Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Reprising the military’s 1989 attempt to rouse Manuel Noriega by blasting rock music at his encampment, and the FBI’s 1993 attempt to get the Branch Davidians to emerge from their Waco compound, U.S. forces are pumping AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix into Fallujah streets to goad Iraqi gunmen into attacking… so they can be mowed down. They’re not stopping with rock, either – insults are being used as well: “You shoot like a goat herder.”
Thanks Roger.
cbrown bought a bag for his computer and did a double-take when he read the wash and care instructions, in both English and French. After the banal “Do not machine wash, do not iron” were three extra lines in French, which translate as:
“We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him.”
Imagine you’re an Iraqi out in the streets protesting occupation of your homeland. And then suddenly you’re deaf.
Went to see CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interview former U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix last night (part of the Media at War conference). A remarkable mind – what struck me most was how totally lucid and committed to his own neutrality he was. It wasn’t that he didn’t have his own conclusions and observations – of course he did – but rarely do you encounter people involved in political processes who so carefully downplay or force aside their own biases, who struggle so carefully and naturally toward the elusive goal of total objectivity. His central problem: The paradox of proving the negative. “How can I prove there is not a tennis ball in this room?” he asked, gesturing to the interior of Zellerbach Hall. Also enjoyed his references to the best headlines he had seen regarding himself in the press, such as “Blix Tricks Irk U.S.”
Dean Schell, in his introduction, quoted Donald Rumsfeld’s tricky koan: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Which is an absurd piece of semantic trickery politically speaking, and yet also philosophically true.
At Salon, a former lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Air Force describes in withering detail what it was like to be inside the Pentagon during the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Five pages of tales on the “Office of Special Plans,” the neoconservatives who run it, their continuous bungling, and most significantly, their willful and calculated manipulation of reality to build a case for war on Iraq from the flimsiest premises. A frightening read.
Also at Salon — and this comes as a total surprise to me — traditionally apolitical shock jock Howard Stern has come out “shwinging” at Bush, and has suddenly become a rare bastion of hardcore liberal speech on mainstream media. I’ve never been a Stern fan, but now I’m curious.
It’s that relative absence of political discussion on Stern’s show in the past that might make the current anti-Bush barrage more influential. “The fact that his audience does not tune in to him to hear about politics means that he is not just preaching to a choir, in the way that most of the conservative talk-show hosts are doing” …
Odd – in one day, two examples relating to squashed speech and the RNC:
The Republican National Committee is telling television stations not to run MoveOn ads that criticize President Bush. The RNC is trying to convince network execs that the ads are illegally funded, while MoveOn says that “The federal campaign laws have permitted precisely this use of [soft] money for advertising for the past 25 years.”
Meanwhile, Britain’s top scientific adviser David King warned his government that global warming was probably a greater threat to global security than terrorism — referring to Bush’s policies on climate change. In response, Tony Blair’s private secretary warned King to “limit his contact with the media” and “to decline any interview requests from British and American newspapers and BBC Radio.”
When I was living in Boston a bunch of years ago, friend Pagan Kennedy used to implore me to get down to the protests where Vermin Supreme was hanging out. Now she is digging his shpiel in the Boston Globe.
What do we want?” “Peace,” the crowd answered. “What do we want?” the guy screamed again. “Peace!” Now the river of people roared the word. The sound boomed through my chest. No one was laughing. “What do we want?” the guy demanded again. And this time, Supreme pointed his megaphone at the sky. “A pony!” he screamed, his amplified voice rising over the roar. Next time around, pretty much everyone in the crowd had defected to Supreme’s chant. “What do we want?” “A pony,” hundreds of people hooted. Some young women near me bobbed up and down. “A pony, a pony,” they squealed.
Snopes.com is my favorite place to send people who send me spurious crap over the wire. Now my J-School officemate Ken Light is featured at snopes, as principal photographer in the recent flap surrounding a supposed image of Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda at a 1970 peace rally.
Update: Strata Lucida sends this damning evidence of Kerry and Fonda working together. Let’s see “the Dems” try and explain this one! Hah! Seriously though, I wasn’t getting why it was supposed to be “damning” to have Kerry connected to Fonda, but this page explains why “Hanoi Jane” is hated by many veterans, even considered treasonous by some. What I find interesting about this is the fact that many hawks claimed that people protesting the Iraq war were as good as traitors too. Some things never change.
Last night Ken was interviewed on MSNBC talking about the growing problem of image doctoring. The Guardian covers the story here.
Update 2: Ken Light writes today:
..check out this web site…the right now says that Jane Fonda was removed from my image..not added…
Amazing what lengths people will go to when reality needs to be distorted to support a distorted position.
In the midst of SF’s last mayoral election, Gavin Newsom looked practically conservative opposite Matt Gonzalez. Newsom’s hair was too shellacked — shiny hair is usually a dead giveaway for a phony — and his musical tastes sounded flat compared to Gonzalez’ (next to hair, musical predilection is the most important barometer of political integrity). Now Newsom is spearheading civil disobedience on a mass scale.
I am an adamant supporter of gay marriage, and feel strongly that anything less than full marriage is a violation of civil rights. To deny full marriage rights to gays is to treat them like second class citizens. Because I feel that current law is morally wrong on this point, civil disobedience becomes an option.
But, unlike a protest, where an individual can go out and lock themselves to a tree or train track, homosexual couples cannot go out and get married to protest the moral bankruptcy of the system that disrespects their humanity. People can’t issue themselves marriage licenses. On the other hand, politicians can, and Newsom has.
But here’s the dilemma: Even though I agree that this act of civil disobedience by a politician is necessary, I also believe, for the most part, in the rule of law. The question is, should a politician be able to disobey the law on a mass scale because s/he disagrees with it?
Look what happens when the shoe is on the other foot, as it has been throughout Bush’s presidency. Start with this statement: “Pre-emptive war is illegal and immoral.” That did not stop Bush from invading Iraq and creating the current quaqmire. Thing is, you can examine examples of politicians not respecting the rule of law left and right and feel differently about each example depending on your own leanings and interpretations.
In my heart, I am bursting with respect for Newsom for taking these steps. He rocks. Gay marriage should not be a curiosity, should not even be an issue. It should simply be normal. It should always have been normal. There is no non-religion-based, rational argument to be made against gay marriage. It is long past time for this change, and if people like Newsom have to lay their figurative bodies across the train tracks to make it happen… I have so much respect for that.
But my head still tells me we need to be cautious of renegade politicians taking the law into their own hands. At the political level, I don’t see how I can reject Bush’s dismissal of the rule of law but simultaneously accept Newsom’s. At the personal level, it’s quite a different matter, because at the personal level we can take intentions and motivations into account, mitigating or overriding strict interpretations of law.
All I know is that right now I am exhilarated to see this issue gaining national momentum, being discussed, chewed on. It’s like a race now, to see whether Bush can amend the Constitution before the rest of the nation realizes that current prohibitions against gay marriage are the segregated South of the current era. Power to the people, right on.
Attended an event at Zellerbach tonight with Amy: Former Secretary of State Robert McNamara and filmmaker Error Morris talking about Morris’ new film Fog of War, which is about McNamara’s role in some of the largest U.S. involvements of the 20th century: WWII, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam (and more) and how his thinking has changed over the years. They showed a truncated version of the movie, and then had a sit-down with Mark Danner.
The film excerpts were incredible — new windows onto 20th century history, beautifully rendered. In one segment, McNamara talked about how Americans had already killed around a million Japanese civilians with conventional firebombs before dropping the big one on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — proportionally equivalent to destroying 40% of New York, 50% of LA, 57% of Chicago, and so on for 60 American cities, raising the question of whether nukes were really necessary to end WWII. And even though McNamara was part of the machinery that made it happen, he says that he and others in the administration asked themselves whether they were behaving like war criminals at the time. And he asks whether they would have been tried as war criminals if we had lost, rather than won… and what it is about winning that lets leaders get away with things for which the loser gets punished.
Human beings killed 160 million fellow human beings during the course of the 20th century. McNamara hopes we can do better in the 21st. While careful not to allow himself to make statements about Iraq and the current administration, he did recently come down hard on the war in Iraq in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
The post-screening conversation was a bit rambling. McNamara is getting older, Morris too, and Danner is… Danner. But still, a moving evening. Webcast will be online here.
