we’ve been blinded

Europeans aren’t just being obstructive. Paul Krugman points out that it’s just that they can see what is being kept from us. [That man is asking to be sacked!]

There has been much speculation why Europe and the U.S. are suddenly at such odds. Is it about culture? About history? But I haven’t seen much discussion of an obvious point: We have different views partly because we see different news.
. . .
So why don’t other countries see the world the way we do? News coverage is a large part of the answer. Eric Alterman’s new book, “What Liberal Media?” doesn’t stress international comparisons, but the difference between the news reports Americans and Europeans see is a stark demonstration of his point. At least compared with their foreign counterparts, the “liberal” U.S. media are strikingly conservative — and in this case hawkish.
I’m not mainly talking about the print media. There are differences, but the major national newspapers in the U.S. and the U.K. at least seem to be describing the same reality.
Most people, though, get their news from TV — and there the difference is immense. The coverage of Saturday’s antiwar rallies was a reminder of the extent to which U.S. cable news, in particular, seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media.
What would someone watching cable news have seen? On Saturday, news anchors on Fox described the demonstrators in New York as “the usual protesters” or “serial protesters.” CNN wasn’t quite so dismissive, but on Sunday morning the headline on the network’s Web site read “Antiwar rallies delight Iraq,” and the accompanying picture showed marchers in Baghdad, not London or New York.
This wasn’t at all the way the rest of the world’s media reported Saturday’s events, but it wasn’t out of character. For months both major U.S. cable news networks have acted as if the decision to invade Iraq has already been made, and have in effect seen it as their job to prepare the American public for the coming war.
So it’s not surprising that the target audience is a bit blurry about the distinction between the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda. Surveys show that a majority of Americans think that some or all of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi, while many believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11, a claim even the Bush administration has never made. And since many Americans think that the need for a war against Saddam is obvious, they think that Europeans who won’t go along are cowards.
Europeans, who don’t see the same things on TV, are far more inclined to wonder why Iraq — rather than North Korea, or for that matter Al Qaeda — has become the focus of U.S. policy. That’s why so many of them question American motives, suspecting that it’s all about oil or that the administration is simply picking on a convenient enemy it knows it can defeat. They don’t see opposition to an Iraq war as cowardice; they see it as courage, a matter of standing up to the bullying Bush administration.

Bloomberg penned in throngs as if they were cattle

Breslin says that George Bush, the Mayor and the Police Chief’s “only excuse could be that they were practicing for the Republican National Convention. That one is going to be the great one.” And, “They penned in throngs [Breslin says “almost a million,” while Chief Kelly still insists it was only a hundred thousand] of smiling people as if they were cattle. It wasn’t the cops’ idea to do it. All they did was carry out orders as poorly as possible.”

The idea of rebuffing and then penning people up is the responsibility of Mayor Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly. They decided to suffocate free speech and right of assembly and block the march. They did it to stop the one picture that would have had the most impact of any in the world, that of an immense crowd in New York walking against war.
It was done to help George Bush have his war. Deny it if you can.

what, me worry?

Is it really so dificult to get a picture of the man that doesn’t shout his stupidity? Or, is the media finally trying to warn the world? [Make sure you click onto the image for a larger, more delicious version.]
Oh yeah, this is from the story that accompanies the wonderful photograph:

In a huge wave of demonstrations not seen since the Vietnam War, more than 6 million peace protesters took to the streets in 600 towns and cities from Cape Town to Chicago on Saturday.
Bush told reporters that “democracy is a beautiful thing and people are allowed to express their opinion” but that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a risk to peace.

curtain time!

Broadway is experimenting with earlier showtimes, meaning 7 rather than 8. The change might catch on and become general.
Personally, I think 7 o’clock curtains are great! Lunch is normally between 2 and 3 for us, and I couldn’t possibly eat dinner at 6. But under any circumstances whatsoever I wouldn’t want to sit through an evening of theatre on a full stomach, even if the choice were 6 or never. Of course for us the choice is never never.
But you don’t really think this piece is just going to be about curtain times, do you?
Years ago performances, whether theatre or concert, normally began at 8:30, even 8:45, making possible real pre-theatre dinners, rather than exercises in expensive fast food. Also years ago, ordinary New Yorkers enjoyed going out after their entertainment, whether it was for dinner or drinks. How do you share the impact of the music or theatre if you can’t talk about it after?
So what happened? The NYTimes article doesn’t begin to tell us. Once upon a time the people who worked in the City lived in the City, but beginning after the Second World War the middle class, which still feeds Broadway and Lincoln Center, opted for the suburbs. Their rapidly increasing numbers made the morning commute more and more dificult and, lacking the imagination as a class for anything better, their solution was earlier and earlier drives to the office. Real nightlife all but disappeared, except for the creative diversions of the Bohemians who never left and the youth who continually reinvent it.
I moved to New York in 1985 and was absolutely shocked to discover that my bosses, who rose in New Jersey and Long Island as early as 4:30, insisted that everyone had to be at the desk at dawn, regardless of their living arrangements. Of course these same dedicated industry servants generally slipped out of their offices sometime after 3 and fled home to 5 o’clock dinners. Until I actually showed up here for good, my New York was the New York of history and fiction (but also the New York of my New York friends, one which still persisted in their really-not-so-rarified, in Gotham, environments: fashion, publishing and the arts). No one was at work before 10, and just getting in sometime before lunch might be acceptable, but clearly the insurance industry was not one of these creative holdouts.
Years ago the work day ended in the late afternoon (or usually in the early evening for the elves toiling in culture), just in time for a drink and the scoot to a darkened auditorium. Afterward there was dinner, maybe dinner and dancing, maybe something else, but turning in early was just about out of the question–and I’m talking about working people, of all ages, not just club kids.
Some people are welcoming the 7 o’clock curtain for reasons very unlike my own. The suburban model encourages neither culture nor joy.

“When you have to go to work by 8 o’clock on Wednesday morning, you don’t want to be out until 3 o’clock in the morning the night before,” said Mr. Stavrides, an assistant district attorney in Queens, who saw “Urinetown” with his wife, Nicole, also a lawyer. “Not only that, we’re commuting. It’s not like we can jump in a cab and be home in 10 minutes. We’ve got a 50-minute subway ride home if the express isn’t running.”
Mr. Stavrides is the kind of theatergoer Broadway producers hoped to reach when they decided to raise the curtain an hour earlier than usual one night a week, on Tuesdays, for more than 20 shows.
They figured that the theater crowd no longer keeps hours that are Runyonesque, or even Conanesque; midnight is late for an audience that has a boss, a paycheck and a W-2. Mr. Stavrides, after looking at his seat mates in Henry Miller’s Theater, said that an audience that can afford ticket prices of at least $80 a seat probably has all three.

And the suburbs certainly don’t encourage dining.

The New York Philharmonic, which in the 1950’s began concerts as late as 8:45, switched its Monday-through-Thursday curtain time to 7:30 this season. (Friday and Saturday concerts still begin at 8, as they have since the 1979-80 season.) Brasserie, on East 53rd Street, was once a 24/7 place but now closes at 1 a.m. The restaurant Around the Clock, on Third Avenue at East Ninth Street, is no longer open around the clock, either. It closes at 3 a.m. four nights a week.
“If you read E. B. White’s essays, he makes the observation about how appalling it is that people have started to go to lunch at 12:30 in the afternoon,” said Jed Bernstein, the president of the League of American Theaters and Producers. “Going to lunch at 1, which he was used to, made sense because they didn’t get to the office till 10, and in those days, theater started at 8:30.

What was the best part about the 7 o’clock curtain for the show Mr. Stavrides attended on a recent tuesday?

“The show was mediocre,” he declared. “At least I got to bed on time.”

Well, he wasn’t the one who established the court’s work hours, and besides, he did go to the theatre, and he didn’t drive.

“First, let us stop calling it a ‘war’.”

He’s a Brit addressing the Brits, but the argument and the message is the same for us Yanks. John Pilger [excerpt]:

First, let us stop calling it a “war”. The last time “war” was used in the Gulf was in 1991 when the truth was buried with more than 200,000 people. Attacking a 70-mile line of trenches, three American brigades, operating at night, used 60-ton armored earthmovers to bury alive teenage Iraqi conscripts, including the wounded and those surrendering and retreating. Survivors were slaughtered from the air. The helicopter gunship pilots called it a “turkey shoot”.
Of the 148 Americans who died, a quarter of them were killed by Americans. Most of the British were killed by Americans. This was known as “friendly fire”. The civilians who were killed, whose deaths were never recorded by the American military because it was “not policy”, were “collateral damage”.
Today, after 13 years of an economic blockade that has been compared with a medieval siege, Iraq is defenseless, no matter the discovery of an odd missile that can reach barely 90 miles. Its ragtag army is woefully under-equipped and awaiting its fate, along with a civilian population of whom 42 per cent are children. They are stricken. Even the export of British manufactured vaccines meant to protect Iraqi infants from diphtheria and yellow fever has been restricted. The vaccines, say the Blair government, are “capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”.
This is the nation upon which the Bush gang says it will rain down 800 missiles within the space of two days. “Shock and awe” the Pentagon calls its “strategy”. Meanwhile the weapons inspectors and their morose Swedish leader go about their treasure hunt and a cartoon show is hosted in the UN by General Colin Powell (who rose to the top by covering up the notorious My Lai massacre in Vietnam).
It is all a charade. The Americans want Iraq because they want to control and reorder the Middle East. Their once-favorite dictator, Saddam Hussein, made the mistake of misreading the signals from Washington in 1990 and invading another favorite American oil tyranny, Kuwait. So belatedly, Saddam must be replaced, preferably by another Saddam, though more reliable and less uppity. There is no issue of “weapons of mass destruction”. That is a distraction for us and the media.
The wider significance of the promised attack is the rapacious nature of the American state. As Tony Blair has confirmed, North Korea is likely to be “next”. I think he is wrong and that Iran will be next. That is what the Israeli regime wants and Israel’s wishes are as important to influential members of the Bush gang as oil. Thereafter, there is China. Says Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Institute in Washington: “What radical US nationalists have in mind is either to ‘contain’ China by overwhelming military force or to destroy the Chinese Communist state.”
ONE of the Bush gang’s planners, Richard Perle, has said: “If we let our vision of the world go forth and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war … our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

we’re under occupation already

Barry and I saw soldiers in the subway on Valentine’s day, in “camouflage” [no, they weren’t wearing tar paper] and armed with assault weapons, but we thought they were, what, just window dressing for the White House’s orange alert games? Or, whatever. Nothing surprises us any more. Tonight we heard in a blog from a friend who found out, the hard way, that we are actually under an occupying army. Dan’l describes his evening in his own words:

if you live in new york city you’ve probably seen the (hot) national guardsmen taking up residence in our subway stations lately… i have to admit that i was a little unnerved the first time i saw assault rifles on the platform, but i was just starting to get used to it… until…
tonight i entered the ACE station at 34th street carrying an overnight bag (containing my computer, clothes, and personal hygiene products) and a shopping bag with groceries i’d just bought for the making of peach cobbler… i was gonna travel up to 103rd street to stay the night with charlie… we’d be waking up late, cooking all day and eventually going outside to play in the blizzard that’s hitting the city right now… anyway, as i approached the edge of the platform, one of these camouflaged yummies steps in front of me and asks me to step aside… “we’re going to ask you to set your bags down and remove your coat and hat…”
[hmmm,] i think, [are we doing random security checks now like they do in airports???] yes sir, of course…
i do as instructed and then am handcuffed… now i’m a little freaked out…
what’s going on???
“sir, we’d like to examine the contents of your bags… will we find any weapons inside???”
no… i have some clothes and my computer…
i looked down at my bag and saw that the power cord and battery were hanging out of the top… [of course that looks suspicious, you idiot!!! not to mention i had a bunch of metal cans and flour in my food emporium bag…] to make what is a very long (an hour spent with these guys) story a little shorter, i had to:
explain traveling uptown so late…
explain my computer and cell phone cords…
explain the workings of a laptop computer
explain the workings of a sprint phone…
explain pajamas with monkey print and two pairs of socks…
explain what q-tips are used for…
explain what it takes to make a peach cobbler…
prove that i’m not a terrorist and that i have no intention of building any kind of weapon…
do i look like him or him or him??? what the???
anyway, i have to say that i feel safer after all this than i did before…

Yipes! I hope Dan’l is just being sarcastic, but the important question is, does anyone know this shit is going on?
Ok, for the curious, and for those who want to know what a terrorist suspect looks like, here he is. Oh, and our monster is 5 feet 6 inches tall and 130 pounds. Cute as the dickens, but don’t let that fool you.

risking the world just to save face?

We have to gasp involuntarily, both for our history and for our future, reading Maureen Dowd today as she attempts to describe why we will be going to war in Mesopotamia.

The painful parts of Washington history have often been about men trying harder to save face than lives.

This sentence, which already looks like an old maxim, appears in the middle of the concluding paragraphs of an essay arguing [perhaps not convincingly] that the administration is pursuing its Iraq war course only to avenge what the Right thinks was the emasculating legacy of its withdrawal in ’91.