Preparing for missile attack

New round of insanity. Preparing for missile attack by blowing our infrastructure money: The House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday backed construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast, rejecting Pentagon arguments that the facility is unnecessary and Democratic complaints that the nearly $5 billion project amounts to wasteful spending in a time of tight budgets. Won't they soon say that they need a West Coast Plan too, and a Southern Plan? The military-industrial complex will never have enough.

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Fighting singers

Who wants to see a bunch of good singers performing? Not so many hands. Who wants to see a bunch of good singers competing, with the losers sent home and the winner crowned as champion? I see lots of hands, and you people might be big fans of a TV show called The Voice, which just completed it's finale for this season. A man named Jermaine Paul was the overall winner, and everyone else from a huge field of singers, was not the winner. The stage from one of the earlier shows says it all. The singers were competing against each other in a boxing ring. They are hitting each other with notes. This is the art of war. The image at the right was from one of the early shows this year. I saw a few of the shows, and my family kept me posted about the shows I missed. Although this post is about singing, it could have been about most anything in America. We are a country that insists that we rank things from bad to good and that we need to have a best, a winner. To have a winner, we'll need some dejected competitors, some sad tears. [caption id="attachment_22546" align="alignleft" width="218" caption="Image from The Voice"][/caption] I thought of The Voice two weeks ago, when I attended a poetry reading by 50 seventh graders chosen by their schools to present their work. No, they didn't compete against each other at the reading. They merely stood up (many of them nervously) and read their work. We in the audience applauded them all because they were all admirable. To keep most people interested in anything, however, you need a good overall story. World class art hanging in a museum doesn't get loud applause. It turns out that conflict provides its own story. All you need is two people struggling over something, even something stupid, and you've diverted attention toward the struggle from every angle, like laser beams. While at work today, I glanced at the TV in the lunch room--it's always on and it forces me to see what corporate garbage (not always, but often enough) is pouring out. I glanced at the tube in time to see the beginning of the Wolf Blitzer "news" show called "The Situation Room." The opening graphics appeared to a series of images from around the world viewed through a gun site from a fighter jet. I suppose this isn't too surprising, given that the show airs in a country that is always at war, and would lose any sense of identity were it not at war. Our national anthem fits us well. Just keep giving us enemies or else we'll create them. If we weren't currently obsessed about the Middle East, we'd be demonizing China (actually we already are demonizing and provoking China). Would a TV show that simply featured excellent singers singing get good ratings? Not likely, but this is true even if the performances were much the same as one would see on The Voice. That is my assumption, and I based it on the powerful and highly addictive effect of gratuitous conflict, of conflict pornography.

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U.S. media ho-hum when U.S. drones kill five more kids from Afghanistan

U.S. drones kill five more kids in Afghanistan. The mainstream media keeps wondering why anyone would want to kill a U.S. soldier. Glenn Greenwald points out that these mental blockages tell us a whole lot about our warped view of the world:

To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.
Today it was announced that authorities had foiled a plot to blow up an airplane. It was clearly stated that the plot never got off the ground, because the "attacker" was an informer working for the U.S. What dominated the news today? You guessed it. I'll quote Glenn Greenwald once more:
Indeed, on the very same day that CNN and the other cable news networks devoted so much coverage to a failed, un-serious attempt to bring violence to the U.S. — one that never moved beyond the early planning stages and “never posed a threat to public safety” — it was revealed that the U.S. just killed multiple civilians, including a family of 5 children, in Afghanistan. But that got no mention. That event simply does not exist in the world of CNN and its viewers (I’d be shocked if it has been mentioned on MSNBC or Fox either). Nascent, failed non-threats directed at the U.S. merit all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm media coverage, but the actual extinguishing of the lives of children by the U.S. is steadfastly ignored (even though the latter is so causally related to the former).

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The Story of 178873: Ben Fainer, Holocaust Survivor

I met 81 year old Ben Fainer two weeks ago at Grand Center Arts Academy in St. Louis. Ben had been invited by one of the social studies teachers to tell the seventh graders about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. As a parent of one of the students, I was also invited to attend. I found his presentation to be stunning and inspiring. One of the things that stood out to me was Ben's admonition that, despite all he went through, he found hatred to be self-destructive. On April 21, 2012, Ben (known as "Bendet Urman Fajner" when he lived in Poland as a boy) allowed me to videotape the story of how he survived six years in several Nazi concentration camps, from 1939 until he was rescued by American soldiers in 1945. He was only 9 1/2 years old when he was captured. Therefore, in this interview, you'll hear what it was like to be a child imprisoned for the crime of being a Jew. At first, he was assigned special chores like shining shoes and cleaning offices for the regime. He grew up in these camps, though, and eventually he was put to work in factories alongside adult prisoners. In this video, you'll hear that he would never have survived had he not lied about his age.

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Barack Obama: Kind and Gentle Warrior

Barack Obama gets a free pass for his war mongering, even from the political left, as described by Glenn Greenwald:

Most Democrats are perfectly aware of Obama’s military aggression. They don’t support him despite that, but rather, that’s one of the things they love about him. After years of being mocked by the Right as Terrorist-coddling weaklings, Obama — strutting around touting his own strength — lets them feel strong and powerful in exactly the way that Bush and Cheney’s swaggering let conservatives prance around as tough-guy, play-acting warriors. Rather than ignore this aggression, Democratic think tanks point with beaming pride to the corpses piled up by the Democratic Commander-in-Chief to argue that he’s been such a resounding foreign policy “success,” while Democratic pundits celebrate and defend the political value of his majestic kills.

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