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IN
THE NEWS Ok, so here's how it's going to
work. This side of the page will be where we discuss matters that are immediately pressing concerns. Over on the
right hand side of the page, we'll be digging into more general thematic issues that aren't necessarily slapped all over the
headlines, but have broader-term relevance. With me so far? (Don't worry, this kind of organization will soon
prove far too much for me.)
April 1, 2007 "Spam,
Spam, Spam, Spam, Eggs, Bacon, Torture and Spam" Terry
Jones, that classically short Welsh member of the Monty Python gang, wrote a wonderful satirical piece for the guardian yesterday,
I thought it worth sharing. "Call That Humiliation?
No
hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians Clearly Are a Very Uncivilised Bunch"
by Terry Jones
I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of
illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to
smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman
Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no
concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with putting a bag over her head? That’s what
we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then it’s perfectly
acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and
humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.
It is also unacceptable that these British
captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over
their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Of course they’d probably find
it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn’t be humiliated.
And what’s all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It’s time the
Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement.
That’s one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.
The true mark
of a civilised country is that it doesn’t rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it’s
just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five
years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives
before the cameras!
What’s more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any
decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting “stress
positions”, which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles.
A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel
to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It’s all good healthy fun and has the bonus that
the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.
And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from
her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists
to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is “unhappy and stressed”.
What is so appalling
is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her “unhappy and stressed”. She shows no signs of electrocution
or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress,
such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed,
as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see
exactly what has been going on.
As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right
to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer -
whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends
to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq. March 20, 2007 "I
can hear the glass cracking!" It's hard to
know exactly where to start with this sort of thing, but here goes. First off, I should probably turn off my mock narrator
voice here, since it's important to be very clear about whose opinion is being proferred here. I'm speaking for everyone
in the band, ever. Current members, former members, part-time members, the guy that did the sound for us at the
Albert, his girlfriend, her parents, my parents, your parents, Arnold Palmer, 'Hacksaw' Jim Duggan, all three of the
Stooges and everyone who's ever had the nickname 'buzz.' You may hold any and all of these people responsible, if you
disagree. Alright, so I noticed a newsbit today that caught my
attention and I think I'll make it the first entry here. In this
article from the AP, it was announced that the Grand Canyon Skywalk will soon be open, allowing tourists the chance to experience
the canyon on a more intense level on part of the Hualapai Indian Reservation in Arizona. The article was interesting,
in itself, for its own confusion on how to report on the subject. For one thing, they can't seem to decide if they are
going to call the Hualapai representatives 'Elders' or if they are going to give use a nice, comfortable business term like
'chairman.' You can feel the uncomfortable way in which the article tries to grapple with what must be a somewhat confusing
situation - these "tribal" people (a term generally used to imply some sort of 'backwardness,' of a people
from an earlier part in the 'evolutionary progression' of humanity) don't typically operate in the world of big business.
One can see, quite easily I think, the conflicted position that
the people on the Hualapai Reservation are in. On the one hand, of course, playing along with wealthy (and mostly white)
tourists must be somewhat degrading to the dignity of people who have traditionally shown a great deal more respect to their
colonial conquerers than was ever shown in return. That said, marginalization on barren desert lands in Arizona makes
it pretty hard to scratch out an existence, and pragmatists among them have obviously seen fit to make the socio-cultural
sacrifice in a desperate effort to alleviate the dreadful conditions faced by many on the reservation. Of course, many in the mainstream circuits will applaud the 'rational' business
decision and display it as a sign that everyone in America has the opportunity to cash in on free-market 'opportunities.'
Others, as the article mentions, have judged the decision sanctimoniously for its assault on the natural environment.
While I'm certainly inclined to agree that building a silly glass walkway in the Grand Canyon is a stupid desecration of an
area of natural beauty, I'm struck by the reaction against the people of Hualapai - this
article quotes a former park ranger calling them hypocrites who are only interested in filling the "tribal treasury."
No doubt the increase in tourism will bring with it an increase in environmental damage - white people in North America have
proven time and time again that throwing the plastic wrappers from granola bars onto the ground is ok, as long as you don't
do it on your own property. But should the Hualapai be blamed
for the fact that suburb-dwellers from Seattle are going to further choke the air with their SUVs once the new skywalk is
opened? What can be expected of people who have been placed in a situation where they rely on gimmicky tourist attractions
in order to support themselves? As one council member noted, the impoverished conditions on the reservation are largely
ignored by the state and its media, so they must do something. Whatever
one thinks of the skywalk itself, it seems absurd (though, by now, not surprising) to lay the blame for its drawbacks on the
people who are in the weakest position of all the players involved. What about the company that designed and invested
in the project? They'll make heaps of cash and claim that they've done a good deed by bringing business to the 'poor,
backwards Indians' who just don't understand capitalism. Lucky fucks.
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ON THE BACKBURNER Maybe the backburner isn't exactly where this section belongs, but the point is, I'm no good at naming shit.
This side of the page will be dedicated to a somewhat broader and less structured category of analysis. For one thing,
we'll use this section to talk about some of the questions raised by the material in Pigdog and Bidet, and
why we think they are important matters to address. Still working on getting
this section interactive, bear with us.
March 23, 2007 Hang
the DJ, but vive les Expos! A comrade recently described
the song c'est la vie westerne as lamenting the commodification of everything, and I think it was a very apt way
of putting it. It isn't necessarily new for artists who are concerned about creativity and integrity in their writing
to lambast the many more who are willing to be tools (of capital) or, as the more common expression has it - sellouts.
(As an interesting bit of trivia, I'm familiar with a cover band circa. 1998 that was called 'Shipley and the Sellouts.'
I don't know who was in the band, but it's a pretty clever name.) At
any rate, Morrissey's beautiful tirade in the Smiths' Panic was one of my favourites - 'hang the dj,
hang the dj, hang the dj, because the music they constantly play says nothing to me about my life.' It comes up more
and more in the realm of radical hip-hop these days, as socially-concious artists rail against the 'bitches and bling' mentality
of corporate rap. Dead Prez's Hip-Hop is prime example - forgive the lengthy quotation, but it's worth it:
'I'm sick of that fake thug, R&B-rap scenario, all day on the radio. Same
scenes in the video, monotonous material. Y'all don't hear me though, these record labels slang our tapes like dope.
You can be next in line and signed; and still be writing rhymes and broke. You would rather have a Lexus? or justice?
a dream? or some substance? A Beamer? a necklace? or freedom?' Capital
is relentless in its quest for more capital - it has to be, that is how the system operates. So any opening that can
be exploited for the purpose of profits is one that business will take advantage of. You can see it in the more obvious
trends towards privatization of social services like health care, water provision or child and family services, but you can
also see it in human culture. Morrissey and Dead Prez, among others, are right to recognize the emptiness of most corporate
music - after all, Sony and Universal know better than to inundate us with messages that undercut the system that facilitates
their wealth. Oh sure, now and then something will slip through - the occasional Rage Against the Machine can be tolerated,
because in the context of all the other mindless garble being proferred, it is unlikely that one band will spawn a massive
and revolutionary social movement. Plus, there are profits to be made selling all that Rage. The song c'est la vie westerne fits into this tradition somewhere, though it is taking a
slightly variant track. For many social activists, being a fan of professional sports is a dirty little secret.
I'm sure there are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is the many problematic social values that are promoted
by the circus surrouding sports and the traditional role sports plays in asserting the primacy of masculine rituals.
There is some truth to this, of course, because everytime I watch the Toronto Maple Leafs I get a kind of hate on that makes
me want to do all sorts of manly things like pick my nose, drink beer and burp loudly, wear socks and sandals and then get
up in the morning, put on a shirt and tie and go to the office where I can bolster company profits by introducing faster spinning
machines to our offshore factories employing poor Thai women making Che Guevara t-shirts. Nonetheless, sport is not intrisically bad - in fact, there is a lot of good that can come from the
experience of playing and watching sports. Witness the remarkably socialistic nature of the 'team' in team sports -
players are scorned for seeking individual glory and routinely reinforce the idea that more will be accomplished by the team
operating as a social unit. Furthermore, sport is a healthy and fulfilling aspect of many young boys and girls and,
for fuck's sake, it's fun. But despite being such a profoundly natural, human form of recreation, it has been, increasingly
over the past century, commodified and capitalized to the point where, today, professional sport as a business is taken for
granted. Sports news generally involves not just scores and standings, but also salaries, free agency, teams being bought
and sold and disputes between players and owners creating strikes and lockouts that last entire seasons. The victims, as popular consciousness seems to understand, are not the players, managers, owners
or gamblers. No, it is the fans who suffer. This is commonly accepted, but rarely questioned; if sport is such
a powerfully popular form of social recreation, why do people accept its commodification? Obviously, to a great extent,
the power of liberal capitalist ideology plays a major role here, and I don't think this is the place to try to answer that
question. The point, such as it is, is that sport represents just one more piece in the puzzle of the commodification
of everything. The sale of the Montreal Expos, a professional baseball team that had a hold on my teenage heart second
only to the Winnipeg Jets (the loss of whom was far too emotional for me to be satirized in song) was a blow to the innocence
of my youth, a notch in my cynic's belt, and it struck a chord that I didn't yet understand. I couldn't intellectualize
it, besides to say, through boyish tears, that 'it wasn't fair' and 'how could they take away the Expos the year
after they were set to make it to the World Series.' Looking
back, my response rings truer than ever. The combination of capital, which has loyalty to nothing but itself,
and popular sports, which for various reasons (including the social bond created by vast and diverse groups of people sharing
the experience of painting their faces and shaking white pom-poms) command a kind of loyalty that can be unparalleled in its
intensity is so deeply contradictory that tears of dissapointment and disallusionment may well be the only appropriate
response. That, and revolution. "C'est la vie;" that's what capital would have us say. But fuck
that - life has not always been like that, and it will not be like that forever. That's life in the world
of advanced capitalism, and it is a world we must strive to change.
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