Straight Up |: April 2008 Archives

It's probably been said before: The Lower East Side is both a location and a state of mind. At least it used to be. Before the developers arrived. Before the la-di-da gentrification of the real estate boom. Before the boutiques.

It's also probable that nobody represented the old Lower East Side with more sweat equity and flesh-and-blood belief than Clayton Patterson -- not Allen Ginsberg or Abbie Hoffman, not Ed Sanders or Tuli Kupferberg, not The Living Theater or The Hell's Angels, not Keith Haring or Taylor Mead, maybe not even Emma Goldman or Dorothy Day.

Clayton who?

This Clayton Patterson -- the videographer, photographer, artist, photojournalist, archivist, community activist, neighborhood preservationist. The motivating force behind the books "Captured" and "Resistance" -- their instigator, editor, and slave. The irrepressible and irreplaceable Clayton Patterson who recorded the infamous Tompkins Square "police riot" of 1988 on videotape. The Clayton Patterson who is the subject of a new 90-minute documentary, also titled "Captured." (It's being screened Thursday, April 24, at 6 p.m., free, at NYU's Cantor Film Center.)

Have a look at the trailer:

It's the Clayton Patterson who was sentenced to 90 days in jail for refusing to give up the riot tape to the district attorney as evidence against the cops unless the original was screened in public, because he feared the authorities would edit out the most damning footage. It's the Clayton Patterson who went on a 10-day hunger strike to make his point and finally succeeded.

"What effect did the tape have on the police?" Patterson has written. "A bunch of cops were fired, five were indicted, a chief was retired, the captain was moved out of the precinct, and there were numerous departmental trials against the rogue officers." As he once told Oprah Winfrey, while brandishing his video camera, "This is a revolutionary tool. Little brother is watching Big Brother."

Over the next 15 years, Patterson would be arrested many times for challenging the authorities. But that's only a small part of his story. Never without his camera, he "has dedicated his life," the filmmakers note, "to documenting the final era of raw creativity and lawlessness [of] a neighborhood famed for art, music and revolutionary minds. ... He's recorded a dark and colorful society, from drag to hardcore, heroin, homelessness, political chaos and ultimately [to] gentrification."

Postscript: In what is being billed as its world premiere, "Captured" will be screened on June 13 in the 2008 Summer Series at Rooftop Films.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

PPS: May 21 -- Yesterday the Lower East Side was designated a "most endangered" nabe by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, along with 10 other historic sites (video).

The lead editorial in today's New York Times -- "The Torture Sessions" -- makes some excellent points about the secret White House meetings revealed earlier this month by ABC News. Here's one:

The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life.

We're glad The Times finally got around to chiming in. But the hope it expresses that "a new Congress and a new president" might provide "the full truth," let alone hold the war criminals to account, is rosy at best.

The Times knows that, of course. Even so, it offers a bromide for the Pollyannas that "only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again."

What about the damage that is not repairable? Uh, take two aspirins and call us in the morning.

Meanwhile, better late than never, the front page investigates a not-so-hidden hand:

Do you have a subscription to Sirius Satellite Radio? I don't. Never listened to it either. Until yesterday, when I was invited to be a guest on "The Blog Bunker." It airs on Sirius Indie Talk Channel 110, which is described as "political talk for people who hate political talk."

Isn't this cute. Aw gee.

Update: April 21 -- Now have a look at "Murdoch, Ink," Newsweek's huge takeout about the actual WSJ that hit the street today. In the orotund prose of magspeak:

With its increased focus on politics, international news, culture and sports, Murdoch's reconceived Journal represents nothing short of a formal declaration of war on that most venerable of journalistic institutions, The New York Times. Not since William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal challenged Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the late 19th century has there been such a clash of newspaper titans.

Give-'em-hell Rupe offers his own sedate description about some of what he's up to in this morning's unsigned column, "The New Opinion Pages." OK, I'm exaggerating. Paul Gigot may have written it, or someone who reports to him. But you can be sure Rupe looked it over and gave his approval.

Robert Parry explains how the United States became a Banana Republic.

A reader writes: "Thank you.  Parry's article is incisive in overview and on the mark in particulars. Excellent." He continues:

One example of Parry's thesis -- that "sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in" -- is waterboarding being dismissively defined by journalistic leaders as "simulated drowning" rather than something like "repeated, forced drowning to near death."

However, what I see as "sophisticated" in that context differs somewhat from Parry's thesis: Much that is now classified and lamented as "sophisticated manipulation of information" is and used to be called "prevarication."

My view is that "what would do the Republic in" is not so much the "sophisticated manipulation of information" as the orchestration (think Rove) of the large-scale, often very clever, sophistry that results in journalistic leaders buying the prevarications by treating them as fact and continually repeating them as fact.

For instance, the Nixon-era's catchy but trivializing and dismissive term "Whitehouse horror story" is still with journalists who use the term "horror story" these days in place of "very serious violations" of criminal statutes, ratified treaties, or constitutional guarantees.  Equating Abu Grab torture and "Animal House" is another example.

The BananaRepublic keeps it going ... six months at a time. Click the link. It's a smart video from moveon.org.

Postscript: I see I completely overlooked the ABC News report on the top war criminals in the White House. It's not as if we didn't already know who they are. But the report -- in the mainstream media, let's not forget -- gives vivid details worth noting.

Watch the report: Bush advisers approved torture.

The other day we said that if David Petraeus can spin the Iraq menu this time around, he ought to be promoted from four-star general to five-star headwaiter.

Well, no promotion for heem. He couldn't spin it. Petraeus himself conceded in his parting remark to the Senate Armed Services Committee, "The Champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator."

(Retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, commenting on today's testimony, caught it just right: "To continue to put the cozy veneer of comfortable half-truth" on the situation in Iraq "is to deceive the American public and to make them think it's not the charade it is.")

The best analysis I've read about the failed Iraqi army assault on the Shiite militias in Basra far surpasses anything I've seen in The New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times.

Written by M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in India's Foreign Service, it ran a couple of days ago in the Asia Times. The headline, "Iran torpedoes U.S. plans for Iraqi oil," gives only a hint of what has happened.

But "oil" is an important hint, and you don't find it mentioned in any of the NYT, WashPost, or LAT takeouts. (I wonder why.)  Meanwhile, Bhadrakumar offers a lot more to chew on while we await the Senate testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

For instance, chew on this:

It appears that one of the most shadowy figures of the Iranian security establishment, General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, personally mediated in the intra-Iraqi Shi'ite negotiations [to end the fighting]. ... 

US military commanders routinely blame the Quds for all their woes in Iraq. The fact that the representatives of [the] Da'wa [Party] and SIIC [the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council] secretly traveled to Qom [in Iran] under the very nose of American and British intelligence and sought Quds mediation to broker a deal conveys a huge political message.

As we were saying, it's the American way:

Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased. You might want to find out the total costs for these deals forecasted for the next several years, because they are not small and they do not promise to end. Remember, we do not own these people. We merely rent them. And they can break the lease at any moment. At the same time, this deal protects them to some degree from the government's troops and police, hardly a sign of political reconciliation.

-- William E. Odom, Lieutenant General (retired) 

Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq

April 2, 2008

(Via  t r u t h o u t  from Information Clearing House / News You Won't Find on CNN.)

Postscript: Here's a link to Odom's complete testimony. "It is the most realistic and disquieting analysis I have seen," a weapons analyst friend of mine writes. He continues:

Odom's recommended course of action is at least as realistic and disquieting. It gives an unpleasantly vivid sense of the enormity of the wanton blunder into which the Bush Administration, the Congress, and many active duty and retired senior officers have led the country.

They have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, destroyed countless lives, wounded the country, and are outraged only by Senator Obama's pastor shouting words of outrage about the carnage they created to fulfill their fantasy of the "New American Century" in the guise of retribution for the Saudi attacks on our country. Chutzpah!

The LA Times says it's silly of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to declare a 40-hour moratorium on violence to mark the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Maybe so. But will somebody please give the editorial board a brain enema? Its own pieties need to be flushed out, not to mention its boring prose. "A moment for Martin Luther King" isn't worth a nanosecond. Better you should read this.

It takes 1,750 words on Maliki's Basra screwup to get to the money (and the money graf). 

But there it is, finally -- the bribes to the tribes, a key tactic used by the U.S. military to suppress the Iraqi insurgency -- in the next-to-last paragraph of today's NYT frontpager: Maliki was pressed by U.S. officials "to seek an alliance with the Shiite tribes, as the Americans had done with Sunni tribes in the so-called Anbar Awakening."

The last paragraph quotes U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker: 

"We strongly encouraged him to use his most substantial weapon, which is money, to announce major jobs programs, Basra cleanup, whatnot," Mr. Crocker said. "And to do what he decided to do on his own: pay tribal figures to effectively finance an awakening for Basra."

You can tell from the whatnot that Crocker isn't talking about anything, really, except bribes. As to Maliki doing anything on his own, except screwing up, that's pure 'ganda talk, too. Such are the arrangements of our subprime war.