A Sanders, Trump Clash: A Dream For Film Script Writers
Saeed
Naqvi
A Donald Trump-Bernie Sanders
clash in the US Presidential elections could be God’s Gift to political cinema.
Some outlines for a script
come to mind: Clarence Darrow versus William Jennings Bryan, on two sides of
the famous Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.
Or, the epic battle between Ed
Murrow of CBS News and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti communist witch hunt.
One can pack Trump’s anti
Muslim, anti Hispanic invective in the script. But where is Sanders in all of
this?
I suspect, the Darrow-Bryan
contest will work better. The scene is set in the criminal court of Tennessee.
On trial is a substitute High School teacher, John Scopes, for violating the
Tennessee Act which prohibits teaching human evolution as enunciated by Darwin.
The result was the classical Fundamentalist-Modernist clash focused on whether or
not any reality exists outside the Bible.
In a country where evangelicals
constitute 40% of Republican voters, a debate on Homo sapiens evolving from
apes may yet raise a storm in pockets even today.
William Jennings Bryan, who felt
that a study of human evolution was anti Christian, actually contested the
Presidential race on three occasions. He was Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of
State, later humiliated by the famous Defense Attorney Clarence Darrow. Bryan and
Trump come from an abiding tradition of anti intellectualism.
Darrow and Murrow represented
the streak in American liberal decency which makes Sanders’ campaign for the
Democratic nomination so compelling.
The world changed when the
West, led by the US, interpreted the collapse of the Soviet Union not as a
victory for freedoms but as the triumph of the Market, of rampaging capitalism.
Nation states, more petrified
than elated, allowed themselves to be stitched together as two party systems,
beholden to corporate and global finance. Within a short span, every electoral
democracy gave out a foul stench of crony capitalism.
Establishments across the
board had lulled themselves into complacency. The global media, Murdochized, would
manage public opinion in their favour. This turned out to be a delusion. Murdoch
today is a bad name in serious media circles.
Remember how new media
technologies were being developed in Washington to create colour revolutions –
orange, rose, cedar – bypassing local controls. Soon, advanced models of these
technologies were available with every West Asian terrorist group. Lightening
spread of the internet has opened up a plethora of the new parallel media, more
credible than mainstream information sources.
Not just electoral democracies
but all other systems of government are now under scrutiny by the people. The
result is that two party systems in democracies are being challenged. People are
placing question marks on other forms of government too.
When the Tunisian vendor Mohamed
Bouazizi ignited the Arab Spring by setting himself on fire in December 2010, ordinary
people began to occupy centre stage for the first time in dictatorships. The
late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, sensed this settlement at the grassroots.
He played the only hand Saudis know: spend money to divert trouble. He rained
$135 billion on his people.
Then, step by step, the Syrian
and Yemeni theatres were opened up to externalize internal upheavals. Today,
the Saudis are riding two tigers from neither of which can they dismount. If they
did the ground at home would heave.
In India the electorate
demonstrated its autonomy from the two party strait jacket by delivering 67 out
of 70 seats in the Delhi state assembly to a barely two year old party called
AAP.
Joko Widodo in Indonesia,
Pablo Iglesias in Spain, Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Antonio Costa in Portugal,
Justin Trudeau in Canada all newcomers, represent a wholesale rejection of new
economic policies bringing corruption and economic disparities in their wake.
Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of the British Labour party, and series of
electoral verdicts in Nordic and East European counties are also a
manifestation of disgust with establishments.
This global trend would tend
to suggest that Bernie Sanders, self avowed Socialist, is not a rank outsider
anymore. But his popularity among young voters is pitted against the powerful
establishments behind Hillary Clinton. And establishments are at this stage being
corroded, not exactly toppled. But the process of toppling them is seriously underway.
Hillary has been First Lady
for two terms, Senator and Secretary of State. Does her performance as
Secretary of State commend her as President? Under her watch, Ambassador
Christopher Stevens was brutally killed in the US mission in Benghazi.
There she was announcing to
the media “I came, I saw and he died”. She was talking of Qaddafi’s death. This
alongside footage of Qaddafi sodomised by a knife.
The next memorable image of
Hillary concerns her management of the Syrian crisis. “Get out of the way,
Assad” she proclaims with an imperious wave of the hand. And Assad is nowhere
close to bowing out.
If voters persist with their
quest for the novel, how is Hillary Clinton a repository of any novelty?
And yet, the celebrated intellectual,
Noam Chomsky is probably right.
“Bernie Sanders is a decent
honest New Dealer.” A “New Dealer” Chomsky explains is “someone who is far out
to the left of the field.” Chomsky spots the conflict between the people and
establishments doggedly fighting to stay on.
Sanders is unlikely to make it
to the White House in the system of “Bought Elections”, Chomsky says. How then has
he come this far?
How does Chomsky explain
Trump’s popularity? “It is a reflection of depression, hopelessness, concern
that everything is lost.” Trump’s propagandist strategy is in line with a
history of directing anger “on straw men such as immigrants, welfare cheats,
trade unions and all kinds of people who you think are getting everything you
are not getting.”
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