Awww, but that’s not what Chuck had in mind

He’s done little enough to keep us out of the mess we’re in now, since he voted for the new Department and for the office, but at least Chuck Schumer knows what kind of “big brother” he doesn’t have in mind, even though it’s too late now to do anything about it.

CHOICE FOR ‘BIG BROTHER’ IS ALL WRONG, CHUCK SAYS
By KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Schumer slammed Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter yesterday as the wrong man to head the Pentagon’s new “big brother” program, saying the retired admiral barely escaped jail.
“If we need a big brother, John Poindexter is the last guy on the list that I would choose,” said Schumer (D-N.Y.).
He demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld replace Poindexter, who is overseeing a Pentagon anti-terrorism project, Total Information Awareness, charged with developing a vast database allowing unprecedented access to Americans’ electronic transactions, from banking business to video rentals.
Poindexter, who was national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, and Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North were convicted in 1990 of lying to Congress in the weapons-for-hostages scandal. The convictions were overturned on the grounds their right to a fair trial was violated.
The conviction “was overthrown on a technicality that had nothing to do with the facts of whether he lied to Congress,” Schumer said yesterday on ABC’s “This Week.”

He “demanded?” Doesn’t he realize who he’s talking to?

a right-wing nation, and it’s on the warpath

Sound vaguely familiar? But don’t draw too many parallels, even if the picture is incredibly grim.
Early twentieth-century fascist and totalitarian states were created in milieus which included strong leftist parties and the regimes were not even partly driven by fanatical religionists, but their party dictatorships were successful nevertheless. In the U.S. we currently have conditions in many ways even more favorable to the emergence of our very own, American fascism.
If we want to understand what’s taking place in the country today we have to realize that the Democratic Party is the American conservative party and the Republican Party is the party of reaction. This means of course that there is no significant center, no progressive party and certainly no left, contrary to the amazingly successful propaganda of the right (the Democratic-Republican coalition) and of its loyal media.
Adding to the tragedy for our clueless and disempowered citizens is the fact that, unlike conservative or even reactionary parties in other countries, our own equivalents do not offer their supporters even the most minimal protections of a traditional democratic socialism or of the more capitalist “economic safety net.” Even historical fascism, the apparent model for the gangs in Washington, accepted the need for certain forms of socialism.
Finally, even our very real liberties, which were once probably the only fair boast of the American system, are now being removed, with the apparent approval of the citizenry, on the specious argument that these freedoms interfere with our security.
We get an enormous, intrusive, reactionary police state backed enthusiastically by the very largest corporations and the most fanatical religious elements, and we get perpetual war, but we get no security, no assistance and a wounded environment. This government asks everything but gives nothing, and yet we cheer loudly and sign up for more of it. How did we get here? Will we ever escape?

Mark Rudd, still on message

Part of The Left, of the 1960’s, of New York City, of our very conscience, Mark Rudd hasn’t retired altogether.

Mr. Rudd, 55, lives in Albuquerque, where he teaches mathematics at the Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute, a community college.
“I’m involved in local antiwar demonstrations,” he said last week, “and I’ve been involved in marches for peace in the Middle East.”
His view of the American government is still bluntly negative. It is pursuing “world domination,” he charged. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were a “terrible crime,” he said, and “I’m not justifying Saddam Hussein.” But of the American plans for military action in Iraq, he asserted, “There are ways to deal with threats to peace other than murdering people.” Then, with the kind of phrasemaking that once rallied the ranks to the campus ramparts, he added: “Saddam Hussein, very bad, very bad. George Bush, very bad, very bad.”

an excellent MIX 2002

Damn! Shoulda posted something before the Festival, since it ends tomorrow! Commenting now won’t help you find the films and videos already screened, and it won’t help the artists.
ACT UP
BUT. We were able to be part of the audience for James Wentzy’s “Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP on Video.” on thursday, which I did recommend in an earlier posting.
The ACT UP documentary was beautiful, but for all the evidence of the success of the activism it records, the reminders of how little has changed in the world in fifteen years is a horrible concomitance. Bush, war in the middle east, health care, drug company profiteering, oil, greed and stupidity. There were also the images of so many activists whose lives were destroyed at the height of their beauty and their powers. I would not have missed this screening for anything, but it was a melancholy, if not terrifying, experience, and one which an intelligent and generous world could have prevented.
The Middle Eastern and Muslim Lesbian and Gay Experience
This afternoon we were very lucky to be able to go back to Second Avenue for the collection, “Queer Diasporas: The Middle Eastern and Muslim Lesbian & Gay Experience,” and we stayed for the discussion which followed.
There are few subjects whose human dimension could resonate more tragicly in the midst of today’s international madness than that of the challenge of queer existence in the cultural milieus of the Middle East.
The films were apparently just about the only ones addressing this subject which are currently available, but their general excellence, as art and as record, certainly did not belie the narrow selection pool. Particularly wonderful were Tawfik Abu Wael’s “Diary of a Male Whore,” “Just a Woman” by Mitra Farahani and “Whistle,” by the curator of the afternoon’s program, Kouross Esmaeli. Finally, I was fascinated by the softly beautiful and amazingly gentle, familiar but still exotic veiled affection, both seen and heard, in Akram Zaatari‘s “How I Love You.”
Oh yeah, a special rave for the audiences which we both saw and shared on each of the days we visited the Anthology Film Archives for the screenings, a very impressive bunch indeed, far more interesting, intelligent-looking, open-eyed and just plain beautiful than any group I have ever sighted at the somewhat less edgy, The New Festival, in spite of that institution’s own virtues.

cover art

The current issue of The Advocate includes a story about Hispanic Chicago teenagers running a Spanish-language radio show for their GLBTZ peers and a story about the courage of a Kentucky high school gay-staight alliance in fighting the homophobia of an entire county. Both stories were illustrated with the smiling faces of bright, courageous (and, incidently, media-photogenic) youth working as real “advocates.”
The cover story is labelled, “SAPPHIC SALMA,” with the beautiful Salma Hayek behind the sub-headline, “PLAYING BISEXUAL IN HER NEW FILM, FRIDA, SEXY SELMA HAYEK COMES CLEAN ABOUT HER ATTRACTION TO GAY ROLES, HER PASSION FOR STRONG WOMEN, AND KISSING ASHLEY JUDD.”
It sounds like a supermarket tabloid, and The Advocate basically pursues a star-stuck and mostly mindless agenda. Still, the magazine maintains that it represents the gay community, so, instead of cover stories honoring strong people who bravely stick their necks out for what they believe and what they are, why do we so often get cover stories about people whose claim to our attention is not much different from that of, say, an insurance salesman whose bravest gay-positive career decision might include deciding to taking a commission for selling a homo a life policy?
Shamefully, the answer is partly in ourselves, and not in our “stars,” since the commercial media survives on what it believes we want to see and read.
The film and television stars who blind the Advocate editors and their readers are doing [whatever gets our attention] because its their job, while the teenagers in the back pages are doing their stuff in order that they and their peers might survive.

American-style family values

Most Americans still believe they live in something close to a meritocracy, and most believe in the family, whatever they mean by that. It turns out that most Americans are half right.

It has always been good to have a rich or powerful father. Last week my Princeton colleague Alan Krueger wrote a column for The Times surveying statistical studies that debunk the mythology of American social mobility. “If the United States stands out in comparison with other countries,” he wrote, “it is in having a more static distribution of income across generations with fewer opportunities for advancement.” And Kevin Phillips, in his book “Wealth and Democracy,” shows that robber-baron fortunes have been far more persistent than legend would have it.

But it’s probably gonna get worse, before there’s a revolution.

The official ideology of America’s elite remains one of meritocracy, just as our political leadership pretends to be populist. But that won’t last. Soon enough, our society will rediscover the importance of good breeding, and the vulgarity of talented upstarts.
For years, opinion leaders have told us that it’s all about family values. And it is — but it will take a while before most people realize that they meant the value of coming from the right family.

the pink triangle then, and now

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has just inaugurated an exhibit that focuses on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the first of a series highlighting non-Jewish groups killed during the twelve years of the National Socialist regime.

The Nazi campaign against homosexuality targeted the more than one million German men who, the state asserted, carried a “degeneracy” that threatened the “disciplined masculinity” of Germany. Denounced as “antisocial parasites” and as “enemies of the state,” more than 100,000 men were arrested under a broadly interpreted law against homosexuality. Approximately 50,000 men served prison terms as convicted homosexuals, while an unknown number were institutionalized in mental hospitals. Others—perhaps hundreds—were castrated under court order or coercion. Analyses of fragmentary records suggest that between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in concentration camps, where many died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and murder.
In the racist practice of Nazi eugenics, women were valued primarily for their ability to bear children. The state presumed that women homosexuals were still capable of reproducing. Lesbians were not systematically persecuted under Nazi rule, but they nonetheless did suffer the loss of their own gathering places and associations.
Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorize German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more.

For the homosexuals, the Nazi terror continued long after the war when the camps were emptied of other victims.

As the Allies swept through Europe to victory over the Nazi regime in early 1945, hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were liberated. The Allied Military Government of Germany repealed countless laws and decrees. Left unchanged, however, was the 1935 Nazi revision of Paragraph 175. Under the Allied occupation, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment regardless of time served in the concentration camps. The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 remained on the books of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) until the law was revised in 1969 to decriminalize homosexual relations between men over the age of 21.

Thousands of miles and decades away from the tragedy, let’s not be smug. A number of U.S. states still criminalize homosexuality, others have kept such laws on the books even as courts have at least temporarily rendered them null, and there is no federal law on the subject.
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Both the Museum’s site and that of Scott Safier (linked to the “pink triangle” in the caption above) have excellent, no, really awesome, texts and visuals.

are the Gauls the planet’s last, best hope?

Right now who else shows the will and has an alternative culture and, perhaps, the means to withstand the American hegemony?
José Bové is a hero, but he’s going to need help.

A star of anti-globalization has fallen.
José Bové, the sheep farmer and convicted vandal whose mission is to save France from fast food and free trade, will serve 14 months in prison after the country’s highest court Tuesday threw out his appeal.
Bové, 49, is a media-savvy, handlebar-moustachioed anti-globalizer who protests at economic summit meetings and is sometimes likened to the French cartoon hero Asterix, leading defiant Gauls against today’s Romans. He attracted worldwide attention three years ago when he led a group of French farmers to smash windows in a McDonald’s in Millau near his home in southern France.
Later that year, he attacked a field of genetically modified rice grown at a research station near the southern city of Montpellier. He was sentenced to six months in prison, and it was an appeal of that sentence that France’s Cour de Cassation in Paris rejected Tuesday.
A man who supplies sheep’s milk for makers of roquefort cheese, he also has opposed U.S. trade tariffs against French luxury foods and multinational corporations.