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April 1, 2002
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
March 24/30, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Year
of the Yellow Notepad:
Plagiarism and History
Rep. Ron Paul
Slavery and the Draft
Fidel
Castro
A
Better World is Possible
Edward Said
What Price Oslo?
José
Saramago
Justice
and Democracy Denied
Azmi Bishara
Talking to Tanks
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Clearcutting
Montana
Alexander Cockburn
50 Years of James Bond
Wilhelm
Reich
Gethsemane
Claud Cockburn
The Horror of It All
Dave Marsh
What's
Playing at My Houe
David Vest
Remembering Tammy Wynette
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Waylon
Jennings:
an Honest Outlaw
March 23, 2002
Mokhiber/Weissman
A
Corporate Lawyer
Speaks Out
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
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!)
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EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 1, 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 New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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
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April 1, 2002
Let's Roll!®
Let us now praise
famous widows
By Steve Perry
I shuffled past the television on the morning
of March 11--the six-month anniversary of the shots heard round
the world--in time to see Lisa Beamer on the Today Show,
weeping at the behest of Katie Couric. (At 45, the terminally
pert Couric is still the cutest succubus on television.) My first
thought, I'm ashamed to say, was It can't be very easy anymore,
crying on cue that way. In recent months anyone who surfs
the news programs has been subjected to Lisa Beamer's teary face
on every outlet worth mentioning. The soundtrack is always the
same, a snippet from Elvis Costello's "Pills & Soap":
"They talk to the sister, the father and the mother/ With
a microphone in one hand and a checkbook in the other/ And the
camera noses in to the tears on her face"
Mrs. Beamer, as everyone knows by now,
was the wife of the late Todd Beamer, one of the principals in
the passenger uprising on United Flight 93, the hijacked jet
that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Lately she's all over the
tube again. There was the birth of her daughter in January, now
the 9/11 anniversary--and sandwiched between the two, the revelation
that she is trying to copyright her husband's endlessly regurgitated
parting salvo, "Let's roll!" "We believe we own
'Let's roll' because Todd said it and it was attributed to him,"
says Beamer's attorney, Paul Kennedy. "We're going to do
all that's necessary to protect that." Well, a widow's got
to do what a widow's got to do. Meantime she is also preparing
a memoir (tentatively called Let's Roll!--of course) to
be published in September (of course, of course) by the Christian
publishing firm Tyndale House, purveyors of the mega-selling
Left Behind novels of religious apocalypse.
I was curious to know just how many times
Beamer has spoken to the press since 9/11, so I did some looking
on the web and located one of her publicists, Helen Cook. Cook
didn't profess to have an exact count, but agreed that two hundred
or so would be a reasonable estimate. No wonder she has a personal
media representative and at least two outside PR guns. Even before
her book deal she was named one of People's "25 Most
Intriguing People of 2001." Intriguing, hell. She's hot--in
a wistful, understated way that becomes her young widowhood.
She is also articulate and relentlessly upbeat. The media never
tire of her.
And God knows she never tires of them.
Beamer's utter lack of compunction about repeatedly baring her
grief and the mundane, intimate details of her family's life
on television may be, in her mind, the dutiful expression of
her evangelical Christianity (evangelicals are taught never to
shy from any opportunity for witnessing, especially an electronic
one), but it reaches the rest of us as something else: just another
spasm of celebrity self-disclosure, albeit of an unusual sort.
Her ubiquity on the news magazine shows has already spawned countless
jokes: Hi, this is Lisa Beamer. Could you let Diane Sawyer
know that on Thursday I'm going to be taking my kids to the mall
for the first time since Todd's death? Get back to me soon--Jane
Pauley is all over me on this one.
All right, one might say, but what exactly
is so terrible about that? It may be unseemly, but at worst the
only sin of Lisa Beamer and her media patrons is banality. That's
entirely too facile and too generous. There is an irreducibly
private dimension to real grief, a point at which one's own words
and the kind intentions of others all run to ground and we can
only bear what follows in silence. And that silence is not a
bad thing; it's a measure of respect, for oneself and for what
is lost, as well as an acknowledgment of the hard things we all
must bear on our own eventually. The media's incessant flogging
of Beamer's story, and her eager collaboration in it, amount
to a grotesque comment on the very idea of grief and loss. They
take catastrophic personal tragedy and cheapen it by making it
feel like a publicity stunt--a set of gestures repeatedly enacted
for the cameras.
The syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall dared
suggest as much in his February 28 posting, entitled "Terror
Widows." In a series of six panels it paints the 9/11 survivors
making the talk show rounds as callow show biz apparatchiks.
"The unbearable grief of the empty spot in your conjugal
bed must weigh down your heart with unimaginable pain,"
says a Good Morning America interviewer to one of them.
"Huh?" she replies. "Oh, yeah, definitely."
Rall's cartoon was pulled from the New York Times and
Washington Post websites after some 9/11 families cried
foul. Rall was unrepentant, going so far as to call Lisa Beamer's
behavior "cynical, crass, and gauche."
Also sinister, for reasons quite apart
from her own motives. Remember always that in wartime, propaganda
is a chief preoccupation of government and its major media adjuncts.
This means, at the most obvious level, a ceaseless and numbing
proliferation of caricatured heroes and villains. Yes, the police
and firefighters caught up in the events of September 11 demonstrated
courage and dedication. But after you have assented to this proposition
a few hundred times, it tends to lose its savor and even its
meaning. Or rather the meaning changes--genuine instances of
heroism and sacrifice become nothing more than veiled warnings,
inducements to the rest of us to keep our mouths shut and rally
round the flag.
Which brings us to the centerpiece of
the six-month anniversary commemorations, CBS's abundantly hyped
9/11 documentary. It was a mess, frankly, marred by studiously
cool narration that talked too much and refused to let the footage
on the screen stand on its own as the ultimate verite
document it could have been. 9/11 was assembled in a manner
that militated against any direct experience by the viewer of
what was happening. Watching it you could almost suppose that
the trade center bombings were staged as the mother of all training
exercises, a backdrop against which good men could prove their
mettle. Like the Beamer saga and all the other wretched post-attack
uplift pieces, it strained too much to present September 11 as
all heroism and no horror. And that is the falsest, most demeaning
note of all.
Steve Perry
is a Minneapolis writer. He can be reached at: sperry@usinternet.com
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