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Happy trails--until August 15!

Greetings all--I see you've met Ashleigh, who will be keeping things afloat as I head off to points unknown! (Regular readers may notice that she's appeared here--indirectly--before.) Yes, it's time for my vacation, which is a long time coming--as you may have noticed, I haven't been writing as much lately...due largely to weighty academic monkeys perched on my back. It's been incredibly annoying not having the time to blog about such choice topics as the execution of the Brothers Hussein (and its symbolic significance), Kelly, Blair and the BBC ...and commenting on topics of personal interest such as the commodification of travel and the socioeconomic and symbolic value of weddings (can somebody explain to me why a sacred ceremony, celebrated for joining two lives, is supposed to cost so much moolah? Methinks it might have something to do with the use of weddings to undergird capitalist industrial relations...). But the good news is that when I come back, I'll be ready to get the ball runing again--and I'm sure I'll have a mouthful...you have been warned.

Now that I've turned in that research paper, taken the GRE once and for all (I hope), and polished my resume, I'm headed for Mediterranean climbs--where it's about twice as hot as it is in Germany, but hey--there's ocean there! I'll be back in three weeks, batteries recharged, so it might be a good idea to wait on the emails if you were planning on sending them--my internet access will be sporadic at best.

I will, of course, be checking in from time to time, posting things to let you know how I'm doing, and the gossip on the street about US foreign policy among other conversation pieces...but in the meantime, I have full confidence in our guest blogger's ability to breathe new life into the little red cookbook--not only is she funny, but she's damn smart, too. Don't hesitate to leave her some friendly comments!

Well, I'm headed back to my suitcase. Am taking off in T-minus twelve hours, and I still have to sleep. Take care, everybody, and have a great week! :-)

posted by Jenny at 4:08 PM |

Operation Air Conditioner. It's enough to make you laugh so hard you'll cry. Not that I want our men and women in uniform to melt out on the desert sands...but isn't it a bit ironic, a bit irksome that people are shipping air conditioners, DVDs and Kool Aid, among other things, to guys for whom fast food restaurants couldn't be imported fast enough? Does anybody know about the human rights situation on the Iraqi side of things...?

posted by Jenny at 12:11 PM |

I wish I'd noticed this article sooner, because it sure does hold some entertainment value alongside its food for thought. Which explains why the FBI wants to check up on people who are reading it. However, as Elayne points out, her paroxysms of soft liberal elitism would have been better left outside. "It's one thing to observe that government/media propaganda is successful," Elayne tell us, "it's another thing entirely to tell people taken in by it that they're dumb or intellectually challenged or lazy or whatever. They tend not to take kindly to insults, particularly ones couched in ivory-tower liberalese. Besides, smart people are duped all the time..."

With that caveat, here's a quick teaser:

Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.

With its red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries and slapstick abuse of lame "liberal" foils who serve them as crash dummies, Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact, the serious problem - is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't funny.

Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became so infuriated by the son of a 9-ll victim who opposed the war -- "I'm against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that he cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor, one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are sickening now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists -- they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.

But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.

Fox's truculent patriotism is misleading, of course. Rupert Murdoch is not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly an American. Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify, under US law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media mainstreams in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable parasite, a vampirish lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking nations and grows fat on their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently degraded media cultures in his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he sells, along with celebrity gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom humor, in every country he contaminates. And a little "white rage" racism has always gone into his mix for good measure. ("He tried so hard to use race to sell his newspapers that he became known as "Tar Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once charged.)

...

Is it sheer coincidence that the president's stage manager, Greg Jenkins -- responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty -- was recently a producer at Fox News?

If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal. They bear an uncanny family resemblance to the red-white-and-blue show at Fox News, and heavy-handedness has never harmed its ratings, nor the president's either.

How stupid are we, finally, how easy to fool? Fox News is run by the insidious Roger Ailes -- image merchant for Nixon, Reagan and Bush senior, producer for Rush Limbaugh, newsman never -- and Fox is not what it seems to be. It's not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It's a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled "Commander-in-chief" and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.

posted by Jenny at 12:06 PM |

Presidential Mad Libs

Tried to email the White House lately? If so, you've been treated with a bizarre questionnaire that apparently requires you to confirm your identity and then launches into a series of questions regarding your blanket "approval" or "disapproval" of a select group of AWOL's policies. (As somebody on a message board said, those who elect to "disapprove" are sent to the "Against Us" file, which is forwarded directly to John Ashcroft. Heh. My cherished roomate (and companion of four years, who is making his first appearance on my blog with this post) sent me this news from a Spiegel article, which includes screen shots of the new, "improved" White House contact system. And here's the kicker...not only does the White House website format your letter to the president, it also tells you what topics you can and can't comment upon...through omission. While you're welcome to write about Bush's nuclear policy or veterans' benefits, there's no rubric for comments on, say, unemployment...and it seems there's no "miscellaneous" blank to fill in. The good news in all of this, however, is that Cheney's contact info has gone unchanged...so even if you can't get through to AWOL, you can still message the guy holding the puppet strings (or, one of the guys holding the puppet strings) as creatively as you want...

Save for a brief mention on CBS, this has barely warranted mention in the eyes of the mainstream (English-speaking) media...as I was telling my mom on the phone, it's not that they presume to tell us how to write or what to discuss...but it's the fact that they presume to do it so openly, without the slightest pretense of listening to what we care about, that freaks me out. Hmph.

posted by Jenny at 4:28 PM |

Impeachment or bust!

skippy directs us to this wonderful website established by Ramsey Clark, from which you can email your congressfolk and tell them to impeach AWOL!

posted by Jenny at 4:11 PM |

...in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.

--Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Feel free to email me at JennyDC-at-AOLdotCom, but if I don't know you and you don't say otherwise, I assume that what you send is open to be quoted at this blog. :-)

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Friday, July 25, 2003

Happy trails--until August 15!

Greetings all--I see you've met Ashleigh, who will be keeping things afloat as I head off to points unknown! (Regular readers may notice that she's appeared here--indirectly--before.) Yes, it's time for my vacation, which is a long time coming--as you may have noticed, I haven't been writing as much lately...due largely to weighty academic monkeys perched on my back. It's been incredibly annoying not having the time to blog about such choice topics as the execution of the Brothers Hussein (and its symbolic significance), Kelly, Blair and the BBC ...and commenting on topics of personal interest such as the commodification of travel and the socioeconomic and symbolic value of weddings (can somebody explain to me why a sacred ceremony, celebrated for joining two lives, is supposed to cost so much moolah? Methinks it might have something to do with the use of weddings to undergird capitalist industrial relations...). But the good news is that when I come back, I'll be ready to get the ball runing again--and I'm sure I'll have a mouthful...you have been warned.

Now that I've turned in that research paper, taken the GRE once and for all (I hope), and polished my resume, I'm headed for Mediterranean climbs--where it's about twice as hot as it is in Germany, but hey--there's ocean there! I'll be back in three weeks, batteries recharged, so it might be a good idea to wait on the emails if you were planning on sending them--my internet access will be sporadic at best.

I will, of course, be checking in from time to time, posting things to let you know how I'm doing, and the gossip on the street about US foreign policy among other conversation pieces...but in the meantime, I have full confidence in our guest blogger's ability to breathe new life into the little red cookbook--not only is she funny, but she's damn smart, too. Don't hesitate to leave her some friendly comments!

Well, I'm headed back to my suitcase. Am taking off in T-minus twelve hours, and I still have to sleep. Take care, everybody, and have a great week! :-)
posted by Jenny at 4:08 PM |

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Operation Air Conditioner. It's enough to make you laugh so hard you'll cry. Not that I want our men and women in uniform to melt out on the desert sands...but isn't it a bit ironic, a bit irksome that people are shipping air conditioners, DVDs and Kool Aid, among other things, to guys for whom fast food restaurants couldn't be imported fast enough? Does anybody know about the human rights situation on the Iraqi side of things...?
posted by Jenny at 12:11 PM |

I wish I'd noticed this article sooner, because it sure does hold some entertainment value alongside its food for thought. Which explains why the FBI wants to check up on people who are reading it. However, as Elayne points out, her paroxysms of soft liberal elitism would have been better left outside. "It's one thing to observe that government/media propaganda is successful," Elayne tell us, "it's another thing entirely to tell people taken in by it that they're dumb or intellectually challenged or lazy or whatever. They tend not to take kindly to insults, particularly ones couched in ivory-tower liberalese. Besides, smart people are duped all the time..."

With that caveat, here's a quick teaser:

Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.

With its red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries and slapstick abuse of lame "liberal" foils who serve them as crash dummies, Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact, the serious problem - is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't funny.

Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became so infuriated by the son of a 9-ll victim who opposed the war -- "I'm against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that he cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor, one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are sickening now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists -- they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.

But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.

Fox's truculent patriotism is misleading, of course. Rupert Murdoch is not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly an American. Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify, under US law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media mainstreams in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable parasite, a vampirish lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking nations and grows fat on their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently degraded media cultures in his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he sells, along with celebrity gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom humor, in every country he contaminates. And a little "white rage" racism has always gone into his mix for good measure. ("He tried so hard to use race to sell his newspapers that he became known as "Tar Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once charged.)

...

Is it sheer coincidence that the president's stage manager, Greg Jenkins -- responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty -- was recently a producer at Fox News?

If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal. They bear an uncanny family resemblance to the red-white-and-blue show at Fox News, and heavy-handedness has never harmed its ratings, nor the president's either.

How stupid are we, finally, how easy to fool? Fox News is run by the insidious Roger Ailes -- image merchant for Nixon, Reagan and Bush senior, producer for Rush Limbaugh, newsman never -- and Fox is not what it seems to be. It's not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It's a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled "Commander-in-chief" and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.
posted by Jenny at 12:06 PM |

Monday, July 21, 2003

Presidential Mad Libs

Tried to email the White House lately? If so, you've been treated with a bizarre questionnaire that apparently requires you to confirm your identity and then launches into a series of questions regarding your blanket "approval" or "disapproval" of a select group of AWOL's policies. (As somebody on a message board said, those who elect to "disapprove" are sent to the "Against Us" file, which is forwarded directly to John Ashcroft. Heh. My cherished roomate (and companion of four years, who is making his first appearance on my blog with this post) sent me this news from a Spiegel article, which includes screen shots of the new, "improved" White House contact system. And here's the kicker...not only does the White House website format your letter to the president, it also tells you what topics you can and can't comment upon...through omission. While you're welcome to write about Bush's nuclear policy or veterans' benefits, there's no rubric for comments on, say, unemployment...and it seems there's no "miscellaneous" blank to fill in. The good news in all of this, however, is that Cheney's contact info has gone unchanged...so even if you can't get through to AWOL, you can still message the guy holding the puppet strings (or, one of the guys holding the puppet strings) as creatively as you want...

Save for a brief mention on CBS, this has barely warranted mention in the eyes of the mainstream (English-speaking) media...as I was telling my mom on the phone, it's not that they presume to tell us how to write or what to discuss...but it's the fact that they presume to do it so openly, without the slightest pretense of listening to what we care about, that freaks me out. Hmph.
posted by Jenny at 4:28 PM |

Impeachment or bust!

skippy directs us to this wonderful website established by Ramsey Clark, from which you can email your congressfolk and tell them to impeach AWOL!
posted by Jenny at 4:11 PM |

Sunday, July 20, 2003

Speechless.

NEW YORK — A new Las Vegas game gets thrill-seekers out of the casinos and into the great wide open — to shoot naked women with paintball guns.

In "Hunting for Bambi," men pay $10,000 each for the challenge of tracking the women, who are nude except for sneakers, and trying to blast them with colored paint.

"You can actually hunt one of our Bambi [expletive] and shoot her with paintballs," Mike Burdick, who runs the game and the site for Real Men Outdoor Productions, says on his Web site, www.huntingforbambi.com.

According to the site, the hunters also have the option of mounting their prey when they're done — and having sex with the women.

Despite criticism that the game is sick and barbaric, Burdick said it was all in fun and caters to both male and female fantasies.

"The majority of women have a deep-seated fantasy of that bad-boy image, to be sought after by a stranger," he told Fox News, adding that the women get paid $1,000 to participate in the game — and $2,500 if they avoid getting hit.

Women's groups and legal experts are, not surprisingly, up in arms over the cruel game.

"I couldn't quite believe it. [The site] advertised this as really hurting people," said legal expert Susan Estrich on Fox News. "[They're] violating about 20 criminal laws, including assault."

The National Organization for Women has also spoken out against the game.

"It's appalling, and it's really frightening," Rita Haley, president of NOW's New York City chapter, told the New York Post . "It says something about the men who want to play this game and something about the financial climate that drives women to participate. The big fear is that somebody who plays will eventually want to use real bullets."

But at least one woman who has participated as a target in "Bambi" said people are over-reacting.

"We're not getting hurt that bad," Taylor, who didn't give a last name, told Fox News. "[The paintballs] don't hurt as bad as everyone says they do. It's about as bad as getting slugged in the arm."

Jeez, "Taylor", think you kind of missed the point...is it really that much fun to be symbolically "killed and mounted"?

More posts to come...in a little while. Unfortunately, another storm is rolling into town...and I'm going to unplug everything lest my substitute modem also get fried...
posted by Jenny at 10:33 AM |

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10/05/2003-10/11/2003
10/12/2003-10/18/2003

Speechless.

NEW YORK — A new Las Vegas game gets thrill-seekers out of the casinos and into the great wide open — to shoot naked women with paintball guns.

In "Hunting for Bambi," men pay $10,000 each for the challenge of tracking the women, who are nude except for sneakers, and trying to blast them with colored paint.

"You can actually hunt one of our Bambi [expletive] and shoot her with paintballs," Mike Burdick, who runs the game and the site for Real Men Outdoor Productions, says on his Web site, www.huntingforbambi.com.

According to the site, the hunters also have the option of mounting their prey when they're done — and having sex with the women.

Despite criticism that the game is sick and barbaric, Burdick said it was all in fun and caters to both male and female fantasies.

"The majority of women have a deep-seated fantasy of that bad-boy image, to be sought after by a stranger," he told Fox News, adding that the women get paid $1,000 to participate in the game — and $2,500 if they avoid getting hit.

Women's groups and legal experts are, not surprisingly, up in arms over the cruel game.

"I couldn't quite believe it. [The site] advertised this as really hurting people," said legal expert Susan Estrich on Fox News. "[They're] violating about 20 criminal laws, including assault."

The National Organization for Women has also spoken out against the game.

"It's appalling, and it's really frightening," Rita Haley, president of NOW's New York City chapter, told the New York Post . "It says something about the men who want to play this game and something about the financial climate that drives women to participate. The big fear is that somebody who plays will eventually want to use real bullets."

But at least one woman who has participated as a target in "Bambi" said people are over-reacting.

"We're not getting hurt that bad," Taylor, who didn't give a last name, told Fox News. "[The paintballs] don't hurt as bad as everyone says they do. It's about as bad as getting slugged in the arm."

Jeez, "Taylor", think you kind of missed the point...is it really that much fun to be symbolically "killed and mounted"?

More posts to come...in a little while. Unfortunately, another storm is rolling into town...and I'm going to unplug everything lest my substitute modem also get fried...

posted by Jenny at 10:33 AM |