Today's Stories

September 27 / 28, 2008

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

Weekend Edition
September 27 / 28, 2008

No Laughing Matter

War Jokes Wanted

By MARC LEVY and SUSAN ERONY

Colonel:  What is that you've got written on your helmet?

Pvt. Joker:  Born to Kill, sir. 

Colonel:  You write "Born to Kill" on your helmet and you wear a peace button.  What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?! 

Pvt. Joker:  No, sir.

Hasford, Herr, Kubrick: Full Metal Jacket

T he well known Uncle Sam portrait pointing at you, but emblazoned on his left breast, combat ribbons, and above and below him the fiery red phrase "I Want Your War Jokes From Hell! And beneath this the tidy message: "Widely published Nam vet seeks your best combat jokes to teach civilians the grim, raw truth of war.  Any war, any branch of service."

The basic assumption was simple: place the ad at VAwatchdog.org, with Armytimes in hard copy, send out informal queries, contact Iraq/Afghanistan veteran associations; the gallows humor will roll in.  Our friend Larry Scott, web master at VAwatchdog.org even profiled the project: we hoped to write a book on combat jokes with essays that explained why soldiers resort to dark humor under extreme circumstances.  We did not want the puff pieces once gamely trotted out in Humor in Uniform, a monthly Readers Digest collection of old-time military gags which put a smiley face on horror.  We sought tasteless, obscene, unforgivable lawless jokes whose wit and irony strips war bare of its mythic bones, looks death full in the face and laughs because that's all that one can do.

Despite our best efforts, veterans struggled with the concept; they sent in cute vignettes, war stories, or clean cut bits on inter-service rivalry.  In the end we received barely a half dozen items that conveyed how war numbs the soul; kills it, the better to survive, and how humor, in service to survival, reflects that demonic courage.

Its possible that far from the heated stink of carnage, combat vets may tell battle gags to unsuspecting civilians, or to other vets, then may set aside the jokes they carried.  Misunderstood on the home front, freighted with secret guilt and shame, after a time, far from the bullet's madding crowd, gallows humor may lose its healing cautery.  The next step may be years of denial, or therapy, or both.

Foolosophy 101

Nam vet, teacher, and distinguished writer Larry Heinemann, author of  Pacos Story (National Book Award), Close Quarters (some say the best fictional account on the Vietnam War) and Black Virgin Mountain, sent this gem:

"A colonel and his sergeant major chopper out to a landing zone to see for themselves the aftermath of a large and bloody firefight.  There was heavy fighting, and many casualties on both sides. When they arrive the American KIAs are lined up shoulder to shoulder in back of the makeshift aid station, covered with ponchos and waiting for the choppers to come fetch them.  There are many, many bodies.  The colonel and the sergeant major slowly make their way down the line, lifting the flaps of the ponchos to view the faces.  The colonel looks more and more troubled the farther down the line he goes, and is truly upset.  Finally he looks over to the sergeant major and says, "All so young.  What a pity. What a waste.  Sergeant Major, how old do you think these boys are?"  The sergeant major looks at the colonel, and says, "They're all dead, Colonel.  That's as old as you get."

Only veterans laughed at the cruel tag line. The joke spoofs superior rank and pathos. A Quixotic colonel is upended by his Sergeant Majors Sancho Panza.  Instead of pity or sorrow, the satiric punch line cracks a simpletons smile over the gauntlet of corpses.  But the simpleton is no fool. The good Sergeants knife-edge clarity has been won through repeated jousts with mortal danger.  His understated last line is a moral coup de grace.

Drop Dead Funny

Former Lieutenant Fred Angyo Tomasello Jr., author of Walking Wounded: Memoir of a Combat Veteran, wrote in, "I never thought anyone would want to hear this," then unleashed this tasty tale: "On February 1, 1968, my Marines responded to an attack on the Cam Lo District Headquarters near the Demilitirized Zone.  My platoon was tasked with counting the dead and wounded. I assigned the job to Frenchy's fire team. Artillery had butchered the enemy bodies. Heads, many still wearing helmets, were separated from torsos. Arms and legs were scattered all over the battlefield. The NVA had dug shallow trenches under the barbed wire and used sand to try to cover their dead. "Goddamn, they're all fucked up, one of  Frenchy's men complains. "They're probably booby trapped too.  I ain't touching any dead gooks. Frenchy shoves him in the chest and yells, "What the fuck's wrong with you? You chicken-shit or something?  Here!  Here's how you do it." Frenchy grabs an ankle sticking up from a shallow trench and tugs as hard as he can. The soldiers body jerks out of the ditch, his other leg flops behind him and the leg that Frenchy's holding snaps from the body.  Frenchy holds the leg up at me and smiles. "Hey, Lieutenant, he says, "Lets grab one leg each and make a wish."

Civilians find this tale repugnant.  How could tough well disciplined US troops laugh as they violate enemy losses?  And why, forty years later, did combat vets belly laugh at the grisly punch line?

The teller of this gruesome event illustrates how war exceeds the boundaries of normal human experience.  Reprised is a dreadful graveyard. An officer is again paired with an enlisted counterpart, who fumbles his task.

By invoking superstition, Frenchy pokes fun at himself, and assumes the Lieutenant will join him in laughter. Why? Because counting corpses is normal.  It has been done many times. War wisdom counsels caution but do the job, marine, and do it right.  Rocket, mortar and sapper attacks, day and night ambushes, hunting and being hunted by human beings, have bled all mercy from these men.  They are numb to gods, immune to devils. They act in league with death, they have become it, which frees them to mock with sublime wit their mirror image.

"Mental survival depended on the ability to view life as a black comedy," said holocaust survivor Thomas Retjo, author of The Reluctant Adventurer.  Or as former Lieutenant Tomasello, Jr wrote, "If you don't laugh, you'll cry."  Both might agree that in the valleys and shadows of death hope dies last.

Home Before Mourning

Battle jokes are a unique route to understanding the war experience. They are defense mechanisms, neither self-nor other destructive. Grim GI gags create and reflect a necessary distance from the situation that is their subject. This gap allows soldiers to continue their dirty work in hell's deadly canyons.  The battlefield joker assumes power over the powerless dead, the nightmare of frightfully mangled, human beings. Cruel jests defuse chaos. With a devils grin war jokes sardonically enervate or erase the rationalized purpose, the  moral and psychological impacts of taking lives, or losing them.  They wittily  give meaning to war by standing meaning on its head.

How to Say Uncle and Influence People

The following arrived from net friend Tommy Skeins, web master of buffgrunt.com, a site dedicated to the Americal's 4/3 Light Infantry Brigade, one of several units at My Lai: 

Little Bobby and his 6th grade class were given the assignment of writing a fairy tale with a moral ending. The next day, the teacher first called on Susie, who wrote about not counting your chickens before they're hatched. Then came Mary, whose story involved not crying wolf.  Then, it was Little Bobby's turn.  "My uncle Tony was in Vietnam and one time he went on a combat assault," he said.  "On the way, he drank a case of beer, then jumped off the helicopter and killed 100 Viet Cong.  He killed the first 80 with his rifle, 10 with his pistol and clubbed the other 10 to death. After that, he took a knife and a pair of pliers and yanked out all the gold teeth from the dead Viet Cong. The teacher was aghast and blurted out: "Bobby, that's horrible! What possible moral can you get from that awful story?" Little Bobby shrugged and said: "Don't fuck with my uncle Tony when he's been drinking.

What makes this 'home from combat' joke funny? Foremost is the point of view: children convey the scope of war and its aftermath.  Naive female 6th graders, aided by a prudish teacher, are pitted against an impish male braggart.  Challenged to defend his tale, the obscenity of Bobby's reply is twofold. There is the adult-like ambush of foul language, and the little one's summary of the immense power men wield in war, and wars power to destroy them.

Let The Bad Times Roll

In 1972 Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Poets award for "Obscenities," re-issued by Carnegie-Mellon in 2002.  A gem among many in the book is the poem "A Bummer." In twenty-six stark lines, Casey depicts an encounter between a column of tracks (mechanized vehicles), a peasant farmer, and the TC (track commander).  The poem's last mordant lines and final barbed flourish could have been written yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

A Bummer

We were going single file
Through his rice paddies
And the farmer
Started hitting the lead track
With a rake
He wouldn't stop
The TC went to talk to him
And the farmer
Tried to hit him too
So the tracks went sideways
Side by side
Through the guys fields
Instead of single file
Hard On, Proud Mary
Bummer, Wallace, Rosemary's Baby
The Rutgers Road Runner
And
Go Get Em-Done Got Em
Went side by side
Through the fields
If you have a farm in Vietnam
And a house in hell
Sell the farm
And go home

*   *   *  

Such things and worse transpire in combat's ironic cauldron, and will continue, until unwanted American troops, struggling to hold out in foreign lands with dignity, depart.  Even then a blood trail of guilt, shame and sorrow will long shadow their lives, and those they love.  And that, Mr. Bring Em On, is no laughing matter.

Marc Levy was an infantry medic with Delta 1/7 First Cavalry in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1970.  He can be reached at silverspartan@gmail.com.

Susan Erony is an artist and art historian who has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US.  She can be reached at  erony1@verizon.net. 

Fred Angyo Tomasello's book is available at http://web.mac.com/kbft2929/iWeb/WalkingWounded/Welcome.html.

Larry Scott's VAwatchdog.org profile on War Jokes Wanted is at http://www.vawatchdog.org/08/nf08/nfJUL08/nf070708-1.htm.

Obscenities, by Michael Casey, is available at: http://www.cmu.edu/universitypress/browse/

(poem used by permission of the author)

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont