WATCHING THE RELEASE OF BOWE BERGDAHL

The watcher sees 1:53 of a 17 minute film.

It is on

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/taliban-release-video-of-bergdahl-handover-to-us-military-1.1820205

and other websites, including YouTube.

It is not a trailer, more a single in a mini-series. It is an incident in the movie of our world, echoing many of the existing images, texts, songs and movies of our world.

The watcher sees a white man, clean-shaven and bare-headed, sitting in a pick-up truck, possibly a Toyota Land Cruiser. The mise en scène is dusty scrub-land, desert, modern-day outback. The watcher wonders if this is Arizona.

The truth is that reality takes too long to put on screen.

The man seems calm in a close up at 0:18. He speaks to another man, who leans in the window of the open door of the vehicle. This other man wears a head scarf. Another man, similarly dressed, standing off, carries a machine gun.

Don't make programmes for your eyes only – that's the province of some experimental 'art' directors. But do make programmes that you want to make and you yourself want to see. There's not much point doing it if your hearts not in it.

A voice-over in a language the watcher cannot understand – Dari? Pashto? Arabic? - runs from the start. A logo, such as appear on TV news channels, is seen in the top right hand corner of the screen.

At 0:31 the bare-headed man stands outside the vehicle. He is guarded by men with their heads covered, a number of them carrying guns. The camera pans upwards to a cloud-filled sky. The watcher hears and sees the distinctive sound and silhouette of a US-built Black Hawk military helicopter.

The camera moves and sweeps across the ground. There is a cut at 0:42 and the helicopter lands in a cloud of dust. The Black Hawk is down, yet safe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnV6wM-vd9s

The voice-over ends and, from this point on, the audio is provided by the rotating blades and the stuttering engine of the Black Hawk. The camera leaves the helicopter and, at 0:50, the watcher sees one of the cowled men carrying a stick with a white cloth on it.

The watcher wonders at the origin of this gesture. There are many songs about it, including religious ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fL-TwKzkCk

The watcher is not sure if singing songs about crosses, war, surrender to a god, while waving white flags, is helpful.

The breaking of weapons and other such gestures often accompany scenes like these. The watcher remembers the films Broken Arrow and The Battle of Apache Pass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOeQaX4kLec

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as468k1om3QAt

The watcher senses we could be in Arizona in the late 19^th Century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRQb7zOeYWk&index=2&list=PLE2FDEE770C710F80

At 0:54 the bare-headed man is led forward. Three men, dressed in civilian clothes, come from the helicopter. They raise their palms in pacifying gestures of greeting. They extend their hands and these men cautiously shake hands with the guarding men. The bare-headed man is passed to the three from the helicopter, who lead him away. Uniformed soldiers receive them.

The bare-headed man is patted down at 1:25 and they are all helped aboard. It is a comically tense moment.

In the end directing video and film is selecting your version of reality and putting it on screen. To paraphrase Degas, the Impressionist artist: it's not what you see that matters-it's what you make others see.

The helicopter rises off the ground at 1:45 and clatters through the dusty air. Two men dangle their feet over the edge of the side doorway of the helicopter. They wave at the people on the ground.

The helicopter bears the number is 41. It's close, but not the ultimate answer.

"The Answer to the Great Question …" "Yes ... !""Of Life, the Universe and Everything ..." said Deep Thought. "Yes ... !""Is ... " said Deep Thought, and paused. "Yes ... !" "Is ... " "Yes ... !!! ... ?" "Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm. … "Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?" "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

The watcher knows that the images are from the point of view (pov) of a man on the ground. The watcher is confident there is a camera on the helicopter, taking images from the Black Hawk's pov.

The camera can't be objective either. Someone has to operate it and operating it involves choice, choosing where to put it and which way to point it and when to start and stop it and what to leave out as the action develops.

Directing on Camera: Harris Watts; book; Aavo Media; London; 1992

The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy; Douglas Adams; Pan Macmillan; London; 2009

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

READING ZYGMUNT BAUMAN

The reader likes the name: Zygmunt Bauman. It has a sci-fi twang to it, though Zygmunt Bauman is very much a writer working now. He is an Emeritus (retired) Sociology professor in Leeds (53 degrees North, 1 degree West), a city in central England with a museum to the work of sculptor Henry Moore and a soccer team known for it's passionate supporters.

The reader likes the name of the book.

Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?

The reader likes the words 'Few' and 'Us' and, in particular, likes the fact that the title is in the form of a question.

The book is short. Not like the more famous and more widely read Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, which covers much of the same ground. The reader rates brevity.

Zygmunt Bauman is not convinced of the benefits of continuing economic growth. He goes back to John Stuart Mill in 1848 for the wisdom that

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement.

Zygmunt Bauman is not the first and won't be the last thinker to zone in on 'wealth distribution' not 'wealth creation' as the major problem facing the world.

Indeed, nearly all the increase in the gross national product that has been achieved in the US since the credit collapse in 2007, more than 90 percent of it, has been appropriated by the richest 1 per cent of Americans.

This is true not only in America. The reader senses that the word 'gross' is ironically appropriate and enjoys the two uses of the word 'appropriate'.

Zygmunt Bauman cites four tacit presumptions commonly accepted as 'obvious' (needing no proof) for the way that we live now and are predetermined to live forever.

Economic Growth is the only way to handle our problems.

Perpetually rising consumption is the most effective way to gratify the human pursuit of happiness.

Inequality of humans is natural.

Rivalry is a necessary and sufficient condition of social justice.

Zygmunt Bauman argues against each of the presumptions in turn, using inequality studies by diverse writers such as James B. Davies, Jeremy Warner, Stewart Lasnsey, Glen Firebaugh, Francois Bourguignon, Joseph E. Stiglitz and, perhaps his favourite, Daniel Dorling. The notes at the back of the book offer plenty of possibilities for further reading.

Instead it (economic growth) portends for an already overwhelming and fast-rising number of people yet deeper and starker inequality, a yet more precarious condition and so also more degradation, chagrin, affront and humiliation – an ever tougher struggle for social survival.

The reader enjoys the language. Using words like 'chagrin' and 'affront' in a book of political economy and philosophy pleases the reader. The book is rigorous and argumentative, but also engaging. Some of the sentences are overly long and occasionally infelicitous, but overall it's a good – short – read.

Does Zygmunt Bauman offer a response to these presumptions and the terminal illness they inflict on society? Not really. Having proved his point, he chastises himself with the thought, developed from the work of Elias Canetti, that there is a gap between our words and our deeds. He offers writers to us as people who may help us bridge that gap.

Ask people about the values dear to them and the odds are that many, probably most, will name equality, mutual respect, solidarity and friendship among the top most. But look closely at their daily behaviour, their life strategies in action, and one can bet that you'll derive from what you've see an entirely different league table of values. You will be astonished to find out how wide the gap is between ideals and realities, words and deeds.

Zygmunt Bauman gets a little Beckettian at the very end of this fine book, when he writes

We will never know unless we try: again and again, and ever harder.

The reader notes that you can now have Beckett's great injunction from his novel Murphy printed on a key-ring, a mug, a tee shirt or the case for your smart-phone.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

The reader thus notes that more writing by Zygmunt Bauman and others may be necessary to bridge the gap between words and deeds in the face of The Four Great Presumptions of our age.

It may be almost as hard as bridging the gaps in one of Henry Moore's statues in Leeds.

Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?; book; Polity; Cambridge; 2013

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter