Montalbán/Cockburn/DirtyWars

Today I read the next fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. In any crime novel set in Argentina (especially a playfully metaphysical one) one would expect some reference to Jorge Luis Borges. But when it comes, Montalbán gives it a surprising form: a serial conman pretends to be Borges’ son, in the process incensing the members of The Aleph Club, a society of Borges disciples composed of members of the Argentine elite. When members of the Club beat Carvalho’s colleague, Don Vito, Carvalho burns down the club in retaliation, leading to his arrest along with that of Alma and Don Vito, with Alma’s arrest leading to a protest by her students, including Muriel, the Captain’s daughter who is in fact Alma and Raúl’s long-missing daughter. The point here is not just how Montalbán uses Borges to construct a particularly complex part of this book’s increasingly tangled storyline but also the fact that he is not particularly interested in paying tribute to or honoring Borges. After all, even though he later came to regret it, Borges did support the dictatorship during the Dirty War and in that sense the fact that Montalbán makes his most passionate supporters members of the oligarchy makes a depressing kind of sense.

I also finished Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. In my posts on this book, I was often conscious about not speaking ill of the dead, and now I’ve finished Cockburn’s final book, I don’t want to go to the opposite extreme and overpraise him. Fortunately, Cockburn solves this problem for me in the way that he so frequently combines observations with which I agree and others with which I disagree in practically everything he writes! I suppose what I appreciate most about him is his refusal to specialize; that is, his freedom to hold forth about everything that piques his interest and to ignore what bores him. I can’t resist saying that even when he was still alive he was part of a dying breed, a fact brought home not only by the frequent memorials to deceased friends in this book but also by its often elegiac tone in other parts of the book—the American left, from Cockburn’s point of view, was more or less dead, while capitalism, in all of its bloody hypocrisy and corruption, was as vigorous as ever. I suppose it’s some kind of testament to Cockburn that the book didn’t feel as pessimistic as I make it sound.

I also watched Dirty Wars, Rick Rowley’s 2013 documentary featuring Jeremy Scahill, upon whose book the film is based. Like The Act of Killing, Dirty Wars has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, but the two films are very different. Dirty Wars is less formally experimental, focuses on the victims rather than the perpetrators, and whereas Killing’s Oppenheimer remains off-camera (though frequently referred to), Scahill is very much the on-camera focus of Dirty Wars. In fact, I would say this last point is a weakness in the film. Following Scahill’s efforts to get to the bottom of exactly how the US is conducting its covert wars gives the film a clear narrative structure (although, as Cahill points out, it is a film without an ending, just as America is fighting a ‘war against terror’ without end) but there are moments when the film because as much, if not more, about Scahill and his feelings than it is about the victims. Centering the film upon a white, Western, male subject might have been thought necessary to engage a Western audience (and perhaps it is) but in my view it doesn’t add to the film’s impact—quite the opposite, in fact. With this said, sometimes the film does make calculations about what it needs to do that are depressingly accurate. When it shows film and photographs of the child victims of an American cruise missile strike in Yemen, for example, the film could be accused of being sensationalistic and manipulative, but I read this decision as a reflection of an inconvenient truth, which is that most Americans don’t care about foreign casualties of American aggression, unless they are children (and sometimes not even then). The film gets in our face at this moment, in other words, because it feels it has to in order to make its point. Whatever the weaknesses of the film, however, Dirty Wars does have the singular virtue of allowing for no ambiguity about the following points: 1. The murder of civilians is now standard operating procedure for how the American government conducts its ‘war on terror.’ 2. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is operating as a paramilitary wing of the American state. It is able to kill with impunity because it has zero accountability except to the President of the United States, who orders the assassinations JSOC carries out. 3. For this reason, Obama, like many other US presidents before him, is a war criminal, and should be arrested and tried as such.