Review: A Marine's Guide to Fishing - A snapshot of a returned veteran's life

Published in the Portland Phoenix

On the one-year anniversary of a life-changing incident on a foreign battleground, a Marine (Matthew Pennington) begins to take up his old life again. In this 15-minute short, writer-director Nicholas Brennan (2009's Portland Phoenix Maine Short Film of the Year Hard Rock Havana) adroitly plumbs the depths of the manifold complications facing servicemembers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Showing samplings of eager hangers-on playing patriot games, flashbacks (including sounds of battle that even the ocean cannot drown out), and quiet support from previous generations of veterans, Fishing asks — but only obliquely attempts to answer — whether a life can ever recover from such an ordeal.

On screen an understated, moving film, its power is only amplified by knowing that lead actor Pennington is a veteran (Army, but we'll never tell the Corps . . .) and a battle-wounded amputee — and that 13 other young veterans worked on various aspects of the movie. Backed by a local score (Dan Capaldi) and Maine coast scenery that feels strong without kitsch, Fishing casts a net upon the waters of possibility. What that net catches is yet to be seen.

A MARINE’S GUIDE TO FISHING | Screening at the Nickelodeon, in Portland | March 16 @ 7 PM

Diagnosing democracy: Why parenthood is a bad model for government

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Political theory has, for centuries, come down to an analogy of anatomy, or of family: the head of the government is the head of the body politic, or the head of the household. Other government agencies are the limbs and organs of the body, or the working adults in the home. Citizens are the cells that make up the body, or the children.

In The Parent As Citizen: A Democratic Dilemma (University of Minnesota Press), Brian Duff, a Portland Phoenix food writer whose day job is as an assistant professor of political science at the University of New England, argues that view is fundamentally destructive to a democratic society. It puts citizens in a subservient role — that of children — and government officials in a paternalistic role, Duff writes. That inversion of proper accountability in a democracy — where the citizens should be in charge of the government workers — has caused unseen and untold damage to our society.

He starts with the political discussion of parenthood, showing how the experience of parenting is considered to be formative and vital in the development of a political player. Then, examining the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche (as classical philosophers and political theorists) and two towering modern political-philosophical figures, Richard Rorty and Cornel West, Duff shows why focusing on parenthood is so dangerous to democracy. He specifically chronicles the hazards — including intolerance, fundamentalism, fear, and disempowerment — that appear when equating a democracy with leaders and citizens to a family with parents and children.

This is not a prescriptive work, but rather illustrates a heretofore unseen problem, asking others to study it, examine it, learn from it, and perhaps ultimately forge a solution to this failing intellectual model of our failing political system.

Prison torture coverage, expanded

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Longtime Portland Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley's investigation of the Maine State Prison and the state's corrections system as a whole have reached a yet wider audience with the publication of an essay by Tapley in The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse (New York University Press, edited by Marjorie Cohn). The book is a collection of essays that describe the conditions in American prisons, and explore what political and social pressures combined to create the abusive, destructive prison system we have today. Tapley's essay, "Mass Torture in America: Notes from the Supermax Prisons," is based on his years of reporting for the Portland Phoenix, and marshals the evidence to show not only that torture (including solitary confinement) is a near-constant part of supermax prisons nationwide, but to describe the vicious and damaging nature of that abuse on tens of thousands of inmates.

Gitmo state of mind: Pingree visits Guantanamo, advocates closure

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress that keeping President Obama's promise to close the notorious military prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would be difficult because of opposition from members of Congress. Maine 1st District Representative Chellie Pingree, however, is among those who support closing the base.

Last month, she was part of a bipartisan (if 10 Republicans and two Democrats is "bipartisan") group of members of the House Armed Services Committee who visited Gitmo to see for themselves what's going on.

"Some things we see are classified," Pingree says, beginning our interview by clarifying that she might not be able to talk about certain topics related to the prison — including ones that might be unclassified, because, she says, it can be difficult to remember what's classified and what's not in a particular briefing. (For example, certain details of what the prison is like are kept secret, but other details are not; keeping the categories straight can be a challenge.)

She was able to say, generally speaking, that "living conditions for prisoners — aside from the fact that they don't know when they are going to leave — have improved tremendously," with no waterboarding, no torture, no guard mistreatment, and no disorientingly loud music (as I described in "A Night in Guantanamo," June 20, 2008).

Obama's "different attitude" about torture — specifically, that this president won't use the techniques George W. Bush authorized but claimed were not torture — is to be credited, Pingree says. "It's become clear that better living conditions for prisoners make it easier for the guards to do their work" — and more information is forthcoming from prisoners who are being interrogated, she says.

While Pingree said Obama "has not fulfilled his promise that he was going to close Guantanamo," she did give the administration credit for "working very hard to sort through the huge range of issues," primarily relating to where to move the inmates now at Guantanamo, and where they should stand trial.

A key obstacle is politics. Buck McKeon, the California Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, wants to expand the use of Gitmo, and is a strong supporter of the existing ban on bringing Gitmo prisoners to the US for any reason, including trial. (That law resulted from the firestorm around the trial of suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which was originally slated for a federal court in New York City.)

Pingree says much of the concern about bringing suspected terrorists to the US is "fear-mongering," observing that "we have a lot of trials in this country," including ones involving terrorism charges.

The Obama administration has been working with other nations' governments to repatriate their citizens when the US is ready to release them; as a result the inmate population has dwindled to 172 from a high of nearly 800 in 2002. Of the inmates remaining, Pingree notes, as many as 48 are "in limbo," with US officials believing they could be dangerous if released, but lacking (or unwilling to declassify) evidence that could aid in a conviction. Other inmates, such as several Uighurs, a central Asian ethnic group largely ruled by the Chinese, cannot return home because their home government will persecute them. (Ironically, that leaves them being incarcerated by a foreign power under the argument that being locked up by the US in Gitmo is better than a Chinese prison — or execution. And sadly, that argument is probably accurate.)

"The problems have now sort of shifted a little bit to how the trials will be conducted, where the trials will be conducted," Pingree says. At the cost of "an enormous amount of money," the US has built a massive courthouse at Gitmo, with room enough for trials with multiple defendants and extensive capability for closed-circuit televisions and teleconferencing with witnesses and attorneys elsewhere, including the US.

But even that initiative faces what Pingree calls "an increasing stalemate" because of complaints about the fairness of the military tribunal system set up to handle inmates' cases.

And ultimately, it is those kinds of problems that convince Pingree the prison does need to close. "To the rest of the world, Guantanamo is a symbol of a country that says it lives by the rule of law, (but) that denied habeas corpus, that used torture to get evidence," she says. If we do close it, we will affirm our belief in the law; if we don't, "they'll say we're just American hypocrites."

Literati: So you thought you were special

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Reading Hannah Holmes's work is enlightening and entertaining — even when it's at its most depressing. And that is how the South Portlander's latest book, Quirk, starts. The intro smacks you with it: There is no "divine spark" that makes humans more special than other animals. Mice, which are as much a subject of the book as people, can be bred to have any of the behavior variations that we call "personality." Holmes goes for the jugular: "Personality isn't personal. It's biological," she writes. There is no "nature-versus-nurture" debate — 90 percent of what we think makes each of us unique is, in fact, embedded in our genes.

When you're done crawling under your rock, though, if you've managed to bring her book with you, it's a real treat to learn exactly how similar we are to cuddly, furry mammals — and cold, slimy reptiles — after all. But Holmes disputes the idea that we're being somehow demoted. Rather, she argues, animals are being promoted to the level of wonder we people have previously reserved for ourselves. (It's not just animals, either — Holmes is presently working on an article about the personality of bacteria.)

It turns out that's the only way we've managed to survive — and it may be the only way anything survives. "Every living thing contends with an unstable environment," the energetic, affable Holmes says over coffee. "The world is too chaotic for one personality type to be adequate for every situation, every challenge."

As a result, you're in luck: "for the most obnoxious person you can think of, there is a role in this world," she says cheerfully. For Holmes, these discoveries, laid out in her clear, smooth, amusingly self-aware prose, are "liberating," because they give us more to appreciate about the world as a whole. "We love what we love and there's no arguing it," she says, noting that no matter who we love, we have to get along with the wider group to stay alive in a world of threats, limited resources, and changing surroundings.

And at the end of the day, what we really have to do is behave as if personality is just like the color of our eyes, hair, or skin — something we're each born with, that we didn't choose and can't really change. So we're better off quitting sniping, and just getting along.

Hannah Holmes | reads from Quirk | February 23 @ 7 pm | Nonesuch Books, 50 Market St, South Portland | February 26 @ 2 pm | Bull Moose, 456 Payne Rd, Scarborough | March 2 @ noon | Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland | March 8 @ 7 pm | RiverRun Bookstore, 20 Congress St, Portsmouth NH | March 10 @ 7 pm | Longfellow Books, Monument Way, Portland | hannahholmes.net