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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

American ‘Voodoo’: Signs of the Times

June 3, 2013 by Jan Herman


‘Voodoo,’ a collage © by N.O. Mustill. All rights reserved.

I don’t know what to say about this collage, except that it has nothing to do with religion — unless it’s the religion of the road — and was made long before the advent of photoshop. Full stop.

Postscript: June 4 — Hell, it just occurred to me that American “voodoo” has moved from the economics promulgated during Ronald’s reign to the military and civilian justice of the Obamarama circus. Per Julian Assange:

“It is a disgrace to charge [Bradley Manning with] communicating with the enemy and to make it a capital offense — to threaten to either kill him or make him spend life in prison. The prosecution has refused to drop that charge. The reason that charge is there, and it should be a wake-up to all U.S. journalists and publishers, is to establish a precedent.

“The precedent works like this: If you communicate with a journalist, then you communicate with a publisher, then you communicate with the public, then you communicate with al Qaeda — so you communicate with enemies of the United States, and as a result your communications with a journalist must be punished by death or life imprisonment. If tolerated, that will lead to regimes where every U.S. government source, when speaking to a journalist, must be concerned that they will suffer either the death penalty or life imprisonment as a result. Now having established that, the U.S. government will have set the precedent that not only is the [source] indirectly communicating with al Qaeda by communicating with the public, but the publisher and the journalist is as well. And therefore the publisher and the journalist can be embroiled in espionage charges, some of which similarly carry the death penalty.”

Seems to me that Assange’s rundown makes a whole lot of sense.

Postscript: Nov. 7, 2014 — Just discovered where that collage came from. See this automobile ad:

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Filed Under: Art, political culture

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
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