It's True, you know*

photo copyright Brendan I. Koerner

Who, you may ask, is Brendan I. Koerner? Mr K. writes periodically for Slate, and Hugozoom's (two or three) regular readers may recall I posted this arresting image* from his website from last fall. He informs me he has a book out, Now the Hell Will Start, which he describes as a "non-fiction account of an American G.I. who married into a tribe of Indo-Burmese headhunters, circa 1944." The book's website is here, and he has an article, "The Greatest Manhunt of WW II" referencing it in Slate this week. Oh, and congratulations Brendan, on your new little one.

photo cropped from original for proper formatting.

Al Nakba at 60

So many words have already been written about the Palistinian-Israeli conflict I'm not sure what I can add. Earlier this week I had a discussion in the comments thread at Karmalised with Diane Warth about a one state versus a two-state solution, which you can see here, apropos of an LA Times op-ed she linked to. Our discussion was and is for naught of course, because neither scenario is anywhere around the corner.

May 15th is commemorated as the anniversary of the Nakba, "the catastrophe", or the forced expulsion of the Palistinians by the nascent Jewish state in 1948. Last week, of course, was the celebration of the 60th birthday of Israel, the other face of the same coin.

Even though 1948 is not exactly ancient history, there is already dispute about the historical record and what really happened. The events at Der Yessin in April of '48 are one example. (More recently the events at Jenin in 2002 are another.)

Here are links to two short films about Deir Yassin, the first[here] is a somewhat impressionistic documentary told from the P.O.V. of an elderly lady who was there, the second["Deir Yassin- what really happened?"] has a more conventional narrative that minimizes the massacre, although it also acknowledges that civilians were killed and the town was attacked by Jewish forces.


As I told Diane, a friend once asked me if I thought there would ever be peace in the middle east, and I told him it would happen when they ran out of oil and the US no longer felt the desire to meddle, although we may well go broke first and find ourselves simply unable to meddle when our Chinese I.O.U.'s get called in. I suppose I'm not exactly objective.

My impression is most Americans really believe our government does care about peace in the middle east, or at least want this to be the case, and hope our apparent missteps in fumbling for peace are just due to our bumbling Western ways being ill-suited for dealing with the inscrutable East, rather than some darker truth. Like-- for instance-- that maybe American exceptionalism and the Israeli myth of the chosen people are schizophrenically complimentary myths that have helped bind the US and Israel together, two nations both invested in denying how their existence came to be at the expense of other people who were already there.



Wikipedia, "The 1948 Palistinan Exodus",
Glenn Greenwald, Salon, "Finding Obama guilty of insufficient devotion to Israel"

a Prescott Bush interview

I posted this at roughly 70% of the standard youtube size to improve the so-so image resolution, but if you want the rest or the "full-size", it's here( part one), and part 2 is here.

Both are via a channel called "BBC propaganda news", which, presumably, is not related to the BBC. As most of you already know, Prescott Bush was a US senator and the current president's grandfather.

Some things to read

1. Helena Cobban: "Israel terrified of Gazans' nonviolent mass actions"

2. Chris Floyd's recent meditation on Woodrow Wilson, whom he doesn't care for so much: "Hundred-Year Hangover: Betrayal and Blindness in the Making of the Modern World"

3.Think Progress:Pentagon pushes for more contractor immunity in Iraq.

4. Scalia fails to see what the big deal is about torture in a bbc interview.

SOTU 2008: Twilight in America

Howard: I don't see it that way, Geoff. Let me tell you what we're dealing with here. A potentially positive learning experience that can—

Grim Reaper: SHUT UP! Shut up, you American! You always talk, you Americans. You talk, and you talk, and say "let me tell you something" and "I just wanna say this". Well, you're dead now, so shut up!

from "Death" in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life


1. As I write this I'm guessing Mr preznit is saying all sorts of swell stuff about what an honor it's been, blah blah, and somewhere out there some lame-ass pro-Obama blogger is counting his guy's closeups vs HRCs to detect media bias, and another lame-ass pro-HRC blogger's doing the same.

And nobody on TV will say anything about how America has long-term problems that both Bush and the democrats are only likely to make deeper. You'd have to mention the war, and how it's going-for-broke, off-the books spending helped get us into this mess and in fact helps keep us in it, but this is inconvenient because of how it doesn't jibe so well with the narrative of how it's disloyal to defund the troops, and it reminds us that the democrats are just the enabling, other bad guys, and there's no white-hatted Gary Cooper in sight.

And even though his wife is running for president, you can't talk about how the last recession was dealt with by a president who was denied a "stimulus package" (mostly on political grounds) and subsequently raised taxes, on gasoline and higher incomes, and put some brakes on expenditures-- like the military base closing commission.(Remember that?). Didn't they call Bill Clinton's 1990s the largest economic expansion in postwar history? But even the Clintons are reluctant to talk about that any more, as it might reinforce the sturdy and simple lesson of raising taxes on those who can afford it(including their huge new rolodex of friends acquired since 1992), and undercut her Iron Lady schtick.

On the other hand, it's o.k. to talk about being "addicted to oil", but less o.k. to talk about any practical short-term strategies for actually starting the transition to a post-petroleum economy. Big vague ideas, hydrogen, The Car of the Future, goals for where we'll be in twenty years without a sliver of a plan to get there-- much better.

It's also o.k. to label that ex-president as bigotted, or at least as too-willing to engage with race-baiting, but not so o.k. to talk about the collective racism that took America to war with Iraq.

GWB: We have other work to do on taxes. Unless Congress acts, most of the tax relief we've delivered over the past seven years will be taken away. Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800. Others have said they would personally be happy to pay higher taxes. I welcome their enthusiasm. I'm pleased to report that the IRS accepts both checks and money orders. (Laughter and applause.)

Most Americans think their taxes are high enough. With all the other pressures on their finances, American families should not have to worry about their federal government taking a bigger bite out of their paychecks. There's only one way to eliminate this uncertainty: Make the tax relief permanent. (Applause.) And members of Congress should know: If any bill raises taxes reaches my desk, I will veto it. (Applause.)

Nobody calls him out for being a bloody, psychopathic loonie. Kansas republican governor Sibelius "responds",talking about bipartisanship: code for we're going to screw you too, and protect wealthy democratic donors in an election year.

GWB:"the armies of compassion continue the march to a new day in the Gulf Coast."

Eric Alterman: Here's what [that] new day looks like: residents in 40,000 trailers, provided by FEMA, that contain potentially dangerous levels of formaldehyde.
[also here.]

(Junior didn't even mention Katrina reconstruction in SOTU 2007, perhaps because it didn't involve explosions and he was bored with it at that point.)

The idea of an "army of compassion" is an odd one, and strikes me as another indicator that George, Jr is a warped, demented character who, whether by his own fault or others', never quite managed a regular route to adult character development. As far as I know he's never spoken about it, but time and again I imagine this metaphor of a coked or boozed up Dubya watching Patton over an over again at a second-run theater in the early 70s on his off days in the Texas Guard, fantasizing about a powerful future when the old man would never, never lord it over him, ever again.

They say he's stupid. Who knows if he is-- either way he's been remarkably successful in getting a nation of 300 million to go along with his numerous crazy schemes, and hastening her collapse. But I guess we can't talk about that either. Sometimes it puzzles me why there weren't more evil but sane capitalists who were smart enough to see the writing on the wall and be alarmed by the portents enough to do something about it, er, him. (If they thought Kerry was the answer, obviously the evil but sane capitalists aren't much smarter than the rest of us.)

Then again, maybe the evil but sane types decided to just ride 2004-2008 out, recognizing it would help to further cow the democratic party, possibly as part of a long-term project designed to convert tomorrow's democratic leadership into yesterday's pre-evangelized Nixonian republicans, since the speaking-in-tongue crazies who had increasingly taken control of the GOP had probably begun to embarrass the industrialists, and even started to get a bit uppity. You're going to put the kibosh on public funding of research that benefits the private sector, you bible-thumping little shits? Oh, hell no!

Certainly if you look at pretty much any democrat who has risen to any level of national prominence in the last 8 years, their voting records, and increasingly even their rhetoric sound pretty GOP. If Hillary Clinton didn't exist the funders of such a project would have had to pour her out of a test tube, while Barach Obama seems to channel MLK and Reagan with equal facility. Against such a discouraging background it's difficult to tell if Chris Dodd's crusade against the odious FISA legislation is the real deal or not, and certainly if it is he deserves to be commended-- especially given how tough his road has been made by unfortunate characters like Harry Reid. Maybe Dodd is an exception who helps demonstrate just what a hidebound, reactionary body the Senate has become, on both sides of the aisle.

2. Going back to Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper and maybe even earlier, Americans have been stirred by the twin myths of innocence and exceptionalism. These were probably pretty easy to nourish and keep functional for quite some time, as white settlers expanded from New England and the Old South and obliterated the people they encountered with weaponry and diseases that the natives never had to face before. And oh yeah, slavery, a few hundred years of it. Maybe the only choice for a society that builds itself with such underpinnings was between racist denial or insanity, and naturally we human beings try to avoid the latter.

One of the best bloggers most of you have never heard of, Jay Taber, calls his site "a journal of the American psyche in transition." I don't know what we're transitioning to, but from my vantage point Old America looks pretty much dead. A walking corpse with eye-sockets stuffed with reality-TV and celebrities, and a surfeit of nuclear weapons dangling precariously out of the pockets. We have the greatest concentration of wealth on the continent, while Cuba, the little runt of a country we've embargoed for 40 plus years, has lower infant mortality rates and universal healthcare.

And we're functionally bankrupt, our appearance of solvency dependent on furiously buying and selling foreign-made trinkets from one another, often with money borrowed from the banks of the trinket-makers. You think your country is alive?




[A late night addendum: see also "Twilight of Empire" by Rob Payne, and

Barbara O'Brien's "When 'bipartisan' means we're screwed." Sometimes when you can't sleep its because you forgot something. I'm no Shakespeare, but like old Will I try to only borrow good stuff. G'night.]

The only one of you characters who has any balls is Dennis Kucinich, and you sorry sons-of-bitches had to run him out of the race

I have a lengthy post about the SOTU which will be up Wednesday night. In the meantime, here a 2 parts(out of 7) of a Real News interview with Gore Vidal from last year.

1.Gore Vidal on FDR: "he smiled benignly on the oil wells."




2.Gore Vidal on Truman:"Hiroshima was the end of the American republic"



3.Vidal on McCarthyism and the Military Comissions Act of 2006


4.Vidal on the US media: "the people have no voice because they have no information."

5.Vidal on the dems and religion.

If you want the other items they're at their site. I found the 1st two plus the one on the media the most interesting, the others less so.

Freud never would have asked, "now why do you think your leaders are bunch of paternalistic pricks?"

Freud's famous sofa. photo: Konstantin Binder

Bernhard at Moon of Alabama: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton called for an independent, international investigation into the death of one million Iraqis — perhaps by the United Nations — saying Friday there was "no reason to trust the U.S. government." [link]

He goes on: Yes - I misquoted that bit of hypocrisy. It was originally aimed at Pakistan. But there is more of her lunacy: "[W]e need to help them understand what is in their interest and that of course includes President Musharraf."

A Monday night miscellany

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about animal testing (vivisection) that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of London University medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.
[...]
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque — "Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?" — leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers". On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles that became known as the Brown Dog riots.

Tired of the controversy, Battersea Council removed the statue in 1910 under cover of darkness, after which it was allegedly destroyed by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. A new statue of the brown dog was commissioned by anti-vivisection groups over 70 years later, and was erected in Battersea Park in 1985.

the BBC on how to boil an egg(!).

Justin Raimondo, American Conservative magazine(2006):
Hillary the Hawk: the Democrats’ Athena only differs from Bush on the details.

John Caruso:
"The one thing that Democrat-hugging progressives must never forget"

Here's former Democratic operative and current MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell, speaking in An Unreasonable Man:

If you want to pull the party--the major party that is closest to the way you're thinking--to what you're thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you're capable of not voting for them. If you don't show them you're capable of not voting for them, they don't...have...to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn't listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.

v. primitive

this is the second version of my first video. I tried to make some of the transitions less abrupt, and added a couple of items, and the length went from 2:37 to 3:00. Constructive comments are welcome, even if you don't care for it. It's mainly an editing exercise, as I noted before, but I tried to impart a narrative as well.

Monaco 1936-37

the end of the world: then and now, and maybe later

images:wikipedia, calendars of the world

Exhibit One, from our wiki friends:

1844 – Millerites and members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church* were greatly disappointed that Jesus did not return as predicted by American preacher William Miller (pictured).



The Great Disappointment was a major event in the history of the Millerites, a Christian denomination, in the United States. Around 50,000 people joined the movement that was to receive Jesus on October 22nd ,1844. Based on an interpretation of the event portrayed in Daniel 8:14, they waited to see the Second Coming as the event that was to be fulfilled on the appointed day. The specific passage reads, in the (King James Bible), as: And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. (Daniel 8:14)


The Great Disappointment is viewed as an example of how the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance manifests itself through failed prophecies which often arise in a religious context. The theory was proposed by Leon Festinger to describe the formation of new beliefs and increased proselytizing in order to reduce the tension, or dissonance, that results from failed prophecies. According to the theory, believers experienced tension following the failure of Jesus' reappearance in 1844 which led to a variety of new explanations. The various solutions form a part of the teachings of the different groups that outlived the disappointment.

Initially I wanted to post this on Monday, i.e. October 22nd, but Rob had a really nice post up and I figured I didn't want to steal his thunder by announcing the end of the world, especially since, if you're 163 years late-- what's one more day? (sometimes, I like to put things off. Other times I just find I have to. One way or another it seems like the story of my life...)

Anyway: I really wish people would make more of a fuss about (the history of)the end of the world, because I think we're living in another day and age when millenarian looniness seems to be screwing with people's thinking, and a reminder of past foolishness in this area strikes me as pretty useful.

About 10 years ago I was working at such-and-such a place, and many of my co-workers were preoccupied with some dubious best-seller about hidden numerical codes in the bible, and they would invite me to their home-study sessions-cum-get-togethers in which (I guess) they discussed this, or prayed, or who knows what. (I never went.)

While I don't know particularly much about the history of religions, my impression is that the afore mentioned William Miller was the trouble maker who started the modern craze over end-times eschatology, whereas Christianity pre-Bill Miller tended to de-emphasize the rubbing of our hands together with messed-up glee and the hoping for the end of creation and the fiery deaths of people who weren't us.

(Long before I'd heard of Leon Festinger and cognitive dissonance I had a hard to define sense of unease about people who grooved on the end times-- how can it possibly be psychologically healthy to aspire all the usual things people aspire to, to make a life for themselves and maybe get married and have kids and plan aspire for the kids to have happy futures while you are simultaneously taught to long for the destruction of civilization?)


Exhibit 2, from Calendars of the World:

When will the Islamic calendar overtake the Gregorian calendar?

As the year in the Islamic calendar is about 11 days shorter than the year in the Christian calendar, the Islamic years are slowly gaining in on the Christian years. But it will be many years before the two coincide. The 1st day of the 5th month of C.E. 20874 in the Gregorian calendar will also be (approximately) the 1st day of the 5th month[Jumada al-awwal] of AH 20874 of the Islamic calendar.

.

May 1st, 20874.


About 2 years ago I came across this interesting nugget o' knowledge. It occurred to me that maybe for the religious numbers crunchers who appear so eager for Armageddon the convergence of the Christian and Islamic calendars, due in a mere 18,867 years, might be the signal from God they were looking for. And, instead of getting hyped-up to wreck the world and all that rot, they're supposed to make sure the world lasts at least another 18,800 plus years, with naturally occurring fresh water and air, trees and flowers, animals still roaming free, and maybe some peace on earth and a convergence of religions and men.

Now, I am not a religious sort per se, and I'm definitely not trying to suggest some sort of half-baked spiritual movement. We have those in abundance, and they don't strike me as being terribly useful. Call it a wistful thought experiment, designed to provoke or soothe or both. It would be nice if we could stick around and manage to civilize ourselves-- but could we do it in a mere 18,800 odd years?


*10.24 addendum: Herbert Ford notes in the comments that the Seventh Day Adventists were not formally established until 1863. (Actually the Wikipedia entry on the 7th Day Adventists notes this as well, although it describes them as having evolved from the Millerites.)

breaking the sound barrier

the Bell X-1 flew faster than mach 1 for the first time on 14 October 1947-- 60 years ago today. In my usually cursory looking about for info about the day's topic, I found out that X-1 pilot Chuck Yeager is A. still alive(and married to a woman 36 yrs his junior of whom his kids apparently disapprove) and
B. Has recently endorsed Duncan Hunter for president.(!?)



Milestones like this one, and their assorted peripheral data make me think again of a topic I often return to, of how I used to be able to appreciate things like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier and how cool-looking the X-1 is without the disagreeable tangential reflections about all sorts of other stuff that kinda spoiled it-- how the US changed since 1947, from the New Deal and the country that mostly still manufactured our own stuff and cared about domestic job creation, to the present shaky state of things.


Yes, I recognize it wasn't all peachy in '47; desegregation was still waiting in the future and we did intern thousands of Japanese-Americans during the war years, just because people were scared and it was politically useful, to name just two things.

Still, the Bell X-1 did look pretty cool.

oh yeah, THAT Glauberg plateau

the English language front page of Wikipedia has a section, perpetually refreshed a little before midnight, called "did you know"(from wikipedia's latest articles). Today's(10.14.2007) page:

From Wikipedia's newest articles:

...that archaeological finds from the German Glauberg plateau include a life-sized statue of a warrior (pictured) dating from around 500 BC?

artifact for a wednesday

Today I finished an article I am foolish enough to try to get published, so I've been neglecting HZ. I would like to discuss al-Sadr's announcement that there's going to be a six-month cease-fire for the Mehdi Army, as well as the Iraq withdrawal plan that John Podesta's think tank just released, but not today. Very soon, though. I'll also discuss my plans for Iraqdoc 2007 next week.

Operation Ajax at 54

image via globalsecurity.org

In spite of his once having been chosen Time's man of the year, I'll bet most Americans don't know who Mohamed Mossadeq was. Likewise, I imagine most Americans don't know that British intelligence and our CIA overthrew Mr. Mossadeq after he nationalized Iran's oil companies and kicked BP out(the nerve!), forcing him out of office on August 19th, 1953, after he was democratically elected two years earlier, putting the Shah in his place.

Of course, given the general mendacity and sheer horribleness of most popular American news outlets, I can't entirely blame most Americans for being mystified by the question-- "why do they hate us?"

from wikipedia's entry on Operation Ajax:

The leader of Operation Ajax was Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior CIA officer, and grandson of the former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. While formal leadership was vested in Kermit Roosevelt, the project was designed and executed by Donald Wilber, a career CIA agent and acclaimed author of books on Iran, Afghanistan and Ceylon.

The CIA operation centered around having the increasingly impotent Shah dismiss the powerful Prime Minister Mossadegh and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans after careful examination for his likeliness to be anti-Soviet.

The BBC spearheaded Britain's propaganda campaign, broadcasting the code word to start the coup.[1]

Despite the high-level coordination and planning, the coup d'etat briefly faltered, and the Shah fled Iran. After a short exile in Italy, however, the Shah was brought back again, this time through follow-up CIA operations, which were successful. Zahedi was installed to succeed Prime Minister Mossadegh. The deposed Mossadegh was arrested, given what some have alleged to have been a show trial, and condemned to death. The Shah commuted this sentence to solitary confinement for three years in a military prison, followed by house arrest for life.

In 2000, the New York Times made partial publication of a leaked CIA document titled, "Clandestine Service History – Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran – November 1952-August 1953." This document describes the planning and execution conducted by the American and British governments. The New York Times published this critical document with the names censored. The New York Times also limited its publication to scanned image (bitmap) format, rather than machine-readable text. This document was eventually published properly – in text form, and fully unexpurgated. The complete CIA document ...[is now available on the web.] The word 'blowback' appeared for the very first time in this document.

[...]
In 2000, then. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that the coup was a "setback for democratic government" in Iran.[2]

[1]BBC: "a very British coup"

[2]CNN:"U.S. Comes Clean About The Coup In Iran", 04-19-2000.


Of course, speaking of history lessons, it would've been nice if the democrats running for president had made a passing refrence to Mossadeq in the debate this weekend, but perhaps that's expecting too much. A time travel-fantasy-- not 54 years, just a few hours, and me there in the audience, being given a chance to speak(and actually being miked by the teevee networks): I would say, when they failed to see why I wanted them to mention Operation Ajax and Mossadeqh, "but what about timeliness, and relevance?" And I imagine HRC and Obama just staring at me while the crickets chirped. Then after a sufficient pause, they'd go back to talking about why we need to stay in Iraq longer, and their avoidance of reminding people of the "off-the-table" discussion with respect to Iran would have nothing to do with the possible embarassment of the confluence with this particular anniversary, and (the apparently diminishing)possibility that bigshot lefty blogger might mention it. Nothing at all.

Meanwhile-- I've been working, off and on, on a couple of longer pieces, including one on the apparent build-up to war with Iran, which I mean to post in 2 or 3 days.

Incidentally, I didn't know about the BBC's complicity until I worked on this post. The link above also has another audio link to a radio program(-me) about their involvement, which is about 25 minutes long and pretty interesting.

About the BBC's code word: it was used in a sentence in a time check at midnight-- in other words, every midnight the announcer would say, "the time is midnight," except when he gave the signal to start the coup by saying "the time is exactly midnight."

Dick Cheney-- a tv snippet

The moveon.org people sent me an email about this video, which is also available at their site, here, and of course directly at youtube. I'm beginning to think it should be called UbiquitousTube, but then again marketing savvy has never been my strong suit.

I'm also reminded of a thing I've reflected on from time to time-- that the Dick Cheney of the 80's and early '90s seemed like a less truculent fellow than the guy who became vice-president and told Patrick Leahy to eff off and went out of his way to wear disgracefully inappropriate garb at a memorial service at Auschwitz not so long ago.

Not only does Cheney of April '94 say completely different (and far more reasonable) things than does the 21st century Cheney, but, however much the ideologue in me balks at saying this, he actually seems kind of collegial here. Is it just me, and if not, do you also wonder what happened?

happy 140th, Canada

map courtesy BBCanada.com

and may you remain less nutty than your neighbors to the south for at least another 140 years.

No, it is NOT Hammer time

Vast Left discusses MC Hammer's unfortunate "anti-war" song(via Avedon.):

If MC Hammer can help save our troops with his new video, "Bring Our Brothers Home," why should I quibble?

Well, because it's deeply dishonest.

Still, I agree with the chorus, which is actually pretty catchy:

Bring 'em home
Bring our brothers home
Too much dying
They've been gone too long
People crying
That this war is wrong
Right or wrong, it's time to come home

Also, the endless montage of war footage and flagged-draped caskets is quite moving. How could it not be?

Unfortunately, Hammer has been Hannitized for our mutually assured destruction.

I have to agree with "Vast Left." Hammer has bought in to the idea that domestic criticism of the war is "hating the troops." Another sample:

Man it must be hard
With all the things you're going through
Got the world on your shoulders
Everybody watching you
Keep us all safe
And out the same mouth we hate you.

and Hammer seems to be saying that the problem with the war was just that we stayed there too long:

You did what we needed
In our darkest hour
While our peoples was dyin'
In them burning twin towers
Never before have we seen it like this
The enemies we looking for
Was living in our midst
So we brought it to 'em
And we hit 'em where it hurts
Stuck they heads in the sand and knocked they dicks in the dirt
They know what it is, sir,
Job well done
Now pick up the phone and tell our boys
Come on home.

"Stuck they[sic] heads in the sand and knocked they[sic] dicks in the dirt, They know what it is, sir, Job well done?"

Apparently he's decided to be a racist to boot. Too bad. The title is "Bring Our Brothers Home," and you can look for it if you are determined; but like hell I'll embed the Youtube video here.

I wonder how many people will also decide, years down the road when(and if) the Iraq occupation is finally over, that it was the right thing to do, but we "just stayed over there too long." For all I know it may already be a common sentiment among the blood-n-guts crowd that keeps buying those damn bumper stickers. (If I displayed a bumper sticker that said "I support the troops, except the deranged and sadistic ones," I imagine I'd be compromising my safety, even though it strikes me as a pretty reasonable sentiment. What if I also specified "And I support extensive mental health treatment for the deranged ones?" No, I think it still would be unwise...)

Anyway: as I said the other day, our mass media operators seem pretty determined that people don't make connections and don't put the pieces together, and Hammer's view is tailor-made for giving a way for people to unreflectively square the sheer waste of the war with the aims of the once and future war machine. It's not that different, if you stop and think about it, from John Kerry's "message" in 2004 that the problem with the war was that it was prosecuted badly.

It wasn't always this way. Remember when Jon Voight and Jane Fonda won the lead acting Oscars for Coming Home? I'm not saying the Oscars are or ever were a meaningful measure of film art (clearly they're not, and if they ever manage to be it's only coincidentally so), but they are a measure of what the Hollywood elite holds up as valuable, and it's unimaginable that a film like Coming Home, were it made today, would receive that kind of conferred legitimacy. Today Hollywood courts Hillary Clinton and (to a lesser degree) Obama, with their "all options on the table" talk viz-a-viz Iran, and even in the last cycle they wouldn't touch Howard Dean when he still seemed viable in late 2003.

If you want another reason to see Hammer's view as small and mean, consider this, from another era:


(larger image here.) photo courtesy "Rom Tobbi"

(a total of about half a million soldiers died at Gallipoli in a few months' time, roughly half on each side, the British and French, and the Turkish. The custom of sending soldiers' bodies back to their home countries is a comparatively recent development. Incidentally the man who wrote the words fought there too.)

All those years ago

magnum photos from the 1967 war

some recent anniversaries, courtesy our wikipedia friends:

June 5th,1967 - Six-Day War begins: The Israeli air force launches simultaneous pre-emptive attacks on the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

June 6th,1944 - The Battle of Normandy begins. D-Day, code named Operation Overlord, commences with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France. The allied soldiers quickly break through the Atlantic Wall and push inland in the largest amphibious military operation in history.

June 6th,1982 - 1982 Lebanon War begins: Forces under Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invade southern Lebanon in their "Operation Peace for the Galilee," eventually reaching as far north as the capital, Beirut.

June 7th,1981 - "Operation Opera":The Israeli Air Force attacked and disabled Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor.

June 8th,1967 - The Israeli Air Force attacked the U.S. Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 and wounding at least 173.

Now, keep something in mind: none of these things actually happened. I'm not saying this because of the faults that many people lay at Wikipedia's feet-- the wikis held up their part of the telling, at least here. But if you watch the nightly news on TV, whether on CBS or NBC, CNN, etc, you won't hear about these things. I am lying of course; they did talk about the Battle of Normandy. CIA chief defense secretary Robert Gates was in Normandy, attending the ceremony, perhaps because the French discretely requested that it not be Cheney, after his dress code faux pas in Poland. Who knows, maybe they even scheduled the G8 shindig when they did so that George Bush,jr not be there either. The Europeans are subtle like that.

Katie Couric talked about how the father of one of the CBS nightly news staffers fought at Normandy, and they had a nice story about how dad went back to the little French town where he helped take care of a sick cow in ‘44. I’m actually not making fun, at least not in this instance-- it was a nice story.

The problem is not the story itself, nor occasional sentimentality-- but the lack of context. Television insists that we regard life as lacking context. Stuff happens, then, inevitably, other stuff happens-- not because of prior incidents, but because each day is a new day, requiring new content. And when anything bad happens it’s genuinely shocking, unpredictable, and unimaginable-- just like the last shocking, unpredictable and unimaginably bad thing.

Although I try my best to avoid keeping up with “dancing with the stars” or the latest misadventures of Paris Hilton, etc, I don’t think of myself as a snob who looks down on his fellow Americans for being dumber than a can of paint, as Xymphora very memorably suggested we were.
Yes, it’s difficult sometimes. Millions of us still believe Saddam was responsible for 9/11. Millions more voted to re-elect George Bush,jr in 2004, and supposedly over 50 percent of the US population believes the planet is no more than 6,000 years old .

Should the nightly newscasts be teaching history? Yes, insofar as current events inevitably occur in an historical context, the news readers’ reluctance to note this notwithstanding. People make fun of the news readers, although I suppose they’re a pretty easy target, shooting fish with really good hair in a barrel. We’re often told they’re excessively ambitious, possibly stupid, probably amoral.


Imagine a young reporter at a smaller-market tv station, say, in Terre Haute or Columbus or Buffalo. She isn’t exactly crazy about her job, but she’s young and maybe even comparatively naive idealistic, and even regards TV news as real journalism. So she appreciates her opportunity to gain experience and hone her skills. They ask her to do a bunch of “man in the street” interviews about some topic or other. Maybe it’s for opinions regarding a bill being discussed in congress or the state legislature. She needs to go back to the station with 3 or 4 good ones, whatever that means. She likes talking to people, and talks to well over 3 or 4, and submits 4 clips that struck her as thoughtful yet unpretentious, and edits that. The very next thing she knows, her producer is livid, chews her out, explaining that they’re all wrong, that wasn’t what she was looking for at all. The smart people make viewers self-conscious about their failings.

The producer wants, well, lunkheads. People you can laugh at for their sheer ignorance. Our young reporter reflects on all the people she talked to, and she doesn’t think ordinary people are uniformly stupid, but she also recognizes that her opinion isn’t exactly valued in this equation, and would like to keep her job(at least for now.). So she re-edits, and considers herself lucky that she did talk to some lunkheads, and doesn’t have to go out and shoot again, and manages to meet her deadline-- barely.

I’ve never worked as a tv reporter, and I don’t know if it actually works that way, but I can well imagine it might. Like our hypothetical young reporter, I don’t believe that Americans are uniformly unreflective and stupid, although distressingly many are. What’s even more distressing, however, is how big-time journalism seems like a hermetic, tightly-coiled mechanism, purpose-built to reinforce our sense of ourselves as unreflective and stupid. And apart from people getting most of their news from teevee, it seems like the other stations and programming are part of the mechanism.

A couple of examples-- one I wrote about before:
“they were the greatest generation, blah blah blah...”(feb 2003)

What is it with the History Channel? I just got back from the gym where the teevee was tuned to a documentary of sorts about the Normandy invasion entitled "Then and Now". They had the customary business of cutting between modern-day experts and stock footage of the events in question, only one of the experts sure looked like Dwight Eisenhower. ...Later they talked to Rommel's son, then eventually to Montgomery's son, and eventually cut back to the Eisenhower look-alike who turned out to be-- yes, Eisenhower's son.
(Apparently he wrote a book about the war too.)
How many documentaries about D-day already existed before this one, I don't know, but there must be many. Why this particular reshuffling of stock footage, at this time? What is this, Pavlovian conditoning? Are we supposed to respond to this procession of WWII sons as a suggestion about how "righteous" George W. Bush is, readying to liberate Iraq, the wheeling and dealing with Turkey and the counsel of the house of Saud notwithstanding? How about a program about, say, the My Lai massacre in the coming weeks? Do you think we'll see it on the History Channel? I'm not even asking about a show on the US role in Mazar-e-Sharif...

I will say one thing though. It would be nice if we had a president who was as articulate in English as Manfred Rommel is.

The second item is from the Speed Channel(which I believe is owned by Murdoch)from some time in 2005; they had a program about cars of the US presidents, including of course the fateful Lincoln Limo convertible JFK rode in. They discussed various personal and white house autos, with the customary cutting to car experts. At one point they discussed a Ford V8 convertible that FDR drove, which may have been the first car with hand controls for a paraplegic driver, and which is preserved today. Then the expert they cut to offered, just in passing, that “FDR gave people hope, even if he didn’t actually do anything about the depression.”

SON OF A BITCH. What, this car guy is suddenly an expert on the New Deal? If he was, they failed to discuss his credentials. I swear, the more you watch tv, the more you want to throw something at it.


FDR's 1938 Ford

I want to offer a solution, but I don’t have one. I don’t think it’s just an abstract problem, something for bloggers and op-ed writers to bemoan. Conditioning people to reject a sense of historical causality could help enable the nitwit-in-chief to launch a war against Iran, for one thing, and will very likely have more pernicious effects in years to come.

The other day I discussed some of these ideas with Arvin Hill, who is singularly pessimistic about it all. I tell myself that ordinary people had it far worse circa 1890, when Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to smash the railroad unions(which were still illegal), and he was the only democrat elected president from 1860 when Lincoln was elected, until Wilson came along in 1912, a period of even greater 1-party dominance.

Of course today’s 1-party state is slipperier, as it require large numbers of democrats to be shadow republicans, and the dynamic of what the parties(ostensibly) stand for today is very different from what it was in the 19th century. 21st century oligarchs have done their damnedest to learn the lessons of economics and the various social sciences, to make sure that they’ll never be caught unawares by a great depression or other phenomenon that might cast the obstacles they set for ordinary people in sharp relief.

Still. If there are any bright spots, maybe it’s found in discontent. Large numbers of people know something is wrong, even if they have a hard time articulating it. They can’t blame Paris Hilton forever-- eventually they’ll notice she never raided anybody’s pension fund or took away their health insurance. Will it happen in time? I don’t know. Will Americans look at the immigrant rallies, quit bitching about the Mexicans, and realize the illegals are doing a better job of being Americans-- demonstrating, causing a ruckus, demanding to be heard-- than most Americans?


also, see Gary Farber: “God Help Us”

Sarabeth, at 1115.org, "mirror, mirror"

Skimble:"desperate to kiss and be touched"
and the follow-up, "deleting the love"(and no, it's not worth noting just because he references me!)

Jonathan Schwarz(2005):“Now More Than Ever, It's Critical That We Learn Nothing From History”
in which he notes that Mike Gerber refers to it as the Learn Nothing From History Channel.

and, as one of Schwarz’s commenters reminds us,
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."--Philip K. Dick

Jeffrey St Clair, Counterpunch:"Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty, Revisited"