THIS MODERN WORLD

August:

So now there’s a bunch of right-wingers who are pitching the desecrated Koran riot story with the line “Newsweek Lied, People Died.”

Get it? It’s funny, because it’s making fun of what all the anti-war people said when 1,700 Americans were killed based on lies they were warned about but didn’t listen to. What, don’t you have a fucking sense of humor?

This isn’t even not caring. It’s beyond not caring. It’s taking pride in not caring.

This probably won’t be the subject of my next cartoon, mainly because I already wrote the cartoon more than a month ago. How’s that for prescience?

Man, this Newsweek story is really setting people off. It’s bad enough that it’s adding fuel to the fire of the right-wing’s hatred for the so-called liberal media, but the magazine’s quickly becoming an Administration scapegoat as well. Here’s what Scotty says :

“This report has had serious consequences,” White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said today in West Point, Virginia, where the president was giving a speech. “It has caused damage to the image of the United States abroad and people have lost their lives.”

The Pentagon’s spokesman was even more blunt :

“What we know is that the Newsweek story about a Koran desecration is demonstrably false, and thus far there have not been any credible allegations of willful Koran desecration, and Newsweek hasn’t produced any such evidence either,” said a Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.
. . .
“The unfortunate part about it is you can’t go back and undo or retract the damage that they’ve done not only to this nation, but those who have been hacked, injured and some even killed as a result of these false allegations,” he said.

Am I the only person who thinks the Bushies are the last people who should be giving lectures on damaging our nation’s image or handing out blame for the resulting violence? If I remember correctly, our reputation in the international community wasn’t exactly stellar prior to the Newsweek piece.

Dan Froomkin sees through the bad dialogue and flashy special effects¹ to see the real story in the new Star Wars films :

“Revenge of the Sith,” it turns out, can also be seen as a cautionary tale for our time — a blistering critique of the war in Iraq, a reminder of how democracies can give up their freedoms too easily, and an admonition about the seduction of good people by absolute power.

Some film critics suggest it could be the biggest anti-Bush blockbuster since “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott gives “Sith” a rave, and notes that Lucas “grounds it in a cogent and (for the first time) comprehensible political context.

” ‘Revenge of the Sith’ is about how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, ‘If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.’ Obi-Wan’s response is likely to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign: ‘Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.’ ”

AFP reports that the movie delivers “a galactic jab to US President George W. Bush.”

I’m shocked it’s taken people this long to pick up on the political stuff. As I wrote on my site a couple of weeks ago, the first two movies are basically parables on how democratic superpowers eventually become controlled by despots. Lucas put it well himself in an interview with Time magazine three years ago :

So where does Lucas stand in this political polemic? “I’m more on the liberal side of things,” he says. “I grew up in San Francisco in the ’60s, and my positions are sort of shaped by that … If you look back 30 years ago, there were certain issues with the Kennedys, with Richard Nixon, that focused my interest.” Lucas’ own geopolitics can sound pretty bleak: “All democracies turn into dictatorships — but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea … What kinds of things push people and institutions into this direction?”

In Clones, Lucas goes a way toward answering that question. “That’s the issue that I’ve been exploring: How did the Republic turn into the Empire? That’s paralleled with: How did Anakin turn into Darth Vader? How does a good person go bad, and how does a democracy become a dictatorship? It isn’t that the Empire conquered the Republic, it’s that the Empire is the Republic.” Lucas’ comments clarify the connection between the Anakin trilogy and the Luke trilogy: that the Empire was created out of the corruption of the Republic, and that somebody had to fight it. “One day Princess Leia and her friends woke up and said, ‘This isn’t the Republic anymore, it’s the Empire. We are the bad guys. Well, we don’t agree with this. This democracy is a sham, it’s all wrong.'”

The amusing thing here² is that the plots of these movies were written before Iraq, 9/11, and the ascension of our lovable cokehead preznit. The question shouldn’t be why Lucas is a America-hating liberal who’s making sci-fi movies that slam our glorious leader, but why Bush et. al. are dutifully following in the footsteps of power-hungry lunatics like Julius Caesar or Emperor Palpatine.

^{1 : Which is, admittedly, a very very difficult thing to do.}

2 : By “amusing” I mean “scary as hell”.

---

Since this is my first post here, lemme take this opportunity to thank Tom for including me on this group blogging experiment of his. Now there’s a good chance that Bob, Jack, or I will post things that our host doesn’t necessarily agree with, so please do us all a favor of directing your comments to the author in question. I can be reached at TheTalentShow [at] gmail [dot] com. Tom’s busy enough without having to defend something I write.

…it’s important to note something about this Newsweek brouhaha: as SusanHu points out at Kos, the allegations they printed were most likely true — and had been previously reported elsewhere.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 20, 2005:

Lawyers allege abuse of 12 at Guantanamo
By Frank Davies
Inquirer Washington Bureau

…Some detainees complained of religious humiliation, saying guards had defaced their copies of the Koran and, in one case, had thrown it in a toilet, said Kristine Huskey [an attorney in Philadelphia], who interviewed clients late last month. Others said that pills were hidden in their food and that people came to their cells claiming to be their attorneys, to gain information.

“All have been physically abused, and, however you define the term, the treatment of these men crossed the line,” [attorney Tom] Wilner said. “There was torture, make no mistake about it.” …

B. From the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City, NY and linked as a footnote in a Human Rights Watch report:

72.They were never given prayer mats and initially they didn’t get a Koran. When the Korans were provided, they were kicked and thrown about by the guards and on occasion thrown in the buckets used for the toilets. This kept happening. When it happened it was always said to be an accident but it was a recurrent theme.

C. From the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City, NY and linked as a footnote in a Human Rights Watch report:

74. Asif says that `it was impossible to pray because initially we did not know the direction to pray, but also given that we couldn’t move and the harassment from the guards, it was simply not feasible. The behaviour of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it. It is clear to me that the conditions in our cells and our general treatment were designed by the officers in charge of the interrogation process to “soften us up”‘.

D. From the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City, NY and linked as a footnote in a Human Rights Watch report:

Statement of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, “Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay,” released publicly on August 4, 2004, para. 72, 74, available online at:
http://www.ccr- ny.org/v2/reports/docs/
Gitmo=compositestatementFINAL23july04.pdf,
accessed on August 19, 2004. The disrespect of the Koran by guards at Camp X-Ray was one of the factors prompting a hunger strike. Ibid., para. 111-117.

This pretty much sums up what’s going on here:

Censorship is what they’re after, and don’t let them tell you otherwise. They announced this goal unmistakably at least a year ago. (Here’s the classic, regret-filled formulation: “And here’s a question: Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?”) Of course, they “regret” that censorship might be necessary. It’s a terrible shame and all that. But damn it, if magazines like Newsweek ARE GOING TO GET PEOPLE KILLED…well, what can we do? We obviously have to shut them up. They brought it on themselves. It’s their own damned fault. Of course, we’d like to have a free press, but THEY’RE GETTING PEOPLE KILLED!

And please, please don’t say it can’t happen here. It did happen here — during World War I and World War II. They want to go back to the good old days, when people got thrown in jail for reading the Bill of Rights in public.

The more enthusiastic proponents of blogging insist that the medium can only enhance the flow of information. You know, information wants to be free, yadda yadda yadda. (If I had a nickel for every time I heard Arianna Huffington using the word “conversation” in some interview last week — well, I would have enough nickels to buy a candy bar or two from a vending machine, at the very least.) Unfortunately it cuts both ways — blogs are equally efficient at shutting down and discrediting inconvenient facts through sheer repetition of — not to put too fine a point on it — complete bullshit. The rightie blogs seem to have formed their own little volunteer Civil Information Defense, vigilantly monitoring all media for possible acts of sedition. Media outlets need to get smart about this stuff and quick, and stop caving in so easily to these morons — because they’re really not going to like the storyline that develops if they don’t.

The more astute among you will have noticed that the blog, while not entirely abandoned, has been somewhat neglected of late. And the fact of the matter is, I don’t see this changing any time soon. So we’re going to run a little experiment here at thismodernworld.com — for the next month or so, this is going to be a group blog. (I hear they’re all the rage these days.) To start out, I’ve invited my friends Bob Harris, Greg Saunders and Jack Hitt to pitch in. Bob, of course, needs no introduction around these parts, having previously guest blogged here at length. Greg is the proprietor of The Talent Show, as well as the co-creator of the animated piece Brother Can You Spare a Job, which was a finalist in the Bush in 30 Seconds contest. Jack Hitt is, among other things, someone who gets paid to write for a living, so we’ll see how long it takes him to see through the “blogging is its own reward” crap. Bob and Greg will probably be cross-posting entries from their own sites, though they’re welcome to post original material as they see fit.

One format note: I hate it when you go to a site you visit regularly and suddenly the tone of the writing is off and you can’t quite figure out why until you notice that the name of the author in that little tiny space at the end has changed and you realize that you’ve got a guest blogger. So I’m changing the format of the page slightly, as you can see — the name of the author of any post will be featured prominently above that post. I’m sure there will still be some confusion — I can’t tell you how much mail I used to get from morons outraged about something or another that Bob had posted, back in the day — but there’s only so much you can do.

Anyway, that’s the scoop for awhile.