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One More Half-Truth for the Road
Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer has a letter in the New York Times today, attempting to set the record straight on a creepy statement he made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11/01. Read it carefully:
In "Lifting the Shroud" (column, March 23), Paul Krugman alleges that at my White House press briefing on Sept. 26, 2001, I "ominously warned" Americans to "watch what they say, watch what they do." He accuses me of telling citizens "to accept the administration's version of events, not ask awkward questions.""They're reminders"--meaning both the statement by the racist congressman and the Maher statement. Nice try, Ari.At that briefing two weeks after Sept. 11, I was asked about a racist comment made by a Republican congressman from Louisiana who said that if he saw a Sikh-American with a towel wrapped around his head, he would tell the Sikh to get out of his state.
I said, "It's important for all Americans to remember the traditions of our country that make us so strong and so free, our tolerance and openness and acceptance." The president, I said, was disturbed by Representative John Cooksey's remarks.
Moments later, I was asked about Bill Maher's statement that the members of our armed forces who fire missiles are cowards while terrorists who crashed planes into buildings are not cowards.
I answered: "It's a terrible thing to say, and it's unfortunate. And that's why — there was an earlier question about has the president said anything to people in his own party — they're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."
My remarks urged tolerance and openness and were addressed to those who made statements and threatened actions against Muslims or Sikhs in America.
ARI FLEISCHER
Washington, March 23, 2004
The writer was White House press secretary from 2001 to 2003.
UPDATE: To make his argument work, even though it doesn't, Fleischer also has to paraphrase Maher's comments. Here's an excerpt from an article giving the context of what Maher said:
Of course, all this was said before President Bush put soldiers in harm's way with an unnecessary land war--forcing them to prove their courage on the ground. The article doesn't mention that Maher groveled to try to save the show, or that there was another prominent dissenter--Susan Sontag--who got slimed around the same time.In the weeks after September 11, critics wondered how late-night talk shows would change. Predictably, Leno and Letterman told fewer and safer jokes, mostly at the expense of easy targets like the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart was so shaken he cried. But Politically Incorrect, true to form, crashed the somber late-night party. Appearing on Sept. 17 for the first show since the attacks, Maher made it starkly clear his show would live up to its name.
"I do not relinquish - nor should any of you - the right to criticize, even as we support, our government," Maher said. "This is still a democracy and they're still politicians, so we need to let our government know that we can't afford a lot of things that we used to be able to afford. Like a missile shield that will never work for an enemy that doesn't exist. We can't afford to be fighting wrong and silly wars. The cold war. The drug war. The culture war."
What Maher said later in the show, however, is what made headlines. Panelist Dinesh D'Souza [a young conservative --ed.] mentioned that he didn't think the terrorists were "cowards," as George Bush had described them. Maher replied: "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. You're right."
Res Ipsa Loquitur
While I'm getting a bagel this morning I see a photo of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the front page of a local newspaper, testifying before Congress. His hands are raised in a weird gesture, half-imploring, half balling his fists, his mouth a rictus of mock-agony. "Even if bin Laden had been captured or killed in the weeks before 9/11, no one I know believes it could have prevented 9/11," the caption has him saying. The same day, President Bush said, "Had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September the 11th, we would have acted." These statements make 9/11 sound like an inevitability, a work of subtle genius that no one could have stopped or anticipated.
But think about it--how subtle was it, really? 19 terrorists pass airport security, four planes are hijacked from three different locations, three planes reach their targets, one of which is the military command center of the United States. No fighter jets intervene during their copious flight time. In law, there is an expression "res ipsa loquitur" (the thing speaks for itself), as when a surgeon sews up a sponge inside someone's body after operating. Meaning, this is the type of thing that would never happen absent negligence. 9/11 is one of those events. And yet no one, not one person, has been fired. The dissemblers in the Administration think if they refer to it often enough as an unpreventable, act of God-like event, people will be worn down and start to disbelieve their own common sense about it.
Speaking of the Middle East and Star Trek, the picture above of the late, soon-to-be-blown-away Sheik Yassin (from the New York Times, looking much like a waxwork from Madame Tussaud's) made me think of Captain Pike:
Which reminded me to look for a cybertheory essay I read years ago, by Alan Shapiro, called "Captain Kirk Was Never the Original." Lo and behold, I found it, and commend it to your reading. In a nutshell, Shapiro contrasts Kirk's Cartesian man of action with Pike's traveler in virtual reality, suggesting that we "read Star Trek against Star Trek" rather than dismiss it, as many theorists do, as a relic of pre-digital consciousness. Here's a good excerpt:
The successful media product model has as prerequisite a mythical moment of transcendent creativity which clears the way for the emergence of a new spectacle object. The spectacle object (celebrity, consumer gadget, media property) then enters the panoply of fetishes among which we shop in our efforts to find an identity "niche" and dubiously distinguish ourselves from others. The model serves as lightning rod for ambivalent collective projections, allowing each individual to feel unique at the very moment when all consumers of that same niche are imitating the same elevated pattern.And another cool passage:
But the fully achieved simulacra of virtual reality threaten the stability and profitability of this system of differences. This is why Captain Pike, who was too far ahead of his time, had to be shunted aside in favor of the valorous Captain Kirk.
So Pike, the true first-born, was whisked away into virtual reality and replaced by the changeling Kirk. There was, of course, another way forward for Captain Pike, but the screenwriters of "The Menagerie" were unfortunately ignorant of the basics of writing operating systems software drivers for peripheral devices. Since Pike's bio-rehabilitation programmers had succeeded in resuscitating at least one controllable nerve impulse from his consciousness, and connecting the discrete signals of this impulse across the synaptic gap to an output device (the beeping for "yes" or "no"), further layers of software to drive more sophisticated output devices and sound cards would certainly be possible. From the single binary registering of a 0 or a 1, an entire operational language (a full digital communication) can be devised. One merely has to enumerate and combine varied sequences of 0s and 1s as discrete identifiers in an infinitely permutated system. The only drawback would be that Pike's consciousness itself would always remain at the level of the lowest machine language, forced to perpetually master and will the lengthy binary sequences in order to express himself! He would literally be the machine and its finally awakened artificial intelligence.
| Who Dares Disturb My Slumber? *cue eerie theremin sounds--figure comes towards you slowly in FLASH animation--surfers faint dead away at their keyboards*
SEE IT TODAY1 at the Nasher Sculpture Center2 website, a Flash-and-popuphell extravaganza declared by this weblog to be Gratuitously Dynamic Website of the Week.3 1. Okay, there's no theremin, but the figure does come towards you from the back of a "virtual gallery" in dramatic, ever-enlarging stages. The sculpture, Willem de Kooning's Clamdigger (1972), introduces Abstract Expressionist subjectivity to the human figure in three dimensions and is one of Count Floyd's favorite artworks.
2. Housing the Raymond and Patsy Nasher sculpture collection, Dallas, TX. 3. This weblog is not responsible if you become lost in the Nasher site and are unable to navigate back to this URL. Thanks to Bill Schwarz, who inadvertently provided this target. |
Beige Programming Ensemble at the Whitney; The Slowes
I missed Cory & Jamie Arcangel and the Beige crew at the Whitney last night because I had to w_rk, but fortunately Thickeye is on it with an excellent report. I like his description of the line of kids wrapped around the block for free admission night, soon to be groping in the darkened video rooms, contrasted with the image of middle age people sitting at tables in the downstairs dining room, politely listening to the Beige-rs explaining their new 8-bit iPod concept.
Beige has a music download page that I highly recommend, consisting of their vinyl releases in mp3 format. Cory also recorded several songs as The Slowes, which I am pleased to offer here. The melodies are faux-dumb and very catchy. I say faux-dumb because they're actually fairly ambitious in terms of musical reach--a lot of pop music history is integrated in them (lounge, 60s-electronica, progrock, Pink Floyd...). The lo fi-ness keeps the homages from being overt or too reverent. Here's how Cory explains them in an email (edited slightly):
yeah,...the slowes is just me. most of the melodies were written by a melody writing program i wrote called "Rudy Tardy Generator Pro"..it was a cgi script. every time you went to its web page, it generated a new song and melodies (in the slowes style, which is lotsa open roller rink kinda chords) so....... i would have the program spit out 10 melodies...i would then pick the best few, turn them into a song, and go into my bedroom and record them. i used an organ, atari, drums, + guitar////The Slowes downloads:the whole myth of the slowes that I made up was that it was this guy who sat in his basement all day and worked on his atari. his name was Rudy Tardy. This was his band. For a few years, i used Rudy Tardy to sign all my art projects...[Beige recording artist] Paul [B. Davis] to this day still Dj's under the name DJ Rudy.
"Fat Bits" [.mp3 - 1.33MB]
"Starship Izod" [.mp3 - 4.12MB]
"The Anthem" [.mp3 - 2.29MB]
"Hooked on a New Thing" (cover of 3Nuff Z'Nuff) [.mp3 - 5.2MB]
Suite: All Four Songs Above [.mp3 - 13.14MB]
Wow. The March 14 Mercury News story about the Fresno polygamist child murder that Atrios originally linked to has been extensively rewritten (see my previous post about all this). I went back to look at it because it described policemen carrying dead children out of the house and weeping, and quoted a police chief holding back tears, saying "this sort of thing doesn't happen in Fresno" or the like, and was very slim on details of what actually happened. The police reactions seemed pretty over-the-top (even for such a tragic crime) and I wanted to reread the account, in light of allegations that the cops had negligently given Wesson time to go into the back of the house and shoot the children while the gendarmes stood on his doorstep, ignoring the pleadings of relatives who knew what Wesson was capable of. Well, all that detail about the crying cops is gone from the story, sucked down the memory hole, and Fresno Police Chief is suddenly dry-eyed, in control, and quoted as saying "what happened at the house is under the investigation." So much for an independent press--obviously this story was rewritten to placate the authorities. Nowadays you have to save every story you read to your hard drive. (A copy of the rewritten story is here.)
UPDATE: It looks like the article was rewritten several times after publication. Mark found another version, posted in the comments.
UPDATE 2: Mark found the "crying, child-carrying cops" version I read, slightly differently worded, on the Mercury News website, as an AP story dated March 13, under a different byline. So it's not down the memory hole (yet). I really do wonder why the article was rewritten several times, omitting more and more detail each time about the emotional state of the cops.
So far, Atrios called it correctly when he predicted, on March 14, that "the horrible case in Fresno, where a man...allegedly slaughtered his 7 children, [will get] about 1/50th of the media coverage that the Andrea Yates case did." Andrea Yates, you will recall, had a history of depression and drowned her five kids; she's now doing prison time while her fundamentalist Christian husband has remarried. Alleged cult weirdo and woman-controller Marcus Wesson has been charged by the Fresno police with shooting his seven kids and two grandkids and stacking their bodies in the back of his house, which had ten coffins in it; he is believed to have fathered the grandkids by impregnating two of the now-deceased children. Sure enough, it looks like the latter is being treated as "local news" and we won't be hearing much more about it. Atrios doesn't spell out why he predicted what he did, so please allow me to state the obvious: Wesson is a man and has the right to sire as many children as he pleases and then destroy them at his whim, while Yates is a woman and has no greater duty than the sacred trust of child-rearing. The media knows this; everybody knows this. That monster, how could she? I'm getting all upset just thinking about her case again.
UPDATE: As Barry mentions in his comment, Wesson is black and Yates is white, which may also have something to do with the disparity in coverage. A Seventh Day Adventist, Wesson lived in a reasonably affluent neighborhood but no one ever really asked what he and all those women dressed in black were doing with the schoolbus parked in the driveway (transporting coffins, among other things). Control freak to the core, he allegedly murdered the children when he became convinced the authorities might take them away from him. Hardly any ingredients of a national story here.
UPDATE 2: The story has picked up unexpected juice with the revelation that the Fresno police may have been cooling their heels at Wesson's front door while Wesson went into the back of the house and shot the children. "Fresno's police chief acknowledged Wednesday that his department is looking into whether Marcus Wesson fatally shot nine of his children while police waited outside his house, despite frantic pleas from relatives to intervene." (CNN). The google count on "Marcus Wesson" jumped from 9000 to 11,000 since this morning.
UPDATE 3: The newspaper account of the Wesson arrest was rewritten several times after publication. More here.
From the NY Times today:
A defiant Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused Thursday to remove himself from a case involving his good friend, Vice President Dick Cheney, dismissing suggestions of a conflict of interest. In an unusual 21-page memorandum, he rejected a request by the Sierra Club. The environmental group said it was improper for Scalia to take a hunting trip with Cheney while the court was considering whether the White House must release information about private meetings of Cheney's energy task force. Scalia said the remote Louisiana hunting camp used for a duck hunting and fishing trip "was not an intimate setting." [...] For the first time, Scalia revealed details of his trip with Cheney. Scalia said he was the go-between to invite Cheney to hunt with a Scalia friend, Wallace Carline, who owns an oil rig services firm, Scalia wrote. Scalia and Cheney are friends from their days working in the Ford administration, Scalia noted. "I conveyed the invitation, with my own warm recommendation, in the spring of 2003 and received an acceptance," Scalia wrote. When the time came for the trip, Scalia and Cheney flew together, accompanied by one of Scalia's sons and a son-in-law, Scalia wrote.Got that? The hunting trip was OK because (1) Scalia and Cheney were chaperoned and (2) the trip was really about Cheney getting together for some male bonding with an oil industry tycoon, and Scalia just hooked the two up. These people are so deeply in bed they expect normal people to think rules of etiquette like "avoid the wet spot" means "never met the dude."