March 24, 2008
Not the Yellow Brick Road
The title -- "Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz" -- tells you it's an unusual novel. But it still doesn't prepare you for the story (or the swastika on the cover). Which is why "Horror Panegyric," published today by Savoy Books, works so handily.
As Keith Seward explains in his introductory essay:
Motherfuckers' principals are Meng and Ecker, twins who had been subject to "scientific" experiments by Josef Mengele. After the war they find themselves in northern England, waiting for Lord Horror the way others wait for Godot. Ecker is rational but violent, Meng is a mutant whose huge cock and tits are nothing compared to the mutations of his mind. Not Holocaust survivors in any sense you've ever seen before, Meng and Ecker have adopted the ways of their captors -- the bloodlusts and hates. However, there is nothing paramilitary about them. They're not neo-Nazis or skinheads. They're more like the ultraviolent droogs of A Clockwork Orange, though it is quite possible that the droogs would not feel any affinity in return. Meng and Ecker are even further out in some post-war delirium. Auschwitz, meet Oz.
"Motherfuckers" is the third in a series of novels by the British writing and publishing team David Britton and Michael Butterworth. The other two are "Lord Horror" (now out of print) and "Baptised in the Blood of Millions." They succeed as "satire via hyperbole and excess," Seward writes, by applying to literature what he calls "the Boschian method":
• "time no longer flows in a straight line"
• "history loses its coordinate points and therefore its constancy
• "cause and effect are sundered"
• "space loses its divisions"
• "motion loses its efficacy"
• "gravity loses its inescapability"
• "life loses its phyla"
• "characters mutate"
• "behaviours lose their norms. Or rather, norms are represented not as injunctions but as worst-case scenarios"
• "art loses its conventions"
"Sure, there are writers who 'push the envelope,'" Seward adds. "But Motherfuckers does not just push the envelope. It beats at it with its fists, kicks, bites, and stabs the envelope. No matter how jaded a reader you are, no matter how much you've read your Henry Miller and Marquis de Sade, this is the book that will leave you feeling bad for the envelope. After Motherfuckers, it will never be the same again."
The police in Manchester, England (where Britton and Butterworth are based), didn't appreciate the idea of "satire via hyperbole and excess." Not long after "Lord Horror" was published, in 1989, the pair paid for their provocations in jail time and other forms of harrassment. Half the print run was confiscated, and a judge declared the book obscene, "less for its sex or violence than for anti-semitic ravings put into the mouths of anti-semitic characters," Seward notes. (The fact that the title character of "Lord Horror" is based on the World War II British fascist William Joyce, popularly known as Lord Haw-Haw, apparently failed to strike the judge as relevant.)
Britton went to prison for four months. Instead of discouraging him, the sentence hardened his resolve. It was in prison that he conceived the story of "Motherfuckers."
Here's a taste of it, taken from "Horror Panegyric," which offers excerpts of all three novels:
Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A fortune awaited the author who could bring 'Mr Auschwitz' to life. To recreate the persona of Auschwitz would be an ordained mission. Auschwitz, the holy end-all of life's futile pattern, slinking through the subconscious of humanity, the one archetypal riff common to all nightmares, fuelled on the anvil of Little Richard.In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world, a name as well-known globally as Coca Cola, taking all media under its encompassing umbrella. The camps were the obvious ultimate enclosed world, the desired image of world television, beamed by satellite into each city, town and village, ideal for community soap operas (a story of everyday life on the edge of life), of science fiction time travel (travel back through your life and end it in Auschwitz). In this televised scenario thhe dog-boys loomed large as Heathcliff doomed lovers, the spice of sexy bodice-rippers which thrilled millions of women. Guilt would never stand in the way of commerce ...
Seward calls "Motherfuckers" a masterpiece and compares it to the works of the Marquis de Sade and William S. Burroughs. After reading it myself, I'm inclined to agree. But he prefers not to emphasize "the rectitude of these books" for their moral instruction. "You can read them like the Gospel, if you want, and draw out the lessons," he writes. "But that's not really the point. These are not moral books. They're good books."
To read Seward's entire essay, go here.
Posted by jherman at 2:43 PM
March 22, 2008
A View from the Top
Things are going so well in Iraq that, as the headline says, "Pentagon Urges Delay in U.S. Troop Reductions in Iraq." Or as retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey said the other day at the Council on Foreign Relations, "If you look at the totality of our experience in Iraq, it's been a major disaster. There's no two ways about it."
(You've heard that before, of course. There's also McCain's way -- a k a the BananaRepublican way.)
Here's something else McCaffrey said that I'm sure you've heard: Things are going so well that "the Maliki government right now" is "largely dysfunctional. To wit -- if you went to any one of Iraq's provinces and asked, 'Is there a federal government that is dominant in electrical energy, the oil business, health, education, security?' The answer would be, 'No.'" But this, he added, is "not to imply the country is in chaos." After all, things are going so well.
"The change in Iraq is like night and day," McCaffrey said. "The violence is down enormously. It's gone from bordering on the edge of all-out civil war to completely different circumstances." How different? Well, there are six million people in Baghdad, "all of them armed."
Here's another way to say how swell it's going:
There's "still massive unemployment. Our allies are leaving." And "there is a complete lack of political domestic support to continue the war." (I think he meant political support in the U.S., minus McCain and Joe Lieberman et al.)
So Jane Arraf, the former CNN Baghdad Bureau Chief, asked, "What do you think Iraq is going to look like in five years?'
"I don't know," McCaffrey said. "I think it's hard to imagine that anyone thinks an all-out civil war to settle the political struggle is a good outcome. I think there's a fear on the part of the Iraqi leadership that all-out civil war will be a blood bath that'll yield Pol Pot's Cambodia." That's how really well things are going.
"The problem," he added, is whether "the Constitution we issued them [is] appropriate for that people and this time. I think there's a good argument that it isn't. So I'd be unsurprised if two years from now there isn't some hotshot two-star general as head of government in Iraq, and I'm not so sure that wouldn't serve the interests of the Iraqi people and their neighbors as well as some of the alternatives."
Which is to say that things are going really really well.
Consider this: "The Sunnis figured out that we're leaving -- and by the way, we are leaving in the next 36 months," he said. Many have become our paid allies for the moment. There are "80,000 primarily Sunni insurgents that we're paying $300 a month to guard their own village[s], their own neighborhood[s], and that has defused an awful lot of the violent insurgency struggle that we are trying to dominate." This comes to $24 million a month for bribes to the tribes. Nearly $300 mil a year. Chickenfeed.
Some more good news: "Your Air Force -- our principal fighter aircraft, probably a quarter of them are down now -- F-15s -- and will never fly again. And the tanker fleet is broken. If you want to have a global air force, there's no sense in buying one unless you buy the tanker fleet to sustain it. Our airlift assets are being ground down by overuse and no resources. Our C-5A aircraft are busted. They're over." Also, "we now have 124,000 contractors in Iraq. They're doing all our retail [and] wholesale logistics. Damn near. They're doing all of our long-haul communications. ... We've been forced to go to contractors to carry out absolutely what our military functions [are]."
But here's what McCaffrey called the truly "good news": Not only has the current Secretary of Defense Bill Gates "restored sanity to the national security process," but the U.S. commander in Iraq is a superhero straight out of the comics: "David Petraeus, personally, I think may be the most talented person I ever met in my life. ... He looks like a movie star. He can jump over high hedges in a single bound. A doctorate from Princeton. He likes being in the public eye. And our U.S. Ambassador there, Ryan Crocker, is as good as he is."
If that's not proof that things are going really, really, really well in Iraq, then McCaffrey is a monkey's uncle. Meanwhile, the even better good news is that when you look at the worldwide terrorist picture, "the Saudi royal family is no longer funding Al Qaeda."
We do have a leetle problem, though. The threat from Al Qaeda "has morphed," he said. "If you asked me to identify the capital of terrorism, I'd be more likely to say London than Damascus and more likely to say Paris and Hamburg than Teheran." And he predicts, "in the first term of the next administration there will be an attack on the U.S."
Why so? Because it's going so well.
Posted by jherman at 1:58 PM
March 19, 2008
Five Years Later
Words won't do:
Postscript: Now have a look at Bearing Witness. As a friend says, "Won't see thees on CNN or FUX news."
Posted by jherman at 9:37 AM
March 15, 2008
Putting Him Where He Belongs
I couldn't be there for his speech to the financial bigwigs, but Gail Collins was. Her column this morning shows yet again that the President With His Head Up His Ass is well named. She writes:
The president squinched his face and bit his lip and seemed too antsy to stand still. As he searched for the name of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia ("the king, uh, the king of Saudi") and made guy-fun of one of the questioners ("Who picked Gigot?"), you had to wonder what the international financial community makes of a country whose president could show up to talk economics in the middle of a liquidity crisis and kind of flop around the stage as if he was emcee at the Iowa Republican Pig Roast.
The column is also charming proof that Collins must be a fan of the 1940 screwball comedy "His Girl Friday" and Walter J. Burns, the editor of The Morning Post, who orders an underling in the newsroom, "Take the President's speech and run it on the funny page."
Burns has plenty of gems like that. Here's another: "Now, listen, Duffy -- I want you to tear out the whole front page... That's what I said -- the whole front page! Never mind the European war! We've got something a whole lot bigger than that."
Posted by jherman at 8:48 AM
March 7, 2008
Take the What Train?
Some folks in Montreal want to name a busy subway station for the late great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in the Montreal nabe where he was born and raised, The Globe and Mail reports.
But zehr eez a leetle problem: The station is already named for Lionel-Adolphe Groulx, a locally famous Quebec priest notable for his xenophobic racism (a k a "nationalistic" beliefs).
Not to worry. A McGill University professor suggests that the station name be shared. He favors "paying homage to both men" (you read that right) with the hyphenated name Station Oscar Peterson-Lionel Groulx.
"Yes, there is a disagreeable underside to the man -- the anti-Semitism, the fascist sympathies," the prof concedes, referring to Groulx of course. But he tells the paper, "I feel uncomfortable about erasing his impact from Quebec history." (If only.) And the prof adds, "We could enjoy the pleasure of an interesting meeting of two important historical figures." (You read that right, too.)
"Yeah," says a friend of mine, a Montreal native who fled the city long ago. "For an allegedly enlightened society, a great number of hardcore fascist bastids is still well entrenched there. I theenk, senor, Kweebek could be considered der Österreich of N. America."
Postscript: Rename the station? Forget it.
Posted by jherman at 9:25 AM
March 6, 2008
Blog Miscellany
A reader from Oregon writes, "Help us, we who check your blog regularly!! Please add something -- ANYTHING!!!! I forget about it being there and then get my special dose of heavy metal speed before I can mute the chaos! -- Your loving fans in the thousands ..."
OK, you asked for it. Here's anything:
A reader from Yurp writes, "Ach!! The Blinding Titties! I'm wearing a string of garlic around my neck now which I clutch feverishly whenever they appear ... and I'm stuffing chunks of garlic in my ears whenever I get hit by the Torture Hit Parade (Actually, I luuuuv it ... Our kraut secretary of the interior, by the way, has "The History of Torture" on his coffee table...) ... Nader: Isn't he, in effect, saying that those of his Florida voters who would have switched to Gore in the case of his abstinence would have given Al a fat lead? However, math is not my forte ... P.S. The Ladykiller rides again...He is now wreaking havoc in Paris ... Sauve qui peut ..."
And another from the Southwest boondocks: "Have you seen this? The mind boggles at possibilities in the hands of neo-quizzers. 'twould make water boarding obsolete, not ta mench human cattle prod ta line 'em up ... Forget da arbeit macht frei signs."
Then yesterday there was David Brooks to the grammar born: "I'm far from the biggest Hillary-lover on the planet, but her resilience and courage is moving." Which brought this reply: "Brooks listens far too much to his hero, the President With His Head Up His Ass. They is fucking stupid."
And finally, shades of James Gilray:
Posted by jherman at 8:49 AM
February 29, 2008
Now for Your Hit Parade
Call it "Pissing Strange." It's not the rock musical "Passing Strange," which just opened on Broadway to crix raves. And it's not with Snooky Lanson, either. Mother Jones magazine calls it "The Torture Playlist" -- a k a the top songs used on detainees in American military prisons "to induce sleep deprivation," to "prolong capture shock," and to "drown out screams."
Listen here or here:
Aiiieeee!! Click the play/pause button to stop the damn sound!
Posted by jherman at 9:59 AM
February 27, 2008
Is Ralph a Spoiler? Or Are We a Banana Republic?
The day after CNN reported that "Nader takes steps towards another White House bid," I had an exchange -- it was a month ago -- with Henry Kisor, an old friend from former years at the Chicago Sun-Times. Citing that report, I said in a comment on one of Henry's blogposts, None of the above, "Go, Ralph, Go!"
The rest of the exchange went like this:
Henry said,
January 31, 2008 at 10:58 am
It's a good thing that Nader admits that he's a minor candidate, the representative of a fringe. But it is appalling that he refuses to admit (maybe even to understand) that a candidacy such as his can result in the election of the worst alternative. He makes his point, but the rest of us have to live with the results.
Jan Herman said,
January 31, 2008 at 12:01 pm
If Nader does run, and if the contest between the two major candidates is close enough for him to actually be a spoiler, then we who have to live with the results will get what we deserve.
Henry said,
January 31, 2008 at 12:05 pm
And we got what we deserved because Ralph ran? I don't see the logic there.
Jan Herman said,
January 31, 2008 at 12:51 pm
That's not what I mean at all. I don't believe Ralph was the spoiler in 2000. Gore should have won going away. It wasn't Ralph that stopped him. There were many other, too many other, factors involved to blame that catastrophe on him. The Supreme Court, for one. What I'm saying is that the upcoming election shouldn't be close enough for him to be a spoiler.(If McCain is the Republican nominee, the electorate ought to reject him overwhelmingly for, among other things, his war-mongering triumphalism. And if it's Romney, it ought to reject him overwhelmingly for, among other things, his democracy-needs-religion crapola. If the Democrats don't win by a landslide against either of them, it will show just how much of a Banana Republic we've become.)
Then, on Feb. 26, Nader announced on "Meet the Press" that he will run, and yesterday NY Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote:
When asked about the possibility of being a spoiler, of tilting the election to John McCain, Mr. Nader replied: "Not a chance. If the Democrats can't landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form."
Herbert, who obviously admires Nader, gently but firmly rebukes him: "He won't countenance the idea that there might be something destructive about his candidacy."
Well, have a look at a video clip of Nader's statement. It's only three minutes long and gives his full reply. See whether Nader makes sense or if he is, as his critics claim, merely an overweaning egotist who can't resist putting himself at the center of public attention.
Prefer to read what Nader said without having to watching an ad on the way to the video? Or because you're deaf and NBC, like all the networks and all the Internet sites for news or entertainment, fails to offer audio captioning? Here's the text of the full reply to Tim Russert, excerpted from a transcript of the program:
MR. RUSSERT: Will you run for president as an independent in 2008?MR. NADER: Let me put it in context, to make it a little more palatable to people who have closed minds. Twenty-four percent of the American people are satisfied with the state of the country, according to Gallup. That's about the lowest ranking ever. Sixty-one percent think both major parties are failing. And, according to Frank Luntz's poll, a Republican, 80 percent would consider voting for a independent this year. Now, you take that framework of people feeling locked out, shut, shut out, marginalized, disrespected and you go from Iraq to Palestine/Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bungling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts, getting a decent energy bill through, and you have to ask yourself, as a citizen, should we elaborate the issues that the two are not talking about? And the--all, all the candidates--McCain, Obama and Clinton--are against single payer health insurance, full Medicare for all. I'm for it, as well as millions of Americans and 59 percent of physicians in a forthcoming poll this April. People don't like Pentagon waste, a bloated military budget, all the reports in the press and in the GAO reports. A wasteful defense is a weak defense. It takes away taxpayer money that can go to the necessities of the American people. That's off the table to Obama and Clinton and McCain.
The issue of labor law reform, repealing the notorious Taft-Hartley Act that keeps workers who are now more defenseless than ever against corporate globalization from organizing to defend their interests. Cracking down on corporate crime. The media--the mainstream media repeatedly indicating how trillions of dollars have been drained and fleeced and looted from millions of workers and investors who don't have many rights these days, and pensioners. You know, when you see the paralysis of the government, when you see Washington, D.C., be corporate-occupied territory, every department agency controlled by overwhelming presence of corporate lobbyists, corporate executives in high government positions, turning the government against its own people, you--one feels an obligation, Tim, to try to open the doorways, to try to get better ballot access, to respect dissent in America in the terms of third parties and, and independent candidates; to recognize historically that great issues have come in our history against slavery and women rights to vote and worker and farmer progressives, through little parties that never ran--won any national election. Dissent is the mother of ascent. And in that context, I have decided to run for president.
Continuing right along from the text transcript, which is on this video clip:
MR. RUSSERT: As you know, Ralph Nader, they'll be Democrats all across the country who are going to find this very disturbing news, and they'll point again to 2000. This was the vote count. Al Gore winning the popular vote, but you've got 2.7 percent, nearly three million votes, in 2000. Then Florida, Florida, Florida. As you remember, George Bush won Florida by 537 votes. You've got 97,488. Democrat after Democrat says to this day, Ralph Nader, if your name had not been on that ballot, Al Gore would've carried Florida. Exit polls show he would've carried Nader voters 2-to-1. Gore would've been president and not George Bush. You, Ralph Nader are responsible for what has happened the last seven years.MR. NADER: Not, not George Bush? Not the Democrats in Congress? Not the voters who voted for George Bush? But there were Democrats in Florida, 250,000 of them. You know, I wish we'd have Al Gore on this program someday Tim and ask him, "Why did you not become president in 2000?" And I think what he's going to tell you is he thought he did win Florida, but it was taken from him before, during and after the election from Tallahassee. Katherine Bush -- you know the secretary of the state...
MR. RUSSERT: Katherine Harris.
MR. NADER: Harris, rather, and Jeb Bush, all the way to that terribly politicized Supreme Court decision. But the, the political bigotry that's involved here is that we shouldn't enter the electoral arena? We, all of us who, who, who think that the country needs an infusion of freedom, democracy, choice, dissent should just sit on the sidelines and watch the two parties own all the voters and turn the government over to big business? What's really important here is, if you want to look at it analytically, is there--Mr. Gore would, would tell you if he won Tennessee, anything else being equal, he would've been president. It's his home state. If he won Arkansas, everything else being equal, he would've been president. The mayor of Miami sabotaged the Democrats because of a grudge, didn't bring thousands of votes out. Quarter of a million Democrats voted for Bush in Florida. There is all kinds of thievery in Florida.
So why do they blame the Greens? Why do they blame the people all over the country who are trying to have a progressive platform, not just the environment. What was their crime? Why, why, why isn't there tolerance for candidates' rights the way there is a building tolerance over the last 50 years for voter rights? Because without voter rights, candidate rights don't mean much. And without candidate rights--more voices and choices -- voter rights don't mean much. I -- I'm amazed at the liberal intelligencia here. They are analytic and they deal with all kinds of variables, but when it comes to 2000 election, it's just one variable.
And I might add that Solon Simmons and other scholars -- he teaches at George Mason -- have shown that by pushing Gore to take more progressive stands, he got more votes than the votes he allegedly -- were withdrawn from for the Green party. Twenty-five percent of my vote, according to a Democratic pollster, exit poll, would've gone to Bush. Thirty-nine percent would've gone to Gore and the rest would've stayed home. Every major -- every third party in Florida got more votes than the 537 vote gap. So let's get over it and try to have a diverse multiple choice, multiple party democracy the way they have in Western Europe and Canada. This bit of, of spoiler is really very astonishing. These are the two parties who've spoiled our electoral system, money, they can't even count the votes, they steal--the Republicans steal the votes, and the Democrats knock third party candidates off the ballot. That's their specialty these days.
And now -- for the sake of completeness -- the text (coming about three minutes into this video clip) cited by Bob Herbert:
MR. RUSSERT: How would you feel, however, if Ralph Nader's presence on the ballot tilted Florida or Ohio to John McCain and McCain became president, and Barack Obama, the first African-American who had been nominated by the Democratic Party -- this is hypothetical -- did not become a president and people turned to you and said, "Nader, you've done it again"?MR. NADER: Not a chance. If the Democrats can't landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form. You think the American people are going to vote for a pro-war John McCain who almost gives an indication that he's the candidate of perpetual war, perpetual intervention overseas? You think they're going to vote for a Republican like McCain, who allies himself with the criminal, recidivistic regime of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the most multipliable impeachable presidency in American history? Many leading members of the bar, including the former head of the American Bar Association, Michael Greco, absolutely dismayed over the violations of the Constitution, our federal laws, the criminal, illegal war in Iraq and the occupation? There's no way. That's why we have to take this opportunity to have a much broader debate on the issues that relate to the American people, as, as, as a fellow in Long Island said recently, Mr. Sloane, he said, "These parties aren't speaking to me. They're not speaking to my problems, to my family's problems."
So, yeah. "Go, Ralph, Go!"
Postscript: "Well. I'd say, 'Go back, Ralph, go back!'" (Henry's riposte. And, he insists, "Waving my arms wildly, too.")
Posted by jherman at 9:29 AM
February 20, 2008
Milton Glaser ♥ Information, Not Persuasion
The 79-year-old graphic designer perhaps most famous for creating the I♥NY logo had a dose of surprising advice last week for the propagandists among us -- the marketers, advertisers, public-relations spinners and, yes, journalists -- along with citizens at large facing an onslaught of political campaigns.
It is "essential for us all to question all the beliefs we cherish," Milton Glaser said in his keynote speech to a daylong 'ganda bash, "Where the Truth Lies," organized by the School of Visual Arts with The Graduate Center, CUNY. "Beliefs must be held lightly because certainty can be the enemy of truth."
Propaganda "substitutes an alien authority for our own perception," he said, adding that "the intersection of fear and persuasion has created the world as we know it" and that we are faced with a "constant and relentless subversion of what is real."
Art is the antidote, Glaser asserted. "Art may be the only truth we can ever know," he said. Through art, "what is real becomes visible." Thus, he takes as his touchstone the words of the poet Horace: "The purpose of art is to inform and delight." Notice, he said, that "Horace did not say persuade and delight."
Furthermore, "art is a survival mechanism for the human species," Glaser noted. "Otherwise it would not have lasted this long." He cited the Lascaux cave paintings of prehistoric times to bolster his point.
In addition to the advice that peppered his speech, Glaser showed slides of some of his work. One, displaying a set of buttons created for The Nation magazine, was called "The Purple Coalition" -- as opposed to red or blue -- and it doesn't seem to have worked yet. It offered the following epigrams, one to a button, and a few more:
Principles not politics
Strength not stubbornness
Justice not junkets
Patriotism not ideology
Cooperation not corruption
Truth not spin
Openness not secrecy
Negotiation not intervention
Jobs not pay-offs
Civility not mudslinging
Voting rights not voter fraud
Security not torture
Civil rights not surveillance
Competence not cronyism
Leadership not devisiveness
Facts not fear
Another slide, titled "Goodbye," displayed four buttons with two characters each -- IM PE AC H! -- and a caption that said: "Help send the president on his way with this new four-button set." Sadly, given the results so far, that too is one of Glaser's less persuasive -- or to use his term, informative -- designs.
Postscript: A reader writes, "Pretty good, save for the fact that Patriotism IS Ideology -- often at its most pernicious." Exactly right. Every time someone raises the banner of patriotism, I cringe.
PPS: On Feb. 22 The Nation magazine posted the text of Glaser's presentation. Go here: "Art and Propaganda".
Posted by jherman at 9:49 AM
February 17, 2008
May We Remind You?
In "The War That Isn't," his latest column in National Journal, William Powers notes, "It's not at all unusual lately to pick up a large metropolitan newspaper and find that there is nothing -- zero -- on the front page about a war in which nearly 4,000 Americans have died." (Let alone the tens of thousands wounded. Or the hundreds of thousands of dead or wounded Iraqis and the millions forced to flee.)
Not to worry. Unless you agree with George C. Wilson, whose article in Army Times and other military publications, "Vietnam Redux," points out, "Now, as then, [the] generals are leading us down the primrose path." But this kind of news, as Powers says, "gets lost in the noise of other news." You know: "Obama and the Clintons. The mortgage crisis. Sports. The Hollywood writers' strike. The Clintons. The weather. Obama. Celebrities in trouble. Obama. Your health."
Postscript: An inherent part of genocide is to deny that people have died. Read "Counting Iraqi Casualties -- and a Media Controversy," about "the war's exceptional human costs" and the smear campaign to deny them. It is a devastating indictment of the American press -- and National Journal and The Wall Street Journal in particular -- by John Tirman, the executive director and a principle research scientist at M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies. Tirman commissioned the survey published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006, that concluded that 600,000 Iraqis died during the first 40 months of the war.
Posted by jherman at 9:08 AM
February 13, 2008
'Ganda Bash
Big all-day propaganda conference coming up in midtown Madhattan: "Where the Truth Lies." Keynoter: Milton Glaser. He asks, per the press release, "Is there any difference between good propaganda and bad propaganda?" Put another way, "Where does truth end and 'spin' begin?"
Topics include: How American Presidents Persuade the Public to Go to War. "It is not war that Americans hate, but, rather, unsuccessful wars," says Eugene Secunda, a marketing and media prof at NYU, per the release. He explains why a majority of Americans "are more than willing to buy a war if it is properly packaged and skillfully marketed."
How about this one? Learning from Las Vegas. "Progressives continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them," says Stephen Duncombe, a political activist and NYU prof. He believes they need to adopt a "spectacular vernacular" without adopting Vegas values. (Paul Krassner, anyone?) And this: The Changing Face of Consumer Marketing. "Sam Travis Ewen -- the man behind the LED light boards that prompted officials to shut down Boston last year -- has some answers." (Abbie Hoffman, anyone?)
Here's a cutie: Your Consumer is Revolting. With a serious subtitle: The History of Rumor Control in American Marketing. "American corporations and government entities have long attempted to monitor, control and influence word-of-mouth communication in order to align it with their own interests." The marketing exec who "led all communication research for Procter & Gamble," per the press release, "will survey the development of rumor control, as the process is known, and the marketing industry's recent response to mass adoption of the Internet."
There's plenty more: Why You Can Trust Comment and Opinion More Than News, also Corporations in the Classroom, and an advance screening of clips from a 10-hour PBS documentary, "Carrier," about life on the USS Nimitz during a six-month deployment to the Persian Gulf.
The conference, moderated by David Brancaccio, is being presented by the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in collaboration with the PhD Programs in History and Sociology of the Graduate Center, CUNY. It begins Friday (Feb. 15) at 9 a.m. and runs through 4 p.m. Place: 365 Fifth Ave. (btwn 34th & 35th Streets), in the Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall, GC CUNY. $35 (general admission); $20 (students). Tel: 212.592.2200.
Posted by jherman at 9:50 AM
February 11, 2008
Our Subprime War
Whenever I read or hear about the success of the surge, I substitute the phrase bribes to the tribes. Those four little words make a world of difference, and they go back a long way -- viz. "Protection Payments" made to Tribes in Ottoman Gaza (1519-1582) -- but you don't see them often enough in news accounts of the Iraq war.
Nor do you hear the President With His Head Up His Ass boasting about our bribes to the tribes. He brags instead, as he did the other day, about "the surge of forces." Even a lengthy report that broke the news of the new Army operations manual on counterinsurgency, revised after the "hard-won lessons" of Afghanistan and Iraq, fails to mention bribery. It speaks instead about the importance of street patrols.
Maybe when the revised operations manual is made public later this month, we'll see the inclusion of a new doctrinal tactic to formalize what has already happened: "Bring lotsa cash to buy off the enemy, especially in ten-million-dollar bricks."
(Hmmm, thanks to Fred Kaplan at Slate, I see that the manual has already been posted in a huge pdf file by Secrecy News. Downloading the 314-page manual-- it's 28 MB -- is guaranteed to freeze your browser for a while. But I managed, and a quick glance through the pages indicates that bribing insurgents is not mentioned anywhere.)
A weapons analyst I know can't understand why "the press lays off all this stuff. It scrubs everything clean, sanitizes it, and presents it in the best possible light. If this were a Democratic president overseeing strategy, he would be ripped apart. We have a real scandal. It's not Whitewater. It's something at the highest level of national security."
In fairness, I have to point out that it's not as if bribes to the tribes have gone unnoticed. Not too long ago, the BBC reported, as did others, that the payoffs have made al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri very unhappy. (Scroll way down.) And they were mentioned in passing only yesterday by NYT reporter Alissa J. Rubin. She noted that groups paid by the American military "to fight Islamic extremists" in Iraq's Anbar Province "have mostly seemed to be cooperating," although recently "their behavior has been [um] problematic."
Meaning, of course, that bribes notwithstanding they'd rather put their own interests ahead of ours and others'. Now ain't that a surprise.
Posted by jherman at 10:10 AM
February 8, 2008
Burros Roam Free
Just back from a trip to Arizona, where I met a herd of typical McCain voters wandering through the business district of Oatman, a former mining town that evokes the Old West with the aura if not quite the flair of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. This voter was about to enter the polling booth at a local hotel. (In case you're wondering, the sign says, "Public restrooms are across and down the street.⇒") And here's a closeup of the leaders of the herd:
Posted by jherman at 9:42 AM
January 28, 2008
Blogging During Wartime
The puppet master looks like your friendly uncle with a Cheshire cat grin and rose-colored glasses that drip with what? ... strawberry soda? ... cherry syrup? ... Aw gee, have a closer look, it's blood.
Artist Joshua Brown, who drew the caricature as a diary entry for his visual political blog Life During Wartime, says that before the invasion of Iraq he was fooled into believing "it was going to be a short, ugly, bloody war and that American influence in the Middle East was going to be triumphant."
It's a telling admission, because Brown's main occupation is teaching radical social history. (He is a grad school professor with a long list of scholarly works to his credit.) But candor is typical of him and worth keeping in mind when looking at the exhibition of all 270 diary entries now on view at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in Manhattan.
Brown trained as an artist before getting his Ph.D. in working-class history at Columbia. (Two murals he painted in 1979 for Yoko Ono and John Lennon apparently still decorate her apartment in the Dakota.) These days he heads the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning based at the Grad Center.
Brown began doing his visual blog on the first day of the Iraq war. In a statement for the Life During Wartime exhibition, he writes:
In the beginning I intended to chronicle and comment on the impact of the war on the home front -- and also to convey some critical views about the war and the duplicitous reasons for its prosecution, which at the time, and especially in editorial cartoons, were getting comparatively little public access.
Starting with a rush, he posted a diary entry "every two or three days," Brown says. He then settled down to posting them once a week. "It was the first time I had done art regularly in 30 years," he adds. "I'm not happy with every one by a long shot, but I don't feel lost." Politically, however, he still feels "pissed off, frustrated and ineffective. I must say it doesn't feel cathartic."
Change of subject: Jan. 29 -- The email message from Moveon.org began, "If you're like us, you dread watching the State of the Union. It's depressing: The doublespeak, the distortions, the incessant Republican applause for far-right policies and words that mean nothing."
True, but the message didn't go far enough. It should have continued like this: "It is never more apparent than during the State of the Union that the pols in the Congress on both sides of the aisle are a clubby class apart, all of them wedded under the skin."
Last night there she was, Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the so-called opposition, smiling like the queen of a beauty pageant, applauding the President With His Head Up His Ass -- and applauding and applauding -- long after decorum required, thus setting a deferential tone for his reception. (At least Harry Reid, for whom I have no great love, sat stone-faced.)
And we, the poor schmucks of the electorate, got to watch.
Postscript: Jan. 30 -- Furthermore, is anyone these days writing a funnier, more penetrating column than Mark Morford? If there is, I don't know about it. He even gives great link. Read his latest. It's about the 935 lies.
Posted by jherman at 12:12 PM
January 23, 2008
Essential Reading
A new, huge database created for the first time and posted online by the Center for Public Integrity collects the BananaRepublican lies that took us to war in Iraq. One section highlights Key False Statements.
Researchers Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith write:
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
The center describes itself as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan, non-advocacy, independent journalism organization" designed "to produce original investigative journalism about significant public issues to make institutional power more transparent and accountable."
The New York Times reports this morning in its news story on the database: "There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war."
That is true. But the old info is plenty startling, doncha think? I'd bet Joshua Brown thinks so. Consider his diary entry for Dec. 7, 2005, above, from his blog Life During Wartime. It's two years old, sure, but as startling as ever. And the words -- pace, Miss Piggy -- are pure Condi. Even if they don't turn up in the database quoted precisely that way.
(Not incidentally, an exhibition of four years of Brown's diary entries, from 2003 to 2007, is on view through Feb. 29 at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he teaches history and directs the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning. More on that later.)
Posted by jherman at 8:39 AM
January 20, 2008
Boris Lurie, R.I.P.
The epigraph on "NO!art MAN," a major 2001 documentary about Boris Lurie, who died earlier this month, says it all: "In a time of wars and extermination, aesthetic exercises and decorative patterns are not enough." Those are Lurie's words, and now they might as well serve as his epitaph.
The obit by Colin Moynihan in The New York Times was an excellent if brief summary of the artist's life and historical significance. But it only skimmed the surface.
For a deeper appreciation of Lurie's prolific output, as well as his importance, you have to go to the comprehensive Web site NO!art created and maintained by Dietmar Kirves. It is revelatory. There you will find more than 100 images of Lurie's paintings, assemblages, collages, multiples, etchings, posters, sculptures and mixed media works, along with detailed biographical notes, extensive interviews, a filmography of documentaries about him, and critiques, press reports and essays that appeared over the years.
Although I've known about Lurie since 1973, when I published one of his essays in a Something Else Press anthology (long after he launched the downtown NO!art movement with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher), my interest was reignited by Clayton Patterson, when he included Lurie in a group show, "326 Years of Hip," at his gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 2005. (I've posted other items about Lurie -- "Boris Lurie's 'NO!art' and the Holocaust," "Shoah and Pin-Ups" and "Boris on the Bill" -- but it would be an exaggeraton to say they even barely scratch the surface.)
It is obvious from the 1959 "Railroad Collage," above, that the Holocaust dominates Lurie's art. How could it not? He was a survivor.
Lurie clearly had the skills to fit any aesthetic mold if he chose. Have a look at the painterly, figurative craftsmanship in his "Dismembered Woman" series: "Figure and Bathtub," or "Apple Eater," or "Nude stepping," or "Pinup with Flower," below.
But if the Holocaust dominates Lurie's work and is the substrate of the NO!art movement as a whole, other matters were addressed as well.
The Israeli filmmaker Amikam Goldman, who made "NO!art MAN," quotes art critic Sarah Schmerler on the "principle aim of NO!art ... to bring back into art the subjects of real life. It thus stood in opposition to the two most popular movements of the era, abstract expressionism and pop art."
"Lurie's art has the distinction of knowing about both freedom and imprisonment, and it is no wonder his work differed from that of the same generation on these shores," Schmerler wrote in a catalog for the "Bleed Show, 1969," a retrospective exhibit mounted in 1997 at the Janos Gat Gallery in New York. "Most American artists of the '40s were fresh out of art school. Lurie was fresh out of Buchenwald."
Not surprisingly, Lurie was unwilling to curry favor with the dealers, collectors and curators whose tastes were offended by the vulgarity he prized in his work. "The art market is nothing but a racket," he said. "There is an established pyramid. ... Everybody who wants to benefit from it has to participate -- if he is permitted to participate."
Nor should it come as a surprise that unstinting efforts to spread the word about Lurie's work, by Kirves, Patterson and others, have largely proved frustrating, especially in the United States, even though Lurie spent most of his adult life after World War II in New York.
Although the Times obit says "his work is included in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington," Matthias Reichelt, a German critic, curator and editor, begs to differ. "It might be possible that the one or the other collection holds a small print or etching," he says, "but his art is NOT at all part of the permanent collections, neither in Manhattan nor in Washington. It still has to be discovered by the museums for the U.S. public."
This 1959 mixed media painting on canvas, "Lumumba is dead," for example:
Reichelt adds:
Boris Lurie was consciously ignored in the 1960s and '70s and the following decades because of the work's content. The museums did not take care of his art at all. They kept him out while other colleagues of his -- like Allan D'arcangelo, Allan Kaprow and Yaoyi Kusama, among others -- made it into the museums.Besides Clayton Patterson and the gallery owner Gertrude Stein, only a few curators and art historians, like Norman Kleeblatt from the Jewish Museum and the freelance art historian and curator Estera Milman, who organized the two major shows in the U.S. in public institutions -- the University of Iowa, in 1997, and Northwestern University's Block Museum in Chicago, in 2001 -- know about Lurie and his radical art.
Patterson, who is a ubiquitous figure on the Lower East Side -- and an artist, photographer, documentary videographer, editor and archivist, not to mention social critic, neighborhood preservationist and rebel in his own right -- has gotten used to the frustration. He still believes recognition will come. "It has to," he says. "It's much too important not to."
Posted by jherman at 11:35 AM
January 13, 2008
Gee, Ya Think?
Just because the NYT editorial "Unfinished Debate on Iraq" popped up today, lamenting the fact that "the war has receded as a major topic on the campaign trail," it does not mean Straight Up is being channelled. Yes, I know, these two questions appeared here on Friday. But so what? Ditto for the Noah Feldman article "Vanishing Act" in today's NYT magazine.
Postscript: Aw ... here's a leetle zumzeeng CNN put on its cover this afternoon, Analysis: Whatever happened to the war?
Posted by jherman at 9:03 AM
January 10, 2008
Uh, Just Asking
Does it matter to the pols running for prez? Does it matter to the people voting for the pols? Let's see whether the latest estimate of the civilian death toll in Iraq makes the agenda.
Doubtful. Why should it? It's old news. It's all about the first three years of the war. We're well past that. We're going on ... what? ... five years?
Besides, the number of the dead -- 151,000 between 2003 and 2006, according to the World Health Organization -- doesn't even come close to the 655,000 estimated earlier by researchers from Johns Hopkins.
Yes, the numbers are all over the lot, depending on the source and methodology. Here's a count of documented deaths based on actual reports, not on estimates. As of today, it's only 80,419 to 87,834. Ahhh ... whatever.
Postscript: Jan. 13 -- Here's the lede in Noah Feldman's article this morning, "Vanishing Act," in the Sunday NYT magazine:
What if the United States were at war during a presidential election -- and none of the candidates wanted to talk about it? Iraq has become the great disappearing issue of the early primary season, and if nothing fundamental changes on the ground there -- a probable result of current policy -- the war may disappear even more completely in the new year.
I don't agree with Feldman's general posture on Iraq war policy or with his analysis, which strike me as compromised by his establishmentarian point of view. But I like what he's getting at, as shown by the chart that accompanies his article. And while I don't like what the chart shows, I like the fact that it answers some of what I asked.
I also appreciate his reference to the Tommy Lee Jones flick "In the Valley of Elah." I thought it was the best movie of 2007. As Feldman indicates, it was ignored by moviegoers. Worse, in my opinion, it was shunned by the critics. I kept looking for it on their "10 best" lists. Couldn't find it.
It was not among the picks of the National Society of Film Critics, the American Film Institute, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assoc., or the Chicago Film Critics Assoc. It did not make Roger Ebert's list, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman's list, or Newsweek critic David Ansen's list. And it was ignored by all three NY Times critics, failing to make Manohla Dargis's list, A.O. Scott's list, or Stephen Holden's list.
Oh yeah ... it did make Time critic Richard Schickel's list and his colleague Richard Corliss's list. They both ranked it No. 8, which I have to say is like pinning the tail on the donkey.
Posted by jherman at 9:45 AM
January 6, 2008
Mom & Apple Pie
The flag-waving has begun, if it ever stopped:
After so many years of fear and loathing, we had almost forgotten what it's like to feel good about our country. On Thursday night, that long-dormant emotion came rushing back, like an old dream that pops out of the deepest recesses of memory, suddenly as clear as light. "They said this day would never come," said Barack Obama, and yet here, right before us, was indisputable evidence that it had.
That's the red-white-and-blue lede in Frank Rich's column this morning, as though Obamarama-cum-Huckababy could flush the BananaRepublic down the drain with, he adds, a "palpable sense that our history was turning a page whether or not Mr. Obama or his doppelgänger in improbability, Mike Huckabee, end up in the White House."
Please, Frank. Cut the bullshit. The winds of change don't smell all that good. Just read what George McGovern says this morning about impeaching the Bullshitter-in-Chief and Attack Dog, the chief's partner in high crimes and misdemeanors. Or have a look at Norman O. Mustill's collage, above. Maybe it will pop the nightmare instead of the dream "out of the deepest recesses of memory."
For all your shiny prose, dear Frank, and all your anti-establishment chest-thumping about the willful Beltway stupidity of mainstream political journalism -- as though a polished reference to "fear and loathing" could channel Hunter S. Thompson -- your column sounds a helluva lot like that old-time religion.
Postscript: A reader who goes by the moniker "LittleBrother" writes, per the HuffPo posting:
No one appreciates a good rush or buzz more than I, but apparently neither the unwashed masses nor the corporate media appreciate that mass euphoria is just a kinder, gentler form of mass hysteria.Moreover, "media" and "mania" only differ by two letters -- mass media not only gloms on to any form of "mania", but incorporates it into a self-propelling, self-inflating, self-confirming mega-mania.
Thus, in the course of a single week, Mr. Obama becomes the Feel-Good Hit of the new year.
Do the lemming-like hordes enthralled by their lemming-herders not remember what we wound up with after the last "Morning in America"?
Posted by jherman at 1:33 PM
January 2, 2008
Retro: Just Cuz It's 2008
The hungover staff realizes it cited the supreme lowlight of 2007 here, but none of the highlights. So what the hell, in reply to popular demand, a random sample: Best Yummy, Best Dummy, Best Bulletin, Best Nader, Best Collage, three Best Oldies (X), (Y) and (Z), Best Rupe, Next Best Rupe, Best Ghost, Best Bones, Best Beast and Best Pinocchio.
Posted by jherman at 10:21 AM
December 31, 2007
Kristolization? Oy!
When The New York Times announced that William Kristol will be a weekly columnist for its Op-Ed page, the first thing it said about him is that he's "one of the nation's leading conservative writers and a vigorous supporter of the Iraq war."
Which prompted a friend to ask two questions: 1) "Hasn't America suffered enough from the actions of these nut-jobs?" And 2) "Is Kristol the Times' move in anticipation of the Murdochization of The Wall Street Journal, sort of the way CNN moved to the right to counter Fox News?"
Well, 1) Apparently not. And 2) WSJ's news columns are more likely to feel Rupe's impact than the editorial page, which is already so far right it can't move further in that direction. If anything, its vicious brand of conservativism is more likely to be moderated in pragmatic support of Rupe's global business agenda.
(Jan. 16 -- Have a look: "Murdoch to Bury the Leder? Rethinks Journal Strategy")
Meanwhile, the lead editorial in this morning's Times, "Looking at America," offers at least some assurance that, despite losing the zip in its prose with the departure of Gail Collins as editorial page editor, it remains the most outspoken establishment newspaper opposing the BananaRepublic. Except for the tooth-fairy conclusion -- a rose-tinted final sentence about hoping to look in the mirror after the 2008 presidential election to "see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America" -- today's editorial is a serious year-end critique.
Remember these?
Posted by jherman at 9:30 AM
December 26, 2007
Before I Forget
Here's a tale you won't find in "Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History," a new book due out soon. I always meant to write it down but never did. I'm telling it now before I forget all the details, because I don't think it's been recorded anywhere.
It was the winter of 1970, probably in February. I'm not sure of the exact date. It must have been around the time that Tom Hayden and four others of the Chicago Seven were convicted of inciting a riot in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
The place was Jessica Mitford's house in Berkeley, California, where a crowd of Bay Area radicals, politicos, artists, poets, journalists, professors and other high-minded riffraff had gathered. We were there to hear the latest news and to rally the troops, raise money, and generally show our solidarity with the leaders of the antiwar movement.
The house was packed. Rumor had it that Jean Genet would be there, along with the Black Panthers. They were squiring him around the country as part of their campaign to free Bobby Seale, who had been on trial with the Chicago Seven until his case was separated from theirs. (You may recall that he'd been bound, gagged and chained to a chair in the courtroom).
A painter's ladder was set in the middle of the living room as a sort of platform for the speakers. Several speeches had already been made when a huge red convertible with the top down roared up to the front of the house. Genet jumped out, surrounded by Black Panthers with weapons bulging under their leather jackets. Among them was David Hilliard, who had taken over running the party in Seale's absence.
I no longer recall the speakers or their speeches. But I do remember Hayden, clearly the main speaker, being very low-key and looking like a Berkeley grad student in jeans and sneakers. His modesty and reasonableness were apparent. I was impressed. Hilliard was not. As soon as Hayden finished speaking, he challenged him. He wanted to know: Why was Hayden out on the street while Bobby Seale was in a jail cell? (Two of the Chicago Seven had been found innocent of all charges. Hayden must have been out on bail, while his conviction, like that of the others, was being appealed.)
Hilliard's question was an accusation. Calmly and with what seemed to me a sadness in his reply, Hayden refuted the implication that he had betrayed Seale in any way. There was only one reason he was free and Seale was not. It could be summed up in the word racism. "Bobby is black," he said. "I am white." Those words I do recall, perhaps because they were so simple. The reply did not satisfy Hilliard. His aggressiveness seemed menacing.
At this point a friend of Hayden's -- I think it was a UC Berkeley student president or former president who had come with him -- stepped in front of Hayden, as if to protect him. He shouldn't have. Hilliard hadn't done anything physically threatening, and Hayden was as composed as a turtle. Now, however, incited by the sudden move of the self-appointed bodyguard, Hilliard picked up an empty beer pitcher and swung it. It was a roundhouse swing that couldn't miss. He and Hayden were standing no more than an arm's length apart.
Incredibly, Hilliard did miss. Instead of hitting Hayden, who somehow hadn't budged or even flinched, the blow struck a young girl (the poet Michael McClure's daughter) who was sitting on the floor at their feet. Two sounds -- a hollow, leaden bonk! followed by a high-pitched cry of pain -- went off like a siren. This sent the crowd into a panic. People dove out of the way.
Genet went into a boxer's crouch, evidently believing he had to defend himself. He was wearing an army fatigue jacket, his head had white stubble and so did his face, like he hadn't shaved. Ready to take on all comers, he planted his front foot on a coffee table. Pugnacious. I remember thinking he couldn't have understood much of what was said. From the few words he'd spoken, you could tell his English wasn't very good.
Somebody shouted that the police had been called and were on their way. The crowd spilled out the front door onto the street and scattered. The last thing I remember of the pandemonium that day was how blue the sky looked and how puzzled Hayden appeared to be as he walked away unhurried, and it seemed to me, forlorn.
Postscript: Well, it looks like the incident took place sometime in mid- to late March. Here's an excerpt from an inelegant letter I wrote on March 27, 1970, to Carl Weissner, which a librarian at Northwestern University Library, Sigrid Perry, found for me:
The mention of Stew Albert, whom I'd forgotten about, makes me wonder now whether he was the "self-appointed bodyguard" who stepped in front of Hayden. Nanos is Nanos Valaoritis, the noted Greek poet. He had fled from Greece after it was taken over in a 1967 coup by a rightwing military junta known as "the colonels." Nanos was a good friend at the time (a warmer human being is hard to imagine) and was teaching at San Francisco State. We went together to Mitford's house.
Posted by jherman at 8:37 AM
December 24, 2007
A Christmas Tale
Once upon a time I wrote a story called "Christmas on the Bowery." It began like this: "Monsignor John Ahern, the redoubtable Skid Row priest, is expecting 800 guests Sunday for an early Christmas dinner."
Most will arrive from a dozen grandly named flophouses along the Bowery -- the Palace, for instance, or the Sunshine -- where they sleep in windowless $5 rooms enclosed in chicken-coop wire. Some will come from the municipal men's shelters, open dormitories where the beds are free but said to be unsafe at any price. Others will flock in from the city's streets, where home may be a piece of cardboard in a doorway on a frigid corner. Whoever they are and wherever they're from, they will receive a full plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes and as full a measure of human dignity as the Holy Name Center for Homeless Men can bestow.
I haven't been down to the center lately. But I was willing to bet it is now a gentrified condo for Wall Street honkies. Anybody who's been to Manhattan's Lower East Side these days probably wouldn't have taken the bet, either.
The free Christmas dinner, a Holy Name custom for five decades, needs no invitation and is, moreover, emblematic of the center's longtime purpose. Located since 1939 in a mammoth old school building at 18 Bleecker St., the center began caring for the destitute in 1906. ... Ahern, who looks more like a Marine officer in civilian clothing than a 58-year-old Catholic priest, has iron-gray hair and a ramrod bearing that exudes military authority. ... "We offer the men a place to come to every day," he says. "For the old guys, it's a safe place where they won't get mugged. For the young guys, it's a bit of hope."
Well, I just checked. The center, it turns out, is still operating two decades later -- though in a much reduced way -- within spitting distance of the most publicized symbol of Bowery gentrification, The New Museum of Contemporary Art. And wonder of wonders -- amid the boutique hotels, the multimillion-dollar condos, the liveried doormen, the custom-shopping grocers, the expensive cafes, the uptown art galleries for rich collectors now lined up on the Bowery in a "gallery row" -- Monsignor Ahern is still there at age 79, offering what he can. These days "he looks like a bantamweight," says Patrick Wynne, the center's program director. The Christmas dinners, however, are long gone.
With the elimination of the flophouses 10 years ago, Wynne explains, "the old guys have disappeared. They've either died off or were sent to nursing homes."
On a recent morning ... a dozen men were lined up for flu shots being given in the library, a room with a single, waist-high shelf of yellowing books. Across the hall, two regulars played pool on a threadbare table. Despite the institutional look of the place and the overpowering smell of ammonia, the center has the reassuring calm of a men's club. But downstairs at the front door, the harsh reality of the streets is borne in on a tide of weather-beaten men entering the basement for their showers. "You ever see 'Wild Kingdom?'" asks Jose, posted at the door. "That's the way it is out there. The strong feed off the weak. Yesterday they stole a coat from one old guy right out front." Cognizant of that, perhaps, one wary visitor stood at a wash basin and kept his overcoat buttoned to the neck even while slathering his face with shaving cream.
The center still offers free daily showers. But now, Wynne says, it's mostly immigrant day laborers, mainly Mexicans, who come in for them.
Posted by jherman at 12:36 PM
December 22, 2007
The Year in Roadkill
Like every two-bit journalist at this time of year, I grabbed a look over my shoulder to see what was left behind. It was uglier than roadkill. The mush rush of the past 12 months turned my stomach. Here's why that is. Not to mention this shitty reminder. Which is where brave Olaf came in.
Posted by jherman at 10:32 AM
December 16, 2007
Liam O'Gallagher, R.I.P.
Our old friend Liam O'Gallagher, the artist and sound poet, checked out on Dec. 4 in Santa Barbara, Ca. He had a good run, though. 
He turned 90 in October. Coincidentally, the date of his death is almost the same (it's off by a day) as that of Sri Aurobindo, the yogi master whose teachings he greatly admired. (E.g.: "An inch of experience goes farther than a yard of logic." "The example is more powerful than the instruction." "Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change of consciousness, it can only bring a change of mind.") Liam was buried in Santa Barbara. He is survived by Robert Rheem, his partner of 58 years.
"Color signals
paintings on the wall
with its occult eye that a black canvas contains interstellar space
it is our emotions that give shape to invisible worlds and leave abstract imprints on human cells
not limited to electronic information they need not be comprehensible in order to be revelatory
art is a medium wherever and instantly the mind can behave non-locally and in dark matter the
random factor is where the unhinged achieve this orbit and the unspeakable appears in a
biological library to answer questions about the meltdown"
-- Liam O'Gallagher
Here's a full obituary by William Gray Harris:
Liam O'Gallagher, an avant-garde writer, painter, and multi-media artist, who combined a lifelong pursuit of an integral spiritual philosophy with an exceptional gift for teaching and mentoring, died on December 4 at his home in Santa Barbara, California, of natural causes. He was 90.Mr. O'Gallagher was associated with some of the twentieth century's most innovative artists and philosophers. In his published works, The Blue Planet Notebooks, Planet Noise, and Fool Consciousness, he dealt with themes related to the evolution and future of human consciousness. He painted in the Abstract Expressionist style, and at the time of his death was working on a series of paintings that he described as expressing, "the surreal aspects of space science." The critic Richard Kostelanetz called him "one of the finest visual poets in America."
Born William Gallagher in Oakland, California, on October 2, 1917, he adopted the more traditional rendering of his name after visiting relatives in Ireland in 1950.
He moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 1945, at a time when the area was known for its resident artists and bohemians. In 1946, he left for Greenwich Village in New York to study painting with the renowned abstract expressionist master Hans Hoffman.After returning to the West Coast in 1948, he met members of the celebrated Ojai Players, including its director Alan Harkness, when they presented "Macbeth" at the Golden Bough Theatre in Carmel, with Ford Rainey in the title role and Iris Tree as Lady Macbeth. An invitation to paint sets for them at the High Valley Theatre in Ojai led to a position teaching art at what was then known as the Happy Valley School. Founded by the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti, and the writer Aldous Huxley, among others, it was a progressive school, and Mr. O'Gallagher's advanced painting and teaching methods fit well into its curriculum and a lifelong association was formed.
In 1954, he commissioned the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi to design a residence for a site overlooking Point Lobos, in Carmel, California. The house was never built, but a model for it is in the collection of the Oakland Museum. Later that year, Mr. O'Gallagher moved to San Francisco's Chinatown, adjacent to North Beach, where an emerging group of writers and poets were forming an artistic movement that became known as the Beat Generation. The hallmark of the Beats was non-conformity, spontaneous creativity, and the influence of Buddhism; all characteristics of Mr. O'Gallagher's own work, and his top floor studio loft above Grant Avenue became a gathering place for some of the group. His concrete poetry and cut-up writings, which heralded a future of artificial intelligence, space migration, and expanding consciousness, began to appear in publications associated with City Lights Bookstore and the Nova Broadcast Press.
The seeds of the Beat Generation evolved into the Haight-Ashbury hippie psychedelic movement of the 1960's, and Mr. O'Gallagher's work reflected the ethos of that era with various so-called happenings. He collaborated with choreographer Ann Halprin on "Ceremony of Us," a dance encounter between the Studio Watts Dance Group and the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop that had its premiere at the opening of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1969. That year, too, KQED-TV broadcast his "Return Trip," an ecological performance piece in which moon rocks were returned to the moon, accompanied by electronic music, and litter that had been left by the NASA crew was collected. The piece was sponsored by the Dilexi Gallery. In 1970, KPFA radio broadcast "Border Dissolve in Audiospace," a taped performance game involving telephone operators on various sides of state and national borders. Another work, "People's Opera," was scored for nine transistor radios, one telephone system, and soloists on tambourine, flute, oboe and French horn, and was broadcast on KQED-FM, also in 1970. In 1972, a compilation of his writing, visual poetry and performance scores of the previous decade was published, entitled The Blue Planet Notebooks.
From meetings with Robert Theobald, the futurist, Mr. O'Gallagher formed a partnership with Germaine Duncan to start a retreat center in the mountains outside of Helena, Montana, in 1972. Taking the name Feathered Pipe Ranch, it continues to this day. He returned to Ojai Valley in 1973, and converted the High Valley Theatre into a unique residence. He served as an advisor to the Happy Valley Foundation, and in 1976 was instrumental in founding the West Coast branch of the Human Dimensions Institute, now known as the Ojai Foundation at Happy Valley.
In 1983 he moved to San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, but ultimately settled in Santa Barbara, where he continued to write and paint. In recent years, exhibitions of his paintings were held at the Helen Pollack Gallery in Santa Barbara and at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai, the former home of one of his closest friends.
Mr. O'Gallagher is survived by his companion of 58 years, Robert S. Rheem, of Santa Barbara; a brother, Ted Gallagher of Walnut Creek; and numerous nieces and nephews.
Postscript: Jan. 5, 2008 -- Today The New York Times published an excellent obituary by Randy Kennedy. It noted that Liam's death "was not widely reported at the time," which is correct. I've added the NYT obit (above), scanned from today's print edition. If you click on it, you'll be taken to the obit at the NYT Web site. You can read it there. It also has the added virtue of a color illustration of Liam's 1960 "Chinatown" painting, which appeared in the print edition in black and white. Awww, what the hell, here's "Chinatown" in color. It's too good not to see pronto. Besides, when the NYT obit eventually goes into the Times' Web archive, the illustration will be dropped.
Posted by jherman at 10:37 AM
December 12, 2007
Rupe Says 'Nope'
Now that Rupert Murdoch has moved his top guys into place to remake the Wall Street Journal, veterans at the paper who are familiar with the dithering of their previous corporate bosses can't help marveling at his speed, decisiveness and personal involvement. "We know that's his M.O., but it's amazing to see," one Dow Jones exec is quoted as saying in today's New York Times. Meanwhile, nervous WSJ reporters and editors were heartened by the wisdom of Rupe's one-word decision to reject at least one plan to remake the paper. It circulated in the newsroom as Design Proposal No. 4.
(Just kidding, of course. The graphic is part of a 2002 ad campaign that introduced a WSJ redesign when color was added to Page One. To build suspense -- and to reassure readers that the Journal wasn't going to change character -- fake mockups appeared in advertisements showing rejected designs.)
Posted by jherman at 8:32 AM
December 10, 2007
Your Pen vs. Their Sword
If this video doesn't illustrate the power of a signature, nothing does:
Today, as noted last week, is Human Rights Day and the culmination of Amnesty International's Global Write-a-Thon, an annual letter-writing campaign to help "human rights defenders, prisoners of conscience, and other victims of human rights abuses." Does letter writing work? Amnesty International says, "It absolutely does." See the Q&A.
Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM
December 9, 2007
Our Man of the Year
"aieeeeee," sez un buen amigo, "el keith es un hombre con cojones gigantescos!" Yes, Keith Olbermann still sizzles. His latest special commentary, an exemplary piece of trash-tawkin' disapproval, hews to the same high standard he set for himself here and here. It's not just that he's so good at delivering his epithets for the BananaRepublican-in-charge. Or that he's doing it on mainstream TV, no less. But that all his epithets ("a pathological presidential liar" who is "transcendently stupid," "an idiot-in-chief," "a president manifestly unfit to serve") have the ring of truth and a conviction behind them worth a thousand pictures. Especially when he looks straight into the camera and says in his closing remarks, "You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar."
Posted by jherman at 10:41 AM
December 4, 2007
Mad Magazine + Tom Hayden = SDS
Who knew? I didn't. But that's what Tom Hayden reveals, give or take a few details, in a blurb for "Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History," a new book due out in January from Hill and Wang. "My own radical journey began with Mad Magazine," he says, "so it feels great that SDS should enter the culture of comic folklore ..."
OK, it's only a blurb. But I believe him. And in one of those perfect coincidences that border on the paranormal, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle, who collaborated on the book with others, will discuss comics and politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, on Monday -- Dec. 10 -- which also marks International Human Rights Day and the culmination of this year's Amnesty International Global Write-a-Thon.
Pekar is best known for his comic book series "American Splendor." He's also the subject of the movie documentary with the same title. Buhle was the founding editor of the 1960s SDS magazine Radical America. They'll be joined in a panel discusion by Jeff Jones, an environmental activist who was a former SDS officer and one of the founders of the Weather Underground. Hayden won't be there, hélas.
Since Buhle and Pekar will be, here's some of what they say in the introduction to their graphic history:
[The book] is, finally, a series of stories from the life of a generation, ending where SDS peaked, at around eighty to a hundred thousand activists and followers. So much had happened so quickly around them, it was no surprise that many young radicals and quite a few conservatives imagined American society to be on the verge of some vast transformation. A significant chunk of SDSers joined and in some cases actually organized the women's liberation movement, the gay and lesbian movements, the environmental movement, and so on. These causes, still far from won almost a half century later, had been essentially invisible before the era of SDS. It is difficult for today's young people to conceptualize a society at once so self-satisfied and so deep in social conservatism, race sentiment, homophobia, environmental indifference, and the assumptions of fixed roles of the sexes, and just as difficult to imagine that all these issues were tackled almost simultaneously, and very largely by the young themselves.
Can't make it to the panel discussion? How about the SDS Comic Show? It's a traveling exhibit of all the graphics from the book, and free, too, in the Graduate Center lobby. Just walk in any time.
Wanna read more? Here's another excerpt from the intro (on view at the exhibit):
The Vietnam War was, of course, the central political issue of Students for a Democratic Society, as inevitable as its locus on the nation's campuses. The mystery of the rebellion unraveled in this book is that SDS and all its energies never resembled the specter that so many in powerful places and in lonely living rooms feared and pondered. If, according to polls conducted among them, a large segment of the student population considered itself somehow "revolutionary" by the peak years of 1968-70, it was not in the name of any revolution that had existed or would exist, perhaps any that could exist.
Some more samples from the exhibit and intro:
In our twenty-first century, the perspective has, of course, become very different. Not because the doddering radical veterans of that era have lived through so many years (and tears, and beers) and still remain part of the largest population bubble. Not because the structure of American society has changed in any fundamental way. Rather, it has to do with the sobering fact that just as the sixties generation is itself entering old age, its hard-won lessons seem to have reappeared.
Today the Empire has badly overreached again. Our political elite is once again in disarray. The current Iraqi conflict, raising the voices of the powerful against each other as never since the sixties, exposes the flawed logic of Empire. However different the nation has become in forty years, creativity still arguably blossoms best among youth, those who have the least stake in the existing rules of society.The reasons that the 1960's have never quite gone out of common perspective is that the music, the cartoons and comics, the posters, the impulses, and the fears did not actually get old with the people who first lived them. The idea that any little group of saviors, self-avowed Weathermen or dogmatic Marxists, would lead America or the world into the promised land is over. Everyone in the Wal-Mart Nation knows better. But the crises didn't really go away, any more than did the urgent need and the simultaneous improbability of an inspired mass awakening to a better, more ecologically sound, more peaceful and cooperative, Age of Aquarius-like future.
You could spend a couple of hours just looking and reading. And shaking your head up, down and sideways.
Posted by jherman at 12:24 PM
December 2, 2007
A Taste of 'The White Beast'
It's an excerpt from William Osborne's 50-minute music video, "Music for the End of Time." He also composed the music. The video features digital stills by Norbert Bach and the trombone playing of Abbie Conant. And here's a trailer for the video, which gives a broader sample of the work.
Now for a change of pace ... how about an Osborne-Conant Song of the Week called "Number Crunchin' Cowboy"?
Hard to believe both videos come from the same artistic team.
Posted by jherman at 12:38 PM
November 26, 2007
Ppffshaw!
She's making me blush. I don't usually get admiring emails from law profs.
Hi Jan -- I just wanted to introduce myself, having followed your blog with great interest. My name is Sonia Katyal, and I am a law professor who specializes in the area of art, law and technology at Fordham Law School in NYC.
Being a fan of your work, I wanted to send you an abstract and article I finished on intellectual property, appropriation art, copyright, and the notion of the relationship between semiotic democracy and disobedience; it seemed like something that was relevant to your work. I'm thinking of turning part of it into a book, and so would be thrilled for any thoughts you might be able to share -- you can also download the paper for free on SSRN. Feel free to pass it on to interested folks via blog or otherwise, and I'd be grateful for any thoughts you might be able to pass along.
I told her I read the abstract. Twice. I also said I'd have to study it, let alone the paper it refers to, before I had any thoughts she might find worthwhile. Since I'm no academic, the terminology went right by me. Off the top of my head, though, I said the whole issue of postmodern appropriation and what it entails made me gravely ill. I called my illness "conflicted feelings." And just to show I was still breathing, I added, "Whether it's semiotic disobedience or outright theft seems to me to depend on whose ox is gored."
When I was finally able to download the paper itself -- not easy to do, it turned out -- I got a short way in and came across this passage:
...the spirit of semiotic disobedience reflects some of the same classic goals and interests of traditional civil disobedience. The individuals I am speaking of do not expressly seek to reclaim the protection of the law; rather, their very objective is to demonstrate the expressive value of transgressing its limits. If our First Amendment jurisprudence has taught us anything, it has taught us the importance of recognizing the value of symbolic dissent, even when unpopular, as a key mediating tool in integrating the marketplaces of prohibited and protected expression.
Which clarifies what she's getting at. I think. More thoughts, anybody?
Postscript: A reader writes:
Hey, who cares what she's saying? She's pretty hot. In the immortal words of Baudelaire:Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
Sois belle! Et sois triste!
PPS: Clayton Patterson writes:
If I am getting this, without reading the paper (or going too far into this, as I don't have time), appropriation -- especially after Warhol -- seems like the backbone of many of today's art treasures. The Warhol soup can is clearly someone else's design. I'm not sure why no one seems to mention this fact or gives credit to the original designer. The same for Roy Lichtenstein's comics. (Today's Damien Hirst shark in formaldehyde at least is not stealing another person's work. But please, where is the art?) Young designers are taking lettering styles from The NY Post, for example, and using it -- and on and on. It is unimportant to be original anymore. Just take it -- whatever it is -- use it, and it is yours. This appropriation as art thinking is another large stone sinking the American culture and society. It is like a cancer -- appropriation of words or pictures, or sounds, or tunes, or looks, or whatever -- sad really.
PPS: Another reader writes:
hmmmm ... semiotics, "the analysis of the nature & relationship of signs in language," plus disobedience. er...uh...duh...d'ya think a clenched fist w/ an upright, erect middle finger would qualify? jist askin'.
PPS: Holly Crawford writes:
Given what I read, which was only your quote from her piece, I would want to know if she is OK with you or me publishing [her ideas] with our names and no reference or citation to her. In art and music it's OK, but in other fields it's plagarism and not freedom of speech. Did she draw a line? Everybody gets inspired by others' work. Obviously you can't have satire or parody without some appropriation, which is why appropriation artists position work as a cultural joke.
PPS: Another reader writes:
As cute as you are, I suspect that the law professor's "having followed your blog" and "being a fan of your work" are boilerplate, along the lines of those pop-up IM's one gets from Cinnamon or Tiffani saying that they've just looked at your online "profile" and you seem like a "cool guy." In short, she says "semiotic disobedience" to all the boys.
PPS: William Osborne writes:
An incredibly interesting and very important article. All artists interested in media theory should read it. It's astounding to find a law professor is so erudite in the area of postmodern cultural theory. And she ain't just any law prof either. Read about her brother.How delighted you must be that someone like her has taken note of your blog!!! I think your off-hand deconstructions of the media pass most people by.
I have printed the article out and am going to pour over it. It is closely related to what I have been working on with our music theater studies of the media, like Cybeline. We want to go much deeper into these themes with our newest work, and I think Katyal's article will be very helpful, not so much for legal eventualities, but for how she discusses the social and aesthetic themes involved.
If all someone can say about her is that she is pretty, then I would rather forget the French and use some good ol' German: Was für ein Dumbkopf!
PPS: A reader writes:
"who cares what she's saying? she is hot!" love that guy. and in addition to fortifying ourselves with baudelaire, let's get interested in semantic righteousness and call a rip-off a rip-off. we know it when we see it. lawyers should stay out of this.
PPS: David Ehrenstein writes:
"Semiotic Disobedience"? Isn't that disciplining your slave by thwacking him in the cojones with the complete works of Julie Kristeva?
William Osborne adds:
From the comments, I don't think anyone actually read her article. I at least went through it, even if pretty quickly, and her arguments are very differentiated. She is not advocating stealing people's ideas. In fact, she discusses in detail all of the problems surrounding appropriation, including very sophisticated arguments about how legal theory must distinguish between simple copying and work that turns the appropriated ideas into very different statements, especially those that involve social protest.
Dec. 6 -- Now for la piéce de rèsistance: "If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What's the Original?" And don't forget to have a look at the slide show.
Posted by jherman at 9:19 AM
November 22, 2007
William Burroughs Gives Thanks
Bon appétit!
Posted by jherman at 10:15 AM
November 18, 2007
Just for the Record
I have no idea how many readers wrote to tell them. But I know of at least one. This was my email message to The New York Times Book Review:
One Legend Too ManyTo the editor:
The Chelsea Hotel has so many legends attached to it one less won't hurt. The Chelsea is not "[w]here William Burroughs wrote 'Naked Lunch,'" as Jeff Giles puts it in his review of "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel." ("Chelsea Mornings," Oct. 28) Mr. Burroughs wrote the manuscript at the Villa Muniria in Tangier (at 1 Calle Magallanes, where Jack Kerouac typed up an early version for him) and at the Beat Hotel in Paris (at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, where Brion Gysin and others helped him prepare a later version for publication).
I sent the email three Sundays ago, on the morning of the review. A few days later I received this automated reply: "Thank you for writing to the editors of the Book Review. We read every e-mail we receive, but cannot always respond. We will contact you if we decide to publish your letter." Never heard from them again.
This morning they ran their correction, unattributed. If they had contacted me, I would have told them my correction was incomplete. And now so is theirs. A key section of "Naked Lunch" was written in a hotel in Copenhagen, as a friend reminded me, and as Ted Morgan writes in his peerless Burroughs biography, "Literary Outlaw":
Burroughs left for Copenhagen in July 1957 ... on an intuition that it would be important for his book. He had four main zones, or sets, where the book takes place -- the United States, South America, Interzone (which was Tangier), and Freeland -- and in Scandinavia he found the real model for his imagined Freeland, a place of the living dead. He had already described it as a series of bars along a canal, which was what he found in Copenhagen. What he saw exceeded the most ghastly product of his imagination. ... The dead-level sanity and bone dullness of the Danes appalled him. It was a police state without police, populated by robots completely conditioned by the state. The only antisocial element was the juvenile delinquents, known locally as "Leather Jackets." It was all horribly depressing, the sandwich bars, the workmen in overalls listening to classical music on the radio, the lack of conversation, the general inanity and squareness of the people.
... Scandinavia catalyzed the novel, which was now taking shape faster than he could write it down in his hotel room. Every time he reached an impasse, something happened to show him the way, so he stayed in Copenhagen through August and worked. The main theme, it was now clear to him, was the desecration of the human image by control addicts. As Lola La Chata, the Mexico City pusher, used to say, "Pushing is more of a habit than using."
You think if I send this item to the Book Review -- naturally with all due apologies to past, present and future generations of the Danish pipples -- that the editors will run a correction to the correction?
Oh yeah.
Postscript: Colleen Thornton writes:
Thanks for shedding new light on an old legend. I had no idea that Copenhagen had made such an impression on William Burroughs, though in an entirely understated (typical) way. You see, I have lived in Copenhagen (København) for nearly 15 years and have, over time, found this so-called "sane" society quite NUTS. The whole country is suffering from an astonishing case of collective passive-aggression that occasionally erupts into overt aggression over things of which they are utterly ignorant; such as the world outside of Denmark, except the fictional reality of the USA.While "Danish Design" is used to solve all sorts of problems here, it clearly has no medicinal effect on the junkies, drunks and prostitutes that live their colorful lives just yards from my doorstep.
Burroughs recognized the symptoms of the Danish disease alright. He'd not be surprised by how this "small country" has slid into social schizophrenia -- self-medicating, self-congratulatory and utterly without self-awareness.
So much for the Danny Kaye version, eh?
Posted by jherman at 9:42 AM
November 13, 2007
Overlooked and Undersung
It is a delicious irony of life in New York to ride the subway during the morning rush hour with Dave Frishberg's "Quality Time" playing on your iPod (listen here). Another irony, not so delish, is to miss what's in front of your eyes. Like walking past the art gallery in the CUNY Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue without seeing the show.
Talk about quality time, "Jim Dine Selected Prints, 1996-2006" gives you as much as you please. It's in the heart of Manhattan (between 34th and 35th Streets) and a helluva lot less crowded than the subway. Cheaper, too. Admission is free. Oh, did I say Dine's prints are a wow?
Among other things, they offer an eyeful on the not small matter of prevarication, which some would submit is the issue of our time. Have a look at the portraits of Gepetto's boy. There are a handful, and they come in all sizes.
Pinocchio may not resemble the current occupant of the White House. His nose is longer, for one thing. He's also made of wood, although that's a debatable difference, and he pays for his lies. Most of all, Dine personally identifies with Pinocchio. I doubt he feels that way about our prevaricating prez.
In any case, precisely why crowds are not packing the gallery is a mystery to me. Maybe it's because the art critics have overlooked it. There hasn't been a single review of the show, despite the fact that Dine is an acknowledged master. Some of the prints have been exhibited elsewhere -- in Minneapolis, for instance -- and you know how New York critics hate to be second in line.
Or maybe it's because Dine's work sells, thank you very much, but usually not at auction, and so doesn't go public with humongous prices. Indeed, maybe that's the most important reason.
Dine is among the most commercially successful artists in the Pace Wildenstein stable -- which is saying a lot, given the stable. But without humongous prices to attach to his name, Dine is old news, or worse, no news. No matter how much they may deny it, the critics are artworld functionaries. Money impresses them maybe more than art.
Yes, this is a rant.
For a serious discussion of the show, go to Jed Birmingham's Q&A with Jim Dine at the Bibliographic Bunker.
Anyway, have a look at another of Dine's Pinocchios. He calls it "Red Enamel Pants." I call it "What Is He Staring At?"
Full disclosure: Straight Up's staff of thousands is a part-time media consultant to the CUNY Graduate Center, which operates the gallery.
Here's what else you need to know: Jim Dine Selected Prints, 1996-2006 is on exhibit through Dec. 8 in the Amie and Tony James Gallery at 365 Fifth Ave. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12 to 6 p.m. (212) 817-7394.
Posted by jherman at 11:38 AM
October 22, 2007
Are We Still Counting?
Postscript: Oct. 25 -- "Another $200 Billion." Read all about it.
Posted by jherman at 12:05 PM
October 14, 2007
Skulls & Bones
I see that in two New York art shows Jenny Holzer and the rest have taken some kind of lesson from the Aztecs. "Death hangs in the air," NY Times art critic Roberta Smith writes. "Or, more accurately, on the walls."
But to be frank about it, the art of Holzer et al. is put to shame by the death-obsessed thingies on display at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City's Chapultepec Park.
Maybe it's just a coincidence: The other day I was at the museum, where this stunning Aztec skull caught my attention. (How could it not?) No encrusted diamonds per Damien Hirst, but a helluva lot more expressive. (There were plenty of other masterly pre-Columbian thingies, so many Aztec, Olmec, Mayan and Teotihuac thingies that it was hard to stop taking pictures.)
Meanwhile, now that I'm back from Mex City, I also had a chance to look in again on the show of collages by Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu. (Scheduled to close yesterday, it's been extended through November.) So here's another coincidence: Beach put pants on a diamond-encrusted skull way back in 2001. On paper, of course, but six years before Hirst's full-fledged encrustation.
Postscript: A reader writes:
Damien Hirst is the kind of guy who could have been a great artist if he'd pre-existed the mass media. I think he has decent ideas but he deploys them in the most superficial way possible (without thereby attaining the depth of Warhol -- a paradox that would take me half the morning to try to explain).Every morning when I come to work, I pass by a teaching skeleton that's been tossed on a cart. It's half broken and somebody has hung a blue hair net over a protruding bit of backbone. This ignominious figure probably has more to teach about death than Hirst and co: in death we're discarded and quite likely mocked as well.
PPS: Oct. 23 -- Maybe I spoke too soon. Here, via this week's New Yorker art listings, are two persuasive images from the group show "I Am as You Will Be" currently at Cheim & Read:
They have a certain je ne sais quoi. Nyet? And, I might add, the title of the show is very William S. Burroughs.
Posted by jherman at 1:51 PM
September 26, 2007
The Ghost in Their Machine
The posthumous show of collages by Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu -- now at John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller through Oct. 13 on Manhattan's Upper East Side -- comes as something of a surprise. Their work is not high on the list of swank art collectors. Hell, I'd be surprised if it's on the list at all. And I don't think McWhinnie's appreciation will change that. As the former Newsweek art critic (and painter) Peter Plagens said to me about a Nelson Algren video I praised yesterday, "The trouble with being dead is you can't fight back against tributes people pay to you."
The show itself is eye-popping, however, and so is the gorgeously printed catalogue. Maybe that will bring on the collectors. I hope so. Of course, I'm partial to Mary and Claude. I knew them in San Francisco, back in the late '60s, when we created a little magazine together. They were doing collages then, too, though they weren't nearly as polished as these -- not even close. It seems to me that by 2001, the year almost all the collages in this show were executed, they had fully absorbed the influence of Norman O. Mustill (who also collaborated on the magazine).
Mustill is not mentioned in McWhinnie's appreciation or in the catalogue or anywhere in the show itself. But I believe it was Mustill's work in the first place that turned Mary and Claude onto the method and style of the collages here. (They were so taken by his work that they commissioned an entire book of his collages. It was called "Flypaper," and they published it in 1967 under their Beach Books imprint.) So this show may be regarded as an unspoken homage to Mustill. He's the ghost in their machine.
This is not to say the furious accomplishment of the "2001" collages is not their own. Mary, who died in 2006, had already been a painter many years before meeting Mustill, and it's evident. Her collages, along with a handful of paintings also on exhibit (like the one above), are more freewheeling, less "designed" than Claude's. Claude, who died in 2002, was first and foremost a writer. A prolific one. He was large in everything he did. And this show, though it only scratches the surface of his output, indicates how prolific a collagist he became as well. And how proficient.
Speaking of prolific, proficient and accomplished . . . Ted Morgan, author of more than a dozen books -- including biographies of Churchill, FDR, Somerset Maugham and, not least, William S. Burroughs -- was at the show's Sept. 14 opening. (So were rockers Grant Hart and Thurston Moore, and poet-photographer Gerard Malanga.)
When he met Pelieu in 1970, in London, Morgan recalled, they used to swap stories about the French Army. Morgan had served as an intelligence officer in Algiers. (See his latest book, the memoir "My Battle of Algiers," a swift, informative and, despite the subject, entertaining read.) "Pelieu was an army deserter," he said. "Claude was full of funny stories. We laughed like crazy. "
At the time, Morgan was staying in Brion Gysin's Duke Street apartment on a visit from Tangiers, where he'd been living since 1968 and where he'd first met Gysin and Burroughs through Paul Bowles. I asked him about Gysin, a special interest of mine.
"You know how Brion always hated government or any governing authority," Morgan said. "Well one day, probably through one of his friends, he was offered an apartment-cum-painter's-studio in Paris owned by the Ministry of Education. More or less against his principles, he agreed to take it. The hitch was that the education ministry was entitled to purchase whatever work he turned out while he lived there. So, whenever the ministry felt like it" -- Morgan didn't say exactly how often, but it sounded like a regular affair -- "Brion had to receive a ministry delegation who came to inspect his work." Morgan laughed at the irony. "And they never offered to buy a thing."
Had he written the Burroughs biography "Literary Outlaw" as a change of pace from Churchill and FDR? "That's it exactly," he said. Burroughs, it turned out, was proud to be in their company. "He even boasted about it," Morgan noted. Guilt by association, I guess.
As good a story teller in person as he is on the page, Morgan recounted how he searched through crates of the Burroughs archive before anyone else -- it was purchased in 2006 by the New York Public Library's Berg Collection -- and how he found a letter from his first wife warning Burroughs it would be a mistake to let Morgan write his biography. He laughed at the memory.
You'd think that at 75 -- with all sorts of accolades to his credit, including a Pulitzer Prize for reporting -- he'd be interested in taking it easy. Forget it. Morgan, who is tall, tan, modest and attractive, and who looks younger than his years, says he's working feverishly on a new book, "Dien Bien Phu: A Tragedy in Four Acts."
"It sounds like you're taking a run at Graham Greene," I told him. He laughed. "I've been to so many places," he said, "I could write a hundred books like that." Unlike his Algiers memoir, however, this one is not personal history. "I'm not that old," he said.
Posted by jherman at 8:29 PM
September 25, 2007
Hustlers' Paradise
Dunno know why it took me so long to catch up with "Nelson Algren's Last Night!" Made by Warren Leming and Carmine Cervi, it's a beautiful video that runs for just over 5 minutes but with a long-lasting eloquence that matches its subject's words.
Such as these:
I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.Now we all know.
... The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
-- Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make
(from the introduction to the 1961 edition dedicated to Joan Baez)
Meanwhile, per World Can't Wait:
Today a belligerent President Bush comes to the United Nations to impress upon the world that the U.S. is in the Middle East to stay, that the war on terror will be endless, and to threaten a murderous war on Iran."That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn or be forced to accept." If you don't show your resistance, it doesn't count.
As the man said, Now we all know.
Posted by jherman at 10:46 AM
September 7, 2007
Have You Heard This One Before?
Posted by jherman at 3:00 PM
Just So You Know, in Case You Didn't
Paul Krugman's column this morning warns us not to put any credence in the claim Gen. Petraeus will make in his upcoming report to Congress "that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq." Excellent point. The column makes lots of excellent points -- like this one:
Oh, and by the way. Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city. And guess what? When a Sunni enclave is eliminated and the death toll in that district falls because there's nobody left to kill, that counts as progress by the Pentagon's metric.
You could argue with the headline "Time to Take a Stand." That time was long ago. So for the record, a few past reminders from this small corner of the world about genocide and ethnic cleansing in Iraq:
Hed: The Sunni Genocide, December 8, 2005.
Lede:
Now that Harold Pinter has given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he has also provided us with cover to post what may be the most incredible item -- truly the hardest to believe -- we've ever put up. It's not only about genocide, which we've written about before, it's about "the coming genocide of the Sunnis in Iraq," to quote a friend of ours, which will be committed by American proxies for a U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder.
Hed: 'Ganda Machine Gears Up, on December 15, 2005.
Lede:
We have led a country to civil war in order to permanently weaken it. We have largely destroyed its cultural patrimony to erase its identity and autonomy. We have set up a potential genocide against our opponents. And now we step aside and claim we can't control what will happen.
Hed: Hidden in Plain Sight, on December 20, 2005.
Lede:
We've been banging on about the American strategy todemocratizeSalvadorize Iraq, as though the coming Sunni genocide is a revelation because a "U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder" has proxies doing the dirty work. But all of this has been hidden in plain sight for so long -- in the mainstream media and elsewhere -- that we're shocked by our own naiveté.
Hed: Bold, Red-faced Contradictions, on February 21, 2006.
Lede:
Iraqi death squads doing America's dirty work? Why would you think that?
Hed: Loud Whispers, on December 17, 2006.
Lede:
Finally, an acknowledgment of Sunni genocide as the BananaRepublic's sub rosa policy in Iraq: "The Whispers and the Why Nots."
Postscript: Sept. 11 -- You can't say the mainstream media is not telling us. Even though it uses the antiseptic term "internal displacement," a New York Times news analysis about yesterday's dog-and-pony show notes that massive ethnic cleansing in Baghdad has soared during the surge:
[M]any Iraqis have told reporters they still do not feel secure, despite General Petraeus's charts showing drops in violence. Internal displacement has doubled since the "surge" began, reaching 1.1 million people nationwide, according to the International Office of Migration and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society. [Emphasis added.]Shiite militias have continued their steady march to force Sunni Arabs from an ever-expanding area of Baghdad and surrounding villages. That has been compounded by mass roundups of Sunni Arabs suspected of being insurgents, who are held for months in dangerously crowded detention centers without trial or charges. Shiite judges concede that 40 percent to 50 percent of those detainees are innocent.
Of course, the analysis by reporters Alissa J. Rubin and Damien Cave, who are in Baghdad, is almost unfindable on the front of the NYT Web site and pretty much buried in the print edition. It's on the bottom of page A16 (though, to be fair, the editors cite it above the fold as part of a front-page package).
Now read "The erasing of Iraq," in The Guardian of London. It's excerpted from Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine," and it's mind-boggling. But I thoroughly disagree with her conclusion that "'[t]his was not what the Bush administration intended for Iraq when it was selected as the model nation for the rest of the Arab world." Or that "cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated."
(Postscript crossposted at HuffPo)
Posted by jherman at 9:28 AM
September 6, 2007
'Our Palace Press'
Jay Rosen lays it out. Read this.
Posted by jherman at 12:02 PM
Orwellian Zombies All
The jingoism implicit in daily life taints everything we say, let alone what we do. To use my friend Bill Osborne's term, we are all "Orwellian zombies." This includes even the most sincere opponents of the President With His Head Up His Ass and his regime of BananaRepublic war criminals.
Consider Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent. His loathing of war in general and the Iraq war in particular expressed by two of his books -- "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," a cri de coeur, and the deadpan "What Every Person Should Know About War" -- would seem to place him above reproach.
Yet he, too, can't be excluded from the ranks of Orwellian zombies. His latest column, "The Next Quagmire," illustrates the point.
When Hedges writes that "we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect," he is correct of course. Same here:
We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force. It hasn't worked well in Iraq. It hasn't worked well in Afghanistan. And it won't work in Iran. But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project. We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.
But Hedges "goes on to create the same alarmist bullshit as bad as the policy folks he criticizes," Osborne contends, as indicated by a key paragraph. His comments on Hedges's points are bracketed in italics:
The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up plans for a series of airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran. The air attacks are designed to cripple the Iranians' military capability in three days. ... It is not hard to imagine what will happen. Iranian Shabab-3 and Shabab-4 missiles, which cannot reach the United States, will be launched at Israel, as well as American military bases and the Green Zone in Baghdad. [The missiles could be taken out within 24 hours -- and hardly get a shot off.] Expect massive American casualties, especially in Iraq, where Iranian agents and their Iraqi allies will be able to call in precise coordinates. [They would not have a window of opportunity for massive casualties. I would say 20 Americans dead.] The Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, will be shut down. [For about 5 days at most.] Chinese-supplied C-801 and C-802 anti-shipping missiles, mines and coastal artillery will target U.S. shipping, along with Saudi oil production and oil export centers. [Utterly vulnerable to A-10 jets so no big threat. Boats laying mines would also be instantly wiped out by A-10s and F-16s.] Oil prices will skyrocket to well over $4 a gallon. [Or at least the plutocracy hopes.] The dollar will tumble against the euro. [Ditto.] Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, interpreting the war as an attack on all Shiites, will fire rockets into northern Israel. [With the same minimal effectiveness as during the last idiotic invasion of Lebanon.] Israel, already struck by missiles from Tehran, will begin retaliatory raids on Lebanon and Iran. [The pretense for hegemonistic invasions would be welcomed.] Pakistan, with a huge Shiite minority, will reach greater levels of instability. The unrest could result in the overthrow of the weakened American ally President Pervez Musharraf and usher into power Islamic radicals. [Yeah, like our actions in Iraq and Iran. It is secular, leftist nationalists we actually fear. In the end, theocracy and plutocracy make great bed partners. See Saudi Arabia. And if business arrangements can't be made, theocracies are easily isolated.] Pakistan could become the first radical Islamic state to possess a nuclear weapon. [Oh dear, I see the smoking gun mushroom cloud already.] The neat little war with Iran, which few Democrats oppose, has the potential to ignite a regional inferno." [Uh, don't let the cat out of the bag about our one-party government.]
Osborne adds: "Yeah, yeah, more mushroom clouds as smoking guns, aluminum tubes, Nigerian yellow cake, attacks on Holy Israel, etc. The Iranians don't have the terrible abilities he describes. Frighten us Hedges, so we will think war with Iran should be brutal and quick. When will someone finally admit that if the Islamic world goes out of control they won't attack Israel with any significant effectiveness, but that they will start slaughtering each other (just as in Iraq and Palestine)? Which is just what the U.S. is counting on.
"Same old story with Serbia, by the way. As the last East Block holdout, it rejected neo-liberal globalism and had to be destroyed. And of course, every fucking honky swallowed the demonizing propaganda hook, line and sinker. Keep up the great work, Hedges. Propaganda disguised as criticism.
"The alarmist Hedges report is a good example of the thinking that gets the sissies (to use Gore Vidal's terms for Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk) shooting at everything. There is nothing more dangerous than a paranoid, belligerent coward with a big military apparatus. They're out to get us; pulverize them!!!!
"And how about the photo (above) that illustrates Hedges's column? It makes his argument hilarious: Iranian female militia members. The column might be called "Big Guns Under Burkas." Notice in the photo how only the front row of women have guns. I can well understand why the patriarchal theocracy in Iran wouldn't want to have too many women running around with AK-47s. There would be some big changes made there really quickly! With just a few touches the column would be great for The Onion."
Posted by jherman at 10:03 AM
September 3, 2007
Still Cookin'
Poetry as Insurgent Art:I am signaling you through the flames. The North Pole is not where it used to be. Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest. Civilization self-destructs. The goddess Nemesis is knocking at the door...
What are poets for in such an age? What is the use of poetry? ...
The master class starts wars. The lower classes fight it. Governments lie. The voice of the government is often not the voice of the people.
Posted by jherman at 8:52 PM
August 27, 2007
Vacation Interruptus -- Again
The ventriloquist dummy took a powder, Stephen Lee Myers reports in The New York Times.
Copy that, said MSNBC.com, which ran his report as its cover story (per the illustration, above), since replaced by the AP report.
There will be many thumbsuckers mulling the whys and wherefores of the dummy's departure, but here's ours (click the photo there or below):
It's our fave foto of El Senor Gonzales because it puts him in the proper perspective. May it long be remembered.
But here's a more important story of this dog day, reported by the AP's Deborah Hastings and published in the Navy Times:
One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.Or worse.
For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.
That's just the beginning of the story, which details the BananaRepublic's treatment of whistleblowers in ways you won't believe.
Posted by jherman at 9:09 AM
August 13, 2007
Vacation Interruptus
Straight Up's Calvin Trillin offers this comment on today's White House resignation:
BODY POLITIC
Farewell to Bush's brain, Karl Rove,
Whose loss will never drain us;
Now when do we wipe away Dick Cheney,
The boss's raging anus?
Postscript: Now watch Bill Moyers's beautiful kiss-off, delivered on Aug. 17:
Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God's anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits.
And that's just for starters. Has anybody said it better?
Posted by jherman at 6:20 PM
August 7, 2007
Banana Days Are Here Again
The BananaRepublic has gained a new lease on life from a craven combination of mindless BananaRepublicans and feckless BananaDemocrats. The dog days of summer are upon us, too. See ya later.
Aug. 10: Oh, and before I go ... here's a postscript: Something even scarier, pointed out by mi amigo with reference to the "brown-skinned shadows" in Iraq, "whose violent demise need not touch the American realm."
Posted by jherman at 8:30 AM
August 6, 2007
It Takes a Genius
The U.S. military can't find 190,000 weapons given willy-nilly to Iraqi forces when security training was run by Gen. David Petraeus.
Which raises fears, as The Washington Post delicately puts it, that the military genius who is now the top U.S. commander in Iraq has armed the insurgents fighting U.S. troops.
Makes you wonder what else besides AK-47s, pistols, body armor and helmets will have gone missing by September, when Petraeus is scheduled to report to Congress about "progress" in Iraq.
Thousands of Iraqi civilians maybe? More U.S. troops killed and wounded? Political sanity?
Postscript: And now for a minor update.
Iraq Weapons Are a Focus of Criminal InvestigationsBAGHDAD, Aug. 27 -- Several federal agencies are investigating a widening network of criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other matériel to Iraqi and American forces, according to American officials. The officials said it amounted to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict here.
The inquiry has already led to several indictments of Americans, with more expected, the officials said. One of the investigations involves a senior American officer who worked closely with Gen. David H. Petraeus in setting up the logistics operation to supply the Iraqi forces when General Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping those forces in 2004 and 2005, American officials said Monday.
Wanna bet the Petraeus report will not mention American war profiteers?
Posted by jherman at 8:59 AM
August 1, 2007
Over the Cliff With Rupe
Is Rupert Murdoch good or bad for The Wall Street Journal? That's the burning question. Today's WSJ editorial assures us, "No sane businessman pays a premium of 67% over the market price for an asset he intends to ruin." Well, nobody has said he intends to ruin it. To use a favorite word of the WSJ editorial board, that's a canard.
Rupe simply intends to run the Journal the way he wants. He has said so himself -- emphatically. No sane businessman pays $5 billion for an asset and does otherwise. Which is no good for the independence of the WSJ news department.
I speak from experience. Once upon a time I worked for a newspaper he took over -- the Chicago Sun-Times. He started it on its downhill slide. Downhill? Ha. He drove it over a cliff.
Personally, I had no cause to complain. He leafed through the paper page by page, an eye witness told me, and stopped at my Sunday "Hanging Out" column. He read it, pointed to it, and said he wanted "more of that." Which is why, in addition to Sundays, I suddenly had a column on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This suited me fine. I even got along with Charles Wilson -- then the deputy editor of The Times of London, later its editor -- who was temporarily installed as the Sun-Times editor in chief. It was only afterward, when one of Murdoch's chief Australian henchman, Frank Devine, replaced Wilson as the permanent editor, that I resigned (following an argument we had about a new assignment, to write a team column modeled on the NY Post's Page Six -- but that's another story).
The Sun-Times is not the Journal and never was. When I began working there, however, it was a really fine daily filled with first-class writing and reporting and a steady diet of major investigative series. During the Murdoch takeover many reporters and editors got out. Not all. Staffers like lifelong Chicagoans Zay Smith, the late Bill Newman and Henry Kisor stayed -- as did others like John Schulian, who remained for a while, and Roger Ebert, who was already a Sun-Times institution -- because they refused to flee to the Tribune or couldn't or had nowhere else to go if they wanted to continue working in their hometown. Mike Royko did eventually cross the street, despite his vow that he never would. But that, too, is another story.
Will the staff dissolve at the Journal? Different paper, different times. But I have no doubt same old Rupe, contrary to the opinion of another old Sun-Times hand. Some folks will be elevated, others ignored -- and many will flee while the fleeing is good or not so good. "I expect the Journal will become even more a place of favorites and outcasts," a longtime WSJ reporter says.
A few marquee names will get more dough and some freedom. They'll be promoted on Fox TV, etc., while those with nowhere else to go will slave on, pressed to churn out more and complain less. Those in the middle will flee when they can. Probably quite a few will leave journalism, because what's the point if it isn't fun and means nothing?I don't think RM cares about any particular staffers at WSJ, but it seems possible that, to the extent the current regime under the very ambitious and generally respected Marcus [Brauchli, the managing editor,] stays intact, they will want to keep people they like in place rather than watch an exodus that will both make it harder to run the newspaper and prove the critics were right about the instant diminution of the Journal's reputation. Once RM's crew insinuate themselves throughout the hierarchy, such attitudes will doubtless change.
Better believe it. And that's no canard.
PS: Lede-ing question
Not to make a big deal about COPYING A LEDE, which wasn't a piece of genius anyway, but have a look:
THE PHOENIX
August 8, 2007
When Rupert came to Boston
Just how badly will Rupert Murdoch screw up the Wall Street Journal?Ever since Murdoch's just-accepted $5 billion offer for Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, became public this past May, this has been journalism's great burning question.
A reader writes: "Seems like he ripped off the entire premise -- what did Rupert do at the Bos Herald, just like you did Rupert at the S-T."
Posted by jherman at 10:31 AM
July 27, 2007
War-Funding Mystery Solved
When you're a mathematician who analyses weapons systems as an independent consultant to the U.S. government, you pay attention to military appropriations (not least because you like to get paid). So it was eyebrow-raising to receive a message from just such a weapons analyst telling me how much he'd learned from Adam Cohen's recent editorial, "Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War."
The editorial goes to the heart of the war-funding debate by describing the attitude of the Constitution's framers toward presidential power, which they regarded with apprehension especially when it came to the monarchical prerogative of making war.
Cohen writes, "They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom." [Emphasis added.] To keep that from happening, "they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called 'the foetus of monarchy.' "
The editorial is emphatic about this. Although it appeared in The New York Times on July 23, it should have appeared five or six years ago -- in late 2001 or early 2002, pick a date, but certainly before the invasion of Iraq. And here's why:
The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe's history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. [Emphasis added]. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that "absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal."Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. "In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed," he warned. "It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle." [Emphasis added.]
When the weapons analyst, who happens to be a friend and who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons, read the last part of that sentence about the laurels, he says an image of Bush in a flight suit and the "Mission Accomplished" banner prominently displayed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln instantly came to his mind.
In that context the next paragraph was revelatory, solving what had been a mystery to him. It tells exactly how "the framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters."
The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years. [Emphasis added]. [Alexander] Hamilton explained that the limitation prevented Congress from vesting "in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence."
"I had known but not understood why such appropriations never exceed two years," my friend the weapons analyst wrote. "But there it is, Article 1 Section 8. I have developed a much deeper respect and appreciation for the honesty, integrity and foresight of the Founders. And, in addition to those qualities, they were smart."
Yup, check the 12th clause of that article and section. It's goddamn clever.
Posted by jherman at 9:51 AM
July 24, 2007
The Thinking Part of My Brain
I'm still pondering why Noam Chomsky's recent article, "Imminent Crises: Threats and Opportunities," was listed on the rightwing cultural site Arts & Letters Daily.
At first I thought it was because the site's founding editor Denis Dutton and managing editor Tran Huu Dung sometimes include maverick pieces from the left that have intellectual heft. Besides, I figured they have a grudging respect for Chomsky's take on the world even if they disagree with it.
But the thinking part of my brain -- actually, my friend Bill Osborne -- disputes that. He believes the A&L editors occasionally aggregate far left articles they deem "so extreme that they pillory themselves," especially feminist articles they regard as nonsense. The Chomsky article is different however. It makes enormous sense.
"So something else seems to be at work," Osborne says.
Here's what the thinking part of my brain came up with: "The right has to find a new narrative, and there is something in the article they think they can work with." It hints at the new story the right is going to tell us:
1. The Middle East has always been a cauldron and so we are not to blame for the mess in Iraq.2. The Middle East is of such historical strategic importance that even our "failed" attempt was justified. We must, for example, not let China control Middle Eastern oil -- to say nothing of the Europeans.
3. Freedom is the essence of good government and economies, so the Iraqis (not America) are to blame for the chaos, killing, and poverty because they would not accept the "freedom" we offered.
"One could twist Chomsky's logic to that narrative," Osborne says. "I am pretty sure this is going to be the new empty oil barrel they drum on." And he adds:
The right is now also openly admitting that genocide is evolving, so they need a narrative to explain it. They must hide that we planned on the genocidal civil war from the outset, and that the war has not been a failure at all. Let them bleed each other white, then go in for the kill. (That same strategy was used for Germany and the Soviet Union before and during the Second World War.)These high level government people are ingenious, the cream of our elite schools. They always amaze me. And of course, actions speak for themselves. We see that in the end those schools, and the entire governmental and economic system they support, ring as morally hollow as someone kicking an empty oil barrel.
Which bolsters what Arianne Huffington wrote last week, "Bill Kristol: On the Train to Delusionville," about his article in the Washington Post, "Why Bush Will Be A Winner," and what she calls this morning "The Long Tail of Bill Kristol's Delusions."
Posted by jherman at 9:30 AM
July 20, 2007
Mr. Patsy Pundit
Paul Krugman zapped a fellow New York Times columnist this morning with a sharp rebuke, basically calling him a Bush patsy and accusing him of being an enabler if not a believer:
In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits -- amazingly, they still exist -- to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever.
Perhaps out of politeness, although more likely out of Times protocol, Krugman doesn't name him. But in case you missed who he means -- since he does name Republican Sen. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana and Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, as key Bush enablers -- the patsy pundit Krugman means is David Brooks.
On Tuesday, in his column, Mr. Patsy Pundit described a meeting he attended at the White House to hear Bush talk about the war in Iraq:
I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency. [Emphasis added.]
Though Krugman is willing to concede that Mr. Patsy Pundit's description of an upbeat, confident Bush "might even be true," he points to an obvious problem. "What I don't understand," he writes, "is why we're supposed to consider Mr. Bush's continuing confidence a good thing."
This doesn't occur to Mr. Patsy Pundit, who goes on to describe Bush in typically grandiose language. Besides gushing about a president with "a capacious view of the job and its possibilities," he elevates Bush to the rarified intellectual realm, believe it or not, of an anti-Tolstoy.
He refers to Bush's "theory of history" as if he actually has one, and "only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back" from believing how "smart" and "compelling" Bush is "in person."
There are always patsies and enablers who surround the worst leaders, who flatter them with euphemisms and heroize them with outright lies. But as Krugman says, "we need to stop blaming" Bush for our mess. "He is what he always was, and everyone except a hard core of equally delusional loyalists knows it."
Even if Mr. Patsy Pundit is not a hardcore loyalist -- and he's not -- he is delusional for writing about Bush the way he does. And that's the trouble. "Many people" who realize what's wrong -- the pols, mainly Republicans, and the U.S. generals at the top -- "still refuse, out of political caution and careerism, to do anything about it," Krugman writes. But it's the patsy pundits like Brooks who enable them.
(FYI: Krugman's column is free to read here.)
Posted by jherman at 12:22 PM
July 17, 2007
Cultural Analysis For Your Viewing Pleasure
Who says we don't blog about high kulcha? Here's something to chew on. "One of the more profound statements on German opera," a friend writes.
Online Videos by Veoh.com
And here are some other Chuck Jones opera classics not to be missed: "The Rabbit of Seville"; "Long-Haired Hare"; "Nelly's Folly"; and, for a change of pace, "One Froggy Evening."
Now the staff of thousands will take some downtime.
Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM
July 16, 2007
Impeach Now!
Never thought I could listen to Bruce Fein without throwing a brick at him. But, man! The nerdie rightwing legal beagle is worth hearing on why the President With His Head Up His Ass and his Attack Dog must be impeached. Yes, must.
Why would I believe Fein on impeachment now when I didn't believe him when he went after Bill Clinton? (He wrote the first article of impeachment against Clinton.) Because in this instance, contrary to his specious puritanical reaction to a sex scandal, Fein makes a be-yooo-tifully justifiable case against the two of leaders of the BananaRepublic.
He did it on Bill Moyers Journal the other day, as he did earlier on Slate against the Attack Dog alone. You can watch Fein do it. Click "watch video" to see the segment. He makes the case, along with leftie John Nichols. (The 'twain doth sometimes meet.) If you prefer to read what they said, click "read transcript."
And here's the video of Moyers' intro. I hope it's a sign of things to come, though our spineless pols make it doubtful.
Cherry-picking is kosher -- yes it is.
Posted by jherman at 8:52 AM
July 12, 2007
Did Someone Say Gestapo?
Can't let the week go by without noting "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness" in The Nation, a devastating piece of eye-witness testimony described by its authors as an investigation into "alleged military misconduct" of U.S. troops in Iraq.
The three words alleged military misconduct are a legalistic euphemism for the banalized horrors of the war -- "indiscriminate killings" of innocent civilians, "checkpoint shootings," night raids by stormtroopers who act like the Gestapo -- all of which are detailed in firsthand accounts by veterans willing to speak up.
As Spc. Garett Reppenhagen, 32, of Manitou Springs, Colorado, a cavalry scout and sniper, points out, "It's just the nature of the situation you're in. That's what's wrong. It's not individual atrocity. It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."
But will the American public get it? Despite polls that say popular opinion has turned against the war, some observers doubt it will make much difference in the long run.
Consider what mi amigo William Osborne wrote before the invasion and in another context: America seems to regard its victims as "little more than nameless bystanders, shadows without identity in a netherworld of 'collateral damage.'"
[They are] brown-skinned shadows whose violent demise need not touch the American realm, even if their deaths were caused or abetted by the U.S. government. In short, it's just massive suffering and death in a remote world, something like images of video games beamed from the ethers.
Today, speaking of the war, he dismisses all talk of an American withdrawal as nothing but smoke and mirrors.
Everything is going exactly to plan -- the civil war, the destruction of Iraq, the strategic 'retreat' into bases, and a gradual genocide, both physical and cultural, against the Sunnis (and, in a way, against all Iraqis).The Americans will back into their bases and wait out the genocidal civil war. It's been U.S. strategy in Iraq all along. How clever to hide it behind the facade that we 'lost' the war, or are withdrawing in failure.
The theater even includes putting Hillary in office to make the presumed de-escalation and partial withdrawal appear to be democratic -- once we have sown the seeds of death.
And now that it is all done, we will, of course, shed a crocodile tear or two, including suitable articles in The Nation and The New York Times.
Or as that now-forgotten prevaricator Rummy Boy would say, "By golly!"
Posted by jherman at 9:56 AM
In Promo Mode
Steve Skrovan writes:
Just read your blog on Huffington about Ralph Nader. As one who has studied Nader for the past five years, I found it to be [praise omitted]. I directed along with my partner, Henriette Mantel, a documentary on Nader's life entitled "An Unreasonable Man," and since I suspect now you will be receiving the same shit that we have been dealing with all this time, it might be worth a look-see.
We were in the documentary competition at Sundance in '06, made the Oscar shortlist this year, had a theatrical release this past spring and had a two-disc DVD released last month. In addition to the film, the DVD has a number of featurettes on such topics as "The Role of Third Parties," "Corporate Power in America," "Why the Right is Better Organized than the Left," "What Happened to the Democratic Party?" "Ralph on the Iraq War," "What Kind Of President Would Nader Be?" and a psychological profile of Nader entitled "Profile Of A Charismatic Leader." Our website is anunreasonableman.com. There you will find links to many of our reviews.
We'd be curious to know what you think.
Here's what I think. I haven't seen the flick (yet). The reviews are remarkable. But the best, by far, is Chris Hedges' review at truthdig.
He writes:
It was an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party, along with the orchestrated fraud by the Republican Party, that threw the 2000 election to Bush, not Ralph Nader. Nader received only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000 and got less than one-half of 1 percent in 2004. All of the third-party candidates who ran in 2000 in Florida -- there were about half a dozen of them -- got more votes than the 537-vote difference between Bush and Gore. Why not go after the other third-party candidates? And what about the 10 million Democrats who voted in 2000 for Bush? What about Gore, whose campaign was so timid and empty -- he never mentioned global warming -- that he could not carry his home state of Tennessee? And what about the 2004 cartoon-like candidate, John Kerry, who got up like a Boy Scout and told us he was reporting for duty and would bring us "victory" in Iraq?
Hedges also comments about the unwise choice of voting for "the least worst" -- a choice I myself made in 2000 and 2004 -- and the anger on the left about Nader's so-called betrayal:
There is a fascinating rage -- and rage is the right word -- expressed by many on the left in this fine film about Nader. Todd Gitlin, Eric Alterman and Michael Moore, along with a host of former Nader's Raiders, spit out venomous insults toward Nader, a man they profess to have once admired, the most common charge being that Nader is a victim of his oversized ego. This anger is the anger of the betrayed. But they were not betrayed by Nader. They betrayed themselves. They allowed themselves to buy into the facile argument of "the least worse" and ignore the deeper, subterranean assault on our democracy that Nader has always addressed.
Cliff Doerksen, in his review in Time Out / Chicago, also makes an excellent point:
"[I]t's quite absurd to exclude a third-party candidate from the choreographed pillow fight laughably called the presidential debates on the grounds that he's too insignificant to be a factor, then later single him out as the factor responsible for handing the White House to the most incompetent and ill-intended administration in history."
PS: Henriette Mantel writes:
Jan, Can't wait for you to see the movie!! If you get too beat up by angry dems, just let us know. We are really good at fighting them off now. Once again, [praise omitted]. Such a nice break from all the (mostly uninformed) Naderhaters on Huffington.
Posted by jherman at 8:47 AM
July 9, 2007
Waiting for Nader
Whenever Ralph Nader comes on the tube, which isn't often enough, it's must-see TV. He's in a class by himself. I don't know of any politician, civic leader or social firebrand who can match him for his unique combination of level-headed insight, deep intelligence, real accomplishment and passionate straight talk.
For instance, in a must-see interview that aired this morning on Democracy Now!, here's what he said about whether the lame duck President With His Head Up His Ass still matters:
Yeah, he matters because he's a national security menace. He's a destroyer of our Constitution, a violator of our statutes, a revoker of our regulations. He's a war monger. He's a war criminal -- clinically a war criminal -- and he's still in charge. And as I said some time ago, he's a giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being, although I sometimes wonder about the word "human." I don't think it's possible to see a more obsessively compulsive person with so much contempt for the traditions of our country ...
That's just a snippet of Nader's wide-ranging discussion of health care, corporate government, campaign financing, the current crop of presidential candidates and the general political realities of the BananaRepublic. (You can also read the transcript.)
I voted for him in 1996 but didn't in 2000, because I wanted Al Gore to win. Nor did I vote for Nader in 2004, because I thought it would mean one less vote to unseat the illegitimate BananaRepublican regime. As I noted then,
If the American people want to elect the nasty little shit now in the White House, they should remember they will be indicting themselves as co-conspirators in his administration's criminal misadventures. They will no longer have the excuse that he was an appointed president, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, and not an elected one.
Even so, I still believed Nader had every right to run in 2004. And now I wish he'd run again, because now I'd vote for him again. His assessment of the political realities following the 2006 Congressional elections has so far proved true, unfortunately, right down to the last detail:
[T]o the extent the Democrats gained the majority in the House, it was on the backs of some very rightwing Democrats who won the election against rightwing Republican incumbents. And so, there was no mandate for any progressive agenda. ...[One] thing that is good, though, is that there's some very good veteran chairmen who are coming in: George Miller, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey and, of course, John Conyers. But to counter that, both John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi have taken the impeachment issue right off the table, before the election, and that means there's going to be no Bush accountability for his war crimes and his inflation of unlawful presidential authority.
... The Democrats will throw a lot of subpoenas at the White House. The White House will, of course, drag it on and on and on. And the public will get fed up with it. The White House has great reserves in dragging it on and on and on. Because Bush can't rely on Republicans as a majority of the Congress, he's going to inflate his presidential power even more extremely and unlawfully, in the opinion of many legal scholars -- to do through the inherent power of the presidency, as Dick Cheney and Bush have talked about, what he can't do through the Congress, which he no longer controls.
That's why the drive to impeach is long past due.
Posted by jherman at 11:16 AM
July 3, 2007
Woof! Woof!
Whatever it's called -- an assault on the rule of law or a prison break -- it comes as the latest illustration of the BananaRepublic's independence from democratic principles. The President With His Head Up His Ass and his Attack Dog have sprung their Lap Dog, just in time for the nation's Independence Day fireworks.
So the coverup continues.
Makes me feel foolish to have asked, "Is the BananaRepublic on its way out?"
Postscript: A reader writes:
Good links. Liked the Abrams piece on the coverup. He's absolutely right. They need to follow that to the end. Until we have the pleasure of seeing Darth Cheney frog-marched across the White House lawn in leg irons.
PPS: Another reader writes: "Rogue Republicans don't let a fellow rogue down." And as others have said: "Paris Hilton served more time."
Posted by jherman at 10:35 AM
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
May 28, 2007
Where Have All the Coffins Gone?
Posted by jherman at 1:06 PM
May 23, 2007
Conscientious Objection
If brave Olaf "whose warmest heart recoiled at war" were alive today, would he tell the President With His Head Up His Ass what e.e. cummings once had him tell a West Point colonel? "I will not kiss your fucking flag."
It would be unfeeling at the least, given the stunning 5-column photo on the front page of this morning's New York Times and the accompanying story of a young soldier killed, of others wounded, on a foot patrol in Iraq.
Besides, the absence of a military draft and the use of an all-volunteer force for making war tend to neutralize the very idea of Olaf the C.O. If you're a conscientious objector, what are you doing in the military in the first place? (Pace Pablo Paredes, the sailor who refused to deploy to Iraq, filed a C.O. application and -- surprise! -- avoided prison time.)
Still, Olaf certainly would not say "DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI," the famous words of the Roman poet Horace that are etched above the west entrance of the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. (Translation: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.")
Olaf didn't believe in patriotic gore. And when saying so got him beaten up and reamed with a hot bayonet, he made it even plainer, "There is some shit I will not eat."
Would that all of us were as brave as Olaf.
Posted by jherman at 11:15 AM
May 17, 2007
One Mo' Time
Have we beaten this to death? I mean the Copycat and the Original Cat, which I've already referred to twice before, here and here. But Randy Kennedy's item, "Photographer Wins Suit Against Designer," in the Arts Briefly column of The New York Times, revived the issue for me -- particularly his description of the plagiarism involved.
A French judge ruled that John Galliano's fashion ads "too closely mimicked a technique" created by William Klein. (An example of Klein's technique, right.) In other words, the plagiarism did not involve an exact image but rather the imitation of a style -- or as the Associated Press put it, "[the judge] said the ads clearly violated intellectual property laws because Galliano never asked Klein's permission to use the style, which the New York-born photographer developed more than a decade ago."
The parallels to the case of a Vik Muniz fashion spread in The New York Times Style Magazine, which imitated the technique and the imagery of the artist Norman O. Mustill, are so close that it's bizarre. Here's some of the evidence one more time, as quoted from the original Muniz-Mustill item of March 13, 2006:
Exhibit A: On the left, Mustill (from 39 years ago). On the right, Muniz (from three months ago). In this case, notice the exact material: tree branches within a human form in the context of a fashion statement and the referential hand.
And that's just Exhibit A.
Perhaps more bizarre than the "paraparallels" between Galliano-Klein and Muniz-Mustill is the fact that the dreadful former public editor of The Times never responded to my complaint. The editors of the NYT Style Magazine published the Muniz spread, undisturbed, and it's too damned expensive to sue.
Without seeing the incriminating Galliano ad spread, which I can't find online, I'm drawing conclusions based on words. If anybody has the spread, please let me or my staff of thousands know. It would be much appreciated. Here's a more detailed explanation of the ruling, from Le Monde.
Posted by jherman at 11:08 AM
May 9, 2007
While We Were Out
Yes, the royal editorial we took a break from blogging. But not from reading. A theater column, of all things, caught our attention while we were out because of its straightforward accuracy, let alone strong writing: "Prisoners of the Past" by Michael Feingold, in the Village Voice. He pinpoints the connection between the Living Theatre revival of Kenneth H. Brown's 24-year-old play "The Brig" and the American premiere of Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon."
If The Brig's power comes from the U.S. military's being tragically the same in 2007 as in 1963, or worse, Frost/Nixon gets its resonance from the difference. Though Peter Morgan's play centers on President Nixon's on-camera post-Watergate "confession" to British interviewer David Frost, its unconscious moral is how good Tricky Dick looks, compared to the slime we have in office now.
The slime, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass, recently reminded the Congress: "I'm the commander guy." That also caught our attention. (See the video.)
Had the royal bloviator kept up his reading, which we doubt, he might have seen Greg Jaffe's frontpage story, "At Lonely Iraq Outpost, GIs Stay as Hope Fades," in The Wall Street Journal. "None of the soldiers in Tarmiyah talk about winning anymore," Jaffe reports.
Tarmiyah is a "small, trash-strewn city 30 miles north of Baghdad" where "U.S. troops just walking a simple foot patrol ... has become unthinkable," Jaffe writes. The 50 soldiers in the outpost are surrounded by about 30,000 Iraqis. The goal of the troops "is to keep the enemy off-balance, with periodic raids. It's the best they can hope for under the new U.S. 'surge strategy,' which some U.S. officers in Iraq say does little more than chase insurgents from one part of the country to another."
Jaffe's war reporting is particularly good (not that it makes any difference to the "commander guy," of course), and we've cited it before -- here and here.
Meanwhile, leave it to The Journal to slam dunk George Tenet's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," with the most devastating review that we also read on our break from blogging: "Inside the Inside Story," written by Doug Feith, one of the chief Pentagon culprits for the phony intelligence and "facts fixed around the policy" to justify the invasion of Iraq. It's behind the WSJ subscription wall, unfortunately, but Feith provides a way around that by posting the review on his own site.
See if you don't get the impresson of a viper baring its fangs. Note, too, the tin-eared attempt at humor in the last paragraph of the review. While that doesn't undermine the points Feith makes, it does reveal a peculiar callowness -- not suprising, I suppose, given his war crimes, but strange nonetheless.
Posted by jherman at 10:10 AM
April 30, 2007
Mission Impeachment
Nobody mentioned "Mission Accomplished" -- Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of that infamous photo op -- but when Chris Hedges called for the impeachment of the President With His Head Up His Ass during a panel on the Iraq war at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, he got a standing ovation.
Hedges read a short speech, "No One Should Be Above the Law," which he'd given earlier last week in Washington at a large gathering of activists, politicians and others to launch an impeachment initiative.
The speech began by pointing out that Prez Huha "has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. ... Most egregiously, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public."
This president is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the "crime of aggression." And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we do not begin the process of impeachment, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences.
As noted last week, Dennis the Menace has already introduced a bill to impeach Prez Huha's Attack Dog. The Democratic leaders in the Congress have said that bill is going nowhere, however, and I don't think Hedges expects the impeachment initiative against Huha himself to go anywhere either. What it will do, he hopes, is show the world that not all Americans are complicit in the BananaRepublic's war crimes.
Posted by jherman at 9:46 AM
April 27, 2007
Grrrr...
It was unanimous. When asked for a show of hands not one went up to support impeachment proceedings against Prez Huha's Attack Dog. Thus did last night's lineup of Democratic presidential candidates distinguish itself.
Make that unanimous minus one. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, who introduced the impeachment bill -- House Resolution 333 -- was apparently too modest to raise his own hand.
Here he is in a video interview about HR 333 earlier this week, as posted on YouTube. And here's a synopsis of the three articles of impeachment with supporting documents.
Missing from the documents is "Buying the War," the debut program of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. If you didn't catch it Wednesday night on the tube, you can watch it online. The program doesn't just indict the press, as advertised, for its contemptible submissiveness in the run-up to the Iraq war. It indicts all the president's men for a crime as serious, according to my Staff of Thousands, as Watergate and Iran-Contra combined.
Postscript: Essential reading from Greg Palast.
Posted by jherman at 10:20 AM
April 25, 2007
Welcome Back, Bill Moyers
"You can't keep asking young people to die for a lie," he said this morning on Democracy Now!, where he talked about his return to public television with a new weekly series called "Bill Moyers Journal." (Have a look at the DN! interview.)
The first program in the series, "Buying the War," debuts tonight. Variety's Bryan Lowery describes it as "a methodical, devastating, pull-no-punches recap of mainstream journalism's collective failure to challenge the Bush administration [a k a the BananaRepublic] in the run-up to the Iraq war."
He quotes Moyers as saying, "The press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration [again, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass] to go to war on false pretenses." Which dovetails with this from yesterday's item, dontcha think?
Tom Shales raves about the program: "Perhaps the truth shall eventually set you free, but first it might make you very, very depressed." He calls tonight's program "one of the most gripping and important pieces of broadcast journalism so far this year." He also notes, "It's always depressing to learn that you've been had, but incalculably more so when the deception has resulted in thousands of Americans dying in the Iraq war effort."
(Gee, Tom, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dead, dying, and displaced Iraqis. You forgot them.)
Meanwhile, here's something else Moyers said this morning on Democracy Now! (not that you haven't heard this before either): "Let's just face it, democracy has become a racket when it comes to politics and the media. ... This is contempt -- contempt for democracy and freedom. We cannot rightly claim to have a democracy as long as money is sovereign. ... There is a cancer eating at the heart of democracy, and it's money in politics."
Finally, congratulations to Sen. Harry Reid for calling Huha's vice president by the right moniker. "The president sends out his attack dog often. That's also known as Dick Cheney."
I've never really decided how best to refer to the vice president. I've called him everything from the chief crony, Assistant Maximum Leader and the oily conman to the wayward shooter, Cheney Boy and Mr. Sourpuss. But this settles it. Henceforth he will be called Attack Dog.
Posted by jherman at 10:04 AM
April 23, 2007
Bulletin From Harm's Way
Statements made by the chain of command [during an investigation of the Haditha killings] suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to "get the job" done no matter what it takes.
The killings in Haditha, in Anbar Province, began with a roadside bombing that killed one American marine and wounded two. Several marines then began methodically killing civilians in the area, eventually going door to door in the village and killing women and children, some in their beds, according to a Naval criminal investigation.
So don't forget to do the patriotic thing: Support the troops.
Postscript: A reader writes:
Yes, the linked mainstream media reports about the military investigation deflate the "support our troops" propaganda, at least in part, by showing that a tiny fraction -- a few rogue Marines -- have behaved like murderers. But at the same time another propaganda tactic seems to be presented, which banalizes evil under the guise of journalistic neutrality.The reports leave the impression we are concerned with justice when, in fact, we're engaged in an unjust war in Iraq that, along with an embargo, has killed around a million people and has so thoroughly decimated the country that the effects will last for a century.
But America's mainstream media never (or rarely ever) publishes articles that mention, much less discuss in detail, that several of our highest leaders are seen as war criminals by many, many very reasonable people throughout the world. It is just some rogue Marines killing 24 Iraqi civilians. Glad to see the media has its priorities straight.
Posted by jherman at 8:05 AM
April 20, 2007
Dummied Up
Is it any surprise the ventriloquist's dummy had so many memory lapses? Or that the President With His Head Up His Ass let it be known he was pleased with the dummy's testimony? Of course not. Nobody is fooled. Certainly not the news photographers who covered the hearing, Don Mills among them.
Meantime, John McCain offered his quippy version of truth on the campaign trail in South Carolina. "Remember that old Beach Boys song 'Bomb Iran'?" he joked, in answer to a question about sending "an airmail message" to Teheran. "Bomb, bomb, bomb," he sang, aping the song "Barbara Ann."
As The Wall Street Journal said last week in "McCain's Finest Hour," an adoring editorial defending his support for the war escalation in Iraq, "he has demonstrated that his views on the subject are serious and born of belief, not of polls."
Uh-uh.
We are supposed to measure McCain by the seriousness of his belief, not by the empirical reality of Prez Huha's so-called "surge." As if "belief" exempts McCain from the stupidity he shares with Huha, let alone the cynicism of overweening political ambition.
Postscript: Moveon.org has just put out an apt video ad: Bomb Iran. Bomb. Bomb. Bomb.
Posted by jherman at 8:46 AM
April 16, 2007
It's All in the Clicks
Be a good citizen and don't forget: The deadline nears for "la machina de guerra," as a friend puts it. This is what he means, of course.
Another essential click is this equation from James Fallows: Wolfowitz = Swaggart, chap. 1.
Posted by jherman at 5:27 PM
April 6, 2007
Eptitudes
This image -- received from a reader who writes, "I am surprised, too!" -- has been making the rounds of the Internet for a long time as a theme with variations (and in many iterations from left, right, and elsewhere):
Although we know what it means, the caption does not parse. It's grammatically inept. But -- I'm switching gears here -- Sam Zell's grammatically ept "I've never read online" also fails to parse and is truly scary, given his winning bid for the Tribune media company.
Since I'm parsing, have you read the LA Times drama critic Charles McNulty lately? Here's what he wrote the other day: "Redgrave honors this journey not by mimicking it but by processing it through her own sublimely empathic instrument." Whoa! The Times would be doing its readers a service by processing empathetically inflated criticspeak like that through a flapdoodle strainer.
Postscript: April 7 -- And now for a caption that parses all too well:
Posted by jherman at 9:28 AM
April 3, 2007
'Ten-Forty'
Sometimes a magazine cover is perfect. This one, by Christoph Neimann, nails it.
Click that thang.
Posted by jherman at 2:02 PM
April 2, 2007
Corporate Artists
Remember when Jay Critchley was blowin' in the wind with his proposal for "Martucket Eyeland,'' a Disneyfied Vegas-style Resort & Theme Park in Nantucket Sound? It was designed to help scuttle the plan for an offshore wind farm of 130 giant wind turbines, each taller than the Statue of Liberty, to stretch across roughly 25 square miles of the Sound from Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. And scuttled it was. Or so it was thought. Well, a year later the wind farm is back.
So is Critchley. Only this time he's up to no good with a new twist on an old project: "TransAmerica -- Condoms with a Conscience." It's part of an exhibition, Corporate Art Expo '07, at THE LAB in San Francisco featuring artists who, in the curator's words, "package themselves as corporate entities" with "whimsical" (read: subversive) agendas.
The exhibition includes Critchley's 3-foot scale model of the TransAmerica Building made out of condom boxes with the logo of his patriotically named Old Glory Condoms Corporation on them. The condoms are imprinted with an American flag. Company motto: Worn with pride country-wide.
Critchley says he wants "to initiate a public dialogue on the role of global corporations in the fight against HIV/AIDS."
As Shane Montgomery, who curated the show, puts it (in corporate-style artspeak, naturally):
Over the last few years, a new group of artists have emerged that package themselves as corporate entities. They develop a company name, a branding scheme, and utilize the language of advertising and marketing. These individual artists and collectives create art objects, marketing materials, and performative event-based pieces that can exist in a gallery setting as well as in the public sphere. Much of this work centers around issues of capitalism and consumerism. By putting this work within the context of fictional products or alternative services, we are able to engage in a more enhanced conversation around topics ranging from globalization, immigration reform, and health care in a way that is whimsical and visually inspiring.
Other artists in the show include the Anti-Advertising Agency, Acclair, C5 Corporation, Davis & Davis Research, Meaning Maker, My Death and Taxes, PP Valise, SubRosa, Slop Art, TDirt, Tectonic Corporation, and We Are War. Among the products on exhibit are "psychological prosthetics, self-help services, psycho-geographic mapping, research and development services, neurotransmitter security services, safety educational materials, and product placement services."
Sidebar
"Old Glory was launched in 1989 at MIT List Visual Arts Center," Critchley writes in a press release. "[It was] inspired by Bush I and the US Congress' attempt to amend the Constitution to ban flag desecration, and the invisibility of HIV/AIDS in the government. Although I had often utilized the corporate structure to create a media platform for ideas and interventions, Old Glory was the real thing -- shareholders and marketable products."
He continues:
My strategy was to challenge the government's silence and redefine patriotism -- it's patriotic to protect and save lives. My US Trademark application was rejected as "immoral and scandalous to associate the flag with sex," but the Center for Constitutional Rights' lawyer, David Cole, represented me pro bono, and we won a three-year legal battle. As a business, it was less successful because the FDA did not approve multi-colored condoms − over concern for the effect of inks on latex. Our successful Latex is 4 Lovers campaign brought attention to lambskin condoms' ineffective prevention of HIV transmission. Senator Jesse Helms, ironically, created the first global safer sex ad, holding up the Old Glory logo in the Senate on CNN, denouncing the trademark designation. Old Glory is now in standard law school textbooks on trademark, copyright and patent law. Long May It Wave.
Hail to the condom.
Posted by jherman at 10:18 AM
March 31, 2007
The Article Speaks for Itself
Here's one of those Wall Street Journal frontpagers that ought to be required reading for its editorial board: "The Conscience of the Colonel," by Jess Bravin. It's about a military prosecutor with a deeply personal reason to seek the conviction of a Gitmo prisoner connected to 9/11 and an even deeper reason not to prosecute him.
The prosecutor's "old Marine buddy, Michael 'Rocks' Horrocks, was co-pilot on United 175, the second plane to strike the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001," Bravin writes. "The prisoner in question, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, had already been suspected of terrorist activity. After the attacks, he was fingered by a senior al Qaeda operative for helping assemble the so-called Hamburg cell, which included the hijacker who piloted United 175 into the South Tower. To Col. Couch, Mr. Slahi seemed a likely candidate for the death penalty."
"Of the cases I had seen, he was the one with the most blood on his hands," Col. Couch says.But, nine months later, in what he calls the toughest decision of his military career, Col. Couch refused to proceed with the Slahi prosecution. The reason: He concluded that Mr. Slahi's incriminating statements -- the core of the government's case -- had been taken through torture, rendering them inadmissible under U.S. and international law.
The Slahi case marks a rare instance of a military prosecutor refusing to bring charges because he thought evidence was tainted by torture.
It's too bad Bravin's reporting legitimizes a newspaper whose editorial writers and columnists refuse to believe the work of the paper's own news staffers like him.
Go read his article on online. I wouldn't bet on it, but the link is supposed to be available to non-subscribers for the next seven days, along with links to "key documents." This one, for instance. (If you click and can't get more than a summary of the story and/or the linked document, it's because The Journal has locked you out, despite advertising the freebie.)
Postscript: William Osborne writes, "Good point. ('It's too bad Bravin's reporting legitimizes a newspaper whose editorial writers and columnists refuse to believe the work of the paper's own news staffers like him.')" He continues:
What is so amazingly clever about these big papers is that the propaganda is never based on a single article. Instead, a Gestalt of articles is created serving different purposes that all work together: articles with false information and analysis; articles to establish false alibis; articles to create the false impression of balance and impartiality; articles to distract people from the truth hidden in plain sight; and articles banalizing immoral or unethical actions in order to inure the readers to their wrongness. Often the writing is very subtly specious.It is only through all of these methods placed along side each other and in sequence, then repeated over and over, that true propaganda is created. And the motive? It takes little more than being allowed into the circle of big-foot reporters with full knowledge that status will be lost if they cross certain lines. There are a lot of views and approaches, but all guided into an isomorphic stance shaped by big money. People will naturally circle around the Golden Calf, and it will eventually shape their view of reality.
There is more to it -- and there are exceptions like Bravin's (whose work, in any case, is put to use for the Gestalt) -- but at least that much I can see.
Speaking of the pressure to conform: The author of the V.I. Warshawski novels, Sara Paretsky, who has a collection of essays, "Writing in an Age of Silence," due out this month, recalls her chilling experience in today's Chicago Tribune.
The night we began our invasion of Iraq -- March 20, 2003 -- I was speaking at the Toledo public library. The day before, my speakers bureau told me that the library wanted me to change my proposed remarks; my talk on how the Patriot Act was affecting writers, readers and libraries was too political. The library wanted instead the kind of humorous anecdotes that other writers used. With war imminent, the library felt that a criticism of the Bush administration was an insult to local families who had relatives in the service.
Haven't we had enough of our BananaRepublic-cum-President With His Head Up His Ass?
Posted by jherman at 12:01 PM
March 29, 2007
The Invitation Speaks for Itself
(Mouse over it for details, and click for Emmett.)
Posted by jherman at 2:14 PM
March 22, 2007
March Madness
This was the week to remember the invasion of Iraq and the climate of opinion four years ago, per "The Ides of March, 2003." Can't let it pass without recalling what I posted at the time on MSNBC.com, links included. (Miracle of miracles, many still work).
Looking back, I see the posts are very tame. I tried not to be, but I knew I could go only so far. Most of the stuff did not sit well with certain company-minded bosses to whom I reported. I was never asked to take a particular point of view, but I was called on the carpet for the viewpoint I took. They wanted me to stick strictly to entertainment commentary without harping on the war or emphasizing antiwar views.
March 13, 2003 / 12:59 p.m. ETThe case for war branding: Selling war to the public depends on branding. Well-branded wars include the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I and World War II. Poorly branded wars are losing or less-than-winning propositions. They include the War of 1812, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War.
Is this nutty thinking or what? If you answered "or what?" you would make Tracey Riese, 46, a happy branding warrior.
"As we move daily closer to war in Iraq, President Bush might benefit from examining how America has branded major wars in the past -- and how each branding strategy contributed to the outcome," says Riese, whose corporate clients have included Revlon and RJR Nabisco, Scholastic Inc. and Schwab.
Her notion of war branding sounds like commodified propaganda. And in our society, commodification is the way to go. But Riese says "the process of branding is the opposite of commodification. It's the opposite of sloganizing. It's finding the true meaning of things. It's not about finding a snappy slogan for war."
She says, "Really great branding connects the product, if you will, with some very powerful emotional need on the part of the people who must pay for it or who you want to pay for it."
For instance, the War for Independence was transformed from a contest between a colony and a great power into a struggle for "liberty" by enlightened citizens. The brand went global as France picked up the idea and went to war in 1789 for "liberté, fraternité, égalité." That's strong branding.
"Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death was a fancy rhetorical point," Riese says. "But it was not just sloganizing. It had an underlying meaning. In the face of war, citizens are asked to pay the highest price. And so they need to make a fundamental connection to the purpose of any war."
The American Civil War began as a struggle between two economic systems over constitutional rights. But it took on new meaning -- and vigor -- when Lincoln was able to characterize it as a battle for the soul of a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Strong branding.
World War I, the tragic, outsized result of a series of petty miscalculations, was redeemed when Wilson transformed it into the "War to End All Wars." Strong branding.
World War II became a moral test of humanity. So pervasive was that brand that it was reflected even in the post-war peace, when the victors revitalized their former enemies and laid the foundation for the modern global economy and the growth of democracy. Its later characterization as "the good war" was strong branding, too.
By contrast, she says, calling the Gulf War Operation Desert Shield and then Desert Storm was "just creating a name or logo. That's an expression of the brand that isn't the brand itself. The underlying meaning was that it was not really war, that it was nothing for anyone to worry about. It was just a military operation. The administration wanted to create the sense that it would all be over in no time." Weak branding.
So what about President Bush's "axis of evil" slogan? And what about the expensive set now being built in the desert by the military for branded TV press briefings? A no-brainer."Right now the brand the administration has established in the minds of Americans and in the global community -- whether it meant to or not -- is that war in Iraq is an American prerogative," Riese says. "We are threatened, and we do not have to be threatened, and so we are going to eliminate a threat to us, regardless of how it affects others. That's the brand."
Full disclosure: Riese also gives branding advice to the World Wildlife Fund. In some quarters that would mean she's a tree hugger.March 14, 2003 / 1:28 p.m. ET
George Bush and Humphrey Bogart: I've been trying to find the apt movie metaphor that evokes the reality of President Bush, and now I've finally got it: "Capt. Queeg." I wish I had thought of it myself, but it's Paul Krugman who came up with it this morning for the title of his column: "George W. Queeg."
The reference, of course, is to Capt. Philip Francis Queeg, the tough-talking, ship-shaping, mind-boggling, nervous-making Navy martinet that Humphrey Bogart played so perfectly against type in the 1954 movie "The Caine Mutiny."
"Aboard the U.S.S. Caine," Krugman writes, "it was the business with the strawberries that finally convinced the doubters that something was amiss with the captain. Is foreign policy George W. Bush's quart of strawberries?"
If you've never seen the movie, you must. It's based on Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and it gives us Bogart's last great role. (He died of cancer three years later. He also lost the best-actor Oscar to Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront," which aced "Mutiny" for best picture.)
You've got to read Krugman's column, too. It's the best summary I've read about the U.S. commander-in-chief's strange command. By his account, Bush is a Capt. Queeg for our time.
And just to be even-handed, here's a very different sort of opinion: the rambling but impassioned Oriana Fallaci's thoughts on the eve of battle. Which is not to say that she's confident of Bush's leadership either.
Finally, a poem by Robert Creeley, called "Help!" It reads like rap, which is totally uncharacteristic of his poetry. This is the way it begins:
Help's easy enough
If it comes in time.
Nothing's that hard
If you want to rhyme.
It's when they shoot you
It can hurt,
When the bombs blast off
And you're gone with a squirt.
Sitting in a bunker,
Feeling blue?
Don't be a loser,
It wasn't you--
Wasn't you wanted
To go kill people,
Wasn't you caused
All this trouble.
I can't say, Run!
And I can't say, Hide!
But I still feel
What I feel inside.March 17, 2003 / 7:43 a.m. ET
Norman Mailer nails it: Just when critics like Michiko Kakutani pretty much dismissed him as an old cuckoo, calling him a writer full of "wacky mumbo jumbo" who could barely cobble together his latest book, the old cuckoo has shined a clarifying light on the American dilemma and the "liberation" of Iraq.
In a powerful speech he gave recently in San Francisco, now published in the New York Review of Books, Mailer asserts: "Behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the Near East as a stepping stone to taking over the rest of the world. That is a big statement, but I can offer this much immediately: At the root of flag conservatism is not madness, but an undisclosed logic."
Read the article and see if you don't agree. Mailer offers straightforward thinking in plain language. His diagnosis of the dilemma as the Bush Administration's dream of an "American empire" may be more frightening than ancient Rome's worst nightmare, but it doesn't sound like "mumbo jumbo" to me.
(By the way, a note to all the folks who prefer to think of George W. Bush as Capt. Ahab rather than Capt. Queeg: That's giving Bush far too much stature.)March 17, 2003 / 4:53 p.m. ET
Turning the Chicks into Chickens? It took a lot of guts for the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines to say she was ashamed of the president of the United States. Foolish guts. And it would have been surprising, given the stakes for a group of platinum-selling superstars, if she hadn't apologized.
But the backlash against them -- pulling them from radio playlists -- is more than mere patriotic outrage. The indefatigable Eric Olsen, who's been following the latest pro- and anti-war stories from Nashville with keen attention, points out that there's been a concerted e-mail campaign orchestrated by "a radical right-wing online forum" to stoke the anger, manipulate the radio polls and pressure the Lipton company to drop its sponsorship of the Dixie Chicks' upcoming U.S. tour.
Do celebrities have a right to speak out on political issues? Should they? Do the media trivialize antiwar messages by providing a forum for celebrities? Media reporter David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times believes so. "We've paid too much attention to celebrity opposition to the war," he writes.
To correct the balance, my staff of thousands and I have taken a solemn vow to report on all the celebrities who favor war. Please help us carry on. Let us know when you hear of celebrities as famous and foolish as the Dixie Chicks going out of their way to praise the Bush team and war in Iraq. There's Charlie Daniels, Bruce Willis, Kid Rock and Dennis Miller. Do I hear more?March 18, 2003 / 4:43 p.m. ET
Martin Sheen strikes back: "The West Wing" star who plays fictional President Josiah Bartlet has written an Op-Ed piece, "A Celebrity, but First a Citizen," in the Los Angeles Times. With eloquence, he defends his right to speak out against war in Iraq.
"I am not the president; instead, I hold an even higher office, that of citizen of the United States," Sheen begins, in reply no doubt to a story the paper carried by LA Times staffer David Shaw that said the media pay too much attention to celebrities who oppose the war.
Sheen notes: "Although my opinion is not any more valuable or relevant merely because I am an actor, that fact does not render it unimportant. Some have suggested otherwise, trying to denigrate the validity of this opinion and those of my colleagues solely due to our celebrity status. This is insulting not only to us but to other people of conscience who love their country enough to risk its wrath by going against the grain of powerful government policy."
Yesterday, my staff of thousands and I took a solemn vow to report on all the celebrities who favor war -- just so we could right the balance that Shaw complained about.
Well, it turns out to be a burning issue. I've received hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, pro and con, about celebrity rights and the Dixie Chicks and famous people who've said this or that. I realize now that even with a staff of thousands I don't have time to fact-check the allegations. So here's a site where you can see for yourselves what some of Hollywood's famous have said, pro and con, about the war and about President Bush and his policies.March 19, 2003 / 10:37 a.m. ET
And now for the petitions: We've heard of famous Hollywood actors against the war (Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, Sean Penn, Jessica Lange, George Clooney), and we've heard of famous pop stars against the war (Sheryl Crow, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks and Barbra Streisand, of course), but what about famous writers against the war?
Well, writers tend not to be famous. But some of them are -- Stephen King, Russell Banks, Amy Tan, Richard Price, Jonathan Franzen -- and they, along with about 150 others, have signed a petition that says to President Bush:
"Iraq, while led by a tyrant, represents no clear and present danger to our shores. We therefore see no sufficient moral or historical justification for a pre-emptive war. ... As you yourself have noted, there are evildoers in this world. Let the United States not be one of them."
Of all people, writers who depend on precise language should know better than to use the term "pre-emptive war." Perhaps they can be excused because everybody's been using it, including President Bush, news reporters, pundits and even foreign-policy experts.
But the proper term is "preventive war." A "pre-emptive war" is undertaken to thwart an imminent attack. A "preventive war" is what we're about to see in Iraq. (I notice that Tom Friedman at last uses the correct term this morning in his "D-Day" column.
Bush has promoted the wrong term precisely because he has had to justify the urgency of an invasion. (It's also why Bush has always made clear that Iraq is a threat to other shores and wants to depose Saddam for that reason.)
Meanwhile, there's another online petition out here in cyberspace. Called "Support of the Dixie Chicks," it endorses the group's right to dissent from President Bush's style of diplomacy. Not many have signed it, only 126 people so far. Many more Dixie Chicks fans have e-mailed me in support of the group. I suspect the reason so few have signed is that they don't know of the petition or can't find it.
Postscript: Whaddya know. At this time -- 5:54 p.m. ET -- many more people have signed: 1,697 ... and counting.March 20, 2003 / 8:27 a.m. ET
When Bush comes to shove: The number of people who have signed the online petition supporting Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks and her right to dissent has climbed to 2,642. When we first posted the petition's address yesterday, the number was 126. So we may have helped people find the petition. We also may have flooded Hollywood on the March, a rightwing site that's been listing what actors have been saying for and against war. At the moment, the site is down. Possibly can't handle all the traffic.
A quick note: Amen to this morning's column by Bob Herbert. He writes: "Now that the U.S. strikes against Iraq have begun, we should get rid of one canard immediately, and that's the notion that criticism of the Bush administration and opposition to this invasion imply in some sense a lack of support or concern for the men and women who are under arms."March 24, 2003 / 9:52 a.m. ET
Oh! What a lovely Oscar war: The real suspense of Sunday night's Oscars was when or even whether the show would be interrupted by news of the invasion of Iraq and what, if anything, the stars would say about the war rather than what they would say about winning an Oscar.
For a long while, you might never have known there was a war at all -- except for Steve Martin's opening monologue. The Oscar producers ought to get down on their knees and thank him. As good as the show became -- only in part because of the classy production -- it would have died without him.
And let us all thank Adrien Brody for his stunning, unprepared remarks about the "sadness and dehumanization" of war. But let's also thank him for his sense of humor, not to mention his wonderful grace under pressure. Before Brody ever got to his serious remarks, he reacted with charming wit to his surprise at winning the best-actor Oscar. "There comes a time in life," he said, "when everything seems to make sense, and this is not one of those times."
Now, about Michael Moore's outburst. I'm all in favor of tasteless outbursts at the Oscars. They lend spice. Tom Shales disagrees. What I wonder, though, is whether the boos his remarks provoked were the result of anger at his lack of taste or disagreement with his political views. Or was it both?March 25, 2003 / 9:47 a.m. ET
Cheers, jeers and Michael Moore: Many readers hated my remarks about Michael Moore's remarks about President Bush. They would like me to take a hike (preferably off a high cliff). Of hundreds of e-mails, this one was typical:
Kelly Evitts
Atlanta
"Of course you agree with Moore. I only hope that when we get attacked, you and he are the first to go. Why don't you communists go over and join your 'human shield' friends. ... God bless our troops, our president, and if there is any justice in the world, let God turn his back on you, and your fat friend."
Here's one of the more pleasant jeers:
Jeff Curran
Oklahoma City
"Michael Moore? Michael less, please."
Some flat-out cheered:
Eduard Itor
Tampa, Fla.
"What Michael Moore did was brave and right."
One cheered with an explanation:
Sarah
Cleveland, Ohio
"Politically, I agree with Moore, too, but in terms of PR value, he's 'our side's' version of Rush Limbaugh: a self-congratulatory clown who behaves like a braying jackass in front of an audience."
Here's an e-mail exchange of March 20, as the U.S. invasion of Iraq began, with a thoughtful reader who doesn't like my views about the war:
Air Force TSgt. Gary J. Kunich
Kenosha, Wisc.
"I'll take it as a small victory for me that you allotted at least one paragraph to give a nod of support for the troops, even if you don't support the action in Iraq. Still think you're wrong, and your column really ticks me off, so begrudgingly, I guess that means you're doing your job.
"Speaking from my personal experience during Desert Storm, public support was very important to us. We were afraid it would change once that war started, and were grateful that the support for us -- and the war -- never wavered. But not everyone fighting this fight is able to see the 'support' through the smoke and noise of the protest. There definitely was no support for the troops when several celebrities and pseudo-politicians signed that full-page ad in the New York Times comparing our military to the terrorists.
"I -- and the majority of Americans according to several polls -- believe this to be a war to ensure our security. The war on terror cannot be summarized by just the face of Osama bin Laden. There are many facets, and this is but one of them. This isn't Vietnam. This isn't a gray area, or a murky quagmire. This is our only option. If you can add just one line in your column, add this on behalf of the U.S. military."
This was my reply:
"I appreciate your point, especially since you are speaking from personal experience. I worry about the safety of U.S. troops. I want them to win -- swiftly and with no loss of life or limb, if that is even possible -- because I, too, am an American who believes in the ideals this country was founded upon. But I fear the motives of our president. I do not believe that this nation should be ruled by Christian fundamentalism or by the imperial mandate of corporate power, both of which I believe is at the heart of the president's beliefs."
And here are words of warning: Though they were never intended as such, they ought to remind us of the perils we face not only from enemies who would destroy us but from leaders who would destroy our enemies.
"Why of course the people don't want war. ... That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Who said that? Hitler's accomplice, Hermann Goering (commander of the German Air Force and president of the Reichstag), at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals in 1946.
Postscript: For all you folks who think I'm making an implicit comparison between Hitler or Goering and President Bush, please put that out of your minds. I don't believe that for a minute. I'm merely using Goering's words to point out that people are too easily manipulated by leaders who are "good" and leaders who are "bad." People are too easily led, period.March 27, 2003 / 10:43 a.m. ET
Rock the protest: The war on the song front has heated up again, and it's not a confrontation over the Dixie Chicks. Lenny Kravitz has joined the battle with a song titled "We Want Peace." You can hear it or download it free at a get-out-the-vote Web site Rock the Vote.
One major critic describes the song as reaching down deep "for a funky, Middle Eastern-flavored ode to peace." What bothers this critic though, is that "it's by far the best song to address" the issue of war in Iraq. So why does it bother him? Because, he writes, it's "anti, and people, I am way pro!"
Critic Eric Olsen, who is also a radio DJ, a music historian and a relentless blogger, further objects that Rock the Vote -- which is dedicated to getting young people to participate in democracy -- is perverting its mission by taking sides on Iraq. He wonders whether the site would give equal time to "equally heartfelt, pro-liberation" songs by -- let's say -- Clint Black or Toby Keith, Darryl Worley and the Warren Brothers.
Olsen contends that the issue dividing Americans on Iraq should not be characterized as "pro-war vs. anti-war." His point is that both sides are pro-peace. When Rock the Vote's executive director states: "We hope the war will come to a swift conclusion with a minimum loss of human life and that we can move on to build a better future for the Iraqi people," Olsen counters: "Who doesn't agree with this?"
His formulation -- "pro-liberation vs. anti-war" -- smartly frames the issue with more nuance than "pro-war vs. anti-war." If it ignores the deeper issues dividing American public opinion, well, you can't expect a music critic-radioDJ-blogger to do what our clever leaders -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other geniuses leading the administration -- haven't done themselves, can you?
Meanwhile, Olsen is not the only blogger seeking some sort of middle ground in the war debate. Here's Ryan McGee, a Harvard smart aleck, prompted by a support-the-troops rally at Yale.March 27, 2003 / 12:36 p.m. ET
What is patriotism? Are we born with love of country? Is it written into our genes, having proved useful for survival from earliest times like a trait expressed through natural selection? Is it hard-wired into our brains like a universal grammar theorized by Noam Chomsky, simply waiting to be applied in specific languages? Is it wholly learned?
Writers, artists and philosophers have grappled with the issue of war and patriotism for centuries -- as a theme in poetry and novels (Tolstoy's "War and Peace"), as a pictorial force (George Washington Crossing the Delaware or The Flag-Raising on Iwo Jima), as a subject of academic inquiry and just this morning as a topic of debate in the media.
The secret of Rome's success, according to the Roman historian Livy, was its belief in the supremacy of country over family and -- just as important -- its ability to inculcate that belief in its citizens. "This, without question," Lee Harris writes in Policy Review, "was the steady drumbeat of Roman pedagogical legend, the unquestioned primacy of one's ethical obligation to the team, the origin of the specifically Western concept of patriotism."
Before that, the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes had challenged the idea of a narrow, that is to say, national patriotism. Reputedly, when anyone asked him where he came from, he said: "I am a citizen of the world."
The noted contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes: "Diogenes knew that the invitation to think as a world citizen was, in a sense, an invitation to be an exile from the comfort of patriotism and its easy sentiments, to see our own ways of life from the point of view of justice and the good. The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation.
"Recognizing this, his Stoic successors held, we should not allow differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings. We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect."
Where does that leave us today as American and British soldiers fight and die in Iraq and as Iraqis fight and die? Basically nowhere. Certainly not with definitive answers, not even with tentative ones.March 31, 2003 / 10:33 a.m. ET
This is patriotism: It's no secret that my staff of thousands and I receive a lot of e-mail messages. Some are more heartfelt than others, but I'd say that with few exceptions they're all sincere. On Friday, we asked the question: "What is patriotism?" Below are a dozen replies. Some are frightening, others reassuring, and still others fall in between. Which are which? We leave that to you.
Jim Nabors
Baltimore, Md.
"Patriotism is being WITH one's country, right or wrong, especially if the overwhelming majority of its citizens are in favor of the government's actions. It is NOT being a minority rebel-rouser who uses 'free speech' as a pretext for one's fringe political leanings against one's country or its leaders. The 'free-speech' argument is a crock, and is used by today's anti-government newspapers, news shows, and 'unpatriotic' low lifes who have no life."
R. Guerrero
San Lorenzo, Calif.
"I believe patriotism is developed and attained by the way in which the government of a nation treats its citizens."
David Maddux
McKinney, Texas
"I firmly support our president and our efforts to remove Saddam Hussein and his oppressive regime. We live in the most loving, caring country on the face of the earth as we have given billions of our tax dollars to help suffering humanity. I respect dissent done in a civil manner but when celebrities or anyone else start getting personal with our leaders, they cross the line of being 'un-American' in my view. For example, Michael Moore's comments at the Oscars. He was disgusting. My forefathers fought and died for his right to be 'disgusting' and my right to call him 'un-American.'"
Sandra Isaacs
Oak Park, Illinois
"I am not in favor of any government that chooses violence. I am a citizen of the world. I wave the flag of Mother Earth."
Brian Kiser
Macon, Ga.
"You quote Martha Nussbaum saying, 'We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect.' Should we not also recognize inhumanity in the same way? Wherever it occurs, should it not be worthy of our disdain and efforts to remove it from this world? Surely Saddam and his Baath party are guilty of some of the most inhuman crimes against his own people, yet those opposed to this war want to look away believing that the United States and its allies should not get involved. Thank God for President Bush and our brave military men and women who are willing to be true citizens of the Earth!"
John Smith
Heathsville, Va.
"Patriotism is loving your country and being willing to defend it. Our country was found on the principle: 'Don't tread on me!' Liberals would change all that. Liberals would allow terrorists and tyrants to overrun us in the name of peace. They prove that by insulting their president at a time of war, and protesting in the name of peace while throwing rocks at service men, beating up policemen, and collaborating with the enemy by not having enough sense to find out who is bankrolling their noble effort."
Michael Anthony
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
"True love of country -- especially a democratic one -- should embrace the concept of keeping that country true to its ideals, and holding its leaders accountable for upholding its founding principles. It is our patriotic duty to blow the whistle on an unprovoked, illegal and shamefully 'manufactured' war. If we love America we will try to keep her hands clean. If we cannot do that then at least we should remember we have dual citizenship -- we are also citizens of the world."
Daniel Hendriks
Chico, Calif.
"I think patriotism is good when you are rooting for your team in the World Cup, but when it comes to a war without support from the U.N. I question my love not for this country as a whole but I question my trust in the government. This whole situation is too fishy for me. ... I will be able to vote come next election and if George Bush gets re-elected I will move to Holland and not come back until a Democrat is in office."
Letitia Little
Bartlett
"We are as one. That's why we are in Iraq. Justice and Freedom for all, is the key. We cannot stand back and allow a government destroy innocent people. And the manner that these people murder is like nothing I've ever heard of before and everything I've ever feared. While I do believe we should have done this long ago (1991) we are where we are. Let's get the job done and get our boys and girls home."
Bob Johnson
"We ARE recognizing humanity as it occurs in Iraq. And we are also recognizing man's inhumanity to man and trying to stop it. After World War II, Harry Truman said, 'We need to build a better world.' We can help to build a better world for the oppressed people in Iraq. That is something that makes a lot of us proud to be Americans."
Tanya D. June
Troy, N.Y.
"Are we going to war with North Korea -- because of lack of disarmament? NO
"Are we going to war with Saudi Arabia -- because of connections to terrorists? NO
"Are we going to war with Iraq -- because he tried to kill our president's daddy? YES
"Have we secured our homeland from future terrorist attacks? NO
"Have we left our men in Afghanistan more vulnerable? YES
"I am a proud Trojan. Because I am an African-American I see our country's values much differently. We are a 226-year-old country trying to tell countries that existed for thousands of years how to live their lives -- when our civil rights movements is barely 40 years old.
"Did we get freedom from the Revolutionary War? NO.
"Did we get freedom after our Civil War? NO.
"Did anything change after we fought in both World War I and II? NO.
"I think our government is so hypocritical. Thank you for giving me a forum to express my views."
Linda C. Strain
Tucson, Ariz.
"I am an American Citizen. Bred, born and reared here in this country. Some of my people were here to greet some of my people on the Mayflower. I love my country, and, yes would give my life for this country and it's people. But I also consider myself a world citizen, and care greatly what happens to my sisters and brothers in other parts of this world.
"The Iraqi leadership was not only a threat to it's own people, but to all of us everywhere. We need to be there, and the rest of the world needs to be there too. It's not about Islam, and it's not about oil. It's about the right of everyone to be able to live and speak freely about their own country and government without fear of reprisal. We are getting rid of a world threat.
"Do I like war? No indeed. Everyone in my family has always served this country from the Revolution to the Gulf War. I considered it an honor, even if I couldn't be sent to the front lines [at that time] because of gender. I still felt obligated to wear the uniform -- for my country and my people, not the government. I still feel that way, and wished I were younger so I could join up. I am flag-waver, tree-hugger, and I break for butterflies."March 31, 2003 / 2:41 p.m. ET
This is satire: We've heard anti-war songs from Lenny Kravitz ("We Want Peace") and from The Beastie Boys ("In a World Gone Mad"). Here, direct from England, is the latest entry: a Bush-Blair duet, "Read My Lips." It's also the funniest.
As I said, pretty tame stuff. But it's not difficult to understand what bothered my company-minded bosses. The MSNBC cable channel, our corporate sister, was veering to the right. Phil Donahue had been fired several weeks earlier, on Feb. 23, ostensibly for poor ratings but really for being antiwar and anti-Bush. If Donahue could be fired, so could they. (And of course so could I.) Paradoxically, the popularity of the blog was cause for concern. It drew tens of thousands of hits on any given day, as many as 500,000 on its best day. This would have thrilled my bosses ordinarily, but not under the circumstances
Posted by jherman at 12:18 PM
March 20, 2007
Playwright Sends a Letter: Tenenbom vs. The Times
First he took on the Polish government, which claims he's stereotyping Poles as anti-Semites, a charge he denies. Now he's taking on a bigger fish -- The New York Times, which has declined to review his play.
In an open letter to news media, Tuvia Tenenbom accuses The Times of doing "the Polish government's bidding ... by refusing to allow Times critics to review 'Last Jew in Europe.'" The play opened last week in an off-Broadway theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
The letter also calls for the firing of the recently appointed chief of The Times theater department, Rick Lyman, whom Tenenbom deems responsible for "censorship by omission" and an attempt to "stifle free speech."
I phoned Lyman for his response. He declined to comment, referred me to The Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis, and hung up on me in mid-sentence. She was unavailable. (See PPS, below.)
Several major European newspapers and magazines have written about the play, in largely laudatory terms, including the top German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel ("Das Drama mit dem Antisemitismus"), the Frankfurt daily Frankfurter Rundschau ("Tuvia & Erika"), and Italy's most respected daily Corriere della Sera ("Teatro d'accusa").
"It never occurred to us that The New York Times would join with anti-Semites so easily," Tenenbom writes. "We did not ask for a 'good' review; all we asked for was that this important project not be ignored." He contends that the paper's unwillingness to write about the play is a "slap in the face on an issue of utmost concern to millions of American Jews, many of whom are faithful readers of the Times." The paper has covered other plays of his.
Full disclosure: I reviewed the play last week.
Further intelligence: Princeton University professor Jan T. Gross, the author of "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation" and "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland," will participate in a post-show panel discussion with the author Thane Rosenbaum, who teaches human rights law at Fordham University Law School, on March 27 at The Triad Theater, where "Last Jew in Europe" is being produced. (A spokesman for the Church of Latter-Day Saints who was to participate has dropped out.)
Here is Tenenbom's letter in full:
For Immediate Release The JTNY, 212.494.0050The Jewish Theater of New York calls on The New York Times to Remove Rick Lyman from his new post of Theater Editor.
The Polish government, using its embassy in Washington D.C. and its Consulate General in New York, is investing resources and time in order to discredit our new show, LAST JEW IN EUROPE. According to the Polish government the show, which uses authentic documentary materials to illuminate the newly resurgent anti-Semitism in the heart of modern-day Europe, could "create a set of negative emotions" in American Jews towards Poland. To prevent this from happening, they urge our theater not to use the documentary materials we collected while in Poland. If we fail to do so, they insinuate, we are "racist." This bizarre intervention by a foreign government in the affairs of an American theater should not be allowed to succeed and will not; we will continue to present our show. However, we are shocked to learn that the Theater Department of the New York Times, under the new leadership of Mr. Rick Lyman, decided to do the Polish government's bidding and do its share to kill the show by refusing to allow Times' critics to review LAST JEW IN EUROPE. This slap in the face on an issue of utmost concern to millions of American Jews, many of whom are faithful readers of the Times, was so important to Mr. Lyman that he issued his order on the second day on the job. To achieve this dubious goal, Mr. Lyman and some of the administrators in the Theater Department engaged in outright lies while speaking to our Artistic Director, Mr. Tuvia Tenenbom.
After being notified that "we'll pass on reviewing" the LAST JEW IN EUROPE because "not one of our critics wants to review" the show, Mr. Tenenbom personally called a few critics. They flatly denied that they ever refused to review the show and claimed that they were not given the opportunity to do so by Mr. Lyman; in addition, they expressed their own opinion that LAST JEW IN EUROPE should indeed be reviewed. Some even asked Mr. Lyman to change his mind, but he refused. Mr. Tenenbom also spoke with Ms. Patricia Cohen, the Theater Editor prior to March 1, 2007 and was told by her that this was "Rick's decision; I can't do anything about it, I'm no longer the editor." But Rick Lyman is not Patricia Cohen. In an angry and uncontrolled outburst that followed days later, Mr. Lyman told our Artistic Director that since the "last two reviews by the Times were negative, we won't review your theater this year."
Commenting on this patently lame excuse, Mr. Tenenbom said: "His words were so strange that my ears could hardly tolerate listening to him. This is not about "good" reviews, this is about abhorring censorship. In our theater we regularly deal with sensitive political issues, where the chance of negative review is higher. We understand it, and we never complained about a bad review; why does he? We are the only English-speaking Jewish theater in the city, all the others closed down years ago. What does he want, to close us down as well?"
What the New York Times is doing in this case is censorship by omission as it tries to stifle free speech. It never occurred to us that The New York Times would join with anti-Semites so easily. We did not ask for a "good" review; all we asked for was that this important project not be ignored. But after more than a decade of continuous coverage by the Times, this new editor flexes his muscles, aided by outrageous lies, and all-too-gladly joins racist censors of the Polish government.
We understand the risk we take by making this story public. After all, the Times' Theater Department is the unquestionable lodestone of most theater people in this city. But we cannot be silent in the face of rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the New York Times' attempts to keep it out of the public awareness. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe should not, and will not, be kept a secret from millions of New Yorkers just because of one man.
The New York Times, due to its enormous influence, has obligations to the public that it must meet. If it refuses to do so, it is our obligation to make this story public. It is our belief that if the New York Times wants to be a liberal paper it should never support either racism or censorship.
LAST JEW IN EUROPE was just recently reviewed by some of the most prestigious publications in Europe. The New York Times can do no less. It is a well known fact that during WWII the New York Times wrote as little as possible about the horrors that befell the Jews during the Holocaust. Indeed, the outstanding order at the time was not to have Holocaust stories on the front pages. Is the New York Times returning to the same patterns? Is every mistake bound to repeat itself?
We hope that our call won't be a voice calling in the wilderness and that the top echelon of the Times will rise to the occasion and either fire Mr. Lyman or revoke his boycott of our show immediately. We also urge the other critics in our city to not follow Mr. Lyman's example. If one man chooses to be blind, the rest of you are still allowed to open your eyes and see. Judge for yourselves. Judge us harshly if you wish, but judge us!
With hope for better times to come,
The Jewish Theater of New York
Postscript: A reader writes, "I guess Lyman picked up on Clive's take on totgeschwiegen and put it to use."
Here's the reader's reference, from an item called GERMAN LESSONS in Dwight Garner's column in The New York Times Book Review of March 11, 2007:
Leave it to Clive James, the London-based critic and poet -- his new book, ''Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts,'' is due out any minute -- to remind us that the Germans have yet another useful word Americans should be more familiar with. It is totgeschwiegen, which James defines this way: ''Killed by not being mentioned.''
PPS: Sam Sifton, culture editor of The Times, replied in an email late this afternoon to my request for a response. He wrote:
The New York Times has by no means decided not to review shows put on by The Jewish Theater of New York. Instead, we are adopting the same policy that we use when evaluating which books to review, or musical performances (or recordings), or art shows, or restaurants. There's simply no room for them all. And in this instance the editors have decided to take a pass.
Moving right along: A reader writes, "Yes, I have seen how things can be totgeschwiegen in the NYT -- like the half a million people protesting the Iraq War in NYC before the war began."
Posted by jherman at 11:25 AM
March 19, 2007
Obamarama
Text, subtext and context, David Ehrenstein's op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times is cultural critiquing at its finest -- the best I've read to date about Barack Obama. It begins:
As every carbon-based life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. ... But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination -- the "Magic Negro."
And it ends:
Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.
In between, Ehrenstein provides substantial insight based on evidence drawn from Hollywood trivia that few cultural critics have the expertise to marshall and fewer still would know how to apply to matters of race and politics.
Posted by jherman at 12:08 PM
Collateral Damage
Katrina vanden Heuvel writes: "Jan -- Enjoyed your post this Sunday." Nice of her to say so. But here's the real import of her message:
The WashPost editorial page is beyond the pale at this stage not only on Iraq, but on fundamental issues of justice. A week or so ago it was attacking efforts to strengthen the right to organize among workers in this country; then it dismissed the Libby verdict; and on Russia, it crusades with a vengeful hypocrisy.
Vanden Heuvel, who is the editor and publisher of The Nation, also sent her Sunday piece "End the War (On Terror)," the latest entry in her blog Editor's Cut. It marks the fourth anniversary of "America's war against Iraq" as a "time to consider the longterm damage [of] the misconceived 'war on terrorism.'"
BananaRepublicans will accuse her of "mandating failure" of course -- as if they have any right to preach about success -- but it's just another of their galling pet phrases (like "micromanaging the war") to deflect attention from their own arrogance and incompetence.
She writes:
Eventually US troops will leave Iraq because the brutal facts on the ground will compel it. But even as we struggle to get out of this failed war, our political system continues to evade the challenge of finding an exit from the "war on terror." At a time when we need a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine and an alternative vision of what this country's role in the world should be, we see both parties calling for intensifying the "war on terror" -- even for increasing the size of the military, and for expanding its ability to go places and do things. But who is asking the fundamental question: Won't a war without end do more to weaken our security and democracy than seriously address the threats and challenges ahead?Witness the collateral damage to our democracy. This Administration has used the "war" as justification for almost anything -- unlawful spying on Americans, illegal detention policies, hyper-secrecy, equating dissent with disloyalty and condoning torture.
The Administration has also justified the expansion of America's military capacity -- over 700 bases in more than 60 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion -- as necessary to counter the threat of Islamic extremism and to fight the "war on terror." What too few politicians are willing to say is that combating terrorism -- a brutal, horrifying tactic -- is not a "war" and that military action is the wrong weapon. Illegality and immorality aside, it simply doesn't succeed. Yes, terrorism does pose a threat to national and international security that can never be eliminated. But there are far more effective (and ethical) ways to advance US security than a forward-based and military-heavy strategy of intrusion into the Islamic world. Indeed, the failed Iraq war demonstrated anew the limits of military power.
Amen, sister.
Postscript: Gary Hart weighs in.
Posted by jherman at 8:59 AM
March 18, 2007
Lessons Four Years After? What Lessons?
A friend who deals in matters of national security writes: "All the major newspapers seem to have a common, inexplicable blind spot in discussing the war in Iraq, which I find very disturbing because it obfuscates the fundamental failures, their nature, and their cause." The most recent example is today's editorial, "Lessons of War," in The Washington Post:
Clearly we were insufficiently skeptical of intelligence reports. It would almost be comforting if Mr. Bush had "lied the nation into war," as is frequently charged. The best postwar journalism instead suggests that the president and his administration exaggerated, cherry-picked and simplified but fundamentally believed -- as did the CIA -- the catastrophically wrong case that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented to the United Nations [emphasis added].
In fact, "many high-level, very experienced career CIA people not only did not believe the stuff, but knew it was wrong," my correspondent notes. "The same is true at State and the Pentagon. The believers were the political appointees -- the agency or department bosses and therefore their unimpeachable mouthpieces, the bosses' immediate staffs, and the upward-bound opportunists. Why should but fundamentally believed even be in the sentence? The core failure at CIA, State, and Defense is that the facts were side-tracked and those who knew them and would speak them were muzzled."
Amen, brother.
Postscript: Furthermore, "take Powell's function as a mouthpiece: An Army four star who does not even suspect that the 'mobile bio-weapons labs' might be just hydrogen generators for inflating artillery weather balloons -- if anything at all? Even though our own Army has them? Even when the intelligence source is Curveball and only Curveball -- whom the CIA knew at the time to be a fabricator? I often wonder whether the editors read their own papers."
Worse, do the editors read their own papers and either 1) not care or 2) choose, for any number of reasons, to act as mouthpieces themselves?
Posted by jherman at 10:41 AM
March 15, 2007
It's Pantheonic
Something else to turn your stomach: The Waverly Inn in the West Village -- Manhattan's "latest clubhouse to the rich and famous under the direction of its host-with-the-mostest, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter" -- where a $50,000 mural by Edward Sorel features caricatures of Anaïs Nin, e.e. cummings, Jackson Pollock, Bob Dylan, William S. Burroughs, Eugene O'Neill, etc. But the actual caricatures are the host and his rich-and-famous customers.
Posted by jherman at 8:38 AM
March 14, 2007
More VD
It was two months ago that the Ventriloquist Dummy claimed "good management" to justify the Justice Department's political purge of federal prosecutors. Now that his excuse has been exposed as one more Orwellian lie in a cynical grab for power by the BananaRepublic's very own President With His Head Up His Ass, the VD's nonconfession that "mistakes were made" reminds me of The Pure Malarkey of Softspeak and his Tortured Testimony in January of 2005.
Posted by jherman at 9:00 AM
March 12, 2007
No Polish Joke -- It's Ecumenical
The government of Poland objects to "Last Jew in Europe," a play by Tuvia Tenenbom that documents and then satirizes the anti-Semitism still visibly thriving in Lodz, the country's second-largest city, a half-century after the Holocaust. Staged with the simplified power of a cartoon, "Last Jew" puts Polish anti-Semites on trial by ridicule. No wonder the government protests.
Self-hating Jews are not spared, either. And Mormons are also likely to be upset when they get wind of the show, which opened Sunday at The Triad Theater in Manhattan. A young Utah missionary from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a central figure in the action. He arrives in Lodz seeking the names of Jews buried in the local cemetery so he can have them baptized -- retroactively. ("Why is he interested in dead Jews?" "I heard they have a law in America to recycle everything.")
The plot revolves around the wedding plans of a butcher's daughter and a morgue pathologist's son. She's a hot young thing who drinks like a sailor and moves like a go-go dancer. Her father is a pastor in the Crucified Church of Christ in Christ. Her fiancé is a Jew, or so he thinks. And of course he's a klutz. The Mormon interloper complicates the couple's plans. Like it or not, "Last Jew in Europe" is the theatrical equivalent of a graphic novel. (More sample dialogue: "Americans know everything. They have good satellites.")
Tenenbom's outrageously comical take on anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred is a long way from the somber vision of Art Spiegelman's in "Maus," for instance. But Tenenbom, the provocateur, is no less serious in his grim estimate of human nature. He says he based the play partly on "a real story," partly on his own travels in Poland, and partly on the "rampant" anti-Semitic graffiti he saw everywhere in Lodz.
Fire did not engulf the stage, as promised in a press release, and the spectacle of crosses with "crucified young females nailed onto them" also failed to materialize. But they weren't needed. As performed by an enthusiastic troupe, "Last Jew" easily made its point without having to go any further over the top.
Produced by The Jewish Theater of New York in association with Peter Martin. Directed by Tuvia Tenenbom and Andreas Robertz. With Bill Barnett (Papa Jocka), Lila Donnolo (Maria), Michal Gregorewski (Dr. Kweczke), Caba S. Lucas (Józef), Aleksandra Popov (Zbrodzka) and Daniel Shafer (John Jay Smith). At The Triad Theater, 158 W. 72nd St., NYC (btwn. Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.) Performances: Sun. (3:00 p.m.); Mon. and Tues. ( 7:00 p.m.) No show on March 12. Open-ended run. Tickets: $55. Available online or by phone: (212) 352-3101.
Posted by jherman at 1:07 PM
March 7, 2007
Fisk's Prize 'Flak Jacket'
So much happens when Straight Up's staff of thousands leaves town. Here's something else that happened. We regret not being there. It isn't everyday that Robert Fisk picks up a Freedom Prize worth $350,000.
But we caught up with him by proxy on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman asked him in an interview to explain why he considered the prize as "important as a flak jacket." She said that's what he'd told the crowd at Town Hall in Manhattan, where the award ceremony was held Saturday.
Fisk, if you don't already know, is the veteran Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London, and the author of several books, including "The Great War for Civilisation" (see Postscript, below*) and "Pity the Nation."
He had much to say worth hearing, as usual. Speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, he noted:
[T]his is the first war I've ever covered in which the leadership in the West bases its policies on its own lies. I mean, it's one thing to lie to the people, and then you have your own policy of how to pursue a war, but to pursue the war on the basis of the lies you're telling the people, this is an entirely new concept in war and strategy in foreign policy. I've never seen it before.
Goodman's interview aired on Monday, the same day that USA Today's top front-page story was headlined "Iraq ousts 10,000 in security ministry." Coincidentally, a manufacturer of armor-plating for U.S. military vehicles in Iraq pointed out the headline to me. He believed the news was a good sign perhaps of better things to come. Anybody who has read Fisk would understand why it isn't. Here's one of the things he said to Goodman:
[W]ho is funding the interior ministry militiamen who are murdering people? The interior ministry is funded by us. We use local gunmen and murderers to do our job for us and save our soldiers' lives, not very successfully, but that's what we do. And, of course, we'll do the same if necessary in Lebanon with all these unsavory groups, all of whom have got blood on their hands. I mean, there's one Lebanese politician -- he's a friend of mine, I know him very well -- who ran a militia during the civil war, which brutally tortured its opponents, committed war crimes, and he met Condoleezza Rice a few days ago. I mean, you know, we will make friends with those who want to help us and whom we think are worthy of our support on the short term. And if -- I mean, who did bin Laden used to work for when he was fighting the Russians? Us, you know? I mean, we use these unsavory -- who was Saddam working for for most of his rule? Us. Who gave him the gas? The components came from the United States.
None of that is secret. We've been going on here for months about death squads doing America's dirty work as the "Salvador option" in Iraq. Shit, years even. Most recently last December (see Loud Whispers). Fat lot of good it does.
*Postscript: March 9 -- "The Great War for Civilisation" has been short-listed for the Arthur Ross Book Award by the Council on Foreign Relations, along with five other books, including Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco" and Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower." The award honors "the best book published in the last two years on international affairs."
(This ought to embarrass the editors of The New York Times Book Review, especially if Fisk wins the $25,000 first prize. In 2005, when Fisk's book was published, The Times failed to include it among the 100 Notable Books of the Year.)
Posted by jherman at 10:27 AM
March 6, 2007
Critic Earns a Rave
Do I hear any bravos for Justin Davidson's principled stand against the Vienna Philharmonic? He wrote he would not be attending the orchestra's Carnegie Hall concerts this past weekend. For that matter, he added, "it may be years before I review it again." This is no small thing. Davidson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning music critc with readers in the New York region.
His piece in Newsday, headlined "Vienna is slow to change its tune," appeared while I was away in Alabama.
Further, Davidson wrote: "I believe that the Vienna Philharmonic has relinquished its claim to serious consideration as a dynamic cultural organization." To feminists who have criticized its exclusion of women that has been obvious for decades, as well as the fact that "the geological pace of change is not merely a regrettable obstacle in the relentless pursuit of quality. It is the product of a narrowly preservationist, antiquarian philosophy, which fetishizes sound at the expense of spirit."
But Davidson makes the unusual point, so easily overlooked, that the orchestra's backward attitude contradicts the most significant aspect of its musical history:
The composers in the Vienna Philharmonic's pantheon were all disturbers of the peace, and they railed against the city's recurring fondness for the status quo. Beethoven was a liberal idealist, a radical egalitarian and artistic revolutionary who would have been revolted by the claim that performing his forward-looking, constantly renewable music required an inflexible reverence for custom.
"This idea that the true tradition of the orchestra is one of innovation is very interesting," says William Osborne, the Vienna Phil's longtime nemesis. "It was only after the Nazification of the orchestra during World War II that it became associated with conservatism and tradition."
(Osborne, I wrote long ago, was the chief instigator who "mobilized a tiny, far-flung band of feminists" that pressured the Vienna Philharmonic to accept its first woman member.)
Meanwhile, this morning's headline over Bernard Holland's swooning review of the Vienna Philharmonic in The New York Times, "Viennese Boys' Club, in for the Weekend," probably won't be clipped for the orchestra's scrap book.
The review itself -- with phrases such as "overpowering beauty" and "Viennese mist of loveliness" -- leaves no doubt that Holland adores the sound of the boys' club. But Holland's unctuous disregard of its sexism has begun to crumble -- slightly. He spends three of 11 paragraphs on the orchestra's "lack of women" and the "ruckus" it has caused, even critiquing the orchestra's program notes as "coy" and "oozing."
Holland is still as condescending as ever about the issue of feminism. And he merely repeats what Osborne has said about the importance of the Vienna Phil's reception in America "for a lot of its prestige and bottom line." But for the first time I'm aware of, he says: "I think the orchestra's embrace of an all-male sound is wrong." That's a milestone for Holland, his caveat about American do-goodism notwithstanding.
Postscript: Davidson follows up with his take on race in American orchestras and gets a snide response at the American Spectator.
Posted by jherman at 10:47 AM
February 28, 2007
Gone South
To the Hellman Wyler Festival, where they're celebrating Lillian Hellman's plays and William Wyler's Hollywood film versions.
South means Birmingham, Alabama, and the town of Demopolis in Marengo County not far from there.
Why there? If you ever saw "The Little Foxes" you'd know. Hellman, who was born in New Orleans, based the scheming Hubbard clan in "Foxes" on her mother's family, which came from Demopolis.
The festival will be staging "The Little Foxes" and screening the film, along with three other Wyler-Hellman pairings: "These Three" (based on her first play "The Children's Hour"), "The Children's Hour" (a remake more faithful to the play), and "Dead End" (based on a Sidney Kingsley play that Hellman adapted).
As a Wyler biographer, I've been invited to take part in panel discussions with Deborah Martinson, Hellman's latest biographer, and many other invited guests.
Back next week.
Postscript: March 2 -- I've returned home with several trophies. This one was bagged in the Demopolis town square.
The festival continues in Birmingham through Sunday.
Posted by jherman at 3:26 PM
February 26, 2007
Hersh Abbreviated
Don't have time this ayem to read Seymour Hersh's lengthy New Yorker report on our Banana Republic's new strategy in the Middle East? Here's a short analysis by Ian Black in The Guardian. No time to read that, either? Here's the lede of The Guardian's news story about Hersh's report: "[The President With His Head Up His Ass] has charged the Pentagon with devising an expanded bombing plan for Iran that can be carried out at 24 hours' notice. ..." Quicker still: N.O Mustill's yummy collage. When it was first published in 1969, in VDRSVP, it was titled "The Vietnam Question." Today it could just as easily be called "The Iran Question." Anyway, you read last week's Apocalypse When and Surging With Chomsky. Right?
Postscript: On a separate issue, how's this for hair-splitting? The International Court of Justice in The Hague, the main U.N. judicial organ, "today overwhelmingly acquitted Serbia of committing genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Balkan war of the 1990s but" -- get this -- "found it guilty of failing to prevent genocide in the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica," a U.N. press release says. Yeah, we know. It's all about the legalisms. This way Serbia doesn't have to pay reparations.
Posted by jherman at 9:09 AM
February 22, 2007
'Just Get to the Verb'
Five little words of wisdom. Robert Altman's words. Words cited earlier this week in a tribute to the late director at the Majestic Theatre in New York. Smarter words than the old Hollywood cliché cut to the chase, which of course is what he meant. Fitting, too, given the paradox of a filmmaker who loved words, especially words that overlapped.
It wasn't only Altman's words that dazzled the crowd at the tribute, which ran uninterrupted for more than two riveting hours.
"I do not think he was a lover of truth as much as he was a hater of lies," Robert Reed Altman, one of his sons, told us. "He did not like conformity," Bob Balaban remarked. "This is an understatement. Bob never met a status quo he didn't hate."
The wire reports I read -- AP's in USA Today and Reuters' in the NY Times -- give a pretty good account of what was said, including Balaban's remark and others I took down in my notes. (Tim Robbins: "He would not only not suffer fools, he'd make fools suffer.'' Garry Trudeau: "I just talked about my old friend for several minutes without interruption, with no overlapping dialogue, without him being able to change a word. He would have hated it.")
But the funniest words of the afternoon -- Julieanne Moore's -- went unreported. Moore recounted the thrill she felt when she was cast in "Short Cuts" early in her career. Altman warned her to read the script before accepting, she said. The role he was offering called for frontal nudity, and it was "not negotiable." She said she didn't need to read the script. Plus, she added, "I've got a bonus for you: I really am a redhead."
That is how Altman always told the tale of "my bush," she said. But he told it so many times to so many interviewers that she became sensitive about it and asked him to stop. Besides, she didn't remember making that comment -- not exactly, anyway. Of course he would stop, he told her. He was a gentleman, after all.
Then one evening over dinner at one of his typically convivial gatherings with lots of friends, including Moore, Altman's wife Kathryn began to tell the tale of the bonus. Altman looked up, and true to his gentleman's word, politely shushed her. "Julieanne," he said, putting his fingers to his lips, "doesn't want us to talk about her pussy."
Posted by jherman at 1:59 PM
February 21, 2007
Surging With Chomsky
Shuttling among poetry, art and politics, yeah. Here's more politics. It's an excerpt from "Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, and the Rest of the World," the latest commentary at Foreign Policy in Focus. He was asked, "What do you think the surge is for?"
This is part of his reply:
It's very hard to predict [President Huha's] administration today because they're deeply irrational. They were irrational to start with but now they're desperate. They have created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.We're supposed to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true. Allowing an independent and sovereign Iraq could be a nightmare for the United States. It would mean that it would be Shi'ite-dominated, at least if it's minimally democratic. It would continue to improve relations with Iran, just what the United States doesn't want to see. And beyond that, right across the border in Saudi Arabia where most of Saudi oil is, there happens to be a large Shi'ite population, probably a majority.
Moves toward sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for human rights among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite population but also toward some degree of autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back to the Mafia principle.
China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary. In particular, it's dangerous in the case of the Middle East. China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.
Chomsky had a lot more to say. Read the whole thing.
Posted by jherman at 9:25 AM
Boris on the Bill
Are you ready for three nights of "Shoah and Pin-Ups," a documentary about the NO!-artist Boris Lurie? I am.
Screenings begin this evening in Manhattan. The first one, at Hunter College, is free (followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers). The second screening, on Thursday, is at Makor ($15); the third, on Friday, is at Anthology Film Archives ($8).
"Most of the film's protagonists will be at the AFA screening," Matthias Reichelt, the curator and art historian who collaborated on the film with the director Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, tells me. Appearing at the AFA "makes sense," he adds. "It's a substantial downtown art institution that's well known, and it's linked through the great Fluxus artist Jonas Mekas to the good old days of the '50s and '60s" -- when Lurie and his fellow NO!-Artists flourished. Did I say flourished? In fact, it is precisely the opposite of what happened.
Unfortunately, Boris Lurie, who's in his 80s and lives in New York, will not be able to make the screenings. "For understandable reasons," Reichelt says. After recovering from heart surgery, "he had two strokes and has been in hospital for more than one year now."
Here's the screening schedule:
HUNTER COLLEGE (Free admission)
Wednesday (2/21) 7:30 p.m.
A presentatioin of the Visual Culture Roundtable
Screening followed by Q+A with the filmmakers
695 Park Avenue at 68th Street
Room 1527 Hunter North Building
MAKOR ($15)
Thursday (2/22) 7:30 p.m.
At Makor/Steinhardt Center
35 W. 67th St.
NY, NY, 10023
T: 212-413-8821
F: 212-413-8860
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES ($8)
Friday (2/23) 7:30 p.m.
Special Screening
32 Second Ave. at 2nd St.
F or V train to Second Ave; 6 to Bleecker.
Posted by jherman at 8:51 AM
February 20, 2007
Cloud Nine
Norwegian master photographer Tom Sandberg's first solo exhibition in the United States -- on view at P.S.1 MoMA -- made me feel like I was walking on air. 
That's my groundling's take on what one expert, Yngve Kvistad, describes as the "ambiguous surfaces that do not quite reveal themselves" in Sandberg's large-format, often painterly, black & white photographs. It's not just in the "titanic, almost monochrome skyscapes" that there's "an invigorating presence of visual paradoxes" or a "tangible absence revealed." It's in the portraits, too. They show what Derrida called the "invisible interior of poetic freedom," Kvistad notes. I'll leave the technical terms to the experts and philosophers. Here's what the Sandberg exhibit did for me: It turned my eyeballs into flotation devices.
Postscript: Speaking of a "tangible absence" ... A sense of the enormous scale of Sandberg's work is missing from the skyscape sampled above. Without that scale, you don't really feel the true impact of his photographs. So here's a snapshot from the exhibition to give you some perspective. The skyscape behind me, "Untitled," is one of Sandberg's latest. It was made in 2006.
Suggested title from an ol' glider pilot: "Hang Time."
Posted by jherman at 9:55 AM
February 19, 2007
Apocalypse When
Chris Hedges was way ahead of the curve. Back in October he wrote on his blog:
War with Iran -- a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East -- is probable by the end of [Prez Huha's] administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks.
Probable? Was he nuts? Three weeks? Really nuts? Well, his timing may have been off, but the clock is still running.
This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as "the Axis of Evil." They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.
This morning, interviewed on Democracy Now! about his latest book, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America," Hedges repeated his warning: "Before the end of [Huha's] administration, they [the BananaRepublic] will make a strike against Iran. ... I think these people live in an alternate reality."
Hedges cannot be easily dismissed. You'll see why when you check out the interview.
Posted by jherman at 8:54 AM
February 16, 2007
Emmett Williams, RIP
Another old friend is gone. We spent many a winter night together in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, keeping ourselves entertained over a bottle or two. He died in Berlin. He was 81.
Emmett Williams was a poet who'd mastered "the write of arting." Here's an interview worth reading that fills in lots of details about him. And here's an excerpt from "THE VOY AGE," which "started out," he once explained, "as a long kinetic poem celebrating the travels and exploits of Two Buk Tim in Tim Buc Too." The format is based on a mathematical progression, the words a mere taste of Emmett's playfulness.
During our time in northern Vermont, after I had succeeded Emmett as editor of the Something Else Press, we taped a long conversation about poetry and art that was later published in the West Coast Poetry Review, in an issue devoted to his work. I asked him if he agreed that he was "a poet before anything else."
"I agree, with a few reservations," he said. "The 'anything else' bothers me."
We sat on a rolling lawn beneath giant pines in a high clearing. Jay Peak could be seen some thirty miles to the north at the Canadian border.
"I was a pretty good bartender once," he went on. "And foreman of a landfill project. I can wield a mean axe in the forest, too. Yes, I'd call myself a poet before anything else, though I wouldn't call it my occupation. Call it my preoccupation. Making poetry is the thing I've always done, or wanted to do, whatever else I was trying to accomplish. The thing that interrupts whatever else I'm doing. A 'disturbance' that I can't tune out."
I said he made it sound painful. "I know," he said, "I'm very romantic about it." He continued:
I see no practical reason whatsoever for making poetry or art. But that's what I do, and there must be a reason for it. I wrote a spooky poem about it once, about this disturbance, how it was like the sound of a baby crying somewhere, you don't know where, and nobody else hears the crying, but you feel compelled to look in every room, comb the fields and forests, and you never get to the source of the sound. Something deep down inside that pushes you on full speed ahead even though you don't know where you're headed. And the poem, or painting, or whatever, is a by-product of the search. It sounds melodramatic, I know. But face it, it's something of a curse. The curse of Erato. Say, that's a good title!
I pointed out that his love poetry was peculiar. In one love poem, for instance, he substituted "objects and activities for the letters of the alphabet." According to the documentation of a performance in London, "the word 'love' could have been spelled the smoking of a cigar plus blowing a silent dog whistle plus eating a chocolate off the floor like a puppy plus tooting a little ditty on the flute."
But "read on," he said. "It says that during the Darmstadt performance it could have been spelled peering at the audience through a hole in a piece of paper plus offering a cigar to a girl plus extracting an egg from a portable vagina plus covering my eye with a patch. And so on." He continued:
The poem is as depersonalized as the letters of the alphabet the twenty-six objects and activities are substituted for, and using an alphabet of objects and activities to spell "love" or anything else is bound to produce combinations that go far beyond the barriers of logic and common sense. Chance encounters make strange bedfellows.
How come he didn't call the poem a Happening? "I call it a symphony," he said, referring to the title ALPHABET SYMPHONY, "though it's a poem, of course. A poem that gets off the page."
If the idea of transposing one set of symbols into another was essential to his poetry, or at least some of it, so was a compulsion to make pictures. "Why does a poet make pictures?" I asked.
"Something Kandinski said years ago about his own poems is as good an answer as I could give, to the effect that writing poetry was for him simply a 'changement d'instrument,' and that the driving force behind all his work -- paintings or poems -- remained always the same. He was a fine poet, you know, only most art historians are too busy with the pictures to bother with the poems."
Emmett made a living through the sale of his lithographs and prints, as well as by teaching. But, "one thing I'd better say right here," he said:
I consider myself a Poet, capital P, without any qualifiers. Not a concrete poet, not a visual poet, not a veri-voco-visual-something-or-other poet, just a plain poet. But a poet who has found his expressive form in some untraditional ways of using language, of using it as raw material. My methods are closer to composing and painting and sculpting than to the methods of most other contemporary poets. I can write sonnets, too, and I have a fairly large body of more or less traditional verse, but that's not what interests me. I feel much more at home in the restricted landscape of "programmed" books like SWEETHEARTS or THE VOY AGE. Maybe restricted is a misleading word. I mean it the way Paul Valery uses it, where he says that the greatest freedom comes from the greatest strictness. I don't like to run off at the mouth in poems. I do that all day long. I'm not a diarist, or a politician, or a hysteric, or an analyst, or merely a recording instrument. A poet is a maker, a creator, and I take that literally.
The conversation went on like that, running off at the mouth for more than 20 pages. It touched on all sorts of subjects, from his early career in Europe as a feature reporter at the Stars and Stripes, to the artists and writers he knew and admired and whose work influenced him -- Diter Rot, Brion Gysin, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Hamilton, Ay-o, Wolf Vostell, Claus Bremer, Hansjorg Mayer, Jackson Mac Low, Jerry Rothenberg, David Antin, Dick Higgins, John Giorno, Ian Hamilton Finlay -- to his interviews with Ezra Pound, to his Kenyon College days as a student of John Crowe Ransom.
"I went to school with Tony Hecht, and James Wright, and William Gass," he recalled. "And so what. It's really irrelevant. There are a lot of people on the planet, and you bump into a lot of them as you travel around. Damn few of them become your traveling companions, though."
Postscript: There will be A Memorial Celebration for Emmett Williams in New York City on Sunday, April 1 (from 7:00 p.m.) at the Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway (at Spring Street), 2nd floor. The program will include videos and live performances of Williams' scores by artist friends and his son Garry Williams. Cake will be served. Event organizer: Geoffrey Hendricks. Contact: 212-431-8625 or cloudsmith@aol.com
Posted by jherman at 4:51 PM
February 12, 2007
John Bryan, RIP
They left 12 roses on his doorstep along with half of their kidnap victim's California driver's license. He was grateful for the roses. "They could have been 12 bullets," he said.
The kidnappers were the Symbionese Liberation Army. The license belonged to Patty Hearst. The year was 1974. The roses were both a warning and an invitation. He'd done an "interview" with the SLA and printed it in his newspaper. This was their response.
The interview was faked -- nobody knew where to find them -- but their statements were real. He'd cobbled them together from fugitive literature, mainly a manifesto they'd issued. I'm talking about John Bryan, cherished friend and colleague, who died in San Francisco on Feb. 1.
As Warren Hinckle once described him, he was "the Peter Zenger of the underground press ... unconquered and ungovernable by the puny laws of journalism."
The world is a much poorer place without him. Here's the obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, which gives an accurate (though necessarily incomplete) account of his life and career.
That warning-invitation led to meetings with the SLA. John became a go-between for the Hearst family in an unsuccessful ransom attempt. The SLA had claim it wanted to trade Patty Hearst for SLAers Joe Remiro and Russ Little, who were in jail on murder charges (for the assassination of the superintendent of the Oakland schools, Marcus Foster).
John eventually wrote a book about Remiro (a Vietnam vet) and the SLA, "This Soldier Still at War." It was one of several books he wrote, in addition to the tons of newspapers he published. John was nothing if not prolific.
What the Chronicle obit doesn't say -- I dunno why -- is that John killed himself. He'd been suffering from full-body rheumatoid arthritis for more than a decade and was in constant pain. The last time I talked with him, in September, he was working at an indie bookstore, the Abandoned Planet. He sounded reasonably well, considering, though hardly like the roaring tornado I was familiar with during the good old bad old days -- when he was fiery, almost crazed, with anti-establishment fervor. I admired many things about John, his unrelenting conviction especially, but what I admired most was his raw personal courage.
He had a stroke in November, which prevented him from writing. That was the final insult. He downed a bottle of vodka and "blew his head off" with an antique rifle. Shades of Hemingway and Hunter T., whose company he joined.
Posted by jherman at 9:58 AM
February 9, 2007
Blogs Are Personal (in Case You Hadn't Noticed)
Been gone. Now back. Why gone? Flew out west to see an old friend and collaborator, Norman O. Mustill, in his desert hideaway. Hadn't seen him or his wife Norma in nearly 40 years. Here I am in their living room, leafing through a cherished item in his vast media collection -- Bruce Bernard's "Century," a massive volume of photos from London's Sunday Times Magazine chronicling the years 1899 to 1999. The main point of interest, however, is the partial view of Mustill's large collage from the mid-1960s on the wall behind me. It's one of several I used to see decades ago on visits to his former home in northern California. And there he is -- l'artiste lui-même -- standing next to another of his large collages.
Care for a further taste of his fun & games? Go to Down With Culture! Up With Barbarism! and Anthem for America.
Posted by jherman at 11:49 AM
February 1, 2007
Molly Ivins, RIP
Molly Ivins, who died too soon, published her last column a few weeks ago. Headlined "Stand Up Against the Surge," it was a sober, even solemn commentary without so much as a hint of the satirical wit for which she was famous. She called it part of an "old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war."
But Ivins wouldn't be Ivins if her thoughts weren't ripe with a sense of the ridiculous. She loved to skewer the President With His Head Up His Ass as often as possible. For good reason. (See The Molly Ivins Touch.) Her next-to-last column, "Iraq Exit is Up to Us," was more typical of her downhome style. "The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck -- so it's up to us," it began. "You and me, Bubba."
There are many tributes to Ivins being published. Here are two at truthdig with a great photo of her. The headline on her obituary in Mother Jones, "Death of a Hellraiser: Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living," says what's needed. Or as she concluded in her last column:
We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.
Here's a video interview with Ivins from July, 2004, when her last book was published. Click the link. There's also a transcript.
Postscript: My staff of thousands should have paid more attention. Whitney Balliett has also died. Doug Ramsey -- whose Rifftides blog on jazz I love to read -- waved good-bye with a note of appreciation that had, as usual, just the right touch.
PPS: I just got around to reading "Missing Molly Ivins," (this morning's, Feb. 2, Friday column) by Paul Krugman. It's too good to keep locked behind the NYT subscription wall. He writes:
I've been going through Molly's columns from 2002 and 2003, the period when most of the wise men of the press cheered as Our Leader took us to war on false pretenses, then dismissed as "Bush haters" anyone who complained about the absence of W.M.D. or warned that the victory celebrations were premature. Here are a few selections:Nov. 19, 2002: "The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now."
Jan. 16, 2003: "I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, 'Horrible three-way civil war?' "
July 14, 2003: "I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I'd rather not see my prediction come true and I don't think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. ... We don't need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers -- we need people who know how to fix water and power plants."
Oct. 7, 2003: "Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. ...
"I've got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I've had a bet out that I hoped I'd lose."
So Molly Ivins -- who didn't mingle with the great and famous, didn't have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East -- got almost everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do?
With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong. They bought the obviously cooked case for war -- or found their own reasons to endorse the invasion. They didn't see the folly of the venture, which was almost as obvious in prospect as it is with the benefit of hindsight. And they took years to realize that everything we were being told about progress in Iraq was a lie.
Was Molly smarter than all the experts? No, she was just braver. The administration's exploitation of 9/11 created an environment in which it took a lot of courage to see and say the obvious.
Molly had that courage; not enough others can say the same.
That's just part of what Krugman had to say. truthout is likely to break the subscription lock and post the entire column tomorrow. So go there for it.
Posted by jherman at 9:30 AM
January 28, 2007
The Experts Do Their Thing
You could say they rounded up the usual suspects experts -- long on scholarship, long on experience, not as long on influence (to judge from the way the Iraq war has played out), in some key particulars short on insight. It was nothing if not a star-studded conference.
"Iraq, Iran, & Beyond: America Faces the Future" opened with an informal talk by Pat Lang, who offered background. "We invaded the Iraq of our dreams," he said. In other words, "the country was not, in fact, what we thought it to be."
Furthermore, Lang said, differences in values between Americans and Iraqis are so great and so misunderstood, on both sides, that there is no basis for believing they can be overcome in the short term and, he strongly implied, not in the long term, either.
The first panel -- Patrick Clawson, Toby Craig Jones, Dafna Linzer, Lawrence Wright -- addressed the subject of "The Proxy War: Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran." The conclusion was unanimous (despite huge but unmentioned political differences among the panelists), which made it striking: Conditions in Iraq are so dire that nothing the U.S. can do -- absolutely nothing -- will end the war there.
This means (though the panel didn't say so) all the BananaRepublican talk of a "new" strategy is pure propaganda. Ditto for the accusation that those who oppose it are defeatists. (OK, you knew that.) Wright did say this: "Reading Al Qaeda strategists is like reading a neocon think tank. They want the U.S. to do things they can't do. For instance, take on Iran."
Panel moderator Stephen Simon won the prize for honky weirdness when he said "genocidal killing" in Iraq was not happening because the Shiites do not have the two defining requirements 1) "heavy weaponry" and 2) "broad communal consent." Progroms? Yes. Genocide? No. (In that case, what would he call the genocide in Rwanda? A large pogrom?)
There was much more to the conference, all of it recorded: Peter Bergen, Steve Coll and Barnett Rubin on "The Taliban Resurgence and the Future of Al-Qaeda"; Max Boot, Noah Feldman, Salameh Nematt, Paul Pillar and Lang on "The Last Best Chances? New Plans of Action"; and Steven Cook, Fawaz Gerges, Farhad Kazemi, and Craig Unger on "The Neighborhood: Dominoes Ready to Fall?"
NYU's Center on Law and Security, which hosted the conference, plans to post video and transcripts, a spokesman says. When it does, I'll link.
Postscript: Feb. 23 -- Tomorrow it will be four weeks since the conference was held, but the center still hasn't posted video or transcripts. The reason for the delay, I'm told, is a lack of staff and resources. But the center hasn't given up. "I imagine we'll have it out in a few weeks," Nicole Bruno, the associate director of programs, says. Doubtful, methinks.
Posted by jherman at 11:49 AM
January 24, 2007
Yeah, Yeah
The state of the union is "strong" wrong. Make that delusional.
Postscript: "Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney." -- Maureen Dowd, 1/27/07
Posted by jherman at 7:52 AM
January 22, 2007
Proud of His Steadfast
The President With His Head Up His Ass made a surprise appearance at the National Conference for Media Reform and gave one of his typical brain-addled speeches. It's guaranteed to make you laugh. Then Helen Thomas asked him a few questions:
As Huha said in closing, "If there's questions that has not been answered that's not my fault."
Now stop laughing and watch or listen to Helen Thomas answering questions put to her at the conference by Amy Goodman. The interview aired this morning on Democracy Now! Thomas is withering about Huha and his regime, and about the mainstream media's craven acceptance of the invasion of Iraq -- before the war, during its early years, and for a long time afterward. She didn't use the word "complicity," but others have. It's clearly what she meant. She also talks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Nixon pardon, Bill Clinton, etc.
And here's a bunch of video excerpts from the conference, featuring Bill Moyers's keynote address and speeches by political luminaries from Bernie Sanders to Jesse Jackson and celebrities from Jane Fonda and Danny Glover to Geena Davis.
Posted by jherman at 9:12 AM
January 19, 2007
He's B-a-a-a-ck!
Whenever this ventriloquist's dummy trots out to justify the latest effort by the BananaRepublic to subvert the Constitution, we feel obliged to post his picture.
This time we also offer the latest example of what he calls "good management," his Orwellian term for firing more than a dozen federal prosecutors who've been investigating corruption fostered, protected, or simply allowed, by his enabler and boss, The Bullshitter, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass.
As this morning's column by Paul Krugman, "Surging and Purging," points out:
Since the day it took power this administration has shown nothing but contempt for the normal principles of good government. For six years ethical problems and conflicts of interest have been the rule, not the exception. ...[N]ow that [The Bullshitter] can no longer count on Congress to do his bidding, he's more determined than ever to claim essentially unlimited authority -- whether it's the authority to send more troops into Iraq or the authority to stonewall investigations into his own administration's conduct.
For whatever reason, possibly because Krugman has said that umpteen times before -- justifiably, in our opinion -- or because of copyright protection, t r u t h o u t has chosen not to post this particular column for free distribution (as it has done with his others, such as "The Texas Strategy").
Postscript: "Surging and Purging" is now free to read.
Posted by jherman at 9:58 AM
January 16, 2007
Shoah and Pin-Ups
That's the title of a new documentary about Boris Lurie, the 80-year-old New York NO! Artist, whose work breaks taboos by combining gassed corpses and nudie pictures, Holocaust realities and sado-masochistic fantasies. "It's not perverted art, but a comment on a perverted society," says Lurie, a survivor of Buchenwald-Magdeburg and other concentration camps, who, not incidentally, draws a line from the Shoah to the war in Iraq.
"Lurie would like to have painted comfortable, comforting things," says Matthias Reichelt, a curator and art historian who collaborated on the film with the director Reinhild Dettmer-Finke. "But something kept him from doing so. And that something is what this film explores."
"Shoah and Pin-Ups" travels from Riga and Buchenwald to the New York of the 1950s and '60s, when NO! Art developed as an obstinate reaction to Pop Art. "NO! is Boris Lurie's motto," says Reichelt. "NO! to the expectations of the art market, NO! to bourgeois decorum, NO! to victim mentality. The film is about the timeless, timely questions of remembering and about coping, through art, with the extermination of the Jews."
The documentary will have a special screening next month (Feb. 23) at Anthology Film Archives in New York. We'll have more to say later.
Posted by jherman at 9:08 AM
January 15, 2007
Bold and Beautiful
Today's national holiday marks the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. He would have been 78. That's younger by five years than two living ex-presidents, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, and yet he seems a figure from a far more distant past.
Is it because he died so prematurely, killed by an assassin's bullet, at 39? Or does he recede into history because someone of his towering stature is unimaginable in a BananaRepublic led by blustering moral pipsqueaks?
Click these links: 1) to read or watch King's greatest address, the "I have a dream" speech, of Aug. 28, 1963, which he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and 2) to hear an audio excerpt of his peerless "Letter From Birmingham Jail," of April 16, 1963. Writing from his cell on a yellow pad of legal-size paper smuggled to him by his attorney, he says:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. ... Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait."
To read the whole letter, click this link. King defends "direct-action nonviolence," explains its principles and expresses his bitter disappointment with white moderates who are "more devoted to 'order' than to justice." Notice he has "almost reached the regrettable conclusion" that they are a bigger stumbling block to freedom and equality for blacks than the White Citizen's Council or the Ku Klux Klan.
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
Listen to him speak on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City about the difficulty of resistance during escalation of the Vietnam War:
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.
Finally, apply what he said then ("A time comes when silence is betrayal") to the war in Iraq:
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. ... I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. ... I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
And wish like hell he were still alive to set an example and stiffen the spine.
Postscript: At least John Edwards is giving it a shot.
Posted by jherman at 1:01 AM
January 11, 2007
Old Bull on Top of New Lies
If anybody needed further proof that whatsisface is still flogging the same old bullshit, let him read "The Real Disaster," which pretty much says what needs to be said about his speech on Iraq. It's the lead editorial in this morning's New York Times. (Then compare it with the Washington Post mush and the Los Angeles Times drivel.)
Meanwhile, the same old bullshit is being floated on new lies: "As part of a campaign to market the new strategy, [Prez Huha's] aides insisted that the plan [for more U.S. troops] was largely created by the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki," David Sanger reports. But, in fact, the Iraqi government "does not really want them," according to another NYT report.
What should be highlighted in big bold print is Huha's comments in a private meeting with Congressional leaders before making his speech. "I said to Maliki this has to work or you're out," Sanger quotes him as saying, according to two officials who were in the room. "Pressed on why he thought this strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, [Huha] shot back: 'Because it has to.'"
Really.
The Wall Street Journal naturally supports the President With His Head Up His Ass. In its lead editorial, under the jingoish headline "Mission Baghdad," it ignores reality and claims that "with the new strategy, new forces and new generals [Huha] is putting in place, we have a fighting chance to create a virtuous circle whereby better security leads to more anti-insurgent cooperation from the [Iraqi] public -- which in turn leads to still better security."
Everything just gets better and better.
Its secondary editorial, "A Cynical Opposition," then tries to shift the focus: "The real question is whether the Democrats are prepared to act like a responsible opposition now that they control both houses of Congress, in contrast to the last four years of partisan minority sniping." Ludicrous as that sounds, it's not surprising. Last June The Journal drew this conclusion: "The U.S. has sacrificed too much already in Iraq to withdraw just when victory once again looks possible." [Italics added.]
Which pretty much defines ludicrous.
Finally, it's worth noting the historian Gareth Porter's take on the perverse logic of Huha's war and, most especially, the involvement of Henry Kissinger, whose "sudden emergence as a key figure" in the so-called new Iraq policy "deserves closer examination."
Although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi'ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the U.S. position in the war is actually weak and unstable. One of Kissinger's accomplishments was to sell the news media on the Nixon administration's propaganda line that the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi had so unnerved the North Vietnamese that it had allowed president Richard Nixon and Kissinger to achieve a diplomatic victory over the communists in the Paris Agreement. That line was a gross distortion of what actually happened before and after the bombing.
And so, Porter writes further, Huha "may be equally interested in Kissinger's experience in shifting the blame for defeat to the Democrats."
That is exactly what he tried to do in spring 1975 when the South Vietnamese military regime fell apart under the pressure of the North Vietnamese offensive. Even though Kissinger had privately admitted at the time of the Paris Agreement that the regime of president Nguyen Van Thieu was unlikely to survive, he insisted that Nixon's successor, president Gerald Ford, go through the motions of asking for an additional U.S. $722 million in military aid on April 11, less than three weeks before the final collapse.
Are we going through the motions again? It would seem so. Only now, in addition to the untold casualties and lost lives, Huha is talking billions -- $6.7 billion, to be precise -- on top of the billions already spent. If the Democrats don't stick it to him, who will? The BananaRepublicans?
Postscript: That was not a rhetorical question. See this:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 -- Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee came to the defense of [the President With His Head Up His Ass] on Friday, lending support to his decision to send more troops to Iraq and hoping to head off a Senate resolution criticizing the plan.
Posted by jherman at 10:45 AM
January 10, 2007
Over the Top
Take a close look. Does he bear any resemblance to the President With His Head Up His Ass, a k a Prez Huha?
It's Alfred Jarry's woodcut of Père Ubu, better known as Ubu Roi, and it comes to mind as a prelude to Huha's speech tonight because a reader has just suggested Père Bubu (Papa Bubu) or BuBu Roi (King BuBu) as our new moniker for the whatsisface who occupies the White House.
"Maybe a bit literary," he writes, "but fitting for an arts website. And this is the centennial year of Jarry's death."
The staff likes the term, especially the kicky Wikipedia description: "Ubu is a nobody. He is fat, stupid, greedy, cowardly, and evil." But I'm not sure.
When I say Papa Bubu I get a different echo, more of an association with Papa Doc, who terrorized the Haitians under his misrule as an incarnation of the voodoo spirit Baron Samedi in top hat and tails. (His secret police, the Tontons Macoute, did the dirty work.) But while Papa Doc's infamous declaration -- "God and the people are the source of my power. I have twice been given the power. I have taken it, and damn it, I will keep it." -- fits Prez Huha with eery precision, it's all a bit over the top, methinks.
Even Papa Huha (sorry, Prez Huha) would not claim, as Papa Doc did, that he was a voodoo Jesus Christ and God himself, would he? And if he did, I doubt that his evangelical base would buy it. Besides, has Huha ever appeared in public in top hat and tails? Not to my knowledge (although he gave it a try in post-Katrina New Orleans).
Posted by jherman at 11:01 AM
January 8, 2007
Terminology
The question was, "Does anyone out there have a suitably demeaning substitute for Bullshitter-in-Chief?" The answers were, "Of course." But the suggested terms, ranging from "d'Oily Farte" and "Mr. Stupid" to "Banana Head," "Fratboy" and "The Dolt," failed to inspire the staff.
So we'll stick with our term, shortened to The Bullshitter. We hope this will underscore his iconic status not just as the first among equals in a fraudulent regime but as an exemplar of fraudulence. From time to time we may also refer to him as the President With His Head Up His Ass, Prez Huha, or PWHHUHA (the other acronym).
When he gives his expected "surge" speech later this week, let's all remember what Harry G. Frankfurt says in the foreword to his latest little essay, "On Truth," about his previous one, "On Bullshit":
...bullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all. Instead, and most essentially, they are fakers and phonies who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and attitudes of those to whom they speak. What they care about primarily, therefore, is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false.
And keep in mind Paul Krugman's "Quagmire of the Vanities."
Postscript: Also, Arianna Huffington offers a smart "Diagnostic Guide" to watching the speech.
Posted by jherman at 10:45 AM
January 5, 2007
More Popcorn
If it's true he hasn't seen the video of Saddam Hussein's execution, as the White House claims, will somebody please explain why not? Is it because it would offend his compassionate soul? Or is it because he would have to describe how he felt about it? And you know what a mumbler he is.
He's already said what he's been told to say by his handlers. (The execution should have been "more dignified.") Presumably, they saw the video. But shouldn't he see for himself what millions of others have seen? If he's too sensitive to watch the raw execution video, he could watch the not-so raw video.
Shouldn't he know first-hand what's happening before he makes next week's do-over speech about his latest "new" strategy for Iraq? (Not that it would make a difference.) Or has he watched the execution video, while munching on popcorn, and that's a national security secret?
Posted by jherman at 12:06 PM
January 3, 2007
The Believer's Gas
He has called himself The Decider. Now he wants to be known as The Cooperator? So it would seem from the ghostwritten gas of his horseshit op-ed column in today's Wall Street Journal.
We're still mulling a suitably demeaning term to substitute for our customary Bullshitter-in-Chief. Based on the column's "I believe" graf, one staffer has suggested The Believer.
Here's the graf, with footnotes for clarification:
I believe that when America is willing to use her influence abroad, the American people are safer and the world is more secure.1 I believe that wealth does not come from government. It comes from the hard work of America's workers, entrepreneurs and small businesses.2 I believe government closest to the people is more responsive and accountable.3 I believe government plays an important role in helping those who can't help themselves. Yet we must always remember that when people are hurting, they need a caring person, not a government bureaucracy.4
1 This is why I ordered up the war in Iraq.
2 This is why I believe in tax relief for the rich and nothing at all for the poor.
3 This is why I'm ignoring the midterm elections and am sending more troops to Iraq.
4 This is why I will pray everyday for the flood victims in New Orleans.
Postscript: The Believer was never under serious consideration.
Posted by jherman at 9:56 AM
January 2, 2007
2007: Time for Him to Go
It's the new year, so nu? What's the point of leaving the old one at the top of this column? There is no point. It just signals my hangover -- not from too many champagne toasts, but too few. There wasn't much to celebrate unless it was the hope that 2007 will bring us closer to the end of our collective humiliation by the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his B