joe.

An award-winning LA Times photographer is fired for altering a news photo.  It took a while to notice, but once I did, the fraud was obvious.  The man with the red bandanna in the lower left corner is duplicated in part just in fromt of the soldier’s leg.  One might argue that the alteration only improves the composition, while leaving the image’s meaning intact.  Of course we only know this because we have seen the two originals from which the altered photo was derived.  But beware; the real deceptions in this war, which I feel are already well underway, will distort the truth grotesquely, not slightly, and will do so with virtually undetectable sophistication.  If I felt that Brian Walski’s minor transgression was the worst lie to come out of this war, then I would be greatly relieved.

We do nothing about people who commit war crimes, yet we fire a reporter for retouching a photo.  What’s wrong with this picture?

Why all the hostility toward journalists?  Most of them not embedded, and at least one of these tragic deaths, because of the secrecy cloaking its aftermath, is now becoming a sign of ominous portent, as well.

Update: Reporters Without Borders accuses US military of deliberately firing at journalists’,CAPTION,’www.rsf.org’);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>This is the link I was looking for when I posted this entry.  Thank you ex-lion tamer.

You know, maybe it is just me. 

I live mostly in fear.  That’s right folks, I am no different than the people I find most revolting; people who pave-over their nagging consciences; people who consider compassion and logic to be unnecessary encumbrances; people who make statements like “You’re either for us, or against us.”  I am just like them. 

The people who believe that ‘might makes right’, who promote distortions of true patriotism with sentiments like ‘America, love it or leave it’, and ‘My country, right or wrong’, they would not agree that I am just like them.  They would dispute that they too live mostly in fear.  They may have no awareness of their fear, or they may be trying to control the fear that haunts them by denying that it exists.  Fear makes us brutal when we could be courageous, it makes us violent when instead we could be powerful, and it makes us view dissent as tantamount to treason.  This is how I know they are living in fear just like me. 

But maybe it is just me.  Maybe I am the only one who is afraid.  When I was a child, I would occasionally have a recurring nightmare of being lost in a crowd of strangers, separated from my parents, terrified that I would never be able to find them again.  I always thought it would never come true, but here I am; they are gone, and I am lost.  I know of course that I am only as isolated as I choose to be, and I choose to be very isolated.  I also know that I am not a child, but I feel that way sometimes, and I know that I am not lost, but it sure seems that way. 

I don’t want to hate them, I don’t want to hate anyone.  But I don’t want to be like them, either.  Yet I am.  I sometimes let my frustration boil over in a froth of rage and reckless acts, like calling the president an asshole, or calling a cabinet officer a Nazi.  While obviously not literally true, such name-calling is polemically unhelpful.  To engage in such divisivness is self-abuse.  We are a body politic beating itself up, like when the police

Police Attack California Anti-War Protesters

‘,CAPTION,’www.commondreams.org’);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>inflict injuries upon peaceful protesters, or when a raucous war rally tramples a noble sentiment.  We—and that is the we that includes us all—we do not want to inflict injury upon ourselves, yet that is what we do sometimes in the reckless folly of our rage and confusion. 

I cannot stop them from

Berkeley resident Clay Hinson \(R\), who was shot once in the chest and twice in the back during an anti-war protest, shows his wounds to an Oakland Police sergeant \(L\) who takes his statement at the West Oakland train station, April 7, 2003.

‘,CAPTION,’www.commondreams.org’);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>hurting me.  I cannot stop them from ”People say this doesn’t happen in this country,” McGeady said, ”but one of my neighbors has been disappeared. It’s not what he might have done that matters to me — they disappeared him. They need to question him and let him go, or charge him. It’s like Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka.”
–Steve McGeady, quoted at wired.com’,CAPTION,’www.wired.com’);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>locking me up in secret without benefit of due process.  I cannot stop them from WE HAD a great day,” said Sgt Eric Schrumpf of the US Marines last Saturday. ”We killed a lot of people.”

He added: ”We dropped a few civilians, but what do you do?” He said there were women standing near an Iraqi soldier, and one of them fell when he and other Marines opened fire. ”I’m sorry,” said Sgt Schrumpf, ”but the chick was in the way”.
–The War for Truth, article by John Pilger in The Mirror’,CAPTION,’www.mirror.co.uk’);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>killing innocent people

.  All I can do is stop myself from running in fear to the opposite pole in this national debate.  I can refuse to become the mirror image of ‘them’, by continuing to patiently insist that there is no ‘them’, there is only us. 

A young woman, plagued by her conscience.  I cannot imagine myself one tenth as brave as she.  Read about her here, or here.

Kill me, you asshole Bush.  Kill me you Nazi, Rumsfeld.  Kill me because I cannot endure the guilt of being a survivor in the world where you are taking me.  Kill me you ruthless elites, because I count it a dishonor to be alive in the United States today and bear no wounds; I consider it cowardice to call myself a bleeding-heart liberal without losing a drop of my own blood fighting this heinous brutality you have instituted.  From this point on I move into grave peril, for I despise the criminal powers that govern my nation, and I will not stay silent or immobile. 

Shoot me, too, and do not be sparing in your cruelty, for it is my goal to richly deserve the contempt of monsters like you.

Read the SF Chronicle article.

Try to find this story on CNN.  Good luck.

I think my preference regarding things which flow mellifluously is for them to flow onto, not off of my tongue.

Thanks to the criminal behavior of the US government, brutal regimes have escalated their killing and have gained confidence that they will not be held accountable.  On Saturday April 5, 2003 a 24 year old American peace activist, Brian Avery, wearing clear markings identifying him as a non-combatant, and with his arms in the air, was shot in the face by an Israeli tank.  The tank then slowly lumbered past without stopping or offering assistance.  This is the new world order which the Bush administration has inaugurated.  Read it.

Two weeks ago, Rachel Corrie, 23, was run down and killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Palestinian town of Rafah.  It appears the bulldozer drove over her deliberately.  She too was a clearly marked, passive non-combatant.  Read it.

A little bit of truth slipped out recently, despite Donald Rumsfeld’s omnipotent micro-management.  The whitewashing effort, well underway for days, helps identify for us those few news outlets which still hold the truth in high regard, and reveals the rest as cowardly apologists for thugs. 

‘Ana, ana’ \(me,me\) as he tapped his chest.  Take just one picture of me.  I never got his name, but he lives in the Saddam City district of northern Baghdad.  Photo credit: Farah Laith

Click to visit more images of the enemy at IraqJournal.org.

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A coworker said to me the other day, “Yeah, well, I’m behind Bush one hundred percent.  I saw the pictures on the news of the kids that got killed, and that’s not nice, but you know, they’re just going to grow up and be just like their parents.”

“And.  What’s.  Wrong.  With.  That?” I asked, incredulous.  “What have they done to us?”  She responded with some vague blither about 911.  “You don’t even know,” I said.  “The fact is that they haven’t done anything to us.  You don’t even know the lies, much less believe them, yet you are willing to let children die.”

Her voice can be a scraping irritating noise even when her words have negligible meaning.  But her cavalier disregard of the slaughter of children, and her use of racism to justify it was revolting.  I nearly struck her.  I had to walk away. 

She is just an overwhelmed child herself, what with all the considerable trauma and stress she has endured in her own life.  Which makes it worse.  She doesn’t have the time or the inclination to be bothered with the esoterica of injustice ten timezones away. Indeed, for anyone, accusing one’s own country of criminal behavior requires an uncommon discernment both incisive and fearless.  And so her opinion is not the result of a rigorous and objective examination of the facts, but is simply a regurgitation of the recieved propaganda, passed on essentially unchanged.  I’d like to think no one else thinks this way.  I’d like to think the propaganda did not have this effect on one as typical as she.  She is in her twenties—starting a family, starting a career, starting an American life.  She is a mother.  And she is studying to be a nurse.  I dread to think how many other young people in america?children really?think as she does. 

I want to throw-up.

There is no question in my mind why the world hates us. 

Sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to leave out even just one word of this statement. 

The “Shock and Awe” Photo Gallery

One cannot help but gasp when confronted by such trauma and agony, unlimited in both its gore and its senselessness.  The wet sound of living body parts splattering…  the snap and pop of limbs dismembered…  and the sight of someone’s animated face at the moment of their decapitation…  all happening under the shrieking, bellowing, screaming roar of the lethal machines of war.  It lifts one–both body and soul–out of the monotonous daily repitition of dull and threatless lives into an experience of the sublime.  For those who come through it conscious and in one piece, such an experience transcends ethical judgement, it transports one beyond such petty distinctions as friend or foe, panic or peace, alive or dead, and it plants one firmly in the center of an unvarnished, undiluted, unmitigated, unadulterated experience of being terribly alive.

Until humankind learns to experience life with the same degree of intensity, clarity, and desperate cruciality as when in the throes of mortal combat, until then humans will continue to make war.  It really has nothing to do with ideology or politics or even justice; those are merely the pretenses upon which we build our horrific stage of war, and where we exorcize the demons of our unsatisfying lives.