Can you oppose the Bush foreign policy and still be an unreflective sexist and racist? Seems so!

#8: American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi
If you think you are angry at Barack Obama after his first year, this may be a good time to remember what a truly awful presidency can bring. At the same time, this film is a little demonstration of what happens when you conflate political venom with cultural biases and an object lesson in being very very careful about understanding your anger before you buy the film stock.

This film is comprised of a series of interviews with people who knew Rice when she was growing up in Birmingham, as a college student in Denver, during her time at Stanford and then into her disastrous runs as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State for the GW Bush administration. There are two underlying themes here, neither of which put Rice in a complimentary light. First, filmmaker Sebastian Doggart sugggests that Rice has something of a daddy complex (beginning with her own daddy); her life has been a chain of close attachments to older men who bring her prestige and power and whose worldviews she adopts chameleon-like and wholeheartedly. It is not clear if Doggart believes this is a strategic ploy to climb the professional and political ladder or if she is just a woman with very little moral compass but a canny ability to be at the right place at the right time. Either way, he makes it clear that pretty young girls who function as ideological mirrors for old men have and advantage in this world. She, for what its worth, attributes it to God's plan for her.

The second theme is that Rice has consistently found herself promoted above her capacities. In this film she is portrayed as the mechanical concert pianist who lacked emotional content, the
Affirmative Action hire at Stanford who undid much of the good of Affirmative Action as its Provost, and the least-prepared National Security Adviser in the history of the post who came to the job as a Soviet specialist even after that country had ceased to exist and failed to protect the president from his own delusions.

I agree that Rice, and the entire edifice of foreign policy under the Bush administration was one long disaster punctuated by sardonic punch lines. No president has ever failed as spectacularly as that one. And Rice certainly bears blame for it all. Only Rice is accountable for her own mendacity. I hate Condi Rice, everything she is and everything she ever will be. She is an American disaster.

And yet this film leaves me feeling a bit icky, as if by agreeing with its conclusions I am somehow complicit in what are fairly routine rhetorical troupes trotted out to undermine women and minorities. Is it really necessary to gender load the pattern of sycophancy that has marked her rise? It seems to me that being personally ingratiating and reflecting back old men's egos is a pretty reliable path to power for both sexes. Is the fact that she benefited from Affirmative Action really necessary to explain her professional incompetence? If so, I must have missed the era of Affirmative Action that forced JP Morgan to take on Jamie Dimon.

Plus the repeated tape of jilted fiancee (and former Bronco Wide Receiver) Rick Upchurch claiming that Rice picked power over love as he described in excruciating detail their sexless engagement was just creepy and mean. Given the tenor of the rest of the film, I'm surprised that Doggart didn't take the opportunity of all of those swirling rumors that Rice is actually a lesbian to make the case that the Iraq War is what happens with lesbians act out their buried hostility to masculine men.

Finally, I can't figure out the title of this film. There isn't even an allegation here that Rice did what she did for knowledge. Sure, I can find plenty of devils in the sorry story of the Bush administration but little evidence that anybody in the joint was thirsting for truth. Least of all Rice.