december 2004

Friday in the book market, central Baghdad. Since the start of economic sanctions against Iraq and the resulting collapse of the Iraqi economy, many Iraqi intellectuals have sold their libraries and other possessions in order to survive. Photo ©2003 James Longley/LittleRedButton.com.
www.electroniciraq.net

Documentary film review: "Mur" (Wall)

Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada, 21 November 2004
http://www.murlefilm.net/
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3357.shtml

Screenshot from Simone Bitton's documentary Mur ("Wall")

Winner at festivals in Marseille and Jerusalem, Simone Bitton's Franco-Israeli "Mur" (Wall), is about Israel's Apartheid Wall. I saw this documentary during the seventeenth international documentary filmfestival in Amsterdam (Netherlands) which opened on 18 November. Mur ("Wall") is nominated for the Amnesty International-DOEN Award, one of the awards presented at the festival. After the screening the audience got to ask Bitton some questions. "The moment I heard about the barrier going up, June 2002, I had to make this film," she said in Cinerama 2 in Amsterdam.

The documentary starts with the slow installation of concrete slabs, one by one, obliterating the view of landscapes and Palestinian villages, until there is not a chink of light remaining. The camera follows the gradual motion and stays fixed on the shot. We see Palestinians cut off from their land, and their olive groves, olives left to rot on the branch.

"I tried to film the beauty of the countryside as it was being destroyed - that's what gives the film its force: I filmed the burial of this land," Bitton said.

Born in Morocco and reared in Jerusalem, Simone Bitton made her career in French television. "Wall," her first long film, has backing from the Sundance Institute and the Ford Foundation. She decided to put herself in the picture, not onscreen but through her voice, which is gently inquisitive. "It's important for me to have a voice, to speak Hebrew and Arabic, to hear Hebrew and Arabic, going from one side of the wall to the other. Because, for me, there are not two sides, there's one small country."

This film was part of the Quinzaine des réalisateurs at the 2004 Cannes film festival, and won the Grand Prize at the 2004 Pezzaro Film Festival, as well as the Grand Prize at the Marseilles International Documentary Film Festival in 2004.

Simone Bitton is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, who has directed about fifteen documentary films for television, about varied topics as Mahmoud Darwish (The Language as the Land), Azmi Bishara (Citizen Bishara), Maroccan Mehdi Ben Barka (Ben Barka: L’equation marocaine), Egyptian singer Um Kalthoum, Farid el Atrash, and the history of Palestine (Palestine, Story of a Land).

"Wall" has been called "sensational" by the French daily Libération, "an eye opener" by the US entertainment industry bible Variety, and "An hour and a half of sadness, transparency and beauty" by Al Hayat.

The film shows that aim of the wall is not security but the humiliation of people. The wall is aimed to break people’s will to resist occupation and destroy livelihoods. It is a film of images not of ideas, there is no narration or voice over, except the voice of Simone Bitton asking questions to people affected by the wall. It shows the daily life of the people around the Wall, Palestinian inhabitants, Israeli settlers, the Palestinian workers building it, passers by, and Defense Ministry Director-General Amos Yaron, who supervises this colonial project and who tells the camera that "we view both sides as ours."

The film was screened at the wall in Abu Dis earlier this year. The wall in Abu Dis was used to screen the film. The film was also screened in Jerusalem's Cinematique and the Kasabah Theater in Ramallah.

One person interviewed in the film, Shuli, drives his jeep through the northern part of the country. He lives in Maanit, a kibbutz, and describes himself as a colonialist. But he rails against what he calls the Israelis' passion "for cutting themselves off and shutting out others." Imprisonment, he says, is a strange concept coming from people like his own, whose grandparents fled the ghettoes of eastern Europe. "We love this land," he explains. "We love it so much that we want to suffocate it, we want to commit suicide with our country." In his eyes, "it is a disease blocking what little that remains of the osmosis between the two sides."

Besides talking to those affected by the wall, Bitton visits the cement factories in the south where the wall's concrete slabs and watchtowers are produced. Most of her interviewees speak with humor about the situation and have not lost hope.

"I did not make this film in order to convince them, or provide them with arguments. I made the film in order to share what I feel, what comes from my heart... The wall that I filmed is as much a part of me as it is a part of the mental and physical horizons of my characters. This wall is, in a sense, testament to our failure. Mur is a political film because everything is political. But it doesn't talk about politics. It talks about me, it talks about us."

TV MUTANTS, "AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, by Neil Postman

There have been many studies which suggest that television increases violence, increases tribalization, shortens attention span and lowers school performance among heavy viewers. But that is not my concern here. Instead, I am concerned that watching television instead of reading tends to degrade the minds of heavy viewers so that they can not think in abstractions such as "cause and effect." In other words, the 100 billion dollars spent on advertising each year, has simply burned abstract reasoning out of their minds.

Today with functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), researchers catch brains in the very act of cogitating, feeling or remembering. The scans show that blood flow varies depending upon the type of activity the brain is occupied with. In other
words, a child that grows up on a heavy diet of TV viewing has a physically altered brain. Once adulthood is reached, it is still possible to enhance brain function but it requires much more effort. Needless to say, it is naive to expect TV-mutants to "figure it out" anytime soon.

In AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, Neil Postman provides a brilliant analysis of our TV-mutant society: "We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

"But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns
that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some
equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

"This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." [p.p. vii-viii]

"From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge." To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud and even inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached." [p. 51]

"I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago."
[p. 80, Neil Postman, AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH; Penguin,
1985. ISBN 0-14-009438]
: http://www.dieoff.com/page22.htm

"You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy."  - Charles Manson, serial killer and one-time cult leader

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." — G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS
http://www.libertyunbound.com/archive/2004_11/holmes-irs.html

by Richard Yancey. HarperCollins, 2004, 695 pages. $17.46 at Amazon Books http://snipurl.com/am5q

The Taxman Cometh Clean

by Mike Holmes

The "Confessions of a . . ." literary genre has long been a popular format that entices readers by promising an inside look at some mysterious and usually disreputable profession, like Mafia hit man, or prostitute, or soldier of fortune or other career choice which average people rarely have firsthand knowledge about. Richard Yancey's "Confessions of a Tax Collector" is no exception. Tax collection, like butchering animals or gathering foreign intelligence on WMDs, has remained shrouded in mystery, and for good reason. Sausage makers and government spooks do not want you to share their secrets.

Yancey's book does a credible job of giving us a look inside the IRS Beast (Yancey's term). It is both less and more than the typical insider account of an unsavory profession. There is plenty of salacious action: mild-mannered, middle-class tax collectors come across as pretty sexed up, and Yancey claims pressured taxpayers regularly offer sexual favors as bribes. But what makes this book distinctive is that it manages to achieve a degree of literary merit.

Yancey came to the IRS as a scrawny, 135 lb. weakling with an English degree and a string of failed careers. His real ambitions were literary, and his literary talent is evident as he paints a vivid picture of the first three years of his often terrifying twelve-year descent into the bizarre world of tax collection. He tells how he (and other) IRS agents intimidate taxpayers into filing and paying taxes, and when they cannot collect, how they barge into their homes and businesses, hauling away cars and trucks, emptying bank accounts, and stickering everything in sight with bright notices warning citizens that their property now belongs to the federal government.

In 1991, Yancey answered a blind newspaper ad in central Florida. It promised college graduates with at least a 3.5 grade point average "interesting and rewarding careers." The ad led to a well-paying but despised IRS job as a point man for the "voluntary" tax system. His job consisted of showing taxpayers who were reluctant or unable to pay just how "voluntary" the system really is. His skeptical fiancee wasn't supportive, and his friends from community theatre were horrified. He quickly was alienated from the civilian world, much like a newly recruited Marine or policeman. The IRS veterans derided him as a "pansy poet" (though he isn't gay) and predicted he'd soon be gone.

The paranoia and bureaucratic infighting within IRS collections offices are even scarier than the things they do to taxpayers.

Yancey manages to present himself as a sympathetic protagonist despite his working for the most despised agency of the government. This is a genuine literary accomplishment, achieved by detailing the progress of his career while presenting himself as different than the insider career-climbing clerks or ex-military types typically hired as R.O.'s (Revenue Officers). Yancey is one of the first of a crop of "Distinguished Scholars," who are hired solely on their demonstrated academic success rather than any knowledge about taxes or ability to bully others successfully. Most of this book centers on the severe and weird year-long training internship designed to turn him into a loyal IRS functionary.

Readers looking for revelations of IRS tradecraft won't be disappointed. Yancey skillfully weaves into the tale many interesting tidbits about, and insights into, the IRS's collection process and the paramilitary mindset of its collections officers. His accounts of paranoia and bureaucratic infighting within the collections offices are even scarier than the things they do to taxpayers. Readers come away with even less confidence in their privacy and in the security of their assets. But they get some small solace in the emotional and psychological price the tax collectors themselves pay for their pitiless intrusions.

The book is full of anecdotes, among them his encounters with tax protesters. He develops a specific hatred for them, especially the promoters of the "untax" movement; and his account of how the IRS squashes their misguided efforts is must reading for libertarians.

Readers get some small solace in the psychological price the tax collectors themselves pay for their pitiless intrusions.

What makes this book extremely readable is that it consists almost entirely of reconstructed dialogues between Yancey and co-workers, friends, or taxpayers, and interior monologues which reveal Yancey's often panicked state of mind. While the author mentions several times his 4 a.m. writing sessions before work at the local Denny's, I have to wonder just how accurately these 8-to-12-year-old conversations are rendered, especially with Yancey's claim that all names and identifying details have been changed. The book jacket tells us that his interactions with taxpayers were all conducted under a self-selected IRS pseudonym, as is common practice, yet nowhere in the actual book is this mentioned. In his reconstructed dialogues, everyone refers to him as "Mr. Yancey." He reports considerable career success, and yet we learn nothing about the final eight years of his service in the Treasury Department.

At one point, he shares a detailed account of how he picked up a wounded dog that had been struck by a hit-and-run driver and left for dead, and heroically rescues the animal despite the owner's indifference. This story, I suppose, serves to demonstrate his charitable moral fiber, but seems so self-serving and irrelevant as to be merely annoying.

Aside from a brief mention in the afterword, where Yancey claims the mid-90s Republican Revolution put severe restraints on R.O.'s with the list of "Ten things that can get you fired" (this was originally, by the way, 30 things), he doesn't deal with many of the changes in the IRS since the early 1990s. The number of field-collection R.O.'s has been cut by over two-thirds, and recent massive IRS reorganizations have doubtlessly made much of his description of the bureaucracy obsolete.

There are plenty of former IRS employees now in civilian life, many of them now representing taxpayers. Some have written similar insider accounts. The IRS functions in three large segments: tax return processing (mostly clerical and data processing), tax return examination (the dreaded audit process, partly by automated methods, partly by trained accountants and attorneys), and the collection process, which, according to Yancey, requires virtually no knowledge of business, tax law, or anything else we usually associate with the IRS. All it takes is a strong stomach and a thick skin, plus a willingness to become part of a dysfunctional bureaucracy full of backstabbing coworkers and managers who spy on their employees.

"Confessions of a Tax Collector" was much more enjoyable than one would expect, given its subject. And if you can justify its purchase as an "ordinary, necessary and reasonable" expenditure for your business, you may even be able to write off the purchase price. But you didn't hear that from me.

Mike Holmes is a CPA in the Houston area