GORT: 2009

Friday, March 27, 2009

Open the pod bay-doors, HAL."

Open the pod bay-doors, HAL."
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

A few days ago, I wrote that the “paranoid style” has been a continual temptation and danger for modern conservatives (whom Hofstadter called “pseudo-conservatives,” owing to their radicalism in wanting to overturn existing laws and institutions). Several readers expressed disbelief that I didn’t mention their left-wing counterparts, and Jonah Goldberg criticized me on The Corner for the same reason. Goldberg accurately brings up various recent left-wing conspiracy theorists, from Naomi Klein to Spike Lee (he might have mentioned Michael Moore as well), and concludes, “By all means, dust off your dog-eared copies of “The Paranoid Style.” But spare me the lectures if you can only find things to worry about to your right.”

There’s plenty of criticism of Klein, Moore, Nicholson Baker, and other paranoid stylists of the left in my book on Iraq, “The Assassins’ Gate.” I didn’t mention them in discussing Hofstadter and the current reaction to Obama for this reason: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck have far more power in the Republican Party (it sometimes seems to include veto power) than Klein, Lee, and Moore have in the Democratic Party. The views of right-wing commentators in the grip of the paranoid style (Obama is a stealth radical, the Democrats are imposing socialism) are much closer to mainstream conservative and Republican belief than the views of their counterparts on the left (the levees in New Orleans were blown up by the government, the White House had something to do with 9/11) are to mainstream liberal and Democratic belief. The reasons are complex, but I would list these: the evangelical and occasionally messianic fervor that animates a part of the Republican base; the atmosphere of siege and the self-identification of conservatives as insurgents even when they monopolized political power; the influence of ideology over movement conservatives, and their deep hostility to compromise; the fact that modern conservatism has been a movement, which modern liberalism has not.

This is not to say that the more destructive forms of populism and outright paranoia can’t appear on the left. They have, they do, and they will, especially in times of extreme distress like these. It’s only to say that the infection has been more organic to the modern right.

Goldberg would have even more basis for his complaint if I were the author of a book called “Conservative Fascism” and he were not the author of a book called “Liberal Fascism.”

OBAMA DOESN'T NAIL IT

It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

THAT IS SO TRUE. I'VE BEEN SUCH A SELFISH WRETCH. NOT LIKE THIS BRAVE AND BRILLIANT NEW PRESIDENT, THIS DOMESTIC WARRIOR THIS ANGEL SENT TO HEAL AMERICA. BUT NO, ALL I COULD SEE WAS MY NARROW INTERESTS.

GOD DAMNED FUCKING CREEP. WHO COULD SAY THINGS LLIKE THAT AND NOT BE AN ARROGANT STUPID CREEP?!

ONLY AN ARROGANT CREEP COULD LET HIMSELF SAY SUCH WORTHLESS STUPID CRAP.

Congress Forced To Watch Training Video About Bipartisan Cooperation

Onion News Network:
Rep. Gary Nelson (R-CT) Introduces The Gary Nelson Personal Pay Raise Bill 11.22.07

Onion Radio News:
Senate Carpool 'Forgets' To Pick Up Feingold Again 10.07.06

WASHINGTON—In an effort to stimulate discussion, resolve party conflicts, and increase legislative productivity, members of the 111th Congress were once again required to watch an instructional video on bipartisan collaboration this week.
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Senators reluctantly watch the section on "non-vitriolic communication."

"Since both House and Senate seem unable or unwilling to compromise on several issues regarding tax money, earmarks, or even seating arrangement, we have decided to take drastic action," Vice President Joe Biden told a special joint session of Congress Monday. "Hopefully this will give you some tools you can use to lend a hand, and maybe an ear, across the aisle."

"And please, no talking on cell phones during the video," Biden added. "I'm looking at you, Senator Reid."

Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution specifies that the legislative branch must watch the instructional training film "A Vote For Understanding" once every six years. The 30-minute video was made in 1976 and stars former Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who guides viewers through a series of short lessons about the importance of listening to the opposition without interrupting, yelling, or filibustering.
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At this point, the film is meant to be paused for a joint-resolution exercise.

After calling the mandatory session to order, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wheeled in a cart with a television and VCR and instructed Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to dim the lights.

The film opens with a dramatization of two legislators tugging at opposite ends of the same bill, until Proxmire steps into frame and freezes the action by calling a "time out." While an up-tempo synthesizer track plays in the background, Proxmire teaches the bitterly divided congressmen to look at each other, open their minds, and work together instead of relying on threats and walkouts.

Another scene revolves around a heated appropriations dispute, and encourages lawmakers to always "S.H.I.N.E." by using the five steps of legislative cooperation: "Show respect, Hold back anger, Identify common ground, Nation first! and Emerge with compromise."

At another point, a split screen depicts two congressmen—a Democrat and Republican wearing blue and red hats, respectively—engaged in a shouting match over a bill's rider. The screen dissolves to reveal the two men facing away from each other, yelling in opposite directions. Proxmire then rotates the legislators' chairs around and switches their hats, teaching both a profound lesson in seeing government through the eyes of the opposition.

Despite the video's distinct message of compromise, cooperation, and not completely ignoring and then vilifying members of an opposing party, many lawmakers called it "unrealistic and outdated." Some claimed their time would have been better spent arguing over provisions of the upcoming health care reform bill.

"That's great: Here we are dealing with the worst recession since World War II and we have to watch a friggin' bipartisanship video," Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) said. "What a waste of time. I already saw that back in '97 when I first took office."

"This kind of Democratic grandstanding is exactly why I didn't read a single clause in the economic stimulus package before I voted against it," Enzi added.

Most lawmakers sat with members of their own party during the mandatory screening and spent the entirety of the afternoon slumped over in their chairs. While both sides mostly kept to themselves, there was one moment of bipartisanship during a scene in which Proxmire tells viewers to take a moment to cross the aisle and introduce themselves—to which someone loudly replied, "Yeah right," causing both parties to burst into laughter.

"I don't need some boring movie to teach me about partisanship," said Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ), adding that he could not believe the junior senator from Alaska was actually taking notes. "I'm one of the most partisan people around. Ask anyone."

Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) was also dismissive of the instructional film, saying that if he ever actually went along with its "corny" message of tolerance, he would lose the respect of everyone in Washington.

Said Risch, "Ooh, I just can't wait to listen to Democrats! I'm totally going to consider their feelings and long-term initiatives before voting. Pff. As if."

A small group of legislators, however, said they appreciated the viewing experience.

"I think it was pretty good," said Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who appeared in the film with a thick head of brown hair. "I wouldn't mind watching it a second time."

There are a number of other videos Congress is bound by law to watch periodically. The most commonly shown films include "Commerce Regulation And You," "Budgets Made Easy," "So You've Been Re-Elected…," and "Drunk Driving: Dying Under The Influence."

Upon conclusion of the video, Democratic and Republican leaders went out onto the National Mall for a smoke break and, after some levelheaded discussion, determined everything was the executive branch's fault.

Laid-Off Ford Employee Decides To Start Own Car Company

Revlon Forced To Test Cosmetics On Plants 03.03.99
We're Investing So Much In Alternative Fuels, Sometimes We Almost Forget To Pump Oil! 07.09.08

HAPEVILLE, GA—Calling his recent layoff "just the kind of a kick in the pants" he needed, former Ford Motor Company autoworker Chris Thaney announced the creation of the Thaney Motor Company Monday.
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Thaney at Thaney Motor Company HQ.

"Losing my job was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," said the 34-year-old Thaney, who made $57,000 on the production line as a door fitter until the Hapeville plant closed down last month. "I know cars. I've been around cars for nearly a decade now. I don't need to work for a big, corporate auto manufacturer to do what I love."

"It's going to be great," Thaney continued. "Finally I get to be my own boss, set my own hours, and make my own cars."

Headquartered in Thaney's home garage and financed mainly through his unemployment compensation and United Auto Workers layoff benefits, the new company's credo is, according to Thaney, to "design affordable, versatile and easy-handling cars for ordinary Americans." Saying that his time at Ford taught him "what not to do," Thaney explained that his car company will not be the victim of overproduction and other inefficient practices that have resulted in intensifying competition and declining profits.

"Today's consumers want something made with precision and care," Thaney said. "Not something that was spit out in 58 seconds by a thousand people and some machines."
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Preliminary designs for Thaney Motor Company's first model, the Centaur.

Thaney said his cars will be a hit with the public because he will "spare no expense," while still managing to avoid stifling bureaucracy, overpaid executives, and cost overruns.

"As long as I'm in charge, that's the Thaney Motor Company pledge," he added.

"At Ford it was all about the bottom line," said Thaney, who is currently on the lookout for a good source of Italian leather for the upholstery. "With me, the customer will always come first. Well, after the cars."

Thaney said Thaney Motor Company will "go out of its way" to show that its commitment to new ideas and innovation extends all the way to the top of the organization.

"Where Ford went wrong was not going on the Internet to find engines and other parts," Thaney said. "They could have joined one of those online car clubs and swapped stuff for practically nothing, without compromising on quality. "

Already, Thaney is hard at work building his first model, the Thaney Centaur, a four-door station wagon based on his wife's 1999 Ford Taurus four-door station-wagon, whose platform he considers "an American classic in need of some minor retooling." He also has plans to create models patterned closely after the Ford Focus engine, the Dodge Neon chassis, and a friend's 1990 Pontiac Grand Prix paint job. In a nod to his old assembly-line position, the models will boast well-fitted doors and multiple side-mounted mirrors.

Though he didn't want to get his hopes up, Thaney admitted the initial planning phases have left him "very optimistic" and said that he already has several friends and relatives lined up who said they would "definitely" drive a car manufactured by him.

"I'm still trying to figure out how to install airbags, CD changers, GPS systems, steering wheels, and trunks," Thaney said. "But once I learn these things, I'll craft them with precision and care, not like some of the stuff you see coming out of Detroit."

Everything Taking Too Long

March 24, 2009 | Issue 45•13

WASHINGTON—An overwhelming sense of restlessness and impatience engulfed the U.S. this week when citizens determined that everything—the morning commute, phone conversations, getting a table at Chili's, making coffee, commercial breaks, everything—was taking entirely too long.

"This is ridiculous," said Boston resident Joe Sosnoff, waiting for a subway train running behind schedule. "I don't have time for this. I seriously do not have time for this."

"Oh, for crying out loud," said Atlanta native Ashley Rose, standing in line at a local Rite Aid pharmacy. "Open up another register if you have to. What are these people doing? Hanging out?"
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At this rate, Americans reported, it would've been faster to take the goddamn stairs.

Between eye rolls, sighs, and repeated glances at wall clocks, a majority of Americans are reporting that the nation badly needs to pick up the pace. In some cases, including those where things are taking so long that it's not even funny, citizens urged all present to hurry the hell up.

According to the latest time estimates, if everything continues to move along at this intolerable pace, Americans will be left with no other choice but to scream.

"You've got to be kidding me," San Francisco market researcher Tim Martin told reporters while waiting for ESPN.com to load on his desktop computer. "Come on."

A CBS News/New York Times poll revealed Tuesday that Americans are split into three separate camps when it comes to the growing national frustration: Those who think everything is taking too long; those who think everything is taking too goddamn long; and a third fringe group that believes everything is taking fucking forever.
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Millions of Americans can just forget about the fucking bus ever showing up when it's fucking supposed to.

Further analysis revealed that 54 percent of respondents are not getting any younger over here. Nearly 10 percent don't understand what the big holdup is. And 23 percent are not only ready, but have been ready for the past half hour, so let's go already.

Several thousand respondents hung up their telephones before answering all of the poll's questions.

While citizens said that a few things, such as lunch, dinner, and sleep, could afford to go on for much longer, everything else reportedly needs to get moving pronto as people have places to be.

A Department of the Interior report released Wednesday stated that there are 6 trillion such instances that could not possibly go any slower if they tried, some of which include budget meetings, shaving, the act of waiting, upward mobility, microwaving that lasagna, settling down and starting a family, walking from one place to another, searching for a misplaced item, returning to the place you initially walked from, air travel, 2009, and the time it takes for a sent e-mail to arrive in someone's inbox.

"Nope," said 37-year-old Glenn Costabile, who entered and then immediately exited a crowded emergency room in downtown Detroit. "No fucking way."

At a press conference, President Obama offered little comfort to the impatient nation, claiming that the number of things that take all freaking day is only expected to rise.

Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany... Anything new here? Don't get your hopes up.

By NOEL ANNAN

W.W. Norton & Company
CHAPTER ONE

The Mystery in the Soul of State

They were playing cards or cleaning equipment in the hut that served as a barrack room when the sergeant came in and pinned a notice on the door. The officer cadets crowded round. But it was only a list of the names of those who had admitted they spoke foreign languages. They were ordered to report to the orderly room to show how well they knew them.

`What do they ask one?' I said to Peter Webber, who had been a contemporary of mine at King's, Cambridge and had studied modern languages.

`Oh, the same old phrases. In French "Tell him to wait until I come".'

`I see, the subjunctive.'

`In German you might get "I was at the meeting when the speaker was speaking", or possibly "I ought to have done it". This is the fourth time I've been tested since I joined the Field Security Police, and they never vary.'

Never was cynicism more accurate. At the interview next morning I was asked to translate every one of those phrases. `But your German is much better than you said it was,' said my examiner.

Two months later at the end of the course in December 1940 the cadets again gathered round the door. Which regiment had they been posted to? I had hopes of being commissioned in the Rifle Brigade. To my dismay I found against my name something called the Intelligence Corps. Hardly anyone had heard of it -- which was not strange, since it had been formed only that month.

`I'm told it has quite a nice cap badge,' said a school friend, John da Silva -- who was in fact to spend his life in Intelligence. I thought that a frivolous observation.

It was now nearly Christmas, and the new officers were all sent on leave over the holiday before they joined their units. One day just before the New Year I was lunching with my father at our club where he introduced me to a member called Carl Sherrington. He was the son of a famous Cambridge physiologist who had won the Nobel Prize with E.D. Adrian, and made a living as a railway economist. He knew the capacity -- that is to say how many trains a day could be run -- of every railway line in Europe and America. Hearing that I was expecting to be posted to the depot of the Intelligence Corps, he said, `But Kenneth Strong is itching to get his hands on people like you.'

Two days later I got a letter telling me to report to a Captain Sanderson at the War Office. He wore the ribbons of a veteran of the 1914-18 war and, characteristic of those days, had a moustache. He looked like a friendly, alert terrier. In a corner of the room sat a young officer peering into an epidiascope examining air photographs.

`I understand you know about railways,' said Sanderson, and looked somewhat disconcerted when I said I didn't. `Well, then, your father does.' I recollected that at some time before 1914 my father had been associated with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. `Ah, that must have been it,' said Sanderson, relieved that he now had a cast-iron case for getting me transferred to his department. `Can you read German? Tell me what this means,' he said, thrusting into my hands a long report. At this point his phone rang, and while he answered it I was able to get the gist of the article.

`It's to do with transport in Europe,' I began.

`Excellent,' he said, without troubling me further. `I am hoping you will hear from us soon.' Next week I found myself back in that room, having been ordered to fill a post in MI14. I was twenty-four years old.

The reason Captain Sanderson was so ready to recruit me was simple. MI14 was the German department in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Office. It was still a tiny unit, and even when I left two years later it numbered no more than twenty officers. The staff had hardly the time to wade through the torrent of paper that fell over their desks. For they were expected to advise the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) what Hitler would do next. The Military Intelligence Directorate contained such well-known departments as MI5 (Security) and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service); and certain other sections specialised in obtaining information from a specific source -- one, for example, interrogated prisoners of war and, having bugged their rooms, listened to their talk. But there was one department which nearly all the others served. That was MI3. It concerned itself with operational intelligence: it collected and interpreted all information from whatever source about the military forces and intentions of other countries -- 3a dealt with Iraq, Iran and the Near East; 3b with Italy; 3c with the Soviet Union.

The German section had once been part of MI3, but it was now so important that it had broken away to become MI14. In MI14 one unit led by the second in command assessed German strategy and intentions. Another worked on what could be discovered about the operations of the German secret services, the Abwehr, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst. (Its head was a theatrical character, Brian Melland, and he was aided by Leo Long, an efficient young officer who was to be shamed years later when he was identified as one of the Cambridge spies. Long was a pupil of Anthony Blunt: self-confident, masterful and dismissive of fools.) Another section, vital for Bomber Command, identified the whereabouts and strength of the German anti-aircraft or Flak regiments. It was led by a former England cricket captain, G.O. `Gubby' Allen. Crucial to the enterprise was the German Order of Battle section, which tried to estimate the number and character of the German divisions, and identify their commanders. Where were these divisions, and were they stationary or moving? The section I joined tried to answer the second of these questions.

After the spit and polish of my officer cadet training, the atmosphere of MI14 was anything but regimental. This was not surprising. It contained only three regular officers, and the only thing that was regimental about its chief, Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong, was his tartan trews. He looked like a beaver -- an eager beaver bursting out of his uniform, with dark hair, a fine forehead, clever, shifty eyes and so chinless that he came to be known as the hangman's dilemma. Strong had been assistant military attache in Berlin before the war, spoke German well and knew several of his contemporaries and elders on the German General Staff. His reports from Berlin were so impressive that they were one of the factors, it was said, that persuaded Chamberlain to introduce conscription.(1) Strong won his reputation as an intelligence officer when he predicted the Germans would attack through the Ardennes in 1940. The French -- our senior ally militarily and in intelligence work -- scouted this bizarre idea.(2) Yet before the war, so Strong recalled, the senior officer present at the end of any lecture he gave would warn the audience against being over-influenced by his words on the strength of the German army; and he was forbidden at the Imperial Defence College to suggest that the German air force might give close support to their troops in the field.(3)

Strong's task was enormous. He had to build an organisation almost from scratch and shoulder a multitude of tasks, such as teaching the Military Operations departments what kind of army they were facing and how it would fight. He was tireless in explaining how the German General Staff was drilled in the tactic of the Schwerpunkt, or sudden concentration of armour and infantry to punch a hole in the enemy's line and exploit the breakthrough. He knew how efficient the German army was: `You need three British battalions to equal one German. When will people learn this?' he used to say. But now his most pressing problem was to gauge how likely Hitler was to invade England. The unit in MI14 which I joined was there to put the evidence before him.

Captain Sanderson, the head of the unit, collated this evidence. But the crucial figure in the room was the man of my own age whom I had seen studying air photographs when I was first interviewed. This was Peter Earle, one of only three regular officers in the British Army who at the beginning of the war knew how to interpret air photographs; it was he who assessed the most crucial evidence by counting the fluctuating number of barges and other craft assembled in the Channel ports. If Strong made one think of a beaver, Earle had the air of a greyhound. He was lean and sensitive, with delicate hands and a quizzical expression. He was one of those Etonians who appear to be indolent but in fact develop curious talents and interests. Like Strong he was not a stereotyped regular officer. He disliked horses -- `nasty, unpredictable animals' -- but knew a lot about fast cars. However squalid our conditions became (we were soon moved underground) his own corner of the room somehow conveyed the calm of a country house. If some vulgarian patronised or oiled to him, his expression never changed; only his nostrils quivered. He was highly strung yet imperturbable -- a quality much needed when later he became military assistant to the formidable and alarming Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke. He was later to tell me that my predecessor was a devious, bone-idle and bad-tempered officer whom Strong had sacked by the well-used method of getting him appointed at a higher rank to a department in Military Operations, whence he departed by being again promoted to the rank of major in some other long-suffering organisation.

My prime task was to collate the evidence we got on the movement of German troops. What kind of evidence could we hope to get?

• Military intelligence, so goes the well-worn joke, is a contradiction in terms. In fact it resembles a fountain, the jets of evidence spurting from different pipes. Air photographs; prisoner of war interrogations; captured documents; the reports of our own, and the gossip of foreign, diplomats; the observations of businessmen and industrialists travelling abroad, and the stories filed by foreign correspondents whose sources of information could be more reliable than those of our own diplomats. We studied newspapers, broadcasts and dozens of specialised periodicals that, unknown to their editors, rendered up secrets. Two organisations produced the most intriguing material. The first was MI6, whose spymasters recruited agents in Europe and elsewhere. The second was the by now famous, but then deadly secret, Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where the radio messages sent between units of the German armed forces were decyphered.

Someone has to put all this information together and make sense of it if he can. It is not an academic exercise, although academic skills and techniques come in handy. The War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Planning Staff wanted quick answers to the questions they asked. What would be Hitler's next move? How strong would the German forces be were we to land in Sardinia -- and how quickly could they be reinforced? To answer such questions a staff had to be set up in each of the service ministries to estimate how many divisions, air squadrons, U-boats and capital ships the enemy possessed; where they were located and employed tactically; how many divisions were armoured, motorised or horsedrawn, and which squadrons were fighters, medium or heavy bombers. Almost anything that told us about the enemy's army was grist to the mill. And when -- as was often the case -- one source said one thing and another the opposite, we had to judge which was the more reliable.

Other ministries in Whitehall were expected to help the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry in their work: the Foreign Office injected political intelligence, the newly created Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) informed them about enemy production of weapons and identified bottlenecks or weaknesses in his economy. So a handful of officers and officials, each a spider, sat at the centre of their web and as each fly or item of intelligence got caught on a strand, they scuttled down to inspect and devour it, hoping that one day a fat bumblebee of information would land on the web and reveal what the other insects were about.

At the beginning of the war the British secret service stood higher in the imagination of foreigners than in Whitehall. The prestige of spies had waned. The masterful agent, who purloins the draft of a secret naval treaty from the private residence of a senior civil servant in the Admiralty, existed only in the imagination of the authors of thrillers. Foreigners took at face value the yarns of dozens of writers from Kipling and Buchan to Dornford Yates in which lean, bronzed British officers, often in disguise, outwitted the other side in the `game': the Great Game. `The only game in the world worth playing,' in Jim Maitland's words.(4) So much so that any event which thwarted their own plans was apt to be attributed to the British secret service. The reality was, alas, somewhat different. Sir Stewart Menzies, the legendary `C', had no second-in-command to organise his office, with the result that he worked late hours and had had no leave for two years. The heads of the espionage and counter-espionage sections hated each other and were not on speaking terms. None of the staff of MI6 was a university graduate. Hugh Trevor-Roper left a memorable account of the power struggles in MI6 during the war(5) and of the egregious characters who worked there; Graham Greene wrote of futile days in East Africa spent controlling agents whom he knew to be unreliable and corrupt and who provided worthless information. The tales of John le Carre told of a world of mirrors in which no one could be certain on which side agents were operating. These gifted writers turned MI6 into a black comedy. From the days when Sir Mansfield Cumming (the original `C') set it up in 1909 its leaders rejoiced in sobriquets like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair).(*)

Between the wars MI6's tiny staff was mainly engaged in identifying Soviet attempts to cause mutinies in the armed forces and to capture the leadership of the left and the trade unions. That famous clubland hero Bulldog Drummond was portrayed by Sapper as the leader of the Black Gang, a set of ex-army officers clandestinely kidnapping Soviet agents as they were infiltrated into Britain under the direction of the greatest of all villains, Carl Peterson. Intellectuals, horrified by Sapper's vision of life, denounced the gang as a bunch of fascists, but in fact they were pursuing a quarry that existed in real life. Christopher Andrew, the doyen of scholars of the intelligence community, concluded that the Zinoviev letter was not a forgery, even though the action of MI5 in briefing Admiral Blinker Hall to leak the letter to the Daily Mail was inexcusable.(+)(6)

The zeal of the intelligence services in such anti-Soviet activities was their undoing. Lloyd George sacked the head of Special Branch, Baldwin treated them with disdain (though his eminence grise J.C.C. Davidson employed retired MI5 officers to infiltrate Labour Party headquarters), and Chamberlain distrusted the former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart's claims that an opposition existed in Germany waiting to overthrow Hitler on a sign from Britain. When members of this opposition came to London to meet Chamberlain, he said they reminded him of Jacobites in the reign of William III.

Intelligence is not the road to promotion in the armed services. Before 1914 only that outrageous Admiral Lord Charles Beresford understood its value to the navy, and got the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, to establish the Naval Intelligence Department in 1886. (In revenge the Admiralty cut the salaries of those who served in it.) As a result the Admiralty's record in the First World War was miserable, misreading intercepts and misleading Jellicoe and Beatty in action in the North Sea. The Commander in Chief of the army, Queen Victoria's cousin the Duke of Cambridge, Buller in the Boer War, and Haig and Henry Wilson in the First World War thought intelligence unnecessary. General French nearly lost the war in August 1914 by refusing to believe reports of the great enveloping movement by Kluck on the right wing of the German armies.

Nor was Whitehall much better prepared in 1939. The War Office and the Air Ministry had no technological sections. The War Office was informed that 1400 medium German tanks were in service: in fact only 300 existed. It was part of Hitler's propaganda to exaggerate the size of the German air force, and the Air Ministry fell for his boast that aircraft production would soar from 700 to 1500 a month: in fact in December 1940 only 780 aircraft were produced. This vast air force was intended, so it was put about, to flatten British cities as the Germans had destroyed Guernica, whereas in fact many of the aircraft were Stukas intended to give close air support to the army. Naval intelligence was much more accurate. Hitler began the war with fifty-seven U-boats, and the navy's estimate was only nine more.(7)

The estimates of Germany's economy were again wide of the mark. It was thought to be near collapse through overstrain. Goering's exhortation `Guns before butter' was taken at face value, and the German people were pictured as having tightened their belts so far that they could hardly tighten them further in order to re-arm. Only a Hungarian refugee don at Balliol, Thomas Balogh, questioned these conclusions: in an article in the Economic Journal in September 1938 he argued that the sacrifice made by the German civilian population was much less than was imagined.(8)

The organisation of intelligence was not much better. Intelligence reports are misleading unless they are analysed and interpreted. Yet even when they have been analysed, intelligence is still a mine of controversy unless there is a single body to resolve the different interpretations which each ministry will put forward. In 1936 Sir Maurice Hankey set up the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to give such a unified view, but the Planning Staff ignored it, and the Directors of Intelligence and the three armed services sent only their deputies to its meetings. Not until February 1940 were the Directors of Military, Naval and Air Intelligence all at the same meeting.(9) Each was briefed by his own staff, and each thought his own view of the situation was the most sagacious, so they did not bother to summon meetings of the JIC or ask it to provide an appreciation. The Foreign Office for long refused to share its political intelligence with the armed forces: indeed, it did not distinguish intelligence from the advice it gave to the Cabinet on foreign affairs. To diplomats intelligence and advice were a seamless garment.

The JIC was also burdened with too many responsibilities.(10) It dealt with plans to deceive the enemy, with internal security, with propaganda, with the treatment of prisoners of war, and with topographical intelligence. It jibbed only when it was proposed that it should mastermind the running of double agents. Too many summaries circulated, and a body on future operations duplicated its work. Much of its time was spent in struggling with the administration of intelligence, and it had no secretariat. Until the fall of France the JIC met the Chiefs of Staff only once, and it was never invited to join the Planning Staff in the War Cabinet Office.(11)

As war drew near, MI6's sources of information began to dry up. When Hitler marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 the SIS network of agents in Vienna and Prague unravelled. Until 1937 our military attaches in Berlin had been able to glean considerable information about German military organisations and equipment: after that year their old haunts and contacts were sealed off. The British network in Holland was penetrated by the Abwehr in 1935, and there was no advance warning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. There were indeed warnings from MI6 and the Foreign Office of the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, but earlier that month the War Office had brushed them aside. Paul Thummel, an old-guard member of the Nazi Party and a captain in the Abwehr, was MI6's most prized agent in the Czech network, but he could give no warning of the German attack through the Ardennes though a woman in the Polish underground did. Whether it was this that alerted Strong I do not know, but it did not convince the French. By mid-1940 the military operations branch in the War Office did not believe what the intelligence sections told them, and hardly ever bothered to meet them.

Nevertheless, hope for the intelligence community was on the horizon. Even before war was declared some of the First World War veterans of Blinker Hall's Room 40 in the Admiralty began to recruit for the Government Code and Cypher School which had recently moved to Bletchley Park. Two classics dons were asked to select likely colleagues. Professor F.E. Adcock at Cambridge was diligent, Professor Last at Oxford was not, with the result that many of the earliest members came from Cambridge. Adcock was a fellow of King's, where I had been an undergraduate. He lured so many of the dons I knew best there -- for instance the devotee of Horace, Patrick Wilkinson, and my own director of studies in history, Christopher Morris -- that it did not require much imagination to guess what was going on. The staff was recruited by unabashed nepotism. Nigel de Grey and Dilly Knox of Room 40 days did not hesitate to recruit their sons; Evelyn Sinclair was the sister of `Quex' Sinclair, a former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. The dons were told to say that they were engaged on research into the civil air defence of London. It is certainly true that had security depended on the normal apparatus of passes and sentries, the secret would have not been kept long. One member of the staff who left his pass at home wrote on the temporary pass he was given the name `Heinrich Himmler' and was admitted without demur.

Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief (`C') of MI6, under whom Bletchley nominally operated, once said that the best guarantee of security was to employ kinsmen of those known personally. Today such faith in the integrity of the old boy network may be met with sneers and the mention of Burgess and Blunt; indeed the `fifth man', John Cairncross, did for a short time penetrate the organisation. Yet the secrecy of the work at Bletchley was preserved because the staff, realising how important it was not to gossip, were fanatically loyal to the institution. No one knew the whole story. Few knew, or had time to know, what the others were working on; and the various processes were so complicated that an individual had only `tunnel vision' of the work on which he was personally engaged. At their peak the staff numbered 9000, but for thirty-five years none breathed a word to the media until F.W. Winterbotham wrote his book The Ultra Secret in 1974. Bletchley's success depended on one word: security. The work of the dazzling mathematicians and cryptographers would have gone for nothing had the Germans discovered that we had broken the secret of the Enigma machine.

The material which the cryptographers at Bletchley dissected was gathered by hundreds of men and women at listening posts scattered throughout the country. They worked in six-hour shifts listening to German radio operators sending messages by wireless telegraphy. It was slogging, unrewarding work to record a lot of unintelligible letters in morse. They came to recognise the individual operators by their quirks and idiosyncrasies in transmitting messages, by the frequencies they used and by their call signs. They could tell who sent an unsigned message from the style of the operators chatting to each other. Sometimes they could sense something fishy: in June 1941 the call signs of two construction companies, known to be in Holland, were transmitted from Poland, yet copious transmissions were still coming from Holland, and very few from Poland. The deduction was clear. The construction companies had moved to Poland and the transmissions from Holland were being faked.(12)

The unintelligible messages logged by our radio operators were sent to Bletchley where the cryptographers in Huts 6 and 8 got to work on them. The cryptographers had spotted the weaknesses in the Enigma machine, and the carelessness of those who operated it. They searched for cribs -- some repetition, such as a weather report transmitted in much the same words at the same time of day week in, week out. With these and other devices they put together what they called a menu and fed this into the `bombes' -- electro-mechanical engines, the brain-child of a fellow of King's, Alan Turing. Turing and Gordon Welchman built on the work of the Poles and the French, and Turing was to invent the first automatic electronic digital computer that could store programmes.(13)

The bombes determined the wheel settings of the Enigma machines. When the German navy in February 1942 added a fourth wheel to the machines installed in U-boats, the bombes could not perform, and it was not until December 1942 that the cryptanalysts broke the new Enigma settings. Meanwhile the sinkings by U-boats of Allied convoys soared. This reverse in the Battle of the Atlantic was to have a profound effect on Allied strategy.

The bombes were dispersed over the countryside and serviced by a flotilla of 2000 Wrens. Year after year, with little chance of promotion, they worked, whey-faced, for four weeks of eight-hour shifts followed by four days' leave, getting electric shocks from the bombes and living in hideous conditions. Some collapsed, others had nightmares of breaking security, but they kept going by knowing that what they were doing was vital, in the way that most war work was not.

When the bombes had done their work and found the solution through permutation to the key on the Enigma machine which had been chosen for that day's transmission, what emerged were puzzling messages in German telegraphese. These were sent to Hut 3. If Bletchley had a centre it was there, where the second echelon of the staff got to work. Inevitably the books on Ultra concentrate on the triumphs of the cryptographers in Huts 6 and 8, but Ralph Bennett is right to point out that Hut 3 made the decrypts intelligible.(14) Linguists translated and emended the messages, and intelligence officers made sense of them. Some of the best linguists were schoolmasters accustomed to give top marks only to those boys who presented meticulously accurate translations. The intelligence officers were often dons who elucidated obscurities, abbreviations and map references. If a text was corrupt, they had to make sense of it. The duty officers in Hut 3, who worked an eight-hour shift, then had to paraphrase the Enigma translations into Ultra, so that if the Germans broke our own cypher they would not identify it as an Enigma message.(15) Only then did WAAFs teleprint the messages to the War Office, Admiralty and Air Ministry; and from to army group and army commanders in the field.

Among the first Enigma settings to be broken were those used by the German air force; and many of the messages that were decrypted came from `Flivos', air force liaison officers attached to armoured divisions. What Flivos reported was of intense interest to MI14. In the first year of the war, however, the security surrounding Ultra sometimes defeated those whom it was meant to help. To explain how these German messages had been received, Bletchley invented a ubiquitous, highly-placed agent with the code name of `Boniface', and displayed singular ingenuity in producing convincing situations in which this source might have got hold of the message that was passed to us in MI14: `Source was able to look over the shoulder of GOC of X Fliegerkorps and read . . .' Once bad weather made an Enigma message almost unintelligible since several groups of numbers in the original signal had not been picked up, but the staff at Bletchley excelled themselves: `Source was able to retrieve from a waste paper basket a badly charred document . . .' When such messages were first received the intelligence staffs gave no more credence to them than they would have to the utterances of a chuckle-headed spy. The navy, on the other hand, insisted on the original messages being sent to the Admiralty, but the intelligence staff there were as sceptical as the army about Ultra, and the muddles between the Home Fleet and the Admiralty remind one of the calamities of the Battle of Jutland, when the outnumbered German fleet inflicted heavy casualties on the Royal Navy. Struggles for turf were also inevitable. When Rommel landed in North Africa in February 1941, Bletchley Park (under the nominal supervision of Stewart Menzies) cut red tape, and Hut 3 communicated direct to Wavell's headquarters in Cairo. Sure enough in the winter of 1941-42 the War Office and Air Ministry tried to assert their control at a time when the battles between Eighth Army and the Afrika Korps were fierce and fluctuating. In the end MI6 won out, and the intellectuals were surprised to find a businessman, E.M. Jones, appointed as head of Hut 3, and even more surprised to find that his sagacity in reorganising duties relieved them of chores and gave them more time to do their own work.(16) Similarly, in Whitehall intelligence staffs became more professional and came to recognise how valuable Ultra could be as the numbers of messages they received multiplied. During 1943 the decrypts rose from 30,000 to 90,000, and in the last five months of the war over 45,000 went to the Western and Italian fronts. By that time 9000 people were employed at Bletchley Park. Long before then, `Source Boniface' had faded away.(*)

Ultra was only one of the Bletchley products. Some staff worked on V cyphers, others extracted information about German troop movements from railway cyphers, which revealed consignment numbers -- tedious hack-work, but ultimately rewarding. Dilly Knox broke hand cyphers, which the Abwehr used. These were invaluable to Melland and Long in MI14(d). Patrick Wilkinson worked on the book code of the Italian navy, an old-fashioned cypher that was far harder to break than machine cyphers. Late in the war Bletchley built the first true electronic computer, Colossus, that enabled the British at last to read messages sent by the German High Command, the OKW, to theatre commanders.

Bletchley was a community where age, sex, rank and appearance were irrelevant. The atmosphere was like a senior common room in one of the less stuffy Oxford or Cambridge colleges. Only those with sensitivity to the life of the intellect, like Hugh Alexander or Commander Travis, could succeed in the art of managing the menagerie of talent. There was only one criterion: could you do the job you were assigned? Women were treated as the equals of men -- except, typical of Treasury rules, as regards pay: they were sometimes enrolled as linguists rather than cryptographers in order to get them equal pay. Many of them worked in dull routine jobs, like compiling the Index -- a vast compendium of cross-references so that any message or unit or event could be traced in an instant. They could hold their own if challenged. Jean Howard, one of three women in the liaison section, was not to be cowed when a group of generals came to inspect the war map of the Russian border in early June 1941 and ridiculed the number of pins representing the massed German divisions: surely there were too many? They were taken aback when she replied that her training as an opera singer ill-equipped her to invent an order of battle.

The fact that so many at Bletchley knew each other had advantages. Patrick Wilkinson judged that the friendship between the two chess-players Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry, or between Gordon Welchman and John Jeffries, prevented rivalry between sections that might have been at each other's throats because they were competitors. The young and obscure chalked up successes. Donald Michie, a classics specialist without mathematical training, straight from Rugby School, made a mark as an analyst and later became a professor of machine intelligence at Edinburgh. Mavis Batey decyphered the Italian Fleet signal that told Admiral Cunningham what he needed to know to win the Battle of Matapan. Peter Calvocoressi, whose sole virtue seemed to be that he could read upside down, and who was rated by the War Office as `no good not even for intelligence',(17) was another success, along with his friend Jim Rose, the future literary editor of the Observer and chairman of Penguin Books. F.L. (Peter) Lucas, another King's don, wrote analyses of campaigns that were full of hints and hypotheses: they jogged the mind out of its rut.

Even more remarkable was Harry Hinsley, who had a sixth sense for deducing from the traffic and decrypts if something was up. In the spring of 1940 he tried to get the Admiralty to understand the significance of some decrypts that revealed that heavy ships were leaving the Baltic. He was ignored -- until the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious was sunk off Narvik. From then on Hinsley, still an undergraduate, with an astonishing shock of hair and a cheeky grin, was persona grata at Scapa Flow and at the Admiralty.

Nearly everyone wore civilian clothes: some, Turing among them, were scruffy. The story circulated that when Churchill visited Bletchley in 1941 he met Turing and, turning to Alistair Denniston, said: `I told you to leave no stone unturned in recruiting the best people, but I did not expect you to take me literally.'

One man transformed the standing of intelligence in Whitehall and throughout the armed services. That was Winston Churchill. From his experience at the Admiralty in the First World War Churchill was almost alone among politicians in understanding the value of intelligence. A cardinal rule of intelligence is never to allow officers, however exalted their rank, to see messages sent by top-grade sources before they have been interpreted by the intelligence staff. The CIGS never saw Ultra himself. Nor did Montgomery. Churchill, however, insisted that he be shown all Ultra messages of interest. Stewart Menzies, who had virtually nothing to do with the running of Bletchley, realised that his prestige and power as head of MI6 rested on serving up what the Prime Minister called the golden eggs, and he saw that he got them with his breakfast. As a result Churchill sometimes startled his Chiefs of Staff -- not yet briefed by their Directors of Intelligence -- by referring to some piece of news they had not heard.

Churchill paid several visits to Bletchley, one of which was to have a sequel. In November 1941, maddened by the inability of the administration at Bletchley to persuade Whitehall to exempt some young experts there from military service and to allow them to recruit twenty women clerks and some typists, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Stuart Barry wrote a long personal letter to Churchill explaining their needs and why, for lack of them, the decrypting of Enigma, vital in the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, was being delayed. Churchill immediately dictated a minute to General Ismay in the War Cabinet Offices: `Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.'(18)

Churchill recognised that the problem was not so much the collection of information as the way to use it. Within a week of taking office as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, he ordered the Chiefs of Staff to draw up a new directive for the JIC in which they were bidden to `take the initiative in preparing at any hour of the day or night, as a matter of urgency papers on any particular development'.(19) The JIC soon found their conclusions subjected to scrutiny by Churchill's personal staff. On 5 July 1940 `The Prof' Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, correctly challenged the Air Ministry estimate, endorsed by the JIC, that the German air force could deliver 4800 bombs a day. The tone of the Prime Minister's directive showed he wanted instant action. Like Ezekiel, Churchill breathed life into the dry bones of the JIC. Early in 1939 the War Office had proposed that the chairman of the JIC should be the Foreign Office representative, the ostensible reason being that a neutral civilian would see fair play between the three armed services. The less charitable view of this decision was that the War Office was determined not to allow the Admiralty to take the chair. No wonder: Admiral Godfrey was the one Director full of ideas. His biographer, however, admits that he was not a man to conceal his contempt for less gifted colleagues, in particular the charming courtier and Guardsman, General Beaumont-Nesbit. But the War Office had not reckoned with the young man whom the Foreign Office appointed, William Cavendish-Bentinck. As the youngest of the JIC members, and a civilian, it took Cavendish-Bentinck time and patience to galvanise his colleagues, and only when Churchill spoke could he at last set up a secretariat under an elusive, secretive barrister, Denis Capel Dunn, and impose some sort of discipline upon them.

• Such was the situation when I joined MI14. When I look back on those days and the years that followed, I see not only the remarkable stream of information that came from Ultra and many other sources. I also see the influences -- some beneficent, some malign -- that affected the interpretation of the evidence. I see the inevitable distortions and the immense efforts made by the operational intelligence staffs to produce a coherent explanation of the evidence that would convince army commanders, Supreme Headquarters, the Chiefs of Staff, the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. The Joint Intelligence Committee embodied an ideal: that each ministry would lay on the table its interpretation of the evidence, and after discussion a unanimous report would be signed which the Planners and the Chiefs of Staff could use. The ideal was frustrated. The War Office and the Air Ministry were both in the grip of what might be called an ideology -- a theory of how the war could be won. The ideology was not constant: it fluctuated according to the fortunes of war. Indeed, within each ministry different interpretations were held, and the director of intelligence would be canvassed by one or other faction. Dejection in defeat affected the appreciation which Auchinleck and his staff made when the Eighth Army was driven back by Rommel to El Alamein. They looked over their shoulder and saw the German army advancing into the Caucasus, so they drew up plans to evacuate the Nile Delta and send troops a thousand miles to the north to protect the oil in Iraq and Iran. Per contra, the euphoria of victory in Normandy blinded Montgomery and his staff: they neglected the evidence from Ultra that the Germans were determined to hold on to the Scheldt estuary and stop Antwerp operating as a port.(20) I was to learn time and again that those of us who served in operational intelligence and tried to make sense of the information got it wrong. Had I been years older I might have felt as Shakespeare's Henry IV did:

O God! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent --
Weary of solid firmness -- melt itself
Into the sea...
O! if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

But this happy youth had no intention of doing so. On that Christmas of 1940, like everyone else, I was full of boundless, unreasonable optimism.

Camera Images and National Meanings BLAH BLAH. THINGS YOU ALREADY KNOW. BIG FUCKING DEAL

I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I
remember the images that I filmed of the month of January
in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my
memory. They are my memory.
Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

A photograph provides evidence of continuity, reassuring in its "proof" that an event took place or a person existed. Though it is commonly understood that photographs can be easily manipulated, this knowledge has had little effect on the conviction that the camera image provides evidence of the real.(3) One seemingly cannot deny that the camera has "seen" its subject, that "it has been there." One looks through the image to the "reality" it represents, forgetting, in essence, the camera's mediating presence. Thus, the camera image testifies to that which has been.

I DIDN'T KNOW THAT. OH WAIT. I KNEW THAT. THERRE IS NOTHING IN THIS BUT FANCY WRITING AND STUFF EVERYBODY KNOWS. JOURNALISM IS A FRAUD. LIKE MODERN ART. MODERN ART? COME ON, THAT IS SICKL. WHITE ON WHITE?? 22 MILLION DOLLARS. IT'S UNJUST AND RIDICULOUS. THE EMPEROR IS BUTT NAKED MY FRIEND. EVERYONE KNOWS IT, BUT THESE GUYS HAVE TO MAKE A LIVING.

Memory is often embodied in objects--memorials, texts, talismans, images. Though one could argue that such artifacts operate to prompt remembrance, they are often perceived actually to contain memory within them or indeed to be synonymous with memory. No object is more equated with memory than the camera image, in particular the photograph. Memory appears to reside within the photographic image, to tell its story in response to our gaze.

Since its invention, the photograph has been associated with memory and loss. An early emphasis on portrait photography demonstrated the desire to fix an identity in the image, to have the image live after the individual's death.(1) Hence, the photograph evokes both a trace of life and the prospect of death. Roland Barthes famously wrote, "Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me ... is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph."(2) In its arrest of time, the photograph appears to hold memory in place and to offer a means to retrieve an experience of the past.

Yet memory does not reside in a photograph, or in any camera image, so much as it is produced by it. The camera image is a technology of memory, a mechanism through which one can construct the past and situate it in the present. Images have the capacity to create, interfere with, and trouble the memories we hold as individuals and as a nation. They can lend shape to histories and personal stories, often providing the material evidence on which claims of truth are based, yet they also possess the capacity to capture the unattainable.

However, the relationship of the camera image to memory and history is one of contradiction. On one hand, photographed, filmed, and videotaped images can embody and create memories; on the other hand, they have the capacity, through the power of their presence, to obliterate them. Some Vietnam veterans say they have forgotten where some of their memories came from--their own experience, documentary photographs, or Hollywood movies. The AIDS Quilt, as a means of forgetting the gaunt figures of people who have died of AIDS, often presents images of them as healthy and robust individuals. For every image memory produced, something is forgotten.

I would like to examine the role of the image in producing both memory and amnesia, both cultural memory and history. Camera images, still and moving, provide important evidence of the past and help define its cultural meaning. They offer incomplete but often compelling versions of the past that often eclipse more in-depth historical texts. They are also a primary mechanism through which individuals participate in the nation. Indeed, national stories are often mediated through specific camera images. This chapter addresses the role of camera images in the production of cultural memory and history through three well-known images: the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination, the television image of the Challenger explosion, and the home video image of the Rodney King beating.

Remembering the Image

When Chris Marker says the images he filmed "are my memory," he is invoking the common conception of the photographic image as a receptacle of memory, the place where memory resides. What does it mean to say that an image, which remains caught in time, is the equivalent of memory? One of the most fundamental characteristics of camera images is their apparent fixing of an event at a single moment. Yet it is precisely this quality of the camera image that distinguishes it from memory. For, unlike photographs or film images, memories do not remain static through time--they are reshaped and reconfigured, they fade and are rescripted. Though an image may fix an event temporally, the meaning of that image is constantly subject to contextual shifts.

A photograph provides evidence of continuity, reassuring in its "proof" that an event took place or a person existed. Though it is commonly understood that photographs can be easily manipulated, this knowledge has had little effect on the conviction that the camera image provides evidence of the real.(3) One seemingly cannot deny that the camera has "seen" its subject, that "it has been there." One looks through the image to the "reality" it represents, forgetting, in essence, the camera's mediating presence. Thus, the camera image testifies to that which has been.

In Ridley Scott's 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, replicants (cyborgs with four-year life spans) are given photographs depicting childhoods they never had. The photographs provide evidence of their humanness, prove the existence of mothers and fathers and childhood homes, record birthdays celebrated. These photographs establish "fake" memories for the replicants, their designer Tyrell explains, to compensate for their emotional inexperience. Yet the images do not simply render the replicants more docile and emotionally stable; they provide the replicants with evidence of their subjectivity. As Kaja Silverman notes, the fake memories of the photographs are constitutive--they construct the replicants as the subjects they appear to be, subjects with childhoods.(4)

The emphasis on photographs as providers of memory in Blade Runner has been discussed at length, precisely because of the anxiety it provokes concerning the veracity of memories and the role of camera images in their construction. The photographs in Blade Runner raise the fundamental question of whether one can ever judge a memory to be "fake" or "real" and what role the camera image plays in creating that uncertainty. How can one know, for instance, that all memories derived from photographs are not as "fake" as the replicants'?

In a certain sense, all camera images can be seen as "screen memories." Freud defined screen memories as memories that function to hide, or screen out, more difficult memories the subject wants to keep at bay.(5) Similarly, an image can substitute for a memory. The distinction between the image and the memory, between the screen and the real, becomes imperceptible. There is no "original" memory to be retrieved; it has already been rewritten and transformed. Freud noted that all memories from childhood may be screen memories:

It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves.(6)

This distinction between the formation, rather than emergence, of memories is crucial. Does the photographic image allow the memory to come forth, or does it actually create the memory?

This critical question applies not only to personal memories of childhood but also to collective and national memories induced by camera images. Freud not only suggests that memories are often formed or scripted at a later time but also elucidates the relationship between memory and fantasy. He defines memory as the object of desire, formed in "periods of arousal" to create a tangle of memory and fantasy within the individual. In analogous fashion, fantasy becomes central to the stories told in the larger narrative of the nation.

The image plays a central role in shaping the desire for cultural memory, specifically the need to share personal experiences. Indeed, the camera image blurs the boundary between cultural memory and history. Well-known images frequently become part of our personal recollections, personal (and "amateur") images often move into public arenas, and Hollywood docudramas can rewrite once personal recollections of "national" events.

At the same time, camera images are evidence of history and can themselves become the historical. Indeed, history is often described in image metaphors. The writings of Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most influential in representing history as an image.(7) In a famous passage in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin wrote:

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.... To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" ... It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.(8)

For Benjamin, history is the image of a fleeting moment. The historical image announces absence, loss, irretrievability. Like a screen memory, it offers itself as a substitute.

The image Benjamin writes about in "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is an instant image, conjured up in a flash. It is the image of history arrested, a moment of historical rupture when everything stops and is irrevocably altered. This is history as the photographic image, history standing still.(9) Still and moving images shape memory and history in fundamentally different ways. The still image carries a particular power, in its arrested time, to evoke the what-has-been; it seems to have an aura of finality. Stillness is precisely what allows the photograph to be, in Eduardo Cadava's phrase, "the uncanny tomb of our memory."(10) The photograph achieves its moment of certitude in its evidence of death, its capacity to conjure the presence of the absent one.(11)

Yet the historical image is not only represented in still photographs. It is also constructed in the realm of cinematic and television narrative, as both drama and docudrama. The Hollywood docudrama is a central element in the construction of national meaning. The films of World War II, for instance, retain a powerful cultural currency; they provide popular narratives of the war that supersede and overshadow documentary images and written texts. Similarly, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, the history of the Vietnam War is being "written" not only by historians but also through Hollywood narrative films produced for popular audiences. These films are ascribed historical accuracy by the media and reenact famous documentary images of the war. They represent the history of the war, in particular to a generation too young to have seen it represented contemporaneously on television.

The historical television image would seem at first to evoke not a fixed history but, in its immediacy and continuity, a kind of history in the making. The essence of the television image is transmission. It is relentlessly in the present, immediate, simultaneous, and continuous. Hence, television is defined by its capacity to monitor (in the form of surveillance cameras) and to be monitored, to transmit images regardless of whether anyone is watching. The primary elements of television's historicization are repetition, reenactment, and docudrama.

The blurring of boundaries between the image of history and history as an image, between the still and moving image, between document and reenactment, between memory and fantasy, and between cultural memory and history is evident in the construction of national memory. Camera images--photographic, cinematic, televisual, documentary, and docudrama--play a vital role in the development of national meaning by creating a sense of shared participation and experience in the nation. It was the collective viewing of television images of the Gulf War, for instance, that made possible a "national experience" of the war. Similarly, the television image of the Challenger space shuttle exploding prompts a shared cultural memory of that event. Though the still photographic image is crucial to memory, and memory and history are often evoked by flashes of images, it could also be argued that memory most often takes the form of cultural reenactment, the retelling of the past in order to create narratives of closure and to promote processes of healing.

It does not follow, however, that the collective experience of watching "national" events on television leaves all viewers with similar and singular interpretations. Rather, in watching national television events, viewers engage with, whether in agreement or resistance, a concept of nationhood and national meaning. Benedict Anderson has written of the "imagined community" of the modern nation as being crucial to its coherence:

[The nation] is an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... [The nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.(12)

Anderson points to the tombs of the unknown soldiers as emblems of the modern culture of nationalism precisely because they are either empty or filled with unidentified bodies; the bodies they contain (either literally or symbolically) are defined solely by their national status. These tombs do not mark individuals, as do the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt. They are, in Anderson's words, "saturated with ghostly national imaginings." Similarly, when one views a "national" text such as a Hollywood docudrama or television coverage of an event of intense public scrutiny, one participates as part of an imagined audience specifically coded as American.

National events are often traumatic ones; we remember where we were when they happened. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, and the Challenger explosion, stand out as some of these moments of shock, experienced not as part of the continual flow of history but as ruptures in it. (Earlier events such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the death of President Roosevelt, primarily experienced via radio, also produced a collective national witnessing.)

Psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik call these kinds of memories "flashbulb memories" that "suggest surprise, an indiscriminate illumination, and brevity."(13) They find a correlation between the fixed memories of national events and traumatic personal events and suggest that surprise, extraordinariness (seeing an authority figure cry, for instance), and consequentiality (the effect of the event on their lives) are central aspects of this memory retention. These vivid memories evoke photographic ("flashbulb") moments in which history appears to stand still. Yet research on flashbulb memories has shown that, however vivid they may be, they often bear little resemblance to the initial experience.

Increasingly, Americans participate in the witnessing of history through camera images; "where we were" when it happened was in front of the television screen. Indeed, recent psychological research shows that people often misremember the moment when they first heard of a national catastrophe by reimagining themselves in front of a television set.(14) This particular mechanism of remembering, whereby we imagine our bodies in a spatial location, is also a means by which we situate our bodies in the nation. Photography, film, and television thus help define citizenship in twentieth-century America. The experience of watching "national" events, from the Kennedy assassination to the first moon walk, enables Americans, regardless of the vast differences among them, to situate themselves as members of a national culture. This experience is an essential component in generating the sense that a national culture, a "people," persists.

The Zapruder Film:
From Still to Reenactment

When an image coincides with traumatic events of historical rupture, it plays a central role in the construction of national meaning. Abraham Zapruder's film of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 (Figure 1) is perhaps the most famous piece of documentary film in American history. It is both a still and moving image icon: because the moving image was restricted from public view, for twelve years it was seen in public only as a series of stills. The Zapruder film represents history as a succession of individual frames sliding forward in slow motion, offering only fragments of clues to what happened. It is a secret image, hidden from view, imbued with a kind of sacred status, as if it holds within it an essential clue to the meaning of this event. Never before had a piece of film been so dissected (in this case, as a surrogate for Kennedy's absent corpse) in the belief that it contained the truth--a truth existing somewhere between the frames.

In the Zapruder film, the limousine carrying the president, Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas governor John Connally, and his wife, Nellie, drives past the camera in a matter of seconds. Briefly obstructed by a stand of trees, Kennedy reemerges into the frame the moment after he is shot for the first time; the camera then witnesses the impact of the fatal shot and follows the car swiftly to the right as it speeds away. Jacqueline Kennedy, clad in a pink suit and pillbox hat, first cradles her husband's head, then crawls backward onto the trunk of the car, presumably to aid a Secret Service agent running toward it. The original Super-8 film presents a grainy color image, its detail blurred by motion--an image that hides as much as it reveals.

The Zapruder film has its own history, and its cultural status has changed several times. It was shot on a home movie camera by Abraham Zapruder as he watched Kennedy ride by. Although an amateur, Zapruder, who ran a dress factory in Dallas, was a skilled cameraman. Richard Stolley, who purchased the film from Zapruder for Time-Life, has stated:

He thought the gunshot was a backfire, then through the viewfinder saw Kennedy slump and realized he had been wounded. "If I'd had any sense I would have dropped to the ground," he said, "because my first impression was that the shots were coming from behind me." Instead, he froze, screaming, "They killed him, they killed him," and kept his camera trained on the limousine and the bloody chaos inside until it went through the underpass.(15)

Zapruder sold the film to Time-Life for $150,000, which published still images from it the following week in Life magazine, without mention of Zapruder. By presenting "exclusive" photos, as if one of its photographers had been present, Life erased the film's amateur status. The footage was then locked away by Time-Life, which permitted only select viewers to see it (among them Dan Rather, whose success in journalism owed much to his proximity to this event). Some assassination historians contend that frames were reversed when they were printed in the Warren Report and that the captions and order for the frames published in Life were misleading.(16)

The Zapruder film thus has a different meaning as still images than as a moving image. The power of the film image lies precisely in its sequence of frames that appear to tell a story, a horrible story, with temporal precision. When Life publisher C. D. Jackson saw the film, he is reported to have been so disturbed that he had Time-Life acquire the motion-picture rights to it; although Life only needed print rights, Jackson wanted to suppress what the moving image showed.(17) Certainly, the sequence is much more palatable as a succession of still images. Indeed, its public release as a moving image in 1975 resulted in calls for another investigation. The relentless scrutiny of the image in both government analysis and public discourse has concentrated on precisely what its movement means: Did Kennedy's head fall backward or forward? From which direction was the bullet fired? This image retains power not only as the documentation of a national tragedy but also as evidence of the crucial role of the camera. The iconic power of these few film frames derives from what they demonstrate about the camera's technical ability to capture a crucial moment, to tell the story unseen by the "naked" eye.

The Zapruder film thus changed over time from an amateur home movie to a copyrighted news image to a piece of legal and historical evidence to "evidence" of a conspiracy. This filmed image, so central to the American historical consciousness, so inseparable from the event itself, has played a particular role in symbolizing Kennedy's life and what is scripted in retrospect as America's loss of national innocence. The instant captured in this film is historicized as the moment when the country changed, when it went from being a nation of promise, good intentions, and youthful optimism to one of cynicism, violence, and pessimism. This historical narrative not only promotes a simplistic nostalgia about the America of the 1950s and the "Camelot" years of the Kennedy administration but also prevents healing from taking place. As Michael Rogin writes:

The widespread feeling that America began to fall apart after Kennedy was killed prolongs national mourning.... The unresolved assassination, combined with Kennedy's complicity with the forces suspected of doing him in, has blocked a national mourning of the president he actually was, encouraging the regression from what [Melanie] Klein calls the depressive position, where loss can be acknowledged and overcome, to idealization, splitting, and paranoia.(18)

The trope of America's losing its innocence at a precise moment is a well-worn one, a concept reiterated with Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and other events. The "regression" noted by Rogin is inextricable from the idea that the moment of the assassination, the instant captured by Zapruder, changed everything. In a certain sense, it is not possible to imagine the event in the absence of the Zapruder images. The film has become the event.

That the assassination, whether photographed or not, would be an ongoing subject of debate is incontrovertible. The existence of the film opened the door for scientific inquiry, but the sequence clearly has defied such analysis. The image withholds its truth, clouds its evidence, and tells us, finally, nothing. Science cannot fix the meaning of the Zapruder film precisely because the narrative of national and emotional loss outweighs empirical investigation. We cannot have, perhaps ultimately do not want to have, a definitive answer to why and how it happened--the answer is potentially overwhelming. Hence, fantasies about what happened are as important in national meaning as any residue of the "truth."(19)

The Zapruder film, imbued as it is with fantasy and nostalgia, has also been rescripted in retrospect. For subsequent generations, it has become so synonymous with the assassination that some think it was seen live on television. In 1975 the film was first shown on television by assassination researcher Robert Groden and television journalist Geraldo Rivera. Inspired by the image, Ant Farm and T. R. Uthco, two media art collectives in San Francisco, went to Dallas to reenact the film for a videotape called The Eternal Frame (1976; see Figure 2).(20) In what they saw as an attempt to get at the "truth" (which was the image) and, secondarily, as an exercise in bad taste, they drove repeatedly through Dealey Plaza, with various members of the group (one in drag as Jackie) replaying the famous scene. The event they were reenacting, however, was not the assassination so much as the taking of the Zapruder film itself. Just as the image had been rerun again and again, the artists drove through the plaza again and again. Ant Farm and T. R. Uthco reiterate the primacy of the image by having artist Doug Hall, as the "artist-president" Kennedy, state in a speech:

Like all presidents in recent years, I am in reality nothing more than another image on your television sets.... I am in reality only another link in that chain of pictures which makes up the sum total of information accessible to us all as Americans. Like my elected predecessors, the content of the image I present is no different than the image itself. Because I must function only as an image, I have chosen in my career to begin with the end and to be born in a sense even as I was dying.

Uncanny in its presaging of the image politics of the 1980s and 1990s, The Eternal Frame is an attempt to produce a compelling simulacrum of the event. The "frame"--which is, by implication, eternally rerun--is primary here.

Yet in striving for macabre humor, these artists did not anticipate the power of mimetic interpretation and reenactment. Dealey Plaza is a popular tourist destination; people make pilgrimages and now visit the museum on the sixth floor of the book depository building, the point from which Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have fired the fatal shots. Rather than stand in horror, the tourists who witnessed the artists' performance wept, reminisced, and took photographs, apparently under the impression that this was an officially sanctioned event. For them, the reenactment was a conduit to participation, a cathartic reliving of where they had been. They made comments such as: "I saw all of it on television after it happened"; "It looks so real now"; "I'm glad we were here.... It was a beautiful enactment." Rescripting the film like the artists, they found pleasure in reexperiencing this moment of trauma--one could even say that, despite its intent to the contrary, the parody had a healing effect.

The reenactment of The Eternal Frame had a small audience, and it has since been usurped by Oliver Stone's controversial film JFK (1991), which incorporated the Zapruder film itself. This docudrama contends, among other things, that the Zapruder film is a crucial piece of evidence that the conspirators who killed Kennedy had not counted on, thus accounting for its suppression. JFK focuses on the real-life efforts of Jim Garrison, a Louisiana district attorney (played by Kevin Costner), during the late 1960s to bring someone, anyone, to trial for participation in the alleged assassination plot. Eventually Garrison tried Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, on charges of conspiracy but failed to win a conviction.

Mixing documentary footage and reenactment, fact and fictionalization, JFK attempts to establish the existence of a wide conspiracy by debunking many of the facts of the case against Oswald. The film centers on a group of shady figures in New Orleans with connections to Oswald, the anti-Castro movement, and an underground homosexual community. The focus of the film, however, is Garrison and his fervent belief that the truth of the assassination can be found through the American legal system. Stone invented "consolidated" characters and fictional scenes that he contended were "close to the truth," and he spent much of the ensuing debate about the film defending his facts and research.

The opening sequence of JFK has Kennedy arriving in Dallas and culminates with the motorcade moving through the streets. Intercutting historical footage with reenacted scenes of the crowd, the film builds to the moment of the shot but defers its image. As the shots ring out, the screen goes black, and viewers see its aftermath--a flock of birds flying to the sky and fleeting glimpses of the limousine speeding away. It is not until much later, during the climactic courtroom scene, that the Zapruder film is shown--in a new, improved, closeup version. The Shaw trial, which took place in 1969, was the first public screening of the Zapruder film. Thus, JFK reenacts both the withholding of the Zapruder film and its charged emergence as an historical image; the audience waits for the image, the moment of impact, again.

The official reason for the suppression of the Zapruder film was to protect the Kennedy family and, as Life's publisher concluded, to protect the American public from the disturbing moving image. In JFK, Garrison is portrayed as neglecting his family in his obsession with the assassination; it is specifically during the screening of the Zapruder film that he is seen reuniting with his wife and son as they sit and watch. The Zapruder film, of course, depicts the demise of the First Family, and JFK attempts to reinscribe the image of the American family shattered by tragedy. This convention of the film is underscored by its insistent indictment of homosexuals, for which it has been criticized by Rogin and others.

Much of the controversy surrounding JFK concerned Oliver Stone's audacity at playing the historian. Yet in their criticism of Stone media critics overlooked the power of his role as docudrama-maker. The meanings of the Zapruder film continue to shift each time it is reenacted, and mimesis becomes history. Indeed, the impressionistic style of Stone's film, with its mix of fact, fiction, and docudrama, is precisely what makes it a memory text. Like memory, the film combines fantasy with fragments of facts. The Zapruder film has the capacity to replace personal memories of the Kennedy assassination, to become those memories; JFK has the capacity to replace the Zapruder film. All subsequent depictions of the Zapruder film are irrevocably altered by its inscription in JFK. Like the films of World War II, Stone's docudrama may operate twenty years from now to encapsulate the story of the assassination at the expense of its documentary image.

In its transformation from still image to moving image to reenactment, the Zapruder film reveals the phenomenological relationship of the image to history and the role of the docudrama as a site of history-making. Reenactment as a historical strategy long preceded the television and film docudrama through the tradition of historical theater and fiction. However, the mass-media context of film and television docudrama amplifies the effects of cultural reenactment. Part of what makes the mimesis of reenactment cathartic is the anticipation of the event we know is coming. Our bodies wait for the moment of the shot.

The Challenger Explosion:
Voyeuristic History

Although the Zapruder film is mythologized as a live television image, it filtered into the national consciousness slowly, through still images. The live images of history in the 1960s were the shooting of Oswald and the first steps on the moon, images produced by the rare live television camera. Television news images in the field were almost exclusively shot on film, and hence subject to delay, until the late 1970s. The television image of the 1986 Challenger disaster marked a turning point in the visual recording of American history, a transition from film to television. In contrast to the Zapruder film, a secret image that was restricted from the public eye in its original form, the television images of the Challenger explosion were unanticipated, unedited, and broadcast live (see Figure 3). These images were unyielding and distant yet relentless and voyeuristic. The blurry image of the cloud of smoke of the exploded space shuttle was emphatically a video image, an image of surveillance; viewers also watched Christa McAuliffe's parents and students, live, at the moment they realized that their daughter and teacher had just been blown up.(21)

The capacity of television technology to transmit images instantly via satellite implicates spectators in new ways. With the Challenger explosion, Americans were witness to a high-tech space-exploration spectacle gone awry, a tragedy with roots in the Cold War space race. The image of the explosion was endlessly repeated, the repetition itself forming a kind of reenactment. Voyeuristically watching the parents and students of Christa McAuliffe, Americans were pre-scripted to share their pride and enthusiasm over the fact that an "ordinary" teacher could experience space flight via U.S. technology. The mission was even timed to allow President Reagan to interview McAuliffe in space during his State of the Union address. As a public relations event, a nationalistic project intended to promote U.S. technology and give the average American a personal stake in the space program, the Challenger failed spectacularly.

In this context, the McAuliffes' moment of realization became a shared national event. They were primary actors in the construction of an American myth about the family's sacrificing for the nation and mourning the loss of a child. In an essay on remembering Christa McAuliffe, Constance Penley notes that McAuliffe was chosen not because of her talents (there were many more qualified candidates) but, in essence, because of her ordinariness--and she knew it.(22) She was to be emphatically normal in space. Ironically, her story has almost completely overshadowed those of the other astronauts who died in the explosion. Her story also dominates the television movie that was inevitably made about the disaster, Challenger, which aired in 1989 and which begins, eerily, with McAuliffe (played by Karen Allen) rehearsing what was to be her message from space. Christa McAuliffe's narrative, designed to make Americans identify with her as an ordinary, non-astronaut space traveler, thus backfired, instead causing viewers to imagine their own deaths in space. Yet the image of McAuliffe's naivete and patriotic earnestness, chronicled in her biography, "I Touch the Future...," and in the Challenger movie, has to a certain extent restored NASA as the Kennedy-inspired symbol of optimistic promise for the future.

Both the Zapruder film and the television image of the Challenger disaster allow us to witness, yet they are central in the American historical imagination in part because they defer the meaning of what is witnessed. The Zapruder film does not tell us who fired the fatal shots and why, and the Challenger image does not reveal what happened to the astronauts. NASA has since acknowledged, for instance, that the capsule of the Challenger continued to climb for twenty-five seconds after the explosion and then descended for three minutes to the water--and that the astronauts died not in the explosion but at the moment of impact with the water. NASA has also acknowledged the existence of audiotapes of the final moments after the explosion, which it has, despite several lawsuits by media organizations, managed to keep secret. According to Time, the tapes reveal that pilot Michael Smith can be heard saying "uh-oh" and that among the last words heard is one astronaut saying to another, "Give me your hand."(23)

Moreover, a purported transcript of the tape, supposedly from McAuliffe's personal recorder, appeared on a private computer bulletin board.(24) This transcript supposedly documents someone yelling, "What happened? What happened? Oh God, no, no." Other voices say, "Turn on your airpack! Turn on your air!" and yell in desperation, and the transcript ends with a voice saying the Lord's Prayer. Haunting and disturbing but completely unverifiable, this transcript nevertheless speaks of a desire to know what the image defers and of the fantasy of bearing witness. The question How did they react to imminent death? becomes How would I react in the face of death? This desire and the fantasies it produces are components of cultural memory. In the world of computer bulletin boards, where information moves from one system to another, from private space to public space, cultural memory is shared, pushing at official history and the ongoing promotion of the space program as a civilian and scientific enterprise rather than a military one.

Does the American public have a right to this information? Penley argues that empirical evidence facilitates mourning. However difficult those details, we need to know them for mourning and closure. She notes that people continue to bring in from Florida beaches artifacts that they claim are refuse from the Challenger, although NASA says it has recovered all possible parts. These acts--the collection of objects, the construction of a fantasy of death--are rituals of mourning.

For those who remember where they were when Kennedy was assassinated, the Challenger disaster may seem less significant. But for those who were in school at the time, many of them watching the launch live as part of the promotion of the teacher-in-space program, it was a defining event. Studies have examined the trauma felt by these children, who generally remembered years later where they were when they saw or heard about it and who often identified McAuliffe with their own teachers. Some fantasized about themselves exploding or about the obliteration of their teachers (in both fear and wish fulfillment).(25) Christa McAuliffe's death is not only a public story but the subject of nightmares, sick jokes, and fantasies.

The memory of "where we were" when the Challenger exploded is, like all memories, a fluid memory of rescripting, reenactment, and imagination. Psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch interviewed a group of students the day after the explosion about their "flashbulb" memories of where they were when they heard of the accident and what their reaction had been; they then reinterviewed the subjects several years later. Not only did many of the students misremember entirely or in part where they had been but, when shown their initial recollections, they were still unable to remember them. Significantly, the study seemed to demonstrate not only that the "original" memories had disappeared but that students who had heard of the explosion in a variety of contexts later remembered that they first heard of it while watching television.(26) The insistent television image was thus highly instrumental in rewriting the memory script. As Neisser and Harsch state, "The hours of later television watching may have been more strongly rehearsed, more unique, more compatible with a social script than the actual occasions of first contact."(27)

By remembering themselves as watching the Challenger explosion on television, these students situate themselves within a "national" experience of the event, sharing the shock of its spectacular and tragic failure with a national audience. Ironically, though, the image that allows the public to feel as though it participated in the event does not aid us in mourning. Rather, we invest it with a truth it cannot reveal. It is the reenactment, the replaying, the fantasizing of the story that allow the mourning process to proceed and the event to acquire meaning. The Challenger explosion is rescripted as a loss of innocence--America once again conceived of as a naive nation, one that believes unfailingly in its technology and feels betrayed--that is recovered through a figure of ordinariness. Through Christa McAuliffe the national trauma of the Challenger explosion can be smoothed over and subsumed into a narrative of patriotic sacrifice.(28)

The Rodney King Video:
The Problem of Reenactment

Whereas the Zapruder film and the image of the Challenger explosion depict nationally traumatic events that would have had historical significance even without their respective images, the videotape of the Rodney King beating is an image that in itself created history (see Figure 4). It is also an image of the 1990s, during which the boundary between domestic and public space is increasingly being blurred as amateur videotapes move effortlessly into the public realm of popular entertainment, news, and history. This brutal beating of a black man by white police officers, captured on a home video camera, came to represent all race relations in the 1990s. This was not a "flash" of history or a moment when people registered "where we were." Rather, it was an image of the endless repetition of history, an "ordinary" image that became history.

In some ways George Holliday's videotape of the Rodney King beating is the Zapruder film of the 1990s, although its meaning retains a different kind of urgency. Whereas the Zapruder film symbolizes a moment of national loss that prompted a nostalgic mourning, the King video signifies the relentless violence of the present. Whereas Abraham Zapruder's film was an exception as an amateur film that changed cultural status, Holliday's videotape was made at a time when video cameras are everywhere; indeed, in the riots that ensued in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the officers who beat King, home video cameras proliferated as much as news cameras.

Like the Zapruder film, the King video changed meaning when it became a series of still images. The defense attorneys deconstructed the sequence and effectively neutralized its violence by presenting it frame by frame. Like the still images of the Kennedy assassination in Life magazine, the stills of the King video reduced events to isolated gestures; blows became hands raised in anticipation, frozen postures without dynamic violence. These images made it possible to rescript King as a threatening and resisting figure and to refigure the beating as a reasonable attempt to restrain a dangerous suspect. Kimberle Crenshaw and Gary Peller write:

The eighty-one-second video was, in short, broken into scores of individual still pictures, each of which was then subject to endless reinterpretation. Then, since no single picture taken by itself could constitute excessive force, taken together, the video tape as a whole said something different--not incredibly clear evidence of racist police brutality, but instead ambiguous slices of time in a tense moment that Rodney King had created for the police.(29)

In both the Zapruder film and the King video, the rupturing of persistence of vision, which allows viewers to fill in the gaps between frames in a moving image, changed the meaning. In the Zapruder film, the space between the still images rendered Kennedy's body movements and the direction of the shots ambiguous; in the King video, it rescripted Rodney King as the agent of his interaction with the police rather than the object of brutal and unreasonable force. What had been popularly seen as incontrovertible evidence of excessive police force when the videotape was first released became, in the course of the first trial, an ambiguous document that was used instead to prove that the police were vulnerable to and threatened by King--an image of Rodney King "in complete control" of the situation, in the words of one juror. This ambiguity undermined assumptions about the nature of the documentary image. If this image was not evidence, then did visual evidence exist?(30)

Rodney King's reluctance to become a public figure, his every move under public scrutiny, is well known. Why, then, did the King video become a national image rather than merely a local one? At what moment did Rodney King's story become part of the nation's story? Not at the moment when the police beat him up--that incident was appallingly ordinary. Nor was it at the moment when George Holliday's camera was focused upon the incident--community organizations in Los Angeles had been distributing cameras and gathering footage of the Los Angeles Police Department's excessive violence for years, but the media had never before been interested. Rodney King's story became the nation's story when news organizations across the country deemed it newsworthy--perhaps at the moment when the mystique about video vigilantes coincided with concern over urban violence. The awkwardness with which King has become a celebrity is precisely attributable to the clash of this image's narrative with nationalistic themes. This is an image of rupture, and Rodney King can't be an American hero.

The Rodney King video shifted status during the Los Angeles riots, when a helicopter news crew videotaped the brutal beating of a white truck driver by four black men. From then on, the King video became one half of two images that defined a national issue: America at war over race. The amateur, low-to-the-ground image taken by George Holliday was replaced by the slick, omniscient view from the helicopter. This image does not show the heroic actions taken by four black strangers who left their home to help Reginald Denny escape and saved his life. The participation of television is crucial here; it was only after they saw him being beaten on TV that these people came to help Denny. Another reluctant public figure, Denny awoke in the hospital without memory of the incident and confused to find Jesse Jackson and Arsenio Hall waiting to see him.

This evolution of the image from a videotape to a series of still images to one of two symmetrical images is crucial in its national meaning. The anger that propelled the Los Angeles riots, an anger at the jury's interpretation of an image everyone had seen, was compellingly and gruesomely enacted in the reverse image of the four young black men beating Reginald Denny as he lay defenseless in the street. This image provided a collective relief in its symmetry with the King video--it somehow balanced the scales, somehow mitigated the troubling image, loaded with historical references, of a black man being beaten by whites. For many, the image of Denny's beating served retroactively to justify the brutal force evident in the King video.

The meaning of the image of Rodney King's beating thus continues to shift, yet it will likely not be subject to the type of reenactment the Zapruder film underwent. There will probably be no television movie of the Los Angeles riots. The television series L.A. Law reenacted the uprising by having one of the lawyers lose his memory after being pulled from his car and beaten. This story of the innocent white victim, in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, may be as close as television will get. Do the hyperdocumented, ultratelevised L.A. riots defy the docudrama form because the formulas of mimetic interpretation can't fit the story of four heroic young black people racing from their home to save a white man's life? Though docudrama reenactments of major disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes are standard television fare, the L.A. riots remain too difficult, too dangerous, for television movie formulas.

However, reenactment is a central aspect of the narrative of the L.A. riots. In the trial of the men involved in the Denny beating, several witnesses--including Denny--testified to events of which they had no memory.(31) Instead, with the prodding of lawyers, they narrated their experience for the jury while watching videotapes of what their experience had been. That the video image became the memory was not new, but what was remarkable was that the court gave it legal and experiential sanction. To this day, the videotape is Reginald Denny's only memory of his ordeal.

In addition, the King video gained a new meaning when placed in a contemporary docudrama, Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992). Inserted into the opening credit sequence of the film, the King video represents the entire history of violence against American blacks and, as Malcolm X's voice-over states, the ways in which blacks are still outsiders in America. The videotape is no longer Rodney King's story but rather is the story of all disenfranchised black men. It is replayed not as a particular moment in history but as the emblem of an ongoing history, one that appears not to be changing but to be replaying constantly, repeating again and again.

The videotape of the beating of Rodney King and its counterpart image of the beating of Reginald Denny thus emerge as particular kinds of screen memories that provide evidence of memories that were never acquired, that never "existed." Irrevocably tied together, these images constitute elements of the cultural memory of the upheaval in Los Angeles, a strange symmetry in the national "experience" of the event.

The relentlessness of television thus operates in tension with the creation of nationally experienced events as moments when we register "where we were." This is no longer the shock of history described by Walter Benjamin, a flash, an arrested moment, a rupture. Rather, the history evoked by the Rodney King video is an endlessly replayed loop.

Yet it is precisely the illusion of continuous flow that is most problematic about televised "history." Television audiences never saw Rodney King's car chase or the desperate rescue of Reginald Denny. They saw snippets of violence with endless commentary, a partial picture with the illusion of completeness.

Reenactment and National Meaning

Thus, historical images are reduced either to still images or to reenactments. When Freud wrote about secondary revision, the process by which a subject revises and narrativizes a dream or memory in order to give it coherence, he was referring to the way in which memories are continuously rewritten and transformed over time until they may bear little resemblance to the initial experience.(32) Renarrativization is essential in memory; indeed, it is its defining quality. Photographs and images from television and film build on the traditions of lithography, historical drama, and the historical novel in retelling the past, but the cultural value of the camera image as evidence of the real shifts this reenactment into new territory of verisimilitude. The reenactments in docudramas can thus be seen not simply as history and memory's reinscription but rather as indicators of the fluid realm of memory itself. Docudramas smooth over historical ruptures, yet, ironically, it is often through reenactment that healing takes place--a healing that necessitates forgetting.

Participation in the nation thus often takes the form of watching or taking part in reenactments. Many historical ceremonies involve the reenactment of battles, with participants sporting historical costumes. On the anniversary of D-Day, World War II veterans parachuted into France to reenact their war experience, reliving what was perhaps the most meaningful moment of their lives. Members of the Veterans Vigil of Honor camp out at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as if to guard it, replaying the codes of war. In the making of Hollywood war films, directors and actors do "battle" on location. Films such as Platoon (1986) reenact famous documentary photographs of the Vietnam War. In television movies, recent events, such as the FBI's standoff with Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the O. J. Simpson freeway chase, are reenacted almost before they are over.

Reenactment is a cathartic means for people to find closure in an event. It is not clear whether this sense of healing involves an erasure and smoothing over of difficult material or a constant rescripting that, like memory, enables an active engagement with the past. Memories and histories are often entangled, conflictual, and co-constitutive. In the context of postmodernity, the slippage between real and fiction, between invention and recovery, is marked.

Yet there also is tension between individual processes of mourning and the simple closure offered by Hollywood docudramas, between the individual memory of traumatic events and their remembrance as national stories. Each carries different cultural meanings and implications. Though an individual may find closure in reenacting an experience, the reenactment of national events through the apparatus of popular culture offers venues for forgetting. The political implications of each are quite different. It is in examining the traffic of cultural events across the porous boundaries of personal memory, cultural memory, and history that the stakes of reenactment can be understood.

GORT

Friday, March 27, 2009

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