The Rabid Dog -- Exihibit A

I quoted Helena Cobban in the original post. Her understanding of Mideast politics is quite extensive. In consultation with other Mideastern political experts like Juan Cole and Pat Lang, she produces some of the most in-depth analysis of Mideastern politics than anything you can find in innumerable think tanks and talking heads on the MSM.

Beamed over the MSM all day today was Pres. Bush's meeting with Shiite parliamentarian Hakim. Amid all the emprty talk and spin, I was left scratching my head in confusion about why the heck Bush was meeting this man at this time. The so-called analysis on the MSM just didn't make sense. Imagine my surprise, then, to read Cobban's understanding of what's afoot in Iraq. ...

That is, while Bush is flailing about like a drowning man but with that shit-eating grin that's really starting to get under my skin, while US troops seem engaged in an insurgency of attrition, Bush's brain trust seems to have had some type of "thinking outside the box" and brought in far left field perhaps a misstep that will not only worsen the political situation but exacerbate the carnage.

Cobban writes quite convincingly that Bush's A-Team has misjudged, misunderstood, and stepped into the cow paddy up to his hip this time.

According to Cobban, the story that the MSM's missing is that the movement that Bush should be concerned about and perhaps backing is the one being ndertaken by the very man that Bush's fascist minions are presently saying he should assassinate--or "take out" as Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs so nonchalantly suggest.

Cobban writes:

I mean, what is happening is that apparently Moqtada al-Sadr-- who was crudely caricatured on the Newsweek cover this week, and portrayed as some kind of near devil-incarnate-- is entering a coalition with Mutlak (a "Sooni") and Allawi (pretty much of a secularist and a fairly strongly Baath-style enforcer)-- and between them the three of them are also hoping to split Maliki's party and lure a sizeable chunk of its members over to their new Front....

Important stuff, don't you think?

The politics of the new Front haven't been described in any great detail that I've seen. But I'm fairly confident that this group of people would be fairly strongly Iraqi-nationalist and anti-occupation. (Though Iyad Allawi looms like a bit of an outlier in this regard.) They are also determinedly cross-sectarian.

So my question remains: Why don't we hear anything about this in the MSM?

I mean, I know journalists can tend to get lazy and use handy labels like "Shiite" or "Sooni" in a fairly sloppy way... But doing so at a time like the present seems to run at least two serious risks: (1) Inasmuch as western media people have any effect on attitudes in Iraq, the too-sloppy use of such labels would seem to essentialize and harden the inter-sectarian differences in question; and (2) This sloppiness leaves the average US consumer of media-- and the average US policymaker-- completely in the dark about what is really going on, while strengthening these people's beliefs that all Iraqis are simply primitive, unidimensional beings who are "consumed by ancient tribal hatreds", etc etc (and thus, that they more or less "deserve" whatever horrendous things befall them.)

You have my vote Helena for Secretary of State. Or how about a position as editor at WaPo?

PS This is an amazing little interview with al-Sadr's spokesman, Baha al-Araji. Listen to this guy; he's intelligent, articulate, knowledgeable about American politics. Imagine seeing this guy on TV--wouldn't that dispel something of the MSM's portrait of the insurgents, al-Sadr etc. as stupid, parochial blood-feeding zombies?

al-Araji says:

The emergence of militias in Iraq is a natural response to the situation here. There is a principle which says that for every action, there is a reaction. So, when there are occupation forces on the ground, there should naturally be a resistance to that occupation. We choose peaceful and diplomatic resistance, so the government and the coalition forces should not exaggerate our activities. Because those of us who are affiliated with the Sadr movement are sensitive, we don’t like to provoke this contentious question.

Do you know that 60 percent of the Mahdi Army already serves in government programs and installations? One of our biggest challenges with this issue is getting the Americans to understand it. The problem is that the U.S. leaders in Iraq, even though they are here, still think in an American way. But Iraq totally differs in its nature, its economy, and its culture from the United States.

Or maybe it's this guy that the Bush brain trust is listening to:

Washington is abuzz with theories offering a potential way out of Iraq, one risk expert poses a new option: split Iraq in two. "We need radical thinking. The military situation (in Iraq) cries out for political experimentation," David Apgar, a risk and development strategist and author of the book "Risk Intelligence."

Read more!

The Rabid Dog (The Media) 1

Let me start out with an image: the modern news media remind me of those people who once used to follow behind the circus elephants to shovel their dung into wagons as they walked down main street before the show. The innovation of the media on this humble job, though, is that they take the offal back to the studio, hire pundits to scrutinize every grain and straw in the pile before them.

Of course, if the news media were historians, archaeologists, biologists, or anthropologists such an enterprise might seem appropriate. The crux of the disconnect is not simply that news people aren’t trained in these other disciplines but that type of activity is not what they should do in the first place.

But that raises the question, doesn’t it, about what it is the media should be doing. …

If the press had spent just 10 percent of its time producing reports like the one I just saw Arwa Damon on CNN or those running nightly by Michael Ware in the run-up to the war in Iraq I imagine that their reports would be much different at this point.

The problem with the press is perhaps best exemplified by the way that CNN host Wolf Blitzer is framing the question about whether to call the Iraq situation a civil war. According to Blitzer, CNN has chosen to “leave it up the public” to come to their own conclusions about whether it’s to simply be called a civil war or not. This “discussion” only comes up because of NBC’s announcement that it has decided to call it a civil war.

There are numerous proposes for the failures of the press in covering the political landscape (see, for example, this article). A decent portrayal of one such explanation comes in John Sayles’ movie, Silver City. There we see the fight that reporters have to wage with the corporatizing of the news, especially in terms of reduced staffs, news bureaus, and pandering to corporate interests in having the corporate ethos. The truth of this portrayal can be seen in recent reports that news agencies are shipping jobs overseas.

Helena, Cobban, a journalist for over forty years has an insider view on her craft. Having written for both British and US media outlets, she suggests that the difference between the two ways that journalists in the US and Britain see their place in the power structure is a matter of elitism. She writes:

Since I grew up in England and have worked in both the British and the US media, I have often been struck by the different self-images and self-definitions that journalists seem to have within the two different national cultures. In the UK, as I understood matters, a "good" journalist was always expected to keep some distance from, and a huge degree of skepticism towards, the holders of or aspirants to political power. But in the US a "good" journalist was seen as one with good connections with the holders of power... The norm of US officials anonymously "leaking" tidbits of newsworthy information to favored journalists only strengthened this tendency of these journos-- Tom Friedman comes to mind here for some reason-- increasingly seeing themselves as part of the power structure, judiciously giving their advice to power wielders while helping the powerful to frame the image they presented to the voting public...

What’s common, perhaps to Sayles and Cobban’s view is the idea that the news has suffered a decline in its reporting by renouncing the critical and analytical understanding of the stories that are important.

Mr. Wolf at Blackfive sees things differently. For him, US news outlets have a decidedly liberal bias and show it by reporting only the negative—anti-American—side of stories. For Blackfive, the news media should provide more balanced reporting. It is difficult to see what differentiates his understanding of the media’s role in American politics from propaganda. In this regard, Blackfive’s prescriptions for fixing the news spears quite similar to the goals and objectives that were recently announced for a Department of Defense office that would monitor and correct news 24/7.

I have documented the techniques and methods used by professional political information consultants in molding messages that produce desired effects (see here, here, here, and here.) CBS News’ Dick Meyer believes that the matter rests in the fact that the press is afraid to breach certain rules of civility that are unspoken rules among the press and those they cover. In this way of looking at the issue, the idea is that we need more straight talk. What’s meant by straight talk here is that kind of talk that can go by numerous clichés: taking the gloves off, no holds barred. For Meyer the problem involves the idea that the press is too civil in its interaction with the inhabitants of the halls of power.

Often what I am calling phony emerges after something older, something that felt authentic, has gone away. In politics, for example, there have been phonies, hypocrites and blowhards since the spoken word was invented. But American politics changed dramatically after modern political marketers, pollsters and ad makers transformed politics for the TV-generation and later for the Information Age. They invented a kind of artificial, ersatz politics: wedge issues, Astroturf lobbying, kabuki hearings, spin, "on message," photo-ops and negative television ads. Of course there have always been dirty tricks and showboating in politics. What has happened in the era of electronic media is categorically different.

The methods that Meyer says are the reason for this inauthentic political discourse are, of course, quite thoroughly documented. I have covered some of them in several postings. Yet, even here, there seems to be a more basic undergirding of these practices. That is, the people who want to employ these professional communication consultants and the methods used to mold public opinion to fir policies.

In his work, The Phantom Public, Walter Lippmann writes about insiders and outsiders. The insiders are those who have the knowledge and expertise to run the government. For Lippmann, this makes perfect sense since the idea of running government by common consent or public consensus is tantamount to courting chaos. Government requires knowledge; that those on the outside don’t know what’s going on only makes the job of governing easier.

In recent postings , Glenn Greenwald has undertaken a very detailed analysis of the insider workings and how they make their way into the media. In a recent analysis of the conflict between Pelosi and Harman, Glenn Greenwald comes close to rendering as clear a statement of this insider cult as has Lippmann.

Greenwald writes:

At first I thought that the media's obsession with smearing Pelosi was some combination of its adolescent cravings for cattle-like demonization of the unpopular, loser Democrats, combined with the surprisingly (at least to me) strong and obvious discomfort with a woman being this politically powerful in her own right, not dependent upon appointments or derivative popularity from political spouses. And there is definitely a lot of that driving this chatter.

But now I believe that what is really responsible for this amazing obsession with undermining Nancy Pelosi before she even starts -- over matters as seemingly irrelevant (in the grand scheme of things) as Steny Hoyer and Jane Harman, no less -- is that institutionalized Beltway personalities fear a repudiation of the rotten system on which they depend and of which they are such integral parts.

They were so petrified by the possible rejection of Hoyer in favor of the anti-war Murtha because that would have been viewed by them as a repudiation of their brand of Serious Washington Centrism -- the disease which enabled the Bush administration and brought us this war. It would have meant that those who continue to prop up this war and this administration, either actively or passively, are going to suffer a loss of prestige and credibility. And that is exactly why it is so important to them that Jane Harman become House Intelligence Chair and why Pelosi's refusal to allow that will unleash even more hostility towards her.

If we didn’t have Lippmann’s testimony and that of Edward Bernays, many might consider such views as somewhat conspiratorial. Yet, the truth of the matter comes by way of those privileged enough to see the insiders at work. Steve Clemons is one of those people. Known as an insider’s insider, Clemons lives in Washington and is part of the social class that is allowed to participate in dinners, lectures, and other hobnobbing events where the powerful talk the talk of technocracy—that kind of talk where the hype and disinformation have their birth. More importantly, this is where the plans and processes are discussed in naked frankness.

Consider the following description from Clemons of a dinner where the very movers and shakers of Washington gears within gears gathered one evening:

I really can't discuss the participants or venue of a dinner I attended last night but suffice it to say that some of America's and Europe's leading current and former political personalities were there -- 60 people only -- and among them a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense. The attendance list was extraordinary.

And the conversations -- on the whole -- were about the crappy condition of America's national security position. The guests in this dinner probably represented key participants in any new strategic consensus for the country. If there were brilliant [sic], silver bullet ideas that might help this country move quickly beyond its problems, it would have been in such a crowd where such notions might be taken seriously and have impact.

But nothing. Absolutely nothing. People were depressed and dismayed about current conditions. One very, very senior Bush administration official when asked by me what ideas he had to stabilize Iraq and stop our slow bleed situation said he had exhausted what he felt was possible.

Another top tier official when another guest pushed him to move the President into some rational deal-making that might trigger a more fruitful trend, ominously said "don't hold your breath." (also see this posting)

This description might shock some for its stark display of power brokers stymied by current events. Others might simply be agog that this is how decisions are made—contrary to the media perceptions. Others might ask why these questions and discussions occur behind closed doors and not within what’s known as the public sphere.

All of these questions and reactions are legitimate, I think. For people like Clemons and Greenwald, obviously, getting to that that level of intimacy revealing the inner workings is paramount in ensuring the health of democracy. Yet, unless you happen to have access to the internet and then are lucky enough to find their blogs, what chance is there of this type of information gaining more widespread dissemination?

Some will say that this is exactly what the press is supposed to be doing. They are supposed to be getting the insiders; secret discussions before the public so that those conversations and the decisions that follow are more participated in by the majority.

Let me cut to the chase by pointing out reporters have done this in the past. Look at Edward R. Murrow’s attack on Joe McCarthy. What Murrow did was to present the facts and then present his conclusion about what the facts revealed. This is the proper way to report events—present the facts and conclude what they show. Based on those facts, the journalist then takes what they have found and makes what can best be described as a crusade of it.

This mode of operation goes back to the beginnings of what we have come to know as the public sphere. Voltaire took up the case of a man unjustly tortured and imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. Voltaire used that event not only to publicize the injustice towards the man but also as a means of attacking the very assumptions that seemed to authorize monarchical rule.

It is this mentality that is perhaps most lacking in the press. Cowed by institutional, social, and political process, they have evinced a lack of courage to confront that very structure that would bring corruption and political injustice to light. And—as we have seen—the consequence is a so-called war that will go down in history as the worst military and foreign policy decision in 2,000 years.

Even more importantly, it has also meant the deaths of 100,000s of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, the deaths of American young men and women, and the padding of the pockets of the military contractors and corporations whose lobbyists have helped plan and sell the war.

To return to the image at the start of this posting and to answer the question about the job of the news media: instead of following behind the circus cleaning up the shit, they should instead be out in front, much like the drum majorette, setting the time and stirring the crowds to want to spend their precious time at the circus.

… to be continued …

PS On the heels of this post Juan Cole comments on the Rumsfeld memo that is making so much news yesterday and today. While most in the press are highlighting the resemblance between Rumsfled's plan for Iraq and that of Democrats like Murtha, Cole focuses in on the "rhetorical" (as one journalist called it today on NPR) aspects of Rumsfeld's memo.

Cole is sensitive to the aspects of this memo that affect the lives of Iraqis. He is also aware of the fact that the insiders don't just come up with ideas, but that those ideas have to be sold to the public. Indeed, the success of a plan--not whether it's a good plan or whether it's workable--depends on the spin and the angle that the technocrat takes in getting that plan in place.

Cole writes:

Rumsfeld spends more time plotting out how to manipulate the American public than how to win the war. Everything is about spin, about giving the image of progress even in the face of a rapid downward spiral into the abyss. Consider these phrases:

' Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi Government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made) . . .

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist. . . '

It is about how we talk, how we are perceived to set goals, what is made to look like progress. It isn't actually about getting progress. The point of going minimalist is to reduce expectations among the American public. If you tell them you can only move the ball a yard, you get a lot of points for moving it two yards.

It's the illusion that counts, an illusion that is meant to forestall debate and question and discussion about whether these are the things that this country should be doing now. Read more!

Language Empire and Media Lies

Don Cupitt has made a career of espousing a religious message that often shocks the pious with its anti-christ vibrado. The heart of Cupitt's assault, following much of recent philosophy, is that what has been depicted as a supernatural world is actually the working of language--invisible machinations that determine and define the outlines of our lives. For Cupitt, the invisibility we often attach to otherwordly entities is actually the result of language and its ability to seemingly control events.

Unseen concepts and notions are anthropomorphized into gods, goddesses, and demons in various types of human, especially nomadic. With the rise of the centralized agrarian state, these powers were invested in one entitity whose attachment to the social, cultural, and political structure is always operative if bot always apparent. The divinity of the ruler reflects the absolute and all-powerful divinity in this other world. ...

Given the emphasis by contemporary philosophers and theologians on the power of language in shaping beliefs and actions in the world, it's always important to stay tuned to the ways that those in power manipulate language and use it to enforce unjust and oppressive political maneuverings.

Lenin's Tomb reviews a recent book by Lila Rajiva, THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE: Abu Ghraib and the American Media. According to the Tomb:

"Ideology", says Lila Rajiva, "prevents the citizens of the state from recognising its violence and allows the state to rewrite the general terrorising of a population through detentions and torture as the inevitable and just operation of law." That's in her excellent book The Language of Empire, an examination of American state violence and political culture in light of Abu Ghraib. The ideology, in Rajiva's account, derives from the myth of Prometheus, America as a rebel taking on the international political and legal establishment lodged atop Mount Olympus. America stealing fire from the world powers to give to the powerless, those states with weak capacity. This myth doesn't so much conceal as provide a semi-coherent story to account for a global system of bribery, coercion, dependency and corruption.

The empire prefers weak states, of course, dictatorships with few of the traditional capacities of modern bureaucratic nation-states, ones that are bought off by the IMF, World Bank, DEA and CIA, ones with weak legitimacy and little accountability to the domestic populace. Hence, you help a general to power in Indonesia, let him butcher a million people, carve up the economy in private sessions with leading multi-national CEOs, encourage the general's family to skim billions off the top of 'development' loans based on exorbitant estimates for construction plans that go nowhere.

Read more!

Pedophiles, Innocence, Historicality

The recent media frenzy and hilarious, if shocking, denouement of the media coverage of the purported capture of JonBenet Ramsey’s killer John Mark Karr will play itself out in various accusations against the Boulder prosecutor for overplaying or mismanaging the accusations against the man.

I must admit that I was struck by the pedophile's demeanor and aloofness. In answering the media’s questions about the murder, he was very nonchalant and obviously short on details about his complicity in the crime. Even with the minimal facts during the first few days, combined with his demeanor, it seemed to me at least (as well as others) that this man was a fantasist whose grasp of reality was questionable. ...

Those on the political left have already noted how this story generated so much press that one google produced over 10 million hits--for a story that was just more than one week old! The political Right jumped on the story as another indication of moral corruption in American society. The middle-of-the-roaders tried to keep some perspective and focused on the Ramseys and the false accusations that surrounded them for many years.

It certainly does seem to be some form of irony that a story that started with false suspicions against the family of the slain girl ended in false accusations of a man who perhaps is an opportunist seeking publicity (or a free ride back from Thailand) at best, or at worst a fantasist whose world is so wound up with the death of a young innocent whom he lusted for that he appears to actually believe he did commit the crime.

Many will criticize–rightly I believe--the press for its prurient interest and its playing into the infantilized imaginations of the American TV viewer and news consumer. That's a pretty blunt way of saying something that can probably be put in a more nuanced way, but I think that the media's overblown sense of what is news has become so tabloidized that it simply leaves one almost dumbfounded by the press’ lack of moral responsibility, not to mention the unbalanced sense of priorities which the press sees that the public needs to know.

What many political leftists and liberals have noted is that the Karr story knocked coverage of important events in Iraq and Iran not only out of the headlines but to the back pages. While the policy wonks were up to date on these issues, during the last week the average American never would have known that last month was the deadliest for civilians in the Iraq civil war, not to mention that there is a civil war in Iraq.

On top of this, very few average Americans would have guessed--if they were interested--that the Bush administration is making more than farting noises towards Iran. There's a steady drumbeat of leaks and so-called back-stories about the Iranian “threat” in the media that it's hard not to believe that war with Iran is "inevitable"--inevitable, of course, because the neocons and the Pentagon have played the media game so well that by the time many people wake up to the issue, it will be a "done deal."

I will leave for another time the issue of the culpability of the media in all of this. There's plenty in the media and the counter-media that deals with this subject. The press loves to beat this phantom all the time--the phantom that arises from a public that is immersed in not only what some have called the narcissism of American culture but deeper issues that relate to how Americans understand themselves as historical beings.

I want to look at what I’ll call the historical aspect of this story and its related non-happenings, i.e., Iraq and Iran coverage. The surface aspect of what I will call the historical void in the American consciousness is that the media themselves contribute to denying the public a historical context on everyday political and cultural events. Dwelling on the immediate, up-to-the minute story, refusing to or incapable of providing historical context, they cater to a short-attention span mentality that simply denies that there is anything beyond the NOW.

But there’s more to why the American public seems to want to know about the pedophile Karr and his fantasies. This story, ostensibly about the past, pushed the present and future concerns about Iraq further out of public consciousness. A story about a lurid past event takes the place of a story of the present lurid reality of thousands of Iraqis dying as a direct result of US actions, i.e., invasion and destruction of the socio-political structures of Iraqi civil society.

The Karr-Benet story—a small-town crime with terrible and horrific details--fills the void of our recent past. The allure of the story resides perhaps in something human that relates to sin and guilt. The psychic threat that past sins (crimes) that are unresolved or unsolved come back to haunt us. The anxiety about a child killed horribly and profanely echoes in the public consciousness because it contains elements of guilt, sex, protection of one’s children, and innocence. Individual anxieties of members of the public who cannot resolve their own separate responses to these issues come into play.

The historical aspect of this crime shows how Americans relate to the past. The unsolved crime--an unresolved act of moral outrage--is repeated over and over in various forms in American culture. The presence of fictional and documentary TV shows about "cold cases" points to this phenomenon. These recent shows follow on the footsteps of shows like Unsolved Mysteries and the X-Files. They are augmented by shows that figure into the shows the added elements of the paranormal in fictional or non-fictional form.

In these stories of crimes that go unsolved and that contain these sexual depravities, the American public looks to a past crime whose character outrages the moral and ethical balance of individual and society alike. The crimes themselves point further and further into the past, echoing in the hollow chamber of a history that is either empty of sacred presence or pointing to a realm beyond this hollow sphere where the crimes will or should find final answer.

Such notions as crime and innocence resonate in the American conscience because Americans are uniquely situated to deny their history. That history is one of revolution, which as Hannah suggests in On Revolution involves an original crime, the revolutionary act. Arendt writes:

[W]hatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime. The conviction, In the beginning was a crime–for which the phrase “state of nature” is only a theoretically purified paraphrase–has carried through the centuries no less self-evident plausibility for the state of human affairs than the first sentence of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word,” has possessed for the affairs of salvation.

We live in a society that prides itself on cutting away from history, making a new start and building our lives from zero. We pride ourselves on the notion that we need nothing but our own self-awareness and the absence of preconceptions and accretions from the past to guide us in meeting the challenges of the present and hopefully the future.

These assumptions work at the personal and social level in various guises. At the personal level, they perhaps do not work as well, since life calls forth the need to account not only for our present actions but those we have done in the past. This past is not simply our own, moreover--the things we do or have done since we were born–but they also include the actions of my parents, my family, my town, and ultimately my country. Unless and until this history is dealt with in a way that sufficiently accounts for them, the future will not be what it is but will be instead the past resurrecting itself as ghosts of past actions.

In this context of unresolved crime, we seek innocence, the innocence of our childhoods. We wish to be pure and unsullied by the past, reforming ourselves according to the present and for the future. We seek an innocence that we can never regain but only infantilize ourselves and shelter ourselves in a fantasy of reshaping the present in an ersatz innocence built from either denying the past or seeking an innocence in a time and place before history.

In his magisterial study of history and Machiavelli’s discovery and investigation of what it means for humans to live in history, in a world where humans have no recourse to supernatural realities but instead must work out their destinies and fates within time, JGA Pocock writes:

It was seen as the essence of modernity [by Rousseau, among others] that one inhabited a world of fictions in which self and other were creations of the partial encounters between humans in a world of exchanges. It may well be that we have ourselves reached a condition where the knowledge of fictiveness is unsatisfying to the point of being intolerable; in doubting whether the oligarchy of politicians who oblige us to choose between them represent us in any way worth speaking of, we doubt whether we have selves left to be represented. The global economy finds an ally in that postmodernism which informs us that self and society are alike fictitious and that our only choice is which fiction to buy next. – Pocock, p. 582

Condemned to living in history, we deny the present atrocities and crimes that occur in faraway lands by fantastically reliving and repeating the atrocity of our own innocence that is slain and profaned in the form of children whom we do not know.

We seek a solution and resolution that never comes except in further fantasy. We are captured by our inability to live in the present except by repeating the past that haunts us with these unsolved mysteries, these crimes that make us alive in their heinous violation of moral and ethical blamelessness. They seek the shock of shame because we have none and because its absence only makes us more aware of our lost innocence.

We become the spectators of our own present, hoping to watch it unfold in some apocalypse that will finally provide the key to why our innocence was lost and bring to us that purity and innocence that we lost seemingly so unfairly. So we watch--like voyeurs at the altar of history--the future come to us in the form that the past has given, atrocity on atrocity, crime on crime. We are spectators of a past that we do not want, a present we cannot accept because it is haunted by the past, and a future that will bring only more of the same haunted innocence we neither have nor will ever regain.

Helpless before the future because we have not dealt with the past, the future inevitability is left to men who have no compunction about exploiting our ghosts in the name of their own lost innocence.

It seems that at these moments, it is germane to repeat what has almost become a cliché, Santayana’s remark that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There is , no doubt much truth to his observation. Yet, as Kierkegaard would remind us, it is not so much that we remember but how we remember the past. That is, we can remember it by seeking its source in some Platonic super-real world beyond this one or we can begin to live the past in the present as prelude to the future, seeking not so much resolution as openness to the possibility for knowing not only ourselves but also those we inhabit history with.

Related links

• JonBenet: Why the Fake Confession?
  
• Satire: DA on 'Insane' Karr Arrest

{to be revised} Read more!

Where's the Press When You Need Them?

I am still wondering why the mainstream media has refused to find and interview the authors at the US Army War College International Strategic Studies (ISS) group who issued a recommendation that seems to envision a nuclear-capable Iran. Their report, GETTING READY FOR A NUCLEAR-READY IRAN, suggests ways to channel this capability in responsible ways that benefit Iran and the mideast region itself, and would calm some of the US' fears. ...

Could it be bcause of the following recommendation that the report makes concerning Israel's nuclear stockpile? According to this report, the US should remedy this perecption of favoritism towards Israel by:

Encourage Israel to initiate a Middle East nuclear restraint effort that would help isolate Iran as a regional producer of fissile materials. [emphasis in original] Israel should announce that it will unilaterally mothball (but not yet dismantle) Dimona, and place the reactor’s mothballing under IAEA monitoring. At the same time, Israel should announce that it is prepared to dismantle Dimona and place the special nuclear material it has produced in “escrow” in Israel with a third trusted declared nuclear state, e.g., the United States. It should make clear, however, that Israel will only take this additional step when at least two of three Middle Eastern nations (i.e., Algeria, Egypt, or Iran) follow Israel’s lead by mothballing their own declared nuclear facilities that are capable of producing at least one bomb’s worth of plutonium or highly enriched uranium in 1 to 3 years. Israel should further announce that it will take the additional step of handing over control of its weapons usable fissile material to the IAEA when:

• a. All states in the Middle East (i.e., the three mentioned above)dismantle their fissile producing facilities (large research and power reactors, hexafluoride, enrichment plants, and all reprocessing capabilities).
• b. All nuclear weapons states (including Pakistan) formally agree not to redeploy nuclear weapons onto any Middle Eastern nation’s soil in time of peace. Such arms restraint by deed rather than negotiation should avoid the awkwardness of current Middle Eastern arms control proposals that would have Israel enter into nuclear arms talks with states that do not recognize it and have it admit that it has nuclear weapons―a declaration that would force Israel’s neighbors immediately to justify some security reaction including getting bombs of their own.

From an Iranian persepctive, it must seem to be the height of US hypocrisy to demand that it not have nclear weapons while the US turns a blind eye to Israel's own weapons.

The Army War College report's recommendations would not only go a long way in heading off nuclear confrontation in the Mideast but also provide goodwill with Iran that can stabilize the region.

Update 1 Dafna Linzer writes:

Officials familiar with the inspectors' summer findings said they will report that Iran has produced several kilograms of low-enriched uranium and as much as 145 tons of converted uranium in the past year. Iran's two main nuclear facilities, the IAEA's most heavily monitored in the world, are outfitted with dozens of cameras pointed at every piece of equipment and barrel that contains uranium.

Inspectors continue to visit certain sites as well, but Iran ended voluntary cooperation with the agency several months ago and has threatened to end it entirely if the Security Council imposes sanctions.

Much of what is known by U.S. intelligence about Iran's nuclear program comes from the inspectors. Current intelligence assessments predict that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within a decade if it vastly improves its capabilities.

Related Links

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• Hoekstra's Doc on Iran: Garish, Lurid and INSANE!
  
• Dicker With Iran?
  
• Israel adds 2 nuclear-capable submarines
  
• All the Options Are On the Table
  
• Bush's new Iraq argument: it could be worse
  
• U.S. spy agencies criticized on Iran
  
• Hezbollah card played in nukes fight
  
• America Plays Poker While Iran Plays Chess

[Xposted at Sic Semper Tyrannais] Read more!

Two Contrasting Views (w. a Plea)

With the defeat of Israel by Hizbullah you'd think the neocons and Cheney would moderate their arguments for invading Iran. Indeed, some in Israel like Defense Minister Peretz are suggesting that Israel open up a dialog with Iran. With thinking like this, I imagine, Cheney and the neocons will not only not moderate their war cry for Iranian blood but will begin to litter the media with greater and greater paranoiac visions of Armageddon. ...

First, the good news from a man who sponsors and promotes dialog with extremist groups like Hizbullah. (via No Quarter) Larry Johnson reports:

Israel, it seems, has few options at the moment. However, there are reports in the Israeli press that Defense Minister Amir Peretz this week hinted at one of them: renewed dialogue with Lebanon, the Palestinians, and even Syria.

Bearden, a staunch advocate for dialogue, even sees the possibility for Israeli dialogue with Iran — although the country is a prime backer of Hezbollah and its leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel.

On the other hand, the neocon Bill Kristol ratcheted up his call for attacking Iran, basing his logic on the idea that if Hizbullah can defeat Israel in the field, then that means they will only get stronger and we should hamstring them and their sponsors before they become much harder to defeat.

According to Kristol:

But such a military strike would take a while to organize. In the meantime, perhaps President Bush can fly from the silly G8 summit in St. Petersburg--a summit that will most likely convey a message of moral confusion and political indecision--to Jerusalem, the capital of a nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our common enemies. This is our war, too.

These comments keep coming from the neocon side, even thought those whose expert voices you'd expect to make a difference keep saying otherwise, e.g. 22 diplomats and military leaders who wrote a scathing indictment of the notion that attacking Iran is prudent, much less workable.

And then there's the voice in the wilderness (via Think Progress, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who asks a very simple but perhaps over-arching question:

And now Iran.

“Some in this administration want some excuse to take military action,” Hagel says.

“That would be disastrous, catastrophic. It would enflame the Middle East in ways we can’t imagine today.”

The United States and Israel already are isolated in the region, Hagel says.

Two wars — in Iraq and Afghanistan — have strained the U.S. military, partly because of decisions made by “all these smart guys” who now talk about bombing Iran.

“The American force structure is broken,” Hagel says. “Everything’s breaking down. We’re chewing up our people.”

A war in Iran would require reinstitution of a military draft, Hagel says.

But Hagel's voice will not be heard; like many before him he'll be laughed out of court as a rustic hick without any sense of the true purpose of the American destiny.

I've wracked my head for over what it is that the neocons want. They've been good at hiding their intentions behind a facade of innuendo, suspicion, and misdirection. Their Machiavellianism carries on something of the spirit of Hamilton since it exaggerates the role of a strong executive with sole war-making powers. As such, they hope to renew the American virtu, a spirit of conquest and entrepreneurial expansionism that will weed out the decay of luxury and self-satisfaction bred by our consumer culture.

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Neocon White House Rhetoric and Action Plan

There does indeed some backing up of rhetoric with action between the neocons and the White House. RawStory recently ran an article that said the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was okayed by Rumsfeld. Al-Jazeera also just ran a story saying that Cheney okayed an invasion several days before the invasion occurred. ...

First, for me at least, these stories, if proved, raise some disturbing questions. That is, the idea that the US is coordinating with another country to implement US foreign policy interests seems illegal. Are there any precedents for this?

Second, there's indisputable evidence in Neocon writings that they wish to invade Iran. James Risen's article in Rolling Stone reports that a plan with these same objectives was discussed and outlined in the Pentagon.

Third, Steve Clemons--a reporter with high-up contacts inside Israeli and US government--has speculated that the Israeli invasion was ana attempt to force the hand of the US to invade Iran.

Given these rather disparate facts, I think we begin to see that there's a coordinated action afoot by the Neocons/Bush admin. to carry out the long-term goal of invading Iran and perhaps Syria.

I'm open to corrections here. Perhaps this seems obvious--yet, if so, it needs to get out into the press. I believe that what we are seeing--as some pundits have noted--is a slow-motion repetition of the Iraq invasion.

All the groundwork is there: the religious right is primed with news stories about the Rapture. This has now become a common-place theme on CNN. Paula Zahn is pushing it nightly and Anderson Cooper is set to do a spot tonight.

With the religious right lined up behind "final war" scenarios, the Neocons have at least one part of their media strategy in place.

The stories about Iran and Syria backing Hisbullah is another part of this strategy. As numerous reports show, there is little hard evidence to these stories, beyond the fact that Iran provides financial and military assistance--but at levels far below those that would lead you to think that Iran wants war with Israel/US. Syria's backing for any such strategy is even less certain.

One point to note about the supposed Iranian support is that Iran's own propaganda machine carries very little on the Israeli invasion, as reported in several western news sources. There's little Iranian media support for Hisbullah's actions at the least and use of the invasion for generating some form of public support for action against Israel is non-existent.

Yet, the reigning media talk--its assumed background premises--is that Iran and Syria are indeed backing Hisbullah in nefariously clandestine ways.

One more theme that forms part of the Neocon media strategy is the attempt to paint everyone--family members, Arabs/Moslem--as Hisbullah supporters. This tactic goes so far as to make killing unarmed civilians in the vicinity of Hisbullah fair game. They have, after all, been exposed to the jihadist disease haven't they?

It's been former AF Colonel and Pentagon inhabitant Karen Kwiatkowski's contention all along that "the" US plan in Iraq all along has been to create chaos in the ME.

Let the wogs kill each other, I guess, and then the US can move in when they're all either dead or dying. William S. Burroughs had some choice takes on how the intelligence services promote anarchy and chaos to attain political objectives.

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• Israel's Mistakes in Lebanon
  
• Lebanon Counts Dead in Qana, Bint Jbeil
  
• Can Hizbullah Win by Hanging On?
  
• Clift: Lessons of History on Lebanon, Iraq
  
• Gaza: Palestinians Reassess Hezbollah
  
• Israel and Hizbullah Adopt New Arsenals
  
• U.N. Deaths: Anatomy of an Attack
  
• Beats Working

Read more!

The Apocalypse WILL Be Televised

I got my semi-monthly visit from the Jehovah's Witnesses yesterday. Traveling in twos, the women walked up the driveway smelling the rosemary growing by the back-door porch while I put a T-shirt on. It's been so hot and humid here that I sit out the bare-chested famine.

We stood in the hot sun partly through my design, partly through my embarrassment at the house's disarray. The design part reflects my desire--after I learn that they're here to proselytize--that they not stay too long. The embarrassment reflects many things, perhaps foremost my disregard for keeping a clean house.

I've always tried to welcome these messengers of the Apocalypse. I imagine that they receive enough incivility and brusqueness as it is int heir peregrinations around the county. Besides, I imagine that if they want to convince me that the world is ending, I might as well make them comfortable so that they can hear my skepticism out without thinking I do so from fear of their message or dislike for them as people. ...

As you'd expect at this time in the world’s upheaval, they were more focused than usual on the coming end-time. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon has stoked their fears and anxieties and fortified their belief that biblical prophecies are playing out in their own day and age. For those who believe and expect to be going to heaven soon, the Israeli invasion and the so-called "war on terror" in general is tacit proof that the final battles described in Holy Writ are about to come true.

The end-time has achieved mainstream status in the MSM. Numerous TV news media outlets run everything from "panels of experts" to hour-long segments on the subject. In many cases, these news shows focus on the religious Right's interpretation of the events. In much coverage, the iconography of the Apocalypse is combined with assertions by politicians like Newt Gingrich and John McCain that the fight against Islamic exremism is WWWIII.

I've discussed in several postings on this blog about American Dispensationalism and its connection to conservative evangelicals. I've also noted that there are apocalypticists (those who believe in a coming apocalypse) now governing the major state powers who glare each other down with a finger itching for the nuclear button. Iran's president, the US president, and the Israeli prime minister appear to subscribe to various versions of the end of the world. Bush believes in the Second Coming of Christ, Ahmedinajad believes in the coming of the Mahdi, and Ehud Olmert believes in the coming of the Messiah.

What has become known as the postmodern world should probably be now known as the pre-Millennial world. After the specters of communism and fascism fade into the maelstrom of history, the threat of world nuclear annihilation seemingly is jammed back like jack in the box, peoples and nations of the world seem strangely mesmerized by this looming world battle that will bring final peace and lasting justice.

On CNN, last day authors Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the gargantuan best seller Left Behind series (along with its multi-million dollar line of Left Behind accesssories) and less well-known auhtor Joel C. Rosenberg, wove their apocalyptic rohrshach, while CNN host Kyra Phillips seemed to smile in blissful accord.

From the CNN transcript, Jenkins and Rosenberg said:

ROSENBERG: Well, this is -- this is about -- this is the prophecy that says that God is going to cause the nations of the world -- the leaders of the nation almost get drunk with the dream of recapturing Jerusalem. Now, the Bible says that Jerusalem will come back under Jewish control in the last days. That'll be one of the indicators. Well, that's where we are today. But, what are we watching? Saddam Hussein or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hezbollah leader [Hassan] Nasrallah, they're all drunk with the dream of capturing Jerusalem. That's what [Rosenberg's] The Copper Scroll novel is about, which is this battle, this intense battle to liquidate the Jewish people and liberate Jerusalem. I mean, are we seeing that happen? It's hard not to say that we are. I mean, that's why I've gotten invited over to the CIA and the White House and Capitol Hill, because people -- it's not that they necessarily believe the prophecies, but they want to understand the prophecies in the Bible in light of what's going on right now.

PHILLIPS: Do you think they're taking what you're saying and incorporating it into foreign policy?

ROSENBERG: I wouldn't go that far. But I would say -- I would say that Bible prophecy is an intercept from the mind of God. It's actually fairly remarkable intelligence, and that's why my novels keep coming true, because mine are on this side of the Rapture, leading up to Jerry and Tim's books, but they suggest events that the Bible does lay out that will get us closer to those events. And, in fact, one by one in The Last Jihad, my book The Last Days, The Ezekiel Option, and now The Copper Scroll, have this feeling of coming true. I think that's why a million copies have sold. They're New York Times best-sellers, because they're based on Bible prophecy, and they are coming true bit by bit, day by day.

There are so many nuggets in this comment for snarky comments and snide asides in that I find I have to restrain myself from voicing them. But such sarcasm is misplaced and beside the point. Taking such an attitude--which I am not above exhibiting--misses the very serious implications of what's happening here.

I could quote ad nauseam the learned, sociologically based, studies of the apocalyptic genre and its origins in historical and social realities related to persecution of believers. From the biblical books of Daniel, the great eschatological prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel to apocalyptic works in what are called the Pseudepigripha (religious writings from Jews living from the end of accepted Jewish prophetic activity and the Gospels) to the canonical book called Revelation–all these works emanate from momentously catastrophic times when religious Jews and Christians faced personal and group extinction.

In some ways, resorting to scholarship trivializes these writings. I don’t disparage the great work–often done from a sincere desire to get closer to a more authentic faith experience–done by scholars. Yet, I have my suspicions that what gets looked at through the lens of the historical microscope often ends up pinned and mounted in a catalog of natural history’s oddities.

Having said this, my own interpretation of an apocalyptic text like Revelation would take a liberation theology interpretation, which is indeed informed by many of these historical critical studies. Yet, what I find uniquely authentic and important about the liberation theology understanding of a apocalyptic texts is that it helps to place the words and images into the present-day faith struggles with forces and powers that transcend any one human’s power of comprehension.

Revelation itself is a wonderfully rich symbolic representation of the faithful’s interpretation of historical events from the perspective of those trying to understand God’s will in the world of social, cultural, and historical facts. Using the symbols and themes of apocalyptic, early Christian believers who were not historians or anthropologists or sociologists attempted to make sense of the impending disasters that threatened them and their small communities.

Consider the following statement from Revelation:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men. And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What [city is] like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

It does not seem to stretch the bounds of reason to say that this passage refers to a great trading capital. Symbolizing this great economic power as a whore–a licentious and wanton power that will do anything for money and financial gain–the early Christians documented their awareness that power and economic interests go hand in hand. Not only that, but this power- and money-hungry entity brings terrible suffering and desolation to the powerless and poor.

I am not conversant enough with Hal Lindsay or the Left behind authors to know how they interpret these verses in their mythology. From my own perspective, I think that the image of the Whore of Babylon could be applied to the United States as easily as it can ancient Rome or any other current politico-economic powerhouse.

Recent polls show that many Americans buy into this end-time scenario. The idea that the world is headed for flame and damnation fits into an ever-growing, deepening despair on the part of Americans. Unfulfilled with their consumer life-styles, a workplace unusually precarious for its insecurity, shadowy threats of terrorism by peoples half-way across the world... all these shades and mysterious movements bewilder a person who has no time to eviscerate the lies and deception perpetrated by their own government nor the equally fatuous and empty criticisms put up by the "loyal opposition."

As the media blitz continues, and Armageddon and its iconography begins to form an accepted backdrop for our lives--as we search the trees and rocks for tell-tale signs of the end-times--what will be lost in our understanding of world events as they apply to our lives is something more precious than innocence. This innocence that Americans pride themselves on, but which is an innocence that the writer Kierkegaard called demonic. For it is an innocence that denies the true nature of our ability to perpetrate and rationalize evil through violence and political intrigue.

It is this demonic innocence that gives birth to the pride that we Americans have in washing themselves clean of the past and making a fresh start. But no one can be born fresh from nothing–either through becoming a citizen of a nation or through the sacrifice of innocent lives. As Americans, we believe that we have shielded ourselves from the evils that beset the old world. By uprooting ourselves from that world, we think can now bring the experience born of the democratic experiment to cure those old ills and maladies.

We cannot uproot ourselves in the way many Americans believe you can. The past comes back to haunt us, whether we will or no. And this past goes back to the Eden now known as Iran and Iraq, that paradise left behind when I or you or any other decides to perpetrate the worst crime of all--making ourselves gods who believe that they can bring about their own beginning and end in wishful and demonically innocent daydreams.

-----------------
When the ladies who witness to Jehovah walked away under the sun that omens a new kingdom to come, I think of the biblical passage that I could not find during our discussion about what it means to witness for Christ. Later, I find the passage, Matthew 25:31-46:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth [his] sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed [thee]? or thirsty, and gave [thee] drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took [thee] in? or naked, and clothed [thee]? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did [it] not to one of the least of these, ye did [it] not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

The world may indeed be in its last moments. Or not.

If so, I imagine that what judgements might take place will be measured by this criterion: what were you doing when the angels came?

Right now, at least, many of the religious in America are selling books wishing death and destruction on their enemies.

They fantasize about getting on the news so they can see themselves–as though that will legitimate their cause; as though their faith requires everyone to think, feel, and believe as they do. It is as though they think that having this message and these beliefs plastered on the TV screens somehow makes what they believe real.

That belief either says a lot about how much people reared on television and the news media believe that if it appears on TV then it must be real and true, or it is a pitiful commentary on how much despair lies at the heart of many of the religious right.

That is, if you require legitimacy from the multitude or demand that your beliefs become the status quo, then there’s more to you wishing your faith to be so than that it is so.

Update 1 The Rt. Rev. Riah H. Abu El-Assal, Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, writes:

In her recent article, “The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel,” American, Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst says, “The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.” She continues, “A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a thirteen year old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post (one of nearly seven hundred Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the Intifada began) is not a society with a conscience.” The “situation” as it has come to be called, has deteriorated into a war without boundaries or limitations. It is a war with deadly potential beyond the imaginations of most civilized people.

Related Links

• Hagee lends support to Israel's struggle
  
• CNN still fixated on Apocalypse predictors, still ignoring alleged invitation to White House, Capitol Hill
  
• Are These the End Times?
  
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• Israel, Hezbollah Militia Clash Along Border
  
• Froomkin on Bush's Lighter Side
  
• Cease-Fire Now
  
• Condi's War
  
• Rice, Asian Leaders Huddle on Mideast
  Israelis, Hezbollah Keep Up Attacks
  
• ABC jumps on Apocalypse bandwagon: GMA host Roberts welcomes End Times authors' "insight"
  
• The upside to Hezbollah
  
• In Middle East conflict, other crises, conservative media find signs of Biblical prophecy of Armageddon
  
• Right-Wing ‘Guide to World War III’: ‘Kill ‘Em All, Let Allah Sort ‘Em Out’
  
• In Europe, Islam rises, Christianity falls
  
• Holy War
  
• Hardball, Fox & Friends hosted "Middle East analyst" whose chief experience is in "prophecy"
  
• 666 ridiculousness
  
• Expediting the end: Various religious groups are trying to play God and hasten the arrival of their messiahs
  
• The Cultural Contradictions of Christian Fundamentalism
  
• Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalypticism
  
• Bibi: Evangelicals are Israel's best gentile friends

Read more!

The "Other" Front

While CNN and the other 24-hour news services are focused on Lebanon, blood continues to cry out from the dirt of Gaza. Israel, perhaps, hoped to draw attention away from Gaza by attacking Lebanon.

This is not to minimize the death and destruction visited on innocent Lebanese civilians.

Just now on CNN they finally report on Gaza. Talk about dead Palestinians. Nah... a dead Israeli soldier and, of course, those Palestinian gunmen attacking the hapless Israeli troops. No mention that Israel is the aggressor here--they invaded Palestine, not the other way around.

And, of course, no mention of the 23 dead Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli military operations in these victims' own land. As Nidal al-Mughrabi reports, this is the worst day of casualties for Palestinians in a long time. al-Mughrabi, at least, can note their passing before the flames and explosions of Beirut drown out all memory of them:

Israel killed at least 23 Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday, including nine members of one family in an air strike that destroyed a house where the army said senior Hamas commanders were meeting, witnesses said.

Wednesday's death toll was the highest in a single day since Israel on June 28 launched an offensive in the Gaza Strip to force militants to free an abducted soldier and halt rocket attacks on the Jewish state.

It was also the highest number of Palestinian deaths in one day since September 2004.

A series of deadly Israel air raids coincided with an armoured sweep into the central Gaza.

I wonder whether these are al-Mughrabi's real words. Or did the editor blot out the more honest and raw reports and replaced with them "news-standard" terminology that all news media impose in reporting events--ostensibly to remain objective.

Related Links/Opposing Views

• Necessary Steps for Israel
  
• War & Piece
  
• Helpless Lebanese pay the price for their weakness
  
• Pressure Builds for Hezbollah
  
• White House Urges Restraint by Israel
  
• Behind Crisis, a Push Toward War
  
• Bush makes pig jokes, Beirut burns
  
• Bad Moon Rising
  
• Beautiful Madness
  
• The obvious success of the "Noboby fucks with da (fill in the blank)" policy
  
• Israel steps up Lebanon Offensive
  
• Israel prepares to invade the Lebanon
  
• Bush the Bystander
  
• Hezbollah Raid Opens a Second Front for Israel
  
• Frustration Grows on Frontier
  
• U.S. Options in Mideast Limited

Read more!

Israel Gets Another Pass While Palestinians Bleed to Death

... and gasp, hunger, thirst, shiver with terror...

So where is the outrage over Israel's invasion of the sovereign territory of Palestine? Pause..............

The "arrest" of democratically elected Palestinian officials. Pause.......................................................

There is none. Instead, the news media lead off the story noting that this invasion and the arrests were preceded by the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by a radical wing of Palestinian militants. Oh, wait, didn't Israel kill, then deny killing, then admit killing seven Palestinian family members on a beach?

Pause...........................

Steve Clemons draws a useful historical analogy and puts the Israeli actions into proper perspective:

Israel would do well to go reacquaint itself with the USS Liberty, which Israelis fired on killing American servicemen. I have had a discussion with someone who was the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency who has no doubt at all that Israel's attack on the U.S. ship was purposeful and not an accident, as Israelis and Americans eager to cover up the incident have asserted.

America's response was measured and put in context -- whether one agrees with that or not. Israel got a huge pass.

Israel is demonstrating profound immaturity with its behavior, though I support the importance of negotiating and even pursuing its kidnapped soldier. However, despite its regional superpower status, Israel is showing that it tilts too easily towards responses far disproportionate to any sane or reasonable action. While Israel radicalizes Palestininans and many Arabs in the region with this behavior, it needs to know that it is eroding American support for its behavior and position.

Lines must be drawn -- and Israel is way over the line now.

Who cares? Let Israel rampage and destroy everything. What I'd like to know is who the fuck gave Israel the right to do this? Oh yeah, I forgot.... G--.

Right.

It's about time that they stop pawning off their thuggish and bullying behavior onto God and realize that soon Americans will begin seeing them for the thugs and bullies that they are. Then they will find that all their petitions to God will simply mean nothing since God--it's supposed--does not support murder and irresponsible and conscious spreading of chaos to foment hatred and vengeance.

While we meditate on this irony, let's also pray for the safe release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, as well as the return of compassion, forgiveness, and reason to the daughters of Jerusalem.

Related Links

• Israel's Failed-State Strategy: Cole in Salon
  
• Israeli Tanks Meet Fierce Resistance
  
• Israel Steps Up Military Offensive in Gaza Strip
  
• Israeli Airstrike Targets Palestinian PM's Office
  
• Pressure Mounts on Hamas
  Escalation against Gaza
  

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Gore Gives the Gory Details and States the Obvious

Gore Vidal is one of those people who has a pedigree of wealth and status but has instead attacked the status quo for its sham hypocrisy and lying deceit. In a recent interview Gore gives his take on the fascism that is either incipient or full-blown, depending perhaps on whether you live in the homeland of fascism or live under its insular blindness. ...

On Bush and his "war," and the media's connivance in the whole fiasco, Vidal says:

"Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless. We are in a dictatorship that has been totally militarised, everyone is spied on by the government itself. All three arms of the government are in the hands of this junta.

"Whatever you are," he goes on, "they say you are the reverse. The men behind the war in Iraq are cowards who did not fight in Vietnam - but they spent millions of dollars proving that John Kerry, who was a genuine war hero whatever you think of his politics, was a coward.

"This is what happens when you have control of the media, and I have never known the media more vicious, stupid and corrupt than they are now."

Now that's speaking truth to power with wit and charm. Read more!

So What CAN the Blogosphere/Internet Do?

One of the accusations against the blogosphere is that it's simply a web of fantasy where people sit around snarking and surfing and getting lost in a world of possibility from which they never escape to live real life. So what, then, can the blogosphere/internet contribute to political dialog and/or activity?

One of Germany's foremost philosophers, Jurgen Habermas, thinks the web can serve the best service by correcting the official news media. (via Habermasian Reflections via signandsight) Dietmar Jazbinsek writes:

According to Habermas, online communication can only make a relevant contribution to political discourse if it deals with reporting in the established media. A positive example is the website bildblog.de (which reports critically on the Bild Zeitung - ed)

Read more!

The Internet, Pseudonyms and the Struggle for Self

One of the more provocative investigations of the strengths and weaknesses of the blogosphere as a political forum, not to mention as a "place" for human interaction comes from Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus wrote the provocative book, What Computers Still Can't Do. He takes up his argument from there and applies it to the Internet in his essay, Kierkegaard on the Super Information Highway. ...

One of his main points with regard to the Internet is that it is an abstract space. Something that seems to be here, there, and everywhere. For Dreyfus, at least, this gives an illusion of personhood that denies what it is that makes us human. That is, character, personality, and sense of who we are must come from being situated in a body in a time/place that involves all those problems/obstacles that being in a body is susceptible to. By giving the illusion that all these things can be overcome via an abstract space gives us a false sense of who we are.

In relationship to political dialog and interaction, the same problems apply. It's easy to come up with solutions and apparent "action," but until these are put into action realtime, they are just an illusion of action. The illusion is that something is happening when it's really not.

The nature of political struggle involves hardship, sacrifice, painstaking confrontation/debate/consensus. Until these exigencies of everyday, real life are encountered and overcome, talk of a political dimension to the Internet is more talk than it is real action.

An extension of Dreyfus' ideas involves the idea that the Internet can add just one more source for the great manipulation machines of the propaganda units of both parties to work. Trying to sort out fact from fiction in the traditional media is hard enough; with the addition of the WWW you now have an ocean to swim in and to discern what's worthwhile reading/responding to and what's not.
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The possibility of being anonymous or creating personae is what attracts many to the Internet. In my first attempts in chat rooms and blogs, I loved creating a pseudonym and the anonymity that that brought with it.

There can be several reasons that people choose a pseudonym. In literature, for example, Rabelias first wrote under the pseudonym of Alcofrybas Nasier. He did so because the scandalous, raucous, scatalogical humor of his writings cut so many ways and chafed so many sensibilities.

But note the name and think of the connotations that easily come to mind: alcohol, food, and Arabs. The combination, of course, is ridiculous. And hilarious. But its very suggestiveness is the point, and the connotations reflect Rabelais' ideological, philosophical, and religious humanism.

Stephen King writes under various pen-names for different reasons. There's very little danger that the church will burn him at the stake as Rabelais could suspect. Instead, King writes so to see whether he can tell a good story and whether it'll sell without his label attached to it.

So, the reasons for pseudonymity are diverse. The writer Kierkegaard--known for using dozens of pseudonyms--suggested several reasons for doing so. One is that people don't want others to know that the ideas are theirs. Some do so to evade detection for espousing various views--for honest or dishonest reasons.

Another reason that someone might use a pseudonym is to create a character that expresses views that the author does not necessarily believe but does understand the power of.

The pernicious aspects of the blogosphere arise from the very possibility for remaining anonymous. It breeds a form of irresponsibility that destroys the principles of what can be termed true selfhood. Publishing views without running the risks of having to actually stand up for them in realtime creates a hypocritical and superficial attitude to the world and others.

I am not unaware of the philosophical ramifications behind some people's desire for anonymity. It denotes for some, I think, a belief that there is no real self anyway. The ability to take on and discard anonymous pseudonyms reflects the very emptiness and nothingness of life itself. It's a form of nihilism that the blogosphere promotes but whose potential damage for political reality have yet to be assessed.

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The MSM, The Conservative Right, and the Blogosphere

In talking about the press and mainstream media (MSM), in its relationship to the so-called blogosphere, there are some major assumptions that bear discussion. ...

• What motivates the MSM to pass on stories? The answer might seem to relate to who has authroity to speak about issues of interest. Since the MSM finds itself incapable of answering these questions in and by themselves, they have to resort to stories about character, which by itself indicates that the a person is telling the truth.
• How the news is packaged. The press makes itself useful by purveying news in neatly discrete packages that appeal to the limited information-seeking time of the electorate. It's much easier to dwell on personal, feel-good stories than it is on the difficult questions of global warming, etc.
  
• The power of the blogosphere is not as ubiquitous or influential as many here assume. The internet--for most people--is still the arena of pedophiles, oceans of garbage-data, and people out to steal personal information. Until the blogosphere can attain some form of influence beyond the stereotypes, any information emanating from it will remain suspect.

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In classical rhetoric, you assume that people are, at heart, disposed by human nature to discerning "the truth," most notably when presnted with an inductive argument that is credible.

One thing that the classisists assumed, however, is that the ones listening to the argument share certain educational and cultural assumptions.

With the advent of "the public"--during the Enlightenment, the appeal to reason became a supposedly universal appeal. Yet, as some commentators have rightly noted, those who hear the appeal are in a position to do something once they "see" the truth of the reasoned argument.

Some current theorists base their arguments on the Enlightenment notion of the public. In this regard, what stops people from coming to the rational, democratic solution is the corruption of the means of communication by diverse personal and socio-economic factors--capitalism in particular. The effort, therefore, is to clear away those obstructions to democratic and clear debate.

Others who oppose this view ask a very simple question. How can we ever hope to achieve this "perfect" communication ideal? That is, the model assumes that for the democratic situation to occur, these changes must have already come about. People must change--socially and subjectively--before that ideal itself can be realized. Yet, the socio-economic and subjective factors at work in modern society may be so great that the perfect communication situation will never happen. It's always an ideal-in-waiting, so to speak.

One solution might be to get rid of the rationalistic model presupposed by the ideal communication model althogether. This solution jettisons any notion of "truth" and insists instead on smaller truths. In the best interpretation of this approach, the use of irony and localized, acerbic tricksterism works in ana anarchic way to undermine the prevailing false ethos. This practice opens up the possibility for alternative and creative solutions to injustice and non-democratic structures.

The gist of the preceding is that "the solution" to your question is not simply either psychological or social. It's a combination of both terms. Any solution must, it seems, work at subjective and social levels to bring about a situation in which anything approaching a just and democratic society can exist.
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Now, you can go back to classical rhetroic to find the idea that a good debated is someone who can argue the other side's position just as well if not better than him/her. Of course, it's exactly this idea od being able to argue both sides of an issue that's given rhetoric and lawyers a bad name in popular usage.

Yet the point, I think is a valid one. But instead of doing it simply froma desire to beat your opponent, the effort to understand the other side should be motivated by the desire to find what's really motivating them. Based on this, it is perhaps possible to find revelational issues that can serve as the basis for further discussion. A basis that forms a bond of trust that I'm not just jettisoning his/her actual concern for the truth just as much as I have.

No one is completely wrong. There's always a mixture of truth, fiction, misperception, etc. Only the insane are completely wrong. And it's hyperbole and mean-spiritedness to accuse the other side of such. They may be really wrong, even mostly wrong, but there's always that substrate of whatever you want to call it--human nature, innate human sensibility for the ethical, etc.--that we can seek to overcome these differences.

And then the question becomes who benefits from such polarization. I think there's something to the idea that insiders/outsiders on all sides are perhaps captive to a socio-economic system that benefits those at the top of that system.

The so-called culture war is really a class war, and the underlying forces at work are an economics that produces and thrives on antagonism between people with the same interests in an effort to consolidate its hold on power.

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The answers to some of these questions originate in remembering the bogus framework that informs all political debate. The Right has been successful in "framing" political dialog for the last 20 years or so.

They have divided the world between left and right and tagged the extreme left with being socialists/communists. This division itself goes back to the 50s, with the successful fear campaign run by politicians in the country to fight a perceived Red Menace.

How many people actually understand political differences of this kind is, of course, up in the air. Whether your normal Jane Doe would know what particular stances a socialist or communist holds is debatable.

Yet, that does not matter; what does is the perception that the press has of these political philosophies. Educated with a smattering of political and historical understanding, journalists and others in the media simply rely on those who supposedly know the threats that face us--the think tanks and inside sources.

The Right has created a convenient filtering system which parses out reality and political questions so that they can then be fed in easily digestible bits to an information-hungry public.

The conventional wisdom among political scientists and campaign consultants is that voters tend toward the center--however that is defined. But the question is, who gets to define the extremes? and what are their agendas? And would voters always vote for the so-called "center" if the issues were really debated?

As many know, the tools of modern political consulting include polling, focus groups, and grassroots networking from the top (also called "astroturfing"). These tools enable political operatives to form their campaigns around simple wedge issues that are then packaged into visually stimulating and provocative bits of "real" information. In this way, a voter decides their vote not on a reasoned understanding of issues but merely a visceral, gut reaction to artfully constructed stimuli devised by politicos adept at manipulating emotions.

The blogosphere--if it's to gain any influence in the political world--has several options open to it. It can 1) serve as a forum for free and open discussion that undermines the think-tank hegemony, 2) freely and honestly debate issues without the prevailing filtering system consstructed by the prevailing political interests, 3) act as a conduit for information that bypasses the filtering processes imposed by the MSM.

Whether the blogosphere can successfully change politics will depend on how well it gains influence within 1) the political establishment and 2) the general public.

The political establishment is wary of the blogosphere because there's some question about the linkage between it and real voters. Does the blogosphere represent or reach into the motivating factors that get people to the polls? Does it represent public opinion? Unfortunately, the politicos will decide this question as they always do: with polls and focus groups.

Gaining influence with the public is questionable itself. While more and more people are gaining access to the Internet, the informational diet has been even more restricted by the way that people filter information.

Much of this seems to offer the hope of a technical adjustment to fix the problems. I suggest that this is just one more superficial fix. The problem is much more fundamental. It gets into the "vocabulary" and "grammar" of the concepts and meanings that inform the political landscape.

This is commonly known as culture; obviously, the Right has been more adept at controlling and manipulating the culural values and imagery than has the Left. By doing so, it can then gain ground on the much more practical field of political operations and electioneering.

All in all, then, those who wish to change the political landscape must begin to address the most fundamental questions that humans face as human beings. Until an alternative cultural vocabulary and grammar can find its way into the hearts and minds of everyday voters, the Right's filtering system will continue to amass votes and structure politics in this country.
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Journalists are limited by time concerns. They do not have the time to do the research that's necessary to confirm or disaffirm stories. In this regard, they must rely on sources, many of whom--obviously--have their own agendas with regard to any particular story.

Sure, you might get sickened by the obsequiousness with which journalists go about this, but that's just a matter of taste, perhaps. In fact, objectivity--the key criterion in our culture for laying the basis for truth--is provided by sources with inside information. The closer to the source, the more objective the information is. This accords with a definition of objectivity that correlates it with influence.

William Beeman writes:

The media bears a great deal of responsibility in this matter. Lazy, news-cycle driven and subject to the pressure of ideology and publicity flackers, it is so much easier to just call the think tank down the street, or a PR firm like Benador Associates where someone is on call and already in suit and tie, or skirted suit to get to the studio within the next 20 minutes, than to spend the extra half-hour trying to locate an ISDN feed in . . . Minneapolis or Austin to get the best possible expertise on a subject at hand. For the print media a quote--any quote--is often good enough to anchor a story. No time to wait for someone to call back after a seminar! If the reporter can't get the quotable phrase on the first phone call, its on to the next, or once again, to the on-call quotables [sic] at the think-tank around the corner.

Even when someone with real expertise can be located, the media vitiates the message by making a fetish of "balance"--an odd feature of American public discourse, documented by my colleague Deborah Tannen in her classic book, The Argument Culture. This means that whatever the subject, a pro and con side must be represented--even if one of the positions is absurd, or representative of an extreme fringe opinion. This results in match-ups like Paul Krugman debating Bill O'Reilly on economic matters and other such ludicrous pairings. This situation has created careers for people like Anne Coulter, David Frum and Jonah Goldberg, who otherwise know very little--but they are reliable as "cons" (pun intended) on virtually any topic that requires an expansion of intellect. No wonder the public doesn't know which way is up.

As something of a commentary to this, consider sociologist Leon Mayhew's (in The New Public: Professional communication and the means of social influence) comments:

This generalization derives from studies of how workers in the news industry decide who should be granted the status of a source. There are two categories of sources: routine sources that provide press releases and similar forms of packaged information and enterprise sources that are generated by reporters' independent efforts to find people who can supply or corroborate stories (Epstein 1973). Epstein's study of 2,850 news stories publicized in the New York Times and Washington Post over a fourteen-year period documented that only about a quarter of these stories were based on enterprise sources. The rest were based on ready made sources. More than half were supplied by officials of the federal government, including the legislative branch (Epstein 1973, 119-30). ... Choosing sources as principal sources flows directly from the two main criteria for choosing sources: credible knowledge and capacity to represent constituencies. Officials are presumed responsible and close to the scenes of action, which makes them what Fishman (1980) has called "people entitled to know what they say" and thus "authorized knowers." Networks of authorized knowers upon whom journalists routinely depend constitute a "web of facticity" (Tuchman 1978, 82-103) that bestows credibility on news workers. [emphasis in original] (Mayhew, p. 252)

It is gaining the type of influence that the sources described by Mayhew have that the blogosphere must garner. Until the blogosphere can gain that influence, its attempts to keep the MSM honest will fall on deaf ears.

What Mayhew describes is only one facet of a much larger picture, of course. The larger question relates to discussion of the issues--a rational and open debate about whether the claims made by a candidate or a policy are true, feasible, or prudent.

It is that debate that the blogosphere promises to provide, yet because it is limited in its coverage, the debate never reaches the ears of those who must make the decisions--ie, the voters, policy-makers, and so on.

Mojo Magazine's blog gives a good example of how the media--under the aegis of "balance"--creates controversy where none exists.

According to MoJo:

Pam Spaulding spots a great example of one of journalism's most annoying tics: the need to put fake "balance" into stories. The other day the Houston Chronicle ran a profile of Sgt. Jack Oliver, the first officer in the Houston Police Department to undergo a sex change while on active duty. Interesting stuff. But the reporter then feels compelled to gin up controversy where none exists and quotes some pastor or other who gets all squirmy at the thought of transsexuals: "That would raise issues of competency in the line of duty in my mind."

The point of Beeman's remarks can be seen in the context of the campaign to discredit and undermine the authority of the intelligentsia and the academy. Perhpas none has been so forceful in this effort than David Horowitz. He's beacked by very powerful friends who have lots of money, yet as the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, in front of a Pennsylvania legislative committee, Horowitz had to detract a large amount of his claims:

This broad-based and even global acclaim for higher education in the United States is strangely at odds with the concentrated political attacks that Cole warns us about and that the academy is currently experiencing. It is particularly out of step with the dark and dysfunctional picture of the academy painted by David Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. If Horowitz were simply a disaffected political crank, as many have hitherto regarded him, then his views on the academy could be easily dismissed. Such dismissal would seem to be all the more in order following his disastrous testimony before the legislative subcommittee in Pennsylvania in which he was forced to recant as unsubstantiated several of the cases that he had been widely circulating as documentation of alleged malfeasance in the academy.

Oddly, however, his campaign goes on. Horowitz, with assistance from Karl Rove and the former House majority whip, Tom DeLay, has briefed Republican members of Congress on his Academic Bill of Rights campaign and DeLay has even distributed copies of Horowitz’s political primer The Art of Political Warfare: How Republicans Can Fight to Win to all Republican members of Congress. Rove refers to Horowitz’s pamphlet as “a perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield.”

Update 1 Karl Rove attacks the Internet:

Additionally, Rove answered the attacks from the left-wing blogosphere:

"The Internet for the Left of the Democratic Party has served as a way to mobilize hate and anger -- hate and anger, first and foremost, at this President and Conservatives, but then also at people within their own party whom they consider to be less than completely loyal to this very narrow, very out-of-the-mainstream, very far Left-wing ideology that they tend to represent."

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