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MORE LINKS TO LINKS to war commentary worth the time and eyestrain:
…and against prowar Democrats, are offered up by an anonymous North Carolinian at Monkeytime’s Monkey Media Report.
…”The war is getting messy, but the peace will be much worse:”
” The Bush administration’s plan to keep several hundred thousand U.S. and British troops for years in a divided, heavily armed Muslim country will make all Americans “targets of opportunity” for terrorists and become a rallying point for fundamentalist revolutionaries throughout the world.”
CAT POWER AND EUGENE CHADBOURNE are among the artists with lively tunes of dissent available for downloadin’ at Protest Records.
FRANK RICH isn’t the first one to notice how the Chicago movie reflects today’s cynical media manipulations. But I haven’t yet read of anybody who’s noticed the political relevance that almost redeems Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones. A republic slowly devolves into an empire while fighting both large-scale battles and sneak terror attacks–and while its supposed leaders are actually conspiring with the attackers, to generate an atmosphere of instability and to promote the “emergency” suspension of democracy. Lucasfilm is now filming the next sequel, in which (as we all already know) the forces of empire win and the defenders of freedom scatter into far-flung exiles. Let’s hope we can improvise a happier ending to our real-life clone wars.
WE DON’T KNOW WHO MADE IT, but here’s a hilariously intoxicating Gulf War 2 Drinking Game:
drink when: bush is called a crusader x2 if its by saddam saddam is called evil x2 if its by bush iraq troops surrender to the media x2 if to a unmanned vehicle or inanimate object a member of the media gets shot at a toast to the shooter if its ashleigh banfield (msnbc), geraldo riviera (fox) or arron brown (cnn) the united states terrorist threat level changes the united states government tries to link iraq to 9-11 someone implies tony blair is bush’s bitch someone implies scott ritter is Saddam’s bitch anybody ‘warns’ anybody the word “escalation” is used the media compares the war to blackhawk down x2 if its because a blackhawk really goes down a puppet government is installed in iraq x2 if its by the puppet government installed in the US
drink when:
TERRY EAGLETON describes fundamentalists as “necrophiliacs, in love with a dead letter. The letter of the sacred text must be rigidly embalmed if it is to imbue life with the certitude and finality of death.” He adds:
“They see God as copper fastening human meaning. Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate.Fundamentalists, however, fail to realise that the phrase “sacred text” is self-contradictory. Since writing is meaning that can be handled by anybody, any time, it is always profane and promiscuous. Meaning that has been written down is bound to be unhygienic. Words that could only ever mean one thing would not be words. Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition of those who do not see that roughness is not a defect of human existence, but what makes it work. For them, it is as though we have to measure Everest down to the last millimetre if we are not to be completely stumped about how high it is. It is not surprising that fundamentalism abhors sexuality and the body, since in one sense all flesh is rough, and all sex is rough trade.”
…another elequent warning speech on the Senate floor:
“…Today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned. Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place. We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat UN Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split. After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America’s image around the globe…. A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of thousands of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq. What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomatic efforts when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy? Why can this President not seem to see that America’s true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?… I along with millions of Americans will pray for the safety of our troops, for the innocent civilians in Iraq, and for the security of our homeland. May God continue to bless the United States of America in the troubled days ahead, and may we somehow recapture the vision which for the present eludes us.”
“…Today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.
Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place.
We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat UN Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split.
After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America’s image around the globe….
A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of thousands of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq.
What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomatic efforts when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?
Why can this President not seem to see that America’s true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?…
I along with millions of Americans will pray for the safety of our troops, for the innocent civilians in Iraq, and for the security of our homeland. May God continue to bless the United States of America in the troubled days ahead, and may we somehow recapture the vision which for the present eludes us.”
NEWSWEEK’S EXCELLENT COVER STORY by Fareed Zakaria, “The Arrogant Empire,” is chock-full-O-lucid-observations. Among them:
“A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn’t solve the America problem. What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country–the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us….”The Bush administration’s swagger has generated international opposition and active measures to thwart its will. Though countries like France and Russia cannot become great-power competitors simply because they want to–they need economic and military strength–they can use what influence they have to disrupt American policy, as they are doing over Iraq. In fact, the less responsibility we give them, the more freedom smaller powers have to make American goals difficult to achieve…. “America’s special role in the world–its ability to buck history–is based not simply on its great strength, but on a global faith that this power is legitimate. If America squanders that, the loss will outweigh any gains in domestic security. And this next American century could prove to be lonely, brutish and short.”
“A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn’t solve the America problem. What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country–the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us….”The Bush administration’s swagger has generated international opposition and active measures to thwart its will. Though countries like France and Russia cannot become great-power competitors simply because they want to–they need economic and military strength–they can use what influence they have to disrupt American policy, as they are doing over Iraq. In fact, the less responsibility we give them, the more freedom smaller powers have to make American goals difficult to achieve….
“America’s special role in the world–its ability to buck history–is based not simply on its great strength, but on a global faith that this power is legitimate. If America squanders that, the loss will outweigh any gains in domestic security. And this next American century could prove to be lonely, brutish and short.”
…also passes along the following anonymous email she received from “a political consultant I know in Boston”:
“All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We’re going to wage war to preserve the UN’s ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN’s word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?”Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it. “Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein’s failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. “And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them. “Listen. Don’t misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,’ but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that. “As a collector of laughable arguments, I’d be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know–we all know–that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.”
“All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are
going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam
Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We’re going to wage war
to preserve the UN’s ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that
the UN’s word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word
to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not
to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?”Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the
democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too,
because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a
little thing like democracy as they define it.
“Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot
afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against
Saddam Hussein’s failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are
sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that
might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does.
“And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us
oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in
power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people
elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice
but to ignore them.
“Listen. Don’t misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members
of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only
wish someone had pointed out that “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the
Looking Glass” are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on
the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing
for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because
he is a threat to peace,’ but not amusing for someone who actually
commands an army to say that.
“As a collector of laughable arguments, I’d be enjoying all this were it
not for the fact that I know–we all know–that lives are going to be lost
in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.”
They’d promised to do it for months now. They never wanted anything else but this, and made sure there would be no other scenario but “we’re gonna go to war anyway, anyhow, period.” The Republican sleaze machine wanted war. It always wanted war. Not war-unless-you-capitulate. Not war-unless-you-disarm. Just war, period. And now it’s got one.
Now it’s up to us, to all of us worldwide, to take their war away from them.
MICHAEL MOORE, as you might imagine, has un-gentle words for the president:
” There is virtually NO ONE in America (talk radio nutters and Fox News aside) who is gung-ho to go to war. Trust me on this one. Walk out of the White House and on to any street in America and try to find five people who are PASSIONATE about wanting to kill Iraqis. YOU WON’T FIND THEM!”
SOME MORE ANTIWAR SITES to peruse:
…toward the most grandiosely stupid single action taken by a first-world nation in my lifetime. I feel like getting smashed, so I’ll probably send myself instead to a no-booze recreation joint (perhaps the go-kart place in Georgetown or the Family Fun Center in Tukwila).
Or I might peruse some of my favorite antiwar websites, such as Boondocks Net (not officially connected to the Boondocks comic strip). It’s got many intriguing essays and features about past wars (particularly the Phillipine-American War), early political cartoons, and peace and justice movements past and present. My favorite pieces on the site include one about Mark Twain’s scathing satirical story The War Prayer and William Dean Howells’s more somber 1905 home-front tale Editha.
There’ll natch be another antiwar rally today, at the Federal Building at 5. Details are at NotInOurNameSeattle.net.
Other antiwar sites with vital stuff on them include:
In punditry you might not have seen on the bigger news sites, the former “most trusted man in America” Walter Cronkite sez a war would not only permanently endanger international relations but could put the U.S. economy into chaos.
And our ol’ fave Molly Ivins asks, “Have you ever seen such amazing arrogance wedded to such awesome incompetence?”
Those nude protests you might have read about can be viewed at Baring Witness, which also provides instructions on staging your own big PEACE bodyscape. Individual ladies n’ gents had been sending self-portraits with body-paint messages to an Australian site called Nude for Peace, but that site has apparently been blacklisted by its server provider.
…a little further on the addictive quest for what my previous post referred to as “abstract power,” the destructive madness that’s fueling our governmental elite during its current drive toward doom.
Some of you who lived through the Watergate era remember the “Blind Ambition,” as Nixon aide John Dean described the White House mindset of the time.
Look at the number of un-reconstructed Nixonians back in the White House now, imagine three decades’ worth of stewing grudges and revenge fantasies.
Next, consider the “Reality Distortion Field.”
That’s the late-’80s-coined phrase with which Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs was accused of being selectively unaware of business conditions that didn’t fit what he chose to believe. The lieutenants and yes-men who surrounded Jobs, according to this theory, held such personal loyalty to their boss that they came to share his delusions?and to feed them back to him, by giving him highly edited market data and highly weighted interpretations of that data.
Finally, we have the example of Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal.
This documentary, currently airing on the Game Show Network, tells the tragic life story of Michael Larson, an unemployed ice-cream truck driver from Ohio with three kids by three different mothers, a man obsessed with finding the perfect get-rich-quick scheme that would set him up for life. He spent his jobless days watching the four or five TV sets he’d stacked in his tiny apartment. He watched the now-classic Press Your Luck until he realized the show’s big game board wasn’t really random, that he could predict the order of its blinking lights and stop it on any prize square he wanted. He got to LA, somehow got through the contestant-casting process, and legally took the network for over $100,000. He then promptly lost it all between a shady real-estate deal and a burglary at his home (yes, he’d kept thousands in small bills lying around the apartment!).
Anyhoo, during the documentary a staff member on the old show recalls seeing a steely, emotionless stare in Larson’s eyes. The staffer says he saw the same look years later, when his teenage son started getting hooked on video games. It’s the “in the zone” stare one gets when one has become one with the game. Total zen-like concentration on making the right moves in the right sequence, and on the power-rush rewards for success. Total obliviousness to everything that is neither the screen nor the control console.
This country, my loyal readers, is being run by people who try to run government, and war, as one big video game. The chickenhawks don’t want to fight. They never wanted to fight. They just want to manipulate the joysticks of power by all means available, including by the means of making other people fight for them, whilst they remain in their posh office suites and luxurious homes bossing everybody around.
I could give a fourth metaphor here, but you already know about the hubris and comeuppance of those ol’ dot-com bosses.
This is written on Sunday, March 16. The day before the Irish Catholic Church’s sanitized substitute for the ol’ pagan spring equinox fertility rites. A time to honor nature’s cycle of renewal; the hope that comes from new life; and the libidinous, procreative spirit that makes it all possible.
But instead the world sits and waits for all hell to break loose, for wanton death and destruction to rain from the sky onto a small country already suffering under a brutal dictatorial regime, now to be decimated by the agents of another brutal dictatorial regime.
No, all you masculinity-bashers out there in alternative-land, this is not a war about penises or testosterone. It’s almost the complete opposite of that. Both the Iraqi and U.S. war regimes are fueled by an anti-erotic passion, an ultimately nerdy-geeky quest for abstract power. The U.S. neoconservatives are particularly addicted to this internalized, repressed, retro-pre-pubescent, anti-sex, anti-life state of mind.
This state of mind can be seen among censors who would outlaw images of sex but who don’t mind images of violence. It can be seen in a government that promotes abstinence-only “education” in the public schools, but refuses to decently fund basic education in these same schools. It can be seen in a national health care “policy” aimed solely at enriching the drug and insurance CEOs. Indeed, it can be seen throughout a federal Executive Branch whose every large and small decision is predicated upon rewarding big campaign contributors and/or silencing dissent.
A Guerrilla Girls ad in the Village Voice suggested sending estrogen pills to government officials, imagining that would immediately make them start seeing everything correctly. I suspect it would only turn them from sanctimonious, repressed men into sanctimonious, repressed women-in-men’s-bodies.
No, we need more passionately female females on the side of peace. And we need more passionately male males. (And, of course, more passionately queer queers, etc.)
In the eternal Dionysian spirit of life, we need to actively be out in the world with an intense, dedicated love. We need to sow the seeds of peace, to cultivate the fruits of true democracy. We need to do our share of initiating consensual, cooperative interaction here and abroad. We need to plow, thrust, pull, push, kneel, gaze, lick, caress, rub, nibble, sniff, and do whatever else it takes to help bring the planet out of its current frustration and toward greater serenity and satisfaction.
Or, to be Irish about it, to help the world become as ecstatic as the end of Ulysses.
NEWSWEEK VET ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE recently gave a long speech to the Foreign Press Association on the messier-every-day mess the right wing sleaze machine has gotten us into, entitled “Clash of Civilizations or New World Disorder?” Some highlights:
“All I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that the world today is a lot safer than it will be in 10 years from now, as the forces of nationalism, fundamentalism, globalism, and increasingly transnationalism sort themselves out. The new nexus that I can see at my work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)—where I direct a program about transnational threats—is an emerging link between fanaticism, religion, and science….”Somebody, somewhere today is planning a post-capital world. I see some of the Phd dissertations being written all the way from Singapore to Spain following the scandals we had recently and still have on Wall Street. If present trends continue with democratic governance dominated by political leaders whose main concern is how to get themselves re-elected, then I’m afraid that democracy and the public good may be deemed incompatible, as indeed they were in Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s. “I don’t think it takes rocket science to figure out how much damage was done to the United States – the citadel of capitalism – by the age of gluttony on Wall Street. These crypto-capitalists saboteurs, as I call them in a column are the fodder that feeds transnational progressivism, which is a new ideology rooted in the NGOs…. “Last fall, Hewlett Packard received a patent for a new computer of breakthrough technology that will enable them to manufacture a computer smaller than a spec of dust. There is already a cell telephone so small that it can be planted in a tooth. So the technology revolution is bound to be an integral part of whatever emerges, as invisible molecular structures embedded in conventional chips will be worn, ingested, or implanted. Imagine entire chemical labs the size of a computer chip. Technology is neutral, but one can easily imagine that the forces of evil will harness it to their objectives…. “[Washington] has become a bilingual city where truth is the second language… “Are the networks in favor of war for ideological reasons or because ratings go up? I would tend to agree with the latter. They want a war. I am convinced of that.”
“All I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that the
world today is a lot safer than it will be in 10 years from now, as the
forces of nationalism, fundamentalism, globalism, and increasingly
transnationalism sort themselves out. The new nexus that I can see at my work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)—where I direct a program about transnational threats—is an emerging link between fanaticism, religion, and science….”Somebody, somewhere today is planning a post-capital world. I see some of the Phd dissertations being written all the way from Singapore to Spain following the scandals we had recently and still have on Wall Street. If present trends continue with democratic governance dominated by political leaders whose main concern is how to get themselves re-elected, then I’m afraid that democracy and the public good may be deemed incompatible, as indeed they were in Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
“I don’t think it takes rocket science to figure out how much damage was done to the United States – the citadel of capitalism – by the age of gluttony on Wall Street. These crypto-capitalists saboteurs, as I call them in a column are the fodder that feeds transnational progressivism, which is a new ideology rooted in the NGOs….
“Last fall, Hewlett Packard received a patent for a new computer of
breakthrough technology that will enable them to manufacture a computer
smaller than a spec of dust. There is already a cell telephone so small that
it can be planted in a tooth. So the technology revolution is bound to be an
integral part of whatever emerges, as invisible molecular structures
embedded in conventional chips will be worn, ingested, or implanted. Imagine entire chemical labs the size of a computer chip. Technology is neutral, but one can easily imagine that the forces of evil will harness it to their objectives….
“[Washington] has become a bilingual city where truth is the second language…
“Are the networks in favor of war for ideological reasons or because ratings go up? I would tend to agree with the latter. They want a war. I am convinced of that.”
