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Sunday, March 30, 2003
Hannity's Hart Problem
Gary Hart kicked ass on the Fox News show Hannity & Colmes Friday night. I came in during the middle, and there was Hart, looking pugnacious and having none of the Hannity’s cheap shots. The following is a recreation, an interpretation, if you will, of a small part of what went down.
Sean Hannity: I just think that when we’re at war, you don’t criticize the president with partisan attacks. Our president has made the decision and you stand behind him, and frankly, Mr. Hart, I’m surprised to hear you undermining this war effort…
Mr. Hannity
And don’t you agree, Mr Hart, that the protestors have been supporting, giving comfort to Saddam Hussein
Mr. Hannity. Look, we’ve covered all this. We should be putting that behind us. We’re at war, so it’s really not relevant now. The issue before us is: what is US foreign policy? Are we going to invade every country that has weapons of mass destruction and is ruled by a dictator?
Are you saying we should not be in Iraq, that Saddam is not evil and an enemy?
Look, we supported Saddam up until 1991. When did he become evil, 1991?
We’ve been fighting him for 12 years. This is just a continuation of that fight, that began with the Gulf War. The U.N. was ineffective in dealing with Saddam. Don’t you think that’s true?
A tough U.N inspections program, with full flyover rights, would have worked and would have been backed by the international community. This war is not.
45 countries now in the coalition of the willing…yada, yada….
That’s not the same.
Didn’t you and George McGovern…(didn’t catch, something about lumping Hart with other pacifist liberals)
George McGovern was fighter pilot in WWII, what’s your point?
Well, again, I just don’t think this is a time for political shots at the President, or protests, or..
Mr. Hannity, I am just as much of a patriot as you are. I’ve served my country. I think the way you impugn the patriotism of all liberals is wrong and dangerous. Opposition to this war is present in the left and the right.
I have never said anything about liberals, just people who are exercising bad judgement…
Mr. Hannity, you just did before I came on this show.
I have never said anything..Never…etc. Never (puffed up self righteousness)
(stone-faced) Ok…. What’s the question now?
Hart asked, looking like he couldn’t believe this was supposed to be a news show with serious conversation about something as serious as war. He treated Hannity respectfully, as you would accord anyone, no matter how delusional, but he also treated him, and Colmes, as the little boys they are.
Friday, March 28, 2003
Welcome to the Desert of the Real
Here's some interesting reading. I picked up the book above this week when I happened upon it at Barnes and Noble. It's part of a series of books from Verso presenting "analyses of the United States, the media, and the events surrounding September 11" by Slavoj Zizek, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio.
an excerpt from the Zizek book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real:
Beneath the opposition between ‘liberal’ and ‘fundamentalist’ societies, ‘McWorld versus Jihad’, there is the embarrassing third term: countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, deeply conservative monarchies but American economic allies, fully integrated into Western capitalism. Here, the USA has a very precise and simple interest: in order that these countries can be counted upon for their oil reserves, they have to remain undemocratic (the underlying notion, of course, is that any democratic awakening could give rise to anti-American attitudes). This is an old story whose infamous first chapter after World War II was the CIA-orchestrated coup d’etat against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Hedayat Mossadegh, in 1953 – there was no ‘fundamentalism’ there, not even a “Soviet threat’, just a plain old democratic awakening, with the idea that the country should take control of its oil resources and break up the monopoly of the Western oil companies.
…
This ‘perverted’ position of the truly ‘fundamentalist’ conservative Arab regimes is the key to the (often comical) conundrums of American politics in the Middle East: they stand for the point at which the USA is forced explicitly to acknowledge the primacy of economy over democracy – that is, the secondary and manipulative character of legitimizing international interventions – by claiming to protect democracy and human rights. What we should always bear in mind apropos of Afghanistan is that until the 1970s – that is prior to the time when the country got directly caught up in the superpower struggle – it was one of the most tolerant Muslim societies, with a long secular tradition: Kabul was known as a city with a vibrant cultural and political life. The paradox is thus that the rise of the Taliban, this apparent regression into ultra-fundamentalism, far from expressing some deep ‘traditionalist’ tendency, was the result of the country being caught up in the whirlpool of international politics – it was not only a defensive reaction to it, it emerged directly as a result of the support of foreign powers (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the USA itself).
As for the ‘clash of civilizations’, let us recall the letter from the seven-year-old American girl whose father was a pilot fighting in Afghanistan: she wrote that – although she loved her father very much, she was ready to let him die, to sacrifice him for her country. When President Bush quoted these lines, they were perceived as a ‘normal’ outburst of American patriotism; let us conduct a simple mental experiment and imagine an Arab Muslim girl pathetically reciting into the camera the same words about her father fighting for the Taliban – we do not have to think for long about what our reaction would have been: morbid Muslim fundamentalism which does not stop even at the cruel manipulation and exploitation of children…Every feature attributed to the Other is already present at the very heart of the USA.
Murderous fanaticism? There are in the USA today more than two million Rightist populist ‘fundamentalists’ who also practice a terror of their own, legitimized by (their understanding) Christianity. Since America is, in a way, ‘harbouring’ them, should the US Army have punished Americans themselves after the Oklahoma bombing? And what about the way Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson reacted to the events of September 11, perceiving them as a sign that God had withdrawn His protection from the USA because of the sinful lives of the Americans, putting the blame on hedonist materialism, liberalism, and rampant sexuality, and claiming that America got what it deserved? The fact that this very same condemnation of ‘liberal’ America as the one from the Muslim Other came from the very heart of [America] should give us food for thought. On October 19, George W. Bush himself had to concede that the most probable cause of the anthrax attacks were not Muslim terrorists but America’s own extreme Right Christian fundamentalists – again, does not the fact that acts first attributed to an external enemy may turn out to be acts perpetrated at the very heart of [America] provide an unexpected confirmation of the thesis that the true clash is the clash within each civilization?
Zizek is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia. You can read more material from the book online here.
Thursday, March 27, 2003
Song to America
(after The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness, by John Prine)
You wake up late or you wake up surly
You come on big when you're feeling small
You watch TV and you listen to Worley, so
Most times you don't wake up at all
You slap stickers on SUVs and you sit in traffic
You dream of beaches and waterfalls
You drive and drive to afford your luxury
And your right to choose between two malls
So what in the world's come over you
And what in heaven's name have you done
You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness
You're out there running a war just to be on the run
You spend your money on a military
That feeds and feeds, but doesn’t protect
No weapon is too scary
When everyone else is incorrect
Because you talk of freedom but you really fear it
It might undermine your control
You could strive for ideals instead of glory
But then you’d have to search your soul
So what in the world's come over you
And what in heaven's name have you done
You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness
You're out there running a war just to be on the run
Well I got a heart that burns with a fever
And I got an open and a worried mind
How can a concept that should last forever
Get left so far behind?
It's a mighty mean and a dreadful sorrow
That’s crossed the evil line today
Well, how can you talk about tomorrow
When you don’t have an honest word to say?
So what in the world's come over you
And what in heaven's name have you done
You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness
You're out there running a war just to be on the run
Wednesday, March 26, 2003
MOAB -- not just a city in Utah anymore
Great article at eXile, a Moscow-based Alternative Newspaper.
Every time the US got into a “limited war,” the generals would get itchy trigger fingers and start hinting that they’d like to use some of those little, safe’n’sane tac nukes. MacArthur just about mutinied when Truman told him to get his hot little hand out of the nukie jar. But Truman stayed and MacArthur was out. That set the pattern. In Vietnam, there were contingency plans for using nukes, but the war was a PR disaster already. The last thing we needed as more mushroom-cloud posters in every hippie’s room. So we dropped everything from defoliant to leaflets to napalm—everything except the nukes, our best and cheapest ordnance. Militarily it makes no sense at all. It’s a cultural thing. Nukes mean the end of the world to most civilians, so no one’s going to get permission to use them unless the Martians are eating the President’s dog on the lawn of the White House.
And this is where the MOAB comes in. What with one thing and another—the hippies, the whole Peace thing, all those Hiroshima books they made you read in high school—the brass finally realized, around the time of the Gulf War, that nobody was going to let them use all those neat, portable tac nukes short of Soviet tanks entering suburban Seattle. And that left a big gap in the arsenal. We had bombs in every shoe-size up to 2,000 pounds. Above that point, the math said that you were better off going to a nice little nuke. But…we couldn’t.
That’s when the ordnance designers started going ultra-low-tech, copying the truck bombs crazy losers were setting off in places like Sri Lanka and Belfast. I can just imagine how ashamed these techies must’ve been when they got the design order: “We want you to make a bomb with ten tons of HE. It doesn’t have to be aerodynamic cuz we’re gonna slide it out the back of a C-130 on a pallet.” ~ Gary Brecher (more)
Thanks to PageCount - Into the Lake of Fire for the pointer. Made my morning.
BONUS: don't miss the eXile #162 - Feature Story, The Road to Perdition: America 2000 - 2005 (or how UN troops conquered the American homeland, ending a five-year reign of terror by the Bushites).
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Bleh
That's how I feel. That pretty much sums it up. My weariness amazes me. I'm tired, Joey Boy.
Nothing much to offer at the moment, so may I suggest Wealth Bondage. The Happy Tutor and his hilarious crew are keeping the conversation lively over there. There's even a couple newcomers -- Chastity Powers and Captain Blowtorch. Candidia's lovin life right now, but she'll get her comeuppance (I hope).
Or you could check out John Robb's Radio Weblog. He is not pessimistic, and that's really saying something these days. I guess it helps if you believe the US should be imposing a military police state on the entire planet. It's a different perspective, you have to admit. One of the best things over there is the comments. In particular, the following, in reponse to this post, from "South American":
Wake up. USA is not a perfect dream. Your great Capitalism and Representative Democracy are the place for corruption and vanity, and it is not able to reflect the true will of a people. As we can notice looking History, the kind of freedom your government wants is not a universal, "free" individual and collective freedom. Look at you, north americans. You are hostages of your own fear. A fear that is result of years of coward undirect fear-spreading by the USA, through its military and economical support for the some convenient allies you've made in the past century.
You just don't know how to live among other human beings, because you just don't want to coexist as equals. You are sick. Your patriotism is a disease.
There's only one nation over this blue ball: humanity, and it's not only US. Accept our differences. Give everybody a chance. Don't take yourself so seriously. Low your expectations on life. Think. Relax. Life is too short.
Ah, South American, don't you know we are the best country in the world, and everyone must emulate us? Why, we believe that all people are created equal -- equally well to serve the rich capitalists and be glad for the opportunity. No, actually, that wasn't the response to South American. It was more like, "Democracy and capitalism may not be perfect, far from it, but it is still the best system available."
The response to that:
..I totally disagree when you (USA) try to spread Democracy through top-down enforcement. Specially when you do that using military force.
I cannot see logic in defending "freedom" by OBLIGATING a people to be "free". It's too much pretension, even for you, the greatest economy in the world.
Just because you are a great economy, this don't give you the right to judge and determine other peoples fate. Intervening in their sovereignty, clearly to obtain advantages, is a great ABUSE. And not only for USA, but also for Germany, Somalia, Brazil or Australia.
And the worse, that's a fact that capitalist democracy is the best system until today. But what about tomorrow? Your idea that economic advancement as an universal goal for every people is quite questionable. What about societies based on collaboration, not on competition? You know that such societies are possible with a social communication infra-structure like peer-to-peer Web, and composed of solidary people.
Would the capitalist democrats see the a collaborative society as a threat against its successful model? How would they deal with the push to substitute representative democracy with an emergent democracy?
You are a people with great problems to solve. Your children grow stressed, unsensible and full of preconcepts. Ask the USA youth if they believe in the "American Way of Co-existing". Your Media was designed to make you think that only USA facts mather (you got a limited vision of the world). Your government don't deserve credibility and confidence - what is the basis for true leadership.
So, how can you push a living model if this model is just falling apart?
C'mon, guys. Wake up. You have your own problems. Teach us to solve ours through example.
Monday, March 24, 2003
Found another great site
thanks to comments at Golby's -- ekleqtik soul.
There's a Noam Chomsky interview over there, including this from Noam:
But the international adventurism, the conjuring up of enemies that are about to destroy us, that's second nature, very familiar. They didn't invent it, others have done the same thing, others have done it in history but they became masters of this art and are now doing it again. ~ Noam Chomsky
Others didn't have control of a pervasive media that can define reality.
We live in fictitious times, Michael Moore said last night at the Academy Awards. Master the art, master the language, the tenor of the war coverage, define the acceptable and the unacceptable, put on your ultimate reality TV show. Do it all in the service of dangerous lies -- war works, violence is okay, America is always altruistic.
Meanwhile, we have the net, where people bravely keep their eyes open and talk about what is happening with a global, humanistic awareness. Here is where I find my "reality TV" antidote. Not one word about a new car, nothing about Pepsi or Coke, no one talking about a war as if it were an action movie.
What we're fighting for
Many people, of course, will die. They will die from war and from want, from famine and disease. At home, the social fabric will be torn in ways that make the Reagan nightmares of crack addiction, homelessness and AIDS seem tame by comparison.
This is the price to be paid for empire, and the men of PNAC who now control the fate and future of America are more than willing to pay it. For them, the benefits far outweigh the liabilities.
The plan was running smoothly until those two icebergs collided. Millions and millions of ordinary people are making it very difficult for Bush's international allies to keep to the script. PNAC may have designs for the control of the "International Commons" of the Internet, but for now it is the staging ground for a movement that would see empire take a back seat to a wise peace, human rights, equal protection under the law, and the preponderance of a justice that will, if properly applied, do away forever with the anger and hatred that gives birth to terrorism in the first place. Tommaso Palladini of Milan perhaps said it best as he marched with his countrymen in Rome. "You fight terrorism," he said, "by creating more justice in the world." ~ Cynthia Korzekwa
read the entire post at American Samizdat
Friday, March 21, 2003
A little bit of soul
In Washington, Donald Rumsfeld is busy as shit. Talk to the media, briefings from generals in the desert of Iraq, think always in terms of how much killing is needed to subdue a country of 24 million. How often does he reflect on what it all means? Does his mind ever light on anything but the mechanisms of death?
Meanwhile, I try to focus on life, not death. I’ve got work to do, thankfully, even if it’s far from an “ideal” job. At least it’s a lot closer to whatever that might be than it is far away. Besides, my most important job is to raise two little girls with my love and helpmate Leigh.
Half way around the world, young men, too young to know much, cheated by a pitiful educational system, born to the classes that serve the rich, are enduring a living hell, and hoping to blow away Arabs. They’ll kill with a primitive lust for blood, or drop bombs on auto-pilot. In the end, as in any war, it will matter less whether it’s soldiers or civilians that are killed. Hey, we kept it to a minimum, but this is war after all, the brass will say. I don’t condemn soldiers; they’ve been fucked over every which way to Sunday. Most no doubt wish they were back home, instead of prosecuting Bush's war.
They’re only doing what they’ve been paid to do, while we watch from the comfort and safety of our peaceful, prosperous home, the USA. What can we do now, but carry on, maintaining our sense of humor, our sense of the absurd, a little bit of perspective, and, hopefully, a little bit of soul.
Like the young college or possibly high school kids who sat down in the booth behind mine at the coffee shop this morning. Facing the other way, but unable not to listen, this is some of what I heard: I hope they get to Baghdad before we leave Atlanta.
Why? So you can watch it on the airplane.
Yeah.
Huh,huh, huh.
There’s a lot of countries that are bad to their people.
Israel has violated more U.N. resolutions.
We have the most weapons of mass destruction.
Yeah, we should attack ourselves. Booogggshhh.
John says big business is the devil. Anyone that’s trying to make money is the devil.
The worlds running out of natural resources.
Yeah, nobody wants to think about that.
In the long run, mother nature always wins. Swallow us back up one way or another.
Everything changes really fast now.
Whatever comes next, they’ll have our skeletons hanging in the airport. “These assholes used to run around here.”
Kinda like we have dinosaur bones now.
It’s beautiful here today. The rain, with us all week, has finally cleared out. Highs near 70. I’m going to soak up the sunshine just as those dinosaurs did -- munching grass, fighting, surviving to raise another generation, oblivious in the face of their ultimate demise.
Thursday, March 20, 2003
Grassroots politics
The other day, raking up leaves left way too long on the ground, I looked across the street at Chuck’s house. His yard is always immaculate. I’m lucky to keep my weeds from getting too long. It was a beautiful early spring day though, and it was great to be outside while Eleanor and Audrey helped with a red plastic rake, then gleefully scattered the piles we'd created.
No, Chuck and I don’t have a common yard work ethic, but we both have kids now. He and his wife Dee had their first child, a little boy, a few months ago. I wonder why Leigh and I haven’t gotten to know Chuck and Dee better. And I answer, because it takes effort to push past our habits of isolation. Hard for my generation, harder still for the next.
To do so would be a small but nonetheless important political act. It would also require a more strenuous kind of effort than we expend when skating along in our well-worn grooves. After all, our views may differ, and that could lead to misunderstandings, and then we’d both have to think about it, clarify and articulate beliefs, struggle for mutual respect and common ground, and still, I might end up feeling they don’t really know me anyway, I don’t have a history with them like I do with my best friends, and it would take work to achieve that, and everything should come naturally.
Yet I know that more friends provides a richer life, even a more secure life. If I get to know my neighbors so that we care about each other, my neighbors will be more keen to watch out for me and I for them, goes my logic.
But let’s not forget, in Bush’s America we’re now being encouraged to suspect our neighbors.
But I don’t suspect my neighbors of anything other than unfortunate acceptance of the administration’s story line. I’ve seen many American flags on mailboxes. So, when I finished mowing the grass for the first time this season and put a “war is not the answer” sign in my front yard, I was a bit apprehensive. I hoped this public declaration of my political views wouldn’t lead to alienation from my neighbors, or even vandalism from individuals who may happen by.
I was gratified to learn from Leigh that she had spoken to Chuck when she was outside with Eleanor and her new trike, and he had commented favorably on the sign. And a neighbor from a street away had walked by the day I planted it and yelled to me from the street: “I like your sign. George Bush needs one in his front yard.” So my public statement is leading to a little better knowledge of my neighbors, and they of me. It may be only a few and only those who seem to agree with me, but it’s a start.
When I was growing up, my parents didn’t lack for connection with the neighborhood. I remember when my Dad lost his job during a recession. I was, I don’t know, about 10. My Mom and Dad, both of whom lived through the Great Depression, were struggling to support themselves and us five kids. What most stands out from that period is that our neighbors brought us paper grocery bags full of food. I particularly remember the novelty of scooping jelly out of those little packets you see in restaurants. For me, life had taken a new and interesting turn; I was shielded from the pain.
I’m just advocating for community here, not communism. I do want America to compete. It’s when striving for excellence turns into a need for domination that you run into trouble. Were I more concerned about my front yard, I could, for whatever personal failing, get caught up in a game of “whose lawn looks best.” I could pour all my energy into yard work, neglecting my family. Just save me a plate honey, I’ve got to get the yard seeded before dark. Keep the kids off the yard, ok? When my wife, trying to make me happy, says, “the yard looks beautiful,” I would smile briefly, while inside agonizing that the fallen Dogwood petals were ruining the effect.
Then I’d have to pour that inability to achieve absolute perfection into an escalating “yard war.” Break the family budget with better mowers, more bedding, fertilizer. I’d “win” by any means necessary. But I could never win such a game, could I? It’s the age-old argument: when do the means justify the ends? And when do the ends lead you into insanity? Take it to its limit and you run up against a “just war.” Think of all the propaganda used to convince the world of a just war. Didn’t the pentagon name some Gulf killing exercise ”Operation Just Cause”?
Nothing’s separate really. Yard work, blogs, bombs. It’s all culture, all part of the milieu. If we let it be. If we draw the connections between ourselves and our neighbors, between our actions, our culture, our beliefs.
The film noir “Out of the Past” explores the dark corners of capitalism as an immoral game. In a word: greed. Anyway, there’s an apropos line from Robert Mitchum, who is trying to settle into a low-key life and put behind him a past that led down some dark alleys. Kirk Douglas is the ruthless capitalist who comes out of the past, and he asks what Mitchum is doing, just running a filling station. Mitchum says, “I sell gasoline; I make a small profit. With that I buy groceries. The grocer makes a profit. We call it earning a living. You may have heard of it somewhere.”
Maybe he heard it from Tom Paine. I did via Joseph Stromberg’s The Old Cause column: After two centuries of allegedly popular rule, we have leave to be more skeptical than Paine was – and yet we can understand our situation using many of his insights. We live under an elective monarchy far more powerful than anything George III ever dreamed of and a "paper aristocracy" (to quote John Taylor of Caroline) of government-connected businesses more powerful and rapacious than England’s 18th-century Whig Oligarchy. All in all, these are things that are quite open to a Paineite analysis and critique. The Anti-Imperialists of 1900 understood that.
Just the other day I chanced upon a website wherein one of the usual suspects (I will call his name when I find the site again) was ranting about how the narrow, philistine capitalists – left to themselves – would just trade with people! Precisely Paine’s point, except for the "connected" businesses alluded to above. Absent political pressure, propaganda, and outright coercion, most people "in trade" would indeed rather buy and sell things rather than uplift and heal the world – with carpet bombs, subversion, and intimidation. Few of them would torture the Iraqi people with sanctions or determine which ethnic expulsions in the Balkans are "good" and which ones are "bad." These tradesmen will have to be shown their place. Yes, your Lordship. By all means, your Lordship.
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name
(more)
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
This war brought to you by...
My last post stirred up some interesting conversation that needed to be brought out in a subsequent post. It’s long but, I think, worthwhile. Thanks to everyone for joining in. And thanks to Doug for pointing to some excellent material.
First, my buddy Ray offered support; then Doug The Dynamic Driveler responded:
I fear for the US but more so I fear for the world and my own poor country sitting so vulnerable just north of yours. What happens to us when we say sorry but our natural resources are ours and we will determine who gets them and at what price? We are certainly going to be made to suffer for not allying ourselves with Bush's unilateral action.
I fear for my friends in the US. This was is exactly what Ashcroft wants in order to push his own extreme right-wing anti constitutional agenda. There will be terrorist attacks on the US as a result of this war and that will play right into Ashcroft's goals. there will be terrorist attacks even if Ashcroft has to use agents provocateurs (oh bad me I used some French).
PATRIOTS I and II are nothing compared to what will come after the next terrorist attack on home soil, or the attack after that. Kiss goodbye to your constitution - it will be willingly ammended out of existence after a couple more 9-11 style attacks . Even as we sit here pondering this coming atrocity there is, in the current batch of proposed constitutional amendments in front of congress, a proposal to remove the two term limit on presidents. John Dean (yes that one!) wrote an interesting article last year in FindLaw on how the US the war on terrorism could make a constitutional dictatorship in the US a reality. Guess who would only be too willing to take advantage of those things.
Zarathustra said:
Know when I felt emasculated? 9-11...as I sat there watching a dozen retards break down everything I believed in and worked for. Not when I lust after some hottie on MTV I cant get. Seriously George, the world as is made 9-11 happen. therefore We cannot let the world go on as is.
Rick Talbot chimed in:
Our society is totally emasculating, as well as mysogynystic and racist. The average person lives life trying to avoid the big problems... lives life with his head in the sand. That's why government is so crooked - because the average person would rather ignore the problem than take the *responsibility* that comes with democratic rights and freedoms. It all plays into the hands of Bushie and his friends, who think that representative democracy is a nuisance.
I responded to Z:
Z, a world with 9-11s is a world the right wing zealots in government have helped create and feel most comfortable in. They have zero interest in stopping it.
Haven't you heard how Bush obstructed investigations into Bin Laden before 9-11? Colleen Rowley (a Time person of the year), Paul O'Neill, even Tenet -- they were all onto something extremely rotten in the White House.
They let it happen, Z. It's helping them to further create a world they want. Look at Dynamic's comment. He knows. He sees what's going on.
Bin Laden and 9-11 are nothing but our attitude that criminal violence is the way to achieve our ends in the world turned back on us. Crime begets crime, violence begets violence. The terrorists r us.
had this country been functioning like a true democracy, 9-11 wouldn't have happened. Ironic, isn't it? Were we actually more free, we wouldn't have this "war all the time." Why? We'd all opt for sensible things like less military involvement in the world; we'd shut down the school fo the americas; we'd put our technological know-how into alternative energy and public transportation; we'd lead the way with fair trade with other nations that didn't leave them "emasculated"; we'd withdraw financial support from Israel and get them to work out a peaceful coexistence with Palestine. I could go on and on. Why don't we do these things? why don't we have democracy? Because corporations have more money and more influence than people do. We have corporate rule for the benefit of corporations, not people. Until we break that hegemony -- with corporations treated as entities above the law and with unchecked power -- we'll continue in a 9-11 world. Violence continuing, attacks, reprisals, etc. Israel and Palestine writ large.
And Doug came back with:
You got it George ....... One of the bigget mistakes ever made in the US and sadly to say we followed course up here, was the granting of personhood to corporations. This is a concept totally alien to what the founders of your country envisioned, indeed they put heavy constraints on corporations. This one error put corpoprations in a position where they held the reins of power due to their wealth and longevity. There's a good article on TomPaine.com that deals with some of this.
The Tom Paine.com article gets to the heart of the matter of this nation and this war, and puts it in a very interesting historical context. If we were to successfully reign in corporations by removing their personhood, we’d have taken one very big step in turning the tide back toward democracy, freedom, fairness and every other ideal this country once aspired to.
This article at Reclaim Democracy.org says the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Nike v. Kasky on April 23, 2003.
The Reclaim Democracy page is subtitled Restoring Citizen Authority over Corporations; Here is their page on corporate personhood.
If 10 million protesters -- everyday men, women and children in solidarity -- in the streets is what democracy looks like; then 3,000 bombs over Baghdad and 100,000 to 500,000 innocent deaths, just from *this* war, is what corporate culture and corporate rule looks like.
This isn’t a left/right issue. A conservative can no more live happily in a polluted, devalued world than a liberal can. This is, imho, the key issue to the much-needed second American revolution.
Monday, March 17, 2003
Had a good weekend; still pissed
I can't stay away. It appears High Water does have a life of its own. I talked with a friend about the war over the weekend. I watched CNN last night. Apparently, the two needed to be combined into a rant. So I did. Encouragement from wonderful friends certainly didn't hurt.
I edited out the curse words.
...
If our unbelievable stockpile of WMD cannot deter someone from attacking us, then it is hopeless. The only other option is to actually use them on the rest of the world. Whether we actually drop the big one, a mini one, or enough conventional ones that add up to same is a moot point. The ONLY alternative in this scenario is for us to kill indiscriminately anywhere we perceive an enemy. And an enemy, for anyone who is paying attention, is anyone who does not do as we say. Period. Do…as…we…say. That stance is one of the farthest things from democracy in the world today. The opposite of all the friggin arguments folks. Why do you think Orwell keeps coming up? 1984 is here.
Democracies are untidy, Rumsfeld said, meaning “I hate those things because they are so inconvenient for dictators.” That SOB wants to rule the world. And our media is enthralled at the notion. It worships such death-dealing concepts.
I watched a little CNN last night. The anchor was interviewing Wesley Clark about battle strategies for the imminent attack. The anchor’s demeanor was unmistakable: sheer adulation of power. “I can’t believe you’re talking about this with me. This is so cool. I can’t wait till we – since you are talking to me on TV, I am SO part of this -- start the killin.”
The warbloggers, the media pundits, the redneck in the street, the cog in the workaday world machinery. Many of them love it. They’ve been emasculated by our culture; they feel powerless before its cold indifference. The war is the perfect vehicle to make them feel a part of something large and powerful. Never mind that it’s all a complete lie. Never mind that it’s the same brutal power that’s robbed them, now turned on someone else. Ha, ha, now YOU will pay for it.
If they could write, if they took up a blog, and if they really connected on more than a superficial level, yes, if they discovered community, they might feel differently. I know I do. But it hasn’t been easy to get to the point of having something to contribute. I’ve spent years reading. First it was alternative magazines such as Z and Adbusters, now it’s the Internet. Plus, through the years, lots and lots of mostly contemporary fiction. Also non-fiction books such as All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture by Stuart Ewen.
I was only tangentially connected to the machinery then. I was working retail at a large independent bookstore in the magazine department. Whenever I got the chance at work I would read alternative magazines. Someone once asked me what I was doing working at a bookstore and reading a lot, when I could be trying to get ahead. I said I was just trying to keep my mind alive. That seemed like the most urgent thing to do.
Everybody needs to do that, it seems, for themselves. There’s one problem in all of this. One very big problem: the majority of Americans do not read.
Orwell only got one thing wrong: Big Brother doesn’t watch us. We watch Big Brother. And he shows us the Way. It’s a death culture, and for far too many, it’s the only thing they have.
Saturday, March 15, 2003
High Water signs up for second tour of duty
With resolve in his heart and light in his eyes, High Water said today that he would not be leaving his comrades in blogspot company.
"The reports of my death have been greatly exagerated," he said, appropriating a phrase from one of his American forebearers.
Just one night disconnected from the Internet was enough to revive him, even if the band sucked. The beer, he said, was especially cold. Apparently that was enough to spark his compassion yet again. "In the face of all this, this bar still keeps its focus on the important things," he said, inspired. On the TV behind the bar, something exploded and brave soldiers marched in, but he was in no mood to dwell on it.
"Shit, I'm one today. Can you believe it?" he asked, draining his beer.
"I'm going to enjoy this weekend," he said. "And I'm going to stay disconnected for a while. I need the break. Then I'll be rejoining all my friends on the frontlines. What other choice do I have?"
Friday, March 14, 2003
High Water first blogspot casualty of war
Sad news today, as High Water fell victim to the latest war of our dear leader. The blog would have been one on March 15.
High Water began life, as most things do, as an experiment. And, as with newborn babies, he was fascinated with his new world and eager to make friends with it. His initial efforts were cautious, however, mostly holding up whatever he discovered in eager anticipation of a reaction from the more mature entities around him. He didn’t realize he’d need comments for that.
At first, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be recognized. His impulsive arrival at blogspot was immediately followed by doubts as to whether he could handle the sudden lack of boundaries. His private and public selves were in turmoil, unaccustomed to a world with few rules.
But he developed quickly, and was learning every day. The rules in what some call the “real” world were proving to be mostly a scam. Everything High Water had learned seemed to be a pretty lie, useful mostly for those that told them. Why, in a world gone mad, limit myself to cautious links to Dave Barry and Salon.com articles, he wondered.
It was then that I first met High Water. I was yet to be born, just chats and e-mail lists mostly, and that’s how I met him. He joined a Van Morrison list I was running. We got into a soul-searching discussion late one night on IM, and the next thing I know he sends me an e-mail with his address on it. He’d posted the damn thing! At least he changed the names to protect the innocent.
He had comments at this point, and to his surprise a few people responded enthusiastically. That was all he needed. Original writing began to appear. Weird, idiosyncratic stuff. Yeah, some navel gazing too; it comes with the territory. But even that was interesting in a train wreck sorta way.
It’s fitting I should deliver this eulogy, as I feel somewhat culpable for his demise. I knew High Water was a political animal at heart, so I asked him, why no political stuff? Heh. That was all it took. He began to focus on The Administration. And, as a new war approached, he became obsessed. He read voraciously and from a wide range of sources, a good habit for a blog. I’m afraid it all began to overwhelm him. He started seeing the connections, how it all tied together into something with its own inhuman agenda.
The last time I talked to him, he was in a typical funk, only slightly alleviated by a few Guinness. He said, “Yeah, I’m hangin it up. High Water is one thing, drowning is quite another. This war is criminal, and I can’t watch anymore. I’m becoming the enemy.”
I said I knew what he meant. The abyss and all.
“I can’t be angry all the time. We’re all suffering through this, but then I find myself wanting to shout, ‘you idiots! Open your eyes!’ Which is basically the same thing the war supporters are shouting at me.”
I said the propaganda was intense. The fear and confusion…
“Yeah, exactly,” he said. “It’s the ultimate mindfuck, and I can’t take it anymore. I want my humanity back.”
He said he was going to give something else a try. “Fuck war,” he said. “My daughter needs a new tricycle, and that’s what’s important. Somebody else can take up this revolution thing. I’m going to concentrate on my own little neighborhood. Maybe I can do something to make that better.”
He popped another Guinness, and was gone…
For Blogger Times, this has been youliveyourlifeasifitsreal dot blogspot dot com reporting.
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Nothing's shocking
It appears the "shock and awe" strategy has been floating around since 1996. Here's the "official document."
In Awe Shocks, Joseph R. Stromberg examines this document, brilliantly, and points to the fact that the U.S. military practices terrorism as a matter of policy.
Chapter Two explains things a bit more. Shock and Awe, bless their hearts, require "instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly against military or strategic objectives…" (my italics) For the hundredth or so time, I note that US military strategy has targeted the entire enemy society since about 1862, and earlier than that in Indian wars.
Jospeh's piece is also good for some painful laughs.
Satellites, sensors, off-the-shelf software, new, rapidly adaptable systems involving other systems can and will be combined so that the US government will: a) know everything about everything everywhere in the world; b) dominate everything everywhere in the world; c) if necessary, target everything everywhere in the world and blow it up.
Sure is comforting, isn't it?
It's not as bad as it sounds, I'm sure. Besides, the "awe" felt by those duly "shocked" will lead to Unconditional Surrender in short order, thereby shortening the war and "saving lives." Anyway, you have to expect some "collateral damage." I heard it on TV; it must be true.
No doubt this will war will provide us with the most nauseating TV show ever.
(thanks to wood s lot for the pointer)
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it
"All I’m trying to do, folks, is rid the world of all these fevered egos that are tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we can fucking imagine." ~ Bill Hicks
found at democraticunderground.com, which was blogged at MediaWhoresOnline, which I found thanks to this post at thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse.
An excerpt from the Democratic Underground post: Janeane, along with the likes of Mike Farrell, Martin Sheen, David Clennon, has been going on all those hostile blow-hard FOX news shows lately like Hannity & Colmes, Tony Snow, Bill "Oh-Really" as well as CNN and MSNBC shows and kicking butt! I hadn't been a fan of hers, really, until I saw her taking no prisoners in these various talking head lions dens. I took some pix of me and her. How do I include them in a post here?
I grabbed her arm and complimented her on her guts, her chutzpah, and her brains. She lit up instantly, and we got into a 20-minute heated political discussion about most of the stuff that's been bandied about on Democratic Underground. We completely became oblivious to the Hollywood schmooze-fest that was surrounding us. They way we were carrying on, my friends enviously thought she and I were friends from before.
Man, it was a real thrill, hearing her express identical opinions and concerns. I told her to check out the forums at DemocraticUnderground.com, where I told her she's become "a veritable political J. Lo here." I told her I thought it was really brave of her, especially cuz in Hollywood everyone is so friggin' touchy and cowardly, and that the industry is always looking for any excuse not to hire an actor, especially any females over thirty expressing strong political views. And the coolest part yet was when I mentioned a couple of the books I've been reading, one of them being Greg Palast's THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY, she whipped out a pen and paper, wrote them down, and said she saw a bookstore in town that might have them. She promptly walked away, and all I could think was, "that was a real clever way of extracting herself from this conversation!"
Twenty minutes later, someone tapped me on the arm, and it was Janeane, unzipping her backpack and showing me the books, "are these the ones you mentioned?"
Sunday, March 09, 2003
Late night ramble
This is the end game of the military industrial complex. The department of defense has never been about defense; it has been about war, war for domination and subjugation both at home and abroad. You can feel it when you compare the budget for our military to the budget for education and social services. Or when you consider the fact that we have the nuclear capacity to kill every living thing on earth 77 times. Our military is not in our hands, as our country is not in our hands. There has been an extremist coup, and an extremist act of criminality was the shock needed to pounce, to push the power all the way, to finally take this military machine for a global spin. We are the world’s only superpower, there is nothing holding us back. And why, these extremists reason, should we wait, when our enemies may be gaining strength?
This is the mindset. This is the system, and the system is the way. It’s a cult of the lowest level of humanity, and we are its leaders. From now on, you will either be in it or you will be an enemy. That applies to everyone on the planet. Full spectrum dominance is the U.S. military dream. They might say it’s for our security, but that’s the security of the gated and guarded mansion around the corner from the most degraded and inhuman slum. That is the U.S. vision of the world. That’s just the way it is. There will always be poor; it can’t be helped. They are to be regarded as inferior, criminal (terrorist almost by definition), and subhuman.
What is amazing is that you can get smart people to accept this. They can train their minds to lock out the arguments supporting more humane approaches to the world. They can easily accept an unknowable evil that resides only elsewhere, never at home. They can even accept the platitudes of a “moral government,” spinning fantasies of bombing for security, bombing for democracy, even bombing for peace. One wonders how they would have responded as Germans in the 1930s.
It’s been said radio made Hitler possible. Is television making this latest rise of fascist extremism possible? Or is it the media in general, owned as it is by a handful of large corporations, many of which can make good money off of the business of war and which have not one civic bone in their body. What is our biggest teacher? Is it a rich and humanizing educational system? Or is it an appallingly empty, crass and jingoistic media? And if it is the later, who has the courage to reject it? To step outside the cult and become an “enemy.” Who can even see the need? We have been trained; we have been sold out to the highest bidder.
Do you accept the price? That may depend on how well you’ve been able to arrange it. Or it may depend on the fact that you didn’t know you’d been had in the first place.
Who will bring the news to an American public that has been in a torpor of consumerist feeding, with the media peddling an exceedingly vacuous and disconnected “good life.” While we’ve slept, we’ve crept down this path, since WWII, ever rightward through Democratic and Republican administrations. We have been so enthralled with the latest toys and technology – so jazzed by our bank accounts and BMWs -- that we’ve never stopped to consider the undercurrents, the fact that our rich and pampered life has been purchased at gunpoint.
Now the cracks are beginning to show, as we push the agenda to the extremes. The breakdown of the community of the American people, the increased militarism, has reached full flower. Community, democracy, humanity, hope – call it what you will – is being bombed and murdered as surely as thousands of innocents have been and will be with America’s military hardware.
No one wants this. No one. Except a handful of criminals. When the laws meant to civilize us have no meaning, we all lose, we all suffer the consequences. How much must we suffer before a new light dawns?
Friday, March 07, 2003
Church and State
Interesting post at MonkeyX - Hairy Thoughts:
I've fled from a religious dictatorship and studied modern Iranian history. The parallels between the religiousity of political debate in America today and Iran in the 1950s onwards is alarming. Iran's constitutional foundations were nowhere near as strong as the US nor its economy able to absorb the difficulties of its time as effectively as the American economy. However, its ethnic and religious diversity and previously secular government were envoloped in a rise of religious politics that had the outcome you witness today. The journey may be longer but the US seems to be embarked upon it nonetheless.
Ayatollah Bush may never be but only by the vigilance of a public caught napping in 2000. Like the rise of far-right political leaders in Western Europe recently, only a concerted effort by those who don't want to embark on this dangerous path will prevent a gradual theocratization of the American political system. Such changes are particularly easier to push through during times of war, when faced with unseen enemies and economic uncertainty.
Perhaps the Bush administration is cultivating the perfect atmosphere for an even more ambitious project than most people thought.
(more)
UPDATE: Also see his comments in response to this post summarizing Bush's press conference last night. It's an excellent point-by-point refutation of Bush's "logic."
Thursday, March 06, 2003
Old hippies never die
They come back to fight another groovy battle against a new war
I had never thought of myself as a hippie until five friends and I drove through Blue Spring, a little town in the Florida Panhandle, early one morning in 19-sixtysomething. A patrol car pulled in behind us. We weren't speeding but, yes, I owned a VW bus and, yes, a girlfriend had slapped some peace symbol decals on it.
The cruiser's blue light flashed on, and I stopped. I opened the door and was yanked from the car by a cop. He had two pals with him, neither in uniform. Pointing to my long hair and beard, one of the gentlemen said: "Look at this fucker. He must think he's Jesus Christ."
The cop then proceeded to interrogate me in what I presumed was by-the-book Blue Spring protocol: "You think you're Jesus Christ, you fuckin' hippie?"
I replied negatively, but I mused to myself: "Is that what I am, a hippie?"
At that point one of the cop's friends moved behind me and held my arms while the other guy hauled my friends out of the van. One of the girls was wearing a big scarf tied as a halter top, and that came off in the manhandling. As she reached for it, the guy stomped on the cloth and told her that he didn't think "hippie girls" needed to wear clothes.
The cop kept calling my male companions and me "draft dodgers," and I finally got pissed enough to say something. My words were to the effect that all three of the men in the van were veterans. I may have inserted my own expletive. Wrong thing to do. The cop turned around and gave me several spirited hits in the gut. I resisted asking, Is that my thanks from a grateful country?
The men started talking about how the world would be better off if they just shot us -- did I mention that all three kept pointing shotguns at us? They allowed as how we were dead if we drove through Blue Springs again, and stalked off.
...
Back to my little adventure in Blue Spring. We were, one, shaken at the thought that we had almost become roadkill and, two, astounded that the cop hadn't searched the van, which, if you get my drift, might have posed problems. So, in a cloud of smoke, with Janis and Jimi melting the radio speakers, we continued to blow along our route. The ensuing conversation went something like this:
"Wow." (Ten minutes pass.)
"Yeah, just what I was thinking." (Seven minutes.)
"Heavy shit, man." (Eleven minutes.)
"Fucking fascists." (Five minutes.)
"That's really profound, man." (Eight minutes.)
"Yeah, I know. We got anything to eat, man?"
(more)
Peace Takes A Bullet
Mark Morford is in fine form in his latest column. He nails the big picture, and it ain't pretty.
These are the final days of peace in America. Please remember to turn off the lights and lock up when you leave.
These are the last days of relative calm before we start bombing and massacring hundreds of thousands of people and in so doing enter into what many believe will a very long, drawn-out, insanely expensive, volatile, destabilizing, completely unwinnable war against a cheap thug of an opponent who has negligible military might and zero capacity to actually harm the U.S. in any substantive way. U-S-A! U-S-A! (more)
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
Jennifer Government
is a new book by Max Barry (see his site, JENNIFER GOVERNMENT | by Max Barry). Saw it in Barnes & Noble during lunchbreak. Looks like a fun, fast read.
From the Amazon review:
In the horrifying, satirical near future of Max Barry's Jennifer Government, American corporations literally rule the world. Everyone takes his employer's name as his last name; once-autonomous nations as far-flung as Australia belong to the USA; and the National Rifle Association is not just a worldwide corporation, it's a hot, publicly traded stock. Hack Nike, a hapless employee seeking advancement, signs a multipage contract and then reads it. He discovers he's agreed to assassinate kids purchasing Nike's new line of athletic shoes, a stealth marketing maneuver designed to increase sales. And the dreaded government agent Jennifer Government is after him.
Like Steve Aylett, Alexander Besher, Douglas Coupland, Paul Di Filippo, Jim Munroe, Jeff Noon, and Chuck Palahniuk, Max Barry is an author of smartass, punky satire for the late capitalist era. It's a hip and happening field; before publication, Jennifer Government (Barry's second novel) was optioned by Stephen Soderbergh and George Clooney's Section 8 Films for a major motion picture. However, the level of literary accomplishment varies wildly among practitioners, from brilliant (Di Filippo and Palahniuk) to amateurish (Besher). This field is so hot, its writers needn't be nearly as accomplished as they'd have to become to break into any other form of fiction.
Hmmm...maybe...nah, I barely have time to blog.
Monday, March 03, 2003
Man of the people
Martin Sheen spoke his conscience on CNN over the weekend. Came right out and called the "anti-war equals anti-Americanism" meme bullshit, but mostly held up true love of country for all to see (or for however many caught it and rescued the sense of it from the rush of misinformation, ads, titilation, logos, theme music, scroll bar trivialities, rapid camera cuts, and general war glorification).
Here's your High Water excerpt:
GUTIERREZ: ... a couple of weeks ago, the president came out and said, I can't make a decision based on the turn out of protesters because that's like make a decision on policy based on a focus group.
SHEEN: You don't think he does that? You don't think that there's a focus group that put him where he is and keep s him where he is? And supports him as long as he fosters a certain point of view?
GUTIERREZ: Should the administration listen to all the people who come forward?
SHEEN: It won't be there long if it doesn't. It can't survive. You know, you can't lead this way. You can't lead by fear and intimidation. You've got to lead with vision and confidence, and humanity. You got to lead all the people. I can't even begin to tell you how much I love my country. I love it enough to risk its wrath by pointing out the things that will destroy it, harm it very deeply. And that's costly patriotism. (more)
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