Lance Armstrong appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s Confessional TV franchise to admit he doped and lied. If Oprah polled her television audience for who should be next episode’s guest star, it might have to be Manti Te’o explaining that his dead fake internet girlfriend was a beard. Imagine the ratings if Oprah could book ex-dope-in-chief George W. Bush minus his minder Dick Cheney. Iraq’s fake WMDs would be the least of it.
Tag Archives: Oprah
This American Life caves to Apple Corp, swaps Mike Daisey Chinese factory horror story for Marketplace puff spin
This American Life host Ira Glass tried to pull an Oprah on playwright Mike Daisey, to dress him down on creative license Daisey took with an excerpt of a monolog aired on TAL titled Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory. The debunking came courtesy of American Public Media’s laughable “Marketplace” Wall Street PR engine, which Glass pretended were reliable experts on the subject of China’s apparently resolved labor abuses. That’s not even funny. This “retraction” reeks even upwind, and Apple’s having become the most highly valued corporation probably explains Glass’s uncharacteristically virulent condemnation. Shameful is what it was, and I hold it unforgivable, for the pretend-affable Glass, so-called folk archivist, to scuttle someone else’s too successful artistic quest for fundamental truth.
Let’s be clear. Mike Daisey was “debunked” based on his Chinese translator contradicting his version of events, and Marketplace finding Hong Kong based activists ready to give Chinese labor problems the all-clear signal. Both sources no longer protected by anonymity are under duress in China, and it’s not mentioned under whose employ they are now.
The Apple Factory story was the first best thing TAL had aired since pioneering post-sardonic navel gazing, but this week Glass issued a full retraction, removed the episode from the archive, and aired a blistering character assassination complete with manipulatively edited confrontations with Daisey, loaded with the expectation he’d buckle like fictional-confession memoir author James Frey. Except Frey’s lies unraveled because they contrived to propagate untruth. Daisey’s truths were undisputed, but the liberties he took to weave a personal narrative were “debunked” to cast doubt on his every word. It was a shameful moment for This American Life, and I’m hoping this time Glass has overestimated the vapidity of his listeners.
For example, when Mike Daisey explained his rationale for not wanting to “unpack the complexity” of his narrative, Ira Glass responded that he didn’t know what that meant. To what kind of reporter, editor, producer, or storyteller would that concept be foreign?
APM’s Marketplace
This was not the first collaboration between Marketplace and TAL. As the Occupy Wall Street protests grew, Ira Glass commissioned folksy research pieces from a Marketplace team to explain world banking and derivatives trading in terms sufficiently lazy to not disturb the usual NPR stupor. It was bunk coiffed in TAL’s typical carefree je ne care pas.
So this time, Marketplace’s man in China was consulted to fact-check Mike Daisey’s account. ACTUALLY, Glass reveals that he was approached by Marketplace AFTER they’d looked into Daisey’s sources. Glass thanked Marketplace for offering the story to TAL, instead of exploiting the exposé themselves. That’s Glass pretending he doesn’t know PR is about getting someone else to say it for you. Absolving Apple required more than one media property criticizing another. Somebody probably wanted a full retraction.
To foul Mike Daisey’s story required one phone call to the translator and guide he’d used in China, whose contact information he tried hide from Glass and co. No mention that this might have been to protect her from angry Chinese authorities, or from Apple and its supplier Foxconn and the inevitable underworld that rides herd on its victim laborers.
Marketplace’s feat consisted of tracking down his translator, breaking her cover, and putting her on the spot for the harsh criticisms which Daisey laid on Apple, Foxconn and their Chinese hosts. Especially as the popularity of Mike Daisey’s performance piece grew, and after its airing on TAL and his many media interviews, the anonymity of his Chinese translator would remain of paramount concern, but once exposed by Marketplace, what choice might she have had but to denounce Daisey’s heresies?
Could Apple’s being the world’s most high valued company have had anything to do with this kill-the-messenger hit piece? Apple has scheduled a press conference Monday morning to announce what it plans to do with its now famous $100 Billion cash holdings.
Storytelling
Isn’t it rich that TAL suddenly wants to hold its stories to journalistic standards? Imagine if someone had called them on the Christmas elven adventures of David Sedaris. Was that fact-checked? Or what of the elementary Christmas play Sedaris so gloriously skewered? IF YOU Criticize TAL for its too-often neglect of difficult subjects and you’re scolded that the show is about culture and storytelling.
Mike Daisey’s TAL recording is now offline, although the transcript remains. In it you’ll find an indictment that Ira Glass perhaps lacks the temerity to redact as well. It’s his introduction to the segment, and I’ll reprint it here, because Glass praises exactly Daisey’s storytelling technique, separate from the facts he recounts.
A couple weeks ago I saw this one-man show where this guy did something on stage I thought was really kind of amazing. He took this fact that we all already know, right, this fact that our stuff is made overseas in maybe not the greatest working conditions, and he made the audience actually feel something about that fact. Which is really quite a trick. You really have to know how to tell a story to be able to pull something like that off.
In his own words, Glass concedes what his show’s retraction is all about. He’s not retracting the facts, these “we all already know”. Glass and Apple are trying to retract Mike Daisey’s effect, that “he made the audience actually feel something about that fact.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Case of curious cellphone, bandana and Greyson Chance’s perfect microphone
![Case of curious cellphone, bandana and Greyson Chance’s perfect microphone Case of curious cellphone, bandana and Greyson Chance’s perfect microphone](https://notmytribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/oprah-gonna-be-good-day-video.jpg)
PT Barnum would have been a terror on Youtube –I’m certainly sobered to see what fools America every time. Is sudden-tween-throb Greyson Chance’s talent for real? Too soon to say. But the 6th grade sound man at Cheyenne School of Edmond, Oklahoma has unlikely genius. * What’s hard to believe about doctors bandaging Bret Michaels’ massive brain hemorrhage with his signature headband? * And my favorite, Oprah Winfrey recording a show performance with her cellphone to attest to her surprise at “the coolest thing ever!”
Oprah
It happened ages ago (in blog-years) but television talk shows bind these three example together. Do you remember Oprah’s anniversary whatsit, taped like a big tailgate party in downtown Chicago? Oprah stood there on the outdoor stage beside the Black Eyed Peas and held her cellphone up, aimed at the audience, as if the dozen or more cameras on cranes, wires and rails weren’t going to be enough. And the crowd erupted in spontaneous dance, although it was choreographed, and a concept swiped from a European video. But Oprah’s deal went viral because, OMG would you believe it, and there was Oprah, OMG’ding herself, careful to record it to show her friends in case they wouldn’t have believe her, or watched the show.
Now how many of you believe the media diva even has her own phone, much less carries it or knows how it works?
Watching the video again, an establishing shot before the music begins shows someone in the audience (who later would turn out to be a dancer) aiming their cellphone like a camera, in case the audience at home needed a reminder that’s what normal people do today, and that’s what Oprah would be doing, to confound your awe with hers. Compound.
After the video had done its viral thing, Oprah had all the crowdsourced uploads removed, being unlicensed and all. I think it was really because her feigned incredulity wasn’t going to pass muster. Better a memory gone viral than video evidence of Oprah taking her viewers for fools.
Bret
Bret Michael’s blue bandana as he reclined on the hospital bed on the cover of People Magazine was just too silly for words. No doubt America wouldn’t know him without his bandana wig, so it was definitely an art director’s call.
Alright, it wasn’t a video, but the internet rumors went viral. Fans started to twitter about an oddly fortuitous recovery which put him back on the Celebrity Apprentice season finale, so now poor Bret is back in the hospital to prove it wasn’t a PR stunt, this time for a hole-in-the-heart, probably something to do with a tatoo, in any case nothing to interfere with his headband.
Greyson
Brand-spanking-fresh-phenom Greyson Michael Chance wowed everyone on Youtube, and Ellen’s people, reportedly before his views had even hit five-digits –are talent scouts that grassroots? He encored with the same brilliant performance on her show, thus certifying his authentic talent, based on the law that lightening can’t be fixed twice. Although the equalizer setting, for lack of a technical term, was remarkably identical, wasn’t it? Same tweaked toning, same very attentive fader, especially if it wasn’t the same microphone.
Seriously, SNL, of the notoriously bad music soundboard, should hire whoever miked that primary school performance.
On the subject of expensive equipment, how often do you see a shiny grand piano at a public school choir concert?
Although the camera work was shaky, the cameraman kept an interesting crop on Greyson, framed by the waiting choir girls. It reminded me of the soldier backdrop they used to give President Bush. Authenticity came of the development that none of the girls were compelled to look too interested, I’m guessing that was sheer fortuity. The result was that Young Mr. Chance was strangely placed off-center, the better to feature the girls. An actual parent would have framed their son to show his feet at the pedals, I guarantee you.
The close crop remained even as Greyson finished and the school emcee offered her remarks, her head off camera. The lens never zoomed, fitting for a digital still camera which cannot zoom in video mode, or because appearances of homemade authenticity be damned, broadcast editors will not abide zoom.
But Greyson gave the game away when he took his bow, aimed not at the audience, but directly at the camera. You’d figure he already had countless home recordings of his Lady Gaga cover, both practice and dinner guest performances. On this stage the camerawork was let to look improvised, like a parent’s afterthought, while Cherub Gaga sang the performance straight ahead, in the same direction to which the emcee addressed the audience. So to whom was Mr. Chance taking his bow?
Avatar: novel push for noble savage
![Avatar: novel push for noble savage Avatar: novel push for noble savage](https://notmytribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/avatar-movie-poster-precious.jpg)
I’d like to contrast the high-profile critical receptions being given two Hollywood films about darker-skinned-ness. Precious is about an African-American girl so dark she absorbs the light, without being about race at all. The movie tells a story of poverty, incest and the cycle of abuse, while tipping the scales with gratuitous stereotypes of Hottentot welfare mamas attendant their usual good-for-trouble black males. Vilifying the subjects it pretends to rescue, Precious has the blessing of the media, a shameless Oprah included. James Cameron’s Avatar on the other hand, opened to depth-charges of faint praise calculated to dim the buzz, perhaps because it packs the most subversive black-is-beautiful message since Muhammad Ali.
Avatar evokes rudimentary indigenous spirituality, peppered with what even elementary-schooled audiences can associate as Native American themes, from which we can infer the concepts are eternal, but idealizes an athletic aesthetic more human than the movie’s live-action characters. The “blue cat people,” as the critics have chosen to describe its Na’vi tribe, are but fantasy-striped, tailed Spartans, computer iterations of the Williams sisters and NBA dream teams. The real humans of Avatar tower in prowess, dignity and luminescence over their modern mensch oppressors.
Where racial equality on film is plotted according to how black figures are granted access to the world of white priviledge, Avatar celebrates the sovereignty of dark skin in its environment, where it’s not a barbershop, rapper’s crib, or street corner in Harlem. And instead of prepping the more palatable light-skinned negro for easier assimilation to the welcome-diversity crowd.
Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, is an ugly project by and for gentrified American, whose title character is White-America’s usual avatar into their mysterious conception of Black America. I can do it no better justice than this review excerpt published Counterpunch:
A fiction whose “policy message is that welfare recipients are black women who wish to avoid work, who use their time having sex with their daughters, watching television and dining on pig leavings.” Is this a film – or a crime?
A crock and defamation that reinforces white man’s supremist burden.
Under Iran’s culturally repressive Islamic Revolution, the artists have produced a golden age of film. The greatest of these films have had to disguise their social message in analogies surrounding the concerns of children. Avatar takes perhaps a similar tack. Behind diversions of fantasy and special effects, is a profound morality tale. Critics can attack James Cameron for his simplistic storytelling, it’s the price to pay to bring the simplest of viewers along. Perhaps the director can release a final cut for cineastes which omits the redundant exposition. I don’t mind that Cameron uses a highlighter for the Cliftnote set. A survey of online comments shows me that some fans applaud themselves for getting Avatar’s message where they are certain their fellow audience members might not.
Most certainly the alarm most critics are raising has to do with the unpatriotic attitude which Avatar takes toward Capitalist imperialism. In GWOT America where we still “Support Our Troops” and still refrain from labeling our military contractors as mercenaries, this film will rub flag wavers the wrong way. I’d hate to be an active duty US soldier, watching Avatar in my uniform, as the audience roots for good to vanquish evil. It will probably be some time before Americans will want to see Iraqi or Afghan freedom fighters depicted as heroes. We’ve yet to see sympathetic accounts for example of the Vietcong holding down the Ho Chi Min Trail, or for that matter, the real Germans or Japanese beyond the Allied propaganda. But by disguising his story in science fiction, James Cameron has rehabilitated the Vandal and Visigoth, from the shadow of the Roman Empire. The shadow of man’s civilizing drive which grows darker the more it is illuminated.
And best of all, Cameron’s pagans are not whites like the typical Anglo Semites of the Christian holy lands. Cameron’s indigenous humans have the beautiful noses, skin and haunches indigenous to the climates which cradled humankind.
Sarah Palin dons lipstick for Dog Dinner
![Sarah Palin dons lipstick for Dog Dinner Sarah Palin dons lipstick for Dog Dinner](https://notmytribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/sarah-palin-scary-lipstick-dogfight.gif)
She’s got a book tour, so what? But Oprah is willing to suffer her for two couch sessions, now Hillary Clinton wants to grant her a beer summit. Foreign leaders can’t get an audience without preconditions. Why is Sarah Palin accorded such stature?
David Letterman protested his contractual obligation to feature reality TV “Survivor” contestants on Late Night. He made them stand at the edge of the stage, at audience level, instead of joining him on the furniture reserved for celebrities and real people lifted from the news. But Letterman’s rejection of the contrived importance of the Survivor casts worked against him. The television audience grown fond of the individual contestants tuned in to see their moment in the spotlight with the king of late night, and felt intimately slighted themselves by Letterman’s haughtiness.
Maybe it’s a lesson the Dem powerbrokers don’t want to relive with John McCain’s last mate from tribe GOP. With the media able to make it all Sarah, all the time, who is the Obama administration to pretend Sarah Palin is just a hockey mom in lipstick –or was it a dog– I’m surprised to have forgotten the distinction.
Actually the distinction is the difference between Sarah Palin being champion idiot at a Dinner Game, or the winner’s date at a Dog Dinner.
I know what they’re doing, and it’s every bit as gruesome as parading the circus freaks. And worse. Those Palin supporters who are also railing at the loss of whatever it was the Constitution meant to them, are going to be proved right.
Of course it depends whether you think Sarah Palin ever had a chance in 2008, or whether she has any viability in 2012. I’m inclined to think not. And I’m pretty sure that’s the consensus of those eagerly pandering to Palin’s political aspirations.
Palin makes an ideal straw candidate. She is who the people want, by “the people” I mean of course, the sans culottes. What’s the new equivalent — the American ill-dressed? Palin appeals to all variety of voters who think politics need a shot of authenticity, whatever. And she hasn’t got a chance, she couldn’t even squeeze a middle school education between now and the start of a 2012 campaign. For the coup de grace, Palin’s character assassins could parade freak two, Levi Johnston, to drop a second shoe.
There’s everything to gain by floating Palin’s balloon, because you prevent opponents from materializing a real one. By all means, inflate Palin’s ego, and let her people’s hopes take flight. Blow, blow, the sky’s the limit.
This is the American two party system at its most efficient. It’s Billie Jean Kings versus Bobby Riggs, all show. Unlike King who only reluctantly agreed to the Battle of the Sexes with the aging baffoon, the Democrats are courting their challenger. The closer she can bring her big mug into camera frame, the bigger the money the Dems can draw from those staking odds.
It’s good for Las Vegas, it’s good for the Dems, it’s good for those who think the Democrats are better then the Repugs, but it’s curtains for democracy.
The Famous Oprah Video punks who?
![The Famous Oprah Video punks who? The Famous Oprah Video punks who?](https://notmytribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/oprah-famous-video-black-eyed-peas-good-day.jpg)
You find it by searching for FAMOUS + OPRAH + VIDEO. Because hyperbole arcs the hyperlink. Allegedly, the viral clip is being removed as fast as websites are putting it up. I’ll bet the reason would have more to do with James Frey and Augusten Burroughs baldfaced disingenuity than copyright infringement or Oprah being embarrassed by pedestrian plagiarism. The performance by the Black Eyed Peas, taped live in downtown Chicago for the 24th season of Oprah’s talk show, purports to ignite a spontaneous dance, to Oprah’s joyful astonishment. While the video may be a crowd-pleaser, it certifies corporate music’s lack of originality, and the American TV tube’s despicable boobness.
The jubilant TODAY’S GONNA BE A GOOD DAY scenario borrows of course from the T-mobile commercial featuring a dance production taped at a Liverpool train station, set to a medley of powerhouse dance numbers. At first fellow commuters are surprised. By the end we realize the entirety has been choreographed. Youtube viewers would recognize the contrivance from the Belgian train station scene, where ordinary commuters begin dancing to a favorite song from The Sound of Music, until the whole crowd is participating.
Is dance so highly infectious? There’s something people really love about seeing that theme play out. It gives viewers warm fuzzy feelings having to do with belonging to community. There’s nothing wrong with the Black Eyed Peas wanting to reap that same enthusiasm for their pretend live video. Who holds it against pop to imitate from anything?
Their job of commercial entertainment is to popularize, and an Antwerp central station is hardly a setting familiar to Americans. Better a live concert audience, youthful, outside, wearing the usual panoply of Disney colors, living in the moment, attached to no context of exterior lives, a high school musical on a sunny day, reality TV on vivid.
Both predecessors feature onlookers who stare transfixed, some calling friends on their cellphones, others recording what they see. In both sequences, often those standing on the periphery turn out also to be participants, eventually joining in the dance.
In Oprah’s version, she is the lone spectator, watching incredulous from onstage. Like the train station commuters, she holds a cellphone aloft, eager to record the dance epidemic as it spreads throughout her “audience.” Apparently, it’s not enough today to drop your jaw to show surprise, you have to pull out your camera to show how you know when seeing defies believing. What, is Oprah going to Youtube it? Would her television audience worry that the impromptu dance was going to pass without someone recording it for posterity?
Oprah’s spontaneous wonder may have passed for genuine before a television audience who didn’t see the dance coming, but on the instant replay, how will Oprah’s act play? Are we to believe she didn’t know about the Christo scale choreographed event? If the stunt had been planned as a surprise, do you suppose Oprah wouldn’t have noticed her audience was suddenly uniformly younger and more fit, wearing uniformly bright colors evenly distributed across the monitor screens. Failing that, do you imagine someone as skilled as Oprah at communicating with peoples en masse, wouldn’t detect that this audience had something up its sleeve? It’s probably no false flattery to brag that Chicago is not big enough for Oprah and a surprise party of thousands, without invitations coming across her desk.
The Black Eyed Peas dance bomb may have made wonderful television, and it might have been even better if Oprah had winked instead of gasped. Because now the scene is simply contrived. To watch it in hindsight, as has become the norm for television in the Youtube age, there’s Oprah punking us all.
CNN did it with Balloon Boy, FOX does it for politics, and the rest do it for the war: false concern, contrived conclusions. American media nourishes with falsity. Musicians lip-sinc, Yo-Yo Ma faked his performance at the inauguration, as we learned all instrumentalists do in cold weather.
Michael Moore CAPITALISM postscript
From Michael Moore: “15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now:”
> Friends, It’s the #1 question I’m constantly asked after people see my movie: “OK — so NOW what can I DO?!” You want something to do? Well, you’ve come to the right place! ‘Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system. Here they are:
FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:
1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people’s homes are now truly worth — and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.
2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.
3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.
4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies — and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies — you name it. If a company’s primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by — and the first rule is “Do no harm.” The second rule: The question must always be asked — “Is this for the common good?” (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)
5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin’s socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don’t contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here’s a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors’ de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete’s sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!
FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:
1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent — or even a candidate from another party — if they don’t do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!
2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It’s time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party — and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama’s agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action — and he won’t feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it’s to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I’ll post it on my website.
3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year — or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don’t have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don’t believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on — and you should be on it!
4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there’s more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place “Capitalism Did This” signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)
5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth — so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here’s an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don’t fill that void, who will?
FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:
1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.
2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one — the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.
3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.
4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run. Here’s how to do it (more info here). Nothing is more American than democracy, and democracy shouldn’t be checked at the door when you enter your workplace. Another way to Americanize your workplace is to turn your business into a worker-owned cooperative. You are not a wage slave. You are a free person, and you giving up eight hours of your life every day to someone else is to be properly compensated and respected.
5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she’s right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, “Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants”). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I’ve turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny — she’s fit, she’s rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don’t put our own “oxygen mask” on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!
I’m sure there are many other ideas you can come up with on how we can build this movement. Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.
Was Aught Eight an inauspicious omen?
![Was Aught Eight an inauspicious omen? Was Aught Eight an inauspicious omen?](https://notmytribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/obama-zero-poster.gif)
I remember the discussion in the nineties of what to name the coming decade. In a previous century yrs 1900-09 were aught years, but “the aughts” is an archaic term. Aught means: no thing; not anything: nil, nothing, null, zero, nix, zilch.
In bookkeeping terms, as with data processing, an aught with its diagonal slash helps the accountant differentiate a zero from an O.
I’m amused obviously, that O stands for Obama, optimism and Oprah; and figuratively it represents a zero. With a slash, we can make the distinction, and association, more pointed.
Admittedly, the 00 decade was defined by George W. Bush, and zero fits, doesn’t it, to describe his gas gauge, if not obviously his mileage? In 2008 Barack Obama promised a return from the brink of meaninglessness, this decade, not later, but how far has he got? His followers hold still plenty of hope, things being complicated in Washington and what not, but Obama is looking more like Bush’s fall guy than his arresting officer.
With his legislative majority, George Bush proved you can take a world to war, dismantle regulatory protections, rape the environment, eliminate rights, screw every last living earthly being, and raid the treasury for the bankers, each act performed faster than a Sotomayor confirmation.
With majorities everywhere, even with public opinion on his side, Obama can’t reform health care. And he didn’t have a stolen election behind him.
We’re fast approaching the anniversary of September 11, an impressive benchmark if you will, for George Bush’s first term. I’d be surprised if Obama could put a Cessna into the Hudson by then.
Of course I recognize that Obama is up against more than the Republicans. He faces the powers that be, the corporations, financiers and oligarchs, the “deciders” whose deciding Bush pretended to do by himself. But if the President of the United States is not the Leader of the Free World, is not the most powerful figure on Earth, as his office is held to be, what is he? Are we prepared to accept that our democratic election accounts for naught?
Obama was elected in aught-eight. Judging by the job he’s doing, the superlatives flying from the corporate media about how he’s turned world public opinion, brought change, ended racism, and pretends to be drawing down bad things, Obama will be a shoe-in incumbent. Come next election, we’ll still need someone to offer us hope for mini-versal health care. So from ’08 we have eight years of aught.
Boy in the Striped Propaganda-jamas
![Boy in the Striped Propaganda-jamas Boy in the Striped Propaganda-jamas](https://notmytribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/holocaust-dachau-concentration-camp-barbed-wire-suicide.jpg)
What’s wrong with imagining that a German youngster could traverse a maximum security perimeter to charm readers with his innocent observations, for example, mistaking dirty excrement- encrusted forced-laborer uniforms for striped pajamas? And more, sneak under the wire, to suffer and thereby confirm, the inmates’ inhuman fate?
This year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 20, arrived with a new tale to beguile the kiddies: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
The photograph above depicts a concentration camp inmate killed between rows of barbed wire. At the Dachau Memorial its caption pronounces: “Suicide,” conjecturing that this inmate chose to rush the fence and be shot by guards sooner than endure any further brutalities. While the scene amplifies the savagery of the camps, it also puts to the lie the poetic liberties which imagine that camp inmates could linger in the no-man’s land between fences, or that likewise nearby locals could approach to within even hailing distance of the prisoners.
Angel at the Fence, Herman Rosenblat’s purported camp memoir, was debunked because the author asserted that he met his wife during the war, across the fence of a concentration camp, and that she saved his life pre-maritally, by throwing pieces of bread to him. Oprah called it the single greatest love story ever, but under scrutiny Rosenblat confessed his fabrication. Now he’s determined it should be redistributed as fiction, because it’s a magical tale that people still want to hear.
Striped author John Boyne paints a similar scenario for younger readers, where two pre-adolescent boys meet on opposite sides of the fence of no less than Auschwitz. The German boy is fascinated by the other’s pajamas. Cute? Like a boy in another hemisphere being intrigued at a slave laborer’s dark black tan, or dirt under his fingernails? Eventually Boyne’s young protagonist crawls under the wire to join his new Jewish friend, and they die together in the darkness of a gas chamber.
Will this prove to be the ultimate aim of Holocaust Rememberers? To drag us all across an impassible divide, over a bridge that stretches credulity, by means of so false a memory that we suffer the Holocaust ourselves through a regression therapy assault on our psyche?
Ted Haggard is less shifty than New Life Church
COLORADO SPRINGS- Ted Haggard’s inconvenient sex life surfaces again! And this time the scandal is all New Life’s. Ted Haggard’s PR talk show onslaught to remake his image has prompted an altar boy to go public. But it seems this violates an agreement the young man made with New Life in the aftermath of the Haggard prostitute meth-habit scandal.
According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, New Life Church leader Brady “Boyd said the church reached a legal settlement to pay the man for counseling and college tuition, with one condition being that none of the parties involved discuss the matter publicly.”
First let’s clarify what New Life has failed to make clear. The young man was in his “early twenties” when he approached the church about the relations between he and Haggard. According to Boyd, the “inappropriate, consensual sexual relationship” had gone on for “a long period of time.” The church denies that the young man might have been a minor when it began.
Second, according to a letter sent to its congregation members as a result of the new revelations, New Life Church admits now that it has “received reports of a number of incidents of inappropriate behavior.”
In light of Ted Haggard trying to repaint himself as a victim in an HBO documetary, and on Oprah Winfrey, and an upcoming Larry King Live, the New Life ex-volunteer now wants to go public with his story.
While the church told the public, and its congregation, that Haggard’s impropriety did not extend beyond the Denver prostitute, it looks like New Life Church deliberately kept this story under wraps, despite an “overwhelming pool of evidence” to indicate otherwise. In the face of the hush-up coming to light, their official response is even more duplicitous.
“It wasn’t at all a settlement to make him be quiet or not tell his story,” Boyd said. “Our desire was to help him. Here was a young man who wanted to get on with his life. We considered it more compassionate assistance – certainly not hush money. I know that’s what everyone will want to say because that’s the most salacious thing to say, but that’s not at all what it was.”
An agreement to keep quiet appears to have been what New Life Church thought “it was.” Asked whether the church will pursue legal procedures against the young man, Boyd replied:
“We have legal standing to do that, but not the desire to.”
Grant Park speech aimed beneath you
The more they replay it, the more Barack Obama’s Grant Park speech comes off like bad theater. From Obama’s lips, I’m not sure the faithful have the skepticism to critique it. But his election night address may be the surest indication of what his centrism is going to look like, political communication for folks across the aisle: exposition and pandering.
“If there is anyone here … who still doubts the promise of our democracy, tonight is their answer.”
Wouldn’t that be more appropriate coming from a high school teacher, asking the class to explore the meaning of Obama’s win, sooner than have the candidate draw the conclusion for us? It’s exposition, telling the audience what you should let them figure out by your actions. When Ussain Bolt heralded his oncoming Olympic victory, it didn’t go over well either.
More than just leading us by the nose, by spelling out the election’s answer Obama made his theme dramatically smallish. Is that what his “change” meant? Regime change? Color change? MLK’s dream in the singular? Was that the mission accomplished? Renewing America’s faith in the two parties? (Forget a third?)
I still doubt. And in Obama’s centrist hyperbole I find few answers. In fact with the Grant Park speech machinations, he raises more.
If Obama underestimated the insightfulness of his audience, or did not trust where their own observations would lead them, he had their number with his last train of thought.
I’m reminded of a comedy skit in which a corporate news outlet was reviewing options for distracting their viewers from the information they were presenting. While naked, might have been one, and certainly farting while sitting in water was a hilarious alternative. Both made light of other real techniques, not the least of which, let’s be fair, is using pictures of puppies.
So Obama closed his address by painting that picture, a promise to his daughters. “You have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the White House.” I thought it was adorable too. Then I wondered if I’d taken my eyes off what either his right or left hand was doing.
In brief, not much. Obama was eloquent and optimistic, his points were from JFK’s inaugural, which fit the youthful, multiracial Camelot we celebrated to see gather onstage. Grant Park became a memorable pageant. There were Jesse Jackson’s tears, Oprah leaning on Joe the White Guy, Michelle’s belted Rothko dress, and a so very presidential President-Elect. What do you remember of the speech?
Democracy worked, see.
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Look folks, a puppy.
Military fiction, publishing as product takes us further downhill to total cultural illiteracy
When Americans step inside the big chain publishers’ bookstores, Barnes and Noble and Borders, they are almost always under the delusion that they are inside real bookstores containing real books. Nothing could be farther from the truth though. We instead have merely entered into the realm of publishing as product.
What do I mean by ‘publishing as product’? The answer simply put is that publishing historically was an act of putting an art form in front of the art appreciating public. That art form was called literature and you had to read to get it. Publishing was never a pure process without politics, but far from it as politics was essential to what often got published, and what did not. But todays publishing world is far different than that of the past. What does the American literature reading public run into today?
Today’s publishing world has as much to do with art (literature) as McDonald’s has to do with cooking (culinary arts). Content inside the big publishing firms today is handled like a product, not an art that has high impact on politics and national culture. Conservative businessmen still limit what gets published and what does not, but the censorship involves not censuring and disallowing individual radical authors, but censoring and disallowing entire product lines. To cover up this censorship, a whole new group of alternative products have been developed to better hide the fact that real literature is no longer a product to be carried on the shelves.
As an avid book reader since I was a kid, I have been going into America’s bookstores for 1/2 a century which has allowed me to see this devolution in process on a continual basis. So let me name a few of the new publishing product lines that have displaced the old book shelves that once were partially inhabited, at least some, by novels in translation from other parts of the world.
Americans have always been an ethnocentric society and that has been always encouraged by conservative publishers who published mainly American authors. But where once stood Steinbeck and Zola, now stands shelves after shelves of books under other categories of products instead of just Fiction , all now directed to a population segmented by market research science laboratories. We now have Gay Literature, Christian Literature, and the latest grouping something called Military Literature. Further, one finds literature now very much separated into gender categories (Thanks, Oprah! See what you helped do?). Of course, as a remnant of the ’60s we have tiny sections of Black Fiction, Chicano Fiction, Native American Fiction, though not Black Fiction from elsewhere than the US, Latin American fiction from elsewhere than the US, or Native American fiction from say Guatemala or Peru.
We also have oodles of shelves with product lines directed to UFO believers, New Age dabblers, fascist talk show lovers, ‘self help’ addicts, and this new grouping identified for product line identity sales, the US military grunt fan club of all that is weaponry and war. Hence comes ‘Military Fiction’.
There is nothing really modern about this since Hollywood keyed in on this crowd since way back even before John Wayne. (Kids, if you don’t know who John Wayne is, then text message some Dude who might know and ask him?) What is new is to see this product line as marked out, pushed, and delineated as it is today. We shall all be corporately sliced and diced down to our very genes, it seems…
So who are the ‘writers’ for this new product line called Military Fiction? Here they are in Barnes and Nobles, War and Military Fiction division. Notice all those B&N sub-divisions of this hither before non-existent category of Fiction. Notice how they tossed in Vonnegut and Hemingway to make the new product line look less superficial than it really is?
Can you imagine this sort of thing in French, Italian, or German bookstores? They don’t have half their countries’ populations working for the military-security-industrial complex though. Personally, I can see a future reduction int he Christian Fiction and Christian Non-Fiction product lines, and and even larger spread of product items in the War and Military Fiction and Non-Fiction departments. Maybe even an ICE Fiction product line, too? And Private Military Contractor Fiction area?
Meanwhile, culturally, the US heads toward being a total illiterate wasteland in the publishing of real literature in the English language, especially in the translation of foreign authors of note. The worst of all this, is that almost all those entering into these warehouses of bookfood products think that they are part of the educated just by being there among the shelves of what??? … shelves of trash. All the books have been replaced by artificial-alterficial-superficial bookfood, or spam of lit. This delusion of education being sold at the bookfood warehouses is the phoniest product line of them all.
Oh, and that photo that led off this commentary? That is a promotion from a category of bookfood called ‘Women’s Military Fiction’, which is a combo of Romance, pseudo Feminism, and Pentagon Pro-war propaganda? Here is Lindsay McKinna’s website promo comments about her bookfood.
‘Lindsay McKenna (A.K.A. Eileen Nauman) is the best-selling author of Valkyrie and 75 fiction books in the last 20 years. Known as the “Top Gun of Women’s Military Fiction,” she created the sub-genre of military adventure/romance and covers a mainstream women’s market having sold over 10 million books worldwide.’
Who needs international literature in American bookstores when there is this sort of crap to sell? That’s why literature by authors from other countries just really is not there anymore. It has been replaced by bookfood spam.
Obama Madonna Sanjaya Brangelina
John McCain might be confusing his rival Barack Obama for a Britney- type celebrity for an obvious reason, his solo moniker. Obama’s name recognition is not just a sound-byte, it’s a single bite. Electoral product Obama makes a spiffy commercial trademark like many star brands before him: Elvis, OJ, Pele, Maradona, Oprah, (Evita, Imelda, Diana…)
Obama also has the extra comfort effect of ending in feminine A.
Obama will bring the single name phenomena to the White House. Is it just the uniqueness of his last name, like Nixon, Eisenhower or Hitler? I think Obama fits in a larger corporate identity trend, where everything needs a logo, usually a single word. It’s a development of ADD limited memory spans isn’t it? Americans focus better on simple single words. Even celebrity couples have to be dubbed into singular contractions: Bennifer, Tomkat, Brangelina.
Not to forget Osama.
Which will make the prettiest Barbie Doll?
Michelle versus Cindy! Which will make the prettiest Barbie Doll? That’s a tough one, if simply because neither one is standing next to a Ken.
May be that they are standing next to an aging Ken on Cialis, or next to A Ken Look Who’s Coming to Dinner Part Deux? So picking the prettiest Barbie Doll this election doll this year is going to be just a little bit different than in the past.
At least we won’t have Hillary as the Barbie Doll, standing next to her Ken! We just barely missed that fate, thank The Gods! But we must choose a Barbie Doll of some sort, so we won’t get off completely now.
So what do the feminists have to say about this selection-election (erection)? Just kidding on that last -tion, but it rhymed and I had to put it in. So let’s go to alternet to see… The Candidates’ Wives Face Media Sexism
(Quite frankly, I’m surprised to see the feminists put it that way…lol) Media Sexism indeed!
I think that the media is actually doing all of us a service by letting us scrutinize the Barbie Dolls this way. One of the most fun things of all was agogging Laura’s activities during the last 8 years. I loved her book selection and would choose it any day over Oprah’s! She has been kind of a soft and sexy Bush family Barbie.
It’s not like the media is promoting pornography by having us all check out Michelle and Cindy closely. It’s not molesting a child or anything. Michelle and Cindy are not sad (female) victims of an old fashioned Mormon cult, or the like. They have functioning minds of their own. They’re talking dolls!
So I haven’t made up my mind yet. I may wait until the day of the election before finally deciding which one of the two will make the prettiest Barbie Doll for me. They’re both cute! Though I’m leaning and a tilting a little towards Candy Cane!
Neo-pregnant women
Controversy across the internet reigns, as Americans discuss whether it was a man or woman who got pregnant recently? As we know, the media has an incredible power to confuse us, and we have been titillated with the story of the supposed ‘first pregnant man’. Is he, or isn’t she?
Actually, I think that women that have kept their womb (I always liked that word!) intact while growing a beard and biceps DO MAKE the best mothers in America. I am hoping that this trend of the neo-pregnant women continues, so that instead of books that read, ‘I have two mommies’ or ‘Living with my two Dads’ we can begin to see published more interesting literature. Books like, ‘Who’s in bed with my mom if my mom isn’t?’ and ‘Why won’t the men open doors for my Mom?’ ‘Mom is at the tittie bar’, etc.
Maybe Oprah can discuss this some? Or Doctor Phil?
Greg Mortenson’s own cup of tea
In his own words, Greg Mortenson is quite a bit more revealing about his motives in Pakistan. Pax Americana is definitely a subtlety lost on him.
This map is from the Central Asia Institute‘s own brochure. It shows the parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Greg Mortenson’s CAI has helped finance community building projects. I thought the shaded area formed an interesting buffer zone along the border to… CHINA! Is that region of greater interest peacewise than the war-torn borders facing Afghanistan or India?!
The current Independent features a cover story on Mortensen, to promote his Jan 15 Colorado College appearance. It turns out he’s as inarticulate as his dictation of Three Cups of Tea suggests. Here’s how Mortenson regards his unwitting Islamic accomplices:
…we bring in mullahs who support girls’ education. We have two ex-Taliban who are now teaching in our girls’ schools and have become some of our biggest proponents. It’s somewhat similar to an ex-smoker or an alcoholic who has changed and becomes very against smoking or drinking.
Here Mortenson describes how his schools convince Muslim communities to enroll their girls:
We even use good old-fashioned Western capitalism. We go and tell a mullah: If I want to marry a girl in your village, how many goats do I owe you? He might say five goats. If she has a fifth-grade education, how many goats would I then have to pay you? And the answer would probably be 15 to 20 goats. A goat is usually $30 to $40 each.
And then we tell the mullah: If all the girls are educated, just think of how much more wealth you’d have. Then you can see his eyes get bigger.
At least Mortenson is up front about the Capitalist invasion for which he plays scout. Evidently the untapped region’s girls are for sale, and once educated they’ll have value-added for mercantilism.
American society tends to glorify education for its own sake. What “education” is CAI providing to the Muslims exactly? Do CAI’s texts teach that secular culture is intent on the eradication of spiritual culture? Is the CAI curriculum simply favoring western indoctrination over an Islamist counterpart? I’ll let Mortenson show his hand:
perhaps the most controversial, is our Islamic studies for about two or three hours every week. It’s very tempered, and we include in that learning the differences between Sunni and Shia. We’ve also added what you might call religion studies, or learning about different faiths or religion.
In a monotheistic society you need that like emperor penguins need tap dancing lessons. Imagine the uproar if we tried to teach New Life Church kids that the faith of their parents was only one extreme of many! A good idea no doubt, but unlikely to provoke a peaceful reaction.
POSTSCRIPT
Our junior high student came home yesterday with three promotional pieces about Three Cups of Tea in advance of Mortenson making an appearance at her school. Do you wonder how he’s getting such press? One of the pamphlets instructs the children about how they can “Help Three Cups of Tea (3CT) surge:” (My emphasis, their slip of the forked tongue)
1. Recommend 3CT to at least one person or place: family, friend, colleague, book club, professor and teacher, student, and places of worship. It also makes a great gift! (You’ve got to be kidding me! 3CT practically screams you’re illiterate.)
2. Visit 3CT website…
3. Recommend 3CT for ‘One Book – One Read’ at http://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/one-book.html (please don’t).
4. Recommend 3CT as a University or college-wide… read http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070607/7summer.htm (YGTBFKM)
5. Ask bookstores without 3CT to stock the book, especially airport bookstores. (?)
6. Send 3CT with a personal note to your Senators and/or Representatives (US legislators, why?)
7. Write a ‘letter editor’ [sic] to suggest 3CT and to support education and literacy… to promote peace, economic development and prosperity. (Emphasis mine. Co-opting Muslim girls for Capitalism promotes peace how?)
8. Ask magazines, newspapers, or radio station [sic] to review 3CT (they suggest sending a copy)
9. Learn about the power of girls’ education… in What Works in Girls Education (by Neocon think tank author Barbara Hertz)
10. Learn about grassroots book promotion…
11. Suggest 3CT to Oprah: http://www.oprah.com/email/reach/email_showideas.jhtml
12. Suggest 3CT to C-Span 202-737-0580.
13. Write a book review on Amazon.com, bn.com… (No need, it’s getting slammed! Too bad my Junior High principle isn’t getting a clue. Are our teachers illiterate too?)
14. Start Pennies For Peace in your school, library, or place of worship… http://www.penniesforpeace.org
Billions for war, but apparently we need only pennies for peace.
Hopefully 3CT’s proceeds are going toward peace. (Marie reports their financials say it’s “up to 7%,” so hey, they do mean single-cent figures!) Perhaps Mortenson can earmark some of the Coins for Cultural Sensitivity.
POST-POSTSCRIPT
The Amazon reviews are uproarious! But 3CT trolls are loading the funniest with bad marks where it asks Do you find this review helpful, so you’ll have to look fast. I’ll reprint a couple below.
By the way, Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… was originally released as Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations. It wasn’t selling the mission?
I’ll work up my own slipcover for Mortenson’s speaking engagement, with help from the comments below. Hopefully he’ll be good-natured enough to sign it:
Three Cups of Tedium: One Man’s Mission to be a Dhimmi
-A Condescending Westerner who attempt to “educate” Muslims.
(This is part 2 of 3 pieces: a review of the 3CT book, the promotion around the book tour, and Mortenson’s public appearance.)
Oprah’s doc busted!
Sometimes US fantasy world just gets too funny and it’s worthy for a good laugh. Such is the case with Doctor Who… I mean ‘Doctor Phil’ and his intervention to supposedly save Britney Spears from herself.
He showed up at her hotel room after she got the word of the judge ruling against her and that she was subsequently losing custody of her kids to her ex! I guess this dimwit thought he was there to perform an exorcism, or some Catholic ritual of that sort?
Who knows, but this brilliant pontiff on all matters psych seems to need a psych GPS device himself to stay out of hysterically funny situations. Oprah’s doc is now busted by Britney’s mom in fact! Truth is funnier than soap opera it seems…
Next you know, ‘Phil’ will be intervening to save the Bush administration from itself! Imagine if he had shown up at the hotel after Dick Cheney had plugged his friend down in South Texas? Now that would have been rich!
Oopsssss….! There is breaking news on the Spanish language channels… Britney Spears has retreated to Rosarito, Mexico 25 miles or so south of Tijuana for ‘vacation’! What a great choice! The Mexican federal government just flew in troops to take the police over ther because they were being run by narcotic traffickers! How restful it will be for her there amongst the festivities then!
Maybe she can do some charity work or something until she gets herself back together? Either way, at least she will be safe from Dr. Phil.
The Early Warriors in the Fight for Racial Equality
Since Martin Luther King Day is coming up shortly, it behooves us to post some material about who really got the Civil Rights Movement moving in the beginning. It wasn’t just tie wearing preachers spouting something vaguely connected to Jesus’s teachings that made this a Movement that had to be dealt with by America’s ruling White elites.
Today, it has gotten even worse. MLK has been turned into a lifeless corporate icon, and today’s supposed civil rights heroes are pretended to be people like Condi Rice, Barack Obama, and General Colin Powell!
Open the most wretched media rags (The Gazette? lol…etc.) and you will see hacks like Thomas Sowell promoted endlessly with photo of his Black face prominently displayed over his columns. And Oprah brings us out to the ‘Far Left’ of these corporate media sponsored ‘rights warriors’! Judge Joe Hill the ‘Center’.
In reality, even the Black Congressional Congress has lost any punch they once had. They have been mainly neutered by the Democratic Party power establishment. So where did the radicals come from that made things happen in the past? Some were Christian inspired radicals, some were Muslim inspired, and many were inspired by ‘The Reds’.
See the published New York Times review of
DEFYING DIXIE
The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950
By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
Laura Bush’s ‘Take a Child to the Libary to Read’ program
The corporate media does such a snow job on us, that most Americans actually seem to buy deep into the image making that is pushed off onto us. Dubya the Clown sez, No Child Left Behind’ and we take that crap seriously, all due to the media dope we are brainwashed with so constantly. Dorothy, I’ve fallen to the ground amongst the poppies.
And how ’bout Laura’s Oprah-style booklists? They sold us on Reading, Righting, and Rithmatick, haven’t they? Such people people they are! Helping the little kids along…. to learn how to read. So let’s take a trip to the libary, shall we not? Let’s go to Salt Lake City’s public library with Chip Ward! Might be good to take some pepper spray along? What do you think?
The new book club at the Colorado Springs Justice and Peace Center
I did a quick google and came across probably a good 15 book clubs in the Colorado Springs area. That is a surprise to me, since I, like many, only think book clubs when I think Oprah Winfrey Show.
I always thought that at least this was one good thing Oprah actually was doing, trying to interest people in reading some again. Lord knows they need to read a little bit more in the US, as most everywhere else, too. So when the peace group PPJPC decided to start one, I thought it a good idea, though the selection of Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, seemed to me at first to be an unfortunate choice. I was mistaken.
I almost didn’t go since I didn’t want to waste my money on Jimmy Carter’s nonsense, but then I thought well why the hell not go and read some of the book in the bookstore instead of buying it? I am glad I did, because I thought our discussions of this book on the three different nights the club has been going were all quite interesting. What was great was the way Steve Saint, organizer of the club, allowed for everyone to participate so well. This was quite a contrast to how much of the affairs at the PPJPC ‘teach’ and preach at people more than allow everyone to give their input.
More than Jimmy Carter’s writings, the discussion was more about the Middle East itself and the current political situation in Israel/ Palestine. We need more opportunities where people can just talk to each other about current political issues in a relaxed manner, and this is what I think will make the PPJPC book club a lot different than the other myriad book clubs around town.
Next book up for discussion is not yet determined, but it will probably provoke a good political discussion, too. I would recommend on checking it out, though the next meeting might well be 2 weeks from now, on Monday’s more than likely. It’s a good opportunity to just be able to sit around and talk, without having to drink or hustle. All ages can attend, and that’s part of what made the Carter Apartheid book discussion so interesting.
Keep up the good work, PPJPC, and I hope that when we get a working dvd player, that the political film club can get itself going, too. Got an old unused one around the house? Then think about donating it and watching some movies at the Justice and Peace Center with others. What movie would you like to see? What book would you like to discuss? I voted for ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ next. It’s short and a classic.
Princess Diana and the end of civility
The Queen is the first film to be made about the woman who has presided over England for half a century. The story deals with the days following Princess Di’s fatal crash in 1997 and the personal challenge her death might have posed for the monarchy’s public relations. The same period saw Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ascendancy to power. The story gives Blair credit, where the queen appeared to faulter, for recognizing Diana as being the “People’s Princess.” And then some.
Asked about his fawning depiction of Tony Blair as man of the hour, director Stephen Frears thought it “a mark of my incredible maturity” to cast Blair in the light of his glory days, this at a time when Blair and his government have fallen irrecoverably, adding that “it’s preposterous that he’s not in jail.” In the interview Frears also makes light of whether Queen Elizabeth II is possibly really as bright as her character portrayed by Hellen Mirren. The Queen celebrates the resolve of royal blood facing a crisis. Elizabeth is both humanized and lionized, by sticking to the stiff upper lip “the world expects of us.” Frears interweaves real news footage of celebrities and the flowers flooding the Buckingham Palace gates, counting the days from Lady Di’s death to the climax when the queen finally makes her long delayed statement.
That’s when Frears lies. He lays the behind the scenes personal anguish which might have explained the dishonor the royals paid to Diana, leading to the Queen’s famous address, but then rewrites the ending. As if Mighty Casey, his vainglorious ambitions thwarted in the minor leagues, stays true to his character that day in Mudville, and now because we can all feel a little sympathy for the self-centered fella, he swings and DOES NOT strike out!!
We all were there when Queen Elizabeth took to the microphone, and no close-ups of a fictional Tony Blair’s tearing eyes, proud of his stalwart sovereign, are going to recast the disgraceful blue-blooded reaction for what it was.
And what of lingering accusations of the royal family being behind Diana’s death? What of the rape tape which Diana posited with a servant for safe-keeping which tells, it’s conjectured because the British press are forbidden to tell us, of Prince Charles interrupted sodomizing a valet. What of Lady Diana being, not even arguably, by the power of her personality, the most powerful woman in the world? But unlike Oprah or Martha Stewart, Diana was a loose cannon championing the cause of AIDs in Africa, and the fight to ban land mines, both subjects the powers that be, certainly in America, did/do not want highlighted.
The Queen‘s smartest character, Tony Blair’s advisor who supposedly coins the term People’s Princess is let to murmur early on, “It wasn’t the press that killed her.” But the subject is dropped there. Instead Blair and his crew seize upon Diana’s death like Mayor Giuliani to 9/11, being seen offering bedside comfort to a traumatized populace, and reaping the accolades. Except director Frears offers nothing behind such scenes. Blair is shown as the earnest surrogate, standing in for his monarch until she can regrasp the helm.
With the ensuing years having shown us Blair’s true colors, what do you think was the more likely scenario? A self-effacing Danny Kaye Pauper Prince or a Rudy Giuliani? I find Frears’ characterization of Blair even more disingenuous, showing Tony living in a modest flat strewn with children’s messes, taking the dinner plates to do the “washing up,” and keeping watch on world events on a television with a Nintendo game atop it. This coming from a “labor” minister who was leading the conservative counter-revolution to restructure the British economy for the elites. Perhaps Frears’ adopted class.
The Queen owes its entire first act to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, the music, the build, the black out of the familiar awful moment, and the protracted montage we needed to absorb the tragedy and understand how it’s changed us.
The great disservice that Stephen Frears does to history, and to all of us because we are still living it, is amplified by the fact that he did get Diana’s death right. Princess Di’s sudden death did change the world, perhaps more than did 9/11. The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was a comeuppance. If the American people did not see it coming, the world did. That such a terrorist act was bound to happen was attested to the fact that the same people had already tried it and at the very same location.
But Diana’s death marked the end of civility, and people felt it. The third world may have been fit to burst under the weight of its post-colonial oppressors, but a great English civility had prevailed since the days of Ghandi. This was a sense that disagreement could be visceral, but apart from the brutality of the unwashed French or the uncouth Americans, a British sense of decency would rule out. Britain, not long ago the Empire, was where we got the rule of law, our rights, and everyone’s concept of a representational parliament.
The circumstances around Diana’s death would present an incredibly interesting lesson in power usurped from the people; Tony Blair’s arrangement with Rupert Murdoch for starters, instead of showing Blair reacting to the newspapers and coaxing his old queen along. The Queen is a marvelous story of two people facing adversity introspectively. Fine, except those personages were at the center of the unification of global corporate power and could not have been idle participants. As if Frears had made a film about the Titanic and chose to focus on the captain’s preoccupation with feng shui.
The 1990s saw a decline in every aspect of benevolent leadership, and I believe the premature death of Lady Diana was the curtain. It was hard those days after her death to imagine a world without her, and indeed events have proved that we were to face the worst. The turn of the century marked the ascendency of the Neocons, the political face of the globalization overlords. It meant corporate overseers with gloves off, Zionist zealotry unabashed, banks with no limits on their usury, and the world media watchdogs in the hands of the wolves.
The ruling few have their hands bloody in genocides the world over, endless wars, massacres, slavery, epidemics, poverty, famine and reckless abandonment. Before Diana’s death at least I believe they would have been concerned to wash the blood off.
James Frey wrong guy
I’m crossing my fingers that this James Frey guy gets what’s coming to him. James Frey has written a best-selling memoir called A MILLION LITTLE PIECES and thanks entirely to Oprah’s shrewd endorsement, has become an inspiration for a suburban nation in the grip of a drug addiction epidemic. The trouble is that Mr. Frey’s memoir has been largely invented. THE SMOKING GUN went looking for Frey’s police records, as is their thing, and found Vanilla Ice basically.
Oprah holds that her man Frey is still a beacon of light of a bad boy redeemed. I would maintain he is not.
Frey may have thought that he’d covered his bases. He killed off every co-conspirator in his book, he had his real police records, or lack thereof, expunged, and he’s claiming artistic license for whatever discrepancy may be left. Now in spite of what TSG has brought to light, Frey continues to defend his criminal street cred. This is not someone who has redeemed himself.
I don’t have any trouble with the fact that he has slandered real people. While Frey was in reality let off lightly for a drinking offense, he maintains those cops beat him mercilessly à la King, and later one of the cops contracted Frey’s cell mate to deliver a further beating. (Frey was never jailed.)
I don’t care if he’s traded on the memory of a small Michigan town’s high profile teenager-train-wreck tragedy, insinuating himself non-grata into several parents’ recollections of painful loss.
I don’t care that he’s taken a vacuous manuscript, rejected 18 times in its previous incarnation as a novel, and parleyed it into a small fortune and himself into a prominent role as recovery guru.
I don’t care that Jame Frey wasn’t the bad-ass he claimed to be, or thinks he remembers.
Except as it relates to Mr. Frey’s recovery from drug addiction.
The detail to which I attach a great deal of significance is Frey’s recovery, which may or may not be true. He says he did it without Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact he belittles them.
Plenty of addicts recover without the assistance of AA or NA, but the greater majority by far need the help of fellow addicts. And tragically, the chief hurdle to bringing addicts into recovery is every last addict’s misconception that they can do it themselves.
So here you have a Mr. Frey who wants to paint himself as the baddest dealer ever, as the most reprobate junkie ever, who hit bottom like no parent should ever hope to see their child hit bottom, and who then got clean, all by his own self, won Oprah’s book club lottery, the end.
If that’s true, congratulations to him. If it’s not true, what kind of hope is James Frey offering the millions of suffering parents and addicts? That they should count on such unlikely odds as winning the lottery?
NA is not for everyone, but it’s nothing to avoid in any case. Every day millions of Americans get together in ad hoc meetings to fight and claw their way out of addiction. Some need the comfort of believing in a “higher power,” some don’t. Whatever. There’s no administrative cost, there’s no hidden agenda, there’s no proselytizing. The meetings are just people who share a common problem, helping each other to overcome.
Middle America is being overtaken by the drug problems that have long plagued the urban poor. Oprah’s handlers may have been urging her to find a way to address the addiction epidemic and help her audience to navigate the dangerous waters. I hope she has the wisdom to admit she may have chosen the wrong guide.