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April 10, 2002
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
April 8, 2002
David
Vest
From
Birmingham to Nashville:
The Making of Tammy Wynette
Rick Giombetti
Paxil, Suicide and Science
Dr. Neve
Gordon
Letter
to an IDF Colonel:
How Did You Become
a War Criminal?
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's Top 10 CDs
Jordy
Cummings
Not
in My Name Anymore
Gavin Keeney
Bush and the Middle East:
Mouth Wide Shut
Edward
Said
The
Future of Palestine
April 7, 2002
Beth Daoud
Accompanying Ambulances
in Bethlehem
Nancy
Stohlman
After
the Invasion:
The Search for Bread
Among the Ruins
Thomas Mountain
"Yellow Peril" In Hawai'i:
Judge Orders Chains and Shackles for Chinese Witnesses
Tariq
Ali
Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?
April 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
War, Snake Oil and Circuses
Viktor
Litovkin
Russian
Generals Raise Questions About Pentagon Victories in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
CIA Survey of Iraqi Airfields
May Herald Attack
Walt Brasch
Oil
Slick George:
Bush-whacking the Environment
Ralph Nader
Campaign Finance Sham
Sam Bahour
The
Blind Leading the Criminal
Bill Christison:
A Former CIA Official on
Oil and the Middle East
April 5, 2002
Charmaine
Seitz
In
Ramallah: The Grueling Reoccupation Grinds On
Nancy Stohlman
The Invasion of Bethlehem
and Our Tax Dollars at Work
Beth Daoud
The
Siege of Bethlehem:
"What Do You Mean God Is Punishing Me?"
Fareed Marjaee:
Demonizing Iran
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Philip
Morris to Canada:
"Drop Dead"
Alex Lynch
Tampa Campus Mirrors
Middle East Strife
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
Resources:
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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
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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April 10, 2002
Across the Political Spectrum
Whatever
Colors You Have in Your Mind
By David Vest
Tom Ridge, after seven months on the job as czar
of Homeland Security, produced a "terrorist alert color
scheme" which no one understood. (Not quite true: everyone
understood that it was a remarkably stupid achievement.)
Do you know what color we are under now?
Is it red? Green? Yellow? We have to pay attention, people!
In the spirit of Ridge's initiative,
the Rebel Angel column offers its own color scheme, to indicate
the prevailing level of insanity.
LIME GREEN. The Attorney-General of the
United States, known simply as "General" to the president,
can be heard online singing gospel music in that peculiar vocal
style of forced, mad jubilation originally introduced into quartet
music by unfeeling, ambitious singers who found themselves unable
to imitate Black gospel artists with any credibility (unlike,
for example, The Statesmen). What Mr. Ashcroft sings is not
the gospel music of Mahalia Jackson or even Ralph Stanley.
It is sung in the tone of voice one might expect from a man
no one has ever seen laugh, who came into office after losing
an election to a dead man.
VANILLA VERMILLION. Down South, the Chief
Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, known widely as "the
Ten Commandments Judge," produces verse that can be read
online by anyone who can stand to do it. Edgar Poe believed
that bad taste, when carried far enough, is prima facie evidence
of madness. Judge Roy S. Moore's most popular piece, "Our
American Birthright," exhibits signs of deep-seated psychological
disturbance and could probably be used to keep the author confined
in an institution, had it been written in one. (Apologies to
Christopher Smart, who wrote brilliantly in Bedlam.)
PURPOSEFUL PURPLE. Richard M. Nixon,
meanwhile, of Pell City, is a candidate for Commissioner of
Agriculture in the same state where Judge Moore dispenses justice
and prosody with equal aplomb. The verse really does make Emmaline
Graingerford look like Sappho. You remember Miss Graingerford,
surely? You met her in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where
she is the author of "Ode to Young Stephen Dowling Bots,
Deceased" and the painter of "And Art Thou Gone Yes
Thou Art Gone Alas" as well as "And Shall I Never
Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas."
The quality of Judge Moore's justice
is presumably less entertaining than his verse.
If Richard M. Nixon has produced either
poems or recordings, they have yet to surface. His namesake,
however, did offer to play a duet at the piano with Duke Ellington,
which tells us how much he knew about both music and modesty.
BLINKING YELLOW. In Texas, George W.
Bush, with Tony Blair grinning grimly beside him, has announced
his triumphant discovery that the violence in the Middle East
is Bill Clinton's fault. "Yes, but whose job is it to stop
it?" Blair might have inquired but did not.
DEAD RED. Colin Powell is dispatched
to the Middle East, but on the local, with stops in Morocco,
Egypt, Syracuse, Paducah and Tucumcari. In Morocco, the king
asks Powell bluntly, on camera, what he is doing there and why
he isn't in Jerusalem.
At least Dick Cheney got to take Air
Force One when he toured the region, not that it helped.
FADING GRAY. Back home in the American
west, while Bush vows to "hunt down the terrorists one
by one and bring them to justice," packs of gray wolves
are being pursued like al-Qaeda and killed from the air by government
helicopters. If only the al-Qaeda could be made to wear radio
collars like the wolves.
CASH GREEN. In the Northwest, the chief
of the U. S. Forest Service complains that logging has fallen
"far short of projected levels," rendering the Forest
Service "ineffective." By his reckoning, the U. S.
Forest Service should be to the lumber industry more or less
what the American Petroleum Institute is to the oil industry.
By mine, the Forest Service would deserve to be called "effective"
only if it put an end to old growth logging permanently, today.
RAGING BEIGE. If the present is too depressing,
try the future, as we contemplate yet another choice between
Bush and Beardless, or Edwards with his lawyerly tic, or someone
else from the South's unending supply of Carters and Clintons.
SHEPHERD'S CROOK WHITE. One could write
that our two-party political system is corrupt beyond redemption,
were it not for the fact that the word "redemption"
has religious overtones. And religious overtones, these days,
are anything but uplifting or consoling. They are more likely
to make us angry and disgusted, given the spectacle of Jerry
Falwell's self-destructive lunacy, Billy Graham's anti-Semitism
(and his son Franklin's) and the Catholic Church's massive
complicity in both covering up and enabling decades of child
sexual abuse. (Are we so scandalized because the perps are
priests, or is it because the victims are chiefly male? The
thought of little boys as wide-scale victims tempts one to forget
that it grows daily more difficult to find women who have not
been molested or sexually assaulted as children in this land
of family values.)
"Yes, but what about all the 'good'
priests?" one hears. What about them? one is tempted to
respond. How long can they go on perfuming a corpse? How much
"good" can anyone accomplish in a privileged position
other people are barred from holding on the basis of gender
or sexual orientation?
I was a college professor at a women's
college in Virginia for a while. One Sunday morning some of
my students, one of whom was Black, went to church. The Black
student was told from the pulpit that she wasn't welcome. The
other young women with her got up immediately and left.
It wasn't rocket science. They weren't
activists, they merely acted. They had no political (or theological)
training, but to their enduring credit it never occurred to
them to "stay and work for change."
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet
and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band,
The Cannonballs.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
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