home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links / feedback

New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: Alexander Cockburn: The Vietnamization of Iraq; Is Howard Dean the New Humphrey? The Cordesman Memo That Explains It All; Jeffrey St. Clair: Leavitt at EPA: Even Worse Than You Thought; His Secret Deals With the Biggest Polluter in America; How He Spread Trout AIDS; Scott Handleman: Trivializing Jew Hatred; Hannah Arendt and the Roots of Anti-Semitism; Court Jews and the House of the Rothschilds; When Bush Came to Bellevue: Craig McCaw's Neighborhood Under Lockdown; Remember, the CounterPunch website is supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide web audience is soaring, with more than 60,000 visitors a day. This is inspiring news, but the work involved also compels us to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Coming in October From AK Press Today's Stories September 12, 2003 Writers Block Todos Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun Laura Carlsen A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers Dave Lindorff The Meaning of Sept. 11 Elaine Cassel Bush at Quantico Linda S. Heard British Entrance Exams John Chuckman The First Two Years of Insanity Doug Giebel Ending America as We Know It Mokhiber / Weissman The Blank Check Military Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Website of the Day A Woman in Baghdad Recent Stories September 11, 2003 Robert Fisk A Grandiose Folly Roger Burbach State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001 Jonathan Franklin The Pinochet Files Niranjan Ramakrishnan Postcards to the President Norman Solomon The Political Capital of 9/11 Saul Landau The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11 Stew Albert What Goes Around Website of the Day The Sights and Sounds of a Coup The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!   September 10, 2003 John Ross Cancun Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle? Zoltan Grossman The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared for the Postwar Bloodbath? Tim Llewellyn At the Gates of Hell Christopher Brauchli Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception Lee Sustar Bring the Troops Home, Now! Elaine Cassel McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Hammond Guthrie When All Was Said and Done Website of the Day Fact Checking Colin Powell September 9, 2003 William A. Cook Eating Humble Pie Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan Bush Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate Bill Glahn A Kinder, Gentler RIAA? Janet Kauffman A Dirty River Runs Beneath It Chris Floyd Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror Bridget Gibson A Helping of Crow with Those Fries? Robert Fisk Thugs in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman Website of the Day Pot TV International September 8, 2003 David Lindorff The Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco Robert Jensen Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis Gila Svirsky Of Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads Bob Fitrakis Demostration Democracy Kurt Nimmo Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind Sean Carter Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench Uri Avnery Betrayal at Camp David Website of the Day Rabbis v. the Patriot Act   September 6 / 7, 2003 Neve Gordon Strategic Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations Gary Leupp Shiites Humiliate Bush Saul Landau Fidel and The Prince Denis Halliday Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq John Feffer Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster Ron Jacobs The Stage of History M. Shahid Alam Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel Laura Carlson The Militarization of the Americas Elaine Cassel The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo James T. Phillips The Mumbo-Jumbo War Bill Glahn RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet Walter A. Davis Living in Death's Dream Kingdom Adam Engel Midnight's Inner Children Poets' Basement Stein, Guthrie and Albert Book of the Weekend It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It by Khalil Bendib September 5, 2003 Brian Cloughley Bush's Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded? Col. Dan Smith Iraq as Black Hole Phyllis Bennis A Return to the UN? Dr. Susan Block Exxxtreme Ashcroft Dave Lindorff Courage and the Democrats Abe Bonowitz Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill Robert Fisk We Were Warned About This Chaos Website of the Day New York Comic Book Museum   September 4, 2003 Stan Goff The Bush Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place John Ross Mexico's Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End Harvey Wasserman Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead Adam Federman McCain's Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost Aluf Benn Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace W. John Green Colombia's Dirty War Joanne Mariner Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America Website of the Day Califoracle   September 3, 2003 Virginia Tilley Hyperpower in a Sinkhole Davey D A Hip Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall Emrah Göker Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted John Stanton The US is a Power, But Not Super Brian Cloughley The Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan Dan Bacher Another Big Salmon Kill Elaine Cassel Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences Uri Avnery First of All This Wall Must Fall Website of the Day Art Attack!   September 2, 2003 Robert Fisk Bush's Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War Kurt Nimmo Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style Elaine Cassel Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong Jason Leopold Ghosts in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes Dave Lindorff Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums? Paul de Rooij Predictable Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation Website of the Day Laughing Squid August 30 / Sept. 1, 2003 Alexander Cockburn Handmaiden in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall of the UN Saul Landau Schwarzenegger and Cuban Migration Standard Schaefer Who Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson Gary Leupp Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial William S. Lind Send the Neocons to Baghdad Augustin Velloso Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey Jorge Mariscal The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante John Ross A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power Mickey Z. War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler Elaine Cassel Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts Stan Cox Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun Tom and Judy Turnipseed Take Back Your Time Day Adam Engel The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY Adam Engel An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine Susan Davis Northfork, an Accidental Review Nicholas Rowe Dance and the Occupation Mark Zepezauer Operation Candor Poets' Basement Albert, Guthrie and Hamod Website of the Weekend Downhill Battle Congratulations to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD   August 29, 2003 Lenni Brenner God and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party Brian Cloughley When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off Alice Slater Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity David Krieger What Victory? Marjorie Cohn The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International Law Richard Glen Boire Saying Yes to Drugs! Bister, Estrin and Jacobs Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters Give Their Views Website of the Day DirtyBush   Hot Stories 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 William Blum Myth and Denial in the War on Terrorism Standard Schaefer Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy 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 Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online Search CounterPunch

September 13, 2003 Adios, Johnny Cash Loving the Man in Black By JESSE WALKER Everybody loved Johnny Cash. I don't care how much someone swears he hates country music, how long he rants against cowboy hats and checkered shirts and the Grand Old Opry and Goo Goo Clusters. Just wait till he pauses to catch his breath, and then say, "What about Johnny Cash?" "Oh," he'll tell you. "Johnny Cash is all right." Cash was one of the great figures of modern popular music, but as I spend the day cycling through the dozen-plus albums of his that I've accumulated over the years, I'm thinking about more than how much I like his records. I'm pondering his iconic stature: his status as the one American that everybody loved. Once I saw a band from Zimbabwe play a concert, and we all laughed when they announced that they were going to play a song "written for us by Johnny Cash." But then they broke into an Afropop version of "Ring of Fire," and everyone looked kind of nonplussed for about a second -- and then we all started dancing. Because everybody loves that song. Everybody loves Johnny Cash. It's part of the Cash legend that he "came out against the Vietnam War." That he did, but the way he did it is telling. The song in question, "Singing in Vietnam Talking Blues," relates how he and June Carter Cash went to play for the boys overseas, and how much they liked the soliders, and how rough things are over there; it ends with the declaration that they sure hope the boys can come home soon, "in peace." Even Ann Coulter would feel mighty churlish calling a man a traitor for that, or for this little speech he gave at a concert in 1969, right after singing a tribute to the men who died at the Alamo: Everywhere we go these days, it seems like, all of a sudden, reporters and people will ask us questions -- ask us questions about things that they didn't use to ask. It seems like everyone's concerned about our national problems, about the war in Vietnam -- as we have long been. And they say things like, "How do you feel about the Vietnam situation, the war in Vietnam?" I'll tell you exactly how I feel about it. This past January we took our entire show, along with my wife June, we went to Long Bien Air Force Base near Saigon. And-- (loud cheering from the crowd) And a reporter friend of mine asked, said, "That makes you a hawk, doesn't it?" And I said, "No, that don't make me a hawk. No. No, that don't make me a hawk." (more cheering, not as loud) But I said, "If you watch the helicopters bring in the wounded boys, then you go into the wards and sing for 'em and try to do your best to cheer them up so that they can get back home, it might make you a dove with claws." (wild cheering) And then he sings a peacenik folk song, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream." I saw Cash play just once in my life. It was 1995, and he was riding high from the success of his American Recordings album; the concert was in Seattle, and he had just recorded a track with some local rockers, including Krist Novoselic of Nirvana and Sean Kinney of Alice in Chains. The crowd was a mosaic of the city: grunge kids and grandmas, hippies and cowboys, Christians and drunks. Everybody seemed to love the show. Because everybody loves Johnny Cash. Jesse Walker is an associate editor at Reason magazine and author of Rebels on the Air: an Alternative History of Radio in America. This essay originally appeared on his entertaining blog, The Perpetual Three Dot Column. He can be reached at: jwalkernot@earthlink.net Weekend Edition Features for Sept. 1 / 7, 2003 Neve Gordon Strategic Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations Gary Leupp Shiites Humiliate Bush Saul Landau Fidel and The Prince Denis Halliday Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq John Feffer Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster Ron Jacobs The Stage of History M. Shahid Alam Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel Laura Carlson The Militarization of the Americas Elaine Cassel The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo James T. Phillips The Mumbo-Jumbo War Bill Glahn RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet Walter A. Davis Living in Death's Dream Kingdom Adam Engel Midnight's Inner Children Poets' Basement Stein, Guthrie and Albert Book of the Weekend It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It by Khalil Bendib   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /