Watching Feurat Alani’s documentary “Fallujah, a Lost Generation?” on RT, about the effects of Depleted Uranium bombarded onto Iraq’s Fallujah, by Americans, I am reminded of similar stories about Basra. Basra’s collection of deformed babies came about after the first US war in Iraq, but Fallujah’s fate seems even more horrific. Fallujah’s seem to have resulted from, effectively, it being turned into a dumping ground of nuclear waste. Particularly vicious aspects of the weaponry have resulted in sadistic effects. And this does not even mention the white phosphorus. (For some images of what the latter did in Fallujah, see Americans’ genocidal killing of millions in Vietnam.)
Glenn Greenwald takes on some journalistic pod-person working at NPR. He blames her for being uncritical, and routinely accepting government officials’ claims about Iran. However, in the past he had correctly observed that, in the current push for war, the media is ahead of the government. Here, this journalistic cog is merely seeking those sources which fit her intended story; hard-nosed, detached skepticism are simply besides the point! And, in the process, this tail has passed any potential blame to the dog it wags.
Now Greenwald has sharper powers of observation than this. Cold deduction should, by now, have made her reportage unworthy of getting worked up about. And yet he seems to jump away, from his conclusion of last month, to an earlier, less seasoned viewpoint!
This ought not surprise, though. It is a pattern of behaviour I often see in the American left. They go most of the way with their deductions, then suddenly their conclusion takes a turn astray! Something unpalatable, perchance?
The American Conservative is carrying a great article by Scott McConnell on Peter Beinart’s much vaunted new book, The Crisis of Zionism. Among other things, McConnell argues that other actors than American Jews have to step-in in order to solve the problems arising from Israel/Palestine. Here is the comment I posted there, opening with a reference to Beinart’s confessionals:
Such soul-searching is purgative for Jewish-Americans, but, at this late a stage, a consequential shift will not take place among them. And the lobby’s machinery is too entrenched to do other than it does.
The counter-currents have been developing slowly, and may increasingly have an inexorable momentum. For it not to get ugly, the article’s closing suggestions may be our only practical hope.
As for what will happen to Israel: I’m afraid it’s one-state for them! Sometimes, we become those we oppress!
The Real News tackles the much-talked-about “Jewish vote“, and Florida swingery, which is often used to explain why major presidential candidates of the planet’s superpower step over each other to pledge allegiance to a foreign country’s needs.
It is highly informative, includes contributions from Max Blumenthal and Phil Weiss of Mondoweiss, and addresses the tacit assumptions and claims about a supposedly pivotal role by a tiny part of the electorate. A main thrust of the argument is that Christian Zionists are key, not the small Jewish electorate–perhaps even in Florida (where the Jewish vote is numerically crucial).
While I buy the argument that it is the evangelicals who wield a determining role, (and I’d never bought the claim that Jewish vote is pivotal in the manner often suggested,) I would add the distinction that the impetus of the thrust for war does not come from Christian Zionists; that comes from AIPAC and its ilk. In this regard, and considering the just-under-the-surface fear, by US politicans, of the Israel lobby, it is not the Christian Zionists who are doing the driving, though they may be in the driver’s seat.
And some questions remain. e.g. if Christians United for Israel are that rich and powerful, then I’d have expected to have heard of them more widely! Moral Majority and Falwell these guys ain’t!
And if Christian Zionists are so powerful, (and I believe the implication/suggestion might have been in the report that some of AIPAC’s funding comes from such people,) then one wonders why they have not been as successful in pushing fundamentalist policies as AIPAC has been in pushing Israel’s needs. Apparently it is easier to get the country into war than to change its domestic policies! This is certainly possible and predictable, but one wonders never the less.
It is why ‘The AGony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs’ was so powerful: because it forced us to recognize there are actual human beings with private lives and hopes and dreams and feelings and ailments and families and friends and souls, like our own, who toil to make the disembodied devices that show up in our Apple store. It forced us into a posture of empathy; to consider that, under another set of circumstances, those human beings, on the other end of the supply chain, could be us! Our family, our friends, our loved ones. It forced us to ask the question why it is that we get to be the ones who delight in the beautiful designs of the nifty devices, why others have to be the ones who work under harsh conditions to make them. And what is our moral responsibility, as fellow humans, to those other human beings, on the other end of our devices.
Key to humanity, and to a sense of justice, is an ability to project one’s self into another’s circumstances. To see The Other as yourself but in only another time and place. Some children develop this early; for most it comes with maturity, while a few become banksters, Ayn Rand and other dysfunctional people. Whatever foolishness Daisey was up to, Chris Hayes rightly brings the focus back to where it belongs: the truth that we need to see, beyond the silicon of the iPad screen and the credit-card-afforded purchase costs, to the very human beings whose lives get shattered in order to put this beautiful, soon to be obsolete, gadget whose manufacture has destroyed the environment elsewhere, and will soon poison landfills.
I can’t say that I have ever cared for film-makers making films about film, writers writing about writers, or any other claimants to art producing works about, or involving, the lives of artists. I am not even talking about bio-pics and other biographies! Rather, it is the populating of their stories with writers and other such artsy types. They cannot write about anyone else; that is all that they know about! Their entire circle is composed of people like themselves; so, slowly, that pool becomes all that they can draw from. The end result are films which are invariably populated by characters who are involved in such lives, or who sound as such.
Never the less, one of my favourite films is The Dresser, a movie about the lives of theatre people! It is supremely watchable. And, in all that it offers, Tom Courtenay’s performance stands out the most.
He plays a person whose life and identity are centred around caring for another (Albert Finney’s character), and who is left with nothing upon the passing of that person. (At the risk of being the only page on the Internet which mentions the two together,) one of my favourite episodes of Star Trek, The Next Generation had the android Data ask whether the purpose of existence is to care for someone. If that is indeed true, then Tom Courtenay’s character is a fascinating depiction of the idea.
But the relationship is far more complex than that. There is repressed love. (Sexuality is kept cleanly out of the foreground, except when the omission is to hint at a sham heterosexual union.) And Courtenay’s character vicariously, and sometimes ruthlessly, uses Finney’s as the vehicle for his fantasies of acting and theatre. Without it, he’d “end up running a boarding house in Westcliffe-on-Sea”. And so, when his cared-for dies, he is left with nothing but fear. What happens when the symbiont’s host dies?
But, again, irrespective of the story, Courtenay’s acting suffices. The only down-side of such a great performance is that one fails by not equally crediting Albert Finney’s depiction of a self-centred, grandiloquent, melodramatic, bullying, cruel, spineless, ungrateful, prima donna who is preparing for death, on the last night of his life. Or Eileen Atkins’s portrayal of Madge.
Watching Chris Hayes’ very daring (by American standards) Up show, on Israel/Palestine, I have come to realize that, at this point, race is now inescapably at the core of the issue.
The Israeli general, Shlomo Gazit, wants a state where Jews form an overwhelming majority. The question will increasingly have to be addressed: Are Jews a race?
The original PLO declaration stated that Jews are not a race. For decades, Israel’s supporters tried to avoid this. But, perhaps in the same manner that their success in settlements has now caused one-state to be inevitable, their success in demanding recognition of Israel as a Jewish state has now made pivotal the question of race.
The confict is already very racialized. While the visceral bigotry against Arabs has a longer history among Americans and Europeans, it has had to take a particularly virulent form since the Western failure of self-examination after 9/11. And, in the context of Israel/Palestine, racial allusions are now heard even in polite society.
One may even argue that, long ago, the deliberate conflation of race and religion, by Zionists and unquestioning Westerners, made the one-state solution inevitable.
This article at Al Jazeera, by Adam Branch, questions the “hysteria” generated by/over Kony 2012. While his analysis of the situation has merit (not suprising, for a professor working in the field), he is of no help. Whatever one may say about the group behind the video, Invisible Children, they have done something which no-one had managed to achieve for decades: bring 75 million pairs of eyes onto this problem. For that alone, they have my gratitude. And what does the good professor offer in its place? A syllabus and cogent analysis!
On Saturday, Chris Hayes brought up the issue in his show, Up. As I recall, he suggested that this very dilution may be necessary in order to bring an idea to the wider public. (He rightly mentioned Michael Moore as an example.) As Harvey Fierstein would argue: Visibility, at any cost.
As an aside, and an obvious point, I have noticed the same thing in other fields. There are influencers, and then there are the influencers of the influencers. Green Day’s innumerable fans would not have listened to 1980s hardcore, or anarcho-punk; it takes several levels of dilution before any of the latter’s ideas could ever hope to reach the wider public. Velvet Underground would not have been listened to by anyone into stadium rock, but their CD collections would certainly have included bands influenced by VU. Brian Eno is/was competely unknown to your average minimal electronica fan, but not to Riccardo Villalobos. Not everyone can read Chomsky, but Arundahti Roy suits many people’s needs. Brakhage is completely unknown to your average Coppola/Scorcese fans, yet may well have influenced many of the videos they have seen. Linux/Unix/FreeBSD are rarely used as desktops, but most people now use them in their iPhones, Androids, iMacs, TiVOs, and all sorts of other devices. And so on.
On the plus side, she never used the word “trope”!
Update 15 March 2012: The Real News interviews Kambale Musavuli, who has his own criticism. The details are valid, but the argument is misguided! Even if the Ugandan government ends up oppressing its own people further; or the AfriCom/oil consequences exacerbate; or (let’s address a criticim implied elsewhere) Invisible Children ends up only enriching itself; their efforts, and that video, has done more good than The Real News’s (this one, or any other) has. Period! They need to build upon this (eg steer it), rather than cut it down. To do otherwise, is to betray this invaluable opportunity.
Update 7 April 2012: Leave it to Charlie Brooker, at (UK) Channel 4′s “Ten O’Clock Live”, to tear into Invisible Children more successfully. He shows several of their other videos, and some additional info on their spokesperson. Not surprisingly, they have been at these slick productions for quite a long time, and not defensibly so. The latest one hit the jackpot, of course. (Like most things on the Internet, luck is paramount, not merit.) However, I still think that the 120 million pairs of eyes are hugely beneficial, even at the cost of strengthening dubious charities.
I watched NIAC’s Titra Parsi on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. It was very kind of him to counter the warmongering, by inviting Titra Parsi of the National Iranian-American Council (or some such expansion of the acronym/abbreviation).
However, I distinctly remember Stewart pushing for (uh, shall we say?) a focus, if not war, on Iran. He was getting all excited by some book which allegedly tied Al Qaeda with Iran. He should have known better, but the behaviour was consistent. Now, we should all forgive past errors in judgement, but they need to be acknowledged as such–especially when Stewart is so often presumed to be on the left.
… Here, I dug it up: 16 June 2005, Jon Stewart interviewing Kenneth Timmerman, whose book was titled, or subtitled, “The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran”. Stewart was clearly directing the audience against Iran, I noted at the time. And then there was a November 2006 interview he had with Ted Koppel….
Update 17 March 2012: I watched Stewart’s 6th of March show on AIPAC and Iran. He argues that all of this is just electoral rhetoric, on all sides–conveniently ignoring the persistence, vehemence, and the decade-long history, of the push for war. It ignores the imminence of the war we are on the verge of–which was the very reason why he had focused on AIPAC and Iran in the first place!
Originally, this piece was written with a bit of the undermining sense of humour that often helps a comedian cope. But the content has outgrown it! Never the less, I have left things as they were.
I don’t watch mainstream news, except as entertainment–and, on that count, they have been failing miserably, lately! All that talk of war; what a bring-down! Whatever happened to the days of Good Morning America…Some Morning Show, with Joan London! (Or was it Landon? No, that was Michael Landon. “Little House on the Prairie” and all that!) Anyways.
I was watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe, with the always entertaining Willie Geist, and the sexiest Brzezinski I know. They mentioned–had to?–the massacre in Afghanistan. But there was no focus on the victims. At all! The only thing that rose it above the statistical, the sole hint at tragedy, the only appeal to emotions, was the word “children” used alongside a count of “nine”.
There were no interveiws with the victims. But then, even if there were, the emotional impact would not have come across. The always-wailing mothers, sitting cross-legged on dusty rubble, appealing in gibberish, gestures and other languages to a viewership that thinks them equal, in principle, but not quite like us, eh! They don’t feel pain quite like us; not the same bonds, emotional ties. Sure, their kids die an’ all, but…you know. It’s their culture. That’s why they send their kids out with suicide vests, to get seventy-two virgins.
Nine kids killed in cold blood. And their day did not change.
More depressing than the realization that I will never have sex with Rachel Maddow. (Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive!)
for better, for worse, the value of life, in that part of the world, is less than ours.
And Alyona’s reposnse was:
So what you’re saying is, perhaps, these are two cultures that, uh, we just can’t understand each other.
When David Axe counters them (and not in the most angered of such), her excuse is that she has not been to Afghanistan! I sure hope she’s been to, say, China, otherwise she’d wonder whether a Chinese mother values her kids’ life as much as we do!
Long ago, I realized that, for most adults, racial equality is something that they work at! It is something that they keep proving to themselves, case by case. They reason towards it. When encountering a positive case, it reaffirms what they believe in. When appearances are otherwise, their reasoning may lead them anywhere–in this case, questioning whether loss affects the Other, equally!
Colonial and racial considerations aside, this is what happens when you don’t show real footage of war. When it is all cleaned up, its human costs become as remote as the war itself. And now, with drones, even the financial cost will increasingly become so.
Update 18 March 2012: The great Patrick Cockburn takes an historical perspective on this. It is very informative, though a different angle from my concern with the response’s racial elements.
Update 26 Match 2012: The great Chris Hayes lists, emphatically and characteristically, the names of the victims. (Of course, he is often such a phenomenal exception in mainstream media that I often fear for his job.)
A Beat, a Bong, and a Bang
Billy Does a Right-Wing Pundit
Billy Does a Vampire in a Tree
Jesus Was an Arab
Mescaline Catechism
