Monday, January 11, 2016

Films to While Away The Class Struggle By- The Halls Of Injustice 101- “Chicago 10”

Films to While Away The Class Struggle By- The Halls Of Injustice 101- “Chicago 10”

DVD Review

Chicago 10, animated and film footage, starring the Chicago 8 plus defense lawyers, government lawyers, presiding Judge Julius Hoffman, assorted rogue cops, and “youth nation", circa 1968, 2006

Okay, I have spilled plenty of ink over the past couple of years trying to look at some of the events in the key political year for my generation, 1968, and draw some conclusions, lessons if you will, from that period. And as fate would have it I am eminently qualified to do so here on this particular film, in an odd sort of way. The events of that decisive year are brought into focus by the central subject of this film, the debacle of the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in August. I know this one well.

And why am I a good witness to those events as portrayed here? In a certain sense I was on the other side of the barricades, then. As I have explained elsewhere in more detail in 1968 I was knee-deep, no waist-deep, in the main task that I had set for my political life then, beating one Richard Milhous Nixon, without question the major political villain of my youth. Starting out that year totally devoted to the Robert Kennedy campaign (and actually earlier as I was part of the movement that tried to draft him to run for president in 1967), after his assassination in June I dusted off my pants and went to work for the campaign of one Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Therefore I was inside the “big tent” of the Democratic Party at that time and no one can accuse me of anything but the mildest bemused sympathy ( on the Vietnam war question, if not the solution) with the doings outside the tent.

Fast forward. Now, however, as this film footage of the events around the convention site amply demonstrates, and as the graphically captured brutal actions by the rogue Chicago police and other officials amply reveal this was a sickening display of governmental hubris (on all levels), and authority run amok. The verdict of those governmental actions at the time? No, not, as a rational person might expect, a skewering of police and their superiors but the bringing of charges against the leaders of the demonstrators, those who were maimed, gassed and otherwise abused by governmental actions.

And the harassment did not end there. Obviously the government thought it had a slam-dunk case to put before a Chicago jury with a cast of characters like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale, who to be kind, in those days if you were respectable citizen you would not want living next door to you, particularly in Chicago. In the end, as has occurred on more than one occasion, the charges against the “conspirators” were, mostly, overturned. But there is a lesson to be learned about the price of such actions, those charges were not overturned before many financial and political resources were brought to bear for the defense. This is a hardly an argument against such actions, but rather to point out that when you go after the “monster” you best be prepared for the blow back.

This film works on two tracks as it tries, I think, to reach a younger audience not familiar with the events, the rest of us have it permanently etched in our brains. The producers use the eminently respectable one of the actual film footage interspersed with the more experimental one of using animation to do the heavy duty work of portraying the antics on both sides, in the circus, oops, of Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom. I believe that the jury is still out (no pun intended) on the effectiveness of that medium to bring out the drama of the events portrayed. Perhaps for a younger audience not familiar with the events this is an adequate teaching tool. However, the segueing between, let us say, defendant Yippie Abbie Hoffman in animation ridiculing the same last named as the judge presiding over the trial and then giving a pep talk to the gathered Yippie tribes is disconcerting, at least to this viewer. Still, all in all, any time that we get to look back at events which formed a decisive part of our formative youth we should grab it with both hands. And hope today’s youth now have it permanently etched on their brains as well.

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