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Coming in October
From Common Courage Press

 

Today's Stories

Ron Jacobs
The Darkening Tunnel

 

Recent Stories


August 21, 2003

Robert Fisk
The US Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing

Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?

Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq

Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps on the Wrists

Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show

Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks

Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?

Vicente Navarro
Media Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush

Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad

 

August 20, 2003

Robert Fisk
Now No One Is Safe in Iraq

Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad

Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?

Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark

Ramzi Kysia
Peace is not an Abstract Idea

Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway

John L. Hess
A Downside Day

Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay

Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake Up Call"

Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype

 

August 19, 2003

Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen

Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South Pacific

Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism

Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense

Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna

John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques

Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say

Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities

 

August 18, 2003

Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace

Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure

Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson

Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!

Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay

Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context

Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge

Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War

Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson

Website of the Day
Fire Griles!

 

Congratulations to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD

 

August 16 / 17, 2003

Flavia Alaya
Bastille New Jersey

Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps

Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50

Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?

William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles

Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk

Wenonah Hauter
Which Electric System Do We Want?

David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?

Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist

Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline for August 14, 2003

David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue

Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin

Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number

Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert

Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder

 


August 14, 2003

Peter Phillips
Inside Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party

Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the CIA's Most Expensive War

Linville and Ruder
Tyson Strike Draws the Line

Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran

Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map

Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq

Gary Leupp
Condi's Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride

Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits

August 13, 2003

Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the Heart

Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire

Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy

Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent

Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count

Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur

Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting

 

August 12, 2003

 

Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and Iraq

Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up

Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens

Ray McGovern
Relax, It Was All a Pack of Lies

Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House

Website of the Day
Black Mustache

 

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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

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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

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August 23, 2003

The Infernal Machine

"Architectures" in Service to Nothing

By GAVIN KEENEY

The machine that ate the garden rages on (and on and on). It bulldozes everything every day. We are all 'landing sites', and this machine levels everything making sure nothing significant might land there (in us).

Rem Koolhaas has declared architecture dead ... I have never listened much to his pronouncements, given that he dumped a load of vacuous rubble into the discourse of architecture anyway. But he is right, insofar as reputation-mongering leads to reputation-mongering leads to reputation-mongering. Everything else is destroyed in the process -- every other alternative. The world is destroyed every day by the vast machine rolling relentlessly towards oblivion.

Arundhati Roy has suggested throwing monkey wrenches. But the machine is now so vast, it would require a cosmic monkey wrench ... which we may anyway, any day soon get. Something has to land to stop the machine.

The machine is Capitalism writ large, ugly, and in-between ... everywhere, every day ... It crushes every other idea that comes along -- every question mark is shredded along with the self-incriminating documents.

Capitalism survives by endless abstraction. What is needed to counter it is a radical contingent alternative vision ... an aesthetics of the sublime, and a sublime aesthetics (Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou's 'Universal'). Zizek is right to defend the principle of radical individuality ... What else is more dangerous to the machine ??? Where else might we find the landing site for Some-thing Else ???

This Some-thing Else (this sublime aesthetics) has been called The Coming Philosophy (Walter Benjamin) ... or The Coming Community (Giorgio Agamben) ... It is the vast landing site within things (including the human soul) that awaits Some-thing Else.

I know so many people, right now, trying to clear away the rubble and free this landing site. The machine senses their presence and grows more subtle and pernicious. The demi-urgic thing -- the Capitalistic beast -- colonizes everything everywhere ... dreams and nightmares. The Surrealist idea that advertizing colonized the unconscious is just one such insight. That this machine is now attempting to finish off the human soul is an entirely different matter.

The way out is always the same way out ... What matters must be sorted out from what doesn't matter. What matters is the nothing much that the machine can never touch. For everyone, today, this nothing much is everything that matters. It must be sited -- again -- in the world as a force that can stop the machine. It requires that everyone still aware of this nothing much marshals the strength (the inner and outer resources) that the machine hijacks to clear away that site, to locate it, and to re-write it into the world.

McHouses, McCars, McCorporations, and McPeople ... What else ??? What can replace such a titanic withering force ??? The secret, sublime antidote (the way out) is to say 'No' to the machine, and to say 'Yes' to everything else.

Cities are the crisis point ... They are the test tube for new experiments in subjecting people to new forms of colonization. In most cities, the interface has been lost (the landing site paved over repeatedly, buried in rubble and resurfaced again and again). Currently, there is a new vast empty thing called Landscape Urbanism making the rounds of architecture schools and design studios equating urban landscape with infrastructure. The former broken interface is to be replaced by a new, fully synthetical interface where everything once 'given' is turned into something 'taken away' (but sold back to you). This so-called new idea is quite simply the reification of the broken idea of Nature ... It is part and parcel of the logic of the machine to take away things 'given' and sell them back to you as the latest, newest thing.

Architecture everywhere is in service to the machine. With few exceptions it services that machine. Massimo Cacciari has asked for buildings that 'sing' -- when what we almost always get instead is building that further divides and destroys the experience of the world (dividing, sub-dividing, and parceling out space, selling space back to us), while pretending that progress has been made. Such architectures are bankrupt even though they made the capitalist machine whirl. Public space has been systematically colonized these past decades such that it is unrecognizable as such. Public resources have been converted to quasi-public piggy banks for speculators ... in the name of productivity and efficiency. Architecture continues to mutate -- attempting valiantly at times to get out of its own path -- re-generating itself and its role, struggling to free its potential, only to fall again into the grinding maw of the machine that is always-already eating the garden.

This bleak scenario contains a singular silver lining ... This silver lining is a golden thread. This golden thread leads out of the labyrinth (Manfredo Tafuri's labyrinth) to a sphere outside, in the air, in the imagination, in the spirit of every thing 'useless' (not yet subjugated, or dying to be reborn out of subjugation). This vast sphere is Idealism Itself ... It involves the collapsing of subject-object dichotomies (of Master-Slave dichotomies). It is mocked in the marketplace of ideas every day ... It is mocked and it is crucified every day. So what ??? This sphere is the landing site the machine can never touch. Embrace it and bring on a new, better world.

Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York and writes on the subject of landscape + architecture + other things, a cultural amalgam always-already forthcoming. He is author of On the Nature of Things (Birkhauser, 2000).

Weekend Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003

Flavia Alaya
Bastille New Jersey

Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps

Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50

Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?

William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles

Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk

Wenonah Hauter
Which Electric System Do We Want?

David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?

Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist

Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline for August 14, 2003

David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue

Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin

Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number

Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert

Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder

 

 

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