Category: Politics

They’re just lucky they haven’t yet had to deal with the bombs and the sabotage which can certainly be expected some time soon.
The NYTimes Business day” section on friday included an article in its “Advertising” column about U.S. companies re-arranging their marketing abroad in the wake of the enormous increase in anti-American sentiment which has accompanied the disaster of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

With the recent surge in petition drives, demonstrations, even physical attacks that equate brands born in the United States with imperialism or militarism, advertisers are confronting perhaps the most sustained anti-American feelings abroad since the Vietnam War.

The article presents the problem as just another challenge for American advertising [“marketers are scrutinizing everything that represents them internationally, from ads to package designs to promotions”], but there is at least a hint of the real disasters which may follow.

Until now, American brands have reaped the benefits of being associated with America,” [said professor Christie Nordheim of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University]. “Now, they’re suffering the consequences.”

Well. yeah, corporate America has paid for and finally gotten exactly the government it always wanted. It now has a regime totally accomodating to the wants and needs of Big Business and totally indifferent to the wants and needs of Americans and people throughout the world, but it was bought on the cheap, and the shoddy political product of small minds is about to explode in their faces. Stuart Elliott, the author of the article, doesn’t seem to have a much of a clue about the horrors ahead for American corporations which have a presence overseas, but the professor he quotes may be more savvy.

Clearly, those most closely associated with the American way of life “are going to suffer the greatest harm,” Ms. Nordheim said.

We may have to swallow their damn junk here, and Americans don’t fight corporations very well, but people outside the U.S. still have market choices and they’re not always afraid of attacking Big Business, even physically.

I actually thought that I had arrived at an epiphany the other day. In total frustration, and unable to understand how the country had bought into this regime with its message and reign of terror, I told myself only half seriously that it was plainly the successful outcome of a deliberate long-term right-wing plan to sabotage the entire education system. We have been rendered morons in a deliberate campaign.
Today I found that I am not alone with these thoughts. On a visit to his website which was encouraged by a very interesting article in the NYTimes thursday about music industry blacklisting, Paris – the self-described “politically conscious artist best known for the incendiary song ‘Bush Killa'” – reminded me that Ted Rall had said it already.

The Moron Majority
By Ted Rall, March 21, 2003
Now it’s official: most Americans are idiots.
Decades of budget cuts in education are finally yielding results, a fact confirmed by CNN’s poll of March 16, which shows that an astonishing 51 percent of the public believe that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
. . . .

For a totally painless argument about why the Bush administration must be resisted, go to the site of that excellent bunch of social humorists who call themselves The Onion.

I Should Not Be Allowed To Say The Following Things About America
As Americans, we have a right to question our government and its actions. However, while there is a time to criticize, there is also a time to follow in complacent silence. And that time is now.
[Here follows, in seven paragraphs, their columnist’s modest list of the things which should not now be said about America.]
True patriots know that a price of freedom is periodic submission to the will of our leaders—especially when the liberties granted us by the Constitution are at stake. What good is our right to free speech if our soldiers are too demoralized to defend that right, thanks to disparaging remarks made about their commander-in-chief by the Dixie Chicks?
When the Founding Fathers authored the Constitution that sets forth our nation’s guiding principles, they made certain to guarantee us individual rights and freedoms. How dare we selfishly lay claim to those liberties at the very moment when our nation is in crisis, when it needs us to be our most selfless? We shame the memory of Thomas Jefferson by daring to mention Bush’s outright lies about satellite photos that supposedly prove Iraq is developing nuclear weapons.
At this difficult time, President Bush needs my support. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld needs my support. General Tommy Franks needs my support. It is not my function as a citizen in a participatory democracy to question our leaders. And to exercise my constitutional right—nay, duty—to do so would be un-American.

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.

This is just too good to resist borrowing a bit from Bloggy‘s more extensive commentary:

From Britannica Concise:
fascism: Philosophy of government that stresses the primacy and glory of the state, unquestioning obedience to its leader, subordination of the individual will to the state’s authority, and harsh suppression of dissent. Martial virtues are celebrated, while liberal democratic values are denigrated. 20th-cent. fascism arose partly out of fear of the rising power of the lower classes and differed from contemporary communism (as practiced under J. Stalin) by its protection of the corporate and landowning powers and preservation of a class system.

Alright, so now is it ok to bring the word to America?

The U.S. is destroying New York City.
What wasn’t accomplished on September 11, 2001 [and some day we may learn to what extent it was not just Washington’s incompetence but even its design which was responsible for those blows] is now being finished by the same insane foreign and domestic policy which uses that date as its argument, by the destruction of our civil liberties and by the current military occupation of the City.
We are the primary target for the the anger of the world primed by the White House; we are the community most sensitive to Washinton’s theft of our freedoms of speech, assembly and unreasonable search and seizure, among others; and we cannot long function as the capital of the world if our movements are slowed or restricted by an army of police, soldiers and every other form of military occupier.
Bush and his handlers will not mourn New York, and I won’t dignify the mass of Americans who support Washington by suggesting they will miss this city when it is gone. The U.S. doesn’t deserve New York. New York belongs to the world. I only hope that world will not soon find we only belong to the ages.

Bloggy has some good photos of the demonstrations responding to the first day of the Iraq massacre. including a couple of Barry’s own New York scenes and others in links from around the world.

This is not a political statement. This is a hedge, this is a feelgood thing, this is a fashion statement, nothing more.
Thursday in the “Business Day” section of the NYTimes we learned that “Hollywood’s decision to roll up the red carpet at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday will cost the fashion industry incalculable publicity.”
But never fear, the actors themselves have now found a means to keep up the public’s interest in costume.

Some stars have apparently chosen to make an antiwar statement through jewelry. Global Vision for Peace, a new group, said yesterday that 10 Oscar-night guests had agreed to wear a dove-shaped gold and diamond pin it had commissioned, including Daniel Day-Lewis, Adrien Brody, Pedro Almodóvar and Meryl Streep.
A spokesman for the group said on Tuesday that the actor Ben Affleck had tentatively agreed to wear one of the pins, but the final decision rested with the actor’s stylist, who would decide which version of the pin — in white gold or 18 karat — would go best with his attire.

If we needed any more reassurance about the meaninglessness of this entire enterprise, we were told in February by one of its creators that the pins are not in protest of George W. Bush or the threat of war with Iraq.
But wait, “Business Day” has more “activist” news from the world of show business:

Yesterday there were other cancellations in keeping with Hollywood’s desire not to be seen as indulging in frivolousness when American soldiers may be dying in battle. Vanity Fair magazine, which is host to an elaborate party after the Oscars every year, will bar all news media — including television camera crews, reporters and photographers — both inside the party and outside Morton’s restaurant, the party site, a magazine spokeswoman, Beth Kseniak, said.

So, let’s see we now have a pseudo-sophisticated celebrity photo and news magazine banning photographers and news reporters from its own very visual and news-y celebrity party, in the name of, uh, the American way?

We have a new blacklist. Right now it’s only about a party, but sometimes party matters.
Certain film people known to be opposed to the massacre in Iraq have been forbidden any opportunity to air their views during the ceremonies sunday night.

The backlash against prominent stars opposing any attack on Iraq has impacted on this year’s Oscars, with organisers drawing up a blacklist of people who will not be allowed a platform to air anti-war views.
Meryl Streep, Sean Penn, Vanessa Redgrave, George Clooney, Dustin Hoffman and Spike Lee are among those who will not be speaking, amid fears they could turn the ceremony into an anti-war rally.
In a move denounced by some as a return to McCarthyism, star presenters have been ordered to stick to scripts, while winners, who the producers have no control over, could find their acceptance speeches cut if they say anything much more than a brief thank you.

Should Michael Moore win an award for his “Bowling for Columbine,” his acceptance speech will be scheduled for a commercial break, but we know he won’t be allowed to win in the first place. This ain’t Oz.

but how do we explain the success of the engineers of our own age of repression? Bloggy argues they’re even beyond satire. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has banned the broadcast media from a ceremony in Cleveland today where he is to receive an award for supporting free speech. His hosts agreed to the censorship.
Metternich on the press: “The public cannot distinguish if news is true or false. False news has the air of being true if no one can he found to contradict it. . . .” The context of this quote was an 1808 argument for governments getting their message out through the press in order to counter the liberal pamphleteers, but our own leader doesn’t have to worry. The government’s message is basically the only one out there.
Last night, before Scalia’s closed award ceremony in the same city, the Roman Catholic Supreme spoke at my own alma mater, John Carroll University, for which outrageous invitation that religious institution shall remain for me even more unmentionable than previously. There the little mind declared, with authority, that we’re all acting like we have a lot more rights than we actually have, and he means to do something about it now that the war offers such wonderful opportunities for a correction.