It is somehow fitting that our first black president should preside over the post-Cheney emergence of what I call "noir America". This week the plotline (see the diary's title) became as lurid as anything that came out of postwar Hollywood.
Film noir is often described as essentially pessimistic. The noir stories that are regarded as most characteristic tell of people trapped in unwanted situations (which, in general, they did not cause but are responsible for exacerbating), striving against random, uncaring fate, and frequently doomed. The movies are seen as depicting a world that is inherently corrupt. ...
Rather than focusing on simple "black and white" decisions, film noirs tend to pose moral quandaries that are unusually ambiguous and relative...Characters that do pursue goals based on clear-cut moral standards may be more than willing to let the "ends justify the means."
Crime, usually murder, is an element of almost all film noirs...In other common plots the protagonists are implicated in heists or con games, or in murderous conspiracies often involving adulterous affairs. False suspicions and accusations of crime are frequent plot elements, as are betrayals and double-crosses. ...
Film noirs tend to revolve around heroes who are more flawed and morally questionable than the norm, often fall guys of one sort or another. The characteristic heroes of noir are described by many critics as "alienated"; in the words of Silver and Ward, "filled with existential bitterness."...
- Wikipedia Film Noir
Four months after Bush, it is quite clear to everyone who's awake that there are more "fixes in", even in the Obama administration, than one can count. The banksters have a big fix in; so do the health racketeers. The gangsters and button-men of the Bush administration still swagger around like they own the town, while the military-industrial-prison complex successfully pressures the crooked DOJ not to arrest them for their openly admitted crimes(torture, torture to get lies to start wars of aggression). Meanwhile, railroaded innocents like Governor Siegelman and many Gitmo detainees rot in jail; and Obama restarts the military commissions he promised to end.
Let's face it; America today looks like Gotham City before Batman arrived. The gangsters (banksters) run the town. They rob whom they please. They shoot whom they please. They "dirty up" anyone who might stand in their way. The politicians are powerless figureheads who can easily wind up dead if they make a mistake; and fatal mistakes are common in an atmosphere as full of betrayals and double crosses as this one. Patsy Pelosi might have made one six years ago when she got played by the CIA.
So where is the hard-boiled, bitter, alientated, ulitmately doomed newsman/detective who will spin the beans? Nobody believes the "father Christmas" fairy tales that the media spout about an "honest" CIA. Even after the Church Committee, the CIA remained a corrupt mess (see Aldrich Ames ); by the time Bush was finished with it, it was an amoral sewer.
The American public has had decades of reasons to think the worst of the CIA, and the discredited but still-unmuzzled GOP attack dogs, who are busy running a combination distraction/intimidation operation against the torture revelations. So, I repeat, where is the Sam Spade of Gitmo? Where is the noir counter-meme to the corporate media crap-spew?
Why would anyone take the word of Porter Goss, who was in THE most infamous picture of the entire Cuban/CIA/Mafia nightmare of the 1960s - hobnobbing with the Operation 40 assassination squad, including Felix Rodriquez, Frank Sturgis, and Barry Seal? When Goss was appointed to run the CIA, he was widely understood to have been put there to purge the CIA of resistance to "loyal Bushies". The man is lower than a snake. His self-serving story about Pelosi has about the same level of credibility as the lying baloney that the Mary Astor character in the "Maltese Falcon" peddles to Sam Spade about how his partner, Floyd, just happened to wind up dead in an alley.
Why does the media unquestionably accept the story of an agency with a mission statement that includes lying and government subversion - an agency that has had many run-ins with Congress for overstepping its authority? What credibility is there to one side of a conversation that was recorded in secret (and the other side prohibited from taking notes or speaking out)? How can torture be vital to our security, and Nancy simultaneously be guilty, guilty, guilty? The whole thing is a stinking, smear job. Today's press is as corrupt as anything Mickey Spillane could dream up. Of course, it helps them that - in true noir fashion - the situation regarding "off the table" Pelosi (not regarding torture) is neither simple, nor black-and-white.
But if America can elect a black president, they can recognize a noir plot when they see one. The progressives are awake; but the rest of the Democrats had better wake up and shoot back before the GOP-in-exile pick them off one at a time. America is down to Gotham City levels of corruption, where vigilanteism or paying protection is the only defense against roving gangs of thugs. Its too bad Americans - so immersed in dark, violent fantasy comics, movies, and games - can't seem to recognize the real thing when it is coshing them over the head with a blackjack.
I'm still waiting for Barack to behave like Sam Spade. So far he is behaving like Kasper Gutman - a well-mannered, talkative, unctuous, but fundamentally driven and unscrupulous pursuer of a mythical (but non-existent) treasure - one of those "flawed, morally ambiguous" noir characters. Maybe its all a trick. Noirs are soooo complicated.