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Today's Stories December 29 / 30, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Options in America: Kill Yourself or Have a Baby December 28, 2007 Farzana Versey The Complex Electra Wajahat Ali A Pakistani Requiem Binoy Kampmark Death in Rawalpindi: Bhutto and Her Legacy Ayesha Ijaz Khan Not Dead Yet: The Pakistan People's Party Still Survives Anthony DiMaggio Turkey's Bombing of Iraq Ray McGovern Creeping Fascism Jim Goodman Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going Ron Jacobs Transcending the Colonizer's History: Iran, a People Interrupted Russell Hoffman Mini-Nukes by Toshiba John Murphy Greens Gone Wild Website of the Day Guiliani Campaign Official: "Only Rudy Can Defeat the Muslims"   December 27, 2007 Dilip Hiro A Tragedy Foretold: Will Bhutto's Death be a Boost for Her Party? Murtaza Shibli Who Killed Bhutto? Stephen Soldz Fallujah, the Information War and U.S. Propaganda Bill Quigley Locked Outside the Gates Paul Craig Roberts The Great American Lock-Up Omer Subhani Killing Bhutto: What Happens Next in Pakistan? Marjorie Cohn The Torture Tape Cover-Up: How High Does It Go? Allan Nairn Cataclysm By Money Whim Jacob G. Hornberger Smearing Ron Paul: Shame on the NYT Norman Solomon Channeling Suze Orman Patrick Irelan Rumsfeld Spills the Ink Ben Tripp Pass the Razor Blades Website of the Day Quagmire, For What It's Worth   December 26, 2007 Charles Tripp From One Saddam to Fifty Paul Armentano No-Knock, You're Dead Rannie Amiri Lebanon in Search of a Government Stanley Heller Brzezinski and Charlie Wilson's War John Walsh Two Unreasonable Men Martha Rosenberg The Strange Career of Scott Gottlieb Norman Madarasz Bolivia Amends New Constitution and Faces Mutiny from Within Website of the Day Cockburn at the Battle of Ideas   December 25, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Conscience and Empire December 24, 2007 Andrea Peacock A Dark Ride on the Border Tariq Ali Thinking of Edward Said Uri Avnery Help! A Ceasefire! Jill Jameson Burma is Not Back to Normal: A Trip from Rangoon to Mae Sot Steve Melendez Russell Means Goes to Washington Mike Whitney The Big Fix Chuck Munson Not Getting It About New Orleans John Walsh Clueless Crusaders Farzana Versey Tony Blair and the Hawking of Religion Richard Neville Dreaming of a White House Christmas Website of the Day Back in the USSR December 22 / 23, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Mike Huckabee's Ascending Chariot Ralph Nader Politics and Profits: How the Oil Cartel Gets Its Way Andy Worthington Intelligence Failures, Battlefield Myths and Unaccountable Prisons in Afghanistan Ahmad Faruqui The Comedian of Pakistan Bill Moyers Society on Steroids Rev. William E. Alberts Blessed are the Peacemakers Timothy J. Freeman From Kant to Lennon: Can War Really be Over? Anthony DiMaggio Democrats Continue to Capitulate on Iraq Fred Gardner Molecule of the Year, Cannabiodiol Paul Krassner Enhanced Hazing Techniques Seth Sandronsky 17 Years of Meanness: Repealing California's Three Strikes Law William Loren Katz Christmas Eve Freedom Fighters: Recalling the Battle of Lake Okeechobee Michael Dickinson In the Dungeon of the Zabita Ron Jacobs Why Leon Russell Still Matters David Vest Doyle Bramhall's "Is It News?" Poets' Basement Orloski, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend George W. Hates Santa   December 21, 2007 John Ross New Massacres Loom in Mexico Jacob Hornberger Nothing Can Morally Justify the Invasion of Iraq Dick J. Reavis A Way Out of the Newspaper Abyss Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon The 2007 P.U.-litzer Prizes Peter Morici Business as Usual as Recession Looms Jack McCarthy Let Us Now Praise Judith Regan (Even If She Did Sleep with Bernie Kerik) Raúl Zibechi Sex and Revolution Steve Early How the Presidential Candidates Made Me an Atheist David Macaray Union Aftermath Patrick Bond Zuma, the Center-Left and the Left-Left in S. Africa Lakota Freedom Delegation A Declaration of Independence from the USA Website of the Day Solomon v. Beck: Tale of the Tape   December 20, 2007 David Rosen Mitt Romney's Secret Life as a Pornographer Alan Farago The Huckster and the Wreckage: Jeb Bush and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis Laura Carlsen Standing Up to NAFTA Ashley Dawson The Return of the Bread Riot Wayne Smith and Jennifer Schuett Cuba Changes, US Policy Stagnates Website of the Day How to Talk to a FoxNews Reporter   December 19, 2007 Saul Landau Is the NIE Bush's Watergate? Paul W. Lovinger Hillary the Hawk Norman Solomon The Mad Corporate World of Glenn Beck Dave Zirin George Mitchell's Drugs of Choice Marjorie Cohn Bush Still Spinning Iranian Nukes Sen. Russell Feingold The Iraq War is Exhausting Our Nation Sonja Karkar A Christmas Reflection on Palestine Anthony Papa Open the Drug Gulags Christopher Ketcham Pave the Holy Lands with Good Intentions Davey D Britney's Little Sister is Pregnant: Should We Blame Hip Hop? Website of the Day When Republicans Use the F-Word on TV   December 18, 2007 R. F. Blader The Politics of Teen Pregnancy George Wuerthner Gunning for Wolves in Idaho Steven Higgs Can the NAFTA Superhighway be Stopped? Vijay Prashad Encounters with Ghadar David Macaray The Free Rider Problem Ralph Nader Nine Books That Make a Difference: a Reading List for the Holidays Eva Liddell Privatizing War Abroad, Invading Privacy at Home Martha Rosenberg While the Bodies are Still Warm: Drugs, Shrinks and Shooters Dave Lindorff When Impeachment is Out of Print Peter Morici The Consequences the Trade Deficit Website of the Day Ron Paul: How Fascism Will Come to America   December 17, 2007 Mike Whitney Staring Into the Abyss Tom Barry Planning the War on Immigrants Uri Avnery A Gaza Masada? Greg Moses Crossing the Line in Texas Allan Nairn Terrorism; Counter- Terrorism: Excuses for Murder Patrick Bond South Africa's Fight Between Hostile Brothers Stephen Lendman Police State America Charles Jonkel Grizzly Right of Way Laray Polk An Inside-Out Crisis in Gaza Stephen Fleischman Pawns in Their Game December 15 / 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh A People's Penny for the Magna Carta Howard Zinn Bomb After Bomb Standard Schaefer The Greening of Big Tobacco Raymond J. Lawrence Let's Take Christ Out of Christmas Alan Farago Down on Desolation Row: the Vultures and the Growth Machine Saul Landau Lord Byron and the Bad Tourists Jenna Orkin Lying to "Reassure" the Public: Bush's EPA and the Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up Ahmad Samih Khalidi Why a Palestinian "State" is a Punitive Construct Robert Fantina Politics By Photo-Op Missy Comley Beattie Resistance Amid the Ruins Ramzy Baroud Of Mormons and Muslims James L. Secor A Vision for China's Future Elijah Wald Ike Turner's Music Won't be Forgotten Website of the Weekend The Alliance for the Wild Rockies Needs (and Deserves) Your Support   December 14, 2007 JoAnn Wypijewski The Dirty Cad: What Giuliani's Sex Life Tells Us About Him John Ross Iraqi Refugees Return: One Cruel Hoax Jacob Hornberger Terror Suspects Belong in Federal Court Andy Worthington Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? Allan Nairn "Shoot Them on the Spot": Rewarding War Crimes Dave Zirin The Mitchell Report: Absolving the Owners Dave Lindorff The First Cut is the Deepest Misty MacDuffee Toxic Grizzlies Ben Terrall What Happened to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine? Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi Prerequisites for Peace Website of the Day Sen. Kit Bond: "Waterboarding is Like Swimming"   December 13, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Shrinking the Dollar from the Inside-Out Mike Whitney Dershowitz for the Defense--of Waterboarding Ron Jacobs Blank Check DemocratsL the Great War Funding Conspiracy Norman Solomon The USA's Human Rights Daze Peter Morici The Dragon and the Toothless Dog: China Doesn't Flinch Sandy Mayes Blocking the Strykers: 13 Days of War Resistance at Port Olympia Franklin Lamb The UN in Lebanon: Whose Mission Is It Fulfilling? Jacob Hornberger Don't Reform the CIA, Abolish It Nadim Rouhana An Interloper in My Own Land Dave Zirin On Pigskin and Petrol Website of the Day Rachel's Needs (and Deserves) Your Support! December 12, 2007 Allan Nairn US Intelligence is Tapping Indonesian Phones Alan Farago How Sprawl Eats Its Young Ray McGovern Torture, Lies and Videotape Winslow T. Wheeler The Phony Pentagon Budget Cuts Evan Jones The Raid on Great Western: Why an Australian Bank Might Spell Doom for the US Farm Belt James Petras An Open Letter to Sarkozy on the Exchange of Political Prisonsers Joel Hirschorn The Horserace Fiction: Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Machine Joshua Frank Why Ron Paul Deserves Our Attention Sherry Wolf Why the Left Should Reject Ron Paul Dan Bacher Survey of a Fish Graveyard Website of the Day Men Eating Bugs   December 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn What's Really Happened During the Surge? Diana Johnstone The Next Kosovo War Paul Craig Roberts It's Waco All Over Again: Preventive Detention and the Constitution David Macaray Impasse in Hollywood Ralph Nader Gail Collins Versus the Underdogs Andy Worthington Guantánamo Britons to be Released: a Mixed Result Martha Rosenberg No Holiday for High Risk Sex Workers Steve Champion / Anthony Ross Words for Our Brother, Tookie Williams Kim Nicolini Tangled Up in Dylan Michael Dickinson Say Goodbye to Purgatory: Pope Rat Gets Indulgent Website of the Day A Charming (and Worthy) Pitch December 10, 2007 Uri Avnery How They Stole the Bomb From Us Debbie Nathan The Perils of Journalism and Child Porn JoAnn Wypijewski Is There a Left Here Left? If So, What Can It Do? Steve Kelly Cheap Chips, Counterfeit Wilderness Donna J. Volatile Welcome to the Revolution   December 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Coup Against Bush and Cheney Brenda Norrell Seize the Land, Chain the Peace Activists Saul Landau The Ruins of Empire R. F. Blader A Rape in Every Drink? Ray McGovern Spinning Iran's Centrifuges Allan Nairn Imposed Hunger in Gaza, the Army in Indonesia Linn Washington, Jr Spotlight on Death Row Paul Craig Roberts When Will Bush Come Clean?   December 7, 2007 Sean Penn Piano Wire Puppeteers Arthur Versluis Mining Water in the Desert M. G. Piety Racism and the American Psyche: Some Thoughts on Race and Intelligence Pam Martens Banksters Gone Wild Alan Farago Will the Free Market Kill Suburbia? Sprawl and the Credit Crisis Allan Nairn It Takes (Out) a Village Col. Dan Smith Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday Alice Slater The Iran Opening Robert Weissman The Story of Stuff Website of the Day Something About Mitt   December 5, 2007 Mike Whitney Why the CFR Hates Putin Sharon Smith The Anti-War Enablers: Tom Hayden and the Dead End Democrats James Petras Venezuela in the Aftermath Ron Jacobs The Iran Charade Dave Zirin Kicking a Dead Man: the Sliming of Sean Taylor John V. Whitbeck Two States or One? Time to Choose Peter Zinn Covered in New Orleans Niranjan Ramakrishnan Impeach Pelosi Instead Alan Farago The Credit Bomb Detonates in Florida Heather Gray US Meddling in Australian Politics Website of the Day A Donner Summit Night Before Xmas   December 4, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Jackboot State Stubs Its Toe in Ann Arbor Andy Worthington Guantánamo and the Supreme Court Paul Craig Roberts The Lies at the End of the American Dream Ray McGovern No-Nuke Iran Winslow T. Wheeler Admiral Mullen and the Defense Budget: When White Elephants are Too Small Allan Nairn The Regime Still Stands in Burma, Where "the People Just Want Food" Russell Mokhiber The USA v. Al Arian Nikolas Kozloff As Chávez Falters: Raising the Stakes for the South American Left John V. Walsh Peace Movement Paralyzed Ghada Ageel Will Peace Cost Me My Home? Stephen Soldz The Facts be Damned!: Psychologists' President Defends Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations Website of the Day Hands Off the People of Iran     December 3, 2007 Tariq Ali Venezuela After the Referendum Bill Quigley New Orleans: Bulldozers for the Poor, Tax Credits for Developers Eric Walberg The Bible and Middle East History Uri Avnery After Annapolis Marjorie Cohn Operation Iraqi Freedom Exposed Dave Lindorff Vengeance Isn't Sweet Stephen Fleischman Homeless in Paradise Martha Rosenberg Perp Walks for the Mink Clad on Chicago's Mag Mile Website of the Day So Just Lead!   December 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Emblems of the Bush Age: Adrift in a Sea of Booze Jeffrey St. Clair The Bear Minimum: the Grizzly and the Future of the Rocky Mountain West Mike Whitney "Iraq Doesn't Exist Anymore": an Interview with Nir Rosen Shemon Salam A Visit From the FBI Roger Burbach The Battle in Bolivia Benjamin Dangl New Politics in Old Bolivia Brian M. Downing The Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front: How Much Credit Goes to the Surge? Greg Moses Night of the Living Redneck: a Texas Horror Story Sonja Karkar The "Never-Never" Peace Conference Saul Landau Ethics and Evil in South Boston Margaret Kimberley Black America Left Behind John Ross What are the Prospects for a New Mexican Revolution? Reza Fiyouzat Exit on the Left: When Che's Children Visited Iran Judith Scherr Berkeley Turns Right for the Holidays Lance Olsen Of Forests and Finance: Logging for the Wealthy Christopher Brauchli Mr. Bush and the Despots Robert Fantina Iraq as U.S. Colony Dan Bacher Fish Triage on Prospect Island Michael Donnelly Remembering How to be Human: John Trudell and the Music of Urgency Website of the Weekend Appalachian Voices   November 30, 2007 Peter Stone Brown The Re-Packaging of Bob Dylan Wajahat Ali The Volatile Mistress: an Interview with Javed Jabbar, Pakistan's Former Minister of Information Allan Nairn Cold-Blooded Celebrity: Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers Alan Farago The Sorrows of Suburbia: Politics, Sprawl and the Housing Crash John Ross The Death of Latin America's First Revolution Corporate Crime Reporter America's Corporate Crime Capitals Lucia Alvarez Diego Gonzalez Argentina's Political Future James Rothenberg The Iraqi Miracle Website of the Day Bio-Bling?   November 29, 2007 R. F. Blader The Most Dangerous Kind of Bribe Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Distorting Fascism to Demonize Iran Stephen Soldz War on the Couch: Fear, Aggression and Empire Sheldon Richman Iraq 3.0 George Wuerthner Forest Fires, Lies and Chainsaws Felice Pace Did All Things Considered Self-Censor on Annapolis? Col. Dan Smith The Meaning of Annapolis Harvey Wasserman Terror Target Nukes Nikolas Kozloff Primetime Hate Debate: Lou Dobbs, Immigration and Campaign '08 Paul Krassner Huffington Post Bloggers Go On Strike! Dave Lindorff News Not Fit to Print: US Coup Planned for Venezuela? CP News Service The One State Declaration Website of the Day A Native View of Yellowstone Bison Slaughter November 28, 2007 James Petras CIA Destabilization Memo Surfaces on Venezuela Jeff Halper Annapolis: When the Roadmap is a One Way Street Pam Martens Crashing Citigroup Peter Morici Economy in Crisis: Avoiding a Recession Mohammed Khatib Separate and Unequal in Palestine Helen Redmond The Horror and the Hope: Health Care in America William S. Lind In the Fox's Lair: Quiet Before a New Iraq Storm? Ben Tripp We, the People: a Trope for All Seasons Liaquat Ali Khan Pakistan: First, Restore the Constitution and Reinstate the Judges Jeff Berg Holbrooke Says Bush Won't Attack Iran Website of the Day The Lies of Joe Klein   November 27, 2007 Joe DeRaymond On the Road to the Torture School Paul Craig Roberts Meet the Only Two Candidates Worse Than Bush and Cheney: Hillary and Rudy Marjorie Cohn Remembering Victor Rabinowitz Mike Whitney A Dollar the Size of a Postage Stamp Ron Jacobs The Myths of Military Progress Col. Dan Smith The Pentagon's "People System" Still Doesn't Work Ralph Nader Family Learning Karim Makdisi Annapolis and the Unholy Alliance: the View from Beirut Christopher Ketcham Memo to Hollywood Writers: Strike Until You Drop Ronan Bennett Martin Amis Does a Coulter Website of the Day Celebrating the Uncensored Media   November 26, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison Heading for Annapolis Paul Craig Roberts The End of All That David Macaray Enter Mediator Sameer Dossani Pakistan's Wounded Dictator Roger Burbach The Final Battle in Bolivia Mark Scaramella Guns and Greed in the Emerald Empire Brian McKinlay Howard's End Rick Kuhn The Fall of a Racist Union Buster Binoy Kampmark Ruddslide and Dull Alec Monica Benderman What Do You Know of War? Brenda Norrell Return to Alcatraz Website of the Day Ghostworld by DJ Spooky   November 24 / 25, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Ordeal of Catherine Wilkerson, MD Robert Fisk Darkness Falls on the Middle East Saul Landau Norman Mailer will Not R.I.P. Jeffrey St. Clair Justice Stephen Breyer, Cancer Bonds and the Origins of Neoliberal Environmentalism Rannie Amiri Beirut's Black Friday Christopher Brauchli Iraq Embassy as Gilded Palace Daniel Gross The Gap and Black Friday Mike Whitney "A Generalized Meltdown of Financial Institutions" Marjorie Cohn Iran and the 2008 Elections David Rosen Senior Sex: the Real Sexual Life of Aging Americans David Michael Green If Conservatism is the Ideology of Freedom .... Kenneth Rexroth When Euripides Played the Hindu Kush: Greeks and Buddhists in Afghanistan Muhammad Iqbal Trans. Shahid Alam Ghazal Website of the Day Aerial Footage of Delta Fish Kill November 23, 2007 Gary Leupp Killing the Buddha in Pakistan's Swat Valley Laura Carlsen Coming to Terms with Diversity in Bolivia: an Interview with Alvaro Garcia, Bolivia's VP David Macaray Keeping Labor Unions Out Andy Worthington Former Guantánamo Detainee Seeks Asylum in Sweden Clifton Ross Trashing Chavez: Keith Olberman's Toxic Rant Seth Sandronsky Battling Sodexho Dan Bacher Death in the Delta: Thousands of Fish Stranded by Bureau of Reclamation William A. Cook The Myth of Middle East Peace Website of the Day Waiting for the Guards: Stress Techniques as Torture, a Short Film   November 22, 2007 Alan Farago Who Lost America's Everglades? Greg Moses A Thanksgiving Basting Dave Lindorff Impeachment is Back on the Table Mike Ely Native Blood: the Myth pf Thanksgiving Omar Azfar Gore for President of Pakistan?   November 21, 2007 Vijay Prashad Our Dictator, Their Democracy Martha Rosenberg Undercover at a Turkey Slaughtering Plant Manuel Garcia, Jr. Epiphany on the Glacier John Ross The Last Days of Mexican Corn Brian McKenna Cancer Terrorists Unmasked Stephen Soldz Isolation Torture Routine at Guatánamo Monica Benderman Needing Peace Ben Terrall Slavery in the Fields: The Real Price of Sugar Website of the Day Mercy for Animals               Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition December 29 / 30, 2007 An Interview with elin o'Hara slavick What We Can Not See By CATHERINE LUTZ This interview is excerpted from Bomb After Bomb: a Violent Cartography, a collection of drawings illustrating the history of bombing by elin o'Hara slavick. o'Hara slavick is a professor of art at the University of North Carolina. More of her visionary work can be viewed on her website. AC / JSC Lutz: Could you describe your drawings in Bomb After Bomb: a Violent Cartography,and the process of making them and could you speak about why you chose abstraction and the aerial view? Slavick: One common formal element of the drawings is that each one begins with ink or watercolor dropped onto wet paper like bloodstains on damp clothing. When it dries this becomes the foundation upon which to tell a violent story. I use this ground of abstract swirling or bleeding to depict the manner in which bombs do not stay within their intended borders. Depleted uranium and chemical agents contaminate the soil, traveling in water and currents of air for decades. Mines and unexploded bombs lay in wait for unsuspecting victims who were not even alive during the war. Bombs lay the groundwork for genocide, cancer, more war, terrorism, widows, orphans and a vengeful populace on all sides of conflict. The drawings are relatively abstract - and I say relatively because there are some recognizable cartographic, geographic and realistic details like arrows, borders and airplanes - and as in war, civilians are rendered invisible. I employ abstraction to reach people who might otherwise turn away from realistic depictions. People approach abstraction with fewer expectations and defenses. I want to reach people who have not made up their minds, who long for more information, the people who vote and want to believe that we are living in a democracy but are filled with fear and doubt. The drawings are also beautifully aerial to seduce and trap the potentially apathetic viewer so that she will take a closer look, slow down, and contemplate the accompanying information that may implicate her. I also chose the aerial view to align myself, as an American, with the pilots dropping the bombs, even though I would not drop them. As a photographer aware of the military's use of the aerial view that flight and photography provide, using the aerial view seems like the natural choice. I utilize surveillance imagery, military sources and battle plans, photography and maps, much of which is from an aerial perspective. Lutz: Given that you have already used photography in a powerful way to comment on militarization in Homefront: a Military City and the American 20th Century, what made you choose a different medium for this project? Slavick: Making the documentary photographs for Homefront was done to illustrate your text. Some of the photographs are strong enough to stand on their own, but most of them are only meaningful alongside your words. The bomb drawings rely on the lengthy titles as well to convey their meaning. However, each one was finished as a painting first and then titled. I chose drawing because of my ongoing struggle with the problematic nature of photography. While the drawings are not photographs, they are photographic. Many of them are drawn from photographic sources and most of them are from an aerial perspective that is inherently photographic. But I can not make photographs of these damaged places. I did not survive the bombings as a victim but as a war-tax-paying citizen of the bombing nation. Even if I could make photographs, I would not because there are already too many photographs--too immediate, too true, too real and too brief - countries and lives reduced to singular images. I hope that if I labor on a series of drawings in which the artist's hand is visible, that people will work to understand them on a deeper and more complicated level than they might when seeing a photograph. Inspired and informed by documentary photographs and violent maps, I want to convey the unsignifiable, to offer a protest against meaningless, to do something in the face of so much destruction. John Berger's ceaseless calls for hope and art challenge me while being fully aware of the impossible reconciliation between art and the reality of such horrific events that W.G. Sebald and Kyo Maclear write so eloquently about. Making these drawings is just one aspect of my life as an activist. I have a similar hope when I organize and march against war--that people will reconsider the present through history to affect the future. However, I do worry about the use of abstraction to address such a magnitude of destruction. W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction - a book about the ceaseless allied bombing of German cities and the subsequent little space it occupies in Germany's cultural memory and the failure of the German people to represent it - both challenges and paralyzes me. Sebald writes, "the construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world is a process depriving literature of its right to exist." What then is an artist to do? Should I put these drawings away? Should I display images of shriveled and burned corpses, photographs of the guilty military generals, pictures of the ruins next to the drawings? I am troubled by these very serious questions but I think I have reached many people who may have otherwise walked away from realistic depictions of war. As Sebald also writes, "The issue, then, is not to resolve but to reveal the conflict." Lutz: Perhaps you are responding, too, to what Paul Virilio has identified as the intensifying speed of warfare over the 20th century. If bombing, like other war technologies, is a primary engine of history, as he claims, and if "history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems," how can your art or how has other art responded to this problem? Slavick: I feel defeated by this idea even though I think it's true. I am more interested in Virilio's claim that the "true enemy" becomes "less external than internal: our own weaponry, our own scientific might which in fact might promote the end of our own society." We are racing against ourselves, bombing ourselves. I am more afraid of my own government than I am of "terrorists". And as John Armitage writes in the introduction to Virilio's Art and Fear, "When Virilio considers the aesthetics of disappearance, he assumes that the responsibility of artists is to recover rather than discard the material that is absent and bring to light those secret codes that hide from view inside the silent circuits of digital and genetic technologies." Indeed, Virilio's book, Art and Fear, is a chilling book for an artist to read. Like Sebald, Virilio makes me feel as is there is no manner in which to properly, effectively or truthfully represent or respond to the horrors of war, genocide, and the holocaust. Yet, they both attempt to do just that and they do it very well. Drawings function differently than words in a book and the endless stream of information on the web. Not necessarily narrative or full of facts and figures, drawings are a visual interpretation or depiction of, reaction against, reflection on and emotional response to the world around us. While some artists--mostly those working with electronic media --attempt to keep up with the "intensifying speed" of everything around us--warfare, information and communication systems --many artists, like me, are responding by trying to slow down, not only ourselves but viewers. I want to slow people down and offer a different approach to seeing and thinking about war. As Kyo Maclear writes in her book, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness, "When one considers how our contemporary image culture is evolving amid real-time suffering, the question of witnessing takes on a renewed importance. Our death-saturated world continues to produce numerous collective traumas, traumas demanding historical awareness yet often defying our usual modes of access. These collective traumas suggest the need for a prolonged gaze. The televisual gaze, however intense, is all too brief." Specifically, I have responded by completing over forty-five of these drawings and when they are all exhibited together, it is a dizzying experience: history comes all mixed up together, Korea beside Germany, Hiroshima next to Kosovo; utter disbelief and shame that "we" have bombed so many places and, yet, the series can never be completed. There is always another war. Alfredo Jaar employs various means to interrupt the impossible speed of warfare. In one installation Jaar displays photographs of a war torn country in black boxes with bare burning light bulbs dangling above them. Viewers are not allowed to open the boxes, depriving us of the all-too-familiar voyeuristic experience of horror. It is an installation of darkness, death, and mourning--one that implicates us as blind participants. Colombian artist Doris Salcedo is another artist who works slowly and who slows us down as viewers. She sews hair into tables and buries shoes belonging to "the Disappeared" in walls. It is as if she is making work from the grave. Lutz: The other change in how war comes to be known by the general public is the result of an intensifying use of massive public relations or propaganda tools by the Pentagon for recruitment and for retaining popular support for its activities. It invests, by some estimates, several billion dollars annually on this, and its images, too, are often beautiful. How do your paintings enter this difficult, some might even say impossible, arena of war making as public relations? Slavick: I do not kid myself. My drawings function primarily in the art world. That said, you might be surprised by the art world's easy patriotism. I am not convinced that I am "preaching to the converted". In this realm, my drawings are anti-recruitment posters; protests against bombing; a propaganda campaign against war; a blatant critique of U.S. foreign policy and activities. I think all art enters the arena of public relations or propaganda to some extent. All art wants to persuade us to enter into the world the artist presents. While most of my drawings are done from military sources, they are very different than their sources. I delete most of the revealing information--names of cities and geographical markers--and try to disengage these places from authority's clenched fist. As a university professor, I can attest to the power of art to educate. I believe that education may be the most powerful form of public relations and if we can interject a discussion of peacemaking and an understanding of U.S. involvement in war after war after war into the deafening noise of patriotism and the chaotic speed of information and communication systems, then we have begun to challenge the status quo. Lutz: Your drawings are deeply historical. Like critical historiography, they tell a very different kind of story about American military history and global history. What other more accepting fields of war art do these drawings enter into? In other words, what other art do these paintings protest? Slavick: I decided to call the series Protesting Cartography: Places the United States has Bombed precisely because I think they are more than just anti-war drawings. They protest the age-old power of maps; power utilized by governments and individuals in the name of private ownership, border control, and imperialism. They are also in protest of and in reaction to the tired arguments against political art and for the purity of form, as if form and content are not ultimately married. "Good art is not political" or "political art is usually bad art" or "art does not change the world" is how the arguments go. What about Goya's timeless Disasters of War, Picasso's sensational Guernica, Lewis Hine's haunting photographs of child laborers that brought about child labor laws and Sue Coe's gripping and graphic drawings of slaughterhouses, war, AIDS and poverty? I watch art change students' lives every semester. In hindsight, perhaps it is exactly those conservative arguments made against and out of fear of such powerful art that drove me to choose a more abstract and painterly form. While one could argue that American Abstract Expressionism was covertly about big, bad, Post-World War II, militaristic America, Jackson Pollock's splatter paintings are primarily still discussed as action paintings. They are all about the energy and motion of the artist, the paint on the canvas. They are in reaction to and about art itself. My drawings react against this "art for art's sake" while utilizing one of its forms. Lutz: Your paintings bring many places to view that will be familiar to people who have learned from their school textbooks that American history is the history of war in places like Europe and Korea and Iraq. But you have as many or more paintings that depict places that have suffered their bombing in silence and invisibility--places like Enewetak atoll, the Sudan, or Mississippi. Did you find different challenges in drawing these two kinds of places? Slavick: Not formally. I tried to keep them somewhat similar visually. I am troubled by having only one drawing of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Hiroshima just as there is only one drawing of Mississippi, Alaska and, the Sudan. Some countries were bombed relentlessly and ruthlessly for decades. Other places we tested nuclear weapons. Other places were accidents. I do not mean to equalize these bombings. Each one has its own history. And it is important to show places relatively unknown, like Enewetak Atoll, alongside infamous sites like Iwo Jima. It is imperative that I not only draw the places familiar to everyone but include the lesser known locations so that people can make connections and begin to have a sense of the unimaginable scope of our violence against civilians, even against ourselves. Lutz: Yes, the places the U.S. has bombed include domestic spaces as well: your maps include Mississippi, Nevada, and Amchitka, Alaska, among other domestic sites. We generally do not think of ourselves as the victim of ourselves, or see the immense costs of war preparation at home. How have people who view your exhibits responded to what is likely the shocking news that America has bombed itself? Slavick: It certainly is important that I include domestic places and in some ways, these have proved to be the most persuasive. People start to question the very foundation and purpose of war and begin to feel some solidarity with those under the bombs. One of the domestic drawings, Philadelphia, the Firebombing of M.O.V.E., was included in the traveling exhibition Toxic Landscapes: Artists Examine the Environment. The exhibition traveled throughout the U.S. and to the Jose Marti National Library in Havana, Cuba. Not surprisingly, more Cubans appear to know about this recent firebombing of American citizens by American police than Americans do. I must admit to having been shocked myself when I discovered that we had bombed ourselves repeatedly and in so many different places: Mississippi, Nevada, Utah, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, New Mexico, Colorado and North Carolina, to name the sites for which there are drawings. I knew about the Nevada test sites but had no idea that we detonated huge nuclear test bombs in Alaska. As Howard Zinn and others have written, bombs are dropped because they have been made and it would be a waste of expended resources and investments not to test and use them. Lutz: Earlier you spoke about the need for a more prolonged view of the impact of bombing: your drawings suggest both the moment of bombing or trauma itself and, as you've noted, your techniques suggest the longer term impacts of things like the toxins that remain behind. Those represent another form of bombing, at the cellular level, that have left the people of Vietnam and Guam, and Vieques, for example, with graveyards filled with victims of the resulting cancers and other diseases. Do your drawings or could other drawings look more closely at this other ongoing result of bombing? Slavick: I do hope that the cellular references that appear in many of the drawings--replicated stains in the background, connected tissue in the foreground, concentric targets like microscopic views of damaged cells--conjure up the buried dead and deadly diseases as a result of warfare. Some of the drawings are accompanied by titles with information about the illnesses and deaths as a result of the bombings. While the drawings do not literally contain this information, it is implied. We know that more civilians die in war than combatants. We know that uranium tipped missiles cause radiation-related diseases like cancer and that landmines remove limbs from innocent children years after the conflict. Carole Gallagher's book American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War uses photographic portraits of and essays on communities living within and downwind of America's test sites in the Southwest to reveal the duplicity of the U.S. government in creating one of the most carcinogenic landscapes in the world. Perhaps, in this instance, photography and the written word are more effective. Lutz: You have worked tirelessly to find and draw each of these places of horror, but in the end, there are many more left undrawn and, unfortunately, more such places being made everyday around the globe. Can you say more about the places you have not drawn? If you or another group of artists were to continue this project, where would you go? Slavick: I keep the written list going. I still want to do one of Cuba and the Philippines. I have not made a new bomb drawing for a few years now, ever since the birth of my first child. I just had to stop. The last one I made was a map of the world with flag pins at every place for which there is a corresponding drawing. I did it for the exhibition Violent Violence that I organized of American artists dealing with violence in their work at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam. Maybe someday I will work on a separate but related series on individual countries--a hundred drawings of Iraq, a thousand of Vietnam. I have a feeling I'll be working on this series for years to come. I want to work on something utopic. What would the opposite of a ruined city look like? Where is that? In Greifswald, Germany, as I write this, I am struck by the camouflage of history. I want to photograph this odd transitional place - a transition from East Germany to Germany, from the east to the west, from socialism to capitalism, from the past to the present, from failure and defeat to reconstruction and resignation. Old drab buildings are boarded up, torn down, renovated or painted pale orange. How can people be riding their bikes over land that once was drenched with civilian blood as if nothing happened? The erasure of history and the constant denial of the ongoing trauma beg for representation. I will continue to try to make visible the traces of war and peace, history and resistance to it, the state of the world as we know it and destroy it. Catherine Lutz is a professor of anthropology at Brown University. She is the author of Homefront: a Military City and the American 20th Century (with photographs by elin o'Hara slavick); Unnatural Emotions and Reading National Geographic (with Jane Collins). Your Ad Here

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