The political documentary, “Weiner,” will probably make you cringe, but not necessarily for the most obvious reasons. Many people who buy tickets may be motivated by the salacious prospect of reliving New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s 2011 sexting scandal. And, indeed, they will get their money’s worth—including the infamous underwear-bulge shot and a pixellated rendition of Weiner’s genital selfie. But there is a lot more to this film than that.

The documentary begins two years after revelations about Weiner’s sexting habit forced him to resign from Congress. It’s 2013, and Weiner has decided to run for Mayor of New York. Weiner is a liberal firebrand and was once the youngest member of New York’s City Council. His campaign is a big-stage attempt at a political comeback. But a second sexting scandal emerges, and [spoiler alert] Weiner ends up dead last [4.9% of the vote] in the race that swept Bill DeBlasio into office.

Weiner grants almost unlimited access to the filmmakers, allowing us to see him, his family and his campaign workers in some very raw moments. It’s not a pretty picture. You have to wonder why he didn’t stop the film when things turned terribly sour in his campaign and his personal life. The armchair shrink in me thinks that Weiner is such a narcissist, such an egotist, and so needful of attention that he believed that the documentary would offer proof of his political brilliance and worth.

It doesn’t. Instead, what I saw was a totally self-absorbed man—cocky [pun intended], calculating and certain that he is right. And worse yet, a consummate user of people: particularly of his wife, Huma Abedin, a behind-the-scenes political force in her own right. She is one of Hillary Clinton’s most trusted advisers.

And for me, the crux of this film is Weiner’s psycho/political abuse of Huma Abedin. People wonder why she stood next to him when he initially lied about his sexting compulsion, and why she didn’t just dump him. We may never know. But we see several painful scenes [again, why did Abedin not tell the filmmakers to stop?] in which Abedin is clearly seething at Weiner’s attempts to wriggle out of his latest screw-up–and use her connections to help him run for mayor. But the film also makes us aware that Weiner and Abedin have a toddler at home. Did Abedin do what so many betrayed women do—stay with the jerk as a way of protecting her child from hurt? Maybe she’ll dump him when the child is older. But, for now, she seems resigned to staying with Weiner. Isn’t that acquiescence a hallmark of psychological abuse?

Everyone will see what they want in this film: Weiner as a full-on perv; or, Weiner as a lost opportunity for progressives [his self-inflicted downfall is sad, because he appears to be sincerely liberal on policy]; or, Weiner as just another of the self-entitled jerks we all knew in high-school. As with all documentaries, it’s difficult to figure out how much of what happens on-screen is Weiner consciously playing for the cameras, how much is the real guy, and what role editing has played in conveying his obnoxiousness.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, we could comfort ourselves with the mythology that all of the Congressional perverts and family-values hypocrites were Republicans. Weiner put the lie to that kind of wishful thinking. And if he thought that opening himself up to up-close public scrutiny via this documentary would help people like him enough to revive his political career and gain himself some measure of personal redemption, he was wrong.

Agreeing to this documentary, and appearing [pretending?] to talk honestly about his indiscretions comes off as just another act of narcissism and of the exhibitionism that he so crudely displayed in the first place. Ick. I need to wash my hands.

[Update, August 2016: Another round of sexting by Weiner–in 2015–has surfaced. One of his texts is a dick pic that includes his toddler son in the background. Ugh. Apparently, this was the last straw, and Huma Abedin has announced that she is separating from Weiner.]

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Yoruba Richen has a unique worldview. As an African-American woman, she sees a distinct correlation between the civil rights movement and the modern day fight for LGBT rights. When people scoff at the notion or debunk the fact that these two are unwittingly similar she reacts with rage.

Similarly, an aged nun tells of her experience as the superior of the sisters of Loretto during the 1960s birth control fight: Nuns and priests alike had both broken the chain of command and disobeyed the hierarchy by signing a pledge that they supported the use of birth control and abortion and taken out a national ad. The sisters of Loretto, a local ministry located in Kentucky and St. Louis, known for their progressive views, were some of the many signers. When the Sister got the letter from the Catholic hierarchy saying that she either had to force her sisters to recant their statements or force them from the faith, her first reaction was rage.

That always seems to be the first instinct, blind rage at the perpetrators of injustice. We’ve all experienced that outrage at someone’s ignorance or bigotry. It is overpowering…but it hinders progress. When we surrender ourselves to blind rage without channeling our anger into the determination to solve a problem, we get nowhere.  When blind rage settles it turns into apathy. So often we surrender ourselves to others ignorance and grow used to bigotry. In doing so we become our own greatest enemies. So many progressive movements and just voices have been silenced by the power of the majority’s apathy. Don’t let it fool you into thinking it is peace; it is surrendering yourself to the wrong in the world.

The women above knew this. They channeled their anger and worked with activism and bravery to make change. Yoruba Richen started filming what she herself had witnessed all these years and created The New Black a documentary being played on Independent Lens (and at the Missouri History Museum in May).  The sister released a statement saying that she would not disown people who had chosen to be her family. She used activism to circumvent the powerful church hierarchy and in 2014 she told her story in front of her peers and one impressionable eighteen year old. They used their anger to create a ripple of change that with other peoples’ help can become waves.

Seeking peace starts with standing up for what is right and supporting those who are brave enough to make a ripple in the façade called “the way it has always been.” Being a progressive means being a leader and a participant in movements. It means being empathetic and practical, and it means being a part of the wave of change that challenge the status quo.  Being a progressive requires action against the injustices in the world. That is where peace, beautiful and exhilarating, is achieved.

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Last week, I watched  a documentary shown by the St. Louis Peace Economy Project and Instead of War. It was called Dirty Wars and was based on the book by investigative reporter, Jeremy Scahill. It concerned America’s covert wars and our use of drones. It was very disturbing to me.

Beginning with a  ,night raid on a remote village in Afghanistan, which goes wrong, it continues with the cover up by those taking part in the raid, and it eventually leads to an investigation of American’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Scahill follows the activities of JSOC,  an organization unknown to the American public because there are no names or paperwork done on their operations. Scahill follows two operations. Some of the CIA operators, victims of night raids and drone strikes, warlords and military generals come forth to share their part in these raids for the first time.

Scahill also follows the targeted drone strike on the first American citizen, allegedly an Al Qaeda operative, Anwar al-Awlaki, and later the drone strike on his teenage son and his friends in Yemen. We learn of the US President Obama’s killing list as part of our War on Terror. Obama’s drone wars have killed more than 2400 civilians in countries whose governments pose no threat to us and with whom we are not at war. We are not following international law or our own U.S. Constitution. The whole world has become a battlefield.

We are left with disturbing questions of secret wars, freedom, justice and democracy.  Scahill persuasively argues that the war on terror is ultimately unwinnable because indiscriminate killings radicalize whole populations.

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