At long last

An odd aside

From a NYT article on the new Bob Woodward book:

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House....

Seems someone's pissed they didn't get a freebie.

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?

The ol' Lysistrata strategy:

Colombian gangsters face sex ban
Wives and girlfriends of gang members in one of Colombia's most violent cities have called a sex ban in a bid to get their men to give up the gun.
more

Žižek's Impossible Realism

Slavoj Žižek on Israel's wars on its neighbors:

Let's try a mental experiment and imagine that, instead of Lebanese women and children, the human shields used by Hezbollah were Israeli women and children. Would the IDF still consider the price affordable and continue the bombing? If the answer is "no," then the IDF is effectively practicing racism, determining that Jewish life has more value than Arab life.
***
The problem courted by Israel in its continuous display of power is that this display will be soon perceived as a sign of its opposite, of impotence. This paradox of power is known to anyone who has had to play the role of paternal authority: In order to retain its force, power has to remain virtual, a threat of power.
***
It is those who evoke the Holocaust who effectively manipulate it, making it an instrument for today's political uses. The very need to evoke the Holocaust in defense of Israel's actions implies that its crimes are so horrible that only the absolute trump-card of the Holocaust can redeem them.

Art is a Cat

Jerry Saltz takes on the neo-Cartesians:

In the days just after September 11, painter Gaylen Gerber reported the "small victories" he felt going to the Art Institute of Chicago and simply "looking at shiny plastic furniture from the '60s and '70s that in some way, maybe because of its superficial and ultra-clean look, made me feel a little better."

Gerber was experiencing the ways in which art tells you things you don't know you need to know until you know them. He was in touch with how art can be "a vacation from the self," in critic Peter Schjeldahl's words, or a journey to it; how it's a system for mapping, reflecting, prospecting, and creating consciousness. Art is a region where protocols are invented or suspended and things one doesn't understand change one's life. That's why those shiny chairs cut through the gloom, a ceramic pot can vie for greatness with the Sistine Ceiling, and the Vietnam Memorial channels a nation's remorse even though it is based on the one thing that most Americans purport to loathe: abstraction.

Art is often political when it doesn't seem political and not political when that's all it seems to be. Neither Andy Warhol nor Donald Judd made overtly political art. Yet both changed the way the world looks and the way we look at the world. That's because art creates new thought structures. Imagine all the thought structures that either would have never existed or gone undiscovered had all of Shakespeare been lost. Art does far more than only meet the eye. It is part of the biota of the world. It exists within a holistic system.

Crazy from the Coffin

Building on a piece from the soundtrack to the film Preparati la bara! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1968) [aka Django, Prepare a Coffin!], Gnarls Barkley has the hit of Summer '06... though it also has similarities to an old tune by Harvey Scales.

Hear for yourself in these mp3s:

• Gianfranco Reverbi, "Nel cimitero di tucson" (Preparati la bara!, 1968)
• Harvey Scales & the 7 Sounds, "Love-itis" (from the Shakin' Fit! compilation)

To the Gallows

New Taibbi:

The Democratic Party has been operating for two decades without the active participation of its voters. ***

It's been an essentially oligarchic system of government, where all the important decision-makers have been institutions, with any attempts by ordinary people to circumvent the system coldly repressed. Remember 2000, when Ralph Nader was not only not allowed to debate with Al Gore and George Bush, but wasn't allowed in the building -- not even allowed in a second, adjoining hall in the building, not even when he had a ticket? Well, we have a replay of that proud moment in our history going on now, with Hillary's Senate primary opponent [Jonathan] Tasini being shut out of debates by New York's NY1 TV channel (owned by TimeWarner) which is insisting that qualified candidates not only reach 5 percent support in the polls (Tasini is at 13 percent and rising) but raise or spend $500,000. Said NY1 Vice President Steve Paulus: "All Tasini would need is for each [New York state registered voter] to send him a dollar. Right now, with the money he's raised, he does not represent the party he claims to represent."

So a war chest is now the standard for representation? In order to get on television, you need a dollar from every voter? (Are we electing a Senator or holding a Girl Scout raffle? What the fuck?) And this is decided by . . . an executive for a corporate television station? One that recently sent a reporter [Adam Balkin] to Japan to do features on high-tech toilets? In other words, NY1 will pay to put an exotic Japanese toilet on a few million or so New York television screens -- but insists on seeing a half-million dollar deposit before it will put a Democratic candidate with 13 percent support in a televised debate? Am I missing something?

more here on Jonathan Tasini

more here and here on the Clinton-Tasini non-debate

Taibbi's "Low Post"

After what seems like an eternity, Matt Taibbi has returned with a weekly web-only column, with pieces on Lamont-Lieberman, David Brooks, the DLC & Yuppie Paranoia, and Hillary Clinton:

Beltway pros like Hillary have long understood that in tough times, the vast majority of disgruntled Americans would rather find a way to convince themselves that their party agrees with them than face the fact that they never had any choice at all on a wide range of crucial issues. They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate [against Donald Rumsfeld] because the alternatives -- third-party politics, grass-roots activism, dropping out of society altogether -- are too exhausting and radical to even imagine. Because getting to the root causes of things is so hard and scary, they'll settle for punishing an unpopular politician, even if it means electing his accomplice.

So they'll vote, even for a factory-produced fraud like Hillary Clinton, because voting is easy. Much easier than doing something.

That Liberal Media II

Remember the NSA wiretapping story published by the New York Times in December 2005? The NYT actually had the story before the 2004 election:

It has now been confirmed by the New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller himself, that they had the story for weeks before the 2004 election and even had a draft for possible publication a week before election day.

Read the NYT Public Editor's piece here.

That Liberal Media

Sickening:

"Is Ned Lamont the Al Qaeda candidate?"

This was the question that CNN's Nice Haircut Chuck Roberts posed this afternoon to Hotline's John Mercurio.

Watch it here.

UPDATE: Mr. Nice Hair apologizes.

Feeding the Pain

Israel continues its war crimes in Lebanon, while the U.S. gives its approval and support.
Bush justifies Israel's acts as "part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East."
Let's give Bush the benefit of the doubt and say he's referring to Hezbollah rather than all the Lebanese people as the "force of terror." What exactly has Hezbollah [or Hizbullah] actually done to Israel to invite this full-scale attack on Lebanon?

Per Stephen Zunes:

Unlike the major Palestinian Islamist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah forces haven't killed any Israeli civilians for more than a decade. Indeed, a 2002 Congressional Research Service report noted, in its analysis of Hezbollah, that “no major terrorist attacks have been attributed to it since 1994.” The most recent State Department report on international terrorism also fails to note any acts of terrorism by Hezbollah since that time except for unsubstantiated claims that a Hezbollah member was a participant in a June 1996 attack on the U.S. Air Force dormitory at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

While Hezbollah's ongoing rocket attacks on civilian targets in Israel are indeed illegitimate and can certainly be considered acts of terrorism, it is important to note that such attacks were launched only after the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on civilian targets in Israel began July 12.

Juan Cole continues to provide useful insights:

The wholesale destruction of all of Lebanon by Israel and the US Pentagon does not make any sense. Why bomb roads, roads, bridges, ports, fuel depots in Sunni and Christian areas that have nothing to do with Shiite Hizbullah in the deep south? And, why was Hizbullah's rocket capability so crucial that it provoked Israel to this orgy of destruction? Most of the rockets were small katyushas with limited range and were highly inaccurate. They were an annoyance in the Occupied Golan Heights, especially the Lebanese-owned Shebaa Farms area. Hizbullah had killed 6 Israeli civilians since 2000. For this you would destroy a whole country?

So once again we see some vague linking of "terrorism" with "Muslim"/"Arab"/"Middle Eastern" peoples, resulting in the indiscriminate collective punishment of entire civilian populations and infrastructure for the alleged crimes of a few militants (who do not in fact hide among civilians). This strategy will surely diminish any anti-U.S. and anti-Israel sentiment in the region and deter people from acting on it, right?

"There's going to be another 9/11, and then we're going to hear all the usual claptrap about how it's good versus evil, and they hate us because we're good and democratic, and they hate our values and all the other material that comes out of the rear end of a bull."
-- Robert Fisk, quoted here

If only "those people" would appreciate the righteous intentions (never about oil) of those who invade their lands, support their tyrants, destroy their economies, and displace and kill them. What an unappreciative lot.

"It is no secret that in past years, Israel has helped to destroy secular Arab nationalism and to create Hizbullah and Hamas, just as US violence has expedited the rise of extremist Islamic fundamentalism and jihad terror. The reasons are understood. There are constant warnings about it by Western intelligence agencies, and by the leading specialists on these topics. One can bury one’s head in the sand and take comfort in a "wall-to-wall consensus" that what we do is "just and moral", ignoring the lessons of recent history, or simple rationality. Or one can face the facts, and approach dilemmas which are very serious by peaceful means. They are available. Their success can never be guaranteed. But we can be reasonably confident that viewing the world through a bombsight will bring further misery and suffering, perhaps even "apocalypse soon."
-- Noam Chomsky

Thankfully, as of this writing, Mazen Kerbaj is alive in Beirut, creating art and music which is truly as serious as your life.

PS - Despite being subject to the distortions of our pro-Israeli media, (actually anti-Israeli, since these crimes will boost anti-Israel sentiment and violence) a significant portion of the U.S. population sees through the lies: according to the latest poll, 44% believe Israel's response is either unjustified or justfied-but-excessive, while 43% believe it is justified and not excessive. However, in yet another example of our democracy gap, blind support of Israel's actions is endemic to the U.S. ruling class:

On July 18, the Senate unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution "condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel's exercise of its right to self-defense." After House majority leader John Boehner removed language from the bill urging "all sides to protect innocent civilian life and infrastructure," the House version passed by a landslide, 410 to 8.

And the "progressive blogosphere" (e.g., Kos) has been conspicuously silent, sweeping the issue of U.S. complicity under the rug.
The Israel Lobby has certainly been effective in instilling the values of self-censorship in public discourse, using the reprehensible tactic of equating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. Is this the legacy of the Holocaust?

Hot Jazz

Time: 1:00am
Temperature: 85°F
Heat index: 93°F

• "Hotter Than 'Ell" (Fletcher Henderson, Tidal Wave compilation, 1934)
  
• "Too Hot For Words" (Billie Holiday, Lady Day: Complete Columbia Recordings, 1935)
• "Too Darn Hot" (Ella Fitzgerald, Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, 1956)

what we need:

• "Drifting on a Reed, aka Air Conditioning" (Charlie Parker, Complete Dial Sesssions, 1947)
• "Ice Cream Konitz" (Lee Konitz, Subconscious-Lee, 1950)
• "Let's Cool One" (Thelonious Monk, Genius of Modern Music, v.2, 1952)

Time for some reggae and a cold beverage.

Meanwhile, back on the East Coast...

While the L.A. Times finally put some focus on the massive Iraqi death toll, the N.Y. Times keeps looking at the country it helped destroy (remember Judy "boo" Miller) through rose-colored glasses:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 25 — Enrollment in Iraqi schools has risen every year since the American invasion, according to Iraqi government figures, reversing more than a decade of declines and offering evidence of increased prosperity for some Iraqis.

Despite the violence that has plagued Iraq since the American occupation began three years ago, its schools have been quietly filling. The number of children enrolled in schools nationwide rose by 7.4 percent from 2002 to 2005, and in middle schools and high schools by 27 percent in that time, according to figures from the Ministry of Education.

The increase, which has greatly outpaced modest population growth during the same period, is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy landscape of bombs and killings that have shattered community life in many areas in western and central Iraq. And it is seen as an important indicator here in a country that used to pride itself on its education system, then saw enrollment and literacy fall during the later years of Saddam Hussein's rule.

The rest of the article is packed with statistics and personal anecdotes about kids going back to school. Isn't that sweet? Hey, maybe that's the solution to truancy in our own public schools: Bomb the inner cities! Let's see... on a per-capita basis, about 20,000 Chicagoans will have to be sacrificed on behalf of this "Reading is Fundamental - Seriously" campaign.

The report uses a framework which absolves the U.S. of responsibility for the sanctions which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children (which was just fine by Clinton's Secretary of State):

In many ways, the increase is a measure of how far Iraq had fallen. Iraq was one of the most educated countries in the Middle East in the 1970's. *** But enrollment began to fall significantly in the 1980's, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and only worsened during the period of international economic penalties that were imposed after Mr. Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. ***
Much of the decline in the education system that happened in the last years of Mr. Hussein's government came as a result of an economic downturn during the era of international penalties on Iraq. As the country grew poorer in the 1990's, the numbers of working children went up.
[emphasis added]

The penalties were "international," and the country just "grew poorer." Apparently the U.S. didn't have any policies towards Iraq until the 2003 invasion, when things got better:

Teachers and administrators interviewed in four Iraqi cities said their classrooms were more full than they had ever been — a continuation of a pattern they began to see just months after the American invasion in 2003, when class sizes began swelling again. [emphasis added]

Again and again, bad things just "happen" or are attributed to "international" forces, while readers are reminded about the evilness of the former Iraqi leader:

The increase has pointed out many of the infrastructure problems that plague the country. Hussein al-Rifaii, a former high school teacher and political prisoner under Mr. Hussein who is now the general director of schools in eastern Baghdad, said the country needed approximately 5,000 new schools, an increase of almost 50 percent.

Infrastructure problems "plague the country" - you know, like a natural case of locusts. And it has to be noted that al-Rifaii was a political prisoner, lest we forget the "liberating" effect of the invasion.

So the kids who have survived the U.S. assault on Iraq are going back to school - while job opportunities are being created daily:

The official who helped prepare the statistics for this article was assassinated this month.

(NOTE: The LA Times and NY Times do not have common ownership.)

It's about time

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for putting Iraqi casualties front and center:

BAGHDAD — At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.
Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since.
The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

Not a perfect article -- it should have mentioned the Lancet study (pdf) and Les Robert's estimate of 100,000-300,000 deaths -- but it's a good start.

Send a letter to their editor, as I did:

Thank you for the article by Louise Roug and Doug Smith on the Iraqi death toll. For over three years the media has been virtually silent about the primary victims of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. These casualties cannot be diminished as "collateral damage," since there are no valid targets in an illegal war. I hope you will follow up with stories about these victims and how their communities have been impacted, in the same way such stories are told regarding much smaller-scale tragedies involving U.S. citizens (e.g., Sept. 11, 2001).

UPDATE: The LA Times published my letter.

Two Funny

The Daily Show on "dickishness" & the Colbert Report on snake marriage

I knew UofC students were special, but...

it's cruel to make them ride the short bus.

Over 100,000 dead Iraqis can't be wronged

Norman Solomon takes on the "liberal" media:

"The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world," John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," describing what happened to two U.S. soldiers whose bodies had just been found. Evidently they were victims of atrocities, and no one should doubt in the slightest that the words of horror used by Burns to describe the "barbaric murders" were totally appropriate.
The problem is that Burns and his mass-media colleagues don't talk that way when the cruelties are inflicted by the U.S. military -- as if dropping bombs on civilians from thousands of feet in the air is a civilized way to terrorize and kill.

Better killing through technology!
It also avoids those high laundry bills when mass homicide is done by less "civilized" means.

We hear that of course the U.S. tries to avoid killing civilians -- as if that makes killing them okay. But the slaughter from the air and from other U.S. military actions is a certain result of the occupiers' war. (What would we say if, in our own community, the police force killed shoppers every day by spraying blocks of stores with machine-gun fire -- while explaining that the action was justifiable because no innocents were targeted and their deaths were an unfortunate necessity in the war on crime?)

As Pierre Tristam notes, the lack of feature-film-friendly images and stories covers up the extent of U.S. terrorism:

Dramatic stories of American losses or suspended tragedies spring up as out of nowhere—Jessica Lynch, the four American mercenaries killed and strung up on that Fallujah bridge, the two missing soldiers. The story plays out in the media in that Black-Hawk-Down language of inspiring honor against overwhelming odds no matter the outcome. The Iraqi background, where everything is more collectively violent, more tragic, more abject than anything the Americans are suffering collectively (remember: civilians have no armor, and civilians are bearing the brunt of the butchery), is nothing more elaborate in the storyline than those painted backdrops the old Hollywood studios used interchangeably movie after movie. Iraqis extras aren’t even in the picture, begging the indelicate cliché: when an Iraqi dies out of America ’s line of sight, has he even existed?

This is the traditional framework:

"It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism."
-- Noam Chomsky

Bacharachablog

Burt gets radical:

I've been writing love songs all my life, never rocking the boat. There were years that I paid no attention to the political process, times I never voted. *** But starting with the 2000 election, things for me began to change. I watched as Bush basically stole the election, and other terrible situations occurred; and by the time 9/11 hit, I didn't feel like writing love songs.

***

On "Who Are These People," it was very important for me to make a statement about what I was feeling at the time.

"Who are these people that keep telling us lies
and how did these people get control of our lives
and who'll stop the violence 'cause it's out of control?
make 'em stop."

And then when Elvis [Costello] came in on the middle verse he sang,

"This stupid mess we're in just keeps getting worse,
so many people dying needlessly
looks like these liars may inherit the earth
even pretending to pray and getting away with it."

Elvis sang my last two lines with the very strong intensity I felt:

"Things really have to change,
Or we're all fucked!"

Nobody has ever sung fucked like Elvis Costello.

Go Burt! Go Burt!

He's obviously not going for radio airplay with that one - especially with the new obscenity laws.

So this is what our broadcast media has come to: a Burt Bacharach song can't be heard, while we get endless doses of the psychopath known as Ann Coulter (who has yet to respond to a very generous offer from Henry Rollins).

When you can't say 'fuck,' you can't say 'fuck the government.'
-- Lenny Bruce

(thanks to A House Is Not A Homepage for the pointer)

ps - Coincidentally, I've been spinning those classic Bacharach/Warwick collaborations lately - amazing stuff.

Reflections on Experience

I really dug this Nation piece by Jackson Lears, ostensibly a review of Martin Jay's Songs of Experience, tracing the concept of "authentic experience" through the history of modern philosophy.

Cruel & Unusual, but Hilarious

The Stern Fan Network has one of the most diabolical and creative - and ultimately hilarious - pranks on its discussion board. I fell for it when I first came across this thread in the main discussion forum, a thread originating in the "Pranks" forum, which I had never checked out. But a couple of minutes (and several extra heartbeats) later, after reading similar threads, I finally figured it out - and realized this gag has been going for at least 3 years. Once you know how it works (via the [you] code) and go back to re-read the threads, you realize it's some Siriusly clever and funny stuff. Revenge of the web geeks?!