In This Issue

I DON'T GENERALLY do movie reviews, and that's a good thing, because I don't watch too many movies these days (two little kids will do that to you) and the ones I do watch, over and over again, have already been reviewed. (Wanna know what I think about Caddyshack and Monty Python and the Holy Grail? I dare you.)

So I'm not qualified to talk about The Fog of War: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, the new documentary by Errol Morris. But when Susan Gerhard asked me to watch it – as a political interview, not a movie – I agreed and spent almost two hours listening to Robert McNamara discuss his life, his feelings about war and peace, and (most relevant to me) his role as one of the architects of the U.S. fiasco in Vietnam.

It's a fascinating film, even for a movie illit like me. As Gerhard notes in her typically insightful review, McNamara freely states that the United States came very close to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis; what saved us, he argues, was luck.

"The point being made by [Philip] Glass's methodical music and the collages Morris matches to it is that Americans have long fetishized the machine and the standardized surety that supposedly comes with it, the means of avoiding the pitfalls of relying on luck," Gerhard writes. "When the screen isn't filled with the face of the man nicknamed 'an IBM machine with legs,' it's filled with other representations of the machine: bombing machines, driving machines, text from machines, IBM punch-card-sorting machines, machines that make the machines.... McNamara is the robot who almost comes to life in front of the camera."

This is why Gerhard writes about movies and I don't; that entire machine point never occurred to me. I wasn't even watching the pictures, really. I was just waiting – and waiting – for Morris to ask McNamara some really tough and ugly questions about his role in sending 50,000 U.S. kids and more than 3 million Vietnamese to their deaths.

And he never really got there.

In other news: I've never been a big fan of Safeway, but the company is getting increasingly bad. As David Bacon reports, employees in southern California are losing affordable health insurance – and as Matthew Hirsch reports, San Franciscans are about to lose a community recycling center. The boycott is on.