MILKING THE JUICE
by Malik Isasis



According to the US Census Bureau, television penetrates at least 98.2% of American homes. The late media critic and media studies founder, Neil Postman stated in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death that “The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation (8).” The 98.2% penetration rate of television suggests that Americans main form of news consumption is through the television.

In June of 1994 a television phenomenon occurred. A once famous football player, Orenthal James Simpson better known as O.J. Simpson, was watched by millions in a low speed chase with California State Patrol. Simpson’s wife Nicole Brown Simpson’s and alleged boyfriend, Ronald Goldman’s bodies were found mutilated, stabbed and lying in a pool of blood at O.J. Simpson’s estate. It was dour, like a made-for-television movie, set in Hollywood. It had all the ingredients of an American taboo, a wealthy black man, who dated and then married an attractive white woman, who would end up dead at the alleged hands of her famous husband. Hollywood couldn’t have written a better set up.

A year and a half later, on October 3, 1995 “an estimated 150 million people stopped what they were doing to watch the verdict of O.J. Simpson trail” (Frontline, 2005). The verdict of “not guilty,” predictably split America right down racial lines, exposing the fragile truce between blacks and whites.

O.J. Simpson has recently resurfaced with a new book titled, “If I Did It” in which he explores the murders of his wife and her partner from his perspective, as if he were the murderer, hypothetically, of course.

The media has expressed their collective disgust at the “exploitive,” and “distasteful” publishing of the book with hours of coverage and panel discussions about whether FOX should air its two-part interview with Simpson on November 27, and 29, 2006.

The O.J. Simpson trail created a cottage-industry of lawyers-cum pundits like Greta Van Susteren, who on any given day, pollute the airwaves with sensational distractions of missing white women like Lacy Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, and Natalee Holloway and a like, creating
victim celebritism, in which books, pundits and movies-of-the-week are created. This genre of news is fast (driven by news conferences), cheap (uses mostly panel discussions) and out of control (numerous dedicated programming e.g. Nancy Grace).

In June 1994, as the low speed chase occurred down the interstate with hundreds of people cheering O.J. Simpson on, half a world away, thousands of bloated and decomposing bodies were floating down the Kargera River, emitting a stench so foul it could be smelled in the neighboring Uganda. In thirteen weeks after April 6, 1994, an estimated 800,000 people were killed in 100 days during the Rwandan genocide.

The corporate media’s main goal is to penetrate our consciousness and sub consciousness every second of every day with its news, images, and products. In ‘94, the media had made a choice, and that choice was to exploit the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, over exposing genocide in Rwanda. It was the media who first exploited the victims in the over dramatization of the O.J. Simpson trail. It was again the media conglomerates exploiting the victims with the publishing of O.J. Simpson’s forthcoming book, “If I Did It.”

O.J. Simpson was a pawn of the corporate media, used as a deflection and to minimize criticism while they profit from the exploitation of the murdered victims. The public’s misplaced outraged has caused Rupert Murdoch and his publishing company to cancel the book and the two-part interview on FOX but as the Bush Administration and the neocons posture towards war with Iran, the media will shake the shiny keys by again manufacturing misplaced outrage and distraction.




Sources:

Frontline, “The O.J. Verdict” 2005.
Postman, Neil Amusing Ourseleves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York, NY: 1986.
CNN Transcript Anderson Cooper 360, November 16, 2006.
BBC News, “Murdoch Cancels OJ Simpson Plans”
Uelman, F. Gerald,“The Five Lessons of from the OJ Trial” Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara Univeristy, 1996.
More on the Rwanda genocide.

PIMP THIS |

ANNEMARIE AND EMILY
by Zena at Beirut Update: War Dairies of a 30 Year Old Woman...With Love From Beirut


i have been absent for a while.

the war ended. maya's condition grew worse. she passed away and i have been left with a stain on my heart. what now? i have been living the past few weeks in total darkness, not know what lies ahead. not knowing if things could get any worse.. if i was going to lose anyone else... and today it almost happened in Palestine. i almost lost two more friends.

below i have posted an email i just received from Annemarie Jacir:


>Four hours ago my sister, her curator Carolyn and I were shot at by the Israeli army. My nerves are still shaky. We’ve been drinking every since. My legs are weak. I feel I can’t stand on them.

Today in downtown Ramallah at around 4:15 pm as we were driving down Ramallah’s main street….we had just bought kanafa to eat ….after spending the day at ‘amari camp.

I was driving down the main street. A taxi driver cut me off. I rolled down the window and cursed at him. We pulled over and Emily and Mohammed jumped out to buy kanafa. Then we continued, dropping off Mohammed at his car…which he had left in the center of town. We agreed to meet at Mohammed’s place down the street.

I was alone in the front seat. Emily and Carolyn in the back. Suddenly there was a van directly in front of our car. He veered a bit towards our car. I slowed down, wondering how I was going to pass him. And then he emerged from his window…pointing an m-16 across the street and spraying bullets.

The three of us hit the floor of the car. All around us…shooting, shooting, shooting. So close. So close.

And then on the other side of the street, another van – looking exactly like the first….men with guns spraying bullets everywhere.

Next to us a man with his 5-year old daughter… Like us, stuck between all the shooting. He opened his door and tossed his daughter to the ground with him.

I lifted my head…the man shooting was around 6 feet from me. Shooting away. Israeli secret service…dressed up like an Arab. They do this all the time…so they come into town and no one notices. Then I saw tens of Israeli soldiers crawling the streets all around us. Did they come out of the vans? They were in full uniform, unlike the two van ‘drivers’ who had dressed as plain clothes Arab men. “Mustarabeen”…Israeli agents who dress like Arabs.

Shooting shooting. I covered my head. All I could think about was Emily in the backseat and Carolyn. Emily…my precious sister…my beautiful sister… Kamran in Scotland… the man who escaped with his daughter. I braced myself at the shooting continued. Told myself calmly that if the windows of the car were hit. Which they surely were about to be. That it was nothing. To remember that all that meant was the window was broken and not necessarily that one of us had been hit.

Mohammed called…I picked up the phone…my voice broke. Crumbled. I hadn’t realized my fear until that moment. Why couldn’t I speak? Why? I didn’t recognize my own voice. I knew I sounded hysterical. I didn’t want to sound like that.

Took another peak. Army everywhere. The men shooting shooting shooting shooting….god, that sound.

Emily. Emily in the back. We made eye contact. What could we do. We were stuck in the middle of a shoot out ..right in the middle of it…with no where to go.

We couldn’t even get out of the car and make a run for it. We’d have been shot down.

I wondered if they’d kill us. I wondered if someone on the street might duck into our car for cover. But the streets were empty.

We stayed on the floor of the car for 20 minutes like that. I thought, really truly felt I was going to die this way. And I didn’t want to die like that. Totally helpless. In a trapped car.

The more the shooting went on, the more I felt my nerves turn to jelly. And then…

Bam. Our car was hit. I heard glass break. I covered my head. My head was covered anyway I think. For fear of the car windows being hit.

We were ok. Emily was ok. Carolyn was safe.

More time passed. How stupid to have my hands on my head. what would that do? Where is Emily? I think i will die today. I am going to die today.

I peaked out. I saw the Israelis grab a man off the street and shove him into the other van.

Then the undercover Israeli closest to us, in the van, …decided to leave. Operation over. He pulled towards us. The criminal. I stared at his face, my head on the passenger seat…he didn’t have enough room to get by us,…so he smashed into our car and scraped his way by. The whole time I couldn’t take my eyes off his face. He didn’t even notice us I think. Three women so close to him, stuck to the floor of the car…

We are all ok. Nothing happened. There’s a bullet in the car. It hit the back of the car. It didn’t hit the gas tank. It didn’t hit the gas tank. We are ok. But three young men tonight are not. And many, many more are not. This is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary.

A man disappeared this afternoon. Two men were killed. It won’t even make the news.

------------

"Nothing much is happening in Beirut, we go on from day to day looking forward to that moment when we can come and go to our homeland without any restrictions or special permission. Regards to all in Bethlehem. Yours, Edward"

- June 12th, 1968 (letter from my uncle to his family)

Annemarie Jacir
www.philistine.org

PIMP THIS |

capitol I, capitol D

by Malik Isasis



When the axe came into the forest, the trees said, “The handle is one of us.” So goes an African Proverb. The “Independent Democratic” senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman, is being courted heavily by the Republicans to caucus with the Republican Party. Senator Lieberman has felt a sense of abandonment by the Democratic Party leadership after losing to his challenger, Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary. After he had lost, he registered himself as an Independent Democrat, to get another bite at the apple.

On November 7, 2006, as an Independent Democrat, Lieberman beat his Democratic challenger Ned Lamont in the senatorial race, putting himself in the middle of a bidding war between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and by a bidding war; I mean a Committee Chair position and maintaining of his seniority to give either side political advantaged.

"I am now an Independent Democrat -- capital I, capital D.” Senator Lieberman said (Associated Press). When asked if he’d switch caucuses if he felt uncomfortable with the Democratic Party, in a not so subtle threat, he replied:

"I'm not ruling it out, but I hope I don't get to that point. And, and I must say, and with all respect to the Republicans who supported me in Connecticut, nobody ever said, 'We're doing this because we, we want you to switch over,' " he said (Associated Press).

Well I say, why else would the Republicans support a Democratic Senator from the oppositional party, if they didn’t expect anything in return? It’s kinda like that guy in prison who offers you a cigarette, only to return later wanting to fuck you in the ass, for the favor.

With a slight advantage in the Senate, the Democrats and Republicans will need Joseph Lieberman to move the agenda in either direction. So, it appears that Lieberman has found himself in a position where he will be able to use his newly found independence to get almost anything he asks for. He has found his “joementum” he’d been searching for since his Vice Presidential bid in 2000; it appears now, that he is one of the most powerful men in Washington, D.C. and isn’t that what it’s all about? Power?

The leadership in the Democratic Party has shot themselves in the foot by not supporting Ned Lamont. They left him twisting in the wind. And now the Democratic Party find themselves having to consider giving Lieberman a leadership position and Committee Chair position, even though he decided to buck the Democratic Party to become an Independent.

If Lieberman had been traumatized by the direction of the Democratic Party, he would have left the party and run as an Independent from the outset. He didn’t do so because he is a coward, and make political gains in the media by marketing himself as a moderate, just like John McCaine markets himself as a Maverick—all sugar, no nutritional value.

Senator Joseph Lieberman is part of the sickness of our political system, where incumbent politicians feel a sense of entitlement to their office and to power. Lieberman waxes eloquently about values, and integrity but he’s a political whore, willing to sell off his services to the highest bidder. Lieberman has made losing about him, rather than about the people he represents. When it becomes about the politicians, it’s not about the constituents. It is personal gain over political responsibility.

His political DNA reads neocon, and the Republican Party is where he should be. Hey Joe, on the way out, don't let the door hit 'ya where the good Lord split 'ya.




Sources:

Associated Press, Lieberman Won’t Rule Out Caucusing with GOP

PIMP THIS |

GHOST IN THE MACHINE
by Malik Isasis



The Bush Administration and the neoconservative cabal has been successful in news management by creating an environment where questioning its motives is unpatriotic.

The news conglomerates such as Disney, Viacom, General Electric, Bertelsmann and News Corp. has forged this unquestioning-environment by producing and perpetuating the American mythology that war is romantic, heroic and that the troops are heroes and beyond reproach. This mythology also incorporates America as infallible and just, in its indiscrimmininate destruction in bringing peace and freedom to the world.
The neoconservatives’ public relations campaign worked because it played on the fresh emotional wounds of September 11, 2001. They over-stated fear and inflated terrorists as scary monsters, for which they, the Rebulican Party, were the only antidote.

The Republican Party’s patriotism campaign was pornographic, and self-indulgent. It worked because the Corporate media refused to stand up. They did not question the Bush Administration’s adventurism for fear of losing access, financial gain and being labeled as unpatriotic. Ben Bagdikian, a media critic stated in his book, The Media Monopoly, “Unchallenged information is inherently flawed information. If it is in error to begin with, it is not open to correction” (Bagdikian X1IV).

The neocons are grieved and are rebuilding. They may have lost congressional power, but they leave behind a corporate media infrastructure with phantom pains of a lost lover. The corporate media has absorbed the talking points of the neocons, and act as surrogates delivering well-polled language and framing the debates, for example, continuing to call the Occupation of Iraq, a War.

The best predictor of future behavior, is past behavior.

The neocons have recessed back into the shadows of American politics and are back-to-basics, using their primary skills as political operatives to again, stage a come back when a world crisis presents itself; the corporate media will no doubt welcome its exiled paramour back with opened arms.


Sources:
Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly. Boston, Massachusetts: 1998.
The Christian Science Monitor, Neocon 101.
Think Progress, “First Post-Election Meet the Press Features Exclusively Pro-War Politicians.
Media Matter, “O’Donnell echoed GOP talking points to attack Democrats.”
More on media conglomeration.
Context of image.

PIMP THIS |

THE EXORCISM
by Malik Isasis



According to the Diagnostic Statistic Manual (DSM IV) some of the criteria for 297.1 Delusional Disorder are as follows:

1. For at least one month the patient has had delusions that are nonbizarre (the content is something that could reasonably happen).
2. Functioning and behavior are not markedly affected, apart from direct consequences of the delusions.
3. The disorder is not directly caused by a general medical condition or the use or substances, including prescription medications.

The Republican Party is wondering around Washington D.C. in a daze, like amnesia patients trying to understand how they got to where they are. The exorcism has left them confused and discombobulated. Neocons and the Republican Party have been beguiled, if not possessed by absolute power, which blinded them to their history, which is their ability to reach absolute power and collapse under corruption and incompetence. In my column Tipping Windmills on October 18, 2006 I stated:

“The Republican implosion is not new. Throughout the 20th century, there are examples of Republicans reaching the pinnacle of power and then collapsing from the weight of their incompetence and lack of compassion. It’s the Peter Principle, which theorizes that a person will be promoted to the highest level of his/or her competence and eventually advance to a level of incompetence. The modern Republican Party implodes every other generation under its own ineptitude and rises like the Phoenix, only to repeat the same mistakes.”

Right up until the results were pouring in from the election, the Republicans were saying that they would keep both houses of congress. This sort of delusion makes sense, especially since they’ve moved from reality-based to an ideological faith-based world. They thought the ideologues or the constituents that they created by redistricting would not see the contempt that they have towards them, but the Republican Party didn’t expect the Frankenstein-monster they had created to turn on them. Now they are lashing out at one another in anger and frustration. Instead of self-reflection, they continue to deflect the reason why they have lost both houses.

The Republican Party and their followers are going through the five stages of grief, with the first stage being denial. As a liberal, I know how you feel, having been on the losing side since the Presidential election of 2000, Congressional elections of 2002, and the Presidential election 2004. It is hard, I know. I hope that when you work your way through to the final stage of grief, the acceptance stage, we can heal and come together as a country again.

Now that the Democratic Party will be in control of both houses of congress, I hope that they will take responsibility for the power that they possess, as they have witnessed, if you do not possess it, it will possess you.

PIMP THIS |

FLYING MONKEYS
by Malik Isasis




We are in the last few days of the election season and President Bush has opened the windows from his dark lair and has commanded his flying monkeys to do whatever it takes to win the elections for the Republicans and their conservative cabal. The neocon political mercenaries fly high over the masses dropping shit-bombs to divert attention away from the inept handling of the Iraq occupation. The American public appears wide-awake and is not being fooled by the trickery. Baghdad is covered in blood and destruction and the American public has taken notice. After Hurricane Katrina, America saw the Bush Administration for who they really are…frauds. It’s like they create crises, in order to pretend to be doing something about it. The Bush Administration’s and the neocons’ one-act play has run its course and they look pathetic as they recite with great conviction, tired slogans.
What is interesting about the Republican Party is the dept of their delusion. They have become so septic and foul that they don’t even try to hide the contempt that they have for the American people.

Senator John Kerry is the target for botching a joke about President Bush and Iraq. The flying monkeys have taken the botched joke, molested it and fed it through their
Right-wing echo chamber. What is frustrating is that the cable news and the punditry class have all begun parroting right-wing political points to appear even handed. This is why the flying monkeys are so successful. They are exceptional at changing the subject and making their complete corruption, and soulless acts of destruction, someone else’s. The corporate media tends to buy into their bullshit so that they won’t come off as unpatriotic and unfair. Their logic I can only guess is that since the Republican Party has been riddled with corruption coverage, its only fair to balance it out with a Democratic botched joke.

The Republican Party and their neoconic mercenaries are able to make a mountain out of a mole hill because they control the language and frame the debates, for example, calling the occupation in Iraq, a war. The war ended three years ago. We are now occupiers.

The political mercenaries use their infrastructure such as think-tanks, right-wing talk radio pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Shawn Hannity, bloggers like Matt Drudge, cable news such as CNN, MSNBC and the closest thing we have to State-run media, Fox News. The echo chamber starts with an allegation, next “columns are written on this theme, first in conservative media, but eventually appearing in mainstream media like the New York Times. This process can be used to turn an unsupported allegation or a partisan talking point into an "accepted fact" (Center for Media and Democracy).With 24 hour news, and thousands of media outlets, the echo chamber appears as groupthink or a glut of information, converging. However, the echo chamber is systematic and highly coordinated efforts by the neocons to affect a message. It is extremely effective.

Now, back to John Kerry. Within 24 hours, the flying monkeys were able to get the corporate media to cover this botched joke as if it were a real news story. They were able to give it some legs by pulling out the old chest nuts from the John Kerry’s 2004 Presidential bid. The corporate media sit on the side lines and watch as if what is going on is a spectator’s sport. The pundits began debating John Kerry’s character. Meanwhile, the characters in the White House and Pentegon continue to stay-the-course in a botched occupation.

What I find really appalling are the Democratic responses from Harold Ford, Jr. who said, “Whatever the intent, Senator Kerry was wrong to say what he said…He needs to apologize to our troops.” Hillary Clinton as predicitable as the sun rising from the east and setting in the west stated, “What Senator Kerry said was inappropiate” (William Roberts). These two corporate shills are trying to inoculate themselves from Republican criticism and curry favor with their critics. What they fail to understand is that the Republican Party hates Democrats and want to destroy them. Mr. Ford and Mrs. Clinton no matter how much you suck up to them, they will never love you.

In this bizarro world, President George Bush is able to joke about not finding Weapons of Mass Detruction at a dinner party. President George Bush is able to call the Iraq Occupation, “a comma.” This is one of those times I truly feel that I am in a matrix or something. Somebody, please pull the plug.


Sources:

Click here to see President George Bush joke about WMDs.
Now click here to read John Kerry’s joke.
Roberts, William Bloomberg News. “Kerry Apologizes for Comment on Iraq After Criticism”
More on the Echo Chamber

PIMP THIS |