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Today's
Stories
November
1 / 2, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
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)
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
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
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
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Weekend
Edition
November 1 / 2, 2003
Midge Decter and the
Taxi Driver
Getting
the Bodies Right
By BRUCE JACKSON
The Wrestler
For years I've thought Midge Decter was,
like her lunatic husband Norman Podhoretz, a far-right ideologue
on all matters social, political and sexual who'd conned everyone
into thinking she was smart enough to have her ideas, no matter
how loopy, taken seriously. Like Podhoretz, she is a silly person.
This was confirmed, perhaps proven beyond
a reasonable doubt, in "Midge's Mash Note," Larissa
MacFarquhar's "Talk of the Town" piece in the November
3 New Yorker.
"The air in Midge Decter's apartment
last week was not particularly humid," writes MacFarquhar.
"Decter herself, sitting on her living-room sofa in a blue
wool turtleneck, black pants, and tennis shoes, appeared cool
and dry. She sat with her legs crossed and her right hand wedged
between her thighs. Every now and again, she removed the hand
and fiddled with the neck of her sweater. There was no sign,
in other words, that she had only recently emerged from the composition
of a sweaty new book about the Secretary of Defense, 'Rumsfeld.'
She spoke of her subject admiringly, but without obvious emotion.
'The key to him is that he is a wrestler,' she said. 'A wrestler
is a lone figure. He battles one on one, and he wither wins or
loses. There is only one man on the mat at the end of a wrestling
match. It is no accident, as the Communists used to say, that
he wrestled.'"
In her book, and in the remainder of
their conversation, Decter detailed just how manly and sexy a
figure she found the Wrestler.
This bears some thought, this conversation
between New Yorker reporter Larissa MacFarquhar and neocon Mother
Superior Midge Decter, with her right hand wedged between her
thighs, maintaining her cool and talking about how sexy she finds
Donald Rumsfeld , particularly in his lone role as the Wrestler.
The first thing that should be noted
is that wrestlers don't do any of it alone. Masturbators and
players of solitaire do it alone; wrestlers need a partner the
entire time. A close partner. Of all the contact sports, wrestling
is the closest. Football players wear huge amounts of body armor
and run  into one another. There are strict rules
in football about laying on of hands and how long hands can be
kept there. Boxers wear gloves and the referees are always breaking
up their clinches; if they close-dance too much the audience
boos and throws things into the ring. Sumo wrestlers grapple
one another standing up, but they never do it on the ground.
Never in front of audiences, anyway.
But wrestlers, oh, the wrestlers: they
wear spandex swimming trunks and they hug and squeeze and fall
on top of one another and squirm around and get points only by
pinning both of their opponent's shoulders to the ground. Both
shoulders! Get one on the ground and the opponent slips out and
you've got nothing; you have to start all over again. It's pinnus
interruptus. Both shoulders! What other contact sport do you
get to pin both your partner's shoulders to whatever is under
him or her?
(Wrestling fans of the world: please,
spare the me hate mail you are even now composing. I'm not disapproving.
I think any way consenting adults want to collaborate with other
consenting adults in pinning or being pinned is just fine. This
is about Midge Decter's inability to distinguish solitary from
collaborative enterprises, and the implications of that for readers
of her political prose.)
The wrestling match doesn't, as Decter
would have it, end with one person on the mat. It ends with two,
one triumphantly atop the other. The two of them finally, and
for that one supreme moment, motionless. In that supreme moment
a third person intrudes, the referee, who gets down on his knees,
places his head as close to those pinned shoulders as he possibly
can, and, if the pinning has indeed been properly achieved, yells,
"Yessssss," or some equivalent thereof. Whereupon the
two wrestlers separate and for the first time since they stepped
onto the mat, their bodies relax completely.
Midge Decter, I have to conclude, doesn't
know jack-shit about wrestling, or contact sport. If she is capable
of looking at two sweaty grown men on a small mat, one atop the
other, and seeing in that space only a single triumphant hero,
how can anyone possibly trust anything she says about sex or
politics?
I do wish MacFarquhar had told us whether
or not Decter's right hand had been locked in place or had been
moving during their conversation.
The Taxi Lady
I met another New Yorker the same day
I read MacFarquhar's "Talk of the Town" note. She was
a taxi driver and she drove a lawyer friend and me from LaGuardia
into Manhattan. The lawyer was sitting on the right side of the
back seat, so she and the taxi driver could talk through the
window in the sheets of heavy plastic above the back of the driver's
seat. They talked mostly about which route to take and about
all the joggers we began seeing once we got over to Fifth Avenue.
It was only two days until the New York Marathon, so the town
was full of them.
After we dropped the lawyer the taxi
driver made one final remark about the joggers--"Don't their
legs get cold running around dressed like that on days like this?"--before
turning to what was really on her mind.
"They should send Bush to Iraq and
let him run the place," she said. "That place is already
totally screwed up by him so how much more could he screw it
up? And it would be good for us. Send him there and don't let
him ever come back."
I asked her what happens then. She'd
given that some thought.
"Then we have a problem because
we've got that vice president nobody ever sees. He's no damned
good. He's as bad as Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld is no damned good. He's
always making wisecracks, but he's no damned good."
She had an accent--Hispanic. I wanted
to ask where she was from but I didn't want to interrupt her.
"You know who should have been president?
Powell, that's who. He's a decent man, and now Bush has got him
standing up there and telling lies. Powell knows what war is
about. If he'd been president we wouldn't have this damned war.
It's got to be destroying him, standing up there and telling
lies for Bush."
"He's a good soldier," I said.
"Yeah. And he's telling lies. I
bet it's killing him inside. And Condi, you see her lately?"
I said that I had.
"You see her face? She used to be
pretty, now she's not pretty any more. She looks old. It's because
of all those lies she's been telling. You tell likes like that,
it shows on your face."
She paused to yell at a car that had
cut her off. "And those Democrats, what are they offering
us? Nothing! That one who ran with Gore last time--"
"Lieberman?"
"Yeah, Lieberman. Why'd Gore want
to run with a guy like that for? There's only one of them who'd
be any damned good."
"Who?"
"Clinton?"
"Which one?"
"Bill, of course. Bring him back."
"There's that amendment that says...."
She waved me off. "It says you can't
follow yourself. But if you're out four years, then you can come
back. I asked lawyers about it. I get lawyers in the cab and
I ask them and that's what they told me. So bring Clinton back.
He had problems, but not like this. Get rid of that goddamned
Rumsfeld, first thing. That man is evil, you know that? So is
Bush. Here we are."
Indeed we were. I got out, paid her,
we wished one another luck, and I went to my meeting and she
went on to wherever her next fare wanted to go.
The Truth
I did not make any of that up; I swear
it. Every word I've just told you is as true as what Larissa
MacFarquhar told the New Yorker about her encounter with Midge
Decter.
As soon as I got out of the cab I dictated
into my recorder as much of the conversation as I could remember
and that's all you got here. Had I wanted to invent a sane American
citizen who wasn't buffaloed by Fox and CNN and the jive put
out by the pros and cons and neocons, I might have invented someone
like that taxi driver, but I didn't. She was a real woman driving
a real yellow taxi in New York City on October 30, 2003, telling
me what she thought about the people running the government of
the United States. Unlike Midge Decter, she didn't find a single
one of them sexy, or useful, or heroic.
I got out of that cab feeling good about
America. My money's on the taxi driver.
Bruce Jackson,
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo, edits the web journal
BuffaloReport.com.
His most recent book is Emile
de Antonio in Buffalo (Center Working Papers). Jackson
is also a contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 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
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