A Letter to Rep. Ryan and the Republican Party

A letter I may or may not send to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who took part in the health care summit today and who was on CNN this evening discussing his party’s position on health care reform:

Dear Mr. Ryan,

In the past weeks and months, I have heard you and many members of your party talk a great deal about the fiscal problems with the current health care bill. A lot of this talk was on display today at the health care summit. You say the bill is too expensive, America can’t afford it, it won’t bend the cost curve enough, it will add to the deficit, it will not solve the problem of Medicare’s looming insolvency, and so on. These are all questionable claims – some of them have been roundly refuted – but for the moment I concede them.

I want to direct your attention to another point. Over the last several months, and years really, multiple studies done by well-respected institutions, both inside and outside of government, have shown the human toll inflicted by our current health care system. Some forty-five million people in our country do not have health insurance, over forty thousand per year die simply because they do not have it or can’t afford it. People, including children and the elderly, are routinely denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions and other factors. Just in the past month, many people have been priced out of the insurance market because of massive premium hikes that they cannot afford.

My question to you is this: do you really believe, given these substantiated facts about our current health care system, that objecting to this bill on fiscal grounds is a morally defensible position? Even if it is economically defensible, do you really believe that shrinking our deficit is as important as saving people’s lives?

The measures that you and your Republican colleagues have proposed to add to the bill speak directly to the financial challenges of providing health care to a large and diverse populous. Enabling people to purchase insurance across state lines, cutting waste and fraud, conducting tort reform, making Medicare solvent, and other ideas all address economic and fiscal concerns. Admittedly, many of these concerns are profound. But I cannot help wondering if you and your party have forgotten that health care is only secondarily a financial issue; it is, first and foremost, a human issue. Throughout this debate, the insurance companies have focused on the financial repercussions of health care reform. That is unfortunate but predictable, as they are companies and inevitably driven by the profit motive and increasing their bottom line. What worries me is that your party believes this issue is only about finances – about who profits and who loses, who gives and who receives, who is in debt and who is not.

President Obama deflected several questions today by saying that his party and yours have “philosophical differences.” That is a mysterious phrase, and the only real philosophical difference I see in this debate is whether one is willing to do the right thing, the moral thing, no matter what the cost. Where the Democratic party stands on that question is uncertain, but your party most certainly considers cost the paramount issue in this whole debate. As a reasonable and moral person, do you really think that is acceptable?

In the weeks ahead, I urge you and your colleagues to consider the principles upon which your party, our government, and this country are based. I urge you to consider that health care is a human right, not a product of the free market, not a gift to be selectively administered by the capricious hand of private corporations. I urge you to consider that providing health care to all Americans is a human challenge with financial obstacles, not a financial challenge with human considerations.

I am an American for whom health insurance has always been as sure a thing as food on the table. This is true of most of the people I know, and it is probably true of you and most of the people you know. I would ask you first to consider the role that this plays in your thinking about the problem. Second, and more importantly, I would ask you to imagine the difficulty you might have in telling a person whose child, spouse or parent was sick and without insurance that national fiscal difficulties prevented you from concurring with a plan to provide them with health insurance. If you think that might be a difficult conversation for you to have, then I would urge you, at the very least, to temporarily bracket your financial misgivings about this bill.

There are many ways of measuring cost. People who are healthy and affluent measure it differently than those who are sick and poor. Different people in different situations gauge affordability in different ways. Consider these differences. There are real people in my state and yours, and in all others in this country, who are sick and dying and cannot get the health care they deserve. These people do not correspond to lines on a balance sheet. This issue is not about money, it is about human decency.

Thank you,

Jasper Engel

A World of Hurt

Kathryn Bigelow has made a career out of the sort of Sunday morning action thrillers that dazzle the eyeballs and the ears without ever really reaching the brain. Her 1989 Blue Steel starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a cop trying to track down an obsessive psychopath. Her 1991 film, Point Break, features Keanu Reeves as “Jonny Utah,” a cop who goes undercover to catch Patrick Swayze and his gang of surfer-bandits. And most recently, in 2002, Ms. Bigelow turned to the historical action thriller genre for K-19: The Widowmaker, a Russian nuclear submarine drama with Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford.

I do not mean to disparage Ms. Bigelow, and I in fact enjoyed these films on a libidinal level. But it is not often that a director who spends two decades making these sort of films suddenly turns out a stunner, and without changing her style, preferred genre, or anything. Make no mistake, The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s latest and by far most critically-acclaimed film, is a B movie, and it is also the first great film about the Iraq War.

I think this is probably not an accident, either. American cinema has, prior to Ms. Bigelow’s entry, taken a decidedly moralizing approach to putting the Iraq War on film. Some of these attempts, like Brian de Palma’s Redacted, focused on how the war is portrayed through various modern media. Others, like Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah, did a fairly good job of showing the war’s effects on soldiers and their families before surrendering the storyline to a kind of left-wing moral vigil. The common failure of these films and many more has been to assume from the start that the war is bad, and then to use the storyline to present evidence that that conclusion is true. The effect of this approach has been to reduce narrative filmmaking to political treatise, and at the end of the day, no one is really interested in listening to one liberal filmmaker after another give an argument about why the Iraq War is wrong. An even more problematic effect, perhaps, is that these films have fed the liberal obsession with the moral-political ills of the war while passing over liberals’ large-scale ignorance of the war’s day-to-day, on-the-ground realities. Where we have gotten plenty of Clausewitz and Chomsky, we have needed a bit more Antoine Fuqua and Ridley Scott; amidst the grand efforts to reason, explain and prove certain points, that is, American filmmakers have not actually shown us the war.

But count on Ms. Bigelow to go for the good stuff, and perhaps partly by artistic limitation, strike gold where others have struck out.  She frames her film with a deceptively simple epigraph – “War is a drug” – and for those who have seen Point Break, this immediately sends the unsettling suggestion that we are about to see the Iraq War Bigelowized – or reduced to mindless, adrenaline-junkie mayhem. But thankfully, that is precisely what we get, and that is why The Hurt Locker is such a novel take on an old subject.

The film’s focal point is Staff Sergeant William James (played by Jeremy Renner in his best performance to date), the newly appointed commander of Bravo Company’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit in Baghdad. If war is a drug, James is the addict; shirking orders, protocol and often his protective bomb suit, James casually ventures into one perilous situation after another to disarm an improvised explosive device that could detonate at any time. In the process, he becomes a weight on the shoulders of his already cracking team members, Specialist Owen Eldridge and Sergeant JT Sanborn (played respectively by Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie).

James is cavalier, a kind of enfant terrible, and impossible to understand for either his fellow soldiers or the audience. He is docile on the surface – not the kind of perpetually jacked-up madman we might have expected. He keeps a crate under his bed full of things that almost killed him, including his wedding ring. He seems just as unsure as we are about the status of his relationship with the woman he married and then divorced. And it is hard to tell what he thinks of Sanborn and Eldridge, if anything. Above all, he is addicted to war, comfortable in only one outfit, in only one situation, doing just one thing. Renner does a superb job with this character, conveying the fragility and angst underlying James’ cowboy charisma. At once, his swagger is irresistible and his singular devotion to the adrenaline rush of combat is tragic. As the movie progresses, this latter, darker side of James gradually overtakes his more appealing side and it becomes clear that he does not have nearly as much invested in any of his relationships – either on the battlefield or off – as he does in his job. Towards the end of the film we see James in a rending vignette in which, after having returned home to his girlfriend/wife and child, he finds that ordinary civilian life simply cannot supply him with the kind of fix he has come to need.

The opening epigraph is a bit of misdirection, though. It focuses us on James and in some ways diverts our attention away from Sanborn and Eldridge. For these two, unlike James, war is not a drug; it is more of a nightmare. Eldridge is visibly suffering emotional torment from the start of the film, and this only grows worse as he is forced to protect and work with James. Sanborn is slightly tougher than Eldridge, but still very much put off by James’ disregard for convention. As James becomes increasingly hooked to the battlefield, his two teammates grow increasingly distressed and distraught. The character contrast is a significant one since it opens up a discussion about the types of personalities that are now voluntarily enlisting for active duty in Iraq even after many of the horrors of the war have been exposed through the media, political discussion, and feature films. There are the war junkies like James, who love war and are a burden on everyone else, and there are the victims, who quickly discover they would really rather not be there. There are of course many shades and nuances in between, but Bigelow makes no attempt to separate out these different character types for the purpose of a “support the troops” agenda within the film. Instead, she explores the tension that develops between the three men, and the film is in large part an attempt to discover the sources of that tension.

One of the areas in which The Hurt Locker excels, in fact, is in its ability to keep us hooked on the little, personal details of war. The film’s suspense comes not from deafening machine gun battles and huge explosions (though those are to be found in the film) but from passing moments of confusion, judgment and uncertainty that bring us face to face with the characters. In a tense sniper scene in the desert, James and Eldridge struggle to wipe the blood off a jammed ammo clip so that they can load it into Sanborn’s gun in time to get a shot at insurgents set up in a hut several thousand feet out. A fly lands on James’ eyelash as he scopes out the bad guys, and he keeps from blinking. Sanborn fires and a single shell casing is seen dancing on the sand in a beautiful slow-motion closeup. Meanwhile, Eldridge, who is covering the unit’s rear, thinks he spies a prone insurgent amidst a herd of black cows, and has to decide whether to fire. Bigelow does not shy away from extending the moments of quiet and anticipation in between gunshots and bomb explosions – the moments where fallible men have to make judgment calls and quick decisions based on confusing circumstances. The notion is that every little thing counts, every bullet matters, every decision has life or death consequences.

What makes The Hurt Locker work ultimately is its narrow focus and attention to detail, both on a cinematic and narrative level. Bigelow uses the scalpel where many have used the sledgehammer, and the effect is both sharper and more disturbing. It is a discerning, probing look at how the male psyche attempts to cope with a situation marked by constant disorientation, pain and fear, and because it fails to generate much of a summary statement on this, it feels honest.

As has become fairly common in the age of Paul Greengrass, Bigelow uses a shaky, handheld camera to persuade us that the story is raw and real. For the most part, we are convinced. There are some scenes in the film in which I would not have minded a static wide-angle shot, for contrast, but Bigelow clearly knows what she is doing. The action seen through the shaky lens feel jarring and literal, but it never sinks into the kind of useless chaos we see in Cops or Cloverfield. The film is frenetic but believable, edgy but methodical. It’s the best of B-grade action – intense, thrilling, arresting – but, unlike a lot of previous B entries, it has a purpose and a conscience.

The Most Dangerous Man

The Most Dangerous Man in America tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, the erstwhile Marine and Defense Department analyst who in 1971 underwent a crisis of conscience and leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. The film is both a historical and personal piece, nudged along by the elderly, reflective narration of Ellsberg himself.

The filmmakers’ decision to have Ellsberg narrate was a good one, as it infuses a dearness into what is otherwise a story of sprawling political scandal and moral decay. Indeed, Ellsberg’s voice, along with those of his “partners in crime,” takes center stage in the film. Some airtime is given to the dissenting point-of-view that Ellsberg was, in fact, a traitor, but most of this comes by way of the crazed and bizarre tape-recorded outbursts of the late President Nixon. The Nixon sound bytes were obviously chosen with precision and care, and it is clear that the filmmakers are advancing a thesis about civic duty, honor, courage, and not least of all, the moral and political rectitude of Ellsberg’s actions in the face of unbelievable madness. Yet, the film hardly comes off as propaganda or manipulation. The bottom line is that Ellsberg’s story is real, and that is why it is special to hear him recount it.

At times, the film utilizes elements of the historical thriller genre to enhance the narrative. It emphasizes the fact that Ellsberg was very much a company man, that he had a deep and total change of heart precipitated by a closer reckoning with the facts, that he was subsequently up against insurmountable odds, and that he emerged victorious in his struggle. This is a failsafe plot arc in fiction, and the filmmakers seem to have made a calculated decision to use it as the undergirding for their non-fiction account. Historical documentation is one of the aims here, but another is pure drama.

The film does not skip past anything of real importance, though. It broaches issues that must be painfully relevant for people who lived through the Vietnam era. A thread that emerges early on is the question of what Vietnam was supposed to be about. Was it about fending off a real and imminent threat, or was it about a symbolic show of military and ideological strength? At the time of Ellsberg’s “conversion,” this was becoming an increasingly prominent question in the national discourse, and more and more people were leaning towards the second answer. It is significant to note, as the film does, the political context in which Ellsberg took action. As we are reminded on several occasions, the government was waging an immoral war, losing, and lying to the American people about it. But few people knew about it and even fewer had the capacity to do anything about it. For Ellsberg, the question of whether to throw all his weight against this corrupt system was rooted in his recognition that there was no other moral thing to do, and perhaps no one else to do it.

That character shift, which deservedly occupies a central place in the film, becomes the basis for talking about a host of issues that are still afflict us: government secrecy and malfeasance, immoral war, the meaning of free press, and maybe most importantly, the power of individual action. The story of the ensuing legal battle over the disclosure of the highly classified Pentagon Papers, for instance, is in many ways a subject in itself – a reminder that our constitutional rights are as much meant to limit government as to empower individuals. But the epic scope of this side story does not crowd out the film’s personal details, such as the months that Ellsberg spent copying the 7,000-page report, or NY Times counsel James Goodale’s advice to run the story even though he knew it was against the law.

It is not hard to see the parallels between Dangerous Man and many of the moral-political questions we face as a people today, and that may be precisely the point. Ellsberg remembers the hard lessons, the horrifying realizations, and the ensuing struggle clear as day. We on the other hand do not, but we ought to.