Unclear and Present Danger - Canadian Bacon

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

This week on Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “Canadian Bacon,” a 1995 political comedy written, produced and directed by Michael Moore, which takes aim at American politics in the wake of the Cold War. It stars an ensemble cast of John Candy (in his last film role), Alan Alda as the president of the United States, Bill Nunn, Kevin J. O’Connor, Rhea Perlman, Kevin Pollak and Rip Torn.In their conversation, Jamelle and John discuss Michael Moore’s work and impact (especially on their political awareness), post-Cold War demobilization, deindustrialization and the ways that race and class work together in American life. New episodes come out every two weeks, so join the podcast then when we discuss James Cameron’s “True Lies.”Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more.

I have the results on the overnight tracking. You know, it's not fair. I mean, every other president had all of the Russians to blame for everything. What have I got? For an unpopular president... The voters felt that your being alive or dead had no real bearing on their daily lives.

It's time to give war a chance. Dead. What are we going to do for an enemy now? A riot between Americans and Canadians broke out last night. Now, with a little inspiration... All I said was Canadian beer socks. Canadian beer suck. Give me one week and I'll have Americans burning maple leaves.

They'll create a cause worth fighting for. Is Canadian Prime Minister Clark McDonald a member of a satanic cult? That is static. Canadians are always dreaming of a lot of ways to ruin our lives. The metric system for the love of God. Do not panic. I'm in complete control. There's a time to think.

There's a time to act. And this gentleman, there's no time to think. Move up! Welcome to Canada. I'm your worst nightmare. I don't know what you're talking about. We've got ways of making you pronounce the letter O. What we have here is a brave but misguided group of Americans.

We've gone right into Canada and kick some serious Canadian butt. Oh, Americans! Welcome to Ontario. Sportsman's Paradise. Isn't it, though? John Candy. New Canadians are so sneaky. Alan Alda.

Surrender pronto. Or will level Toronto. Rhea Perlman. What is this look like to you? Never saw a white man that size. Kevin Pollock. When have you ever heard anyone say, honey, let's stay in and order some Canadian food? Rip Torn.

I can't kill America's neighbors? I can't. Canadian bacon. From the director of Roger and me. Now, how did you know that was a nuclear facility? Well, they tricked us all that one. That's a hospital. But it's a hell of a sprite.

Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamal Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gann. I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front, and I'm editing my book on American politics in the early 1990s. So we get new listeners with every episode that happens. And what I do enjoy is how as the book progresses, if someone drops in here and they'll be like, oh, John's editing a book.

And then if they go to the beginning, they'll be like, oh, John's writing the book. And they can kind of see the thing happen and somewhat, you know, they can see the progression. me get increasingly demoralized in my voice. That's not what I was implied. I can hear my soul slowly being crushed. It'll be done soon enough. I hope so. Yeah.

Yeah, we can talk about it. Right. This week, we watched Canadian Bacon, a 1995 political comedy, written, produced and directed in a cameo, including, a movie that takes aim at American politics in the wake of the Cold War. It stars an ensemble cast of John Candy. This will be his last film role. Alan Alda, playing the president of the United States, Bill Nunn, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ria Perlman, Kevin Pollock, yeah, Kevin Pollock, and Rip Torn.

Here is a very short plot synopsis. The U.S. president, low in the opinion polls, gets talked into raising his popularity. by trying to start a Cold War with Canada. The tagline for Canadian Bacon is, I'll tell you another thing, their beer sucks, which tells you nothing about the film. Canadian Bacon is available to stream for free on Pluto TV. That's the only place I could find it. You'll have to watch the occasional commercial.

It's fine. It only adds like 15 minutes to the total runtime. It was released on September 22nd, 1995, so let's check out the New York Times for that day. Well, here we go. As prospects in Bosnia Brighton, GOP doubts a need for GIs. Clinton-Aid C opposition is threat to peace. As chances for peace in Bosnia improve, bringing America's promise to send troops to enforce agreement closer to reality, Republicans today question whether the United States should send any soldiers to Bosnia, even if their warring parties put down their weapons. Administration officials warned that failure to meet the

President's state commitment to provide troops to enforce an accord would undermine the search for peace and cause serious friction with NATO allies, but even within the administration, senior officials are divided over how many American troops should go. Two years ago, President Clinton said that the event of a peace settlement in Bosnia, the United States would send as many as 25,000 troops, half the proposed 50,000 member NATO-led force to patrol new borders, protect relief workers, and generally enforce the court. Mr. Clinton also promised he would consult with Congress before sending ground troops. Okay. So the United States and NATO intervenes in the Yugoslavian civil war. I guess that's not really the right way to say it. The war in Bosnia between the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, which genocide took place during that war. The NATO intervention was controversial, both on left and right. The U.S. did end up sending peace.

keeping forces in a fairly successful mission. And that's what this is about. A lot of stuff because the Republicans have won Congress, so they're causing a lot of problems. House GOP plan doubles premiums of Medicare users, new details disclosed. Other savings are sought by limiting malpractice sums and pushing HMOs. House Republicans today disclose that their plan to slow the growth of federal Medicare costs would gradually double health insurance premiums for the elderly. It would also limit payments to victims of medical malpractice and encourage doctors and hospitals to join together in selling their services to consumers. While putting forth new details, the Republicans failed to provide the text of any legislation

and acknowledge that they were still short of their goal of saving $270 billion over seven years. They left Democrats and elderly people hungry for more specific information but their Republican plan to redesign Medicare. Nicker Newt Gingrich predicted that millions of elderly people would voluntarily enroll in health maintenance organizations, and he said the government could save $70 billion as a result. Yes, that's one of their big slashing and burning that the Republican Congress is attempting to do to the remnants of the welfare state in the United States, and they successfully did a lot of. Here's another one, not welfare exactly, but liberal policies. spending bill would reverse nation's environment policy, House and Senate negotiators completed work today on spending bill

that reverses decades of Democratic environmental policy and reduces protection for endangered species, cutting deeply into federal conservation programs, and expanding opportunities for logging, mining, and ranching interests on public lands. Ending four days of deliberation, negotiations clear the way for the full House and Senate to vote on the spending bill, which pays for the operations of the Interior Department

and other agencies in the 1996 fiscal year beginning on October. First, the Interior Department would be allowed to spend $6 billion, 8% less than the current fiscal year. You know, what's interesting about this era is that a lot of things that they want the day, the Republicans wanted to do in the Reagan era, but weren't able to do because they didn't have the House of Representatives. They're sort of getting done under Clinton, which is this like attempt to basically just like destroy the regulatory and welfare state of the United States, which even Reagan, as much

damage as he did, couldn't quite do. I mean, that is the dream of at least a large portion of the right kind of just rolling back the New Deal. I mean, it is, it is for as much as the New Deal state doesn't really exist in the same way anymore. There's a new deal programs that have survived, but the kind of state that emerged at the New Deal no longer exists in the same way. Obviously, New Deal coalition doesn't exist in the same way. But the New Deal represents an active state that is involved in both a state. supporting the public with programs and also regulating capitalism, does that still is part of the American political system? And it is like an unending war to roll that back, to kind of erase

FDR's legacy, which is a testament to FDR's legacy and to the utter failure of conservatives to address the Great Depression. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that they just can't, you know, they want to take a shot at Social Security. It just ain't happening. Like, there are certain things that programs that I just think that they, you know, a lot of conservatives have sort of given up on really trying to totally uproot the New Deal. Obviously, not all of them have. But, yeah, this effort to get rid of the Great Society, to get rid of the New Deal,

it's just caused an enormous amount of hardship for the American people, expose them to difficulties when the economy goes south. It's a philosophy for another time. It's not meant for this notion they have of a nation of self-reliant entrepreneurs doesn't really apply to the present circumstances. And they're just, in my view, and I think your view as well, just creating hardships for people. And here's more of it.

Gingrich threatens U.S. default if Clinton won't bend on budget. And this is the beginning of a Republican hardball on budget shift. House Speaker Newt Gingrich threatened today to send the United States into default on its debt for the first time in the nation's history to force the Clinton administration to balance the budget on Republican terms. His comments, a more extreme version of the hardball stands frequently used in the past budget showdowns, raised the specter. I mean, you've heard this and read this in the newspaper a billion times since then. Well, it's probably more like a handful, but it feels like every time that they have to do the budget or raise the debt limit.

Raise the specter that the looming standoff may begin to rattle the financial markets around the world. Mr. Gingrich's remarks came in the... the middle of the day in which the dollar plunges as much as 5% against major currencies before recovering slightly, sending interest rates up sharply. The speaker statement appeared to be one of the several factors that added to the market's unsettled condition. Yeah. So that's more of their bullshit, which doesn't even make sense. I think Tim Barker's point is interesting about this. He's like, some of these things don't even make sense from the standpoint of protecting capital accumulation because they would do such an unbelievable amount of harm to the U.S. economy if it

ever went through. Like, it's just really, really crazy stuff. Like, Gingrich, for example, Gringrich is someone who I truly think is like a genuine nihilist. And the only thing he really believes in is or believed in when he was in office is sort of his own power. And so I don't think Gingrich actually cares all that much about what it would do to business insofar that that, you know, only insofar that it affects his political standing, his ability to solicit donations and that kind of thing.

I think he just, he just wants to beat Clinton. He wants to, he wants to beat Clinton and he'll do anything it takes to, to make that happen. I got to say, I feel obligated here to just throw out my take that the debt limit is unconstitutional. I do not think it would withstand a serious constitutional challenge. And here is why, and just a couple minutes, here is why the U.S. Constitution gives the president two directives. I mean, a lot of directives, but two ones that are relevant here. The first at kind of the top of the page is the president has to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, which everyone, from Washington on words, has interpreted demean, if Congress passes a law, the president has to follow it as passed. The president does not have discretion in how to implement a law barring Congress

giving the president discretion. When Congress says, we're going to do a thing and the relevant agency can make rules, that's discretion, right? That's giving another entity discretion to decide how the law is going to be carried out. But even that discretion happens within kind of a relatively narrow range of things. So for example, if Congress says we're going to pass a health care program, it's going to cost $50 billion, and it's going to be run out of the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Health and Human Services can't trim the program to spend $40 billion or expand it to spend $60. That department, meaning the executive brands, meaning the president, has to aim for $50 billion.

dollars. If the program in implementation ends up costing a bit less, that's fine. But you can't unilaterally decide it's going to be bigger or smaller. You have to do the thing that Congress told you to. So that's the first thing. The president has to do what Congress says when it passes a law. The second thing in the 14th Amendment simply states that the debt of the United States cannot be questioned. It cannot be repudiated. It cannot be defaulted on. And there's actually a lot of interesting constitutional law about what this means or a constitutional interpretation because it's really rarely been in question necessarily. But the general view is that at the very least, you know, you can't, you can't, no one can actively say the U.S. debt doesn't count. And there's a view that this also means that no constitutional actor can take actions that would result in.

in the nation's debt being called into question in a serious way. And so the debt limit, which doesn't say you can't spend, it simply says you cannot issue additional, you can't issue additional debt beyond this limit without congressional authorization, kind of stands in direct tension with both the 14th Amendment section four, but also the president's duty to execute the laws as passed, because if Congress passes the law, this is you have to spend. this amount of money. And the only way the president can comply with that law is to issue new debt, then he can't if it's near the debt limit, which to me by itself means you can't have a debt limit. Like you can't, the Congress can't give you a thing to have to do and then basically

say, for you to be able to do this, you have to break the law. Like you, that's, that can't happen. Full faith and credit seems pretty plainly decisive on that question, yeah. Anyway, no, it's never been challenged because Americans don't like debt or whatever, but I think that if you were, I think I think actually like the case for the debt limit, just like not being a thing Congress can do. And that's what that would be the constitutional question. Can Congress tell the president to essentially not obey its own laws that it passes in favor of this rule? And I think there's like two grounds on what you can say, well, no, I can't. You can't, you can't do that. Anyway, that's my little, that's my little rant. interesting. I agree with you. I don't think about the Constitution a lot, but I, and so I defer to your interpretations. I think about it too much. I, you know what? I used to, I was brought up in this kind of like environment at school of liberal constitutionalism, you know, very like war in court, all of, you know, the Supreme Court is good and nice, and the Constitution is fundamentally a document. And I kind of pretty much got disillusioned with all of that stuff.

I mean, I'm still like, I don't know. I'm not one of these people exactly who just says we need to rip up the Constitution and replace it with some more modern document. But I don't know. Sometimes, especially with the Supreme Court the way it is now, I don't, I'm not, I'm not a liberal constitutionalist that so much anymore. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that the Constitution has any sort of like, you know, inherent anything, right?

Like, it's all just words on paper. I do think that there is political value because of the role the Constitution plays in like National American mythology and just how people think about it conceptualized politics, I think there's actually a lot of use in sort of pushing to demystify the Constitution and like bring it back down the earth, but also sort of like really point out that lots of people make claims about the Constitution that aren't really borne out by either the document or the case law or the history or anything. I think it's a useful thing to do.

do. Yeah. But when people are like, well, they can't do that because the Constitution, it's like, shut the fuck up. Yes, they can't. Like, unless there's someone willing to enforce the thing or challenge the thing, this is the whole Trump thing. Well, the Constitution has guardrails.

The Constitution just says a bunch of shit. If there's no one there to do anything about it, then it doesn't matter. Right. Right. Right. All right. Is that all that? Yeah, I think so.

There's not that much here. that's relevant to the show. I don't know if anything else catches your eye. Not really. I think the Medicare story is just funny and as in how the U.S. has consistently done everything other than the obvious stuff with regard to how to structure health care system. Yeah, there's a thing on the Simpson, on the OJ. Simpson case, which was obviously huge. Choice on verdict for Simpson jury. Judges ruling may provide a room for a compromise. I don't really understand how you have a compromise and a jury trial. Judge Lance Edo. today handed O.J. Simpson a major setback in jury some maneuvering room, ruling if they found

that Mr. Simpson killed two people impulsively rather than with deliberation, he could be convicted with murder. Well, that's not a problem because he was acquitted and we all know that he was innocent. I will say, before we move on, there's an interesting pop culture story to tell about how in the moment there is like a real debate over whether he did it. And then like not even that much hindsight. type that I feel like the consensus is among some Americans is he did it and it's a travesty that he got away with it and among others he did it but like fuck the LAPD. Right, right, right. Well, I mean, you can't understand the OJ Simpson case out of the context of the LAPD and out of

the contents of the Rogni King case. This is a highly politicized jurisdiction. Right. With an extremely racist police force. And there was lots of resentment and lots of anger and lots of feelings. feeling that trials were political and a place to settle grievances, I think that, you know, yes, in this particular trial, the defense really played up the actual racism of the LAPD, which ended up hurting their case, you know, and that's the thing about the LAPD is like

their racism actually makes it harder for them to properly police the city that they are supposed to protect because they're not trusted and you know it creates setbacks like this one anyway i can go on along about that but yeah there was a there was a huge political context yeah okay so the movie is canadian bacon i figured it would just be worth some time to talk about one michael more who is not an obscure person it wasn't at the time Canadian bacon is his second feature film his first feature film is the documentary, Roger and Me, about the impact of the closure of auto plants in Flint, Michigan. One of the major closures in the early 90s, thousands of workers were fired really kind of plunged the area into, or one of the things I'll plunge the area into

economic turmoil. In our executive action episode on the Patreon, we talk a little bit about the collapse of the Rust Belt. So if you, If you're not a Patreon listener, sign up, listen to that episode. If you are and you haven't checked it out, you should check it out. But Roger and Me was his first film. It was a big hit, overwhelmingly positive reviews, won a bunch of awards. I don't think you got nominated for an Academy Award, but it was a very well-regarded and very popular film. And basically gave more the space to do this second film, which is a documentary, a traditional feature, but it is a satire.

Moore says the film was inspired basically by the events around the Gulf War. President George W. Bush was, like, insane popularity at the time. It's from 91. And he wrote, conceptualized and wrote the film kind of during that time and then began shooting in 1993. This conceit of Canada being potentially a threat is not like a new one. Moore didn't make it up. There apparently was a 1985 mockumentary about this thing. And obviously, Americans were making jokes about Canada for a long time.

So that's sort of the background of the film. More, of course, would go on to make more films, but would not return to features, in part because Canadian Bacon was kind of a huge failure. It cost $11 million to make. it grossed, but $180,000. So not that much. I should find out how many screens it was released to because you might be looking at like, you know, $100 bucks per screen, $1,000 per screen, just like really abysmal numbers.

More subsequent films of Albin documentaries, I think they've largely been self-finance or financed by other folks. And the two that I feel like have defined more. Moore's career and reputation are 2002 is Bowling for Columbine and 2004 is Fahrenheit 911. I got to say, I don't know what your history with Moore is. I got to say teenage me got bowling for Columbine and Fairhine 911 or just like the pinnacle of political filmmaking. Yeah.

Really influential on me at that age. Agreed and even younger. I mean, like so I like to tell when I. have to recount my origin story. I always say that I read the Communist Manifesto when I was really young, but that's maybe a little bit not the whole story. I think that I watched Roger and Me when I was very young, and I watched this movie too.

I think Roger and Me made a huge impact on me. Roger did me in a movie that Tim Robbins made Bob Roberts, which was sort of about this, you know, kind of fascist evangelical politician who rises. Roger May had a huge impact on the way I thought about the world and made me very concerned about labor issues. I mean, I grew up in a family that had always had that background, but that was important for me. And yeah, like you were saying, you know, when as a young leftist or a person with left-leaning views in the 90s and 2000s, you know, there was a lot

of things now. I mean, people are socialist now and there's DSA and, you know, Bernie. I mean, Bernie was around but he wasn't quite as big of a national figure um you know back then it was michael moore maybe the green party you know ad busters magazine if you were sort of going towards the fringe michael more was very like you know one of the few major left wing figures left i mean i mean in that he wasn't just a liberal he seemed to well he was but he he had a kind of labor side of it of his argument too seemed to care about working class people um I don't know how I feel about him in retrospect. It's complicated.

I mean, I think that, you know, obviously he sort of kept the flame going in a certain way for labor leftism and the New Deal and, you know, stuff like that when not a lot of people cared about it. And, you know, that's important. I think he kind of hurt himself with how overtly propagandistic some of his films were. Yes, I think I think that's probably right. I mean, just to just to add to your recollection there. And there's some discussion about this. I think we even talked about this a bit kind of around the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war in March. It's hard to communicate just how reactionary and right wing American pop culture got in the first years of the 2000s after 9-11. It's like, Like, really, I feel like it's, especially for trying to communicate it to younger people, people in their teens and their 20s, it's really hard to kind of communicate, like, what it felt like, the war fever that was, that had consumed the country. And I think Michael Moore really did, like, stand out as a one of the few mainstream voices saying basically sort of like, this is insane. and here is why. And I think that's why he became influential

for a lot of folks like us. Absolutely. I'm thinking one thing... He took a lot of shit for it. He took a lot of shit for it. Yeah. One thing that was really profoundly influential on me, it's funny, like being growing up in the South,

like reunions weren't really around. Like labor doesn't really come into my political sight line until I'm in college, really. But what is very much in my, political sight line as a military kid. And this is a rock war era, you know, post 9-11, and being, living in a military town, it's just like American foreign policy. And so there's a montage in Bowling for Columbine that's like just more going through

all kinds of horrible American foreign policy decisions from like the 1950s onwards. And that montage was like really influential on me and like how I conceptualized sort of like what American policy was. And in retrospect, looking back at the film and at that montage, in this place in a movie that's about guns and gun violence, what's interesting about this movie is it does a thing that I'm not even sure that, setting aside, it's depiction of Columbine, which has been contested because of what we've learned about Columbine in a year since. But what it does is it does connect guns to first industry. It's like very focused in the gun industry specifically as one of the things that is responsible for an epidemic of gun violence in the United States. And it connects all of this to our foreign policy and to how the country conducts itself on the world stage. And I thought that was like really powerful as a teenager. And I still think it's kind of powerful as an adult.

Like I think it's a point that's important to make. I think he kind of grasped, and you see this in this movie as well, is he sort of grasps at these kind of larger points that maybe he doesn't make all that gracefully or like the connection, yeah, like you're saying this connection between the violence of the United States and our war making and our military industrial complex. I mean, there is something to be said about this. Does he always make the point well? No, but someone was saying it at some time, you know,

I think you see this a little bit in Canadian Bacon. Yeah, and let's get the Canadian Bacon. And so we'll do wag the dog later to like a variation on the theme. But the basic idea in Canadian Bacon is that in the wake of the Cold War, people don't like the president anymore because the president can no longer cover himself in Marshall, Marshall Glory, or at least previous presidents could, and this president cannot play by Alan Alda. And also, there's been demobilization. And so factories are getting shut down. people are very unhappy about losing their jobs and so on and so forth. And so the president's national security advisor, played by Kevin Pollack, suggests that

why not start a new Cold War and start a new Cold War with Canada? And this can, you know, generate support for the president. It can get the industrialist back into gear. And this is a kind of a key point part of the story, that part of what is driving this, what the pressure is coming from, is a weapons manufacturer who just wants to keep making money. Interspersed with this is John Candy, plays kind of dim-witted sheriff along with Kevin J. O'Connor, his friend, and Bill Nunn, his friend, and Rayapult, Proman plays his deputy and also, I guess, like, girlfriend or something. It's unclear. And they, you know, get war fever and

end up precipitating even greater tensions between the U.S. and Canada. So that's kind of the basic outlines of the story. This movie was panned and it panned for a good reason. It's not very good. It's like watchable, but it's not like unwatchable, but it's sort of, it feels more like a vehicle. It's very dated. But for Moore's politics than it is like a movie. no and the jokes kind of fall off it's not that funny anymore right um yeah you know as a satire

it's a little bit bleak and and not wrong about the about the moment because you know the kind of military canesianism of the cold war ends and a lot of defense worker i mean this this tapp niagara falls they depict it in the upstate new york as being you know reliant on his defense plant and all these people are out of work he grew up as an auto worker and a family of an auto worker in Flint. It can be very sentimental about, you know, like American working class life. It's this very kind of almost, not cruel,

but it really makes fun of, you know, these working class Americans as kind of idiots, first of all. And then it kind of doesn't give them a break for the fact that their livelihood was based on the creation of like these horrible arms that were fueling the Cold War. It's difficult. It's there's, there's, it's true. I mean, how can you really blame people?

for being upset when a defense plan closes that was the there they were told uh you know you're defending freedom and these jobs are good union jobs and you know it it provided the basis for a lot of communities uh livelihoods and then that when the when the cold war ended that created a lot of hardship um right is it bad that we still make as many arms anymore no but i mean we didn't come up with another system of and this i guess this movie sort of points that it kind of says you know we need to find a different way to produce and as a society then to just then to build arms a huge part of the end of the cold war was the transition away from a society who's one of main heavy industries was the production of arms aerospace and so and so forth

space seat a lot of shipyards closed aircraft factory closed not so much small arms unfortunately because they've still had huge problems with that but um yeah so i don't know i'm very conflicted in my book um you know a lot of it i deal with lots of scenes of of defense plants closing and these very sad stories of these people living of being you know living in a world where they you know well this is what we do and this is how we live and this is how I make a living and my children might be able to make a living here or I'll have enough money to send them to college and then that's this appears overnight and what they thought was America is gone um is that a reason to create or desire conflicts no absolutely not none of the thing about the way we fight

wars now you know it's not like oh you know the classic explanation of the of World War II getting us out of the Depression is because we had to produce so much for the war effort. The way we fight war now, we don't have to produce nearly as much. We don't have to create thousands and thousands of jeeps and planes and so on and so forth, which puts a lot of people to work, you know. These are very technical, highly specialized arms that require a few plants, that require a few very specialized workers. I was very interested in this recently. Like, I was like, how long does it actually take to build like a fighter? It takes months. It takes months. And it's crazy if you think about it. You're like, oh, like how long does it make

an F-16 or an F-35? You know, they're on, they're kind of being like hand-built on this line with all these specialist workers. It's not like the war, these images we have of the war where it's like these assembly lines where they're, you know, B-25s are just rolling off like one after one after one after one. So things have changed in that regard a lot. But it is sad in a way. I mean, I have very on, you know, as a liberal, as a New Deal social Democrat, you know, and want a person who, you know, thinks highly of what America did in the war and defending democracy. And I buy into all that shit. It is sad, though, on reflection that our, so much of our productivity and the power

of labor to create this world of prosperity came from destructive from the creation of arms and I don't know sometimes how to deal with that or make sense of that because it's a world that I look back fondly to but I can see the critique of it I don't think we should return to the Cold War or the definitely not the Second World War mode of production you know I wish we would have a peaceful way to do this something similar. But that's such so strange. It's like, well, we were at our most productive. We were at our most unified. In certain ways, we were the most eager to realize our national ideals when we were producing all these destructive things. Sort of a tragedy.

I'm not sure there's much, there's much more you can, you can say than that. Like, part of the tragic dimension is sort of the recognition that in the absence of that kind of, you unifying um unifying object it's like there's not all that much unity in american society and of course i mean it's important to say that there even at the time the degree of unity in american society is exaggerated it's exaggerated over city there's a great book by hands now known that deals a lot with america in the 40s and the south in the 40s because it's a book about the gym pro legal system and it's very i mean even even for someone who knows quite a bit of about this stuff. It's very shocking to read stories of the sheer amount of racial strife and

violence happening on like American bases, army bases. Yeah. In the South. Well, partly because of the integration it was creating because it was bringing a lot of black people into industrial jobs and bringing them into the military. And then it was creating contact and class conflict and in places it hadn't existed before. Right. And in a funny way, that's kind of I mean, the afterlife of that is sort of part of the story of this movie, or at least it's gestured towards in this movie. Bill Nunn plays a laid-off factory worker in Niagara Falls, where the film takes place. And, you know, if you just, like, know, if you just, like, know, migration patterns in the U.S., like, it's very clear that Nunn probably is, his character is a son probably of a black person from the south who came to the north to build weapons.

Right. which is after the huge populations yeah right huge populations huge numbers of people made that move to urban centers across the country we've talked about los angeles being one of those places but um again all over all over the country you know one of the things about this movie is that it's its politics are very much of the Like, so it both has a dim view of the public. Like, there's a scene where Kevin Pollack's character says, well, I can convince the American people would hate everything. And then we get this sort of like kind of montage sequence of Americans, like, you know, being fiercely anti-Canada after hearing some anti-Canadian propaganda, which is very silly.

The whole sequence is very silly. But the movie also doesn't blame the public for events and stuff. circumstances, right? Like, the public is dumb, but innocent in Moore's vision. Yeah. And that the blame goes primarily, and he doesn't even blame politicians either. Like, Alanola's character is, you know,

uh, venal and he's very stupid and cowardly, but like, he's not like some sort of mastermind or he's not malicious necessarily. He's just like is highly self-interested. The movie's like target

is mainly, you know, corporations, big business, which, which reflects Moore's preoccupation about, like, Roger, I mean, this is, this, this in a lot of ways is, like, a fitting follow-up to Roger and me. And I'm not sure that we've discussed this necessarily, but, like, one of the interesting things about kind of, like, the end of history post-politics 1990s, is that right, there is, like, this intense cynicism about two-party politics. They're both the same. There's no difference between the two sides.

it's like you know two faces of the same beast kind of thing but then like a lot of political energy is then devoted to basically the influence of corporate America who has seen as like these are the real people running everything here and that's that's like the real target for shaping uh political life and that that's very much part of this part of this movie yeah absolutely i mean and that was a big part of i mean 90s and 2000s leftism such that it was was a criticism of corporations I mean, there's no Chomsky, and Green Party, Ralph Nader comes in corporations were the big, bad guy, you know. Corporations were the ones that created wars. Corporations were the ones that were destroying the environment.

Is that all false? No. I think that, like, now the attitude of people on the left towards corporations is a little bit more nuanced. And I think that also came out of the new left, which was sort of. of reacting towards the kind of decadence of the New Deal order and how it created such powerful corporations who then were involved in, you know, all kinds of horrible things like Vietnam and various environmental degradation, you know, regime of social control that was, was people started to find dehumanizing and not.

The image we have of the 50s and the early 60s was most people, they like their jobs, they like their suburban lives, they like working for IBM or whatever, or GM, and if you worked at a factory, and, you know, like life was secure. And the people who really didn't like that were kind of like hippies and beatniks and weirdos, right? There were social rejects and outcasts who wouldn't have fit into any order. But once you get to the 70s, you know, there's this funny story where. some labor activists from Columbia or some Ivy League school lefties commies really they go to they went to

a mining town to organize the workers there and they cut their hair to try to fit in because they figure these people would be would be real clean cut they get there all these guys have long hair and they all smoke weed you know they're all hippies basically yeah not necessarily often with left wing politics or anti-establishment politics but like you know you see the spread of the counterculture to the culture at large because I think everybody got fed up with how boring and restricted and stultifying the society was and how it started in the 70s, especially not to have any, the material rewards were even were growing less and less. So you had a world of, you know, social control, which gave very little back or gave less and less back. And yeah, then you start to, you just look at working class people

in the 50s or you look at everybody in the 50s. They all look a certain way. You start to look at working plus people in the 70s, and they look totally different. They look like hippies, you know, and that whole style spread. It's not just fashion. It is a rejection of, you know, the previous order of social control. And people just said, you know what, I don't really want to live that way anymore. I'm not getting that much out of it. I think also for working people, this is what's also forgotten, is that this kind of Aussie and Harriet leave it to beaver world, that didn't, either it didn't exist ever or it lasted for a lot shorter than people think it did you know like the the the the life of of working class people um was always more difficult obviously they had more dangerous jobs and so and so forth

and harder jobs but the the clawback of the capitalist class on you know what workers had gained during the depression after the depression and during the war came very fast and it much faster for for middle class workers. It eventually reached them too. But, you know, it fell as it usually does on the people at the bottom of the social order. So yeah, I think that like basically what you had so you had that in the 70s and then what happens in the 80s and and in the 90s is basically just like this gutting and destruction of the American working class. And no one really understood what it was when it was happening because first of all, it was racialized. So you had, You're like, oh, what's going on with black people in the inner cities?

And you're like, well, they don't have jobs anymore. Like it was able to pathologize it because they're like, well, it's happening to black people first. We always know that they have problems. And then it's, and it gradually spreads to the rest of the country. And then people start to go, oh, maybe it wasn't just that there's something wrong with these people. Although they're always like, look at fucking J.D. Vance. He all, you know, there's always somebody who's now a populist. There's always somebody willing to say, oh, these people whose livelihoods have been taken out from under them, who were always at the bottom of the social ladder, but didn't have very much, you know, had some sort of grasp on security, and that's been cut out from them.

There's always someone willing to go out and say, the problem is that. They're lazy people. They're bad people. They have drug problems. They don't have good family units. They don't have good habits. You know, there's something wrong with them, essentially, rather than that they don't have any money or they don't have good job. So, you know, and I think with the sad thing about the Trump phenomenon and the growth of right-wing populism is that, you know, people all of a sudden, all these people in the media start going, what's going on with the working class in America?

They're so angry. Only when it, first of all, it got to white people. And second of all, only when it got such a bad situation that, you know, I just think it's very easy to forget. You know, this movie shows it in kind of a light, hard way. But if you go to some places that were formerly industrial centers in this country, they are absolute ruins. And the people living there are really hurting. Yeah, so anyway. No, I have like a lot to comment on.

Yeah. I'll start with the last point. I mean, right behind me in my room where I record this, I have a big photo that I took years ago from St. Louis, and it's just like two ruin buildings, but someone graffitied potential is just one half across them. I have always found that very poignant. But if you ever, I mean, anyone who ever has a chance to just drive around St. Louis, which at one point in the middle of the 20th century is one of the largest cities in the country and is now completely depopulated. and in large parts of it, kind of just in utter ruins. It's like very striking to just drive around there and observe what, again, was a critical city in American industrialization. I forget the historian, a recent book on the history of St. Louis.

And is it Walter Johnson? It may be. I think it's his book. But again, yeah, so that's the thing. I wanted to quickly make two notes about your just observations about the 70s, just in terms of sort of like how the changing working class culture. First, in terms of like cinematic depictions, this is going to be my requisite. People should watch Paul Schrader's blue collar. That's such a good movie.

Which I think is like the great movie about the American working class. Yeah, it really is. One of them for sure. Yeah. Yeah, certainly one of them. But it's, it kind of gives you. this like, you know, picture of, I think a quite, quite compelling picture of what working class life looked like as far as auto workers in the 70s. And along those lines, like in real

life, the 1972 Lordstown strike in Ohio, which was a pretty much like young workers leading that strike, it's very much like, it's very much a example of workers of the 70s, working class men of the 70s at least, sort of like rejecting. the kind of culture of their parents, of their fathers, in trying to forge something new. And so worth reading about the Lordstown Strike, which you can do in a great book, Jefferson Coe's book, Staying Alive, which is all about the 70s, a really phenomenal book. Yeah, a lot of younger workers were very fed up with their unions and felt like they were, you know, we focused so much on the new left's kind of booge.

little intellectuals, we forget that the people who actually worked in factories had similar critiques of their, of their lives and the institutions that they had to come up. Right. I just, I think I want to make the observation, the point, just related to you talking about the spread of the industrialization, first and sort of like, you know, black urban center, which are predominantly black urban centers and then out to the rest of the country. And how the reaction at first to unemployment among African-Americans was, yeah, there must be something wrong with them, you know, family dissolution, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, William Julius Wilson, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think that is all, that is a excellent demonstration.

We were talking, we were just talking about Adolf Reed, Edolf Reed. Yeah. Not at all. wrong one we were talking about adolf read before we got started recording and you know one one point he makes that i do very much agree with is the way that sort of like race and racism can be is used to like mystify class relations and that's a great example of people of racism basically sort of like mystifying what's happening in terms of class relations right uh because it couldn't see that them as working class people.

They were like, oh, they're blacks. You know, like there's no, there's no like, oh, well, they worked in factories. Now they don't, you know. And even in the present, I mean, it's really, they still do this. It still happens, but it's still read back to the past as well. I think it's, I think even in the present, it is hard for people to conceptualize black Americans of 40 years ago as being like working class primarily, like working in factories, working in fields, working in homes. And certainly in the present, I mean, you know, it's hard people, so readers of mind will know that, like, I did a lot of reporting from Ferguson almost nine years ago. Jesus Christ.

It does not feel like it was that long ago, but that's how long ago it was. And one of the things that's like so important to recognize about that and a lot of a lot of those. vents, the early Black Lives Matter stuff, this stuff was happening in like predominantly working class communities. And there's this way, you know, in the wake of Trump, speaking of Trump, in the wake of Trump, there was the, you know, the explosion of critiques of identity politics, of a quote-unquote identitarianism and so on and so forth, some of which, you know, had real meat to them, others which were, did not, were suspect. But one thing I do think a lot of those critiques missed is that, you know, the demands of black people in Ferguson to not be harassed by the police

should be understood in part as like a class demand, right? Like, this is an experience of working class people facing a police force that's like openly acting in an extractive manner. And this is sort of like, you know, we can't, we can't afford to live here in part because the police keep on stealing our money in addition to harassing us. It's about the question of dignity, but also a question of, like, literal resources. And, you know, one of the things that sometimes loss in discussions of police violence is that your class status does very much, like, structure your exposure to it, even among black people. Like, I, an upper middle class guy professional, who drives like a, I drive a Mazda, but like it's a nice enough car and probably, like, I'm less likely

statistically to find myself in that situation than one of my working class neighbors who drives like a beat up pickup truck and works at odd hours. Even now, I think both my people and like black political demands are too often slotted until like this is all about identity when like when you really begin to look at these things. Like not suffering violence at the hands of the state in addition to just being like a legitimate political demand should not be solely understood in terms of identity. It needs to be need to be integrated into an understanding of like how class looks for different categories of people. Well, yeah. I mean, like who is getting policed?

You know, I mean, there is a legitimate complaint among, you know, among black middle class and upper class people that like, You know, Jay Caspian King made this point once when he was kind of making fun of somebody Asian Americans who complain about being mistaken for a delivery guy, which, you know, is obviously offensive. But he was like, well, you just kind of don't like being identified as being poor. Right. You know, when you say that. So what's going on there? You know, it's a little bit like, well, you know, poor and working class communities are more heavily policed. And that's like, you know, there are also people that don't have the resources.

to defend themselves and don't have the resources to have not legal defenses or to get media on their side, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're easier to, to push around and they get pushed around. That's who gets pushed around in our society. What, why are these certain communities so heavily policed? Obviously, part of that is racial, but it's because of what class of racial category gets stuck where, you know, it's like it's, it's, uh, there are obviously just, racist cops who want to humiliate and hurt black people because they don't like to see black people who are higher up in the social ladder. Don't want to see a brother succeed. That's right. That's right. I mean,

that's true. But more often than not, a lot of people, a lot of, there are plenty of cops who are probably justified themselves as not being racist because that doesn't bug them. And they were like, well, you know, that's a nice black person. It was a good, oh,

I read an interesting story. I read, no, it's not a story. When I was doing research for my book, I read a book called Canarsie, which was about the struggle, about the integration of Canarsie. And, you know, Canarsie was an Italian and Jewish lower middle class and working class neighborhood that started to get an ingress of black residents in the 60s and 70s. And there was a guy who was part of this horribly racist. community organization, you know,

and we're this, end word that, blah, blah, you know, putting out horrible flyers. And then he moves out to Long Island to a kind of middle class neighborhood, right? And he has black neighbors and he says, I regret some of the ways I behaved back then, but these people are middle class and it's different.

You know, and it's like, yeah, well, that's not less racist in a way. It's like, you know, as long as they'll behave, according to the class norms of the community you're in, you know, you're fine with them. But when they were like, oh, actually other poor people are here competing for resources or trying to move up into, you know, a slightly higher standard of living, which then brings my standard of living down, then you were a raging racist. Now that you have middle class neighbors, you're like, hey, maybe I was a little too bit

hardcore. You know, it's not to say that happens in every case, but I thought it was very interesting that when his material circumstances changed and the material circumstance of his neighbors changed and what they were like and how he perceived them, you know, his racial attitudes shifted a lot. And he became like, maybe my racial attitudes when I was living in Canarsie were too much. Yeah. This person was a hardcore racist, you know, or would it, would it on paper look like a hardcore racist? And then he was like, yeah, I like my black neighbors now.

Yeah. So Canadian Bacon doesn't really get into any of it. Deal with that. Yeah. But, I mean, I do think, I do think because it is centered on the working class community and working class characters, which, I mean, I'll say, I'll say to Moore's credit, again, not a good movie, but to Moore's credit, it is still very unusual to see a movie. Especially in the 90s. Especially in the 90s. Yeah, a movie centered on working class characters, even if they're caricatures, which it's a far as a satire. So that's sort of part of the territory. But they aren't unsympathetic. They're kind of portrayed as being well-meaning, but manitur. manipulated and in dire financial straits. And that's like, it's a very unusual thing to see.

But yeah, just the, the extent to which the movie is mainly populated by working class characters in terms of the people you're supposed to identify with and sympathize with, I think provides like, it's something, you know, something of a way into, into discussing this. And just to emphasize the point about this being unusual for the 90s, it is this. way, right? Like the 90s, in a lot of ways, like the great middle class decade, right? Sort of like prosperity was rising all boats. And so, you know, popular culture didn't really depict working class families as much. Yes, there's Roseanne, but that's like the exception that proves the rule. But to your point earlier, John, it is interesting how the groups, the group left

behind in the 90s, which was urban African-Americans, are, you know, swiftly pathologized. Like, this is the bell curve. This is all that stuff about sort of like, well, maybe they're just biologically or genetically or socially, culturally, for some reason, unable to get ahead. And you're right to note that it's interesting that's sort of in the post-Trump selection and as the eye of the chattering classes moved over to the white working class that has been left behind. That language reemerged. Charles Murray even wrote a book. Was it falling behind, something like that?

Coming apart. Coming apart. The problem was that white working class people were coming up too much like black working class. Right, right, exactly. The general unwillingness, I think, in terms of the American political class, to look at these phenomena as anything other than the product of some deficiency on part of the people, what that deficiency is attributed to something inherent to the person or whether it's like, well, there's just not enough. job training, right? There's just not enough, you know, you got to get more skills, improve your human capital. It's not enough education. Right. Rather than something, you know, structural about the economy. And the unfortunate thing is that, like, there are plenty of ordinary people

who believe this as well, that like, you know, part of the success, the ideological system, the ideological system of the American system is actually to persuade quite a few people that this is, this actually is the case that, like, if you can't make it here, it's because there's something wrong with you. Yeah, you're a loser. Right. Well, I'm here to tell you you're not a loser. If you get nothing else from this podcast.

Yeah. It's that system is to blame. Yes. Okay. I think that's it for Canadian Bacon. I mean, not a movie I'd recommend. I mean, if you watch the movie if you're going to listen to this episode, as always. But like, if you're just looking for something to watch, like, don't worry about.

No, it's not that funny. Not that funny. It's more, it's like, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a new, it's like a fun artifact. It very much is sort of like, this is a funny thing in the, in the context of the early 90s that was produced. I mean, he got 11, they more got 11 million dollars to make it. So, um, you know, can we can we watch Bob Roberts actually? I think that would actually fit. Have you ever seen that?

I've never seen that. Watch the trailer. It's from 92. I think, I think it would fit. yeah let's let's do it oh yeah okay let's totally watch this this is right in my alley yeah yeah um okay so we'll do bob roberts at some point maybe maybe not next episode because we have a thing we want to do next episode maybe the episode after that and then we'll get back into the into the timeline okay that is our show if you're not a subscriber please subscribe

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For this week in feedback, we have an email from Craig titled Die Hard. This is a comment on our Die Hard with a vengeance episode from the previous episode. Hi, guys. Thanks for the great podcast. I just listened to your episode on Die Hard with a Vengeance. And I wanted to share that, well, I know I'm probably the only person in the world with this take. for me die hard with a vengeance and the memories it evokes stand in for much of the domestic politics of the south in the early 90s despite its gloss as a very new york movie large chunks of die hard with the vengeance were shot in charleston south carolina i know because i was living there at the time it was filmed this was a film shoot people definitely took sides about he in he this is like such a great email at the time of filming charleston was facing the closure of the naval base as part of the program

of post-Cold War military consolidations. Navigating the future of the city in the wake of the loss of what was one of the largest sources of income in the city was Mayor Joe Riley, who was then firmly in the middle of his remarkable 41-year tenure at Charleston's mayor. Charleston was still a sleepy city at the time, but Riley had a long-term vision to migrate the city away from its dependence on industrial and military economics and guided towards an investment in what we would now call cultural capital. Part of Riley's vision for a modernized and more economically diverse city was building the cultural capital of the city.

This meant encouraging more TV and movie production in the city with a list of productions that would include the Gone with the Wind TV sequel, Scarlet. I have no idea that existed. Mel Gibson's The Patriot in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries where if you look closely, I think you can see me in the background in one shot. That's wonderful. I love Unsolved Mysteries. Update. Die Hard with a Vengeance was one of the first. first large-scale production shot in the city, whether you were for or against this movie shoot, or whether you were for or against Riley's plans, was in some ways a debate over

whether you wanted things to change or remain the same, whether you wanted Charleston to say part of the Old South or joined the New South. This debate was also happening after the admission of the first female cadets to the Citadel, another one of those cultural flashpoints in the early 90s that has now been mostly forgotten. So the discussion was very much for its explicitly on those chains or remain the same terms. Charleston did, for the most part, choose the New South, and went down a path which

invested heavily in the city as a cultural destination and saw a tremendous increase in wealth and economic activity. But this growth came at the cost of insane levels of gentrification, the slow displacement of the peninsula's black population, and the pricing of the working class out of the city almost

in its entirety. The base closures also seem to have had the side of of reducing the number of people across the country who interact with servicemen, both personally and economically, on a day-to-day basis, which must have played a part in how much militaristic rhetoric and even cosplay has become part of American political life. So as I said, I'm probably the only one he feels this way, but for me, Die Hard with a Vengeance, is the most political movie of the decade, and it reminds me of how the potential for the post-Cold War was simultaneously fulfilled and squandered.

incidentally speaking of shifting cultural capital the movie was also filmed at a time when when another artifact for the post-cold war was ending namely bruce willis pretending to be a rock star as bruno a friend of mine was drinking in a bar downtown one night during filming when an announcement was made that there was a surprise special guest willis comes on stage with his fedor and harmonica and as soon as he blew his first note i'm told everyone in the place immediately got up and walked out thanks again for some great work uh this i think is a phenomenal email that really kind of is like, you know, talk to what we've talked about this episode, certainly.

But, yeah, I don't necessarily have anything to add. I think the analysis is really interesting. It's right. And I think, you know, it's interesting to think about the effects, like the regional effects of base closures and post-cold war and sort of different places trying to eke out new ways of, like, of sustaining themselves. And, yeah, Charleston, I mean, Charleston now today is like a very vibrant and cultural hub with all the problems that Craig kind of outlines. And I wouldn't have necessarily tied it to sort of the effects of the base closures.

But yeah, any thoughts, John? No, I think that's just fascinating. It was very interesting to hear a story and to have that, you know, related to the movie is super interesting. Yeah. Thank you again, Craig. episodes come out every other Friday so we'll see you in two weeks with the movie we had to skip previously because i could not find it that's true lies that apparently is now streaming on apple's streaming platform so and streaming in HD no less true lies you think it's kind of

interesting that they got tucker carlson off the air and now true lies is available i think that they're they're trying to make up for the removal of them yeah that's right yeah that's right um so uh this is james cameron's 1994 kind of i don't know what to call this movie it's an it's an action thriller it's an as finage movie it's kind of a farce a little bit because like arnold schwartz snaker as a spy it's just like profoundly unconvincing but it is true lies uh short plot synopsis a fearless globetriding terrorist battling secret agent has his life turned upside down when he discovers his wife might be having an affair with a used car, salesman, while terrorists, smuggle nuclear warheads into the United

States. A very silly movie, very fun movie that we will cover in the next episode. Again, available to watch on Apple TV, the streaming service. Do not forget our Patreon. The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on Executive Action, a 1973 conspiracy movie. I don't want to say Thriller because there are no thrills in executive. Action. There's barely a story. It's barely a movie. But we did have a good conversation about it. You can listen to that and much more at patreon.com slash unclear pod for just $5 a month. $5. That is roughly the cost. I don't really buy coffee. So what costs $5 these days? A gallon of milk. I buy milk a lot for children. For my kids. Milk costs $5 where you are? Yeah.

It's $9 here. Jesus Christ. Well, down here in the south. Yeah. Milk costs $5. There's nothing that costs. A hot dog maybe costs $5. So for the cost of a hot dog or a gallon of milk in Virginia, you can subscribe to the

Unclear Pod, Patreon, but highly recommend it. Our producer is Connor Lynch, and our artwork is from Rachel X. For John Gans, I'm Chmall Bui, and this is unclear and present danger. We'll see you next time.