Which made for an interesting contrast with the other two movies I watched over the weekend: The Most Dangerous Man in America and Sometimes in April. My blurb copy for each of them would read as follows: Freedom of speech: Yes? No? Maybe?
I didn’t fully experience the 1970s, but I still get nostalgic for the era. From what I’ve read and heard and seen, it seems to me that the 1970s is the last time people, en masse, actually rejected convention. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon employee and the Wiki leaker of his day, earned the most dangerous designation by sharing massive volumes of classified documents with The New York Times. He was driven to this act because, as someone who had contributed to the “intelligence” used to justify the war in what Nixon called, on tape, “that little shit-ass country,” his conscience would no longer permit him not to. The most compelling part of the film, I thought, occurred after the leak. Nixon imposed an injunction, so other papers across the country, one by one, in solidarity, took up publishing the documents where the New York Times left off. In fairly quick order, the supreme court also answered to its conscience and dismissed Nixon’s injunction, but not before what for me was the movie’s most memorable scene. As Tricky Dick was doing his best to nationalize the print and broadcast media, Daniel Ellsberg gave a copy of the documents to a congressman from Alaska, who read from them at the U.S. Capitol during a filibuster, which, technically, transferred the official ownership of the papers from the Pentagon to the U.S. Congress. I love dangerous people.
Finally, on Sunday afternoon, Rwanda. The 1994 genocide in that country in which nearly 1 million people (more by some estimates) were killed intrigues me. April 1994 for me is not confined to grainy black and white photographs in history books. I remember it, and I remember it well. Sometimes in April follows two brothers throughout the killing spree and its aftermath. One is married to a Tutsi woman; the other is an announcer on the Rwandan radio station that beat the death drums via the airwaves throughout the genocide, branding Tutsis as, among other things, “cockroaches.” The story is a complex one, and the questions it left with me are even more so. What exactly does freedom of speech mean? Is it okay for people like Michael Savage to take to dehumanize Muslims and liberals and anyone else he doesn’t like by calling them “vermin”? Does the right to free speech cover Portland’s own right-wing, talking hyena, who claims, repeatedly, that well over half of all Latinos in the city are “illegals”? Should her station be required to have documentation on file to back up that claim? I don’t know.
Throughout Sometimes in April, newsreels from a particular day of the genocide were shown along with the number of people killed by that date at the bottom of the screen, a morbid ticker, if you will. One day that month – and I remember this very clearly – as people were hacked to bits with machetes, the lead story on the national news in the U.S. was the mournful youngsters gathered in Seattle to comfort one another through a devastating blow: Kurt Cobain had killed himself, silencing forever “the voice of a generation.” What on earth were they going to do without him? In spite of the message that Courtney Love had recorded for the weeping wounded, they were lost, as was Julia Roberts on Saturday afternoon as she gazed down at her wedding photos and tearfully realized she couldn’t picture herself in her own marriage. It was a crisis, to be sure, as was the number accompanying the images of the mourners. I believe 30,000 people had been murdered in Rwanda at that point in the film, but it may have been up to 60,000 by then. Sorry – I’m not so good with numbers.
