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July
9, 2003
David
Krieger and Angela McCracken
10 Myths About Nuclear Weapons
Gary Leupp
"Pacifist" Japan and the Occupation of Iraq
July
8, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Bully on the Bench: the Pathological
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Alan
Maass
Nights of Fire and Rage in Benton Harbor
Chris
Floyd
Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag
Linda
S. Heard
America's Kangaroo Justice
Brian
Cloughley
They Tell Lies to Nodders
Charles
Sullivan
Bush the Christian?
Saul
Landau
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age
Website
of the Day
Occupation Watch
July
7, 2003
William
Blum
The Anti-Empire Report
Harvey
Wasserman
The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head
Ramzy
Baroud
Peace for All the Wrong Reasons
Simon
Jones
What Progressives Should Think About
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Lesley
McCulloch
Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh
Uri
Avnery
The Draw
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July
4 / 6, 2003
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?
Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
and Neglect
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture
Standard
Schaefer
Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004
Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today
Elaine
Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth
Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?
Wayne
Madsen
A Sad Independence Day
John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
Jim
Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim
David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
Adam
Engel
Queer as Grass
Poets'
Basement
Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
The Lipstick Librarian
July
3, 2003
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Meaning of Gettysburg
Thomas
W. Croft
There Was a Reason They Called It the Casino Economy
David
Lindorff
Outlawing Subversives: Hong Kong
and the US
John
Chuckman
Lessons from the American Revolution
Jackson
Thoreau
New Far-Right Scheme: Impeach Supreme Court Justices
Stan
Goff
"Bring 'Em On?": a Former
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to Attack US Troops
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July 2, 2003
Diane
Christian
Good Killing and Bad Killing
Richard
Falk
After Iraq, Does UN War Prevention Have a Future?
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
Justin
Podur
Uribe's Onslaught Across Colombia
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
and the Sodomy Cops
Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
of Progressive Politics in America
Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
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June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
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Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
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Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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July
9, 2003
They Do Their Job
& You Don't See the Mess
The
Worst Kind of Lie
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
A few years sometimes make a big difference in
human affairs. A few years ago an American President was put
through the 18th century ordeal of impeachment, a vast, expensively-staged
comic opera of white manes waving and grave baritones intoning,
over a dribble on a dress and the lie he told to save himself
embarrassment. Today we have a President who has hurled the world
into two dirty, pointless wars after what undoubtedly qualifies
as the longest sequence of public lies ever uttered in a free
society, and yet in his homeland he remains popular and is collecting
enough campaign cash to rival the Swiss bank balances of the
Russian Mafia.
Leaders have always lied in times of
war and when maneuvering for advantage in international affairs,
American presidents, despite puffed-up claims to different moral
standards, no less so than others. Usually the lies they tell
are not understood until years later. The lies then often seem
to become small, unimportant details in a history of big events.
But Bush has lied daily, doing it so awkwardly at times that
you might think everyone is aware of it, and it seems to make
no difference to his political standing.
What will Bush do with all the cash he
is hoarding for the next campaign? He will use it to practice
the worst lying possible in a democratic society, lying that
subverts the intent of democracy, replacing meaningful debate
by the suggestions, half-truths, and staged images of advertising
and marketing. Perhaps, I should correct that to the second-worst
lying possible in a democratic society, for Bush, of course,
entered office with the worst lying, claiming to have won an
election he lost by any sensible reckoning.
Why are Americans not distressed at this?
Because they live in an intense field, an electromagnetic haze,
of marketing, advertising, and commercial propaganda twenty-four
hours a day. Americans are so saturated with this stuff that
they regard it as normal communication.
But it is not normal. It is deliberate
and manipulative. At its very best, advertising is only ever
half truth, telling a few favorable aspects of something that
deserves greater scrutiny. At its worst, it is simply artful
fraud and deception. But in no case is it truth or, perhaps better
put since truth is a large and difficult idea, honest communication.
Advertising, like its fraternal twin, propaganda, always has
a purpose other than helping you understand something. This other
purpose is its raison d'etre. Advertising wants to separate you
from your money or, in the case of politics, from your vote.
I've often chuckled over the way Americans
used to get so upset over the idea of Communist propaganda. While
Americans decried that propaganda, they themselves lived in a
dense fog of advertising and propaganda. Only the American stuff
isn't quite so obvious as the ponderous old Soviet stuff, at
least to anyone immersed in it. It is far more artful and effective.
That friendly well-known face on TV is speaking to me, being
a friend to me in my isolation and loneliness, cares about me,
why he's even recommending something good for me. What a nice
man.
In America, wave on wave of these smiling
frauds sell floor mops, breath mints, female hygiene, Christ,
cancer treatment, hamburgers, and presidential candidates.
An interesting story from Maine, a place
that prides itself on tourist billboards as having "Life
the way it should be," shows, in another sphere of life,
how people, responding to the intense environment of advertising
and marketing, sometimes act with no examination of their actions.
An otherwise very nice person was vigorously preaching one day
some years ago to an associate at work about his not using a
paper-recycling container in his office, an oversight that may
have involved a few dozen sheets of paper in a week.
Now this "environmentally-concerned"
preacher with her spouse had just built a large, brand-new house,
a five-bedroom monster for two people with no children. And where
did they build it? On the fringes of a suburban area that was
already suffering from exactly the kind of hopeless sprawl afflicting
every other part of the United States where life is not advertised
as being "the way it should be." They built on a one-acre
site along a tiny road on the edge of a forest. And how were
they getting to work? Why, each drove his and her own gasoline-wasting,
road-wasting, polluting SUV.
An acre of land, of course, required
a large, polluting rider-mower just to keep the grass clipped.
Their long driveway required lots of private plowing in the winter.
The small road leading to it required the sprawled-out town to
plow regularly for the benefit of a fairly small number of people.
So too for garbage pick-up, and indeed for every other public
service. And five bedrooms use a lot of heating oil and a lot
of air-conditioning. If these people ever do have children, they
will require bus service along thinly-populated roads.
But in their minds they are doing nothing
irresponsible. It is that fellow at work who refuses to use a
re-cycling box that is irresponsible. Of course the amount of
environmental stress and strain caused by their choices is at
least a hundred thousand times greater than that caused by the
man without the box, but no real analysis takes place here. They
are immersed in suggestions of their lifestyle having an almost
quasi-sacred character to it, being fulfillment of that unexamined
advertising slogan, "the American dream," and they
equally are immersed in suggestions that things like recycling
boxes in every office are very good things indeed.
I said this example was from another
sphere of life, but really it isn't. The energy to do all the
things necessary to support their sprawl-lifestyle, multiplied
by tens of millions of other Americans just like them, has to
come from somewhere. Like Iraq or Iran or Saudi Arabia. Pick
your troubled part of the world and add the cost of America's
belligerent policies to keep it in line. But Americans rarely
see the results of these abhorrent policies, the mutilated children,
for instance, of Iraq.
And the immense pollution generated by
this lifestyle has to go somewhere, but who cares just so long
as you don't see it piled up on your front lawn? It all gets
taken away, to dumps, somewhere. And the smoke from the power
generators? Well, they don't build those in areas like this.
The green-house gases from burning all that gasoline and fuel
oil and diesel truck fuel? The wind takes it off somewhere. The
road salt. The insecticide. The weed killer. Well, they do their
job and you don't see the mess.
And that is the answer that explains
America's system of paid political lies: it does its job and
you don't see the mess, at least if you are not looking, and
most Americans aren't looking.
John Chuckman
lives in Canada. He can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?
Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
and Neglect
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture
Standard
Schaefer
Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004
Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today
Elaine
Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth
Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?
Wayne
Madsen
A Sad Independence Day
John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
Jim
Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim
David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
Adam
Engel
Queer as Grass
Poets'
Basement
Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
The Lipstick Librarian
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