RAPING WOMEN, BEATING MEN, RAPING BOYS,
AND MURDER; IT JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE

From the London Independent courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

The Bush administration was bracing itself last night for the release of new pictures and video footage from Abu Ghraib which show US soldiers having sex with an Iraqi woman prisoner, troops almost beating a prisoner to death, and the rape of young boys by Iraqi guards at the jail.

Senior officials have warned that the new images and details of the abuse and torture at the prison west of Baghdad will be even more shocking than those already released. They will undoubtedly place even more pressure on President George Bush and his beleaguered Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as they desperately try to limit the political damage from the growing scandal.

Click here for the rest.

Clearly, this is far, far worse than the horrific humiliations that, at this point, have been seen by the entire world. Furthermore, these are videos, not debatable reports: our soldiers have raped, beaten, and possibly murdered in cold blood helpless Iraqi prisoners.

Somehow the word “atrocity” doesn’t seem adequate for describing what has been done in America’s name.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

NOT AN ISOLATED INCIDENT
Not a Few Rogue Guards

From the Baltimore Sun courtesy of Eschaton:

The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners.

But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally.

They said in interviews Friday and yesterday that the abuses were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police charged with abuse.

The beatings, the two soldiers said, were meted out with the full knowledge of intelligence interrogators, who let military police know which prisoners were cooperating with them and which were not.

Click here for the rest.

So, the question here is how far up the chain of command does this go? Rumsfeld has already apologized, but my bet is that he had no problem with these abuses until they saw the light of day. For that matter, I bet the only thing Bush is sorry for is that they got caught: these guys are hardcore bastards, without any sense of morality as you and I understand the term. As far as I can tell, the entire military, from the lowliest MP to the Commander-in-Chief, is now in cover-your-ass mode, pointing the finger of blame at anyone in sight. In my opinion, the commanding officers bear much more responsibility, but it remains to be seen whether they will actually be held responsible.

Just another day in the American Empire.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

TORTURE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Two from the London Guardian courtesy of Eschaton:

UK forces taught torture methods

The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11".

When the interrogation techniques are used on British soldiers for training purposes, they are subject to a strict 48-hour time limit, and a supervisor and a psychologist are always present. It is recognised that in inexperienced hands, prisoners can be plunged into psychosis.

The spectrum of R2I techniques also includes keeping prisoners naked most of the time. This is what the Abu Ghraib photographs show, along with inmates being forced to crawl on a leash; forced to masturbate in front of a female soldier; mimic oral sex with other male prisoners; and form piles of naked, hooded men.

The full battery of methods includes hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners not only of dignity, but of fundamental human needs, such as warmth, water and food.

Click here for more.

General Told MPs to 'soften Up' Prisoners

The Guantanamo Bay prison complex was run by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. In late August 2003, Miller conducted an inquiry on interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq and suggested that prison guards could help set conditions for the interrogation of prisoners, according to the Taguba report.

Most of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib took place from October to December 2003.

A November 2003 report by Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, the Army's provost marshal, concluded that the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade, which was running Abu Ghraib, was not given official orders to get involved in setting conditions for interrogations.

Taguba, however, offered a different view.

"It is obvious,'' he wrote, that at least some at lower levels of the 800th did get involved.

Interrogators from military intelligence and other government agencies, believed to include the CIA, actively requested that MPs guarding prisoners at Abu Ghraib set the conditions for interrogations, Taguba reported. This is in violation of Army Regulation 190-8, he said.

That regulation states: "All persons captured, detained, interned or otherwise held in U.S. armed forces custody during the course of conflict will be given humanitarian care and treatment from the moment they fall into the hands of U.S. forces until final release or repatriation.''

Click here for more.

I have felt disgusted countless times over the past four years or so--the Bush administration in cahoots with corporations, Christian fundamentalists, and empire-eyed neo-conservatives have so utterly soiled everything for which this nation supposedly stands that I really believed that nothing could make me feel any worse. But now...

I thought I was disgusted with Bush, but the truth is that I was just angry. Extremely angry, to be sure, but not truly sick-to-my-stomach disgusted. The more I learn about this torture business in Iraq, however, the more I learn about what it means to be disgusted.

I suppose that some people believe that, because the prisoners aren't physically harmed, most of these "interrogations" are civilized. That's total bullshit. Humiliation, especially sexual humiliation, is immoral. Sleep deprivation is immoral. Depriving helpless prisoners of food, clothing, and heat is immoral. This is not something that would be done by the America that I love. This is not something that any humane person would do.

Is it now time to say that I am ashamed of my country?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Manager destroyed air controllers' 9/11 tape

From the NY Times via the Houston Chronicle:

At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording a few hours later describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said Thursday.

The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as the Bat Cave and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events of a few hours earlier.

And

A quality-assurance manager at the center destroyed the tape several months after it was made, crushing the cassette in his hand, cutting the tape into little pieces and dropping them in different trash cans around the building, according to the report.

And

The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to Federal Aviation Administration policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping" because of the stress of the day.

And finally

The quality-assurance manager destroyed the tape sometime in December 2001, January 2002 or February 2002. By that time he and the center's manager had received an e-mail from the FAA instructing officials to safeguard all records.

Click here for the rest.

Uh...is this setting off anybody else's bullshit meter the way it's setting off mine? Why did this "quality-assurance manager" go to so much trouble to crush the cassette, cut up the tape into little pieces, and then deposit it all in numerous different garbage cans? I mean, okay, maybe this is legit, but it sure smells rank, and simply adds to my dawning 9/11 realization that Bush knew.

This is screwy, and if the Bush administration wants people to think that this was just some innocent mistake, they're going to have to explain what the hell was up with this in much more detail.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

NBC'S FRIENDS ENDS ITS PRIME TIME RUN: BFD!

From an amusing essay at AlterNet:

I watched the final episode of Friends from a hot tub on the roof of a hotel in Burbank. I just wanted to go to the hot tub, I swear. Went to dinner with a friend, bitched about how the end of Friends is eclipsing one of the defining moments in modern American democracy: the slow-motion implosion of America's legitimacy on the global and human-rights stage, quite possibly the end of an empire, because even Rome could not stand beset by enemies without and the slave revolts within, and should Rummy resign? And was the apology enough? It's enough to curdle your sushi (pass me the unagi....) – or, wait, maybe it's the reverse. Maybe this media coverage of this whole torture-Iraqis thing was some evil rival-network attempt to take media attention away from the end of Friends. Like, CBS exposed the prison story and Friends is NBC. It's clear now! Those bastards!

Click here for more.

What's amazing to me is that this writer managed to find an entire article's worth of material about what has to be the most whitebread show to ever hit the airwaves. All I've been able to say about Friends over the years is that it's boring and lame--indeed, the show's utter lameness easily cancels out any babe factor that Aniston and Cox might have brought to the table. That's right: Friends is worse than Baywatch.

If you're actually sad about the show's demise, you should be ashamed of yourself.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

MUZZLING MICHAEL, MUZZLING ME

From the website of the best American journalist in the world, Greg Palast opines on Disney's refusal to distribute Michael Moore's new documentary:

WHEN the fattened cats at Disney put the kibosh on Michael Moore's new film, “Fahrenheit 9-11,” they did more than censor an artist. Gagging Moore is only the latest maneuver in suppressing some most uncomfortable facts: the Bush Administration's killing off investigations of Saudi Arabian funding of terror including evidence involving a few members of the bin Laden family in the USA.

I know, because, with my investigative team at BBC television and The Guardian of Britain, I wrote and filmed the original reports on which Moore's new documentary are based.

On November 11, 2001, just two months after the attack, BBC Television's Newsnight displayed documents indicating that FBI agents were held back from investigating two members of the bin Laden family who were fronting for a "suspected terrorist organization" out of Falls Church, Virginia - that is, until September 13, 2001. By that time, these birds had flown.

We further reported that upper level agents in the US government informed BBC that the Bush Administration had hobbled the investigation of Pakistan's Khan Laboratories, which ran a flea market in atomic bomb blueprints. Why were investigators stymied? Because the money trail led back to the Saudis.

And the layers of deception get deeper and deeper.

Click here.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

US president's popularity hits all-time low

From the London Guardian courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

Americans have given President Bush his lowest approval rating since he came to office and are more dissatisfied with where the country is going than at any time in the last eight years, says a Gallup poll.
The survey shows 62% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going, while only 49% approve of the way Mr Bush is handling his job, on a par with the lowest figure he has reached during his presidency.

The poll, conducted early this week, continues to show a polarised nation split right down the middle, with major events such as those taking place in Falluja and the pictures of Iraqis being tortured having little impact on attitudes because most of the electorate has already made up its mind.

Since mid-January, the president's approval ratings have moved only within a narrow band, between 49% and 53%.

Heh, heh, heh. Click here for the rest.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

HOUSTON CHRONICLE REVIEWS THE HOTEL PLAY

Of course, this is the show in which I currently play a small role. From the Chronicle's theater guy, Everett Evans:

As written by Shawn and gamely staged by IBP artistic director Anthony Barilla, the vignettes are variable, ranging from sluggish and dreary (particularly some of the clerk's frozen-in-time private interludes) to preposterously funny.

The proceedings drift lackadaisically through bizarre speeches and unwieldy group scenes in the hotel bar, occasionally sparking to life in abrupt outbursts of exaggerated violence and volatility. This registers as Shawn's most potent comic device, for all the funniest moments involve a character (usually male) exploding in rage out of all proportion to the incident that provoked the response.

And

These occasional moments of amusement must fight their way out of the general aimlessness of the proceedings.

Perhaps this enterprise comments on the meaningless of existence -- perhaps, upon the meaninglessness of such theatrical exercises as Hotel Play. At any rate, it fades in the sigh of a somber, inconclusive finish. What The Hotel Play is, more than anything, is just plain strange. That's probably just the way Shawn and IBP want it.

Hmmmm. It sounds like he didn't like the script, but was amused by the producion. I hate second guessing these damned reviewers; at least he didn't skewer us, but he didn't exactly call it great, either.

For what it's worth, I think it's pretty great....

...aaahhh, just click here.

And then click here for streaming audio of a brief interview with the show's director and assistant director on KUHF, Houston's local NPR affiliate. It's more fun than the review.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

IRAQ: ONE BIG F'ED UP MESS

From the Houston Chronicle, Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, considers American options in the new Vietnam:

So get ready for the coming national debate over withdrawal. The unthinkable is becoming thinkable. And it isn't hard to understand why.

All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now. Consider Fallujah: One week they're setting deadlines and threatening offensives; the next week they're pulling back. Then they briefly name one of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard generals to lead the pacification of the city — the kind of bizarre idea that only desperate people can conjure. The Bush administration is evidently in a panic, and this panic is being conveyed to the American people.

Events in Fallujah have also conveyed another impression: The administration is increasingly reluctant to fight the people it defines as the bad guys in Iraq. This reluctance is perfectly understandable. No one wants more American casualties. And no one doubts that more violence in Iraq may alienate more of the Iraqi population. But this reluctance can also appear both to Iraqis and to the American public as a sign of declining will. Among the many lessons of Vietnam is that American support for that war remained remarkably steady, despite high American casualties, until Americans began to sense that their government was no longer committed to what had been defined as victory and was looking for a way out. If Americans see signs of wavering by the Bush administration — and Fallujah may be one of those signs — support for the war could decline sharply.

It is the sense that Bush officials don't know what they are doing that has fed all the new talk about "lowering our sights." No one will say, "Let's cut and run." Instead, people talk about installing a moderate but not democratic government. They talk about letting Iraq break up into three parts: Kurd, Shiite and Sunni. But at the core, this is happy talk, designed to help us avert our eyes from withdrawal's real consequences. The choice in Iraq is not between democracy and stability. It is between democratic stability, on the one hand, and civil conflict, chaos or brutal, totalitarian dictatorship and terrorism, on the other.

To top it all off, this whole thing is America's fault. No one to blame but the good old US of A.

Click here.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST GEORGE WILL JOINS
THE RANKS OF CONSERVATIVES WHO BASH BUSH
Time for Bush to See The Realities of Iraq

From the Washington Post courtesy of Eschaton:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."

What does such careless talk say about the mind of this administration? Note that the clearly implied antecedent of the pronoun "ours" is "Americans." So the president seemed to be saying that white is, and brown is not, the color of Americans' skin. He does not mean that. But that is the sort of swamp one wanders into when trying to deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters.

Scott McClellan, the president's press secretary, later said the president meant only that "there are some in the world that think that some people can't be free" or "can't live in freedom." The president meant that "some Middle Eastern countries -- that the people in those Middle Eastern countries cannot be free."

Perhaps that, which is problematic enough, is what the president meant. But what he suggested was: Some persons -- perhaps many persons; no names being named, the smear remained tantalizingly vague -- doubt his nation-building project because they are racists.

That is one way to respond to questions about the wisdom of thinking America can transform the entire Middle East by constructing a liberal democracy in Iraq. But if any Americans want to be governed by politicians who short-circuit complex discussions by recklessly imputing racism to those who differ with them, such Americans do not usually turn to the Republican choice in our two-party system.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, Will dolls it up with his usual flourishes of grandiose verbosity and five dollar words, but it now looks as though he's starting to believe what the left has known for some years now: our President is an inarticulate bully. Or a stupid bully. One of those two.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

US abuse worse than Saddam's, say inmates

From the Sydney Morning Herald via J. Orlin Grabbe:

The photographs of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib have reinforced the long-held view that the US occupation is intent on humiliating the Iraqi people.

Other Iraqis have given similar accounts of what goes on inside the prison that was a centre of torture and execution under Saddam Hussein's rule.

Dhia al-Shweiri spent several stints in the prison, twice under Saddam and once under the Americans. He preferred Saddam's torture to the humiliation of being stripped naked by his US guards, he said. Now Mr Shweiri, 30, is a diehard fighter in the Mehdi Army, the anti-US militia of a Shiite Muslim imam

Mr Shweiri said that while jailed by Saddam's regime he was electrocuted, beaten and suspended from the ceiling with his hands tied behind his back.

"But that's better than the humiliation of being stripped naked," he said. "Shoot me here," he added, pointing between his eyes, "but don't do this to us."

Click here for more.

Obviously, treating POWs in this way is immoral and wrong. Furthermore, such behavior utterly undermines what slim hopes may still exist for anything good eventually coming out of this ill conceived Bush administration adventure. Throw in the recent wave of uprisings and the steady rise in US casualties and it becomes clear that the occupation is an utter disaster.

What blows my mind, however, is how whoever's in charge of interrogations over there could so easily forget about the Islamic world's higher level of sexual Puritanism, and the taboos on nudity that come with it. I mean, this whole thing is just awful, but it's pretty damned stupid, too: it seems like the Pentagon is still finding new ways to piss off the Iraqi population. The situation in Iraq is getting worse, not better, and it seems like this is exactly how the President wants it.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

TWO FROM THIS MODERN WORLD

From the London Guardian:

Use of private contractors in
Iraqi jail interrogations highlighted
by inquiry into abuse of prisoners

Lawyers for the soldiers argue they are being made scapegoats for a rogue military prison system in which mercenaries give orders without legal accountability.

A military report into the Abu Ghraib case - parts of which were made available to the Guardian - makes it clear that private contractors were supervising interrogations in the prison, which was notorious for torture and executions under Saddam Hussein.

One civilian contractor was accused of raping a young male prisoner but has not been charged because military law has no jurisdiction over him.

And

Mr Myers said the role of the private contractors in Abu Ghraib are central to the case.

"I think it creates a laissez faire environment that is completely inappropriate. If these individuals engaged in crimes against an Iraq national - who has jurisdiction over such a crime?", Mr Myers asked.

"It's insanity," said Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, who has examined the case, and is concerned about the private contractors' free-ranging role. "These are rank amateurs and there is no legally binding law on these guys as far as I could tell. Why did they let them in the prison?"

Click here for more.

And from the New York Times, Paul Krugman on the aimlessness of US policy in Iraq:

In Front of Your Nose

And all of the proposals one hears for resolving this ugly situation seem to be either impractical or far behind the curve.

Some say we should send more troops. But the U.S. military doesn't have more troops to send, unless it resorts to extreme measures, like withdrawing a large part of the forces currently in South Korea. Did I mention that North Korea is building nuclear weapons, and may already have eight?

Others say we should seek more support from other countries. There may once have been a time — say, last summer — when the U.S. could have struck a deal: by ceding a lot of authority to the U.N., we might have been able to persuade countries with large armies, like India, to contribute large numbers of peacekeeping troops. But it's hard to imagine that anyone will now send significant forces into the Iraqi cauldron.

Some pin their hopes on a political solution: they believe that violence will subside if the U.N. is allowed to appoint a caretaker government that Iraqis don't view as a U.S. puppet.

Let's hope they're right. But bear in mind that right now the U.S. is still planning to hand over "sovereignty" to a body, yet to be named, that will have hardly any power at all. For practical purposes, the U.S. ambassador will be running the country.

Click here for more.

Also, you should go check out Tom Tomorrow's new comic strip on this past week in conservatism. As usual, it's pretty funny. Click here.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

THEATER AND RACIAL DIVERSITY IN HOUSTON

Infernal Bridegroom Productions' artistic director Anthony Barilla responds to my recent post on IBP's production of The Hotel Play, which Tony directs, and in which I play a small role. From Real Art comments:

I'm glad you're having a good time, Ron: we're having a great time having you on board. You're a very good actor and you deserve good work.

Just wanted to mention that we pitch hard to "multi-cultural" actors to get them involved in all our shows that we cast from outside the company. I mean: we've practically begged. My experience had been that most actors-of-color in Houston are very focused on getting regular paying gigs.

This is really a drag for us as there are certain shows that we simply can't do without, for example, black actors. And yet we've only rarely found black actors willing to work with us.

Lemme know if you know anyone who would like to work with us in the future: of-color or otherwise.

Wally's a genius? Hell yeah.

Curious which two shows of ours didn't live up to our rep - thanks man: tony (the director)

First off, thanks to Tony for the compliments--like most actors, I crave such life-affirming ego-boosts.

Second off, and more importantly, Tony's statement reminds me that achieving racial diversity is quite often much more complicated than simply, say, supporting affirmative action. As I mentioned in my previous post about IBP, the dearth of actors-of-color seems to be a problem affecting the entire underground theater scene in Houston. This is an irony, indeed: the vast majority of theater artists, and artists in general, are politically liberal. That means that theater people are extraordinarily sensitive to racial and ethnic issues--generally, white actors and directors want to work with non-white artists. What do you do, then, when it appears that people of color, on the whole, don't want to work with majority white theater companies? Short of all-out recruiting drives which would, conceivably, deplete much needed resources for creating shows, thereby rendering moot the diversity issue, I have no idea.

Case in point: my experience as a high school theater teacher.

There are two high schools in the district where I work. Both have theater departments. Ours is white. The other one is black. That is, our department has only four or five non-white students participating in advanced classes and after school production work, and our two person faculty is all white. The other department, however, seems to have closer to a 50-50 white to black student ratio; their single faculty member is African-American. The other school, overall, has fewer white students than ours, but not by much.

It's tempting to conclude that the difference must have something to do with the color of the faculty at the two schools, and I think that there's something to that, but there's more to consider. For instance, our season, chosen by our department chair, is composed of plays written exclusively by white playwrights. Their season showcases both white and black plays. Furthermore, they offer an entry level theater class that focuses on black writers; we offer nothing like that. It is clear that they provide students with much, much more black culture than we do--in fact, it's safe to say that our white department provides no black culture.

(It is important to note, however, that both departments, as far as I can tell, aren't doing Hispanic students any favors.)

Again, it is tempting to conclude that their department is more racially diverse because of its strong dose of black culture, and, again, I think there's something to that: in fact, my gut instinct is that the other department, with a black teacher and black plays, makes African-American students feel more comfortable, like theater is a place that they can call home. The truth is, however, that I don't really know what the deal is. It has been very frustrating, year after year, to see so many talented non-white students come through my Theater Arts I class to get their fine arts credit, and then decide to not continue with the program. I seem to have good relationships with most of my students of color, and the few non-white students who do continue with the program seem to enjoy themselves.

Ideally, one would think that it might be a good idea to introduce a strong, black cultural component to our department in hopes that this might increase retention of black students, but then we don't live in an idealized world. My second year as a teacher I tried to mount a staged reading of Beah Richards' fabulous poem, A Black Woman Speaks, for Black History Month. I called for an open audition of black actresses and fifteen or so showed up. Not everybody was great, but there was so much excitement, so much happiness that our theater department was doing a black show, that I decided to cast all of them.

A few days later, the grandfather of one of the girls, a conservative minister at a black Pentecostal church, knocked on my classroom door. The conversation that we then had out in the hall startled me so much that it still makes me angry: he essentially ordered me to cease production of the show. His reasoning was weird: this poem talks about slavery; today's black kids get so upset about slavery that they can't be friends with white kids. Or something to that effect. He told me that it was better to confine myself to plays about black leaders and inventors. He also told me that, in choosing such a radical piece (in fact, I had chosen it because it seems, at this point in history, utterly non-controversial), I had insulted the entire black community in the town where I teach--of course, I knew that this was bullshit, but he seemed to completely believe in what he was saying. He also told me that Alex Haley's Roots, a book he called "trash," had started all this slavery nonsense. I was in the Twilight Zone, but I didn't back down: I told him that there was no way that he could barge in here and tell me what shows I could and couldn't do. He trumped me by calling the principal who then shut me down. No black faculty members would support me; in fact, some of them found new problems with the poem: one had a problem with the mention of rape; another had a problem with the n-word (which has, ironically, been censored from the above-linked text of the piece).

I've never again tried to do a black play. It's almost as though those in power, black and white alike, believe it's not my place to do so.

So this brings me back to IBP. Infernal Bridegroom is a fairly high-profile company in the city of Houston, just as high schools are high-profile within their respective communities. It is fair, indeed, obligatory for a person of conscience to criticize both schools and theater companies for not being racially diverse. However, it is very important for me to admit that if IBP is guilty of shunning diversity, then I am, too. The thing is, on the other hand, that, like Tony at IBP, I feel like I've exhausted any realistic options for recruiting and retaining non-white actors: I have absolutely no idea what to do at my school, and I have absolutely no advice to give IBP.

One thing's for sure: in the post civil rights era, the politics of race are maddeningly complicated and baffling.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

TWO FROM ESCHATON

First, Atrios links to a nice little recounting of a liberal Canadian columnist's appearance on Fox's O'Reilly show. From the Globe and Mail:

My Fox trot with Bill O'Reilly

We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.

I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.

I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."

"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far. Mr. Doyle would have been shrieking.

And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk. He then went into a mad rant about lefties like Mr. Doyle and how I was a typical Globe columnist. I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response -- not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.

Leave it to those insufferably polite Canadians to tell it like it is. Click here for more.

Second, Atrios hits the keyboard and personally dissects a strongly biased NPR report on the weird and nearly incomprehensible thing about Democratic presidential contender John Kerry's Catholic faith:

NPR

Here we get the punchline - those who are moral vote Republican. Those who are not vote Democrat. Kerry is immoral, simply because he doesn't believe all of his personal religious beliefs should be legislated.

Hagerty doesn't bother to consider all of the pro-choice Catholic Republicans. She doesn't bother to find out why all Catholic Politicians aren't clamoring to outlaw birth control, and why the figures within the Church are silent on that. Ditto the death penalty.

Hagerty is a menace. She is NPR's religion reporter and always writes about the hot-button social issues. She's careful - very careful - to not let her reporting appear to be obviously slanted, but it's hideously slanted in a subtle manipulative fashion. The good guys and bad guys are always clear in her stories, even as she seeks to provide "balance."

Click here for the rest.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

THE HAYMARKET RIOT

Today is May Day, a sort of international Labor Day, which commemorates the Haymarket Riot of 1886. From Wikipedia:

On May 1, 1886, labor unions organized a strike for an eight hour work day in Chicago, Illinois, United States. On May 3, a small riot occurred at the McCormick Harvester Plant in which there was a shooting and one fatality when police tangled with the rioters.

Violence escalated on May 4 when a protest meeting began in Haymarket Square. During this meeting to denounce the events of the previous days, the police began to disperse the crowd when someone threw a bomb, killing twelve people. Policeman Mathias J. Degan was killed almost instantly and seven other policemen later succumbed to injuries. Some of the speakers earlier in the day had been anarchists, and so the crime was presumed to have been committed by an anarchist, despite the fact that no evidence for such a link could be demonstrated.

Click here for the rest.

Here's the post I made for May Day last year.

¡Vive la revolución!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

TEST TRAVESTY

More education bashing from the Houston Chronicle editorial board:

Advising students that the answer to any question on the American Revolution is likely to be George Washington bears not even a slight resemblance to teaching. Yet more than one teacher defends the practice of suggesting answers without context in lieu of teaching the subject.

Chronicle columnist Rick Casey revealed and disparaged this dispiriting custom in an April 25 commentary after a substitute teacher showed him the regular teacher's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills review sheet. The sheet listed key historical names, dates and other facts for students to memorize and then regurgitate on test day.

At first impression, this is teaching at its worst. Upon greater reflection, this effort to raise test scores without learning is education accountability at its worst.

Of course, the Chronicle is assuming that Texas education is broken and needs to be fixed. I'm of the opinion, however, that education is working exactly as intended. That is, knowledge and thinking aren't nearly so important as doing what you're told, in this case passing the TAKS test: don't think about it; just do it! High stakes standardized tests are simply another manifestation of the discipline and authority culture in which our schools are steeped.

Click here for the rest.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

THE NEW JIM CROW, 2004

From the Nation, the best American journalist in the world, Greg Palast, writes about the potential disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of African-Americans for the 2004 Presidential election:

That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election, 1.9 million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical reasons, like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on. The reasons for ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious shading to the ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of Harvard experts discovered that just as in Florida, the number of ballots spoiled was--county by county, precinct by precinct--in direct proportion to the local black voting population.

Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--both in the percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled--not counted--as a white voter," explains political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report. "National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters."

So there you have it. In the last presidential election, approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November 2004, efficiently, by computer--because HAVA and other bogus reform measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted vote.

Click here for the rest.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Disturbing photos of Iraqi prisoners surface on TV

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

One photograph shows Iraqi prisoners, naked except for hoods covering their heads, stacked in a human pyramid, one with a slur written in English on his skin.

That and other scenes of humiliation at the hands of U.S. military police that appear in photographs obtained by CBS News have led to criminal charges against six American soldiers.

The images were shown Wednesday night on 60 Minutes II.

CBS says they were taken late last year at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, where American soldiers were holding hundreds of prisoners captured during the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In March, the U.S. Army announced that six members of the 800th Military Police Brigade faced court martial for allegedly abusing about 20 prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The charges included dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, assault and indecent acts with another person.

Personally, I think that the behavior of American military personnel will get worse the longer they're in Iraq: this is probably a taste of things to come.

Click here for the rest.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

NOAM CHOMSKY ON
AMERICAN EDUCATION
(and more!)

David Barsamian, longtime alternative radio journalist, interviews linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky for the Progressive:

Q: Why do so many people in the United States just go along with U.S. policy?

Chomsky: What's striking is that this view is accepted without coercion. If you're living in a dictatorship or under kings and princes or in a place run by murderous bishops, you'd better take that view or you're in deep trouble. You get burned at the stake or thrown into the gulag or something.

In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.

Orwell had some words about this in his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm. He says straight, look, in England what comes out in a free country is not very different from this totalitarian monster that I'm describing in the book. It's more or less the same. How come in a free country? He has two sentences, which are pretty accurate. One, he says, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And second--and I think this is much more important--a good education instills in you the intuitive understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say.

I don't think he goes far enough. I'd say there are certain things it wouldn't do to think. A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension--it becomes unconscious and reflexive--that you just don't think certain things, things that are threatening to power interests.

Not everyone accepts this. But most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, can look back at our own personal history. For those of us who got into good colleges or the professions, did we stand up to that high school history teacher who told us some ridiculous lie about American history and say, "That's a ridiculous lie. You're an idiot"? No. We said, "All right, I'll keep quiet, and I'll write it in the exam and I'll think, yes, he's an idiot." And it's easy to say and believe things that improve your self-image and your career and that are in other ways beneficial to yourselves.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

Click here for more.

I must admit that thoughts like this one are what first got me thinking about education in a deconstructive way--in my first year of teaching, I watched the Noam Chomsky documentary Manufacturing Consent; at one point in the film Chomsky says that "education is a system of imposed ignorance." The idea stuck with me. After reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, I was convinced: public education teaches us all to obey.

I have looked in this mirror to which Chomsky refers, and I am now disgusted with myself. If one is to survive as a teacher, he must believe in what he is doing. Since learning the hidden truth about our national indoctrinational system, it is impossible for me to believe that I'm doing good work. In fact, every time I punish a kid for breaking a minor rule, or reward a kid for asking how high when I say jump, I'm doing bad work.

Thank God I'm quitting. Continuing as a teacher would eventually drive me insane, or, to paraphrase Chomsky, make me buy into the system. Of the two choices, insanity is preferable.

It's almost May...

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

ZERO TOLERANCE
Common sense must be a
factor in school discipline

From a Houston Chronicle editorial:

Many school districts across the United States adopted severe disciplinary policies laying out rigid punishments, especially after two Littleton, Colo., students killed 12 classmates, a teacher and themselves five years ago at Columbine High School. Parents and school officials demanded measures to keep schools free from weapons, drugs and violence.

An April 18 Chronicle report by reporter Rachel Graves presented evidence that some districts have gone too far, greatly expanding the number of prohibited behaviors and possessions considered contraband, and punishing even first offenders with special discipline school, suspension, expulsion, police citation or arrest.

Now a backlash is growing against draconian measures such as random drug and weapons searches. But the policies also have their staunch defenders, including anxious parents and school administrators who like the idea that zero tolerance requires them to employ almost no judgment of their own.

Click here for the rest.

This is, of course, no surprise when one considers the overemphasis on discipline that has been the core philosophy of public education in the US for over a century. Throw in our general society's gradual drift toward "get tough on crime" attitudes, and all it took was one high-profile massacre to transform our schools into the soft-touch gulags that they are now. The Chronicle is right to condemn "zero tolerance," but it won't be enough to simply call for an end such policies: the schools are about discipline; we must eradicate what we have now and begin anew. Nothing less will halt the rise of such policies.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$