"Reclaim Your Sense Of Outrage" Scott Horton Interviews John Cusack

[Hissyspit]

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=12921

Reclaim Your Sense of Outrage

An interview with John Cusack by Scott Horton
by Scott Horton
"War is the improvement of investment climates by other means" -Clausewitz for Dummies.

Interview conducted May 22, 2008. Listen to the interview.

Alright everybody, welcome back to Antiwar Radio – KAOS 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas. Introducing actor, writer, producer, John Cusack, on the phone from England today. He's the star of Say Anything, The Grifters, The Thin Red Line, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, Grosse Pointe Blank, Identity, 1408 and dozens of other movies including his brand new War Inc., which he also co-wrote. It also stars his sister, Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd, Hilary Duff, Ben Kingsley, Montel Williams and John McLaughlin. It starts tonight in New York and LA, and then hopefully soon thereafter nationwide. Welcome to the show, John.

Cusack: Hi, how are you doing?

Horton: I'm doing great. Thanks very much for joining us on the show today.

- snip -

Horton: Alright, so this movie is great. I've already watched it about 3 times and shared it with a couple of friends of mine. It's pretty ruthless satire of empire and the so-called "war-on-terrorism." I'm going to see if I can go ahead and start us off with a couple of clips of Dan Aykroyd here.

Cusack: Sure.

The Vice President (Aykroyd): I hope you like the smell of fresh liberation

Brand Hauser (Cusack): Turaqistan. What's the gig?

TVP: Omar Sharif, CEO of Ugi-gas, the Ugijastani conglomerate. The son of a b*tch is trying to build a pipeline through his own sheep fu**ing country. We didn't liberate Turaqistan to get hustled by some co**-sucking fez-head, Hauser! Terminate! You will be working directly under the Viceroy just appointed by the President. Tamerlane is sponsoring a trade expo, "Brand USA." It's our big launch bringing democracy to this part of the world - plus now that we've bombed the shit out of them, well - there's lot of rebuilding to do.

Hauser: That shows a nice spirit.

TVP: Well, somebody has to help these poor people. This moment presents a great opportunity for Tamerlane – and the United States for that matter. Not to mention the people of Turaqistan. This is a historic moment, Hauser; the first war ever to be 100 percent outsourced to private enterprise: Tamerlane jets, Tamerlane tanks, Tamerlane soldiers, and to top it all off – a "Brand USA" expo!

Horton: All right. So that's you, you're Hauser, the hit man having some personal problems, and you're the fixer for this company, "Tamerlane," running the very first all-outsourced war.

Cusack: Yeah, I guess Halliburton and Bechtel and a lot of the Green Zone gang – now, they got about half of it done, but there is still the problem that they have to use the United States military – but they are trying their best to make it a totally outsourced war. There are 180,000 troops, I think, and 140,000 contractors, or it might be the other way around, but we've got about a half-privatized war now. So this is a logical extension of that trend. So it could be two weeks into the future or two years unless we can get this administration out of power – and what they represent; that strain in the Republican party – and hold them accountable for their crimes.

Horton: You know, I interviewed this guy named Bruce Falconer from Mother Jones magazine, and he had written this article all about Blackwater, and he talked about how they really are now building their own navy, their own air force and their own ability to actually do an entire war.

Cusack: Yeah, that's the future that the Republican Party, and of the Democratic Party, if they're going to be complicit in this, are offering us. If you want a world where corporations can hire their own armies, run around with weapons and kill people without any accountability to international law, and do it on our tax dollar – then that's what you can get with this ideology.

Horton: Now have you always been this opposed to empire? I don't remember you really being lumped in with the members of the "Film Actors Guild" from Team America or anything earlier in the war.

Cusack: Yeah, I guess I didn't make the cut there, but I think that's just because my agent is the agent of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. So I think he said, you know, "you ain't using Johnny." So I think it was basically the threat of my agent to Trey and Matt, probably, that they didn't lump me in there. But I always thought that was a completely jive argument anyway, you know? I mean, I think it's fine to make fun of celebrities, but to kind of equate actors and artists who may or may not be self-righteous with dictators and corporate war profiteers is a bit of an uneven comparison – to put it mildly. I always thought that making fun of actors was a kiind of paper tiger thing. I don't know. I don't get it.

Horton: You know, at least those people, self-righteous or otherwise, were trying to stop this war and pretty much everybody seems to agree that it was a bad idea now.

Cusack: Yeah, I think the biggest thing to fight now, and the whole reason we made War Inc. was to fight apathy. I think the first thing people need to reclaim is their sense of outrage and their sense of defiance and their spirit, right? It may take awhile and to hold people accountable for this but we don't have to just roll over. It should feel good to be subversive. It should feel good to tell the right people to go to hell. It should be empowering. I can't really tell many people to go to hell, because otherwise I would be living in a glass house. And I don't really want to tell that many people to go to hell. But war profiteers, who then come back and then deny the GI Bill of Rights to the real soldiers? I can wake up in the morning every day, look in mirror and tell those people to go to hell.

Horton: Well, part of the joy of the movie for me and was just seeing you get away with it, because it really is very ruthless in its delivery of the satire, gag after gag for the first forty minutes. You know, it's pretty shocking. That was part of the joy for me was that "Wow, John Cusack and these guys even got this movie made."

- snip -

Cusack: I was hoping that people would they would use it as a springboard to get people riled up and reclaim their spirit about this. If you think about the war it's really depressing too, and at some point when you know all this stuff, as every one of your listeners already know, you get a little bit down about it and you get a little doom struck about it, and you think, well it's just inevitable that these bastards are going to keep doing this. So I think the first thing you want to do is just reclaim that sense of outrage. Name it and shame it and tell 'em to go to hell. So people can use the movie as a springboard to take action to take the country back in some way – in some small way, that would be great. If they want to, go see it this weekend – don't wait. If we can keep it in the theaters maybe we can have some real fun with this. I would love to keep it in the theaters all the way to the Republican convention.

Horton: Well, your character in the movie kind of goes through that. He is sort of a Tin Man character with no heart who's got to reclaim his outrage, right?

Cusack: Yeah, I guess so the character in it... I don't know if he's quite so redemptive, but I think certainly the politics of the movie are things that people who are interested in ending the war and ending some of the abuses of empire would really like.

Horton: You said something very interesting in an interview with – I forget the guy's name, the Scottish guy that does the TV talk show at night.

Cusack: Craig Ferguson?

Horton: Craig Ferguson, that's right. You said something in the interview with him – that this "disaster capitalism" is not the free market. It's actually a big protection racket – welfare for billionaires.

Cusack: Yeah, absolutely. Let's just say for example... I mean, here's some of the arguments that the movie makes, and this is also something a lot of your listeners would know if you would read Jeremy Scahill's book Blackwater, or Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine or Anthony Arnoves's book or the blogs of RawStory – a lot of these journalists who are doing unbelievable work is... Well, we all know, we hear about this "privatization" thing and it's kind of an abstract thing. It's like "globalization" – Like, "What does it really mean? I don't really know."

But when you really get down to it, if you want to believe that it's okay for Exxon to, say, hire a private army to protect their oil fields, well then okay let's say you could make that argument: That it's okay for corporations to have a private army that's totally outside international law and not accountable to anybody. Well then you could say, "Alright, well you know, they're producing the oil and they've got to project their pipeline or whatever they've got to do, so I guess, you know, yeah, let them pay for it." Well that's an insane argument: to say that it's okay for a corporation to have its own private killing army, but let's say you went with that, but even that's not true, because we pay for it. We are paying Blackwater – the U.S. taxpayers. So it is not even like a free market. It is not even these people kind of just taking care of themselves in the lawless international land, I mean all these myths are bullshit, you know?

Horton: Right they like to call it "free market fundamentalism" when what it really is, is fascism. It's mercantilism at war. What else could you call it?

Cusack: Yeah. I don't know another name for it. Nor do I think you should be polite with it anymore. I think We have to be past that point. So, you know, if you think it's okay for these corporations to help create these conditions for war, drive us into war, and then make money bombing the place, make money rebuilding it, all the while barring other people from the competition, right? And then come back on television and preach about the free market, when they are orchestrating a vast protectionist racket, where they are securing their market and profiting off of people's death and destruction. I mean that's what's happening, We're in a place right now where it's okay for people to not only do the United States' torture, but we've turned torture into a for-profit business that is paid for by and the U.S. taxpayers. We have outsourced interrogation, right? – you know, a gentle semiotics for torture.

Horton: Right. CACI International at Abu Ghraib.

Cusack: That's the reality. So I don't know... If this isn't enough for revolt, I don't know what is. And the Democrats have got a lot to answer to as well. I mean, if Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is "off the table," what does that mean? That means that you commit crimes as long as the Democrats are within striking distance of capturing power?

Horton: Yeah, that's exactly what it means, apparently.

Cusack: That's what it means.

MORE

[G_j]

1. Cusack really gets it

can't wait to see the new film, War Inc.

[notadmblnd]

3. I did see it , it's pretty good

I found this link. It's called watch-movies.net

http://watch-movies.net/s/war_inc.html

[magellan]

2. "Private" mercs paid with US tax dollars

Who authorized that crap on our behalf anyway? Why weren't we told about it/given a vote on it? We already pay for a 5-branch military (including the knee-deeps) with our taxes. Who gave the government permission to expand it to 6?

....

"But when you really get down to it, if you want to believe that it's okay for Exxon to, say, hire a private army to protect their oil fields, well then okay let's say you could make that argument: That it's okay for corporations to have a private army that's totally outside international law and not accountable to anybody. Well then you could say, "Alright, well you know, they're producing the oil and they've got to project their pipeline or whatever they've got to do, so I guess, you know, yeah, let them pay for it." Well that's an insane argument: to say that it's okay for a corporation to have its own private killing army, but let's say you went with that, but even that's not true, because we pay for it. We are paying Blackwater – the U.S. taxpayers. So it is not even like a free market. It is not even these people kind of just taking care of themselves in the lawless international land, I mean all these myths are bullshit, you know?"