Uncle Sams Blog – Page 20

Hoe-Headed Shock Jock

You know, I’ve never liked the shock jock world. Insulated as it is from the real elbow jabs of mixing it up that harshly in person, the radio version of being the biggest loudmouth is kind of like the raging drivers who only act that way because they’re behind the wheel. No one can hit you back. And if there’s one thing in the world of media communications that’s consistently underestimated by those of us who lament the passing of planet earth, it is the degree to which all of us human beings continue to be operated by our lizard brain.

I’m not saying we have to run the world from the brain stem, it’s just that without a lot of yoga and massage, in one form or another, that’s where things normally end up. Not that it’s all Lord of the Flies, but we better be honest here: we’re capable of being the most horrible and brutally monstrous animal of all the animals. Slapstick, practical jokes, insult humor, mob mentality, lowest common denominator, the rat race, dog eat dog, the world is really not funny. Why? Because we so easily can put our whole brilliant apparatus – and by default usually do – at the service of a largely fear-based, dinosaur-style brain. So there’s a lot at stake in stoking those fires.

They’re cheap laughs. Hit ’em when they’re up. Hit ’em when they’re down. Just hit ’em. Me, I learned early on to check myself. What’s so funny here, I would ask. I get no pleasure from seeing the kid end up crying and run off alone. I feel something really hollow inside when I join the bully on the block. I don’t like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly or Newt Gingrich or Jim Scarborough, and I’d even be willing to exile Howard Stern if I could lose the rest of them. I just think once they’re gone we won’t miss them. And while I’m still a few One-A-Day vitamins away from being a true blue-haired old lady, I am starting to agree with my Grandma Pearl that the biggest problem facing America is a lack of civility. We’re just not nice. Whether it’s the jerk who just stole my parking spot, or all of us collectively and how we act abroad, the image of the American as a total jerk is not doing hardly anybody much good any more. Like I say, we have to check ourselves.

So when this hater Imus spiels his spleen like he did, I am already predisposed to rule: “Dude. You are fired.” But when I think about this country even a little, and think about what Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson were able to accomplish, there is nothing I am more proud of America for than how our country managed to honor these heroes (except perhaps what they did in the first place). And there is nothing I am more ashamed of than how much racism has existed and continues to exist. It’s a 300+ year old scandal and what we continue to see and see amplified is that it’s killing our country, both figuratively and literally. And when you think of what it must take to be a young black girl in this country, and make it to the college basketball finals, only to have one of the most well-known, talented, articulate, highly-paid radio personalities call them “nappy headed hos (whores)” – well! It blows my mind that the discussion is about whether to fire this man! The discussion should be about whether to lynch him.

I know. Lynching is bad. Bad for black people. Bad for white people. OK. But at least somebody should hit him. I mean physically hurt him somewhat. He has a total bully pulpit, millions of dollars, he’s king of the talkers, and this is what he uses his super powers for. That’s a special violation. So please understand that it’s for those reasons, in addition to the fact that he’s made a career of being mean, that I say: Hang him! Exceptions are OK once in a while. It’s fair turnaround.

Anyway, whatever, I give up on the physical violence. But he should pay for it, and we should not let him or the cultural zeitgeist move on until he does.

And what the hell is going on anyway? What evil voodoo are these old hippie-like pseudo-cool white men channeling?

Speaking of which, here are my votes on four public comments today regarding this issue:

YES = Hillary: ‘I’ve never wanted to go on his show and I certainly don’t ever intend to go on his show’…

YES = Obama calls for Imus to be fired…

NO = Rosie on Imus: ‘Thought police’ are coming…

NO = Edwards On Imus: ‘I Believe In Forgiveness’…

And here is a transcript from a 60 minutes Mike Wallace interview:

MIKE WALLACE: You told Tom ANDERSON, the producer, in your car coming home that Bernard McGuirk is there to do “n—–” jokes.

DON IMUS: Well I’ve n– I never use that word.

MIKE WALLACE: Tom?

TOM ANDERSON: I’m right here.

DON IMUS: Did I use that word?

TOM ANDERSON: I recall you using that word.

DON IMUS: Oh, okay, well then I used that word, but I mean– of course that was an off the record conversation– [LAUGHTER]

MIKE WALLACE: The hell it was!

April 12, 2007 0 comment

Free Speech Freedom Technology

The Great Memory Hole of China

written by Uncle Sam

I highly recommend the story Kremlin, Inc. in last week’s New Yorker. It’s a very good piece, and it awakens me to the corrosive by degrees nature of our own compliance in corporate evildoing. If this age truly is the age where the most technically useful aspects of all the previous ages are gathered up and re-used, then the practice of dealing with ones’ enemies by simply having them killed, which here and there throughout history has enjoyed some popularity, would certainly be central to the combo platter of options considered available to today’s leaders. And while we may be correct in saying: we can’t fight them, the fact that we likewise refuse to protest in small ways seems the most disingenuous of all.

I’m thinking specifically of Google, both the richest company and the first to ever adopt as its mission statement “Don’t be evil.” I’m thinking of hanging out with Sergei Brin, which I actually did a couple of weeks ago at a party, and what we talked about. And I’m thinking of Professor Ding Zilin, whose son was shot dead protesting freedom on the night of June 3rd, 1989, and who since has been collecting names of those who were killed around that night. At the end of June 2006, she was able to confirm 186 deaths. But when she logged onto the Internet and went to Google.cn, which began operating in China in January of 2006, and typed in Tienanmen Square, zero results showed up. She typed in her son’s name. There was no such person. In exchange for what could be billions of dollars of revenue, Google agreed to censor all of its Chinese searches to exclude, how did the Nazis put it, “any unpleasantness.”

How many people died at Tienanmen? According to Wikipedia: “Estimates of civilian deaths vary: 23 (Communist Party of China), 400–800 (Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000.” Wow. That’s a lot of human sacrifices for freedom, in a country without, shall we say, a history of strong protest movements. These people were killed or injured for doing nothing but peaceably assembling, one of the cornerstone reasons for why there is an America. And while it was American freedom that gave birth to the Internet, ironically none of these people will ever turn up on a Google search in China. Look it up. It never happened. Imagine being someone who knew them, loved them, someone like their mother, like Professor Ding.

The BBC wrote: “Google’s launch of a new, self-censored search engine in China is a ‘black day’ for freedom of expression, a leading international media watchdog says. Reporters Without Borders joined others in asking how Google could stand up for US users’ freedoms while controlling what Chinese users can search for.” The article continues: “The BBC news site, for example, is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles.” Please keep in mind: this isn’t the fascist Chinese government building these algorithms; it’s Google! Big Brother says these people are disappeared, and Google complies. They fix it so these trouble makers never existed. I know it sounds shocking, but this is the deal Google made.

Microsoft and Yahoo!, by the way, do the same thing. Big surprise, but they aren’t run by two Jews who founded a company with an ethical imperative. The lame argument they make is: “They would do it anyway, so why not make money on it?” What would happen though if the big search engines refused to play China’s game? Government’s wage war but if the soldiers won’t pull the trigger there isn’t much of a war. Is it really better to assimilate and hope for the best? What possible motive would China have for changing? But unless we as Web users agree not to support them, which is almost impossible, why would they ever feel the need to change?

I’m only 230 years old, a young adult in Nation Years, but I remember being a grown teenager and coming out of the shadow of the Cold War, with Rod Serling and Hannah Arendt and Mad Magazine and Edward R. Murrow and Elie Weisel laying bare the cultural shame surrounding what it means to be silent. It was as if a generation of WWII survivors were dedicated to teaching the next generation never to stand by as they come for your neighbors, for they will soon be coming for you. I witnessed a tremendous amount of science fiction and social fiction and social analysis, created in the aftermath of WWII. What Americans learned about human nature after WWII was unprecedented, and there was an unprecedented effort then made to ensure that a society would be able to identify it when the powers that be start to wear these freedoms down. Through melodrama and satire, a new and clear picture was painted of what constitutes an unacceptable un-human response. And yet that is the picture I see today.

It’s tough to watch it all go to hell. I have a particular soft spot for that generation that received giant cultural inoculations of this freedom virus. I am still moved by all the TV shows that have the lone man stand up and shock the community and say, “But I saw what happened…” or who refuses to pretend that all is well. And yet I see virtually none of my fellow ‘liberals’ and ‘activists’ paying attention to this pernicious threat. Indeed, I did all my research for this article on Google. And so when should you begin to doubt its complete objectivity?

For more on the subject, here is Human Rights Watch’s take:
http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/china14867.htm

And here’s the original New Yorker story: http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2007/05/31/the-new-yorker-kremlin-inc-why-are-vladimir-putin%E2%80%99s-opponents-dying/

February 5, 2007 5 comments

9-11 Osama bin Laden

Osama, Obama, what’s the diff?

written by Uncle Sam

I couldn’t have seen it until I saw it but now here it is. They’re going to try to take down Obama by tarring him as a Muslim. Say it enough and it will stick, especially with a scandal-hungry press ready to report every rumor and lie as a “controversy.”Obama’s only hope of survival is to meet the charges head on, exactly as he would have to if the charges were actually true.He must realize, as Kerry was to dim to understand, that it simply doesn’t matter whether a political attack has any basis in truth.TV creates the reality; the truth is whatever is on TV.

It was reported the other day that Barack means ‘Blessed’ in Arabic, and that Barack’s grandpappy was a hard core Muslim. That means in the minds of most Americans he was hanging out fighting whitey with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s grandpappy. And Barack’s middle name is Hussein, and his first name rhymes with Osama, so that’s that.He might as well be wearing a turban and carrying a scimitar.

OK. There’s only one way to handle this. Right here, right now, big throwdown. Obama has got to hold a Checkers-style, prime-time 1/2 hour of plain speaking about himself and his God-blessed American-ness. And at the end he’s got to cry about how much it hurts him to have anyone cast aspersions about how much he loves this country. He’s got to detail everyone in his family’s lineage that was Muslim, and tell the heartwarming story of their conversion to God’s real religion, and how converting is part of what a free nation allows its free people to do.

But mainly, he’s got to say that we’re not in a war against Islam, we’re in a struggle for the hearts and minds of a billion Muslims. He’s got to say that our leadership, by making this moral struggle a shooting war on terror, has terrorized the Muslim base, which is at it’s core actually quite conservative and religious, and apt to be friendly to good American Heartland people.Obama has to compile a list of all the great people who say that we are not at war with Islam and read it to us. He’s got to paint a devastating, super-scary and super-detailed picture of what’s going to happen if we keep treating this like it is a war–really paint the full-on doomsday scenario. And all the while he does this he must wrap himself in the flag.

He has to explain that we can’t militarize our way out of this situation, and that while we will go after specific people who are known to be bad, we have created a global war out ofour conflict with a few small and isolated bands of fanatics.It is only a global war because we made it one. And he’s got to make it look bad. Really bad.

Then he’s got to offer us a way out. Instead, he would say, we will play the long game, using our real strengths: our moral vision, our honesty, our can-do attitude and good old American ingenuity.And we’re going to do what half a trillion dollars has been (intrinsically) unable to do: we’re going to calm these people down. We’re going to get enough of them back on our side that we aren’t doomed. How? Well, he’ll explain, we’re going to try to become as energy independent as is reasonable, we are going to reach out to the international community, we are going to try to work with the world to stabilize this region, we are going to try to figure out what the source of disaffection among the populace at large is such that we can help address their grievances in ways other than having them blow themselves up and us with them. Subtext: I can deal with these people.

So he gives this talk and the whole thing shifts. Imagine the headline: Presidential Candidate Denies US In War on Terror! It would make worldwide news. Can you imagine Obama in the follow up interview: “Look, one crazy guy with a few crazy followers managed to do something very smart and cunning, but the cleverness of the hijackings doesn’t prove that entire countries and their populations were behind it. Indeed, prior to the bombings, only 3% of the Muslim populations advocated bombingUSsoil. Now 56% do! It wasn’t the bombing of Americans that made their world hate us. We had their sympathy! It was our idiotic and indiscriminate response. We have to undo some serious damage here, and you are lucky you have me at your disposal to do it.”

Then, by not fighting, we win. In summary: if Obama creates a strong enough cognitive dissonance, and makes it utterly clear at the outset that the problem is that we’ve ignited a world to hate us, and that only a guy with an Islamic inoculation can address the situation, we win. Though not a Muslim, Obama has Muslim antibodies. It’s not a liability. He’s our secret weapon.If Obama flips his Muslimness thus, in essence saying: “I can get these guys off your back,” then with each subsequent attack he only gains strength.

February 2, 2007 0 comment

'merica

Is Democracy the Highest Good, or is Being Free?

written by Uncle Sam

Every Thursday night I have my General’s Ghosts poker night, and last Thursday I had the pleasure of sharing some fine Kentucky Bourbon and Cigars with the ghosts of Generals Sherman, Pershing and Patton, and herewith is my best transcript of some of the ideas these good old boys were kicking around. Not saying I agree with them now, but last night they looked pretty good:

Solutions to the US-created quagmire in Iraq are being entertained with an unprecedented sense of urgency, and yet they range in a narrow band from slightly decreasing troops to slightly increasing them. No proposed solution discusses the root causes of the problem, namely a culture that has had its institutions literally ripped from it, plagued by an inherently unjust and decrepit infrastructure, with a wholesale lack of tools and resources to address day-to-day, and historical, grievances. Sectarian infighting has begun in earnest, and no government, as imagined by the US or anyone else, stands half a chance of stemming the violence.

We are suffering from a classic and yet at the same time perhaps unprecedented failure, mainly a failure of imagination. And so we are trying to solve a problem with the symbols that created it, and find ourselves in a sort of paradox in reverse. Either the US pulls out and the fighting gets worse, since leaving would then result in even poorer security, or it adds more troops and the fighting gets worse, since at the core of the current state of terrorism in Iraq is the highly convenient resentment of the US presence there.

Perhaps we need to think outside the falafal, and start with a vision of what the solution could look like, with the only requirement that a heavy and wet blanket be thrown over the red hot violence. What would it take to tamp down the rampant shootings and bombings?

The premise we are operating under is that no matter what the US does, Iraq will continue to disintegrate. And what if that’s true? What if, due to all the forces of history and geography and fate, based on all that has led us to this moment, Iraq is intractably heading towards an unchecked rampage that will end with a Rwanda-level genocide? Assuming that’s true, and I think most analysts now believe it certainly could be, what in the world could the US do?

There is an unexamined assumption that we are not willing to wake up to and acknowledge and put back on the table. It’s that the government in Iraq needs to be a democracy. But what if that’s the thing we have to give up?
What if the US was premature in its assumptions about regime change, and a democracy for Iraq can’t work? Or, more aptly stated, can’t work under the present conditions? Or, at least given the way the US went about foisting it, it can’t work any more? What if there is no way now – no matter how many troops the US sends and how much money it pours into the black hole – for there to be democratic institutions in place that are compatable with peace?

The answer is actually simple then. The US needs to install a dictatorship in Iraq. Not just a secret dictatorship, a de facto dictatorship, but an honest-to-God dictatorship, one in name as well. A real, old-fashioned Franco or Pinochet-style dictatorship. Why not? The US could say it was wrong, that it screwed it up, and that in the name of all that is decent, it is going to do the one thing it still can do to save the lives of average Iraqi citizens.

Sorry for the confusion folks, but the United States is now going to impose a fascist dictator on the people of Iraq, train him and his army, aid and arm him, and get out. He will brutally surpress all opposition, assassinate his enemies, and create order. How bad could that be? I mean, consider the horror of how things are now. He would need to be a native Iraqi, and as friendly a person to the US as the US could get who would still be cruel enough and smart enough to rule with an iron fist. I happen to not think there’s any shortage of these people in Iraq.

The US forces there could even allow the Iraqi people to vote for him.
Occupation troops could bill it as “One last election — Vote for your new dictator!” No more phony legislature, no more infighting and lack of clarity about who is working for whom, or whether this province is in cahoots with the Americans, that one still tied to a warlord. The US needs to give the Iraqi people what they want, or if not what they want, at least what they are used to. If the US does this, I believe we can have peace, and can provide Iraqis with some stability.

Yes, a fascist dictator would have to do some bad things. He would have to execute people, sometimes without trial, with no due process. He would have to supress public assembly, freedom of the press, and any right to dissent.
All those cherished “freedoms” would be sacrificed for law and order. But the number of innocent people who would die would be 1/10,000th of how many innocent people are dying today. And isn’t that the metric to be employeed?

To the objection that freedom in some abstract sense would be sacrificed, I
say: so what?! The fact that Iraqis can now write tepid editorials, purchase alcohol, watch M*A*S*H, use profanity, see a prostitute, or whatever pathetic and miniscule elements masquerading as freedom they, or we, affix to the bone crunching miasma of pain that is day-to-day life in 2006 Iraq, is so much less freedom than at least the freedom to walk down the street at night, there really is no comparison.

Democracy is not the highest good. And freedom is just an abstraction.
There
is being free, which is an actual thing, and that surely is the highest good, but that is not what the people in Iraq are. With certain preconditions, it is possible, but by no means guaranteed, that democracy leads to the most freedom. But without those preconditions, as we are seeing, democracy actually leads to the least freedom. And so in the name of being free we must now change course and impose a brutal, military dictatorship in Iraq. Look at the bright side. At least that’s something the US has some experience doing.

January 28, 2007 0 comment

'merica

Hilary – O Say What You See

written by Uncle Sam

So now Hilary is in. And she’s leading in the polls. I’m interested to see what she says. I’ve always liked Hilary, mainly enjoyed watching her talk – watching the way her mind works is fascinating – and now I’m interested in what actual ideas she’s going to come up with to straddle the hawks vs. doves divide.

I think it’s fitting, and wonderful, that this is the first presidential election with a major candidate who is a woman, and at the same time the first one with a serious contender who is black. Despite their differences, there will be a lot that Barack and Hilary will agree about, and even more than that, a lot that they will share in terms of editorial style and world view.

My question for Hilary will address the the transcendent issue of our times, peace. Can we recast the United States at this dire juncture to stand for more than consumption and killing? What is the vision for America? Tell us Hilary, what do you see?

January 21, 2007 0 comment