Dave Shiflett: Home

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – If you think someone’s watching you, you may not necessarily need medication.
So suggests fabled civil rights lawyer Martin Garbus in “Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech,” which airs on HBO June 29 at 9 p.m. New York Time.
Garbus, most famous for defending neo-Nazi marchers in Skokie, Illinois and serving as a lawyer in the Pentagon Papers case, warns that Americans face growing threats from a government with unparalleled snooping powers, compliant courts and fellow citizens with axes to grind.
The 75-minute show, hosted by Garbus’s daughter, filmmaker Liz Garbus, begins with a paean to the First Amendment, which Garbus, now gray and soft-spoken, calls the “cornerstone of democracy” and a “miracle.”
The miracle, he says, isn’t universally revered, especially in wartime, when dissidents are likely to pay a price for speaking their mind.
One segment takes up the case of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, fired in 2007 after an investigation found him guilty of academic misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication.
Garbus says Churchill’s real sin was an inflammatory post-911 essay which argued that the attacks at least partially payback for U.S. policies, a case of “chickens coming home to roost,” as Churchill says in an interview. That analysis picked up steam in 2009, when Churchill won an unlawful termination lawsuit.
The show features other luminaries including former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, attorney Floyd Abrams, Columbia University professor Eric Foner, Appeals Court judge the Hon. Richard Posner, along with activists Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, both of whom vociferously opposed Debbie Almontaser, a Lebanese-American named to head the Khalil Gibran International Academy, an Arabic-English public school in New York.
Almontaser was accused of harboring terrorist sympathies before the school ever opened, a charge picked up by sympathetic journalists at the late New York Sun and the New York Post. The show indicates she was the victim of hysteria-driven smear job, though Garbus says there was no libel. Free speech, we are reminded, can have unpleasant consequences.
That was also a lesson learned by Chase Harper, a California high school student suspended for wearing a t-shirt bearing a Bible verse condemning homosexuality during a school gay awareness day. Though no students complained, he was sent to the vice-principal’s office, where he says he was told, “If your faith is offensive, you have to leave it in the car.”
“Are we in the United States?” Harper asks.
Well, yes. The show makes clear that protecting freedom of speech has been a struggle since the get-go, tapping into HBO’s “John Adams” miniseries to hear Adams and Thomas Jefferson debating the merits, and drawbacks, of untrammeled tongues.
Garbus recalls the late 1970s uproar in Skokie. Many Jews, he said, believed the ACLU shouldn’t take up the case, and when it did he was the target of advanced vitriol. All told, he says, it was a “horrendous experience” though certainly a sacrifice worth making.
The future should offer plenty of opportunities for First Amendment lawyers, the show indicates.
Government is using the war on terror as an excuse to curb dissent and snoop on Americans who have not been accused of any crime. At the 2004 Republican convention in New York City, marchers could hardly get to chanting before they were rounded up and arrested, according to the show, which says there were 1801 arrests compared to 688 arrests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Government surveillance, Garbus warns, is more pervasive than ever before, thanks to technological advances and a compliant court system.
Perhaps most disturbing is apparent public support for curbing speech. According to the show, before 911 20 percent of Americans believed freedom of speech “goes to too far.” After the attacks, the number rose to 50 percent.
The apparent message to Lady Liberty: Muzzle up, Buttercup.

Get Me a Nurse – Hey, Make That a Double: TV

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – There’s a nurse shortage in the real world but in TV land two are hanging their shingles in June. The prognosis for both shows enjoying healthy life-spans is excellent.
“Nurse Jackie,” which debuts June 8 on Showtime at 10:30 p.m. New York time, stars Edie Falco, formerly Mrs. Tony Soprano, as Jackie Peyton. She works in the emergency room at All Saints Hospital in Manhattan and is as edgy as a box of razor blades. She’s also an addict, a wife and the mother of two kids.
“Hawthorne,” which airs June 16 on TNT at 9 p.m. New York time, stars Jada Pinkett Smith, currently Mrs. Will Smith, as Christina Hawthorne, a much straighter arrow who oversees the nursing staff at Richmond Trinity Hospital in Virginia. Her husband resides in an urn, courtesy of cancer, though she talks to him on a regular basis.
Both women are strong, passionate and have limitless dedication to their patients, unlike some of the doctors they have to contend with. Both are saintly, in their own ways, though Jackie’s more my type of saint.
Falco definitely moves out of Tony Soprano’s large shadow in this “dark comedy,” which starts out with the Jackie lying flat on her back while reciting the opening lines to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” She’s in a deep funk because she’s just about out of pain pills. She has a bad back and needs additional drugs to help her through 80-hour workweeks.
Many viewers are likely to fall hard for her when she tells a young associate, “I don’t do chatty. I like quiet. Quiet and mean – those are my people.”
Doctors, on the other hand, can be definite health hazards. A bike messenger comes in with a broken leg. Jackie suspects a deeper injury as well but the arrogant young buck on call, Dr. Fitch Cooper (Peter Facinelli) is sure he knows better.
“Knock! Knock!” he chirps to the patient. “Who’s there?” the injured man responds, which convinces the doc that all’s well. In the next scene, the messenger is Nirvana-bound, inspiring Jackie to observe, loudly: “I have seen hundreds of you jerk offs blow through these doors.”
The scene that may capture her spirit best of all features an employee of the Libyan ambassador, who has had his ear sliced off in a dispute with a hooker, whom he has grievously assaulted. Yet he won’t be prosecuted because of his status.
Jackie knows just what the doctor should order. She clasps the excised ear in a pair of hemostats, hisses “F--- you!” into it, then flushes it down the toilet.
That’s the way the world is supposed to work.
Doc-botch is also a theme in “Hawthorne,” which is billed as a dramatic series. In the opener a bitchy doctor has ordered an injection for a patient. Nurse Ray Stein (David Julian Hirsh), phones her to warn that the dosage is wrong, for which he receives a tongue lashing. The patient, a twice-deployed veteran, barely survives, though the doctor is unrepentant. One hopes someone drops a house, or perhaps ambulance, on her in a future episode.
While Jackie’s salty and weary Christina is deeply earnest and a knockout. Her staff includes several other babes, including a buxom brunette with a prosthetic leg and a blonde who, in one scene, conducts a strategic laying on of hands that could raise many corpses from the dead.
Both shows feature plenty of the sorts of crazies who visit hospitals, including a 16-year-old stoner who launches roman candles from his buttocks and a psycho who chases his wife into the emergency room with a butcher knife.
Viewers looking for a role model will prefer Christina while the jaded will prefer Jackie, who nonetheless takes time from her hellish schedule to contemplate the virtues of sainthood. She’s clearly not ready to don the hair shirt.
Her credo, repeated a couple of times, comes from Saint Augustine: “Make me good God, but not yet.” Both shows are good from the get-go, unless you happen to be a doctor.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Not everyone believes the world is spinning out of control.
Alex Jones, an Austin, Texas radio talk show host, is dead sure that what many of us mistake for economic and political chaos is actually the handiwork of a group of elitists moving ever closer to world domination.
His strange yet engrossing story is the subject of “New World Order,” a documentary airing on the Independent Film Channel (IFC) May 26 at 6:45 p.m. New York Time.
At first glance Jones resembles Christopher Hitchens, though when he starts talking you’ll likely notice a profound difference.
Jones and a committed band of fellow travelers believe 911 was “an inside job” orchestrated to sow panic and reliance on an increasingly repressive government. They believe JFK was killed by “the military industrial complex” and that Halliburton is constructing a gulag of concentration camps capable of holding 50 million Americans.
At the controls are members of the Bilderberg Group, whose members include Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and dozens more bigs from the worlds of politics, finance, and media.
So far as Jones and company are concerned, the Bilderbergers’ wingtips conceal cloven hooves and they expend much time and effort stalking and filming the supposed puppet-masters (who are also said to control both major U.S. political parties and the “mainstream media”).
Ambitious claims, but any measure, and while few viewers are likely to be converted they may be amazed and sometimes amused by the 83-minute film.
Some of the most interesting segments feature the faithful taking their gospel to the streets.
Jones plays his bullhorn like a Stradivarius and he and his mates attract plenty of attention when insisting the Trade Center towers were brought down by planted explosives.
New Yorkers are a hard sell, however, with one barking “get the f*** out of my country.” Geraldo Rivera is a bit more subtle: when Jones and his cadre heckle him and a couple of Fox blondes as they broadcast live, Geraldo slyly flips them off. A group of sidewalk strollers in New Orleans listens more tolerantly, perhaps because most are nursing beers.
The film doesn’t attempt to debunk the conspiracy theories and includes sympathetic treatment of some enthusiasts, including a young man who was driven to the movement by his opposition to the Iraq War and his is belief that the media does not give ample coverage to the mayhem. This segment includes horrifying night-vision footage of the machine-gunning of three apparent infiltrators; the bursts reduce their bodies to small piles of rubble.
Filmmakers Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel also show Jones’s playful side as he sings along with a Jerry Reed song and delivers amusing analysis at the Washington Monument, which he calls a “giant power talisman” that elitists believe channels dark power into their evil, conspiring souls.
Yet when his microphone goes on, Jones can display an unsettling ferocity and there is highly developed paranoia on display as well. One activist explains that the red and blue dots on some mailboxes (generally believed to have been put there by mail or newspaper carriers) are actually government markings to indicate status on a hit list.
Red dots mean “they take you out immediately and shoot you in head” while blue dots mean you are sent off to the Halliburton concentration camps, which makes standard issue Bush/Cheney hatred seem like a schoolgirl crush.
Near the end, Jones rejects the idea that conspiracy theorists embrace their all-encompassing beliefs so they will feel that at least someone or something is in control. They believe they’re really on to something. Many viewers will likely retain their view that the world continues to fly by the seat of its well-worn pants, thank goodness.
And no, I am not now nor have ever been a Bilderberger.


(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)