I, a Nestbeschmutzer: Robert Bresson�s L�Argent, Prisons, Thomas Bernhard, and Some Choice Words for the United States

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I want to denigrate one of the many aspects of American barbarism, namely the American prison system.  The Germans have a word for this�as they have a word for everything�I say, for a person who denigrates his own country country: Nestbeschmutzer��one who dirties one�s own nest� is how Wikipedia defines it.  Apparently this is what the Austrians called Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian novelist and playwright who really, really hated Austria (and in his will banned the performance of his plays in Austria as a final, posthumous fuck-you). 

Thomas Bernhard, not a fan of Austria.

Now, I don�t hate America; �America� is an abstraction, it has no referent, it doesn�t mean anything.  Rather, I hate aspects of it, just as I like aspects of it, if we want to define these things I like as �aspects of America.� For example, I like the American writer William T. Vollmann�is Vollmann an aspect of America? I like Wes Anderson�is he an aspect of America? I�ve never understood it when someone criticizes American foreign policy and they�re accused of being �anti-American.� I mean, is that all America has? A foreign policy? Nothing more?

Before I denigrate the American prison system, I should say where this is coming from.  I just watched Robert Bresson�s final film, 1983�s L�Argent (Money), a great deal of which depicts the tribulations of a petty criminal in a French prison.  And the man�s prison experience destroys him.  And I thought to myself, �My God, and imagine if he�d been in an American prison.� Because awful though the French prison experience may have been, he didn�t get raped.  He didn�t get physically tortured.  He didn�t get murdered.

The incarerated man in L'Argent, quite notably not being raped, tortured, or murdered.

I could never send a person to an American prison (as a juror, I mean), regardless of what the person had done.  I mean, certainly if it was a non-violent crime, I couldn�t send the person to prison.  You were caught smoking crack cocaine? Well, you shouldn�t do that, that�s bad for you, but shit, I�m not sending you to prison for that.  But even for violent crimes, like rape or murder, I�m not sending you to an American prison, because I am a believer in fundamental human rights, and a person�s fundamental human rights are at a significantly elevated risk of being violated in an American prison.  In an American prison, you are at risk of being assaulted, tortured, raped, murdered, or of being subjected to all sorts of mental degradation.  Solitary confinement is a form of torture; it destroys the mind, and it does so quickly.  According to the doctor-writer Atul Gawande, even after only a week of solitary confinement, chemical changes are already taking place within the brain.  And when you send a person to prison, you have no idea what�s going to happen to them in there, you don�t know whether or not they�ll be subjected to solitary confinement, a form of torture; but you know that there�s a risk that they will be.  Bradley Manning, the hero who exposed the crimes of governments around the world, was subjected to months of completely unjustifiable solitary confinement on a US Navy base, and his treatment only improved after a hue and cry was raised about it, including by US State Department spokesman Peter Crowley, who lost his job after publicly expressing his incomprehension over Manning�s treatment.  Remember folks: Obama: Change we can believe in! (Does anyone still believe that shit?) (I must extend credit to Glenn Greenwald, my main source of news on Bradley Manning, for highlighting Gawande�s New Yorker article on solitary confinement and relating it to Manning).

Oh, and this is so obvious as to be almost clich� at this point, but I can�t notmention that the American prison system is really, really racist.  The United States currently incarcerates more black men than were imprisoned in South Africa at the height of Apartheid.  The late Harold Pinter referred to the American prison system as the American Gulag, and yes, perhaps there�s some hyperbole there�perhaps the equally deceased Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would take exception to that, but Solzhenitsyn was never raped in the Gulag, at least as far as I�m aware.  Perhaps Pinter�s statement is unfair, but it�s shocking, and it�s meant to be shocking, because somebody needs to shock people out of their complacency and make them realize how awful the situation truly is.

Really, I don�t want to turn this blog into one long tirade against Obama.  As it says right on the side of the screen, I�m here to write about movies, first and foremost.  But god damn it, I have a platform, small though it may be, but it�s still a platform!  I reach more people through this blog than I would if I were shouting into the ether.  And can someone, some good-hearted �liberal� or �progressive� or leftist or whatever they want to call themselves, can one of you explain how Obama is still palatable to you? (And I�m not talking to my foreign readers here, as I�m sure any of you who once liked Obama have given up on him long ago, far before many of his American true believers). American Obama supporters, how do you justify his crimes? How can you continue to support him? I know there�s an element of smartassery in my question, but I am genuinely curious.  Because I couldn�t think of supporting Obama without deliberately deceiving myself as to what he�s doing.  How do you justify his support for the persecution of Manning (or the fact that he publicly declared Manning�s guilt, which makes it pretty much impossible for Manning to receive a fair trial in the military tribunal he�ll eventually face, where the jurors are soldiers whose commander-in-chief is none other than Obama himself)?  Or to return to the theme of a previous blog post, how can you possibly justify his assassination of the sixteen-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki?  And in that post, I only talked about American citizens killed by Obama.  I left out the dozens of Yemeni civilians and the hundreds of Pakistani civilians (and some of those Yemenis were killed by cluster bombs, which only compounds Obama�s guilt).  How are these things justifiable?

I have decided that I am not anti-American.  No, I am in fact so pro-American (strange though it may be to me to say these words) that I want America to be a fundamentally just society and state.  I like America so much that I would like for its government to not perpetrate terrible crimes domestically and abroad.  I would like to see the restoration of the rule of law in this country.  I would like to see a humane prison system that wasn�t racist and that didn�tdestroy people.  I would like to see people not got to prison for the possession and ingestion of substances which, as adults, I think it is there write to possess and ingest.  Let adults make adult decisions, I say.

Hell, it�s the same basic principle that animates my general opposition to the governments of Russia, China, Iran, and Israel.  Am I anti-Russian, anti-Chinese, anti-Iranian, or anti-Israeli? (or, in the last case, anti-Semitic, as critics of Israeli government policy are so often accused of being?) No, not at all, quite the contrary, in fact! I like all these countries!  I like them a great deal!  I like their people! And I especially like their cultures, which are some of the richest in the world, which is why it pains me to see them languishing under oppression and brutality (as is the case with the citizens of Russia, China, and Iran) or subject to a government which inflicts oppression and brutality on other people (as is the case with Israel).  I think Israel is an especially good and instructive parallel when it comes to my feelings towards the United States.  I want the people of Israel to be free of association with a criminal government, just as I, as an American citizen, wish to be free of a criminal government acting in my name and spending my tax dollars on its prisons and cluster bombs.

Let�s conclude this piece by going back to Thomas Bernhard and the concept of the Nestbeschmutzer.  Now, why did Bernhard rail against Austria so much? Was it just to be a dick? No, he railed because he saw injustice and criminality and hypocrisy (and perhaps he saw it in places where it didn�t exist, I will concede that point; he was a trifle sensitive, to put it mildly).  But Bernhard was born in 1933 and so spent much of his childhood under Nazi rule; he saw Austrian Nazi collaborators during the period of the Anschluss and then he saw these Nazis and Nazi sympathizers slip back into respectable Austrian society after the war.  He saw festering rot at the heart of society, and from a young age, before he�d learned the ways of adult dissembling and self-deception, and unlike so many other people, he could not bring himself to shut up about it; he must have been elated over the scandal surrounding former Nazi officer Kurt Waldheim�s presidential campaign in 1985, where the alleged extent of his complicity in Nazi war crimes came to light in ways it hadn�t before (his Nazi past hadn�t prevented him from serving two terms as UN Secretary-General in the 1970�s). 

Kurt Waldheim, Nazi turned U.N. Secretary-General turned President of Austria.

Waldheim had his defenders, including Austria�s former Jewish Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, and I don�t know enough about the matter to come down definitively on one side or another (although I know that the great German writer W. G. Sebald, whom I hold in high esteem both as an artist and as a man of considerable moral stature, was repulsed by Waldheim).  But Waldheim�s dead now, so he can�t be hurt by me �putting this out there.� And my main point is that, if Thomas Bernhard was a Nestbeschmutzer, then it�s probably because the nest needed to be dirtied.  And that this was, in the long-term, good for Austria, from a moral and cultural perspective.  The same can be true for the United States, if we ever bring our own political criminals to justice.