By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
There’s something fitting about the times. While many of
us live under a form of house arrest, the Internet is delivering to us the
purest vintage right-wing anti-government storytelling available, if you know
where to look.
Various on-demand services now have Clint Eastwood’s
little masterpiece from last year, Richard Jewell. The title refers to
the security guard who foiled the 1996 Centennial Park bombing, then turned
into the lead suspect of the FBI’s investigation, and was ultimately proven a
wronged man. The script is more complex than some of the initial reviews gave
it credit for being, but the message comes through loud and clear. In Richard
Jewell, the media and the government are corrupted by their own strongly
held, barely justified narratives of good guys and bad guys. And the people in
these institutions are perfectly willing to destroy a few good guys to get
ahead in their careers, especially if those good guys are strange in any way.
The destructiveness of media and government is a function
of their laziness. Over time it is revealed that a cursory examination of the
distance between a phone booth and the bombing would have shown that it was
physically impossible for Richard Jewell to have committed the crime by
himself. And if he didn’t commit it by himself, then the criminological
“profile” of a lone wolf and wannabe-hero that was used to make him a suspect
no longer applied to him. But for the FBI, one bad theory is just the entry
point for embracing another.
And that is more than true on Netflix, which bought the
little-noticed Paramount miniseries Waco. This series portrays the
horrible standoff between the Branch Davidian cult and the federal government,
which ended with the Davidian “Mount Carmel” compound undergoing a gas assault
led by tanks. It culminated in a fire that killed the 75 remaining inhabitants,
25 of them children.
While the series does show some skepticism of David Koresh,
particularly concerning his practice of assuming the marital rights to the
women from all the married men in the compound, overall it takes a maximally
anti-government side in all the disputes about what happened in 1993 (spoilers
to follow). From the initial raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms to the aggressive tactics used by the FBI, the nature of the Davidian
cult itself, and the moral responsibility for the deaths in the awful final
assault on the compound, my thought at the end was, this could have been
written by Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing militia man whose reaction to
the events at Waco led him to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. But
here it is, with well-cast stars and streaming on the most popular streaming service.
The initial ATF raid is portrayed as a needless publicity
stunt — Koresh could have been arrested on a morning jog. The grounds for the
initial warrant are shown to be suspect; the Davidians had fewer weapons per
capita at their compound than the population of the state they were in. Throughout the ordeal, it is pointed out that
it is absurd to use tanks on American citizens, that the government
misunderstood the religion that the Davidians practiced, and that this led them
to miscalculate in a way that cost more human lives. The Davidian cult is
portrayed as a millennial religion that believes it will be persecuted, but not
a suicidal one along the lines of Jonestown. It’s stated that the gas used to
flush out the Davidians from their standoff had been banned by chemical-weapons
treaties as weapons of war. And the gas is shown asphyxiating and killing the
Davidian children before the fires reached them. The final scenes are partly
narrated by a local right-wing talk-radio host, who, taking on the role of the
voice of God, essentially accuses the FBI of at-best deliberate negligence with
the lives of the Davidian children, or at worst, a positive intention to kill
the Davidians and destroy all the evidence of federal wrongdoing.
Still, this doesn’t exhaust all the potentially
right-wing content on streaming services. There’s always the Norwegian series Occupied
on Netflix, which portrays a future in which a Green Party government abolishes
petroleum production in Norway, only to be swiftly subjected to a silk-glove
invasion from Russia (more spoilers to come). It turns this with was done with
the connivance of greedy European Union officials, who fold at the first
confrontation with real power. Much of the Green Party’s establishment is shown
as easily corrupted, and the main protagonist has to become a nationalist
savior for his people, even organizing his counterassault by becoming a
“gamer.” Not everything runs in a right-populist nationalist direction on Occupied,
but much more than you’d think possible.
If anything, this little burble of content suggests that
no political faction’s stranglehold on storytelling is absolute or
unchallengeable. And sometimes what was once the paranoid fantasy version of
history turns out to be the truth recorded in history.
No comments:
Post a Comment