April 3 is Triple B Day: Anniversary of The Bolshevik Revolution, Black Dahlia on TV, and Bradley Manning on the Radio

The Black Dahlia is on AMC, gruesome murder playing softly the background as I write this. I point out because it reminds me that a quote from the author of the novel on which Brian de Palma's film is based, appears on the front pages of the CMNS120 coursepack, a coursepack that didn't get a ton of use on account of: Wisconsin, Bradley Manning, murders based on hate speech in Arizona (the response to the shooting? Arizona to force universities to allow guns on campus. Why not-what could possibly go wrong?), and the most revolutionizing the world's seen since Lenin stepped off at the Finland Station the night of April 3, 1917. That's 96 days years ago, to the day.

I listened to The Pet Shop Boys sing about "from Lake Geneva to The Finland Station" forever in West End Girls. I thought the song was about English girls shopping, not the historical inequality between the propertied classes and workers. I tip my hat to Neil Tennant, for his subversion. I wish I had a Bolshevik hat to tip, because those hats look warm.

James Ellroy's coursepack quote: “Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.”

James Ellroy writes in this sort of staccato style like a reporter on deadline, with 200 words and 30 minutes to tell his readers that they've all been the victims of a century-old conspiracy. The Black Dahlia covers a real (and really gruesome) murder, that of Elizabeth Short, a Massachusetts beauty queen who (like tens of thousands of beauty queens before and since her), made her way to Hollywood. Short ended up dead. The actual crime remains unsolved. But the point of the book is that Hollywood, the biggest mass-mediated bully the world had yet known, itself is the crime.

As film critic David Thomson suggests The Black Dahlia covers the era when the mass media began to differentiate us into two different categories: those worthy enough to get time on the big screen, and those of us just making up the numbers in the darkened cinema. To Thomson, The Black Dahlia traces our collective mania to measure worth according to the attainment of celebrity, and to accept as proof of failure the inability to attain this: "There was a rare tension between high hopes and helpless anonymity that added to the high murder rate. Young people came and went, eager to be meat for the public gaze, but regularly discarded. In the film world as a whole, humanity was often judged according to the unkind standards of an audition: you were in or you were out. A sense of cruelty and exploitation was becoming structural."

Perhaps devaluation of the worth of the individual explains apathy over the things that used to shock. As Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, writes about the way the media has abandoned Bradley Manning, despite selling truckloads of newspapers filled with the stories that the cables he leaked revealed, Manning gets thrown aside:  "So? If these news media believe they were right to publish the material Manning gave them, how can they stand aside as he faces life in prison for giving it to them? If they did right and the world benefited, did he do wrong? On what grounds can they say - as [NYT editor-in-chief] Keller and Guardian of London editor Alan Rusbridger have - that they would help defend WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange if the U.S. charges him, while they won't lift a finger to protest Manning's incarceration?"

I think the answer is clear. Because Manning doesn't matter. Anymore than the countless casualties and collateral damage statistics matter to the "journalists" reporting the news. When news serves to entertain, more than it does to change, readers become complicit in the facilitation of new supplies of statistics. Four days ago Rolling Stone published "The Kill Team," an article that documents how 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington-- started killing Afghani civilians, just for fun. As Time notes, it's a massive story in Europe, particularly with German newspaper Der Spiegel, but has hardly caused a ripple in North America.Why would it, though? It's the world we inhabit, the world we accept. Seemingly, it's the world we North Americans want.

Tonight, Daniel Ellsberg talks live with blogger Glenn Greenwald, about The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning. In a better world, this conversation is carried live on CNN; it's a conversation between one of the brightest minds The United States has ever produced, and the 2010 winner of The Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary for his coverage of Bradley Manning. As it is, you can listen live on LiveBlogRadio.

Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer were, as all fans of film noir understand, perfect together as they snarled their way to their inevitable coquettish heartbreak in The Big Steal (1949).  It's a film only aficionados of Film Noir tend to find their way to. Greer and Mitchum get all their credit for their pairing two years previously in Out of The Past (1947) which is darker according to all the ways film noir found to turn low the lights.

Out of The Past may be more canonical, but The Big Steal is more comical on account of Mitchum, by 1949, is a dope fiend in the eyes of the public. Leading female stars of the time wouldn't work with him. The studio had him on contract so they still had to make movies, so they threw him on noir-comedies set in Mexico, --the B-movies of the B-movie world. Out of loyalty -- and possibly also because working with Mitchum was fun -- Greer stuck with him, which has always seemed like a classy move. Hollywood produces bad boys as regularly as it produces summer blockbusters and Charlie Sheen's the latest. In a battle between Mitchum's smirk and Sheen's smirk, I wouldn't want to say which would win.

Film Noir is dark not just because the lighting is low but because post WWII North Americans sensed something in their society was off, and was bound to get offer. Former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the same themes as part of his farewell address in 1961. A lot of people have been expecting The Big Steal for awhile. Now that it seems to be here, and here, we can't entirely say the media hadn't warned us. The media, certain segments of it, did. Even a former President did. And the warnings have been circulating throughout our popular culture for the past fifty years. You can't blame Charlie Sheen for being Charlie Sheen anymore than you can blame Robert Mitchum for getting high, a half decade before most of the continent followed his lead. The bad behaviour of celebrities equipped with a smirk is endlessly fascinating. But when the hijacking of our democracy doesn't lead the news in all news outlets, that's some sort of cause for concern, isn't it?