Welcome to the official Web log for American Zeitgeist, a feature-length documentary exploring the most explosive themes running through the War on Terrorism.
Here you will find writing by Rob McGann, the film’s director, on a running list of topics, including:
1. breaking developments in the War on Terrorism, with links to information and analysis from expert sources quoted in the film;
2. experimental thoughts pushing the borders of American politics and documentary filmmaking;
3. and updates on the progress of the film as it rolls out this year.
Entry 2: On Independent Media (another sleepless cogitation)
Interesting thing about independent filmmaking: the rules of traditional media don’t apply. You can create an environment where it all comes down to the power of the experience. The borders are rougher—the resulting insights, potentially much sharper and occasionally profound. A kind of high-wire act. Without a net, so to speak. And the distance to fall, quite a long way.
The point—not unlike a blog—is to push the borders of the askable, at a time when the attempt to do so can be both dangerous in the short-term and penalizing when measured against any kind of conventional standard; but in the spirit of the best sort of inquiry, perhaps one of the only ways to really learn how to learn…
So we’ve been slowly developing a hard-hitting movie designed to address the most vital questions underlying the American War on Terrorism. And one primary goal is to reach beyond the limitations of any single analytical perspective, no matter how “expert” or widely espoused. No, my friend, this ain’t a topic where toeing the line of any kind of liberalism or conservatism will suffice. The flashpoints of the debate are far messier and more important than that.
As I said to many people in the time leading up to the 2004 election, the politics dominating the discussion of what’s at stake in the War on Terrorism are inherently misleading. That said, it has become painfully clear that without assuming a much more involved and interactive approach to internationalism—where we position ourselves outside a context of scandal into the much riskier field of seeking the tough answers—no, we really aren’t going to get very far in resolving the problems that will be affecting all of us in this new century.
Entry 1: Entering the Terrorism-scape
It’s clear that something is happening in the world. For me, as for a lot of people, the story this film addresses dates back to the shock of a September morning some years ago. But, truth is, the origins of the tale go a long way further back than that.
I remember waking up shortly before 9 o’clock that day, having recently returned to the States from an exhausting three-month shoot in Ladakh, India for my first film (on the Tibetan Oracle tradition). We were in Michigan, oddly enough, just beginning the first review of over 100 hours of footage for that first project. Oddly, I say, because aside from the time I spent on the dusty trails of the Rooftop of the World that summer, the preceding three years had found me exclusively based in New York.
I had come to learn something about the problems of religious fundamentalism in places like Afghanistan, Kashmir, and various flashpoints in the Middle East in my pre-production research for that project. But the audacity of hijacked civilian airliners crashing like missiles into two towers that stood watch over my earliest days on this island of millions was…well, shocking even for a lad who had glimpsed some of the explosivity behind the phrase “Islamic fundamentalism” before then.
Fact was, some of the forces dangerously alurk in Eric S. Margolis’s War at the Top of the World—the same jihadist anger he documented in that eloquent book—had followed a very unlikely course across the frozen sea of Afghan mountains known as the Hindu Kush all the way to Lower Manhattan.
I remember fiery plumes of yellow and orange, and reddish spheres fading all too quickly into black. Gorging smoke that had no godly reason for being there, except hatred—one we would all have to take a soul-searching look at to determine what role we had played in setting this violence into motion, and what reasonable thing there was to do about it, if we were ever going to find the healing to come with understanding.
Something in the gut reluctant to acknowledge that thousands had been murdered—just hundreds of yards from where I lived my first ten months in New York in 1998 in an earlier time I still remember fondly, with the fish smell of those streets, as “my Seaport days.”
Suddenly we weren’t bullshitting about technology or millennial stock options anymore. The country, which had been on a kind of titillated hiatus since the fall of the Berlin Wall, was now going to have to grow up in a hurry.
It was as if the 9/11 attacks had been written in a fluorescent script with a wattage no American I knew at the time had the eyes to focus on without having his or her retinas seared. A brightly illuminated avowal of war, written in the blood of people from many countries—office people settling into a day’s work on a morning marked by serene weather.
And the retribution by the world’s sole remaining superpower, once it focused on the enemy, would be terrible and unrelenting. All of it seemed to signal a collision course of vastly different Weltanschauungen, the fragments of which we would be stinging ourselves on for quite some time.
As the title American Zeitgeist implies, the film we are now sending out into the world, while zeroing in on the origins of recent conflict, ultimately turns its questions back to this country. How would we respond? And what would happen as a result of that response? What was the back history? How connected to the fault lines of conflict in the Middle East? What about Afghanistan? Add Iraq into the mix, and the idea of spreading freedom around the world suddenly sounded a bit insane.
Somehow when you look deeply into why we are even engaged in a War on Terrorism, you have to realize the explanation extends beyond the radicalism of a small group of individuals from a particular religious faith. Oil interests, the Risk board sense of geopolitical decision-making and naked economic pan-nationalism also come into play. And whatever the outcome will be, if we can speak of outcomes, ultimately will come down to the trajectory of values and philosophy this country is based on. Trial by fire, if there has ever been a meaning to the phrase. And whether or not some of the fine ideals that have carried us this far are still tenable in the 21st century after the insanity of an incident like Abu Ghraib would also fall within the crosshairs of the film’s analysis.
For me, I guess directing what I have learned in the last few years of journalistic research and documentary filmmaking to these questions is my own way of making peace with what happened—what was happening—as the world began to spin off into what seemed like a most dangerous age of conflict and endless war.
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