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Today's
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February 14/15, 2004
Stan Goff
Beloved Haiti
February 13, 2004
Alan Maass
Kevin
Cooper's Fight to Live
Karyn Strickler
McCarthyism in the Sierra Club
Annie Higgins
On
a Street in America
Adam Federman
Democratic Snipers Target Nader
Mike Whitney
George W. Faces the Nation
Brian Cloughley
Our Imperial Leader Has Spoken
Website of the Day
Lying Action Figure Doll
February 12, 2004
Ray McGovern
George
Tenet's Spin Cycle
Robert Jensen
Bush's
Nuclear Hypocrisy
Saul Landau
Elegy to the Salton Sea
February
11, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Hail, Kerry: Senator Facing-Both-Ways
Steve Perry
Bush
v. Bush?
February
10, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
Inquisition in Iowa
Ron Jacobs
Politics and the Beatles: Don't
You Know You Can Count Me Out (In)
Elizabeth
Schulte
The Many Faces of John Kerry
Mickey
Z
Meet the Oxmans: "The Rich
Shouldn't Sleep at Night Either"
February
9, 2004
Michael
Donnelly
Will Skull and Bones Really Change
CEOs? Inside John Kerry's Closet
Chris Floyd
Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush
B-Boys Replay Their Greatest Hits
Bill
Christison
What's Wrong with the CIA?
Dr. Susan
Block
Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment:
Boob Tube Super Bowl
February
7/8, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
Offending Valerie: Dealing with
Jewish Self-Absorption
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave
Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine
in Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide
from Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure:
Our Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
February
2, 2004
Gary
Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free
Environment
Tom
Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee
Winslow
Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget
Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth
Leonard
Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is
Rigged
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Website
of the Day
Resistance:
In the Eye of the American Hegemon
Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
February 14 / 15, 2004
CounterPunch Diary
Milk
Bars, Hollywood and the March of Empires
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Scarcely more than a decade after Winston Churchill
had assured the British people that the German foe at last lay
prostrate at their feet, the invasion against which Britain had
been unable to defend itself was portrayed in lurid terms: "The
milk-bars indicate at once, in the nastiness of their modernistic
knick-knacks, their glaring showiness, an aesthetic breakdown
so complete that, in comparison with them, the layout of the
living -rooms in some of the poor homes from which the customers
come seems to speak of a tradition as balanced and civilized
as an 18th-century town house. Girls go to some, but most of
the customers are boys aged between 15 and 20, with drape-suits,
picture ties, and an American slouch. Compared even with the
pub around the corner, this is all a peculiarly thin and pallid
form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour
of boiled milk. Many of the customers--their clothes, their hair-styles,
their facial expressions all indicate--are living to a large
extent in a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which
they take to be those of American life."
By the time Richard Hoggart thus savaged
the innocent milk-bar (aka, in America, the soda-fountain) in
The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, the transatlantic contagion
had ranged far beyond the milkshakes and 'mechanical record player'
that stirred him to such fury.
At the politer end of the national culture,
Encounter, a politico-cultural monthly, was being covertly financed
by the Central Intelligence Agency. And crucially, at the level
of mass entertainment, Hollywood, after a fierce struggle, had
carried all before it.
Until the French refusal to capitulate
entirely to the US entertainment industry threatened to torpedo
the GATT Treaty in 1993, most people had been unaware of the
enormous importance attached not only by the US film industry
but by Washington to unimpeded access of Hollywood product to
foreign markets.
It was brought home to me forcibly in
1987 when Hollywood's top lobbyist of the period, President Ronald
Reagan, suddenly departed from a numbing formal oration on the
glories of US-Canadian free trade to lecture the Canadian prime
minister, Brian Mulroney, in terse and uncharacteristically specific
terms about legislation just passed by the Quebecois provincial
legislature. The Quebecois bill threatened to prize loose movie
distribution in the province from the grip of the American film
industry.
That morning in Ottawa, as the press
looked on uncomprehendingly, Reagan inquired sharply of Mulroney
whether he really agreed with such plans to inconvenience the
US president's former employers. Mulroney swiftly promised that
no Canadian restrictive legislation would impede Hollywood's
freedom of action. Reagan beamed with satisfaction.
Today, the number of countries sequestered
from American cultural icons and imagery represented by the word
Hollywood has dwindled almost to zero, and the hold-outs are
looking increasingly frail. It is now only a matter of time before
the former Soviet Union arrives at the vassal status of Great
Britain or Brazil. (The Hollywood Reporter headlined the 1991
attempted coup by the Gang of Eight 'Soviet Coup Blow to Piracy
Fight', and called it a 'potential major setback for the Motion
Picture Association of America'.) Even India, home of the largest
domestic cinema industry on earth, is beginning to lower obstruction
to foreign penetration.
In these days of the New World Order,
Washington sets the political and Hollywood the cultural terms
of world trade. Entertainment is, after aerospace, the US's second
largest export, and exports are a matter of great import to the
movie studios. In 1990, they took in $ 1.8 billion in rental
fees inside the US and $ 1.6 billion in rentals from foreign
distributors. American films take up more than 90 per cent of
all screen time in countries as disparate as Canada, Nigeria
and Brazil. Jack Valenti, head of the film industry's international
lobbying arm, the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA), throws
around the figure of a $ 3.5 billion trade surplus for his industry.
In 1992 US audio-visual exports to Europe amounted to $ 3.7 billion
in value, while equivalent EC exports to the US amounted to only
$ 288 million.
But though the march of political and
economic empire has been the stuff of headlines ever since the
days of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, the commercial victories
of Hollywood on foreign soil have been the topic of far more
discreet record. This most notable saga has been treated as something
beautifully natural, like an Austrian child's sudden realization
that McDonald's hamburgers and fries simply taste nicer than
Knockwurst, Brot and Kartoffelsalat. So set now is Hollywood
in the idiom of planetary universalism that it requires a conscious
effort of memory to evoke the times, not long gone, when 'Americanization'
was something that in many countries was denounced and resisted
by enemies such as nationalists, ecclesiastics, and local film-makers
and entrepreneurs zealous to maintain concessions and patronage.
Such were the barricades that Hollywood's salesmen and lobbyists
aimed, from the 1920s onwards, to smash down.
Sometimes the American film industry's
mundane economic interests were clothed in exalted language,
as when the head of Paramount told the New York Times in 1946,
'We, the industry, recognize the need for informing people in
foreign lands about the things that have made America a great
country, and we think we know how to put across the message of
our democracy.' (Of course those in Hollywood who tried to send
out a different message in those crucial postwar years were swiftly
red-baited out of the business by such FBI informers as Ron Reagan.)
While mythology tells us that 'the message' of American democracy
was conveyed through the irresistibly combined charms of American
stars, stories and production values, it has actually been force-fed
to the world through the careful engineering of taste, ruthless
commercial clout, arm-twisting by the US Departments of Commerce
and State, threats of reverse trade embargoes, and other such
heavy artillery. By 1968, Valenti was boasting that 'the motion
picture industry is the only US enterprise that negotiates on
its own with foreign governments.' The moment of political truth
which struck Anthony Eden when President Eisenhower told him
to call off the Suez adventure in 1956 had struck the British
film industry, centered at Pinewood studios, nine years earlier.
By the summer of 1947, American film corporations were taking
more than $ 60 million out of Britain. This, coupled with Britain's
war debt, helped trigger a severe balance-of-payments problem.
On August 6, 1947, the postwar Labour
government, wishing to fortify cultural nationalism and repel
invasion by Hollywood, imposed a 75 per cent tax on the box-office
earnings of Hollywood films. The tax was to be paid in advance,
on the basis of estimated revenues. On August 9, Hollywood, in
the form of the MPEA, retaliated with an indefinite suspension
of all films to Britain. The co-founder of Pinewood studios,
J Arthur Rank, announced that to fill the breach he would undertake
the production of 47 films at a vast capital outlay, the largest
commitment to film ever made in Britain.
But the Labour government was buckling
under fierce pressure from the US. On May 3, 1948, the 75 per
cent levy was abandoned and replaced by a ceiling on profits
that could be repatriated to Hollywood. The Hollywood films came
flooding back, just in time to sink the hastily produced and
cheap material being put out by Rank. By the 1950s, all British
resistance had collapsed. Across the Channel, the same battles
were being fought and won by Hollywood. The US economic package
designed to bail out a France bankrupted by war was withheld
by US Secretary of State James Byrnes until prime minister Leon
Blum agreed to annul the import quota which limited Hollywood
to 120 American films a year. Blum told the French movie magnates
that he was fully prepared to sacrifice the entire French film
industry to get an agreement.
Surrender followed. The French war debt
was erased and France given a 30-year, $ 318 million loan along
with $ 650 million in credits from the Export-Import Bank. But
the collapse on quotas dealt the French film industry a near-fatal
blow. Half the studios closed and unemployment in the industry
soon reached 75 per cent. The number of workers employed in the
French film industry dropped from 2,132 in 1946 to 898 in 1947.
Another round of layoffs in 1948 chopped 60 per cent of the remaining
workforce.
This defeat duly produced an ironic sort
of Vichy regime, in the form of young French cineastes immersing
themselves in the American movies now flooding the country, evolving
the auteurs and movie pantheon that had enthusiasts of my generation
in the early Sixties scuttling from one end of London to the
other, Cahiers du Cinema in hand, trying to track down B-pictures
by Sam Fuller, Frank Tashlin and other Hollywood favorites of
the French crowd.
If my own home in Ireland in the mid-1950s
was anything to go by, US cultural imperialism was not meeting
with much in the way of stiff resistance. My father toiled away,
doing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. Time magazine
arrived each week. At school, under the leadership of Miles Kington,
our jazz band (in which I played bass) rehearsed New Orleans
blues. The third record I ever bought was a blues '78 by Leroy
Carr. We weren't alone. At the art schools around London, lads
like Keith Richard were working their way through the classics
of R&B, from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf
and B B King.
What Hoggart, tautly defensive of British
working-class culture and traditions, didn't quite get was that
American culture was liberating, whether in the form of blues,
jazz, rock, or prose. Here was escape from airless provincialism,
BBC good taste and the mandates of the class system, which Raymond
Chandler caught so well in his discussion of style: "The
tone quality of English speech is usually overlooked. This is
infinitely variable. The American voice is flat, toneless and
tiresome. The English tone quality makes a thinner vocabulary
and a more formalized use of language capable of infinite meanings.
Its tones of course are read into written speech by association.
This makes good English a class language and that is its fatal
defect. The English writer is a gentleman first and a writer
second."
It was the difference between Dashiell
Hammett and Agatha Christie, the Beats against the home crowd.
It's not hard to pick out the great defeats
which signalled the true nature of the 'special relationship'
and British inferiority in technology and R&B. Politically,
Suez summed up the whole situation sharply enough. The Comet--Britain's
effort to build a long-range passenger jet--kept crashing because
the designers hadn't properly figured out the vibration stresses
on the windows. In the early 1960s, Defence Minister Dennis Healey
cancelled the TSR2, beaten into the ground by General Dynamic's
F-111,itself a disaster, also a pay-off by JFK to the Chicago
Mob. The staggering success of the MG and the Triumph sports
cars which helped make England, between 1947 and the early 1960s,
the leading exporter of automobiles, inexorably wilted under
the duress of managerial incompetence and archaic manufacturing
processes.
And yet the MG, brought back to the United
States by American servicemen after the war, could have been
described by some American nativist Hoggart as just the same
intimation of invasive cultural imperialism as the milk-bar was
to Hoggart himself. Detroit had no response, beyond the baroque
glories of the tailfin era, which never answered the design or
mechanical challenge of the MG and Triumph directly, but loudly
changed the subject. By the mid-Sixties, our American Hoggart
was having to deal with the invasion of the Beatles in 1964 and
subsequent years of dominance of British bands, whether The Who,
the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. There
were Laura Ashley prints and Crabtree & Evelyn jams mellowing
the rude shanties and preserves of the frontiersfolk. There was
the British pub. And this was only the beginning.
I should at this point unveil the argument,
already emerging in silhouette. We can show with copious illustration
how America came to dominate British economic and, to a considerable
extent, political and cultural life. It wasn't long after Bill
Clinton's victory in 1992 that political stylists from the Labor
Party were studying his techniques with all the rapture of Elvis
Look-alikes lip-synching 'Love Me Tender'. This domination has
extended gradually down the years, penetrating publishing, television,
music and, on the bottom line, film.
But from the British side have come equally
potent invasions. Benignly, the British music invasion saved
American blues. When Keith Richard first saw Muddy Waters, the
latter was painting the walls of the Chess recording studios
because he had no musical work at the time. The Stones, mostly,
put the great American blues singers back into the big time.
Malignly, from Albion's fatal shore came
the glorification of the British class idea, at a particularly
fraught moment in American political and cultural life, when--in
the wake of the Watergate scandal--government and corporate institutions
were in disrepute and businessmen actually lower than journalists
in public esteem. American Public Broadcasting, theoretically
a venue for talent and ideas barred from the commercial TV networks,
became a showcase for Masterpiece Theater, oil-company sponsored
and devoted to endless episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs and well-mannered
British actors togged up in Victorian or Edwardian fancy dress.
By the late Seventies, young American
fogeys were aping Evelyn Waugh at his most loutish, with their
noses dipped into Oakeshott or, more likely, getting their world
history straight from Paul Johnson. Just as stylists from the
Labor Party raced to mime the Clinton thing, the Reagan crowd
before them had their model in Thatcherism, herald to the Age
of Ron, same way Curtis LeMay, in the Pacific theater, held "Bomber"
Harris in high esteem as his guide in the arts of killing very
large numbers of civilians with high explosive and incendiaries.
Masterpiece Theater brought gentrification to the TV screen and
the British hacks brought their vulgar arts to the National Enquirer
and later, under Rupert Murdoch's supervision, the New York Post.
Study the literature of the paranoid American right and you'll
usually find, at the apex of the conspiracy to sap American freedoms,
a 'British-Zionist' plot.
In a timbre certainly less drear than
the shadow of Margaret Thatcher, the impact of Ian Fleming and
of his creation, James Bond, nicely illustrates the British imperial
contribution. Fleming wrote the memo that inspired the charter
of General Donovan's Central Office of Intelligence, which later
evolved into OSS, and still later into the CIA. In 1960 Fleming
was taken to dinner at the home of Senator Jack Kennedy, and
held the room riveted with an amusing scheme for the US to drop
leaflets over Cuba, with the compliments of the Soviet Union,
announcing that, due to American atom bomb tests, the atmosphere
over the island had become radioactive; that radioactivity is
held longest in beards; and that radioactivity makes men impotent.
As a consequence, Cubans would shave off their beards and without
beards there could be no Cuban revolution.
The day after, Allen Dulles, head of
the CIA, told a friend of Fleming's that he was sorry he had
not been present to hear Fleming's plan in person. Within two
years the Kennedy brothers, along with Dulles, were hiring gangsters
to help either in the murder of Castro or in his humiliation,
the latter being attempted by proposed application of a dust
that would make his beard fall out. In 1961 Hugh Sidey of Time
magazine announced that the President had 10 favourite books,
of which one of Fleming's was ninth, just ahead of Stendhal's
Scarlet and Black. (Sidey later admitted that he and Kennedy
had made up most of the list, though probably not the Fleming)
along with the widely-broadcast fantasy that JFK read at a rate
of 1,200 words a minute.
Bond became the embodiment of Western
discourse on the Cold War. The ur Reaganites watched Thunderball
and conceived the idea that terrorists, probably Libyan, would
steal atomic bombs and attack American cities. They watched the
lasers in Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever, plus the 'particle
beam' in a Bond sequel novel called For Special Services, and
came up with the space-based defence system later known to the
world as SDI.
Thus has evolved not so much a cultural
imperialism but a mutually reinforcing culture of capital, with
all the oft-advertised propensities of capital to degrade, vulgarize,
constrict, or, as the argot has it now, 'tabloidize'. British
TV executives justify the plunge into whatever unidimensional
crudities they have in mind by pointing to the necessity of pleasing
the American co-producers--and, putatively, American audiences--essential
to financial survival. But while the transnational capitalist
crowd have been happily co-operative in their manipulation and
degrading of the cultures, outlaw cultures have made their brave,
sometimes prosperous, and mostly brief stands. American blues
nurtured the dreams and the fortunes of Lennon and Jagger.
Fifteen years after, the dreams of youth
utterly desolate or commodified, British punk gave expression
and a fighting spirit (if not much in the way of fortune) to
dour and alienated American children previously transfixed by
disco. Kurt Cobain, young, rich and dead, inherited and remodelled
that tradition. There are lots of wrecks littering both sides
of this two-way street.
Fifty years on from VE Day, the big cultural
entrepreneurs experience little hindrance in their zeal for the
commodification and vulgarising of more or less everything, but
there's always still that space, at the margins, for originality,
whose integrity may only survive for the briefest of moments.
These are the moments none the less that prevent the cultures
both sides of the Atlantic from becoming irrecuperably sterile.
This essay is excerpted from CounterPunch's
forthcoming book Serpents
in the Garden: Liaisons with Culture and Sex. (AK Press).
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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