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July 29, 2002
Tom Stephens
Fast
Track and the
Hypocrites of the House
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
July 26, 2002
Jerre Skog
American
Dictatorship:
It Couldn't Happen...Could It?
Philip Farruggio
Lie,
Rob and Steal
Rep. Ron Paul
Monitor
Thy Neighbor
Ron Jacobs
Thinking
About the
Weather (Underground)
Walt Brasch
Ashcroft's War on Bookstores
July 25, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Paul
Krugman's Howl:
Populism, War and
the Melting Economy
Gavin Keeney
Van Morrison: In September
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
War
on Terrorism or
Police State?
July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Cockburn
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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
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Reviews of Gore:
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July
30, 2002
September
11, the Brand
by Pierre Tristam
Get ready for September Eleven, the brand.
Between now and the first anniversary
of that horrible day, Sept. 11 is going to be commemorated sometimes
in the most moving ways, sometimes in the most humbling, even
sublime ways: Greatness can be touched in spite of -- and because
of -- the greatest tragedies. But Sept. 11 is also going to be
commemorated in the most self-righteous and opportunistic ways
any tragedy has been in this age of hyper media, pillaging businesses
and dust-mite politicians. It is easy to make the prediction
because previews of the spectacle began last Sept. 12 and have
been building since, with each side of the profiteering triangle
reinforcing the other's perversion of the date.
The anniversary will call in the troops
of cultural jingoism. Broadcast and print media will come up
with logos, series and special sections, some of them legitimate
attempts to bring perspective to what has transpired since the
event, others merely wraps for fat advertising opportunities.
Wall Street firms desperate to win back the favor of the millions
they've swindled will outdo each other with flag-waving mission
statements (never mind protocol about desecrating the Stars and
Stripes), with minuscule donations that their press releases
will magnify into generosity, with a day off so their employees,
what's left of them, can be with families not yet wrecked by
economic anxiety.
And politicians: Woe be us on the receiving
end of the cant, the rehearsed tears, the jostling for maximum
bombast and indignation at the altar of Sept. 11. The coattails
this election season don't belong to W. the Emperor, who barely
has clothes left anyway, but to The Date. A few isolated spots
in Death Valley aside, there will be no place to hide. America
and the world will be branded: This nation brought to you by
September Eleven, and of course the corporate junta at whose
behest (as the red, white and blue sponsors will subtly remind
us from their tax shelters in Bermuda), the world must go on.
Anniversaries and the rituals surrounding
them are extremely important to societies, as they are to individuals.
They help preserve memory and the meaning of why we are what
we are, reinvigorating hopefully the best in us, even if the
ritual seems trite. Sept. 11 must be commemorated just as the
site of the World Trade Center will be memorialized. The problem
is when proportion and purpose are lost to expedience and self-congratulation.
The problem is when the original event is remade into a stepping
stone to something entirely divorced from its meaning. That something
can be as ugly and self-serving as the original event should
be meditative and humbling.
Examples abound of other nations turning
memorials into cause for breast-beating. The bigger the memorials,
the louder the arrogance, or insecurity. Think of Soviet statuary,
or the self-aggrandizing monuments to the pharaohs, to Saddam
Hussein. In 1982 Maya Lin showed how memorials could be much
more than slabs of granite with her design of the Vietnam War
Memorial. Sunk into the grounds of the Mall in Washington, D.C.,
the memorial is an awesome rendition of the private price of
public folly, the more awesome for being understated. It struck
a chord deeper than anyone expected. It also inadvertently made
memorials hip: Memorials as tourist draws. And boosters thought:
The bigger, the better.
Memorials as massive blares -- or worse,
economic development -- began in Oklahoma City after the bombing
of the Alfred P. Murrah building. The idea is striking, with
two arches at either end of a reflecting pool, and the time before
and after the blast imprinted atop the arches. But the thing
is enormous. It is far bigger than the too-big World War II memorial
planned for the Mall in Washington, D.C. And it is designed more
as a money-making draw for downtown merchants than as a commemoration
of the 163 people killed there on April 19, 1995. (A plaque celebrating
"First Responder Teams" and other rescue workers is
more hero-worship of those who did their job that day than reflection
for those who died.) If Oklahoma City's version of April 19 is
preview to Lower Manhattan's version of Sept. 11, architects
might as well start looking for inspiration from Albert Speer
instead of Maya Lin. That would be a tragedy in itself.
The branding of Sept. 11 is just such
a tragedy. It is the Oklahoma City impulse of memorializing through
grandeur writ large, with equally crass ends. President Bush,
whose bumbling cluelessness has been laid bare again by the financial
scandals, needs the day and a long warm-up to it for his own
revitalization. Afterward, how better to franchise Sept. 11 than
through the imminent initial public offering of homeland security?
The whole nation will have stock in that
one. Even children (never too early to recruit snitches). Every
American will be asked to build this massive memorial, whose
beauty is that it'll never be finished. Forget Speer, the architect
for Greater Germany in the 1930s. Call in Babel. And the ribbon-cutting
of this public folly at any price begins, naturally enough, at
Ground Zero, on Sept. 11.
Pierre Tristam
is a Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial writer. He can be reached
at ptristam@att.net.
Today's
Features
Tom Stephens
Fast
Track and the
Hypocrites of the House
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
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