Media propagandists can’t conceal the state of the union address for what it was, a pageant of creeps, a pandering freakshow, and a flaunting of the celebration that the American constituancy is peopled by idiots on both sides of the aisle.
Before Pearl Harbor, there was Remember the Maine (Spain’s sneak attack), before that Americans were admonished to never forget the Alamo (Mexico’s sneak attack). After Pearl Harbor, the sneak attack that conscripted US public opinion into WWII, there was the Gulf of Tonkin (Viet Cong sneaks), among countless false flags calculated to mobilize a peaceful population to support retaliations that would otherwise be acts of aggression. The Third Reich had its Reichstag Fire and fabricated depredations on German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland to justify launching war. Whatever happened at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, immediately branded “Nine Eleven”, launched the West’s overt War on Islam. It’s Yellow Journalism 101, but Americans never seem to learn. A Japanese flotilla traversing the Pacific to launch a suprise attack on the US fleet, unbeknownst to US intelligence, is as improbable as the collapse of the steel WTC towers. That our fleet’s capital ships, the aircraft carriers were off on maneuvers, leaving only aging battleships to be bombed, gives December 7th something of the odor of 9/11’s Building 7. Roosevelt’s legacy was haunted by accusations of “conspiracy”, of having sacrificed the unsuspecting servicemen’s lives to protect corporate oil interests extending beyond the Pacific. In view of the lives expended since, both military and innocent, to preserve the reaches of empire, what’s so hard to believe?
COLORADO SPRINGS– Whose fault is it that America is “forgetting the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan”? We never learned them… Instead of prosecuting war criminals like General “H.R.” McMaster, fans of neoliberal genocide like the Colorado Springs World Affairs Council celebrate the yahoo and let him infect public minds about how the atrocity of TEL AFAR was a victory and not the crime against humanity it resembles. What was this bastard’s kernel of wisdom about his fine-tuning of a counterinsurgency technique which dates to America’s Indian Wars? Don’t be afraid to call genocide a “win”. Uncritical Gazette reporter Tom Roeder quotes McMaster saying Americans should be “unabashed.” Unabashed! Goddamn moral degenerate and we stand him up in front of crowds without a noose and scaffold! We have only ourselves to blame that our blimpneck officers congratulate themselves for their lessons learned.
I read 30 Seconds Over Tokyo when I was still a war-playing kid, before I would understand the mischievous consequences of the Doolittle Raiders B-25 bombers deploying without their bombsights. This was to prevent US war-making advantages falling into enemy hands but it also precluded dropping bombs with accuracy. I’m pretty certain the account for young readers also didn’t explain why over a quarter of the squadron’s bombs were of the incidiary cluster variety. Readers today know what those are for. Doolittle claimed to be targeting military sites in Japan’s capitol, but “invariably” hit civilian areas including four schools and a hospital. Of the American fliers captured, three were tried and executed by the despicable “Japs”, who considered the straffing of civilians to be war crimes. After the war, the US judged the Japanese officers responsible, as if their verdict was a greater injustice against our aviators’ “honest errors”. Today we rationalize our systemic overshoot policy as “collateral damage”.
Every year since WWII, Doolittle’s commandos are feted for their milestone bombing mission. This Veterans Day is to be the last due to their advanced ages. But it is fitting, because isn’t it time Americans faced what we’re celebrating? There’s no denying it took suicidal daring, but the Doolittle Raid inaugurated what became a staple of US warfare, the wholesale terrorizing of civilians from on high, with impunity and indifference. To be fair, the American public has always been kept in the dark. American aircraft have fire-bombed civilians at every diplomatic opportunity since 1942, and a Private Manning sits in the brig for trying to give us a chance to object.
We now know that the Doolittle Raid didn’t turn the tide, nor shake Japanese resolve. It was a retalliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, intended to boost US morale as if to say, America wasn’t defeated. Kinda like why and how we struck back at Afghanistan after 9/11, just as indiscriminately.
The “Mark Twain” ersatz bombsight
The Norden bombsight was a closely guarded US secret weapon. An airstrike without it would today be like lobotomizing so-called smart bombs, and deciding to opt for imprecision bombing. The official army record recounts that a subsitute sighting mechanism was improvised for the raid, dubbed the “Mark Twain” and judged to be effective enough. Now a bad joke. Indochina and Wikileaks-wisened, we know the mendacity of that assessment. The vehemently anti-imperialist, anti-racist Twain would not have been honored.
Twain satirized Western so-called Enlightenment thus: “good to fire villages with, upon occasion”.
Post-postwar hagiographies of the raid have suggested the improvised bombsight was better suited to low-altitude missions than the Norden model. That conclusion is easily dismissed because the device was used only for the Doolittle run and never after. The sight’s designer, mission aviator C. Ross Greening, offered a explanation for why he named the device after Mark Twain in his pothumously published memoir Not As Briefed. He didn’t.
The bombsight is named the “Mark Twain” in reference to the “lead line” depth finder used on the Mississippi River paddle wheelers in bygone days.
Because its design was so simple, we’re left to suppose. Greening’s bombsight was named for the same “mark” which Samuel Langhorne Clemens adopted as his celebrated pen name. I find it disingeneous to pretend to repurpose an archaic expression whose meaning was already eclipsed by the household name of America’s most outspoken anti-imperialist. Who would believe you named your dog “Napoleon” after a French pastry?
We are given another glimpse into Greening’s sense of humor by how he named his plane, the “Hari-Kari-er” ready to deal death by bomb-induced suicide. Greening’s B-25 is the one pictured above, with the angelic tart holding a bomb aloft. Greening’s plane was another that carried only incendiary ordnance.
Much was made of the sight’s two-piece aluminum construction, reportedly costing 20 cents at the time compared to the $10,000 Norden. This provided the jingoist homefront the smug satisfaction perhaps, combining a frugality born of the Depression with the American tradition of racism, that only pennies were expensed and or risked on Japanese lives.
War Crimes
Targeting civilians, taking insufficient care to avoid civilian casualties, using disproportunate force, acts of wanton retaliation, and the use of collective punishment are all prohibited by international convention. They are war crimes for which the US prosecutes adversaries but with which our own military refuses to abide. Americans make much of terrorism, yet remain blind to state terrorism. Doolittle’s historic raid, judged by the objective against which it is celebrated as a success, was an act of deliberate terrorism.
Forcing the Japanese to deploy more of their military assets to protect the mainland sounds like a legitimate strategy, except not by targeting civilians to illustrate the vulnerability, nor by terrorizing the population, one of Doolittle’s stated aims. He called it a “fear complex”.
It was hoped that the damage done would be both material and psychological. Material damage was to be the destruction of specific targets with ensuing confusion and retardation of production. The psychological results, it was hoped, would be the recalling of combat equipment from other theaters for home defense, the development of a fear complex in Japan, improved relationships with our Allies, and a favorable reaction in the American people.
There is no defending Japan’s imperialist expansion in the Pacific, and certainly not its own inhumanity. The Japanese treated fellow Asians with the same racist disregard with which we dispatched Filipinos. While Americans point in horror at how the Japanese retalliated against the Chinese population for the Doolittle Raid, we ignore that Doolittle purposely obscured from where our bombers were launched, leaving China’s coast as the only probably suspect.
To be fair, most of Doolittle’s team was kept in the dark about the mission until they were already deployed. I hardly want to detract from the courage they showed to undertake a project that seemed virtually suicidal. But how long should all of us remain in the dark about the true character of the Doolittle Raid?
Out of deference for the earlier generation of WWII veterans, those in leadership, certain intelligence secrets were kept until thirty years after the war. Unveiled, they paint a very different picture of what transpired. The fact that the US knew the German and Japanese codes from early on revealed an imbalance not previously admitted, as an example.
About the Doolittle Raid, much is already openly documented, if not widely known. The impetus for the raid was public knowledge, the evidence of its intent in full view.
BY DESIGN
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, American newspapers were already touting offers of cash rewards for whoever would be the first to strike back at Japan. President Roosevelt expressed a deliberate interest in hitting the Japanese mainland, in particular Tokyo, to retaliate for the Japanese strike against Pearl Harbor, never mind it had been a solely military target.
Plans were made to exploit the Japanese homeland’s vulnerability to fire, as ninety percent of urban structures were made of paper and wood. Writes historian William Bruce Jenson:
In his “confidential” meeting with reporters back in November, Marshall had declared that the US would have no cavil about burning Japan’s paper cities.
For the Doolittle Raid, a bombing strategy was developed to overwhelm the fire department of his target, the Shiba ward.
A former naval attache in Tokyo told Doolittle: “I know that Tokyp fire department very well. Seven big scattered fires would be too much for it to cope with.”
As lead plane, Doolittle’s role was to literally blaze the way. Fellow pilot Richard Joyce told Nebraska History Magazine in 1995:
The lead airplane, which was going to have Doolittle on board as the airplane commander, was going to be loaded with nothing but incendiaries -2.2 pound thermite incendiaries- in clusters. They drop these big clusters and then the straps break and they spray, so they set a whole bunch of fires. He was to be the pathfinder and set a whole bunch of fires in Tokyo for pathfinding purposes.
Doolittle’s report outlined his objective more formally:
one plane was to take off ahead of the others, arrive over Tokyo at dusk and fire the most inflammable part of the city with incendiary bombs. This minimized the overall hazard and assured that the target would be lighted up for following airplanes.
Greening paints the most vivid picture, of burning the Japanese paper houses to light the way:
Doolittle planned to leave a couple of hours early, and in the dark set fire to Tokyo’s Shiba ward … the mission’s basic tactic had been that Doolittle would proceed alone and bomb a flammable section of Tokyo, creating a beacon in the night to help guide following planes to their targets.
Doolittle’s copilot Lt Richard Cole, told this to interviews in 1957:
Since we had a load of incendiaries, our target was the populated areas of the west and northwest parts of Tokyo.
After the bombers had left on their raid, and before news got back about whether or not they accomplished it, the Navy crew on the carrier USS Hornet already sang this song, which went in part:
Little did Hiro think that night
The skies above Tokyo would be alight
With the fires that Jimmy started in Tokyo’s dives
To guide to their targets the B-25s.
When all of a sudden from out of the skies
Came a basket of eggs for the little slant eyes
Incendiaries
Most of the bombers were loaded with three demolition bombs and an incendiary cluster bomb. Some of the planes carried only incendiaries. According to Doolittle’s official report of the raid, here were some of their stated objectives:
Plane no. 40-2270, piloted by Lt. Robert Gray:
thickly populated small factories district. … Fourth scattered incendiary over the correct areaPlane No. 40-2250, Lt. Richard Joyce:
Incendiary cluster dropped over thickly populated and dense industrial residential sector immediately inshore from primary target. (Shiba Ward)“The third dem. bomb and the incendiary were dropped in the heavy industrial and residential section in the Shiba Ward 1/4 of a mile in shore from the bay and my tat.”
Aircraft 40-2303, Lt Harold Watson:
the congested industrial districts near the railroad station south of the Imperial PalaceAC 40-2283, David Jones:
the congested area Southeast of the Imperial Palace
Even though the planned night raid became a daytime mission, Doolittle did not alter his original role, intended to light the way for the following planes. His target remained the Shiba District of Tokyo. His own plane: “changed course to the southwest and incendiary-bombed highly inflammable section.”
Doolittle’s report included a description of the incendiary bombs:
The Chemical Warfare Service provided special 500 incendiary clusters each containing 128 incendiary bombs. These clusters were developed at the Edgewood Arsenal and test dropped by the Air Corps test group at Aberdeen. Several tests were carried on to assure their proper functioning and to determine the dropping angle and dispersion. Experimental work on and production of these clusters was carried on most efficiently.
As has become an aerial bombardment tradition, crews were let to inscribe messages on the bombs about to be dropped. Accounts made the most of these chestnuts: “You’ll get a BANG out of this.” And “I don’t want to set the world on fire –only Tokyo.”
These details, which reveal the intentions of the raid, were not made known to the public immediately. The Doolittle Raid was planned and executed in secret, with US government and military spokesmen denying knowledge of the operation even in its aftermath. The first word to reach the American public came from the New York Times, citing Japanese sources:
Enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo for the first time in the current war, inflicting damage on schools and hospitals. Invading planes failed to cause and damage on military establishments, although casualties in the schools and hospitals were as yet unknown. This inhuman attack on these cultural establishments and on residential districts is causing widespread indignation among the populace.
This report was dismissed as propaganda. When Japan declared its intention to charge the airman it had taken captive with war crimes, the US protestations redoubled. The accusations were belittled even as our own reports conceded to the possibilities.
Lieutenant Dawson’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was the first published account of the raid. Printed less than a year after the event, wartime-sensitive details such as the phony guns made of broomstick handles poking out the back were left out. Targets were also not specified, but a candor remained, probably intended to be threatening. Lawson described the 500-pound incendiaries as “something like the old Russian Molotov Breadbasket”, and related US naval attache Jurika’s advice:
“If you can start seven good fires in Tokyo, they’ll never put them out,” Jurika promised us. … “I wouldn’t worry too much about setting fires in flimsy-looking sections of Tokyo,” he said. “The Japanese have done an amazing job of spreading out some of their industries, instead of concentrating them in large buildings. There’s probably a small machine shop under half of these fragile-looking roofs.”
“Flimsy” became Lawson’s keyword for the residential areas. Here Lawson described dropping his third and fourth bombs, when he saw their corresponding red light indicators:
The third red light flickered, and, since we were now over a flimsy area in the southern part of the city, the fourth light blinked. That was the incendiary, which I knew would separate as soon as it hit the wind and that dozens of small fire bombs would molt from it.
I was satisfied about the steel-smelter and hoped the other bombs had done as well. There was no way of telling, but I was positive that Tokyo could have been damaged that day with a rock.
Our actual bombing operation, from the time the first one went until the dive, consumed not more than thirty seconds.
Thus: Chance of hitting civilian homes: 50/50.
Charges of Excessive Force could be expected, because
blame the victim for being weaker than: a rock.
Care taken to avoid innocent casualties: 30 seconds.
In a later afterword, Lawson blamed Tokyo for having insufficient bomb shelters.
After the war, US occupation forces recovered Japanese records which documented the losses attributed to the Doolittle Raid: fifty dead, 252 wounded, ninety buildings. Besides military or strategic targets, that number included nine electric power buildings, a garment factory, a food storage warehouse, a gas company, two misc factories, six wards of Nagoya 2nd Temporary Army Hospital, six elementary or secondary schools, and “innumerable nonmilitary residences”.
Strafing
Japan accused the fliers of indescriminate strafing civilians. The US countered that defending fighters were responsible for stray bullets when their gunfire missed the bombers. That’s very likely, except the raiders were candid about their strafing too. Lawson:
I nosed down a railroad track on the outskirts of the city and passed a locomotive close enough to see the surprised face of the engineer. As I went by I could have kicked myself for not giving the locomotive’s boiler a burst of our forward 30-calibre guns, then I remembered that we might have better use for the ammunition.
A big yacht loomed up ahead of us and, figuring it must be armed, I told Thatcher to give it a burst. We went over it, lifted our nose to put the tail down and Thatcher sprayed its deck with our 50-calibre stingers.
Greening’s account of firing on a sailor, raises the moral ambiguity of air warfare with which few airmen grapple. By virtue that technology allows it, combatants become slave to a predetermined outcome:
When we attacked the next patrol boat, a Japanese sailor threw his hands up as if to surrender. I guess he expected us to stop and take him prisoner. We shot him and left this boat smoking too.
The Medals
Friendship Medals exchanged between Japan and the US found themselves requisitioned for Doolittle’s Raid:
Several years prior to the war, medals of friendship and good relationship were awarded to several people of the United States by the Japanese government. In substance these medals were symbolic of the friendship and cooperation between the nations and were to represent the duration of this attitude. It was decided by the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Frank Knox, that the time was appropriate to have these medals returned. They had been awarded to Mr. Daniel J. Quigley, Mr. John D. Laurey, Mr. H. Vormstein and Lt. Stephen Jurkis.
After arrangements had been made and the medals secured, a ceremony was held on the deck of the Hornet during which the medals were wired to a 500 lb. bomb to be carried by Lt. Ted Lawson and returned to the Japanese government in an appropriate fashion.
Lawson’s plane no 40-2261 dropped that bomb on an “industrial section of Tokyo” omitting to mention that Japan’s industry was still a post-feudal cottage industry.
“The medals were subsequently delivered in small pieces to their donors in Tokyo by Lt. Ted Lawson at about noon, Saturday, April 18, 1942.”
–Mitscher, M.A. Letter Report to Commander Pacific Fleet.
“Through the courtesy of the War Department your Japanese medal and similar medals, turned in for shipment, were returned to His Royal Highness, The Emperor of Japan on April 18, 1942.”
–Knox, F. Letter Report to Mr. H. Vormstein
Corporate media doesn’t want to do its job investigating or reporting on security state mechanisms and excesses, and it’s not going to let Edward Snowden do it either. Isn’t it curious that they’re able to allege Snowden’s leaks are “allegations” instead of …LEAKS? Of course they’ve only got their corrupt selves for peer review. The US press leaves the foreign papers to break Snowden’s documents after which it can accurately say the conclusions are “reported”, giving US officials a premise to dismiss the “accusations”. Except they’re not accusations, or allegations or conclusions, they’re unveiled fact. The US security agencies aren’t reportedly violating the privacy of citizens, they ARE! And no, “everyone is[n’t] spying on everyone” the security states are spying on their peoples. Neither you, nor I are spying on anyone, except maybe via Facebook. Our oligarchs and their world security apparatus are keeping close tabs on us via wildly illegal surveillance, to the bemusement of media talking heads.
NMT has for some time been writing about how the NSA is recording all phone calls and internet transmissions, not merely “meta” data. Of course our reports were suppositions, so THANK YOU EDWARD SNOWDEN for the confirmation. Any credible response to Snowden’s revelations, whether from the White House or Angela Merkel, must begin with expressing gratitude for the moral superiority of a brave whisteblower.
George Zimmerman’s MO has nothing on the US justice system. High school freshman Philip Chism is accused of murdering Boston teacher Colleen Ritzer. Though he’s only 14, Chism is being arraigned as an adult. The media is playing it down but Philip Chism is black. You’d think somewhere in America, district attorneys want to prosecute an African American juvenile AS A juvenile because, you know, Obama and shit. Neatly bookending this story today, white felon and Kennedy kin Michael Skakel, has been granted a retrial. Skakel was 39 when the law finally caught up with him, but Skakel was TRIED AS A JUVENILE (AT 39) because he was 15 when the murder was committed. In a further flaunting of priviledge, the judge granted Skakel a retrail because the judge decided his original defense must have been inadequate. That should set quite a precedent for anyone who’s been failed by a public defender, which would be EVERYBODY! But probably this precedent will only apply to everybody who’s white, and a Kennedy.
Grace is only afforded to juveniles who are white, consistent with Western disregard for the children of the Global South whose adult worklife begins even before puberty.
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO- International news headlines read “G-20 Summit Overshadowed by Syrian Crisis” but not in Colorado Springs! Here every politically active Democrat was working to defeat a recall of state senate leader John Morse, a democrat though barely. Morse is a duly elected, if unlikely, representative of conservative El Paso County, being assailed by a mutinous GOP majority angered by his stewarding of gun control legislation. The NRA has backed a blitzkrieg recall campaign, aided by local Republican officials and judges who connived election parameters designed to coax a recall victory. But who’s on the side of right, presumably with the people?
Democrats are crying foul. They’re cursing corporate money and lobbyist-villain NRA, complaining that recalls shouldn’t be motivated by ideological reasons. Really? Are recalls only for impropriety? I’d prefer corruption be answered with criminal charges, and scandal should produce resignations. I’d say ideology would be the most appropriate reason for a recall, especially if it’s about a difference of opinion about the idea of representational government.
Ironically, the underdog’s usual complaint is that incumbents are always impossible to unseat, even when they act in total defiance of their constituents. Don’t you hate that? The irony is compounded because no one will deny that the overwhelming majority in these neighborhoods oppose any abridgement of the Second Amendment right to wave guns. Senator Morse acted in defiance of that interest. Undemocratic, is what he was, as his critics accuse.
We like to vilify the NRA as the worst of special interest lobbies, but one can’t accuse them of being corporate, they’re famously supported by members! The NRA is probably the single MOST democratic of lobbying outfits. The fact that the corporate media loves to demonize the NRA should give one pause about who’s looking after who.
What’s very odd is that the NRA-backed Republicans are targeting a term-limited Democrat who has only a year left in office. What’s that about? Pundits speculate that an NRA win would be symbolic, so it’s worth the money they’re spending. Maybe. It certainly will reinforce the corporate narrative that legislators daren’t cross the NRA. How convenient.
But the recall campaign, a national story now, is not so mysterious if you think about the Kabuki nature of our two party theater. The defense campaign contrived for Senator Morse is a disquietingly artificial shade for grassroots. Against “People Against Morse” the Democrats countered with: “A Whole Lot of People For Morse”, which is certainly a catchy slogan for a politician looking to highten his visibility for a run at a next office, but for locals it lacks the ring of authenticity. What viewers outside the area don’t know is that John Morse has been a superlatively minor functionary, with a reputation for backstabbing more than leading, and certainly no one to bother defending or applauding, even if his name came up, which it rarely did.
Before this recall, people hadn’t cared enough to even think about John Morse, except to spout the usual lesser of evils rap, when there is consensus, it’s that Morse isn’t the creepiest person they knew, depending on who you asked. Now the louse has “a whole lot of people” behind him, how odd. That’s a whole lot of people who don’t care that Morse misrepresented his district, who don’t care that he’s been a war-monger right-of-center pro-industry shill. Because he’s of their party, Democrats want to propel Morse upward. And this is how malignant anti-democratic corporate bureaucrats roll into power.
To judge by the press, and the surge of effort to combat the recall effort, it appears John Morse does have “a whole lot” of support. Propaganda and amnesia.
If the recall succeeds, Americans will be shown that money does influence elections and special interest groups are adversaries to be feared. Sounds like an honest lesson. If the recall succeeds, the displeasure of the gun-loving voters of Colorado Springs will have been heard. If the recall fails, you’ll have Democrats unironically cheering against what Democracy is supposed to look like. In either event, John Morse comes out looking like somebody likes him, and that’s a step in the wrong direction for those of us without a political machine.
Bored Oklahoma teens who shot a random jogger in the back are being tried as adults not juveniles because “it was an adult crime”; though killing while bored seems a juvenile crime by definition. So does immediately confessing a motive, “we were bored,” to the police, it would seem to me. But there’s more. Despite the confessions, it was not immediately clear who pulled the trigger as the three teens trailed their victim, Australian college baseball player Christopher Lane, in their car, then sped away to find a next target. But that didn’t stop Oklahoma police from charging just TWO of the boys with first degree murder, bail denied, with the third considered an accessory. I’ve provided the mug shots to give you a hint. For which 15 and 16 year-old do you think the state of Oklahoma is seeking the death penalty? (Spoiler: YES) And the older accessory –17 but white– gets bail and will be tried as a juvenile.
Pundits deride African American leaders for not decrying the Lane murder like they did that of Trayvon Martin, presumably because the victim was white. But I’ll ask where is the community outcry for young James Edwards and Chancy Luna, joy-killers they may be? Though I understand full well that other than the “doing it for fun” headlines, this event is unexceptional. Black children bear the brunt of law enforcement everyday, our prison system follows in the lynching tradition.
IF the bodies in Syrian videos purporting to document a chemical attack aren’t littering hospital floors like so many fictional Kuwaiti incubator babies, we are compelled to ask who unleashed the chemicals? Bashir Assad? The rebels? Our “rebels”? The odds favor us and even our western media agrees, refusing to remove the quotes everytime they refer to the “chemicals”. If covert western forces struck a Dow Chemical plant effecting a Bophal-like result to resemble a “chemical attack”, neither our soldiers nor the chemical agent supplier are going to confess. Dow still won’t apologize for the original Bophal.
Want to know where you can find Prince Harry on his war cheerleading US tour? Half of it is in Colorado. On Friday he’ll be at a UK Consul-General’s reception at the private Sanctuary Golf Course in Sedalia. Between Denver and Castle Rock, that’s the Castle Pines exit off of I-25. He’s staying overnight in Colorado Springs and leads the opening ceremonies of the Warrior Games at the US Olympic Training Center at Union and Uintah. He concludes his Colorado visit on Sunday at the Air Force Academy on Sunday before flying east for a polo match. How unseemly for American media to be fawning over a British royal, and what a slap in the face for Colorado Springs Tea Partiers, if they weren’t so uniformly stupid, to celebrate a monarch for which they claim so much credit for having expelled. Nathan Hale would have hung a second time and a third and forth presumably to have had the chance to show smug twits like Prince Harry the door. Harry pretends to continue the work of his mother Lady Diana, ridding the world of land mines, yet how much credit does he get when he advocates for their root cause, war?
Remember the jokes-on-them cautionary tale about admen trying to sell the Chevy NOVA in Latin America, oblivious that “no va” means “doesn’t go?” in Spanish. You’d think Capitalism’s missionaries would know their “freedom” brand has already been unmasked. Translated it means “World Bank Compliant Fascist State” whose media is embed only. How ironic that capitalism in democracy’s clothing is heralding World Press Freedom Day. I suppose Russia and Iran are held as examples where the press isn’t free, although RT and PRESSTV are by far more reliable sources of news than anything in the “free” world. I most appreciated WPFD for the light it brought on its international supporters, bloggers who I might not have immediately known were sock puppets for western tentacles. Here’s someone in Colombia who depends “in great part on international co-operation” to fund her work.
LOCKDOWN. The term has become ubiquitous, though lifted easily out of context, being self-explanatory. Its predecessor “batten down the hatches” used to be too. Before the advent of recreational sailing it came from a work environment synonymous with incarceration, in the days of debtors prison for penury, before which were slave galleys. As an idiom, batten the hatches still means to fasten things down, brace for difficult weather. “Lockdown” was used this week to describe the city of Boston, as its neighborhood of Watertown was swarmed by militarized police, the residents commanded to “shelter in place”, officers barking at them to stay in your houses, under penalty of being shot, by accident we like to suppose, for their own safety is the implication, or be arrested for obstructing justice. We’ve come to know what lock-down means. It’s a prison term for everyone stuck in their cell, until further notice, sometimes indefinitely. Colorado’s Supermax prison operates in a permanent state of lock-down. Of course in this age of school shootings –another self-defining expression, like “going postal”– lock-downs have become an educational tradition, and isn’t likening schools to prisons forcing an interesting slip into Freudian reality?
Students have always inferred they were inmates. Without looking it up, I’m now certain the expression “matriculation” was abandoned for its unfortunate implication of being compulsory. Before the middle class, vocational training was worse than mandatory, it was an inevitability. If of course a luxury –how far we’ve come. But our labor saving inventions weren’t meant to save our labor, that profit went to the hoarders of what we produced: produce, became grain, now money. With the means of production owned by the land owner, the rest of us are laborers once again. Underemployed, idled, in the lull of post industrialism, we’re put into lockdown.
And we accept it. Now we’re speaking of building walls to control immigration which means a macro lockdown. We’re prisoners of nation states and we’re breeding children in captivity who can never live Born Free outside zoos.
Boston accepted its lockdown. The media is reporting Bostonians are now catching their breath as if the restriction was some collective girdle. How long would the lockdown have seemed justified? I was rather hoping if the lockdown had extended, that Occupy Boston would have rallied to march on Watertown, to reject the premise that a manhunt for a solitary teen of dubious menace would justify unqualified home invasions without search warrants. I’m rather confident, had Watertown been a submunicipality of Denver, that the infamous cop-baiters of Occupy Denver would have flown their colors in the officers’ faces.
The police were hunting a fugitive teen accused of planting a crude bomb at the Boston Marathon. He’d fled a firefight with police after a car chase said to have involved pipe bombs and grenades, but whose? The suspect was armed and dangerous, but was he? The police also warned that he’d be booby-trapping the neighborhood. They searched houses not just to locate the fugitive, but to check that he hadn’t rigged unsuspecting houses. When he was finally caught there was no mention of his being armed. Perhaps that’s why they couldn’t immolate him like the usual felon, because his hiding place was fiberglass and the imaging devices gave away the fact that he was absolutely defenseless. What may have saved Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was perhaps less the virtual Cop Watch of oversight on police scanners broadcast over the internet, but that the young man sought refuge in a boat.
You might quarrel with my nautical analogy, there are perhaps less archaic idioms than “batten down the hatches”, but specifically it means to seal the hull, batten in this case being a verb referring to a tool for reefing the sail, and see, none of this translates anymore. As we lose the middle class, we lose our sailing terms, just as the working class has lost its fisheries. Hatch is still relevant to aircraft and spaceships, which the common urchin might still know virtually, but for how long prison ship Spaceship Earth?
Odysseus had his men lash (See?) him to the mast so he could resist the Sirens’ call that lured sailors to their doom. Literally battening him in lockdown, because beyond here lie dragons, sea monster mermaids who would waylay the course of Western Civilization, which now seems the better idea.
STREAMING OF CONSCIOUSNESS ON BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING DENOUEMENT: DID YOU KNOW that law enforcement can tell you “If you want to live, turn off your cell phone.”? That was shouted to an AP reporter tonight in Watertown, just before he heard officers shout “Fire in the hole” as they encircled a suspect. So they’re chasing a marathon attendee whose face matches the surveillance video, who they can refer to as a suspect with impunity if he’s dead so they’re about to Dorner his ass (Remember Chris Dorner? Remember Waco? The gov-lit inferno, not the gov-neglected “Waco” redux.) to beyond facial recognition. Boston Marathon Bombing solved.
Do cellphone beacons mess with police pyrotechnics like we pretend they do aviation electronics? Or was the officer concerned the reporter might be tweeting, enabling a suspect to triangulate his encirclement on Twitter? I bet the officer just wanted to shoot the reporter if he didn’t jump on command.
We know police have the authority to tell television reporters to turn their cameras away lest they jeopardize a SWAT stakeout. Apparently cameras also endanger oil spill cleanups. Are media reporters complicit or simply that stupid? A recent consensus of journalists asserted to me “they’re stupid” but that’s probably a cop-out, odd expression that, to protect media assets who are as enslaved by the system as police officers or oil workers.
Who knows what’s going on in Boston, er, Watertown. Major sports teams are attributed to greater metropolitan areas. Crimes are branded to satellite communities like Watertown, Mayflower, Aurora, Littleton, aka Boston, Little Rock, Denver, Denver. The point of a press pass is that your objective is supposed to be respected by the authorities. In a police state it means they can treat you like an embedded bitch.
Update: “First suspect” reported to be in custody was captured, released, and also killed. A police briefing just clarified all three congruent incongruities. Police scanner suggests the captured suspect detonated himself in custody. Twitter beat television media by an hour in relaying the development that the first suspect was killed.
Update 2: Hospital which admitted suspect won’t reveal his identity, or extent of his injuries, or his age. They were embarrassed sufficiently to admit they could confirm his gender. Most interesting, the doctor who addressed the press would not say if he worked on the suspect, but described how he had witnessed the gun fight from his home, then dressed and reported to the emergency room before the suspect was transported there. Hmm.
Now they’re evacuating blocks of Watertown, so it’s going to be a MOVE climax. Follow police instructions yes, but call them on bullshit. So far the entire narrative has come from authorities, including the inconsistencies which go unchallenged.
When was the last time YOUR issue was given the president’s bully-pulpit? Yeah, the outcry for Gun Control is not yours, and this campaign is not for you. President Obama trotted up a Sandy Hook Mourning Mom TM to rally the nation for action, of the usual so that they will not have died in vain variety, although she said only that the children “deserved a vote”, code for, it doesn’t have to pass, meaning this national conversation about societal violence is more kabuki. And how. Strange too how campus shootings are proliferating like pipeline spills, except the media are allowed to show the gun carnage. Before we’re done, it would not surprise me if Sandy Hook victims are compensated like 911 survivors. MNBC has labeled this issue “Massacre Control” as if school shootings have anything on air strikes. “For the children” only applies to ours.
DENVER, COLORADO- Protesters from AIM, Idle No More, 350 Colorado, Deep Green Resistance, and Occupy lay siege to the Suncor Energey refinery, where what Canadian Tar Sands oil isn’t processed is spilled into Denver’s Sand Creek.
DENVER, COLO.- It’s day three of the 2013 NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MEDIA REFORM and I haven’t heard one mention of perhaps the media story most pertinent to this gathering: the tar sands oil spill in Mayflower Arkansas that is and isn’t in the headlines. Because the media is being denied access to the story, because the media isn’t making a story of that censorship, and because most relevant to the media reform crowd, the scarce images that are emerging are coming from activist video streamers breaking the law to get the story. I’m especially excited by that development because it renders my exhortations mute, that journalists look with skepticism on the oath of “objectivity” which binds them to the corporate spun narrative. “You can’t be neutral on a moving train” was Howard Zinn’s entreaty. “Neutrality helps the oppressor never the victim” said a Zionist without irony. But when reporting means having to break the law, then wanting to tell the story means becoming an activist.
I use the expression “illegals” in accordance to the AP’s new stylebook, to connote an illegal act, and to poke fun. “The I-word” is no longer acceptable to describe undocumented immigrants, but speaker after speaker at the conference heralded the announcement as if it had not just been explained by the previous. It was apparently “the applause line” of this year’s conference. Too bad, because in a year of unending Obama betrayals, the victory is meager cause for celebration.
Indefinite detention, solitary confinement, torture, and assassination are tools America does not hesitate to use to enforce its feudal corporate agenda. That the US didn’t dispatch Bolivarian hero Hugo Chavez like they did Yasser Arafat is belied by their protestation that such accusations would be far fetched. Wikileaks has already documented ceaseless US plots to eradicate Chavez, second only perhaps to their attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, whose last years bear a resemblance to what befell Chavez. It’s a testament to the magnanimity of both leaders that they didn’t immediately finger US dirty deeds. Because proved or not, it’s dispiriting and serves empire’s purpose that dissenters should take heed: you can spend the foreseeable future tortured behind bars, gunned down by a mob, under house arrest in London, incinerated via drone or LAPD’s “burner”, or tagged with carcinogens. The long arm of Western injustice gets their man.
Could this ugly crime matter less? Except that the media is exploiting the story to deny domestic violence (The Blade Runner couldn’t have meant to kill his model girlfriend, she was so beautiful). And except now that it looks like the Oscar Pistorius case is taking a JonBenet Ramsey turn. A celebrity shoots his girlfriend through a locked bathroom door, and suddenly detectives are reported to be botching the case, misidentifying evidence and contaminating the crime scene. This is big league defense where the moneyed class walks even as one of their own dies, justice usually failing a woman. Why should a crime of passion ruin a second affluent life?
DENVER, COLORADO- Score another success for Colorado Fractivists who crashed this weekend’s climate rally with their unequivocal anti-fracking message. The February 17 event was intended to urge President Obama “Forward on Climate”, to borrow his most recent campaign vagarity, but when official speeches began, and the prefab signs were distributed, it became unclear who might be trying to co-opt whom.
Gas
The 350.ORG sponsored march, coinciding with a rally and civil disobedience in DC, called specifically for a halt to the Keystone XL Pipeline and Tar Sands extraction which climate scientists have dubbed “game over” for hopes of averting climate disaster, but the dominant signage spoke vaguely of “Climate Action” and “It’s Time to Cut Carbon” and “Big Coal Makes Us Sick”, all of which are slogans used by proponents of natural gas. 350-ORG has been raising awareness of the imperative to reduce carbon emissions, while recognizing that the groundswell driving environmentalists across the country is opposition to oil & gas hydraulic fracturing.
It’s all the same fight to reduce burning of fossil fuels, but moderate allies like the Sierra Club haven’t been prepared to denounce their new-found bed partners urging consumers to get “Beyond Coal.” To her credit, local 350-ORG coordinator Micah Parkin incorporated fractivist groups into the Feb 17 rally, but Democratic Party panderers didn’t get the memo. A representative read a letter of support from Senator Michael Bennet and was able to sneak past: “I stand with Obama” and even “in favor of US energy independence” although that’s code for oil & gas exports, dependent on construction of the XL pipeline. But when Mark Udall’s representative referred to “clean burning natural gas” the crowd booed. Even as he pleaded “we’re on your side,” the crowd wouldn’t relent, making sure his takeaway would be that fracking compounded global warming, among its other horrors.
The highlight of the rally occurred immediately afterward when the master of ceremonies, a twelve-year-old rapper and member of the Boulder based Earth Guardians, thanked Udall’s rep affably but then assured the audience that “of course there’s no such thing as clean natural gas!”
Occupy
A word about Occupy Denver’s part in Sunday’s march. Occupiers took the black-tie invitation to heart and turned up in black bloc attire with bandanas and balaclavas. OD then pushed the envelope to the consternation of parade marshals, stepping into the street at one point, blocking cars at another, in the spirit of their banner which read “ONLY DIRECT ACTION WILL STOP THE PIPELINE.”
To what end, creating friction during an event otherwise running smoothly? Who knows. The demonstration was uneventful and garnered scant media attention. Mixing it up might have helped, or not. The turnout was large but not up for a confrontation. Occupy didn’t push it.
The irony of 350-ORG supporters being upset by the antics of the Occupiers, was that behind the masks were many activists who’d actually gone to Texas to stop the XL pipeline, who’d gotten arrested, some out on $25,000 bond. How unfortunate that those troublemakers weren’t recognized from the stage. It was a real missed opportunity, this having been a rally to, um, STOP THE PIPELINE. These rowdy boring-party crashers were actually its unsung, veritable heroes. What the crowd wanted to mistake for infantile grandstanding, was really the infantile audacity that stops pipelines. Yes you get in trouble if you step off the sidewalk. Do you think the police are going to let you stop the pipeline?
MANITOU SPRINGS- Idle No More organizers from Denver and Pueblo woke the sleepy local Native American community with a spirited gathering on Saturday, smack in the middle of Manitou, neath the town clock, only blocks from the CS Indian Center.
Tuning in to developments with fugitive cop-killer Chris Dorner in Big Bear on Tuesday, I half expected a televised denouement like Fahrenheit 451, where impatient viewers were given a contrived final scene, fitting the short arc of the average attention span for corporate media fodder. As I recall, that renegade fireman watched his pursuers stage his capture/demise, because authorities favored truncating a felon-on-the-lam narrative lest it generate a deviant hopeful following; it didn’t matter if the criminal really escaped. Could Ray Bradbury have envisioned the expectations which reality TV has created to satiate real blood lust?
No doubt Bradbury foresaw the ferocity with which a vengeful police state would immolate their one-man insurgent, with a compliant media averting their cameras so American viewers didn’t witness another Waco.
Americans should be attuned to these out of sight infernos, all our wars for example. Except that we know Dorner was set aflame with an paramilitary incendiary device dubbed “the burner”, this is what our extrajudicial executions look like via drones. Only last week news junkies were treated to the legal argument which the USG made to justify killing untried suspects, even US citizens. A if international law differentiated among infidels. One man’s infidel may be another’s exemplar, but he’s every government’s infidel.
So Chris Dorner had snapped. His manifesto, rambling only as much as those were his parting words, Dorner a Falling Down avenger who knew there would be no Hollywood ending. But Dorner had bought into the Rambo Army-of-One mythology. No disrespect intended toward Dorner’s feat, but elite military training proved more of a dud than a fighting machine, did it? What a laugh that American forces deign to train Afghan recruits. Any one mujahideen is likely the equivalent of a high-capacity magazine clip of US special forces in their underwear. But it’s likely authorities will never reveal Dorner’s actual superhuman achievement. He knew what he was up against, and now so do we. The crooked police machine has proven to be worse than Dorner’s complaints. Perhaps that was meant to be the audience takeaway. We didn’t get to see Chris Dorner burn at the stake, but we sure as hell felt the heat.
How’s this for a Wikipedia item update? After five years of having denied the practice, the Israeli government admits it is secretly administering birth control injections to its Falash Mura population, reducing that community’s birth rate by half. Falash Mura you may ask, translates to “horse of the raven” –consult Wikipedia if you’d like to see some champion dissembling from the racist imagery of that term– and refers to the descendents of Beta Israel, or Ethiopian Jews, contested as improbably Jewish on account of their skin color making Semitic Europeans uncomfortable. Israel has very reluctantly offered birthright invites to their Ethiopian Diasporans. Israel’s Law of Return is not to be confused with the International Right of Return, to which all refuges are entitled, which Israel refuses to grant Palestinians, the original and more likely descendents of ALPHA ISRAEL. But getting back to this breaking story on Zionist racism, it turns out Israel has been preemptively ethnically cleansing their darkies, no worse than the US does with ghettos, drugs, cheap guns, and the prison industrial complex.
DENVER, COLORADO- Downtown eatery co-owner Jon Schlegel thought the homeless were defenseless when he led an effort to criminalize sleeping or seeking shelter out-of-doors last year. Instead Schlegel incurred the wrath of Occupy Denver, who’ve maintained a now seven-month long Boycott Snooze protest opposite his trendy restaurant. Yes it’s personal, Schlegel opened SNOOZE in a depressed area adjacent to a homeless shelter, now he wants to gentrify his digs by running out the homeless. So every Sunday occupiers bring signs to sway potential customers from supporting Snooze’s war on the homeless, and every Sunday Schlegel calls the police. But there have been no charges, officers remind Occupiers they are within their rights, yet Snoozegoers are treated to the illusion that the boycott’s legality may be borderline. You know, it’s that phony paradox promoted by our corporate media, that free speech means having to tolerate another’s opinion however offensive. (When free speech offends you, you are likely the offender being protested.) The real question is how Denver Police justify juxtaposing their intimidating armed presence against a citizen’s First Amendment rights.
You’d think that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o would be overjoyed to learn his internet girlfriend’s death was a hoax, that the person with whom he spent days and nights on the phone is alive and well, even if her name isn’t Lennay Kekua. If it’s true the NFL hot-property had never met this posthumous paramour, but fell in love with her over the course of years on the phone, you’d think the bond would be super-ordinary and he’d be on the first plane to meet his miraculously restored Ophelia. The death “hoax” could have a fairytale ending!
(Maybe I’m overestimating the emotional availability of a football player, but that exclamation could be a pun and a twist.)
Evidently Manti Te’o presumes his fabled “Lennay Kekua” by any other name will not smell as sweet. That’s certainly the conclusion a TV audience is meant to infer. The football star’s sagging enthusiasm for his ex phone pal enamorada suggests he might already know her identity doesn’t it? His business-of-football associates don’t seem to show much curiosity either. Is it that Lennay Kekua’s real identity and physical appearance have to be vetted by Notre Dame or by the NFL before they approve a re-engagement with the Manti entity integral to their business plan? No doubt American Football might also not ready for a gender switch, if the phone passed around the locker room in the persona of “Lennay” turns out to be Manti’s “prankster” friend Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
Macho Manti Te’o is entitled to the private life of his choosing, but when the media money machine plumbs real-life drama to pull the nation’s heartstrings, we’re entitled to see what comes up at the end of the line, especially the more feverishly they try to cut it.
Because isn’t there a real chance here for something transformative? Imagine if Manti Te’o is revealed to be gay, what that could do for traditional divisive stereotypes, blessed by football.
Reality television teases us with the charismatic potential of witnessing real life, but carefully scripts what we see to preclude an unpredictable outcome.
Here’s an idea for First Nations rattling their chains with IDLE NO MORE. Declare your sovereignty for real. “Sovereignty” has become a meaningless descriptor, now counting puppet states of Iraq and Afghanistan. How did we expect George W. Bush to explain what sovereignty meant? Even he probably knew what it was supposed to mean, and so do you. Sovereignty doesn’t mean captive reservations, rural ghettos, Gaza Strips or West Banks slowly being ethnically cleansed by attrition. Sovereignty means independent nation states, not dupes of duplicitous treaties. Chief Theresa Spense is right to hold out to meet with the Canadian Prime Minister and a representative of the English crown. First Nations leaders deserve to meet with fellow heads of state, if the treaty lands are truly sovereign.