The Fallen

Watched Nightline’s “The Fallen”. It was respectful and appropriate. Putting faces to the number of dead is just the kind of accountability lacking in our government and media. Not doing so is irresponsible. Not to consider the true cost we’re demanding of our young people is wrong. I doubt ABC had winning an award in mind by airing “The Fallen”, but they deserve one. Ted Koppel was smart to address the critics that preemptively called the show anti-war propaganda. The TV markets it was banned from are no doubt markets where the Bush administration is desperate to hold onto political control. Hopefully some people will be swayed against Bush and his war by proof of the human loss. The cultural diversity among the fallen soldiers should shut up racists who think only whites contribute to what they think is great about America.

“‘Nightline’ pauses to take a full account”

Tonight Ted Koppel will honor the dead soldiers killed so far in Operation Iraqi Freedom. However, in markets where ABC is broadcast by the Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group, ‘Nightline’ will be censored and pre-empted. Democracy Now! reports “98 percent of Sinclair’s political contributions in 2004 have gone to Republican candidates.”

Student Art Mistaken for Torture

At first glance, the shocking photos of distressed Iraqis held by Americans in Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison seem like the work of overextended, misguided and possibly psychologically destabilized captors. Closer examination of one of the photos reveals references to an ancient catholic ritual in Spain called Semana Santa, or Holy Week. Classical Spanish painter Joaquin Dominguez Becquer depicted this ritual commemorating the trials and tribulations of Christ. Semana Santa is still observed in places like Sevilla during the week between Palm and Easter Sundays. Perhaps one of the American jailers is a frustrated missionary and former art student desperate for a creative outlet. These photos are not scenes of abuse, but highly stylized stagings of scenes from a passion play, meant to involve the poor, heathen muslims in their own evangelization. But before receiving the benefits of being a good christian, it is customary that the U.S. military’s own hazing rituals be “done unto” the Iraqis so that they may in the future do them unto other poor, heathen muslims. In no time the good will of the christian church should be spread throughout the muslim world, making it a safe and peaceful place where we can all drill for oil together in harmony.

The evangelical nature of the conflict in Iraq goes on beyond and behind the front line. This week the Chicago Tribune featured a soldier being baptized on its front page, doing its part in illustrating the cliché that there are no atheists in foxholes.

iTunes Charts

Apple’s iTunes Music Store now offers a pretty cool feature: playlists from radio stations across the country and Billboard charts. Of course you have to buy each song for 99¢ if you want more than a 30 second clip, but it’s finally possible to go to one place to find out what that song you heard in the car was, hear it and buy it.

War is Peace

<rant class="big_brother">Is there really any ambiguity in the term “cease-fire” or does the pairing of two unmistakably defined words somehow form a meaning-free zone to “The Adults”? (Bush bragged before coming into office that his administration would seem like adults compared to Clinton’s cabinet.) They have basically already said that war is the only way to ensure peace. If you haven’t read 1984 yet, don’t bother, you’re living in it.</rant>

Woman loses job over coffins photo

The Seattle Times reports that a woman was fired from Maytag Aircraft for taking photos of military caskets transporting soldiers’ remains.

…she hoped the publication of the photo would help families of fallen soldiers understand the care and devotion that civilians and military crews dedicate to the task of returning the soldiers home.

The same company then fired her husband.

Since 1991, the Pentagon has banned the media from taking pictures of caskets being returned to the United States.

Media coverage of Vietnam taught the government nothing if not that support for a war sours in direct proportion to dead Americans witnessed by the US public. The Pentagon’s policy directly addresses this problem by keeping what’s out of sight out of mind.

More information:
Images of war dead a sensitive subject

“The image of dead Americans, especially the dead American soldier, is probably the most powerful image of war for Americans,” [said poet Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1863]. “It’s the one that immediately strikes us in the gut, because we hate to see it but we recognize we may need to see it.”

Other photos of soldiers’ coffins in transport:
The Memory Hole

The Agronomist

From the same director as the remake below comes a documentary about Haiti’s “own true hero”, Jean L. Dominique, called The Agronomist. Jonathan Demme has always made complex films with a social consciousness, but this film stands out from his recent work as the true story of one man standing up against overwhelming forces for democracy in the country he loves.

The Manchurian Candidate

It’s about time Hollywood made a film about the political use of fear and paranoia. A remake of The Manchurian Candidate fits that bill perfectly.

Just as I suspected…

As I said on August 12, 2003, Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Short, Happy Life of the Brown Oxford” would make a great film. According to last December’s Wired, it is in the works at Miramax.

Bush Knew

Take Back the Media is hosting a powerful animation that shows exactly what Bush was doing as people were dying in New York City on September 11, 2001. Why was he reading a book about a goat in a class full of children instead of telling our fighter planes to shoot down four (4) jets making U-turns in the sky before almost 3000 people were murdered? “He didn’t know!” Really? Watch the animation and then tell me it wasn’t all about plausible deniability.