Category Archives: Politics

Bill Moyers Goes To Town

Politics

One should beware of judging a man by his manner.

It is possible, for instance, that George Bush’s appointee to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, is in fact a thoughtful and decent human being, rather than the jowly, priggish, self-satisfied good ol’ boy whose image leaps unbidden to my mind every time I hear him speak.

I couldn’t say. All I know is that every time I hear the man’s voice, I think that it’s time to re-animate the moldering remains of William Tecumseh Sherman, because the South has clearly risen again and needs to be put down at least as hard as the last time — and a zombie Union general is just the revenant for the job.

For the nonce, however, we’ll need to settle for a living southern gentleman with which to fight the fire of another southern “gentleman”. Fortunately, Bill Moyers is up to the task.

I caught part of his superb closing address to the National Conference on Media Reform on the radio a few nights back. It’s heady stuff, full of the rhythm and power this preacher’s son must have learned at his father’s knee.

Listen to the recording or read the transcript, and be glad that there’s at least one journalist still alive who hasn’t decided to expediently compromise himself.

Beatings all ’round

Idiots, Politics

“It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Where to begin with this one? Well, with the facts, I suppose.

  1. Newsweek publishes a small sidebar item alleging that interrogators at Guantanamo flushed a copy of the Qur’an down a toilet.
  2. The faithful in Afghanistan, incensed by this, stage riots in which several persons are killed.
  3. Newsweek determines that it cannot substantiate the allegation, and retracts it.
  4. The White House, scrupulous and unwavering adherent to the absolute truth that it is, comes down with the righteous indignation of injured virtue on Newsweek for running with something it wasn’t absolutely certain about, insinuating in the process that the blood of the dead Afghans is solely on Newsweek‘s hands. (Because this is, after all, a sentence in the exalted Periscope section, by all that’s holy, not something trivial like the decision to invade and ineptly occupy a fractious country in one of the most volatile regions in the world.)

    Stepping in to assist with the arduous and thankless task of pillorying Newsweek is the full force of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and the rest of the Jingosphere, who are never so indignant about the death of Muslims as when liberals or the mainstream media might somehow be implicated.

  5. A Pentagon investigation prompted by the furor over the Newsweek report determines that while it cannot be substantiated that the Qur’an was ever flushed down a toilet, it was definitely stepped on, kicked, and splashed — inadvertently, it would seem — with urine. In the proud tradition of righteous vindication and unblemished consciences since time immemorial, these findings are released late on a Friday afternoon, ensuring that they would quickly be plowed under by the weekend news cycle.

There is so much scorn and contempt to be dished out here that it’s hard to decide who gets the first helping.

The administration gets its usual generous serving, of course — this time for having the gall and effrontery to accuse Newsweek of insufficient regard for the truth. This from the people with such a long record of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies that we’ll need to devise a new numbering scheme just to catalog them all. It takes a certain kind of genius to straight-facedly accuse others of playing fast and loose with the facts when you yourself have swept so much dirt under the rug that the resulting bulge is making it hard to keep the lamps standing. It’s a kind of genius I don’t understand, and hope I never will.

Let’s save a healthy portion of the aforementioned scorn and contempt for the rioters, though. You need to be in possession of a highly-refined grade of dumbshit to let yourself, or fifteen of your countrymen, get killed over a book. I don’t care if it’s a holy book. If your God is so small and weak that treating a copy of His words with disrespect actually diminshes Him, then He and you both have more pressing problems.

Lest you think that I’m being cavalier because it’s not my holy book, let me disabuse you. You can damage or destroy as many copies of things I hold dear as you have the energy for. Shred them. Burn them. Piss on them. Wipe your ass with them. I don’t care. Because they are merely symbols, representations of things that cannot be destroyed unless you manage to kill every last person who knows and loves them. If you can’t understand the distinction, then you probably get a lot of weird looks in restaurants, too, because you must wind up forgetting yourself and taking a bite out of the pictures in the menu from time to time.

About the only people who don’t wind up looking bad in this entire pathetic shitstorm are the folks at Newsweek. They got the essence of the story right, if not its details. The fact that other people were stupid enough to kill or die over it is not Newsweek‘s fault. When it was revealed that they’d made a factual mistake, they went into a veritable frenzy of excruciatingly public self-examination, vowing to amend their processes in ways that would prevent a recurrence. If I’m worried about anything as regards them, it’s not that they’ll make a similar mistake again, but that this whole sorry affair has left them so cautious as to be ineffective. The people running the clown show need more scrutiny, not less, and Newsweek needs to keep its part to provide it.

Today, on The Clown Show

Idiots, Politics

President Bush simultaneously derides an Amnesty International report condemning conditions at Guantanamo Bay — where people are held without, you know, so much as the pretense of due process — as “absurd”, and then proceeds almost in the same breath to decry the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, piously declaring that “Here, you’re innocent until proven guilty and it appeared to us, at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial.”

Hee hee ha ha ho ho… sob. We’ve done it. We’ve crossed some kind of event horizon from which not even irony can escape.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to beat my head bloody on the desk.

A Note About The Title

Politics

This blog was named for a parking-lot epiphany I had sometime in the spring of this year, 2004, when I realized that the war in Iraq just really wasn’t going as well as might be hoped. Somehow I had been reluctant to let myself acknowledge this: in realizing the inhibition’s cause, I overcame it.

There is a notion running loose in our culture, one I’m inclined to glibly blame on a glut of crowd-pleasing war and sports movies, that you can accomplish just about anything if your cause is noble, your heart is pure, and above all, if you just believe hard enough.

What’s lost between the rousing soundtrack and slow-motion charge is the realization that belief, while necessary, is not sufficient. Yes, you need determination to win, but for every hero who gritted his teeth and forged ahead to glory, there are ten more whose dessicating remains now litter the roadside as evidence to the fact that right does not always make might. (People like to talk about the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team. They’re less likely to bring up, say, the Warsaw Ghetto.)

And so it’s come to this: at the dawn of the twenty-first century we are, as a country, grappling with the idea that the war will be won or lost not because we succeeded or failed to put enough troops into the theater, not because we enlisted or completely alienated our allies, not because we understood or utterly ignored the local culture, not because we chose principle or expediency when deciding how to treat detainees, but because the home audience, thousands of miles from the zone of conflict, slacked off when it came to waving the pom-poms.

Thus the sock puppets for those who got us into this mess exhort us to continue doing what hasn’t helped so far, sure that it will work if we just do it harder than ever. They’re like Peter Pan halfway through the stage version of J.M. Barrie’s story, urging the audience to save the fading Tinkerbell through the sheer force of their belief. Somehow a benign children’s fantasy has become grotesque talk-radio reality. Drink all of the Kool-Aid! Keep the faith! Believe! Believe! Believe!

Or fuck it. Wake up. Realize that the Emperor isn’t going to get any less naked because you refrain from pointing out that he’s not wearing clothes, and focus your passion in a direction where it will actually make a difference. If this blog’s title becomes an antibody for the meme which holds that remarking upon the bleeding obvious is somehow an act of disloyalty, I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.