The money quote in If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth
Liberation Front, directed by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman,
comes near the end when the movie’s affable hero, Daniel McGowan,
asks rhetorically: “When you’re screaming at the top of your lungs
and no one hears you, what are you supposed to do?” Um, how about
shut up? That, clearly, is not the answer expected, either by Mr.
McGowan, who is now serving a sentence of seven years in the
federal pen, or by the film. His assumption that the sort of
extreme environmentalism which led to his participation in a series
of arson attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s on businesses and
research installations is its own justification remains
unchallenged by Messrs. Curry and Cullman. If people don’t “hear”
him — by which he means if they don’t do as he says and abandon
their lawful businesses and livelihoods in order to flatter his
compassion (as he would no doubt describe it) for trees — then
those businesses and livelihoods must be destroyed.
Daniel suffers from the “attention must be paid” syndrome,
first enunciated by Mrs. Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death
of a Salesman and since adopted by the “progressive” mind as
one of its intellectual cornerstones — that is, the belief that
the world owes you a hearing merely because you are you, and you
suffer. And, as so often, the “attention must be paid” syndrome is
intimately linked to the “right side of history” syndrome so
beloved of progressive thinkers like President Obama and Senator
Harry Reid. In a democracy, the will of the majority rules, but
what if the majority is hostile or indifferent to the progressive
agenda? Then the majority must be educated, violently if necessary.
In fact, the majority is usually wrong and needs to get used to the
idea that it is being disciplined not just by a few socially
dysfunctional and overprivileged youths but by that imaginary
deity, history, which may be reliably assumed to be on the side of
the progressives.
Young Daniel, who was in his mid-20s when he committed the
crimes for which he is now incarcerated, was the son of a New York
City cop. Dad appears, with an ear stud, long enough to say,
admirably, that “I don’t believe in his philosophies but he’s my
son and I love him.” He went to Catholic school and appears to have
had a normal middle-class childhood. While working for a non-profit
helping women victims of domestic abuse in the '90s and studying
for a graduate degree in acupuncture, Danny (as he is more often
called here) went to an environmentalist center where “they played
this film that blew my mind.” Oddly, the directors appear to be not
at all interested in what the film was or what there was about it
that was mind-blowing. As propagandists themselves, they might have
been expected to take an interest in such an effective example of
their craft. Instead, he hurries on to tell of this city boy’s
first experience of the great and beautiful forests of the Pacific
Northwest.
“I had never seen with my own eyes what kind of world we
lived in,” says Danny, which is wonderfully amusing given how
little he appears to know even now of what kind of world we live
in. But the movie has little to tell us about Danny’s
“philosophies” or political ideas, much more about his human
predicament and the fact that he is “trying to get over the shame
of making dumb mistakes.” Whether the dumb mistakes were burning
down lumber mills and meat-packing plants or getting caught after
having done so is not made quite clear. Although he is ostensibly
(sort of) penitent for his career as an eco-terrorist, he still
evidently thinks that he has some kind of divine right to be heard
and his environmentalist agenda to triumph over the forces of
reaction which, pending the arrival of the progressive utopia,
continue have the law and the majority in their grip. Even if he
regrets what he did, he doesn’t regret the intellectual and moral
arrogance that made him do it.
But If a Tree Falls seldom allows us to see this
side of Danny, who even manages enough self-detachment at one point
in the movie to put himself in the place of a bewildered public,
wondering why people like him are destroying other people’s
property. “What if I burned down what pissed me off?” he
imagines “people” saying to themselves. “It sounds kind of crazy.
And it is kind of crazy.” Kind of crazy, maybe, but not
crazy enough for him to apologize to those whose research,
livelihoods, and businesses he helped to wreck. He rejects the
label of “eco-terrorist” or “terrorist tout court to
describe his acts on the grounds that he only destroyed property.
“We didn’t try to hurt people.” But people’s lives are bound up
with the property they have devoted them to acquiring and improving
— and arson even in remote spots always involves a risk of death
or injury to firemen or to those who simply happen to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time.
Through out the film, we feel that we are being asked to
feel sorry for “Danny” as he is torn from his family, his new wife
and young child, and sent to do his time in the clink. And we
do feel sorry for him. Even Kirk Engdall, the U.S.
attorney in Eugene, Oregon, who was instrumental in cracking the
case of the Earth Liberation Front’s acts of destruction, says he
is now more circumspect in his view of the ELFs. “I know now that
the world is not black and white,” he says, hitting just the right
progressive note and adding: “you gain an insight about how they
came to do these things.” So, of course, do we, though it’s not
necessarily the same insight or one which would interfere with our
resistance to the progressive assumption that tout comprehendre
c’est tout pardonner. Making excuses for Danny and his kind is
really the purpose of political movies like this one as they seek
to confirm the enlightened in their conviction that history is
going their way. And the more such movies there are, the more it
seems that history is going their way.
