PETER WATKINS' LA COMMUNE

The Paris Commune, that is -- a citizens' revolt against a royalist government, the organizing of that revolt, and the crushing of it by government forces, all in the course of three spring months in 1871.

After staring at a screen for 345 minutes, my wife and I -- completely revved -- looked at one another, and both asked the same question: "Are we doing enough?" What an outcome from seeing a film we expected to tax our endurance.

Peter Watkins' La Commune (Paris 1871) is unlike any other political film I've seen. I've previously been appalled by suffering depicted, awed at Davids fighting huge Goliaths, frustrated, and angered and stressed. But never before have I felt so personally challenged to think acutely through my beliefs, to measure my own action against my ideology.

Watkins achieves this effect via an astonishing conceptual move which greatly expands the potential for the art of political film. Assembling a group of 200 non-professional actors, he asked them to research their roles in the great insurrection, and to so understand the history of their characters as to be able to speak for them in interviews, in modern language, perhaps, but accurately, and with passion.

His players thus had to grapple with six different personae, three personal and three collective:

-- the historical figures, individually, and as class members at a defining moment of history;
-- themselves, as actors presenting those figures, playing them out while simultaneously judging them, a la Brecht;
-- themselves, as themselves, as individuals come together for an ambitious, artistic/political project, and also as groups, say of men vs. women.

In the course of making the film, these 200 people had to build their own commune, to establish decision-making groups around their work, and the agenda of the project itself.

What we see is startlingly unrealistic. We are shown around the "studio" by a pair of commentators from "Commune TV", dressed, as is everyone, in nineteenth century garb, but utilizing hand-held mikes for their reporting. Written commentary flows throughout the film, describing historical events in great detail; the viewer comes out well instructed as to actual history, sometimes with modern comparisons. In general, the rhythm proceeds from these historical introductions to the scenes described, action and interviews, with frequent cuts to contrasting reports from effete anchors on National TV. Thus, La Commune is also about the media: some news for communards, different news for the haute bourgeoisie. Commune TV itself is also critiqued, with one reporter wanting to self-censor to better serve the struggle, and the other arguing for objectivity.

In the course of scenes and interviews, we experience the difficulty of creating a just society in the midst of competing world views, strategies at odds, and varying levels of commitment -- and the threat of external force. At the same time, we come to understand the individual struggles which must occur at such potentially world-changing moments.
Beyond the designated enemy, who else is the enemy? Does a revolution require a guillotine?

Once the social/historical background is laid, the radical nature of the project emerges with increasing intensity, as Commune reporters start to intercut their interviews with different kinds of questions: Not What are you, the character, thinking?, but what are YOU, the actor, thinking about what's going on? What IS going on -- not for the character you are playing, but for YOU? Would YOU do today what your character did in history? Such questioning begins gently, so that the actors can be reflective about their answers, but finally it intrudes, overwhelms, fiercely, passionately, right at the peak of the barricades. In the feverish pitch of their historical action, almost hysterical actors are badgered, mercilessly, about their personal reality.

The film emerges as a theater of cruelty, as these amateurs try to access such schizophrenia in the midst of their characters' life and death struggles. The level of emotional and intellectual intensity is unmatched, especially compared to the smoothness of normal, professional productions. And it is here -- in this harassment -- that the film becomes uniquely interactive. For viewers, rather than settling into the problems of the characters portrayed, are caught up in the inquisitorial demands of the interviewer, and absolutely MUST ask themselves the kinds of questions my wife and I were forced to face. Paradoxically, it is via such a non-realistic theatrical contrivance that Watkins achieves total breakdown of aesthetic distance. Astounding.

During the final third of the film the momentum becomes so great and potentially exhausting that the audience is given occasional breaks as the cast comes together to discuss the actual making of the film, the contemporary and personal politics (especially sexual) that got swept under the rug, or hidden behind the historical story. Yet, though the tempo goes from allegro agitato to andante, one's interest is further intensified by meeting the individuals involved, and comparing their experiences with one's own.

For theater and film folks, La Commune is an outstanding primer of Brechtian technique, with a compositional strategy reminiscent of the Living Theater's Paradise Now, or Peter Brook's Marat/Sade. The emergence of Artaudian effects from Brechtian theory is nowhere better seen.

Yet the prime importance of this work is as an organizing tool. If political action in your community is plagued by low energy or lack of commitment, a viewing of La Commune should solve that type of problem, for no one can leave it at the same ethical or intellectual energy level as before. The political difficulties depicted are daunting; some might find them depressing. Yet witnessing them so clearly can warn us of our own, contemporary, traps.

This is a film of first rate importance for current political struggle.

J. S. BACH WAS BORN THIS DAY

Here is something he wrote about his work:

I want to demonstrate to the world the architecture of a new and beautiful social commonwealth.  Each instrument in counterpoint, and as many contrapuntal parts as there are instruments.  It is the enlightened self-discipline of the various parts, each voluntarily imposing on itself the limits of its individual freedom for the well-being of the community.  That is my message: not the autocracy of a single, stubborn melody on the one hand, nor the anarchy of unchecked noise on the other.  No, a delicate balance between the two, an enlightened freedom.  The science of my art, the art of my science, the harmony of the stars in the heavens, the yearning for brotherhood in the heart of man: this is the secret of my music.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALBERT

  (Albert Einstein was born on March 14th, 1879.)

Blanchot : " La réponse est le malheur de la question. " (The answer is the misfortune of the question.)

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

Sometimes I ask myself how it came about that I happened to be the one to discover the theory of relativity. The reason is, I think, that the normal adult never stops to think about space and time. Whatever thinking he or she did about these things will already have been done as a small child. It, on the other hand, was so slow to develop that I only began thinking about space and time when I was already grown up. Naturally I then went more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

There exists a remarkable photograph of Einstein and Marie Curie standing together on a naked, blasted heath, both dressed in black -- he in a cape, she in a hooded cloak. They look like allegorical figures from an early Bergman film -- set eternally there for us to ponder their meaning, their relationship to one another, their relationship to us.

I'd been carrying that mysterious image around for a long time when I came upon a poem by Adrienne Rich which explained it to me:

Today I was reading about Marie Curie

She must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified.
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her
finger ends
till she could no longer hold a test tube or a
pencil

She died a famous woman denying her wounds
denying her wounds came from the same source
as her power.

Einstein, too, suffered from radiation sickness. Einstein, too, denied. Two kinds of radiation sickness, actually. Sickness over his unintended contribution -- in theory and in practice -- to the deaths of so many and the poisoning of the planet. And sickness about from-radiation-born physics, a disease within the whole swing of science which left him behind, an oddball, a hermit, a naysaying party pooper, a pathetic, has-been, once-important old man.

His wounds came from the same source as his power. The power to imagine an entirely other view of the world, of the universe, the view of someone who rides on a light beam. The power of the light-beam-rider to see the light also enabled him to envision a world without war, a world beyond nations, beyond power, greed and corruption. One can't see these visions without being seriously wounded. One can't be wounded without denying.

"God does not play at dice," he said. Events in the world must have a cause, in spite of what the quantum mechanics were saying. At its deepest level the universe must be orderly, not random. If he could only find this statement which would describe it. "Forget it," said the mechanics.

He wouldn't forget it. His eyes were glued on the universe and the possibility of penetrating to the ultimate core where all secrets would be resolved and understood as the emanation of a single law. This law, the unified field theory, would be for him the name of God. He could never name the Name. His wounds came from the same source as his power. He could never name the Name

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifested in the laws of the Universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of humanity, and one in the face of which we, with our modest powers, must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.
THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

MOSES AND ARON

He could never name the name of God. It is a remarkable coincidence that just at the time Einstein was leaving the physics community, beginning his retreat into the desert of his solitary vision quest, another German seeker was articulating something very similar. Let's switch our eyes over to the power and wounds of Arnold Schoenberg, the great revolutionary who broke open a millennium of Western tradition to lead music into uncharted territory. Between 1923 in 1928 he worked on his largest, most ambitious and shattering work, his opera, Moses and Aron. This piece is a radical and comprehensive act of the imagination, an attempted human song in the face of the unspeakable immensity of God.

At the opening of the first act, Moses hears the wordless voice of God, and understands that it is einziger, ewiger, everywhere, invisible and inconceivable. Standing in relation to such a God, he cannot sing, he is almost dumb, he can express himself only in a halting, halfway manner, using a vocal technique of Schoenberg's called Sprechstimme -- half singing, half speaking, limited, frustrated, fallen. The voice from the burning Bush instructs him to prophesy the name of the eternal God. But he resists. He is too simple, he cannot speak, he cannot express the infinite.

No prob. Aron, his brother, sizes up the situation, and is ready for the job. He has a beautiful tenor voice, sight-sings well, and although describing the infinite God is a difficult task, he'll give it a shot. Granted, it may be only an approximation, but it's close enough for church work, and besides, the people need an image to hang onto, or they just won't buy the whole business.

The opera concerns the conflict between Moses and Aron over trying to enclose the boundless in a finite image. Like Einstein.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

I do not believe in a personal God. If something is in me which can be called religious, it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

THE RETREAT FROM THE WORD

A nine-year-old asked me the other day "What did Einstein do?" I found it hard to describe. If he had invented the steam engine or discovered penicillin, or the charge on the electron, I could've explained more easily. But just try telling a child what Einstein did -- it ain't easy. And that is in large part because what he did is not in English. It's not in German either. As his futile search dragged on, it was conducted more and more in the language of mathematical symbols, unrepresented by the tongue.

This was new, but not, perhaps, inappropriate. New because until relatively recently, our Judeo-Christian culture bore witness to the belief that all truth and realness -- with the exception of a small, clear margin at the very top -- could be housed inside the walls of spoken language. Until the 17th century, the predominant bias and content of the natural sciences were descriptive. But with the invention of analytic geometry and the theory of algebraic functions, with the development of calculus, mathematics transcended being an instrument to characterize certain aspects of nature, and became its own independent language, one of progressive untranslated ability. Mathematical forms and meanings have receded from spoken language at an ever accelerating pace. For no dictionaries to relate the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary higher mathematics to ordinary speech. One cannot even paraphrase.

This was the world in which Einstein ended. No more railroad cars and flashing lights of special relativity. Gone were the elevators of general relativity. Just pages and pages of reiterative tensor equations. The small, queer margin at the top. No song; beyond speech; never expressible even in its own terms. Einstein. Moses. The Unspeakable, Unreachable Absolute Idea of God.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at this scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to fashion a godlike being in our own image -- a personage who makes demands of us and to take some interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither will nor goal, but only sheer being.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

THE TRIAL OF ALBERT EINSTEIN

PROSECUTOR
Is it not true that your discoveries of mass and energy equivalence led directly to the production of atomic weapons?

EINSTEIN
(Shakes his head vehemently)

PROSECUTOR
Is it not true that you wrote a series of letters to President Roosevelt recommending that the United States develop an atomic bomb?

EINSTEIN
(Thinks, then shakes his head decisively)

GEORGE GAMOW
When Einstein accepted a consulting ship with the Bureau of Ordinance he said he would be unable to travel to Washington regularly, and that someone from the Division of High Explosives would have to come up to meet him at Princeton. I was selected to carry out the job. And so, on every other Friday, I took a morning train to Princeton, carrying a briefcase packed with secret Navy projects. Einstein would meet me in his study at home, and we would go through all the proposals one by one. He approved practically all of them, saying, "Oh, yes, very interesting, very, very ingenious," and the next day the admiral in charge was quite happy with Einstein's comments.

EINSTEIN (screams out)
I have never worked in the field of applied science, let alone for the military! I condemn the military mentality of our time just as you do! I have been a pacifist all my life, and I regard Gandhi as the only truly great political figure of our time!
(Pause, quietly...)
I just served as a mailbox. They brought me a letter and all I had to do was sign...

AUDIENCE APPLAUSE FOR FAMOUS SPEAKER EINSTEIN

EINSTEIN
Our time is distinguished by wonderful achievements in the fields of scientific understanding and technical application. But let us not forget that knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. What humanity owes to Buddha, Moses and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the inquiring and constructive mind. What these blessed men have given us we must guard and tried to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and the joy in living.

APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our ways of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. A new way of thinking is essential if humanity is to survive and move toward higher levels.

HUGE APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
The big political doings of our time are so disheartening that one feels quite alone. It is as if people had lost the passion for justice and dignity and no longer treasured what better generations have won by extraordinary sacrifice. The foundation of all human value is morality. To have recognized this clearly in primitive times is the unique greatness of our Moses. In contrast, look at the people today...

POLITE APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
(Yelling)
It is easier to change the nature of plutonium than people's evil spirit!
(He looks at the clappers, who do not respond)
People grow cold faster than the planet they inhabit.
(He looks for God)
Mine eyes fail with looking upward.
(Pause)
Three great powers rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.

SILENCE
THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

People like you and me, though mortal like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live. What I mean is that we never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we are born.

THE JEWISH QUEST FOR THE ABSOLUTE

Aron puts forth a comprehensible image so that Israel may live and not fall into despair. Moses loves an idea, an absolute vision, relentless in its purity. He would make of Israel the hollow, tormented vessel of an inconceivable presence.

Here, in George Steiner's imagination (in The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.), is Hitler's self-defense after he was captured as an old man in the Brazilian jungle:

"There had to be a solution, a FINAL solution. For what is the Jew if he is not a long cancer of unrest? Gentlemen I beg your attention. Was there ever a crueler invention, a contrivance more calculated to harrow human existence, than that of a non-impotent, all seeing, yet invisible, impalpable, inconceivable God?... the Jew emptied the world by setting his God apart. No image. No concrete embodiment. No imagining even. A blank emptier than the desert. Yet with a terrible nearness. Spying on our every misdeed, searching out the heart of our heart for motive... the Jew mocks those who have pictures of their God. HIS God is purer than any other. And because His inconceivable, unimaginable presence and develops us, we must obey every jot and tittle of the Law. We must bottle up our rages in desires, chastise the flesh and walk bent in the rain. You call me a tyrant, and enslaver. What tyranny, what enslavement has been more oppressive, has branded the skin and soul of man more deeply than the sick fantasies of the Jew? You are not God killers, but GOD makers. And that is infinitely worse. The Jew invented conscience and left humanity guilty serfs.

"But that was only the first piece of blackmail. There was worse to come. The white-faced Nazarene. Gentleman, I find it difficult to contain myself. But the facts speak for themselves. What did that epileptic rabbi ask of us? That we renounce the world, that we leave mother and father behind, that we offer the other cheek when slapped, that we render good for evil, that we love our neighbor as ourselves, no, far better, for self-love is an evil thing to be overcome. Oh grand castration! Note the cunning of it. Demand of human beings more than they can give, demand that they give up their stained, selfish humanity in the name of a higher ideal, and you will make of them cripples, hypocrites, mendicants for salvation. The Nazarene said that his kingdom, his purities were not of this world. Lies, honeyed lies. It was here on earth that he founded his slave-church. It was men and women, creatures of flesh, he abandoned to the blackmail of hell, of eternal punishment. What were our camps compared to THAT? What can be crueler than the Jew's addiction to the ideal?

"First the invisible but all seeing, the unattainable but all demanding God of Sinai. Second the terrible sweetness of Christ. Had the Jew not done enough to sicken man? No, gentlemen, there is a third act to our story.

"'Sacrifice yourself for the good of your fellow man. Relinquish your possessions so that there may be equality for all. So that justice may be achieved on earth. So that history may be fulfilled and society be purged of all imperfection.' Do you recognize that sermon, gentlemen? Rabbi Marx. Was there ever a greater promise? 'The classless society, to each according to his needs, brotherhood for all humanity, the earth made a garden again, a rational Eden.' In the name of which promise tyranny, torture, war, extermination were a necessity, a historical necessity! It is no accident that Marx and his minions were Jews, that the congregations of Bolshevism -- Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, the whole fanatic, murderous pack -- were of Israel. Look at them: prophets, martyrs, smashers of images drunk with the terror of the absolute. It was only a step, gentleman, a small inevitable step, from Sinai to Nazareth, from Nazareth to the covenant of Marxism. The Jew had grown impatient. Let the kingdom of justice come here and now, next Monday morning. Let us have a secular messiah instead. But with a long beard and his bowels full of vengeance.

"You are not humanity's conscience, Jew. You are only its bad conscience. And we shall vomit you so we may live and have peace."

The Nazis set a price of 50,000 marks on Albert Einstein's head.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

The physicists walked away from Einstein to follow Schrodinger's cat. The old man was left alone on his deathbed, pad and pencil in hand.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

God does not play at dice.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

OUR UNSINGABLE NATIONAL ANTHEM

Oh, say can you see? o sa cn u c?  When did we have to stand and sing this at hockey games? Revolutionary War? The War of 1812? Maybe the Civil War? Actually it wasn't until this week in another Great Depression year, 1931, that President Hoover signed a congressional resolution creating "our national anthem."

Originally a British drinking song, the octave and a half tune is quite unsingable -- at least for the average Joe when sober -- to the point that "the rockets' red glare" or "conquer we must", or even "freeeeeee" take on a grotesque crowd cacophony so beautifully illustrative of our drone attacks for democracy around the world.

In November of 2001, shortly after 9/11, along with the music to be played (one piece being Grieg's Two Elegiac Melodies) the players found on their stands the music to The Star Spangled Banner. The orchestra board had decided that from here on, we would begin each concert, to a standing audience, with this hymn to patriotism. I stood up and objected, to glares from the other players, and did not participate in the short play-through.

At the next rehearsal, the players found on their stands a little manifesto:

A PERSONAL STATEMENT
For those who find perplexing the opposition to playing the Star-Spangled Banner.

At the present moment, the Star-Spangled Banner is not just the Star-Spangled Banner, but is also a clear, even fierce, political CODE.  For those of us in the peace movement, here is what the code signifies:

-- My country right or wrong.
-- Rally behind the President, regardless of his agenda.
There are corollaries to the code, not as universally espoused:
-- You are with America or against it.
-- If you don't support the war, you are a traitor.

As I stand daily at a Burlington peace vigil, I am acutely aware of a dangerously violent strain of jingoism, as some people yell obscenities at us, and advise us loudly to "Kill 'em all!" or "Nuke 'em."  One guy even swerved onto the sidewalk yesterday threatening to swipe the vigilers.  Invariably, these cars are flying the largest possible flags on antennas and windows, and the comments often accuse us of not supporting America. [This was back then; mostly we get thumbs up now.]

There are those of us who believe that democracy involves multiple opinions, not unanimity, and that patriotism can require criticizing the government, especially in a thrust involving killing innocent civilians, skewing domestic budgets toward military spending, and tightening down on civil rights in the name of "security".  I personally -- and I am not alone -- believe that our current course, far from increasing national security, will seriously increase the odds of further attacks against hated Americans.

It would surely be appropriate to acknowledge the tragedies spinning around us, and to dedicate the Grieg elegiac pieces to the victims of terrorism -- which I understand to mean ALL victims of ALL terrorism, individual, group and state terrorism, everywhere.  But playing the Star-Spangled Banner transforms the sentiment into the CODE, and implies the orchestra's support for the Bush/Cheney agenda.   I think this inappropriate for us to do. 

Sincerely,

Marc Estrin

By the first rehearsal of  next spring's concert, it seems all this had been forgotten -- no Star Spangled Banner was on the stands or at the concert. Did I win? I doubt it. Probably the "good intentions" were just gobbled up by the memory hole.

But what wasn't gobbled was the jingoist military muscularity -- now enshrined ever more fiercely in our foreign and domestic policies -- making any "national anthem" (much less the unsingable SSB) stick in the craw of peace-loving, humane singers except of course those who have substituted the far simpler-to-sing obsessive compulsive chant, USA! USA! USA! USA!

Franklin warned us as he left the Constitutional Convention in 1787. A reporter asked: “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” The good doctor famously responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

When the bankers and political crooks seized on the opportunities offered them by the nation's founding documents, the founders, whatever their differences, lamented:

Hamilton spoke of “the culpable desire of gaining or securing popularity at an immediate expense of public utility.”

John Adams: ”Oh my country, how I mourn over thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening admiration of fools and knaves!”

Jefferson feared the onslaught of “pseudo-citizens infected with the mania of rambling and gambling” among those obsessed with commerce and moneymaking.

Madison had hoped that ordinary people would have the “virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom” as their representatives; if not, he warned, no government could “render us secure.”

Oh, say, could they see? You betcha. We, as a nation, are just beginning to understand what they saw.

  

SKULKSTACK

Writing fiction is a curious business. Given that most fiction is generated from one's past experience, one finds oneself stroking a lamp whose vapors snake around through lost time, evoke its smell, and sometimes even genie up the future.

Joseph Stack's alleged kamikaze attack on an IRS building in Austin was creepily like the events described in my novel, Skulk, written three years earlier:

Frustrated, well-educated, white Americans with trenchant analyses of what's going on decide to provide America with a teaching moment to kick some ass in a stuck system. They both use or steal single engine planes, and crash them into a local building creating scenes reminiscent of 9/11. They both publish manifestos of dissection and complaint.

Initially, all of this provoked merely a slight smile and a squinty-eyed shaking of my head until the final similarities began to fall into place: embryonic net-rumors of a plot behind the plot, the possible involvement of false flags and patsies and government manipulation.

(Google "stack irs oddities" for a start, or link to http://killtown.blogspot.com/2010/02/austin-suicide-plane-crash-next-to-cia.html
or
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-10438-Human-Rights-Examiner~y2010m3d1-TX-suicide-attack-links-to-L3-Communications-and-governors-office
for good introductions to this material.)

It's too early, and the evidence too skimpy and tenuous to come to any conclusions about the Stack affair. But what has resonance for me is this: in Skulk, although the protagonists were involved in a pedagogic plot of their own, and stalking a possible accomplice, they were simultaneously being stalked by their stalking beast, a secretive department store Santa with an odd knowledge of martial arts, explosives, and access to tools.

Skulk might have been about a simple, if extreme, act of pedagogy. It was planned that way. But while writing, smoke from the past and a whiff of the future curled back into the text, and Santa began to infiltrate the plot, bringing gifts as usual. 
"Gift" means "poison" in German.

So I was struck by this new development in the Stack story, and wonder about how right-on predictive Skulk actually was. Is the MSM reporting as mendacious as that in my novel? Who has been black-hooded? Who benefits by the obscurity?

One thing can be said: Skulk is a lot richer and funnier than the current initial and investigative reporting. Check it out.