birds fly, buddies stay on the ground
I have no first-hand experience with the hunting of tiny birds, but I assume any “sportsman” engaged in its pursuit is supposed to wait until the intended target is in the air before blasting at it. Judging from a description of the damage he did to his friend’s chest, face and innards, it looks like our SUV-riding vice-huntsman wasn’t going to wait for his host’s house quail to get more than five feet off the ground last Saturday. Although to be fair, as Barry reminds me, these little shooting-plantation quail are raised in cages and may not be able to fly very high when finally released as Republican targets.
It also probably wouldn’t help the cute little critters one bit, or our good old boy’s buddies either, if he had been drinking all afternoon. Why else do we suppose the Vice President was totally unavailable that day, even to talk to his [pretend] boss? It would also help to explain how Mr. Whittington might have looked like a Quail.
But hunting, even badly, and drinking, also even badly, are not crimes. I don’t even think badly handling the bad consequences of bad hunting or bad drinking is a crime. Even if it does involve Dick Cheney, this is really not a major story, probably regardless of what we might still learn about it.
My real question is why, after six years of a very deliberate reign of fear, a politically-motivated war, the brutal murder of tens of thousands of innocent people and the corruption and near ruin of a great nation, it’s a hunting accident which seems to have finally persuaded the media to begin to look serious about trying to hold this administration accountable.
The most likely answer is that what happened in south Texas seems perfectly-designed for the tabloid journalism into which our media has been tranformed. The only thing missing, at least so far, is sex.
[image from grousewing]
Category: Politics
Plamegate updated and illustrated
Juan Cole cuts through all the mendacity this morning: He describes, in the clearest possible fashion [and richly illustrated] the crimes of Bush, Cheney, Libby and Rove as they relate to the Valerie Plame story.
Cole’s good, but it’s really all over now, except for some of the shouting. Even after the revelations in today’s news, I see his account primarily as a lesson in why it was so important to get Alito appointed.
Listen to the administration’s assertions of the legitimacy of their own spying ever since the wiretapping story broke. They know that everything they have done and will yet do really is perfectly legal and constitutional, because the Supreme Court, as Bush has now constituted it, will end up ruling so.
And don’t think that this crew will ever have to surrender their power. Everything has finally been put in place for the perpetuation of a one-party state.
And we can’t do a thing about it.
Those who have refused to play along have to be asking how much time they will have to get out of the country.
the cartoon war, and Thomas Hirschhorn at Gladstone
Thomas Hirschhorn Superficial Engagement 2006 [detail of installation]
Thomas Hirschhorn Superficial Engagement 2006 [detail of installation]
Most of the commercial media has decided that Americans shouldn’t be shown the drawings which seem to have made the world go crazy over the past week, but this absurd delicacy is only the latest, and certainly not the most outrageous, insult to come from those who do a pretty thorough job of controlling access to the outside world for all but the most curious of our compatriots.
Americans, unlike almost all other peoples on the planet, have not seen the notorious Danish cartoons, but, even more importantly, they also have not seen the messy images of burnt, ground-up, chopped-up and gutted bodies which have haunted and angered people everywhere around the world for years.
We are being treated as children and we’re doing a pretty good job of justifying the censorship and restrictions to which children are subject. Of course I have to admit that as a nation we haven’t actually shown much real maturity in the last five years, but heavily insulating an already embarassingly-provincial people who make up the most powerful and most war-like state on the planet just doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Where are these notes going? Well, I’m trying to tie together the two experiences which have so disturbed my mind and my sanity this week. I haven’t been able to do any art posts for days because I’ve become so depressed following developments in the cartoon war, but most of all because of finally being confronted with crude photo reproductions of the most obscene and grotesque scenes of death as inflicted both by our oh-so-innocent selves and a lot of people who see us quite otherwise.
On my first visit to Thomas Hirschhorn‘s extraordinary installation at Barbara Gladstone last week, I was so overcome with the power of the piece that I was unable raise the camera I was carrying aound in my right hand. Several days later I decided I had to make my way back in and try to get something I could upload here, if only for the sake of anyone unable to make the pilgrimage to West 24th Street by this coming Saturday. I felt like I was profaning a sacred grove; I was nervous as hell, and I got in and out as quickly as I could.
Is it the pictures downloaded from the internet or is it what the artist has done with them? Why is moving through the groteque clutter of this gallery space so moving an experience? I don’t think I can answer the question, at the very least because as an American who hasn’t been surfing on line for these images what I saw on Saturday is still too much of a shock, even though all along I’ve considered myself pretty well informed and had thought that nothing about cruelty could shock me, short of being placed personally in its midst.
See Jerry Saltz’s “Killing Fields” for more questions and a few answers.
I will say that it is surely the most courageous show in the city right now, and that I admire both Thomas Hirschhorn and Barbara Gladstone for bringing it to us.
How can we match such a gift? We could start by growing up and putting the censor out of business.
ADDENDUM:
This note arrives with the clarity of the next morning. In a much better world it could even form the basis for reconciling the irreconcilable.
I admit that as an atheist I’m hardly in a position to preach here, but with all respect it seems to me you’re missing the point if, in the name of avoiding the dangers of idolatry, you make the unseen image into a fetish.
The real obscenity is the evil which produced these photographs, and the blasphemers come in every description.
“Mahomet débordé par les intégristes”
This cartoon appeared today in Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly associated with the radical Left. The in-house drawing portrays the prophet of Islam next to a headline, “Mahomet overwhelmed by the fundamentalists.” The distraught man cries, “It’s hard to be loved by fools.”
Anyone who comes to my blog regularly knows that I have great affection for the planet’s diversity, and that I am extremely sympathetic to the people and cultures of the middle east, but I expect I’ve also made it pretty clear that I consider myself an adversary not just of fundamentalism, but of all organized religions, equally, and regardless of where they are found. Okay, I admit that sometimes there’s a worthy aesthetic element, but as in any other institution, that’s not the part that destroys and kills.
BETTER THAN A CARTOON
Barry has uncovered the best words to appear on the subject of the cartoon war yet.
The fact that fundamentalists of all persuasions are completely incapable of self-reflection, self-criticism, and self-irony would not warrant a mention, were it not for their practice of imposing their issues on me and my world. They assume that we will kowtow to them as soon as we recognise who they are: “Look out! Religious feelings! We’re leaving the private sphere.”
See his site for the context of this piece and a link to Sonia Mikich’s entire text.
[image from nouvelobs, via a news item from Reuters]
wacky Christians green with envy?
The U.S. and British governments criticized publication of the caricatures as offensive to Muslims, raising questions about whether the line between free speech and incitement had been crossed. [Associated Press]
One more short thought on the subject of cartoons (although as much as I would like never to have to address this stupidity again, I suspect this is only the beginning):
Our own fundamentalist Christian religio/politicos must be green with envy of their Islamist fellows for what they have been able to accomplish around the world in just a few days.
Contrary to the principles and practice of their open societies, virtually everyone of any authority in what we would like to regard as an enlightened world is currently bending over backwards to apologize (for the normal exercise of hard-won fundamental freedoms) to particularly vocal members of one cult. Our sad, clueless guardians and the institutions they control are going even further and affirming a quite new and unrestricted principle of untouchability with respect to both the practice and beliefs of that cult – and in theory at least that of any other which manages to get noticed.
Where will this end? There are lots of different religious formats out there, with lots and lots of taboos, and lots of cynical people willing to use them for their own political purposes.
We seem to be engaged in a political and cultural suicide which will be mourned by people of intelligence and good will everywhere in the world – if any of us survive the deceased ourselves.
we are all Danes today
This whole Mohammed image thing is almost perfectly ridiculous, but there is one perfect solution to the problem.
Denmark simply must not be left hanging in the wind. There is a popular, although apparently apocryphal story concerning the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation. Supposedly the aged King Christian X left the palace on his daily ride wearing the yellow Star of David, the symbol which jews had been ordered to display prominently on their clothing.
Maybe it’s just a nice story, but whatever its basis in fact, the combined efforts of the Danish population saved from extermination all but a few dozen of the nation’s 6500 jews.
Let’s put together a wonderful, real story with the material we’ve been handed sixty years later.
It’s time for all newspapers, and all nations, everyone who has a media outlet, to make themselves a common target of those who would threaten the freedoms which support liberal societies.
I believe the images scorned by ignorant or cynical people who do not, or pretend not, to understand our liberties should be shown everywhere, and as prominently as is possible. Now.
We are all Danes today, regardless of our beliefs.
[image via Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who has published all 12 original cartoons on his blog]
NOTE:
It would be inappropriate under the circumstances were I not to mention the significance of the source of the very elusive image I’ve used and the link I provide. Geert Wilders is more than a little controversial himself.
more on Cindy Sheehan’s dress code incident
I don’t know what to make of all of this, but in the end I have to say I’m not losing interest in this story.
See yesterday’s post for the background.
Thanks to Towleroad for alerting me to the latest developments from MSNBC.
disorderly conduct before the emperor
House arrest
If she just had the common decency to wear Old Navy or GAP, it would only have been American business as usual and there wouldn’t have been any fuss.
Even MSNBC can’t make Cindy Sheehan look like a miscreant.
Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an antiwar slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.
The T-shirt bore the words 2,245 Dead How Many More?? in reference to the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq, protesters told NBC News.
Police handcuffed Sheehan and removed her from the gallery before Bush arrived.
[image by Jason Reed from REUTERS]
Gore calls it tyranny, and suggests impeachment
see, if you’re a Democrat they can make your oh-so-patriotic scads of flags quite invisible
Al Gore has disappointed me over and over again in the past, but what is that saying about a drowning man grasping at straws? Unfortunately in this case the threatened demise is that of an entire polity and its people aren’t even going to be in a position to see the straws before they go under.
I’ve just watched the entire video of the former Vice President’s very impressive speech delivered inside Washington’s DAR Constitution Hall yesterday. You can catch it here on C-SPAN [see “recent programs” under “video/audio”]. The written text is available here, corrected for the words actually delivered.
This major address, although brilliantly assembled and delivered, seems to have been largely ignored by the media – or, for that matter, anyone else who could profit from its warnings and its call to action. The NYTimes for one gave it only a passing mention in two and a half small paragraphs at the end of a page 14 story about lawsuits being filed against the Bush administration’s domestic spying program. What on earth is the matter with those people? I think they’ve totally lost it.
In any nation with a responsible government and press this speech would have been front page news. This was a major political statement (actually it was more in the way of a dramatic cry of alarm and outrage) presented on a monumental day and in an historic hall by a famously temperate politician who is arguably the leading spokesperson for the leading opposition party of a government and a nation which is in serious trouble. The content of this address even if it hadn’t included an accusation of executive tyranny and an implied call for the impeachment of a sitting president should be all the buzz in the halls of government and everywhere on the streets of the nation today and for some time to come.
But we have no real opposition party in America today, and people have to know about something before they can buzz. In the third century of his beloved United States we bear no resemblance to Jefferson’s ideal of an informed citizenry. I’m afraid our republic really is now beyond resuscitation. This puts me somewhat at odds with Gore’s optimistic conclusion, although I understand his is ultimately still a political speech.
Is this man running for president? But I thought we went through that already and it turned out he didn’t really want it after we gave it to him.
Anyway, I’m definitely not a politician; when I hear the thoughts I have already lived with for years echoed by the vice-president’s lines recorded just yesterday, I feel not hope but only despair:
Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is “yes” then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?
The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch’s extravagant claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”
The fact that our normal American safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is, itself, deeply troubling.
Gore thinks we’ll wake up, come to our senses and restore the Constitution. But I’m thinking, the “safeguards” he speaks of were built into that document and they amounted to much of its substance but they didn’t work. I believe that no constitution can be reconstituted once it has been so easily trashed, We’ve certainly trashed ours, and for no real cause but an irrational fear, hardly a suitable building material for a free people.
If I have any other quarrel with Gore’s rhetoric or delivery on this occasion it is that even when he is describing the most egregious assaults on our historic liberties and fundamental law he still only begins to approach the fire his message demands.
And oh yes, not to be too picky about visual design, but did they really have to plant nine (9) American flags directly behind him for 65 minutes? I know, I know, we aren’t supposed to let the radical Right take possession of every one of our dear old war banners, but don’t we know yet that the Republicans will always win that particular numbers game? [see photo above]
[image by Susan Walsh from AP via Washington Post]
finally it’s right here: a secret police with matching state*
Jane and Louise Wilson Stasi City 1997 video [still from installation]
All this blithering about to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against – all rot, comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgment.” – Erich Mielke, GDR Minister for State Security, in a 1982 address to high-ranking Stasi officers [from “Stasiland”]
While still trying to fathom my fellow Americans’ seeming indifference to extraordinary reports about our National Security Agency‘s domestic spying operations I’ve found myself reading Anna Funder’s “Stasiland“.
It’s a terrifying story and it’s incredibly depressing, even if it ultimately ends somewhat happily in 1989 – happily for those who survived. Oddly, and unfortunately, it’s also a story which many Germans seem to want very much to forget.
I have to confess that even I wasn’t very interested in the particulars of Stasi history until recently, in spite of having regularly and almost literally bumped into the physical relics of its power in the eastern neighborhoods of Berlin last fall. It was actually Barry’s idea to order “Stasiland” from the library when we returned from Germany, having heard about its existence while we were there.
Since he was too busy with projects to begin reading it when it arrived, I took up the book myself, at first almost casually, although a somewhat dutifully, and certainly thinking it would be a bit of a drudge. Only then, when I became totally absorbed in this world I wish had only existed in the imagination of George Orwell, did I realize how relevant this brilliant account from both its victims and its perpetrators was to what was going on around me today.
Today’s Germans may entertain the luxury of this selective amnesia about the very recent past, but the course of our own recent political history has made it more and more clear that we, as citizens of the nation which was so important as both model and midwife in the birth of their post-war democracy, must not.
“Stasi” was the common name for the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry of State Security). I think it’s interesting that the increasingly-threatening contemporary U.S. equivalent should go by a name virtually identical to that given to the hated DDR secret police. Ministry of State Security or National Security Agency. There is only the slightest semantic difference between the two, little more than a question of style.
The German victims of an experiment gone very wrong are quite free today, but here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we seem anxious to build our own police state, or we’re at least remarkably indifferent to the construction going on all around us.
If we want to get the attention of a sleeping citizenry, maybe we’ll have to come up with an appropriate nickname for our own National Security Agency, a tab which could hold its own when set next to the one which described the East Germans’ nightmare. My own first thought? “NASY” (with the second letter pronounced “ah” of course)
*
“Well, when the president decides that he can do whatever he wants in violation of the law, including detaining citizens without charges and spying on citizens without warrants, that pretty much is the definition of a police state. It’s the claimed authority that matters, not the extent to which it’s used.” Atrios
[image from Bayerisches Rundfunk]