Images Matter

Whereas watching the USS John F. Kennedy ride a tsunami and plow right through the White House might have made Malcolm X grin (in a wry, America’s chickens are coming home to roost but on a cosmic scale sort of way), I found that a limousine swerving, jumping, squeezing underneath and basically outrunning computer generated imagery is only slightly less annoying than contrived and recycled lines like “What are you waiting for, go now!” However, if Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor are going to make Africa their base camp while they repopulate the planet, you can count me first in line.

2012 - Official Trailer

While the evangelical community of the United States spreads the good news of the dry-cleaned and spotless “prosperity” version of the Love of God every Sunday with live amplified music and internet video feeds, the Coen Brothers craft a pathologically disquieting examination of the existentially transmogrified despair that is modern American Judaism. And as far as viewers being attached to an emotionally and spiritually redemptive denouement, how does “F#*k off” grab you?

If it’s lacking the technological splendor of a film like Beowulf, and it’s not nearly as disturbing or magical as a Quay Brothers’ short, what can one really say about the latest animated flick 9 which is marketed primarily off of the name of the formally visionary director known as Tim Burton, and which seems to be neither visually nor textually related to said director’s former works of brilliance save for the repeated appearances of skulls? How about, “Can you believe that a small popcorn and small Diet Coke® literally costs more than nine dollars?

9 - Official Trailer

To give you a foreshadowing of the ignorance and false claim to historical authority that you will find in Tony Karon’s 9/11/09 Time.com article Eight Years After 9/11: Why Osama bin Laden is a Failure , I offer you the sub-title of my essay, Two Hours After Reading Karon: A Generation of Students Condemn his Idiocy. I am jumping to a hasty conclusion and exaggerating the importance of my personal perspective?

Exactly.

Karon begins his article by throwing a few prototypical bones to his presumed opponents by granting…

“He may have eluded justice and the long reach of the world’s most powerful military force; his followers may (and probably will) strike again at some point in the future, near or distant;…”

Eluding justice and retaining the ability to generate belief in a future attack is actually quite a feat. If the apical commanders of the largest terrorist attack in US history have basically escaped, and there remains the probability of another attack, I would at the very least deem this a failure that could at any given minute be transformed into another tragedy—I’d hate to see what a victory looks like in Karon’s cosmology. He then lays out his brilliant premise…

“…but history’s verdict on Osama bin Laden has been in for some time, now: Al-Qaeda failed.”

Wow, I have been spending way too much time on my thesis. Not only have I completely missed the sweeping epic and passage of “history” in the EIGHT years since the tragedy of 9/11, I apparently missed it “some time” ago. Perhaps my concept of time isn’t even functioning. What qualifies for history in the age of opinion journalism? About the time it takes an Alaskan Governor to fulfill one half of her elected time commitment? Twice the time it takes to watch the complete and up to date collection of the television program 24? Or maybe the use of the word history in Karon’s article is just a feeble attempt (recognized by the ancient greeks as a fallacious form of reasoning) to claim even a modicum of authority and gravity, the likes of which is wholly absent from his argument.

It is a ubiquitous phenomenon within the current trend of opinion journalism; assigning an authoritative and complex perspective to what is actually a singular opinion. Claiming that “history” has passed a verdict on bin Laden, a mere eight years after the tragedy of 9/11, assumes that any subjective portioning of time can be given the finality that great passages of time affords us when analyzing past events. This day, we cannot even make the statement “a decade later” in regards to 9/11. And since we are not even past the least of the linguistically florid words which give us that feeling of epic and sweep, we must continue to use the simple metric of the word “year”, and there have only been eight, that’s right, a whopping 4/5 of one decade.

Karon claims that Al-Qaeda’s bombings to date have been “tactical successes” but were part of bin Laden’s “fundamentally flawed” strategy to…

“launch a global Islamist revolution aimed at ending U.S. influence in Muslim countries, overthrowing regimes there allied with Washington, and putting Al-Qaeda at the head of a global Islamist insurgency whose objective was to restore the rule of the Islamic Caliphate that had once ruled territory stretching from Moorish Spain through much of Asia.”

Let us forget that bin Laden did successfully launch Al-Qaeda, and probably retains the “aim” to end US influence and allied regimes in Muslim countries, as that fact is probably just another clever attempt by Karon to appeal to the opponents who would state the same information as a refutation of bin Laden’s failure. Tony Karon is after all a Senior Editor at Time.com. Let us instead tear asunder the ludicrous foundation of Karon’s entire argument which posits that Osama bin Laden’s success or failure should be judge on whether or not he is able to restore the Islamic Caliphate which once sullied Spain and “much of Asia” with its abhorrent Moorish attitudes towards women, and it’s complete disregard for the inherent supremacy of western civilization. Has bin Laden even seen Zach Snyder’s film 300 ? Sheesh (Kabob).

I don’t believe we have to worry about an Islamic Caliph. We seem to be doing just fine with a Catholic Pontiff who refuses to approve the use of contraceptives to millions of his most abjectly poor followers. Nor do I believe the existence of a Caliph should enter into our judgment on the success or failure of Al-Qaeda.

“But bin Laden himself has stated that he wants to establish an Islamic Caliphate” you may offer in support of the above argument (I myself have been known to throw a bone or two). To which, I would return that not all truth is derived from the literal utterances of people’s words. See the title of Karon’s article for further demonstration of this concept. And while an imaginary future which contains an evil religious dictator certainly sells advertising space and maintains the feeling of conflict which is the life-blood of today’s media, it may be wiser to look around us at the very real machinations of our world.

Our most provocative and yet proudly acclaimed achievement in the war against Al-Qaeda has been the invasion of Iraq, a foreign country with zero political or logistical connections to Al-Qaeda, and the militarized dethroning and sanctioned execution of its once allied dictator Saddam Hussein, a man whose only affinity to Osama bin Laden was perhaps a similar skin-tone and the sharing of a common language. And while there may be some talented intellectuals who could formulate a compelling moral argument for a country to invade a sovereign nation in order to rescue its citizenry from despotism, our nation rationalized, concocted or simply through vapid ignorance projected a justification that bypassed morals, and presumed an impending mushroom cloud. It’s hard to imagine a cogent individual who would deny that Saddam Hussein was responsible for years of bloodshed within Iraq, but as the toppling and continuing primary power base in that country today, its nearly impossible for the US to reject its responsibility for the bloodshed since Husseins’s fall.

Osama bin Laden instigated this. His plan of action was the catalyst which brought the United States Armed Forces into Iraq, and we are still there today. Although the apex of the erstwhile command hierarchy of Al-Qaeda has been degraded to the point of inefficacy, the Al-Qaeda name has been successfully spread throughout the world and adopted by so-called grass-root jihadists. And now, as a globally recognized brand of ideology, Al-Qaeda is impossible to kill with military force, and therefore, has successfully escaped us…forever. Osama bin Laden’s “failure” has been scattered in the wind like the biblical mustard seed and may even one day evolve into an actual political body.

An ignorant and sweeping claim unsupported by factual evidence? Israel’s military, the Israelll Defense Force, began as the paramilitary group Haganah, which followed after the Jewish defense organization Hashomer, which was itself evolved from the clandestine Bar-Giora, whose desire it was in the earliest part of the twentieth century to form a Jewish military force in the British mandate of Palestine. Formed by immigrants escaping the anti-semitism of eastern europe, these groups opposed British rule and actively sought violent means to protect themselves. The group Irgun, which also was absorbed into the Israel Defense Force, was responsible for sabotaging strategic British resources in later years as well as bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 people. The British regarded these activities, unsurprisingly, as terrorism. But that didn’t stop the creation of a Jewish state and the incorporation of violent paramilitary groups into a state-sanctioned military apparatus that is today respected as a legitimate fighting force by the majority of US and other media. Nor is this a singular case. The Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Irish Republican Army both began as terrorist groups fighting what they saw to be an oppressive and occupational foreign country, and both are now legitimately held political bodies without sanctioned military wings. Even Hamas, still held as a terrorist group by the United States and Britain, and still wielding a paramilitary wing, has a political body which was elected to office.

Is it not only possible but probable that Al-Qaeda will follow along a similar evolution? It certainly seems to be the human way to establish power by first violently taking it away from those that we feel are using it against us unfairly. I wonder what Karon’s verdict on bin Laden will be then. Or perhaps by that far away and hypothesized date, history itself will be able to clearly show a judgment on Karon’s opinion journalism. Lucky for me, his history is comprised of fantastically convenient eight year increments, I’ll be able to claim the victory of my argument against him before I retire.

I understand the need and desire to bolster our spirits on this auspicious day. I continue to cry when I watch documentaries and even narrative films on 9/11, I feel that need to be safe and to believe I live in a world where terrorism does not exist. However, this is a luxury that we cannot afford to the journalists of our culture. Journalists, like artists, have an ethical obligation that transcends professional mores, and are mandated by the social contract to reveal and publicize the things that we common folk are unaware of or unable to. If journalists wish to share their heart-felt feelings and informed opinions with us they should be mandated to maintain them within their personal websites, and not be paid by internationally recognized news outlets like Time.com to publish those opinions with the implicit stamp of authority and authenticity that comes along with such an arrangement.

Tony Karon is free to consider Osama bin Laden a failure because there exists no Islamic Caliphate in the world. But it is a betrayal of the highest order for Time.com to title Karon’s opinion as a matter of historical fact. I believe there are roughly three thousand murdered Americans who might consider bin Laden rather successful at his pernicious and nefarious agenda, but this is only my opinion. If an actual media outlet asked me to publish this opinion, call it journalism, and offered to pay me for it, I would decline. Not from any sense of moral righteousness, but from the clear knowledge that my opinion does not make a single one of us any safer from the men with guns in this world…and that knowledge does carry the authority and gravity of history.

When comparing one’s positive experience of viewing South African director Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 to the problematic encounters one has with so many prominent American film makers, one is tempted to use the model of a homophobic heterosexual male lamenting an extended period of drunken bisexual experimentation. Considering the voluptuous story that District 9 hangs in front of one’s face, and the nearly flawless and seamlessly integrated visual effects the film attempts to seduce one with, one might imagine the aforementioned heterosexual male asking himself why he ever allowed Quentin Tarantino to go down on him that year.

District 9 - Official Trailer

Although the film makers of Gamer tried to create images that would afford visually sub-textual commentary on a hypothetical vulgarity which is overcoming society, or an obscene montage of simulacra threatening an equally hypothesized humanity, ultimately the attempt is dwarfed by the grotesquely stunted intellect of the film itself; that is, nothing contained within the film is as disturbing or frightening as the thought of the film makers encouraging one another that they were constructing something cinematically cogent. In fact, I stepped out of the auditorium during the film to write this, and in the time that it took to write these two sentences, the warm realization that I would subsequently leave the cinema washed over me like the relaxed pleasure of urinating in the shower.

Gamer- Official Trailer

When I was eleven years old, I fell off the roof of a two-story house and landed directly on my right arm, fracturing both my fibula and tibia in a near compound manner, and sending me on a torturous road-trip with my father that passed through one hospital that denied me treatment because of my father’s empty bank account, a gas station as my father literally pushed our empty-tanked Comet GT out of the middle of Woodman avenue during rush-hour, and to a second hospital that set my arm as I whimpered through a semi-conscious black-out of prolonged agony. That afternoon was exponentially less painful than sitting through Sandra Bullock’s latest film, All About Steve.

All About Steve - Official Trailer

I felt sick to my stomach.

Each time a republican senator asked Sonia Soto Mayor to recant her now (in)famous “Wise Latina” remark, and each time she obliged them by recanting, I felt a little bit of my soul turn black with rage, never to recover.

Each time a democratic senator wasted their precious time behind the mic to comment on Perry Mason, or deliver useless platitudes as a meager show of support, I spat bile in the troubled recesses of my psyche.

I desperately waited for Feinstein or Klobuchar to bring up the fact that although women represent more than 50% of the US population, they occupy only 11% of the supreme court (not to mention roughly 10% of the Senate Judiciary Committee itself), and while the current census list hispanics as representing about 14% of the US population, they’re maintaing a big fat goose egg as far as their representation on the highest court of the land (followed closely by a goose egg owned by another 14% of the population, Asian-Americans).

I thought, “though I disagree with his politics, Clarence Thomas laid it out with his High-Tech lynching comment…Sonia should go for it…do it…tell the truth”.

I closed my eyes and I pictured Judge Sonia Soto Mayor saying,

“This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a female Latin-American, it is a high-tech raping for uppity women who in any way deign to think for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be raped, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S Senate rather than strewn across the floor.”

I opened my eyes and Soto Mayor kowtowed. Yet she had to. The simple fact is that the United States, despite the rape and murder and humiliation it has heaped on African-Americans over the years, HATES WOMEN MUCH MORE. The constitution was amended to allow black males the vote in 1870, but another half-century would have to pass before women would be allowed the same.

So how screwed are you if you’re a person of color AND you are unfortunate enough to be born with ovaries? You’re forced to code-shift AND find some way around the fact that you’re biologically incapable of being “ballsy” and reduced to pathologically wielding your “temperament”.

The answer…Está chingada usted hermana.

If we truly are living in a society where we cannot openly say that Sonia Soto Mayor’s “Wise Latina” comment was a spot-on attempt to portray the state of the art of our high court (and government) as a location of socio-ethnic conflict, where women, homosexuals, and people of color are not yet represented nearly as well as heterosexual, Caucasian-American males…
…then we might as well let Pat Buchanan claim something foolish like the Supreme Court should only be populated by descendants of the original signatories of the Declaration of Independence.

Oh wait, he kinda-sorta did…
Ms. Sally Hemmings the Fifth? Shall we stroll our ass on up to Washington? I hear the circus is in town.

I feel sick to my stomach.

There’s something very disturbing about the public discourse of the USA. If one meanders through the comments sections of blogs, online videos, and other stories of interest, one will find that there appears to be a dead-on split between the participants. And both parties appear to occupy diametrically opposed positions.

If we use the concept of a grey scale to represent it, we find that the online participants seem to identify the world as either black or white, as opposed to something that would appear in between, or god forbid, towards the center of the grey-scale.

(On the floors of inpatient psychiatric treatment centers, professionals define “black and white thinking” as characteristic of two populations: adolescents, and individuals with certain personality disorders.)

Consider the aforementioned as applied to the recent comments of FOX AND FRIENDS co-host BRIAN KILMEADE during a broadcast in which he discussed a study that suggested that people who live with a long-term mate may experience a lesser prevalence of dementia type disorders. Kilmeade suggested that the study did not apply to Americans, who in his words,

“…marry other species and ethnics”

He went on to bolster his position with comments about the authors of the study,

“…swedes have pure genes because they marry other swedes, thats the rule.”

and then,

“…finns marry other finns so they have a pure society.”

Yahoo…where to begin…I can’t believe this even has to be stated…
Marry other species?
Species?
Really?
If we discount the apes, there’s not much left on the menu in the way of hominid species. Homo habilis? Homo erectus? Are these who Kilmeade is suggesting we necrophiliac Americans are marrying? I’d go back to Long Island University Mr. Kilmeade and demand a return of my tuition if you think that Americans are searching for a really saucy Homo neanderthalensis with whom to start a family.

Or did you mean that we marry raccoons, salamanders, and yet to be discovered extra-terrestrials and the like. I mean, we degenerate Americans are hardly likely to let something as arbitrary as TAXONOMIC RANK stop us from finding a nice, stay at home mate with a healthy sexual appetite.

For the sake of argument, we’ll completely bypass the fact that Kilmeade’s comments absolutely smack of Nazi ideology, and that his statements are so full of unfounded and ignorant conclusions, one may be tempted to deduce that Kilmeade just barely passed the IQ cut-off point for developmentally disabled.

We’ll also forego the basic facts that Sweden has no law forbidding it’s citizens from marrying outside it’s own citizenry (there is no “rule”), and that the term “Swedish” denotes a nationality, and not a classification of species. And we won’t even begin to examine the markedly MEANINGLESS question that, on a planet of six billion people, what in the F*#K would constitute a “pure” society.

Let’s just talk about the simple scientific fact that the term “race” has no actual genetic usefulness. It’s a simple fact that we learn in anthropology class. One cannot look at the DNA of an individual and determine if that individual is “Black” or “White” or any other “racial” description that we use so carelessly in our public discourse. Our genes can definitely tell us about what region of the planet our ancestors came from, and what the physical expression (phenotype) of our genes may look like (this person is likely to have darker skin tone, and an epicanthal fold, for example), but you can’t examine a gene sample and state, “This individual just missed the cut-off point for being (pure) caucasian.”

(And good god, I’m not even remotely close to having enough time to include the faulty assumptions surrounding the term “ethnicity”)

Kilmeade is either oblivious to the science that refutes his comments, couldn’t care less about thinking about his comments before broadcasting them to millions of people, or believes that science is just another liberal trick to brain-wash Whitey into self-hatred, and other unpatriotic ideas like “Slavery actually happened”.

Again, considering the aforementioned, as applied now to the comments sections of several YOUTUBE clips highlighting Kilmeade’s close-to-fascist treatise (oops, I said that we’d bypass that point), it’s amazing to find that so many comments attempt to forgive Kilmeade’s remarks as misunderstandings or even humor.

Are we so polarized politically, that we can’t even admit when someone from our own side of the political spectrum has their head so far up their ass they could scratch their forehead with their pyloric valve?

Is our political divide truly caused by an exponential amount of uneducated ignorance and vacuum of common sense, or are we just regurgitating what the MEDIA says is our official understanding? Do the radio and television pundits really have a bead on who we are, or have they devised a clever way to engage us as actors who readily bring our own supply of the basic element of drama…conflict? After all, if media isn’t entertaining, isn’t dramatic, why would any of us consume media in the volumes that we do?

As corporate culture continues to evolve and devour what scant understanding we have of ethnicity and our actual, historical cultures, and scientific fact becomes just another commodity that only the rich can afford, we truly will inhabit a color-blind society, because we will have ceased to have any connections to the scientifically studied, historical roots of our ethnicities, and we will be saturated with the pseudo-culture in which we are all MEGASTARS, acting out our corporate prescribed roles. And those roles may still have the “tags” of ethnicity hanging around them, but their cores will be more accurately described as an expression of false consciousness.

And it begins in the degraded, media-flooded synaptic gap between America’s public discourse, and the televised lunacy of brain-dead mannequins like Brian Kilmeade.

Peace

Of course, first across my lips must be my deepest and sincerest thanks to (the soon to be erstwhile Governor) Palin, as she has proven to be my own St. George, slaying the seemingly immortal news cycle dragon of Michael Jackson’s death. The man is an Icon, but he is not worthy of 24 hour news coverage day after day. Planes into buildings…yes. A dead entertaining legend…no. Just my own perspective. I had actually begun pondering about who would be the one to step up to the media plate when switch-hitting Palin hit a mutter-shtupping home run.

Her announcement today, that she is basically quitting her job, is physically painful to watch:

It rambles and tumbles.

The meter of breaking up what is in essence the fallacy of the False Dilemma…

(Because I don’t want to be a Lame Duck Governor who spends flipping great wads of public money, I will quit, rather than be a Lame Duck Governor who DOESN’T spend flipping great wads of public money, or a Lame Duck Governor who spends flipping great wads of some rich bastard’s private money, or perhaps just a Lame Duck Governor who grows a social conscience and then lays down and simply dies)

…with quotes by Gen. Patton and magnets on her parent’s refrigerator is so uneven, one needs off-road tires just to traverse it. Kind of like that last sentence.

She seemed unconvinced by her own words. Vacillating between political hot-topic phrases and “go get ‘em” platitudes, she never once sounded like she had a bead on where she was in her own discourse.

The ‘official aura’ that most political announcements carry was mercilessly ruptured when the cameraman gave an unmotivated whip-pan to reveal the reverse-shot of what appeared to be about 10-12 people in somebody’s backyard.

And the local waterfowl were ABSOLUTELY WAILING to the point that at times the audio was completely overridden.

I haven’t felt this confused, excited, fearful, and cogently fragmented since the time as a teenager when I OD’d on cocaine and psychotically ranted about my knowledge of a future plane crash (Come to think of it, there were more people listening to my delusions that night than there were attending Palin’s announcement today )

Does Palin have even ONE advisor who has managed to amass something beyond a GED? Even if she was taking the calculated risk to hit the presidential posturing stage without appearing like a self-serving quitter, could she have at least ATTEMPTED to write a lucid speech?

I have to say that at times, I feel that Palin is discriminated against because of her class background. Her immediate family comes across in a sort of rural, middle class caste, and I’m sure that the intelligentsia loves to poke fun at her for that fact alone, despite how well they or the media shields it. Jimmy Carter got the same “bumpkin” treatment from the media. It’s discrimination based on class and it’s wrong. But something extremely important separates Carter and Palin. Carter graduated in the top 10 percent of his class from the United States Naval Academy, and Palin attended five different colleges (dropping out at one point to compete in beauty pageants) to finally receive her Bachelors. Good looks appeared to be more important than an education. I think if Palin was not a physically attractive woman to many heterosexual males, she may have formed a different appreciation of the looks over intelligence quotient. She may have been able to at least learn how to appear bright, or wield a bit of judgment. You would think that a former newscaster would have at least learned to perfect the ’shell’ of a sentient being.

But the fact is that, at her core, Palin is simply a pretty face, trying to brand herself as a politician. They say she’s maverick for calling her own shots, but how maverick is it to quit your job in public service one day before Independence Day, use a basketball metaphor in which you awkwardly refer to yourself in the third person, and panic when you realize that you just said the word “consideration” without having said the word “prayer”, and then rather than just adding the word “prayer”, you back-up real quick and squeeze in the whole phrase “prayer and consideration” so your audience remembers what a pious and righteous maverick you are. I prefer the term dip-shit.

I confess again, the only person more grateful to Palin than myself today is Governor Mark Sanford. When you are addicted to news while despising the media you take your moments of succor and lunacy with extreme gratitude. The talking heads pretend to support the lunacy or despise the hypocrisy, but they’re just selling advertising space. Politicians and the Media are part of an obscene and disingenuous puppet show that belies the superficiality of our avaricious culture and the lack of lucidity in our public discourse.

You are my dearest train-wreck Palin, but if your lunacy and news anchor strategy pays off with the presidency…I promise you that I will immolate myself in the National Mall.

PS Remind the sound guy to turn the freakin birds off.

Peace,