May 06, 2003

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McCarthy: The Past as Prologue

You saw yesterday's news. And what a grand time it is for the US government to release five volumes of newly opened McCarthy hearings proceedings from the 1950s.

You can download them as text or .PDF files here.

Here are a few initial reaction pieces: New York Times, Japan Today, LA Times, Portland (Maine) Press-Herald.

It will be some days before anyone has a chance to digest yesterday's releases and react to their contents; drop me a line (sperry@citypages.com)  if you see a particularly good piece on the papers in coming days or weeks.

"These five volumes provide the first public look at the intimidating interrogations conducted by Sen. McCarthy behind closed doors," said [Maine Sen. Susan] Collins, a Republican. "The transcripts, which have been sealed for 50 years, shed new light on a shameful chapter in American history."

Which shameful chapter do you suppose she means--the one that occurred then or the one happening now? See Elaine Cassel's fine Civil Liberties Watch for news on the latter.

If you'd rather have a laugh about it, there's a good Ashcroft joke at Dave Schimke's Blue Notes blog.

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 02:56 PM

 

Superfriends Vs. the Terrorists

The Bill Bennett/AVAT (Assholes Vying for Air Time) anti-terrorism reader

Someone sent along a link to Bill Bennett's Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT) archive, which collects a number of Chairman Bill's many belches and groans on the subject. 

There's one transcript in particular, of a "teach-in" at UCLA last month, that features Bennett, Adm. James Woolsey, and newly appointed civilian governor of Iraq L. Paul Bremer speaking briefly--well, not briefly enough--about the war on terror. Read the transcript or see the video here.

And finally, speaking of L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, here is the text of the so-called Bremer Report of the National Commission on Terrorism from June 2000, aka "Countering the Changing Threat of Terrorism."

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 01:43 PM

 

Hating Bill Bennett

It's one of the things that makes America great

Frankly I had no idea that so many people remembered Bill Bennett so well or despised him so enduringly. My TCB stablemate Steve Monaco has a nice comment on Vegas's love-slave, and links to several more. Dave Marsh has an excellent Bennett piece as well.  

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 10:20 AM

 

Shizzolation Row Revisited

I got a number of responses to the question I posted last night about Bush, Snoop, and my use of the shizzolator (basically a gangsta-ebonics translator) to recast GW's victory speech from last week. About two-thirds said of course it wasn't racist, and about a third said of course it was. I remain ambivalent myself, but in any case I can't imagine using the shizzolator again--as reader Pedro Villareal wrote, it really ain't that great a gag in the first place.

Brian Stefans, who runs his own political satire clearinghouse site, Circulars, sent the most far-ranging post. Read it here.

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 10:01 AM

 

Shizzolatin' Response, Brian Stefans

Dear Steve,

I run the website Circulars - http://www.arras.net/circulars/ -- and reposted the Shizzolatin piece, though with some reservations:

http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000608.html

I didn't foreground the metaphor that you were making between gangsta culture and the Bush regime - I don't think too many people would have gotten that, certainly not in the formulation that you made on your blog today.

("The point I wished to make between the lines was this: Gangsta culture is gangsta culture, and if you credit the reasoning of Bush's foreign policy, you have to respect the most hardcore gangsta rappers as well--and, needless to say, vice versa....")

I put it up, though, because I see my site as a sort of clearinghouse for different ways of making political art, even if slightly tasteless. At times--like when I make links to the site whitehouse.org--racist stereotypes and language are involved. (Actually, it's only that site that moves into racism - other more or less "tasteless" political art seems to have no problem stereotyping gays and women, not to mention those with mental health issues.)

Here are the two times that I linked to whitehouse.org and/or took some of their art: -- http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000583.html.  (I actually agree with "Buford," that the piece, which I hadn't read entirely before posting, is pretty bad, though I think "he" is more full of "hatred" than I could ever be - I would never fantasize about doing harm to someone the way he does.)

Here's the other one -- http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000480.html which seems to take shots at everybody, though the commenter didn't obviously think so.

This is because I'm interested in the creative, non-discursive, "surprise attack" aspects of political art - excess, even if it moves beyond positive formulations of "what we should do," since I feel pretty desperate to fill in the void of wilder forms of protest art that seem to have been more prevalent in the last century. Here is something rather extreme, again having to do mostly with celebrities:

http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000582.html

In addition, I write about "digital poetics" and cover topics concerning how a text can move from an ethically neutral zone to one that is ethically charged based on the work of a simple algorithm - the site "pornolize.com" is the example I use, but it seems the most recent crop tends to have to do with Black American English (there are tons of "Ebonics" translators out there).

I suppose, if this didn't come from a site actually created by Snoop Dogg - I'm assuming it was, or by his company - then I wouldn't have posted it, as there is a pretty tedious new streak of web art these days (I assume by whites) that tries to make a good point - that the internet, or at least most of the discourse around it, seems to be the domain mostly of whites and Asians - by "getting dirty," trying to be the good cop by pretending to be the bad cop, and doing obnoxious things like this site -- http://rent-a-negro.com/ -- whose URL speaks for itself.

I myself am Korean American ("half" Korean), and was not raised in a Korean neighborhood, so I've had my share of racial epithets tossed my way. I know that when I was in high school - I attended an urban high school in Jersey City rather than my mostly white high school in the suburbs - it was somewhat liberating for me and my friends there, who were mostly non-white, to play with racially-charged language - we took it over, in a sense, though not to pathological extremes - it still hurt when we heard it elsewhere.

I've never mentioned that I was Korean American on the site, though, as I didn't think it mattered, in a way, and my hope was that the sensibility expressed on the site - to which there are over 15 contributors - would be general enough, beyond any need to psychoanalyze motives. But I confess that I was a bit afraid, also - would it be acceptable to people "out there" that a site that is so obviously critical of the Bush administration was created by a Korean American? I don't want to know.

I guess I always hope that "we" can share a joke by putting on the masks, switching identities, playing with the language, etc., but I'm not sure how that plays out in the long run, in either reaffirming what we would like to destroy, etc.

I may have lost some readers by posting the links to whitehouse.org, or even your site - well, my readership has gone down anyway, since the "war" "ended" - which is unfortunate, but I've learned a lot by reading the comments section on my site in reaction to these pieces, even when they were flames.

There are certainly enough stereotypes about white people flying around in the political art of today, perhaps particularly Texans - is the fact that it white Americans create this art important? Are the perspectives translating well across a broad spectrum of culture? Anyway, I have no answers to any of this. One can't expect everyone to share one's sense of the range of permissible forms of expression -something will always confuse or anger someone else - negativity, whether in the form of punk rock, gangsta rap, Dada, even these language algorithms, can have its liberating aspects, but to many it might just seem vicious noise.

One last point I wanted to make was this - that the ethnic make-up of the Bush cabinet seems to suggest that he is responding to a need for racial diversity in the government, and is in some ways "progressive."  Fine, but I think the issue is not just "diversity" but "difference" - that the various races that live in America also play by different rules when they are existing in their own neighborhoods, cultures, etc. - speak differently, also. Sometimes they don't even hear each other, though the Bush cabinet, working in exquisite concord, apparently does.

I suppose, though I am not sure, that creating obnoxious cartoons about "difference" at least suggest the contradictions and potential conflicts in American culture that the Bush cabinet seems to want to gloss over, as they have glossed over differences with their peers around the world.  I prefer this harsh highlighting of recalcitrant social detail over the evangelical "vision" that guides our foreign and domestic policy at the moment.  Perhaps I am the wrong person to foreground this - I'm pretty middle class - but nonetheless it seems necessary.

 

Thanks,

Brian

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 09:52 AM

 

IDF Thuggery: An Experience for the Whole Family

They shot the son, and they would be happy to shoot the parents too

This from the Telegraph:

The parents of [Tom Hurndall,] a British peace activist who was shot in the head by Israeli troops, came under fire themselves as they travelled to the spot where their son was critically injured.

Anthony and Jocelyn Hurndall were in a British diplomatic convoy entering the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip when Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint fired a shot, which passed narrowly over the top of their vehicles....

The incident on Saturday afternoon took place despite the Israeli Army being given notice of the journey on at least three occasions – the last minutes before the convoy arrived.

Read the rest.

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 09:35 AM

 

Al-Qaeda: On the Move!

The terrorist you are dialing is no longer at this number. Calls are being taken by...

G8 leaders meeting in France warn that Al-Qaeda is re-establishing its operations, this time in Central Asia--Georgia and Chechnya are mentioned specifically. Chances are, though, that the US will prefer to find its Asian terrorists in places where there's more oil available.

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 09:29 AM

 

At Last, A Female Villain in the Mix

Now they can launch the Operation Iraqi Freedom superhero comic!

Dr. Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash--purportedly one of Saddam's chief biowar scientists; US/UK media have already dubbed her "Mrs. Anthrax"--has been apprehended in Baghdad. Best of all, the NYT has Judith "I see terrorists!" Miller on the case.

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 09:18 AM

 

Guess What: More Iraqi "Secret Files" in the Telegraph

This time they're suggesting that Scott Ritter--the former UN weapons inspector who was one of the loudest critics of the Bush invasion back in the planning stages, when everyone was pretending it was about weapons of mass destruction--was viewed fondly by Saddam, and targeted by Iraqi intelligence for recruitment by bribery.

The papers referring to the so-called "Scott Ritter Project" were found in a file marked "Hosting in hotels 1997-2000", which held details of Iraqi intelligence guests who had travelled to Baghdad. The records were in the same folder as reports of a visit to Baghdad in 1998 by an envoy of Osama bin Laden, [emphasis added] which were disclosed in The Telegraph last week.

Amazing, huh? What a small, and convenient, world we live in. Read the rest.

Posted by Steve Perry at May 06, 2003 08:56 AM

 

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