Eisenhower Predicts the Apocalypse

With the release of his latest documentary, Why We Fight, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki has effectively become a more vital man than George W. Bush.

"The Presidency has become the office of a politically impotent despot," Jarecki explained (his emphasis on the position rather than the man presently embodying it) before hustling me into the back of his hired Mercedes in order to conduct an impromptu interview. Ironically, this deceptively radical statement is the director's paraphrasing of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's decreasingly evoked farewell address, in which he coined the term "military-industrial complex" and warned the American populace of its nation's inevitable surge toward empire.

Why We Fight concisely suggests that the Eisenhower speech that became such a formative moment for the film's director was even more prescient than most realize, as the complex of which he spoke has become both the means and the ends to America's militaristic policies the world over. While Jarecki wouldn't deny that Bush was responsible for bungling the Iraqi War, he subverted the commonly accepted notion that America was destined for combat since Sept. 12, 2001 by suggesting that the current regime was committed to war, regardless of its venue, because of the country it ran rather than how poorly it ran it. Jarecki elaborated by saying that, "The biggest mistake one can make about the military-industrial complex is to picture it as a group of evil people; it's much subtler than that. At the end of the day, it's a funneling of precious natural resources to the defense part of society until that part becomes so heavy that the country loses its balance and is tilted towards militarism."

Essentially Bush is today's most inarticulate and endlessly replaceable pawn, whereas Jarecki has become a singular voice in a sea of showmen. The former is just the most prominent of the American machine's innumerable single-serving cogs, whereas the latter's work is perhaps the most successful attempt at unmasking the contraption with images as indelibly as Noam Chomsky has with words. The self-perpetuating and intangible transition from nation to empire demands an independent interpreter, a role Jarecki assumes without the arrogance that might taint his message. Acutely attuned to the complex's evolving anatomy, Jarecki founded academic initiative The Eisenhower Institute as a means to monitor the forces shaping American foreign and defense policy. His voice demands to be heard, as the aural manifestation of political altruism can be found in the selflessness of his words and unflaggingly smooth affectation with which he delivers them.

Among the most integral of his contentions can be found in Why We Fight's tagline ("It is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever.") a simple statement which ominously suggests that our nation, like all things, will one day cease to exist regardless of our unjustifiably fortified egocentricity. The reality of transience is made evident in the film's opening moments as devices of perpetuity such as flags and statues are burned and toppled. Jarecki hints that the very notion of empire stands at odds with the irrefutable truth of ephemerality, a question he responded to with an ease that hints at a dormant optimism. "The illusion that what we're doing can go on forever," Jarecki explained, "came from our republican origins because the notion of self-government resonates with all of us and our ideals for democracy and for the human spirit, which is indefatigable ... and it's a wonderful reason that it's perpetuated. It happens because we are a peace-seeking electorate, and those in power know that the public is a peace-seeking electorate, and the evidence of that is the incredible lengths they go to in order to deceive us into wars that are against our better judgment, because if we were inclined to war it wouldn't be necessary to lie to us."

His response inevitably leads to a discussion concerning both the blatant forms those lies have assumed as well as their subtler and more effective counterparts. Jarecki once spoke of the chimera of total information and the black ink that buries the most crucial portions of our most crucial documents, but when faced with the choice of indulging in that delusion or to living in a society of unabashed censorship, the documentarian urgently replied that, "It's much more dangerous to have the pretense of freedom of information rather than have an outright clarity from the powerful that you live in a restrictive society. But the powerful have learned to exercise more subtle methods of oppression, the most effective of which is the baffling contradiction of good advertising and false product-we're told that we have freedom of information so that we're made blind and docile to the reality that we don't. It paralyzes us all to think that if it's all going wrong then the bitch was asking for it."

But how do you get the bitch to realize what she's begging for? Faith in the televised media began to wane with the death of Edward R. Murrow and has continued to decline as the world further complicates itself.

"There was a crisis of confidence in the public media," Jarecki explains. "And at that moment all eyes turned towards the documentary, as people have begun to feel that mainstream journalism has been corrupted by forces for whom the truth is inconvenient."

The documentary renaissance has arisen from the amplification of isolated voices, voices that have suffocated the middleman by arousing those troubled by their reluctant compliance. Jarecki concludes that, "The middleman has told us for years that the public is apathetic and girls just wanna have fun, but the girls have spoken. It's still not lucrative for people like me, but the difference now is that the public and we have met and the middleman has been cut out of the loop. This is happening."

I offered that the documentary's resurgence might be a result of political filmmakers finally living up to the narrative promises of Nanook of the North and Luis Bunuel's Land Without Bread (among the first and most successful cinematic attempts to contort the facts into a greater truth) rather than a newfound public responsibility, to which Jarecki, the most quietly patriotic of documentarians, replied dismissively.

"Narratives have always been fashioned out of talking heads," Jarecki elucidated. "But such films delivered what Werner Herzog called 'the accountant's truth'; presenting every fact and figure obscures the truth because the truth is beyond the numbers." Why We Fight hums along on such unquantifiable certainties, punctuating the narrative with prominent speakers to support Jarecki's thesis rather than create it. Jarecki's subjects don't always provide the argumentative mileage the filmmaker needs, but the documentary's occasionally frustrating refusal to lose sight of its thesis consistently compensates for his interviewees' shortcomings.

As our car arrived at its destination and our dialogue slinked into non-existence, I asked Jarecki if America could sustain itself without becoming an empire, to which he replied, "That's what Eisenhower was afraid of-if you build it, they will come."

That very fear was palpable in Jerecki's voice when he stepped out of the car, the moment when I realized I had no idea where the fuck I was-never before had I so eagerly jumped into a car without knowing where it was heading. Perhaps the question of destination never occurred to me because I was too eager to conduct my first interview to bother with such unpleasantness. Or maybe Why We Fight's indelible appeal against the illusion of permanence had temporarily elevated me beyond the accountant's truth in favor of far less ephemeral concerns. Regardless of the reason, as Jarecki's driver left me at the entrance to the West End, I knew that my night had been far too sobering to drink.