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Today's
Stories
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
November
14 / 23, 2003
A DC Lefty in King
George's Court
A Conversation in Medieval
America with Sam Smith
By ADAM ENGEL
ENGEL:
We're constantly bombarded by Mainstream Media Polls that portray
"The American People" as idiots. Each time I hear or
read about one of those polls in which the "American People"
(whoever or wherever they are) belie their almost super-human
capacity for ignorance, I say to myself, "why bother?"
Obviously, as the title of your book, "Why Bother? Getting
a Life in a Locked Down Land," indicates, I'm not the only
one thinking this.
Until recently, I hadn't bothered to
ask myself whether the polls themselves are a complete hoax,
especially the claim that 69 of the American people allegedly
believe Saddam was responsible for 9/11 (lampooned by Gary Trudeau
in "Doonesbury" a few weeks ago). If, even after Bush
himself made the (impeachable?) admission that there is no connection
between Saddam and 9/11 (and apparently no connection between
Bin Laden and 9/11 for all we hear about Ossama in the Mainstream
news and White House press conferences), those who believe in
such a connection deserve whatever verbal abuse comes their way.
But again, what if those numbers are
completely false? It would certainly be helpful to the Administration
to have an "American People" so docile and bone-headed
that they will believe and support the Government, "regardless
of the facts."
Where do these polls come from? Who are
the "American People" they're polling? I don't think
I've ever met one of these "American People," but if
I could locate one I'd surely introduce myself. Why should these
polls be taken any more seriously than the rest of the Corporate
Media's lies?
SMITH:
Polls are the standardized test used by the media to determine
how well we have learned what it has taught us.
The problem is not in the polls, which
tend to be quite accurate. For example, three quarters of the
major polling firms came within three points in calling the 2000
election. In state races, the major firms also came within three
or four points.
The problem is with what is being measured,
namely the effects of living in a semio-sphere of erroneous,
deliberately false, or badly distorted information. For example,
in the lead-up to the Iraqi invasion, the TV channels were inundated
with 'military experts,' despite the fact that making peace requires
considerably more expertise than making war. But absent comparable
time for 'peace experts,' one can't expect the public to understand
the arguments or even that there are any.
And it's not just a liberal vs. progressive
matter. For example, our schools long ago decided that teaching
students how to drive, or why they should avoid a drug far milder
than the vodka their principal drinks each evening was more important
than teaching history, the Constitution, or contemporary affairs.
For this we have paid mightily.
Further, we are living in quasi-revival
of the middle ages in which social behavior and choices are governed
by mythology rather than rationality--only with the arbiter being
cable television rather than religion. The truth no longer seems
to set us free; it just makes us catatonic. Far easier to pretend
we're living in a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead
role.
ENGEL:
I still remember last year's "open discussion" between
you and Alexander Cockburn regarding the "grass roots left"
and the "Academic left." You've been around as a journalist/lecturer,
you've seen much of America. I don't really know my own country
outside of New York-Boston-LA etc. I know what people are thinking
in the Universities, but not in their neighborhoods. Is there
a leftist or at least left-leaning movement in this country?
The mainstream media shows only Democrats and Republicans, occasionally
Greens. Is there a "movement" growing in America? I
thought the anti-war demonstrations last year in NYC were surprisingly
large.
SMITH:
I don't think there is a left movement of any great strength
in the country. But there are pieces of it. And there are all
sorts of opportunities for crossover politics on issues such
as civil liberties. A lot of people get nervous about that, but
I tell them that if you can find a gun-toting, anti-abortion
nun who wants to save your forest with you, put her on the committee.
Worry about the other stuff later.
I am the third of six kids, so it comes
naturally to me to be around people who disagree with me. You
learn to build your coalitions one issue at time and they may
not all look the same. I got started in activist politics in
part by being involved in a local anti-freeway movement. We kept
Washington DC from looking like LA. The day I knew we were going
to win was when I went to a rally and the two main speakers were
Grovesnor Chapman from the all white Georgetown Citizens association
and Reginald Booker, head of a group called Niggers Incorporated.
Part of the secret of politics is to put people together whom
the establishment wants to have fighting with each other. It's
what the white establishment did in the south with rural whites
and rural blacks: convinced them they were enemies. One of the
reasons Huey Long was considered so dangerous was because he
started to break up that myth.
ENGEL:
Well it would be nice to "win a game" once in a while,
or even score a goal. It seems like the more the right demands,
the more it gets, and there's no real way to stop this. Even
"influential" people and organizations known to the
progressive community (is there a progressive community?) are
relatively powerless and unknown among the "other"
99 percent of Americans.
SMITH:
Unfortunately, many liberals and progressives fall into the trap
the conservatives have set--which is to argue more about religious
and social issues, which should be individual decisions, than
political and economic ones, which should be collective choices
The trick is not to win the argument on religious grounds but
to change the grounds of the argument.
One concept that helps in this is that
of reciprocal liberty, which is to say that I can't be free unless
you are also free. If you look at an issue like abortion, you
find surprisingly little change in the public split over the
years. Yet both sides have spent extraordinary effort to convinced
the other that they are wrong.
But what if you restate the issue based
on the real problem, which is how can people in favor of and
opposed to abortion live together in America with neither side
causing more than minimal interference in each other's values
and practices? The argument of both sides starts to change.
ENGEL:
This would entail real liberty and democratic values. People
would have to withdraw from "movement" rhetoric (regardless
of the issue) and think for themselves. As you said yourself,
the mainstream media is not interested in promoting independent
thinking. This is related to my earlier question regarding polls.
Are people even capable of independent thought in a society saturated
with either/or Manichean dichotomies promoted by Mainstream Media?
SMITH:
I liked what one of the existentialists said: even the condemned
man has a choice of how he approaches the gallows. We can't choose
our time in history, but we can always choose how we react to
it. Coming out of a Quaker education, I take this somewhat for
granted. One of the reason Quakers have been so useful at critical
times in our history is because they have been willing to repeatedly
and continually fail between those times. A good example is the
first women's conference at Seneca Falls in 1848. Out of 300
persons at the meeting, only one woman lived long enough to vote.
Was it worthwhile going to Seneca Falls anyway?
One of the reasons I have spent my life
in the alternative media is because I think it's a good thing
to do while waiting for something good to happen. And certainly
better than working for the archaic media. The conventional press
rarely does anything useful in helping human evolution or social
transformation. This is why the Washington Post is still bragging
about Watergate, a story that is 30 years old. Nothing much has
happened since.
The really important media in this country
has been the alternative one, starting with Peter Zenger and
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine and moving on to Frederick
Douglass and two thousand different labor newspapers and I.F.
Stone and right on down to Indymedia and Counterpunch.
Another good thing to do in bad times
is to create communities that subvert what is, scorn those who
accept it, and suppose something better. A good model is the
beat culture of the 1950s.
The media could be an enormous help in
this, but unfortunately believes that all of life is a football
game that someone has to win and someone has to lose. The media
is also full of silly or damaging religious myths including the
notion that criticizing Israel will bring back the Holocaust
or that the only Catholics are the Pope and a bunch of pedophiles.
But the non-religious are also non-visible. Ted Koppel doesn't
do a show on their problems. 'Religious tolerance,' doesn't include
tolerance of the skeptic. And there are no national holidays
for doubters.
ENGEL: Personally,
I'm rather put off by organized religion. Having been a 'skeptic'
since the age of ten, I see nothing but trouble emanating from
the "peoples of the book" (Old and New Testaments;
the Koran). Whatever I believe personally, the "Great Religions"
have me down as a Jew, just as the "Two Party System"
has me down as a Democrat. Again, there is a movement away from
individual liberty and conscience. And again I ask you, is this
"really" happening on the scale I'm led to believe
it is, or is it magnified greatly, if not invented, by mainstream
media?
SMITH:
Well, I've argued that what this global crisis needs is a good
Seventh Day Agnostic. If bin Laden were a Unitarian, or Sharon
a secular Jew, or Bush a mushyEpiscopalian, we wouldn't be in
this mess. Faith transformed into certainty and self-righteousness
has been one of humanity's deadliest sins...
On the other hand, as a one-time anthropology
major, religion and its excesses don't surprise me much. And
religious extremism is often the sign of the end of something
rather than the beginning, as with the long nosed God complex
that spread rapidly through American Indian cultures as they
were under near terminal attack by whites. The problem is that
now everyone feels under attack--American, Israeli, Muslim. So
everyone gets to try out their brand of extremism.
Then there is the myth of the non-existence
of the non-religious. In fact, according to a recent Harris poll,
atheists and agnostics amount to about ten percent of the population.
(Other surveys put the figure at close to 15%). Of those that
believe in God, there is a sharp division as to whether the almighty
is a he, a she, a them or it. And only about one third of those
who believe in God bothers to go to services regularly to find
out the answer. This is not the picture of religion one gets
from the media.
On a global basis, the non-religious
fall somewhere between Hindus and Buddhists in numbers. In America,
the non-religious are roughly 2.5 to 3.5 times as common as all
U.S. Jews and Muslims put together, even including the 5 out
of 6 Jews who only go to synagogue a few times a year.
ENGEL:
But isn't self-righteous faith a hallmark of America, from Manifest
Destiny to the Abolitionists, to the McCarthyist "Christian
vs. Communist" vision to today's Bushite Christian Fundamentalists
and Zionist Christians and Jews? Doesn't this separate us from
a good part of the "West" in that (with the exceptions
of German Nazis and Soviet Russians) America whips up popular
outrage by placing foreign and domestic policy in religious terms
(i.e. good versus evil etc.)? The corporate elite may have its
sights on Mid East oil and global hegemony, but the message to
the people, no matter what Bush says, seems to be "Judeo
Christian" America versus Muslim Arabs?
SMITH:
America has had a number of periods of religious excess, sometimes
called the Great Awakenings. Some scholars would say we are presently
in the middle of the fourth one. One of them, Robert William
Fogel describes them this way:
"A cycle begins with a phase of
religious revival, propelled by the tendency of new technological
advances to outpace the human capacity to cope with ethical and
practical complexities that those new technologies entail. The
phase of religious revival is followed by one of rising political
effect and reform, followed by a phase in which the new ethics
and politics of the religious awakening come under increasing
challenge and the political coalition promoted by the awakening
goes into decline. These cycles overlap, the end of one cycle
coinciding with the beginning of the next."
The American Revolution, the abolitionist,
women and labor movements, as well as the New Deal all followed
such religious revivals. I suspect what happens is that people
get tired of waiting for God's miracles and turn back to politics.
In any case, if this construct is correct, cheer up. The best
is yet to come. One good cure for bad religion is good politics.
And good politics start with getting people to think about the
right things. We have, for example, always had fundamentalist
Christians; we just had other names for them--like 'New Deal
Democrats.' That's because the Democratic Party of that era got
people thinking about economic and social issues rather than
religious ones.
ENGEL:
I've had it with the Democrats. In 2000, when I volunteered to
distribute pamphlets for the Nader campaign, simply because I'd
"had it" with the Democrats and Liberalism, I experienced
the same harassment as I did when I opted out of Judaism because
I just simply didn't believe in any sort of anthropomorphic god
and wanted to be left alone. The unrelenting emails from (former)
friends and strangers I'd met in discussion groups, begging me
to "come back" and see the light and what not. The
Democrats, in my opinion, are shameless. They should have been
fighting Bush Inc. tooth and nail from day one. Instead, many
voted for unlimited war powers and the Patriot Act and turned
their backs on the underhanded trashing of Cynthia McKinney.
Now I get newsletters/emails telling me, more or less, that all
of America's troubles began on November, 2000 (why didn't Gore
fight? If it were Nader, he'd STILL be in court demanding a recount)
and if we'd only vote for Dean or Kucinich or (gasp) Clark, the
days of milk and honey would be back by mid-term.
SMITH:
What I tell my Democratic friends is that if they want my vote
they have to treat me at least as nice as a soccer mom or one
of their corporate campaign contributors. How come, I ask, Greens
are the only constituency in history that you think you can convince
by hectoring them? What are you going to do for my vote? I ask.
And they look at me perplexed.
There are a couple of important things
to keep in mind. One is that these phenomena are not fixed in
time; we may be laying the groundwork for a new social transformation
and not even know it. Second, the fact that someone has thoughts
and beliefs that one considers naive or nasty, doesn't mean they
will always have them. Martin Luther King used to tell his aides
to keep in mind that if they were successful, the people they
were opposing would become their friends.
I think progressives need to keep this
in mind when dealing with people whose values seem alien. My
rule of thumb is go after the people at the top rather than to
blame their followers. Because with any luck, some day the latter
could be on your side. If you don't think this is possible, then
it's probably best to give up on politics. Once, on a talk show
in Michigan Militia country, a caller began, "You know,
this fella is right. We've got to stop worrying about all those
homosexuals and feminists and start worrying about what the corporations
are doing to us." I thought, well there's 20 minutes well
spent.
ENGEL:
Okay. We know that propaganda, from the first alleged "kiddie"
TV show usually sponsored by some major corporation
through elementary and high schools and even into college and
grad school, not to mention the nightmarish barrage of images
pounded into our heads via billboard, television, radio, newspaper,
website etc. plays a major role in shaping peoples' thinking.
In fact, it plays THE role, especially in a "democracy"
such as ours (it's not really a democracy, but it's not Soviet
Russia either; I don't know what to call this system anymore).
But don't people have some control over their own lives? How
can so many people allow themselves to fall into the somnambulant
mind-set that enables them to cheer the destruction of Iraq and
ignore the $400,000,000 spent on defense while millions of American
children -- not to mention Iraqi children are underfed,
under educated and have no healthcare etc?
Shouldn't people be held responsible
for their actions or rather inactions, especially if the "selling
point" of the whole deal is "freedom and democracy?"
We blamed the German people for "looking
away" while the cattle cars passed. We blamed white South
Africans for supporting apartheid through silence, and now we
blame Israeli citizens for not only allowing their government
to engage in apartheid and its attendant horrors against the
Palestinians, but tacitly support it by electing Sharon. Again,
there's always a minority who protest, but in all these cases,
including that of the United States, the majority is silent.
Why do some break away from the fairy-tale
world of CNN and the New York Times while others, most others,
do not? Is it wrong to blame people for "willful ignorance"
(for wherever you live, especially with the advent of the internet
and sites such as the Progressive Review, you have access to
alternative news) in the face of insurmountable evidence that
the corporate/military complex and the elites who run it are
destroying this country day after day?
SMITH:
As I mentioned, I prefer to aim my fire at the people in charge.
This is in no small part a practical choice. In politics you
want people to join you, not confess their sins. As an existentialist
I believe we are all responsible for our decisions, but I have
seldom seen the blaming tactic work particularly well.
In conversation, I use what I think of
as the barroom approach to politics, which is to say I try to
use arguments that would work--or at least not start a fight.
This begins with trying to find common ground rather than points
of disagreement. I once got a great lesson in this. I was on
a talk radio station in Idaho--in Mark Furman country not long
after the OJ Simpson trial. I was meant to be on for twenty minutes
to discuss my book on Clinton, 'Shadows of Hope.' I was expecting
trouble. But the host introduced me by saying, among other things,
that I was a supporter of the fully informed jury movement. The
right of jury nullification is quite popular among conservatives
especially in the west. But I only had one sentence in the book
on the subject. Somehow that was what he chose to pull out, knowing
it would appeal to many of his conservative listeners. And I
knew I was home free, which I was, for an hour and a half. Once
having broken the stereotype of the Washington liberal journalist
the door opened to a rational conversation.
So while I am sympathetic with your intellectual
argument, on a day to day basis with real people, it's probably
wiser to approach others with the heart and skills of an educator
rather than with the righteous anger of a wrathful God. Save
that stuff for Cheney and Bush in your next column.
Sam Smith is
a lecturer, activist, and author of such books as "Why
Bother? Getting a Life in a Locked Down Land" and "Sam
Smith's Great American Repair Manual." The founding
editor of The Progressive Review,
his writing has appeared in more than 30 publications. Sam Smith
can be reached at mailto:news@prorev.com
Adam Engel
can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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