Tag: politics

It’s midnight and I’ve been watching CNN for awhile now.

Take whatever your stance is on what is happening and set it aside for a second, if it’s possible.

There is nothing quite so otherworldly than watching a split screen on TV… live footage of the American troops speeding through the southern Iraqi desert toward Baghdad on the left, and live footage of Iraqi troops milling around in northern Iraq on the right.

Does seeing it happen like this make the war more acute or less real in the end? I’ve had both feelings come over me in the course of watching.

There are so many bigger things happening here… removed from a political context there are things happening here on a cultural level. The war itself may be a footnote in the end, but somehow it feels as if the shape of the next 50 years of our lives is being drawn now, in innumerable ways.

Reading some journals, some communities, can be really depressing.

I am a dissident in my own country.

I know it’s a common belief of those who place themselves outside what’s accepted as the political spectrum, particularly Chomsky, that the average American cares more and is smarter than we are led to believe. His example given is in listening to sports radio one night, and hearing the callers go into such great detail about statistics and history. His point was that people are willing to devote themselves to the things they care about and pursue them passionately, and that the majority of people have been led to believe that politics and world affairs are too complicated for them to understand, so they should leave these matters up to their leaders.

I have tried, for years, to hold fast to that belief. That people are not stupid. That they simply have been marginalized for so long that they’ve come to believe they are exactly what their government thinks of them, what Alexander Hamilton called “the dirty rabble.”

But when something so blatant, so obvious is happening, and you watch the debate form around it in the most asinine, most limited and most ill-informed ways, it’s hard to maintain that faith.

—————————————————–
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be in the parade so bad, man. It took me years to get up the nerve but I finally did. I got some crepe paper — tied it all over my bike and rode along side all the fire trucks and everything. And do you know what happened?”

“Everybody laughed.”

“No. Nobody gave a fuck at all.”

—Hutch Owen’s Working Hard – Tom Hart

Go back to bed, America, your government is in control.

One of the things I find so amusing about reading news on Yahoo is watching the headlines change depending on who they think they need to appease. Today’s top news story on Yahoo was about the UN Inspections in Iraq and the preliminary report that Hans Bliz was delivering. The story has not changed during the day but the headline has.

This morning’s headline:
Blix: No ‘Smoking Gun’ in Iraq

This afternoon’s headline:
Blix Says Iraq Violated U.N. Sanctions

The story is the same for both, and also, by the way, supports both headlines. But the tone of the article is much different depending on which headline it’s saddled with.

The point… is this is how important language is and how easily we can be manipulated subtly by the bias of the agency presenting the news. It’s why it’s so important to know what their motivations are.

But try to point it out to people and they give you the stare they reserve for Kennedy conspiracists.