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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Two Recommended Film Reviews
Its nice when your students rise to the task of responding thoughtfully to the films we watch:
Jacob Goldberg: This Is Not a Pipe (but it will do)--Mulholland Dr.
Trevor Tremaine: Hard Candy--One Tough Nut
Jacob Goldberg: This Is Not a Pipe (but it will do)--Mulholland Dr.
Trevor Tremaine: Hard Candy--One Tough Nut
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Thinking About Culture, Nationalism, War, Empire, Rhetoric and Media
(Just some quotes and resources that are helping me think through some themes... )
What is Culture?
BLOOD SACRIFICE AND THE NATION: REVISITING CIVIL RELIGION Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle
(published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion: 64(4), Winter, 1996)
Americans live in a culture that is as religious as any that exists. In this article we contend that nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States, and perhaps in many other countries. Structurally speaking, nationalism mirrors sectarian belief systems such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and others that are more conventionally labeled as religious. It happens that nationalism also satisfies many traditional definitions of religion, but citizens of nation-states have religious reasons for denying it. We argue that both sectarian and national religions organize killing energy by committing devotees to sacrifice themselves to the group. We also explore the ritual role of media in propagating national religion. Media are not the most important ritual vehicles for nationalism, but they matter. Though based in empirical observation, our claims are theoretical in nature. Their value lies in re-thinking certain empirical phenomena in relation to notions of nationalism and religion in the contemporary world. Although our examples come mostly from the United States and its majority sectarian faith, and although generalization is risky, the principles we describe are broadly applicable to other enduring groups, defined as groups for which members are willing to give their lives.
Later published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press as Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag
Excerpt from the book:
In the religiously plural society of the United States sectarian faith is optional for citizens, as everyone knows. Americans have rarely bled, sacrificed or died for Christianity or any other sectarian faith. Americans have often bled, sacrificed and died for their country. This fact is an important clue to its religious power. Though denominations are permitted to exist in the United States, they are not permitted to kill, for their beliefs are not officially true. What is really true in any society is what is worth killing for, and what citizens may be compelled to sacrifice their lives for.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1991.
Excerpts from Introduction:
Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept -in the modern world everyone can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender-vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, 'Greek' nationality is sui generis. (3) The 'political' power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers...
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion... In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.
The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.
Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
From the Reading Guide to the book:
In the introduction to his searing portrait of war, Chris Hedges writes, "I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments." Hedges has seen war, and its effect upon those who wage it, at close range. And in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, he brings fifteen years of experience reporting from the front lines to bear on the very nature of war itself, its causes and consequences, and the physical, emotional, and moral devastation it leaves in its wake.
Hedges argues that war is both a deadly addiction—a drug that offers an unmatchable intoxication, the thrill of being released from the moral strictures of everyday life—and a unifying force that provides a sense of meaning, purpose, and self-sacrifice that can wash away life's trivial concerns. But the meaningfulness of combat, Hedges suggests, depends upon the myth of war. In reality, no matter what grand cause it is supposed to support, war is simply the basest form of aggression: "organized murder." Once war begins, the moral universe collapses and every manner of atrocity can be justified in the eyes of those who wage it, because the cause is just, the enemy is inhuman, and only war can restore balance to the world. Hedges reveals the hollowness of such thinking and makes an impassioned plea for humility, love, and compassion as the human race's only hope for survival. Only when a nation can accept its share of blame and see its enemy with compassion rather than hatred can war be averted and true peace prevail.
Combining a great erudition of the literature of war—from Homer to Shakespeare to Viktor Frankl—with an unflinching focus on the particular and terrifying reality of combat, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a sobering book whose relevance could not be more pointed.
Excerpt from War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning:
Once we sign on for war's crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder.
The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War, in times of malaise and desperation, is a potent distraction.
George Orwell in "1984" wrote of the necessity of constant wars against the Other to forge a false unity among the proles: "War had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.... The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil."
Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us. Never mind the murder and repression done in our name by bloody surrogates from the Shah of Iran to the Congolese dictator Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who received from Washington well over a billion dollars in civilian and military aid during the three decades of his rule. And European states--especially France--gave Mobutu even more as he bled dry one of the richest countries in Africa. We define ourselves. All other definitions do not count.
War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.
Video presentation by Chris Hedges on the Themes of the book
Citizens of the Empire by Robert Jensen
After an antiwar talk in which I sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy, a student asked me, "Don't you find it hard to live being so cynical?" When I responded that I thought my comments were critical but not cynical, he asked, "But how can being so critical not make you cynical?"
The student was equating any critique of injustice produced by institutions and systems of power with cynicism about people. His question made me realize how easy is cynicism and how difficult is sustained critique in this culture, which shouldn't surprise us. People with power are perfectly happy for the population to be cynical, because that tends to paralyze people and leads to passivity. Those same powerful people also do their best to derail critique -- the process of working to understand the nature of things around us and offering judgments about them -- because that tends to energize people and leads to resistance. Understanding the difference between critique and cynicism -- and the difference between hope and optimism -- is crucial to the future of any struggle against injustice.
At this moment in history, those struggles must not only be about trying to win changes in policies but also about the reinvigoration of public life -- a call for participation, for politics, for radical citizenship in reactionary times. Radical and reactionary in this sense are not used to describe specific political positions, left versus right, but instead describe an approach not just to politics, narrowly defined, but to the central questions of what it means to be a human being in connection with others. The world we live in is reactionary because it is trying to squeeze those important human dimensions out of us in the political sphere and constrict the range of discussion so much that politics does seem to many to be useless. To resist that one must be radical, be political and be radical in public politically.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoyesky’s Poetics. ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984.
Monologism at its extreme denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach…another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons. (Bakhtin: 292-93)
The dialogic nature of consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open- ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bakhtin: 293)
Winning Modern Wars by General Wesley Clark
The truth is, the war with Iraq began in early January 1991-with the congressional resolution authorizing President George H. W. Bush to use military force to liberate Kuwait-and the war hasn't ended yet.
Take Them At Their Words by Bruce J. Miller
"The cost of the war will be small. We can afford the war, and we'll put it behind us."
—Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, New York Times, 3/9/03
"The loss of innocent life is a tragedy for anyone involved in it, but the numbers are really very low."
— Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, Chicago Tribune, 8/17/03
"And there is, I am certain, among the Iraqi people a respect for the care and the precision that went into their bombing campaign. It was not a long air campaign. It didn't last for weeks. And there was minimal collateral damage -- unintended damage."
— Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Defenselink.mil, 4/9/03
"If we don't know for sure they're going to do something, or not, we need to make sure that we prevent anything they may be planning, whether or not we know or don't know about it."
— FBI agent quoted by Nicholas von Hoffman, New York Observer, 11/3/03
"And I said on my program, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again."
— Bill O'Reilly, "Good Morning America," ABC, 3/18/03
"The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."
— A "senior administration official," discussing George W. Bush's use of faulty intelligence in the State of the Union address, Los Angeles Times, 7/29/03
"I don't understand how poor people think."
— George W. Bush, New York Times, 8/26/03
"We're poor people."
— Newt Gingrich, describing his wife and himself, Denver Post, 12/29/95
"When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 a year, that's middle class."
— Rep. Fred Heineman, R-N.C., Washington Post, 10/29/96
"I thought [Jesus Christ] was a free enterpriser ... He was a carpenter's son and I thought he was doing well. He was able to change water into wine; now that to me is the classic definition of a guy in the entrepreneurial spirit."
— Gov. Tommy Thompson, R-Wis., responding to a reporter who asked him if Jesus was a socialist, Madison (Wis.) Capital Times, 7/10/96
"God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"
— Ann Coulter, "Hannity & Colmes," Fox News, 6/20/01
- David Berman, Teacher (January 22, 2004; New York, NY)
"What is the difference between an adult and a child, or a good government and a poor government? The ability to think in the long term. Thinking short term: we topple Saddam now, while creating generations of enemies for the future; we act unilaterally now, weakening the alliances that ensure a peaceful future; we fail to provide regular health care now, guaranteeing emergency room visits in the future; we run up deficits now, which will be a huge burden for the future; we do standardized testing now, instead of investing in schools and teachers for the future; we support energy company profits now, rather than protecting clean air and old growth forests for the future...In every way, the Bush policies are about making an impression now at the expense of the future. To defeat Bush, this must be made clear to all the adults who, because they have children, have some reason to care about the future."
Thoughts in the Presence of Fear by Wendell Berry
What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.
The Problem of the Media by Robert McChesney
The corporate domination of both the media system and the policy-making process that establishes and sustains it causes serious problems for a functioning democracy and a healthy culture. Media are not the only factor in explaining the woeful state of our democracy, but they are a key factor. It is difficult to imagine much headway being made on the crucial social issues that face our nation given how poorly they are covered by the current U.S. media system. The democratic solution to this problem is to increase informed public participation in media policy making. The corporate media powers-that-be and their political surrogates oppose this prospect because they know that when the public understands that the media system is the result of explicit public policies and not natural law, the public will probably demand reforms.
…
The corporate-insider hegemony over media policy debates, and the lack of public participation, are encouraged and protected ideologically by eight myths surrounding media in the United States. … The first myth is that media do not matter that much—that they merely reflect reality, rather than shape it. In fact, media are asocial force in their own right, and not just a reflection of other forces. These are complex relationships, often difficult to disentangle, because media are so interwoven into the fabric of our lives. It is noteworthy that the argument that media have little or no social effect became prominent precisely as commercial interests locked up their control over media industries in the mid-twentieth century. Proponents of this argument would like us to overlook the fact that media sell billions of dollars worth of advertising on the belief that they, indeed, have tremendous influence.
…the second myth—that the corporate, commercial media system is “natural,” the intent of the Founders, and the logical outgrowth of democracy. In fact, the vision of a free press held during the first few generations of the republic was diametrically opposed to the contemporary idea that a free press means letting media owners do whatever they can to maximize profit. The early republic provided lavish subsidies to support a diverse range of media the market would never have supported; these press policies were sometimes generated by widespread public debate. The notion that letting media owners maximize profit would necessarily generate a free press came much later, when powerful media owners with a decided self-interest propagated that view. Those of us who argue for informed policy making, for enlightened and proactive policies to enhance a vibrant free press, do not stand outside the historical tradition of freedom of the press in the United States. We are the tradition.
The third myth is that debates concerning media policy in the United States have accurately reflected the range of public opinion and public interests. … important policy making has been and still is to the creation of the U.S. media system, … By the late twentieth century, media policy making was the private playground of a handful of powerful corporate lobbies and trade associations. The public knew next to nothing about the crucial debates over policies that would set the terms for the media system and it played almost no role whatsoever in their development. … the basis for understanding why the resultant media system is so deeply flawed: it is set up to serve the needs of a relative handful of profit- seeking corporations and wealthy investors. In that sense our media system is a success because it does that very well. But lost in the shuffle are the requirements of a democratic and self-governing people.
The fourth myth is that commercial media unquestionably provide the highest quality journalism possible—the caliber of journalism a democracy necessitates for informed self-government. This is a curious myth because on the surface the notion of subjecting journalism to commercial principles is a nonstarter. What sort of integrity can the news have if it can be bought and sold like . . . advertising? The inherent problem with commercial journalism is a major reason that professionalism in journalism emerged a century ago. Yet built within the journalists’ professional code are significant flaws that limit its usefulness. Those flaws, combined with media owners’ pressures on journalism to generate maximum profit, offer a recipe for disaster. …
The fifth myth is that the news media in the United States today have a “left-wing” bias. This is a peculiar myth, of recent vintage in the United States, and not prevalent in very many other nations. … the reason for its prevalence has little to do with the intellectual strength of the arguments and a great deal to do with the right-wing political muscle behind them, including conservative power within the mainstream media. What this myth does, more than anything else, is reinforce and accentuate the core problems with commercial journalism. Right-wing media bashing and commercial journalism, rather than being antagonistic, constitute a marriage made in heaven.
The sixth myth is that the commercial media, due to the competitive pressure for profit, “give the people what they want”—so the only policy option is to unleash the market. Government policies that interfere with the market substitute the prerogatives of a bureaucrat, no matter how well informed or intended, with the will of the people as expressed in the market. Government actions therefore are antidemocratic and should be kept to a minimum, largely to protect private property rights. If there is a problem with the media, it is not due to the system or the policies that put the system in place but to “the people” who demand the content that the commercial media firms obediently provide. This may well be the most important myth of all, partly because it contains an element of truth. At a certain level it seems like it must be true; after all, why wouldn’t profit- seeking firms try to satisfy the market? But upon close inspection, the argument has a number of flaws. … Not only does the market not necessarily give us what we want, but it also gives us plenty of what we do not want. In particular, the commercial media system has generated a hyper-commercial carpet bombing of our culture that is decidedly unwelcome by much of the population.
The seventh myth is that technologies determine the nature of media. This is a long-standing position and it, too, contains a small element of truth; the nature of media technologies does indeed have distinct effects upon the nature of the media system and its content. … The Internet, we are told, will set us free. All we have to do is let the technology work its magic. Long-standing and lucrative commercial media industries, such as network commercial television and the music recording industry, appear to be in the process of a radical transformation, if not an elimination, by these new technologies. Indeed, to a casual observer, these technologies are so extraordinary as to render public policies unimportant. But nothing of the kind is true. These satellite and the Internet technologies themselves are the direct result of policies and subsidies. How they are going to be developed is not predetermined. It has everything to do with explicit policies, and commercial pressures wrought by those policies. Indeed, powerful commercial interests use this myth to prevent the public from pursuing alternative policies.
Finally, there is the myth that no alternative to the status quo will improve matters. No matter how many flaws are present, the status quo offers the best of all possible media worlds. In shorthand, the options are usually presented as one of corporate control versus one of government control. Jefferson or Stalin. This framing is dubious; societies can and do have mixed systems all the time. Even a “market” system is based on layers of explicit government policies and laws that make it possible. The point of this claim is patently ideological— to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations. In fact … there are rich traditions in media policy making from which citizens may draw guidance. The logic of my argument is that a democratic media system—or a democratic solution to the problem of the media, as I put it—would necessitate a large, well-funded, structurally pluralistic, and diverse nonprofit and noncommercial media sector, as well as a more competitive and decentralized commercial sector. Where economics preclude competitive commercial markets, there must be transparent regulation in the public interest. The reforms I envision should be content neutral and viewpoint neutral. This does not mean they would generate bland content, but rather that the reforms would not favor a specific viewpoint over others. We need to think creatively, not be imprisoned by the myth that there can be no alternative to the status quo but the gulag. The exact contours of such a media system must be determined by informed and widespread public debate. Without that, media reform and a democratic media system are unthinkable.
Unless all eight of these myths are subjected to critical analysis, the prospects for energizing popular participation in media policy making are remote. That most of these myths are accepted as revealed truth in mainstream political culture helps explain why so many groups that have a stake in media policy debates and should be active in them—for example, environmentalists, civil rights activists, labor unions, working journalists—have generally not engaged in the fight.
What is Culture?
BLOOD SACRIFICE AND THE NATION: REVISITING CIVIL RELIGION Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle
(published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion: 64(4), Winter, 1996)
Americans live in a culture that is as religious as any that exists. In this article we contend that nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States, and perhaps in many other countries. Structurally speaking, nationalism mirrors sectarian belief systems such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and others that are more conventionally labeled as religious. It happens that nationalism also satisfies many traditional definitions of religion, but citizens of nation-states have religious reasons for denying it. We argue that both sectarian and national religions organize killing energy by committing devotees to sacrifice themselves to the group. We also explore the ritual role of media in propagating national religion. Media are not the most important ritual vehicles for nationalism, but they matter. Though based in empirical observation, our claims are theoretical in nature. Their value lies in re-thinking certain empirical phenomena in relation to notions of nationalism and religion in the contemporary world. Although our examples come mostly from the United States and its majority sectarian faith, and although generalization is risky, the principles we describe are broadly applicable to other enduring groups, defined as groups for which members are willing to give their lives.
Later published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press as Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag
Excerpt from the book:
In the religiously plural society of the United States sectarian faith is optional for citizens, as everyone knows. Americans have rarely bled, sacrificed or died for Christianity or any other sectarian faith. Americans have often bled, sacrificed and died for their country. This fact is an important clue to its religious power. Though denominations are permitted to exist in the United States, they are not permitted to kill, for their beliefs are not officially true. What is really true in any society is what is worth killing for, and what citizens may be compelled to sacrifice their lives for.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1991.
Excerpts from Introduction:
Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept -in the modern world everyone can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender-vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, 'Greek' nationality is sui generis. (3) The 'political' power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers...
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion... In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.
The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.
Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
From the Reading Guide to the book:
In the introduction to his searing portrait of war, Chris Hedges writes, "I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments." Hedges has seen war, and its effect upon those who wage it, at close range. And in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, he brings fifteen years of experience reporting from the front lines to bear on the very nature of war itself, its causes and consequences, and the physical, emotional, and moral devastation it leaves in its wake.
Hedges argues that war is both a deadly addiction—a drug that offers an unmatchable intoxication, the thrill of being released from the moral strictures of everyday life—and a unifying force that provides a sense of meaning, purpose, and self-sacrifice that can wash away life's trivial concerns. But the meaningfulness of combat, Hedges suggests, depends upon the myth of war. In reality, no matter what grand cause it is supposed to support, war is simply the basest form of aggression: "organized murder." Once war begins, the moral universe collapses and every manner of atrocity can be justified in the eyes of those who wage it, because the cause is just, the enemy is inhuman, and only war can restore balance to the world. Hedges reveals the hollowness of such thinking and makes an impassioned plea for humility, love, and compassion as the human race's only hope for survival. Only when a nation can accept its share of blame and see its enemy with compassion rather than hatred can war be averted and true peace prevail.
Combining a great erudition of the literature of war—from Homer to Shakespeare to Viktor Frankl—with an unflinching focus on the particular and terrifying reality of combat, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a sobering book whose relevance could not be more pointed.
Excerpt from War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning:
Once we sign on for war's crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder.
The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War, in times of malaise and desperation, is a potent distraction.
George Orwell in "1984" wrote of the necessity of constant wars against the Other to forge a false unity among the proles: "War had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.... The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil."
Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us. Never mind the murder and repression done in our name by bloody surrogates from the Shah of Iran to the Congolese dictator Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who received from Washington well over a billion dollars in civilian and military aid during the three decades of his rule. And European states--especially France--gave Mobutu even more as he bled dry one of the richest countries in Africa. We define ourselves. All other definitions do not count.
War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.
Video presentation by Chris Hedges on the Themes of the book
Citizens of the Empire by Robert Jensen
After an antiwar talk in which I sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy, a student asked me, "Don't you find it hard to live being so cynical?" When I responded that I thought my comments were critical but not cynical, he asked, "But how can being so critical not make you cynical?"
The student was equating any critique of injustice produced by institutions and systems of power with cynicism about people. His question made me realize how easy is cynicism and how difficult is sustained critique in this culture, which shouldn't surprise us. People with power are perfectly happy for the population to be cynical, because that tends to paralyze people and leads to passivity. Those same powerful people also do their best to derail critique -- the process of working to understand the nature of things around us and offering judgments about them -- because that tends to energize people and leads to resistance. Understanding the difference between critique and cynicism -- and the difference between hope and optimism -- is crucial to the future of any struggle against injustice.
At this moment in history, those struggles must not only be about trying to win changes in policies but also about the reinvigoration of public life -- a call for participation, for politics, for radical citizenship in reactionary times. Radical and reactionary in this sense are not used to describe specific political positions, left versus right, but instead describe an approach not just to politics, narrowly defined, but to the central questions of what it means to be a human being in connection with others. The world we live in is reactionary because it is trying to squeeze those important human dimensions out of us in the political sphere and constrict the range of discussion so much that politics does seem to many to be useless. To resist that one must be radical, be political and be radical in public politically.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoyesky’s Poetics. ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984.
Monologism at its extreme denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach…another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons. (Bakhtin: 292-93)
The dialogic nature of consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open- ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bakhtin: 293)
Winning Modern Wars by General Wesley Clark
The truth is, the war with Iraq began in early January 1991-with the congressional resolution authorizing President George H. W. Bush to use military force to liberate Kuwait-and the war hasn't ended yet.
Take Them At Their Words by Bruce J. Miller
"The cost of the war will be small. We can afford the war, and we'll put it behind us."
—Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, New York Times, 3/9/03
"The loss of innocent life is a tragedy for anyone involved in it, but the numbers are really very low."
— Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, Chicago Tribune, 8/17/03
"And there is, I am certain, among the Iraqi people a respect for the care and the precision that went into their bombing campaign. It was not a long air campaign. It didn't last for weeks. And there was minimal collateral damage -- unintended damage."
— Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Defenselink.mil, 4/9/03
"If we don't know for sure they're going to do something, or not, we need to make sure that we prevent anything they may be planning, whether or not we know or don't know about it."
— FBI agent quoted by Nicholas von Hoffman, New York Observer, 11/3/03
"And I said on my program, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again."
— Bill O'Reilly, "Good Morning America," ABC, 3/18/03
"The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."
— A "senior administration official," discussing George W. Bush's use of faulty intelligence in the State of the Union address, Los Angeles Times, 7/29/03
"I don't understand how poor people think."
— George W. Bush, New York Times, 8/26/03
"We're poor people."
— Newt Gingrich, describing his wife and himself, Denver Post, 12/29/95
"When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 a year, that's middle class."
— Rep. Fred Heineman, R-N.C., Washington Post, 10/29/96
"I thought [Jesus Christ] was a free enterpriser ... He was a carpenter's son and I thought he was doing well. He was able to change water into wine; now that to me is the classic definition of a guy in the entrepreneurial spirit."
— Gov. Tommy Thompson, R-Wis., responding to a reporter who asked him if Jesus was a socialist, Madison (Wis.) Capital Times, 7/10/96
"God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"
— Ann Coulter, "Hannity & Colmes," Fox News, 6/20/01
- David Berman, Teacher (January 22, 2004; New York, NY)
"What is the difference between an adult and a child, or a good government and a poor government? The ability to think in the long term. Thinking short term: we topple Saddam now, while creating generations of enemies for the future; we act unilaterally now, weakening the alliances that ensure a peaceful future; we fail to provide regular health care now, guaranteeing emergency room visits in the future; we run up deficits now, which will be a huge burden for the future; we do standardized testing now, instead of investing in schools and teachers for the future; we support energy company profits now, rather than protecting clean air and old growth forests for the future...In every way, the Bush policies are about making an impression now at the expense of the future. To defeat Bush, this must be made clear to all the adults who, because they have children, have some reason to care about the future."
Thoughts in the Presence of Fear by Wendell Berry
What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.
The Problem of the Media by Robert McChesney
The corporate domination of both the media system and the policy-making process that establishes and sustains it causes serious problems for a functioning democracy and a healthy culture. Media are not the only factor in explaining the woeful state of our democracy, but they are a key factor. It is difficult to imagine much headway being made on the crucial social issues that face our nation given how poorly they are covered by the current U.S. media system. The democratic solution to this problem is to increase informed public participation in media policy making. The corporate media powers-that-be and their political surrogates oppose this prospect because they know that when the public understands that the media system is the result of explicit public policies and not natural law, the public will probably demand reforms.
…
The corporate-insider hegemony over media policy debates, and the lack of public participation, are encouraged and protected ideologically by eight myths surrounding media in the United States. … The first myth is that media do not matter that much—that they merely reflect reality, rather than shape it. In fact, media are asocial force in their own right, and not just a reflection of other forces. These are complex relationships, often difficult to disentangle, because media are so interwoven into the fabric of our lives. It is noteworthy that the argument that media have little or no social effect became prominent precisely as commercial interests locked up their control over media industries in the mid-twentieth century. Proponents of this argument would like us to overlook the fact that media sell billions of dollars worth of advertising on the belief that they, indeed, have tremendous influence.
…the second myth—that the corporate, commercial media system is “natural,” the intent of the Founders, and the logical outgrowth of democracy. In fact, the vision of a free press held during the first few generations of the republic was diametrically opposed to the contemporary idea that a free press means letting media owners do whatever they can to maximize profit. The early republic provided lavish subsidies to support a diverse range of media the market would never have supported; these press policies were sometimes generated by widespread public debate. The notion that letting media owners maximize profit would necessarily generate a free press came much later, when powerful media owners with a decided self-interest propagated that view. Those of us who argue for informed policy making, for enlightened and proactive policies to enhance a vibrant free press, do not stand outside the historical tradition of freedom of the press in the United States. We are the tradition.
The third myth is that debates concerning media policy in the United States have accurately reflected the range of public opinion and public interests. … important policy making has been and still is to the creation of the U.S. media system, … By the late twentieth century, media policy making was the private playground of a handful of powerful corporate lobbies and trade associations. The public knew next to nothing about the crucial debates over policies that would set the terms for the media system and it played almost no role whatsoever in their development. … the basis for understanding why the resultant media system is so deeply flawed: it is set up to serve the needs of a relative handful of profit- seeking corporations and wealthy investors. In that sense our media system is a success because it does that very well. But lost in the shuffle are the requirements of a democratic and self-governing people.
The fourth myth is that commercial media unquestionably provide the highest quality journalism possible—the caliber of journalism a democracy necessitates for informed self-government. This is a curious myth because on the surface the notion of subjecting journalism to commercial principles is a nonstarter. What sort of integrity can the news have if it can be bought and sold like . . . advertising? The inherent problem with commercial journalism is a major reason that professionalism in journalism emerged a century ago. Yet built within the journalists’ professional code are significant flaws that limit its usefulness. Those flaws, combined with media owners’ pressures on journalism to generate maximum profit, offer a recipe for disaster. …
The fifth myth is that the news media in the United States today have a “left-wing” bias. This is a peculiar myth, of recent vintage in the United States, and not prevalent in very many other nations. … the reason for its prevalence has little to do with the intellectual strength of the arguments and a great deal to do with the right-wing political muscle behind them, including conservative power within the mainstream media. What this myth does, more than anything else, is reinforce and accentuate the core problems with commercial journalism. Right-wing media bashing and commercial journalism, rather than being antagonistic, constitute a marriage made in heaven.
The sixth myth is that the commercial media, due to the competitive pressure for profit, “give the people what they want”—so the only policy option is to unleash the market. Government policies that interfere with the market substitute the prerogatives of a bureaucrat, no matter how well informed or intended, with the will of the people as expressed in the market. Government actions therefore are antidemocratic and should be kept to a minimum, largely to protect private property rights. If there is a problem with the media, it is not due to the system or the policies that put the system in place but to “the people” who demand the content that the commercial media firms obediently provide. This may well be the most important myth of all, partly because it contains an element of truth. At a certain level it seems like it must be true; after all, why wouldn’t profit- seeking firms try to satisfy the market? But upon close inspection, the argument has a number of flaws. … Not only does the market not necessarily give us what we want, but it also gives us plenty of what we do not want. In particular, the commercial media system has generated a hyper-commercial carpet bombing of our culture that is decidedly unwelcome by much of the population.
The seventh myth is that technologies determine the nature of media. This is a long-standing position and it, too, contains a small element of truth; the nature of media technologies does indeed have distinct effects upon the nature of the media system and its content. … The Internet, we are told, will set us free. All we have to do is let the technology work its magic. Long-standing and lucrative commercial media industries, such as network commercial television and the music recording industry, appear to be in the process of a radical transformation, if not an elimination, by these new technologies. Indeed, to a casual observer, these technologies are so extraordinary as to render public policies unimportant. But nothing of the kind is true. These satellite and the Internet technologies themselves are the direct result of policies and subsidies. How they are going to be developed is not predetermined. It has everything to do with explicit policies, and commercial pressures wrought by those policies. Indeed, powerful commercial interests use this myth to prevent the public from pursuing alternative policies.
Finally, there is the myth that no alternative to the status quo will improve matters. No matter how many flaws are present, the status quo offers the best of all possible media worlds. In shorthand, the options are usually presented as one of corporate control versus one of government control. Jefferson or Stalin. This framing is dubious; societies can and do have mixed systems all the time. Even a “market” system is based on layers of explicit government policies and laws that make it possible. The point of this claim is patently ideological— to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations. In fact … there are rich traditions in media policy making from which citizens may draw guidance. The logic of my argument is that a democratic media system—or a democratic solution to the problem of the media, as I put it—would necessitate a large, well-funded, structurally pluralistic, and diverse nonprofit and noncommercial media sector, as well as a more competitive and decentralized commercial sector. Where economics preclude competitive commercial markets, there must be transparent regulation in the public interest. The reforms I envision should be content neutral and viewpoint neutral. This does not mean they would generate bland content, but rather that the reforms would not favor a specific viewpoint over others. We need to think creatively, not be imprisoned by the myth that there can be no alternative to the status quo but the gulag. The exact contours of such a media system must be determined by informed and widespread public debate. Without that, media reform and a democratic media system are unthinkable.
Unless all eight of these myths are subjected to critical analysis, the prospects for energizing popular participation in media policy making are remote. That most of these myths are accepted as revealed truth in mainstream political culture helps explain why so many groups that have a stake in media policy debates and should be active in them—for example, environmentalists, civil rights activists, labor unions, working journalists—have generally not engaged in the fight.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
For a Student Writing on the Death Penalty
Punishment: Web Resources
Patrick Jonsson: North Carolina creates a new route to exoneration
U.S. Prisons and the Death Penalty
Sister Helen Prejean: Death in Texas
Houston Death Penalty Controversy
Death Penalty History Made at Northwestern
Burden of Innocence (Frontline documentary)
The Plea (Frontline documentary)
Reasonable Doubts: The Growing Movement Against the Death Penalty
Patrick Jonsson: North Carolina creates a new route to exoneration
U.S. Prisons and the Death Penalty
Sister Helen Prejean: Death in Texas
Houston Death Penalty Controversy
Death Penalty History Made at Northwestern
Burden of Innocence (Frontline documentary)
The Plea (Frontline documentary)
Reasonable Doubts: The Growing Movement Against the Death Penalty
Jennifer L. Pozner: A Culture of Rape
A Culture of Rape
By Jennifer L. Pozner
AlterNet and WIMN’s Voices: A Group Blog on Women, Media, AND… (April 2006)
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial used tired old 'blame the victim' reasoning to explain away two high-profile rape cases.
Fresh from the media's trusty "Feminism is responsible for every evil thing that can happen to a woman or a man" files, is a new one: Feminists cause rape. That's the premise of an April 14 Wall Street Journal opinion piece headlined, "Ladies, You Should Know Better: How Feminism Wages War on Common Sense."
In a rehash of some of the oldest blame-the-victim nonsense, Naomi Schaefer Riley declared that, although sexual assault is bad ('natch), many women are bringing it on themselves by "engaging in behavior that is 'moronic'."
Upon learning that DNA evidence links Darryl Littlejohn -- the bouncer charged in the gruesome, high-profile rape and murder of graduate student Imette St. Guillen in New York -- to a prior sexual assault, Schaefer Riley's ultimate conclusion is not that American culture and law needs to find real solutions for punishing serial rapists or, more importantly, preventing men from perpetrating such criminal behavior in the first place. Rather, she declares that this brutal attack should serve as a cautionary tale for women, who should "use a little more common sense" lest they go out and get themselves raped.
"Ms. St. Guillen was last seen in a bar alone and drinking at 3 a.m. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan," Shaefer Riley wrote, and "more than a few of us have been thinking that a 24-year-old woman should know better."
If you're wondering who are these "more than a few of us" who'd look at a brutal assault such as the one against St. Guillen and think, "Wow, what a stupid dead girl," it's worth noting the company this Wall Street Journal opinion writer keeps. Her prior work on religion was financially subsidized by the John M. Olin Foundation, a right-wing foundation which -- before it closed shop -- placed hundreds of thousands of dollars into media programs designed to convince the public that feminists whine too much about rape, that date rape is a "myth" and that the Violence Against Women Act is unnecessary. (For example, Olin was a major funder of Christina Hoff Sommers' error-filled screed "Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women," a highly inaccurate, widely debunked polemic that nevertheless garnered a heap of press coverage about feminism's supposed failures.)
Now that we've played "follow the money" for a bit of instructive backstory, it's time to get back to the WSJ commentary, which wasn't content to blame just one victim for her own demise. After dismissively referring to the heated public debate surrounding the alleged gang rape of a 27-year-old North Carolina Central University student and exotic dancer as "much hand-wringing about the alleged rape of a stripper," Schaefer Riley writes that, since the woman didn't anticipate the possibility of being attacked and [didn't] refuse to work the Duke University lacrosse team's party, "A stripper with street smarts is apparently a Hollywood myth."
The trouble with this sort of drivel is not simply that it's insensitive and insulting to the victim and, indeed to all women -- it is -- the problem is that under the guise of advising women about ways they can keep themselves safe, Schaefer Riley promotes dangerous misperceptions about the nature of rape in American culture. While there's certainly something to be said for women (and men) to thoughtfully evaluate the social choices we make with an eye to personal and public safety, staying sober and staying home will never inoculate women against sexual violence.
But keeping women safe wasn't Schafer Riley's real goal -- nor were St. Guillen and the woman at the center of the Duke U. firestorm her ultimate targets. In a typical rhetorical argument often offered by conservatives who lobby against feminist anti-violence efforts, the WSJ's opinion writer claimed that feminists have created a culture of female irresponsibility by telling female college students that:
If the author really believed that it is "not her fault" if a woman is sexually assaulted, it's likely she would have devoted more column inches to discussing men's responsibility to educate other men about not abusing women -- as Jackson Katz does in the newly released book "The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help" -- and fewer to bashing rape and murder victims as too stupid to prevent the attacks against them. But ideological arguments aside, it is simply not true that campus feminist education and advocacy programs fail to include discussions about safety issues.
To Read the Rest of the Article
By Jennifer L. Pozner
AlterNet and WIMN’s Voices: A Group Blog on Women, Media, AND… (April 2006)
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial used tired old 'blame the victim' reasoning to explain away two high-profile rape cases.
Fresh from the media's trusty "Feminism is responsible for every evil thing that can happen to a woman or a man" files, is a new one: Feminists cause rape. That's the premise of an April 14 Wall Street Journal opinion piece headlined, "Ladies, You Should Know Better: How Feminism Wages War on Common Sense."
In a rehash of some of the oldest blame-the-victim nonsense, Naomi Schaefer Riley declared that, although sexual assault is bad ('natch), many women are bringing it on themselves by "engaging in behavior that is 'moronic'."
Upon learning that DNA evidence links Darryl Littlejohn -- the bouncer charged in the gruesome, high-profile rape and murder of graduate student Imette St. Guillen in New York -- to a prior sexual assault, Schaefer Riley's ultimate conclusion is not that American culture and law needs to find real solutions for punishing serial rapists or, more importantly, preventing men from perpetrating such criminal behavior in the first place. Rather, she declares that this brutal attack should serve as a cautionary tale for women, who should "use a little more common sense" lest they go out and get themselves raped.
"Ms. St. Guillen was last seen in a bar alone and drinking at 3 a.m. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan," Shaefer Riley wrote, and "more than a few of us have been thinking that a 24-year-old woman should know better."
If you're wondering who are these "more than a few of us" who'd look at a brutal assault such as the one against St. Guillen and think, "Wow, what a stupid dead girl," it's worth noting the company this Wall Street Journal opinion writer keeps. Her prior work on religion was financially subsidized by the John M. Olin Foundation, a right-wing foundation which -- before it closed shop -- placed hundreds of thousands of dollars into media programs designed to convince the public that feminists whine too much about rape, that date rape is a "myth" and that the Violence Against Women Act is unnecessary. (For example, Olin was a major funder of Christina Hoff Sommers' error-filled screed "Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women," a highly inaccurate, widely debunked polemic that nevertheless garnered a heap of press coverage about feminism's supposed failures.)
Now that we've played "follow the money" for a bit of instructive backstory, it's time to get back to the WSJ commentary, which wasn't content to blame just one victim for her own demise. After dismissively referring to the heated public debate surrounding the alleged gang rape of a 27-year-old North Carolina Central University student and exotic dancer as "much hand-wringing about the alleged rape of a stripper," Schaefer Riley writes that, since the woman didn't anticipate the possibility of being attacked and [didn't] refuse to work the Duke University lacrosse team's party, "A stripper with street smarts is apparently a Hollywood myth."
The trouble with this sort of drivel is not simply that it's insensitive and insulting to the victim and, indeed to all women -- it is -- the problem is that under the guise of advising women about ways they can keep themselves safe, Schaefer Riley promotes dangerous misperceptions about the nature of rape in American culture. While there's certainly something to be said for women (and men) to thoughtfully evaluate the social choices we make with an eye to personal and public safety, staying sober and staying home will never inoculate women against sexual violence.
But keeping women safe wasn't Schafer Riley's real goal -- nor were St. Guillen and the woman at the center of the Duke U. firestorm her ultimate targets. In a typical rhetorical argument often offered by conservatives who lobby against feminist anti-violence efforts, the WSJ's opinion writer claimed that feminists have created a culture of female irresponsibility by telling female college students that:
"… if a woman is forced against her will to have sex, it is 'not her fault,' and that women always have the right to 'control their own bodies.' Nothing could be truer. But the administrators who utter these sentiments and the feminists who inspire them rarely note which situations are conducive to keeping that control and which threaten it. They rarely discuss what to do to reduce the likelihood of a rape. Short of reeducating men, that is."
If the author really believed that it is "not her fault" if a woman is sexually assaulted, it's likely she would have devoted more column inches to discussing men's responsibility to educate other men about not abusing women -- as Jackson Katz does in the newly released book "The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help" -- and fewer to bashing rape and murder victims as too stupid to prevent the attacks against them. But ideological arguments aside, it is simply not true that campus feminist education and advocacy programs fail to include discussions about safety issues.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Jennifer L. Pozner: The Terrorists Who Aren't in the News
The Terrorists Who Aren't in the News
By Jennifer L. Pozner
AlterNet
Anti-abortion fanatics spread fear by bombings, murders and assaults, but the media take little notice.
On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.
Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.
Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists and members of Congress.
After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554 envelopes containing white powder and messages like: "You have been exposed to anthrax. ... We are going to kill all of you." They were signed by the Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled web pages for "Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith," including minister Paul Hill, Michael Griffin and James Kopp, all convicted of murdering abortion providers, and a convicted clinic bomber, the Rev. Michael Bray. Another of their "martyrs," Clayton Waagner, mailed anthrax letters while a fugitive on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for anti-abortion related crimes.
"I am a terrorist," Waagner declared on the Army of God's web site. Boasting that God "freed me to make war on his enemy," he claimed he knew where 42 Planned Parenthood workers lived. "It doesn't matter to me if you're a nurse, receptionist, bookkeeper, or janitor, if you work for the murderous abortionist, I'm going to kill you."
That's textbook terrorism, defined by the USA Patriot Act as dangerous criminal acts that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or "to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion."
To Read the Rest of thie Article
By Jennifer L. Pozner
AlterNet
Anti-abortion fanatics spread fear by bombings, murders and assaults, but the media take little notice.
On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.
Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.
Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists and members of Congress.
After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554 envelopes containing white powder and messages like: "You have been exposed to anthrax. ... We are going to kill all of you." They were signed by the Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled web pages for "Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith," including minister Paul Hill, Michael Griffin and James Kopp, all convicted of murdering abortion providers, and a convicted clinic bomber, the Rev. Michael Bray. Another of their "martyrs," Clayton Waagner, mailed anthrax letters while a fugitive on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for anti-abortion related crimes.
"I am a terrorist," Waagner declared on the Army of God's web site. Boasting that God "freed me to make war on his enemy," he claimed he knew where 42 Planned Parenthood workers lived. "It doesn't matter to me if you're a nurse, receptionist, bookkeeper, or janitor, if you work for the murderous abortionist, I'm going to kill you."
That's textbook terrorism, defined by the USA Patriot Act as dangerous criminal acts that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or "to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion."
To Read the Rest of thie Article
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
On the Day After the Elections
To the rapturous Democrats, sorry to piss on your parade, but as an independent citizen I would just like you to know that the only reason you got these votes was because the other option was unthinkable, please don't let this all go to your head and see if you can do something positive for a change, I'm skeptical, and probably will soon be ranting about your mistakes/abuses, but for the moment I will remain hopeful ... so back to the celebration and here's a dedication to get you started:
Yeah Yeah Song by The Flaming Lips
If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch
Would you do it?
If you could make everyobody poor just so you could be rich
Would you do it?
If you could watch everybody work while you just lay on your back
Would you do it?
If you could take all the love without fiving any back
Would you do it?
And so we cannot know ourselves or what we'd really do...
With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
What would you do?
If you could make your own money and then give it to everybody
Would you do it?
If you knew all the answers and could give it to the masses
Would you do it?
No no no no no no are you crazy?
It's a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want
Because you cannot know yourself or what you'd really do
With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
What would you do?
Yeah Yeah Song by The Flaming Lips
If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch
Would you do it?
If you could make everyobody poor just so you could be rich
Would you do it?
If you could watch everybody work while you just lay on your back
Would you do it?
If you could take all the love without fiving any back
Would you do it?
And so we cannot know ourselves or what we'd really do...
With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
What would you do?
If you could make your own money and then give it to everybody
Would you do it?
If you knew all the answers and could give it to the masses
Would you do it?
No no no no no no are you crazy?
It's a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want
Because you cannot know yourself or what you'd really do
With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
What would you do?
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
AlterNet Voter Protection Page
To get information, to report abuses, to participate in protecting the vote:
Voter Protection: Action and Resources
Voter Protection: Action and Resources
I Voted, Did You?
(The polls were packed... kind of anxious to see how it all turns out!)
Bush's Election-Eve Message: Lies and Nonsense
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
AlterNet
The Nov. 7 elections are shaping up as not just a choice between Republicans and Democrats, but a test of how gullible -- and how divorced from reality -- the American people have become.
In campaign stops across the country, George W. Bush is delivering a medley of his favorite lies, half-truths and non sequiturs about Iraq and the "war on terror." Yet the President's listeners seem to revel in the distortions, celebrating with shouts of "USA! USA!" and responding on cue when Bush has them mock the Democrats.
Some appearances have a Lord of the Flies quality, as excited Republicans rally around their strong man hailing his pronouncements even when they make little or no sense, or when they celebrate the misjudgments that led to the disaster in Iraq.
"One of the lessons of September the 11th is that when we see a threat we have got to take that threat seriously before it materializes," Bush told a cheering throng in Springfield, Missouri, on Nov. 3. "It's an essential lesson in this new war. I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein."
In that remark, Bush reaffirmed his commitment to what he calls "preemptive war," but what others call "preventive war" and we have termed "predictive war." Bush's strategy is not classically "preemptive," which implies the other country is poised to strike. Bush's idea is to predict a future threat and then attack before the threat "materializes."
While "preemptive" invasions are illegal under international law, "preventive" or "predictive" wars represent even greater threats to world order. They effectively guarantee endless warfare based not on real security threats but on vague perceptions of the future, a prescription for one, two, many Iraq Wars.
But on the stump, Bush's talking point about this "essential lesson" is greeted like a golden oldie from the rally-round-the-President days after 9/11. Though the consequences of Bush's faulty prediction about Iraq can now be measured in the deaths of more than 2,800 American soldiers and other horrible costs, it still works as an applause line.
Bush then repeats another part of his mantra, how Americans must listen to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden when he boasts about driving the United States out of Iraq: "He understands the stakes. He says that victory for the terrorists in Iraq will mean America's defeat and disgrace forever. That's what the enemy says."
However, as U.S. intelligence knows, bin Laden actually views the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a great boon to his cause. Not only did Bush's invasion divert military pressure away from bin Laden's battered forces in Afghanistan in 2002, Bush then knocked off one of bin Laden's secular enemies, Saddam Hussein, and turned the U.S. occupation of Iraq into al-Qaeda's chief recruiting poster.
An April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, called the Iraq War the "cause celebre" that has spread Islamic extremism around the world.
In June 2006, U.S. intelligence also learned from an intercepted al-Qaeda communiqué that bin Laden's terrorist band wants to keep U.S. soldiers bogged down in Iraq as the best way to advance al-Qaeda's goals.
"Prolonging the war is in our interest," wrote "Atiyah," one of bin Laden's top lieutenants, in a letter dated Dec. 11, 2005.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Bush's Election-Eve Message: Lies and Nonsense
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
AlterNet
The Nov. 7 elections are shaping up as not just a choice between Republicans and Democrats, but a test of how gullible -- and how divorced from reality -- the American people have become.
In campaign stops across the country, George W. Bush is delivering a medley of his favorite lies, half-truths and non sequiturs about Iraq and the "war on terror." Yet the President's listeners seem to revel in the distortions, celebrating with shouts of "USA! USA!" and responding on cue when Bush has them mock the Democrats.
Some appearances have a Lord of the Flies quality, as excited Republicans rally around their strong man hailing his pronouncements even when they make little or no sense, or when they celebrate the misjudgments that led to the disaster in Iraq.
"One of the lessons of September the 11th is that when we see a threat we have got to take that threat seriously before it materializes," Bush told a cheering throng in Springfield, Missouri, on Nov. 3. "It's an essential lesson in this new war. I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein."
In that remark, Bush reaffirmed his commitment to what he calls "preemptive war," but what others call "preventive war" and we have termed "predictive war." Bush's strategy is not classically "preemptive," which implies the other country is poised to strike. Bush's idea is to predict a future threat and then attack before the threat "materializes."
While "preemptive" invasions are illegal under international law, "preventive" or "predictive" wars represent even greater threats to world order. They effectively guarantee endless warfare based not on real security threats but on vague perceptions of the future, a prescription for one, two, many Iraq Wars.
But on the stump, Bush's talking point about this "essential lesson" is greeted like a golden oldie from the rally-round-the-President days after 9/11. Though the consequences of Bush's faulty prediction about Iraq can now be measured in the deaths of more than 2,800 American soldiers and other horrible costs, it still works as an applause line.
Bush then repeats another part of his mantra, how Americans must listen to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden when he boasts about driving the United States out of Iraq: "He understands the stakes. He says that victory for the terrorists in Iraq will mean America's defeat and disgrace forever. That's what the enemy says."
However, as U.S. intelligence knows, bin Laden actually views the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a great boon to his cause. Not only did Bush's invasion divert military pressure away from bin Laden's battered forces in Afghanistan in 2002, Bush then knocked off one of bin Laden's secular enemies, Saddam Hussein, and turned the U.S. occupation of Iraq into al-Qaeda's chief recruiting poster.
An April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, called the Iraq War the "cause celebre" that has spread Islamic extremism around the world.
In June 2006, U.S. intelligence also learned from an intercepted al-Qaeda communiqué that bin Laden's terrorist band wants to keep U.S. soldiers bogged down in Iraq as the best way to advance al-Qaeda's goals.
"Prolonging the war is in our interest," wrote "Atiyah," one of bin Laden's top lieutenants, in a letter dated Dec. 11, 2005.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Monday, November 06, 2006
Jeffrey Ellison & John Pisapia: The State of Holocaust Education in Illinois
The State of Holocaust Education in Illinois
by Jeffrey Ellison & John Pisapia
Idea: A Journal of Social Issues
Abstract:
The state of Illinois was the first state to mandate the teaching of the Holocaust in 1990. This article reports the results of a study of Holocaust education practices at the high school level. At present, it represents the largest study of Holocaust education practices ever conducted in the United States.
The study produced eight major findings: (a) Most teachers of the Holocaust are white, Christian, hold degrees in history, and have been teaching it for less than ten years or more than twenty one years; (b) A wide array of topics such as death camps, anti-Semitism, Hitler’s rise to power, non-Jewish victims, creation of the state of Israel, and the U.S.’s response to the Holocaust is being taught in Illinois high schools; (c) Most students receive Holocaust education in American History in the junior year, however, students taking advanced placement classes receive appreciably less instruction on the Holocaust than those in the regular program; (d) Teachers use traditional methods of discussion, lectures, and questions on the final examination to deliver and test their lessons on the Holocaust; (e) Schindler’s List, the course textbook, the Diary of Anne Frank, Night are the most widely used materials by teachers teaching about the Holocaust; (f) Teachers teach about the Holocaust because of its importance, its part of the curriculum, personal interest to a much greater degree than because it is a state mandate; (g) Teachers believe learning about the Holocaust is a important for the lessons it imparts to students regarding discrimination, stereotyping, critical independent thought, and the human capacity for evil; (h) Most teachers favored mandates, believed that their school was in compliance with the state mandate in Illinois, and believed teaching of the Holocaust would continue if they retired.
To Read the Report
by Jeffrey Ellison & John Pisapia
Idea: A Journal of Social Issues
Abstract:
The state of Illinois was the first state to mandate the teaching of the Holocaust in 1990. This article reports the results of a study of Holocaust education practices at the high school level. At present, it represents the largest study of Holocaust education practices ever conducted in the United States.
The study produced eight major findings: (a) Most teachers of the Holocaust are white, Christian, hold degrees in history, and have been teaching it for less than ten years or more than twenty one years; (b) A wide array of topics such as death camps, anti-Semitism, Hitler’s rise to power, non-Jewish victims, creation of the state of Israel, and the U.S.’s response to the Holocaust is being taught in Illinois high schools; (c) Most students receive Holocaust education in American History in the junior year, however, students taking advanced placement classes receive appreciably less instruction on the Holocaust than those in the regular program; (d) Teachers use traditional methods of discussion, lectures, and questions on the final examination to deliver and test their lessons on the Holocaust; (e) Schindler’s List, the course textbook, the Diary of Anne Frank, Night are the most widely used materials by teachers teaching about the Holocaust; (f) Teachers teach about the Holocaust because of its importance, its part of the curriculum, personal interest to a much greater degree than because it is a state mandate; (g) Teachers believe learning about the Holocaust is a important for the lessons it imparts to students regarding discrimination, stereotyping, critical independent thought, and the human capacity for evil; (h) Most teachers favored mandates, believed that their school was in compliance with the state mandate in Illinois, and believed teaching of the Holocaust would continue if they retired.
To Read the Report
Michael McCaughan: Que Pasa en Oaxaca?
Que Pasa en Oaxaca?
Michael McCaughan
The Nation
A virtual state of siege prevails in Oaxaca City where thousands of military police have occupied the central square and surrounding streets, clearing barricades and detaining dozens of opposition activists. The city's emergency services are idle while banks and schools remain closed and the city center, usually bustling with tourists, has the air of a ghost town. The hub of activity has shifted to the Santo Domingo church where thousands of activists gather daily to swap news, make plans and denounce police brutality.
The federal police occupation began on October 28 with an aggressive push toward the Zocalo (town square) which was occupied in June by teachers, students and workers demanding the removal of discredited state governor Ulises Ruiz. The roots of the conflict go back a month earlier when teachers occupied the city square in demand of better pay. This annual protest dates back twenty-six years and the ritual typically ends with a small wage increase being approved. This time, however, Governor Ruiz violently evicted the teachers from the square, provoking a popular uprising.
Workers and students united to shut down government offices and seized local radio and television stations. The state government ground to a halt and Ruiz has gone into hiding, communicating through paid announcements in the press.
"The conflict in Oaxaca is almost over," announced Ruiz on Friday--confirmation, if it was necessary, that his hiding place must be a long way from Oaxaca.
The opposition formed the Oaxaca People's Popular Assembly (APPO), which comprises 200 organizations drawn from 600 villages and towns across the state, all determined to stand firm until Ruiz has left office and with him the federal security forces.
The APPO is a temporary alliance of activists ranging from moderates with links to the ruling party to radicals calling for armed struggle to overthrow the state. In conversation with APPO members this week there was consensus that the time had come to replace traditional political parties with community-based governing assemblies, in keeping with indigenous tradition.
On the eve of the police occupation the teacher's union signed a wage agreement and agreed to go back to work. The push to topple Ruiz would have continued but the core of the resistance movement was effectively neutralized. On that same day, however, government officials opened fire on a group of protestors, killing US citizen Brad Will and raising the profile of the dispute internationally.
Under pressure to resolve the impasse, President Fox dispatched police with orders to retake the square and dismantle barricades around the city. Mexico's congress simultaneously pushed for the resignation of Ruiz, to ease tensions. However the plan backfired as Ruiz refused to step down and appears determined to hang on until the bitter end.
To Read the Entire Report
Michael McCaughan
The Nation
A virtual state of siege prevails in Oaxaca City where thousands of military police have occupied the central square and surrounding streets, clearing barricades and detaining dozens of opposition activists. The city's emergency services are idle while banks and schools remain closed and the city center, usually bustling with tourists, has the air of a ghost town. The hub of activity has shifted to the Santo Domingo church where thousands of activists gather daily to swap news, make plans and denounce police brutality.
The federal police occupation began on October 28 with an aggressive push toward the Zocalo (town square) which was occupied in June by teachers, students and workers demanding the removal of discredited state governor Ulises Ruiz. The roots of the conflict go back a month earlier when teachers occupied the city square in demand of better pay. This annual protest dates back twenty-six years and the ritual typically ends with a small wage increase being approved. This time, however, Governor Ruiz violently evicted the teachers from the square, provoking a popular uprising.
Workers and students united to shut down government offices and seized local radio and television stations. The state government ground to a halt and Ruiz has gone into hiding, communicating through paid announcements in the press.
"The conflict in Oaxaca is almost over," announced Ruiz on Friday--confirmation, if it was necessary, that his hiding place must be a long way from Oaxaca.
The opposition formed the Oaxaca People's Popular Assembly (APPO), which comprises 200 organizations drawn from 600 villages and towns across the state, all determined to stand firm until Ruiz has left office and with him the federal security forces.
The APPO is a temporary alliance of activists ranging from moderates with links to the ruling party to radicals calling for armed struggle to overthrow the state. In conversation with APPO members this week there was consensus that the time had come to replace traditional political parties with community-based governing assemblies, in keeping with indigenous tradition.
On the eve of the police occupation the teacher's union signed a wage agreement and agreed to go back to work. The push to topple Ruiz would have continued but the core of the resistance movement was effectively neutralized. On that same day, however, government officials opened fire on a group of protestors, killing US citizen Brad Will and raising the profile of the dispute internationally.
Under pressure to resolve the impasse, President Fox dispatched police with orders to retake the square and dismantle barricades around the city. Mexico's congress simultaneously pushed for the resignation of Ruiz, to ease tensions. However the plan backfired as Ruiz refused to step down and appears determined to hang on until the bitter end.
To Read the Entire Report
Support Peace Candidates
(In Red Kentucky I guess we don't have any peace candidates?)
The Peace Race (Continued)
Katrina Van Heuvel
The Nation
"In general, ‘peace candidate' means wanting to bring our troops home from Iraq," says Peace Action's Organizing and Policy Director, Paul Kawika Martin. "Although some also believe in cutting military spending, diplomacy for Iran, nuclear disarmament and other important peace issues."
Here, then, are some peace candidates in tight races who are worthy of your support:
Charlie Brown (D-CA) for Congress
Charlie Brown is running for Congress in California's 4th District against Republican incumbent John Doolittle, who is losing ground due to links to Jack Abramoff. Brown is a retired Lt. Colonel in the US Air Force who voiced opposition to the war in Iraq before it began. Despite a district redrawn for Doolittle's benefit, recent polls show Brown in a statistical dead heat with the incumbent.
Jerry McNerney (D-CA) for Congress
Jerry McNerney is a progressive Democrat who has a good chance of beating the reactionary Richard Pombo (R-CA) in California's 11th District. He supports Rep. Murtha's plan for a speedy withdrawal of the troops, and The Cook Political Report now calls this once safe Republican seat a toss-up.
Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) for Congress
In the highly competitive race for the open seat in Colorado's 7th District, Ed Perlmutter has made his support for troop withdrawal well-known. He has said that one of his first acts in Congress will be to add his name to Rep. Murtha's list of co-sponsors for legislation calling for a speedy withdrawal. Perlmutter is also a strong advocate for alternative energy research and is effective at making the connection between US foreign policy and the need for a new energy policy at home.
Diane Farrell (D-CT) for Congress
Running against Republican Chris Shays in Connecticut's 4th District, Diane Farrell has taken a strong stance against nuclear proliferation. Farrell recognizes that the US needs to lead by example when it comes to nonproliferation and understands that investment in new nuclear weapons detracts resources from critical parts of the federal budget. She also knows that it's time to bring the troops home in a way that respects their safety and our obligations to the Iraqi people. Polling shows the candidates even in this race.
Ned Lamont (D-CT) for Senate
Running against war hawk Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont says: "Those who got us into this mess should be held accountable…the $250 million a day we are spending in Iraq is better spent on pre-school and healthcare, public transit and veterans benefits." Lamont praises the leadership of Rep. John Murtha and calls for a speedy withdrawal of troops.
Paul Hodes (D-NH) for Congress
Paul Hodes faces Republican Rep. Charles Bass in New Hampshire's 2nd District. Hodes believes that the US should lead global nuclear disarmament by example – ceasing new nuclear weapon development, maintaining the moratorium on nuclear tests, and reducing our current nuclear stockpile. Hodes also supports a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and pledges to work against permanent US military bases in Iraq.
Bob Menendez (D-NJ) for Senate
Sen. Bob Menendez opposed the Iraq War from the start, back when most of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate failed to take a strong stand. Although Menendez angered many in the peace movement with his vote for the Military Commissions Act, he supports beginning troop withdrawal this year. He faces a tough opponent in Tom Kean, Jr., and is locked in a tight race.
John Hall (D-NY) for Congress
Running in New York's 19th District, John Hall is a truly progressive candidate with pro-peace positions on important issues such as nuclear weapons and the occupation of Iraq. Hall calls for immediately beginning troop withdrawal. He also recognizes the urgent need to rebuild relationships with the international community, particularly by joining treaties to ban landmines, the International Criminal Court, and reducing global warming emissions. The redistribution of federal funds from nuclear weapons to funding human needs is another key issue for Hall.
Dan Maffei (D-NY) for Congress
Dan Maffei challenges 18-year incumbent Rep. Jim Walsh in New York's 25th District. Maffei is a strong advocate for an immediate and safe withdrawal of our troops. He also supports an independent investigation into the Bush administration officials' involved in leading us into a war under false pretexts.
Sherrod Brown (D-OH) for Senate
Progressive Rep. Sherrod Brown is in an extremely close race to oust the conservative Senator Mike DeWine (R). Although Brown angered many in the peace movement with his vote for the Military Commissions Act, over the past four years in the House he has averaged more than 94 percent on Peace Action's voting record.
Joseph Sestak, Jr. (D-PA) for Congress
Running against incumbent Rep. Curt Weldon in Pennsylvania's 7th District, retired three-star Admiral Joe Sestak calls for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq by the end of 2007 and favors nuclear disarmament. Sestak would act far better on peace issues than ten-term incumbent Weldon who in the last six years averaged an appalling 11 percent on the Peace Action voting record.
Bernard Sanders (I-VT) for Senate
This isn't actually a "close race." Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the founder of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is heavily favored to win Vermont's open Senate seat. But his wealthy opponent has spent more than $2,000,000 of his own money. If Sanders is indeed elected, he will be the most progressive member of that body and will continue to champion peace issues.
To Read the Rest of the Post
The Peace Race (Continued)
Katrina Van Heuvel
The Nation
"In general, ‘peace candidate' means wanting to bring our troops home from Iraq," says Peace Action's Organizing and Policy Director, Paul Kawika Martin. "Although some also believe in cutting military spending, diplomacy for Iran, nuclear disarmament and other important peace issues."
Here, then, are some peace candidates in tight races who are worthy of your support:
Charlie Brown (D-CA) for Congress
Charlie Brown is running for Congress in California's 4th District against Republican incumbent John Doolittle, who is losing ground due to links to Jack Abramoff. Brown is a retired Lt. Colonel in the US Air Force who voiced opposition to the war in Iraq before it began. Despite a district redrawn for Doolittle's benefit, recent polls show Brown in a statistical dead heat with the incumbent.
Jerry McNerney (D-CA) for Congress
Jerry McNerney is a progressive Democrat who has a good chance of beating the reactionary Richard Pombo (R-CA) in California's 11th District. He supports Rep. Murtha's plan for a speedy withdrawal of the troops, and The Cook Political Report now calls this once safe Republican seat a toss-up.
Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) for Congress
In the highly competitive race for the open seat in Colorado's 7th District, Ed Perlmutter has made his support for troop withdrawal well-known. He has said that one of his first acts in Congress will be to add his name to Rep. Murtha's list of co-sponsors for legislation calling for a speedy withdrawal. Perlmutter is also a strong advocate for alternative energy research and is effective at making the connection between US foreign policy and the need for a new energy policy at home.
Diane Farrell (D-CT) for Congress
Running against Republican Chris Shays in Connecticut's 4th District, Diane Farrell has taken a strong stance against nuclear proliferation. Farrell recognizes that the US needs to lead by example when it comes to nonproliferation and understands that investment in new nuclear weapons detracts resources from critical parts of the federal budget. She also knows that it's time to bring the troops home in a way that respects their safety and our obligations to the Iraqi people. Polling shows the candidates even in this race.
Ned Lamont (D-CT) for Senate
Running against war hawk Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont says: "Those who got us into this mess should be held accountable…the $250 million a day we are spending in Iraq is better spent on pre-school and healthcare, public transit and veterans benefits." Lamont praises the leadership of Rep. John Murtha and calls for a speedy withdrawal of troops.
Paul Hodes (D-NH) for Congress
Paul Hodes faces Republican Rep. Charles Bass in New Hampshire's 2nd District. Hodes believes that the US should lead global nuclear disarmament by example – ceasing new nuclear weapon development, maintaining the moratorium on nuclear tests, and reducing our current nuclear stockpile. Hodes also supports a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and pledges to work against permanent US military bases in Iraq.
Bob Menendez (D-NJ) for Senate
Sen. Bob Menendez opposed the Iraq War from the start, back when most of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate failed to take a strong stand. Although Menendez angered many in the peace movement with his vote for the Military Commissions Act, he supports beginning troop withdrawal this year. He faces a tough opponent in Tom Kean, Jr., and is locked in a tight race.
John Hall (D-NY) for Congress
Running in New York's 19th District, John Hall is a truly progressive candidate with pro-peace positions on important issues such as nuclear weapons and the occupation of Iraq. Hall calls for immediately beginning troop withdrawal. He also recognizes the urgent need to rebuild relationships with the international community, particularly by joining treaties to ban landmines, the International Criminal Court, and reducing global warming emissions. The redistribution of federal funds from nuclear weapons to funding human needs is another key issue for Hall.
Dan Maffei (D-NY) for Congress
Dan Maffei challenges 18-year incumbent Rep. Jim Walsh in New York's 25th District. Maffei is a strong advocate for an immediate and safe withdrawal of our troops. He also supports an independent investigation into the Bush administration officials' involved in leading us into a war under false pretexts.
Sherrod Brown (D-OH) for Senate
Progressive Rep. Sherrod Brown is in an extremely close race to oust the conservative Senator Mike DeWine (R). Although Brown angered many in the peace movement with his vote for the Military Commissions Act, over the past four years in the House he has averaged more than 94 percent on Peace Action's voting record.
Joseph Sestak, Jr. (D-PA) for Congress
Running against incumbent Rep. Curt Weldon in Pennsylvania's 7th District, retired three-star Admiral Joe Sestak calls for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq by the end of 2007 and favors nuclear disarmament. Sestak would act far better on peace issues than ten-term incumbent Weldon who in the last six years averaged an appalling 11 percent on the Peace Action voting record.
Bernard Sanders (I-VT) for Senate
This isn't actually a "close race." Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the founder of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is heavily favored to win Vermont's open Senate seat. But his wealthy opponent has spent more than $2,000,000 of his own money. If Sanders is indeed elected, he will be the most progressive member of that body and will continue to champion peace issues.
To Read the Rest of the Post
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth: Voter Information Site
KFTC: Voter Information Site
Includes candidate surveys and coverage of key voting concerns.
---------------------------------------------------------------
If you believe your right to vote has been violated contact:
County Clerk--County Board of Elections--State Board of Elections
(502) 573-7100 or (800) 246-1399
Attorney General's Election Fraud Hotline
(800) 328-8683
If they don't give you satisfaction seek out the many independent organizations documenting voting abuses/violations.
Includes candidate surveys and coverage of key voting concerns.
---------------------------------------------------------------
If you believe your right to vote has been violated contact:
County Clerk--County Board of Elections--State Board of Elections
(502) 573-7100 or (800) 246-1399
Attorney General's Election Fraud Hotline
(800) 328-8683
If they don't give you satisfaction seek out the many independent organizations documenting voting abuses/violations.
Amy Goodman and Adam Cohen: Voter Suppression in Midterm Elections; Protecting the Right to Vote
(Be cautious when voting tomorrow, be observant of the process, check your vote, and report/record any violations/problems/abuses.)
Voter Suppression in Midterm Elections: Robocalls, ID Confusion, Voter Roll Purges
Amy Goodman and Adam Cohen
Democracy Now
In Virginia, Democratic Senatorial candidate James Webb's last name does not appear on the voting summary sheet. In Indiana, African American congresswoman Julia Carson was told her congressional ID was not sufficient to vote. In Broward County, Florida early voting, a vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate registered as a vote for the Republican candidate. Adam Cohen, editorial writer for The New York Times, joins us to discuss voter disenfranchisement.
On Tuesday, millions of voters will cast their vote in the mid- term elections. Many are calling this the most high-stakes election in recent years with the possibility of a Democratic takeover of Congress. But some are warning that voters could be subject to intimidation and a variety of suppressive tactics meant to keep them from casting a ballot. Some of these tactics have been mandated by the government like new rules requiring government-issued voter identification cards. Others have been perpetrated by unofficial sources such as the bogus letters sent to thousands of Latino voters in California telling them it was illegal to vote.
To Watch/Listen/Read the Report
Adam Cohen's New York Time's Editorial "Protecting the Right to Vote"
Voter Suppression in Midterm Elections: Robocalls, ID Confusion, Voter Roll Purges
Amy Goodman and Adam Cohen
Democracy Now
In Virginia, Democratic Senatorial candidate James Webb's last name does not appear on the voting summary sheet. In Indiana, African American congresswoman Julia Carson was told her congressional ID was not sufficient to vote. In Broward County, Florida early voting, a vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate registered as a vote for the Republican candidate. Adam Cohen, editorial writer for The New York Times, joins us to discuss voter disenfranchisement.
On Tuesday, millions of voters will cast their vote in the mid- term elections. Many are calling this the most high-stakes election in recent years with the possibility of a Democratic takeover of Congress. But some are warning that voters could be subject to intimidation and a variety of suppressive tactics meant to keep them from casting a ballot. Some of these tactics have been mandated by the government like new rules requiring government-issued voter identification cards. Others have been perpetrated by unofficial sources such as the bogus letters sent to thousands of Latino voters in California telling them it was illegal to vote.
To Watch/Listen/Read the Report
Adam Cohen's New York Time's Editorial "Protecting the Right to Vote"
Joshua Holland: GOP Sacrifices Justice for an 'October Surprise'
(Please vote tomorrow)
Saddam Trial: GOP Sacrifices Justice for an 'October Surprise'
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
White House press flack Tony Snow told his former colleagues at Fox News that it was "a good day for the Iraqi people." Of the charges that the verdict was timed to influence the midterms in the U.S., Snow said, "the conspiracy theorists are climbing out of the woodwork trying to manipulate things," and added: "The most important thing to know is that the Iraqis are running their own system. We're not telling them what to do, when to do or how to do it."
The statement begs the question, not for the first time: Exactly how stupid does this White House think we are?
Scott Horton, a Columbia University law professor who's been to Baghdad several times to see the proceedings up close, told The Nation's Tom Engelhardt that "most observers expected the date would be much later, but it seems to have been moved up." He said the verdict's timing "is designed to show some progress in Iraq" so that "the American public will see Saddam condemned to death and see it as a positive thing."
In my experience, everything that comes out of Baghdad is very carefully prepared for U.S. domestic consumption. ... There is a team of American lawyers working as special legal advisers out of the U.S. embassy, who drive the tribunal. They have been involved in preparing the case and overseeing it from the beginning. The trial, which is shown on TV, has mild entertainment value for Iraqis, but they refer to it regularly as an American puppet theater.
The occupation authorities are decidedly political. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, wrote that partisan loyalty has consistently trumped experience when it comes to hiring Americans to staff the largest Embassy in the world in Baghdad's Green Zone:
[The authorities] posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade.
Although the trial was expected to last months longer, the date of the verdict was moved up, in part, by ending the evidentiary phase before all of the defense's witnesses could be heard. Presiding judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman -- the third judge to oversee the trial -- shut down the testimony before it was complete, saying: "We are done with witnesses. . . . If those 26 were not able to make the case, then 100 will not."
Abdel-Rahman got the job after the Iraqi government and its American "advisors" dismissed the previous judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, for being "too soft" on Hussein. In January, the first judge to hear the case resigned because of the government's attempt to influence the proceedings. An Iraqi source told reporters: "He's under a lot of pressure. The whole court is under political pressure."
Ironically, if there is a new wave of violence, the rushed decision could very well backfire on the administration; instead of two news cycles with the Fox News ticker reading "Justice for Saddam," the last 48 hours of the campaign could be dominated by stories of the unfolding chaos.
Apparently that's a risk the administration is willing to take. From the outset, politics have come before justice in the trials of Saddam Hussein. The proceedings, which the administration and its boosters likened to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officials in the late 1940s, have been a sham from the start, marred by stunning levels of interference from the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. The occupation forces launched the trial before a government with a veneer of sovereignty was even established. Before Hussein was found guilty, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly called for his swift execution.
Three of Saddam's lawyers, one of the prosecuting judges and his son, and another judge's brother-in-law have been gunned down in the streets during the trial. Defense attorneys have boycotted the proceedings and still others have been barred from the courtroom.
According to Human Rights Watch, defense counsel hasn't been allowed to consult with their clients; HRW expressed "concerns" over the proceedings' "inappropriate standard of proof and inadequate protections against self-incrimination." The defendants have alleged that they've been beaten in custody. They've been kicked out of the courtroom every time they open their mouths, probably because of fears that they'll remind people that the same country occupying Iraq today was supporting Saddam during the worst of his abuses. Judges allowed prosecuting attorneys to introduce evidence without giving the defense a chance to preview it, which Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's international justice program, called "trial by ambush." There aren't adequate transcripts of the proceedings.
That's the process that Fox News said has been "lauded for its fairness." Future generations of law students will study it as a textbook example of a kangaroo court, a model of "victor's justice."
Before he got the job advising Iraqi officials during the trial, even Case Western Reserve University law professor Michael Scharf, now one of the proceedings' staunchest defenders, wrote of the tribunal:
... [It] is in fact not international enough to successfully accomplish the goals that have been set for it. As currently structured, the Iraqi Special Tribunal risks being seen by both Iraqis and outsiders as a puppet of the Occupying Power, and as a tool for vengeance by Saddam Hussein's enemies, rather than as the cornerstone of a new judicial system committed to the rule of law.
Attorney and right-wing blogger John Hinderaker, summed up the myopic bloodlust with which many of the war's supporters have justified the sham trial, writing: "the whole idea of 'trying' Saddam is foolish. His countless crimes are known to the Iraqi people, and the world, beyond the ability of any judicial proceeding to prove or disprove... Saddam should have been shot years ago."
What people like Hinderaker fail to grasp is that the importance of Saddam the human being -- a 69-year-old thug pulled out of a "spider hole" two years ago -- pales next to the significance of Saddam the dictator -- the leader who ordered the gassing of the Kurds, who drained the "Marsh Arabs'" marshes, who put down his opponents with remarkable cruelty, who ordered whole villages to be razed and under whom torture was almost as prevalent as it is in Iraq today.
It's the principle of the rule of law that will suffer when the hang-man's noose tightens around Hussein's neck. Since the adoption of the Genocide Convention in 1951, no national leader has been convicted in a competent court of humanity's highest crime, and with the trial of Saddam Hussein widely considered to be a joke, that will continue to be the case.
Human Rights Watch's Malcolm Smart called the trial an "an opportunity missed" and said it "should have been a major contribution towards establishing justice and the rule of law in Iraq, and in ensuring truth and accountability for the massive human rights violations perpetrated by Saddam Hussein's rule." Instead, as Mohamad Bazzi reported this week from Beirut, "Hussein could become a martyr for the nationalist strain of the Iraqi insurgency, and in death he could be an even more potent symbol than" in life, "especially if [the proceedings are] perceived not to meet international standards."
It's inconceivable that a man with Saddam Hussein's ego wouldn't prefer a quick martyr's death after a trial widely viewed as a mockery of justice to being humbled before the rule of law -- to having the impunity that marked his decades of rule ripped away from him before the eyes of the world.
A fair trial would have demonstrated some of the best principles of liberal democracy: judicial independence, the right to a rigorous defense and the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. But, tragically, in order to get vengeance against Saddam the flesh-and-blood man -- and for the sake of the American electoral calendar -- Saddam the dictator will never see justice.
To Read the Entire Article
Also on Democracy Now:
* Saddam Hussein Sentenced to Death, Legal Experts Question Court Proceedings *
An Iraqi court sentenced Saddam Hussein to death by hanging for committing crimes against humanity. The decision was announced on Sunday, just two days before the U.S. mid-term elections. We speak with Scott Horton, the Chairman of the International Law Committee and a member of the Iraqi Bar Association.
To Listen/Watch/Read
Saddam Trial: GOP Sacrifices Justice for an 'October Surprise'
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
White House press flack Tony Snow told his former colleagues at Fox News that it was "a good day for the Iraqi people." Of the charges that the verdict was timed to influence the midterms in the U.S., Snow said, "the conspiracy theorists are climbing out of the woodwork trying to manipulate things," and added: "The most important thing to know is that the Iraqis are running their own system. We're not telling them what to do, when to do or how to do it."
The statement begs the question, not for the first time: Exactly how stupid does this White House think we are?
Scott Horton, a Columbia University law professor who's been to Baghdad several times to see the proceedings up close, told The Nation's Tom Engelhardt that "most observers expected the date would be much later, but it seems to have been moved up." He said the verdict's timing "is designed to show some progress in Iraq" so that "the American public will see Saddam condemned to death and see it as a positive thing."
In my experience, everything that comes out of Baghdad is very carefully prepared for U.S. domestic consumption. ... There is a team of American lawyers working as special legal advisers out of the U.S. embassy, who drive the tribunal. They have been involved in preparing the case and overseeing it from the beginning. The trial, which is shown on TV, has mild entertainment value for Iraqis, but they refer to it regularly as an American puppet theater.
The occupation authorities are decidedly political. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, wrote that partisan loyalty has consistently trumped experience when it comes to hiring Americans to staff the largest Embassy in the world in Baghdad's Green Zone:
[The authorities] posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade.
Although the trial was expected to last months longer, the date of the verdict was moved up, in part, by ending the evidentiary phase before all of the defense's witnesses could be heard. Presiding judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman -- the third judge to oversee the trial -- shut down the testimony before it was complete, saying: "We are done with witnesses. . . . If those 26 were not able to make the case, then 100 will not."
Abdel-Rahman got the job after the Iraqi government and its American "advisors" dismissed the previous judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, for being "too soft" on Hussein. In January, the first judge to hear the case resigned because of the government's attempt to influence the proceedings. An Iraqi source told reporters: "He's under a lot of pressure. The whole court is under political pressure."
Ironically, if there is a new wave of violence, the rushed decision could very well backfire on the administration; instead of two news cycles with the Fox News ticker reading "Justice for Saddam," the last 48 hours of the campaign could be dominated by stories of the unfolding chaos.
Apparently that's a risk the administration is willing to take. From the outset, politics have come before justice in the trials of Saddam Hussein. The proceedings, which the administration and its boosters likened to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officials in the late 1940s, have been a sham from the start, marred by stunning levels of interference from the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. The occupation forces launched the trial before a government with a veneer of sovereignty was even established. Before Hussein was found guilty, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly called for his swift execution.
Three of Saddam's lawyers, one of the prosecuting judges and his son, and another judge's brother-in-law have been gunned down in the streets during the trial. Defense attorneys have boycotted the proceedings and still others have been barred from the courtroom.
According to Human Rights Watch, defense counsel hasn't been allowed to consult with their clients; HRW expressed "concerns" over the proceedings' "inappropriate standard of proof and inadequate protections against self-incrimination." The defendants have alleged that they've been beaten in custody. They've been kicked out of the courtroom every time they open their mouths, probably because of fears that they'll remind people that the same country occupying Iraq today was supporting Saddam during the worst of his abuses. Judges allowed prosecuting attorneys to introduce evidence without giving the defense a chance to preview it, which Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's international justice program, called "trial by ambush." There aren't adequate transcripts of the proceedings.
That's the process that Fox News said has been "lauded for its fairness." Future generations of law students will study it as a textbook example of a kangaroo court, a model of "victor's justice."
Before he got the job advising Iraqi officials during the trial, even Case Western Reserve University law professor Michael Scharf, now one of the proceedings' staunchest defenders, wrote of the tribunal:
... [It] is in fact not international enough to successfully accomplish the goals that have been set for it. As currently structured, the Iraqi Special Tribunal risks being seen by both Iraqis and outsiders as a puppet of the Occupying Power, and as a tool for vengeance by Saddam Hussein's enemies, rather than as the cornerstone of a new judicial system committed to the rule of law.
Attorney and right-wing blogger John Hinderaker, summed up the myopic bloodlust with which many of the war's supporters have justified the sham trial, writing: "the whole idea of 'trying' Saddam is foolish. His countless crimes are known to the Iraqi people, and the world, beyond the ability of any judicial proceeding to prove or disprove... Saddam should have been shot years ago."
What people like Hinderaker fail to grasp is that the importance of Saddam the human being -- a 69-year-old thug pulled out of a "spider hole" two years ago -- pales next to the significance of Saddam the dictator -- the leader who ordered the gassing of the Kurds, who drained the "Marsh Arabs'" marshes, who put down his opponents with remarkable cruelty, who ordered whole villages to be razed and under whom torture was almost as prevalent as it is in Iraq today.
It's the principle of the rule of law that will suffer when the hang-man's noose tightens around Hussein's neck. Since the adoption of the Genocide Convention in 1951, no national leader has been convicted in a competent court of humanity's highest crime, and with the trial of Saddam Hussein widely considered to be a joke, that will continue to be the case.
Human Rights Watch's Malcolm Smart called the trial an "an opportunity missed" and said it "should have been a major contribution towards establishing justice and the rule of law in Iraq, and in ensuring truth and accountability for the massive human rights violations perpetrated by Saddam Hussein's rule." Instead, as Mohamad Bazzi reported this week from Beirut, "Hussein could become a martyr for the nationalist strain of the Iraqi insurgency, and in death he could be an even more potent symbol than" in life, "especially if [the proceedings are] perceived not to meet international standards."
It's inconceivable that a man with Saddam Hussein's ego wouldn't prefer a quick martyr's death after a trial widely viewed as a mockery of justice to being humbled before the rule of law -- to having the impunity that marked his decades of rule ripped away from him before the eyes of the world.
A fair trial would have demonstrated some of the best principles of liberal democracy: judicial independence, the right to a rigorous defense and the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. But, tragically, in order to get vengeance against Saddam the flesh-and-blood man -- and for the sake of the American electoral calendar -- Saddam the dictator will never see justice.
To Read the Entire Article
Also on Democracy Now:
* Saddam Hussein Sentenced to Death, Legal Experts Question Court Proceedings *
An Iraqi court sentenced Saddam Hussein to death by hanging for committing crimes against humanity. The decision was announced on Sunday, just two days before the U.S. mid-term elections. We speak with Scott Horton, the Chairman of the International Law Committee and a member of the Iraqi Bar Association.
To Listen/Watch/Read
Sunday, November 05, 2006
War Times; Peace and Justice Activism; Please Vote
Please vote on tuesday!
War Times
Rebecca Gordon from the latest issue:
"After the vicious September 11 attacks, President Bush vowed to make the nation safe by launching a global “war on terror.”
His administration has prioritized military muscle and forcible regime change over diplomacy. It has justified torture and illegal spying to defeat “evil.”
Five years later it is evident that these policies have been a dangerous failure.
“Glance at any television screen . . . and chances are that the screen will be showing mayhem in Lebanon , Baghdad or Gaza . It usually takes a minute or so to decipher which Arab city is burning,” observed the New York Times.
These policies, often supported by Congressional Democrats, have polarized the Middle East , turning it into an ever-worsening killing field. The entire Arab and Muslim worlds are now aflame with anti-U.S. rage."
Also:
United for Peace and Justice
War Times
Rebecca Gordon from the latest issue:
"After the vicious September 11 attacks, President Bush vowed to make the nation safe by launching a global “war on terror.”
His administration has prioritized military muscle and forcible regime change over diplomacy. It has justified torture and illegal spying to defeat “evil.”
Five years later it is evident that these policies have been a dangerous failure.
“Glance at any television screen . . . and chances are that the screen will be showing mayhem in Lebanon , Baghdad or Gaza . It usually takes a minute or so to decipher which Arab city is burning,” observed the New York Times.
These policies, often supported by Congressional Democrats, have polarized the Middle East , turning it into an ever-worsening killing field. The entire Arab and Muslim worlds are now aflame with anti-U.S. rage."
Also:
United for Peace and Justice
Dave Marsh: Gang of Four (An appreciation: 1990); Simon Goddard: Chairman of the Bored (Uncut article: 2000)
(I recently picked up the Gang of Four's "Return the Gift" as a part of my annual birthday music spree. Gang of Four were one of those important voices that broke through my nihilistic teens, alerting me that something was wrong and perhaps we should consider what that might be. Instead of the inarticulate, albeit needed, pure rage of many punk bands of the late 1970s, GOF's lyrics used a sense of irony to expose social problems. I've been playing them a lot over the past few weeks and its good to hear that their music/lyrics is just as powerful and relevant now.--Michael Benton)
The Gang Of Four
Greil Marcus, July 1990
The Gang Of Four - Dave Allen, bass, Hugo Burnham, drums, vocals ("It's Her Factory"), Andy Gill, guitar, vocals ("Anthrax," "Paralysed"); and Jon King, vocals and melodica -played their first show in the summer of 1977 in Leeds, England. Burnham, Gill, and King were middle-class graduates of Leeds University: Allen was a working-class musician who answered a bassist-wanted ad for a fast R&B band. They were one of countless groups to spring up in the wake of the promise people heard in the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K.": the rules have changed. Now anything you want, anything that's on your mind, can be made into pop music. It's your move.
There was something on the Gang of Four's collective mind, picked up from books, painting (Manet's especially), movies (notably Jean-Luc Godard's Numero Deux), not-so-fast R&B (George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic), and Leeds street politics (marches against the neo Nazi National Front party that ended with police violence; violent attacks by Front goons on pubs frequented by the likes of the band and their pals the Mekons and Delta 5). What was on their mind was the notion that everyday life-wage labor, official propaganda, the commodity system, but also the way you bought a shirt, how you made love, the feeling you had as you watched the nightly news or turned away from it-was not "natural", but the product of an invisible hand. It was an interested construction, someone else's project, a rulers' project. Some of the rulers were dead, some were living, but all held power. "The attitudes and beliefs that people take as being natural," King said early on, "have been inherited through the social structure they're brought up in. An example is the man who believes that women are by definition more suited to working in the home than to making decisions. The belief in the natural puts all this outside the realm of debate - and unless you have an awareness of your ideas as political manifestations, you won't believe you can change them."
"If you're not aware of the processes and thoughts by which you arrive at a statement about a situation", Gill said of the bands songs, "If you're not aware of that, you probably can't sufficiently analyse the situation". Highfalutin stuff, even after the Sex Pistols had pinned history itself as a "mad parade" and the Royal Family as a theme park, but when I first saw the Gang of Four I didn't catch a word and could have cared less. They were opening for the Buzzcocks in San Francisco in 1979; they'd just released their first album, Entertainment!, in the U.K.: no one in the audience had heard it. They took the stage and held it as if all bets were off. I couldn't take my eyes off Gill, scared, tense, but ready, he looked like an extra from a British end-of-the-world movie suddenly forced to carry the film.
I saw the Gang of Four play many times after that night - in England, in Los Angeles, again in San Francisco, after Busta Jones and then Sara Lee replaced Dave Allen, after Gill and a drum machine (on record) and Steve Goulding (on stage) replaced Hugo Burnham - and the shock of that night, its displacement, was always present. Jon King was hurled around the stage as if by an unseen puppetmaster, as instruments dropped out, leaving holes in the sound, as the wrong man plugged them, leaving holes of his own, you could almost see the puppet's strings being cut, you could certainly hear them. As King jerked, Andy Gill attacked him; Dave Allen upended both of them. Hugo Burnham hammered at all three like a judge. I walked out of that first show before the Buzzcocks came on; I didn't want to know what they had to say. I didn't want anything to break the confusion, the delicious horror, of what the Gang of Four had done.
What had they done? Always, they were talked about as some kind of rebel-rock or agit-prop ("neo-Marxist funk" as one treasured review put it), or as a band bent on the deconstruction of all received ideas, including all received ideas about rock 'n' roll. Even the band members occasionally said such things, but that wasn't exactly it.
The Gang of Four acted out, and out into records, a picture of an individual who had discovered that ordinary life - the gestures of affection and resentment one made every day, the catch phrases one spoke every day as if one had invented them - is in fact sold and bought as grease for shopping and silence, for the accumulation of capital and passivity. The person who has made this remarkable discovery begins to re-examine his or her life, and it begins to look different: "Natural's Not in It." History - "Not by Great Men." A woman in the home: "It's Her Factory."
Life looks different, but it doesn't change. The Gang of Four pursued their subject's discoveries not as if they might lead to some grand general strike, some revolutionary epiphany ("it's a good name," a fan told them, not likely thinking of China's Maoist Gang of Four, "because there are four of you"), but as if, once recognized, those discoveries would remain trapped in the prison of familiarity. Playing everyman on stage, Jon King was never free. He was an explosion of doubt. He dramatized a glimpse of liberation, but simultaneously the wish to conform, to be at home in the only home available, not matter how false.
When Hugo Burnham sings "It's Her Factory", he speaks conversationally about a news item he's encountered; he's sardonic but direct. When Andy Gill recites the theory behind "Anthrax" or the monologue of "Paralysed" when he momentarily takes over "Damaged Goods" or any of the other tunes in which he's immediately evident (his grainy voice has none of King's wail in it), he's no less naturalistic. Both men get to the point, and both are a bit forbidding. But King is the Gang of Four's patsy - and the world's. In almost every song, you can hear a very specific struggle: the struggle of the person who has heard the bad news to love it. He always fails. He realizes everything he does is second-hand, a waking dream, a dream someone else has dreamed for him - when he walks into a pub and greets friends with a line he's half-consciously lifted from last night's sit-com, he's an advertisement. He hears himself and he feels tricked, humiliated, so he smashes into his friends, into the other members of the band, as if he's never seen them before but knows they mean him no good. Screaming, he insists that he's happy.
Dave Allen, Burnham, and Gill work as the singer's bad conscience. Most pointedly it is Gill, along with King co-author of almost all of the band's lyrics and co-designer of their hilarious sleeve art. On stage he was by far the most intense and willful of the actors. He remains the locus of danger in the songs. While King splatters himself across the music, Gill is watchful, the man who knows too much; he communicates terror because he has an idea what's coming. As a guitarist he is also the narrator, to the degree that the Gang of Four, their words not much less cut up than their sound, used one. The rhythm section can frame the singer's absurdities, but not keep up with him; Gill is the musician who communicates the value of form, of one-thing-leads-to-another, even when what has to be said demands that ordinary narrative be abandoned, demands that the urge to speak, or the impossibility of making oneself understood, be dramatized rather than any message or thought. Allen, Burnham, and Gill may be the singer's bad conscience because as they play they make irrevocable choices, and fix their value; he can't.
You could see this happen on stage, and you can hear it in the music; you don't have to follow any lyric sheet. From "At Home He's a Tourist" to "Capital (it Fails Us Now)" to "I Love a Man in a Uniform" the Gang of Four's music was always about resistance, but it was not the resistance of the rebel against the ruler. It was about the resistance of the rebel against him or herself. Most of the time, most intensely, most dramatically, the struggle ends with a raging acceptance, a rage that can't find its target: that's what happens in "Damaged Goods" with its many puns echoing off THE CHANGE WILL DO YOU GOOD, a supermarket slogan, the promise of a new life summed up in a few pennies less for eggs and cheese; that's what happens in "To Hell with Poverty" and "The History of the World." Occasionally, as with the quiet mumbled "Paralysed" a person faces oblivion, in this case what unemployment is so chillingly called in the UK, "redundancy". Rage becomes meaningless, and the acceptance you hear takes on a new form: self-hate.
To Read the Rest of Dave Marsh and Goddard's Appreciation of their first release
The Gang Of Four
Greil Marcus, July 1990
The Gang Of Four - Dave Allen, bass, Hugo Burnham, drums, vocals ("It's Her Factory"), Andy Gill, guitar, vocals ("Anthrax," "Paralysed"); and Jon King, vocals and melodica -played their first show in the summer of 1977 in Leeds, England. Burnham, Gill, and King were middle-class graduates of Leeds University: Allen was a working-class musician who answered a bassist-wanted ad for a fast R&B band. They were one of countless groups to spring up in the wake of the promise people heard in the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K.": the rules have changed. Now anything you want, anything that's on your mind, can be made into pop music. It's your move.
There was something on the Gang of Four's collective mind, picked up from books, painting (Manet's especially), movies (notably Jean-Luc Godard's Numero Deux), not-so-fast R&B (George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic), and Leeds street politics (marches against the neo Nazi National Front party that ended with police violence; violent attacks by Front goons on pubs frequented by the likes of the band and their pals the Mekons and Delta 5). What was on their mind was the notion that everyday life-wage labor, official propaganda, the commodity system, but also the way you bought a shirt, how you made love, the feeling you had as you watched the nightly news or turned away from it-was not "natural", but the product of an invisible hand. It was an interested construction, someone else's project, a rulers' project. Some of the rulers were dead, some were living, but all held power. "The attitudes and beliefs that people take as being natural," King said early on, "have been inherited through the social structure they're brought up in. An example is the man who believes that women are by definition more suited to working in the home than to making decisions. The belief in the natural puts all this outside the realm of debate - and unless you have an awareness of your ideas as political manifestations, you won't believe you can change them."
"If you're not aware of the processes and thoughts by which you arrive at a statement about a situation", Gill said of the bands songs, "If you're not aware of that, you probably can't sufficiently analyse the situation". Highfalutin stuff, even after the Sex Pistols had pinned history itself as a "mad parade" and the Royal Family as a theme park, but when I first saw the Gang of Four I didn't catch a word and could have cared less. They were opening for the Buzzcocks in San Francisco in 1979; they'd just released their first album, Entertainment!, in the U.K.: no one in the audience had heard it. They took the stage and held it as if all bets were off. I couldn't take my eyes off Gill, scared, tense, but ready, he looked like an extra from a British end-of-the-world movie suddenly forced to carry the film.
I saw the Gang of Four play many times after that night - in England, in Los Angeles, again in San Francisco, after Busta Jones and then Sara Lee replaced Dave Allen, after Gill and a drum machine (on record) and Steve Goulding (on stage) replaced Hugo Burnham - and the shock of that night, its displacement, was always present. Jon King was hurled around the stage as if by an unseen puppetmaster, as instruments dropped out, leaving holes in the sound, as the wrong man plugged them, leaving holes of his own, you could almost see the puppet's strings being cut, you could certainly hear them. As King jerked, Andy Gill attacked him; Dave Allen upended both of them. Hugo Burnham hammered at all three like a judge. I walked out of that first show before the Buzzcocks came on; I didn't want to know what they had to say. I didn't want anything to break the confusion, the delicious horror, of what the Gang of Four had done.
What had they done? Always, they were talked about as some kind of rebel-rock or agit-prop ("neo-Marxist funk" as one treasured review put it), or as a band bent on the deconstruction of all received ideas, including all received ideas about rock 'n' roll. Even the band members occasionally said such things, but that wasn't exactly it.
The Gang of Four acted out, and out into records, a picture of an individual who had discovered that ordinary life - the gestures of affection and resentment one made every day, the catch phrases one spoke every day as if one had invented them - is in fact sold and bought as grease for shopping and silence, for the accumulation of capital and passivity. The person who has made this remarkable discovery begins to re-examine his or her life, and it begins to look different: "Natural's Not in It." History - "Not by Great Men." A woman in the home: "It's Her Factory."
Life looks different, but it doesn't change. The Gang of Four pursued their subject's discoveries not as if they might lead to some grand general strike, some revolutionary epiphany ("it's a good name," a fan told them, not likely thinking of China's Maoist Gang of Four, "because there are four of you"), but as if, once recognized, those discoveries would remain trapped in the prison of familiarity. Playing everyman on stage, Jon King was never free. He was an explosion of doubt. He dramatized a glimpse of liberation, but simultaneously the wish to conform, to be at home in the only home available, not matter how false.
When Hugo Burnham sings "It's Her Factory", he speaks conversationally about a news item he's encountered; he's sardonic but direct. When Andy Gill recites the theory behind "Anthrax" or the monologue of "Paralysed" when he momentarily takes over "Damaged Goods" or any of the other tunes in which he's immediately evident (his grainy voice has none of King's wail in it), he's no less naturalistic. Both men get to the point, and both are a bit forbidding. But King is the Gang of Four's patsy - and the world's. In almost every song, you can hear a very specific struggle: the struggle of the person who has heard the bad news to love it. He always fails. He realizes everything he does is second-hand, a waking dream, a dream someone else has dreamed for him - when he walks into a pub and greets friends with a line he's half-consciously lifted from last night's sit-com, he's an advertisement. He hears himself and he feels tricked, humiliated, so he smashes into his friends, into the other members of the band, as if he's never seen them before but knows they mean him no good. Screaming, he insists that he's happy.
Dave Allen, Burnham, and Gill work as the singer's bad conscience. Most pointedly it is Gill, along with King co-author of almost all of the band's lyrics and co-designer of their hilarious sleeve art. On stage he was by far the most intense and willful of the actors. He remains the locus of danger in the songs. While King splatters himself across the music, Gill is watchful, the man who knows too much; he communicates terror because he has an idea what's coming. As a guitarist he is also the narrator, to the degree that the Gang of Four, their words not much less cut up than their sound, used one. The rhythm section can frame the singer's absurdities, but not keep up with him; Gill is the musician who communicates the value of form, of one-thing-leads-to-another, even when what has to be said demands that ordinary narrative be abandoned, demands that the urge to speak, or the impossibility of making oneself understood, be dramatized rather than any message or thought. Allen, Burnham, and Gill may be the singer's bad conscience because as they play they make irrevocable choices, and fix their value; he can't.
You could see this happen on stage, and you can hear it in the music; you don't have to follow any lyric sheet. From "At Home He's a Tourist" to "Capital (it Fails Us Now)" to "I Love a Man in a Uniform" the Gang of Four's music was always about resistance, but it was not the resistance of the rebel against the ruler. It was about the resistance of the rebel against him or herself. Most of the time, most intensely, most dramatically, the struggle ends with a raging acceptance, a rage that can't find its target: that's what happens in "Damaged Goods" with its many puns echoing off THE CHANGE WILL DO YOU GOOD, a supermarket slogan, the promise of a new life summed up in a few pennies less for eggs and cheese; that's what happens in "To Hell with Poverty" and "The History of the World." Occasionally, as with the quiet mumbled "Paralysed" a person faces oblivion, in this case what unemployment is so chillingly called in the UK, "redundancy". Rage becomes meaningless, and the acceptance you hear takes on a new form: self-hate.
To Read the Rest of Dave Marsh and Goddard's Appreciation of their first release
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Frank Zappa: On Censorship
(Thanks to Harwell for reminding me of the genius of Frank Zappa, not only his music, but also his ability to communicate his viewpoints. This argument is still going on today and Zappa's comments are still relevant.)
Zappa, Frank. “On Censorship.” Crossfire (CNN: 1986)
The musician Frank Zappa was an intelligent, articulate and important voice in the battle against censorship. In this Crossfire episode we see him debating the censorship of music lyrics—he is, of course, against this censorship of “words.” This debate really gets to some of the core issues surrounding the “call for censorship” and the defenders of “freedom of expression.” Frank Zappa just devastated those pundits, exposing their idiocy... I miss Frank Zappa!
Zappa's Statement to Congress About Censorship of Music Lyrics
The Official Frank Zappa Website (where you can also listen to his music)
After you listen to Frank Zappa's debate on Crossfire, read this:
Haggard, Foley and GOP Preach Against the Vices They Can't Shake
Zappa, Frank. “On Censorship.” Crossfire (CNN: 1986)
The musician Frank Zappa was an intelligent, articulate and important voice in the battle against censorship. In this Crossfire episode we see him debating the censorship of music lyrics—he is, of course, against this censorship of “words.” This debate really gets to some of the core issues surrounding the “call for censorship” and the defenders of “freedom of expression.” Frank Zappa just devastated those pundits, exposing their idiocy... I miss Frank Zappa!
Zappa's Statement to Congress About Censorship of Music Lyrics
The Official Frank Zappa Website (where you can also listen to his music)
After you listen to Frank Zappa's debate on Crossfire, read this:
Haggard, Foley and GOP Preach Against the Vices They Can't Shake
Sad, So Sad
The self hatred, the repression, the need to put on a front and eradicate what one desires. I wish we lived in a more open society, one that didn't value puritanical mores in their leaders. We all desire, we all need, who cares what shape or form it takes as long as it is between consenting adults... sad, so sad... in a world full of violence, dischord, hatred, why would anyone care if two consenting adults find happiness, for moment, for a awhile, or for ever.
I'm trying to be still these days--think and reflect--not be the angry person that my society wants me to be--this is one thing that makes me rage, ok the war is another (anyone who knows me, hears this often), but why do we in a democratic society continue to discriminate against people based upon their sexual orientation?
I'm not angry, I feel pity, he so hated who he was that he had to eradicate it
Ousted evangelist confesses to followers
Such self-loathing that he felt he must persecute and oppress those that have the same desires as him...
Fired Evangelist Slams Gays in Jesus Camp
Even as he falls, he remains in denial of himself, and other evangelical leaders bury their heads in the sand (I feel sorry for the members' anguish over Haggard's deception, but the evangelical leaders continue to incite hatred and discrimination):
ABC Video Report: Fall From Grace
sad, so sad
please vote this tuesday and search down in your soul and think about what a democracy could be
I'm trying to be still these days--think and reflect--not be the angry person that my society wants me to be--this is one thing that makes me rage, ok the war is another (anyone who knows me, hears this often), but why do we in a democratic society continue to discriminate against people based upon their sexual orientation?
I'm not angry, I feel pity, he so hated who he was that he had to eradicate it
"The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life," he said.
Ousted evangelist confesses to followers
Such self-loathing that he felt he must persecute and oppress those that have the same desires as him...
Fired Evangelist Slams Gays in Jesus Camp
Even as he falls, he remains in denial of himself, and other evangelical leaders bury their heads in the sand (I feel sorry for the members' anguish over Haggard's deception, but the evangelical leaders continue to incite hatred and discrimination):
ABC Video Report: Fall From Grace
sad, so sad
please vote this tuesday and search down in your soul and think about what a democracy could be
Friday, November 03, 2006
Michael Benton: Violence and Film; Audience-Experience as a Factor in Our Reception of a Film (Revised)
(My film courses are focusing on the use of violence in the films of Tarantino, Cronenberg and others this week)
I believe that violence is a necessary part of many narratives because it is a part of reality. Violence is a part of being human and our interrelations--how can we ignore it?
At the same time I reject simplistic, cartoonish uses of violence where the hero is shot at a hundred times and perhaps receives a scratch while methodically dispatching every person they face. I think it is irresponsible to portray, or think of, violence as simply mindless entertainment, there are outbreaks of violence that when it happens it seems beyond our kin, or present understanding, but usually with time we are able to grasp the motivations or causes. Likewise in a work of art one can begin to grasp at the reason for the violence, make sense of a sort, even if one does not agree with the portrayal of the causes or motivations for the violence. (I feel the same way about the mindless-commercial usage of sex and sexuality in our culture.)
I seek intelligent reflection on the uses or outbreaks of violence--whether as a means to a goal, or as a frustrated reaction to events beyond our control, or as atool for oppression/resistance. Who is using the violence, as a means for what, and to whom, and why, and what are the goals of this violence? Ultimately violence in great works of art will cause you to respond (positively or negatively) and will cause you to exercise your own judgement and thought--it will initiate critical reflection upon the events of the story (and for me this is a defining moment in judging a narrative/film, or any other work of art).
The benefits of some narrative violence is that it makes it harder for audiences to ignore the motivations or beliefs of the characters (especially when we become implicated by our own violent impulses, becoming so wrapped up in the narrative we encourage the violence--do it, do it!!!--a good narrative can cause us to reflect on this impulse)--thus in the complex cinematic presentation we are faced with an intellectual quandry to the usage of the violence and the rationale for its usage. We cannot stand on the sidelines and retain our intellectual integrity. We have to take a stand, even if it is to condemn the movie, afterall, the artist did present us with a work that is intended to shock or affront. It is also hypocritical for the artist to complain when people condemn them for their work if their intent was to depict acts of violence in a graphic manner.
What is often missed in Hollywood films (as well as many foreign films--see the new run of Asian extreme films) is that violence is usually employed in the service of power (whether on an individual or systemic level). Our democracy is built on the ignorance of the daily usage of violence to keep some people/groups quiet/docile about their situation in life, this structural mask sometimes slips allowing a glimpse of the true face of that power--a very important glimpse. Thus, a necessary part of some violent narratives is our understanding of the roots of this power/control ...
People facing the threat or actual acts of violence also helps us to understand human potential, but it is not a case of human physicality or big weapons. In the narratives I am speaking of it is the plumbing of the human soul and the questioning of the mind/system (a person's perspective and a system's effect/control). Violence in cinema can help us to examine the operations of power in society? Passolini's brutal, disgusting and difficult Salo forever burned in my mind the operations of fascism (could you ever recommend this film to someone, it is a truly painful and wrenching film), or the ending of Greenway's beautiful Baby of Macon which horrified me more than any sophmoric slasher story could and to this day has left me pondering the meaning/causes of the film. This film was blocked from being exhibited in the U.S. When we showed it at Illinois State University, people were crying in the audience and afterwards we spilled into the streets and made our way to a pub, where we argued into the night about the meanings of the film. As with any difficult film, some were angry that we had shown the film and they had a reason to be angry. We listened patiently to their complaints, even if we believed, ultimately, that the film should be seen. Once again if you believe that a disturbing portrayal is important and should be seen, you should respect contrary, disturbed and angry reactions. This is what you expected the film to do and thus you should address its effects on those audiences. Do not dismiss them, engage in a dialogue that art demands of its audiences.
A problem with the usage of violence in film is that it has become an effect used to entertain and titillate, one of the most powerful and disturbing films of the last year was Michael Haneke's Cache (Hidden), which explores the aftereffects of repressed systemic and individual acts of aggression/violence. It is minimalist and subtle in its presentation of violence, but the impact is long-lasting, reverberating in my mind still a year later causing me to question the impact of individual and societal repression of violent acts. This film is much more powerful than all of Takashi Miike's countless blood-fests put together, why, because it forces us to reflect and the narrative demands audience involvement (if you see the film you will understand what I mean), rather than to simply jump and recoil, as in Miike's recent film Audition. Instances of violence can also bring us to focus on what gives life dignity and what is noble and ignoble in the human condition. A last thought, legitimated violence (sanctioned by the state, or other social forces) usually is a clear indicator of the boundaries of society, what is permitted, what is forbidden, and who controls these boundaries.
John Fraser states in "Violence in the Arts" (1974: 162):
"Far from being mindless, violence is usually the cutting edge of ideas and ideologies."
Violence and Film:
Castle, Robert. “Disturbing Movies, Or the Flip Side of the Real: Disturbing Movies Shouldn’t Equivocate.” Bright Lights Film Journal #44 (May 2004)
Ebert, Roger, et al. What is the Place of Evil in Film?
Grossman, Andrew. “Bleeding Realism Dry, or How to Turn One’s Back on a Tyrant: The Crippling Small-Minded Art of Verisimilitude Becomes Crippled By Its Own Technology.” Bright Lights Film Journal 37 (August 2002)
The Metaphysics of Violence (Special Themed Issue) Senses of Cinema 36 (July-September 2005) [An issue that examines the metaphysics of violence through examples from world cinema.]
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg) 2005: 96 minutes.
Dean, Jodi. “A History of Violence.” I Cite (October 16, 2005)
Ebert, Roger. “A History of Violence.” Chicago Sun-Times (Septemeber 23, 2005)
Edelstein, David. “Art for Arteries’ Sake: The Bloody Fatalism of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.” Slate (September 23, 2005)
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “A Depth in the Family: A History of Violence.” Chicago Reader (September 5, 2005)
Shaviro, Steven. “A History of Violence.” The Pinocchio Theory (October 19, 2005)
Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol.2 (2004) Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Anderson, Aaron. “Mindful of Violence: The Visibility of Power and Inner Life in Kill Bill.” Jump Cut 47 (Winter 2005)
Doyle, Jon and Sarah Duda. “Kill Bill, Vol. 2: The 2nd Inter-Review.” Synoptique 3 (June 14, 2004)
Freedland, Jonathan. “The Power of the Gory.” The Guardian (October 15, 2003)
Jonas, Marty. “Quentin Tarantino’s Playful Violence and High Body Count: Kill Bill, Volume 1.” WSWS (November 11, 2003)
Le Cain, Maximillian. “Tarantino and the Vengeful Ghosts of Cinema.” Senses of Cinema 32 (July/September 2004)
O’Hagan, Sean. “So Has Quentin Just Shot Himself in the Foot?” Guardian (September 21, 2003)
Pavlus, John. “A Bride Vows Revenge: Robert Richardson, ASC Lends His Keen Grasp of Aesthetics to Kill Bill, a Genre-Blending Martial-Arts Extravaganza.” American Cinematographer 84.10 (October 2003)
Proleg, Dror. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and Prospects of Subversion in the Works of Quentin Tarrantino.” Bright Lights Film Journal #45 (August 2004)
Rose, Steve. “Found: Where Tarantino Gets His Ideas.” Guardian (April 6, 2004)
Rowin, Michael Joshua. “Blood Feud: Oldboy Meets Kill Bill.” Reverse Shot (Summer 2005)
Sheehan, Henry. “Kill Bill, Vol. 1.” (October 2003)
---. “Kill Bill, Vol. 2.” (April 2004)
Walsh, David. “A Culture at the End of its Rope: Kill Bill, Volume 2.” WSWS (June 25, 2004)
------------------------------------------
(A final reflection from my second viewing of the film City of God--I was discussing with my students how the place/time/audience we view a film with alters the way in which we experience it...)
This is the second time that I have seen City of God.
The first time I watched it was like a rollercoaster ride in which the story washed over me and left me somewhat breathless. This time was different, where before I watched it in the privacy of my home, this time I was in a dark theater with a larger screen. Although it is often claimed that the theater encourages the "voyeur's gaze" (Norman K. Denzin), I find that watching a movie at home is much more voyeuristic in that one can simply watch without thoughts of others impeding on your experience, on the other hand, a public theater involves one in a communal experience in which you interact with the narrative on the screen while experiencing the reactions of your fellow filmgoers. You may think why is someone laughing at this point, or watch as someone flees the theater, or wonder if anyone can see the tears streaming down your face as you recognize something of yourself in a cinematic moment. While the darkened theater does allow the viewer to easily slip into a dream-like state, it is a much more "restless" state than watching in the privacy of one's home.
This time I watched City of God with the knowledge of where the story would end and it forced me to deal more directly with my responses to the violent spectacle of the narrative. This is one of the reasons I value rewatching films in different contexts because it forces different perspectives (at least in me, I also feel very fortunate to be a teacher of film in that new generations of film students confront me with their experiences and responses, causing, nay forcing me, to revisit my own intepretations in light of their own responses and comments).
One example that has always replayed in my experience is the case of the grand cinematic spectacle of Schindler's List (1993). The first time I watched it was in its second week of release in a crowded megaplex theater. The theater was overcrowded, people were sitting in the aisles, and the stench of movie popcorn was overwhelming. It sickened me to watch this portrayal of the Holocaust with people munching on buckets of popcorn and slurping at their quarts of soda. Even though I was revolted by the spectacle of the gorging while starving people are represented on the screen, there was a moving point when I noticed an elderly couple sobbing and I wondered who they knew that had tragically been lost in the Holocaust. I left the theater disgusted, at humanity, at the gross displays of consumerism, and at myself for not knowing how to make things better.
The second time I watched Schindler's List it was during the special showing of the film on television free of commercial interruption (February 26, 1997). The network that was showing it, along with some petrol company (if memory serves me correctly), declared that this was a cultural artifact that demanded to be shown uninterrupted and that it should not be sullied with the dirtiness of commercial concerns (OK, those are my words, but that was the sentiment of the time, but this should also cause us to pause and think about commercials and commercial TV in general--I disconnected mine because I agreed that my cultural myths should be free of commercial propaganda). I was a master's student in the Popular Culture Department at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). A wonderful, nurturing, small environment of scholars seeking to glimpse outside the fishbowl. We gathered at a professor's house to watch the event and analyze the film as well as the cultural moment. Again, food was abundant, but it was the food that is cooked with one's own hands, thoughtfully prepared, and shared communally. Somehow this did not disturb me in the way that the popcorn/candy/soda of the movie theater did. We sat in a circle aound the TV, lights on, and discussed all aspects of the film, the historical period and the significance of a large percentage of Americans tuning in that night to watch the film. The experience provided distance from the cinematic experience, yet at the same time enhanced my engagement with the film. It forced me to think about the (re)presentation of the historical facts, to compare the film with other films/histories presented by the audience and to revisit my first distasteful communal experience of the film.
The third time I watched Schindler's List was during another equally powerful historical moment that exposed some of the worst aspects of human cruelty. It was the following academic year after the commercial-free broadcast and I was teaching Introduction to Popular Culture courses for BGSU. During the early part of the semester a student group did a presentation on the film Schindler's List and claimed that it was unique document because it provided insight to a unique event in human history and that it let us understand this isolated example of evil. The Holocaust because of its increasing historical example as the ultimate "evil" of humanity had become, for these students, an isolated example that they could point to as a place humanity was once at, but never would return to again. I attemted to get my students to understand that this was not an isolated event and that there were many examples of similar collective acts of violent genocide throughout history and the present time. I was struggling to somehow break through their assumption that it could never happen again because we "know" better. I fell into a state of bewildered despair for the next couple of weeks as I struggled with how I could bring a new perspective to their understanding of Schindler's List and the Holocaust--to provide a context that would combat the sense of it being an isolated, special circumstance, caused by depraved monsters, rather than the self-interested actions of everyday humans. Then, as sometimes happens, events provided another opportunity for revisiting the film:
This performance opened up a new world for me and the students. It forced us to examine our American history from the eyes/perspective of (an)other culture and irrevocably altered my understanding of education. A week later after this powerful performative event, the South African Truth and Reconciliation committee was holding public hearings and parts of their video broadcasts of amnesty confessions were aired on 60 Minutes. The Post-Apartheid government of South Africa had decided that a full public exposure of the crimes carried out under the Apartheid government would ensure that the world would never forget what had happened. 60 Minutes broadcast an episode that featured men discussing in detail the everyday tasks of disposing and hiding bodies, including the difficulties of completely incinerating a human body. My class watched these historical broadcasts and developed a new understanding of the problems of isolating the Holocaust, or any collective violence, as a unique event, that has never happened before, or will never happen again. My class asked to rewatch Schindler's List and I agreed with the understanding that we would all research the broader historical background of the event. The experience of watching students watch this film, actively taking notes, and later debating the history of the Holocaust, with a deeper awareness of its development and its future ramifications, was an amazing experience. It completely transformed my understanding of the film and the potential for teaching about the politics/aesthetics of the film.
So, why do I bring all of this up after watching City of God? Because in talking with colleagues/students that have seen this film it often seems that the rollercoaster ride of the quick editing and the violent spectacle of the fast-paced narrative keeps us from engaging with the reality of the people who live in dangerous environments like this, in Brazil, in other countries, and definitely in our own country. I think this is a good film, but something keeps nagging at me, perhaps there is more to the story, why the focus only on criminals, why are women just backdrops for the actions of violent men, is there more to the story--why does the main character Rocket seem so lifeless and undeveloped (it was his story? yet it became the tale of Little Ze)?
On the DVD edition of City of God there is an amazing documentary by Katia Lund (co-director with Fernando Meirelles of City of God) called News From a Personal War that examines the lives of the poor people who live in the favelas, including the working class striving to better themselves, and the police/politicians who view the place as a dumping ground for society's undesirables. Everyone interviewed in the documentary from the street level gangsters, to the workers, to militia-style policeman, to the wealthy politicians, are brutally honest about their motivations/intent in a way that we rarely see discussed in the U.S. For example this quote from a high-ranking police officer:
In the last week I have talked to four people who own a copy of the DVD in their home, yet they have never seen the documentary... perhaps this is what we should have shown last night? Once again, City of God is an amazing film, a favorite of mine, but this cannot stop us from asking questions about lessons-learned and lessons-hidden in the films we watch, most importantly we should question the films we enjoy the most.
I believe that violence is a necessary part of many narratives because it is a part of reality. Violence is a part of being human and our interrelations--how can we ignore it?
At the same time I reject simplistic, cartoonish uses of violence where the hero is shot at a hundred times and perhaps receives a scratch while methodically dispatching every person they face. I think it is irresponsible to portray, or think of, violence as simply mindless entertainment, there are outbreaks of violence that when it happens it seems beyond our kin, or present understanding, but usually with time we are able to grasp the motivations or causes. Likewise in a work of art one can begin to grasp at the reason for the violence, make sense of a sort, even if one does not agree with the portrayal of the causes or motivations for the violence. (I feel the same way about the mindless-commercial usage of sex and sexuality in our culture.)
I seek intelligent reflection on the uses or outbreaks of violence--whether as a means to a goal, or as a frustrated reaction to events beyond our control, or as atool for oppression/resistance. Who is using the violence, as a means for what, and to whom, and why, and what are the goals of this violence? Ultimately violence in great works of art will cause you to respond (positively or negatively) and will cause you to exercise your own judgement and thought--it will initiate critical reflection upon the events of the story (and for me this is a defining moment in judging a narrative/film, or any other work of art).
The benefits of some narrative violence is that it makes it harder for audiences to ignore the motivations or beliefs of the characters (especially when we become implicated by our own violent impulses, becoming so wrapped up in the narrative we encourage the violence--do it, do it!!!--a good narrative can cause us to reflect on this impulse)--thus in the complex cinematic presentation we are faced with an intellectual quandry to the usage of the violence and the rationale for its usage. We cannot stand on the sidelines and retain our intellectual integrity. We have to take a stand, even if it is to condemn the movie, afterall, the artist did present us with a work that is intended to shock or affront. It is also hypocritical for the artist to complain when people condemn them for their work if their intent was to depict acts of violence in a graphic manner.
What is often missed in Hollywood films (as well as many foreign films--see the new run of Asian extreme films) is that violence is usually employed in the service of power (whether on an individual or systemic level). Our democracy is built on the ignorance of the daily usage of violence to keep some people/groups quiet/docile about their situation in life, this structural mask sometimes slips allowing a glimpse of the true face of that power--a very important glimpse. Thus, a necessary part of some violent narratives is our understanding of the roots of this power/control ...
People facing the threat or actual acts of violence also helps us to understand human potential, but it is not a case of human physicality or big weapons. In the narratives I am speaking of it is the plumbing of the human soul and the questioning of the mind/system (a person's perspective and a system's effect/control). Violence in cinema can help us to examine the operations of power in society? Passolini's brutal, disgusting and difficult Salo forever burned in my mind the operations of fascism (could you ever recommend this film to someone, it is a truly painful and wrenching film), or the ending of Greenway's beautiful Baby of Macon which horrified me more than any sophmoric slasher story could and to this day has left me pondering the meaning/causes of the film. This film was blocked from being exhibited in the U.S. When we showed it at Illinois State University, people were crying in the audience and afterwards we spilled into the streets and made our way to a pub, where we argued into the night about the meanings of the film. As with any difficult film, some were angry that we had shown the film and they had a reason to be angry. We listened patiently to their complaints, even if we believed, ultimately, that the film should be seen. Once again if you believe that a disturbing portrayal is important and should be seen, you should respect contrary, disturbed and angry reactions. This is what you expected the film to do and thus you should address its effects on those audiences. Do not dismiss them, engage in a dialogue that art demands of its audiences.
A problem with the usage of violence in film is that it has become an effect used to entertain and titillate, one of the most powerful and disturbing films of the last year was Michael Haneke's Cache (Hidden), which explores the aftereffects of repressed systemic and individual acts of aggression/violence. It is minimalist and subtle in its presentation of violence, but the impact is long-lasting, reverberating in my mind still a year later causing me to question the impact of individual and societal repression of violent acts. This film is much more powerful than all of Takashi Miike's countless blood-fests put together, why, because it forces us to reflect and the narrative demands audience involvement (if you see the film you will understand what I mean), rather than to simply jump and recoil, as in Miike's recent film Audition. Instances of violence can also bring us to focus on what gives life dignity and what is noble and ignoble in the human condition. A last thought, legitimated violence (sanctioned by the state, or other social forces) usually is a clear indicator of the boundaries of society, what is permitted, what is forbidden, and who controls these boundaries.
John Fraser states in "Violence in the Arts" (1974: 162):
"Far from being mindless, violence is usually the cutting edge of ideas and ideologies."
Violence and Film:
Castle, Robert. “Disturbing Movies, Or the Flip Side of the Real: Disturbing Movies Shouldn’t Equivocate.” Bright Lights Film Journal #44 (May 2004)
Ebert, Roger, et al. What is the Place of Evil in Film?
Grossman, Andrew. “Bleeding Realism Dry, or How to Turn One’s Back on a Tyrant: The Crippling Small-Minded Art of Verisimilitude Becomes Crippled By Its Own Technology.” Bright Lights Film Journal 37 (August 2002)
The Metaphysics of Violence (Special Themed Issue) Senses of Cinema 36 (July-September 2005) [An issue that examines the metaphysics of violence through examples from world cinema.]
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg) 2005: 96 minutes.
Dean, Jodi. “A History of Violence.” I Cite (October 16, 2005)
Ebert, Roger. “A History of Violence.” Chicago Sun-Times (Septemeber 23, 2005)
Edelstein, David. “Art for Arteries’ Sake: The Bloody Fatalism of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.” Slate (September 23, 2005)
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “A Depth in the Family: A History of Violence.” Chicago Reader (September 5, 2005)
Shaviro, Steven. “A History of Violence.” The Pinocchio Theory (October 19, 2005)
Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol.2 (2004) Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Anderson, Aaron. “Mindful of Violence: The Visibility of Power and Inner Life in Kill Bill.” Jump Cut 47 (Winter 2005)
Doyle, Jon and Sarah Duda. “Kill Bill, Vol. 2: The 2nd Inter-Review.” Synoptique 3 (June 14, 2004)
Freedland, Jonathan. “The Power of the Gory.” The Guardian (October 15, 2003)
Jonas, Marty. “Quentin Tarantino’s Playful Violence and High Body Count: Kill Bill, Volume 1.” WSWS (November 11, 2003)
Le Cain, Maximillian. “Tarantino and the Vengeful Ghosts of Cinema.” Senses of Cinema 32 (July/September 2004)
O’Hagan, Sean. “So Has Quentin Just Shot Himself in the Foot?” Guardian (September 21, 2003)
Pavlus, John. “A Bride Vows Revenge: Robert Richardson, ASC Lends His Keen Grasp of Aesthetics to Kill Bill, a Genre-Blending Martial-Arts Extravaganza.” American Cinematographer 84.10 (October 2003)
Proleg, Dror. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and Prospects of Subversion in the Works of Quentin Tarrantino.” Bright Lights Film Journal #45 (August 2004)
Rose, Steve. “Found: Where Tarantino Gets His Ideas.” Guardian (April 6, 2004)
Rowin, Michael Joshua. “Blood Feud: Oldboy Meets Kill Bill.” Reverse Shot (Summer 2005)
Sheehan, Henry. “Kill Bill, Vol. 1.” (October 2003)
---. “Kill Bill, Vol. 2.” (April 2004)
Walsh, David. “A Culture at the End of its Rope: Kill Bill, Volume 2.” WSWS (June 25, 2004)
------------------------------------------
(A final reflection from my second viewing of the film City of God--I was discussing with my students how the place/time/audience we view a film with alters the way in which we experience it...)
This is the second time that I have seen City of God.
The first time I watched it was like a rollercoaster ride in which the story washed over me and left me somewhat breathless. This time was different, where before I watched it in the privacy of my home, this time I was in a dark theater with a larger screen. Although it is often claimed that the theater encourages the "voyeur's gaze" (Norman K. Denzin), I find that watching a movie at home is much more voyeuristic in that one can simply watch without thoughts of others impeding on your experience, on the other hand, a public theater involves one in a communal experience in which you interact with the narrative on the screen while experiencing the reactions of your fellow filmgoers. You may think why is someone laughing at this point, or watch as someone flees the theater, or wonder if anyone can see the tears streaming down your face as you recognize something of yourself in a cinematic moment. While the darkened theater does allow the viewer to easily slip into a dream-like state, it is a much more "restless" state than watching in the privacy of one's home.
This time I watched City of God with the knowledge of where the story would end and it forced me to deal more directly with my responses to the violent spectacle of the narrative. This is one of the reasons I value rewatching films in different contexts because it forces different perspectives (at least in me, I also feel very fortunate to be a teacher of film in that new generations of film students confront me with their experiences and responses, causing, nay forcing me, to revisit my own intepretations in light of their own responses and comments).
One example that has always replayed in my experience is the case of the grand cinematic spectacle of Schindler's List (1993). The first time I watched it was in its second week of release in a crowded megaplex theater. The theater was overcrowded, people were sitting in the aisles, and the stench of movie popcorn was overwhelming. It sickened me to watch this portrayal of the Holocaust with people munching on buckets of popcorn and slurping at their quarts of soda. Even though I was revolted by the spectacle of the gorging while starving people are represented on the screen, there was a moving point when I noticed an elderly couple sobbing and I wondered who they knew that had tragically been lost in the Holocaust. I left the theater disgusted, at humanity, at the gross displays of consumerism, and at myself for not knowing how to make things better.
The second time I watched Schindler's List it was during the special showing of the film on television free of commercial interruption (February 26, 1997). The network that was showing it, along with some petrol company (if memory serves me correctly), declared that this was a cultural artifact that demanded to be shown uninterrupted and that it should not be sullied with the dirtiness of commercial concerns (OK, those are my words, but that was the sentiment of the time, but this should also cause us to pause and think about commercials and commercial TV in general--I disconnected mine because I agreed that my cultural myths should be free of commercial propaganda). I was a master's student in the Popular Culture Department at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). A wonderful, nurturing, small environment of scholars seeking to glimpse outside the fishbowl. We gathered at a professor's house to watch the event and analyze the film as well as the cultural moment. Again, food was abundant, but it was the food that is cooked with one's own hands, thoughtfully prepared, and shared communally. Somehow this did not disturb me in the way that the popcorn/candy/soda of the movie theater did. We sat in a circle aound the TV, lights on, and discussed all aspects of the film, the historical period and the significance of a large percentage of Americans tuning in that night to watch the film. The experience provided distance from the cinematic experience, yet at the same time enhanced my engagement with the film. It forced me to think about the (re)presentation of the historical facts, to compare the film with other films/histories presented by the audience and to revisit my first distasteful communal experience of the film.
The third time I watched Schindler's List was during another equally powerful historical moment that exposed some of the worst aspects of human cruelty. It was the following academic year after the commercial-free broadcast and I was teaching Introduction to Popular Culture courses for BGSU. During the early part of the semester a student group did a presentation on the film Schindler's List and claimed that it was unique document because it provided insight to a unique event in human history and that it let us understand this isolated example of evil. The Holocaust because of its increasing historical example as the ultimate "evil" of humanity had become, for these students, an isolated example that they could point to as a place humanity was once at, but never would return to again. I attemted to get my students to understand that this was not an isolated event and that there were many examples of similar collective acts of violent genocide throughout history and the present time. I was struggling to somehow break through their assumption that it could never happen again because we "know" better. I fell into a state of bewildered despair for the next couple of weeks as I struggled with how I could bring a new perspective to their understanding of Schindler's List and the Holocaust--to provide a context that would combat the sense of it being an isolated, special circumstance, caused by depraved monsters, rather than the self-interested actions of everyday humans. Then, as sometimes happens, events provided another opportunity for revisiting the film:
During the middle of the semester Dr. Lisa Wolford, a performance scholar, hosted an interactive performance piece "El Mexterminator", featuring Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, as part of an ongoing series on campus. I heard that the performance was going to address stereotyped and racist representations of Chicano/as and Latino/as. Sensing that this would provide a good opportunity to introduce my students to a different cultural sensibility and to open up the spatial environment of the sealed classroom I decided to bring my entire class to the performance.
This performance opened up a new world for me and the students. It forced us to examine our American history from the eyes/perspective of (an)other culture and irrevocably altered my understanding of education. A week later after this powerful performative event, the South African Truth and Reconciliation committee was holding public hearings and parts of their video broadcasts of amnesty confessions were aired on 60 Minutes. The Post-Apartheid government of South Africa had decided that a full public exposure of the crimes carried out under the Apartheid government would ensure that the world would never forget what had happened. 60 Minutes broadcast an episode that featured men discussing in detail the everyday tasks of disposing and hiding bodies, including the difficulties of completely incinerating a human body. My class watched these historical broadcasts and developed a new understanding of the problems of isolating the Holocaust, or any collective violence, as a unique event, that has never happened before, or will never happen again. My class asked to rewatch Schindler's List and I agreed with the understanding that we would all research the broader historical background of the event. The experience of watching students watch this film, actively taking notes, and later debating the history of the Holocaust, with a deeper awareness of its development and its future ramifications, was an amazing experience. It completely transformed my understanding of the film and the potential for teaching about the politics/aesthetics of the film.
So, why do I bring all of this up after watching City of God? Because in talking with colleagues/students that have seen this film it often seems that the rollercoaster ride of the quick editing and the violent spectacle of the fast-paced narrative keeps us from engaging with the reality of the people who live in dangerous environments like this, in Brazil, in other countries, and definitely in our own country. I think this is a good film, but something keeps nagging at me, perhaps there is more to the story, why the focus only on criminals, why are women just backdrops for the actions of violent men, is there more to the story--why does the main character Rocket seem so lifeless and undeveloped (it was his story? yet it became the tale of Little Ze)?
On the DVD edition of City of God there is an amazing documentary by Katia Lund (co-director with Fernando Meirelles of City of God) called News From a Personal War that examines the lives of the poor people who live in the favelas, including the working class striving to better themselves, and the police/politicians who view the place as a dumping ground for society's undesirables. Everyone interviewed in the documentary from the street level gangsters, to the workers, to militia-style policeman, to the wealthy politicians, are brutally honest about their motivations/intent in a way that we rarely see discussed in the U.S. For example this quote from a high-ranking police officer:
Hélio Luz: I'll say it myself. The police are corrupt. The institution was designed to be violent and corrupt. And the people think that's odd. Why do I say it was designed this way? Because it was created to protect the State and the elite. I practice law enforcement to protect and serve the status quo; no beating around the bush. It keeps the favela under control. How do you keep two million people under control; people who make R$112 a month, when they make any? How do you keep the underprivileged under control and calm?
interviewer: With repression?
Hélio Luz: Of course! How else would it be?
In the last week I have talked to four people who own a copy of the DVD in their home, yet they have never seen the documentary... perhaps this is what we should have shown last night? Once again, City of God is an amazing film, a favorite of mine, but this cannot stop us from asking questions about lessons-learned and lessons-hidden in the films we watch, most importantly we should question the films we enjoy the most.
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