Religion out of Control

We've followed the stories of right-wing evangelicals threatening the lives of Supreme Court justices and federal judges...watched last week as Tom DeLay led a meeting at the National Day of Prayer...shook our heads at the attempt by creationists in Kansas (and about a dozen other states) to present religion as science, and make our students even LESS prepared to compete in the global marketplace (wait...are we supposed to win the battle of capitalism, or are we supposed to accept the Bible as infallable? If I were an impressionable young rightie, I'd be really confused right now!).

Here are two other recent stories that aren't likely to garner a great deal of attention:

First, as the New York Times reports, evangelicals are out of control at the Air Force Academy:

One chaplain instructed 600 cadets to warn their comrades who had not been born again that "the fires of hell" were waiting. Pressure to view "The Passion of the Christ" was reported, extending to "official" invitations at every cadet's seat in the dining hall. Nonevangelicals complained of bias in the granting of cadet privileges and of hazing by upper-class superiors, who made those who declined to attend chapel march in "heathen flights."
...General Baldwin had segments cut out [of an instructional video] on such non-Christian religions as Buddhism, Judaism and Native American spirituality.

Second, an important reminder that it's not just the evangelical Christians who pose a threat to rationality, liberty and intelligent debate. I've expressed my opinions about Islamo-Fascism before; here is a recent story about Leicester University in Britain, which cancelled a lecture over fears of retaliation by Islamic fundamentalists (who are kissing cousins of Falwell, et al, even if they occasionally have serious family spats):

Leicester University has cancelled a talk by Muslim lesbian feminist Irshad Manji because of fears of hostile reaction from right-wing local Muslims.
Compare Haifa. Ilan Pappe, a lecturer at Haifa University, is a vehement anti-Zionist, as unpopular with right-wing and conservative opinion in Israel as Irshad Manji is with right-wing and conservative Muslims.
Pappe has had trouble at the university, and some professors there are very hostile to him, but he is still in his job, still lecturing.
The pro-boycotters in the Association of University Teachers persuaded the AUT conference on 22 April to declare an academic boycott of Haifa because of Pappe's hard times.
If so, why not a boycott of Leicester University? The Manji incident shows up the pro-boycotters' double standards.
Irshad Manji spoke in London today, 12 May. She is, as far as I can judge, no sort of socialist or social radical, but she is an advocate of universal human rights, an opponent of cultural relativism, an advocate of what she calls a "reformation" in Islam.
According to Irshad Manji, Leicester University gave two reasons for cancelling.
First, that they feared hostile reactions from some local Muslims so severe that they could not guarantee the security of a lecture by Irshad Manji.
Secondly, the scheduled date of the lecture being soon after the General Election, they feared pressure during the election campaign on local politicians to come out against Manji speaking.

In both my personal and political life I have seen others deploy religion and spirituality in extremely progressive, loving, and humanizing, liberating ways. I have also seen others deploy religion and spirituality in exploitative, ignorant, silencing, marginalizing and destructive ways. The key difference is whether one is willing to submit their religion to pluralistic, rational, deliberative conversation and shared understanding. One can do this without abandoning one's beliefs. One can agree to disagree in the public arena, still motivated by the desire to do good things, a desire motivated by one's religous beliefs. The only question is whether one is willing to temper those beliefs with the humility of public deliberation.

That such a compromise seems alien to so many religious people (and seems impossible from the point of view of the non-religious) only reveals why the entire absolutist paradigm of religious faith ought to be challenged. The idea that one can be deeply religious and simultaneously committed to reaching deliberative consensus on matters of both faith and politics has been the guiding belief of Unitarians, Universalists, anti-trinitarians, and huge sections of the real religious left for centuries. In fact, I would submit that the wacked out evangelical Air Force brats, the Islamo-nazis and the bible-thumping creationists, while possessing boatloads of certainty and pantloads of dogma, actually lack faith.

Love Songs and Politics

Here I go again. While trying to compose an essay on the public sphere, media, and political life, you'd think my playlist would be a little different. But this is what I have spinning on my computerized jukebox this morning:

"Cotton Alley" by 10,000 Maniacs
"Evangeline" by Bad Religion
"Must I Paint You a Picture" by Billy Bragg
"A Home" by the Dixie Chicks
"Sweet Avenue" by Jets to Brazil
"Forget Me" by the Promise Ring
"I am Stretched on Your Grave" by Sinead O'Connor
"Love Serenade" by the Waifs
"Only in Dreams" by Weezer

Except...except...this is so hard to explain sometimes...because it makes me seem so unscientific and undisciplined...but songs about politics and social criticism merely give me intellectual inspiration. Love songs help me remember why I care enough to give a damn in the first place, you know? So a good love song, for me, isn't necessarily "political," but it is what is behind those politics...at least some of them.

It's that ineffable, unphrasable longing for another's well-being. It's the feeling I get when I look at my child and the person with whom I co-created him. It's the idea that somewhere, in Iraq or South Dakota or Mexico, someone is languishing and longing, wants a nice place to live with someone he or she loves. That somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, there are people afraid of losing jobs, certainly, but really, when you get underneath it, they are afraid of losing the ability to love, losing the object of their desire, not in some abstract sense, but in the concrete material sensuality of love. Bombs falling from the sky, means I cannot touch you. Union losing its pension fight, means I cannot feed you. Oh God, let me take care of those I love. Let me have dignity and security. Let me stretch myself across this great, beautiful earth and get some of the plenty, some of the promise. Not just for me. Not just for me.

Here's Weezer:

"You can’t resist her.
She’s in your bones.
She is your marrow, and your ride home.
You can’t avoid her.
She’s in the air.
And in between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide."

I Love Militant Nurses!!!

From laboreducator.org

NURSES KICK ARNOLD'S BUTT

HARRY KELBER, LABOR EDUCATOR - Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have made a major political blunder when he called the California Nurses Association a "special interest" and sought to block the independent union's successful sponsorship of legislation to reduce the RN-patient ratio in the state's hospitals.

Schwarzenegger infuriated CNA members when he pointed at a group of protesting nurses in the audience at one of his fund-raisers and told the crowd they were "special interests" and he was always "kicking their butts." His remarks were also meant for the state's teachers, police and firefighters who have good reasons to oppose him. . .

CNA has led the fight against the "Great Arnold" by using guerrilla tactics that caused his public approval rating to plummet from 65% to 43% - and it's still dropping. RNs have dogged each of some forty of the governor's fund raising and media events, evoking his anger and frustration.

For example, at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco on April 5, some 5,000 RNs, teachers, firefighters and police circled the hotel and made it a media circus that dominated the news for three days and left 500 to 600 seats at the fund-raiser empty, while creating beautiful footage of the governor sneaking into the back of his own event. At various fund-raisers, a light plane has been a frequent uninvited guest, towing a banner through the skies that read "California is not for sale."

The Fairness Doctrine Revisited

Steve Rendall of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has a wonderful piece on the Fairness Doctrine: what it was, what it wasn't, and why we need it again.

Announcing the "Solidarity in Debate" Awards

I'm pleased to announce the formation of a new award to honor service in the intercollegiate debate community. Starting in the spring of 2006, the University of Wyoming Debate Team will sponsor the Solidarity in Debate awards. These awards (two or three of them each year, depending on the number and quality of nominations) will be presented each year to individuals (coaches, directors, debaters, alumni, etc.) who have done significant things to help economically disadvantaged people succeed in debate.

I am honored to report that the following people have volunteered to serve on the inaugural awards committee:

-Gina Lane, Director of Forensics, William Jewell College
-Ed Lee, outgoing Director of Forensics, University of Alabama
-Emily Cram, 2005-06 parliamentary debate coach, University of Wyoming
-Joe Bellon, Director of Forensics, Georgia State University
-and of course, me

Who might qualify for Solidarity in Debate awards? Some initial thoughts:

- Directors who aggressively recruit and find sources of financial support for poor and working-class debaters;
- Coaches, debaters, or directors who operate low-cost summer institutes or debate cooperatives;
- Scholars and activists in the debate community whose scholarly research and/or political advocacy significantly advances understanding and amelioration of poverty;
- Debaters or coaches who make economic access issues a significant part of their argumentative work;
- Alumni, directors, coaches or debaters who help resource-challenged programs stay alive, or resource-challenged debaters keep debating.

But this list should NOT be seen as exhaustive! Indeed, the process of award selection, and criteria for these awards, will be shaped by the nominations received, meaning those doing the nominating (you in the debate community) can help define what economic solidarity means by nominating people you believe are worthy of the awards.

Beginning this September, I will periodically issue calls for nominations. The awards will be decided by March of every debate season, and I will personally fund the (inexpensive) trophies and deliver the awards to the recipients (donations to that end are certainly welcome). The winners will be announced publicly on intercollegiate debate list-serves and (with the permission of relevant governing bodies) at national tournament awards ceremonies. Winners' names will also be forwarded to administrators, news organizations, and campus public relations officers.

Please feel free to forward this announcement to any of the many intercollegiate debate listserves or organizations. Any questions or suggestions about the philosophy and process of the Solidarity in Debate awards may be directed to me, via one of my many email accounts.

In solidarity,

Matt Stannard
University of Wyoming

On Identity Politics

This is reprinted from my MA thesis, and I'm posting it mostly as a gesture of solidarity with Emily, who will have some personal things to say about her own encounters with "identity activists" when she finishes a long post over at Fiercely Feminist.

Identity-based radical politics argues that the best way to fight systemic injustice is through organized resistance by those groups most clearly marginalized within the system. These same proponents, however, reject class as a ground for identity because it seems to "erase" other identities—race, gender, sexual orientation—which they see as more victimized by the system. In turn, they view class affiliation as ineffective as a basis for political organization. In a recent issue of New Left Review, Michael Lind writes: "At the end of the twentieth century we now have enough examples of democratic regimes to know that parties based on class affiliation rather than other aspects of identity—regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious—are the exception rather than the rule" (99). Lind concludes that this fact delegitimizes Marxism:

In many democracies, then, class alignments are fairly weak, compared to
‘primordial’ ties, particularly where there are deep and enduring cleavages
among sub-national communities defined by race, religion, region or other
non-economic factors. Marxists may wish that most democratic party systems were
organized around debates over the means of production, but they are not, and it
simply will not do to dismiss all of the non-economic concerns of real voters in
real democracies as trivial diversions by "bourgeois" parties—particularly given
the fact that many of the intellectuals and activists of "proletarian" leftist
parties are so seldom proletarians themselves. Confronted with the fact that the
majority in most democracies, including a majority of the working class, rejects
radical leftism, middle-class leftists often console themselves with the thought
that the "people" have been brainwashed by "the capitalists" or "the interests."
Of course, if the people are really so stupid and vulnerable to propaganda one
must wonder whether they are capable of self-government at all. (99)

One sees in Lind’s argument many of the metaphysical assumptions that characterize an identity-based retreat from socialist politics: the "primordial" nature of these other identities, the inevitability of capitalism, and the tacit denial of the role of establishment rhetoric in erasing class-consciousness.

Moreover, Lind’s dismissal of Marxism contains an implicit (and undocumented) argument that most Marxists are not really "working class" but rather bourgeois academics. Solidarity activist Justin Schwartz concludes from his own political experience that nearly "all socialist theorists and leaders have been middle class, as are almost all socialists in the U.S. today." He adds: "try talking to workers about socialism" (40-1). Proponents of identity politics believe that anti-oppression movements must abandon both class and socialism: class because people do not recognize it the way they recognize their racial, ethnic, spiritual, or sexual identities; socialism because it offers only an economic structure, and does not proceed from the metaphysics of identity and difference.

However, critics of identity politics contend that the movement’s aims and achievements are not nearly as far-reaching as the anti-capitalist struggle. Mary Marcel argues that many one-time radicals have chosen "to privilege one area of oppression and stick with it, to the exclusion of any other ‘distracting’ matters." As a result, she claims, "the specific category of class oppression has often gotten transformed or subsumed within the structure and praxis of some other kind of liberatory movement, while losing the overt language of the critique of capitalism" (n. pag.). The reasons for the move away from class struggle have been more material than critico-theoretical, since

to some extent the success of liberatory movements, or perhaps I should say
their partial or nascent success, at moving at least some of their number from
the positions of absolute economic and social marginalization has weakened or
blunted the solidarity of such movements, to either keep fighting until everyone
else is free and the revolution has been televised, or, to form coalitions and
totalize the efforts of what may have begun as a single-issue agenda into an
all-encompassing one. Not all liberatory movements critique the capitalist
system in which their specific oppression is created. Many seek merely a more
comfortable place within that system, and are satisfied once that has been
accomplished. (Marcel n. pag.)

Identity politics are "easier" to mobilize around than class politics. Since it is possible to satisfy many of the immediate, reform-oriented material demands of particular identity groups (while it is impossible under the current system to liberate an entire working class from wage oppression), identity movements win small victories. Political scientist Michael Parenti sees these victories as winning "limited to changes in procedure and personnel, leaving institutional class interests largely intact" (13). Other critics complain that attempts to introduce class into discussions of movement theory or strategy are discouraged—forbidden, in a manner of speaking—in forums from classroom to meeting hall "by Right and Left alike" (Spivak 294-5).

To summarize, identity-based politics reject the notion of history as material struggle, positing in its place a concept of oppression based on the ideas of race, gender, sexuality, religion, language, or other signatory identity. These movements affirm a struggle over resources, but they see these resources as consisting of the consciousness of identities, ideologies such as racism or patriarchy, and only indirectly connected to the system of resource distribution. Moreover, identity-based movements dismiss class struggle; they believe most anti-capitalists are not workers anyway and that class is a poor basis for political organization. Finally, identity-based movements believe that theory-building can only occur within particular identity groups, rejecting attempts to universalize or combine divergent causes and types of oppression. Identity politics are a material, as well as an ideological, retreat from Marxism.

Works Cited:

Lind, Michael. "Why there will be no revolution in the U.S.: A Reply to Daniel Lazare." New Left Review, January-February 1999: 97-117.

Marcel, Mary. "The Marxian Afterlife: The Vanishing Category of Class in Cultural Politics." Paper presented at the annual conference of the National Communication Association, New York City, 22 November 1998.

Parenti, Michael. "Reflections on the Politics of Culture, Monthly Review, 1 February 1999.

Schwartz, Justin. "The Final Goal and the Movements." Against the Current, May/June 1994, 40-41.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988) 270-295.

Moral Myopia: "Cultures" of Life and Death

The same Republicans who postured about Terry Schiavo are now (and have for a long time been) blocking legislation that would help others in the same situation as Terry--victims of eating disorders. Read Jane Fleming's short article here.

No need to isolate the Republicans for "culture of life" hypocrisy, though. Don't forget that it was Democrat Bill Clinton who smugly condemned the Columbine shootings on the same day that U.S.-led NATO warplanes began bombing Kosovo. Clinton's showmanlike return to Arkansas six years earlier to watch the execution of Ricky Ray Rector similarly greased the wheels for the pro-life hypocrites who've followed since.

Here is the pattern: Condemn localized, individualized acts of violence and death, while condoning, facilitating, and accepting large-scale, systemic death.

Support the death penalty but not environmental regulations. Condemn school shootings but carpet bomb Baghdad. Condemn Ward Churchill for insensitivity about 9/11, but conveniently ignore Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson for same. Or, condemn Ward Churchill and maybe even Falwell and Robertson too, but support a system that results in the functional equivalent of a dozen or more 9/11s every week, somewhere else in the world.

Or, if you're our dearly departed pontif Pope John Paul II, condemn war in very abstract and unworkable terms, but oppose the distribution of condoms (condoms!) and in doing so set the stage for millions of agonizing AIDS deaths in poor nations.

It's called moral myopia, folks. Looking at the world through a keyhole. Both bourgeois parties do it. The powerful routinely do it. But hey, a lot of them go to church, so it's okay.

Don't be afraid to call them on it.

Parliamentary Debate and the Cult of Adaptability

“In the present state of history, all political writing can only confirm a police-universe, just as all intellectual writing can only produce para-literature which does not dare any longer to tell its name.” --Barthes

"The Happy Consciousness-the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods-reflects the new conformism which is a facet of technological rationality translated into social behavior. It is new because it is rational to an unprecedented degree. It sustains a society which has reduced--and in its most advanced areas eliminated--the more primitive irrationality of the preceding stages, which prolongs and improves life more regularly than before. The war of annihilation has not yet occurred; the Nazi extermination can1ps have been abolished. The Happy Consciousness repels the connection. Torture has been re-introduced as a normal affair, but in a colonial war which takes place at the margin of the civilized world. And there it is practiced with good conscience for war is war. And this war, too, is at the margin--it ravages only the "underdeveloped" countries. Otherwise, peace reigns. The power over man which this society has acquired is daily absolved by its efficacy and productiveness. If it assimilates everything it touches, if it absorbs the opposition, if it plays with the contradiction, it demonstrates its cultural superiority. And in the same way the destruction of resources and the proliferation of waste demonstrate its opulence and the “high levels of well-being”; “the Community is too well off to care!”"--Marcuse

***

These are only my initial (admittedly provocative and argumentative) questions about an issue that many have posted on in recent weeks on the parli-L listserve.

1. The privileging of style over substance:

The charge towards the "policy-fication" or "flow-gocentric" approach to debate is chiefly that it privileges technicality over style. Is it possible that the cult of adaptability does the opposite? And if the Jon Logings of this activity are guilty of privileging style over substance, what political implications exist to those of us who feel that, rather than training future business leaders or public relations specialists, we are training critical advocates?

Why are we so eager to vilify technical knowledge, the grasp of analytic complexity, and high-level abstract thought? Is there a post-modern assumption built into parli "traditionalism?"

For those more on the critical/activist end of the attack on technicalism, what makes you think that the oppressors will not appropriate adaptable, aesthetically pleasing debate-speech just as readily as (or perhaps more readily than) the oppressors will apropriate hypertechnical discourse?

2. Adaptability as a construct:

Toulmin's world of "Argument Fields" --as was pointed out in an excellent article several years ago by Ted Prosise, Jordan Mills and Greg Miller*--ignores the existence of those fields as real sociological (read material) entities whose power to control acceptable and unacceptable discourse is more a function of institutional and material control rather than the persuasive abilities of authorities and systems. If this is true, then is it possible for debate theorists to come up with a definition of "adaptation" that is in the least bit stable, pragmatic, or objective?

Isn't academic debate ITSELF an arena of discursive struggle whose antecedents are the clashing proponents of political views outside of the institution of debate?

It is at best extremely ignorant, and at worst scandalously disingenuous, to suggest that the form of abstract “accessibility” is more conducive than esoteric forms to a politics of liberation. The argument that a conversational rate of speed, an abandonment of academic and theoretical discourse, and an eschewment of “specialized” strategic positions will more easily veer towards liberation fails even the most elementary tests of logic and empirics. History is full of strong examples to the contrary. All sorts of monsters and murderous tyrants have talked pretty.

There is at least as much reason to believe what we already know in our own minds: A game whose emphasis is strongly on burden of refutation, research responsibilities on the cusp of impossibility, and time-based pressures to manage one’s thoughts and discursive economy, engenders a critical sensitivity that renders its participants far less likely to accept closed systems of totalizing discourse, an appeal to common and ancient prejudices, or calls for violence to supplant reasoned argument.

3. The danger of anti-intellectualism:

Behind every word of those posting that "critiques"/"kritiks" are "not relevant," not on-point, etc., does there not lurk a dangerous functionalism, a thinking that reduces all difference and challenge to safe, civil, self-limited, sterile argument?

Given that what we debate folks do cannot ever be completely removed from the political and economic realities of our times, is there a relationship between the active discouraging of critical and non-intuitive, non-"populist" debate argument and the anti-intellectualism of the recent upsurge in evangelical-apocalyptic Christianity, the over 50% functional illiteracy of the American population, the embrace of cultural icons that discourage, rather than stimulate, critical thinking, the popularity of hate radio's Michael Savage, and the tendency to reduce all opposition to warmaking to "you're anti-American?"

In other words, is there a relationship between the attempt to limit debate practice to a pre-ordained (and inevitably conservative) notion of "relevance" and the watered-down political discourse that greases the wheels of incipient fascism?

[*Prosise, Theodore O., Jordan P. Mills, and Greg R. Miller. "Fields as Arenas of Practical Discursive Struggle: Argument Fields and Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Social Practice." Argumentation and Advocacy 32 (Winter 1996): 111-28.]

STATEMENT OF IRAQI OIL WORKERS

I have reprinted the Southern Oil Company Union's statement in the Guardian below. Another of their statements can be found here.

Guardian (London) - February 18, 2005

Leave our country now
From the first days of the US-British invasion of Iraq, oil workers have resisted foreign occupation

Hassan Juma'a Awad

We lived through dark days under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. When the regime fell, people wanted a new life: a life without shackles and terror; a life where we could rebuild our country and enjoy its natural wealth. Instead, our communities have been attacked with chemicals and cluster bombs, and our people tortured, raped and killed in our homes.

Saddam's secret police used to creep over the roofs into our homes at night; occupation troops now break down our doors in broad daylight. The media do not show even a fraction of the devastation that has engulfed Iraq. Journalists who dare to report the truth of what is happening have been kidnapped by terrorists. This serves the agenda of the occupation, which aims to eliminate witnesses to its crimes.

Workers in Iraq's southern oilfields began organising soon after British occupying forces invaded Basra. We founded our union, the Southern Oil Company Union, just 11 days after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. When the occupation troops stood back and allowed Basra's hospitals, universities and public services to be burned and looted, while they defended only the oil ministry and oilfields, we knew we were dealing with a brutal force prepared to impose its will without regard for human suffering. From the beginning, we were left in no doubt that the US and its allies had come to take control of our oil resources.

The occupation authorities have maintained many of Saddam's repressive laws, including the 1987 order which robbed us of basic union rights, including the right to strike. Today, we still have no official recognition as a trade union, despite having 23,000 members in 10 oil and gas companies in Basra, Amara, Nassiriya, and up to Anbar province. However, we draw our legitimacy from the workers, not the government. We believe unions should operate regardless of the government's wishes, until the people are able finally to elect a genuinely accountable and independent Iraqi government, which represents our interests and not those of American imperialism.

Our union is independent of any political party. Most trade unions in Britain only seem to be aware of one union federation in Iraq, the regime-authorised Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, whose president, Rassim Awadi, is deputy leader of the US-imposed prime minister Ayad Allawi's party. The IFTU's leadership is carved up between the pro-government Communist party, Allawi's Iraqi National Accord, and their satellites. In fact, there are two other union federations, which are linked to political parties, as well as our own organisation.

Our union has already shown it is able to stand its ground against one of the most powerful US companies, Dick Cheney's KBR, which tried to take over our workplaces with the protection of occupation forces.

We forced them out and compelled their Kuwaiti subcontractor, Al Khourafi, to replace 1,000 of the 1,200 employees it brought with it with Iraqi workers, 70% of whom are unemployed today. We also fought US viceroy Paul Bremer's wage schedule, which dictated that Iraqi public sector workers must earn ID 69,000 ($35) per month, while paying up to $1,000 a day to thousands of foreign mercenaries. In August 2003 we took strike action and shut down all oil production for three days. As a result, the occupation authorities had to raise wages to a minimum of ID 150,000.

We see it as our duty to defend the country's resources. We reject and will oppose all moves to privatise our oil industry and national resources. We regard this privatisation as a form of neo-colonialism, an attempt to impose a permanent economic occupation to follow the military occupation.

The occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division of Sunni and Shia. We never knew this sort of division before. Our families intermarried, we lived and worked together. And today we are resisting this brutal occupation together, from Falluja to Najaf to Sadr City. The resistance to the occupation forces is a God-given right of Iraqis, and we, as a union, see ourselves as a necessary part of this resistance - although we will fight using our industrial power, our collective strength as a union, and as a part of civil society which needs to grow in order to defeat both still-powerful Saddamist elites and the foreign occupation of our country.

Bush and Blair should remember that those who voted in last month's elections in Iraq are as hostile to the occupation as those who boycotted them. Those who claim to represent the Iraqi working class while calling for the occupation to stay a bit longer, due to "fears of civil war", are in fact speaking only for themselves and the minority of Iraqis whose interests are dependent on the occupation.

We as a union call for the withdrawal of foreign occupation forces and their military bases. We don't want a timetable - this is a stalling tactic. We will solve our own problems. We are Iraqis, we know our country and we can take care of ourselves. We have the means, the skills and resources to rebuild and create our own democratic society.

Hassan Juma'a Awad is general secretary of Iraq's Southern Oil Company Union and president of the Basra Oil Workers' Union

Fake reporter unmasked at White House

I'm just going to let this story speak for itself for now. I've added some links. Oh, and I think the gay porn spin on this is horrendous. I know it's tempting in light of what the right often does, and it exposes the hypocrisy of the Bushites. But it shouldn't matter in assessing Gannon or the Bush method of media control. mjs

The Guardian (London)

February 11, 2005
Guardian Foreign Pages, Pg. 18

Fake reporter unmasked at White House

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

The White House faced fresh accusations of a clandestine propaganda campaign yesterday after it emerged it granted regular access to a rightwing blogger with a habit of asking President Bush easy questions.

Jeff Gannon, who represented a rightwing site owned by a Texas-based Republican activist, had been a regular at White House briefings since 2003 but aroused reporters' suspicions after posing ideologically loaded questions.

The fake White House correspondent quit his job at the Talon News site on Wednesday after liberal bloggers found he had been operating under a pseudonym, and that he was linked to several gay pornographic web domain addresses under his real idenity, James Guckert.

The White House spokesman, Scott McLellan, has dismissed charges that Gannon was part of an underground propaganda effort as "just a wild conspiracy theory". But questions remained yesterday about why the White House suspended the normally rigorous vetting process to issue daily passes to an organisation rejected by the Senate last year for not being a legitimate media outlet.

The extent of Gannon's links to an earlier White House scandal - the leaking of the name of the CIA agent Valerie Plame - also remained unclear yesterday. Gannon has been targeted for questioning in that case.

"It's just common sense that the White House knew who Jeff Gannon was, and they were waving him in for a reason," said David Brock, director of Media Matters for America, the liberal monitoring group which named the reporter last week.

Gannon's unmasking comes only weeks after the Bush administration admitted paying handsome sums to three conservative commentators to promote its social programmes in print, radio and TV, and has led to calls from Democrats for an explanation."It appears that Mr Gannon's presence in the White House press corps was merely a tool of propaganda for your administration," the Democratic congresswoman Louise Slaughter wrote in a letter to Mr Bush.

In its investigations, Media Matters for America discovered that Talon News was owned by a Texas-based Republican activist called Roger Eberle, and that its so-called correspondent was in the habit of lifting verbatim large chunks of White House and Republican party press releases without attribution.

It also discovered a disturbing pattern at White House press conferences during the year or so when Gannon was a regular fixture. "You could see there was a pattern in which the White House press secretary, Scott McLellan, would be getting a more aggressive and less friendly question, and then would seem to call on Jeff Gannon to change the subject. And when he did he got a softball question in return," Mr Brock said. The fake reporter's downfall came last week when he attracted suspicion with a particularly loaded question to the president on how he would enlist Democratic support for his social security reforms.

After falsely attributing quotes to Democratic leaders, Gannon asked: "How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" Mr Brock then launched his investigation. Subsequent inquiries by liberal bloggers uncovered Gannon's links to gay porn domain addresses under his real name, and a posted photograph of a man posing in his underwear with his initials.

The exposure prompted Gannon to resign his job at Talon, although he has shown no remorse about his conduct at the White House. "I asked a question at a White House press briefing and this is what happened to me. If this is what happens to me, what reporter is safe?" he told a newspaper in his hometown in Delaware yesterday.

Meanwhile, Talon News was looking for a replacement correspondent on its website yesterday.

We're All In The Machine, But Some Are More In Than Others?

Both sides in the debate over Ward Churchill's 9-11 comments--calling those who perished in the WTC "little Eichmans"--have a preference for hyperbole over science. While there is a place for outrage over both the "efficient" destruction wrought by capitalism and the barbaric "kill-em-all-and-let-god-sort-it-out" tactics of Islamic terrorists (and both east and west alternate between efficient and barbaric killing as it suits them), both sides of the debate are guilty of talking largely out of their butts when it comes to making points about scale, magnitude, intent, and tactical justification. Even those who also condemn both Al Qaeda and
American imperialism don't always do so consistently or carefully. It seems as if everyone (and I am not excusing myself for the past couple of years) is off-the-cuff across the board at a time when it would greatly benefit all of us to rigorously study the relationship between a system and its subjects. Indignant hyperbole, the reduction of a mass of people to an emotive label like "Eichman," and conservative blather about leftist professors ought to be transformed into informed comparisons, serious confrontation of the spaces we all occupy, and fair-minded criticism of Churchill's blind spots.

Although few activist-writers are as disciplined as Ward Churchill when it comes to recording the history of colonialism's crimes, and the Native American case for recognition and reparation are irrefutable and immediate, Churchill's failure has always been in coherently describing the enemy, and in so doing, tying the indiginist struggle into the larger struggle against capitalism. There are reasons for these limitations beyond his own rhetorical and political choices, and even with those choices, he is a valuable political ally, and his writings are invaluable resources especially for people from all walks of life who are just learning about the magnitude of colonialism. But as I read Churchill's "little Eichmans" phrase, and the entirety of the work in which it appears, I can't fight the feeling that such deliberate phrasing is symptomatic of a rhetorical commitment that is judgmental, presumptuous, and bourgeois. The phrase itself is an inaccurate metaphor. What is worse is that its composer likely knows it to be so.

[Churchill may reply, has replied, that he doesn't give a crap about tying the indigenist struggle to other struggles. He and M. Annette Jaimes* and others have eloquently pointed out that the indiginist struggle is unique, a foundation for other struggles, and requires an indigenous vanguard. I sympathize with all those arguments, but Churchill has always made the choice--a valid choice--to enter into dialogue with others on the left, and it was Churchill himself who once said that all peoples are and were colonized. More importantly, it's as foolish for indigenists to take other struggles for granted as for those on the anti-capitalist left to ignore indigenous struggles.]

As Andy Liu pointed out, many of the so-called Eichmans weren't even in the building yet, but many poor working people were. Now, there is a certain type of trendy lefty who delights in being harshly dismissive about this fact, displaying a kind of hardheartedness that seems impressive to the cadre; they get to appear tough on "collaborators" at little personal and political cost. But for me, our struggle makes little sense if we don't look at how innocent conscripts and custodians and couriers are casualties in 1944 Berlin, 1991-2003 Baghdad, 2001 New York City, etc.--and how unacceptable that always is. One gets the impression that Churchill wouldn't blink if he learned that some of those who died cleaning the offices of the alleged little Eichmans were poor, indigenous workers. There's a war on, he'd say, people are gonna die if they take jobs working for the bad guys. The problem is that the other side is saying that too, and in both cases it's true: War is what happens when powerful people--whether renegade sons of rich Saudis or rich transplanted Texans--make casualties out of the powerless in order to make money and promote regressive, distopian visions.

Still, to say that Churchill's declaration is insensitive and unwarranted (and bad for the cause of righteous resistance) is not to excuse or affirm the predictable conservative condemnation of that declaration. It's even more ignorant to simply dismiss all questions of the way citizen-subjects are constituted in the dialectic of hegemony and resistance, to just say "Can you believe it, that commie called 'em all little Eichmans...for shame!"

Questions of culpability and collaboration seem like a distraction to me unless they are contextualized by serious inquiry into who is truly culpable. The relationship between capitalist/colonialist exploitation and terrorist forms of resistance is relatively simple: When one side oppresses, it allows and invites cynical manipulators to align themselves with the oppressed and commit further destruction. Both sides are scoring their points on the backs of the poor and powerless. Both sides have successfully brainwashed large segments of their populations into carrying out their dirty work. Being brainwashed doesn't make someone an Eichman. Stepping into the shoes of the poor and powerless--whether those be fireman's boots, the shoes of Iraqi conscripts, those of Afghan women, or the kids from Wyoming who've died in Iraq--may not always yield comfortable ideological lines, but it is an absolute prerequisite to fighting for a world in which people are treated as means and not ends.

And somewhere, under all of this, there's a way of thinking, a radical understanding of how precarious we constituted subjects are, that says even little Eichmans are victims. That kind of radical love may not be historically possible, but it wouldn't hurt to allow its impossibility to haunt us a little.

------------------------------------------------------
*"For the great mass of non-Indian Americans, those who wish not to be Nazis or heirs to Nazism , and whose collective conscience might bestir itself to compel some positive alternation in the colonial relationship were the facts known to them, our present realities remain as far from sight and mind as the history upon which they are predicated...we are mutually confronted with the specter not of simply a present determined by the unrelenting horror of America's past, but a future dictated by the never-quite-acknowledged ugliness of America's present. ...To a very real extent, the key to reversing this process may be fond in achieving the liberation of Native North America, the empire's first victim and in whose ongoing victimization the empire finds the cornerstone upon which the whole of its continued existence ultimately rests." (M. Annette Jaimes, "Sand Creek the Morning After," The State of Native America, 1992)

Bill Gates on Chinese Workers

I'm not going to write a lengthy comment about this. Just listen to how he sees working people:

Bill Gates says China has created brand-new form of capitalism
Saturday, January 29, 2005 10:07:24 AM
http://www.afxpress.com

DAVOS, Switzerland (AFX) - Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates said China has created a brand-new form of capitalism that benefits consumers more than anything has in the past.

"It is a brand-new form of capitalism, and as a consumer its the best thing that ever happened," Gates told an informal meeting late Friday at the World Economic Forum here.

He characterised the Chinese model in terms of "willingness to work hard and not having quite the same medical overhead or legal overhead".

Manufacturers have created "scale economies that are just phenomenal", in part owing to companies there and elsewhere on the planet designing good products, Gates said.

Looking ahead, he added: "You know they haven't run out of labor yet, the portion that can come out of the agriculture sector" was still considerable.

SUU Debate Slashed

The trustees at Southern Utah decided to fund the new MA program in communications by cutting debate--which is like cutting a writing lab to fund a grad program in English.

This morning, I sent the following to the opinion pages of The Spectrum, Salt Lake
Tribune, and Deseret News:

To the Editor:

I am not merely saddened by the SUU Trustees' decision to eliminate funding
for Southern Utah's century-old forensics program. I am also intellectually
and morally disappointed in their reasoning. By framing the funding of both
forensics and a Masters Program as a zero-sum game, the Trustees are guilty
of an "either/or" fallacy that will ultimately hurt SUU's academic
reputation.

Hundreds of Communication Studies programs around the country, including
some of the most top-ranked programs, consider forensics a vital
complimentary component to a strong Communications graduate program.
Eliminating funding for speech and debate to fund a Communication Masters
program is like eliminating funding for a writing lab in order to fund a
graduate program in English. Moreover, research overwhelmingly concludes
that speech and debate increases academic achievement across the curriculum.
The presence of a debate team on campus is an intellectual barometer for a
university.

Twenty years ago, as a young member of the speech and debate team at West
Jordan High School, I attended my first summer debate camp at Southern Utah
University. I would not have gone to college had it not been for my
involvement in debate, nor would I (and thousands of others like me) have
completed a graduate program in Communication Studies.

It's a sad day for speech and debate in the West; not merely because we will
miss our friends from Southern Utah. It's a sad day because the Trustees at
SUU ended up eliminating the very program most likely to aid them in their
quest for academic legitimacy. They ought to reconsider, and restore
funding to, the SUU Forensics Team.

Matt Stannard
Director of Forensics, University of Wyoming
Rocky Mountain Regional Representative, Cross Examination Debate Association

Two Fond Farewells

At the end of Fall Semester 2004, both Michael Owens and Joshua Wilkerson said their goodbyes to the University of Wyoming and the Cowboy Debate Team; they'd stopped competing in the Spring of 2003, but had provided us with valuable coaching after that while finishing up their degrees. Both of these remarkable young men have incredibly promising futures ahead of them, and both will leave a gap that we won't even try to fill. Talk about retired jerseys, retired numbers, hall of famers, no metaphors can possibly come close to explaining what Mike and Josh meant to our team, or what they've left behind not only in unprecedented competitive success but also in subsequent coaching and their own unique visions of an already unique squad and philosophy of debate.

Josh was a transfer student, one of the rare out-of-state students that actually stayed on the team and endured the culture shock of Laramie. He won around five extemp tournaments his junior year (and remember, we don't officially "do individual events" at UW...), along with innumerable debate elims with multiple partners, and although he didn't clear at the NPTE his junior year, he did take 4th speaker. He was glib, driven, a brilliant researcher, a tireless peer coach, and a bar hopper worthy of legend, perhaps the one thing that made him feel at home in Wyoming. As we got to know him, we also learned of his genuine friendliness, sensitivity, undying honesty, and team spirit.

But more than all these things, and more than being a brilliant debater --an incredible speaker and a walking lexis-nexus database who would overwhelm you with well-processed research worthy of a first-round NDT debater--Wilkie was different from most of us, because he was, and is, an unapologetic Republican and capitalist. And top that off with his preference for classic rock and long, dirty blues jams (on a team that's 60% hip hop and 40% punk or post-punk), and you had a large, brilliant, loving, gregarious, generous, winning, and very unique soul. Randy DeBerry called him the "LSM"--the Large, Smoking Man. And in spite of his unbending (and I dare say, at times, brutish) Republicanism, Wilkie was one of the best political conversationalists I've ever come across. Josh loves the game of politics and I doubt we've heard the last of him on that level.

In Josh we had a debater who could be as good as he ever had to be; who gently bested less experienced teams and ruthlessly pounded away at rival greats until they fell, relieved to be done with the experience. He could argue "capitalism good" and convince even me. But he could also argue "capitalism bad" and provide reasons I hadn't even thought of. He was a parli purist's dream, speaking slowly and eloquently and always placing accessibility before theory. But he never lost to any of the "faster" parli teams and grew to develop a genuine love for the UW policy squad and their arguments.

There was no question that in 2002-2003, Wilkie would be the appropriate partner for Mike Owens. Mike had walked on the UW squad mid-semester his freshman year amidst the praises of skilled senior Beth Gasson (later Worthen) who promised me he would eventually win nationals. Although Mike had the benefit of four amazing partners, each of those four people also stood in awe of Mike. He has been called one of the best ever. His style was totally unique, completely accessible, terribly intimidating, disarmingly sincere, wildly passionate, completely his own. He was top speaker at both the 2002 and 2003 NPTE's, third speaker at NPDA nats twice, an NPDA finalist as a sophomore with James Worthen, an NPTE semifinalist with Worthen and then with Justin Racette, and with Josh Wilkerson won both nationals his senior year.

Like Josh, Mike could advocate just about any reasonable position, regardless of whether it cohered with his compassionate libertarianism. But where Josh found his strength in economic and political empirics, Mike found his soul in philosophical and rhetorical critiques of statist and collectivist arrogance. Watching him debate helped me understand rhetorical theories of enactment. The speaker became the position he was arguing, and frequently, that position called for the rebellion of individual integrity, the responsibility of one person for another, transcending and encapsulating the foundations of state and law. These were philosophical perspectives that deeply influenced the UW squad. He won those debates because we'd watch and listen to him believe his arguments so much that we believed them too.

Mike's taste in music was much better (in other words, closer to mine) than Josh's. Those who know Mike won't be surprised to learn he prefers cheesy-but-edgy underground pop and has a special place in his heart for the avant gard. But to give credit where credit is due, Josh was much more responsible than Mike. Mike's irresponsibility is only slightly less legendary than his debate skills. If there is an irresponsibility hall of fame, he might get in except that he probably bet money on his irresponsibility. It is only when you see his long list of accomplishments at UW--including editor of the school newspaper, student body officer, representative to the Irish Debates AND national debate champion--that you wonder how he could do all of these things while never getting up before about 1:00 PM except at tournaments. And I'm sure the NPTE committee would agree that Mike's most impressive (immortal, really) work came the year after he won the title. Enough said about that. Too much probably.

In NPDA finals, Josh and Mike defended the Iraq war in front of a panel and audience who largely opposed said war (Rob Klingler's post-final round discussion of this phenomena in last year's NPDA journal is particularly enlightening on this point)...in doing so they overcame a bias in the debate community in the same manner that they, along with so many of their colleagues here at UW, transcended expectations of what debate was, is, and could be. More than that, they are good friends of mine, people who survived the transition from being coached by an insufferable S.O.B. to befriending said S.O.B. But that's like them. They were and are genuine friends of many in the debate community. Part of the reason for that is their honesty and genuine-ness. In an activity where many participants are chameleons and players, Mike and Josh have always been Mike and Josh, what you see is what you get. Amidst some rather disappointing public displays of competitive jealousy, and more than one unsuccessful attempt to smear their reputation, Mike and Josh just kept on winning and hanging out with their friends.

I was lucky enough to be one of those friends, and as is the case with so many successful debaters, coach learned a little more from them than they learned from coach. So this missive might serve as a little farewell nod and wink to two very unique debate immortals who, we hope, will keep visiting and helping out from time to time. But no words could ever do justice to what they've done for UW, or for this activity. Goodbye, Wilkie and Mike, and thanks, and best of luck.

death, proportionality, and memory

If a friend hadn't started a thread about the recently departed Susan Sontag, I would have missed that piece of news amidst the stunning cataclysm of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

There's not a doubt in my mind that Susan Sontag would point out that her death occurred around the same time as around 150,000 others, that she died in relative comfort, and these folks didn't, and that the tsunami was as much a social disaster as a natural one. She'd be right, as she mostly was.

I read Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors as an undergraduate. As a student teacher of a philosophical writing course I caused some trouble among some religious conservative students who reported to their parents that they were forced to read Sontag's calm, intelligent ridicule of those arguing AIDS was God's punishment. I was angry at the way these college students ran crying to their mommies and daddies, but more disappointed at their failure to appreciate a method of close reading and extensive literary review that would have been a great model for them in any kind of philosophical, political, or polemical writing. Sontag's Metaphor works were treasure troves of reference, analysis, and review. Her conclusions only came at the end of amazingly long and original lines of reading the work of others. From what little I know of the rest of her writing, this was the rule, not the exception.

Currently, a few conservatives are pissing on Sontag's grave, pointing out that she had the audacity to criticize America. Yawn. Didn't see that coming. She was a brilliant writer, a mostly careful thinker, and like so many intelligent Americans, was disappointed with how thorough and self-deceiving the American ruling class could be with its various corruptions and imperial designs. I have no idea if everything she said was factually correct or appropriately timed, but I would be remiss if I did not point out that conservatives have been reminding us for the last two years that Bush's factual misstatements about Iraqi WMD should not be called intentional lies, that we should give Bush the benefit of the doubt. The truth is, we dwell in a post-ethical public sphere, where the charge of lying is a post-hoc construct and even obituaries are politicized.

Again, I'm drawn back to what Sontag might herself say. Don't we have better things to do?

Some socialist tsunami analysis, then, because it's important, and I'll bet you need something important to read. Oh, and if you can, give some money to an aid organization. Andrea says to remind everyone they don't need your clothes or cans of tuna, bro. They need money, because it's difficult to get stuff over there.