THE SO-CALLED LIBERAL MEDIA

There are two dominant strains of mainstream media criticism convincingly demonstrating that the news has a conservative bias rather than the popularly believed but non-existent liberal bias. The first of these lines of criticism is an institutional analysis of the media, originally put together by Noam Chomsky and Ed Hermann in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. The long and the short of this argument is that the news media are owned by corporations and reporting tends to reflect a pro-corporate, pro-government point of view--the book uses countless case studies to essentially prove beyond any reasonable doubt that this is true. The second line of criticism is messier, virtually all case study, trying to illustrate on a point by point basis that the media favors conservative views over liberal views, without the clean overview of corporate structure provided by Chomsky and Hermann. Despite it's down and dirty, street fighting approach, this second strain of criticism is also compelling: the massive piles of evidence dug up on a daily basis by bloggers, left-wing journalists, and progressive media watchdog organizations make it quite clear that the media are, indeed, conservative.

One of the superstars of this second strain of criticism is Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?, a great book, much less dry than Chomsky and Hermann's academic language in Manufacturing Consent. Anyway, the point to this brief diatribe is that Alterman often likes to go out in the streets to rough up some right-wing toughs. Here's a bit from his latest:

A second technique is more often deployed on network television, where such naked partisanship is frowned upon, but executives are, if anything, even more worried about appearing unsympathetic to the red-state, red-meat offerings of George W. Bush. This is to ignore the substance and focus on the spectacle, the "feelings" and the atmosphere. CBS's Bob Schieffer, on his best post-Dan Rather behavior, for instance, marveled, "One of the best-delivered speeches that I have heard President Bush make. He was confident, he was direct, he drove his points home."

On ABC, Cokie Roberts found herself enthralled with a faux-dramatic--and most likely fully staged--embrace between an Iraqi woman seated next to Laura Bush and the mother of a soldier who died for Bush's folly in Falluja, gushing, "To have that completely spontaneous hug was something that leaves you with goose bumps." Tim Russert--who, like so many Democratic pols who transition to media megabucks, is committed to proving his bona fides by kowtowing to Republicans at every opportunity--professed, "You can feel...in this town" that Democratic "nerves are frayed." Russert was reacting to a rare display of Democratic spirit during the speech--booing when Bush sought to mislead the country into dismantling the most successful government program ever attempted in America: Social Security. To Russert and much of the permanent Washington establishment, the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat--or at least one who's willing to act that way.

Click here for the rest.

Go read it; it's good stuff.

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CHAIRMAN DEAN

Party politics are not at all my area of expertise--I'm much more of an issues-oriented kind of guy. So, while I really like Howard Dean, I've really only been intrigued from a distance by his reputation for upstart fund-raising and organizational strategy: "that's cool; he used the internet in new ways that other politicians don't yet seem to understand." Of course, inherent in such a statement is that I don't understand, either. Consequently, I've had very little to say about Dean's coronation as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As far as I can tell, issues aren't nearly so important to this position as is strategy.

Fortunately, others are much better informed on this topic than I am. Enter Rob Salkowitz from Emphasis Added:

Howard Dean won the party chair by preaching a devolution of control (and money) to local and state organizations. His ideology on policy matters, while appealing to the party faithful, is largely irrelevant to the task at hand. His challenge is to reorganize what has been a centrally-managed national coalition of horizontal issue-advocacy constituencies into a federation of 50 locally-run “vertical” state organizations, each able to contest races by running a better ground-game, rather than relying on the air-cover of an overarching ideology. This will mean putting some long-time friends in discomfort, while trying to breathe new life into nearly moribund operations in many states.

The stereotype of Dean is as a raving liberal, far to the left of the country and even the party. This is largely a caricature, but it will serve Dean well in his work, since he enjoys the trust of the progressives who will often be the targets of his organizational battles. Dean’s real support for DNC chair comes not from those who favor unlimited abortion on demand or immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but from those in the party who understand that it takes different tactics to win elections in Alabama than it does in New York.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, if Salkowitz is correct in his analysis, Dean gaining the DNC chair does not mean that the party is going to surge to the left, which is something of a bummer to me, but I wasn't really expecting that, so it's not a huge bummer. What this does mean, however, is that the Dems may very well develop some balls. That's something I can get behind.

Theoretically.

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FAREWELL ARTHUR MILLER

Years ago I believed that Miller's plays were much better as reading than as theater. His heavy, slowly paced stories were great and emotionally moving, I thought, but, in performance, prone to melodrama under the worst circumstances, and boring under the best. Of course, I was wrong. Miller's plays are simply hard to perform, requiring actors and directors to dig deeply through weighty philosophical, cultural, and political issues in order to get through to the truth of human existence that lies beneath: Miller's plays are great because he hits the audience with a double whammy of hardcore intellectualism infused with raw emotional reality. When a production truly commits to executing this double whammy, it becomes quite clear that Miller's plays are among the best ever written by an American.

(I've even seen dedicated high school kids pull this off. One of my prouder moments as a teacher was being involved with a kickass production of All My Sons back in 2000 at Sterling High School in Baytown. It was one of those cool moments when you have the right people with the right kind of artistic hunger all working together on the same project. These kids put themselves totally on the line, and the result was just beautiful.)

The thing I really love about Arthur Miller's work, however, is his sense social conscience. Death of a Salesman indicts capitalism and the so-called "American Dream." All My Sons takes on corrupt capitalists, profiteering at the expense of American airmen during WWII. The Crucible attacks McCarthyism by way of the Salem witch trials. In other words, Miller was an expert practitioner of Real Art.

Miles, below, hit the general info about Miller's life and work. As for me, I offer this essay Miller wrote nearly a decade ago when The Crucible was being made into a film:

Why I Wrote The Crucible:
An Artist's Answer to Politics

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or rs in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks sing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however there was often a despairing pity mixed with "Well, they must have done something." Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

Click here for the rest.

(By the way, I believe that the word "rs" in the excerpt above means "revolutionaries," but I'm not one hundred percent certain about that.)

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STONERS IN HISTORY

Okay this is partially absurd, partially persuasive, but thoroughly amusing. From AlterNet:

What's In Popeye's Pipe?

So from these seemingly innocent beginnings, what evidence is there that Popeye is actually a stoner?

During the 1920s and '30s, the era when Popeye was created, "spinach" was a very common code word for marijuana. One classic example is "The Spinach Song," recorded in 1938 by the popular jazz band Julia Lee and Her Boyfriends. Performed for years in clubs thick with cannabis smoke, along with other Julia Lee hits like "Sweet Marijuana," the popular song used spinach as an obvious metaphor for pot.

In addition, anti-marijuana propaganda of the time claimed that marijuana use induced super-strength. Overblown media reports proclaimed that pot smokers became extraordinarily strong, and even immune to bullets. So tying in Popeye's mighty strength with his sucking back some spinach would have seemed like an obvious cannabis connection at the time.

And

For example, in many of the animated Popeye cartoons from the 1960s, Popeye is explicitly shown sucking the power-giving spinach through his pipe.

Click here for the rest.

I told my wife (a.k.a. "missus r" on the Real Art comment boards) about this article and she added to the argument by observing that Popeye always seems to be muttering and giggling as though he were stoned bejesus. Suddenly I've got this picture of a Vietnam era Popeye toking up with John Kerry on a swift boat in the Mekong Delta. Hey, it could have happened, right? Well, no, because Popeye's a fictional character after all, but this is my amusing vision, so in my mind, it happened.

Jeez, all this stoner talk must be getting to me.

Anyway, when I read about Popeye the Stoner Man, I remembered a little news piece I read a few years back that I thought would be a great companion piece. After a quick visit to Google, I found this from Harvard Magazine:

"Shakespeare’s 'Tenth Muse'"?

One smoker may even have been William Shakespeare.

With colleagues Francis Thackeray and Tommie van der Merwe (not a relation), van der Merwe analyzed scrapings from the bowls and stems of 24 pipes dug from sites in and about Stratford-on-Avon. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust provided fragments of kaolin (white clay) pipes, some unearthed from the garden at Shakespeare's residence and all dating from the 1600s. "There's an archaeological dating system for pipes, based on shape and the diameters of the bowl, stem, and stem bore," van der Merwe explains. "I scraped things out of them--mostly soil--but you could see little black flecks on the inside of the bowls."

When subjected to a chemical assay using gas chromatography and a mass spectrometer--as summarized in the South African Journal of Science--these flecks proved most interesting. Though cannabis itself degrades fairly quickly, cannabidiol and cannabinol are stable combustion products produced when it burns. (Van der Merwe has detected these substances in 600-year-old Ethiopian pipes.) Eight of the 24 pipe fragments showed evidence suggestive of such marijuana-related compounds.

Click here for the rest.

At the very least, this would explain A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Actually, this wouldn't be surprising at all if it were true: actors and creative people in general have long been known to be more prone to substance abuse problems than the general population. If I were still teaching high school, I would be very tempted to use this article during a lead-in to a Shakespeare unit. "Bonging with the Bard" might very well enhance the average teenager's attention span. For a few minutes, anyway. Until the buzz creeps in.

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THREE FROM NOAM CHOMSKY

First a couple from his blog, via ZNet:

Oil for Food Farce

I presume the main motivation is to make sure that no one pays attention to the real scandal: that the US-imposed sanctions slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, devastated the society, compelled the population to rely on Saddam Hussein for survival, and probably saved him from the fate of comparable monsters supported by Washington and London, including those now in office, all overthrown from within despite US-UK support to the very end in some of the worst cases.

That’s definitely not something that can be allowed to enter public discussion. Another motive could well be to divert attention from the fact that whatever corruption there may have been at the UN is scarcely a toothpick on the mountain of the vast corruption of the occupying authorities.

Click here for the rest.

I haven’t really posted on this oil-for-food corruption scandal because it struck me superficially as just another excuse for right-wing UN haters to beat their chests and point their fingers. According to Chomsky, when you look at the scandal relative to American actions concerning Iraq overall and the oil-for-food program specifically, I was pretty much right for not taking the story too seriously. Granted, corruption of this sort really shouldn’t be tolerated, but the people raising the biggest stink about it really have absolutely no moral authority to do so. I’m reminded of a good Bible verse. From the book of Matthew, chapter 7, verse 3:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Everybody says that, but nobody actually believes it.

Iraq’s Election

That is a real triumph of non-violent resistance, for which Sistani has been the symbol. The US sought in every possible way to avoid elections, but has been compelled to back down, step-by-step. First, it tried to ram through a US-written constitution. That was barred by a Sistani fatwa. Then it tried to impose one or another device (caucuses, etc.) that could be controlled completely. Also blocked by non-violent resistance. It continued until finally the US (and UK, trailing obediently behind) had no recourse but to allow an election—and of course, the doctrinal system went into high gear to present it as a US initiative, once it could no longer be avoided. The US also sought to undermine it as much as possible, e.g., by driving independent media out of the country (notably al-Jazeera, the most important), by ensuring that its own candidates, particularly Allawi, would be the only ones to have access to state resources to reach the public (most candidates had to remain unidentified), etc. But the US-UK couldn’t block the elections, greatly to the distress of Washington and London. The question now is whether they can be compelled to accept the outcome. There’s little doubt, even from the more serious mainstream press as well as from polls and from properly hawkish experts (like Anthony Cordesman) that people voted with the hope that it would end the occupation. Blair announced at once, loud and clear, that the prospect is not even being contemplated, clearly articulating his usual contempt for democracy.

Click here for more.

This is different from what I’ve been saying about the elections, that they are ultimately meaningless as long as US forces occupy Iraq. However, Chomsky makes a good point in that having elections at all represents something of a triumph for the Iraqi people: it means that the US does not exercise absolute control over Iraq's politics, and that there is bound to be tension between the newly elected government and American policy in the region. In this sense, the elections are not meaningless. On the other hand, I just cannot accept that our government is going to let their government do whatever it wants, like nationalizing Iraq’s vast oil resources, or insisting that the US military gets the hell out. Indeed, my prediction is that we’ll still have troops permanently stationed in Iraq twenty years from now, if not more.

Finally, getting away from his blogging quickies, Democracy Now presents about forty five minutes of a recent Chomsky speech in Santa Fe. Overall, the speech is on Iraq, but, as usual, Chomsky, ever the intellectual, is all over the place, incorporating ideas from several of his recent essays and articles. The excerpt I’m posting is a bit of a diversion from his overall topic, but well worth posting here. It’s a fairly big Chomsky meme, PR and politics, that I haven’t paid enough attention to here at Real Art:

U.S. Might Face "Ultimate Nightmare" in Middle
East Where Shiites Control Most of World's Oil

For many years, elections here, election campaigns, have been run by the public relations industry and each time it's with increasing sophistication. And quite naturally, the industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information, and similarly, to undermine democracy by same method, projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information. The candidates are trained, carefully trained, to project a certain image. Intellectuals like to make fun of George Bush's use of phrases like “misunderestimate,” and so on, but my strong suspicion is that he's trained to do that. He's carefully trained to efface the fact that he's a spoiled frat boy from Yale, and to look like a Texas roughneck kind of ordinary guy just like you, just waiting to get back to the ranch that they created for him to, you know, throw a cow over his shoulder or whatever you’re supposed to do on a ranch, but, all of this is careful training. Ordinary guy. Meanwhile, Kerry is trained to be a goose hunter and a motorcycle rider and so on and so forth. The other imagery seemed to work marginally better, but the important thing to do is to keep people from knowing the stands and positions of the candidates on any issue or the parties. And it sort of works. Take a look at the last election. Right before the election people were asked -- potential voters were asked, on what -- what are the grounds for your vote going to be? About 10% said they were voting on the basis of the candidate's stands on issues, agendas, policies and ideas. 6% for Bush voters, 13% for Kerry voters. The rest are voting for what are called qualities or values in the P.R. industry, which is, of course, all meaningless.

Click here to read the transcript of, watch, or listen to the speech.

Of course, this PR industry dominance within the American political sphere is why most Americans have such deluded views about what’s going on in Iraq: the aim of PR is to obscure the truth, not enlighten it. Consequently, we’re bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq rather than securing control of a vital global security interest. That is, their oil.

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OLD STORY, NEW WRINKLE PART TWO:
Enron plotted to shut down power plant

From CNN courtesy of This Modern World:

A Washington state utility released audiotapes Thursday that it said revealed bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. plotted to take a power plant off-line in 2001 to jack up electric prices in Western states.

That same day, shortages of power forced rolling blackouts in northern California that affected about 2 million customers.

And

Eric Christensen, the utility's assistant general counsel, said the tapes show Enron was planning to manipulate Western power markets as early as 1998 -- before California's deregulated energy market opened.

And

Earlier tapes obtained during the Enron-Snohomish lawsuit indicated Enron had manipulated the Western power grid for a year and a half.

Those tapes include traders gloating profanely about overcharging "Grandma Millie" in California.

Click here for the rest.

The point here is not that Enron was a one of the greedier evil corporations out there—we already knew that. Rather, the point is that all this information is coming out in lawsuits instead of federal investigations.

Remember how when California’s rolling blackouts were occurring the Bush administration’s stance was that the crisis had nothing to do with corporate manipulations resulting from the state’s recent energy industry deregulation. They asserted every conceivable explanation they could come up with except for what was actually happening: energy corporations were manipulating energy prices because the new deregulation laws allowed them to do so!

This kind of federal stonewalling is continuing apparently. As the CNN article notes:

Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington accused FERC of dragging its feet in reviewing the case, even though its staff, she said, has found "documentation of criminal activity."

"That means a little utility in the state of Washington has actually had to become the private investigator, the policeman on the beat, their own counsel and attorney before the FERC -- and at their own expense do the job that federal investigators and regulators should do," Cantwell said.

My best guess is that this stonewalling isn’t about protecting Enron’s key players so much as it is about protecting the conservative idealization of corporate deregulation. If it ever becomes achingly clear to the public at large that “getting the government off the people’s backs” often means getting the corporations onto the people’s backs, conservatives are in big trouble. Here’s hoping.

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OLD STORY, NEW WRINKLE
PART ONE: Hiding the wires

From Orcinus:

I was amused by the claims that George W. Bush wore a listening device under his jacket in the first two of his three debates with John Kerry, but recognized that, at the time, the evidence in the case was largely speculative. I was waiting to see if the press would do its job and investigate the matter thoroughly.

Turns out they did, according to a report from David Lindorff at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Problem is, they didn't tell the public what they had uncovered: that Bush almost certainly did, in fact, use such a device.

And

The truth of the matter is that killing a story that could affect the outcome of the election simply because it could affect the outcome of the election is an abandonment of one's duties as a journalist dedicated to publishing the truth and adequately informing the public. It would be one thing if the evidence was indeed speculative; but the evidence presented by Nelson and the Times' other sources, in fact, was well past speculation. It was, in fact, highly substantive.

There's no other way of putting it: This is a gross dereliction of its Fourth Estate role as a public watchdog by the Times.

Click here for the rest.

The point isn’t just that Bush cheated in the debates: it’s that he cheated AND the “liberal” New York Times killed the story! I think it’s pretty clear at this point that:

1. The mainstream media are not at all liberal.

2. The mainstream media employ an entirely different standard for Democrats and liberals than they do for Republicans and conservatives (just compare this Bush thing, or the WMD story, or AWOL Bush, with all the lies being thrown about during the Clinton impeachment, lies that by and large have never been corrected by the news organizations that reported them in the first place).

And

3. Our President is a lying, cheating, criminal son of a bitch (everything I’ve heard about Barbara is that she is, indeed, a big huge bitch) who should be tarred and feathered, flogged, and left on the side of the highway in an orange jumpsuit wiping vomit off the gravel.

God bless America!

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New York's same-sex marriage ban struck down

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

"The court recognized that unless gay people can marry, they are not being treated equally under the law," said Susan Sommer, a Lambda Legal Defense Fund lawyer who presented the case for five couples who brought the lawsuit. "Same-sex couples need the protections and security marriage provides, and this ruling says they're entitled to get them the same way straight couples do."

Click here for the rest.

I expect this to be happening more often, especially since the US Supreme Court ruled in it's 2003 sodomy decision that homosexuals are a distinct category of citizens, worthy of the Constitutional right to equal protection under the law. Sooner or later, legally married homosexual couples are going to sue for the right to have their marriages recognized by other states. That's when the fun starts: one of the more important principles of the Constitution is that contracts made in one state are legally binding in all other states; of course, marriages are contracts, and gay marriages are very illegal in most states right now. Sparks will fly, the Supreme Court will be put into a very awkward position, and biggoted moralists and fundamentalists everywhere will gnash their teeth.

I can't wait.

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ANOTHER STAR TREK SHOW BITES THE DUST

From some email list via This is not a compliment, a quick article by comic book writer Warren Ellis about Enterprise's demise:

And so another Star Trek show descends into TV Hell. I met someone last year who'd been brought in to pitch a new Trek show: but, more than half a year down the line, I haven't heard anything else. So my suspicion is that Star Trek is gone from our screens for a comfortingly long time.

Click here for the rest.

I do love Star Trek, so one might think that this news would be cause for a few tears. Alas, such is not the case. Some years back, after Star Trek: the Next Generation had finished its seven year run, it became increasingly difficult for me to find time to watch Deep Space Nine and Voyager. My motivation had run out, and I'm still not sure why. When I did manage to watch an episode or two, I usually enjoyed them. Perhaps I had developed other interests. I don't know: what I do know is that I just didn't care anymore. When Enterprise premiered a few years later, I liked what I saw, a more Kirk style Trek, with lots of sexual tension coupled with lots of fist and phaser fighting. Captain Archer was cool, as was the rest of the cast. I was especially fond of the engineer from the South, Trip. So I watched for a couple of seasons, but then the same thing happened. I lost interest, and I don't know why. As with the other two shows, whenever I did tune in, I enjoyed myself, but I never really made much of an effort. Most of this has probably more to do with my watching less television overall than with the quality of the shows, but here we are with Enterprise being cancelled. I feel like I should be bummed, but I'm just not.

Ah, well. Live long and prosper.

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SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY’S SUPER BOWL NIPPLE

Of course, I love Paul McCartney so there was already a good chance that I was going to like the halftime show. After all, I’ve been making it a practice to avoid the traditional celebrity glitz-fest for some years now. The only reason I didn’t change the channel or head to the bathroom was because it was Paul.

Fortunately, he didn’t disappoint. The four songs he performed, three Beatles tunes and one solo song, were excellent choices. Paul deftly worked his way through “Drive My Car,” expertly executing the ever infectious refrain “beep-beep, beep-beep, yeah” as though his career depended on it. “Get Back” was well done, too, although I wonder if his shameless singing about the allure of “California grass” will cause any controversy in these FCC challenged times. The one song from his solo career, the James Bond theme “Live and Let Die,” seamlessly slid into Paul’s Beatle song sandwich so well because it’s practically a Beatle song to begin with: longtime Beatle producer George Martin originally collaborated on the song’s construction with Paul when it was first recorded. As with the first two performances, this one was also well done: after many years Paul has finally reclaimed the song from the trailer-trash rock ‘n’ roll recesses to which heroin-vomit band Guns N’ Roses had it exiled. Complete with pyrotechnics and cool lights, “Live and Let Die” was waaaay cool. The Cute One’s final selection, “Hey Jude,” was also performed adeptly, although in a somewhat tarnished fashion due to the cheesy audience sing-along during the “na na” section—the candle waving dancers were both good and lame, absurdly sentimental up close, kinda neat from a distance. In a surprise juxtaposition of song and video image, we learned that “Jude” does not, in fact, refer to Julian Lennon, as had been believed for decades; rather, “Jude” is, in reality, the Statue of Liberty. I never knew.

On the whole, Paul really did turn it up to eleven. The band was tight, and he really threw himself into his songs. I haven’t seen him kicking ass this way for years. Of course, it’s hard for me to not be a bit cynical about this, too. Paul, ever the business Beatle, chose really well known songs and performed them exactly as heard on their famous studio recordings, giving consumers what they want. Indeed, Paul hasn’t performed on a stage this big since the 1960s, and he was obviously hyper-aware of that fact. Perhaps his inspired renditions resulted as much from his desire to increase his net worth as from his personal dedication to his art. Given tonight’s massive audience, the entire Beatle and McCartney catalogues are certain to get a significant bump in sales. Hell, I’d go out and buy another Beatle album myself if I didn’t already have a pirated MP3 disk of everything they ever did. But why am I surprised? Paul has always been the businessman of the Beatles, despite his groovy, feel-good rhetoric.

What I really want to know is why my favorite Knight of the British Empire flat out refused to show us his nipple.

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SUPER BLOWG

I'm nominally for the Eagles because they're the underdog and I'm a bit tired of the Patriots' dynasty. This is a bit weird because I almost always support AFC teams. On the whole, though, I guess I don't really care who wins this year: I just want to see a good game. Things would be different if the Patriots and their fans were as arrogant the Cowboys, who I hated, and their rabid fans back in the 90s, but such is not the case today--the Patriots are pretty classy, and it's hard to hate them just because they're great. Anyway, here's hoping for something worthy of one of those old NFL highlight films, legendary and cool.

If we're really lucky, we'll get to see Sir Paul McCartney's nipple during the halftime show.

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Mardi Gras History

Here's a pretty good general history of Mardi Gras in Louisiana from the website of nearby East Jefferson Parish:

The history of Mardi Gras began long before Europeans set foot in the New World. In mid February the ancient Romans celebrated the Lupercalia, a circus like festival not entirely unlike the Mardi Gras we are familiar with today. When Rome embraced Christianity, the early Church fathers decided it was better to incorporate certain aspects of pagan rituals into the new faith rather than attempt to abolish them altogether. Carnival became a period of abandon and merriment that preceded the penance of Lent, thus giving a Christian interpretation to the ancient custom.

Mardi Gras came to America in 1699 with the French explorer Iberville. Mardi Gras had been celebrated in Paris since the Middle Ages, where it was a major holiday. Iberville sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, from where he launched an expedition up the Mississippi River. On March 3 of 1699, Iberville had set up a camp on the west bank of the river about 60 miles south of where New Orleans is today. This was the day Mardi Gras was being celebrated in France. In honor of this important day, Iberville named the site Point du Mardi Gras.

Click here for more Mardi Gras history.

This is a pretty informative article: unfortunately, it doesn't explain why Mardi Gras is so weird. I mean, people do realize it's weird, right? Am I crazy on this, or what?

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MY FIRST MARDI GRAS (PART II)

Today, we went to the biggest Mardi Gras event in Baton Rouge, the Spanish Town Parade. And I brought my camera for this one, too. Fortunately, the blotter seems to have finally worn off, and the pictures seem less hallucinogenic. Some of the floats were pretty weird and cool. Others were plain, but impressive because they essentially amounted to efficient, massive bead distribution systems. All in all, it was pretty cool. And I scored a bunch more beads.

Here are some pics:

























I have to admit that I still don't quite understand Mardi Gras. I mean, I get the part about the last big celebration before the austerity of Lent, but that does nothing to explain why it's all so weird and bizarre. Of course, the gaudy strangeness is what I really love about Mardi Gras, so I'm not knocking it; I'm just observing that I don't get it. Maybe if I did, it wouldn't be so cool. Perhaps there's supposed to be some mystery about this. Mystery and booze. And boobs. Okay, I haven't seen any Mardi Boobs so far--I bet that's just a New Orleans thing--but the mammarian reputation of Mardi Gras precedes itself, so it's worth a mention at least.

Hee hee. "Mardi Boobs." I crack myself up.

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MY FIRST MARDI GRAS

My acting professor invited the first year MFA students to his house earlier this evening to watch his neighborhood parade in Southdowns here in Baton Rouge. I now understand why people are into those cheap plastic beads--I've got my own now, and, boy, are they cool. I also brought my new digital camera, which I have no idea how to use. Consequently, most of my shots evoke the acid scene from Easy Rider (which was also during Mardi Gras):









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FAREWELL OSSIE DAVIS

"Struggle is strengthening. Battling with evil gives us the power to battle evil even more." --Ossie Davis

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

When not on stage or on camera, Davis and Dee were deeply involved in civil rights issues and efforts to promote the cause of blacks in the entertainment industry. In 1963, Davis participated in the landmark March on Washington. Two years later, he delivered a memorable eulogy for his slain friend, Malcolm X, whom Davis praised as "our own black shining prince" and "our living, black manhood!"

"In honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves," said Davis, who reprised his eulogy in a voice-over for the 1992 Spike Lee film, Malcolm X.

And

As black performers, they found themselves caught up in the social unrest of the then-new Cold War. In one instance, Davis stood by singer Paul Robeson even as others denounced him for his openly communist sympathies. "We young ones in the theater, trying to fathom even as we followed, were pulled this way and that by the swirling currents of these new dimensions of the Struggle," Davis wrote.

Click here for the rest.

Davis wasn't simply a great actor; he was a great man. I've known his work all my life, but I wasn't really able to put his face with his name until I saw him talking about Louis Armstrong in Ken Burns' jazz documentary on PBS a few years ago. He spoke about how when he was younger, during the Civil Rights Era, he did a film with the great trumpeter. Davis' attitude going into the project was something to the effect that Armstrong was just an Uncle Tom, grinning and mugging for white people's money. Along the way, however, Davis spied the tired and old jazz master in a moment of private and sad contemplation. This sight was something of an epiphany for Davis. He immediately realized that Armstrong was simply from another generation, doing what he had to do to survive in a racist nation: Armstrong, like Davis, had suffered greatly as a black man in America. Of course, my words are inadequate; Davis, telling this story, verged on poetry. It's probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen on television.

Ossie Davis, like Paul Robeson, like John Lennon, embodied what I believe to be the ideal artist. He devoted his life to making the world a more fair and just place. His passing is a great loss.



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UBER-TEXAN MOLLY IVINS

Two from WorkingForChange:

Bush pronouncements don't match Bush programs

Then there is the ludicrously loony matter of the budget deficit. Recall these people inherited a whopping budget surplus. For over a year now, the administration has said, "We've got a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years." The deficit in 2004 was $412 billion, the largest ever. The White House now says this year's will be $427 billion -- BUT that the plan to cut the deficit is "on track." Man, that's some track.

To this cascading disaster, Bush wants to add $2 trillion in transition costs over the next decade for his scheme to partially privatize Social Security. This is one I'm really having trouble figuring out. There is no crisis in the Social Security program. It is not in trouble. If nothing is done, come 2042 -- or 2052 if you believe the Congressional Budget Office -- SS will have to start paying less than its promised benefits, but will still be able to pay seniors more than it does today in constant dollars. You can easily fix even that minor problem by lifting the cap on FICA taxes now at $90,000.

Why should people who make more than $90,000 have their higher income exempted, when every nickel made by people below the poverty level is taxed?

Click here for the rest.

Iraq election heartwarming, but
haven't we been here before?

But mitigating my optimism is the fact that I've been around for a long time. Not that longevity is any guarantee of wisdom, but it does provide perspective. I can remember when they had elections in Vietnam that looked hopeful in 1967. I can remember the elections in El Salvador in 1984. And I remember last year's election in Afghanistan, with the almost unbearably moving sight of Afghani women coming out to vote. Still, it didn't kill off a single raping warlord, did it?

In Iraq alone, we've been through "mission accomplished," then the violence would end once we captured Saddam Hussein, then the all-important handover of sovereignty that would make all the difference and next the destruction of Fallujah that was going to break the insurgency. (Well, it did destroy Fallujah.) Someday, we will actually capture al-Zarqawi, and I bet we find that doesn't make much difference, either.

I really don't like accentuating the negative, but I also don't like spin, especially after what we've been through with this administration and the truth about Iraq.

Click here for more.

Poor George. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
--Molly Ivins

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No Tomorrow

Progressive journalist Bill Moyers on Christian fundamentalism, the environment, and American flirtation with self-destruction. From AlterNet via ZNet:

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

And

A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture?

Click here for the rest.

One doesn't really realize how strong Apocalyptic Millenialism is as an ideological force in the US until one gets to know some Apocalyptic Millenialists. Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, my father is one of these people. He's intelligent, kind-hearted, and wise. But he believes that the Apocalypse will happen, sooner than later, and that it is a good thing: this means he advocates the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, which would mean the destruction of one of the most holy sites in all of Islam, the Al Aqsa Mosque. Obviously, massive war would result from such an action, and given Israel, Pakistan, and Iran's nuclear capabilities, this war would make the current one in Iraq look like a cakewalk. My father understands all this, but believes that this is the will of God. He's not crazy; he's just deluded. And there are millions and millions of his fellow countrymen who see things as he does.

I have no idea how to engage him in a dialogue about this: to doubt his interpretation of the Revelation is to doubt the word of God; this he cannot do, and urging him to do so would only deafen his ears to what I have to say. Having been a Southern Baptist once myself, I generally feel comfortable talking to fundamentalists on their own turf, but this one has me stumped. It also has me scared when I think about it too much.

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The meaning of revisionism

From journalist David Neiwert over at Orcinus:

But the conservative-movement enterprise extends beyond mere policy, and appears determined to overturn the very way the populace at large thinks and sees itself.

Historical revisionism plays an essential role in achieving this. Thus, Ann Coulter's rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy in Treason was only the first iteration of this trend. (Trent Lott's nostalgia for Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats was an ill-received version of it as well.) It was shortly followed by Michelle Malkin's defense of the Japanese American internment.

Now we have Thomas Woods' right-wing bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which explains why such progressive advances as civil rights for minorities were actually harmful to the nation.

And

This is what we all need to understand about the current spate of historical revisionism: It is occurring in the service of a broader agenda to recast our very understanding of the meaning of our history, and thus the meaning of America itself.

Thus we have the spectacle of the GOP recasting itself as the "party of civil rights," which as Hunter suggests might be laughable -- coming, as it does, from the party of the Southern Strategy -- were it not of a piece with the Newspeak that permeates the conservative march on America.

Click here for the rest.

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IRAQI ELECTIONS, VIETNAMESE ELECTIONS

A New York Times blast from the past. From This Modern World:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 (1967)-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

Click here for more.

It is important to note that the Vietnam war continued for five or six more years after these 1967 elections. Then we lost. Then we left in disgrace. These "successful" elections in Iraq mean nothing. The US is still an occupying force and the insurgency continues. Really, we ought to pull out right now.

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CHILD MOLESTATION: IT'S NOT
JUST FOR CATHOLICS ANYMORE

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A former pastor has been indicted on charges alleging that he sexually abused six boys over a 14-year period, many inside Westside Victory Baptist Church.

The Rev. Larry Nuell Neathery, 55, has been jailed since he surrendered three weeks ago. He was indicted Friday.

Neathery, who resigned as Westside Victory's pastor in December, is accused of sexual misconduct from 1990 until last year.

Defense attorney Tiffany Lewis said Monday that Neathery "emphatically denies each and every allegation."

Click here for the rest.

Hmmm. Catholic priests can plead insanity born of celibacy. What's the Protestant excuse?

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