Any Goodman: John Cusack joins us now from
We’re also joined by लोकशाही आता! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill. His book, ब्लॅकवॉटर: जगातील सर्वात शक्तिशाली भाडोत्री सैन्याचा उदय, is coming out next week in paperback.
John Cusack, welcome. Thank you for taking time from making your new movie. Talk about the genesis of this film, वॉर, इंक.
John Cusack: Well, hello, and thanks for having me on the show. I’m a great admirer of it.
I think, probably like a lot of the great journalists that you’ve mentioned and the other guest you have on the show, Jeremy Scahill, I think I was probably trying to put the Iraq fiasco into a larger context and maybe put it through a different sort of lens and tell a different narrative than I think the corporate narrative that we’ve been getting about the Iraq War and explore some of these themes.
When we hear these words like "privatization," you know, what does that mean? In the case of the Iraq War, it meant outsourcing what you would imagine to be the very core functions of government and the very thing that makes you a state, to turn that into a for-profit business. And we’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole now, where actually torture is being outsourced. So it’s strange and savage times. So that was really kind of the genesis of it.
And there’s also a climate where people were telling Americans to watch what they say and the hypocrisy and the stench of lies was so intense it would make your eyes water. So, as a filmmaker and citizen, you think, well, how do you contextualize this? And so, that was really why I wanted to make it.
Juan Gonzales: Well, John Cusack, obviously you’re dealing with weighty and tragic situations, but you’ve chosen satire. Why the satire approach?
John Cusack: Well, I think all satire or absurdism does is take current trends to the logical conclusion, you know, if you follow it a couple weeks or a couple years down the road. And some would argue, I think rightfully so, that we’re already there. So I think at times you have to put a different lens on it in order to kind of process the information. And, you know, there’s a great tradition of satire mocking power elites — whether they be kings or corporate kings — and shaming them and naming things and calling things what they are.
एमी गुडमन: John Cusack, what about
John Cusack: I don’t know. I think that there are individuals out there who are trying to do good work, and so I don’t like to lump people into a kind of groupthink — I don’t like to sort of think that way. Obviously, the industry really wants to make money and protect itself, and I think, like the rest of the country, people have been, I think, kind of zonked spectators just going along this conveyor belt and not really wanting to face what this particular administration has done to the Constitution and to the very idea of
एमी गुडमन: Jeremy Scahill, your book काळे पाणी has had such an important effect, and actually it’s as if a part of this film, we’re watching the — sort of what it looks like on film. You wrote a really positive piece about वॉर, इंक. and its importance, especially in the
जेरेमी स्कॅहिल: Well, first of all, John Cusack is really to be commended for this. I mean, he and I have had a dialogue ongoing over the years. It’s kind of funny. When you talk to a lot of unembedded independent journalists who have been to
And, you know, I grew up — one of my favorite films was John’s movie काहीही म्हणा, and you remember that famous scene where he’s standing outside of the home of the woman that he loves, and he’s playing Peter Gabriel’s song on a boombox above his head. It’s one of those sort of iconic moments of film, and certainly for my generation. And now I sort of see John as standing outside the gates of
We have to remember, this is the most radically privatized war in the history of this country. I don’t think most people in this country or around the world can name more than three or four countries that have an official deployment in
You know, you have journalists in the movie who are embedded inside of the
And I think that John is really to be commended for doing what is actually not a satire; it’s a very powerful commentary on the way things actually are in
Juan Gonzalez: And yet, almost predictably, a lot of the commercial media have been panning the film, right?
जेरेमी स्कॅहिल: Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is sort of the hubris of power journalism; a न्यू यॉर्क टाइम्स reviewer said something like, you know, that satire has to be in the current moment and that this film was looking backwards and sort of implying that this was a moment in time, when Paul Bremer was there. No, no, no, this is the Cinnabon war. I mean, you can go to war with a cappuccino right now. This wasn’t something that happened in 2004 for a year. It’s on right now. I mean, there’s recent reporting talking about how troops are now becoming obese because of all of the fast food that’s being fed to them inside of the Green Zone and these other heavily fortified areas. I mean, this film is a better reportage than a lot of what we see in the corporate media.
एमी गुडमन: And, John Cusack, you have some of the biggest stars going in this film: of course, you, yourself, and you’ve got Marissa Tomei, you’ve got Hillary Duff, you’ve got Ben Kingsley, you’ve got Dan Aykroyd.
John Cusack: Yeah. And all of these artists kind of jumped in and were very gung-ho about doing it. And what’s been so kind of pleasing is that many of the people who I deeply respect and admire and who are courageous journalists and writers and thinkers, like Jeremy, whose book has been so influential, and Naomi Klein, whose groundbreaking work is universally recognized, and the list goes on and on, who have knowledge of the situation, have all kind of come to support the film and defend it. And I think it’s because — since they’ve been there and they know that this is the prime example of this ideological mission to sort of hollow out the government and privatize it and privatize everything in sight.
I think in Jeremy’s book, Erik Prince said he wants to do for the military what FedEx did to the post office. And I believe he said it with a straight face, as if running a for-profit occupation in the Green Zone is nothing more than delivering the mail. If private corporations should be able to defy international law and shred the Constitution and blow up the streets to protect a corporation’s interests and do it all on our dime, you know, if that’s the future that we want, that’s the future we’ve got. So if the reviewers say we’re looking backwards, I don’t know what they think the current state of the world is right now.
एमी गुडमन: Jeremy Scahill?
जेरेमी स्कॅहिल: Well, you know, John points out this comment that Erik Prince made about FedEx. I mean, Erik Prince recently reemerged from the Great Dismal Swamp in
एमी गुडमन: Dick DeVos.
जेरेमी स्कॅहिल: So he goes there to give a speech — right, Dick DeVos — and no tape recorders or cameras were allowed into it, but he said during that speech the exact same thing. He said, "When you want to send a package overseas, do you use the post office, or do you use FedEx?" implying that Blackwater is sort of the Federal Express of the U.S. war machine, that it’s the best way to get your product delivered.
But there’s actually an irony there. When you send something via FedEx, you can have your package insured against loss or damage, you can track your package. Blackwater has shown itself above any form of tracking or accountability. And when things go lethally wrong, you can’t find out. There are no consequences. There’s no accountability whatsoever. So even when Erik Prince tries to spin a metaphor about another corporation, it falls flat, because Blackwater is the least accountable corporation operating in Iraq right now, because its product is essentially death and destruction.
One thing I wanted to say, though — and John won’t bring this up, because he’s too modest — John gets these big budget films. He’s shooting one right now, where, you know, there’s a lot of money at play, there’s a lot of commercial value to them. He’s been bankrolling these projects in part with his own money, because he can’t find big
एमी गुडमन: It’s also interesting, John, that when filmmakers do films about war, they can get access to high-tech, taxpayer-funded, otherwise unavailable military gear from the military. In return, of course, the military has the right to alter the script, like with movies like ब्लॅक हॉक डाऊन. Your comment about that? And also maybe you could just quickly comment on कृपा गेली, which is gone from the movie theaters now but a very powerful film about a woman soldier who is killed and then her family surviving here.
John Cusack: Well, I think, you know, I’m just very grateful that programs like this and a large activist base and some writers and thinkers — you know, we have a MySpace site where we have a list of people who I deeply respect, who have come out to defend and support the film and help get it out there. So there are avenues to get this out, but the corporate media, yeah, has been predictably soft in looking into the deeper meanings of satire and, you know, that art is about ideas, and ideas have consequences.
And also, it’s a fun, funny, entertaining movie, because I think subversion and throwing bricks at the right sort of people is supposed to feel good. So I think it reclaims a spirit of resistance and a spirit of defiance that I think is the first step towards action, because I think a lot of us are sort of depressed about all this. So I think if it does those things — and we have the support of so many terrific people — I think the film will find an audience.
But as far as the corporatization, the military corporatization of
एमी गुडमन: John Cusack, I want to thank you so much for being with us, joining us from
John Cusack: Which — that should be a must-read.
एमी गुडमन राष्ट्रीय स्तरावर सिंडिकेटेड रेडिओ वृत्त कार्यक्रम, डेमोक्रेसी नाऊ!
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