Read This Leftist Critique Of U. S. Policy In Iraq, If You Dare!

A thoughtful critique of U. S. policy from the Left? If this be (fair & balanced) polemicism, so be it.

[x Logos]
Iraq, Hegemony and the Question of American Empire
by
Michael J. Thompson

It is rare that political debates typically confined to the left will burst into the mainstream with any degree of interest, let alone profundity. But this has not been the case with the question of American empire and the recent military campaigns in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. For many on the left, this was a political question with a cut and dried answer: the American-led military campaign was a clear expression of its imperial policies and motives, the object of which is economic global dominance. But in some ways, such assumptions voiced by much of the American and European left—specifically among its more dogmatic and sectarian strains—mischaracterize and even misunderstand the reality of American global power and the possible contributions of the western political tradition more broadly.

I

With each passing day the events in Iraq deliberately evoke the question of American empire, and not without good reason. The neoconservative position on this has been to see American policies and its position in the world as that of a hegemon: a nation which seeks to lead the constellation of world nations into the end of history itself where the fusion of “free” markets and liberal democracy is seen to be the institutional panacea for the world’s ills and with this the enlargement of capital’s dominion. But the deepening morass of the occupation of Iraq belies such intentions. Paul
Bremer’s statement that “we dominate the scene [in Iraq] and we will continue to impose our will on this country,” is a concise statement betraying not America’s imperial motives, but, rather, the way that its hegemonic motives have ineluctably been pushed into a logic of imperial control. America has, in other words, become an empire by default, not by intention, and the crucial question now is: how are we to respond?

But the charge of America-as-empire is not as obvious as many have assumed even though many superficial elements of its history point to that conclusion. Students of American political history know of the dual policies of American empire from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Gunboat Diplomacy” was the imperial policy of backing up all foreign territorial policies with direct military force. From the Philippines to Cuba, Grenada and Haiti, this was an effective policy—copied from the British and their acts in the Opium War—which allowed the United States to extend itself as a
colonial power.

“Dollar Diplomacy” was America’s effort—particularly under President William Howard Taft—to further its foreign policy aims in Latin America and the Far East through the use of economic power. Theodore Roosevelt laid the groundwork for this approach in 1905 with his Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, maintaining that if any nation in the Western Hemisphere appeared politically or fiscally so unstable as to be vulnerable to European control, the United States had the right and obligation to intervene. Taft continued and expanded this policy, starting in Central America, where he justified it as a means of protecting the Panama Canal. In 1909 he attempted unsuccessfully to establish control over Honduras by buying up its debt to British bankers. In Nicaragua, American intervention included funding the country’s debts to European bankers. In addition, the State Department persuaded four American banks to refinance Haiti's national debt, setting the stage for further intervention in the future.

Both policies were imperial to the extent that they wanted to manipulate and use other countries as geographical means for domestic economic and political ends. To expand markets were meant, during the late 19th century and early 20th, as a means for displacing excess domestic industrial productivity—the cause of most cyclical recessions during that period. Goods produced in excess could be unloaded in more local foreign markets and there was also the return of agricultural goods and natural resources, too. We could probably say that America is once again becoming an empire of sorts, but this is something that is more recent than some may in fact think.

The Cold War was a battle of hegemons—between the U.S. and the Soviets—and this has, since the latter’s collapse and the ascendancy of neoconservatives to positions of influence and power in Washington, turned into a political situation where American interests are pursued unilaterally without the intervening countervailing tendencies of international institutions such as the UN. And it is here that the moment of empire begins to eclipse that of hegemony: when a single nation begins to hold direct control over foreign territory for its own interests. The Iraqi oil fields were up and running not long after the fall of Baghdad where, even now, electricity and clean water are in short supply if even existent. (An Iraqi friend in Baghdad tells me that they have power for about one hour a day.)

When I visited Baghdad in January of 2003, several of my colleagues and I were fortunate enough to be able to have a private conversation with several members of the faculty from the College of Political Science at Baghdad University. For them, the consensus for political change in Iraq was clear: the ousting of Saddam Hussein was necessary for the Iraqi people and any semblance of political freedom, but it was his regime that was the problem and it was the regime, they felt, that should be the focus of UN sanctions and pressure, not the total annihilation of state institutions that the Ba’athists had inhabited and, in part, created. (See the interview in
Logos, Winter 2003 .)

Hegemony in international terms without some kind of competing force—such as the Soviets—can clearly lead to the abuse of power and a unilateralist flaunting of international institutions that do not serve at the imperium’s
whim. But this should not mean that hegemony itself is a negative concept. Although empire is something rightfully reviled, hegemony may not be as bad as everyone thinks. We need to consider what is progressive and
transformative in the ideas and values of the western republican and liberal traditions. We need to advocate not an anti-hegemonic stance in form, but an anti-hegemonic and anti-imperialist stance in content, one that advocates the
particular interests of capital of the market in more broad terms rather than the universal political interests of others. Rather than choose between western hegemony on the one hand and political and cultural relativism on the other, we need to approach this problem with an eye toward cosmopolitanism and what the political theorist Stephen Eric Bronner has called “planetary life.”

Simple resistance to American “imperial” tendencies is no longer enough for a responsible, critical and rational left. Not only does it smack of tiersmondisme but at the same time it rejects the realities of globalization which are
inexorable and require a more sophisticated political response. The real question I am putting forth is simply this: is it the case that hegemony is in itself inherently bad? Or, is it possible to consider that—because it can, at least in theory, consist of the diffusion of western political ideas, values and institutions—it could be used as a progressive force in transforming those nations and regions that have been unable to deal politically with the problems of economic development, political disintegration and ethnic strife?

It is time that we begin to consider the reality that western political thought provides us with unique answers to the political, economic and social problems of the world and this includes reversing the perverse legacies of
western imperialism itself. And it is time that the left begins to embrace the ideas of the Enlightenment and its ethical impulse for freedom, democracy, social progress and human dignity on an international scale. This is rhetorically embraced by neoconservatives, but it turns out to be more of a mask for narrower economic motives and international realpolitik, and hence their policies and values run counter to the radical impulses of Enlightenment thought. Western ideas and institutions can find affinities in the rational strains of thought in almost every culture in the world, from 12th
century rationalist Islamic philosophers like Alfarabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sinna) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) to India’s King Akbar and China’s Mencius. The key is to find these intellectual affinities and push them to their concrete, political conclusions.

Clearly, the left’s problem with the idea of the spread of western political ideas and institutions is not entirely wrong. There was a racist and violent precedent set by the French and English imperial projects lasting well into the 20th century. The problem is in separating the form from the content of western hegemonic motives and intentions. And it is even more incorrect to see the occupation of Iraq as a symptom of western ideas and Enlightenment rationalism. Nothing could be further from the case and the sooner this is realized, the more the left will be able to carve out new paths of critique and resistance to a hegemony that is turning into empire.

AND IT IS PRECISELY FOR THIS REASON WHY, in institutional terms, the UN needs to be brought back in. Although there are clearly larger political and symbolic reasons for this—such as the erosion of a unilateralist framework for the transition from Hussein’s regime—there is also the so-called “effect of empire” where Iraq is being transformed into an instrument of ideological economics. The current U.S. plan for Iraq—one strongly supported by Bremer as well as the Bush administration—will remake its economy into one of the most open to trade, capital flows and foreign investment in the world as well as being the lowest taxed. Iraq is being transformed into an neo-liberal utopia where American industries hooked up to the infamous “military-industrial complex” will be able to gorge themselves on contracts
for the development of everything from infrastructure to urban police forces.

As time moves on, we are seeing that Iraq provides us with a stunning example of how hegemony becomes empire. It is an example of how the naïve intention of “nation building” is unmasked and laid bare, seen for what it truly is: the forceful transformation of a sovereign state into a new form suited to narrow western (specifically American) interests. Attempts to build a constitution have failed not from the lack of will, but from the lack of any political discourse about what form the state should take and about what values should be enshrined in law. Ruling bodies have become illegitimate almost immediately upon their appointment because there exists almost complete social fragmentation, and the costs of knitting it together are too great for America to assume.

In the end, America has become, with its occupation of Iraq and its unilateralist and militaristic posture, an empire in the most modern sense of the term. But we should be careful about distinguishing empire from a hegemon and the implications of each. And since, as Hegel put it, we are defined by what we oppose, the knee-jerk and ineffectual response from the modern left has been to produce almost no alternative at all to the imperatives that drive American empire as seen in places such as Iraq. To neglect the military, economic and cultural aspects of American power is to
ignore the extent to which it provokes violent reaction and counter-reaction.

But at the same time, to ignore the important contributions of western political ideas and institutions and their power and efficacy in achieving peace and mutual cooperation—whether it be between ethnic communities or whole nations themselves—is to ignore the very source of political solutions for places where poverty, oppression and dictatorships are the norm and remain stubbornly intact.

Western hegemony will not be seen as problematic once the values of the western political tradition and specifically those of the Enlightenment—from the liberal rule of law, the elimination of the arbitrary exercise of power and
the value of political and social equality—are set in a cosmopolitan global framework. Only then will the words of Immanuel Kant take on any kind of concrete meaning for people the world over. “To think of oneself as a
member of a cosmopolitan society in compliance with state laws is the most sublime idea that man can have about his predicament and which cannot be thought of without enthusiasm.”

Michael J. Thompson is the founder and editor of Logos and teaches political theory at Hunter College, CUNY. His new book, Islam and the West: Critical Perspectives on Modernity has just been released from Rowman and Littlefield Press.

Copyright © 2003 Logos

Philip K. Dick, the best author you never heard of

I read a LOT of sci-fi in my early teens: Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, C. H. Kornbluh, and Arthur C. Clarke. THAT probably explains my weirdness. I wouldn't call Philip K. Dick a hack. These guys wrote some brilliant stuff that no one (high brow) read. I am amazed that I am living in the 21^st century. This was the future for these sci-fi authors. Now what? If this be (fair & balanced) weirdness, so be it.


[x Wired]
The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick
The inside-out story of how a hyper-paranoid, pulp-fiction hack conquered the movie world 20 years after his death.
By Frank Rose

The unbilled costar of Paycheck, the latest Hollywood thriller from the battered typewriter of Philip K. Dick, is a bullet. A crack engineer named Jennings, played by Ben Affleck, finds himself in a jam, as Dick's characters invariably do, and the bullet is headed his way. Spiraling through the air in superslow motion, it pierces his chest in a plume of red and bores into his heart. Or does it? Though the image recurs throughout the film, it's hard to tell whether it's actually happening or not. Philip K. Dick liked nothing better than to toy with the fundamentals of human existence, reality chief among them, so what better for the movie than a bullet that may or may not be tearing through the main character's flesh? Like other Dick protagonists - Tom Cruise in Minority Report, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall, Harrison Ford in Blade Runner- Affleck finds himself struggling for equilibrium in a world where even the most elemental questions are almost impossible to answer. Can the senses be trusted? Are memories real? Is anything real?

Paycheck, directed by John Woo and set to open Christmas Day, is the latest in a run of films based on Philip K. Dick stories that began 21 years ago with Blade Runner. The writer's hallucinatory tales make for suspense with an epistemological twist: full-bore action pics that turn on questions of perception versus reality. Having agreed to have his memory erased after completing a super-sensitive job, Jennings learns that he apparently signed away his $4.4 billion paycheck in exchange for an envelope of trinkets. Armed men are chasing him, but he has no idea why until he teams up with Rachel (Uma Thurman), whom he vaguely recalls meeting just before he started the job. Jennings, it turns out, is a man who has seen the future but can't remember it.

Dick died shortly before Blade Runner's release in 1982, and, despite a cult readership, he spent most of his life in poverty. Yet now, more than two decades later, the future he saw has made him one of the most sought-after writers in Hollywood. Paycheck, based on a 1953 short story Dick sold to a pulp magazine for less than $200, will bring close to $2 million to his estate. And movies based on more than a half-dozen other stories and novels are in the works - among them "The King of the Elves" at Disney, "The Short, Happy Life of the Brown Oxford" at Miramax, and A Scanner Darkly at Warner Bros.

Dick's anxious surrealism all but defines contemporary Hollywood science fiction and spills over into other kinds of movies as well. His influence is pervasive in The Matrix and its sequels, which present the world we know as nothing more than an information grid; Dick articulated the concept in a 1977 speech in which he posited the existence of multiple realities overlapping the "matrix world" that most of us experience. Vanilla Sky, with its dizzying shifts between fantasy and fact, likewise ventures into a Dickian warp zone, as does Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. Memento reprises Dick's memory obsession by focusing on a man whose attempts to avenge his wife's murder are complicated by his inability to remember anything. In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey discovers the life he's living is an illusion, an idea Dick developed in his 1959 novel Time Out of Joint. Next year, Carrey and Kate Winslet will play a couple who have their memories of each other erased in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Memory, paranoia, alternate realities: Dick's themes are everywhere.

At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn't really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a nerve. "People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it when they see it in their own lives."

Like the babbling psychics who predict future crimes in Minority Report, Dick was a precog. Lurking within his amphetamine-fueled fictions are truths that have only to be found and decoded. In a 1978 essay he wrote: "We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."

Viewed in this context, Dick's emergence in Hollywood seems oddly inevitable. His career itself is a tale of alternate realities. In the flesh he was the ultimate outsider, pecking out paranoid visions that place the little guy at the mercy of the corporate machine. Yet posthumously he feeds the machine, his pseudoworlds the basis of ever more elaborate entertainments doled out by the megacorporations we pay to stuff our heads. How he made the leap from pulp-fiction writer to Hollywood prophet is a tale almost worthy of the man himself.

Dick's career in movies did not begin with a bang. It was 1977, and a small-time actor named Brian Kelly wanted to option the 9-year-old novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? For a mere $2,500, he got it. "The works of Philip K. Dick were not exactly in demand," recalls the writer's New York literary agent, Russell Galen, "and for Phil" - then 49 and living in suburban Orange County - "that was enough to make the difference between a good year and a bad year." Kelly's partner wrote a screenplay and shopped it around. Eventually it landed on the desk of Ridley Scott, who'd just directed Alien. Scott brought in a new writer and sent it to Alan Ladd Jr., one of the top players in Hollywood.

"I liked the project," says Ladd, a quiet, deliberate man whose Beverly Hills offices are lined with posters for the films he's made: Star Wars, The Right Stuff, Chariots of Fire, Braveheart "It was a good old-fashioned detective story set in the future." Ladd thought Harrison Ford, who'd costarred in Star Wars, would be good as a Humphrey Bogart-type sleuth. Blade Runner was a go.

Just a few months before the movie's release, Dick suffered a massive stroke. Blade Runner proved only a modest success at the box office; if not for two other developments, Dick's career might have died with him. The first was the emergence of home video, which gave new life to small films with cult followings. Throughout the '80s, Blade Runner's reputation as a noirishly futuristic gem continued to build. The second was the interest of Ron Shusett, a screenwriter who'd worked on Alien. Before Dick died, Shusett bought the film rights to "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," a story about a nebbishy clerk with dreams of going to Mars. He retitled it Total Recall and took it to Dino De Laurentiis, who put it into development.

Total Recall languished for years before all the elements - producer, director, star - came together. At one point, Richard Dreyfuss was attached. At another, David Cronenberg was going to direct and wanted William Hurt for the lead. "I worked on it for a year and did about 12 drafts," Cronenberg recalls. "Eventually we got to a point where Ron Shusett said, 'You know what you've done? You've done the Philip K. Dick version.' I said, 'Isn't that what we're supposed to be doing?' He said, 'No, no, we want to do Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.'" Cronenberg moved on. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to star, but De Laurentiis refused: Even in an overamped Hollywood bastardization, he couldn't see Schwarzenegger in the part. Instead, it went to Patrick Swayze, with Bruce Beresford directing. They were building sets in Australia when De Laurentiis' company went bankrupt.

This gave Schwarzenegger his chance. He got Carolco, the high-flying mini-studio behind the Rambo series, to buy the property, and Paul Verhoeven to direct it. The henpecked clerk named Quail became a muscle-bound construction worker named Quaid, and a new ending was written to make up for what many filmmakers see as the problem with Dick's short stories: their lack of a third act that will take a movie to 90 minutes or more. But while Verhoeven's film was an interplanetary shoot-'em-up that bore little resemblance to Dick's story, it did retain the tale's essential ambiguity: At the end, we're not sure whether the main character actually went to Mars or only thought he did, thanks to some memory implants he bought. "This was extremely innovative, coming from a Hollywood studio," says Verhoeven. "To dare to say, Everything you see could be a dream, or everything you see could be reality, and we won't tell you which is true - I thought that was pretty sensational."

Total Recall was one of the biggest hits of 1990, grossing $118 million in the US alone. That was good for Carolco, even better for Dick. "The whole phenomenon of Philip K. Dick short stories selling for a lot of money started with Total Recall," says Russell Galen, the literary agent, who now represents his estate. Before Total Recall, Dick was a Hollywood unknown; afterward, screenwriters and producers saw his stories as properties they could build action movies around. And there were dozens of these properties - 36 novels and more than 150 short stories, most as-yet unoptioned.

It would be a while before anything was available. Dick had died without a will, and his estate was in probate for 11 years. When it was finally settled, however, Galen had work to do. Warner Bros. bought the novel Time Out of Jointfor Joel Silver (who went on to produce the Matrix series) and optioned A Scanner Darkly for George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's production company, Section 8. The Jim Henson Company optioned "The King of the Elves" and set it up as a children's film at Disney. Spyglass Entertainment, makers of M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, took an option on "Paycheck." Business got so heavy that Galen had to devise a computerized chart showing what's available, what's been optioned and will become available in the future, and what's been sold outright.

One of the first to go was "The Minority Report," a short story published in the January '56 issue of Fantastic Universe, about a police commander who uses clairvoyants to arrest people before they actually commit a crime. Gary Goldman, the screenwriter who'd reworked Total Recall for Verhoeven, brought it to the director, who decided it would make a great sequel. This was a story in which Dick's obsession with alternate realities dovetailed with a fascination with fate: If we can see into the future, does that mean the future is set? That humans have no capacity for free will? Verhoeven envisioned Total Recall II: The Minority Report as a whiz-bang, action-packed, "theological-philosophical challenge" to the Calvinist concept of predestination. But Carolco went bankrupt before he could make it. So Goldman took it to director Jan de Bont, Verhoeven's former cinematographer, who showed it to Tom Cruise, who'd been thinking for some time about doing a science fiction picture with Steven Spielberg.

To Galen, the 1998 announcement that Cruise and Spielberg would team up to make Minority Report was electrifying. Three years passed before they actually got to it, and when they did the movie departed significantly from the short story, which was a paranoia-soaked potboiler in which the police commander in charge of "pre-crime" is framed by his new deputy, or his wife, or an ex-general, or all or none of the above. "I don't think Phil was all that interested in the morality of pre-crime," says Goldman, an executive producer of the film. But Spielberg was, and the movie ends with a ringing endorsement of the American justice system. "It's very difficult to be true to Phil Dick and make a Hollywood movie," Goldman observes. "His thinking was subversive. He questioned everything Hollywood wanted to affirm." No matter. With the release of Minority Report, Dick became an A-list Hollywood scribe, a player, a member of the club.


Art Sreiber
Paycheck director John Woo made his name with violent ballets of bullets; his new inspiration: Hitchcock.

Vancouver, June 2003. The Paycheck shoot is well under way, and this morning Woo is rehearsing one of the pening scenes. A vast soundstage on the edge of town has been converted into the headquarters of Allcom, a company that seems to be an unholy marriage of Microsoft, Monsanto, and GE. On one side of the soundstage is the bio lab, a rainforest of orchids and bromeliads and water lilies and trees reaching up to the ceiling, interspersed with catwalks and robot arms. This is Uma's domain. On the other side, behind an enormous door, is the computer lab Ben is about to disappear into. When he emerges, three years later, it will be with his memory wiped. But on his way in, he captures Uma's attention. Mischievously, she hits him with a blast of air almost strong enough to bowl him over. "I give up! I give up!" he cries, slicking back his hair. In a flash a robot arm swings in front of him, halting an inch or two from his face. In its pincers, a yellow orchid.

"Don't give up," Uma says softly.

There are plenty of action sequences in Paycheck- a motorcycle chase through the streets of Vancouver, a climactic fight scene replete with explosions, gunfire, and people diving through the air. But for Woo, that's not the point. Woo made his name in Hong Kong in the '80s with hyperviolent cult films like A Better Tomorrow and The Killer- maximum spatter rendered with balletic grace. Transplanted to Hollywood in the '90s, he graduated to big-budget action-adventure tales, most notably Face Off and Mission: Impossible 2, the second-highest-grossing film of 2000. But like other genre directors, he dreams of greater things. "Paycheck is a suspenseful movie, but also it is a love story," he says in heavily accented English while the crew preps the next shot. "Usually, science fiction movies are pretty cold. I am trying to make this one more human. Some of the scenes are a tribute to" - he claps a hand over his mouth, pretending he's afraid to utter the word - "Hitchcock."

Woo cites Hitchcock - along with '30s musicals, Francis Ford Coppola, and the blood-soaked Westerns of Sam Peckinpah - as a major influence. "Hitchcock's movies are so precise," he says admiringly. "Every shot is calculated. And they're not only about suspense - I also find them very romantic." He mentions the scene in The Birds when Tippi Hedren is driving to meet Rod Taylor, a pair of lovebirds in a cage on the floor: There are lovebirds in Paycheck, too. He mentions the scene in North by Northwest when Cary Grant is chased by a crop duster in an Indiana cornfield: In Paycheck, Affleck is chased by a train. "Ben plays an ordinary man, not a superhero," Woo says. "Just like a young Cary Grant - that's how I want him to be."

"This is a part I went after really aggressively," says Affleck. "I've always been a fan of Philip K. Dick, both his writings and the movie adaptations. They're big-budget movies for smart people." Too often, Affleck admits, that's an oxymoron: "There's a tendency to dumb these movies down - they're spending so much money on them, and conventional wisdom dictates that you have to go for the lowest common denominator. But his ideas prevent that. To anybody who's ever thought, Did that happen or did I dream it? - you'd have to have a PhD in philosophy to get too deep into this, but it has to do with wanting to validate our own first-person experience."

Just as Spielberg was dismissed by hardcore Dick fans, Woo strikes many as unworthy. They probably don't realize that the Matrixseries contains almost as many references to Woo as to Dick. (Fluttering pigeons heralding a fight, a shooter with two guns blazing - pure Woo.) And though he makes exceptions for Star Wars and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Woo thinks most science fiction is limited in scope.

But then, so did Dick. In response to a 1969 questionnaire, Dick described SF's greatest weakness as "its inability to explore the subtle, intricate relationships that exist between the sexes," adding that as a result it "remains pre-adult, and therefore appeals - more or less - to pre-adults." The male-female relationships in Dick's work tend to be more dysfunctional than romantic, but the idea of Woo interpreting Dick through Hitchcock makes sense: These are three genre artists who've transcended their category. Certainly if Hitch had tackled science fiction, his trademark combination of paranoia and suspense would have fit Dick perfectly.

Philip K. Dick appeals to Woo, and to studio execs as well, because the humans take precedence over the science fiction elements of his stories - the robots, the gizmos, the spaceships that transport you to Mars. The ideas are a bonus, though in "Paycheck" and other early pulp-fiction stories, they're not always well developed. "One thing he didn't go into," observes Dean Georgaris, who wrote the Paycheckscreenplay, "is what kind of person would agree to have a large portion of his memory erased. For me, that was the key that opened the door to the movie. It's about what's important in life - is it the great moments, or the little things that add up?" But the big question Dick only hinted at was what people would do if they had the machine Jennings built before his mind was wiped - a machine whose nature only gradually becomes apparent in the movie. "Would we become addicted to it, like we've become addicted to TV?" Georgaris wonders. Movies like The Terminator and The Matrix are about machines that attack humans. The more likely scenario, Georgaris thinks, is that humans will submit voluntarily.

It may be for the best that Dick's career in Hollywood took off only after his death, because he'd certainly have had a hard time handling it in life. Psychologically, the guy was a mess. His fear of going out in public was so bad it's difficult to imagine him taking a meeting at a film studio. According to Isa Dick-Hackett, one of three children he produced in five marriages, he couldn't even make good on a promise to take her to Disneyland when she was little. "Twenty or thirty minutes into it, he started to complain of back pain and had to leave," she says. "Later, I realized the crowds just freaked him out."

The Philip K. Dick estate has no such problems. Isa and her older half-sister, Laura Leslie, are upstanding Bay Area citizens, both intelligent and obviously competent. Together with their younger half-brother, Chris, who works as a martial arts instructor in Southern California, they control their father's legacy. Russell Galen advises them from New York. The four take their stewardship seriously: They're fine with repackaging a novel to tie in with a movie, for example, but novelizations of short stories are out. And thanks to Vintage Books, every word of his fiction will soon be in print - as you'd expect for an author who's now taught in colleges and cited by the French post-structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

As for film deals, the estate has become increasingly choosy. "We sort of feel like we have to protect Philip K. Dick's brand image," says Galen. "So we set very, very high prices, and we'll only do business with people who are established. It's ironic, because the films that created the phenomenon started with options that were granted to struggling filmmakers. Today, we shun people like that." Not every movie based on Dick's writings has been a hit: The 1996 film Screamers, starring Peter Weller, and last year's Imposter, with Gary Sinise in the lead, grossed only $12 million between them. "But in Hollywood, what matters is getting the movie made," explains Galen. "If somebody options a story and it's not made, that spoils the track record."

Still, most Hollywood writers, even successful ones, live mainly off properties that are sold but not developed, and the Dick estate is no exception. Of the more than half-dozen film projects currently in the works, some are inching forward while others are caught in limbo. John Alan Simon, who produced The Getaway with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and his partner, Dale Rosenbloom, are trying to get studio backing for films based on three Dick novels - Radio Free Albemuth, Valis, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Miramax has a script and is looking for a director for "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford," a story about a shoe that comes alive. ("With the right actor and the right filmmaker, it will be memorable," says development exec Michael Zoumas. "Without them it will be, what were they thinking?") Both Joel Silver's Time Out of Joint and Steven Soderbergh's A Scanner Darkly are idling while the producers work on other projects. As Galen puts it, "To have Minority Report and Paycheck back-to-back like that" - big-budget films with big-name stars and a top director - "requires an incredible planetary alignment."

Dick's kids grew up poor - no health insurance, clothes from Goodwill. Laura recalls how grateful she was to get braces. But the hard-scrabble life was critical to Dick's sensibility. "Phil's work came out of an atmosphere of want and struggle," Galen observes. Science fiction was a ghetto in the '50s and '60s, and Dick was one of its least fashionable residents: While Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were writing best sellers, he counted himself lucky not to be collecting rejection slips. "From the day he wrote his first story, he was worried would he ever get another sale," Galen says. "Certainly he was as prolific as he was because he needed money. We have 30-odd Philip K. Dick novels and not 10 because he was not that well paid."

How celebrity would have affected him is a different question. "He would never have been that Hollywood thing, ever," says Laura, sitting with Isa on the patio of Spago in Palo Alto. The closest he came was buying a sports car, shortly before he died. But he was afraid to drive it, and apparently with good reason: "6,000 miles, and it had dents all over it," Laura observes. In most ways, they agree, he wouldn't have changed. He wouldn't have gotten health insurance. Instead of filing his income taxes, he'd have continued to claim he was handing everything over to "Mrs. Frye" at the IRS. (As far as the daughters know, Mrs. Frye never existed.) This is a guy who had to have a friend take Isa to the toy store because he couldn't handle the anxiety. "The thought of the general public knowing who he was," she says now - "he would have been out of his mind."

As things turned out, he never had to worry about it. Instead, it's Laura and Isa who deal with his fame. The two daughters had quite different upbringings, and as primary guardians of the estate they play equally divergent roles. Laura, trim and proper and blond, saw her father only four times after the age of 3, but she read all his books when she was 12, and the two corresponded and talked on the phone constantly. Today she shuns publicity and focuses on the deals. Isa was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian home; every book her father sent was burned because it contained swear words. Outgoing and enthusiastic, with dark curls cascading almost to her shoulders, she likes to reach out to the fans. Now, for example, she's working with Jason Koornick, who runs the fan site PhilipKDick.com, to convert it into an official one - a place where they can post unpublished letters and other documents.

Neither of the daughters was prepared for the Spielberg effect. "The whole Minority Report thing blew us away," says Laura. "It was so unexpected" - the hubbub of the New York premiere, the glamorous party at Cipriani, the effusive praise from stars like Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell. "We didn't realize what a phenomenon our dad was."

"He's a question on Jeopardy," Isa interjects.

Laura recalls a Dean Koontz story that contains a remark about "having a Philip K. Dick moment." She finds the notion a little unsettling: Her world was full of Philip K. Dick moments. "That was just my dad," she says. "The concept of alternate realities - I thought that was the way everybody talked."

In his 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Dick wrote about the sudden shift experienced by Jason Taverner, a world-famous talk-show host who wakes up one morning to find that no one has heard of him and no record of his identity exists. Dick's own experience of celebrity is almost the reverse: For decades, no one outside the science fiction ghetto had heard of him, and now he's world-famous, the kind of guy Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg talk about on Oprah. All this fame came at the stage in life when he was best able to handle it - after he was dead. "I feel so happy for him," Isa declares. "He was so afraid of death - and how amazing for him."

"He's going to live forever," says Laura, continuing Isa's thought.

"Every day, more and more people know him."

"He transcended death," Laura says, a note of wonder in her voice - half awe, half bemusement. As if to say: How very Philip K. Dick.

Reality Check
Uma Thurman on the surreal world of Dick, karmic paybacks, and working with mind-bending auteurs.
by Frank Rose

"It's all very Buddhist," says Uma Thurman, sitting in a dressing room as a makeup artist dabs at her face.

She means Philip K. Dick, of course. Her father, Columbia University professor Robert Thurman, is a leading Buddhist scholar and a good friend of the Dalai Lama, so she's no stranger to discussions of memory and reality. "Reality is an illusion - that's the principle of ancient Buddhist thought," she continues. "And the basic idea of being reborn is that you erase the memory. Everybody is interconnected, and you're working out your karma with people - so you get erased, but all work left undone has to be completed."

So Thurman is a fan. Blade Runner was one of her favorite movies growing up - the plight of the replicants was so affecting it made her cry - and after seeing it she read Dick's novel. "There's something very earthly in his imaginings," she says. "You don't have to set them on Mars - they're projections from here on Earth. There's class struggle, there's government deceit. And these nightmarish fantasies about corporations owning the world - I mean, obviously there's a reason people relate to that."

Thurman was coming off a grueling 11-month shoot in China for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill when she received the offer to costar in Paycheck. "I never get asked to be 'the girl,'" she says, "so I was sort of thrilled to just be the sidekick in a romantic context, instead of the man/woman/fighter/stunt-double/ you-name-it. I thought that would be nice - to not be the one covered in blood." She also wanted the chance to work with John Woo, whose Hong Kong films Tarantino had reverentially screened for her.

"I was completely blown away," she says. "I've always been drawn to directors who have a real voice." She was 17 when Terry Gilliam cast her in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. After that came, among others, Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons, Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, and James Ivory's The Golden Bowl. "It's special, being in front of those cameras. It doesn't mean the movie's going to work, but I'd rather err with that kind of director. They've each created their own world, many times over."

The Metaphysics of Philip K. Dick
Don't know Dick? Here's his philosophy in capsule form. (Warning: May cause anxiety or dizzyness.)
by Erik Davis

1. FALSE REALITIES
Today we are almost bored by the idea that reality is a just a construct - neuroscience, postmodernism, and The Matrix have made sure of that. But Dick remains the supreme mythmaker of the false reality. His 1959 novel, Time Out of Joint, was the original Truman Show, while his 1964 book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, describes a society that succumbs to permanent hallucination. Faced with such illusions, Dick's characters have to ask, "What is real?" because their lives (and sanity) are on the line. That's why hipster Hollywood loves him: Dick turned metaphysics into a whodunit.

2. HUMAN VS. MACHINE
Dick wanted to know how, in a technological society, we can recognize the authentically human. He saw the line between people and machines become hopelessly blurred. So his human characters often behave like cruel robots, while spunky gadgets - like the automatic cabbie in Now Wait for Last Year - can be sources of wisdom and kindness. And in "The Electric Ant," when businessman Garson Poole discovers that he is actually an android, he doesn't despair. Instead, he begins to reprogram himself.

3. ENTROPY
One thing you learn from drug addiction, five marriages, and a visionary imagination is how easily your world can fall apart. Perhaps this was why Dick was obsessed with how things decay. He even invented a word for one of entropy's most ordinary manifestations: "kipple," which he defined as all the useless crap that creeps into our daily lives, like junk mail and gum wrappers and old newspapers. Don't bother fighting it - Dick's First Law of Kipple states that "Kipple drives out nonkipple."

4. THE NATURE OF GOD
Dick was a garage philosopher, an autodidact who read voraciously in religion and metaphysics. Sometimes his speculations leaked into everyday life. In 1974, undergoing a psychotic and/or mystical break, Dick encountered a cosmic force he later called Valis, which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System - a cybernetic God. But keep on your toes: To sneak into our fallen world, Valis must disguise itself as TV ads or trash - or pulpy sci-fi entertainment.

5. SOCIAL CONTROL
Dick was always pretty paranoid. But when thieves broke into his home in 1971, it sent him over the edge. Soon he came to believe that all political tyrannies were facets of one cosmic oppressor: the Black Iron Prison, a timeless archetype that he associated with the Roman Empire. Dick sometimes thought that history was an illusion and that the Nixon administration's dirty tricks only proved that "The Empire never ended." One wonders what he would think today.

The Hollywood Treatment: Why do filmmakers love Philip K. Dick? Credit his mix of head-spinning imagination and high-concept action—not to mention big fans like Tom Cruise. Of course, Dick's paycheck was a bit smaller. Here's a breakdown of PKD movies so far:

FILM	PLOT	DIRECTOR	STAR	GROSS (US)	BASED ON	WHAT DICK GOT PAID
BLADE RUNNER (1982)	A bounty hunter chases down and kills remarkably human androids, then begins to suspect he might be one himself.	Ridley Scott	Harrison Ford	$28M	"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968)	$1,250
TOTAL RECALL (1990)	A man tries to take a virtual vacation on Mars, only to learn he’s actually a secret agent fighting a brutal dictatorship there.	Paul Verhoeven	Arnold Schwarzenegger	$119M	"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966)	NA
SCREAMERS (1996)	An army commander on a distant planet battles androids that can be distinguished from humans only by their screams.	Christian Duguay	Peter Weller	$6M	"Second Variety" (1953)	$375
IMPOSTOR (2002)	A scientist who has developed killer androids is arrested and charged with being one.	Gary Fleder	Gary Sinise	$6M	"Impostor" (1953)	$75
MINORITY REPORT (2002)	A police officer in a unit that captures murderers before they strike is then accused of a future crime himself.	Steven Spielberg	Tom Cruise	$128M	"The Minority Report" (1956)	$130
PAYCHECK (2003)	An engineer whose memory is erased races to find out why he traded a huge payday for seemingly useless trinkets.	John Woo	Ben Affleck	opens December 25	"Paycheck" (1953)	$195

Copyright © 1993-2003 The Conde Nast Publications Inc.

Been There, Done That

Attempting to fly out of Logan International in Boston on Saturday morning was a real adventure. Unfortuntately, the airline was AirTran (a no-frills subsidiary of Delta) and the cancellation of flights and the closing of the airport made for chaos. Anyway, I attempted to book myself into an airport-area Rodeway Inn (low-cost, but tolerable) to wait out the storm. However, I went through two cab drivers (one from Nigeria, I think, and the other from a Middle Eastern country) who could not find the Rodeway Inn. With the second ride and the meter already at $15 in less than 10 minutes, I demanded to be dropped at the next available hotel. The driver—glad to be shed of me—dropped me in front of the Seaport Hotel (on Boston Harbor, across the water from the airport). Poor me. I rode out the first big storm of the season in a 5-◊ hotel. Dead giveaway: free bottled water in the room; terrycloth robes in the closet; phone by the commode; and a concierge desk in the lobby. This was not the Rodeway Inn. The snow stopped (finally) on Sunday eve. I went to Logan on Monday morn; a zoo-like atmosphere. The 8:55am flight didn't take to the air until 11:00am or so. Connections missed all the way around. I finally made it to DFW at 6:00pm. I had to retrieve my suitcase and go through the security gate all over again. Somehow, I staggered in my door at 10:45pm. What a fun day! Somehow, I lost the spirit for AudioBlog updates as the day wore on and on. If this be (fair & balanced) self-pity, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Snow Deep and Deadly Leaves a Region in a Daze
By PAM BELLUCK and KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON, Dec. 7 — Talk about a home field advantage. Despite snowfall of up to three feet in parts of the Boston area, the New England Patriots carried on with their scheduled game here Sunday afternoon, perhaps hoping that the lollapalooza of a storm would disorient and derail the opposing team, the Dolphins of no-snow Miami.

But the Patriots, who played in blowing snowflakes on a white-glazed field framed by mountains of snow (and won, 12-0), took care to make sure their fans were not caught unawares.

"We request ALL FANS to please CAR POOL," said a weather advisory issued by the team on its Web site. "We cannot stress this enough!"

What's more, the advisory continued: "Due to the overwhelming amount of snow in the stadium and the height of some of the snowdrifts, fans should expect many of the seats in the bowl of the stadium to be covered in snow. We advise all fans to bring blankets, snow gloves and snow boots and caution fans to expect to clear snow from their seats when they arrive."

Stacey James, a spokesman for Patriots, said grounds crews had removed "tons of snow," hauling it out on conveyor belts, but he added: "It's like removing sand from the beach. It's next to impossible to get to some of the sections, but fans are doing it." The fans "burrowed in like they're in igloos," he said.

It was a quintessential New England way of dealing with a prodigious pounding by the weather: Just carry on, and don't expect it to be easy.

On Sunday much of New England seemed dazed by a weekend-long snow deluge that traumatized traffic, contributed to at least six deaths in the Northeast, punched out power lines for some 7,000 residents of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, caused flooding along the coast and generally stalled things like SAT exams, Sunday school classes and the high school football playoffs.

Coming two weeks ahead of the start of winter and on the heels of last winter's malingering snowstorms that lasted into April, this storm struck people with a kind of head-shaking surprise.

"It feels like winter just ended," muttered a woman who was trudging through the Natick Mall with two bundled-up children.

She was part of a skeleton crew of shoppers at the cavernous mall in the western Boston suburbs.

"It is pretty light," said Stephanie Messina, a manager at the Waldenbooks in the mall, speaking of the traffic in her store. "Just proportionately compared to what it should be this time of year, it's pretty sad, actually."

Walter Drag, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass., said the storm was one of the five worst in Massachusetts since 1950; most areas received 25 to 40 percent of their annual snowfall this weekend.

"It is early and notable," Mr. Drag said, adding that the odds were that the coming winter would be a snowy one. Usually, he said, "when you get an early start, you're going to get more than normal."

Scott Whittier, senior meteorologist at the weather service station in Burlington, Vt., said that while most people thought the worst storms occurred in January in February, the fiercest storms actually occurred in December and March, as the seasons are changing.

"We're in the transitional mode from summer to winter, and there's a lot of energy in the cold air in Canada and the warm air in the gulf," Mr. Whittier said. "Whenever you have large air masses trying to fight one another, you get the most potent storm."

The deaths attributed to the storm came in several New England states. In Rhode Island, a 46-year-old man riding a snowmobile was struck and killed by an Amtrak Acela Express train, and a 25-year-old man riding in an inner tube being towed by a truck was killed when he slammed into a pole. The driver of the truck was charged with driving under the influence, the police said.

In Vermont, a 46-year-old woman and her 15-year-old daughter were killed while traveling in poor road conditions, the state police said.

In Boston, which got about two feet of snow, Logan International Airport closed Saturday evening and did not reopen any runways until after noon on Sunday. Mayor Thomas M. Menino warned residents that they could be fined $250 if they shoveled snow onto city streets.

In the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, cold, exasperated residents spent hours unearthing their cars from snowdrifts that stood higher than most people. Others walked in the brown, slushy streets or trekked through semi-shoveled sidewalks on their way to convenience stores, coffee shops and bars seeking respite from cabin fever. Groups of neighbors could be seen having what they called "shovel parties," where everyone pitches in to dig out cars.

Sebastian Beninca, 33, who works in construction, could not make it to work on Sunday, and by midafternoon he was shoveling out his car for the third time.

"I hope that's the last time," he said. "My arms are tired."



But for all the snow-induced stress, there were bright spots.

Traffic accidents were greatly minimized throughout the region because the storm hit on a weekend, side-stepping commuter traffic.

Operators of ski areas in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine were beside themselves with glee over the early windfall of a snowfall.

"There are a lot of happy people here today," said Jim Costello, vice president of brand management for the Sunday River ski resort in Maine, who said more than 30 inches had fallen over the mountain by Sunday morning. "I've been in the business 15 years and I've never seen this much snow this early in the season."

In Boston, John Caplice, 43, who had spent hours shoveling out his car on Sunday — breaking up his shoveling regimen with "a big Irish breakfast" — said he had discovered an upside.

"People generally tend to say hello during snowstorms," said Mr. Caplice, a photographer, "and they ignore you the rest of the year."



Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company