Many people have written about the passing of Christopher Reeve in the last couple of days. Today, comedian Margaret Cho one of the best reflections on his life and death:
It is super sad. The death of Christopher Reeve sends a shock of grief through the most cynical and jaded of us all. His entire life was a poetic metaphor, an epic hero’s journey, where he gave us the heady meaning and illustrious example of bravery, and how the courageous must sometimes fight face to face with circumstance.
Driving home from work today, I was listening to the NPR report about evacuations along the Gulf Coast in preperation for Hurricane Ivan. One of the families interviewed was indicating that they were planning to stay in their Orange Beach, Alabama, home and ride out the storm. The woman being interviewed actually said:
“Well, we thought about heading to Mobile, or maybe New Orleans, but you never know, you might end up at even more risk there.”
And I instantly thought, “I couldn’t help but noticing you seem to have more or less ignored north. I would have thought that north was a particularly promising direction to flee.”
Sheesh.
From the Portrait Unveiling Ceremony at the White House today:
“You know, Most the people I’ve known in this business, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, were good people, honest people, and they did what they thought was right. And I hope that I’ll live long enough to see American politics return to vigorous debates where we argue who’s right and wrong, not who’s good and bad.”
–Former President Bill Clinton
Amen.
Ronniecat on rec.arts.comics.strips, on the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
The lack of cultural interpretation or advice the administration seems to be receiving is appalling. I remember when the statue of Saddam was pulled down, and all the men were beating it with their shoes and slippers. Commentators on the news were laughing at this (the slipper thing). Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Arabic culture understands the very strong significance of what they were doing – and it wasn’t funny to them. (It is, for example, the traditional way one punishes a servant [or daughter-in-law] who one is displeased with; it is laden with class ramifications. It is in the domestic sense an ultimate act of disrespect.) It was a political statement. (One which a President getting good advice would’ve worked into a message to the population and capitalized on: “Now, the Iraqi people have beaten their former master with a slipper, as he deserves; now the Iraqi people are masters in their own house…”)The fact that several of a pathetically small pool of US military Arabic translators were fired shortly after September 11 because they were gay speaks volumes about the administration’s priorities as they prepared for their “war on terror”.
The bottom line is, it doesn’t make one single bit of difference what Jed in Ohio thinks of the prison abuse scandal in the long run (Bush can, after all, only serve two terms); it matters what Ahmed in Basra and Hussein in
Riyaad think; and Ahmed in Basra wept with shame in his living room when he saw those pictures of his fellow Iraqis before he went out onto the street in his dirty soccer jersey and sign scrawled in Magic Marker on a torn piece
of cardboard that said, “Amercans are TORTRERS worse than SADAM!” And he and his son will hate America forever and will never, *never* forgive them; and Hussein will send his two sons to a secret training camp and write a cheque
that will eventually end up in Al Qaida’s hands; and Jed in Ohio will snicker at Ahmed’s dirty soccer jersey and stupid misspelled sign on CNN tonight and call Hussein, who he knows only in the abstract, a fucking raghead.THAT’s the problem with the apologists’ reaction to Abu Ghraib.
(Posted with permission from the author)
Something that a lot of people don’t know about me is that when I first went to college in 1988, I was a journalism major. I was deeply interested in politics, and had some ambition to write about it professionally.
By the end of my first term, I had soured on the idea, largely because of the intensely negative presidential campaign that year. It seemed to me that the line between the legitimate press and the tabloids was becoming increasingly blurred, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be any part of that. I ended up deciding to change my major to English not too long before I left school altogether for a variety of unrelated reasons.
Over the last 15 years, the direction of the media hasn’t made me regret my decision.
All of this is prelude towards this story on New York Magazine’s webpage, in which Alexandra Polier, the woman who was falsely accused of having an affair with presidential cantidate John Kerry, details how the story unfolded, and what she found when she tried to track the rumours back to the source. Fascinating reading. Don’t skip this one; it’s an eye opener.
I don’t want to suggest in any way that the honour and attention being afforded Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan is in any way unearned. And I should not be surprised that our celebrity-driven culture latches onto a story in which a “name” is involved.
But I sat at lunch and idly watched as Fox News talked about nothing but Tillman’s death. For an hour. With commentary from a variety of journalists and pundits, and a conversation with his old college roommate and a variety of lauds and repeated reference to the multi-million dollar contract that he walked away from in order to join the Army.
And he should be commended for that, to be sure.
But….every single man and woman who has died in the service of this country deserves just as much attention. Every single soldier in our military is someone’s son or daughter, someone’s brother or sister, someone’s mother or father, someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife. Every single one of them volunteered to go into harms way in the service of their country.
Over 700 US soldiers (and another 100 UK and other coalition forces) have died in Iraq alone over the last 13 months. Every single one of them was as much a hero. Every single one of them. Why don’t each of them get their hour of television? Why don’t we know each and every one of their names as well as we know the name of Pat Tillman?
Maybe I’m just cynical, and maybe I’m just plain wrong, but somehow the whole spectacle that’s being made of Tillman and his sacrifice leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth.
I posted this back in 2002, because I liked it, and I think it’s worth repeating again during these uncertain times:
Seething Bilious Hate, Down 3% – Where is all the good news? Why is the media so obsessed with horror and misery? Herein, some possible salve
rmjwell points to this wonderful article by Avadon Carol.
Consider the teachings of Jesus: He preached against public piety, against putting material wealth above the spiritual, against casting the first stone, against bigotry. He spoke up for the poor and told us to love our neighbors. He blessed the peacemakers and the merciful, and taught his followers to share. He preached love, hope, and charity. He was about forgiveness and redemption.
And so, as someone who, “was raised on the Good Book Jesus ’til I read between the lines,” it’s pretty much impossible for me to look at the modern GOP and the Christian right – and particularly at the Bush administration – and see any of Jesus’ teachings there. I don’t claim to know the mind of any god (which, after all, would be blasphemy), but it seems to me that Bush represents the kind of self-righteous, publicly pious, war-mongering rich men who Jesus warned us not to become.
Unlike Avedon, I wasn’t even raised in a religious tradition, and have always considered myself far more spiritual than religious. But even so, I read this and said “yes, this, this exactly, this is what I’ve been saying all along.”
Go read. it’s good stuff.
Listening to NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, I heard a report on the President’s video address to the National Association of Evangelicals in Colorado, which predictably focused on efforts to make gay marriage illegal.
Now, there are certainly some legitimate arguments against gay marriage. By legitimate, I don’t mean that I agree with them (as I don’t), but in the sense that they are founded on an actual thought process that one can use to support a rational argument.
Then there are people like Pam Flannery, interviewed in the segment, who said
There will be problems in, you know, in the western world, because then we’ve broken down the family, we’re no longer producing children, and yet in other countries, where there’s an agenda to affect America, they are going to be producing children with a agenda to hurt the United States, and so there’s a concern, there’s a fear there.
To which I went….”Whaaaa—?”
What barren intellectual wasteland produces people like this? What sort of low grade paranoia allows people to think that if we allow same-sex couples to get married, that we as a society will stop producing children, allowing our enemies to outbreed us? I admit that as arguments go, it’s hard to refute, if only because the sheer ludicrousness of the approach tends to leave anyone with an above-room-temperature IQ speechless and unable to defend themselves.
Someone isn’t making a lot of sense here. And I don’t think it’s me.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén