Listen to Tim

You can listen to Tim Robbins' address to the National Association of Broadcasters, expletives undeleted. Here's how it begins:

I'd like to start with an apology to Rush and Sean and Bill and Savage and Laura whatshername. A few years ago they told America that because I had different opinions on the wisdom of going to war that I was a traitor ... I was a naive dupe of left-wing appeasement. And how right they were.

If I had known then what I know now, if I had seen the festive and appreciative faces on the streets of Baghdad today, if I had known then what a robust economy we would be in, the unity of our people, the wildfire of democracy that has spread across the Mid-East, I would never have said those traitorous, unfounded and irresponsible things.

I stand chastened in the face of the wisdom of the talk-radio geniuses, and I apologize for standing in the way of freedom.

But the really good stuff comes when he skewers the broadcast industry itself:

In the 80s and 90s, the FCC under pressure from the Reagan and Clinton administrations changed the rules limiting the number of radio and television stations a business entity could own, paving the way for large entertainment corporations to buy up local stations and put them under the umbrella of the larger corporations. Again the community benefited. Because of these conglomerates innovative approach, listeners no longer had to be subjected to perplexing controversial subjects, or confused varied opinion, or alternative rock.

1.2 Million Dead in Iraq

From AlterNet:

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent. ...

Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Where Are You?

This grim map of U.S. war dead by home town is from Iraq Coalition Casualties. Iraqi deaths are beyond grim.

Memorial Day Class War in Iraq

Be sure to read Limited Inc.'s posts on class and the Iraq war. Recommended Memorial Day reading.

One of the things that is most striking about this war – and striking about post-Cold War kultcha in general – is the lack of any reference to class. When Marx analyzed the civil war in France, after the French defeat in 1870, he naturally turned to class analysis. Somehow, this handy and hardy tool has become obsolete. Googling for some reference to class analysis of the situation in Iraq, I found zip.

So let me take it out of my ass here.

I could make a joke, and say that the sectarianism really is a big problem in the Iraq war – sectarianism in the U.S. of A.., that is. But that would be inexact. More coldly, the class segmented structure of Iraq has been shattered by the war, and that shattering has been the prerequisite to sectarianism. ...

In essence, the U.S. underwrote the expropriation of the upper class in Iraq without even knowing it. Contra those who think that every mistake that the U.S. makes is part of some devilish, conspiratorial plan, this unleashing of forces is precisely the kind of thing that upsets the plutocratic vision of Iraq.

So it goes

LI has written a beautiful post about the passing of Kurt Vonnegut. Go read the whole thing, but here is a small taste:

He survived the firebombing of Dresden – as did another now famous literary figure, Victor Klemperer. Fire responds to fire – the fire that destroyed Dresden on February 13, 1945 was of the same flame as that which destroyed Dresden’s synagogue on the night of 9 November 1938, even though the happy German crowd in 1938, entertained by the torching and the fortuitous torture of a Jewish teacher, forced to bow to the crowd and take off his hat, couldn’t see the obvious message in those flames. What power, high on its arrogance and so indebted to its power that it can only up the ante, ever has?

Vonnegut subtitled his most famous novel ‘The Children’s Crusade”, and the way it got that subtitle is incorporated into the book in the first chapter, when Vonnegut goes to visit his ‘war buddy’, Bernard V. O'Hare, and discovers that O’Hare’s wife doesn’t like him. And then she tells him why:

“Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. "You were just babies then!" she said.
"What?" I said.
"You were just babies in the war -- like the ones upstairs!"
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
"I -- I don't know," I said.
"Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."
So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
* * *
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.' "

Kurt Vonnegut did as much as he could to take the piss out of the ‘glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men’. He lived to see their children set fires that call to other fires in the future, fire to fire. News of his death comes on the same day that the Pentagon announced “that most active duty Army units now in Iraq and Afghanistan and those sent in the future would serve 15-month tours, three months longer than the standard one-year tour.”

WARNING: This book contains frontal nudity, profanity & anti-war sentiment

This is the cover of a book my sixteen-year-old daughter checked out from her public high school library the other day. The title of the book is 2/15: The Day the World Said NO to War. It's a collection of photos of the global anti-war protests of February 15, 2003 that happened just before the invasion of Iraq. My daughter marched in one of the large anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C. during the run-up to the Iraq war and continues to have a keen interest in the anti-war movement, so she was very happy to find this book in her library.

I think it's wonderful that our public school's library has this book. It's certainly a much rowdier book than I can remember finding in my high school library. It shows pictures ranging from naked protesters in Antarctica to a granny proudly sporting a large "FUCK Your War" button. I think it's admirable our librarian purchased such a book for our very red-state school's library. I want to commend, encourage and support such efforts.

However, there was one thing about this book both my daughter and I found very disturbing.

On the bottom, left-hand corner of the front cover there is this label:

It says, "WARNING: This book contains frontal nudity, profanity & anti-war sentiment."

WTF?! One of these things is really, really not like the others. I'm alternately shocked, appalled, flabbergasted and bemused by this bizarre and jarring warning label. I can't quite believe such a thing really exists and, yet, there it is.

Although as a parent I would be fine with not having any warning labels ever, I'm not overly troubled by warnings about nudity and profanity. If that's the price for having these books available to students, then I would much rather have the books with the warnings attached, than not have the books at all. But anti-war sentiment is different. This is not something that needs a warning label. Ever. It is not something children need to be protected from. And it is not in any way, shape, or form analogous to nudity or profanity. Ideas are not something to protect school children from, and neither is peace.

I'm confident we'll be able to resolve this small, local conflict without any real acrimony. However, I am determined to resolve it. Anti-war sentiments are not going to be one of the things our children will be protected from, certainly not as long as our high school students remain unprotected from Army recruiters in their school.

Masters of War

By way of Professor Zero, here's a link to an excellent anti-recruitment effort organized by Leave My Child Alone that aims at helping to remove school kids' names from the military recruitment list mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. And just in case you want to remind yourself why this is important, you can watch this: