I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,
and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
=
I, George W. Bush, an evil Republican fascist,
used God to inflict pain on the world, end life, facilitate death,
create militant jihad rebels, and to let youths die for nothing.
I've been seein' a lot of movies lately. For the most part really, really good ones. I just saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance last night. My friend Caz talked me into seein' it. I don't like Westerns and the one time I was forced to watch a Western (in a film class) I hated it. It was The Searchers. Had John Wayne playing a racist cowboy who hates Indians. It was probably more complicated than I gave it credit for but nonetheless it just wasn't my cup of tea.
But The Man Who Shot Liberty, Caz said, is a "thinking person's Western" and he was right. It was really good. It's about a idealistic young lawyer named Ransom Stoddard played by Jimmy Stewart who goes west and runs into a town bully by the name of Liberty Valance. Liberty's pretty much a hired thug: mean, agressive and in-definite-need of reigning in. John Wayne plays his counterpart, an equally tough violence-prone "good" guy. He keeps Liberty at bay (haha) and sorta protects the hapless townfolk from his unpredictable rampages.
But Ransom's a law and order guy. He doesn't believe in violence. He wants to arrest Liberty, not shoot him. And ain't that a perfect setup for a good story?
Although me being who I am, I was wanting it to turn out to be about the Man Who DIDN'T Shoot Liberty Valance. The man who found the third way between violence and submission: non-violence. Then what a parable it would be for the post 9/11 world! To have someone stand up in a world of ever-escalating tit-for-tat violence and say no. Here's an alternative.
It doesn't turn out that way, of course and for a while, carrying my international relations theory further in the movie I was afraid that the parable was going to be that it was the John Wayne character who represented the U.S. --the user of "restrained" violence, violence as a last resort-- who comes in and saves the law-and-order weakling from the throes of the terrorist. Fortunately it didn't turn out that way either.
How it turns out (and don't worry if you haven't seen it, this won't spoil anything) is that law-and-order is NOT what prevails against the Liberty terrorist but what makes it a good movie is that this is not portrayed as an uncomplicated good thing.
Now here is a spoiler alert! If you want to see it stop reading now. I mean. Go look at this.
Okay, for the rest of you: The idea that men get elected to positions of power based to greater or lesser extents on the fact that they have proven themselves capable of violence is something that is definitely has particular relevance to us today. Just be careful not to say that out loud or you might end up like Retired U.S. General Wesley Clark this past week, who dared to say that military service in and of itself should not qualify someone to be President.
It shouldn't but too often it does.
Paul Krugman's column today is exactly what I was talking about in the post below. I think Obama will win. And I think he'll change things. The question is how much. I also think that however much he does change things, compared to Bush, this country will look a thousand times better than it does today.
The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn't too clear about what that change would involve.
Of course, there's always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all.
One thing is clear: for Democrats, winning this election should be the easy part. Everything is going their way: sky-high gas prices, a weak economy and a deeply unpopular president. The real question is whether they will take advantage of this once-in-a-generation chance to change the country's direction. And that's mainly up to Mr. Obama.
My mom forwards me lots of spam, even though I've repeatedly asked her not to do this, and of course they are the kind of messages that you've all seen: lots of cheap, cheezy graphics, an over-abundance of exclamation points and almost always WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS!!!! Since I can't stop her from sending them (short of blocking her entirely which I don't want to do because every now and then she does write me an actual email) I've decided to start using these emails to be my window to the underbelly of American conservatism.
It's a very scary world indeed.
The Washington Post has an article today that offers some insight into this world. These are the people who believe Obama is "a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance". (If only it were so! lol... Let me assure you, dear Conservatives that Obama is hardly so radical).
But it got me thinking: why don't we try to create the same kind of obnoxious emails like this? They obviously work (get people's attention). Would it feel too much like we're sinking to the lowest common demoninator?
We could make ours not just different in content but qualitatively different. Their emails never give a source for the information cited. Ours would. Their emails often contain statements that just aren't true. Ours would not. The thing is to make them short, written at an elementary school level and appeal to the over 50 crowd (read: use lots of animated GIFs, pictures of babies and cute cuddly animals and flashing fonts). I think it might work. What do you think?
No time now to tell you how much this disappoints/angers me and I don't have time to take his freakin' badge off my sidebar but I am heartbroken over the actions of Mr. Obama lately. I really thought he was different. I thought he was principled. I was wrong. He's just another politician, doing politics-as-usual and things will not be radically different when he's President.
Here are some links to some of things I'm referring to:
He disagrees with Supreme Court ruling limiting death penalty to homicide cases only.
He voted for the sweeping counterintelligence surveillance law known as FISA.
And he supported overturning the DC gun ban (exactly what this city needs: more guns, more shootings, more violence! hooray!)
Fucking sell-out.
I want my donation back please.
My second foray into the documentary film festival got cut short. I only saw one film today I had plans to see at least two more (after all, these are films that I probably will never have the chance to see again) but after I saw the first one at 10:30 this morning I felt so emotionally exhausted I couldn't do anything more. I came home to think about it. The story was that powerful.
The film was Mi Vida Dentro (official site), also known as My Life Inside (Silverdocs site) by Mexican filmmaker Lucia Gajá. It is the story of Rosa.
Rosa was 17 when she crossed the border (illegally, yes, what can you do?) into this country and at first things were good. She met her husband, another Mexican, here, started a family, got a job babysitting. One day she's watching her kid and another little boy in her small apartment. The kids were both sick, sitting in the living room watching tv with runny noses. She was in the kitchen cooking lunch. When the boy came in clutching his throat choking on something she panicked. She didn't know what to do so she ran to a neighbor's apartment. The neighbor called 911 and the police came. The officer blew hard into the boy's mouth. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing. The paramedics came. They checked the airway found nothing and did the same thing. The boy died.
It turned out there were paper towels blocking his airway. They accused Rosa of murder. And just like that she was caught up in the complexities of the U.S. justice system. She was barely twenty years old, didn't speak the language, knew nothing about the legal system of her adopted country. She didn't stand a chance.
A woman from the Mexican consulate here says Rosa's situation is not unique. Most of the people who immigrate here know very little about the U.S. legal system. They don't know their rights, don't know what to do when confronted by the police.
Rosa was interrogated by an officer. She wasn't under arrest so the officer didn't have to read her her rights. She didn't know she could request a lawyer. She called her husband who told her that officers had come by and taken their little girl away. She was hysterical. The film shows all of this on police footage. She tried explaining that she had just wiped their noses with the paper towels. They didn't believe her. She asks finally "if I say I did it will you give me my daughter back?" Yes, he said. You will see your daughter again.
She did see her daughter --for about five minutes. The she was charged with murder.
A medical examiner for the defense testified that children do sometimes choke on paper towels. The child might have twisted these into something to suck on. The saliva generated from that would have triggered a reflex to swallow.
Now maybe if Rosa or the neighbor or the police officer had known what to do, had checked his airway for a blockage they might've seen the paper towel, but once the police officer blew into the boy's mouth he just pushed it farther down.
The jury didn't just find her guilty of murder, they sentenced her 99 years. 99 years! A human lifetime! Even the boy's family did not think she was responsible for the child's death. His uncle apologized to her at her sentencing.
What hurts so much about this story --and what I think the filmmaker did so well at conveying-- is that it's not just a case of bad luck for this one particular person. It's bad luck compounded by that person's particular class status within the society she lives in. An accident like this would have been tragic enough but add to the tragedy of random luck the tragedy of a grossly inequitable society filled with racism and classism and the sum is just too much. I can't help but think that if Rosa had been someone like me (white middle class) the result would have been vastly different. You cannot leave this movie without being outraged at the overwhelming cruelty of a system that failed and continues to fail.
Rosa's might be one of the more extreme cases but as the woman from the Mexican consulate says this is all too common. At the end of the film there is a series of still shots of the major characters standing within different settings: the judge in his chambers; the defense attorney at the apartment complex where it all happened; the woman from the consulate's office overlooking the city; Rosa's mother in her home in Mexico; her husband in front of his home in the U.S.. And then there are more people, others who were interviewed in the film about their journey to the U.S. ("Was it worth it? Do you regret it?") and then still more people we never heard from, face after face after face. And then there's a young girl in her jail cell. My name is Rosa. I'm 23 years old and I have 99 years.
Mi Vida Dentro will be playing in theaters in Mexico this fall.
"Do you know what it means to leave everything you have as a human being, for you to leave your family to leave your childhood, memories and go to a country where you are a total stranger to start life over again? -
-Nigerian refugee
No, we don't know what it means. Most of us in this country don't know what that means at all. We cannot imagine. And so when people here see refugees, we think... I don't know ...I think we think that maybe these people --refugees-- are greedy and selfish, they want what we have. Maybe they see this country as an easy life, (and for many of us who hate refugees life is easy. It's so easy we don't see how it could possibly be anything but easy for anyone else). I think that is what we think.
Forgive us. We are blinded by our own privilege. We cannot see you. We cannot hear you. You remind us our own complicity in a "dirty rotten" system that gives some people much more than others (adjectives courtesy of Dorothy Day). We don't like to be reminded of this. So we hate you.
You think I exaggerate? You think that people in this country don't really hate refugees? Let me tell you this: a few months ago I went to a briefing here by a big civil rights group who was revealing the results of a nationwide survey they had done on attitudes of US citizens towards immigrants and you know what they found?
The word "refugee" now tests worse than "illegal immigrant". Really.
So don't believe the xenophobes when they say they don't have a problem with LEGAL immigration, that it's only the ILLEGAL ones they hate. They feel threatened and vulnerable and so they lash out at the easiest target: those who are still more vulnerable than they themselves. But I digress.
I saw two really good documentaries about migration today at the Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival here in Washington DC.
The first was called The Infinite Border, by Jose Manuel Sepúlveda from Mexico. It was about the journey of Central Americans northwards through Mexico to hop on trains on their way to the United States. There is much waiting and hiding to avoid the Migra. Some get caught in Mexico, in Guatemala and deported over and over again only to try again because in the words of one young man, "what else can you do"?
Then I saw a movie by Paul Rowley called Seaview about a very surreal place in Ireland: an abandoned amusement park on the sea shore that has been converted into a sort of living prison for asylum seekers from all over the world. You can see a trailer for it below. The quote above comes from a Nigerian woman who was interviewed in this movie and I thought her words were hauntingly relevant to the immigration debate in this country, they explain so much of the irrational xenophobia that I've had such a hard time understanding lately.
Both movies were really well done. Excellent cinematography. Sepúlveda did a great job at capturing the heaviness of time --the time they spent waiting for the trains-- with these long, slow panning shots. And the sense of isolation and rejection at the end as the camera slowly pans across this endless dark gray wall in the desert --yeah that wall-- which workers are still constructing, just drives the point home even more.
But Seaview, I thought, had something extra. Narrative voice overs with still shots of inanimate objects, empty rooms, dusty furniture-- a bizarre juxtaposition. And sometimes, as in the case of the Nigerian woman, you never see the person's face, only hear their voice. And when they translate, the subtitles fade in and out in the picture with the person not under it, like they normally are. It made their words seem less removed, less translated from speaker to audience, more a part of them. Their words. Their stories. Owned by them. It was very moving.
Just two of the great films you can catch this weekend at the Silverdocs. Check it out.
Reads all 35 articles of impeachment on the House floor yesterday. Wish I coulda been there. I'da been so proud!
Here are the articles:
Article I
Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.
Article II
Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a
Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of
Aggression.
Article III
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.
Article IV
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.
Article V
Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.
Article VI
Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of H. J. Res114.
Article VII
Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.
Article VIII
Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.
Read the rest here.
I have mixed feelings about posting this for a couple of reasons. One, these things may be true but it's just not polite to point them out. Maybe if it looked like people really were going to vote Republican this November and I was feeling BITTER about it (ooh, that word again!) but fortunately I don't think we have to worry about this much this time.
The other reason I feel mixed about it is because it's sorta obvious that Republicans stand for these things and what we need is Democrats to grow backbones and stand AGAINST them! But that's a different video I guess.
Anyway here for your viewing pleasure is a video from imvotingrepublican.com:
Snagged this from Carlosqc in Washington DC... Rodrigo y Gabriela are coming to DC! I *love* them!! I *so* want to go! But the tickets are $100! How can I justify that on my budget? *sigh* well, if you're in DC and you can do it, you should definitely check them out. They're absolutely amazing. Check out this video for a live performance they did on the David Letterman show:
I found this article on Alternet today that echoes something I've been thinking about lately: how to describe non-organic food in a way that more accurately captures what it is. The word "conventional" as Will Allen states, brings to mind "safety" and "normalcy" --two things that couldn't be further from the reality of the agribusiness method of producing food. So I've started calling non-organic foods, chemical foods. Why? Allen explains:
Is food called "conventional" grown and processed with chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones, toxic pesticides, sewage sludge, irradiation and genetic manipulation? Yes it is...
Clearly, something in our food system has gone terribly amiss since a majority of the food is loaded with poisonous pesticides, laced with antibiotics and hormones and infused with genetically modified growth hormones or genes from rats, bacteria, viruses and antibiotics and then -- through some bizarre logic -- labeled "conventional...
Corporations call chemical food "conventional" to conceal the fact that the food they produce is grown with the most toxic chemicals on the planet.
The rest of his article explains the various subsidies that US agribusiness has won in order to make chemical food "cheap". At least in the checkout line.
No time yet to write much of a post about Obama winning the nomination but that's okay because I'm sure there's lots of stuff out there. I'll just say that as the campaign progressed I got more and more relieved that Hillary wasn't going to be the nominee. I think Obama is the better feminist and that Hillary time and again, because of her gender, felt forced to prove her toughness/manliness by following the hawkish actions of others in Congress (I mean her vote to invade Iraq and her vote to declare Iran's military a terrorist organization). Those are hugely irresponsible votes and I think they cost her the nomination amongst people like me. An article by Meghan O'Rourke in Slate.com had the same take: "Her problem wasn't that she was a feminist. Her problem was that she wasn't feminist enough". I feel like I've said this until I'm blue in the face. Feminism is not merely a matter of putting a female face on the current power structure. Margaret Thatcher, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice were not feminists. Feminism is about deconstructing the current power structure and building a new more egalitarian, more democratic one. Hillary Clinton is not a feminist. I believe Barack Obama is. I think that If Obama wins in November, the first black President of the United States will also be the first feminist President of the United States. And that makes me deeply, deeply proud of my country.
The global food crisis is a product of a market-based (capitalist) system of food distribution and Raj Patel, a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy and author of the new book Stuffed and Starved agrees with me:
"People go hungry not because of a lack of food but because of poverty"
Mr. Patel lays it out in an interview on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday.
My nephew's joining the Marines. They promised him money for college and training as a helicopter technician. He'll almost certain to be sent to Iraq.
I don't care what anyone says, I cannot see how it's possible that he is NOT making a huge mistake. It's possible that he'll come out of it okay. But I feel it's more possible that he won't. Much more possible. Even if he isn't killed. What he'll be doing over there... will very likely mess him up. That's what war does. Messes up a lot of people. His life will be forever changed.
I am thinking about what this will mean for my family. What it would be like for my sister, my parents, if he didn't come back. Or comes back with PTSD or missing arms or legs. Or comes back and commits suicide. It makes me think of when my own parents lost their son at a really young age. It happened before I was born but for as much as it impacted my life, it may as well have happened last year. So much of who we are and why my family is the way they are is due to that single tragedy. The reverberations are still felt today, more than 30 years later.
My nephew's going to Iraq and I have the most awful feeling about this...
Isn't it reassuring to think we have someone so smart running the country? Bush's comment over the weekend that the food crisis is due to countries like India raising their standard of living has really pissed off the developing world:
"When you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food. And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.
What a moron! The global food crisis is caused by people in poor countries eating more??! You've got to be kidding me! Sometimes I can't decide if he's an asshole or just stupid. He could take some lessons from this columnist in the Hindustan Times:
"these comments are a brazen admission by the industrialised West that their levels of prosperity are mainly dependent upon the levels of impoverishment and malnutrition in the developing world. Having plundered for centuries through colonialism, they seek to continue to fatten themselves by a similar plunder through current phase of imperialist globalisation, whose hallmark is the sharp escalation of inequalities" full column here.
Oh wow there is the most incredible story on NPR right now about transgender children! They explore two cases of very young children, both biologically male, who strongly believe they are really females. Each set of parents have completely different responses to this: the first boy/girl's parents take him/her to a therapist who bans girl things and pretty much forces them to make the child "learn to be comfortable with being a boy" saying it's like a black child who wants to be white it's the product of dysfunction. The second boy/girl's parents let the child be the person she feels she is. They take her to buy her first dress and let her start kindergarten as a girl. They say they don't want to repeat the mistakes of years ago when homosexuality was viewed as a dysfunction and therapists encouraged patients to repress it.
It was such a powerful story I'm still crying as I'm typing this. If you haven't read the novel Middlesex yet, you should! My god it's good!
Here's an even better column on the controversial issue of candidates and their loud-mouth preachers. Frank Rich says
... it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.
...which means all these white Republicans seeking out endorsements from racist bigots like the Rev. John Hagee, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell better think twice about throwing stones at Obama. What's more,
...the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house.
Thanks for the perspective, Mr. Rich!
Finally! I've been waiting for someone to say something that makes a little bit of sense in the Obama-Wright controversy. No surprise that EJ Dionne steps up to the plate, pointing out the hypocrisy of how quick our society is to condemn radical black preachers while being more diplomatic and understanding of racist white preachers who say things like "God doesn't hear the prayers of the Jews" and call the Catholic church "the anti-Christ".
I disagree with the biblical scholar he quotes towards the end of the piece who says Wright was wrong to cloak himself in the mantle of a prophet because "prophets of old didn't announce their prophetic prerogatives at press conferences and press clubs". Well, duh! They lived 2,000 years ago! That has nothing to do with anything. I think we do have prophets today just as human society had prophets 2,000 years ago and just as we will 2,000 years from now. Who knows how they're going to deliver their messages? Prophets just might use press conferences and press clubs to speak truth to power. Whether Rev. Wright is one or not is up for debate but it's silly to attack the means of delivery instead of the message.
This cracked me up! In a pathetic attempt to draw attention away from the rallies and marches around the country yesterday --and I have to say this is also an example of very unsuccessful "framing"--the White House has proclaimed May Day as um, hold on, I can't type it without laughing... er-hem, excuse me, International Loyalty Day! I have to believe this is some belated April Fool's Day joke because it's just so hilarious --in an slightly Orwellian kind of way. Just the sort of humor this administration might be expected to have. Anyway I hope you all got out to a march yesterday, danced around a May pole and enjoyed your International Loyalty to the Worker Day!
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