Caught Up In Die Walle

You can file this in the drawer that says "If you had told me this five yeas ago, I would have said yer nuts!" Last night I saw a German film that had Swedish subtitles. Here are the thoughts I had last night:

The screen darkened and the ending credits began to roll. The audience at Stockholm’s Sture movie theater sat in their seats, silent and still, despite the loud rock music that thumped while the credits rolled. No one moved, each lost in their own stunned silence, trying to overcome the predictable, yet chilling ending to the movie they had just watched.

The movie is Die Welle (The Wave) the latest effort from director Dennis Gansel (he also wrote the screenplay based on the book by Todd Straser). In the movie, Rainer Wegner (played by Jürgen Vogel), a popular high school teacher, finds himself relegated to teaching autocracy as part of the school’s project week. His students greet the prospect of studying fascism (yet again) grumbling: The Nazis sucked. We get it. Struck by the teenager’s complacency and unwitting arrogance, Rainer devises an unorthodox experiment.

In probing the underpinnings of fascism, Die Welle is far from a social-studies lesson. As with his previous film, Before the Fall, director Dennis Gansel uses teens to fashion an energetic, gripping drama that cuts through the ideology and goes straight for the marrow—the human motives and individual behaviors that contribute to gangs, cliques or national political movements. In stripping away the emotions and inconsistencies of his characters (the need to belong, to be cool, to be outside the norm), Gansel puts a local and human perspective on the terrifying paradox that these students may welcome the very things they denounce.




Die Welle is based on the true story of Ron Jones, a high school teacher in Palo Alto, California. His sophomore World History class was studying World War II. During one lecture, he was interrupted by a question. How could the German populace claim ignorance of the slaughter of the Jewish people? How can people who were neighbors and maybe even friends of the Jewish citizen say they weren’t there when it happened? They were good questions and Jones had no simple answer. Jones decided to take a week and manipulate his class into a fascist “state”. Beginning with a simple step, having his students sit at attention, Jones began the “movement” and gave it a name, The Third Wave.

When he ended the experiment, Jones used a ruse, telling the class that they were actually being trained as part of a national movement to change the way the country was run. He had them gather to “meet” the supreme leader of National Third Wave movement. When no such leader appeared, it slowly dawned on the students they had been duped. In the four years Ron Jones taught at Cubberley High School no one ever admitted to attending the Third Wave Rally.

In Die Welle, we, the audience, are also manipulated. Gansel uses violence in increasing doses to lead into his inevitable finish. He suggests that the fascist state creates an environment where violence is the answer to any challenge to that state. But in reality, the violent scenes could be drawn from any teen angst movie in the last fifty years, from Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without A Cause, West Side Story, and Over The Edge.
Reiner Wegner, however, teaches in the era of cell phones, SMS messaging, e-mails, and My Space. His students create web sites and are exposed to a modern world of video games and wars of terrorism shown on the daily news. Violence is not in the abstract and information is passed instantly. What the audience at the Sture realized this night was that the morality play they had just witnessed was not only believable but was wicked easily possible, not just in the Germany portrayed, but here in Sweden as well as anywhere.

Answer To A Question Of Age

This was reported by Steve Benen in Crooks and Liars today. The Candidate Characteristic We’re Not Supposed To Talk About:

"But the one question that no one seems anxious to talk about is the fact that John McCain, at age 72, would be the oldest person ever elected president. There’s apparently some public discomfort over this, but it’s ground that few are prepared to tread...Voters may not be comfortable with McCain’s age, but figuring out what to do about this may be one of the more complicated questions facing Dems in the general election."

Sez Who?

Steve then further asks the question,

"Here’s the catch: Americans may not like the idea of a 72-year-old candidate, but no one has any idea how to take advantage of this. What are Dems supposed to do, tell elderly jokes? That’s clearly not going to happen."

Steve's right and the Democrats don't have to do that. Colbert, Leno, Letterman and Stewart will take care of that aspect. All the Dems have to do his show how the Office wears and tears on any one elected to be the POTUS.

Like this:








That should take care of the problem.

Tells Us What We Don't Know

Tuesday night, another woman didn’t listen to the experts. Hillary Clinton got off the canvas after taking a hard punch in Iowa and won the next round in New Hampshire. I don’t care about your interest or affiliation with American politics. You still have to tip your hat to Senator Clinton and her victory in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday night.

Tom Brokaw, the retired news anchor wondered aloud on MSNBC, last night about listening to the “experts.” He said, to Chris Matthews directly and the media in general, that they have to “temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding:

Brokaw made that assessment based upon the fact that the media had all but written the Clinton campaign as crippled, due to the large margin of Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa, the apparent disarray of the Clinton team and the polling done on the New Hampshire voters. Yet, when the voters emerged from their vote, the outcome was decidedly different from the predictions. The predictions of the pundits, that is. A closer look at the poll data showed them to be fairly accurate in their estimates.

The American media has based its coverage of national elections, not on what a potential office holder stands for, but the coverage is about the race itself. The reporting is exclusively who is ahead and who is behind. Reporters don’t try to establish the candidates’ policies, but try to catch them in “gotcha” moments of mistakes in what they say or about the events in their private lives. Questions are not focused on foreign policy or the national budget. Candidates are allowed to preach. The candidates talk about "change" as if it were substantive. Reporters dutifully transcribe the message, but not the blueprint. It takes too much effort to pull the curtain away from the wizards. Political coverage is asking how much a candidate spends on their haircut.

I’m sure all the candidates, no matter their political party or how they placed, are taking pleasure in the political pundits' blunder in New Hampshire. Settling in their seats as they head to the next series of events in this long trek to the White House, I’m sure every one of them thinks to themselves with a wry grin, “Gotcha!”

No Wimps...please!

The Iowa caucus is over and the winners are Barack Obama, the freshmen Senator from Illinois and Michael Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas. We could debate the qualifications of each man, but the reality is that neither one has enough credentials to give a high school debate team a good workout.

I know that the purveyors of news in the United States like to break down the American elections to the level of Seabiscuit against War Admiral. It would seem that the last two national elections for the President of the United States has proven the error of that kind of coverage. Living in Stockholm, Sweden, I've been spared the countdown to election coverage, but it is incredulous that America is forced to choose from these pretenders for its next president.

Obama has been preaching his mantra of bringing the country together. He said in his victory speech, "We're choosing unity over division and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America." However, no one has ever asked the follow up question, how is he planning to do it? How does a man who has never done anything for the State of Illinois but be elected propose to pull the United States out of its morass of difficult problems and the loss of its prestige overseas?

On the Republican side, the bible thumping former preacher turned politician has used the well-oiled machine of the Christian fundamentalists to win in Iowa. Like Obama, Huckabee does well telling his story in the cozy confines of the living rooms, VFW halls and church basements of Iowa. He is personable and he mirrors the hopes of God fearing folk. "Values voters spoke loudly tonight in Iowa," said Greg Mueller, a GOP strategist. "Huckabee also demonstrated an authenticity; he ran as a genuine candidate. Now, he's got to use that bully pulpit to broaden his populist appeal in New Hampshire." Huckabee's thinking seems to be that if the voter just believes strong enough and we can keep the sinners and heathens in check, the good ‘ole USA can return to the glory days of William Jennings Bryant. Or, at least, back to the days before the farm wasn’t being turned into a Wal-Mart strip mall because of all those foreign immigrants. The former governor's lack of any sophistication on the way the world works, either in politics or natural science is a warning. He is less capable of performing the duties of the President then George Bush. And this country cannot afford to have that happen. A Huckabee administration in the White House would be for the country like Katrina was for the Mississippi Delta. The United States has a lot of damage to repair on the world stage and saying, "There is a higher father that I appeal to" on U.S. foreign policy has not worked too well in the immediate past.

To me the lesson of Iowa is very simple. Obama has galvanized the young voter and the progressive grass root Democrats. The vote was not so much for Obama as a vote against the status quo. Like Howard Beal in the movie “Network”, the massive Democratic turnout told the Party’s leadership that they are mad as hell and they don’t want to take it anymore. They want the Party to do something different and they want it done immediately. The only entity that has a lower approval rating then the President is the Congress.

The congregations of the hinterlands are single minded, motivated and they can mobilize for their candidates and causes like the Christian soldiers in the songs. The outpouring of the fundamentalists for Huckabee in Iowa shows that they are ready for the fight in 2008. The only way that the Democrats can overcome the stranglehold that the Christian nationalists have on the elections is to mobilize the progressive side of the Democratic Party.

The good news from Iowa is that Barack Obama won. There is the smidgen of hope that the Democratic Party might, after all it's misjudgement and capitulation in recent years, will have the good sense NOT to nominate another cupcake "moderate" who will try to placate the voters by saying “We’re just like the other guys, only nicer.”