Hello Antiheroes
Part Two of GIMME SOME TRUTH, WONDER WOMAN - The United States of 2021 in Multipart Disharmony
There’s a moment in Wonder Woman 1984 when Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, is trying to persuade Barbara Minerva to come back from the dark side of her Cheetah alter-ego.
Barbara has lost her moral compass but not her critical insight. She responds that Diana is being patronising. To her ears Diana is really saying something like “I know best” and “you’re too dumb to get it.”
I think that’s how Trumpians feel when opposed by Progressives like me. They feel that I think I know better than them. I acknowledge this. It is true that I think that.
So does that make me part of a patronising Liberal elite?
I’ve been reading about elites. Like a typical hungry Liberal I feed at The Guardian. There I was served Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut who has analysed 10,000 years of historical data and established general explanations for social patterns.
Using that data Professor Turchin has developed the ‘elite overproduction’ concept. By that he is referring to a historically repeating process in which both the independently wealthy and the highly paid grow in number.
With more of them around these elite members of society have to compete more intensely with each other for resources, position and power.
And Turchin observes that, with elite oversupply, your success can become based not on your abilities but on your willingness to play dirty to get ahead, undermining social norms and civic institutions.
At times of rising inequality unscrupulous elite insiders may join forces with disaffected outsiders. This union can augment their power with strength of voting numbers, enabling electoral success.
The Turchinian analysis is ironically an inversion of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory that has been gaining traction around the world.
For the QAnonsters, who were out in force for the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, the Liberal elite are ‘deep state’ Satan-worshipping paedophiles embedded in government, business and the media.
That pernicious narrative aligns easily with the Trumpian terminology of a bureaucratic, technocratic ‘swamp’ that must be drained on the path to salvation.
But Turchin gives us a more plausible take on things, helping to explain populist right-wing electoral successes in the past few years, such as those of the Brexit campaign and the Trumpian Republican Party.
No doubt his analysis might also be applied to the election of other antidemocratic, populist and nativist ‘strongman’ governments, such as in Brazil and Hungary.
Trumpdom, viewed through Turchinian eyes, is therefore not just a random democratic error.
Donald John “the former guy” Trump was the right unscrupulous man for the moment. Just like the villainous Max Lord in Wonder Woman 1984 is also clearly a man of his time.
Each of them is a charming charismatic man who fosters a personality cult, and who prizes winning and owning above anything else.
They are also each a creation of the media of their time. And they each need people to have reached a state of readiness to follow them. For Max that is in 1984 in the era of television. For Trump it is in the era of social media.
The people behind The Simpsons could see the hour and the man coming together when they predicted a Trump presidency in one of their episodes in the year 2000.
A writer behind the show, Dan Greaney, has said that the idea of Trump being president “just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane."
So the Turchinian analysis may tempt Progressives like me to claim that it is not Liberal elites but conservative elites who are tearing societies apart by manipulating disaffected voters in order to get their own wicked ways.
It’s a moral high horse we need to be wary of mounting. Corrupt elites can come in all sorts of political flavours. Power does have a tendency to corrupt. And if you’re on the left-hand side of politics there are some friendly-fire nightmares to haunt you.
Right now, for example, Venezuela isn’t looking too good.
But I am feeling hopeful at this point about the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
And I’m delighted that the racist, misogynist Trump has flown off into the balmy Floridian sunset in that modified Boing 747 known as Air Force One.
It was actually late morning on 20 January 2021 when Trump, still POTUS for about another hour, arrived in the Sunshine State of Florida. But I couldn’t resist the sunset metaphor.
I’m not feeling delight for Floridians. More like sympathy. But he does have to go somewhere, so why not the Sunshine State?
The last time I was in Florida was when I was backpacking around North America for three months in 1979, as mentioned last week.
And I may have been in Florida – I was certainly in the South but, dammit, I can’t find my diary of that trip – when another billionaire authoritarian ruler was heading that way in a modified military transport plane.
It was in the news but I was ignorant of what was happening. I wasn’t paying attention.
But while I can’t remember exactly where I was on 17 July 1979 it is remembered fondly by Nicaraguans as ‘el Día de la Alegría’ (the Day of Happiness).
And it was to Miami, Florida that their dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle tried to flee early in the morning that day.
Two days later on 19 July 1979 the Sandinista National Liberation Front, aka ‘the Sandinistas’, entered the Nicaraguan capital Managua. That day is remembered as ‘el Día del Triunfo’ (the Day of Triumph). It is the anniversary day of the Nicaraguan Revolution.
My awareness of Nicaragua began with the 1983 film Under Fire, which is set during the final period of the revolution and Somoza’s downfall.
The film was inspired by the murder in Nicaragua of Bill Stewart, who was an ABC journalist, and his translator Juan Espinoza on 20 June 1979.
Bill Stewart’s murder by Somoza’s National Guard was itself filmed from down the road by an ABC cameraman, Jack Clark. The footage was shown on television and became a major international incident, undermining what remained of Somoza's support.
https://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/june-20-1979-abc-news-correspondent-shot-dead-56533140
If you want to see the cold-blooded shooting moment you will need to sign in to YouTube, prepare to be distressed, and confirm that you wish to proceed here:
Under Fire fired me up. Here was a cause I identified with and wanted to get involved in. My interests lay in politics, media and culture. As a young and aspiring film maker it felt like Latin America was a good part of the world to focus on.
After completing my degree in philosophy and politics and a postgraduate diploma in film and television, I moved quite fast in my industry. Nine months after my first film job as a runner I got a job as a producer.
But the films I was producing – promotional videos for corporate clients – didn’t interest me. I was quite well paid but creatively and politically frustrated. When my partner suggested we quit our jobs and travel around the world I was all for it.
That trip in my mid 20s took me to South-East Asia, Australia, Aotearoa, the Pacific, Central America and the USA. My mother called it my ‘odyssey’.
I had no idea in advance how those two years of travel would change my life, including growing my bond with the country I would come to call my home – Aotearoa.
But I was clear that the adventure would be an opportunity to transition my career towards work I cared more about than promoting frozen chips and forklift trucks.
While we were travelling my partner lent me a book to read. It was An Unfinished Song about the Chilean teacher, theatre director, poet and singer-songwriter Victor Jara.
Victor Jara was tortured and murdered after the military coup that brought the dictator Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte to power in Chile.
The coup had taken place in 1973. It had toppled a progressive, democratically elected government. As with the Nicaraguan revolution six years later I had been ignorant of it at the time.
Roll forward and back to my mid 20s ‘odyssey’. An Unfinished Song had fanned the fire in me that Under Fire had lit. My mission was to do my bit to support the Nicaraguan revolution. There was a determination among the liberal left that Nicaragua would not go the way of Chile.
In early 1988 I was in Wellington in Aotearoa. I joined the local Nicaragua Must Survive campaign.
I would check The Dominion newspaper every day for any news about the plucky little country, half the size of Aotearoa. It was now under fire again – this time from the USA-backed right-wing ‘contras’, many of whom were former members of Somoza’s murderous National Guard.
Through Wellington friends I met Phil Shingler, a Cornish film maker who had made a documentary in Nicaragua a few years earlier when he was based in the USA.
Like Lou Rispoli, who I wrote about last week, Phil became a mentor for me – as he was for so many of the film students he supported.
I regret I never told him that was how I thought of him while he was alive. He died in Cornwall in 2018 on a march to protest education cuts.
Phil was in Wellington in 1988 to team up with the Aotearoan film maker Alister Barry. They made A Nuclear Free Pacific (Niuklia Fri Pasifik). It was a ground-breaking co-production between the New Zealand Film Commission, Television New Zealand and Channel Four in the UK.
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/nuclear-free-pacific-1988
I told Phil that I also wanted to make a Nicaraguan documentary for television. I hadn’t made a broadcast documentary before but you have to start somewhere, so why not Nicaragua?
Phil suggested I make a film about the creative cultural explosion in Nicaragua since 1979. I thought that was a great idea. I remain very grateful to him for giving it to me.
So later that year, on 19 July 1988, I was both a participant and an observer of the big 9th anniversary celebration of the Nicaraguan Revolution.
I spent four months travelling the country and researching murals, painting, poetry, theatre, dance and music. It was exciting and at times maybe a bit dangerous.
I could hear the gunfire of the ‘contras’ when I was in the north of the country, staying with a theatre group and photographing murals on military outposts.
My parents were concerned for my safety. I told them that this was ‘my Spanish Civil War’. My father regretted that he been dissuaded by his parents from joining the Republican cause in Spain in the 1930s. So my ‘civil war’ allusion helped them to understand.
The research paid off. In 1990 I made Viva Nica! for Channel Four.
Like many Liberals in the 1980s I was politically and emotionally aligned with the Sandinista Revolution. It was a very progressive place, emerging with pride from the poverty and suppression of the Somoza dictatorship.
Now I wonder if, as in Venezuela, the country’s left-wing leadership has lost its way. From what I can see, the presidency of José Daniel Ortega Saavedra is looking increasingly dynastic and antidemocratic.
I’d love to talk with him and first First Lady / Vice President Rosario María Murillo Zambrana about what has taken place in their country since the time when I researched and made Viva Nica!
The film features an interview with Rosario. From what I’ve read it might be hard for me to get an interview with her again but you never know.
Rosario and Daniel, if you’re reading this, I’d love to do a follow-up interview. I would be there to listen to what you have to say about how things have gone for ‘
Nicaragua Libre
’ (Free Nicaragua) over the past 30-odd years.
The underlying idea for Viva Nica! was much discussed as I travelled around the country in 1988: “la cultura es una ventana sobre la politica” (culture is a window on politics).
That idea of culture being a window on the politics of a place still lives with me today. It underlies this Expressly On Toast newsletter. I hope it still lives in Nicaragua.
And funnily enough a related idea came to me as I watched TV in my motel room in the wee hours of my first night in Florida back in 1979. I was struck by how much television had defined the culture and politics of modern America.
Right at the same time the televised murder of a journalist was having a big political outcome. For the administration of President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr it was the final straw in their relationship with the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza.
All bets were off after the world had witnessed Somoza’s National Guard shooting ABC journalist Bill Stewart in cold blood.
So Somoza never actually made it to Florida until he was buried there. On the Day of Happiness in 1979 President Carter denied him entry to the USA.
Instead he was granted refuge in Paraguay by fellow dictator Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda.
But he didn’t last much more than a year there. He was assassinated by a seven-person Sandinista commando team (four men and three women) in what they called ‘Operation Reptile’.
Trump would no doubt love being compared to a Central American dictator. After all he does have a penchant for calling people ‘hombres’ and ‘loco’.
And for many Americans (North, Central and South) 20 January 2021, the day that he decamped to the Sunshine State, was indeed a day of happiness.
But for all his lack of a moral compass I don’t wish for Trump a grizzly end like Somoza’s.
Donald, I wish you a retirement that is both active and restful. But please, please, leave America alone!
From what I can see you’re not just compiling your legal defences against what you call “
the continuing political persecution of President Donald J Trump
”.
And you’re not just negotiating with creditors, pumping your personal brand and yelling at the TV.
You’re also plotting revenge on those in the Republican party who you feel have betrayed you.
I won’t call it ‘your party’ because, contrary to your narcissistic delusions of grandeur, you don’t own it mate.
That’s something you might like to think about while you try to strong-arm the party leadership to remain loyal to you.
I do know you have a massive fighting fund thanks to donations to your ‘Save America’ political action committee, which you formed for your post-presidential political activity shortly after you lost the 2020 election.
Yes mate, you lost it. Money doesn’t buy everything. That’s the point I’m trying to get through to you.
Part Three Next Week: DANGEROUS ZEALOTS AND MASTERS OF MISINFORMATION - Starring paymasters, telescreens and infowars