At The End of America Premiere: Alec Baldwin and Naomi Wolf Talk Fascism
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A funny thing happened on the way to The End of America.
Midway between Manhattan and the Hampton Film Festival premiere of her new documentary (based on the New York Times best seller) this weekend, filmmaker Annie Sundberg was held up because of a highway traffic accident.
So was the film. (Sundberg had the master tape with her.)
Rather than wait for the inevitable riot (you know how unruly those East Hampton mobs can get), author Naomi Wolf, Alec Baldwin, Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, and co-director Ricki Stern took the opportunity to engage the audience in an impromptu question and answer segment on the historical parallels between fascist regimes and the current US government, and the gradual erosion of our civil liberties.
Here’s an excerpt of the transcript, as recorded by SpoutBlog’s Karina Longworth:
Alec: It makes you look at that idea: do we care what the government is doing that’s stripping away the rights of people that aren’t Americans. That’s been a big, big part of this administration, is they believe you don’t care because it’s not Americans.
And that’s a really, really profound idea. I’ve always had one motto or one perspective that was leant to me, which is that America is special and America is different, but only in direct proportion to us doing great things and us doing good things. We live in an age now where you have a very tired, wheezing group of people who keep wanting to tell you, “America’s great. America’s great,” regardless of what we do. We just have to keep telling ourselves we’re great and we can go out there and torture people and do these horrible things.
Do you think this is the new reality? Or do you think that a new administration, an administration that ends with a vowel [pause for laughter], would be able to turn this stuff back and change things?
Naomi: Just before I answer that, the most important issue is these boots on the ground. And I should explain what that is, because the next president will have to deal with that.
The 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division has been deployed by George Bush to somewhere in the United States of America. So, that’s 3, 000 or 4, 000 warriors. And they aren’t answerable to Congress, they’re not answerable to the American people, they’re answerable to President Bush. Again from my study, this is never a good sign.
Alec: Where are they now?
Naomi: Nobody knows. I had the surreal experience of being on the “Today Show” this morning and having the “Today Show” give me a great big sound bite from their commander saying, “They’re here to save lives.” And they challenged me as if I was a fear-monger and a dangerous radical for raising the questions about them. And no one, including NBC, knows where they are.
Alec: They’re on 27 Highway, that’s why the tape isn’t here.
Naomi: Who are they and what are they doing? They are battle-hardened soldiers. They’ve spent two tours in Iraq. They were responsible for crowd control in Fallujah. And their original mandate according to the Army Times was crowd control here. They’ve got tasers, they’ve got rubber bullets. They’ve got tanks capable of killing 300 people. They’re armed. And I guess looking at what’s happening around the world in closed-in societies or in weak democracies, soldiers are often sent to monitor elections. Especially contested elections.
So, I don’t like them being here. And by the way, it violates 200 years of the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus, which kept us safe. And why did people around the world envy us? Because we’re safe from soldiers policing our streets. We have civilian police.
Audience member calling out: Why have we not read about it?
Naomi: That is really a very good question. I was just on the phone with a friend from the New York Times saying, “When are you guys going to run the story about where the 1st Brigade is and what they’re doing?” [He said] “It’s classified.”
Jameel: We just filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, I guess this morning, asking for more information about this. But, they’ve only had a few hours to respond and they haven’t come up with a response yet. They may yet come back and say that the information is classified.
Naomi: And if is classified, none of us will ever be able to know, and if you know and tell us, they can prosecute you for a 10-year jail sentence. So this sucks.
[Audience laughs]
Alec: [Motioning to side of the room] Where are you? Ricki, come out for a second. Come and sit with me on my luxury bench here
[Baldwin moves over to the side of the piano bench on which he’s sitting. Ricki Stern, the co-director of the film, comes and sits next to him]
Alec: We’re just going to take another quick minute. I think one of the greatest things about when I come to these events, not just this film festival, but any great film festival, and see great narrative and documentary films, is this idea that this is the democracy in action that, I think, is really withering in the country that we live in right now. The corporate media assumes that people don’t want their day to be ruined. I’m somebody that used to read the New York Times every day, and basically watch morning news shows every day. I haven’t watched a morning news show in five years. And I might read the New York Times if I pick it up in somebody’s office while I’m waiting for them to finish on the phone. I get my news online, from other sources that I have more faith in.
This war is, in terms of how it was prosecuted, the worst thing this country has ever done. Vietnam fell and it did not make a bit of difference in anybody’s life here at all. All those [American] men who died were brave soldiers, and they should have not have been treated the way that they were treated when they came home, but in terms of Vietnam falling, in terms of our political stability and our economic stability, that meant nothing. It meant nothing. Now we go ahead and have this war that we have now, where is the protest against this war? Something tells me that there have been a lot of protests, but you just don’t see it on TV. It’s not covered by the media, because the media assumes that the lion’s share of Americans would rather watch Deal or No Deal.
So what was it that led you to make this film?
Ricki: Honestly we were asked. We met with Naomi and Avram Ludwig, the producer of this film, and some of the other people who were involved. They asked us if we would be interested in making it. I think probably from our other films that we had made. And when we met with Naomi early on she thought that it would translate well into a film because the images and the visual comparisons that you see in the film are ones that you don’t need words. They just resonate alone, just by seeing the comparisons. We tried to take her lecture of the book and put it into pictures.
Naomi: What got you interested in this, Alec?
Alec: I’ve said this before and it may seem modest to everybody here, but Bloomberg and the Republican convention really burned my ass. I mean, I was so upset that that happened in the city of New York that they weren’t going to have any protests allowed, it just really kind of drove me almost crazy.
I think both people running for president today - I think presidential candidates are like luggage in some old movie, with all those big stickers on them. Paris. Lisbon. Kyoto. Venice. Presidential candidates are owned by someone. But you still have to ask yourself, in this election, who’s the person who is going to turn back this assault? Who do we have the best chance of turning back this assault of our freedoms in this country? I still believe that the bulk of Americans are hard-working people. They work too hard, as a matter of fact. They pay a lot of money in taxes, and they want to be left alone and they want to live their lives in peace. They don’t need to be monitored by the National Security Agency on an ongoing basis.
Naomi: Alec, there is a question of who’s going to fix it. And I’m trying to tell you that if Barack Obama is elected by a miracle in a transparent, accountable election, we are not out of the woods.
