|
July 6, 2002
Mark Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
Weekend
Edition
July 6, 2002
Loose
Lips
Liberty,
Democracy and Bush
by Gavin Keeney
Instead of mouthing the words "liberty"
and "democracy", illiberally and demotively, George
W. Bush might consider the universal implications (the ideal
lineaments) of Liberty and Democracy. But anyway, please don't
hold your breath.
The so-called president's limited IQ
has some bearing on this conundrum. What in the world have his
Yale and Harvard degrees done for him?
One has to wonder in general if political
rhetoric is simply political rhetoric, or if there is a possible
signified lurking somewhere between the lines. Does the word
"liberty" have a concept? Does the word "democracy"
have an implied ethical dimension?
If so, then the next question is "Who
owns these terminologies?" Our best collective hunch might
be absolutely no one, since they are by definition abstractions.
Does the merely nominal nature of the terms "liberty"
and "democracy" account for the in-one-ear-and-out-the-other
quality of political rhetoric? Are these terms, therefore, bankrupt?
Well (as Ronald Reagan used to say quite
a lot) ... George seems to think he knows what they mean and
he has expended quite a lot of words to tell us what he seems
to think they mean, including words at war with themselves insofar
as he contradicts himself from one minute to the next (from one
speech to the next). It is apparent that these two words have
a temporal meaning in the nouvelle-vague, Orwellian world of
the Bush League.
"Liberty" means, of course,
privileges for the elect -- a kind of neo-Calvinist school of
thought where you are damned in advance if you have not somehow
wrested a sizeable income from either: a/ your parents; b/ investments;
or c/ crony capitalist machinations and etcetera. This is, after
all, the "End of History", and winner takes all.
"Democracy" means, on the other
hand, U.S.-approved puppet regimes as far as the blind eye can
see, plus free market cowboy-capitalism with its attendent woes
-- i.e., currency speculation, capital flight, and round-robin
indentured servitude (for "emerging markets"!) to international
financial institutions that are merely the stalking horses for
the neo-imperial aspirations of the economic elite.
Attending more to rhetoric than the Real
Thing, Bush has made almost anyone with a conscience (again an
abstract thing) uncomfortable. Clearly more at home with syntactical
operations (even though these are, hopelessly, a serious challenge
for the president), Bush seems to either not care about semantics
or is oblivious that words usually have meanings. Are we to assume
that the president is a brilliant post-structuralist? A savvy
devotee of circular, nihilist language games?
I don't think so ... Bush only speaks
when the words are prepared in advance by his guardians. As ward
of the state, the president can only do what he is told. This
brings to mind the apparitional (repressed) golem stalking the
American republic. This thing, meant to protect us, has turned
into a monster prepared to devour our last principles, including
"liberty" and "democracy". This beast is
an amalgam of the National Security State, the plutocracy, and
corporatism (a.k.a. "globalism").
Bush was placed in the Oval rocking chair
by this amalgam. This amalgam is NOT structural -- it is very
real -- but composed of "spectral" neo-Americans. Neo-Americans
are essentially post-modern vampyres. This gang has hijacked
the U.S. economy, foreign affairs, all forms of popular media,
the Congress, the judiciary, the military, and -- tragically
-- language itself.
This all reminds me of a Robert Heinlein
novella, "Magic, Inc." (1942), wherein demons have
taken over the U.S. government, "magic" has been corporatized,
and a cadre of independent magicians endeavors to sort things
out. The great climax of the novella involves a heroic descent
into Hell, led by an Oxford educated African shaman, to do battle
with the Evil One himself.
Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York, New
York. and the author of On
the Nature of Things, a book documenting the travails
of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.
He can be reached at: ateliermp@netscape.net
This Weekend's
Features
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|