Christopher Nolan’s Inception is an exceptionally ambitious film about the journey of thought-thieves who enter into the dreams of others. The film intertwines multiple story arcs into one viewing experience. The film opened worldwide in July, 2010 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. Given that the film deals with topics at the cutting-edge of neuroscience, it is worthwhile comparing the arguments about the mind presented in the film to prevailing theories in neuroscience.

The main character in the film, Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a thief adept in the art of extracting thoughts from the dream-state of individuals as required by his business clients. Inception is a film about his last assignment which requires him to do the exact opposite––insert an idea in the mind of a young business tycoon.

At the heart of the film is a reinterpretation of the old-fashioned heist movie filled with car chases, gun-fights, and resplendent pyrotechnics. These sequences are wondrous spectacles. The second half of the film sees a particularly dazzling progression of scenes, all the more compelling since they are layered in the alternative, tiered, reality of dreams and dreams-within-dreams.

Nolan splices layer upon layer of these different visual sequences to Hans Zimmer’s mesmerizing soundtrack. A film of this nature requires a complex soundtrack to enhance experience. It is worth noting that recent research indicates that both listening to music and receiving formal training helps develop auditory ability in much the same way that physical activity enhances endurance.
The film is also about the complex relationship between emotions, perception, and reality. Cobb brings a fair share of emotional baggage to the table, and the film is as much about his perception of reality and the emotional bonds he shares with others as it is about the mind of the people he enters.

Finally, in order to build the framework for examining dreams, Nolan spends a substantial amount of time in Inception building a set of rules for dream examination and extraction. Plot structure, attention to detail, and character are central to the experience, these components of the film have been dealt with in detail by other critics. Because Inception is purported to be a thinking person’s film and because the director’s invests significant time in explaining the theoretical underpinnings of thought-capture in the film, it is worth examining them in detail.

How do you insert an idea into someone’s head? Let us consider the idea presented in the film first. According to the film, in order to have a successful inception of an idea, it must be planted as a “seed” or a vague notion in the subconscious and allowed to grow into a full-fledged idea. To gain access to the mind, it must be inserted when the subject has his or her guard relaxed: the best way to enter the mind of a subject is when he or she is dreaming because it is at this time that it is exceptionally vulnerable to the power of suggestion.

Why can an idea not be planted through the power of suggestion in a wake subject or through hypnosis? Well, for one there would be no science-fiction blockbuster woven around this simple, yet true explanation. Nolan tries to hammer across the notion that “ideas” are “parasites” that elicit a reaction similar to an immune response in the brain. This is untrue, and there is an inherent paradox in the explanation. We know that very few behaviors, mostly associated with survival, are instinctive. However, if an idea is not innate, then by definition it has external roots and it is susceptible to the power of suggestion—dream state or otherwise. In other words, most ideas do come from outside the mind and are subject to constant modification. This paradox does not detract from the narrative, but it is worth bearing in mind.

Law enforcement officials and magicians have known for years the relative ease by which false memories can be implanted. Psychologists have studied many of the ways by which memories can be changed in alert individuals without their conscious knowledge. Recent studies have affirmed that when there is mismatch between a decision and its outcome, subjects retrospectively rationalize choices they never made in the first place. Clearly, the mind is a place ripe for tricking!

Also, as we all painfully know, the act of forgetting is also a common occurrence. For many years the general assumption was that once a memory had been consolidated and turned into part of a long-term memory system, it was maintained indefinitely. Recent research has demonstrated that even consolidated memories are susceptible to decay. Whenever a memory is retrieved, it is prone to change. In other words, every time you recall events from your childhood, you change these through reconsolidation. Over time, these events add up so you either remember incorrectly or even forget.

There are additional preconditions to the foundations of the plot. First, is the assertion that dreams influence conscious decision-making in individuals. Second, is the corollary that that the rules of conscious decision-making apply to dreams too. Both are required to believe the premise of the film. Currently, these theories are the subject of intense debate. Although there is no reason to believe that dreams can influence decision-making in adults, new research suggests that newborn infants do indeed, learn while they’re asleep. Whether or not this trait is maintained throughout life is not currently known.

What Nolan probably did not know at the time of filming is that the brain can indeed “shut down” sequentially in parts to create altered states between sleep and wakefulness. A study published earlier this year demonstrated that the thalamus deactivates a few minutes prior to the cerebral cortex at the onset of sleep. The deactivation of the thalamus is a prerequisite to losing consciousness, but during this wake-sleep transition phase, there is a high chance that the sleeper will experience hallucinations of a vivid nature.

There is also another concept presented in the film, that of a limbo-state. Nolan concocts an elaborate guise in that the dreamer cannot die in his or her own dream, but the dream invaders enter a comatose, vegetative state once they die inside someone’s dream.

Nonetheless, setting these preconditions aside, the dreams in Inception are vivid, though for the most part, linear. Even the most creative filmmakers are constrained by the limitations of their imagination and their art. I suspect that Nolan knew that it would be foolhardy to even try to replicate an actual dream, so he broke dreams down into two fictitious components. The first is the architectural structure that is created by the thieves and somehow uploaded into the mind of the dreamer. The second is the people that populate these hollow architectural structures which he calls projections in the film. Both are ingenious devices that allow Nolan to rein in dreams so that they resemble recognizable locations such as street corners in Paris.

Nolan also uses a very early Freudian notion of deep layers of thought, which has since fallen out of favor. At one stage, Cobb perpetuates the “we only use a part of our brain” fictitious meme. His use of  “subconscious” (which has no concrete scientific meaning) throughout the movie to the more commonly used “unconscious” is also likely deliberate in order to put forward the idea that there are layers below the conscious. This comes into great effect in the final act when there are layers of “subconsiousness” which can be controlled and navigated like different levels of a video game. The denouement may also leave some viewers exasperated. However, given the complexities of the plot it was one of only few resolutions logically possible.

So is Inception worth watching? Definitely. Is it rooted in the current understanding of how the mind works? No, but that should not detract from the viewing experience. Inception is a thoughtful and beautifully-shot film. In addition, how many other commercial films can claim to ask us to delve deeper into the recesses of our own minds?

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A poignant, compellingly rendered tale about a little man ajar with the world, Arzee the Dwarf is also a love letter to Bombay. Rohit Chopra reviews Chandrahas Choudhury’s brilliant debut novel.

A SPECTACULAR NOVEL about a small man locked in a permanent lover’s quarrel with the world, Chandrahas Choudhury’s Arzee the Dwarf reminds us why we read. It reminds us of the reasons that we as humans need to dwell in language. And it reminds us why writing that can claim the name of literature is both of its milieu and beyond it, illuminating the peculiar richness of a time and place and, in doing so, gently asking us to reconsider the self-image of that historical moment.

The novel ushers us, in media res, into the life of Arzee, who works as a projectionist at the Noor, a cinema that has seen better days. Convinced that the cosmos has dealt him an unfair hand—largely but not only because of his diminutive size—Arzee chafes at both his professional and personal situation. He lives with his brother, Mobin, and his mother, who he loves even as he feels hemmed in by her. Plagued by the memory of a lost love, he yearns for that intimacy and fulfillment that neither friends nor family can provide.

Arzee, however, is not quite ready to give up on life. He is willing to grant the universe the opportunity to redeem itself, which it tantalizingly offers to do. When we meet Arzee, he is on the verge of realizing a longstanding ambition. Phiroz K. Pir, the head projectionist of the Noor, is about to retire, and hand over control of the Babur, the great German projector of the cinema, to Arzee. In addition to earning Arzee respect from his friends and his mother, the promotion will also allow Arzee to pay off a gambling debt to Deepak, the ne’er-do-well who hounds him across the streets of Bombay to collect the money.

But the universe complicates things, as the universe is wont to do, and Arzee must contend with a few surprises, disappointments as well as delights, in the days that follow. Unfurling the course of events, Choudhury takes us on a captivating ride with Arzee that is funny and sad, ecstatic and glum, tender yet unsentimental. Travelling with Arzee across the streets and suburbs of Bombay—and within his head as he mulls on the meaning or meaninglessness of things—we arrive at the bittersweet end of the novel, which verges on hopeful possibility but withholds from us the easy satisfaction of certitude.

The novel throngs with a memorable cast of characters, drawn with great economy in prose that is controlled and evocative. We meet, with Arzee, several of his colleagues, from the spectral Abjani to the canny Phiroz; Deepak, whose heart is really not quite in the villainy his profession demands; and Dashrath Tiwari, the taxi driver given to poetic eloquence and philosophical rumination. To this human cast, we may also add other life forms. The Noor, its corridors adorned with framed photographs of Bollywood heroines of years past, is both character and setting, demanding its own adjective: Noorian. The Babur—a linguistic mutation wrought by the Indian tongue on the German name Bauer—the magnificent life-force of the Noor, uncomplainingly throwing its beam on screen day after day. Tyson, the house dog of the Noor, who we meet briefly. And, finally, the great city of Bombay, in all its shabby, resplendent charm.

Indeed, the novel is also a love letter to the city of Bombay, to its alleys that, despite their filth, hold in them a quiet silence and beauty, to its decrepit buildings like the Noor, and to its dusty suburbs. Choudhury writes as someone intimately familiar with Bombay, incorporating the rhythms of the city and the cadences of its speech into the flow of events in the novel. This is the city of the flaneur, quite distinct from the fevered nostalgia of the expatriate seen in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City or the vacuous, sterile aestheticization of filth witnessed in Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire.

Choudhury’s skill as a writer shines through in his description of the relationships between the characters, which are conjured up with empathy and sly humor. We sense the grudging admiration that lies underneath the sarcastic banter of Arzee and his friends, and the gruff tenderness that develops between seeming adversaries as they realize that it is circumstance that has pitted them against each other. Unusual and apposite metaphors, unexpected turns of phrase, and delicate poetic touches vest the text with a pleasing richness. Waking up one morning, hot, bothered, and in a foul mood, Arzee’s annoyance is compounded by the fact that he is covered by a sheet, which Mother has placed over him, a perfect symbol of the nature of their bond, as Arzee sees it. A light mist rises, “like that seen when sugar is poured into jars” (59). The day looms before Arzee like a “long, flat, soul-sapping expanse” (67). And Arzee’s unruly mind, even in his despondency, cannot help wonder what shampoo the Godman Sri Sri Ravi Shankar uses.

The one criticism one might have with the book is that Choudhury is almost overcautious in not wanting to overwrite. Readers of The Middle Stage, Choudhury’s literary journal, will know that he considers engaging in pointless verbal pyrotechnics an act of literary self-indulgence. While Choudhury is careful not to lapse into such excess, one feels that some of the relationships, like that between Arzee and Phiroz or Arzee and Phiroz’s daughter, are pregnant with possibilities that could have been mined further. But this expectation may itself be seen as proof of Choudhury’s abilities as a writer, and his commitment to restrained and measured description does not diminish the tremendous achievement of a remarkable first work.

As a result of India’s integration into the global economy, the abiding effect of the Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga Booker victories, and the interest of Western publishers in Indian writers, Indian fiction is at an interesting crossroads. It appears to be driven by competitiveness for bigger advances, global markets for neo-Orientalism, and a fetishization of the expatriate Indian experience. The imaginative worlds of recent fiction about India, by Indians and non-Indians alike, teem with themes by now tedious because worked threadbare. Many novels or collections of short stories are simply unoriginal elaborations of such ‘Indian’ themes, a representative list of which might be as follows. Masala or spice, chutney, chai, the idiosyncracies of Indian English, immigrants finding their roots by returning to the towns and villages of their ancestors, laments about the diasporic and postcolonial predicament, the encounter of East and West, arranged marriage, love marriage, women throwing off the yoke of tradition and entering the state of emancipated selfhood, joint families, poverty, garbage, caste, religion, riots, especially of the Hindu-Muslim variety, terrorism, the Indian underworld, and Bollywood. The Marxist critic Frederic Jameson’s controversial remark that all Third World literature is national allegory might, paradoxically, hold true for much Indian (and South Asian) fiction being produced today, even as the content of the national is reframed for global markets. Alternately, one finds Indian novels that are simply compendia of the excruciating minutiae of personal biographies, masked in unconvincing pseudonyms, to which grand political and sociological significance is immodestly imputed.

Like the finest novelists writing today who take as their canvas that space and place called India—among whom one might count Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Jhumpa Lahiri, and I. Allan Sealy—Choudhury’s work refuses to be straitjacketed into a formulaic prepackaging of things ‘Indian.’ Arzee the Dwarf, the poignant, moving story of a man slightly ajar with the world, finds kinship with characters from a range of literary traditions, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. Beautifully produced, with a mesmerizing cover design, Chandrahas Choudhury’s gem of a book inaugurates what promises to be a formidable literary career.

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Rohit Chopra is Editor, Interjunction and Assistant Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University, California.

SUFFICE IT TO say that in our secular age religion is everywhere. The orthodoxies of social science once had it that as the world progressively fell under the sway of modernity and societies got increasingly rationalized, faith and belief would concurrently diminish in importance. That perspective has increasingly been qualified in academic understanding: the secular and religious are not necessarily viewed as antithetical to each other; religious commitment is not conflated with tradition; tradition is not considered the polar opposite of modernity. Nonetheless, the appropriate role of religion in society continues to be a matter of contentious debate, including in its ambit a series of vitally important questions. What is the relationship between religion and politics? Is religious fundamentalism a quintessentially modern phenomenon or an eruption of primordial hatreds? How are religious tenets about non-believers to be reconciled with ideas of democracy, equality, and universal human rights?

To the many views about religion that permeate public discourse in the US and globally, we can now add a distinct and provocative voice: that of stand-up comedian and social critic, Bill Maher. Religulous, which Maher has produced and stars in, is directed by Larry Charles, he of the cinematic deadpan seen in episodes of the acclaimed HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Maher’s targets in the film are religious absolutism and religious literalism. In a series of conversations with believers and religious authorities, Maher pushes them, in genial but relentless fashion, to explain their core beliefs and to confront contradictions among their beliefs. Focusing on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Maher poses a series of specific queries to his interviewees that often reflect deeper questions. How is x or y claim to be explained? Why does evil still exist in the world if god is all powerful? Why is damnation reserved for the unbeliever or outsider to the faith?

Maher does all this in singularly funny fashion, not necessarily unsympathetic to, or patronizing of, his interview subjects, but with the slightly bemused air of someone who doubts. He claims not to have all the answers, and is, apparently, at least, willing to be dissuaded of his skepticism by those he speaks with. His litmus test is what may be called the counter-literalism standard, which, more often than not, is met with silence: “What if you’re wrong?” he asks one such believer who has just posed the same question to Maher.

As Stephen Holden observes, in his New York Times review of the film, Maher’s targets are often almost too easy, such as flashy self-promoting self-appointed prophets or kitschy theme park recreations of the life of Christ, bursting with melodrama and sentimentality and seemingly utterly devoid of any meditative or spiritual reflection. Holden also suggests that Maher does not push at the more profound philosophical questions about faith and belief which naturally emerge in an endeavor such as his.

There are, additionally, at least two other grounds on which the film might be critiqued. First, Maher does not distinguish between different interpretive frameworks for understanding religion or between the positions of literalists and those who find in religion something other than prescriptive absolutes. In failing to acknowledge the metaphorical significance that religious narratives might hold for believers, Maher is perhaps guilty of the same literalism that he critiques. And, secondly, Maher does not consider that secular rationality, scientific rationality, or just rationality– a word that Maher mentions several times in the film as a positive virtue– might also result in irrational outcomes, might also be the cause of violence and discord, and might very well cause the world to end with either bang or whimper. Rationality, then, is a self-evident and transparent concept for Maher; it does not seem to occur to him that the very category of rationality, too, could be deconstructed like the axioms of religious belief.

But Maher’s film should not be judged by omissions alone. The strength of the film lies in several timely and necessary points that it makes in unapologetic, if sometimes subtle, fashion. In drawing attention to the fact that 16 percent of Americans claim to have no religious belief, Maher suggests that this constituency also has rights that are no less important because their ‘identity’ is defined negatively, that is, as the absence of belief. Maher here implicitly offers a brilliant critique of one strand of contemporary American and global religious identity politics: the idea that god and the claims of a particular faith are the exclusive property of believers or adherents of that faith and that non-believers must constantly meet believers on their terms.

When addressing Islam, Maher also treads fearlessly where, with a few notable exceptions, most academics, journalists, media experts, or policy wonks have failed to go. He draws attention to the deeply problematic positions held by several Muslim activists, religious leaders, and politicians in the West. For instance, Maher brings into focus the apologetic view that any and all violence carried out in the name of Islam is ‘political’ and has nothing to do with the religion itself. Some of the Muslims Maher interviews refuse to admit that Islamic sources discriminate in any way against non-Muslims. The controversial British Muslim rapper, Propa-Gandhi, waffles about why Salman Rushdie’s freedom of expression in The Satanic Verses controversy is not a simple black and white issue, even as he seeks to assert his own rights against an apparently oppressive West. Maher’s film illustrates that ‘contextual’ or ‘holistic’ approaches, as held by Fatima Elatik, a Muslim Dutch politician, or Propa-Gandhi, can sometimes function as an evasion of the discriminatory aspects of a religion. The fact that Muslim youth in Europe are disaffected or that countries with Muslim populations are locked in neocolonial or neoimperial relations with the West do not satisfactorily account for or explain the actions of some Muslims against those accused of denigrating Islam.

The public discussion on Islam in the US and the West often appears stuck between, on the one hand, right-wing vilifications of Muslims and Islam, and, on the other hand, liberal refusals to criticize Islam out of an apprehension that right-wing Islamophobes will coopt any such criticism. Maher’s film demonstrates that it is okay to criticize Islam, even if one is a non-Muslim, and that one should not hesitate to engage in such criticism for fear of committing the cardinal academic sin of ‘essentializing’ about Islam and Muslims.

Perhaps the most enduring message of the film is a simple one that sometimes gets buried in the gnarled debates about history, policy,violence, rights, faith, West and non-West, democracy, clash of civilizations, terrorism, modernity, progress, etc. that haunt our times. The film reminds us that the right to freedom of expression includes the right to offend. It also includes the right to be questioning, skeptical, cynical, ignorant, wrong, and mistaken. That right, Religulous and Bill Maher say, belongs to believers and non-believers alike. Of any faith or lack thereof. Anywhere in the world.

Rohit Chopra is Assistant Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University and Editor, Interjunction.

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Dahr Jamail rejects the fetters of embedded reporting to seek the truth about Iraq. What he finds squarely contradicts the mainstream media picture of insurgency and everyday life there, writes Amy Blyth.

DAHR JAMAIL’S Beyond the Green Zone offers a remarkable and terrifying insight into the lives of ordinary Iraqis struggling to survive in a war-ravaged country controlled by brutal American forces. Jamail reports from the other side of the occupation, the one we rarely glimpse from the mainstream media, the side of the Iraqi people – one that the reporters embedded within the relative safety of US army lines – for the most part rarely see, acknowledge or include in their discussions about the future of Iraq.

The book manages to reveal the injustice, the incompetence and the sheer bloodthirsty nature of the occupation. This is a war in which, Jamail reveals, over 65,000 Iraqis – mostly ordinary women, children and the elderly – have been killed, over 14,000 innocent men imprisoned and often tortured for imagined crimes, and snipers indiscriminately fire at old women hanging their washing out to dry on the roof. This is a war where, Jamail argues, unarmed crowds participating in peaceful protests are showered with bullets fired by US soldiers, one where Geneva conventions are ignored. Cluster bombs and depleted uranium litter the streets of Fallujah and ambulances that race to the scene are shot at and bombed. These are occurrences, Jamail points out, which are often denied by the military and left unreported by the mainstream media. These atrocities are part of a largely hidden war, which Beyond the Green Zone goes some way toward uncovering.

Jamail argues that above all else this is a war of misinformation, of propaganda and of suppression. While the occupying powers say they aim to install democracy, this claim, Jamail proposes, is fundamentally undermined by the lies, cover-ups, and biased official reports that the military feed to the mainstream media. Jamail reports that during the first four days of a siege in Fallujah, 300 Iraqis were killed and 500 wounded by US forces, many whilst trying to flee the city and then while being turned back at US checkpoints. These casualties were not reported in the mainstream news. What we saw instead were news stories derived from military sources who insisted that US soldiers were fighting to ‘liberate’ Fallujah. From talking to the residents trapped inside the city, Jamail finds out that what was actually being fought for by Iraqis was liberation from the American occupiers.

Jamail does however acknowledge that a small number of independent journalists and Arab media work tirelessly throughout the occupation to get alternative stories out of Iraq. He also acknowledges that some of the more critical sections of the Western press do question the military line, but he notes that these stories are almost impossible to hear amidst the all-encompassing mainstream media coverage. Largely responsible for this are the embedded reporters who take cover in US and British Humvees, who, in their bullet proof vests and hardhats enjoy the luxury of clean water and electricity in the Green Zone barracks. This media, far from acting as the fourth estate, the eyes and ears of the unknowing Western public, have instead become scared and lazy and have ensured that the full terrible truth of the Iraqi occupation is shielded from the public eye. Illustrating this, Jamail tells of arriving at an American checkpoint on the way out of Fallujah and encountering two embedded photographers. They inquire of him: “Did you see any bad guys in there?” To which Jamail replies: “No, I did not see any ‘bad guys’ inside the city. Perhaps you should have gone in to see for yourself.”

All but a few independent journalists, such as Jamail, dare to inhabit the Iraq outside of the Green Zone. Jamail states that his aim from the beginning of this mission was to create an alternative to the vast majority of US biased media. He says: “I chose to look for stories of real life and ‘embed’ myself with the Iraqi people. The US military side of the occupation is overly represented… I consciously decided to focus on the Iraqi side of the story”. However, Jamail recognises the complexity of media ‘truth’ telling and professes only to tell what he knows, which are some of the stories of the ordinary Iraqi people he meets. So, armed with camera, notepad and a deep-seated desire to let the voices of Iraqis be heard, he delivers reports of what everyday life is like in a country already suffering from the American attacks of 1991, the effects of years of extreme sanctions and Saddam’s brutal dictatorship.

Jamail set off from his home in Alaska to Iraq at the start of the occupation, frustrated and embarrassed by his country’s response to September 11th, the illegal war they had waged with Iraq and the pro-American propaganda which littered the mainstream news. What he found when he arrived were Iraqis pleased on the whole that Saddam’s regime was over and hopeful for the future. He describes talking to a group of young Iraqi boys by the roadside soon after his arrival; they are fascinated by Jamail’s tales of life in America. Over his subsequent months in Iraq, Jamail sees this innocent interest and sense of hope fade to bitterness and anger. A year after the occupation Jamail witnesses a similar group of boys aiming rocks at US tanks and shouting: “Down with America.” This shift in cultural attitudes toward the occupation hints at what many of us already suspect; that this war has merely increased animosity toward Western forces. What can be seen from Jamail’s observations of the Iraqi people is that violence breeds violence, and that for generations to come we will all reap the effects of this war.

It is not hard to see why this transformation in Iraqi opinion has occurred when you read Jamail’s tales of the countless people he meets. Most have relatives or friends who were killed by occupation forces, most have lost or badly damaged homes, many live without clean drinking water and electricity, which is routinely cut by the Americans as a form of collective punishment. Half the population are unemployed and in a country rich in oil, fuel is scarce and the black market thrives. American patrols ransack houses in the middle of the night, shooting first, reasoning and (often not) apologising later.

It is also not hard to see, as one Iraqi tells Jamail, why ‘all of Iraq’ has joined the resistance against the Americans. Jamail problematises the official category of ‘terrorist’ in the anti-US insurgency movement, offering proof that Al Qaeda groups often blamed for these attacks are actually often ordinary Iraqis driven to extreme measures in an attempt to rid their country of foreign forces. This is illustrated by one resistance fighter Jamail interviews, a former portrait photographer, who was opposed to Saddam and rejoiced when US military first arrived. However, as he tells Jamail, he grew angry as he watched more and more Iraqis killed, humiliated and tortured by the occupiers every day. This prompted him to join a resistance group which has been responsible for 250 attacks on Americans, 70 of which he was directly involved in. He claims that the resistance is made up of a mix of Shia, Ba’athists, Sufus tribalists and Arab fighters, telling Jamail: “I have been fighting for a year now, and I have not seen one Al-Qaeda fighter, nor have I heard of one fighting in the resistance… As more Iraqis are provoked, more are joining the resistance… the Americans are the terrorists, their military has killed millions of people all round the world, I will stop fighting when the last American soldier leaves Iraq.” This interview represents a perspective that the Western media often find easier to ignore. It is simpler to blame such unthinkable atrocities as suicide bombings on fanatics like Al-Qaeda than to recognise such acts as partly a reaction to what the West has done to Iraq’s culture and people.

Jamail does not give up his fight to bring this vital information back to the Western world – he is a true investigative journalist in a world of corporate, biased media. Despite suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and extreme threats to his personal safety, Jamail is plagued by the guilt he feels at being able to leave Iraq for safety whilst so many have no such option. What he does do for the people of Iraq, however, is to carry their stories out of the country and into the ears of the Western public.

Amy Blyth can be reached at amy.interjunction@gmail.com

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Greg Mitchell lays bare the psychology of the ongoing self-censorship in the American media. There was not so much a conspiracy of silence about the war as an ideological refusal by the media to listen, see, and ask, writes Rohit Chopra.

GREG MITCHELL’S So Wrong for So Long is an immensely significant work, for reasons beyond the apparent. The book is a record of the life of the Iraq war in the American media from the time it was a neocon idea gathering force in January 2003 to the imbroglio of the second half of 2007. It is a compendium of the complicities of the mainstream American media in creating a narrative about the inexorable need for going to war. It is an examination of the appropriate relationship between the media and the state and a provocative questioning of the meaning of journalistic autonomy during the exceptional conditions of war. Each of these aspects of the work in itself justifies the value of the book. Cumulatively, they amount to a powerful statement and inquiry about the very meaning of freedom and voice in a democracy.

So Wrong for So Long consists of more than 75 columns written for Editor & Publisher — which Mitchell edits — from January 2003 through October 2007, adapted for the book. Each chapter brings together one more columns from a particular month during this time period. These columns are prefaced by Mitchell’s reflections on the main war-related events of that month in Iraq and / or in the US and the actions, decisions, and products of American media organizations about these events. The structure of the book compellingly juxtaposes past and present. Mitchell has framed these columns with the lightest and surest of editorial touches, providing an apposite amount of contextual information and letting the columns speak for themselves.

As the title of the book suggests, Mitchell addresses the role of various actors, including the media, experts, political authorities, and the American people, in contributing to the American failure to establish a viable Iraqi state after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. However, the main focus of the book is on the many ways in which the mainstream media fell short of its obligations before and through the war.

Patterns clearly emerge from the story that Mitchell tells us about the media coverage of the war. He highlights the incredible consensus among the media that Colin Powell’s speech at the UN on February 5, 2003 had incontrovertibly secured the case for war, and shows the eagerness with which the media accepted the claim of ‘mission accomplished.’ With due acknowledgment of the fact that certain restrictions may apply to covering a war situation, Mitchell draws attention to the politics of embeddedness, and the problematic implications of the conventions by which the media have covered the dead and wounded, military and civilian, coalition force or Iraqi.

Mitchell notes the double standards applied by the media in evaluating the claims of pro-war and anti-war sources. He comments on the gentle self-recriminations of the New York Times and the Washington Post for their earlier failings in reporting the war, which, Mitchell argues, did not go far enough. He chronicles the stubborness of prominent media columnists in refusing to budge from the essential premise that the war was justified. The book addresses the anxieties about appearing non-patriotic and the fear of a backlash from the public that have haunted media coverage of the war from its inception.

But we also find that it is not the case that there were no skeptical voices in the media and the political arena. Mitchell provides us several examples of these voices. Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the Pentagon papers, is one such figure who was unconvinced by the administration’s case for invading Iraq. Described by Mitchell as “one of the most important figures in the history of American journalism,” even though not a journalist, Ellsberg was also critical of the media for failing to do their job. Bill Moyers of PBS emerges as another dissenting voice, interviewing Mitchell for his PBS program NOW in April 2003. Four years later, in April 2007, Moyers also presented a 90-minute PBS broadcast “Buying the War” that offered a blunt, hard look at the responsibility of the media in contributing to the climate that made the war possible. In Moyers’ own words, quoted in an April 21, 2007 E & P column reproduced in the book, “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses” (p. 237). Mitchell’s book chronicles how, as the war has progressed, more columnists, conservatives and liberals alike, have advocated a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Politicians such as Representative John Murtha and Senator Chuck Hagel have also recommended a withdrawal in light of the situation in Iraq.

And yet, as Mitchell notes, the editorial columns of major newspapers have continued to stay mum or have equivocated on a host of glaring issues related to the war. We read through E & P columns in chronological order, accompanied by a constant sense of déjà vu, knowing more or less what is to follow.

The book thus hints at an intriguing phenomenon, one that deserves close attention from journalists, mediapersons, and scholars alike. It demonstrates that that there was not so much a conspiracy of silence as an ideological refusal by the media and others to listen, ask, see, and believe. It shows us the pyschology of self-censorship in operation and the ongoing construction of a self-willed amnesia on the part of the American media in its coverage of the Iraq war. What we see is memory — or rather a particular memory and narrative of a war, a society, a time — in the making. Where and why, one might, inquire, do these imperatives come from? What are their historical and sociological roots?

The book also causes us to look at the politics of differential access to information. It is one of the cliches of our times that in our information age and networked society, flows of information can cross national boundaries in the twinkling of an eye, across national boundaries and beyond the grasp of national governments. Global media and communication technologies such as the internet, with the forms of hyper-literacy and global discourse communities that they have engendered, are often adduced as proof of this new informational economy. But Mitchell’s book is a sobering reminder that such flows of information cannot be understand independently of the structures of political power, the stark inequalities that characterize international relations, the calculations of corporate organizations, and the pressures that all of these factors bring to bear on individual voices, journalistic or otherwise.

Mitchell begins the Introduction to the book with the words, “If only this were merely a book of history. Sadly, the war in Iraq is still very much with us, which makes this a current affairs volume as well. More than anything, however, I hope it serves as a warning for the future” (1). One may disagree respectfully with his distinction between history and current affairs. Current affairs are, after all, predicated on history or histories. The value of the book too, one may observe, is as much as documentary record, a four year history of how the media in the world’s only superpower covered that superpower’s decision to go to war and its aftermath, as political commentary about the present or political critique. And, in the words of NBC reporter Kevin Sites who is quoted in the book, it is an urgent and poignant reminder that the “burdens of war…are unforgiving for all of us” (p. 107).

Rohit Chopra is Editor, Interjunction and Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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