9/11

My daughter & I paid tribute in silence at Ground Zero in New York four years after 9/11 happened. The list of the names of the 2, 753 women and men who perished in September 11, 2001 was mostly the only physical reminder of that tragedy, even as that gruesome event is still very vivid in our minds today, many years after it happened.

As part of my “memory truth telling” responsibility to the younger generation, I am trying to recollect the events now because many of my students were still in pre-school when it happened.
When it happened, the entire world was glued to the television for days.

 My best friend in New York at first thought she was looking at a film on television.
Another friend who lived in Brooklyn could see the smoke from downtown Manhattan for days.
New York City and the United States and even the world are now changed forever by that single event. The how and the extent of the changes continue to unravel up to today, many years after.
The word terrorism came to be defined in national legislations – wrongly or rightly.
 Then, in 2003, Iraq was invaded for allegedly harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD) led by the United States and the so called Coalition of the Willing. 

One of the more popular indictments of the events that followed was captured in 2004 in Fahrenheit 9/11, a popular film documentary by Michael Moore.
This documentary became a must see for the world.
I saw this film in a premiere in Europe (Amsterdam) and we talked about the film for days in class as a course treatise on film representation.
The film documentary opens with a suggestion that election fraud was committed in the way the voting controversy in Florida was managed particularly when politician friends of George W. Bush in media pre-maturely declared him as winner as President of the United States.

Then, the next scenes were about 9/11 and that when it happened, President Bush did not display any shock or that the way he handled his shock was to continue reading a poem to school children for about seven minutes after told of a second airplane that hit the Twin Towers.

And that the US administration of George W. Bush evacuated about two dozens of Bin Laden’s relatives on a clandestine flight when planes were apparently grounded after the attacks and without subjecting them to any routine investigation thereby implicating that the US government had a history of friendship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Bin Laden family and Taliban. 

The documentary is a treatise about the Iraq war - which Moore sees as based on a lie.
The documentary represents the Iraq war as the George W.Bush and his War on Terrorism agenda - as the iconic response to 9/11.
 It is a film which sought to suggest that the decision to declare a war in Iraq involved conditioning the minds of every citizen in the world as can be seen, for example, in the way security system was handled after 9/11;
and how we saw that the campaign against terror effectively produced paranoia as can be seen in the different and new ways of behaving after 9/11 which on the surface could be construed as either hate for terrorism and violence or values on patriotism.
 It is represented in the documentary that the world and the Americans were conditioned to feel fear to justify the war against terror.
The real life story of the mother who initially cheered and supported that Iraq war suddenly questioned the Iraq war when she lost her son in the senseless war. 

The documentary also attributes ulterior motives for the War in Afghanistan, as there is a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean.
 Moore in a gesture of gratitude to American servicemen who were serving in the war also finds out that the poor self selects themselves to enlist in a war and that only one member of the US Congress served in the Iraq war and so the film shows Moore giving armed services enrollment forms to members of the US Congress and urges the lawmakers that they enlist their children in the Iraq war. 

The documentary was dedicated to "countless thousands" of civilian victims of war as a result of United States official foreign military policy & activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 Based on archived film footage, interviews with politicians, an accounting of funds wasted in a war that was based on the likelihood of the presence of weapons of mass destruction, this documentary is one way of representing the still largely unresolved 9/11 tragic event and its aftermath. 

Picture credit : David Ake, AP, Sept. 17, 2001 & with many thanks to Ellen Dionisio for the picture.

Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps

Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps




This is the first movie I saw on the big screen this year so I might as well revisit it with you.

As a sequel of the first 1987 Wall Street movie and made relevant with a poetic treatise of the real 2008 financial crisis, this film is worth writing about.

Manhattan is postcard pretty as ever as the financial center of the universe.

The screenplay is made familiar by a show of the state of the art of the financial markets and some of our current concerns such as energy requirements of the future and progressive non profit websites that are tools to change the world for the better for our children and the next generations.

This Oliver Stone ( 1987 Wall Street JFK & Nixon fame ) film opens with Gordon Gekko ( Michael Douglas) being released after eight years in jail for financial fraud, which as the character explains later in the film, is actually a much larger crime than the insider trading crime, the initial transgression that we saw at the end of the first Wall Street film.

After seven years we find Gekko a star again as the author of a best seller book : Is Greed Good?

But, the angst of the life of Gekko is mostly about his estrangement with Winnie ( Carey Mulligan), his daughter who blogs in a non profit website, that started to get 50,000 hits or website visits per day and ultimately got 200,000 hits per day when indications for market corrections were published.

The daughter blames the absentee Gekko in jail for all the tragic events in their dysfunctional post modern family : a brother who died due to drug overdose and a mother who went mad.

The partner of Winnie is Jake Moore ( Shia LaBeouf) an energy investment expert working in Wall Street who thinks that energy fusion using water, through hydrogen fusion, is the next “bubble” that will solve our energy problems for the next generations.

The poetic screenplay ( Allan Loeb & Stephen Schiff ) is actually narrated from the point of view of Jake, a protégé of Lou ( Frank Langella of Nixon fame), who commits suicide after his financial investment bank falls. With the help of Gekko, Jake finds out how and why the company of his mentor went bankrupt.

The next scenes are about the so called “ market corrections” in the financial meltdown that is ailing Wall Street. These corrections largely use the legal and justice system structures.

This film tries to explain in scenes, not unlike the television clips we saw in the real life 2008 financial crisis, what is wrong with our financial markets :people borrowing to the hilt, all of the profits coming from financial services such as trading, leveraging, hedge funding and some of these funds are used to finance industrial military weapons of mass destruction ( WMD) and that only about almost a hundred people in the world control these transactions.

That speculation is the mother of all evil.
Gekko describes the current Ninja generation as the generation with “no income, no job and no assets.” The solutions to all these in the words of Gekko are three words “Buy My Book” as the answers can be found in his best selling book.

Gekko, while introspecting in jail felt that he was the lone sane man inside and everyone and all out of prison were crazy.

The conflict in the movie is the struggle of Jake to make the corrections in the cancerous financial market mess, not unlike the real life 2008 financial mess that as we saw was bailed out by the United States treasury in what was called the billions worth “stimulus package.”

The concept of “ moral hazard” is explained: “someone gets your money and that someone is not responsible for it.”
The villain in Bretton James ( Josh Brolin) is exposed; the wall street crook was found committing securities fraud : trading for his own account and betting against the market he was making.

One of the scenes described by A.O. Scott in the New York Times movie review, that also caught my fancy was the fundraiser soiree event where one finds the beautiful people of Manhattan dressed in designer clothes and the camera of Rodrigo Prieto, director of photography, zoomed in on the bulky & beautiful earrings of the women in gorgeous gowns.

 It was such an ostentatious display of wealth for charity.

The beauty and the beast that is Manhattan & Wall Street as further described
by A.O. Scott is the intersection of “ material excess…. with genuine beauty”
and that “ what went wrong” in the financial center can be explained in two words: “ human nature.”