Misleadership v Leadership
There's a funny unstable feeling in the air- it's that same dizzy perfect
autumn seasons changing accelerated spin & tilted sunlight feeling of Sept.
11th that we're all imprinted with forever... Something is up, up, up.... The
swifties are after Ned Lamont, a major propaganda initiative that literally
feels like brainwashing... because IT IS BRAINWASHING rewriting the
history of 9/11 is underway... the pieces are on the chessboard. Strange
rumblings abound as we come to the fifth anniversary of the attacks that
happened under Bush's watch, with Osama still on the loose- perhaps to be pulled
from his den & conveniently re-introduced to the American public (so hinted a
smirking Alberto Gonzales last week?) in handcuffs. Will the corporate overlords
again have their set carpenters construct faux "spider holes" & so the news
anchors (aka "actors") can demonstrate to us exactly how they work? Or have
their knees given out by now....
Christiane Amanpour's report is scaring me
(for Sep-11) by joan reports
Less than
three days to understand what is happening by wilbur
I rewatched the opening to F-911 the other day- pretty painful & powerful stuff.
I thought the film was great of course when I first saw it. (Remember how Kerry
wouldn't admit to seeing it or wouldn't see it? "Pffffttt.")
from IMDB
Narrator: "As Bush sat in that Florida classroom, was he wondering if maybe
he should have shown up to work more often? Should he have held at least one
meeting since taking office to discuss the threat of terrorism with his head of
counter terrorism? Or maybe Mr. Bush was wondering why he had cut terrorism
funding from the FBI. Or perhaps he just should have read the security
briefing that was given to him on August 6, 2001 that said that Osama bin Laden
was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes. Or maybe he wasn't
worried about the terrorist threat because the title of the report was too
vague.
[cut to 9/11 Commission hearing, where Condoleeza Rice is testifying]
Condoleezza Rice: I believe the title of the report was 'Bin Laden
Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'
Narrator: A report like that might make some men jump, but as in days passed,
George W. just went fishing.
As the minutes went by, George Bush continued to sit in the classroom. Was
he thinking, "I've been hanging out with the wrong crowd. Which one of them
screwed me? Was it the man my daddy's friends delivered a lot of weapons to? Was
it that group of religious fundamentalists who visited my state when I was
governor? Or was it the Saudis? Damn, it was them."
[an image of Saddam Hussein appears onscreen]
Narrator: [as George W. Bush] I think I better blame it on this guy."
end IMDB quotes
A lot of words are flying around lately- from the beleaguered Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld* himself- words like, fascist. Nazi. Macaca. Keith O
summons Murrow's ghost... *Dada
Rumsfeld: Absurd Words From Washington's Highest-Profile Loser
In business and in war, doing it on the cheap is dangerous (you've got to
read the comments that article- and just realize that the people writing the
comments are not lefty bloggers- they're business people...
Other words are being added to the mix. Documentary. Docudrama. Primetime CNN
shows actually feature blogwatches & video from YouTube & they don't understand
the irony. One has the sinking feeling the level of the debate is
sinking/collapsing on one side as the press remains largely adamant about not
doing their job, the debate not rising as we slog through the mud to the
midterms- Sure, our hopes are high, but so too, we are a little fearful. We've
got something more than rats cornered. The question of whether or not they have
a secret escape hatch or poison pill remains unknown. The fact remains, we have
madmen with "The Suitcase." Paranoid madmen, and madmen who are not so mad as to
not fully realize the scope of their crimes, even though they retain the ability
to rationalize their crimes in their own minds. Bottom line: we have people in
charge who we are pretty sure will literally stop at nothing. And after several
years of their disastrous divisive policies- they have every reason to fear a
watershed moment.
But in seeing Moore's American masterpiece again film, I was almost
overwhelmed by the artfulness of it, by how well it is handled frame by frame.
It is a thing of beauty. Harsh beauty, but beauty.
As the camera focuses on a bewildered Bush sitting there for long moment after
long moment as a nation reels- Moore wonders aloud- "What was he thinking? Was
it... Which one of them screwed me?..."
about the "President"
w
"His face just started to turn red," said Tyler, now 13 and in
seventh grade. "I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom."
For a puzzling seven minutes, the youngsters read aloud from the story "The Pet
Goat" while the shaken president followed along in front of the class, trying to
come to grips with what he had been told -- that a second plane had just hit the
World Trade Center and the nation was under terrorist attack.
"He looked like he was going to cry," said Natalia Jones-Pinkney,
now 12.
-----------
But hey, don't worry. He's a Uniter, not a Decider, right? That must be why
on the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11th, Meet the Press brings out the everyone
agrees he's the "real" President- Vice-President Coldeye Dick "Chickenhawk"
Cheney as their exclusive guest for the first time in three years. Because
who in their right mind would want to hear from...
Lila Lipscomb: "The ignorance of everyday people killed my son."
Kristen Breitweiser answering Coultergeist
or anyone else whose opinion & experience actually matter. Thanks Tim! Way to
go. Hey- and thank YOU, CNN- for making the video of the entire day of 9/11
unfold in real time on pipeline- thereby purposefully inducing some kind of mass
hysteria/brainwashing. Because it was a stupid idea to say- I don't know- not do
that. ? Or- well. I guess you're kind of in a spot there, eh- since you can't
really show us footage of the not so "smoked out" Osama bin Laden being brought
to justice. Is it some kind of fucked up reliving your birth trauma hippie
voodoo? I really don't get it. Sept. 11th is the last day I really want to
relive- but the Sept. 11th timeline, on the other hand- is interesting. Like,
did you know Enron was kind of collapsing simultaneou- oh, nevermind. We'll do
it ourselves.
The truth is - 1. I'm running out of writing time so I have to wrap up, and
2. we do have great leaders. And we do have each other. And we know this is a
process. And we will get through this hysteria-inducing fifth anniversary
together. And we know that the revolution really won't be televised- but, it
will be blogged dammit. Take comfort in whatever you find inspiration in- I
found some below. Bring it here. Tell us what gets you through your day.
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General Clark
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This is what the general does. He internalizes his opponents--those on the other
side of an issue or a battle--so that he may prevail over them. ...
It is not until one reads Holbrooke's book, To End a War, that one finds out
that after the APC went off the road, Clark grabbed a rope, anchored it to a
tree stump, and rappelled down the mountainside after it, despite the gunfire
that the explosion of the APC set off, despite the warnings that the
mountainside was heavily mined, despite the rain and the mud, and despite
Holbrooke yelling that he couldn't go. It is not until one brings the incident
up to the general that one finds out that the burning APC had turned into a
kiln, and that Clark stayed with it and aided in the extraction of the bodies;
it is not until one meets Wesley Clark that one understands the degree to which
he held Milosevic accountable.
Four years later, the general went to war against him after the failure of
diplomacy to drive the Serbs out of Kosovo. By this time, he had spent "dozens
and dozens and dozens" of hours with Milosevic during the negotiations in Dayton
of the accord that ended the war in Bosnia, and then in all the fruitless
negotiations thereafter. He knew him; in fact, as he says, "I'm probably unique
among twentieth-century commanders, in that I really knew the person I was
fighting. So I knew what it would take to beat him, personally. And I knew he
was watching me. I knew he watched every briefing. He looked at me to see if I
was tired. He looked at me to see if I was discouraged. We were engaged in a war
of the mind. Once the fighting started, though, it was a simple straight-line
equation. The plan was to gain escalation dominance. Avoid anything that might
suggest to Milosevic that the campaign was about to be ended and ratchet up the
intensity step-by-step until you broke his will. He wasn't a tough guy. You know
what kind of guy he was? He was the kind of guy who said he didn't play sports
because his mother wouldn't let him. He was a wuss! He had these . . . soft,
puffy white hands."
Esquire, The General, By Tom Junod
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Remember Remember the Fifth of November
" [quoting George Orwell] "It's not a matter of whether the war is not
real, or if it is, Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it
is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the
basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different
past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to
keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group
against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either
Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact."
Oh- and don't forget to watch Meet the Tim. Know your enemy.
update: WOW! I found my original Sept. 11 journal entry....
30 September, 2001
Send in the Clowns
I've decided to wear a big red clown nose, maybe forever. Historically I've felt mostly neutral about the American flag. As a child, I was a perpetually dyslexic patriot, without exception needing to look to my classmates to pick the correct hand when it came to the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we just stopped saying it.
George W. Bush, the unlikeliest Frodo ever. For months I've listened, watched and experienced a disconnect ala Mad Libs whenever the word President is followed by the seemingly oxmoronic (if not downright moronic word, especially when combined with "President") Bush and not even Nader, not Gore, not Clinton. Bush? The mind rejects it, the ear rejects it. The election formerly known as disastrous has become miniscule, shrinky-dinked in the World Trade Center inferno.
On September 11, we spent the morning in the unknown, jamming the net, making frantic phone calls to establish a baseline. We made ATM withdrawals and sized up our chances. All of a sudden we were acutely aware we were dealing with chances, with odds, with horrifying statistics. All of a sudden we remembered, Oh yeah, we've girded the planet with nuclear power stations. My Mom saying if we were going to die, she would really appreciate it if I could drive two and half hours upstate so we could die together. Would I come home?
Box cutters. BOX CUTTERS? Box cutters. The bound wrists of the flight attendant, the phrase anthrax spores. Singed and pristine papers, alighting miles away in Brooklyn, smoke and ashes, New York, New York (insert music) looking like Beirut. Operation Infinite Justice? Why not just come out and say Operation Armageddon? The weirdly perfect, fragile confluence of events. People knocked out of their socks. Roasted. Rudy Guiliani, heroic. The rescue workers. Doctors grief-stricken because there were not enough people to treat. The last phone calls. The ferocity of our generosity. The voice on the intercom saying it's okay, it's under control, go back to your offices. Singing down the stairwells, holding hands and counting. Take your families our and enjoy America's great destinations?
I was just arriving at work after my normal hour long commute from Philadelphia when, as I stepped onto an elevator in an office building in Wilmington, Delaware, someone clutching a cell phone said, "They bombed the World Trade Center."
The metal doors of the elevator closed. It whisked me unhindered up to the third floor, a simple mechanized act that in and of itself will rarely go unfelt in America again. How is it, friend, that we're dancing around like angels upward, unquestioning? Other people were likely even then trapped in the then-impending immolation in elevators in New York. Unfolding events sent waves of disbelief that mutated into an urgent rainbow of raw emotion that has yet to play itself out, a quick sound check of all possible human feeling, as if the seven stages of grief were plunked down on Wheel of Fortune and we just keep spinning.
Even though it sounds mentally landlocked, since we landed on the moon, we've been as a species reduced in a way to three flags: Old Glory, the white flag of surrender and the Jolly Roger. The Western world now says, Choose Carefully. Not quite the stars and stripes, but the clown nose is the only response that even begins to make sense to me in answer to the twin towers' appalling vaporization and subsequent collapse (not to give short shrift to the other attacks).
Last week after work I turned back to look at the mirrored, many-storied set of modern office buildings we occupy daily. Their slicked, sun-sheeted mirrors catching fire like giant mood rings, like opals. My mind flickered again to what the planes must have looked like reflected in all the windows in Manhattan, those eyes on the world, our mutual retina, in the last seconds before impact. Victor Hugo said of the coming of the Guttenburg press that the arrival of the typeface looked like "a million sparrows flung at God." In bare beehiving minutes, most of us were reduced to a nation of stricken mimes in the most effective television moment ever, a knifepoint of diabolical yin yang.
I object to the use of the word unimaginable to describe what has happened, and perhaps more alarmingly, what should and will happen now. If it were unimaginable, it couldn't have happened, just like you can't imagine death, not really. You can get close, but you can't get to it, because it cannot be depicted from inside itself. In order to own these events, we have to describe them. Fully.
We routinely litter our movie screens (and so ourselves) with similar imagery, with worse. And confusingly, prior to these last few weeks, I would have been certain that most people would not have been able to distinguish between virtual and occurring violence. Not so, not by a long shot.
I've been transported back to a listening space I haven't occupied since high school, when I was immersed in late night college radio. It's been newly wonderful to hear and actively appreciate hearing voices, to enjoy my cat's fur, to listen to the tension of the parking brake. I was thrilled the first morning I cursed back at another driver cutting me off on the interstate, all of us still a bit tentative, tender and bruised over the bridge near the airport...
We have now crossed emphatically into the literal from the figurative, a border the rest of the world long ago crossed. The bridge back has been blown to bits, or might as well be a land bridge from which we and our ancestors once migrated, obscured now by deep and final waters, the opposite of the parting of the Red Sea. We now inhabit a country we haven't seen for decades and one that I, an American woman, a Gen-Xer, have never really approached before. I did glimpse it once in the glacial whiteout media coverage of the Gulf War, t.v. snow punctuated only by Scud missiles, reporters barricaded in hotels, distant beacons of red.
But back to the flag, to the clown nose. I'm not against the flag, but I'm not so sure I want to display it by itself because I'm not sure what it means at the moment. I feel pretty dicey about the wisdom of military strikes. But quite frankly, we all know the peace sign isn't going to cut it this time. What we really need is a supplement, another symbol, a global indicator. The flood of t-shirts emblazoned with Bin Laden's face (his sallow, somehow Byzantine portrait) on a Wanted Dead or Alive poster (lousy font choice aside), doesn't seem quite right either. A friend proposed adding a picture of a bottle of
Heinz 57 "43% American, 57% Everything Else" to one's flag display.
What is the paradigm of the American tribe? In the first few days after the attacks I noticed I felt something close to being left out as the people around me confided they were back in contact with their New York friends and all was well, as well as it could be. I realized why.
It was because I felt like they were all mine, all of them.
And they were, momentarily. Then the inevitable second hijacking, a political hijacking--began.
I believe less and confusingly, more, in being American now. I have a dark fantasy about evacuating Israel and the Gaza Strip, and pounding the land itself into absolute oblivion, then carting and scattering the ashes throughout the entire world. If that's how small your idea of God is, you can fight over the ashes. Where's God now, huh punk, huh?!... I'd like to bomb Afghanistan with apples and small business grants and atheism.
If the world is suddenly officially divided into the Civilized World vs. the Terrorists, is it really a war between the modern and the superstitious? Who would have ever thought I would now be thinking it would be not just okay, but great, to momentarily don Mickey Mouse ears, that rock and roll, Levi's and Marlboros are the right thing to do? I can't be the only one who wanted the dumb Americans just to drive the minivan to the mall, dress their children in pastels, just for everything to be okay and mindless again here in our artificial semi-utopia for a minute.
It's less that the world is now composed of honorary Americans, and more like now we know, now we have to admit, that we are also and have always been, immigrants and refugees here ourselves. We just forgot.
Check your faith and leave your tribal genocide at the door- the line forms at the left.
My heart definitely, definitively plunged when driving home from work with a voice on the radio saying, "We have a very large hammer that can be brought to bear on these events in any number of ways, and will be." To my left, a Biggie-sized flag, slumped at half- mast, hanging from a massive crane to the left of the highway. Traffic slowed in unison, like we were synchronized swimmers.
By all means, show your true colors. Raise your flag, but make sure it's the right one. For me, nothing else but the clown nose really points to the borderline, quick change territory we now inhabit , the highwire, the posturing, the pagentry.
When I visited Party USA (now how could I make that up?) to purchase clown noses, all I could find were clumsy foam ones that pinch your nostrils shut. I got six red ones, and two black ones, even though the black ones made me look more like a mouse. I got a few laughs out of my co-workers with them. What I really wanted was an old-fashioned rubber one, but I'll have to visit a real costume shop for that.
I just can't figure out another way to say, I'm home now, Mom. The lights are on. And what the lights illuminate looks a whole lot like a three-ring circus to me. Send in the clowns.