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June
17, 2003
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
Entertainment Media 2003
Wayne Madsen
Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
June
16, 2003
Frida
Berrigan
Death in Aceh: US Weapon Aid the
Repression
Publius
Candidate Dem and Citizen Green
Tarif
Abboushi
Roadmap or Roadkill?
Rep. John
Conyers
Bush's Deceptions about Iraq Threaten Democracy at Home
Julian
Samuel
A Review of Pilger's The New Rulers of the World
Uri
Avnery
The Children of Death
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies,
Part 2
June
14 / 15, 2003
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pryor Unrestraint: Killer Bill Pryor's
Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
David Lindorff
Rumsfeld v. Belgium
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Lee Sustar
US Tax System: Rigged for the Rich
Ben
Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
William
S. Lind
Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
Gila Svirsky
A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
Chris Floyd
Metaphysics as a Guide to Murder
Noah
Leavitt
Peru as Our Crystal Ball?
Yves Engler
and Bianca Mugyenyi
The G8 and Africa
Dr.
Gerry Lower
Dear Rudy, Let's Get Those Damned Liberals
Ted Dace
A Review of Kovel's The Enemy of Nature
Adam
Engel
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Greeder, Albert, and O'Hayer
Website
of the Weekend
AEI: Starts Wars; Creates
Poverty
June
13, 2003
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Counting Bush's
Lies, part 2
June
11, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Attack of the Hog Killers: Why the
Generals Hate the A-10
Elaine
Cassel
Meet Michael Chertoff: Ashcroft's
Top Gremlin
David Lindorff
The Republican Drive to Eliminate Overtime Pay
Tom
Gorman
Greens, the Antiwar Movement and 2004
Alfredo
Castro
Colombia: The Most Dangerous Place
on Earth for Trade Unionists
Nnimo
Bassey and Lawrence Bohlen
Bush Must Stop Telling Us What to
Eat!
Julie Hilden
Spike Lee v. Spike TV
CounterPunch
Wire
Blair Bros. Change Jobs!
Eric
Hobsbawm
The Empire Expands, Wider and Still
Wider
Steve
Perry
DHS: As Big
a Planning Snafu as Iraq?
June
10, 2003
Benjamin
Shepard
A Season in the Anti-War Movement
Chris
Floyd
Bush Family Lies About Iraq and Nazi
Germany
Wayne
Madsen
Weaponsgate
Jason Leopold
Powell's Denials Ring Hollow
Richard
Lichtman
Whining, Whimpering Leftists Confront the Logic of American World
Domination
Ray
Close
A CIA Analyst on Why the Lies About
WMD Matter
Hammond
Guthrie
Banking on Saddam?
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/10
June
9, 2003
Alex
Coolman
Male Rape in US Prisons
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft is Coming!
Lee
Sustar
Is Iran Next?
Agustin
Velloso
Equatorial Guinea: Few Rich, Many
Poor
Gila
Svirsky
Some Lives Are Worth Less Than Others
Dr. Gerry
Lower
Human Worth in Bush's America
Michael
S. Ladah
A True Liberation
Ishmael Reed
Iraqi Slaughter, Mayhem and Plunder
Steve
Perry
How to Beat Bush, part 1
June
7 / 8, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Terrible Truth
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species
Joanne
Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
Steven
Sherman
A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
Shahid Alam
Pauperizing the Periphery
Amelia
Peltz
If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
Binoy Kampmark
Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea
Ben
Tripp
A Fish Story
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Where is the Outrage?
Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
June
6, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Steve
Perry
Greens and
Moore in 04? No
June
5, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear
Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina
Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done
Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over
Paul
Dean
How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush
Gary Leupp
When Spooks Speak Out
Website
of the Day
Evidence in Black and White?
Hot Stories
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
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
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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June
18, 2003
A Reply to Publius
Greens,
Dems and 2004
By JON BROWN
Friend Gaius Publius,
I send you greetings from across the
wine-dark web. As ever I welcomed the arrival of your epistle
in CounterPunch, this time called "Candidate
Dem and Citizen Green". Because by now you've moved
on to other pastures, I'll remind you that in that chronicle,
you spoke about the curious outcome of a poll conducted by Steve
Perry, proconsul
of the site Bush Wars, which you sought to understand
through a rehearsal of not yet ancient history. I join you there,
in spirit, across the vasty depths of time etc.
The scene you lay out is familiar from
Chomsky and Vidal. I too agree with the drawing of its contours.
Crudely, the U.S. consensus, broadly understood as the inertial
sway of longstanding military, economic, and ideological commitments,
render the person and even party of the president almost meaningless.
It's a structuralist view Foucault would approve of-the discourse
speaks even the exceptional man.
I know. Chomsky and Vidal would say I
misrepresent them, and rightly so, if for no other reason than
the pessimism and passivity it implies. After all, if people
make no difference, as in the dusty idea of historical inevitability
that once caused oohs and ahhs on the runways of European Marxism,
why bother? Yet both go on speaking as if their actions do matter.
So let's assume the choice we make isn't wholly irrelevant. Then
which will it be, discussion or disguise?
To answer that I need clarification,
and to get it, let me characterize what you lay out by implicit
tropes I think I perceive in the piece. Disguise entails a few
victories amid defeats in a maddeningly drawn-out process, with
mostly tacit acceptance of U.S. foreign policy and possibly even
movement away from progressive domestic goals. Here, the world
goes on, leadenly, dully, oppressively, beating down the dreams
of significance.
Discussion, because of its extremism,
more effectively brings out, as a character from Monty Python
might say, the violence inherent in the system. Because of that,
it may promise emotionally satisfying leaps through explosive
movement rather than incremental adjustment. In this story the
plot takes a decisive turn when the dormant conscience of a culture
awakens when confronted with its own depravity. (Cut to Tiresias
and Oedipus.)
No wonder discussion looks better. It's
dramatic, cataclysmic, big, whereas disguise is just one petty
episode after another, with no hope of release. The question
is, which is likelier?
The unconscious of language may lend
us a figurative hand. The word "progressive" presumably
comes from the idea of progress, advance toward a more perfect
union, the realization of better standards of justice, peace,
and pleasure. Also inescapable, like an uncanny overtone or the
return of the repressed (if I may allow a nod to a properly repressed
Freudian magic act), is the notion of the gradual, the shaded,
the-progressive. To which the only sensible pomo American reaction
is: quel drag! That's not rock-and-roll. That's work. That's
the daily grind. That's accepting a limited capacity to affect
the badness of a bad old world.
At this juncture, please imagine the
tune with the lyric "Do you believe in miracles?" That's
because behind each so-called rational judgment a story lurks,
with disguise and difference belonging to different genres, even
centuries (diguise/18th/picaresque; difference/19th/romance),
though we can leave that as a suggestive parallel rather than
an academic's deus ex verba. What we can say, as a would-be script
doctor, is that disguise is all middle without an ending, while
difference is boffo box office, especially with the right special
effects, as long as we fade out before the hero must pull out
the broom and shovel to clean up the tremendous mass of excrement
left behind after all that excitement.
Either way, they're stories, and sooner
or later we're back in the harsh sunlight, in a world that often
as not serves shit for breakfast (though after a while it sort
of tastes like chicken). Which would I pick? That would be telling.
And like you, I decline to loosen that last veil occluding an
august mystery. And then there are the vicissitudes: I'm awfully
moody, and all literature is finally occasional, no? Plus my
agent would never forgive me. The real money is in the sequels.
Semper parodus,
J. Alfred Don Quixote Rasselas Brown
J.A.D.Q.R. Brown
can be reached at: dogen@mindspring.com
Today's Features
Dr.
Susan Block
Sex, Lies and WMDs
Elaine
Cassel
Scalia, the Rumsfeld of the Supremes
Roger Burbach
Brazil Under Lula
Dan
Bacher
The WTO's War on Salmon
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
Entertainment Media 2003
Nuclear
Age Peace Foundation
The Challenge of Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century
Wayne Madsen
Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
Larry
Kearney
Starlight
Steve
Perry
The Bush Administration
Lies Marathon, Day 3
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Weekend Edition Features
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pryor Unrestraint: Killer Bill Pryor's
Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
David Lindorff
Rumsfeld v. Belgium
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Lee Sustar
US Tax System: Rigged for the Rich
Ben
Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
William
S. Lind
Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
Gila Svirsky
A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
Chris Floyd
Metaphysics as a Guide to Murder
Noah
Leavitt
Peru as Our Crystal Ball?
Yves Engler
and Bianca Mugyenyi
The G8 and Africa
Dr.
Gerry Lower
Dear Rudy, Let's Get Those Damned Liberals
Ted Dace
A Review of Kovel's The Enemy of Nature
Adam
Engel
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Greeder, Albert, and O'Hayer
Website
of the Weekend
AEI: Starts Wars; Creates
Poverty
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