Off Line Texting

I’ve been making a habit of taking photos of public attempts at off-line broadband communication. Its easy to forget we live in a physical world, with a multitude of surfaces, canvas and de facto view screens with which to communicate to thousands of random people daily. The dangers inherent in this form of texting are similar to those found in cloud computing, in that your messages are often owned by soulless corporation. Unlike cloud computing, however, you are not actually paying them to store your data. In fact, they are often paying someone to erase it. So, I took some pictures for posterity, which is a good thing, because some of these have already been eliminated, their brief moment in human visual history evaporated.

Home2Roost: Someone was leaving these roosters all over the place and in all kinds of colors and poses. This one was convenient as it was huge and placed right around the block on Peralta. What was nice about it was the reflective white paint, which caught the flash I used and made the outline glow. You may recognize it from my home page banner. I kept meaning to photo some more, but they’re all gone now, including this one. Guess what they replaced it with? Yes, more brown. You’re  welcome.

When the War is Over: I actually did a U Turn right at the fork of Shattuck in Berkeley to get this one; it had been so long since I’d seen a billboard defaced with a subversive message. I really thought that people had stopped doing it. After all, who wants to get their hands dirty and/or risk arrest when they can just facebook. I’m glad this person took the time, and I’m glad I turned around and got it when I did, because it was gone the next day, resurfaced with a Pharma Ad for anti-flatulence medication or something.

Leaf in Amber: I was walking my dog at Emeryville’s Blowjob Park when I found this. Its an odd place: right on the freeway, at the end of town; convenient for anonymous sex, but also for ski jumping and frisbee football. Anyway, someone took the time out from whatever regular activity they do there to make a statement. Not sure what it is, but its beautiful nonetheless.

Now for the toilet portion of our show:

In Roll Form: Not your average toilet for grafitti. Though its on the Berkeley Campus, you need a code to get into this restroom, and there are dozens of old and unworking codes floating around, and no one really knows how to get in. I managed to follow one of the chosen few–who must be important to have been given an updated code. Perhaps he has a subcutaneous marker, like that guy in A Beautiful Mind. Okay, so its not exactly original, but it is astute. The funniest part was that there were only a few sheets of toilet paper left in the roll. Well, not actually funny at the time.

Homage to Rutabaga: Whereas most grafitti is self-aggrandizing iconography, some bomber/gardening enthusiast decided instead to create an homage to root vegetables on the inside of the bathroom door at Mama Buzz on Telegraph. Big Up Turnips.

The People’s Historian, Dead at 87: Updated below

I became politicized at the height of the Rodney King verdict demonstrations in my early twenties. Before then I had been a pretty apathetic person. Naturally, like any change, the stage had already been set by an accumulation of events that had been happening over the years. I had lived in Barcelona for some time, and that was the first time that I had experienced virulent society wide racism. As an Arab-American speaking accented Spanish, I was the target of constant police harassment, to the point where if I saw a police officer, I generally began turning the other way or ducking into a shop.  I found out that my landlady had been asking other tenants if I was a drug dealer and if my girlfriend was a heroin addict or prostitute. This culminated for me during a police sweep of my neighborhood, the Barrio Chino, where I and two American friends were arrested together. We all had American passports, but where they were let go, I was detained and spent the next three days in a dark cell with about eighty Moroccans sleeping nose to toe. No one believed I was really American. It was obvious that there was no such thing as an Arab-American. Naturally, my passport had been forged.

Soon after I was released, the Gulf Crisis ignited, and then the war. It was the first time that I really became aware that I was not considered to be the same as my American friends. That in the eyes of the world—at that time at least, and perhaps now again as much—I was not really an American.

I was in San Francisco when the protests over the King verdict broke out a year or so later. I wasn’t concerned about that, I’d heard about some looting downtown the night before, but I had never really thought the cops would do any time and I didn’t really think it was a good idea to demonstrate by walking away with a television. Things still hadn’t coalesced for me. I had become aware that I was a “minority”, but for a lot of reasons, I wasn’t sure what that meant if anything. Walking out to get a burrito that afternoon, I was caught in a police cordon of the entire Mission district along with nearly a thousand other people. It was the most blatantly racist and imperial exercise of naked and unjust power that I’d ever seen. They put us in city buses and took us to another county’s jail. We were disappeared for three days, with no access to legal counsel and no phone access.

When we were finally released, I was angry. I remember it as a blur, and I remember that anger was almost intoxicating. I had the courage of a hero, I belted crowd raising speeches into microphones, I risked arrest again to protest, I spoke to newspaper reporters with an eloquence I never knew I’d had. I began volunteering with a group, and we would table by the Bart stations on Mission street, selling consciousness-raising books to every day people in the neighborhood. And one of these was A People’s History of the United States.

The book was a revelation to me, the personal histories came alive. It wasn’t just history, it was a saga of forgotten, unimportant people. People like me, my true ancestors. But they were speaking now, they were important! I remember pushing the book on anyone that would listen when I tabled. It was a guarantee, I would say, “its going to grab you by the throat from the first page, when you read about Columbus landing on Hispaniola, and the first thing he thinks is, I could run all these people with just a couple of swords.”

So this brings me to why I want to honor Howard Zinn, on the day of his death; a man I didn’t really know. His book collected my anger, distilled it, made it one with the collected history of the different, the persecuted; the misunderstood, the never-known, small-time and forgotten heroes of our country. Zinn’s collected personal stories, journals, letters, witnesses to history, were all people like me, each with a key to understanding the past, and unlocking the solutions to the future. And Zinn, was in the most perfect way, a testament to his own project. A working class veteran–the child of a waiter who’d never gone to school, Zinn was educated with the help of the GI Bill, itself the product of protest by the forgotten veterans of World War 1 in the Bonus March.  Without those voices that Zinn put in that book, I would never have become the politically aware person that I became, and without his own activist ancestors, Zinn would never have become the man who could write that book.

And so, if Zinn leaves any legacy, its that small changes do make a difference, that everyone of us can be a small change, that our changes aggregate, that we droplets can become rivers, with the force of all of history behind us. I never stopped looking at the world like a witness to history. Its why I’ve toiled in obscurity on this blog these past five years, its why I’ve never lost hope that I can make a difference, and that the people standing beside me on the train can make a difference. That I and all of us are tomorrow’s heroes, though no one alive may ever know it.

Maybe some day, in an equally oppressed future, some Zinn of the next generation will find these writings and the writings of other people, know that though polls showed Americans supporting our wars, that there was resistance. That people hated Guantanamo.  That there were people who recognized the important barrier broken by Obama and still hated him for not keeping his promises, for being just another American President. That there were American Palestinians and even Colombian Palestinians, and that their children were Colombian Palestinian Native Americans, and that they were soldiers too. And most importantly, that there were people like the man I’m writing about, Howard Zinn!

Update:

I had a real great email exchange with a couple of readers about Zinn and the nature of narrative and the value of political labels such as conservative, left or what have you. Paul, one of the participants managed to post some of that in the comments section, but the other person, Michelle couldn’t because I hadn’t yet approved her for comments. In the interest of discourse, I decided to post the whole [or most of it] exchange in the blog itself:

Paul wrote:

I know you’ve got your differences with Zinn & the People’s History, but it had a real impact on people – especially of my generation – who tried to understand why the world seemed SO different than what we were taught. I don’t think many people – certainly not me or Jaime – felt that Zinn’s was the ONLY story of America, just that it was a corrective to the one we were all raised with: a homogeneous society that suddenly burst out in inexplicable unrest in the 60s and 70s.

We’re now in a period of general political conformity, despite the culture wars: issues like minority rights, foreign policy, economic development & healthcare are set, though faux-debated within a narrow range. The media says that the range of thought in America runs from Harry Reid to John McCain, but it’s not so. So many voices are just not heard, relegated to (& marginalized by) blogs and conferences.

The story of the United States is – always was – bigger than what’s in newspapers and history books.
Michelle responded:

think of it like the ipad- Zinn was a man who had a chance to create a paradigm chance in the way history was taught- balanced and story based. and instead did nothing put present and equally biased view of history from the voice of the previously unheard.

bias is bias and raising a generation of children to honor what they are taught in “A People’s History” is, in and of itself, not wrong. but, we are raising generations of children to honor and not question what they are taught, not just in “A People’s History”, but in any reference text, any TV news show.

Until people are taught to open their eyes, examine and live in the world (don’t bus kids from Dot to Newton, bus them from Newton to Dot. although why inner-city youth continue to be low academic achievers is actually a very different can of worms. or maybe not, since it is mainly a product of culture values and feeling without a place in the current societal hierarchy) nothing will change. voices will be marginalized and the “range of opinions” will continue to be the ever shrinking scale of center -right to center-left that appeals to the MOST people, without any necessary thought.

My anger towards Zinn has more to do with the way Newton Public Schools reacted when i dared to suggest that simply biasing history in the other direction wasn’t an unbiased history at all. i don’t know what Zinn intended, but i hope he would be horrified that that is the way his book is being used.

if Jaime (who i am presuming is the author of this blog) really hopes that someday someone will collect the voices of today’s marginalized “witnesses to history” he should do it himself. take responsibility for your opinions. writing a blog is a great first step. now find a way to bring blogs together- blogs that agree with this and blogs of the right-wing-ignorant-god-crazed. but even that is not enough, anyone can write a blog. how many people are willing to put in the amount of research and fact checking in creating a blog post as a “witness to history” that would be worthy of actually being that… which is the second problem i had with “A People’s History”- how do you create a standard for opinions. if you and Murthy were to write about winter in Boston, whose voice would be more accurate? the answer is that question is stupid, how do you contextually represent both voices?

“tomorrow’s heroes” may never be judged as such today, but who is really doing what it takes to step up to the plate to actually become one?

Paul responded:

My idea of democracy is a contesting of differing opinions WITHOUT the depersonalization of elections, media, & ahem, blogs. Those obviously have their places inside of a functioning body politic, but at present that body is ravaged by money cancer & on consent-manufacturing life support. Face to face interactions between left & right, teapartiers & treehuggers, Hayekians & socialists might actually lead to productive dialogue instead of pointless flame-wars.

How we get from here to there is a profound question. My first novel was partly an attempt to work out this sort of yearning for apocalypse that is increasingly common among radicals and in general in society: “flush it all away” in the words of the Tool song. There’s an appeal to the clean-slate scenario, but the likelihood that – rather than bringing about the social democratic millennium – the collapse of the United States would lead to a Russia-style robber-baron oligarchy. & as much as it offends my radical sensibilities, even incrementalism is preferable to THAT.

Jaime is going to the US Social Forum this year, which will be interesting in terms of at least providing a forum for progressive voices. A dialogue between progressive and conservative may be too much to ask for at this point, but not impossible in a different world…

Omar [who is also Jaime] responded:

Indeed, I didn’t mean to imply that Zinn’s view was CORRECT. In fact, I really mistrust anyone who says “what really happened is…” because that’s as much a product of in-out-group thinking as the mainstream version.

I think Zinn’s main objective was to create a “people’s” perspective–that is a perspective just as biased but from another—and even many—points of view. I don’t think there’s any other option in coming to develop one’s optimal opinion about anything. Collect as many viewpoints as possible, study the bias, pit them against one another and see what makes the  most sense from the mash up. From the beginning that’s how I’ve viewed Zinn, and I think that’s where the power in his work lay for me. The idea that we aren’t lost in the sands of history, that we can leave markers in the historical record. Indeed, when I lived in Palestine and I really wondered what we were really doing and about how hopeless our work seemed, a friend of mine that I really look up to used to say, “when all is said and done, you’ve contributed to the historical record, if nothing else”. And that’s no small thing, being a witness to history. While I’ve always enjoyed reading personal accounts of almost anything, from cooking rice to watching battles, to being stuck in the cheap seats at the March on Washington, my quest has never been to collect those. Instead, I’ve wanted to leave my voice for some future version of “me” to read and know that there were people, even in the early otts, who WERE certain things, WHO believed other things, that were as unique. I suppose that comes from having such a collision of cultural histories to deal with. I think that there are other people searching for a tradition, an ancestry in the past that has less to do with blood, and more to do with identity and train of thought.

That’s why I love Zinn and that book. I leave it to my partner to collect my work, when I’m gone, and to give it to our children and families to pass on to the future.

Michelle wrote:

what would have to be so different about the world for that to happen? nothing fundamental has to change. to come back to my issues with Zinn: when you set everything up as a dichotomy dialogue becomes impossible.

progressive vs. conservative
left vs. right
republicans vs. democrats

these things only exist because we have pitted them against each other. the only way they can interact is as categorical stands against the other. the irony being that these things over time have ceased to exist as entities onto themselves, with real definition or understanding of a role in the world, and instead exist only in opposition to the other.

i am a scientist, but bear with me. the solutions come from asking the right questions.
so: what does it mean to be a radical?  what is the root of marginalization? what is progressive, reall? conservative? left? right? these things need to be redefined so that they can be understood. and at the core of all that is the most important question, one that that can never be answered, but only grasped: what is truth?

Omar responded:

I actually agree with everything Michelle is saying. I stopped using the progressive term a few years ago. One of our biggest problems is that these labels became calcified and meaningless. We have to abandon these and move forward. Agreed…although, i’m not going to like people who claim that I have no right to live in this country. That’s not going to change no matter what i call myself.

Michelle responded:

from what you’ve said what you see and what you do comes as close to answering my core question as anyone can get. there is no objective “truth”. there is no one answer, one story, one paradigm. we should all carry it on ourselves to bear the burden of writing our stories, what we have witnessed, so that future generations can glimpse a whole that can only emerge from many, many voices.

and, i realize i may have come across as overly-critical in suggesting that blogging alone is not enough. because, i think your viewpoint “I’ve wanted to leave my voice for some future version of “me” to read and know that there were people, even in the early otts, who WERE certain things, WHO believed other things, that were as unique. I suppose that comes from having such a collision of cultural histories to deal with. I think that there are other people searching for a tradition, an ancestry in the past that has less to do with blood, and more to do with identity and train of thought.” is something for which the world should be grateful.

to ask you (or anyone) to “like” someone who vehemently disagrees with what one holds to be basic tennent of humanity is pointless- it comes back to the whole dichotomy issue and probably impedes forward progress. It was J.D. Salinger who said something along the lines of: “i’m sick of meeting people i like, i just want to meet someone i can respect”. what i would hope that you (Jaime) will take on, in addition to blogging, is creating some sort of room for respectful dialogue between people who don’t agree. we are being raised in a society where we are taught that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. well it doesn’t. the truth is in the eye of the beholder. the challenge we need to take on, and inspire future generations to take on, is to leave behind calcified labels and meet as respectful, peaceful trailblazers of a people’s movement.

idealistic? hell yes, but it doesn’t call for revolution. all it takes is people thinking about what they are saying, taking responsibility for what they say, and LISTENING to the other voices.

The Aftermath

I’m not usually one for these kinds of articles—-the two children, two different sides of the conflict thing—-but I found this story quite moving. Certainly, it should be pointed out that the death toll in Palestine due to Israeli attacks is about quadruple the corresponding death toll in Israel. When taken as a proportion of the population, it is nearly eight times greater.  And it should also be noted that it’s quite clear that Palestinian civilian deaths and injury in the course of Israeli  targeted killings, like that of Marya,  are the norm rather than the exception; and that indeed, Israeli civilian injuries and deaths, such as Orel,  have been rare in the corresponding rocket attacks in Israel proper. The fact that neither of these facts are mentioned—-that there is no contextualizing and proportional coverage of just how much more devastating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Palestinians than Israelis—-is the signature style of the piss-poor reporting of New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner.

All that being said, I was touched by the tragedy of this story, which I must admit is well written and evocative. We are used to hearing about the fact that missiles and bombs kill and injure people; we’ve become inured to the madness that we are all currently part and parcel of. But especially in the case of those injuries, we rarely are confronted with the actual impact on those human bodies and the people that love and care for them.

December 31, 2009

A Mideast Bond, Stitched of Pain and Healing

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — He can be impulsive. She has a touch of bossiness. Next-door neighbors for nearly a year, they talk, watch television and explore the world together, wandering into each other’s homes without a second thought. She likes his mother’s eggplant dish. He likes her father’s rice and lamb.

Friendship often starts with proximity, but Orel and Marya, both 8, have been thrust together in a way few elsewhere have. Their playground is a hospital corridor. He is an Israeli Jew severely wounded by a Hamas rocket. She is a Palestinian Muslim from Gaza paralyzed by an Israeli missile. Someone forgot to tell them that they are enemies.

“He’s a naughty boy,” Marya likes to say of Orel with an appreciative smile when he gets a little wild.

When Orel arrived here a year ago, he could not hear, see, talk or walk. Now he does them all haltingly. Half his brain is gone. Doctors were deeply pessimistic about his survival. Today they are amazed at his progress although unclear how much more can be made.

Marya’s spinal cord was broken at the neck and she can move only her head. Smart, sunny and strong-willed, she moves her wheelchair by pushing a button with her chin. Nothing escapes her gaze. She knows that Orel is starting to prefer boys as playmates and she makes room. But their bond remains strong.

In a way, a friendship between two wounded children from opposing backgrounds is not that surprising. Neither understands the prolonged fight over land and identity that so divides people here. They are kids. They play.

But for those who have spent time in their presence at Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem, it is almost more powerful to observe their parents, who do understand. They have developed a kinship that defies national struggle.

“The wounds of our children, their pain, our pain, have connected us,” noted Angela Elizarov, Orel’s mother, one recent day as she sat on a bed in the room she shares with her son. Next door is Marya, her 6-year-old brother, Momen, and their father, Hamdi Aman. “Does it matter that he is from Gaza and I am from Beersheba, that he is an Arab and I am a Jew? It has no meaning to me. He sees my child and I see his child.”

It was two weeks into Israel’s Gaza war last January when Orel was hit. After days in a shelter his mother took him out in the car. As they drove around Beersheba, a siren blared, warning of an incoming rocket. She pushed Orel to the ground, lying protectively on him. When she heard the explosion in the distance, she rose in relief. A second rocket exploded and she saw her son’s head bleeding profusely.

A surgical nurse, she flagged down a passing motorist who drove them to the hospital where she works.

“I saw his brain coming out, everything around me was burning, and I was not even scratched,” she recalled. “When I got to the emergency room, I said to the doctor: ‘You can’t kid me. I know he has no chance of survival.’ The doctor looked away. But after six operations, he is actually making some progress. God took my son from me, but he has given me another one. A year ago, he was the best in his class in sports, the best in math. Now he is learning to walk and talk.”

Her husband, Avrel, who works with children, spends much of the week at home with their 18-month-old daughter but comes often. The couple, originally from Azerbaijan, had been childless for years, and Orel’s birth, coaxed along by infertility treatments in Israel, seemed a miracle.

Their hospital neighbor, Mr. Aman, is a 32-year-old construction worker from Gaza who not only cares for his own two children but helps with Orel. He is regarded as a luminescent presence, an inspiration to staff, volunteers and fellow parents.

This is partly because the pain in his own story is hard to fathom.

More than three years ago, Mr. Aman and his uncle had split the cost of a car and, having paid for it two hours earlier, took it on the road. With them were Mr. Aman’s wife, their three children and his mother.

Prowling above, an Israeli jet fighter on an assassination mission was seeking its target, a militant leader named Ahmad Dahduh. Two missiles were fired at Mr. Dahduh’s car just as it passed Mr. Aman’s, killing Mr. Aman’s oldest son, wife and mother. Marya was thrown from the car.

He and his children have been at Alyn Hospital, which specializes in young people with serious physical disabilities, for nearly the entire time since. The Israeli government, which brought him here for emergency help, wanted him and his children either to return to Gaza or to move to the West Bank. But attention in the Israeli news media produced a bevy of volunteers to fight on his behalf. Marya would not survive in either Gaza or the West Bank. The government has backed off, supporting Mr. Aman on minimum wage and paying for Marya to go to a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew school nearby.

But Mr. Aman has no official status and is also raising a healthy and bright son in a hospital room. He wants residency or a ticket to a Western country where his children will be safe and Marya will get the care she needs.

Volunteers who help are often religious Jews performing national service. Some ask Mr. Aman how he can live among the people whose army destroyed his family.

“I have never felt there was a difference among people — Jews, Muslims, Christians — we are all human beings,” he says. “I worked in Israel for years and so did my father. We know that it is not about what you are but who you are. And that is what I have taught my children.”

Mr. Aman’s hospital door is rarely closed. Asher Franco, an Israeli Jew from Beit Shemesh who has been coming to the hospital for six months for his daughter’s treatments, was a recent visitor. They greeted each other warmly. A manual worker and former combat soldier, he was asked about their friendship.

“I was raised as a complete Zionist rightist,” he said. “The Arabs, we were told, were out to kill us. But I was living in some fantasy. Here in the hospital, all my friends are Arabs.” Ms. Elizarov, Orel’s mother, noted that in places like Alyn Hospital, political tensions do not exist. Then she said, “Do we need to suffer in order to learn that there is no difference between Jews and Arabs?”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Super Gay

No longer the stuff of fan fiction nor the butt of jokes, it seems a new era may be dawning for the gay superhero. Granted this may simply be anecdotal, but in my own travels through the various comic publishing universes I have noticed recently several gay capes plying their heroics. What I find most interesting and perhaps even unique about this phenomenon is the fact that sexual orientation plays such a minor role in plot lines and character development. In a sense, perhaps, though it may be more a product of a squeamish reticence to get too deep into ALL the facets of gayness, comics seem to be sending the message that sexual orientation is only one element of personality. Indeed, in the comic world, it may have little to do with traditional hegemonic notions of femininity or masculinity, and certainly has no impact on appearance, fashion [unlikely, considering the de rigeur spandex] or attitude.

Comics have been for years in the forefront of gay visibility. Northstar, the French Canadian super speedster admitted he was gay in an unprecedented story arc that dealt with gay visibility, AIDS and prejudice in the mid-nineties. And the Wildstorm company’s Justice League simulacra, The Authority, has had two prominently gay characters, Apollo and Midnighter (very obvious analogues for Superman and Batman, their stable relationship perhaps a nod to fan fiction fantasies) for nearly a decade. But Northstar was a sideline character, quite neutered, and Wildstorm, until its purchase by DC comics was hardly a mainstream line.

Gay/French-Canadian Pioneering Super-Hero, Northstar

Most of the higher visibility recently has come from Marvel comics, which as introduced four main characters into its comic line–though admittedly, only its more adult titles–in the past few years. The trend began with Marvel’s Ultimate X-Men, part of the “Ultimate” series of re-imagined iconic staples. The books are a nod to grown but life-long readers hungry for subversive plot lines to shake up the old cornball, hypocritical heroics; the hyper-patriotic Avengers, for example, undertaking black ops missions in Iraq. Thus, its not surprising that gay characters find a home in the Ultimate’s X-Men mansion. In this reality stream, Colossus, the hyper-masculine but sensitive Russian metal-man, is a former

and Northstar in tender embrace”]

A fan fiction rendition of Colossus and Northstar in tender embrace

mob enforcer, estranged from his homophobic family and in a long-term and committed relationship with Northstar. Indeed, an entire plot-line revolved around Colossus’ coming out to both readers and team-mates, and a homophobic and Catholic Nightcrawler coming to terms with his friend’s orientation. Also, interestingly, writers of Colossus in the Ultimate X-Men have not spared him any of the severe moral failings his teammates endure [and which generate many, if not all, of the plotlines]. Last year, Colossus was addicted to a power-boosting concoction called “Banshee”, and seemed poised to betray all of his teammates and even his lover due to his weakness.

More recently, Exiles, a comic based on re-jiggering famous and favorite Marvel epics in endless alternate universes, featured a gay Beast, quite open about his relationship with a Colossus from an alternate reality [though its a mystery why Colossus seems to be the gay lodestone for the Marvel multiverse].

And finally, there is Phyla Vell, the new Quasar of Marvel’s galactic saga Annihilation: Conquest. The openly gay cosmic super heroine is given lavish downtime with her lover, the bald and beautiful psychic ninja MoonDragon, a recycled minor character from Marvel’s more psychedelic seventies.

MoonDragon: Psychic Ninja, Significant Other

Phyla-Vell, aka Quasar: Out, Proud, Cosmic

A brief ass-kicking before a kiss

The lovers kiss and hold each other in panels often squeezed in between action shots. Its possible that the far more graphic nature of their relationship may just be an effect of the gay double standard, which privileges Lesbian sex in the same way it privileges any activity which makes women partially to fully naked and/or sensual. And though the comic keeps MoonDragon scantily clad it keeps the action charmingly celibate and even precludes an eventual consumation scene by transforming MoonDragon into a…winged Dragon. Interestingly, the love affair endures , as Phyla Vell states “The intimacy of your mental powers give us is so much deeper than anyone knows. And those abilities still seem to work just fine…you haven’t changed in any way that matters.” In the next panel, Phyla Vell rides MoonDragon in an obvious homage to both the poster from Heavy Metal and unconventional relationships.

Indeed, though most often chaste, comic characters seem poised to explore adventures currently closed off to them in other media, where sexual orientation so easily becomes the raison d etre for gay characters. Though Phyla Vell goes on to beat the bad guys,  she doesn’t do it because they’ve insulted her sexual orientation, she doesn’t even do it to save her lover Moondragon. Like any other superhero, she does it to save the Universe.

Footage Courtesy of Youtube

KTVU’s lead story on Sunday night is a perfect example of the on-going Youtubification of the Nightly News.

It becomes clear by the end of the story that the BART police press conference created this television story; it involved almost zero investigatory or reporting work on the part of KTVU.  The press conference itself, ironically, is the obvious police reaction to dozens of Youtube Zapruder clips of BART police apparently murdering Oscar Grant–stung once, BART tried to get in front of this story, and rightly so.  Indeed, the police official noted as much. As you watch the clip, look for his oddly honest admission at the end–”We are keenly aware of what Youtube brings to the public”–as he described BART’s rationale for the press event.

But far more interesting to me, is how the stock arm-flapping that is local news is laid bare by stories like these. What is it that local tv news can bring to this story in the first place? The arrest occurred the previous night, and the on-the-scene reporting is over 24 hours later and virtually pointless. All they can do is report the press conference, and despite the self-promoted investigatory power of television media to uncover and illuminate, they were invited to that by the very actors  under scrutiny. The ever-growing power of Youtube to publicly EXPOSE made this a story all by itself, reversing the quotidian reality of the voiceless subject public by forcing both media and establishment to react. The bug in the bottom left corner of the screen “footage from Youtube” is the perfect expression of the ever more apparent superfluousness of the local news program.

Here’s the original Youtube video of the arrest:

And here’s another Youtube capture of police tazing someone during a baseball game at the Coliseum. This also became television news, and engendered a conversation about police abuse of tazing as a replacement for police work.

In both of these instances, apparently, the victims suffered from schizophrenia.

One last thing, perhaps of no real importance. In the background of the original Youtube video of the West Oakland incident, you can hear an idiot marveling at how cool it is to watch a man thrown through glass and wrestled to the ground in a pool of blood. That made me despondent about the trajectory of the human race, until I overheard the exact opposite sentiment coming from the background at the A’s game; someone excoriating the police for taking things too far.

More Noise than Signal at the UC Berkeley Stand Off

Things are getting heated on the UC Berkeley campus today; students have blockaded themselves in Wheeler Hall as I’m writing this. The building occupation mirrors other elevated levels of activity at the disparate UC campuses across California in the aftermath of the fee hike by the Regents of the UC system yesterday.

Why don’t I care? I’ve wrestled with this question all through the week. There are some ready answers that seem to seep up, unwanted as they may be, from the cracks. As a forty year old student who worked hard to get to UC, not only scholastically but in all areas of my life, the attitude students have towards their education here rankles me. Granted, that rankling is tempered by the reality that many of them are closer to childhood than adulthood, and are far more mature and focused than I was at that age. Another easy answer; I have too much school work to care. Add that to the mind numbing real work I have to do to to make sure I can eat in a home and sleep in a bed during the remainder of my UC education.

Those are, as I said, the easy answers. They mirror some of the virulently angry opinions of some average Californians. Such as these, published in an LA Times blog:

They can always go to community college like the rest of us. Screw those spoiled brat UCLA students. Hit up your rich mommies and daddies for the difference. Cry me a river. What a bunch of useless losers.

And:

Listen up, UC students. I’m about to lose my job and I’m close to losing my house. Do you want me to sell my 10-year old car so that I can pay for your incredibly cheap tuition?

I’m at once offended and saddened by this kind of populist antagonism while oddly in agreement with it. Its taken me awhile to understand why, but this is my best answer to date:

I don’t feel like those leading these actions have done a very good job of describing what it is they’re fighting for, and what it is I, as a student, should be fighting for. I know, as far as students go, I’m not alone in this feeling. I should say that at first I was very supportive of the strikes last month. But when I really began to understand the issues, I understood less and less what the resistance was advocating. The Blue and Gold Program, according to Yudoff, will be maintained, and guarantees that working class students like me won’t see any change in January or September of next year. Those who oppose the tuition hike seem strangley silent on this issue. Is it true? And if it is true, then isn’t one of the most powerful symbols for the movement against tuition hikes—that poor students who need education the most will be most affected—undermined? Thus, is this a fight for middle class parents who can’t afford the extra two hundred dollars monthly? Or is it about reinstating the custodians? Or is it about keeping the jobs of teachers at UC? Or is it about holding on to the  breadth of classes at the school?

What’s most startling about the tactics at the school, today, is the reality that the poorest students are the ones least likely to be able to protest or support the actions. And for others, like me, the risks entailed by breaking the law—expulsion, the need to find a full time job again, while faced with paying back student loans for an education that provided no advantages—are too great to have anything but a tangential relationship with the protesters.

Most importantly, the movement lost control of the message, and never communicated very effectively to their base—other students and their families. This is in stark contrast with the very effective action today, coordinated across multiple campuses in synch. I think even a disinterested or antagonistic observer would have to give credit where credit is due—the actions were superbly carried out and have splashed the issue on the country’s tv screens in a way that last month’s strikes failed to do. But then what? There is no call to action. The hikes affect few people outside of the campus; there is no tension or leverage between the communities surrounding campuses and the Regents; there is little the average Californian can actually do to make their voice heard on the issue,  that is if they actually understood what was at stake or how to reverse the changes. With so many cuts across so many lines, with people struggling to keep their jobs and homes, with an unprecedented number of adults returning to Community Colleges in search of better opportunities, just what can they do for the UC system? On the radio, on televisions, on internet and on campus, I hear no answers.This passage from New York Times coverage of the event shows exactly how muted the protester’s voices really are on the issue:

“The group inside delivered a list of demands to the administrator, and it’s a pretty far-reaching list, to get them to repeal the fee hikes and stop the privatization of Santa Cruz and U.C.,” said Don Kingsbury, a Santa Cruz graduate student in politics. “It’s kind of a symbolic list.”

Indeed, many of the long-term demands are beyond the reach of the Santa Cruz administrators, including the impeachment of Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California system; the elimination of the Regents’ positions; and an end to all student fees and student debts.

I don’t expect the NYT writers to do the work for the protesters; what’s going on here? What do the protesters want? Why are they so visible and yet so voiceless? Is it a standard issue of framing and bias? And is that even possible when the issues of a powerful student body and faculty at a prestigious university are being discussed.  I hope to find some answers to these questions. There are none for the time being; despite the fact that the multiple occupations of the UC Campus’ were very effective ways of broadcasting a message, the signal was empty.

Ledeen Self-Pwns

Micheal Ledeen may not be a household name, but he certainly knows how to start a rumor. A few days ago, Ledeen published a story about a supposed newly discovered copy of Obama’s college “thesis”, which he quoted:

“… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

This was obvious proof of what a horrible commie Obama really is. Other conservative fog-nets of the noise-universe such as Rush Limbaugh used Ledeen’s blog for their daily anti-Obama rant, practically spraying themselves with glee at finding written evidence that Obama favors income redistribution [and that he's an unamerican founder-hater, to boot].

The document, of course, was a fake outed as early as three months ago, and Ledeen was forced to admit that his own eagerness to defame Obama had gotten the better of whatever academic rigor he retains after years of serving as a think-tank rumor-factory.

Its not that Ledeen was punked; he indeed suckered himself, like the dummy chasing the dollar bill on a string all the way down the street or the guy who buys the laptop box that “fell off the delivery truck” from the sketchy dude in the BART station for twenty bucks, only to find the box full of cardboard and newspaper [okay, that last guy was me, five years ago, but I learned my lesson!]. There’s an old saying, often misunderstood, “You can’t fool an honest man.” What that old saw really means is that you can’t fool someone into doing  a dishonest deed unless they are comfortable with dishonesty. Indeed, Ledeen’s public record reads like a primer on bold mendacity, from Iran-Contra, to forging the Yellow-Cake documents, to pushing the Iraq war, despite fears of instability because:

One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That’s our mission in the war against terror.

In the non-Bizarro version of our universe, where dishonest ineptitude is not a pre-requisite for controlling the media beacons of influence, one would think that Ledeen’s corpse-ridden trail [four thousand US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis in the war he cheerily pushed] would have meant the end of his career. But soft, Ledeen continues to be an oft-quoted luminary in the conservative world where the unmitigated success of the Iraq war that he championed, now qualifies him as a spokesperson for attacking Iran. His column is named “Faster, Please”–a phrase from his 2002 plea to hurry up and invade Iraq quoted abovbe–though he now, quite shockingly claims that he opposed the war, despite a wealth of public statements and an entire archive of  National Review columns that scream otherwise in no uncertain terms . Its no surprise that he was taken in by the “thesis hoax”. The only surprise is that he didn’t invent it himself.

You can read Ledeen’s article here…and Ledeen’s half-hearted apologia here

Update: Earlier in the same week, Ledeen was forced to back away from a rumor, completely of his own fabrication, that  Iran’s Khamenei was in a coma. Subsequent photos and video of an upright and conscious Khamenei entertaining foreign dignitaries caused Ledeen to drop the issue, but not before he claimed for several days that they were a product of photoshop.

An Anatomy of Impenetrable Media Obtuseness

Glenn Greenwald, a self-made blogger who has, by the sheer force of his intellect and astute commentary,  insinuated himself into the mainstream media discourse, appeared on MSNBC’s  Morning Meeting, hosted by Dillon Radigan, this morning. Opposite, Greenwald were Arianna Huffington [of the eponymous internet broadsheet] and Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post, and the ostensible topic of the day was the putative danger of a nuclear armed Iran. This interaction is a perfect vehicle for examining the great wall of media static and obtuseness which prevents all but a few appearing on cable and broadcast television from being able to discuss issues in any way which reflects reality.

Glenn makes some great points early on in the segment:

…the only obligation that Iran has under the nuclear non-proliferatition treaty is to disclose any facilities at least a hundred and eighty days before nuclear material is introducred and they did that well in advance of a hundred and eighty days. They did it at least a year or a year and a half before that facility is operable…

…and at the same time, America’s key ally in that region, Israel, refuses to belong to the nuclear non proliferation treaty, refuses to have its nuclear stockpile inspected by the IAEA, and so there are nations, beginning with Israel, that refuse to comply with these rules.

Its time for Arianna Huffington, a supporter of sanctions and isolation of Iran, to respond to that statement:

Huffington couldn’t have provided a more pointed and irony-saturated critique of the vast wasteland of unfounded blather that is the discourse on Iran. In the first place, though Radigan asks “how do you balance your coverage so that you’re representing the apparent threat and at the same time not inciting either fear or irrational responses”, Huffington can’t seem to wait to suggest that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map:

Iran is actually challenging the existential presence of Israel, and so its not just…they don’t believe that Israel has the right to exist…so you have a player here that is actually presenting a major threat to Israel which immensely complicates the international response.

Then, of course, Huffington completely shrugs off Greenwald’s points, she makes no reference to them. Greenwald, though, responds to hers quite directly:

Greenwald makes a crucial point. That its Iran that’s under siege, that its Israel and the US that have been military aggressors and invaders in the past decades.

I think its a very hard case to make that Iran is some sort of a unique threat because of some crazy rhetoric that its president engages in that it could never possibly carry out and I think that’s what needs to be the focal point is, what is the reality of these countries capabilities and what their actions are…

Huffington throws all caution to the wind:

What’s most amazing about this whole exchange is that the theme of the program, as described by Radigan, is the question of how the mainstream media can be more sober, analytical and rational in its assessment in an effort to avoid the bandwagon leap that preceded the war in Iraq. The only person on the program who does that is Greenwald. Huffington, shockingly, given the supposed bonafides of her publication, has literally lifted the script from the Iraq War Progaganda Gin. Rather than address Greenwald’s points that Iran poses no credible threat, and that is guilty of no activities not also undertaken by Israel and the US–and that indeed, Israel and the US have been bigger threats to the region–she simply brings the argument back to the same point every time. Iran wants to destroy Israel. In this colloquy, Radigan plays the traditional role, questioning none of the mainstream points, while acting as little more than a host, making sure that all the guests get a chance to speak, but failing to make sure they address each other’s points. The idea of engaging in analysis of the history of the region–the fact that Israel “illegally” built its nuclear arsenal and that no one anywhere has any idea what’s in it or what Israel does with it– is rejected again and again in favor of exceptionalist platitudes, mythologies and black and white characterizations. US/Israel good, Muslim States/Iran bad.

The exclamation point for the segment came when Capehart finally injected himself into the three way. Capehart complained of confusion at Greenwald’s suggestion that Iran is not a threat. Hadn’t Greenwald noticed that MSNBC’s b-roll during Greenwald’s first comment:

…was showing video of Iran shooting off those missiles just this past weekend, so how does that match up…?

Indeed, how could Iran not be a threat, when the tv showed images of a missile launch over and over again for the entire program?

Clyde Haberman of the New York Times, engaged in a similar dynamic with an analysis of the UN General Assembly, last week in New York. Haberman referred to the “usual gang of despots and rogues who make the collective American skin crawl”. Though its those wearing the American skin that launched two invasions in the past eight years, ending  the lives of tens of thousands, the US remains the indisputable  mediator for the world. No matter what we do, despotism and criminality are characterizations for other countries to bear, and it is always our responsibility to correct their bad behavior. We are always in search of peace. Indeed, opprobrium need only be brought against America and its allies when we try to reach accomodation with the world’s lesser criminals. Habermann implies that Gordon Brown may receive some rebuke at the GA–not because of his continuing support of US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but because he allowed dying Libyan terrorist Abdel Basset Ali al-Magrahi to return to Libya.

Given this allergy to the truth about our actions and the constant finger-pointing to the [much more modest] evil deeds of other countries, the media is destined to make exactly the same mistakes about Iran as it has in every other war for two decades. In fact, they seem to relish the opportunity.

Glenn’s column about the appearance:

Of Sambots and Haltertops

The NYT today carries a little blurb about Family Guy cartoon spin-off Cleveland, today. Several things in this photo jumped out at me. The first is the overt sexualization of the Cleveland daughter, in a mid-drift and cleavage bearing haltertop . The second was that she is lighter skinned than the rest of the family. Not to mention, her long-flowing straight hair, quite unlike every other member of the family.

Sex sells, goes the Hollywood logic, so it makes perfect sense when portraying a family to cast an attractive young woman who can easily slip into male fantasies as the “daughter”, doing double duty as both a symbol of home and available sexuality. This maxim becomes even more disturbing when the time comes to cast black daughters, becoming a rather open admission that in Hollywood, only African Americans with light skin can be the product in the “sex sells” formulation.

Indeed, you need only look at casting throughout the eighties and nineties, as African Americans began breaking the color barrier and appearing regularly on television and in movies as serious subjects of narratives:

Here’s the Cosby Show’s Lisa Bonet, a mixed race young adult with African American parents:

Another rather blatant case in Lethal Weapon:

The Fresh Prince of Bel Air:

And, of course, the entire light-skinned cast of A Different World:

The dynamic has become a shamefully accepted trope  for the business, as this casting call for Puff Daddy’s Ciroc vodka specified “Race: White, hispanic or light skinned african american “.

But what’s really of interest in this dynamic is how closely Hollywood mirrors this real life preference even when it is completely freed of the burdens of flesh-and-blood casting. Someone sat down and made the decision to sexualize the “Cleveland” character and to give her straight hair and light skin. Someone made the decision to extend the trope  that attractive and sexually available African American women are “whiter”. And, there’s a more disturbing idea that undergirds this Hollywood convention: the daughters of black men can be co-opted into “whiteness” as the object of safe trans-racial fantasies, while the males remain dark-skinned and un-absorbable.

Such absurd conventions have been notable in animation for some time, especially Disney’s odd fixation of imbuing animal-forms with stereotypical “Black”, “Latino” and “Asian” mannerisms. Most recently, the  “Twins” from Transformer’s 2: Revenge of the Fallen

took such racial designs to new and more enduring extremes. As one reviewer from a generally industry-friendly website put it:

The Twins have a simian appearance, with wide faces and huge ears. One of them… has a gold bucktooth. They have a ‘playful’ back and forth relationship, which includes them talking in some sort of modern day rap-age jive, calling each other ‘bitch-ass’ or ‘punk,’ talking with an exaggerated, crunked-up ’street’ accent. They appear to be stoned all the time. And they can’t read; when asked to translate some ancient Cybertronian language they sheepishly admit they ‘don’t do much readin’.’ …The Twins are completely illiterate, it seems. I was actually surprised that the film didn’t find a way to make them wear a Transformers version of baggy pants.

Here’s the most tragic part of this story–creator Michael Bay purposefully created these characters for younger audiences:

…”I purely did it for kids. … Young kids love these robots, because it makes it more accessible to them.”

Once, casting agents and directors were able to plead ignorance as they claimed that the lightest skinned African American also happened to be the best actress for the part. Or they could plead that their black actors were bringing something of their own culture to the roles in their larger than life stereotype-to-life interpretations, as many have claimed. But as animation becomes a more influential genre on television and CGI characters soak up larger chunks of celluloid in mainstream films, directors and producers will be given even more freedom to project their stereotypes on the minds of moviegoers. They may have to start defending their decisions about the bodies, minds and voices they imbue their non-white characters with.

The Absurd Spectacle of Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Movement

Melissa Harris Lacewell, Rachel Maddow’s oft-time guest and fellow creature of Princeton,  is generally a bit too pro-Obama for me. But here I think she does a perfectly succinct job of putting the utterly absurd philosophical underpinning of Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Movement in perspective:

Here’s Beck’s original push for 9-12 in which he weeps with nostalgia for the happy day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.