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June 22, 2007
Web Shorthand
It lacks the humor of the blowjob sign displayed outside the White House several years ago. But the full-page ad in this morning's NY Times shows more fervor. Talk about powerful!
Postscript: Now for the longhand:
YOUR GOVERNMENT, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in its sights.YOUR GOVERNMENT is openly torturing people, and justifying it.
YOUR GOVERNMENT puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.
YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.
YOUR GOVERNMENT suppresses the science that doesn't fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.
And that's just the beginning. Click on the image and listen to Olympia Dukakis deliver "the call" to drive out the BananaRepublic and impeach the regime's leaders for war crimes. It's wall-to-wall stunning. ("Olympia Dukakis is begging for a one-way ticket to Gitmo." -- David Ehrenstein)
Posted by jherman at 8:09 AM
June 21, 2007
Under and Over
When Ed Sanders made the cover of LIFE magazine 40 years ago -- on Feb. 17, 1967 -- the editors took note of a growing resistance to the mainstream with a cover line that read: "The worldwide underground of the arts creates THE OTHER CULTURE." The "human be-in" in San Francisco had made news four weeks earlier, on Jan. 14. The "summer of love" -- now being memorialized in a show at the Whitney Museum, "Art of the Psychedelic Era" -- was still several months away.
Sanders was not only a founding member of The Fugs, whose songs included "Kill for Peace," "Slum Goddess," "CIA Man," "Group Grope" and "River of Shit," he owned the Peace Eye bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he published a mimeographed literary rag called Fuck You / a magazine of the arts. (Arrested and charged with obscenity, he was found not guilty.)
Meanwhile, the hippie counterculture was turning political. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others (including Paul Krassner, who reputedly coined the term Yippie at a 1967 New Year's Eve party) founded the Youth International Party. Peace activists led huge protests against the Vietnam War later that year. On Oct. 21 more than 100,000 demonstrators marched in Washington, where Yippie leaders tried to "levitate the Pentagon" and Sanders performed an "exorcism."
The most dramatic, most violent culmination of the politicized counterculture -- bombings by the Weather Underground excepted -- came on the streets of Chicago. Yippies clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention and were charged with conspiracy in the notorious trial of the Chicago Seven. (Their convictions were reversed on appeal.)
But while all of that has receded into history, the counterculture itself has merged so comfortably with the mainstream that its concerns, if not its aspirations, are often similar to those of today's homogenized society. Issues that were once too "far out" for the mainstream to take seriously are now part of common debate. Just yesterday, referring to his antiwar stance, Michael Moore said in a press conference for "Sicko," his latest movie: "I am now in the mainstream majority, which is weird."
Still, it's worth recalling the nascent days of the counterculture, when "beatnik" was the opprobrious term applied to Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg and their ilk well before underground art turned psychedelic and the "summer of love" had hippies putting flowers in their hair. For a fine retrospective, check out the current summer-long show "FUCK FOR PEACE: A History of The Fugs." It runs through Sept. 8 at Printed Matter on Manhattan's West Side in Chelsea. Psychedelic it's not, but it opens your eyes.
Postscript: A reader writes:
And what a wonderful world we went on to create afterward.Some things never change. We had reasons to hate our parents' generation, and, now, our kids have reasons to hate us, too.
Touché.
A reader writes:
Interesting! A lot of cool things went on in the 60s, but in my opinion the root cause of the problems the nation is going through right now is Me-Generation selfishness institutionalized.IMHO Rove, Shrub, et al. have a serene sense of entitlement that only comes from being preened and fawned over by parents substituting empowerment for love, and ego-boosting for education.
This goes BEYOND partisan politics and ideological orientation. I have met tons of sour-ass ex-hippies who are as dark and cynical as any Cheney aide, and everyone from that time seems to have an addiction to auto-validation through olympian pronouncements rather than honest, respectful debate.
Uh, really? No doubt there are plenty of sour-ass ex-hippies out there. But "as dark and cynical" as Attack Dog's helpers? Please. As for Rove's "serene sense of entitlement," or Shrub's et al., I doubt that Me-generation parenting had anything to do with it. Rove was a self-generated nerd. Shrub was a self-generated jerk.
PPS: The Printed Matters exhibition has an FBI surveillance document, dated Oct. 10, 1968, describing Sanders as "a leader of the Youth International Party (Yippies) and leader of the rock music group 'The Fags.'" I presume that was an agent's typo, but on second thought I wonder if it was an intentional insult. Funny either way, eh?
I should mention here that the Whitney show is a complete dud. It's a piece of curatorial junk, no more psychedelic than a lifeless collection of antiquarian memorabilia. Anybody who wants a real sense of the art and culture of the "summer of love" would do better just to look at this "flower power" photo, taken at the Oct. 1967 peace march on the Pentagon:
Click the photo for a Universal Newsreel about the march, which was broadcast at the time.
Posted by jherman at 6:29 PM
June 18, 2007
Just Ducky
As American and Iraqi troops launch an offensive near Baghdad, it may be unwise to apply a description of the morale of the French troops at Dien Bien Phu to the mood of the American troops in Iraq.
But even given the enormous differences between the Indochina war and the one in Iraq -- in geography, battle conditions, politics, culture, technology and, of course, causes -- I can't help noticing the aptness of Graham Greene's observation: On the eve of their defeat, in May 1954, the French troops had reached a period "not so much of exhaustion as of cynicism and dogged pride -- they believed in no solution but were not prepared for any surrender."
Greene spent only a day and a night at Dien Bien Phu in January of 1954, two months after six parachute battalions were dropped on the French outpost in a doubling of the military force there. But he sensed the mood accurately, surge notwithstanding. "It was no novelist's imagination which felt the atmosphere heavy with doom," he writes, "for these men were aware of what they resembled -- sitting ducks."
Despite news reports testifying to the can-do spirit of the U.S. Marines, the underlying question "Is U.S. troop morale slipping?" seems more pertinent than ever, especially when a recent study commissioned by the Pentagon has found that "45 percent of the junior-enlisted Army soldiers overall rated unit morale as low or very low" and "one in five soldiers suffers from a mental health disorder like depression or anxiety."
In Iraq the ducks have gone on the offensive, we're told. They're not just sitting there, say the American generals. But let's not forget the French generals said that, too. "What remains a mystery to this day," Greene writes, "is why the battle was ever fought at all, why twelve battalions of the French Army were committed to the defense of an armed camp situated in a hopeless geographical terrain -- hopeless for defense and hopeless for the second objective, since the camp was intended to be the base of offensive operations."
Is the surge in Baghdad like the parachute drop on Dien Bien Phu? I hope not. Military analysts would find the question ridiculous on the face of it. But then it's not the military analysts who've been running this war. It's the French generals in the White House.
Posted by jherman at 2:00 PM
June 13, 2007
Land of Shadows
Is the BananaRepublic on its way out? I don't mean just the elected officials like the President With His Head Up His Ass and his Attack Dog in their lame-duck days. I mean their modus operandi or, if you like, their institutional style and substance.
Not to stretch the point, but "there is no crueller tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice." That's Montesquieu, via Clive James, speaking about the Roman emperor Tiberius. "Montesquieu was impressed by the efficiency Tiberius brought to the business of perverting the judicial system," James writes.
Jess Bravin, reporting in today's Wall Street Journal, gives me hope our boys are less efficient. He writes that the "effort to create a separate legal system for the war on terrorism may be foundering."
The latest sign, Bravin notes, was Monday's federal appeals court ruling that it's illegal to hold a U.S. resident arrested in this country in indefinite military detention without charging him with a crime simply because the president has declared him an enemy combatant. He writes:
Skeptical civilian and military courts, using language both sweeping and technical, have blocked the government's contention that to fight terrorism the president can invoke military powers that supersede traditional legal protections. None of these setbacks has resulted in the immediate release of prisoners, but they raise questions about the long-term viability of the legal regime.
Bravin is not alone in his analysis. Others -- law professor Jonathan Turley on "Countdown," for one -- have commented pretty much likewise, which is heartening. And yet ... it staggers the mind to realize what we've come to.
Postscript: A reader, "Balakirev," comments:
Not when you factor in a benignly complicit press -- owned and operated as conservative/neo-con radical organs, or taking refuge in bland reporting without investigation. This is the tool that has allowed Bush and his cronies to get away with aggravated assault on the Constitution, a smoke screen of Hiltons and Brittanys, haircuts and madrasses, that keep the public from any chance of developing a sense of outrage.
(June 14, 2007 at 11:42am AM EDT)
PPS: Point taken.
Meantime WSJ's editorial page has already attacked its own reporter's analysis. Yesterday (June 14) its lead editorial dissed Bravin without naming him. Here's the first graf:
On Monday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that al Qaeda agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri can't be detained as an enemy combatant. The press corps is reporting -- no, shouting, cheering, doing somersaults -- that this is further proof that Bush Administration detainee policies are doomed to legal oblivion.
The headline "Al Qaeda's American Harbor" and the subhed "A bad decision likely to be overturned" summarized the theme.
If that wasn't aggressive enough, the op-ed page led with a piece, headlined "Terrorist Safe Haven," by a former associate White House counsel to Bush that took the same line as the editorial. The pull quote: "Thanks to the Fourth Circuit, al Qaeda operatives can breathe easy once they hit our shores."
Posted by jherman at 4:56 PM
June 11, 2007
The Albanian Idol of the BananaRepublic
His latest moniker on the front page of The New York Times print edition did not make the paper's Web site, except here, where the text type is so small it's unreadable. So I offer it now as a public service: "American President, Albanian Idol." It's the caption head on the photo -- above the fold, no less.
Did the news editors of The Times believe the implied satirical content needed to be eliminated for the Web? I didn't ask. Maybe the newly installed public editor will.
But at least the following exchange in the story itself -- a great snapshot by Sheryl Gay Stolberg -- was allowed to stand:
On Saturday in Rome, the president agreed that there should be a deadline to end the United Nations talks [about independence for Kosovo], saying: "In terms of a deadline, there needs to be one. It needs to happen."But on Sunday, Mr. Bush tried to backtrack when asked when that deadline might be. "First of all, I don't think I called for a deadline," Mr. Bush said, during a press appearance with [Albanian Prime Minister] Berisha in the courtyard of a government ministry building. He was reminded that he had.
"I did?" he asked, sounding surprised. "What exactly did I say? I said deadline? O.K., yes, then I meant what I said." The reporters laughed.
He's so laughable it tempts me to change my term for him from the President With His Head Up His Ass to, yes, the BananaRepublic's "Albanian Idol."
Postscript: A friend writes: "For folks w/ a long history of being fucked over, wot a superb cherce!"
PPS: Stolberg is on the case again today (Tuesday, June 12). She quotes another of the idol's brilliant remarks: "We're proud to stand with you in NATO," he told Bulgaria's president. "These are big achievements for this country, and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved."
Posted by jherman at 8:39 AM