Desiree Farooz confronts Condi, and other Code Pink activists get manhandled out of a public forum for… wearing pink? I know it’s after after Labor Day — and I’m a huge fan of Mr. Blackwell — but since when is that a crime?

From the voiceover:

“Damn. Damn.”

“Take her to the Hague!”

h/t Crooks and Liars

The RAND Corporation, always a great source of ethical thought in the world, has proudly finished another one of its blockbusters. This position paper, for the US Joint Forces Command, describes how the US military can borrow techniques from the compliance industries to help it “sell” war to the lucky consumers of its counterinsurgency operations. Finally, a three hundred page document arguing that you can put lipstick on a pig.

Here’s a thought: Why don’t those serving in the military actively question and contradict their commander in chief? That was the point of Nuremberg, wasn’t it? I salute the retired generals who have spoken out against the war, and those few active service members as well, but it’s time for massive action from within.

As a teenager, I remember being struck by a statistic from those “brighter tomorrow” 80’s when it was reported that under Reagan’s defense increases the budget for military bands dramatically exceeded that of the National Endowment for the Arts. It seemed preposterous at the time. In retrospect, we didn’t know from preposterous.

Foreign Policy passport reports that the D.OD has more musicians than the State Department has diplomats. Normally I’d say that more music was a recipe for success, but those martial tunes (with a few exceptions) don’t win friends or influence people. Too much syncopation, corny standards, blaring orchestration with little dynamic subtlety. In fact, the more I think of it, the more I realize how the military can save money that can instead go toward diplomacy. The solution even has an appropriately martial name: General Midi.

So now the Bush folks are saying that they want to keep US troops in Iraq for as long as they’ve stayed in Korea. Sort of the opposite of what they said at the beginning. How’s that working out?

We’ve been here so many times before, like when the US government and a willing public inflamed by yellow journalists took the opportunity to invade the Phillipines and take over Cuba and Puerto Rico. Ah, Rico: What do you do with a colony that still doesn’t have the right to vote? Oh right, use it for target practice.

Then, as now, some smart cultural critics saw past the fluttering flags and yellow ribbons. Mark Twain objected to making war with Spain and wrote, but did not publish, this dissenting narrative. Not coincidentally, he sets his story in a church, where the pastor is praying to preserve our boys, make our arms strong, and give us fortune in war. An angelic figure gate crashes, explaining to the parishioners that there are two sides to this type of prayer, and tells them the other side:

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”

Mark Twain, 1904-1905.

Full story here.

Years ago, I was working in a sculpture courtyard at the visual arts building at UCSD. I looked up just as a professor of mine, BM, was walking through the courtyard with a fellow graduate student of mine, AJ. AJ was dragging a roll-on suitcase, and they looked very serious. BM’s dog, an old, lame mutt who BM had inherited from a loved one, had died. They were going to bury the dog in the canyon behind our offices, no doubt illegal, but a good idea.

After burial, we lay flat stones over the grave. Both AJ and I had heard to do this, because the coyotes that circled the campus eating house cats were also quick to dig up graves. I could understand the coyotes doing that; they’re animals. As a human, though, I felt pretty good about honoring the little mutt, and felt like our little ceremony might have been the most respectful and honest funeral I’d ever been to.

Speaking of foul smelling animals feasting on fresh corpses, take a look at this Fox News obituary (h/t crooks and liars). I remember those students in High School who were too busy torturing flies or ogling the young teacher to pay attention to the books they were assigned; I guess I know what they do for a living now.

After watching this bizarre video, take a moment to reread some Vonnegut. This excerpt, from Slaughterhouse 5, tells the story of a war vet who slips in and out of time:

…He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from a airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at the backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments for some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly into racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids.

One of Vonnegut’s editors, purportedly hearing that Vonnegut was writing a novel about war, purportedly said, “Why not write about glaciers?” By which he meant, according to Vonnegut, that both phenomena were equally unstoppable, especially by a novel. Vonnegut wryly admitted, in the intro to S5, that his editor was right. But humankind has successfully proven that, working together with the power of technology, labor, and globalism, we can successfully destroy glaciers. Global warming is severing them from their mountains and sliding them, dramatically, into the sea. Maybe we can do the same with war.

News from the New York Times that US Army troops will now be serving 15 month tours instead of 12, in addition to being sent unprepared, poorly equiped, and sent back on successive tours wounded. This will shatter the lives and families of even more domestic victims of this deeply stupid and unnecessary war.

WASHINGTON, April 11 — All active-duty Army troops now in Iraq or Afghanistan or headed to either country will serve 15-month tours of duty, up from the usual 12-month tours, effective immediately, the Pentagon announced today.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called the change “a difficult and necessary interim step” and said it would at least give soldiers and their families more predictability than they have now…. Mr. Gates said the impetus for the increase in Army combat tours had come from the service’s leaders, who saw a demand for “more clarity and fairness.”

Time to watch the most inspiring documentary produced yet about domestic class politics in the war in Iraq, Eminem’s Mosh. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a smart, stylish attempt to radicalize Americans — especially those directly affected — towards political opposition against the war. Why aren’t we seeing dozens of videos this good?

I have a brief article in Bidoun, journal of Middle Eastern of arts and culture, on the ways that new American weapons systems use images. These remotely piloted vehicles relay video back to operators, who then make decisions based on what they see. The process is pretty complicated, and none of the contingency of the meaning of images — these guys aren’t reading Mulvey, Sekula, or Sondheim — makes it into the official training documents.

We have little reference for understanding images of this nature; they are like documentary, in that they offer a view, with implicit and explicit perspective, on a non-fiction event. But they are like computer games in that the viewer is supposed to interfere in that event. Drone-generated video is unlike documentary or video games — or indeed any other visual media — in that the decisions made based upon them are both immediate and possibly fatal.

One cockpit video that swept the Web in 2004 showed the obliteration of a large group of men in Fallujah, based on no apparent information other than that they were men, and walking out of a mosque. Do the millions of dollars of imaging equipment used to make this film present a neutral image? Is the suspicion with which these images are taken not transmitted through the apparatus to the viewer? My guess is that these technologies, while deadly and effective, are increasingly isolating Americans to the point that they are unable to gauge their own telemediated actions… After seeing the real-time video of the Falluja bomb obliterating a score of anonymous pedestrians, the overwhelmed pilot simply sighed, “Oh, dude.” He was flying blind.

Check out Bidoun…