Issue #223
is brought to you by...
Constant updates from my blog at http://dareland.blogspot.com/
|
Posted January 13, 2008 Letters
to Editors of Other Publications
Dear Time Magazine,
I thought last year's man of the
year, me, was a much better choice than this year's.
Sincerely,
Everybody
Dear Cat Fancy,
My cat is dead. Can I feed it to my
other cats?
Sincerely,
Britney Spears
Dear Proctology Today,
Have you seen my head?
Sincerely,
George W. Bush
Dear Newsletter of the Fan Club of
Ann Coulter,
I'm Ann's plastic surgeon and I'll be
auctioning off her penis on eBay this week.
Sincerely,
Dr. Rannosaurus Rex
How Serious is
R.U. Sirius?
 by
Paul Krassner
This is a mini-interview with Ken Goffman (a.k.a. R. U. Sirius), co-author of Counterculture Through the Ages. Q. How would you compare the counterculture of the ’60s with today’s? A. In the 1960s, there were three television channels, newspapers and magazines, pop radio. People got their messages from very few sources. There was a mainstream culture that had a strong sense of itself--the generally accepted rules around sex, swearing and style of dress were very narrow. A youth counterculture that emerged to challenge those cultural mores surprised and delighted people in the media. So the counterculture was worthy of a lot of attention, which gave it power. And you could have a pretty simple and straightforward sense of us and them--counterculture vs. the establishment. Today, we have a zillion media channels vying for people's attention--pushing attention in millions of different directions. Everything is distributed and diffused and confused. And then, extreme types of dress and irreverence are mainstream.” In fact, we can question whether a mainstream or a counterculture really exists any more. Our cultures today are cauldrons of confusion and contradiction. Rather than a counterculture, you have these sorts of counter-subcultures. Cultures that evolve out of punk, raves, riot grrls, and body mod freaks. And it gets pretty tribal--the eco-anarchist may have a war with the techno-anarchists. However, the Bush Administration has been so distressing that people seem to be setting aside some of their differences. Increasingly, subculture as a source of an identity that needs to be exclusive to remain hip is giving way to a desire among lots of different people to preserve the right to non-conform and dissent. Q. Tell me about your current projects. A. I've started two companion projects that I hope will alter the current course of American politics and culture, or at least amuse and inform and incite some fellow rabble. QuestionAuthority is an attempt to bring together everybody who thinks we've gone too far in an authoritarian direction and who wants to push back against that. We have a five-point platform that I think most of your readers will agree with, related to getting back civil liberties lost to the war on terror and the war on drugs, reigning in the runaway executive branch and defending free expression, and we are planning some very cool educational projects. Perhaps most important, we're trying to create some cohesive structure through which people can respond the next time this administration or the next one does a mind-twisting assault against our basic constitutional rights. You know, don't leave it up to the lawyers. The QuestionAuthority proposal is here. Open Source Party is an attempt to apply some of the principles of the Open Source movement, which started out as a software movement and has evolved into a cultural sensibility, to the current and future political situation. Why are our political institutions decades or centuries (Washington B.C.) behind our technology? It's also an attempt to define a sort of alternative political agenda that seems nascent in our culture right now--this novel mix of liberalism, libertarianism, pragmatism and vision that many of us see buzzing around us. The Open Source Party is here. Both projects try to bring liberal, libertarian and my favorite political type--other--together around common agenda items that are in dire need of being addressed. Imagine Michael Moore and John Stossel coming together to defend the constitution and end the drug war? You may say I'm a dreamer.... A social network that is hosting both organizations is here. Q. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future? A. Maybe I'm poptimistic--I'm all about mergers of opposites. Seriously though, I don't believe in optimism or pessimism. Either way, it's going to skew your perception of the world. I find it interesting that people who like the free market can marshal facts and figures to show that the living standard of the world's people has grown by leaps and bounds since globalization took hold in the 1990s, with all its new agreements and virtually no opposition. Anti-capitalists and nationalists can marshal facts and figures to prove that third world people--and the working class in the advanced world--are facing economic destruction on an unprecedented scale, because globalization has taken hold with virtually no opposition. The facts and figures used by each side may be entirely accurate. Our mutual friend Robert Anton Wilson wrote, “The prover proves what the thinker thinks.” I always try to keep that in mind. So as I get deeper into advocacy, I always have to remind myself to take even my own glorious bullshit with many grains of salt. The Ballad of
Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton version)
by Michael Dare (with apologies
to Stephen Sondheim)
Defend the
film of Sweeney Todd
You made some
choices that were quite odd
You cut this
song. There's no defense.
And now the
whole thing doesn't make any sense.
You might
deserve a firing squad
for Sweeney
Todd.
The demon
barber of Fleet Street.
Johnny Depp
was your casting choice
His acting's
good but not his voice
I know he's
got a pretty face
but he is a
baritone and not a bass
like Sweeney
Like Sweeney
Todd
the demon
barber of Fleet Street
Raise your
budget high, Burton
Build a
lovely set
Get a nice
percent of gross
but never net
You cast your
wife, so what's the sin?
Her breasts
are heavy, her voice is thin
It's madness
that her makeup warps
a beautiful
woman right into a corpse
It's really
quite a strange facade
for Sweeney
Todd
and
necrophilia on Fleet Street
Art direction
rules, Burton
Cut it and revise Freely flows the blood of those Who criticize! Untranslatable
Sweeney was
to the cinema
screen 'e was
Lyrics
condensed, really absurd
Half of the
priest song that nobody heard
Art directed
and nicely shot
but no chorus
explains the plot
Kiss Me was
gone, so was the coda
Still it went
nice with popcorn and soda
did Sweeney
did Sweeney
Todd
the demon
barber of Fleet...
Street
Killjoy of the
Week
Leaving The Ballad of Sweeney Todd out of the
film of Sweeney Todd is like leaving the song Oklahoma
out
of the film of Oklahoma
or the song Hello Dolly out of the film of Hello
Dolly. It's the TITLE SONG for Christ sake, and if it takes
an extraordinary effort to squeeze it into the confines of the
cinematographic concept, you do it, for no other reason than it's the
fucking TITLE SONG.
The chorus in Sweeney Todd served many purposes.
It's not just a catchy ditty but a constant commentary upon the goings
on. In the play, the chorus consists not just of anonymous
passersby but actual cast members. If you're in the cast of Sweeney
Todd and you play one of his victims, you don't get to go
home after your death, you join the chorus. One of the
coolest things in the play is that the percentage of dead to living
characters in the chorus grows as Sweeney's carnage increases.
The official excuse for leaving it out is perfectly rational. The song
is theatrical, sung by a chorus to the audience, which doesn't fit
Burton's decision that the songs come from character and plot. But who
says the Ballad needed to be sung directly to the
audience? Who is every other song sung to? No one. The entire concept
of people singing in the midst of a drama is nothing but theatrical, so
what we're talking about is levels of theatricality. Yes, it would have
ripped the audience out of the film for a standard Broadway chorus to
appear out of nowhere and start singing directly to them, so why
couldn't the chorus have sung to the ether, just like everyone else?
The song The Impossible Dream doesn't really
advance the plot of Man of la Mancha. The play,
and the film, basically stop while Don Quixote sits there and sings.
But leaving it out of the film would have been insane. It was arguably
the best song in the play and certainly the only hit that became a
standard for lounge singers everywhere. One of the most powerful
examples of how a chorus can work in a film is the song Skid
Row from Little Shop of Horrors, and
anyone who suggests the film would be better without it is out of their
mind. And then there's Mighty Aphrodite, one of
Woody Allen's finest, which makes constant use of an actual Greek
chorus right out of Aristophanes. To suggest the chorus in any way
detracts from the story is totally nuts. The chorus augments the story
in every possible way, just like The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.
Chicago got away with big theatrical
choruses by making them fantasy numbers only taking place in the heads
of the participants, a technique Burton actually used in the Soliloquy
number in Sweeney Todd. Todd goes nuts after
Judge Turpin escapes from his grasp, singing "Why did I wait? You told
me to wait" to Mrs. Lovett in his apartment. Suddenly he's outside
singing "I will have vengeance. I will have salvation" to pedestrians
who are completely oblivious to the madman singing in their midst, then
at the end, he's back in the apartment, he was never actually out in
the street, it was all in his head, he's still with Mrs. Lovett. If it
worked there, why wouldn't it have worked throughout with the Ballad
of Sweeney Todd? It needn't have broken the fourth wall like
it did on the stage. Pedestrians in the chorus could have simply sang
to air, just like everybody else in every other song.
Where it's missed the most is at the end. Everyone agrees Sweeney Todd
ends abruptly and the only reason is that's not where it ends. There's
the final verse of the Ballad of Sweeney Todd
that brings everything to a satisfactory conclusion.
Of course people who never saw the play don't miss it. Those of us who
revere the play not only miss it but suffer a strange form of songus
interruptus every time the opening chords appear throughout the film
but the song is never sung.
The song Ah, Miss (AKA Kiss Me),
while it might not seem to further the plot, has character development
up the wazoo. In it, Joanna and Anthony plot to run away together but
there's no harmony, literally, the verses they sing to each other are
two different songs in counterpoint, one of Sondheim's specialties,
two, three, even four songs that somehow mesh into one, in this case,
coming together in the chorus when Joanna and Anthony sing "kiss me" to
each other. The song reveals its sinister purpose in the last verse, a
classic of Sondheim cynicism where it's revealed the
ingénue, Joanna, the lovely girl the whole plot revolves
around, is a total airhead, barely worth fighting over, a ditsy ninny,
like Ophelia gone mad with hints of Orpheus and Eurydice, she can only
think of her... reticule (a drawstring handbag). Here are the lyrics.
JOHANNA:
I'll take my reticule. I need my reticule. You mustn't think Me a fool But my reticule Never leaves my side... ANTHONY: Why take your reticule? We'll buy a reticule. I'd never think You a fool, But a reticule Leave it all aside...
The audience realizes she's a ditz right before Anthony, who seems to
give a momentary consideration to ditching her for someone more
coherent, but realizes the play would be over and simply repeats "kiss
me," and of course they kiss, the physical attraction being the only
thing they really have in common. Only Sondheim would dare to reveal
the hollow center of the traditional relationship between leading man
and ingénue, mirroring the genuine love Mrs. Lovett has
for Sweeney Todd, a love that necessitates a lie about his wife that
becomes her downfall.
Name
another songwriter where it's even possible to analyze the lyrics so
deeply. The only modern songwriter who even comes close to exploring
Sondheim's magical world of interior rhymes is Eminem, of all people,
who has probably never even heard of Stephen Sondheim. In any case, Ah,
Miss, and especially Ah, Miss Part II,
might be the most disposable songs in the play but that's not saying
much. They're still masterpieces of modern song
construction.
Then there's the incomplete song A Little Priest,
which was pared down to the absolute minimum to
deliver the necessary plot progression. Does anybody really think the
film of Sweeney Todd would
have been worse if
A Little Priest was three minutes longer, lengthening the
film from 117 minutes to two hours? Is the missing three
minutes necessary? Only if you care about some of the greatest
lyrics in the funniest song in one of the finest masterpieces
ever written for the theatrical stage. It's like leaving out half of
Hamlet's soliloquy.
There's no doubt Johnny Depp is a fine actor and endlessly creative,
but I wouldn't cast him as Mozart's Don Giovanni because Don Giovanni
is a bass, has to be a bass, that's the way Mozart wrote it, and if any
opera company transposed the score to make the part singable by a movie
star baritone, they'd be quite rightly trashed by everybody who gives a
damn about Mozart's original intentions.
It's possible to reject the entire idea that the film version of a
Broadway show needs a movie star in the lead anyway. Name the movie
star in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's a
whole generation of deviates who thank God every day they didn't recast
Tim Curry. Anybody think My Fair Lady would have
been worse if Eliza Doolittle had been played by Julie Andrews, the
original Broadway actress, instead of the overdubbed movie star Audrey
Hepburn? Jack Warner was rightly raked over the coals for that
decision. Sometimes the film of a Broadway show is literally
ruined because they cast a movie star instead of a singer. (Man
of la Mancha, anyone?) Sometimes, and I know this
is a stretch, you want to hear a song sung by an incredible voice, not
just an adequate one. Nobody will ever sing If Ever I Would
Leave You as good as Robert Goulet, and history will never
forget and never forgive the moron who cast Franco Nero instead of
Goulet as Sir Lancelot in the film of Camelot.
Yes, the film of Sweeney Todd works the way it is.
It doesn't just work, it's one of the best films of the year. But it
could have been better. Maybe the director's cut with all the missing
music will raise it into the rarefied strata of the best films
ever made.
Please oh please buy the Original Broadway Cast
Album
instead of the soundtrack of the film Caption Contest
Free Speech Zone
by Michael Dare
This
Week: What happens when you try to write an editorial right after
seeing The Aristocrats.
I'm in a quandary. I
wish to denigrate the souls of those in power in the strongest possible
terms, but if I were to really let go, no holds barred, set free the
reigns of my ability to express myself, I'm afraid I just might end up
saying that this county is being run by fascist cocksuckers and I'm
angry, not just at the fascist cocksuckers, but at the media who refuse
to call them fascist cocksuckers, because if any fascist cocksuckers on
earth deserve to be called fascist cocksuckers, it's the fascist
cocksuckers running this country. Calling them fascist cocksuckers
doesn't even do them justice. There does not exist in the English
language a word filthy and depraved enough to describe the asshole
scumbags running this country. Those motherfuckers need their asses
reamed out by Bubba with Brillo on national television. They need their
heads ripped off while the schoolchildren of America line up to shit
down their throats. They should be hung by their balls from Barbra
Streisand's nose while their cocks are shoved into manual pencil
sharpeners with Rosie O'Donnell on the crank. They should be
waterboarded on LSD, only it shouldn't be water, it should be
hydrochloric acid and piss, with an extra helping of sandpaper on their
eyes till they beg you to stop, but only stop if they beg you to
"fucking" stop, then keep going. And the corporate cunts of America,
the deceitful slimeballs perpetuating the degradation of all that is
decent and moral about the human species, they can blow me, and it
better be a good one, none of this kissy shit, I want it rammed down
their throats till they're choking and screaming for mercy. And if any
motherfucker thinks I just crossed the line from civil discourse into
profanity for profanity's sake, they can lick my balls while my cock is
shoved down the throats of the corporate cunts running America. And if
AOL filters out this email assuming it's spam, they can stick their
pinky up my ass as the motherfuckers lick my balls while my cock is
shoved down the throats of the corporate cunts running America.
Figuratively speaking, of course.
If
I don't stretch the boundaries of free speech, allowing
expression uncensored by the limits of conventional language,
conventional thought, conventional anything, using every word available
to its fullest potential, letting it all hang out no matter how
provocative or uncompromising, who the fuck else will? It's not just a
coy phrase or a random excuse to be a potty mouth. It's a very
real fight for your rights and it's pathetic I'm the one who has to do
it. The 1st amendment, use it or lose it.
High
Bandwidth Zone
Filipino Noir
"The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing
harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may
have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the
Filipino Monkey.
"Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day
later, the U.S. Navy has said its unclear where the voice came from. In
the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black
at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the
scenes on the water.
"We don't know for sure where they came from, said Cmdr.
Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. It could have
been a shore station.
"While the threat I am coming to you. You will explode in a
few minutes was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the
tension, theres no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials
have said its difficult to figure out who's talking."
- Andrew Scutro and David Brown: Filipino Monkey may be behind radio threats, ship drivers say -
"Q. US officials claim that Iranian boats have harassed and provoked
three US Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz, describing it as a
provocative act. Do you think this is yet another excuse by Washington
to justify their invasion of Iran?
"A. I think that possibility cannot be dismissed. President
George Bush has been making threatening gestures toward Iran for
several years now, including it as part of the 'axis of evil' during
his State of the Union address in 2002, and later sending warships into
the area for 'war games.' When the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
report recently stated that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program
four years ago, Mr. Bush was left without a reason to continue his
march toward war with Iran. The alleged incident in the Strait of
Hormuz will enable him to once again attempt to portray Iran has being
the aggressor in the current tensions with the United States.
"Q. Can you trace a similar incident in the history of
American policies? How do you find an analogy between this incident and
the incident in The Gulf of Tonkin some 44 years ago?
"A. The similarities to the Gulf of Tonkin incident are
alarming. On August 2, 1964 the US destroyer Maddox, on an espionage
mission in the Gulf of Tonkin off the Vietnam coast, reported being
fired on by North Vietnamese torpedo patrol boats. Two days later, the
Maddox and another destroyer were again patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin.
Instruments on the Maddox indicated that it was either attacked or was
under attack, and both destroyers began firing back, with assistance
from US air power.
"It was less than 24 hours later when the captain concluded
that there might not have been an attack. The pilot of a Crusader jet,
James B. Stockdale, undertook a reconnaissance flight over the gulf
that evening. He was asked if he saw any North Vietnamese attack
vessels. In response he said: Not a one. No boats, no wakes, no
ricochets off boats, no boat impacts, no torpedo wakes--nothing but
black sea and American firepower.
"Yet this non-event was seen by the US Congress as an act of aggression
against the United States, and caused Congress to authorize the first
major escalation of the disastrous war in Vietnam.
"One hopes that Congress will take a more studied approach to
the current situation, but unfortunately that is not likely to occur.
Members of Congress seem to believe that any careful review of
circumstances involving alleged aggression by any other nation against
the US will make them seem weak. One would think they would have
learned, if not from the Gulf of Tonkin situation then from the Iraq
War, that it is necessary to look beyond the sensational headlines and
seek out the facts. Sadly, this does not appear to be the case.
"Q. There have been some attempts to demonize Iran in the
past. Is the new incident meant to follow the same old US policy?
"A. This incident, or alleged incident, will certainly be
used to attempt to convince US citizens that Iran is dangerous and
poses a threat to the United States. Mr. Bush and others of his ilk may
use this situation to prove to the world that they were right about
Iran all along, that that nation seeks to destroy or at least harm
American citizens, and that aggressive defensive actions must be taken.
"It must be remembered that even after the NIE reported that
Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program four years earlier, Mr. Bush
said that that only proved that Iran was a threat to the US How he
reached and justified that bizarre opinion is anybody's guess. In
following this train of thought, Mr. Bush can say that this new
situation in the Strait of Hormuz is further evidence of the danger the
US faces from Iran.
- History repeats itself in the Persian Gulf: An interview with Robert Fantina by Ismail Salami - Iranian Version
CNN Version
Rational Version
Warner Brothers Version
Every
time you take a crap, an angel gets the hiccups.
Don't
Take My Word For It
"Almost always, the creative dedicated
minority has made the world better."
- Martin Luther King, Jr. -
"The most
interesting thing about the Republican race for president, at least so
far, is not what's working, but what isn't.
"The best
known candidate, the superstar, America's Mayor Rudy Giuliani is
floundering in the early contests.
"The best
financed, best organized candidate, not to mention the best looking,
has been unable to translate all his money and organization, not to
mention the neighboring state advantage in New Hampshire, into better
than a second-place finish in either of the first two major contests.
"The most
sought-after candidate, the one conservatives fell over themselves
encouraging to get into the race and propping up when he did, Fred
Thompson has practically fallen off the radar screen.
"Presidential
politics looks easy until you try it."
- Susan Estrich: Looking
at What's Not Working -
"St. Joseph
Health Services is a Catholic nonprofit that cares for many poor people
in Rhode Island. Last year, UnitedHealthcare of New England tried to
cut the hospital group from its provider network. The reason? After
years of seeing little or no increases in payments for services, St.
Joseph had demanded that the insurer raise its reimbursement levels.
"UnitedHealthcare played hardball. It proceeded to threaten its
customers with a huge 58-percent compounded hike in premiums if it had
to start writing bigger checks to St. Joseph.
"During the
angry standoff, St. Joe's chief revealed these interesting numbers: In
2006, the former CEO at UnitedHealth Group (the parent company in
Minneapolis), William McGuire, made $124 million. That was
one-and-a-half times the entire payroll of St. Joseph's 2,000
employees. That's right, one poo-bah at one insurance company pulled in
150 percent of what everyone at St. Joe's three health-care facilities
made put together not only the nurses, orderlies, administrators and
floor-swabbers, but also the executives and
surgeons. Everyone!"
- Froma Harrop: The
Wisdom of Crowds -
"Maybe
intelligent life is so unimaginably different from us that we are
looking in all the wrong "places." Maybe really intelligent life forms
hide their presence.So I changed my mind. I now take the null
hypothesis very seriously: that Sagan and Shklovskii were wrong: that
the number of advanced technical civilizations in our galaxy is exactly
one, that the number of advanced technical civilizations in the
universe is exactly one.What is the implication of the possibility,
mounting a bit every day, that we are alone in the universe? It
reverses the millennial progression from a geocentric to a heliocentric
to a Milky Way centered universe, back to, of all things, a geocentric
universe. We are the solitary point of light in a darkness without end.
It means that we are precious, infinitely so. It means that nuclear or
environmental cataclysm is an infinitely worse fate than we thought.
"It means that
we have a job to do, a mission that will last all our ages to come: to
seed and then to shepherd intelligent life beyond this pale blue dot."
- Martin Seligman: We Are Alone
-
"If there isn't life in the universe more
intelligent than man, then the universe is more fucked than we can
possibly imagine."
- Xarvon: Alien Investigator -
"This is where
the revolution began: a cafe decorated with sunflower yellow walls and
botanical prints, a default lunch spot on a day for running errands. It
was here, over mid-morning coffee with undecided voters, that an
exhausted Hillary Clinton came close to tears, and the women of New
Hampshire - or at least those old enough to remember the struggles of
the 70s or even Anita Hill's Senate testimony on sexual harassment in
1991 - decided it was time to come home.
"It was not
just pity, though a number of women admitted their eyes misted up at
the sight of Clinton close to tears. It was not just annoyance at
commentators who called Clinton 'shrill', or anger at the hecklers who
yelled: 'Iron my shirt.' Women, even those who have disliked Clinton
since she arrived on the national stage in 1992, felt a sense of
obligation."
- Suzanne Goldenberg: Hill's
Angels - how angry women of New Hampshire saved Clinton -
"I do not care which person is your
candidate. I don't care what you think of Hillary Clinton as a
potential president. What is being done in the press is akin to a pack
of rabid 7th graders trying to haze the nerdy girl in school simply
because they can. It has nothing to do with her qualifications - it has
to do with gender, and these lemming pundits think that it's perfectly
acceptable because everyone is doing it, including women like Andrea
Mitchell and Anne Kornblut."
- Christy Hardin Smith, Firedoglake - "Think about this for a second: Chris
Matthews is holding it against Hillary Clinton that her
husband cheated on her. But he doesn't
hold it against John McCain and Rudy Giuliani that they
cheated on their spouses. Matthews seems to think
women are to blame when their husbands have affairs - and men who cheat
on their spouses are blameless."
- Jamison Foser: MSNBC's
Chris Matthews problem -
"Sometimes I'm
a little stupid, maybe, a little slow in the head, so I'm wondering if
you can help me get something straight. Maybe you can help me
understand one fucking thing right now, America, and explain to me what
in the Christ is going on here. 'Cause, unless I'm missing something,
this country is in the middle of a motherfucking shitstorm, and I have
no fucking idea what you're gonna do to get out of it. I mean, are you
seriously considering voting for one of these
shitbags you got here in '08? Fat fucking chance.
"Way I see it,
America needs a president who's gonna somehow un-royally screw up the
Middle East, do some serious cleaning up after you dropped your pants
and took a steaming dump all over the fucking environment, and - boom!
- restore dignity, honor, and all that shit to these United States.
"See, I got
solutions to all your problems - I got 'em right here in my big, hairy
ballsack."
- Jimmy Carter: I
Got What America Needs Right Here -
"U.S.
President George Bush landed in Israel yesterday on his first
Presidential trip to the country. He participated in a press conference
in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in what both men
termed a historic and monumental occasion. After listening to both
so-called leaders make their opening comments and fielding questions
from journalists, the only groundbreaking revelation I could register
was that the naiveté of President Bush, either real or a
charade, only served the agenda of one party in the region - Hamas. The
radical Islamists at Hamas could not have recruited a better
cheerleader for their movement if they tried.
"My opinion
may be extreme, but then again, I live in an extremely violent limbo
under Israeli military occupation, shaped by a policy both men
continuously refuse to call by its true name state terror.
"Again, my
opinion is certainly subjective - but then again, I started my day by
reading a communique from the real world: a report issued from the
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
titled, Gaza Humanitarian Situation Report: Power Shortages In The Gaza
Strip (8 January 2008). The report states the background of the issue;
on 28 June 2006 the Israeli Air Force bombed the power plant in the
Gaza Strip destroying all six transformers and cutting 43% of Gaza's
total power capacity. The report says 'households in the Gaza Strip are
now experiencing regular power cuts' and goes on to note that 'the
irregular [electricity] supply causes additional problems. Running
water in Gaza is only available in most households for around eight
hours per day. If there is no power when water is available, it cannot
be pumped above ground level, reducing the availability of running
water to between four and six hours per day.' The result of this single
punitive measure, as stated in this report, is that if Gaza's Coastal
Municipalities Water Utility cannot provide its own emergency power
supply because of its own fuel shortages, it has to pump raw sewage
into the sea which damages the coastline in Gaza, southern Israel and
Egypt.'
"In another
report, released the same day, the World Food Program spokesperson
Kirstie Campbell says 70 percent of the population of Gaza has to
choose between putting food on the table or a roof over their heads.
"For President
Bush and Prime Minister Olmert, the fallout expected from the
information in these disturbing reports, released one day before
President Bush arrived in Israel, was not even worthy of worry. As a
matter of fact, the reality that Israel has successfully placed 1.5
million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, over 50% of them children, in
the dark and under the most draconian siege in recent history did not
even make it to the footnotes of either leaders comments."
- Sam Bahour: Bush
Peace Hallucinations Continue -
"Air Force One
touched down in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. President Bush has come to the
Holy Land for the first time as president of the United States.
"But he's
trapped inside his security bubble, his every step mapped out in great
and precise detail by teams of security experts and handlers. In the
end he'll see a side of this unhappy land that bears as much
resemblance to reality as Hollywood does to real life.
"I spend a lot
of my time covering the West Bank and Gaza: here's what I see, and he
won't.
"He won't be
going to Gaza, the Palestinian territory that is under the rule of
Hamas. Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the
United States. Watch what Bush won't see
"Gaza today is
a wasteland. Since Hamas took power, the Israeli government has made it
extremely difficult for Gazans to travel outside their crowded strip of
land along the Mediterranean. Israel has also severely restricted
imports in Gaza to essential humanitarian goods. Four out of every five
Palestinians depend on international food aid, according to the U.N.
Relief and Works Agency. No one is starving, but the economy has come
to a virtual standstill.
"President
Bush won't see the hospital wards where babies, just weeks old, are
dying because their doctors can't get permission from Israeli
authorities to go to Israel for treatment as they did in the past.
"Earlier this
week, I visited the intensive care unit in Gaza's Nasser Pediatric
Hospital. Hospital director, Dr. Anwar Khalil, explained that a third
of their incubators have broken down because of a lack of spare parts.
The electricity goes out on a regular basis because the power is cut up
to eight hours a day after Israel reduced fuel supplies."
- Ben Wedeman: Reporter
offers Bush a Gaza, West Bank misery tour -
"In the
sexually-charged world of teenagers, it can be tough to just say, 'no.'
"'It's
difficult to really be abstinent until marriage because it's a lot of
different things pulling at you when you're a teenager,' 16-year-old
Kristen Brown explains.
"CBS News
correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports the forces pulling at America's
teens include the tribulations of idols and icons from pop-culture;
like the recent news that Britney Spears' 16-year old sister is
pregnant.
"All those
influences have driven Congress and the Bush administration to push
'abstinence-only' education. The government has provided states a
billion dollars during the past decade for abstinence-only programs.
"But many say
it just doesn't work, and they point to the teen birth rate's first
rise in 15 years as proof.
"A growing
number of states are taking a stand and actually rejecting federal
abstinence-only funds, reports Attkisson. New Mexico just became the
15th.
"'The
governors are saying; "Even if this administration is going to continue
to push abstinence-only, we in the states are going to do the right
thing by teens and actually give them the information they need to
actually prevent an unintended pregnancy,'" said Cecile Richards, the
president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America."
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: '.---.,,.,...,.,.,.,..---. ' ;
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