As I may have had occasion to mention before, movies go as
naturally together with paranoia as they do with voyeurism.
Possibly with other mental disorders as well, but we can confine
ourselves to these two for the moment. Sufferers from both imagine
that they see things most people do not see, and the thrill of that
exclusive view is what makes it so compelling. The moving picture
camera flatters that sense of exclusivity. Everything that it shows
us, it has sought out and separated from the torrent of visual
experience available to it, a tiny nugget of presumed significance
amidst the booming, buzzing confusion. Every movie’s unspoken
assumption is the same as the paranoiac’s, namely its view of the
world is something new, exciting, and more or less invisible to
everyone else up to now.
At any rate, some such idea has been indispensable to recent
history of documentary film-making. With each new documentary, it
seems, there’s at least one conspiracy theory, new or old, to be
added to the ever-growing pile. And the latest, Aaron Russo’s
America: From Freedom to Fascism, shows us that the
conspiracies can be right-wing as well as left. In fact, in Mr.
Russo’s film right and left are often indistinguishable. Starting
out from the venerable right-wing theory that the income tax and
the Federal Reserve are gigantic frauds perpetrated on the American
people by the IRS and the banks, it falls into the familiar trap of
conspiracy-overload that also afflicts such left-wing docs as
Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight. Like Mr. Jarecki, Mr. Russo
seems to think that throwing in ten or a dozen extra fantastical
conspiracies will act as a further confirmation of the main
one.
But anyone not already committed to the paranoiac’s view of the
world will find the movie’s case diminished by each successive
theory, rather than enhanced. By the time Mr. Russo’s movie gets to
David Rockefeller and the Council on Foreign Relations, voting
fraud in Ohio in 2004, and the little microchip that the federal
government means to implant in each of us, the craziness factor is
so great you’d almost have to be crazy yourself to believe a word
of it. Not that, even if the film had managed to stick to the
conspiracies of the IRS and the Fed, it would be any more
believable. The title says all you need to know, since America’s
purported descent into “fascism” — though a familiar trope on the
left, where anything not quite echt
socialist-pacifist-libertarian is routinely called “fascist” —
suggests a level of rhetorical unrestraint that the picture itself
tends to bear out.
We see Mr. Russo himself, a producer of The Rose and
Trading Places who for the last decade or so has been
busying himself with libertarian politics, browbeating Sheldon
Cohen, a former IRS commissioner, and others to cite the legal
basis for the income tax until they are forced to acknowledge that
it pretty much boils down to judicial precedent. So then, says one
of his tax-resisting heroes, the author Irwin Schiff, “Nobody can
know what the law is, because the law is what the judges
say the law is.”
Well, duh! Like so many of those who are self-taught, whether in
religion or in politics, Messrs. Schiff and Russo believe
implicitly in self-interpreting scriptures. All they want is that
there should be no intermediary, no one entitled to such a position
by knowledge, experience, or authority, who stands between them and
the plain sense of the law. And if such people exist, in the form
of judges appointed by the state, the fact is itself prima facie
evidence of a conspiracy by the state to deny him his God-given
rights to decide for himself what the law means. This belief,
ultimately derived from Protestant fundamentalism, has had a long
history in America and is periodically revived by those who seek to
get back to American basics. But now it can also merge with the
Marxist-Leninist view that all authority is mere power-lust in
disguise.
Thus one of Mr. Russo’s interview subjects says that “the guy
with the badge and the gun, who can take you off to jail — that’s
the law.” To him, this is not even a controversial statement. Nor
is saying that “most politicians will sell their soul for a dollar”
or that the income tax is “the instrument of totalitarianism” or
that “Americanism is now like Nazism, Communism, Fascism.” Can you
tell that this, like most of the documentaries produced these days,
is intended for an audience already predisposed to believe in the
conspiracies of the powerful against them? In this super-heated
rhetorical atmosphere, where wild and scurrilous charges have
become commonplace, you’ve got to be even more wild and scurrilous
to produce any effect at all. There, far out on the margins of the
normal political dialogue, left and right begin to merge. Though
Mr. Russo believes with the far right that gold is the only real
money, he also believes with the far left in the evils of
globalization, throwing up his hands in horror at the fact that, as
he claims, of the 190 countries in the world, the U.S. has military
bases in 130 of them. Some of us, if we are Americans, might ask:
isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t it mean that we’re in a
better position to shape the world according America’s interests?
Doesn’t being an American mean that you would want to
project America’s power around the world?
But being an American also seems to mean that you are ready to
believe at the drop of a hat that America — or at least the wicked
cabal that has seized the reins of American power — is intent on
enslaving not only its own citizens but the whole world. Such a
belief may be crazy but, because it appeals to the natural paranoia
of the American movie audience, it is also better box office than
political sanity and restraint.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie critic.
He is the author of the new book, Honor: A History (Encounter
Books).
