My version of The Godfather would open with a voice in the darkness saying, “I don’t believe in America. The American Dream is a once-beguiling fairy tale; show’s over, y’all.” But The Dream is still real to many people, and the violence that powerful private interests have done to it in the last century pains them like a kidney punch.
Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson was one of the wounded, and so is Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Darkside), the far more straight-laced director of the entertaining documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. They share a proprietary sense of outrage over abuses of power they’ve witnessed in their times. For them, America’s Nixons, Enrons and Bush-Cheneys have desecrated the church, the front lawn. For all their passionate trouble-making, there’s no denying that Gibney and the late Thompson, two white males who came up through America’s hallowed institutions (Thompson through the U.S. Air Force; Gibney through Yale), are insiders.
When I went to interview Gibney about Gonzo, I remembered the film’s procession of leathery right-wingers and elites, former Thompson nemeses, who have warm, friendly things to say about “Dr. Gonzo” now that he’s dead, now that his caricature as a gun-toting drughead has endured beyond his politics. I wondered if, in the end, being inside got the hole dug any better than chucking rocks from outside.
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It’s funny how various threads in my life will converge sometimes. I recently read Susan Sontag’s essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, a dense and beautiful examination of the relationship between photography and war. It has enough fodder for a few dozen blog posts (her observation that the US has a museum devoted to the Holocaust and another to the Armenian genocide, but not a single museum devoted to the African slave trade could be fodder for a four volume gift set), but for this post I’ll focus on her closing point. However much we hanker for statistics, sound bites, and photos regarding war, for those of us who haven’t been there, those things can’t hold more than a momentary shock to our otherwise fortified thinking. Art, film, and literature, on the other hand, can go a long way toward a deep change in how we see and understand war.
Two recent examples of this come to mind for me
