US veteran who killed unarmed Iraqis wins Tea Party support
Murder charges were dropped against Ilario Pantano, who now verges on election victory buoyed by right-wing backing
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Ed Pilkington in Wilmington, North Carolina
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 October 2010 12.18 BST
Article history
Ilario Pantano, who is standing as a Republican candidate in North Carolina's 7th congressional district in the US midterm elections. Photograph: Logan Wallace/AP
The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons.
Pantano ordered the two men to search the car for a second time and then, with no other US soldiers in view, unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine at them – some 60 rounds in total.
Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: "No better friend, No worse enemy."
Six years later Pantano is on the verge of a stunning electoral victory that could send him to the US Congress in Washington. He is standing as Republican candidate in North Carolina's 7th congressional district, which was last represented by his party in 1871.
With the help of the right-wing Tea Party movement, and with the benefit of his image as a war hero acquired from what happened on that fateful day in 2004, he has raised almost $1m (£630,000) in donations and is now level-pegging with his Democratic opponent, Mike McIntyre.
"We are in complete contention. We are certainly neck-and-neck. And we are feeling terrific," he said at a Tea Party rally outside Wilmington.
Pantano is one of the new breed of hardline Republicans thrown up by the turmoil of the economic meltdown and the ensuing Tea Party explosion. He served in the first Gulf war, then worked for Goldman Sachs before rejoining the marines days after the 9/11 attacks.
A few months after he killed the two unarmed Iraqis, a member of his unit reported him to senior officers and he was charged with premeditated murder. At a pre-trial military hearing, prosecution witnesses testified that the detainees, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Hanjil, were unthreatening and that their bodies were found in a kneeling position having apparently been shot in the back.
The defence countered that weapons had been found in the house from where the Iraqis were fleeing. The men had turned on Pantano unexpectedly as he was guarding them. He shouted "Stop!" but they didn't respond and he opened fire in self-defence.
Defence lawyers highlighted inconsistencies in the accounts of the prosecution witnesses and portrayed the main witness, who had been demoted by Pantano, as a soldier with an axe to grind. Forensic evidence was said to conflict with the prosecution case.
In the event, all charges against Pantano were dropped on grounds of insufficient evidence. But the officer presiding over the hearing recommended that Pantano be given non-judicial punishment for having displayed "extremely poor judgment", adding that by desecrating the Iraqi's bodies with his placard he had brought disgrace to the armed forces.
Pantano declined to be drawn on the specifics of his case. "I'm running for Congress. I'm not defending myself for something that happened five years ago," he said.
But what about that placard? "I don't need to explain anything to people. If folk are alarmed, well war is alarming. All of my men that are alive are grateful for my service."
Neither Pantano nor McIntyre, who has held the seat for the Democrats for the past 12 years, have raised the shooting incident in their campaigns. The only criticism, paradoxically, has come from the Republican who Pantano beat in the primary election, Will Breazeale.
"I myself was a veteran of Iraq. I've detained Iraqis, and in my view Pantano is no war hero," he said.
Pantano dismissed his criticisms as "an historic case of sour grapes".
But in this district, which has a large military population due to its proximity to Camp Lejeune, the marine base where Pantano's pre-trial hearing took place, most voters know Pantano's story intimately. "He's a war hero," said a top local Republican official who declined to give his name. And the placard? "Doesn't bother me."
Arthur Plante, a veteran of the US coastguard, said: "If I had been in his situation over in Iraq I would have done the same thing." His wife, Cynthia, also a veteran, said: "I would follow Pantano to war any time, any place. He did what had to be done."
Pantano is fighting the election on a national manifesto for change. He wants to cut back on government spending and clamp down on extremist Islam.
He recently spoke at Ground Zero in New York where he opposes plans to build an Islamic cultural centre nearby. "America objects to what's happening there. The folks in this district think it's an abomination," he said.
He has been endorsed by Pamela Geller, one of the leading opponents of the cultural centre who has built bridges between her group Stop Islamisation of America and the British far-right group the English Defence League.
"I don't have any anxieties about Pam Geller," Pantano said. "She is a patriot. I'm thrilled to have her endorsement."
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
"Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth
WEDNESDAY, OCT 6, 2010 20:30 ET
ANDREW O'HEHIR
"Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth
Diane Lane shines in a Tea Party-flavored, Christian-friendly yarn about one big horse and our nation's past
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
"Secretariat" is such a gorgeous film, its every shot and every scene so infused with warm golden light, that I began to wonder whether the movie theater were on fire. Or my head. But the welcoming glow that imbues every corner of this nostalgic horse-racing yarn with rich, lambent color comes from within, as if the movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose. (Or as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.) I enjoyed it immensely, flat-footed dialogue and implausible situations and all. Which doesn't stop me from believing that in its totality "Secretariat" is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.
In its own strange way, "Secretariat" is a work of genius. On its lustrous surface, it's an exciting sports movie in a familiar triumph-over-adversity vein, based on the real-life career of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat, probably the greatest racehorse ever, and his owner, Penny Chenery, played by Diane Lane in a resplendent collection of period knitwear and steel-magnolia 'tude. "Secretariat" is self-consciously crafted in the mode of last year's hit "The Blind Side" (which made a zillion bucks and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar), and clearly hopes for similar rewards. Like that film, it uses a "true story" as the foundation for a pop-historical reverie that seems to reference enduring American virtues -- self-reliance, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. -- without encouraging you to think too much about their meaning or context.
Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in "The Blind Side" (where it's more like text, period), "Secretariat" actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord. In the world of this movie, strong-willed and independent-minded women like Chenery are ladies first (she's like a classed-up version of Sarah Palin feminism), left-wing activism is an endearing cute phase your kids go through (until they learn the hard truth about inheritance taxes), and all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean Überhorse, a hero so superhuman he isn't human at all.
Now, the fact that director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich locate this golden age between 1969 and 1973 might seem at first like a ludicrous joke, if you are old enough (as I am) to halfway remember those years. I'll say that again: The year Secretariat won the Triple Crown was the year the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate hearings began. You could hardly pick a period in post-Civil War American history more plagued by chaos and division and general insanity (well, OK -- you could pick right now). Wallace references that social context in the most glancing and dismissive manner possible -- Penny's eldest daughter is depicted as a teen antiwar activist, in scenes that resemble lost episodes of "The Brady Bunch" -- but our heroine's double life as a Denver housewife and Virginia horse-farm owner proceeds pretty much as if the 1950s had gone on forever. (The words "Vietnam" and "Nixon" are never uttered.)
One shouldn't impute too much diabolical intention to the filmmakers; for all I know, Penny Chenery really did live in an insulated, lily-white bubble of horsey exurban privilege, and took no notice of the country ripping itself apart. But today, in the real world, we find ourselves once again in an enraged and dangerously bifurcated society, and I can't help thinking that "Secretariat" is meant as a comforting allegory, like Glenn Beck's sentimental Christmas yarn: The real America has been here all along, and we can get it back. If we just believe in -- well, in something unspecified but probably pretty scary.
Religion and politics are barely mentioned in the story of Chenery and her amazing horse, but it's clear that "Secretariat" was constructed and marketed with at least one eye on the conservative Christian audiences who embraced "The Blind Side." The film opens with a voice-over passage from the Book of Job and ends with a hymn. Wallace, also the director of "We Were Warriors" and the writer of "Pearl Harbor" and "Braveheart," is one of mainstream Hollywood's few prominent Christians, and has spoken openly about his faith and his desire to make movies that appeal to "people with middle-American values."
Hey, all's fair in art and commerce. Hollywood has finally woken up (a few decades late) to the enormous consumer power of the Christian market, and given all the namby-pamby Tinseltown liberalism right-wingers love to complain about, it's about time. But it's legitimate to wonder exactly what Christian-friendly and "middle-American" inspirational values are being conveyed here, or whether they're just providing cover for some fairly ordinary right-wing ideology and xenophobia. This long-suffering female Job overcomes such tremendous obstacles as having been born white and Southern and possessed of impressive wealth and property, and who then lucks into owning a genetic freak who turned out to be faster and stronger than any racehorse ever foaled. And guess what? She triumphs anyway!
If Americans love to root for the underdog, they may love to root for the favorite disguised as the underdog even more. That's pretty much what happens here, with the blond, privileged Penny Chenery and her superhorse posed as emblems of American ingenuity and power against the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat's archrival. (Even the horse's name is evil!) The competition between the two horses was real enough; they raced neck-and-neck in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. But the depiction of Martin as an evil, chauvinistic braggart is fictional and highly unpleasant -- and it's tough not to notice that he's one of only two nonwhite speaking characters in the film. The other one is Eddie (Nelsan Ellis), an African-American groom who belongs to a far more insidious tradition of movie stereotypes. Eddie dances and sings. He loves Jesus and that big ol' horse. He is loyal and deferential to Miz Penny, and injects soul and spirit into her troubled life. I am so totally not kidding.
To move from content back to form, let me repeat that there's a whole lot to like in "Secretariat." Diane Lane gives a weirdly compelling performance, one of her best. She renders Penny Chenery as an iron-willed superwoman, striking and magisterial but utterly nonsexual, illuminated from within like a medieval saint. She busts down the doors on the boys' club of old-money Kentucky and Virginia racing, outwits the tax authorities and defangs Pancho Martin, in between doing loads of her kids' laundry. It's hard to say who is more indomitable, Penny or the magnificent colt she called Big Red, who capped his Triple Crown with an unbelievable 31-length victory at New York's Belmont Stakes. It's a charismatic, ultra-cornball performance, and right about the time that Rich's screenplay runs out of let's-go-get-'em speeches for Lane to deliver, Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler step in with wonderfully varied and dazzling approaches to Secretariat's four big races (the Triple Crown plus the earlier Wood Memorial, where he finished fourth).
Despite those thrilling sequences, you don't learn much more about the world of racing in "Secretariat" than you learn about Facebook in "The Social Network" (and a lot of the stuff about racing in this movie is wrong or misleading). (You won't learn anything about anything from John Malkovich's mailed-in performance as eccentric French-Canadian trainer Lucien Laurin.) Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power. Horses don't go to the movies, and this movie is about human beings, and our nonsensical but inescapable yearning to find the keys to the future in stupid ideas about a past that never existed.
ANDREW O'HEHIR
"Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth
Diane Lane shines in a Tea Party-flavored, Christian-friendly yarn about one big horse and our nation's past
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
"Secretariat" is such a gorgeous film, its every shot and every scene so infused with warm golden light, that I began to wonder whether the movie theater were on fire. Or my head. But the welcoming glow that imbues every corner of this nostalgic horse-racing yarn with rich, lambent color comes from within, as if the movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose. (Or as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.) I enjoyed it immensely, flat-footed dialogue and implausible situations and all. Which doesn't stop me from believing that in its totality "Secretariat" is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.
In its own strange way, "Secretariat" is a work of genius. On its lustrous surface, it's an exciting sports movie in a familiar triumph-over-adversity vein, based on the real-life career of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat, probably the greatest racehorse ever, and his owner, Penny Chenery, played by Diane Lane in a resplendent collection of period knitwear and steel-magnolia 'tude. "Secretariat" is self-consciously crafted in the mode of last year's hit "The Blind Side" (which made a zillion bucks and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar), and clearly hopes for similar rewards. Like that film, it uses a "true story" as the foundation for a pop-historical reverie that seems to reference enduring American virtues -- self-reliance, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. -- without encouraging you to think too much about their meaning or context.
Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in "The Blind Side" (where it's more like text, period), "Secretariat" actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord. In the world of this movie, strong-willed and independent-minded women like Chenery are ladies first (she's like a classed-up version of Sarah Palin feminism), left-wing activism is an endearing cute phase your kids go through (until they learn the hard truth about inheritance taxes), and all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean Überhorse, a hero so superhuman he isn't human at all.
Now, the fact that director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich locate this golden age between 1969 and 1973 might seem at first like a ludicrous joke, if you are old enough (as I am) to halfway remember those years. I'll say that again: The year Secretariat won the Triple Crown was the year the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate hearings began. You could hardly pick a period in post-Civil War American history more plagued by chaos and division and general insanity (well, OK -- you could pick right now). Wallace references that social context in the most glancing and dismissive manner possible -- Penny's eldest daughter is depicted as a teen antiwar activist, in scenes that resemble lost episodes of "The Brady Bunch" -- but our heroine's double life as a Denver housewife and Virginia horse-farm owner proceeds pretty much as if the 1950s had gone on forever. (The words "Vietnam" and "Nixon" are never uttered.)
One shouldn't impute too much diabolical intention to the filmmakers; for all I know, Penny Chenery really did live in an insulated, lily-white bubble of horsey exurban privilege, and took no notice of the country ripping itself apart. But today, in the real world, we find ourselves once again in an enraged and dangerously bifurcated society, and I can't help thinking that "Secretariat" is meant as a comforting allegory, like Glenn Beck's sentimental Christmas yarn: The real America has been here all along, and we can get it back. If we just believe in -- well, in something unspecified but probably pretty scary.
Religion and politics are barely mentioned in the story of Chenery and her amazing horse, but it's clear that "Secretariat" was constructed and marketed with at least one eye on the conservative Christian audiences who embraced "The Blind Side." The film opens with a voice-over passage from the Book of Job and ends with a hymn. Wallace, also the director of "We Were Warriors" and the writer of "Pearl Harbor" and "Braveheart," is one of mainstream Hollywood's few prominent Christians, and has spoken openly about his faith and his desire to make movies that appeal to "people with middle-American values."
Hey, all's fair in art and commerce. Hollywood has finally woken up (a few decades late) to the enormous consumer power of the Christian market, and given all the namby-pamby Tinseltown liberalism right-wingers love to complain about, it's about time. But it's legitimate to wonder exactly what Christian-friendly and "middle-American" inspirational values are being conveyed here, or whether they're just providing cover for some fairly ordinary right-wing ideology and xenophobia. This long-suffering female Job overcomes such tremendous obstacles as having been born white and Southern and possessed of impressive wealth and property, and who then lucks into owning a genetic freak who turned out to be faster and stronger than any racehorse ever foaled. And guess what? She triumphs anyway!
If Americans love to root for the underdog, they may love to root for the favorite disguised as the underdog even more. That's pretty much what happens here, with the blond, privileged Penny Chenery and her superhorse posed as emblems of American ingenuity and power against the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat's archrival. (Even the horse's name is evil!) The competition between the two horses was real enough; they raced neck-and-neck in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. But the depiction of Martin as an evil, chauvinistic braggart is fictional and highly unpleasant -- and it's tough not to notice that he's one of only two nonwhite speaking characters in the film. The other one is Eddie (Nelsan Ellis), an African-American groom who belongs to a far more insidious tradition of movie stereotypes. Eddie dances and sings. He loves Jesus and that big ol' horse. He is loyal and deferential to Miz Penny, and injects soul and spirit into her troubled life. I am so totally not kidding.
To move from content back to form, let me repeat that there's a whole lot to like in "Secretariat." Diane Lane gives a weirdly compelling performance, one of her best. She renders Penny Chenery as an iron-willed superwoman, striking and magisterial but utterly nonsexual, illuminated from within like a medieval saint. She busts down the doors on the boys' club of old-money Kentucky and Virginia racing, outwits the tax authorities and defangs Pancho Martin, in between doing loads of her kids' laundry. It's hard to say who is more indomitable, Penny or the magnificent colt she called Big Red, who capped his Triple Crown with an unbelievable 31-length victory at New York's Belmont Stakes. It's a charismatic, ultra-cornball performance, and right about the time that Rich's screenplay runs out of let's-go-get-'em speeches for Lane to deliver, Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler step in with wonderfully varied and dazzling approaches to Secretariat's four big races (the Triple Crown plus the earlier Wood Memorial, where he finished fourth).
Despite those thrilling sequences, you don't learn much more about the world of racing in "Secretariat" than you learn about Facebook in "The Social Network" (and a lot of the stuff about racing in this movie is wrong or misleading). (You won't learn anything about anything from John Malkovich's mailed-in performance as eccentric French-Canadian trainer Lucien Laurin.) Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power. Horses don't go to the movies, and this movie is about human beings, and our nonsensical but inescapable yearning to find the keys to the future in stupid ideas about a past that never existed.
Ebert attacks my "Secretariat" review -- it's on!
FRIDAY, OCT 8, 2010 10:58 ET
ANDREW O'HEHIR
Ebert attacks my "Secretariat" review -- it's on!
My response to the critic's takedown of my takedown
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
I recently published a review of the new Disney film "Secretariat" that took an unorthodox and admittedly inflammatory approach to a would-be inspirational movie about a lady and a racehorse. Nearly all viewers will choose to see or not see the movie based on their level of interest in watching Diane Lane in an awesome array of early-'70s fashions, or watching exciting re-creations of the 1973 Triple Crown races. I accused the film of concealing -- or embodying, that's a better word -- an ideological worldview that is never made explicit but is present in every frame.
I don't claim the review makes its case with perfect clarity, and I didn't expect many people to agree completely. Being forcefully told that you're full of crap goes with the job description, especially in an inherently subjective endeavor like movie criticism. I was gratified that a lot of people read the review, and e-mailed or Tweeted it onward -- and was somewhere between flattered and startled that Roger Ebert posted a lengthy takedown of my review on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. Like almost everyone in this insular field, I venerate Roger as a passionate movie lover, a generous spirit, and an old-school journalist who has made the transition to new media and now pretty much owns the joint.
I thought Roger's response was worth a response of my own, partly because I think he's misreading or misinterpreting me, but mostly because I think the cultural gulf between our understandings of "Secretariat" offers a fascinating opportunity to talk about all kinds of stuff film critics don't generally discuss: the nature and meaning of propaganda, the ideology (or lack thereof) of Hollywood movies, the role of religion in public discourse and maybe the gap between idealism and cynicism when considering movies, or the world. (Actually, activists and commentators on the right are way ahead of us: They talk about this stuff all the time, and have compelled Hollywood to understand that there's enormous demand for a movie like "Secretariat.")
UPDATE: I also posted this to Roger's blog, where he has responded. Scroll to the bottom of the page to read that.
--------------------
Well, gee. Thanks, Roger. (I think.)
I'm not eager to get into a public dispute with you over a Disney movie that you found "straightforward" and "lovingly crafted" and I found weird, fake and inexplicably disturbing, which may be all this boils down to. The world isn't likely to care much, and will render its verdict without our help.
I appreciate that you opened and closed this piece with some kind words, and I have great respect for you as a man and a critic. That said, I think the only place where we agree here is when you say, "O'Hehir's reading [of 'Secretariat'] is wildly eccentric." I'll cop to that happily -- my review of the film was willfully hyperbolic, even outrageous, in hopes of getting people to look at a formulaic Disney sports movie through fresh eyes. I know I don't have to explain the function or uses of hyperbole to you, since it's a technique you often employ (here and elsewhere). My hyperbole in the "Secretariat" review was supposed to be funny, and also to provoke a response. I appear to have succeeded brilliantly with the second part! The results on "funny" are more mixed.
Now, clearly I could have written a more "normal" review, in which I said something like: "Secretariat" was kind of fun to watch, but it bugged me. It presents a prettied-up, phony-baloney vision of America in the early '70s, in a transparent effort to appeal to the "family-values" crowd who ate up "The Blind Side" -- people who want a comforting and unchallenging movie without any sex or swearing. There's nothing wrong with that as a way to make a buck, but this example is ultra-tame, scrubbed clean of any genuine conflict or drama, and I pretty much think it's crap.
Now, I gather you would have disagreed with that, and pretty sharply, but I very much doubt you'd have bothered writing several thousand words ripping me apart. Now perhaps you see the genius of my plan!
Seriously, that is what I think -- and pretty much what I said, albeit in somewhat stronger language. In your haste to take me down, I think you frequently read my gag lines as being deadly serious, mix or conflate different aspects of my argument (e.g., I don't say or think anything about the horse being evil, or representing evil), and confuse events in real life with what we see in the film.
Now then: I do indeed compare "Secretariat" to "master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl," a deliberately outrageous claim that, I suspect, pissed you off right at the outset. Let me elaborate a little. In my view, the most effective propaganda movies are not the ones about dudes with guns that espouse militarism, or the Soviet boy-meets-tractor films, or the Nazi cartoons about Jews. Those are too obvious. The most effective kind of propaganda depicts normal life, or rather an idealized vision of normal life, one that (as one of my readers put it) "makes a particular worldview seem natural, right and appealing." Viewed that way, of course, a very large proportion of Hollywood movies could be considered propaganda, which is a subject for another time. (The shoe may fit.)
Of course it's offensive to compare a contemporary filmmaker to Riefenstahl -- although she was unquestionably a great director -- but I never said or suggested that Randall Wallace had consciously or deliberately created a film whose primary purpose was ideological. It's more like the ideology of reassurance and comfort and gorgeous images -- what I refer to as the "fantasia of American whiteness and power," which is, yes, going kind of far -- is so built into this kind of movie you can't get it out. I do, however, see Wallace's desire to appeal to Christian audiences and a never-enumerated set of "middle-American values" as politically coded, at least to some degree. (Or rather, it's coded if you want it to be; of course he's happy with secular left-wing types watching the movie too.)
You believe, or suggest, that I damn the film for not noticing Vietnam or Watergate, but that isn't quite right. As I think I make clear, I was struck by the oddness of the film's idealized, "Ozzie and Harriet" portrait of American life, which feels more like the '50s, being set in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. That's a suggestive fact, an element of the overall picture, not an indictment. You indulge in some hyperbole of your own in suggesting that I accuse Penny Chenery (the movie character? the real person? I am not sure) of being an evil right-winger, when I never say, and do not know, anything about her politics. Watch out for the "O'Hehirian Riefenstahlian TeaPartyite" clique, though --we're on the rise!
I could go on, and I guess I will just a little: I never say or suggest that anyone considered the Triple Crown victories "as a demonstration of white superiority." (I honestly don't believe you don't get the "Nietzschean Überhorse" joke. Secretariat was a product of eugenics if any living creature ever was.) You suggest that I attack Randall Wallace for his religious faith, but I do not, and you cite nothing to support this. You say that I see "a repository of Christianity (of the wrong sort, presumably)" in the film, when I say clearly that religion plays almost no role in the story. On the other hand, it's simply a fact that Disney is marketing the film to Christian conservatives, and neither of us is required to have an opinion about it. And I'm not sure what you mean when you say you refuse to allow me to define the film as "Tea Party-friendly." Is Sarah Palin not allowed to like it?
On the film's racial issues: You suggest that I am demeaning the real-life Eddie Sweat, Secretariat's groom. I say nothing about Eddie Sweat. I am discussing a fictional character, the only black person ever seen in the film, who is presented as subordinate, unreflective, constantly cheerful and uniquely well equipped to communicate with an animal. Could there be such a person? Of course. But in the context of my perception of the film's total universe, this feels like an unwholesome and old-fashioned stereotype (for which there is a borderline-offensive name I will not use).
Similarly, I have a tough time believing you don't get what I'm trying to say about the Pancho Martin character. Those who reported on the Triple Crown at the time have said that the real Pancho Martin was neither talkative nor boastful, and had no particular adversarial relationship with Penny Chenery. That stuff we saw in the movie did not happen. But the filmmakers have taken the one faintly "ethnic" or non-American character in the movie, and made him thoroughly despicable. What was that? An accident? An aesthetic choice? Or a lazy and coded shortcut?
For me, all in all, "Secretariat" adds up to something that looks pretty but tastes pretty bad, and apparently I expressed that view with a degree of force you found "insane." Frankly, I wish you had avoided those kinds of epithets, and focused more on areas where we may have real differences of philosophical or political or aesthetic opinion and interpretation to discuss. I'm inclined to believe that you understood my argument well enough -- better than you claim to, at least -- but that it pissed you off so much you just didn't want to deal with it. But that's only a theory, and I assure you that my faith in Roger Ebert remains. Generally speaking.
--------------------
UPDATE: Ebert's response, just posted on his Sun-Times blog, is typically concise and gracious, and comes with a zinger or two:
Thanks for responding. I understand your points, and have had similar thoughts of my own about some films. But you're correct: I didn't read it as satire, maybe because I've been softened up by so many similar Armond White reviews that he (apparently) writes seriously.
We can agree perhaps on one thing: Your review helps us define what Rotten Tomatoes considers "positive."
ANDREW O'HEHIR
Ebert attacks my "Secretariat" review -- it's on!
My response to the critic's takedown of my takedown
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
I recently published a review of the new Disney film "Secretariat" that took an unorthodox and admittedly inflammatory approach to a would-be inspirational movie about a lady and a racehorse. Nearly all viewers will choose to see or not see the movie based on their level of interest in watching Diane Lane in an awesome array of early-'70s fashions, or watching exciting re-creations of the 1973 Triple Crown races. I accused the film of concealing -- or embodying, that's a better word -- an ideological worldview that is never made explicit but is present in every frame.
I don't claim the review makes its case with perfect clarity, and I didn't expect many people to agree completely. Being forcefully told that you're full of crap goes with the job description, especially in an inherently subjective endeavor like movie criticism. I was gratified that a lot of people read the review, and e-mailed or Tweeted it onward -- and was somewhere between flattered and startled that Roger Ebert posted a lengthy takedown of my review on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. Like almost everyone in this insular field, I venerate Roger as a passionate movie lover, a generous spirit, and an old-school journalist who has made the transition to new media and now pretty much owns the joint.
I thought Roger's response was worth a response of my own, partly because I think he's misreading or misinterpreting me, but mostly because I think the cultural gulf between our understandings of "Secretariat" offers a fascinating opportunity to talk about all kinds of stuff film critics don't generally discuss: the nature and meaning of propaganda, the ideology (or lack thereof) of Hollywood movies, the role of religion in public discourse and maybe the gap between idealism and cynicism when considering movies, or the world. (Actually, activists and commentators on the right are way ahead of us: They talk about this stuff all the time, and have compelled Hollywood to understand that there's enormous demand for a movie like "Secretariat.")
UPDATE: I also posted this to Roger's blog, where he has responded. Scroll to the bottom of the page to read that.
--------------------
Well, gee. Thanks, Roger. (I think.)
I'm not eager to get into a public dispute with you over a Disney movie that you found "straightforward" and "lovingly crafted" and I found weird, fake and inexplicably disturbing, which may be all this boils down to. The world isn't likely to care much, and will render its verdict without our help.
I appreciate that you opened and closed this piece with some kind words, and I have great respect for you as a man and a critic. That said, I think the only place where we agree here is when you say, "O'Hehir's reading [of 'Secretariat'] is wildly eccentric." I'll cop to that happily -- my review of the film was willfully hyperbolic, even outrageous, in hopes of getting people to look at a formulaic Disney sports movie through fresh eyes. I know I don't have to explain the function or uses of hyperbole to you, since it's a technique you often employ (here and elsewhere). My hyperbole in the "Secretariat" review was supposed to be funny, and also to provoke a response. I appear to have succeeded brilliantly with the second part! The results on "funny" are more mixed.
Now, clearly I could have written a more "normal" review, in which I said something like: "Secretariat" was kind of fun to watch, but it bugged me. It presents a prettied-up, phony-baloney vision of America in the early '70s, in a transparent effort to appeal to the "family-values" crowd who ate up "The Blind Side" -- people who want a comforting and unchallenging movie without any sex or swearing. There's nothing wrong with that as a way to make a buck, but this example is ultra-tame, scrubbed clean of any genuine conflict or drama, and I pretty much think it's crap.
Now, I gather you would have disagreed with that, and pretty sharply, but I very much doubt you'd have bothered writing several thousand words ripping me apart. Now perhaps you see the genius of my plan!
Seriously, that is what I think -- and pretty much what I said, albeit in somewhat stronger language. In your haste to take me down, I think you frequently read my gag lines as being deadly serious, mix or conflate different aspects of my argument (e.g., I don't say or think anything about the horse being evil, or representing evil), and confuse events in real life with what we see in the film.
Now then: I do indeed compare "Secretariat" to "master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl," a deliberately outrageous claim that, I suspect, pissed you off right at the outset. Let me elaborate a little. In my view, the most effective propaganda movies are not the ones about dudes with guns that espouse militarism, or the Soviet boy-meets-tractor films, or the Nazi cartoons about Jews. Those are too obvious. The most effective kind of propaganda depicts normal life, or rather an idealized vision of normal life, one that (as one of my readers put it) "makes a particular worldview seem natural, right and appealing." Viewed that way, of course, a very large proportion of Hollywood movies could be considered propaganda, which is a subject for another time. (The shoe may fit.)
Of course it's offensive to compare a contemporary filmmaker to Riefenstahl -- although she was unquestionably a great director -- but I never said or suggested that Randall Wallace had consciously or deliberately created a film whose primary purpose was ideological. It's more like the ideology of reassurance and comfort and gorgeous images -- what I refer to as the "fantasia of American whiteness and power," which is, yes, going kind of far -- is so built into this kind of movie you can't get it out. I do, however, see Wallace's desire to appeal to Christian audiences and a never-enumerated set of "middle-American values" as politically coded, at least to some degree. (Or rather, it's coded if you want it to be; of course he's happy with secular left-wing types watching the movie too.)
You believe, or suggest, that I damn the film for not noticing Vietnam or Watergate, but that isn't quite right. As I think I make clear, I was struck by the oddness of the film's idealized, "Ozzie and Harriet" portrait of American life, which feels more like the '50s, being set in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. That's a suggestive fact, an element of the overall picture, not an indictment. You indulge in some hyperbole of your own in suggesting that I accuse Penny Chenery (the movie character? the real person? I am not sure) of being an evil right-winger, when I never say, and do not know, anything about her politics. Watch out for the "O'Hehirian Riefenstahlian TeaPartyite" clique, though --we're on the rise!
I could go on, and I guess I will just a little: I never say or suggest that anyone considered the Triple Crown victories "as a demonstration of white superiority." (I honestly don't believe you don't get the "Nietzschean Überhorse" joke. Secretariat was a product of eugenics if any living creature ever was.) You suggest that I attack Randall Wallace for his religious faith, but I do not, and you cite nothing to support this. You say that I see "a repository of Christianity (of the wrong sort, presumably)" in the film, when I say clearly that religion plays almost no role in the story. On the other hand, it's simply a fact that Disney is marketing the film to Christian conservatives, and neither of us is required to have an opinion about it. And I'm not sure what you mean when you say you refuse to allow me to define the film as "Tea Party-friendly." Is Sarah Palin not allowed to like it?
On the film's racial issues: You suggest that I am demeaning the real-life Eddie Sweat, Secretariat's groom. I say nothing about Eddie Sweat. I am discussing a fictional character, the only black person ever seen in the film, who is presented as subordinate, unreflective, constantly cheerful and uniquely well equipped to communicate with an animal. Could there be such a person? Of course. But in the context of my perception of the film's total universe, this feels like an unwholesome and old-fashioned stereotype (for which there is a borderline-offensive name I will not use).
Similarly, I have a tough time believing you don't get what I'm trying to say about the Pancho Martin character. Those who reported on the Triple Crown at the time have said that the real Pancho Martin was neither talkative nor boastful, and had no particular adversarial relationship with Penny Chenery. That stuff we saw in the movie did not happen. But the filmmakers have taken the one faintly "ethnic" or non-American character in the movie, and made him thoroughly despicable. What was that? An accident? An aesthetic choice? Or a lazy and coded shortcut?
For me, all in all, "Secretariat" adds up to something that looks pretty but tastes pretty bad, and apparently I expressed that view with a degree of force you found "insane." Frankly, I wish you had avoided those kinds of epithets, and focused more on areas where we may have real differences of philosophical or political or aesthetic opinion and interpretation to discuss. I'm inclined to believe that you understood my argument well enough -- better than you claim to, at least -- but that it pissed you off so much you just didn't want to deal with it. But that's only a theory, and I assure you that my faith in Roger Ebert remains. Generally speaking.
--------------------
UPDATE: Ebert's response, just posted on his Sun-Times blog, is typically concise and gracious, and comes with a zinger or two:
Thanks for responding. I understand your points, and have had similar thoughts of my own about some films. But you're correct: I didn't read it as satire, maybe because I've been softened up by so many similar Armond White reviews that he (apparently) writes seriously.
We can agree perhaps on one thing: Your review helps us define what Rotten Tomatoes considers "positive."
Liu Xiaobo Wins Nobel Peace Prize
CHARLES HUTZLER AND KARL RITTER | 10/ 8/10 06:06 PM |
Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
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BEIJING — China has long wanted a Nobel prize. Now that it has one, its leaders are furious. The Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday, lending encouragement to China's dissident community and sending a rebuke to the authoritarian government, which sharply condemned the award.
In naming Liu, the Norwegian-based committee honored his more than two decades of advocacy for human rights and peaceful democratic change – from the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.
President Barack Obama, last year's peace prize winner, called for Liu's immediate release.
Anticipating the award, Chinese circumvented Internet controls and called friends overseas to learn the news. Supporters and friends gathered outside Liu's central Beijing apartment, where his wife was kept inside by police. At a park, a civil rights lawyer, a retired official-turned-blogger and a dozen other people cheered and waved placards saying "Long Live Freedom of Speech." The demonstrators were later taken away by police.
A buzz of congratulations coursed through Chinese instant messaging sites before censors scrubbed postings and blocked cell phone text messages that contained the characters for Liu's name. Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who won the prize in 1989, joined Obama and other leaders in congratulating Liu.
"Last year, I noted that so many others who have received the award had sacrificed so much more than I," Obama said. "That list now includes Mr. Liu, who has sacrificed his freedom for his beliefs."
The president praised China for its stunning 30 years of transformative economic growth. "But this award reminds us that political reform has not kept pace, and that the basic human rights of every man, woman and child must be respected," Obama said.
Two years into an 11-year jail term for subversion at a prison 300 miles (500 kilometers) from Beijing, the slight, 54-year-old literary critic was unlikely to have found out about the award. Prisoners are restricted to state media, which mostly ignored the news. His overjoyed wife, Liu Xia, said she hoped to give him a hug and tell him if police allow her to travel to the prison on Saturday.
The contretemps points to the sticky predicament the prize poses for the communist leadership. Liu is the first Chinese and first member of the much persecuted group of political activists to be given the peace prize, but he is virtually unknown among ordinary Chinese. The award is likely to carry his name and his call for democracy to a wider audience, especially among young Chinese who are avid Internet and cell phone users but due to censorship know little of the rights camp's past struggles with the government.
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"They are going to want to know who Liu Xiaobo is and why he won this prize. They are going to learn who he is and this way they are going to learn more about freedom, democracy, justice and about the Tiananmen generation," said Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who has become a fierce champion of human rights.
"It also sends a message to China and the Chinese government, that while the international community recognizes the economic achievements of today's China, it still cannot forget that China is falling behind in terms of some basic values and human principles, such as human rights and freedom of speech."
A Nobel for a Chinese dissident is one prize not wanted by a government usually hungry for international approval. It has launched a deep-pocketed campaign to win science prizes. And the peace prize lands squarely in the middle of a brewing debate among the Chinese leadership and the elite over whether to begin political reforms, and if so, how quickly.
In recent weeks the premier has called for changing the political system to safeguard China's stunning economic achievements while the powerful Politburo member overseeing law enforcement has urged officials to resist "erroneous Western political and legal perspectives."
Chinese Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing and Oslo lodged protests. The agency's spokesman issued a stinging condemnation, branding Liu a criminal, warning Norway that relations would suffer and accusing the Nobel committee of undermining the prize's mission to promote international understanding.
"Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law," spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in the statement. "The Nobel committee's decision to award such a person the peace prize runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and also desecrates the prize."
Jonas Gahr Stoere, foreign minister of wealthy, oil-rich Norway, said any punishment would backfire. "I think that would be negative for China's reputation in the world, if they chose to do that," Stoere told National Broadcaster NRK.
In announcing the prize in the Norwegian capital Oslo, the Nobel committee issued a challenge to China to live up to responsibilities as the world's second-largest economy and a burgeoning diplomatic and military power.
"China cannot only demand to have political and economic power, without being exposed to the same kind of discussions as other superpowers have been," committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said. He called Liu the "foremost symbol of Chinese human rights activists," adding: "So it was natural to give the prize only to him as a symbol of the whole Chinese society's wish for more democracy."
Liu is the first peace prize winner chosen while still in prison, although several laureates, including Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) and German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (1935) were in custody. Still others, like Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov (1975) and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa (1983), were prevented by their governments from going to Norway to accept the prize.
Liu's wife, prevented by police from mixing with the nearly 100 Chinese and foreign reporters outside her apartment, said by phone and messages that the award would give Liu encouragement. She hoped to go to Norway to collect the medal and its prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.5 million), if he cannot.
"I think this prize doesn't only belong to Liu Xiaobo one person, but also for all the people in China who advocate democracy, freedom and peace and for all the prisoners of conscience in jail," Liu Xia told Hong Kong's Cable TV.
In a statement issued by the Washington-based group Freedom Now, she thanked former Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, the Dalai Lama and South African Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, also a Nobel laureate, for nominating her husband.
Havel, who never won the prize but whose own human rights petition Charter 77 inspired Liu's tract Charter 08 and helped bring about the end of communist rule in then Czechoslovakia, said Liu "is exactly the kind of a committed citizen who deserves such an award."
Liu's Charter 08 called for greater freedoms and for the Communist Party to give way to gradual, democratic change. "The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer," Charter 08 says.
The government arrested Liu hours before the document's release in December 2008. It was the most programmatic in the hundreds of essays Liu wrote. Jailed for two years after the Tiananmen protests – when he helped persuade student protesters to leave the square before a military assault – and again for three years in the 1990s, Liu found a computer and the Internet at home on his release in 1999. "God's present to China," he called the Internet.
Thousands of Chinese – civil rights campaigners, professors and young professionals – signed on to Charter 08, which circulated by e-mail and on overseas Internet sites after being expunged from web pages in China.
The ability of Chinese to surmount censorship barriers using proxy servers and coded language kicked into high gear in the hours just before the Nobel announcement.
Excitement pulsed among students at Beijing Normal University, where Liu earned a degree in the '80s, and at Peking University. They passed word via the popular QQ.com instant messaging site.
When messages with Liu's name became blocked and online searches for him or "Nobel Peace Prize" failed – a usual tactic of censors – people began posting oblique congratulations to an unnamed Chinese for winning a Nobel.
Some curious students also said they did not know why Liu won and, echoing an oft-stated government line, wondered whether it was not a backhanded plot to shame China.
"The impact he has made is not Nobel Prize-level so far," said a Peking University English major, who would only give his English name, Eric Zhang. "People abroad know him better than we do. This is not us choosing him. They chose him, so I'm a bit suspicious. But maybe this is an opportunity to get more freedom so we don't have to go to Twitter to find out about him."
The government blacked out reports on CNN, which can be seen in tourist hotels and places where foreigners work and live, and kept the news off the main nationwide TV newscast. China Central Television-4, which is aimed at Chinese overseas, read the Foreign Ministry statement, providing a back door for Chinese to learn about Liu.
"Millions and millions of ordinary Chinese people, government employees, party cadres, students ... are going to want to know who is Liu Xiaobo and why he was sentenced to prison," said Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "They are going to discover Charter 08, which will spread uncontrollably."
The decision to jail Liu, he said, "has backfired spectacularly, and at a very critical juncture when China is coming out in the international community. Was jailing Liu worth the price of the current predicament?"
CHARLES HUTZLER AND KARL RITTER | 10/ 8/10 06:06 PM |
Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
Get World Alerts
Email Comments 1,414
BEIJING — China has long wanted a Nobel prize. Now that it has one, its leaders are furious. The Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday, lending encouragement to China's dissident community and sending a rebuke to the authoritarian government, which sharply condemned the award.
In naming Liu, the Norwegian-based committee honored his more than two decades of advocacy for human rights and peaceful democratic change – from the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.
President Barack Obama, last year's peace prize winner, called for Liu's immediate release.
Anticipating the award, Chinese circumvented Internet controls and called friends overseas to learn the news. Supporters and friends gathered outside Liu's central Beijing apartment, where his wife was kept inside by police. At a park, a civil rights lawyer, a retired official-turned-blogger and a dozen other people cheered and waved placards saying "Long Live Freedom of Speech." The demonstrators were later taken away by police.
A buzz of congratulations coursed through Chinese instant messaging sites before censors scrubbed postings and blocked cell phone text messages that contained the characters for Liu's name. Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who won the prize in 1989, joined Obama and other leaders in congratulating Liu.
"Last year, I noted that so many others who have received the award had sacrificed so much more than I," Obama said. "That list now includes Mr. Liu, who has sacrificed his freedom for his beliefs."
The president praised China for its stunning 30 years of transformative economic growth. "But this award reminds us that political reform has not kept pace, and that the basic human rights of every man, woman and child must be respected," Obama said.
Two years into an 11-year jail term for subversion at a prison 300 miles (500 kilometers) from Beijing, the slight, 54-year-old literary critic was unlikely to have found out about the award. Prisoners are restricted to state media, which mostly ignored the news. His overjoyed wife, Liu Xia, said she hoped to give him a hug and tell him if police allow her to travel to the prison on Saturday.
The contretemps points to the sticky predicament the prize poses for the communist leadership. Liu is the first Chinese and first member of the much persecuted group of political activists to be given the peace prize, but he is virtually unknown among ordinary Chinese. The award is likely to carry his name and his call for democracy to a wider audience, especially among young Chinese who are avid Internet and cell phone users but due to censorship know little of the rights camp's past struggles with the government.
ADVERTISEMENT
"They are going to want to know who Liu Xiaobo is and why he won this prize. They are going to learn who he is and this way they are going to learn more about freedom, democracy, justice and about the Tiananmen generation," said Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who has become a fierce champion of human rights.
"It also sends a message to China and the Chinese government, that while the international community recognizes the economic achievements of today's China, it still cannot forget that China is falling behind in terms of some basic values and human principles, such as human rights and freedom of speech."
A Nobel for a Chinese dissident is one prize not wanted by a government usually hungry for international approval. It has launched a deep-pocketed campaign to win science prizes. And the peace prize lands squarely in the middle of a brewing debate among the Chinese leadership and the elite over whether to begin political reforms, and if so, how quickly.
In recent weeks the premier has called for changing the political system to safeguard China's stunning economic achievements while the powerful Politburo member overseeing law enforcement has urged officials to resist "erroneous Western political and legal perspectives."
Chinese Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing and Oslo lodged protests. The agency's spokesman issued a stinging condemnation, branding Liu a criminal, warning Norway that relations would suffer and accusing the Nobel committee of undermining the prize's mission to promote international understanding.
"Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law," spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in the statement. "The Nobel committee's decision to award such a person the peace prize runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and also desecrates the prize."
Jonas Gahr Stoere, foreign minister of wealthy, oil-rich Norway, said any punishment would backfire. "I think that would be negative for China's reputation in the world, if they chose to do that," Stoere told National Broadcaster NRK.
In announcing the prize in the Norwegian capital Oslo, the Nobel committee issued a challenge to China to live up to responsibilities as the world's second-largest economy and a burgeoning diplomatic and military power.
"China cannot only demand to have political and economic power, without being exposed to the same kind of discussions as other superpowers have been," committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said. He called Liu the "foremost symbol of Chinese human rights activists," adding: "So it was natural to give the prize only to him as a symbol of the whole Chinese society's wish for more democracy."
Liu is the first peace prize winner chosen while still in prison, although several laureates, including Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) and German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (1935) were in custody. Still others, like Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov (1975) and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa (1983), were prevented by their governments from going to Norway to accept the prize.
Liu's wife, prevented by police from mixing with the nearly 100 Chinese and foreign reporters outside her apartment, said by phone and messages that the award would give Liu encouragement. She hoped to go to Norway to collect the medal and its prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.5 million), if he cannot.
"I think this prize doesn't only belong to Liu Xiaobo one person, but also for all the people in China who advocate democracy, freedom and peace and for all the prisoners of conscience in jail," Liu Xia told Hong Kong's Cable TV.
In a statement issued by the Washington-based group Freedom Now, she thanked former Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, the Dalai Lama and South African Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, also a Nobel laureate, for nominating her husband.
Havel, who never won the prize but whose own human rights petition Charter 77 inspired Liu's tract Charter 08 and helped bring about the end of communist rule in then Czechoslovakia, said Liu "is exactly the kind of a committed citizen who deserves such an award."
Liu's Charter 08 called for greater freedoms and for the Communist Party to give way to gradual, democratic change. "The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer," Charter 08 says.
The government arrested Liu hours before the document's release in December 2008. It was the most programmatic in the hundreds of essays Liu wrote. Jailed for two years after the Tiananmen protests – when he helped persuade student protesters to leave the square before a military assault – and again for three years in the 1990s, Liu found a computer and the Internet at home on his release in 1999. "God's present to China," he called the Internet.
Thousands of Chinese – civil rights campaigners, professors and young professionals – signed on to Charter 08, which circulated by e-mail and on overseas Internet sites after being expunged from web pages in China.
The ability of Chinese to surmount censorship barriers using proxy servers and coded language kicked into high gear in the hours just before the Nobel announcement.
Excitement pulsed among students at Beijing Normal University, where Liu earned a degree in the '80s, and at Peking University. They passed word via the popular QQ.com instant messaging site.
When messages with Liu's name became blocked and online searches for him or "Nobel Peace Prize" failed – a usual tactic of censors – people began posting oblique congratulations to an unnamed Chinese for winning a Nobel.
Some curious students also said they did not know why Liu won and, echoing an oft-stated government line, wondered whether it was not a backhanded plot to shame China.
"The impact he has made is not Nobel Prize-level so far," said a Peking University English major, who would only give his English name, Eric Zhang. "People abroad know him better than we do. This is not us choosing him. They chose him, so I'm a bit suspicious. But maybe this is an opportunity to get more freedom so we don't have to go to Twitter to find out about him."
The government blacked out reports on CNN, which can be seen in tourist hotels and places where foreigners work and live, and kept the news off the main nationwide TV newscast. China Central Television-4, which is aimed at Chinese overseas, read the Foreign Ministry statement, providing a back door for Chinese to learn about Liu.
"Millions and millions of ordinary Chinese people, government employees, party cadres, students ... are going to want to know who is Liu Xiaobo and why he was sentenced to prison," said Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "They are going to discover Charter 08, which will spread uncontrollably."
The decision to jail Liu, he said, "has backfired spectacularly, and at a very critical juncture when China is coming out in the international community. Was jailing Liu worth the price of the current predicament?"
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