Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
As long as we are on a religious bender all the sudden, why not throw in this map of Florida, superimposing the path of the recent hurricanes with the county-by-county totals.
You get a clear message from God that Bush voters in Florida suck, and in fact should be punished for having contributed to the disaster of the Bush administration. Sweet. But I am still an atheist. And I have not confirmed the veracity of this map with anyone.
Thanks to Kat for this one.
UPDATE: Apparently the map is inaccurate. I am glad that I warned y'all about not knowing the veracity of it.
Last Friday, David Domke, the director of the U of Washington's journalism program, came to speak in out rhetoric of campaigns and elections class about what he termed 'political fundamentalism' in the Bush administration. Domke just released a book called "God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the 'War on Terror' and the Echoing Press." He brought up a whole array of things that terrified me long ago, so long ago that the alarm bells had worn down to alarm hums. So I got alarmed all over again.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about this administration, besides its violent unpredictability, racism and self-destructive tendencies, is its employment of religious symbols, metaphors and imagery to build a framework so Christian fundamentalists can believe that Bush is acting as God's divinely appointed agent on earth. This takes a number of forms, from subtly coded allusions to the outright claim that freedom is the almighty's gift to humanity.
As an atheist I find all this talk deeply threatening because I am aware that at various points in history, cynical political leaders vest themselves with this kind of messianic garbage, and whether or not they themselves believe that they are acting on a higher plane, their followers get more crazy and cease acting rationally. And a lot of times, people get killed, especially unbelievers.
So to summarize Domke, the Bush administration is different than other presidencies because it has shifted from the 'petitioner to God' position ("O lord, grant us the wisdom...") to the 'prophetic' position, speaking as God or in God's voice. Domke said that prophetic rhetoric is all right when it comes from religious organizations, but to use it for the dirty world of politics invariably corrupts both politics and religion. Hence, it is morally wrong and hazardous for Bush to sell Vengeful Jesus to us.
There was also a shift in the prism of worldview from 'triumphal' ("God bless America, yay!") to 'apocalyptic' (a fight of good vs. evil projected from the material to spiritual plane RIGHT NOW). So this religious fundamentalist worldview is joined to a strategic agenda, to the delight of all.
There is also an intolerance of dissent and a peculiar obsession with time, which was my favorite insight. The Bush administration projects a sense of almost histrionic immediacy to its situation. They are of the view that the End Times could happen any time, so what we do now positions ourselves before this ultimate judgment. He pointed out that Tom DeLay has a plaque in is House office that says "Today could be the Day," meaning the Day of Judgement.
Like I said, those old alarm bells went off all over again.
So with this in mind, I wrote a short essay for American History since 1940 class, which was supposed to be about how American propaganda films were used during World War II to generate a hegemonic sense of national unity. But the whole God complex-War on Terror thing seemed relevant, so I put it in. The beginning of the essay refers to the part in Casablanca where the drunk Nazis in Rick's bar starting singing and they try to drown out the voices of the non-Germans there. Here is what I wrote:
In times of conflict and threat, the public becomes more receptive to messages and images that signify unity and strength against the unknown danger. During the months following September 11 in the United States, the flag itself was made to represent this unity. A slogan implying ongoing mobilization, ?United we stand,? was associated with the flag displays and the wars that followed. This slogan meant almost the same thing as ?We are on the march!?
It was easier for people to receive and accept an understanding of their situation in World War II than today?s war. Then, Hollywood?s advantage was that World War II looked more like a ?classic? war with evil imperial armies and easily caricatured villains, like in Russian Rhapsody and Private Snafu. For those who crafted the messages about the Nazis and American unity, their task was rendered far easier by the media environment they lived in. Most people then could be expected to get their news from the same sources: a few newspapers, the radio, the movie reels. The plethora of entertainment services didn?t exist, so the pro-unity messages were transmitted through a much narrower band of services, and in turn the whole meta-narrative appeared simpler and more cohesive.
Today, on the other hand, we are fighting ?shadowy networks? of ?evil? people hidden among others that at least rhetorically we are not supposed to be fighting. Within our highly diversified media environment, every sort of generalized image and comic exaggeration has been presented about the cave-dwelling jihadis, but these images lie on a rhetorical spectrum where no one can say with certainty what the enemy looks like. Even conservatives vary widely: Toby Keith and Charles Krauthammer used their own contemptuous caricatures to build the image of the rarely spotted enemy. The images they build are vilified and the oppositional image, the upstanding exceptionalist Americans spreading freedom, springs almost naturally from the demonized fundamentalists. Then people are supposed to associate a deeper meaning with the moral contrast of this sketch of reality and offer their faith and obedience accordingly. If you still don?t get it, the President explains that ?the liberty we prize is not America?s gift to the world, it is God?s gift to humanity.? We just happen to have the hardware for installing liberty. While Americans quickly came to understand that World War II was a titanic struggle against evil, it was presented in a more matter-of-fact, less messianic fashion, while President Bush argues that the Almighty was a player in this war from the beginning, a darn good reason to Stand and Unite.
In an essay, ?War is a force that gives us meaning,? veteran war reporter Chris Hedges argues that conflict can be used to generate meaning because the war messages tell people how trivial their daily lives are, but now they are part of an essential, unifying project. ?War makes the world understandable, a black-and-white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good; for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically, war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.?
It was not difficult to illustrate the idea that the Nazis were trying to drown everyone out, and this lent itself to a more grounded sort of rhetoric about why unity was important. Today, in contrast, the shadowy and shifting nature of the War on Terror rhetorically demands stronger medicine for the everyday mind, so to imbue it with meaning, they drafted God.
War makes the world understandable, a black-and-white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good; for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically, war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.
Chris Hedges, "War is a force that gives us meaning."
What can I say? It has been busy as hell lately. I have been shoehorning Spanish workbook pages and Polanyi's 'The Great Transformation' into my morning shifts at the computer lab in the library. Then there is all the Mac Weekly stuff, and those people would flay me alive to tick away on this site on Tues. or Weds. when there's so many glitches to be fixed in the paper. Even though I did last week.
I will move right along to the big event on campus. Ralph Nader came last Thursday, and gave a press conference in the Campus Center. Peter Gartrell asked him some questions, actually, although I'm not sure what Nader said. Shouldn't Peter get a recording device?? So anyhow, Nader then spoke at the Chapel for an admission of $5 for students, $10 for the general public. A bunch of Mac students protested outside and carried Kerry signs. My moral fiber felt weak after giving that man money.
Nader admitted during the talk that he had Republican lawyers, but kept harping on the Dems, demanding they step aside and let him slither onto state ballots.
So a couple hours later I had to meet my dad to get this textbook which had been left back in Wisconsin. We met at the Artist's Quarter in downtown St. Paul, where my dad's friend from the olden days, Lucia Newell, was singing jazz with her group. They have just released a CD and it's a damn fine one.
So there was another old friend of my dad's there, a cynical, middle-aged Republican, whom I told about seeing Nader. Nader's a great human being, he intoned. "He's appealing to your noblest instincts, Daniel," he said. And then came the kicker.
He told me he'd given Nader's campaign a good deal of money.
That, essentially, tells you everything you need to know about the Nader situation.
Right now I am sitting in the Mac Weekly office in the basement of 30 Mac as the first issue of the semester slowly comes together.
This semester I am the co-editor of the Opinion section, which is a nice break from scurrying about and covering campus events. Instead, editing other people's screeds and contributing to the paper's editorials fills my time.
I am getting pissed off rapidly by our page layout software, the excrement-based Quark Xpress 6, which seems to have stalled its evolution in about 1996. It does not anti-alias text very much and its object manipulation is incredibly awkward, especially when compared with the new version of Adobe InDesign. I suggested that we switch to InDesign a few times, but these kids fear the learning curve. I would say that InDesign works like you think that Quark should work, but doesn't.
But then again, I've been partial to InDesign since it evolved out of Adobe PageMaker, which used to be Aldus PageMaker. Ah, for the long-lost days of yore when I would visit my dad's little office on Cleveland Ave. & I-94, and he'd lay out pages of the Disc Golfer newsletter on a Radius full-page display. So in other words, I was exposed to page layout when I was about 5, and hence always favored the much superior PageMaker lineage of software. Really, Pagemaker circa 1988 probably would get our stuff done, minus the color, better than Quark 6.
I will say that I think Quark hates its customers and takes them for granted. For example, look at the user comments on VersionTracker about this new version of Quark. NO ONE likes it.
Ok, ok, this is a boring, you say. And you are correct. But don't underestimate what a pain in the ass it is to get text to wrap around a little box in an aesthetically pleasing fashion, nor how incredibly long it takes to actually finish anything.
MOVING ON. I am settling into my classes, but I'm sad that I think I lost my Spanish textbook sometime in the last year and a half, which is going to cost me some exorbitant sum like $80. So I have to finish my foreign-language requirement this semester.
Other than that, I am taking Global Political Economy, which is one of those world systems/globalization gigs with Prof. Blaney. Also taking Rhetoric of Campaigns and Elections with Adrienne Christiansen, and there will be a lot of guest speakers. In that class we are supposed to either do 30 hours of volunteer work on a campaign, or take a final exam. I opt for the volunteering, especially now that I'm no longer a staff writer at the Weekly. However, that whole thing has not started yet.
I'm also taking American History since 1945 with Norm Rosenberg, and words fail me when trying to encapsulate how brilliant and weird that one is going so far.
On Sunday, the Minnesota College Democrats had a kickoff event here at Macalester, featuring Congresswoman Betty McCollum, State Representative and Mac alum Matt Entenza, but the headliners were Dennis Kucinich and Garrison Keillor, who both offered top-notch speeches to fire us up. It's really a treat to hear Garrison give a true partisan talk, definitely aural chicken soup to the Minnesotan soul. My favorite line was when he described himself as a "museum-quality Minnesota liberal."
In the room adjacent to the Mac Weekly office, right now they are laying out the schedule for Macalester's radio station, 91.7 WMCN. I applied for a radio show, and right now it looks like it will be on Sunday evenings. Very exciting! I haven't had a radio show since sophomore year, which was "As the Tables Turn" on Wednesday at noon. That was a good time, and this one should be even better. Cheers to that.
Plans have a funny way of twitching around. I planned to present a few 9/11-associated pictures from New York on Saturday night, but I was feeling moody with a lot of pent-up energy, so I decided to bike to some of the places I was on September 11, 2001. I went to the monument at the west end of Summit Ave., and then up the river to the University East Bank.
As I pulled up to the corner of Harvard St. and the East River Parkway, right at the Fairview-University Medical Center where I was born, a friend called my phone, feeling pissed off. Turns out her birthday is September 11, a fact I'd forgotten since last year. When "Happy Birthday" transitions into "pivotal national catastrophe," that has to bring you down. So we went to the bar.
I don't want to get into more details, but I got all lost in my thoughts and never made it around to post something up for the anniversary. So here are a few from NYC. The picture above (and below) is a flag at the protest rally on the day of Bush's coronation, in Union Square if I recall.
The most powerful image, for me, is one that I don't have a picture of. On Monday night, Dan Schned and I had been scooted away from an economic justice protest that the cops cut up with severe prejudice, and we found ourselves across from some delegates having dinner at Cipriati's, near Grand Central Station. I took one picture before my batteries died, of spotlights in the foreground and the interior behind:
As we stood, police escorted a protester from the sidewalk in front of Cipriati's. This spawned a whole confrontation between her, some impromptu advocates, random protesters, the police and legal observers in green hats from the National Lawyer's Guild. A stringer from Reuters named Dan and some other media people all came for a piece.
Dan Schned and I started talking with one Officer Mullin, a short (ok, relative to my standards) NYPD cop who was surprisingly receptive to the protests going on around the city. He even told us how he didn't like the cops when he was young.
I asked Mullin about the significance of the black bar next to his badge that read 'WTC' in gold letters. He said it meant that he was there.
I sort of silently nodded, and he suddenly pulled off his officer's hat. Fixed inside the hat were a few plastic ID cards bearing the photographs of other officers. He said they were officers he'd known that were killed that day. On top, a smiling guy with red hair.
He had grown up with that guy's wife, he said. Now she had two kids to raise.
The way that Mullin looked at me and Dan was so plain, so genuine, it was disconcerting. As if Mullin was an actor playing a police officer on this Manhattan stage we'd walked into. How many times had he pulled his hat off to tell this to visitors like us?
It was the kind of exchange that settles something permanently. Before, for me, there was just the mental picture of a dead cop's family and friends, but now it was real. It was a guy in front of me and a picture in his cap. If only life was always so direct.
Earlier that day, at the economic justice march, I was going along next to the line of motorcycle police separating us from the traffic when I spied a tattoo on a police officer's arm. It read
All Gave Some
Some Gave All
9-11-01
The look in his eyes tells you a lot, but you have to decide what it means for yourself:
Oh God, my senior year at Macalester starts in about 9 hours. What am I going to do??!!
No, actually everything is unfolding smoothly so far and I'm really excited about my classes. I got my books today and picked up a bunch of dusty old volumes that the Poli Sci department was giving away. I must develop an amazing bookshelf of dusty volumes!!
On Tuesday, Robert Putnam, the well-known author of "Bowling Alone" and an observer of political trends in the American public gave the convocation speech at Kagin. Essentially his point (and he asked us to summarize this way) was that after any disaster, such as 9/11, there is a positive spike in how people perceive the social connectivity of their society. That is, disasters bring people together. However, these spikes fade as events fade, and in most age groups the post-9/11 spike has faded.
Yet for some reason in our age band—late teens to mid-20s or so—the spike remains high. He drew a parallel to our grandparents' generation that experienced Pearl Harbor and went on to become extremely engaged in social life here, and their children, the boomers, really let things slide, and our generation was on course to slide even further.
And so now it is our generation's responsibility to generate new forms of social capital, translating to communities and new organizations, because for some reason we are still on that spike.
That was one hell of a convocation speech. After the event, I skipped the great picnic get-together and went to Taste of Thailand instead because I'm tired of Cafe Mac before having eaten there once!
September 1, 2004: A police helicopter circles the Brooklyn Bridge:
Later, in Chinatown. I am not sure what this man was trying to prove:
At a labor protest later that day, a man placed his evil Bush head against the ever-patient TV news anchor:
Obligatory end-of-the-world fanatic distributing literature:
There was a media protest at the headquarters of CBS and FOX that night:
This is in fact a large foam finger given unto the (Fox) News Corporation global headquarters.
We were there. Eat it, Hannity.
More to come, but god, I have to start class now!!
Here begins the picture collection. Some of my photos are still on Bill's computer, but the big batch of protest photos was still on the camera when we got back. This is a just a handful of pics but more are coming along. I have to go have dinner with my family now, so here it is.
Click on the pics to expand to full size.
These pics were from the march on Tuesday that started next to the United Nations building. The people in white PPEHRC shirts were acting as a layer of peacekeepers between the unpermitted march and the police.
It's fitting that a march shielded by peacekeepers started by the U.N.:
I can't find the words for this one:
Protest medics:
The police:
The end of this project was decided by no more than sixty seconds. A single stoplight or stopped car would have blown it apart for us. But we made it out of New York in time.
We bailed after I took pictures at the ANSWER protest during Bush's convention speech Thursday evening. We hopped a cab to Bill's house in Brooklyn, grabbed our bags and spun right back to the Penn Station/Madison Square Garden epicenter, hoping to catch the 10:35 train to Philly. It was nearly 10:30 when the cab dropped us several blocks from Penn. There were barricades and cops everywhere.
We ran north one block and asked an officer the quickest way into Penn Station. He said to take the red subway line one stop north. We pivoted down the stairs and missed the 1 line by about 20 seconds.
We waited endlessly. Finally the next train came and dropped us off in the bowels of Penn, filled with every sort of law enforcement official. In the huge station, we sprinted around people, swinging duffel bags wildly. The New York ticket desk directed me up to the New Jersey ticket desk, and I ran up to ask the attendant:
"Did we miss the 10:35 to Trenton?"
She said: "You boys got one minute."
No time to purchase tickets, so we sprinted, and I took a wrong turn for several feet. I wheeled around, skipped down escalator steps to the platform. The first car we saw was dark, and I yelled, "Conductor!!" We saw a couple guys looking out from farther ahead and ran towards them. "Can we get on?" I asked.
"Well, the door's open, isn't it?" one replied.
And that is how we squeaked out of Manhattan with not a minute to spare.
The drive took 22 hours back from Philly, and altogether, a whopping 2495 miles. Hooyah!
