Wag the Dog
Twenty-five years ago Barry Levinson directed a little movie. He had directed such greats as The Natural, Tin Men, Rain Man, Diner and Sleepers, so he is an accomplished director who knows how to tell a great story through some complex plots. In 1997 he made a movie with Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Woody Harrelson, Anne Heche, Kristen Dunst and William H. Macy. It was about a scheme by a U.S. president who had been caught out in a sex scandal and who’s polling numbers implied that he would lose his upcoming election due to the increasing dissatisfaction in him by the electorate. As a last ditch effort to turn the tide back in his favor, his political hack advisors suggest that he go to war, but not a real war. They decide that time is of the essence and gearing up for a real war is just too difficult, so they fabricate a war in Albania, a place where news coverage effectiveness is limited and therefore there is less chance of tripping over reality. They hire a top Hollywood producer to fake a war and film it such that they can release footage over the course of the supposed war in a way to win the hearts and minds of the population as their president enters and resolves the conflict, saving lives and garnering the admiration of the world and his electorate. This movie was called Wag the Dog after the political tactic of diverting attention from something by throwing something more salacious in the public’s path.
We’ve seen lots of dog wagging over the last five years as Donald Trump and his cronies have stumbled from one scandal to another and learned how effective stumbling forward can be in a world of alternative facts where just saying almost anything loudly enough can create sufficient conspiracy theories and “dust in the air” to distract the public from the sobering reality of what is really going on. Don’t be confused by the phony Hollywood movie theme used in Ben Affleck’s great film Argo, where he tells the story of the CIA ex-fill guy Tony Mendez getting six U.S. embassy staffers out of fundamentalist-controlled Iran when Ayatollah Khomeini took over the country. In that movie, the CIA made up a pretend movie to distract a war zone, and that is quite a different feat even though the Hollywood phony machine was equally deployed. In fact, the Hoffman producer character and the Alan Arkin producer character that pull off these stunts are of similar tongue-in-cheek ilk. But ultimately, Argo was a true story brought to film and Wag the Dog was a piece of pure fiction which required the suspension of some degree of disbelief even if it is the sort of belief that conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones love to spin and spin and spin.
Times have changed in twenty-five years. It was plausible, indeed quite Clintonian, to have a U.S. president hoisted on the petard of his own dalliances. By the way, did you know the derivation of the euphemism of being “hoisted on one’s own petard”? It is, like many great turns of phrase, Shakespearean. It comes from Hamlet where a bomb-maker is often the unintended victim, and thereby “hoisted” into the air by his own bomb, or as Medieval Frenchmen used to call it, his own petard. But Donald Trump changed all that. Non-politicians can get slammed for their sexual dalliances, ranging from Jeffrey Epstein to Harvey Weinstein, Trump has proven that a politician can “grab them by the pussy” repeatedly and brazenly and still get away with it, even with the Evangelical Right, if the infamous “Bigger Picture” is served.
The real dog wagging that goes on now in Washington and Mar-a-Lago…and Tallahassee and Austin and Richmond and the soundstage of Tucker Carlson and the districts of Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are less about sex scandals (since, apparently, Matt Gaetz had “no awareness that she was underaged”), and more about distracting the public eye from the realities of the authoritarian world they love to espouse. If there is original sin in this kluge it is the attempt by Trump to sway Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into throwing Hunter and then-Candidate Joe Biden under the bus by wagging an investigative dog about dealings in Ukraine. Why Ukraine? Well, when you get elected with the help of Vladimir Putin and he has what is probably a very nice pee-pee tape of you reveling in a Moscow hotel room (perhaps less sexual for a germaphobe like Trump than generally depraved about stomping on his predecessors in a bed they once slept in), you help the man out with his own wagging dog.
And that brings us around to the real story facing the world at this moment. I grew up in the era of a very nasty police action that everyone tried not to call a war in Vietnam. As much of a mistake and bungled affair as it was (Hoffman and Arkin would never have produced such a messy failure on film), it was a very real conflict that was not a distraction, but rather a national mistake. Probably a misguided mistake of national pride more than anything. But is was all too real…even though I wasn’t there, man! Today we are finally getting more intelligent about conflict. We are still prone to sending off an unmanned drone now and then to surgically kill some terrorist (Eye in the Sky reminded us that the surgeon’s knife is not as precise as it sometimes claims to be), but we have mostly even gone beyond that. We are now realizing that the weapon of the Twenty-First Century is the economic sanction. We have used the duller versions of that sword (truly a sword rather than a scalpel) for years now starting with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. But that has been in conjunction with traditional military muscle. That made those countries more like bayonet dummies on which we practiced our use of sanctions.
Our more refined use of sanctions has been against our arch-enemy of the Cold War, the great and mighty empire of Russia. That empire is led by good old Soviet boy and spymaster Vlad “the Destroyer” Putin. He and his Oligarchs cannot fathom having to stay in their dachas around Moscow and St. Petersburg and find the eastern shore of the Black Sea too constraining when the Crimea is visible on the horizon. Indeed, those Oligarchs view the entire world as their playpen and have no intention of being economically restricted by some silly Western sanctions, thank you very much. Ten years ago, driven by the light yoke of early sanctions, they decided that fixing elections was the way to go as the best defense against economic sanctions. Hence the 2016 crowning glory of election manipulation (notice I did not say fraud for fear of sounding like the Donald himself).
Now, back to the Black Sea, as someone in the halls of the Kremlin streamed the Barry Levinson film one night and said, “Oro!!!”, as the Ruskies say our version of “No way!!!” Cut to Vladimir’s office…”So, ve make a movie of ze Ukrainian nationalists killing vomen and children and zen ve show those clips on Fox News (I vill call Tucker to set up). Zen we invade under provocation and Bob’s Your Uncle ven Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych become president again (after ve change his haircut so he not look so much like that loser Manafort). Easy, peasy, right boss?”