Jody Rosen at the formerly-locally-owned Slate has a lovely rant about the unbearable whiteness of “indie” music. Then Rosen segues into a side rant about the peculiar slant of NPR (and upscale white America) toward black music; preferably their preferences for Af-Am artists who are “Dead, Old, Retro, Foreign,” or “DORF.”
The domain-name server change is going a lot more slowly than I’d hoped. Darn.
DANNY SCHECHTER offers up a handy list of media war-coverage cliches to watch out for.
FOR MAINSTREAM MEDIA WAR COVERAGE ONLINE, here’s a list from CyberJournalist.Net.
…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.”
KARLA HAILER-FIDELMAN explains why dissenters are the true patriots:
“Personally, I don’t need to hide behind a flying flag to be proud of being an American and I know that so long as I can speak out, my brand of patriotism will survive over the sheepish bleating of those who believe you have to go along because someone said so.”
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.
WIRED MAGAZINE put out its tenth-anniversary issue last month. Its contents will appear on its website once the issue disappears from the stands.
The issue contains a big section in which the mag, now run by the Conde Nast empire, relived its heritage as the most rah-rah, corporate-hip, cheerleader of the ’90s tech boom in all its manifestations. Particularly noticable are all the excerpts from pieces in which the magazine’s original regime emphatically insisted that “the old rules” of just about everything no longer applied. (With one exception: It once insisted the only way Microsoft could become a company it could approve of was to move to Silicon Valley, because “the Evergreen State is still the sticks.”)
In the world of the old Wired, everything was either Wired (hip) or Tired (square).
What was invariably deemed “Wired:” Giant corporations built up from nothing. Hyper-luxury lifestyles. CEO celebrity cults. Stratospheric stock prices for companies that had never earned a dime. Stock markets that would rise, rise, and keep rising into infinity. Unabashed greed and individual ambition. Power tripping. The relentless thumpa-thumpa of generic techno music. Sex redefined as individual pleasure (hence the “dildonics” fantasies for futuristic elaborate masturbation machines).
What was invariably deemed “Tired:” Thrift. Quiet dignity. Long-term relationships, other than with financial advisors. Labor unions. Health-care reform. Poor people. Caring about poor people. People in rural areas who didn’t move there from a city. Cities in North America that weren’t San Francisco. The “old media.” France. Environmental laws. Minimum-wage laws. Governments in general, except when subsidizing businesses. Literary genres other than science fiction. Movies without special effects.
True to past form, the magazine follows this nudge at its old arrogance with a big bit of new arrogance, in the form of a long cover story extolling hydrogen power, for cars and just about everything else. It’s a nice idea (a clean-burning fuel-O-the-future that emits only water vapor).
But you have to use some other generation system to make hydrogen. Windmills and solar panels could be used for that; but the corporate energy czars would rather promote “more fully developed” technologies—petroleum, coal, and especially nuclear power. The Wired piece goes on to suggest environmentalists should start loving nukes, as long as they’re being used to make hydrogen, and insists there are no safety or waste-disposal problems with today’s nuke-plant designs.
But then an article in the back of the same issue, about the eternally pesky issues regarding permanent radioactive-waste disposal, reminds us we’ve heard those no-problem promises before.
