Baffling

So, after noting the utter predictability of the Democratic fold on FISA and telcom retroactive immunity, Greenwald writes:

But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is. If the plan all along was to give Bush everything he wanted, as it obviously was, why not just do it at the beginning? Instead, they picked a very dramatic fight that received substantial media attention. They exposed their freshmen and other swing-district members to attack ads. They caused their base and their allies to spend substantial energy and resources defending them from these attacks.

And now, after picking this fight and letting it rage for weeks, they are going to do what they always do -- just meekly give in to the President, yet again generating a tidal wave of headlines trumpeting how they bowed, surrendered, caved in, and lost to the President. They're going to cast the appearance that they engaged this battle and once again got crushed, that they ran away in fear because of the fear-mongering ads that were run and the attacks from the President. They further demoralize their own base and increase the contempt in which their base justifiably holds them (if that's possible). It's almost as though they purposely picked the path that imposed on themselves all of the political costs with no benefits.

Glen, that's because the Democratic base is, if anything, more craven than their leaders. They keep coming back, year after year after year of this nonsense. Anybody but Bush!! Anybody but Bush!! (Except Nader.) Just who holds who in contempt, really?

Cloverfield

So I just watched the movie Cloverfield, and I really have to say that the tacky and exploitive allusions to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in atomic bomb explosions make the Godzilla movies entirely inappropriate and tasteless.

Ahem... Which is to say that the hand-wringing over supposed 9-11 references found in many of the reviews of Cloverfield is just more narcissism from Americans who have no sense of the horror that we've unleashed on the rest of the world. How much hand-wringing do we get over using the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for our cheap Sunday morning entertainment? (PIX! PIX! PIX! PIX! PIX!--to situate myself generationally and geographically for those in the exact same demographic.)

Cloverfield is an exploitive and rather forgettable monster movie, with flashy special effects and very little to say about the world we live in. Get over it.

Sunday tunes: Whities dancing edition

Lest I offend, let me first preface by saying that some of my best friends and family are honkies...

Living in Austin, TX, many moons ago I caught a great show from South African "township jive" or "mbaqanga" group Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens at a club that I'm pretty sure no longer exists called Liberty Lunch. The belated "Lion of Soweto," as at least his promotional material dubs him, was on his first American tour and put on one bass-and-drum heavy, kick-ass show. During a break between songs, Mahlathini addressed the crowd:

Mahlathini: Thank you, thank you, thank you. It is great to be here on our first American tour!

Crowd: Woooooooooo!!!!

Mahlathini: I have to tell you, when I told my friends that I was coming to America, they said "No, no, don't go to America!"

Crowd: Woooooooo..... Waaaaah?

Mahlathini: And so I said, "Why not go to America?" And they said, "Because in America, everyone dances like this!"

(Mahlathini does hilarious physical caricature of Caucasian Benign Arrhythmic Dance Syndrome--or C-BADS)

Crowd: awwwww....

Mahlathini: But! But! But! I am so very happy to say that is not true!

Crowd: WOOOOOO!!!!!

Mahlathini: For some of you!

The following is not Mahlathini performing for honky Texans, it is instead the late, great Fela Kuti performing for some Europeans of unknown variety (and on an unknown date). Yet, it appears to my eye that C-BADS is a perhaps a transatlantic disease.

Sunday Tunes: Wattstax edition

Some tunes from the documentary Wattstax, centered around the August 20, 1972 concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum on the occasion of the 7th anniversary of the Watts Riots, but also including commentary from Richard Pryor and, somewhat oddly to later eyes, Ted Lange (who would go on to play Isaac, the bartender from "The Love Boat"), as well as a panoply of Watts residents. Put on by the premier label of southern soul, Memphis, Tennessee's Stax Records, home of Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, William Bell, The Mar Keys, Johnnie Taylor, the Sweet Inspirations, Eddie Floyd, and many others, including of course everybody below.

The rest of the vids are live performances, but the movie opens with The Dramatics: What You See Is What You Get, one of my favorite tunes from that era of Stax, so I include it in spite of my general predilection for live music in these posts:


The rest of these are presented out of chronological order due to rationales that I will explain. Rufus Thomas, here doing The Funky Chicken, was part of duet that first garnered Stax the attention of Atlantic Records, which led to a distribution deal allowing Stax to expand much more than they might have in the earlier years and also led to Atlantic artists Aretha Franklin and Sam & Dave to come record in the Stax studios with house band Booker T. and the MGs, producing a number of hits for the former and almost all the significant charting tunes for the latter. So, Rufus gets first ups (nothing bad happens to the dude at end, I'm pretty sure):


The other half of that early duo with Rufus? His daughter Carla Thomas. Here she is with Pick Up the Pieces:


Appearing for the second time here at Sunday Tunes, the Staple Singers, with Respect Yourself, garner the middle slot by process of elimination solely:


The headliner for the evening was Isaac Hayes, who prior to his own recording career taking off with Hot Buttered Soul, his second album, was songwriter with David Porter for many of those aforementioned Sam & Dave hits and, after Atlantic severed its relationship with Stax and pulled Sam & Dave out of the Stax studies--basically never to be heard from again, the Soul Children, among others. Some of you young'uns might remember him better as the culinary artist forced to abandon his vocation because of his religious beliefs. Anyway, here he is near or at the height of his popularity with the Theme from Shaft, introduced by Jesse Jackson:


Finally, if you thought Isaac's look was 70's outre (how does one add accent egouts in blogger?) check the Bar-Kays in the following. But, what do you expect from "the son of a bad..." "Shut your mouth!"? Son of Shaft is the tune, which explains its placement (fans of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back might recognize a sample or two from this clip):

Random thoughts from my regular job: Lit-crit bull-shit

[much much later update, as in no longer blogging update:
I just exchanged a few emails with Ms. Eoff, and she makes clear that she was a graduate student at the time the quote below was written and was herself frustrated at the academic culture requiring this kind of writing. I apologized to her in private and do so again here. All other individuals derided on this blog remain derided.]

"William Gibson's Virtual Light: The Conversational Construction of Chevette Washington," by Amy K. Eoff:

Femininity is a social construct. Science Fiction is a literary construct. In William Gibson's "Virtual Light", femininity and science fiction intersect in the person of the protagonist Chevette Washington. Chevette is a woman built of words. A feminine, literary construct in a science fiction novel. The writer, the narrator, other characters, and Chevette herself employ words, specifically conversation, to build her physicality, personality, and selfhood. Chevette Washington is both a personality and an act of discourse to examine. I apply both speech act theory and conversation analysis to "Virtual Light", arguing that William Gibson endorses and advances the concept of total personhood proposed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her famous 1892 speech "The Solitude of Self"...

This passage just forced an end to my workday due to the contusions I suffered as head repeatedly met desk. Normally when I mention my job here, it will more likely be in reference to propaganda and obfuscations found in history, economics, political science, and similar fields (i.e. the productions of Chomsky's "New Mandarins"), but I had to highlight this because it demonstrates two particular things I loathe about lit-crit. A) I find it far more likely that Professor Eoff "endorses and advances the concept of total personhood proposed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton" than I find believable the proposition that Gibson's cyberpunk is based on the speeches of 19th century feminists.* B) How can one make one's living working with literature and still manage to write in such a stultifying manner? That's the opening paragraph for crissakes!

* [added later] Not that I necessarily wish to abuse the "concept of total personhood"** and perhaps an argument could be made that Gibson's writings, or at least his creation of Chevette Washington as "both a personality and an act of discourse" echoes Stanton's views. But "endorses and advances"? Puhleaze. What I'm saying is that lit-crit is far too often an excuse to advance whatever the politico-cultural agenda of the academic may be rather than any thing that actually may be found in the text. I mean, sure, one can always find multiple meanings in texts, dependent on the receiving audience, the temporal and cultural contexts, yada, yada, yada, but it hardly means that every bit of meaning later readers can extract in order to advance towards tenure was consciously intended by the author and, contra academe, the intentions of the author remain important for assessing a book.

** Of course one might want to assess Stanton's "concept of total personhood" against comments such as this: "With the black man we have no new element in government, but with the education and elevation of women, we have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life." [emphasis mine] (From Ishmael Reed's criticism of the Clintons' racist-tinged Obama bashing, which I recommend while simultaneously reserving the right to bash Obama as a cog of the imperialist machine. Yes, not as bad as either of the Clintons, but his identical voting record with the NY Senator on funding the war and his comments on the campaign trail concerning military actions against Iran and Pakistan leads me to suspect that his relative lack of warmongering enthusiasm*** is only due to "lack of experience.")

*** Shockingly suggesting, for example, that dropping nuclear bombs on small terrorist camps in ostensibly allied countries--camps no doubt unerringly identified by that ever-reliable creature operating under the nom-de-guerre of the "US Intelligence Community"--might not be the wisest course. Hillary used this blindingly-obvious-to-all-but-the-most-monstrous observation to suggest that Obama was not ready for imperial prime time: "Presidents should be very careful at all times in discussing the use or non-use of nuclear weapons," Clinton said. "Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. And I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons"****

**** What? You would prefer endless parentheticals?

Belated Sunday tunes...

Sugar Minott: Herbsman Hustling


Barrington Levy: Here I Come

Random thoughts from my regular job: Stakeholders

I hate with a passion the relatively new capitalist--and now apparently imperialist (but I'm getting to that... and of course they're related)--apologist/obscurantist term "stakeholders," which is intended to defuse popular global calls for democratic control over their own lives in the political and economic spheres, where such call exist in any strength.

I come across it a lot in the economics literature that crosses my desk. Also, significantly, in the reports that are issued by the United Nations, the international monetary institutions, by the US government (although more so under Clintonites than Bushies), European governments, and governments toadying up to the "Washington Consensus." A "stakeholder," for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, is any party who may have some concern in some "development" activity: the profiteers, the government, the international development complex......and.......the workers together with the regular other folks in the neighborhood who might get polluted, displaced by dams and such, have their farms sprayed with unwanted pesticides, be subject to destabilizing forest cuts that might lead to landslides on their head, watch their marshlands disappear no longer to protect them from hurricanes, and, well shit if you extend the metaphor to its logical conclusion, all the poor coastal people all around the world who are well and truly fucked when those ice caps melt (Alexander Cockburn, much as I generally approve of him, notwithstanding*). So right there's the pernicious thing about the term "stakeholder." It places these parties of unequal power on the same unequal playing field; it mishes and mashes a few sham community forums and meetings attended by "workers representatives" who may or may not actually represent the interests of the workers; and it then pretends that this process represents a process of equality in which all "stakeholders" have been heard from.

But the following represents the first time (and please leave links in comments if you've seen others, he says to the nonexistent readership)... the very first time I've seen it used to refer to actual state-to-state-satrapy relations. Promoted from comments to Barnett Rubin's post on the recent bombing of the elite hotel over at the group Informed Comment Blog** one Farid Maqsudi makes these observations:

"The key to success for Afghanistan and stakeholders such as USA and the international community, is the shift of burden from US and international community to Afghans.

The accountability for the success and failure needs to be with the Afghans and the Afghan government.

A common Afghan knows what he/she wants and needs for better life.

I agree in principle with the government's position that aid should flow through it. But as President Karzai acknowledges the increasing corrupt environment, he must first take serious action against the corrupt culture to gain the confidence of the donors, citizens and the private sector.

I am involved in the reconstruction economy of Afghanistan and from experience, I can tell it is better for Afghanistan and the world to stop with much of the technical studies and consultants to consultants in the reconstruction projects.

Afghans are hearing about billions and billions of aid money but they don't see it benefiting them. Let's talk smaller money and extend it directly to the people so they appreciate the challenges of reconstruction as well as the benefits.

The Afghan government should promise and deliver to its citizens a number of high impact projects that will boost the confidence of its citizens and stakeholders.

No doubt that various entities in Pakistan*** are taking detrimental actions against Afghanistan but Pakistan is not the entire cause of the problems in Afghanistan. The Afghans on both sides of the border should demonstrate their patriotism for Afghanistan by taking constructive and peaceful actions.

It is high time that we address the basics.

It is time for President Karzai to take the respectful robe off and pull up the shirt sleeves.

It is time for President Karzai to spend several continuous months in each regional capitals like Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat to bring attention to security and reconstruction.

It is time for the international community to support Afghans.

It is time for the country to come together."

Now aside from other evidence of willful ignorance about the basic power equation (Karzai pull up your shirt sleeves indeed! Maybe Hamid should go cut some brush?) and some small bit of valid observation ("Afghans are hearing about billions and billions of aid money but they don't see it benefiting them."), let's just look at the explicit and implied use of the term "stakeholder." The first stakeholders mentioned are the "USA and the international community." See how that works? The US and the "international community" are now on an equal moral par with the Afghans themselves concerning the fate of the country. Or maybe not, because shortly afterwards, the commenter mentions "citizens and stakeholders." So clearly they're not the same. Then who should have more legitimacy and control? Well, given my experience with the literature I mentioned above, I rather suspect that most people using such language will de facto support "USA and the international community," in that order, at least until the power equations change.

* Here George Monbiot calls him basically a "9/11 truther" for that piece.

** Informed Comment: Global Affairs is an alternately fascinating and infuriating read. Infuriating especially if you have to swallow as much imperial academese as I have to in my regular job. Fascinating because...well, look at what you learn from this eyewitness report of the population at the Serena hotel at the time and in the immediate aftermath of the recent attack on Kabul's elite luxury hotel. Listed in order of mention, but minus the bombers themselves, they include: Rubin's correspondent "Naser Shahalemi, an Afghan-American friend living and working in Afghanistan," Shahalemi's cousin Arif, Shahalemi's "office manager," "4-6 guards posted outside, one a good friendly face Aghai Sultan always gives me a friendly wave and waves my car in after checking the vehicle," "the friendly hostess," "a few friendly faces," "Serena employees,"

"Amongst us is the Norwegian Foreign Minister, and his security contingent. Also is the UN Human Rights activist Sima Samar [she is Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on the situation of human rights in the Sudan], also a former Women's Minister of the Karzai Administration [and Chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission]. We get in the cafeteria and more Afghan politicians are amongst us, with Europeans and foreigners. Karzai''s oldest brother is also trapped with us and he is pacing frantically as we are unaware of what is going on in the lobby,"

"Zina a very pleasant Filipino Girl who was just doing her job working in Afghanistan to support herself and family abroad," "president of the Olympic Committee, Mr. Anwar Khan Jagdalak [a former mujahidin commander of Jamiat-i Islami] ," the "doorman [who] had passed out from all of the events he saw," "two Russian girls," and after some hours "two U.S. Marines" "armed to the teeth," and "Hundreds of Afghan Secret Service and NDS [National Directorate of Security, Amaniyyat-i Milli] guards."

Anne Patchett's got nothing on that!

*** Note that "various entities in Pakistan" are not "stakeholders."

Sunday tunes

The Minutemen, live in '85.

"The tendency of imperialism to rot the brains of imperialists..."

I mentioned the movie Charlie Wilson's War briefly before here. Not having seen the movie or read the book it was based upon, by one George Crile, I could do little more than compare two pieces written about it. One, by the Washington Post, was happy to vet the historical accuracy of the sex and drugs angle of the movie but unlike the other piece mentioned was notably unconcerned about the historical accuracy of the more substantive events of the film. Today, Chalmers Johnson has a piece up on TomDispatch that goes into considerably more detail. You should read the whole thing, but here's a couple of stand out extracts:

Neither a reader of Crile, nor a viewer of the film based on his book would know that, in talking about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also talking about the militants of al Qaeda and the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s. Amid all the hoopla about Wilson's going out of channels to engineer secret appropriations of millions of dollars to the guerrillas, the reader or viewer would never suspect that, when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, President George H.W. Bush promptly lost interest in the place and simply walked away, leaving it to descend into one of the most horrific civil wars of modern times.

Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the U.S.) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer, Osama bin Laden, whom we helped by building up his al Qaeda base at Khost. When bin Laden and his colleagues decided to get even with us for having been used, he had the support of much of the Islamic world. This disaster was brought about by Wilson's and the CIA's incompetence as well as their subversion of all the normal channels of political oversight and democratic accountability within the U.S. government. Charlie Wilson's war thus turned out to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and consolidation of the American empire -- and an imperial presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and our massive standing armies. The billion dollars worth of weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up being turned on ourselves.

And:

The tendency of imperialism to rot the brains of imperialists is particularly on display in the recent spate of articles and reviews in mainstream American newspapers about the film. For reasons not entirely clear, an overwhelming majority of reviewers concluded that Charlie Wilson's War is a "feel-good comedy" (Lou Lumenick in the New York Post), a "high-living, hard-partying jihad" (A.O. Scott in the New York Times), "a sharp-edged, wickedly funny comedy" (Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times). Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post wrote of "Mike Nichols's laff-a-minute chronicle of the congressman's crusade to ram funding through the House Appropriations Committee to supply arms to the Afghan mujahideen"; while, in a piece entitled "Sex! Drugs! (and Maybe a Little War)," Richard L. Berke in the New York Times offered this stamp of approval: "You can make a movie that is relevant and intelligent -- and palatable to a mass audience -- if its political pills are sugar-coated."

Sunday Tunes: Hip hop edition

Even though I'm a Gen-Xer, I have a pretty curmudgeonly view of music videos, which is the reason the bulk of the Sunday Tunes are so far and will continue to be live music clips. But I also love the hip hop and I'm afraid I have to make an exception for hip hop because the live performances one can find on the Web are perhaps interesting for those already familiar with the particular piece but have sound quality that sucks so bad it's difficult for the unfamiliar to get a real sense of the music being performed.

The following clip by Mr. Lif, of Live From the Plantation, demonstrates some of what annoys me about the genre. Here Lif has constructed a great story rap in the tradition of Slick Rick, for which the sounds and the lyrics create all the imagery necessary and, I find, that the video imagery detracts from the mental picture painted by the song.



Not that I'm posting that as an exemplar, I'm just saying. The following serves as nice counterpoint, however. If you do have to make a video, this is how I think you should do it. Mr Lif again, with Because They Made it That Way. Here the imagery is a bit more subtle and, yet, more concrete. It's a case where pictorial imagery, if it has to be there, adds rather than detracts. (As a side note, I should mention that Lif has forced me to readjust my NY-oriented snobbery towards Boston hip hop, if not Boston itself)



I think you probably get my gist. I won't comment on the particular visual characteristics of the rest.

Blackalicious, Deception, another great story rap.



While looking for that, I found this great example of the freestyle skills of Blackalicious's Gift of Gab. Having seen him live a few times, I'll tell you that, as amazing as it is, this is par for the course for him.



The album Illmatic by Nas is one of my favorites (Don't tell anyone that I presented Boston and Cali tunes before I got to the NYers!). This is The World is Yours off that album.



Let's finish this edition of Sunday tunes with a few of the tunes that got me so excited about hip hop in the first place:

I remember being about 12 years old or so and sitting in the very middle class living room of my tenured professor parents (lest anyone think I'm try to construct a false NY urban gritty past for myself in any of the above commentary) watching 60 Minutes, as seemed to be the weekly ritual of "concerned liberals" in my world. I can't recall a single detail of what the report was attending to but I can still see clearly in my mind's eye two girls from one of the over-bridge boroughs (i.e. Queens, Brooklyn, or the Bronx), a year or two younger than me, sitting on a park picnic table rapping, "Don't push me/cause I'm close to the edge/I'm trying not to lose my head/a-huh-huh a-huh-huh/it's a jungle sometimes/it makes me wonder how I keep from going under." It stuck in my head, but it would be at least a year or so before I would first hear the original: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982).



The following are two of my favorites from the era that I began to get an inkling of the full glories and promise of hip hop.

Eric B. and Rakim: Follow the Leader (1988)



Finally, here's the very first Public Enemy tune, appropriately titled, Public Enemy #1, from Yo, Bum Rush the Show (1987). (no video, just listen to the music, dammit!)

An opportunist's eulogy

Needless to say, I take no pleasure in Benazir Bhutto's assassination, as corrupt a politician as she might have been and as much as she was enthusiastically playing the role of Washington's stooge-in-waiting in Pakistan. But even if I were to make some comments suggesting that Bhutto's death might have been beneficial for Pakistani or world politics (which I don't actually think, given that she will now inherit a martyr's mantle which she doesn't deserve and that, whatever Musharraf's fate, US support for the Pakistani military establishment is unlikely to wane) the tastelessness would pale in comparison to this statement from Joe Biden:

We need to have a person in that Oval Office come January 20th next year that when the unexpected like this happens, it will be a person who's dealt with issues. I've spent 26 years on the Foreign Relations Committee. I served in the Peace Corps in Latin America. I know the middle east well. A year ago at this time I was in the region here, in Pakistan, for obvious reasons but over the years, you know Musharraf. I met with him. Benazir Bhutto's a friend. I've known her for a long time, so I'm not encountering these issues for the first time and I think as people get closer to Caucus date, these events and events like this are going to highlight the importance and understanding that good, soaring speeches are not the experience we need at this moment and frankly, even being the First Lady of the United States, it doesn't necessarily qualify for you for dealing with these issues as I have over the last quarter of a century on a daily basis.

With friends like these...

Bonus Belated Sunday Tunes

R.I.P. Oscar Peterson (15 August 1925 – 23 December 2007)

Oscar Peterson and Ben Webster - Perdido (1973)

Belated Sunday Tunes

Them, with a young Van Morrison: Mystic Eyes and Gloria.


The Band, doing The Weight, enhanced by the soul-gospel stylings of the Staple Singers, Mavis Staples stepping in first, followed immediately by her father Roebucks "Pops" Staples. (From Scorsese's The Last Waltz, which is the best concert movie I've ever seen.)

Charlie Wilson's War

Writing about Charlie Wilson's War, the Washington Post finds it to be "pretty accurate, as movies go." Of course, being the Post, the premier newspaper of the nation's capital, ahem, they appear to be primarily concerned with Wilson's womanizing and drug use, which as we all know are the truly important issues to be concerned about in a movie about covertly funding and arming proxy mujaheeds in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Yes, they mention it, but the coverage is limited mostly to uncritical quotes from the CIA's station chief in charge of the effort:

"Charlie got Washington behind it," remembers Milt Bearden, who was the CIA station chief who helped run the Afghan war. "The irrepressible Charlie Wilson was pushing to get the money."

Using all his skills at backroom politics, Wilson maneuvered to get funding for the Afghan rebels -- overt funding for humanitarian aid and covert funding for weapons. "It's the only place in the world where we are killing Russians," he said in the early 1980s. "I don't know anybody who wants to be against backing religious freedom fighters against the atheistic horde from the north."

Wilson made more than a dozen trips to Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, where he was deeply moved by the courage and tenacity of the Afghans. Being Charlie, he also managed to have some fun. On one trip, he brought along his girlfriend, Annelise Ilschenko, a former Miss World USA. On another trip, he strapped on a gun, saddled up a horse and rode into Afghanistan with a group of rebels.

"He loved that whole Kipling scene," says Bearden, laughing.

For all his antics, Wilson was deadly serious about the Afghan war, and he lobbied behind the scenes to win authorization to arm the rebels with shoulder-fired Stinger missiles that could shoot down Soviet aircraft. In 1986, the Stingers reached the rebels and proved very effective.

"After that, it was just a nightmare for the Soviets," says Bearden.

In 1989, after a decade of war, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. On "60 Minutes," when Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq was asked how the Afghan war was won, he simply said, "Charlie did it."

"Every once in a while, you have somebody who changes history, says Bearden, "and Charlie did that."

Note, when fact-checking a movie about covert imperialist adventures, it's always important, if you're the Post, to go directly to one of the principals of such efforts for a critical perspective. On the other hand, there's also the historical record:

In the latter half of the movie, there is one big lie and one item of anti-Afghan propaganda. The lie is that U.S. support to the mujahiddin went only to the faction led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan leader who was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001. I spoke with Rep. Charlie Wilson, D-Texas, in 2002, at which time he called Massoud "a Russian collaborator." I find it disingenuous that Wilson and his Hollywood biographers now want to throw their arms around him. (Note: George Crile's book does not make this false claim.) Moreover, if this movie succeeds in convincing Americans that the U.S. support went to Ahmad Shah Massoud alone, it will have effectively let the CIA and Wilson off the hook for their contribution to the circumstances leading up to 9/11. During the 1980s, Wilson engineered the appropriation of approximately $3.5 billion to help the Afghans fight the Soviets. According to Milt Bearden, CIA chief of station to Pakistan, Massoud received less than 1 percent of it.

Huh, apparently CIA operative Bearden might actually be of some informational use after all, if asked about something substantive by a knowledgeable interlocutor.

Random thoughts from my regular job: Community

I love/hate the term "US intelligence community," which is faithfully used even by ostensible critics. Do we ever use the term "intelligence community" to refer to the spy agencies of official enemies of the US? No, in that case it becomes the "spy apparatus" or equivalent.

Similar for the term "international community," which in the US press is a euphemism for American imperialism and whatever other countries it could bribe, bully, or cajole into supporting the particular policy in question. Thus the US-French-Canadian overthrow of Haiti's Aristide becomes the "will of the international community," as does the US-British-and-assorted-hangers-on (but not France or Canada) overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

This post brought to you by the Curmudgeon Community (as I've found one other, albeit anonymously sourced, curmudgeon who agrees with me).

Islamo-perialism

Via Angry Arab, I come across this commentary by Samir Amin arguing that political Islam (or "Islamofascism" from such addled brains as Christopher Hitchens or David Horowitz) is in fact a bulwark of imperialism.

I commend to you, dear reader.

Excuses...

I won't bother with 'em. I'm doing this more for me than anyone else, but for those who may actually be reading this thing: a perfunctory apology.

'Til I get a bit more time, forecasted to be this weekend, have some fine Marvin Gaye as a belated Sunday tunes.

This is Marvin doing Got to Give it Up in 1980. It's funky as hell and he gives it a nice workout. He's also clearly having more fun on stage than he seemed to have during much of the 1970's (although Live at the Palladium remains a great slab of vinyl), based on what I've seen.

Sunday tunes

Here's the bomb I promised (other promises are delayed-bills, bills, bills): Charles Mingus live in Norway, 1964, in seven parts. This is from the same tour that resulted in one of my favorite Mingus albums of all time, The Great Concert (Paris, 1964). With the exception of half of one song, apparently edited together on the record from more than one performance, Johnny Coles's trumpet was missing on that album, apparently due to a perforated ulcer (in Coles, not the trumpet). Below, Coles is present for the whole proceedings. The other performers are: Charles Mingus on bass, Jackie Byard on piano, Eric Dolphy on alto sax, Clifford Jordan on tenor sax, and the great Dannie Richmond on drums.

(pre)Sunday tunes

Tomorrow I'll bring you the promised second part of the post discussing estimated excess deaths in Iraq as well a BOMB of a Sunday tunes entry.

Until then, have some Nina Simone.

"Ain't Got No... I Got Life."

Political humor of the day: Crushing the gatekeepers

I'm not getting to the second part of the Iraqi deaths post for a couple days, as I'm working under deadline right now and will be pulling looooong days tippity-tap-typing on the 'puter (my non-pseudonymous alter-ego earns his living writing--and that's all you need to know), but I had to point out this bit of ridiculousness from the ever self-important Kos:

I don't know if I'd previously announced this or not, but I'm currently writing a book for Penguin Books, scheduled for September 2008 publication, on modern day activism.

In short, traditional activism was predicated on influencing the gatekeepers -- getting concessions from management in a labor dispute, or getting editors, producers, or pundits to alter their coverage of an issue or event, or pressuring the government to change course in its actions (like ending the war in Vietnam), and so on. There was never any expectation that the gatekeepers were going anywhere. The best we could do was force a change in their behavior.

Today, we are able to target the gatekeepers directly, working to change their behavior, yes (like with Time and Joe Klein), but also working to eliminate them or, when that's not possible, bypass them. We are building an alternate media, alternate party infrastructure, and alternate institutions of power and influence. As I wrote seemingly a lifetime ago in Crashing the Gate, the gatekeepers were welcome to work with us, get out of our way, or get crushed and rendered irrelevant.

In any case, that's the broad point of the book. Now, I'm looking for examples to fill the book of effective people-powered activism that has done just that -- bypassed the establishment gatekeepers (in media, politics, business, Hollywood, wherever), trampled them, or forced them to play nice. I've got several examples already sketched out, like the rise of Cindy Sheehan (and the fall as well, as a cautionary tale), the Draft Webb movement, the efforts of Mac and Linux fanatics to undermine the Microsoft borg, Energize America, the Lieberman/Lamont race (and "The Kiss" float), the immigration rallies, and so on.

Now leaving aside Kos's ahistoricism (apparently he's never heard of Mario Savio or the direct action tactics of the Wobblies, etc.) and the silliness of his examples (how exactly is running a multimillionaire primary opponent against one of the most warmongering members of the Senate, and losing, an example of this brand new phenomenon of "crushing" the gatekeepers and rendering them irrelevant? And of course large political rallies pressing civil rights issues are also an entirely new experience in American history! And so on.), what I wanted to draw your attention to was the bolded comment above. I can only imagine that what he refers to as Cindy Sheehan's "fall" refers to the shunning of Sheehan by Democratic partisans (not to mention the rhetorically nasty attacks she suffered on the pages of DailyKos itself) for, get this, daring to challenge the seat of Nancy Pelosi because of Pelosi's gatekeeping extraordinaire position that "impeachment is off the table."

I got nothing more here, that just speaks for itself.

I've brought this to the attention of Monsieur IOZ, because his rhetorical scalpel is far more honed than mine for nonsense such as this. I'm hoping he'll address this with his patented brand of scorn, but if he doesn't... Well, just click the link and read through a few postings and you'll get a sense of what he might have said.

And while I'm directing my nonexistent traffic to other bloggers, I'll note that I shamelessly borrowed the "Political humor of the day" label from Eli over at Left I on the News, who should be added to your blog reading schedule, if he's not there already.

[update - I was correct in thinking that IOZ couldn't resist commenting on the "rather extraordinary statement of triumph-by-defeat by the Little Colonel of Donk politics himself."]