Issue #223
is brought to you by...
Constant updates from my blog at http://dareland.blogspot.com/
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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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