Photographs will end these wars

Jon Stewart has had it with these expensive, gory and secret wars. Secret? Yes. There are no photos. The wars fought by America are covered-up wars. They are wars we don't care about because there are no photos of our gristly business of war. Nor do we see any photos of the alleged good things that have been going on for the past year in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wrote about this lack of war photos previously in a post I titled "Where are the Photos of Good Things Supposedly Happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our media is doing its damned best to make these happy wars, bloodless wars.   We are therefore supposed to trust the government that we have made ten years of progress in Afghanistan for our $2 Billion dollars per week.  Bullshit.  I'm equally angry at  our federal government, including both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, and our patronizing mass media.   Where are any headlines that the only reason that we can't afford to build 100 new $20 million schools across the U.S. is that we blew that much money in Afghanistan this week. We also blew that much money last week and the week before.  And we do it week after week without even one photo of the violence or deaths making it onto any of the newspapers of America.  Week after week after week, for ten years and counting. PoliticusUSA sums up Jon Stewart's points nicely:

Later The Daily Show host said that more pictures of all of the elements of these wars need to be released so people can see what is really going on, “The best reason in my mind for releasing the pictures is that we have been fighting this war for nearly ten years, thousands of US deaths, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis have died, and we’ve seen nearly zero photographic evidence of it. Remember how long the media had to fight to show military coffins returning from overseas? You probably don’t remember, because you saw pictures of it the day they won the case and not since.”

Jon Stewart concluded, “Maybe we should always show pictures, Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war, if we see what war actually is and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin, which from what I understand is going up. By the way, the White House announced today that they have officially decided not to release the Bin Laden photo. Instead to keep it a secret they are going to airdrop it into an affluent Pakistani suburb, so it won’t be found for years.”

I am not surprised that many of the stories on this have discussed Stewart’s argument for releasing the photos, but have omitted the media criticism. The media has been complicit in keeping the American people in the dark on these two wars. Don’t buy for a minute that they don’t show the American people what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan because it is an issue of access. The footage is shown every day in the Middle East, but the US corporate controlled media has decided that we don’t need to see that here.

Everyone who writes a story about Jon Stewart and the Bin Laden pictures who doesn’t discuss the media blackout on these wars is complicit in the cover up. Jon Stewart’s logic for releasing the Bin Laden photos applies to all war coverage.

Continue ReadingPhotographs will end these wars

The lesson we learn from Birtherism

This insightful passage was published by Think Progress:

HOW DID WE GET HERE: If the endurance of the birther myth teaches us anything, it's the power of repetition. Any claim, no matter how outrageous, can take hold over time if it gets enough media exposure. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that nearly 25 percent of Americans, and 45 percent of Republicans, believed Mr. Obama was born in another country. The shocking fact that a quarter of all Americans now believe the lie -- and an additional 18 percent say they don't know where he was born -- illustrates just how successful birther conspiracists have been at sowing doubt and attracting attention from mainstream news outlets.

Epilogue: This episode on Birtherism also demonstrates the power of a vigorous and self-critical media to advance the public good. I will adhere to one of my personal articles of faith: That most people will think in admirable ways and act decently if given accurate information and if treated with at least a modicum of respect by their leaders.

Continue ReadingThe lesson we learn from Birtherism

What I Have To Say About Ayn Rand

From time to time, here and there, someone brings Ayn Rand up as some kind of role model. Lately it’s even in the national news, thanks to the Tea Party and an apparently not very good film of Rand’s seminal masterwork, Atlas Shrugged. The uber conservatives now crowding reason out of the halls of congress with their bizarro legislation and their lectures from the floor and on committees about how their toilets don’t flush right so why should regulations on light bulbs be passed are the children of the Dragon’s Teeth cast randomly by Ms. Rand and her philosophical cult followers. It amazes how people who profess to believe in a philosophy of independent thought can sublimate themselves so thoroughly to the dogmas of that philosophy and claim with a straight face that they are free thinkers on any level. The phrase “more Catholic than the pope” comes to mind sometimes when crossing verbal swords with these folks, who seem perfectly blind to the contradictions inherent in their own efforts. Rand laid out a My Way or the Highway ethic that demanded of her followers that they be true to themselves—as long as they did as she directed. Ayn Rand’s novels, of which there were three (plus a novella/parable I don’t intend to discuss here), moved by giant leaps from promising to fanciful to pathetic. There are some paragraphs in any one of them that are just fine. Occasionally a secondary character is nicely drawn (Eddie Willers is possibly her most sympathetic and true-to-life creation) and from time to time there is even a moment of genuine drama. But such bits are embedded in tar pits of philosophically over-determined panegyric that drowns any art there might be. But then, her devoted fans never read them for the art. What Rand delivers in both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is a balm to the misunderstood and underappreciated Great Man buried in the shambling, inarticulate assemblage that is disaffected high I.Q. youth. The give-aways in both novels involve laughter. The opening scene in The Fountainhead characterizes Howard Roark for the entire novel, prefiguring the final scene in the novel, which translated to film perfectly in the weird 1947 Gary Cooper thing.

Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff….He laughed at the thing which had happened to him that morning and at the things which now lay ahead.
Of course, the thing that had happened to him that morning was his expulsion from university for not completing his assignments. You can pretty it up with philosophical dross, but basically he didn’t do what he was required to do, instead opting for self-expression in the face of everything else. Hence the misunderstood genius aspect, the wholly-formed sense of mission, the conviction of personal rightness, and the adolescent disdain for authority no matter what. But his reaction? To laugh. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingWhat I Have To Say About Ayn Rand

More on Bradley Manning

For many months, Glenn Greenwald has documented the many ramifications of the mistreatment of Bradley Manning, including the failures of the U.S. media and the moral failures of Barack Obama. I highly recommend his latest article for the latest information. His final line: "And it's quite telling how one must go to to a British newspaper to read about U.S. abuse of a U.S. service member." [Addendum of April 21, 2011]  Bradley Manning has been transferred out of the military brig at Quantico, and he's headed toward Leavenworth.  As usual, you can learn many of the details from Glenn Greenwald.   One can only hope that he is kept in more humane circumstances in Kansas. Greenwald takes a moment to celebrate the work and success of the independent press, which carried this story along where the mainstream media melted:

[T]his episode should be a potent antidote to defeatism, as it provides a template for how issues that would be otherwise ignored can be amplified by independent voices creatively using the democratizing and organizing power of the Internet, and meaningful activism achieved.

Continue ReadingMore on Bradley Manning