Spies in the Garden of American Liberty: 'CitizenFour'

"... if you think no one knows whom you’re calling, what you’re texting, or what websites you’re patronizing, you should think again." -- Ty Burr, Boston Globe, Oct. 30, 2014              

If you already feel strongly that government surveillance,  or spying into all you phone calls and Internet communications and credit card transactions violates your Constitutional rights; and outraged that a systematic government intrusion into the personal lives of Americans has been planned and pursued in total secrecy without any public scrutiny... then you probably don't need to see the new film "CitizenFour."

            The film documents the act of going public with the revelation of a massive government surveillance system by a civilian "senior advisor" to the NSA (National Security Administration) named Edward Snowden.

            And if you believe this spying into everybody's personal business in the name of national security is an abuse of power, you probably don't need to be confronted with the realization that while the government's systematic storing of your complete digital footprint began during the Bush administration, it received approval and came to full fruition under Barack Obama, who warned during his 2008 campaign about the risk  of infringment on First Amendment freedoms posed in the name keeping us safe. Or to watch the film of his reaction to the exposure of a secret surveillance system far more extensive than anybody outside the government surveillance apparatus guessed, as he says he welcomes a national discussion of issues raised by the need to protect freedom of speech while keeping us safe -- but that he didn't want it to happen "this way."... When, in fact, he had already approved a massive government spying operation in complete secrecy without any public discussion of "the issues" whatsoever... And when he and everybody else in his administration kept their mouths shut as a top security bosses blatantly lied to the American public, denying the systematic surveillance of American citizens' private communications in response to direct questions raised on the floor of Congress.

            Because you will likely find this hypocrisy galling. You may feel (as I did) when watching this part of the film that Obama's reputation will never escape this self-inflicted wound.

            If on the other hand, you don't see what all the fuss has been about, then you probably should see "CitizenFour.'

            The film-maker, Elizabeth Poitras, who was contacted by Snowden when he decided to make the public aware of the existence of the government's secret surveillance system because she had made films about related subjects in the post-911 era, simply filmed Snowden's encounters with the journalists who broke his story. It's a reporter's procedural. The film has also been termed a "political thriller" or even "spy thriller" because the parties' interactions are conducted in pre-emptive 'hiding,' because they are plainly worried about government security police breaking in on them at any moment to find out what they are talking about and shutting them up when they do. The tension is gripping. Snowden plainly expects to end up in jail.

            But the film is also a documentary. Though conducted in hiding -- an anonymous hotel room in Hong Kong -- the film preserves a record of what Snowden says about his intentions, his concerns, his fears, the price he might pay, his desire to shield others from undeserved consequences. The two reporters' own thoughts of what they are doing and why -- Glenn Greenwald in particularly is remarkably articulate and effective in explaining the significance of complex technical issues -- are also on record. A record debunks slander. What we see is whistle blowing, not conspiracy. Poitras is not "a provocateur," Snowden is not attention-seeker, Greenwald is not a camera-hound with a scoop.

            As nonfiction cinema it breaks down the story and gives us information: pressured by the government Verizon agree to give up everything: all the calls that everybody makes. Google and Facebook and all the other Internet servers agree to give the government everything everybody does online; where you 'go' online, all your transactions. Your banks, your credit card company, your subway pass -- the same deal.

            What the NSA -- and the FBI -- do, will do, or might consider doing with all this information it has intercepted and continues to intercept is something we don't know. Hopefully very little. But is that a decision we feel secure about leaving up to appointed officials who will make it, and do what they decide to do, in the way they're most comfortable doing everything -- completely in the dark, with nobody watching?

            The bigger point has to be that this staggering level of a state's surveillance of so many of the routine, daily actions of all its citizens is a recipe for 1984.

            "CitizenFour" is filled with talk, short on action, often slow-moving. But it's also chilling.

November Early Darkness, Best Twilights, Celebrations in the Trees

           The most beautiful and stirring twilights of the year arrive in November. We say that to one another at the end of the first shortest day of the season, the surprising day after turning back of the clocks when the five o'clock close-of-day routine suddenly begins nearer to four. Even after a wild day such as this one, when for an hour or more this morning a driving snow fell sideways, product of a northeaster steeper in its plunge into low pressure than predicted locally and so arriving with a sort of unexpected hurricane punch this weekend. That freight-train scraping sound tearing through the house at one point in the late afternoon was made by the wind loosing a porch chair and dragging it across a wood floor to toss it down on the front garden. The wind thought that would be fun.

            Meanwhile the clouds parted for a golden sunset, offering a deeper pink in the western sky than we've seen since I can remember. It turned deeper still, minute by minute, painting a rose window in the quickening alchemy of November skies.

            The end of daylight savings time is the trumpet blast that begins the dark season in the northern hemisphere. 

            Savoring what we had, for as long as we still had it, we drank in the last of October foliage, picking a mild day last week to pay a visit to the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard's arboreal fantasy land in a rolling piece of baronial property on the edge of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston.

            All season we watch the perennials flower display in turn, the spring reveille of bulbs and the low spreading violet-tinted groundcovers, the quick burst azalea, rhododendron and peonies, June's burst of bloomers, the lush lilies of July, the somewhat more muted and yet wilder blossoms of late summer and September, and the last lunge of mum and aster and spotted purple toad lilies in the month just ended -- but, truly, October belongs to the trees.

            The perennials are all but finished, though sometimes our roses last into December, and I don't know what will remain of the potted annuals after the storm that greeted the first two days of this month. The prospect of freezing temperatures by early tomorrow morning drove me out in the night winds last night to rescue the house plants from the danger of overstaying their summer vacation out of doors.

            But, frankly, this time of year is about the trees. We usually visit the Arboretum on a weekend, so our weekday stroll reduced the number of fellow visitors and gave us a different view of this well-groomed playground. We saw the staff out, riding the foot paths in their vehicles, one man even using a leaf blower (destroyer of rural peace) to clear the ground under a shrubby little tree near the visitor center. Others gathered up brush or previously trimmed branches gathered into piles by the roadside. It was like visiting a mansion arriving in time for the vacuuming. People watching is always good there, even on light days. We saw fathers keeping watch over very small children. A woman walked six dogs at once, each on separate leads. Each groomed canine kept perfectly to his lane, but I had to wonder how much fun this was for the dogs.

           Yes, you can come for the people, but you will stay for the trees.

           We saw a giant maple (top photo) round outward in a perfect expression of its innate drive for space and air and sunlight. The tag named it a "painted maple," but the paint had yet to be applied to leaves that were still green.

            On the arboretum's "Evergreen Trail" we saw tall and stately spruces standing their ground, including a huge Canadian spruce (second photo down: a Mountie or two could hide behind it) and a grand Asian spruce (third photo) well over a hundred years old.

            Another evergreen, the golden larch (fourth photo), in fact lives up to its name, spinning its needles into gold each autumn. And the ginkgo tree (fifth photo down), a product of northern China, Korea and Japan, turns a pale yellow bright as any spring or summer flower.

            Then there is that shrub, or small tree, whose name I can never keep track of, that produces a full wardrobe of soft violet foliage (bottom photo) I cannot even describe. We've seen it in other well-tended properties, grown and maintained especially for its winter-long color.

            Back home with the calendar page changed, we know where else to find color this time of year, even when the last of the trees shed their leaves. In the sky.

Garden at the Curbside: Still Shining in October

            The curbside garden in front of our house -- known in the how-to books as the "sidewalk strip" -- is rich in sedum, a plant that not only tolerates, but loves heat and dryness. If you're trying to grow between the asphalt of the roadway on one side and a paved sidewalk (asphalt in our case) desert-like conditions are what you can expect. A row of Autumn Joy sedum provides the biggest hunk of foliage and "plant material" in the strip (rivaled only by high-summer weeds) for most of the growing season. This year the sedum flowers showed and exhausted their color early in autumn, so I've moved on to coaxing what color I can get from the other plants.

            Following the sedum, come the mums; a mixed bag of new 'hardy' ones  purchased this year and a few still hardy returnees from previous years. This year I went for the small-size on the new mums, betting less on their capacity for surviving a winter and coming back next year,and leaving more space for annuals the rest of the season. The top photo shows a sedum bloom at left; a couple of orange nasturtium flowers, an annual; and a red-flowering mum.

            By the end of October, the new hardy mums have mostly exhausted their blooms, though a few of the returning mums are still showing color. I had to nurse these, watering them frequently through our long dry September and deadheading off the dried or failed blooms. The yellow-flowering mum shown in the second photo is the best of these.

            A personal favorite because of its modest persistence, the summery, warm-weather portulaca is an annual that just keeps seeding itself and coming back each year in the same spots in the poor, crowded, beleaguered soil of the sidewalk strip. They take all summer to sprout and most remain small when they flower in September, often only a single flowering stem: little buttons of color in the strip's flayed soil and mulch (third and fourth photos). I bought a couple of these in August this year; larger plants, larger flowers. They're hanging in there; after surviving a cool and rainy week, they're making new buds for another flowering. I would have bought more if I could have found them locally.

            Curbside strips naturally attract certain activities that make life tougher for plants. Dogs are frequently walked down the sidewalk in front of our house. Plants get stepped on. Occasional litter, sometimes following neighborhood curbside trash pickup day, settles there. These areas require policing.

            But the curbside garden offers its own little ecosystem, with a stable of persistent, heat-loving plants, warmed by the concrete jungle of the surrounding pavement, surviving the pollution of the passing cars and trucks, squirrel predations, pet visits, and the regular arrival of tossed garbage lids. They keep blossoming straight through autumn.

            To top it off, the strip is crowned by a tall maple, which at this moments happens to be looking very orange.

The Garden of Film: 'Omar' Climbs the Wall of Sad Experience

            Nominated last year for Best Foreign Film Oscar, "Omar," a film about Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, has almost nothing "Hollywood" about it.After seeing the film last night at the Boston Palestinian Film Festival, I'm surprised it made to the Oscar finals. Written and directed by Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, "Omar" is neither resistance propaganda or a "message film." It assumes the audience knows what life has been like for decades in Occupied Palestine, never a good idea with

American audience. Its true subject is the cost of resistance to the resisters themselves, and audiences can draw little consolation from its conclusion.

             Omar is young, sincere, and idealistic. He is also in love with the sister of the man who leads an armed Palestinian resistance group.The Israelis call such people 'terrorists.' In Palestine they are called 'freedom fighters.'

            The film begins with Omar's strenuous struggle to scale "the separation war" built by Israel to keep the Palestinian population separate from both pre-1967 Israel and the Israeli settlements built on the West Bank land captured in the 1967 war. The reason for these climbs -- not clear to me until after the film -- is that Omar lives in a part of Jerusalem (the Arab part) annexed into Israel after the war and so must get over the wall to meet with Palestinians on the West Bank. It's a tricky business. To Israeli security forces being Palestinian is a lot like being black in Ferguson, Missouri. Omar is caught after one climb by Israeli soldiers, who humiliate him and club him in the face with a rifle butt.

            This event precipitates the group's attack and killing of the Israeli soldier, which in turn leads to Omar's arrest. His capture convinces his resistance group that they have been betrayed to the Israelis. In Israel, Palestinians who cooperate with the security forces are called 'informants.' Palestinians call them 'traitors.' We see Omar stripped naked and tortured in an Israeli prison -- routine, everyday operational procedure in Occupied Palestine, though most Americans don't know it because of the success pro-Israel groups have in shutting down informed discussion of life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation, abetted by the appalling spinelessness of American politicians (including the current occupant of the White House).

            Worse than torture, Omar is tricked by a Mossad (Israeli intelligence) agent disguised as a prisoner into making the single statement "I will never confess" caught on tape. We are told that Israeli courts regard will regard this as a legal statement of confession to whatever crime a prisoner is being charged with. He is then offered freedom by the agent in exchange for delivering the comrade the Israelis believe (wrongly) shot the soldier. Omar accepts the deal with the intention of using his freedom to learn the identity of the traitor and set up an ambush of Israeli soldiers; but, of course, a deal with the devil is a slippery slope.

            It's the beginning of a trail of compromises and betrayals that end up taking more lives and destroying all of Omar's meaningful connections with his own people. When the young woman whose love he regards as the foundation of his future hopes confronts him with the rumors that he is "working with both sides," the burden of the secrets and deceits he knows of prevent him from giving her the categorical denial she seeks. The Israelis have told him lies. But they are acting on information (some of it untrue) betrayed to them by one or more of his own comrades. In place of his youthful clarity and honor, suspicion is general.  

            The qualities and beliefs that motivate the idealistic young such as Omar to take up arms against the conqueror can't survive survive the ambiguities of the secret war of 'resistance.' They never do.The film reminds me of all the French resistance films made after World War II in which heroic Resistance fighters are betrayed by one of their own placed under impossible pressures by the Nazis. To save your family, or your lover, or your children, or some greater good of humanity, you betray your comrades -- the apparently lesser evil. As brutal occupiers in Algeria the French used the same tactics of official terror, infiltration and paid informers to try to put down a revolt by Algerian rebels. Stories of the Irish revolt and "civil war" in the early 20th century sounded the same note. Who was the true Patriot? Who among a range of likely "double agents" was the informer?

            Tyrants, conquerors and occupying armies always turn to the same tactics: torture, lies, psychological manipulation, betrayal. The Romans found locals to do their dirty work in ancient Jerusalem. The conqueror and his armies of occupation always turn into some version of those 20th century demons, the Nazis. The resistors begin each day wondering who they can trust.

            "Omar" isn't a cynical movie. It's a complex, nuanced film, but its message is a sorrowful one. Power relationships between oppressor and oppressed always corrupt. Israeli society will go on decaying morally behind its separation walls until all those who call the ancient land of Palestine home have equal rights in an open and just society.

The Boston Palestine Film Festival continues through Sunday, Oct. 26. For the full festival schedule see the link at http://www.bostonpalestinefilmfest.org/festival/schedule.