"the Battleship Potemkin"

This story in the Washington Monthly doesn't surprise anybody....even the press is starting to recognize that the visits by "dignitaries" to Iraq are nothing but well-staged dog-and-pony-shows. This article points it out well but puts it in a context that resonates with me and points to a much bigger problem...

first..lets look at a snippet or two from the article about the Dora Market in Baghdad:

....After the delegation left, Maj. Ron Minty , 36, said that the generals had wanted 300 shops open for business by July 1. By the day of the delegation's visit, 303 had opened....Still, the Dora market is a Potemkin village of sorts. The U.S. military hands out $2,500 grants to shop owners to open or improve their businesses. The military has fixed windows and doors and even helped rebuild shops that had burned down, soldiers and others said...."The Americans are giving money, so they're opening up stores," said Falah Hassan Fadhil, 27, who sells cosmetics.

We knew that the markets were "fixed" in the sense that they were show places that received special treatment....even when Lieberman and Senator Lindsey (Huckleberry) Graham visited the market, they had to wear flak jackets and be accompanied by a platoon of Marines...even in a false environment created by the military. But this is beyond what I imagined in my most paranoid dreams.

The phrase Potemkin Village rings a bell with me and I think I should explain exactly why it does.

Here's the "wiki" site for Potemkin and here is some info:

The Battleship Potemkin (Russian: Броненосец «Потёмкин», Bronenosets Potyomkin), sometimes rendered as The Battleship Potyomkin, is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a glorified version of the Battleship Potemkin uprising, a real-life event that occurred in 1905 when the crew of a Russian battleship rebelled against their oppressive officers during the Tsarist regime.

Potemkin has been called one of the most influential films of all time, and it was even named the greatest film of all time at the World's Fair at Brussels, Belgium, in 1958.

snip

Eisenstein wrote the film as a revolutionary propaganda film, but also used it to test his theories of "montage". The revolutionary Soviet filmmakers of the Kuleshov school of film making were experimenting with the effect of film editing on audiences, and Eisenstein attempted to edit the film in such a way as to produce the greatest emotional response, so that the viewer would feel sympathy for the rebellious sailors of the Battleship Potemkin and hatred for their cruel overlords. In the manner of most propaganda, the characterization is simple, so that the audience could clearly see with whom they should sympathize.

Are you beginning to understand why the film is considered so influential? Film makers of the time (1925) were just beginning to understand the power of the new media...this thing called "movies"...and Eisenstein sensed, quite correctly, the power that editing could have in evoking emotions from the audience. In fact, he understood that a story edited with simple images could evoke incredible responses.

The event that the movie was based upon, the uprising of sailors on the Battleship Potemkin, actually happened, but the images Eisenstein created, the sympathetic and lovable leader of the rebellion, the cruel and immoral officers and petty officers, the heart rending funeral of the leader of the rebellion, the bloody and (at that time) terrifying Odessa Steps sequence (which has been copied in thousands of movies in one version or another since 1925)..all those were fabricated to evoke the emotional response that Eisenstein wanted the audience to experience.

But Eisenstein wasn't the only one wanting that response...the Bolsheviks wanted it more than anything to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the uprising and remind the masses of exactly why they had to sacrifice under the new regime.

By now you've guessed my larger point.....

Everything the Bush Administration has presented to us has been a staged "Potemkin Village" event. And I'm not talking just about Iraq either...it has been everything...every speech is properly staged with the appropriate props....and on the "prop" front the Bushites have absolutely no shame...they'll use Soldiers (a favorite of the "War President"), children and also the BUF....which stands for BLACKS UP FRONT,(where the camera can see them) in order to prove that he's "the Civil Rights President".

But it's all a sham.

It's all staged for our uncritical, undemanding, uneducated masses. We're not supposed to question anything we see. We're not supposed to look for substance behind the image...we're only supposed to look at the image.

And emotion.

Today is September 3, 2007. In one week we will be observing the 6th Anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our emotional strings will be pulled hard and the Bushites will remind us in so many subtle (and some not-so-subtle) of the images, techniques, and ethic of The Battleship Potemkin.

We can safely predict:

The term "hero" will be thrown around cheaply to evoke the same sympathetic images that Eisenstein put forward in Potemkin.

We will see countless replays of the towers collapsing in much the same way that we see the "Odessa Steps Sequence"* in Potemkin.

We will see our wise, sorrowful, and valiant leader offer us words of encouragement.

We'll see false, misleading and deliberate attempts to link Iraq to the fall of the towers and we will hear, once again, the chorus of right wing radio talk hosts, parroting the "We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." bullshit.

Finally, we are seeing some in the media....like the Washington Weekly article challenge the Potemkin Village that Bush has created for us.

Maybe....and just Maybe...we'll become a "reality-based" country yet.

*About the "Odessa Steps Sequence". Here is Wiki's excellent description of it:

The most famous scene in the film is the massacre of
civilians on the Odessa Steps (also known as the Primorsky or Potemkin
Stairs). In this scene, the Tsar's Cossacks in their white summer tunics march down a seemingly endless flight of steps in a rhythmic, machine-like fashion,
slaughtering a crowd, including a young boy, as they attempt to flee. After the
boy falls, his mother picks up his body and yells at the soldiers to stop firing. They do only to shoot her minutes later. Toward the end of the sequence, the soldiers shoot a mother who is pushing a baby in a baby
carriage. As she falls to the ground, dying, she leans against the carriage, nudging it away; it rolls down the steps amidst the fleeing crowd.
snip

The scene is perhaps the best example of Eisenstein's theory on montage, and
may have influenced many of Leni Riefenstahl's similar images in the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. It has been endlessly referenced in many motion pictures, with famous homages occurring in Francis Ford Coppola's The
Godfather, Brian De Palma's version of The Untouchables, and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. It was also spoofed in Woody Allen's Bananas and Love and Death, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and the ZAZ film Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult

I was privileged to see "Potemkin" in college in a History of the Motion Pictures class. It was unforgettable. It was made even more remarkable when we understood the state of the technology in 1925 and the imagination of Eisenstein and his willingness to experiment. Who knew that it would become the template for all propaganda films to follow?