Michelangelo Signorile reports that, in the midst of the real business of the military, its peak period, actual war, once again the Pentagon has decided that gays are too useful to be thrown out.
Rather than speedily drumming out gays based on rumors or overheard declarations – the essence of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy – the military in some cases even appears intent on proving service people aren’t gay, even after the individuals claim to be.
It’s official. It’s impossible for Americans to get real news. Our “news” sources have actually become, almost sui generis, government propaganda.
The Peter Arnett story is the latest, and perhaps the most dramatic, evidence of the sad development which has left us so ignorant of the world and vulnerable to its threats. Writing in New York Newsday, University of Austin professor of journalism Robert Jensen argues,
Peter Arnett has an overblown sense of his own importance and lousy political judgment. That’s been true ever since he became a television “personality,” and he’s hardly the only one with those traits.
But Arnett’s pomposity and hubris are not what got him fired by NBC and National Geographic this week after giving a short interview to Iraqi state television. When the controversy first emerged, NBC issued a statement of support, which evaporated as soon as the political heat was turned up and questions about Arnett’s patriotism got tossed around. In short: Arnett was canned because he took seriously the notion that, even in war, journalists should be neutral.
. . . .
If . . . criticism of Arnett [for being obliging or disingenuous in his relations with the Iraqi regime] is appropriate, we should also ask whether American journalists are overly deferential to U.S. officials. Consider George W. Bush’s March 6 news conference, when journalists played along in a scripted television event and asked such softball questions as “How is your faith guiding you?” Journalists that night were about as critical as Arnett was with the Iraqis.
Such performances leave the rest of the world with the impression that American journalists – especially those on television – are sycophants, and Arnett’s firing only reinforces that impression. That’s why before the end of the day he had a new job with the British tabloid The Mirror, which described him as “the reporter sacked by American TV for telling the truth about the war.”
Arnett certainly hasn’t cornered the market on truth, and many U.S. reporters and photographers are doing fine work under dangerous conditions.
But many other American journalists have abandoned any pretense of neutrality and become de facto war boosters. All over the world, viewers are seeing images of the effects of the war on the Iraqi population that are largely absent from U.S. television. We shouldn’t mistake the limited critique of strategy and tactics – should the United States have unleashed a harsher attack from the beginning, and should the invasion have waited until more troops were in place? – for a serious challenge to the Bush administration’s spin on the war.
It was assembled in love and anger thirty years ago in a world most of us could hardly have imagined, safe in our enlightened beds, until now.
In 1973, at the height of the Apartheid regime, the playwright Athol Fugard collaborated with John Kani and Winson Ntsona to develop the wonderful South African play, “The Island,” being staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater this week and the next.
Barry and I were lucky to be in the theatre last night to see the original artists bring their work back to New York, to a society very different from that which originally inspired the work, yet one suffering its own new dark age.
The Brooklyn production demonstrates that the play has lost none of its power, and amazingly Kani and Ntsona have actually enhanced its profundity, without sacrificing its art, through tweaking and expanding the original lines of the final scene, a dramatization of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” with its magnificent theme of civil disobedience, by two convicts in the penal colony of the play’s title. The play now clearly relates to a new authoritarian regime, and it pulls no punches.
Even without the changes in the script, the production would have been a triumph. As it was, virtually the entire audience, having audibly gasped at some of the last lines delivered by the two artists, stood in an astounding ovation to their accomplishment. Kani and Ntsona were nowhere to be seen however. It was clear that they wanted it understood that the evening and the work was not about them, and that it was no longer just about South Africa.
An extraordinary bit of theater and an awesome statement for all times. Don’t miss it.
A personal note: In 1974 and 1975, when the play was first produced, outside South Africa of course, I myself was living an extraordinary privileged existence in that frightening and beautiful country. My only exculpation is the fact that I was more than aware of my unnatural status and that I was there basically hoping to learn more about the extremes of both human good and evil, in which I think I succeeded somewhat. Unfortunately South Africans didn’t have to travel so far for their own lessons. In reality, of course, neither did I, and today none of us do.
[For a follow-up, on the morning after I originally posted this, see Bruce Weber’s review in the NYTimes.]
Iraqis have just arrested Saddam Hussein, formed a secular democratic government of unity and demanded the U.S. and Britain leave the country immediately and pay reparations for 12 years of damages and loss of lives.
April fool.
Jimmy Breslin continues to cover the war from the subways of New York.
This subway is my base for this war, the subways of the city, a battlefield that could be the most important action in the war. Because you can lose through enemy action, an attack on the subway now, and 10 and 20 years from now, or by your own people snatching freedom from you on the grubby pretext of security.
Yesterday afternoon Breslin sat at the counter of a coffee shop at the Port Authority Bus Terminal while on the wall CNN enjoyed a coffee counter exclusive on showing the war.
Now on television was a story about Peter Arnett, a correspondent in Baghdad for NBC, who was fired for saying something on Arab television in Baghdad. His words were about the same as what is reported on television and newspapers here.
It was silly for Arnett to go on the Arab television because they were only going to steal it from Arnett’s NBC anyway.
However, if Arnett said this on Arab television because NBC wouldn’t let him say it to America, then there is deep trouble.
Newsday‘s intrepid reporter ends his column today with an anecdote culled from years of professional duties sitting with New York’s most quotable bar and cafe denizens.
Perched on a barstool [years ago] in the old Costello’s on 44th Street, visitor I.I. Rabi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the CAT scan and MRI, and who also was a consulting engineer on the first atom bomb, told us:
“It is a fact in this country that you have free speech. But everybody is afraid to use it.”
Molly Ivins reminds us in The Progressive this month that, in spite of his other failings, Hermann Goering was no fool.
While under arrest in Nuremburg in 1946 the Nazi leader told an interviewer, “Why of course the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?” He went on to insist that it was up to the leaders of every country and every form of government to drag the people along. Goering would have none of the interviewer’s naive objection that in democracies people have a say in the matter through their elected representatives.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Ivins recognizes how conflicted many Americans are now that “ghastly conflict” in Iraq is underway, but she offers encouragement to those who persevere in protesting the deadly policies of the regime in Washington.
Speak up, speak out, but never let anyone else define what you think–including the President. It is never “My country, right or wrong.” As the Radical Republican Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri once put it, “Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to put right.”
And that’s fine with me.
Sam, of Pedantry [via Alas, a Blog], has a great take on Barry Goldwater’s most famous epigram, “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
It can take angry extremists to draw public attention to a matter, and to serve as a rallying point for those might agree, in part or in whole, with the extremists goals. It can also make dealing with the moderates much more appealing for those who would rather ignore the whole issue.
. . . .
Fear – fear from the white upper and middle class – of a more violent response to the situation of blacks in America was a factor in advancing the cause of civil rights, and the lack of any such fear now is one of the reasons racial integration and equality has been set so far back in the last 20 years.
On the other hand, it does not do for a large public cause not to have its moderates. Civil rights were advanced in America in part because a large part of the white American public believed that many, perhaps the overwhelming majority, of blacks simply wanted equal treatment in society and nothing else. There was a group of moderates that white people could easily identify with as not asking for them to radically change themselves or their lives, and able to make the kinds of arguments able to appeal to them. This kind of good cop/bad cop approach has on the whole been wildly successful in producing actual progress in almost every kind of industrialised, mediated state in the world.
He follows his argument with compelling examples of the disastrous consequences which result when reactionaries clear the playing field of all moderates. The examples cited? Central America, the Middle East and the U.S. Surprised?
What has happened in America in recent years is that the moderates are under attack. The assault on “liberals” – mostly just moderate progressives who are hardly demanding radical changes to American society – has undermined the possibility of moderates driving institutional change. A radicalisation [more accurately, a polarization] of American politics is the inevitable consequence.
I didn’t really need encouragement in my radicalism, but maybe others could use a bit. Say what you think, and say it as loudly as you wish. You know you won’t get what is needed, but if moderates survive, we can at least see reaction brought down and avoid civil war.
The household has been delightfully distracted for five days while the perfect mother-out-of-law visited us this past week. It was also a healthy diversion from a virtually full-time obsession with, well, that damn elephant in the parlor.
Could any report on this, the sixth day of the slaughter in this unjust war, be more revealing of the failure of American journalism, even of America? This is the actual NYTimes headline, spread in two horizontal lines across all six columns of the front page of the “Late Edition” this morning:
ALLIES AND IRAQIS BATTLE ON 2 FRONTS;
20 AMERICANS DEAD OR MISSING, 5O HURT
This goes well beyond the effrontery in the famous pre-World War II headline in the Times of London: “Fog in Channel: Continent isolated.”
Unless “the newpaper of record” is reporting that after five days no Iraqis are dead or hurt, the Times is joining our fascist regime, and most Americans, in refusing to recognize the humanity of our victims.
“All the News That’s Fit to Print”
[This headline doesn’t appear online right now. If it was there earlier, it’s now been succeeded by another which is more distanced.]
Sometimes there’s no temptation to comment on a news story.
NEAR NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) – Burned-out vehicles and incinerated bodies littered a plain in central Iraq on Sunday after U.S. forces overwhelmed Iraqi militia fighters in a battle south of the holy city of Najaf.
U.S. armored infantry and tanks took control of the plain in the early hours of Sunday after a battle of more than seven hours against Iraqi forces who were armed with machineguns mounted on the back of Japanese pick-up trucks.
Najaf lies just 100 miles south of Baghdad.
On the main road running across the plain, burned-out Iraqi vehicles were still smoldering on Sunday afternoon, and charred ribs were the only recognizable part of three melted bodies in a destroyed car lying in the roadside dust.
“It wasn’t even a fair fight. I don’t know why they don’t just surrender,” said Colonel Mark Hildenbrand, commander of the 937th Engineer Group.
“When you’re playing soccer at home, 3-2 is a fair score, but here it’s more like 119-0,” he said, adding that the Iraqi sport utility vehicles (SUVs) stood no chance against tanks.
“You can’t put an SUV with a machine gun up against an M1 tank — it’s heinous for the SUV,” Hildenbrand said.