aside. And while I completely agree with the sentiment of this post--about the imperial arrogance of demanding that our tragedy be remembered above and to the exclusion of all others--I do remember. There are things from that day and the days that followed that I can recall with a visceral, snapshot clarity that hasn't faded after nine years and maybe never will.

On September 11, 2001, I was a 19-year-old sophomore at Columbia University. I was six miles away from the World Trade Center that morning, at the other end of Manhattan, but that was close enough. These are some of the things I will never forget:

Checking in with friends to make sure they are still alive.

Standing on the roof of my friend's building, watching the F-16s fly over Manhattan, with a Lebanese friend who casually remarks, "Huh. That's the first time I've seen those when they weren't going to bomb somewhere."

Eating a late dinner at JJ's Place a few days later, listening to some bigot-on-the-street scream hatred on CNN, and suddenly being engulfed in a physical, palpable wave of fear. Not fear of more terrorist attacks but fear of my own government, and what it might try to get away with under the shadow of racist hysteria.

The missing posters. The faces that stared up at you from subway stops and telephone poles, framed with the desperate pleading of loved ones, and the twisted connection they invoked to that other 9/11--also a clear blue Tuesday morning--a parallel so surreal it could only have happened in real life. The way people say missing when they can't yet bear to say dead.

That demonstration, that incredible night march through the streets of Manhattan ten days after 9/11, when we expected a hundred people and five thousand showed up. Chanting "No war, no attacks, bombs won't bring our loved ones back" as if the raw power of our grief could actually make those in power listen. Marching against war before we even knew where the war was going to be. The two-hundred-person antiwar organizing meeting held on the lawn outside Columbia's student center, when it seemed, for a historical split-second, that something other than slaughter might have been possible.

The moment at the end of that same night march, in Union Square, when the wind shifted, bringing with it the acrid smell of the still-burning rubble less than a mile away. "I left Sarajevo to get away from that smell," a woman standing near me said. At that moment we were just scared civilians in another bombed-out city.

And, most of all, the thing I thought about as we went out to get food after a long day of news-watching and check-ins to assure ourselves and others that yes, everyone we knew was still alive: Imagine living every day like this.

I know the terror and grief New Yorkers experienced for one day is minuscule compared to what our government has visited on other countries and on the people who were here before us. I am humble about our place in the world historic scale of destruction. But I think it is important not to forget those feelings, to hold on to them and to see in them the reflection of other bombed cities and shell-shocked survivors. I think they are useful when remembering whom to sympathize with and whom to fear, when remembering who is the us and who is the them.

Whenever someone shouts "Remember 9/11!" to justify war or Islamophobia or attacks on immigrants, I want to ask, "Do you?" Were you there? Because if you weren't, shut the hell up. And if you were, if you really remember the fear and vulnerability and pain that engulfed the city, how dare you wish that upon anybody else?

mockingjay review, WITH SPOILERS. and block quotes.

WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS. Big ones! If you've already read Mockingjay or you are some kind of weirdo who doesn't mind spoilers, read on. If you haven't read the Hunger Games series, you probably shouldn't read this either, because most of it will not make sense and I'll only ruin the last book for you.

Sometimes you want to like a book so much, it takes you a while to admit that it did not, in fact, meet all your expectations. Such was the case with Mockingjay, the final book in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy.

Suzanne Collins could have knocked it out of the park with Mockingjay. All the ingredients were there. Collins had set so many wonderful, complex and exciting dynamics in motion by the end of Catching Fire. Sadly, so many things just didn't pay off in the way I hoped they would.

Remember this, from Katniss and Peeta's Victory Tour in Catching Fire?

You can feel something in the air, the rolling boil of a pot about to run over. Not everywhere. Some crowds have the weary-cattle feel that I know District 12 usually projects at the victors' ceremonies. But in others--particularly 8, 4, and 3--there is genuine elation in the faces of the people at the sight of us, and under the elation, fury. When they chant my name, it is more a cry for vengeance than a cheer. When the Peacekeepers move in to quiet an unruly crowd, it presses back instead of retreating.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Catching Fire was the way Collins captured the feeling of a revolution starting. People beginning to shake off the fear that used to paralyze them, suddenly having the courage to challenge power that seemed invincible only yesterday, solidarity and defiance blooming out of alienation and despair seemingly overnight. This was reflected in the Games of the second book--from the tributes holding hands in the beginning, all the way through to the epic win of an ending, when Katniss turns her arrow not against a fellow victim of the Capitol's game, but against the game itself. At the end of Catching Fire, the stage was all set for Panem's mass popular revolution to begin in earnest.

So I was disoriented and distressed to find this popular element almost entirely missing from Mockingjay. It's like Collins forgot about all the social power she set into motion in the second book and somehow decided the only way to overthrow the Capitol was with a conventional military force. Enter District 13.

I hated District 13. I was suspicious of them the moment I learned they really did have nuclear weapons, because I didn't believe that Collins would ever make people who rely on nuclear terror the good guys. And they aren't, really.

Bringing District 13 into the mix destroys one of the best things about the series, which is the asymmetry of the conflict--the will and solidarity and creativity and ingenuity of ordinary people against the massive military power of the Capitol. Watching teenagers pwn the Capitol with improvised weapons was one of the things that made the books great. It doesn't work the same way when you start relying on a conventional military power.

I know we aren't supposed to like District 13--or, I should say, the leadership of District 13 (its people are strangely undifferentiated and passive.) But the problem is that while Collins doesn't encourage us to like Coin and her army, she can't quite dispense with them either. She relies on them to win the war. It's like she can't quite trust the popular revolution she set in motion in Catching Fire to actually take power.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the biggest missed opportunity of the whole book: the attack on the mountain-encased military base called the Nut in District 2. There's something that feels so wrong about districts fighting districts, and to her credit, Collins lets her characters think so too. The sudden flashback to the mine accident that killed Katniss's father is a total surprise, a scene I never expected to see, but it's brilliant. When Katniss looks at the people she's supposed to be fighting, she sees not enemies, but her own family. Instead of feeling victorious, she feels manipulated and sick. And to top it off, her scripted, stage-managed television appearance (in a series that's so much about the power of media) is interrupted by the real-life, bloody consequences of her actions. Katniss seems to realize that they're going about this all wrong, that she's just back in the Games again, fighting the wrong enemy. And she gives one of her best speeches of the entire series:

"Who is the enemy?" whispers Haymitch. [Nice callback to the end of Catching Fire, SC.]

"These people"--I indicate the wounded bodies on the square--"are not your enemy!" I whip back around to the train station. "The rebels are not your enemy! We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol! This is our chance to put an end to their power, but we need every district person to do it!"

YEEAAAHHHH! I'm thinking at this point. This is what we've been waiting for! Katniss is going to unite the districts--not as a figurehead, but as an actual military leader. The final battle against the Capitol is ON! I'm ready for someone to start singing the Marseillaise.

But instead, Katniss gets shot.

I kept waiting for confirmation that it was one of Coin's people who shot her. This would have made perfect sense, because Coin obviously sees Katniss as a threat, unscripted Katniss as a bigger threat, and Katniss with the power of the districts behind her as the biggest threat of all. But there is never any textual evidence to support this theory, so as far as we know, Katniss was shot by someone random who clearly wasn't listening very closely to what she was saying. I think this says a lot about how Collins feels about human nature.

In hindsight, I think this is where the book started to derail. This should have been the moment Katniss took the offensive and started calling the shots herself, making all her friends and allies choose sides and setting her up for an inevitable conflict with Coin. I thought maybe Coin was going to threaten to nuke the Capitol, and Katniss and friends would end up racing against time to stop the war before that happened. (That would have been cool, wouldn't it?) Instead, Katniss gets taken out of the action at a crucial moment with an injury.

This exact same thing will happen again, later, only the second time it will be infinitely more frustrating. It's like Collins is afraid to let Katniss take control of the story. The same way she doesn't quite trust or understand how to let the revolution she created take power, she can't quite trust her main character to move from figurehead to general, from reacting to driving the action herself.

In retrospect, this is a problem that plagues the entire series. My one discomfort with Catching Fire was that for the whole book, Katniss was a pawn in a game she didn't understand. It made her look stupid. I just assumed the third book would be when she finally came into her own. I was concerned when she wasn't part of the mission to rescue Peeta, but I was temporarily mollified by the twist of Peeta being insane, which was a cruelty that seemed genuinely worthy of the Capitol's sick imagination. But the place where Katniss's lack of agency drove me to distraction was in the final assault on the Capitol.

I guess this is the place to just come out and say it: I flat-out hated Prim's death. I will accept the death of almost any fictional character--provided it's earned. It was not. It was cheap and useless and didn't serve any dramatic purpose. The possibility of Prim being on the front line was never even planted as something we were supposed to be worried about. Then there is the fact that Katniss's trek through the Capitol had already been bloody enough. It had claimed the lives of quite a few characters we'd come to care about. Gale had just been captured and Katniss had failed in her one final promise to kill him in order to spare him a miserable slow death by torture. The stakes were already high enough without throwing Prim in there out of nowhere.

Killing Prim does something else. It short-circuits the entire trilogy. This whole story was set in motion because Katniss wanted to save Prim. While Katniss certainly couldn't have known how things would turn out, having her die anyway sends an awfully fatalistic message, doesn't it? Whether Collins intended it or not, it kind of makes you question whether everything Katniss did was worth it.

I don't think I would ever have been fully comfortable with Prim's death, but I might have accepted it if it had propelled Katniss directly into the president's mansion, into the final conflict with Snow and/or Coin. But that doesn't happen.

No matter what you think about Prim's death, the fact that the Capitol fell while Katniss was in the hospital is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. It's such a fatal dramatic error that I actually had to read that chapter twice to realize that's what happened. The whole trilogy had been preparing us for a showdown between Katniss and Snow. It's Katniss's one consistent goal throughout the book: I kill Snow. As Katniss approaches Snow's mansion, her mission couldn't be clearer: Kill Snow. End the war. And she fails.

I would have accepted a last-minute twist in the confrontation with Snow. (Like, maybe, Coin already being there, negotiating a surrender with him while their respective armies slaughter each other outside? And Katniss deciding to kill Coin instead, because she realizes Snow's power is already broken. That would have been cool, right?) But taking Katniss out of the action at this point with a near-fatal injury--one inflicted by people supposedly on her own side--made me want to throw the book against the wall.

Katniss's last mission was plagued with so much danger and bad luck and impossible odds, so many characters who risked or lost their lives to see her succeed, that having her fail at the last minute felt like a horrible sick joke. It made Katniss look criminally stupid and the whole ending section in the Capitol feel cheap.

So why did Collins do it? Either it was bad writing, or there was a purpose. Let us assume for a moment that it was not bad writing and that Collins was trying to say something.

Because Prim was killed by the rebels (or at least by a splinter cell acting on Coin's orders) the only message that I can possibly extract from this horrible dramatic choice is a kind "pox on both your houses" condemnation. The Capitol is awful, but the rebels are just as bad. Or, if they didn't start out as bad, they've become the very thing they're trying to destroy by engaging in war.

There are many scenarios under which I wouldn't have any problem with an antiwar message like this. Collins's other series, the Underland Chronicles, has a powerful antiwar message much along the same lines. And there it works beautifully, because the Underland Chronicles are all about the moral problems of conventional war. The different species in the Underland fight each other over land and resources and all kind of stupid shit, with conventional armies of approximately equal power. Their wars are useless and destructive. In this context, an antiwar message is not only radical and humanist, but logically the only dramatically satisfying conclusion to the series.

But the war in Mockingjay isn't a conventional war. It's a revolution. And the problem with tacking on an antiwar message at the eleventh hour is that you've just spent the better part of three books convincing us that Panem needs a revolution and the Capitol deserves to be overthrown. "A pox on both your houses" doesn't exactly fit with "We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol!" In this context, an antiwar message becomes reactionary, because what's the alternative? The status quo? Not to resist at all? That would make a very boring book, wouldn't it?

Nevadeline, perhaps the only person who shares my obsession with the political book review with equal passion, suggested that maybe Collins is trying to show what happens when a genuine popular revolution gets taken over by people who are fighting the old order because they want to be the new ruling class--people who don't really plan on being less oppressive than the old ruling class. I wish I thought Collins was this politically sophisticated, but I don't think she is. I think if that was what she was going for, we would have seen some conflict between Coin and the folks who organized the uprisings in Catching Fire, instead of all those folks just kind of mysteriously disappearing in Mockingjay. I also think it's hard to reconcile that analysis with this quote, near the end of Mockingjay:

They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself.... Snow thought the Hunger Games were an effective means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.

Yes, no one. Except the people who never have to send another child to the Hunger Games. Who maybe don't have to live the rest of their lives behind electric fences and under Peacekeepers' guns. Who don't have to watch all the fruits of their labor be loaded on trains to the Capitol while their families starve. Who maybe, just maybe, have a chance at a more equal society. They benefit.

People may fight conventional wars for the interests of those in power, but we fight revolutions for ourselves. Collins seems to have lost track of this distinction somewhere along the line. Revolutions--even revolutionary wars--are waged for liberation. There is no guarantee the new order will be better than the old, but if people are willing to risk their lives, it's because the old order has become intolerable, and because something has given them hope that a better world is possible. You can argue about what methods and targets are moral or justified. You can question whether the leadership of District 13 is really on the same side as the ordinary people of Panem. You can debate whether war is actually necessary when the districts produce everything and the Capitol produces nothing. (I wish someone had! That's what general strikes are for.) But you cannot read these books and come out thinking that it is not justified to resist the Capitol.

What Mockingjay was missing most was a sense of hope. One of the reasons that Harry Potter feels like a realistic resistance story even though there are wizards and house-elfs and magic is that JK Rowling gets the emotional landscape right. Resistance has highs and lows. So there's grief and rage and terror and guilt and self-doubt and despair, but there's also love and camaraderie and purpose and liberation and empowerment and joy, and, sometimes, victory. And they're all mixed together and unpredictable, which is what makes resistance stories great fun to read and write.

The best moments from the first two books were the highs: the moments of defiance or humanity or triumph in the face of oppression--the little moments of victory for ordinary people against the Capitol. These little sparks could have grown into something much bigger, into a blaze that devoured the whole rotten system. But only if you believe these moments weren't just "symbolic resistance," but were the actions of people actually capable of remaking the world in their own interest. Only if you really believe ordinary people working together are capable of defeating even the most ruthless oppressor.

resistance as survival

On the very last day of my trip with Interfaith Peace-Builders, we met with Omar Barghouti, one of the founding members of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and a leading advocate of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) as a nonviolent form of resistance against Israeli colonialism and apartheid.

I knew we were in for a treat because I've heard Omar speak before and he is teh awesome. Calm, logical, humane, amazingly articulate, often funny, angry but never hateful, he's just one of those people who manages to say ten inspiring things every time he opens his mouth.

We talked a lot about BDS and Omar said a lot of smart things, but there was one thing he said that really stuck with me. "If you're not resisting this system, it can kill you." He talked about his firm belief that resistance is liberating and empowering and sometimes the only means of maintaining your humanity under oppression.

This stuck with me because it fit with something I started thinking about in Gaza, where so many people had endured things that would seem to be unendurable. While I was there, something clicked in my head, about how sometimes resistance isn't so much a conscious choice but an instinctive survival mechanism. How sometimes it's the only way to hold on to your sanity in the face of so much pain. The only way to feel like you have some agency when your oppressor controls everything in your life down to when the lights go on and off.

Systems of oppression are not stable. They are governed by their own internal dynamics, which force both sides into confrontation whether they're prepared for it or not. Oppressors, unchecked, grow into bottomless pits of power-hungriness. No concession, no degree of passivity and submission and boot-licking is ever enough for them. If you give them an inch, they'll take everything you've got. At the same time, very few human beings can stand to be ground down indefinitely. Eventually one of two things will happen. Either they'll push you so hard against the wall that you have no choice but to fight back--resistance or death--or some particular injustice will just be too much to bear, snapping some deeply-buried tripwire of defiance that makes you explode in a spontaneous, instinctive act of rebellion.

Of course, in a system of oppression any resistance will be punished, and often punished with disproportionate and spectacular cruelty. It seems paradoxical that the thing that can free you will also make you suffer. But you must remember that something else happens when you fight back. All of a sudden you remember that you are a human being, with agency and choices and control over your actions. You stop being paralyzed by fear and remember that they don't control everything you do. When you're busy being compliant and obedient, all you feel is their power over you. But when you resist you start to feel your own.

bil'in friday

Video coming soon. Stupid non-Mac-compatible camera.

The first day after the delegation is officially over is a Friday, and a few of us who are still around go out to the protest in Bil'in. The residents of Bil'in hold a weekly nonviolent demonstration to protest the confiscation of the village's agricultural land by the Apartheid Wall. While Bil'in is far from the only village that holds these nonviolent protests, they've been at it for over five years and have become one of the more famous.

We manage to find a cab driver with a big enough vehicle to fit all of us, but then realize he doesn't really know how to get there. This is not helped by the fact that many Palestinian towns and villages are not marked on Israeli road signs. Thank God someone has one of those handy maps we got from UN OCHA showing every road and movement obstruction in the West Bank! We arrive in plenty of time to meet the demonstration at the assembly point across from the Bil'in Popular Committee headquarters.

There are not too many internationals in the crowd today, but there is a good crew of Israelis. Israeli activists--mostly young anarchists, with a few old lefties mixed in--participate in this and many other of the Friday demonstrations every week. Of course the vast majority of the crowd is Palestinians, from Bil'in and other places in the West Bank. We see some folks we recognize from Nablus.

The march out of the village is spirited despite the ungodly heat. The aim of every week's demonstration is to march through the gate in the wall and onto Bil'in's village land. I don't know when they last made it through. The gate is at the end of a narrow path on top of a steep, rocky hill, giving the Israeli army the high ground, the most favorable position, and us the least.

Sometimes the soldiers hang back a little but this time they're ready to meet us, lined up in two rows in front of the gate, in full riot gear with tear gas launchers at the ready. It's hot and they want to get this over with quickly.

Because none of us have taken the nonviolent resistance training workshop offered by the Bil'in Popular Committee, we're advised to stay at the back of the demonstration. There's a bit of a stand-off, that tense pre-melee dance that goes on whenever the unarmed side is daring the armed side to attack. Some kids skitter up the scrubbly embankment near Bassem's grave and pick up rocks. Demonstration organizers are up at the front in a second, trying to convince the kids to put down the rocks. Many people consider rock-throwing, a tradition from the First Intifada, to be within the spectrum of nonviolent resistance when the other side has live ammunition, but they're still trying to stop them, determined the soldiers should not have any excuse even though they don't need one.

Meanwhile the front of the demonstration has pushed right up against the riot shields of the first line of soldiers. Many times there are internationals at the front of the demonstration but this week it's all Palestinians, which means the response is expected to be quick and harsh. After five years of confronting soldiers, these people aren't scared of shit. They're primed, on their toes, donning bandannas, keffiyahs and gas masks, waiting for the skirmish to begin. Some of the shebab are laughing at us, hanging out in the back, sending us friendly challenges to come up to the front with them. Other people are looking out for us, giving us advice as we're obviously newbies. Someone passes out cut onions, to counter tear gas inhalation. "Remember to look up," a young guy reminds us, gesturing at the sky. Tear gas canisters fly hundreds of meters, get scalding hot, and contain an explosive charge to disperse the gas. Even if you're not directly targeted you can be injured if one hits you or lands close by.

People have lots of tips, but there's only one instruction you really need to remember. "When they fire the tear gas, run."

And all of a sudden, they do. I have enough time to hear the person next to me say "Run," then all hell breaks loose. I can hear the sharp cracks of tear gas canisters going off somewhere behind me; I shoot a glance back toward the gate and see the area where the kids were gathering rocks is already thick with those sinister white trails of descending gas.

It turns out run means RUN and soon the majority of the crowd is sprinting up the path back toward the village. You have to be quick because sometimes the soldiers are right behind you. Young men from the front of the demonstration have already made it all the way to the back, some carrying their coughing, choking friends between them. How the hell did they run so fast? I guess if you do this every week for five years you get in pretty good shape. I am not in pretty good shape and it's taking all my concentration to keep moving without tripping, colliding with someone or passing out. It's so hot it's like running through soup. I'm secretly glad we stayed in the back because I don't think I could physically have run the distance from the front to safety. I can't imagine having the wherewithal to be directing the action or helping someone to safety right now; it's all I can do to take care of myself.

Another round of loud cracks--five, six, ten at a time. I look away from the path just long enough to see a bright white cloud of tear gas blooming on the ground just feet behind me. We must be several hundred meters away from the soldiers at this point. The wind is not in our favor, blowing all the gas back toward the village. I get one good waft of it--hot, acrid, stinging, burning the skin, eyes and throat. It seems harsher than the tear gas I've encountered at protests in the Americas. Maybe I've never been this close to it or maybe the Israelis have their own extra-evil mix. I remember to breathe through my keffiyah but one whiff is enough to give me a pack-a-day-smoker's rasp the rest of the way back to the village.

Some weeks there's more back-and-forth between the soldiers and the protesters, but this Friday when the intense heat makes fainting and respiratory problems more likely, the majority of protesters head back to the village after one round of confrontation. A few hard-core shebab stick it out by the gate, slinging rocks at the soldiers in the thick of the tear gas. No one's going to stop them once the gas starts flying.

Afterward we're all invited to Iyad Burnat's house for tea and recuperation. He looks gently amused by our sweat-soaked dishevelment. "That was mild!" he says with a grin. Sometimes the soldiers chase people all the way back into the village and fire tear gas into the houses. "My daughter knew the smell of tear gas when she was one month old," he says. He shows us a spent canister of the kind the army was firing today. This kind can travel 500 meters.

Iyad has that quintessential Palestinian mix of warmth, humor, stubbornness and dignity, always with a little bit of sadness underneath. Bassem's martyr poster hangs on the living room wall, along with a picture of a relative who's served eight years of a nine-year sentence in Israeli prison. Iyad discusses a new flanking maneuver they've been trying out to get around the soldiers and up to the gate. He talks about it like a military operation, which I guess it sort of is, except only one side is armed.

Iyad's wife brings out Bil'in handicrafts for sale and serves up cup after cup of sweet Palestinian mint tea. Meanwhile their kids pile into the living room, eager to entertain us. The girl can sing and one of the boys dances, a bundle of spastic energy. Iyad seems like he'd be a great dad, someone who'd raise his kids to be kind and always hold their heads up. I think about the fearful thoughts he must have sometimes, about how his kids will be made to pay for his being a leader of the resistance. At the same time it's so obvious that this is what he's fighting for. This is the only reason people who live here need to go out and face the soldiers week after week. And after I've caught my breath and drunk some tea, I'm ready to go back and do it again too.

new look + new title

Blogger has made some new template designs that are very clean and easy to read, so I'm trying one out for a slightly more professional look.

I also decided I needed a new title for this blog, since I am no longer on the left coast and don't plan to return any time soon. I got a few suggestions (I thought my sister's idea of "Laura Left the Left Coast" was pretty funny) but in the end I decided simple was best. I think the new title also reflects the blog's evolution from its initial hey-I'm-moving-across-the-country roots to something that is mostly political in nature.

I haven't decided yet if I'm getting a new URL, because I hate it when someone does that and you have to change all your bookmarks. I'll keep you posted.

what happens at the allenby bridge...if you're palestinian

Having dinner last night with some friends who'd read my blog, I joked that I'd met the Israeli Dolores Umbridge at the Allenby Bridge. "Yeah, I was waiting for her to make me write stuff in my own blood," I said. "If I were Palestinian, she would have."

Then, today, I remembered the story of young Gazan journalist Mohammed Omer. And suddenly it didn't seem like so much of a joke.

was i targeted for refusing to get out of the palestinian line at the allenby bridge?

Pamela Olson, commenting on Mondoweiss, seems to think so, and I think I agree.

I've thought a lot about the initial interaction with Israeli security at the Allenby Bridge, the first passport check that set off the whole chain of events, particularly because it was my first meeting with Skinny Jeans, the woman who became my primary interrogator. Maybe I'm reading too much into little moments, but damn, I couldn't have written a better character introduction. The way she popped up right by my side, just minutes after I'd relented and gone over to the "tourist" line, meant that it's very possible she watched the whole interaction between me and the soldier who tried to pull me out of line. She might have been standing there the whole time and I didn't notice her because I was busy feeling so horrible about being forced back into my place of privilege in the tourist line. Actually at that exact moment I was concentrating most of my energy on not crying over how unjust and dehumanizing the whole border system is. Sympathy with Palestinians!!! I bet she could smell that shit like a bloodhound. I can almost imagine her muttering: "Oh, you want to go where your Palestinian friends go? We can arrange that."

Of course there is no way of knowing for sure if my being singled out was an act of random terror, blanket young-person profiling, or targeted cruelty. But knowing what I know of the IOF, I tend to lean toward "targeted cruelty." Was everything that happened the rest of the day just punishment for trying to stay with my newly-made Palestinian friends in the line they had to wait in? I wouldn't put it past them. Not when the punishment for holding a Turkish flag at a Flotilla protest is a crippling and potentially fatal injury. Not after the targeted destruction I saw in Gaza, the attacks on schools, hospitals, the main UN food warehouse, attacks that were unmistakably completely intentional.

One reason this explanation feels likely is that it fits with the Israeli M.O. of disproportionate response. Ten seconds of disobedience, unsuccessful and over something that's really purely symbolic? Five hours' harassment for you! Yup, that feels about disproportionate enough.

Pamela Olson makes a very good argument that the border is not the best place to be noncompliant, because they have a lot of power there. And this is the strategy I followed when I was traveling with other people who could be put at risk by my belligerent tendencies. But on my own, sometimes I just can't help it. I also think, they're the occupying power. They have a lot of power everywhere. And as the occupying power, they'll always set things up so that the spaces where you have direct contact with them are places where they're strong and you're weak. Borders, checkpoints, home invasions, patrolling soldiers--they're all just various choke points of the occupation. So if the border is not the space to be noncompliant, where is?

I realize there's another reason I like the targeted-response explanation over randomness. In a weird way, it puts the agency back in my hands. They're responding to me. They might appear to have all the power, but secretly I'm controlling the action. I did something to provoke them and they have to respond. And yes, I'm aware the consequences could have included deportation. But the idea that one minuscule act of noncompliance could bring this whole enormous system of repression lumbering into action--three interrogators, five hours of questioning, who knows how much energy and resources--is kind of funny, and also kind of empowering. The fact that the tiniest acts of resistance provoke such an insane response ultimately betrays their weakness and their fear of being challenged in any way.

Of course the point of disproportionate response is to terrify; to make the price for the smallest act of resistance so appallingly high that no one will dare challenge them. So it follows that the only way to defeat that repressive strategy is to keep resisting anyway, no matter what the price. Easier said than done, I know. Don't get me wrong--I know just how high the price can get. But that's the only way.