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Today's
Stories
January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
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
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
Topiary,
an Excerpt
Hall
of Hoaxes
By ADAM ENGEL
Took a brief but necessary vacation to visit the
world famous City Museum Complex.
The plaque outside The Hall of Hoaxes
read, "Everything the City promised you, but never delivered.
Everything the Nation promised you, but never delivered."
Hyperbole, true, but what can one expect
from The Hall of Hoaxes?
The Hall featured exhibit upon exhibit
of hoaxes hoaxed upon citizens of the previous century. Lot of
money during those Main Street days when Citizens gladly paid
to be bamboozled. Who can forget the Great Hoax of the Giant
unearthed? This alleged precursor to the Citizens' glory was,
like all artifacts in the museum, an enormous but lucrative fake
created from limestone. Neuter (so squeamish were the Main Street
days Citizens that few questioned the naked Giant's missing genitalia).
The Giant was displayed again, after the hoax was revealed, earning
thrice the loot as people queued up to gaze upon the "false
ancestor who gulled millions."
Am I a hoax? No exhibit for me here.
Nor for promises broken by friends, lovers, teachers, innocence
lost, disappointing lives...only the big things, the obvious
things. The two-headed boy and the shin-bone of an angel. Skull
of an alien from outer space and a handwritten love letter from
God...
Disfigured fetuses in pickle jars; dinosaur
eggs; cavemen preserved in ice. All sorts of freaks and hoaxes,
but none so famous as the Fossil Giant, nine feet tall, three
feet wide sleeping, arms folded across his great expanse of chest
and sleeping peacefully on a slab of marble. His existence carved
meticulously from limestone, down to the detailed pores in his
bone-white skin.
The Giant had been unearthed in the heart
of the Nation, somewhere out West, suggesting that before the
Indians a great race roamed the land, the true inheritors of
The Nation's great expanse of real estate. The perfidious Indians
stole their land.
The City con-man impresario, originator
of the hoax, intimated the original people of the Nation - not
Indians - were a race of friendly Super Giants. White. Specimen
pulled from the ground petrified, but intact. Nomadic hordes
migrating from the North, later to be known as "Indians,"
slaughtered these Giants and ate them, grinding their bones to
foot powder and aphrodisiacs. Away, away the community and culture
of these friendly Titans. Dead. Hence, whatever Citizens of the
Nation later did to the Indians was well deserved.
"Many people parted with their money
to gaze upon the face of this giant unearthed during the height
of the Indian wars," Plantman read from pamphlet. "One
day an honest archeologist, posing as a typical rustic of the
Nation - for scientists were not allowed anywhere near the Giant
- exposed the giant for the Pygmy that it was: a life-like statue
carved from stone.
"Headlines read 'Giant Hoax,' and
much newsprint was devoted to the sham, which had already become
famous worldwide, generating literature and speculation of a
master race of Giants (some people in the Nation believe the
legend of the Giants to this day).
"Unexpectedly, even for cynics of
the Nation, the Giant and its creator made even more money after
the hoax was exposed. People gladly paid to see the statue now
billed as the 'False Giant who fooled millions.'
"Even those who saw the Giant the
first time parted with twice the money to review the piece of
stone that had duped them and so mesmerized the Nation."
I pocketed the pamphlet, scrutinized
Giant. Old Time Main Street decorum: the naked Giant had no testicles
or penis.
I left the Hall of Hoaxes somewhat disappointed.
I had expected bigger, more immediate, contemporary hoaxes to
be revealed. Perhaps the hoaxes of today are quieter, less visible,
more discreet. Perhaps the Citizens of today are more subtly
fooled.
Adam Engel
can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net.
This is an excerpt of a longer piece
called Topiary.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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