Awake: a dream from Standing Rock – documentary (Josh Fox, James Spione, Myron Dewey)

Controversy, contagion, contamination, calamity, climate catastrophe, – pick your own bunch & call it what you will. Another pipeline? Coursing crude-oil from north Dakota to Chicago (the Dakota Access Pipeline-DAPL) to line-up more apocalypse for self-exterminatory short-termenomics. Leaving aside every obvious environmental concern such a disastrous addition could stir, this particular tragedy has two extra mega detractions – it needs to cross the Missouri river, which happens to provide water to seventeen million Americans. Secondly, It also cuts straight across sacred Native American land (the don’t want the pipeline on their territory). Well, this is Amerikkka, & poisoning public water sources that millions rely on for their health & survival is not seen as a problem (the recent atrocity in Flint & the states unforgivably pathetic reaction will never ever leave my memory), as thousands of frack wells have also insured. Mistreating the original inhabitants of this entirely stolen country has become so blasé that it’s celebrated yearly through the commercial ritualization of Thanks Giving, without many even understanding the custom they are enacting.

More bones on the pile? Yes! But Standing Rock has massively usurped the standard of super-shitness & lowered the limits to yet another record level of barely-fathomable wrongdoing. I did’t think there was any tissue left to damage? But it seems America has invented a way. With this enormously controvertible, gallaxy-offendingly heinous ultra-idiocy of a pipeline (which has already, twice, leaked <in march 2017> ), major contesting has been mobilized encompassing massive, fervent & sustained direct-opposition from citizens/activists. It was so unprecedented that Obama, who had been supporting the pipeline like the ventriloquist-dummy sell-out shit-bag that he was, was forced to relent under indefatigable pressure & ceaseless moral-authority, confrontation & outrage from activists. Euphoria & relief! Thank goodness the threat had been staved. Then came the Chump Disintegration, with renewed, max-strength excrement from steroid-enhanced biblical-felons like Rex Tillerson & Scott Pruitt, appointed to demolish, putrefy, gralloch & evirate any effective regulation, human-hesistancy or basic sentience-standard for the most fundamental of planetary norms. Disaster. The shit-shower of malfeasors rushed out of their padded cells & corporate brothels to lay waste & the reviled pipeline was revived (Chump issued an ‘expedited order’ or ‘rape rush’ to take by force & crush consent).

– Yeah! So Josh Fox.. a US environmentalist, climate activist & exceptional film/documentary maker who bought us the seminal Gaslands part 1 & 2 & 20016’s ‘How to Let Go of the World..’ unifies to co-direct with Myron Dewey & James Spione, bringing us this flawed, but extremely important & at times superb documentary, a vital piece of critical contemporary journalism covering one of the most urgent struggles of the moment. By & large, this is rough, choppy & rushed, almost like scrounged composites presented at speed. This is food-on-the-go, no time to digest & banged-out on a budget to aid an unfolding emergency (or at least that’s my impression). This rawness is intensely pleasing & at times plenty messy. Again, get the footage out, expose the despots ill-deeds & fire it international. Josh does not narrate or even appear in this picture, & his usual meticulously fastidious factual break-downs mixed with bare-boned emotional reactions & wry-humour are absent (for reasons that are not detailed). The picture is all over the shop (there’s a somewhat unhealthy proclivity for drone footage). I would of personally liked more factual analysis & breakdowns on the astronomic, bone-shattering lunacy & egregiousness related to this indescribably awful ‘investment’, particularly regarding Chumps suggested counter legislation (no doubt conspired by ALEC) that must be read to be believed (exemptions from prosecution for vehicular fatalities {yes! Seriously.}, prosecution for donors towards protestor efforts & other implausibly sinister authoritarian fascism in overdrive). These, truly obscene measures are barely covered in the documentary. The closest we get is a brief & poignant take from Chase Iron Eyes, explaining the double importance of this particular battle & that these perversions are clearly ‘fascist’ & ‘tyrannical’, which is exactly what they are & why this all takes on greater urgency. There should have been a whole section on this specifically, so people know whats at stake & how insane the degenerates on the opposing end are & the level of extremism that is being touted.

Then of course, we have – the police. Can you even call it the police? It looks more like a military ground offensive (it’s an aggregation of local/federal police, national units & FBI bodies plus goodness knows what else?). It’s one of the most abhorrent displays of fantastically excessive & repellent overkill I have ever seen in a ‘democratic & non-warring country, cascading into America’s already uniquely lamentable lineage of cowardice, gratuity, brutality & state-terrorism towards it’s own citizens. Extraordinary grotesque….just extraordinary. Are you actually serious? Alarmingly, the ‘militarization’ of the U$’s police forces (it’s not like they were not already equipped & able) has been growing & normalizing (most dramatically in the roll-out at Ferguson, Missouri, after the murder of Michael Brown) with tactics, protocol & appliance from the more recent overseas campaigns of war, invasion & colonization (Iraq & Afghanistan more than anything) now being ‘repatriated’ to the domestic theater. What makes it’s application here even more monstrous, sick & absurd, is that these are strictly non-violent, unarmed protesters. They are not even throwing projectiles for fucks-sakes. The closest they get to physicality is a human barrier, mass sit-downs, human road-block. It’s incredibly restrained, & yet, the state responds, on behalf of a giant petroleum multi-national, with distinctly outrageous, civil-liberty pulverizing, hard-line military bellicosity & tyrannical, violent repression. Its is sick, it is obscene & it is criminal, on a level that transcends the ordinary & becomes something singularly malign. Absolutely, unashamedly perverse.

What an insane, corrupt & exclusively odious country. The thread-bare fallacy of “land of the free” could hardly be more farcical, ridiculous & deceptive. & the message to every other shitty authoritarian abuser the world over? No other country pollutes & catalyses international injustice like the United States of America (it’s laughable, trailing-haemorrhoid – the Benighted Kingdom is trying it’s best to repeat such squalor under the rancid, plutocratic rot of transgressive Tory oblivion).

The most recent malformations in the Standing Rock saga come from a series of draconian, doctored & trumped-up prosecutions of protesters, who are facing extreme ‘mandatory minimums’ for warped-concoctions of peaceful protest. These deplorable, supernaturally-excessive misapplications of the law (life imprisonment attempts for the activist Red Fawn Fallis on some bogus, shady, shoddy lab-bred nonsense) are being used to ‘terrify’ protesters & deflect attention from the gallons of extreme police brutality & mass-oppression that has been so abundantly lathered. We have been here before, – the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) that was passed in 2006 & the subsequent spate of austere prosecutions against non-violent, direct action individuals dropped a ‘Mother of all Bombs’ on a movement that was actually challenging untrammeled & uncountable free-market onslaught in the absence of state protection & regulation. Here we are yet again, with even worse stakes, worse circumstances, worse tactics by the oppressors & the worst ever president in the history of mankind soiling what little remains unmolested. It’s imperative to seek out the excellent documentary If A Tree Falls by Marshall Curry & work by the journalist, writer & expert on the subject Will Potter who has covered the criminalization & mendacious-mislabeling of ‘non-violent civil disobedience’ misrepresented as ‘terrorism’ substantially over two decades.

Support these brave, principled, moral, compassionate, considerate, conscious people in their struggle against these inexplicably corrupt, corporate death-cult extremists & their extinction advocacy. A lot more is a stake here than just a section of North Dakota.