The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

The pace and content of change in Washington DC is certainly striking these days.

US President Donald Trump had pledged before he was reelected to shake things up in Washington. That can certainly be counted as a campaign promise kept.

Most observers feel that Trump will eventually fall out with billionaire Tesla Motor and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who may have purchased the November election for Trump and who is clearly enjoying the headlines and notoriety he has gained since Trump put him in charge of eviscerating the American government.

But Trump doesn’t like others edging him out of the headlines. Musk evidently really likes being in the spotlight. Something’s got to give here.

However, other than their publicly slavish devotion to Trump as their “dear, supreme leader”, there’s been a lot to like about Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz. They are so far clearly engaged in classic American shuttle diplomacy in what appears to be a genuine effort to halt the grinding, dismal Russo-Ukraine War.

They have both deftly navigated the obstacles placed in their path by the relentlessly thoughtless, whimsical and spontaneous nature of Trump’s off-handed comments on anything that’s on his mind. Of course, American diplomacy, as always for the past 80 years, has been buttressed by the financial and military supremacy of the US.

Still, it’s not hard to be optimistic that some kind of ceasefire will be the result of Rubio and Waltz’s efforts.

If you think that expelling or disenfranchising Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as Israel more formally appropriates those territories is a good way to ensure Middle East peace, you’ll be pleased at recent developments there.

Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and their supporters have abandoned any pretense of sympathy for the Palestinians. Like the Kurds nearby in the Middle East, the Palestinians have no sovereign homeland. The Kurdish problem, often at the center of Turkish foreign policy in the region, has proven to be intractable and unavoidable. But it has not yet sparked wider war.

Maybe however the Palestinian “problem” is resolved won’t incite regional wars either. But there is a new sheriff in the region, and his name is Trump. Expect Ukraine to remain front of mind for American diplomats and policymakers until some kind of cease fire is negotiated.

But then, it is anticipated that the White House will turn again to the Palestinians and Israelis. If Netanyahu is still in control in Jerusalem when that happens, Trump may well join an effort to resolve Israeli security concerns by acquiescing in more formal annexations of territory.

The Iranian president muttered the other day that “Trump can do whatever the hell he wants”. That seems to hold true generally in the Middle East, at least for now.

Meantime, a real crisis is brewing between the Americans and their reliable neighbors across their northern border. As Trump ramps up his attacks on Canada, it looks likely that after elections in the near future, the leader in Ottawa will be a former investment banker and central banker who has never been elected to public office.

Mark Carney has headed the central banks in both Ottawa and in London, where he was the first non-British born director in the nearly 600-year history of the British central bank.

Carney has come out swinging. He said: “Trump’s attacking Canadian families, workers and businesses and we cannot let him succeed and we won’t. We didn’t ask for this fight. But Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves. The Americans should make no mistake: in trade, as in hockey, Canada will win.”

A strong recent surge in Canadian nationalism has bolstered Carney’s Liberal Party’s chances in upcoming parliamentary elections.

“The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country. If they succeed, they would destroy our way of life,” Carney said. “In America health care is big business. In Canada it is a right.”

Carney said America is “a melting pot. Canada is mosaic,” he said. “America is not Canada. And Canada will never, ever will be a part of America in any way, shape or form.”

LIFE IMITATING ART

Sometimes life does imitate art.

The following item appeared in The Tribune the other day. It brought to mind an intriguing 30-year-old film that was quietly notable for several reasons. Here’s the news item:

“Bahamasair has confirmed an incident involving a flight attendant at Cap-Haïtien International Airport in Haiti on March 1.

“The airline stated that it is taking the matter seriously and has launched an internal review while cooperating with Haitian authorities, the Royal Bahamas Police Force, and local Interpol.

“Reports indicate that the flight attendant allegedly escaped and returned to The Bahamas before authorities could detain them. The circumstances surrounding the detention and escape remain unclear.”

Details about the Bahamasair incident remain unclear. But what facts we can glean from the brief Tribune story recall a 1997 Hollywood film called “Jackie Brown”. In many ways, the film isn’t especially memorable. It features undeveloped characters, casual violence and some pretty improbable twists and turns.

But look at the cast: Robert DeNiro; Samuel L Jackson; Michael Keeton; Bridget Fonda; Chris Tucker; Isaac Hayes. And those are just supporting players. The stars of the film were Pam Grier, still alive and still making films despite various lifestyle issues that might have ended things for her, and Robert Forster, now deceased but with a gravelly voice that even moviegoers who don’t know his name would recognise.

The movie’s director was Quentin Tarantino, who has achieved considerable renown since “Jackie Brown”. The movie was based on a book by an author whose spare prose, unsurpassed skill at appropriating and employing authentic dialogue, and fascinating character development made him in many minds the most consequential American author of the last half of the 20th Century. That author was Elmore Leonard.

Never heard of him? One critic wrote that “Leonard’s mastery of free indirect discourse, a third-person narrative technique that gives the illusion of immediate access to a character’s thoughts, is unsurpassed in our time, and among the surest of all time, even if we include Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Hemingway in the mix.” Leonard is often compared to Ernest Hemingway, though his characters are far less noble.

Here’s another critic: “If you’ve never read him, or if you’d never heard of him until yesterday, or if you merely need a fitting way to relax, pick up 52 Pick-Up, LaBrava, Swag, or Glitz, and tune into the voices of America—calling loud and clear, and largely ungrammatically, from Atlantic City, Miami, Hollywood, and Leonard’s home turf of Detroit. Elmore Leonard got them right, and did them proud. He was an author.”

Here’s where the Bahamasair story comes in.

Elmore Leonard sold a lot of movie scripts in Hollywood, including “Jackie Brown”, that was based on his novel “Rum Punch”. In the movie, Jackie Brown is a stewardess whose sideline is smuggling illegal money into the US from Mexico for a menacing, murderous character played with evident relish by Samuel L Jackson.

After off-handedly shooting an associate, Jackson moves on to threaten Pam Grier’s character. But she unexpectedly pulls a gun on him, and the whole zany cast is off to the races.

A note about Pam Grier: She was cast in several of the most notable “blaxploitation’” films that were made between 1970-75.

As one film historian notes, “blaxploitation was born of crisis. Hollywood was in big trouble in the 1960s. The bloated studio system was dying under the weight of big-budget flops, shockingly out-of-touch products, and the rising popularity of television. On the brink of financial collapse, production companies were saved by an unprecedented boom in films that featured black casts and targeted black audiences.”

Pam Grier was called the “Queen of blaxploitation films”. Her role in “Jackie Brown” was an homage by Tarantino to the films that rescued Hollywood 25 years earlier.

Grier is now 75 and reportedly living on a ranch in Colorado. Tarantino has called her “cinema’s first female action star”. Grier is considered to be “an iconic figure in American cinema and pop culture, overcoming racism and violence to become an early African American action hero.”

Wonder if the Bahamasair flight attendant has ever heard of her?