VIEWS by ART:    SOCIETY and POLITICS...           list view              more excerpts   Lee Ballinger  What Backlash Against the Dixie Chicks?  Country radio has been refusing to play the first two singles from the new Dixie Chicks album Taking the Long Way, supposedly because "country people" are still offended by Chicks' singer Natalie Maines' anti-Bush comments made in 2003. The new album, which defiantly takes pride in still attacking Bush, has come on the album charts today at number one, selling 526,000 copies. It is also number one on the country album charts, despite the attempted boycott by country radio. The supposed justification for this "backlash" against the Dixie Chicks is a myth now just as it was in 2003. What actually happened then when the media was filled with stories about a backlash, with allegations that all country fans and especially Southerners are rightwing rednecks, when country stars such as Toby Keith were attacking the Chicks every day? The Chicks began their nationwide 2003 tour just six weeks after the invasion of Iraq. The first show was in Greenville, South Carolina. At this and every subsequent stop--the first several in the heart of the South--they showed a video montage of Malcolm X, the civil rights movement, Gandhi, and the struggle for women's rights. In Greenville, South Carolina, and every subsequent stop, they were greeted with massive cheering at each show. At some shows there were, at most, a dozen protestors outside. The backlash should be against country radio, the corporate sponsors who dumped the Chicks, and the entire mythical red state/blue state nonsense. America wants peace. Country fans want peace. The South wants peace. Everyone wants artists to be able to speak out for our interests. How can we build on these realities to get the world we want, need, and deserve? The "long way home" leads right through the heartland of the very people the media tries to make us fear. Let's go! Arthur Asiimwe  Rwandan president scoffs at "Hotel Rwanda" Rwandan president Paul Kagame on Wednesday dismissed the Oscar-nominated drama "Hotel Rwanda" as an attempt to rewrite the history of the central African country's 1994 genocide. The 2004 film refueled world interest in the massacres, in which some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of killings. Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of a luxury hotel in the Rwandan capital Kigali who uses his position to help save more than 1,200 Tutsi refugees. Kagame said the movie's portrayal of Rusesabagina as a hero during the genocide was false. "It has nothing to do with Rusesabagina," Kagame told reporters during a visit to Washington. "He just happened to be there accidentally, and he happened to be surviving because he was not in the category of those being hunted." Kagame said people in the hotel were saved in part because U.N. forces occupied the hotel and because the killers wanted to keep it as a place where they could drink beer after a long day of killing and discuss whom to kill the following day. Kagame, a Tutsi, said another reason lives were spared is that talks had been underway between his rebel group and the then-interim government to exchange Tutsis in the hotel for Hutu soldiers captured by his group. "Someone is trying to rewrite the history of Rwanda and we cannot accept it," he said. Some survivors of the genocide also have been critical of movies about the slaughter, saying Hollywood got their story wrong. Amid international inaction, the genocide was finally ended by Kagame, who led a rebel army from Uganda to seize power. Rusesabagina, awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom last year, has recently been critical of the Kigali government, accusing it of continued human rights violations and oppression of political opponents. Kennedy Johnson  How Radio Continues to 'Dumb Down' Blacks in Los Angeles [And, one might add, everyone virtually everyplace else.] In the nation’s second largest media market that is home to almost one million blacks, there is only one daily talk show that focuses on issues relevant to blacks in Los Angeles and unless you’re up at 4:30 a.m., you miss it.  And this is not a plug for the “Front Page” on KJLH, but it is what it is. Please tell me that I am not the only black person in Los Angeles to notice the gradual yet progressive downward spiral of black radio into meaningless banter by obsolete personalities who are solely focused on their own lives and use four hours during morning drive time to tell you about it.  And if it’s not the “Chatty Kathy” personalities then it’s the celebrity who has a new movie, television show, album, video, ring tone, sneaker, or whatever that just won’t shut up. Then there’s the issue of community news, you know news about issues relevant to you and me.  Well, that’s just about disappeared too. If radio stations read news, it’s usually Associated Press or City News copy that wasn’t written by us and usually doesn’t pertain to us....  Consider this.  Spanish language radio disc jockeys were the moving force behind the mass numbers of people in attendance at the pro immigration rallies and marches.  They told their people where to go, when to be there, what to bring with them, and the people came. When was the last time John Salley, Big Boy, or Cliff Winston told you to attend a rally in support of an issue that was important to blacks?  My point exactly.... Orhan Pamuk  Freedom to Write [If link fails, see here] ...didn't I often and angrily fantasize about raising these subjects in my novels, just because they happened to be forbidden? As I thought all this through, I was at once ashamed of my silence, and reconfirmed in my belief that freedom of expression has its roots in pride, and is, in essence, an expression of human dignity. I have personally known writers who have chosen to raise forbidden topics purely because they were forbidden. I think I am no different. Because when another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free. This, indeed, is the spirit that informs the solidarity felt by PEN, by writers all over the world. Sometimes my friends rightly tell me or someone else, "You shouldn't have put it quite like that; if only you had worded it like this, in a way that no one would find offensive, you wouldn't be in so much trouble now." But to change one's words and package them in a way that will be acceptable to everyone in a repressed culture, and to become skilled in this arena, is a bit like smuggling forbidden goods through customs, and as such, it is shaming and degrading. The theme of this year's PEN festival is reason and belief. I have related all these stories to illustrate a single truth —that the joy of freely saying whatever we want to say is inextricably linked with human dignity. So let us now ask ourselves how "reasonable" it is to denigrate cultures and religions, or, more to the point, to mercilessly bomb countries, in the name of democracy and freedom of thought. My part of the world is not more democratic after all these killings. In the war against Iraq, the tyrannization and heartless murder of almost a hundred thousand people has brought neither peace nor democracy. To the contrary, it has served to ignite national-ist, anti-Western anger. Things have become a great deal more difficult for the small minority who are struggling for democracy and secularism in the Middle East. This savage, cruel war is the shame of America and the West. Organizations like PEN and writers like Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller are its pride. Tim Harper  Hollywood Star Tim Robbins Blasts US Media Ignorance of 'High Crimes' in Iraq Acclaimed American actor/director Tim Robbins blasted the US government's policy on terrorism -- and the US media's failure to examine it critically -- at a news conference in Athens promoting his stage version of George Orwell's "1984". "We have right now a media that is willfully ignoring the high crimes and misdemeanours of the president of the United States," the star of Hollywood hits including "Mystic River" and "The Player" told reporters.... "(Bush) got us into (the Iraq) war based on lies that he knew were lies. ... His war has recruited more Al-Qaeda members than Osama bin Laden could ever have dreamed for ... yet no one in the media is calling for impeachment," he said. Robbins pointed out similarities between current US policies on terrorism and the authoritarian society described by Orwell. "Unfortunately, the book and the play is more relevant now than it ever has been," he said. "(It) talks about continuous warfare as a means to control the Western economy, and as a way to control rebel elements within society through the use of fear, constant fear" ...  The play, which Robbins produces and directs, opened in Athens for a five-day run on Tuesday. He is hoping to also direct a film version of the play in the fall. Terry Eagleton  What Are We? A review of Nation and Novel by Patrick Parrinder As a literary form, the novel is more fascinated by rogues, orphans, vagrants, whores and eccentrics than it is by knights, demi-gods or aristocrats. It is the most realist of genres, one for which the odds and ends of everyday life are a lot more exciting than the heroic or supernatural. An 18th-century reader, raised on a high-minded diet of elegy and pastoral, must have felt stunned on first encountering the jagged prose of a Daniel Defoe, with its street-wise populism and delight in the commonplace. The novel has an inexhaustible middle-class appetite for the real. As its name suggests, deriving as it does from "new", the novel is the product of the modern, secularised world. Sceptical of absolutes and wary of conventions, it is the kind of writing in which you can do more or less what you like.... ...fictions play a key role in [nations] collective image of themselves. Because novels are capacious pieces of writing, they have the space to roam from one end of the social scale to the other, shifting from Fagin's underworld to Brownlow's suburbia. No other kind of literary art can match their blend of social range and psychological subtlety. In the 18th century, as Nation and Novel shows, the rise of the novel is bound up with the forging of a new kind of Protestant national identity, as Britain consolidates its commercial and imperial power after the revolutionary upheavals of the civil war era and the Restoration. It's no accident that Defoe writes a scabrous poem entitled "The True-Born Englishman", as well as producing what Parrinder sees as a study in national character in the figure of the robustly individualist Robinson Crusoe. Henry Fielding wrote the original lyrics for "The Roast Beef of Old England", while Samuel Richardson's novels can be read among other things as Whiggish political allegories. It took an outsider, Sir Walter Scott, to launch some of the most searching reflections on nationhood and national character. The art of Dickens, an author Parrinder reads as both an instinctive republican and a Little Englander, was praised by George Gissing as embodying the spirit of the English race. Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which portrays an English nation at the mercy of (probably Jewish) foreign crooks and speculators, is one instance of that spirit at its most sourly xenophobic. Stephanie Merritt  Still a street-fighting man  In his first interview with an English newspaper, 83-year-old Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago reveals that his famed radicalism is undiminished Saramago is about to leave Lanzarote for two months of travelling, as he does most years, in part to promote the new novel, but mainly to speak at conferences and presentations on politics and sociology. 'Most of it doesn't have much to do with literature,' he explains, 'but this is a part of my life that I consider very important, not to limit myself to literary work; I try to be involved in the world to the best of my strengths and abilities.' Still a member of the Communist party, Saramago is a vocal opponent of globalisation and many of his best known novels have taken the form of political allegory. Does he believe that the artist is obliged to take on a political role? 'It isn't a role,' he says, almost sharply. 'The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.' Kari Lyderson  Support Builds for Immigration Protests, Boycott  As May 1 action looms, undocumented workers discuss their power, solidarity In the 2004 independent film A Day Without a Mexican, Californians woke up and all the Mexicans had disappeared. Lawns went untended, hotel rooms sat uncleaned, and countless other jobs performed by low-paid immigrants were left undone. Immigrant-rights groups have frequently mentioned this film and the larger concept behind it during the past six weeks of massive pro-immigrant marches. In Chicago, where the first of the large demonstrations took place, a central theme has been waking the American public up to the economic importance of immigrants. Organizers say they want to show how much immigrants, including close to 12 million undocumented ones, contribute with their labor and with their buying power.... CONTRATIEMPO  Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: 100 Years Later  Back to the Back of the Yards In 1906, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was published. Almost immediately, it had an impact on U.S. society unlike no other book since Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. A few short months after its publication, The Jungle arrived in the halls of power in Washington and at the dinner tables of the middle class. In the history of the U.S., few books have achieved the social and political impact of The Jungle. ... What has changed is that today Jurgis doesn't come from Europe, but rather from Latin America. His only destination is the United States, and his name isn't Jurgis, but José and Maria (Joseph and Mary).... Throughout the month of March, immigrants took to the streets: a half million in Los Angeles, 300,000 in Chicago, 40,000 in Milwaukee and New Mexico staged the biggest mobilizations ever. Although the nationalists attacked immigration and immigrants, above all through the English-language media, José and Maria acted with great dignity during all the marches. They didn't stay quiet and now they're part of a new social movement that has spread rapidly around the country. It began last July when more than 50,000 marched in the Back of the Yards, the neighborhood Sinclair made famous 100 years ago. A century after the publication of The Jungle, it would seem that history is repeating itself. It's yet another time when the poorest and most oppressed offer a way out of the jungle: demanding dignity, equality and justice for all. CONTRATIEMPO, A monthly Spanish-language review of political and cultural issues published in Chicago, printed this editorial in its April issue, noting the 100th anniversary of Upton Sinclair's classic novel exposing the meatpacking industry, The Jungle. (Translation by Lance Selfa.) Ron Jacobs  A Review of Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun  "I Know I'm Not Dreaming, Because I Can't Sleep Any More" A few years back I was talking with a young socialist organizer about books. He had just asked me why I wasted my time reading fiction when there was so much non-fiction that needed to be read. Culture, I replied, reflects and illuminates a society just as much, if not more, than history or economics. Even when the fiction one reads is bourgeois fiction the story reveals the society within which the story takes place. If there is such a thing as proletarian fiction, it too reveals the lives and desires of that class. Peter Weiss's narrator in his marathon work The Aesthetics of Resistance, notes that "art could not be versatile and inventive enough....Painter, poets, philosophers reported on the crises and confrontations, the concretions and awakenings of their time....one might social upheavals, yet in the multiplicity of mirrorings, of visual concentrations, one could always find a unity...." In 1998, the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury published his novel Gate of the Sun in Arabic. This work is a powerful piece of literature that illustrates quite evocatively why fiction is important. The publication of the English translation in 2006 by the small Brooklyn, NY company Archipelago Books was an important event missed by much of the US cultural media. This is unfortunate for all involved. Although I do not read or speak Arabic (to my regret), I found reading the English translation by Humphrey Davies spiriting me into the soul of Palestine. Dream and reality flow back and forth becoming one. Fears, hopes, love and anger are more than theories on a page. Khoury's story makes these emotions real in the souls of the people and the Palestine they want to maintain. The Nation  Songs of Protest For years, Justin Sane, lead singer of the political punk band Anti-Flag, said it was "left to artists to make the statements that should be getting put into the public discourse." But Anti-Flag is no longer shouting from the sidelines. The band's new CD, For Blood and Empire, features the song "Depleted Uranium Is a War Crime." It was inspired by an appearance at a 2004 Punk Voter rally in Seattle with Representative Jim McDermott, a Vietnam-era vet who has introduced legislation calling for an investigation of the military's use of DU. McDermott is on the CD, and the band is spearheading a drive to get Congress to act on the bill. Come to think of it, if a 69-year-old Congressman is heeding the call of a punk band, maybe it's time to recognize that, with prodding from outspoken and courageous musicians, the Bush order is rapidly fading and the times, again, are a-changin'. David Krieger  The Courage of Sophie Scholl -- Resisting Hitler  If young people today would like to learn something about courage, they should see the movie "Sophie Scholl--The Final Days." Sophie Scholl was a 21 year old student at the University of Munich in 1943. Her older brother, Hans Scholl, was a medical student at the University, and a founder of the White Rose, a small group of students that secretly put out leaflets critical of Hitler's Germany. Sophie Scholl and her brother took risks to oppose the Nazi regime, when most Germans, including students, were either enthusiastic supporters of the regime or were cowed by fear from speaking out.... Amadou Deme  Setting the Record Straight -- Hotel Rwanda A small convoy of refugees is confronted by a murderous mob at a roadblock in the widely praised film Hotel Rwanda. The UN troops protecting the convoy, led by a bold white commander, brandish their weapons. After some scuffling, threats and a few shots being fired, the refugee trucks are turned around and the passengers safely returned to the Hotel Rwanda. The hero upon whom the film is based has now written a book, An Ordinary Man, in which he describes that terrible incident in much the same way as the film. But in fact the crisis did not happen as depicted in the film and book. And that troubles me because I was one of the UN soldiers with the convoy. Mr. Rusesabagina, as he acknowledges, was not there, though his wife and children were among the refugees.... The convoy was saved through tense but patient dialogue with leaders of the unruly roadblock. There is no question in my mind, or in the minds of those who served with me, that many could have died if anyone had fired a shot or said the wrong thing. At one point I said to a Tunisian sergeant manning a 50mm machine gun, "Don't start firing" and he answered "Don't worry captain; we're not crazy". The talking went on, the armed crowd calmed down, and the refugees were safely returned to the hotel from whence they had come. No fighting took place between army and militias to provide diversion as mentioned in Rusesabagina's book and the movie. I wonder why the story has been changed and the truth hidden. A possible answer occurs to me: The man who confronted the angry crowd and did the most to save all our lives is known to Mr. Rusesabigina. His name is Georges Rutaganda. He is an old friend of Paul Rusesabagina and is portrayed as a villain in the film Hotel Rwanda. Sometimes the truth can be very awkward. I know that Mr. Rutaganda came to that roadblock because I am the one who brought him there.... Amadou Deme was a Senegalese Army Officer who served in the intelligence team of the UN Mission for Rwanda from August 1993 to July 1994. To hear an interview with Amadou Deme on this question www.taylor-report.com March 13, 2006. Charles Isherwood  Is Lefty Finally Showing Up? "Strike, strike, strike!!!" Those words, howled at the audience at the end of "Waiting for Lefty," launched Clifford Odets's career and brought a fierce new political consciousness to the American stage. But you don't see Odets's drama about rebellious taxi drivers revived much these days. Agitprop has become an afterthought in American theater, and the issue of labor relations has largely receded from public consciousness. Today, strikes seem to make news more as public nuisances, even the recent one by the transit workers (though the repercussions, including fines, still make headlines). And yet, coincidentally or not, this season two Broadway revivals, "Awake and Sing!" and "Pajama Game," feature similar calls to arms. The first, a Lincoln Center Theater production at the Belasco, is Odets's turbulent family drama that originally opened in 1935, shortly after the premiere of "Waiting for Lefty." In "Awake and Sing!" Ralph Berger, the agonized young protagonist (Pablo Schreiber), is torn between love, family obligation and his grandfather's urgent prompting to devote his life to the larger social good. The noble cause wins out. "Spit on your hands and get to work," he says to himself in the last act, vowing to help organize his co-workers to agitate for better treatment. "Maybe we'll fix it so life won't be printed on dollar bills." The measure of just how established unions had become by the 1950's can be taken at the American Airlines Theater. A strike is merely the decorative background for a swoony romance in the musical "The Pajama Game," which opened on Broadway in 1954. Here, a strike is not a galvanizing implement of social justice but a diverting subplot buttressing the more important questions of when and how the feisty union rep will fall for the hunky factory foreman. Does irrelevance follow innocuousness? There's no denying that the union movement has been in retreat for the last few decades. For this and other reasons, the calls for collective action in both "Awake and Sing!" and "The Pajama Game" strike audiences today as quaint period markers. But even if their arrival together on Broadway is just a fluke, it may still signal a reawakening, at least among artists and arts organizations, to the idea that the widening gap between rich and poor poses possible dangers to the country's social fabric. O.K., so the sight of Harry Connick Jr. in pajama bottoms isn't a major political statement, but "Awake and Sing!" did receive another major revival this spring (timed to the centenary of Odets's birth), at Arena Stage in Washington. And Mike Nichols is producing the Off Broadway play "On the Line," about a blue-collar strike in New Jersey. An experimental revival of "Waiting for Lefty," peopled not by cabdrivers but by disgruntled greeters at Wal-Mart, seems a distinct possibility. Just don't make it a musical, please. Richard Ouzounian Play Pushed Underground: Cancelled in New York, the first Toronto reading of My Name Is Corrie is being held at a secret location Rachel Corrie was born in Washington, killed in the Gaza Strip, praised in London and censored in Manhattan. Now she's being forced to go underground in Toronto. My Name Is Rachel Corrie is a play based on the life and words of the 23-year-old American activist who died in Gaza on March 16, 2003, after an incident involving an Israeli Defence Forces bulldozer. Corrie's supporters claim she was run over deliberately during the course of a peaceful political demonstration. Those on the opposing side insist the bulldozer driver couldn't see her and it was simply an accident. The New York production of the play was recently cancelled, because of fears that its pro-Palestinian stance would upset the Jewish community at a difficult political time. This decision provoked a worldwide debate that has become so heated it has become necessary to keep secret the exact location of a simple reading of the script for 50 people at the University of Toronto Sunday night. But the astonishing thing about this whole affair is that at no point in the play's history has it been the cause of any actual confrontations or demonstrations. It's the fear of what might happen that seems to be motivating people's actions. Manohla Dargis  'Sir! No Sir!' Salutes Vietnam's Dissenters in Uniform ...one of the most memorable chapters of the Vietnam War has also long been one of the least revisited: the antiwar movement inside the military. Called the G.I. Movement, this resistance manifested itself in countless ways: in organized protests, in desertions and in the coffeehouses that sprang up across the country near military bases. In the early 1970's the documentary filmmaker David Zeiger worked in one such coffeehouse, the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Tex., not far from Fort Hood. Named for a helicopter shock absorber, the Oleo Strut was where off-duty soldiers went to decompress and to check out the latest issue of one of the many underground military publications, like The Fatigue Press, that gave powerful voice to their dissent. In his smart, timely documentary about the G.I. Movement, "Sir! No Sir!'" Mr. Zeiger takes a look at how the movement changed and occasionally even rocked the military from the ground troops on up. On one level the film serves as a corrective to the rah-rah rhetoric about Vietnam in such schlock entertainments as the 1980's "Rambo" franchise, in which Sylvester Stallone's veteran turned mercenary ritualistically wipes away the spit lobbed at him by a phantom antiwar protester. The image of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran, explains Jerry Lembcke, himself a Vietnam veteran and one of the persuasive talking heads who appears in the new film, helped maintain the important fiction that opposition to the war came strictly from outside the military. During the 1960's and 70's American newspapers routinely reported a significantly different story than the one later cooked up by Hollywood and other revisionists. This film shows that as antiwar sentiment gathered strength in American streets, a parallel movement seized the armed forces. By September 1971 dissent among the ranks had become a front-page subject in this newspaper, with a headline that read "Army Is Shaken by Crisis in Morale and Discipline." Soldiers were fed up and up in arms, and not always against the Vietcong. Desertions were on the rise, as were fraggings, named for the fragmentation grenades lobbed at superiors by their own men. By 1974 the Defense Department would record more than half a million incidents of desertion since the mid-60's. Jeff Leeds  On His New Album, Neil Young Calls for Bush's Impeachment  Neil Young, who has periodically touched on political themes during a four-decade career, plans to release a hastily recorded new album ruminating on the war in Iraq and directly calling for the impeachment of President Bush. The 10-song album, "Living With War," will probably represent Mr. Young's most overtly partisan work since the song "Ohio," recorded and quickly released by the group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as a response to the Kent State shootings in 1970. Elliot Roberts, Mr. Young's longtime manager, said the album would be "more about soldiers" and "what it's like to all of a sudden be 18 and on the line." The titles on the album include "Let's Impeach the President," which features Mr. Bush's voice overlaid above a 100-voice choir singing, "Flip flop." Another title is "Lookin' for a Leader." The album also includes an a cappella version of "America the Beautiful," sung by Mr. Young with the choir. Mr. Roberts said that he did not know exactly what had inspired Mr. Young to record the new songs, which were written and recorded in a span of roughly two weeks, but that "I know he watches the news." He added that he believed the album's sentiments would resonate broadly, adding that "it's not a political, Democratic versus Republican feel." The album comes at a time when major record companies and radio stations appear to have developed a degree of comfort with bluntly political material. The latest song from the band Pearl Jam, "World Wide Suicide," which accuses the president of taking soldiers' sacrifices for granted, recently logged three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard modern-rock airplay chart. And Green Day's 2004 album "American Idiot" which addresses themes of alienation but also includes lyrics like "Sieg Heil to the president gasman," has emerged as a blockbuster, selling more than 5.4 million copies so far, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. Mr. Young has expressed varying views on politics over the years. In the 1980's he openly supported Ronald Reagan, but he has since become a fairly consistent critic of Republican administrations. His 1989 song "Rockin' in the Free World" implicitly criticized the first President Bush. In "Greendale," a film he directed to accompany his 2003 album of the same name, Mr. Young sings lyrics nodding to the Patriot Act — "We'll be watching you/ No matter what you do" — against images of former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Billy Bragg  The lonesome death of Rachel Corrie download (MP3): The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie Rachel Corrie went to Gaza to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians, whose voice is seldom heard in her country, the US. That she herself should be silenced -- first by an Israeli bulldozer, next by a New York theatre cancelling a play created from her words -- is a testimony to the power of her message. This song was written on a plane on March 20 and recorded at Big Sky Recordings, Ann Arbor, Michigan on March 22. The tune is borrowed from Bob Dylan. Arthur Asiimwe  Rwanda Survivors Say Hollywood Has Got It Wrong Three films in two years about Rwanda's genocide have shocked Western audiences with the scale and savagery of the slaughter, but many survivors in the tiny central African nation are unimpressed. They say the big-screen depictions of the carnage, when about 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of state-sponsored killings, have got the story wrong. "My conclusion was that both movies are another Hollywood fiction geared at making money," said Jean Pierre Rucogoza, a 47-year-old university lecturer and genocide survivor who has watched "Sometimes in April" and "Hotel Rwanda." Rucogoza lost 11 relatives in the killings. In an interview on the eve of the 12th anniversary of the genocide earlier this month, he said he believed the films partly represented the West's conscience rearing its head too late. "But, unfortunately, they are also being used as a money-minting tool," he told Reuters. Many who lived through Rwanda's bloodshed say they are happy the films remind the world of the tragedy, but say the reality was different. 'South Park' aims at censors, hits Bush, Jesus Banned by Comedy Central from showing an image of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, the creators of "South Park" skewered their own network for hypocrisy in the cartoon's most recent episode.... In an elaborately constructed two-part episode of their Peabody Award-winning cartoon, "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker intended to comment on the controversy created by a Danish newspaper's publishing of caricatures of Mohammed. Muslims consider any physical representation of their prophet to be blasphemous. When the cartoons were reprinted in newspapers worldwide in January and February, it sparked a wave of protests primarily in Islamic countries. Claudia Parsons  "Stuff Happens" play sears Rumsfeld in New York A play that skewers Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as arrogant and war-mad has opened to a largely favorable welcome in New York this week, even as former generals turn against him in Washington. In "Stuff Happens," by British playwright David Hare, Rumsfeld is described as a "velociraptor" and at one point his character says "I could eat a baby through the bars of a crib." The growing number of retired U.S. generals who have called for his ouster has not gone that far describing Rumsfeld, but the arrogance and failure to heed military advisers that they accuse him of are given dramatic life in Hare's play. Mark Scaramella  The Timeless Sarcasm of Mark Twain: When Even God Can't Keep His Own Commandments Twain was a master at elevating his criticism to highly literate sarcasm. Late in life (the early 1900s) he blended his skepticism of the Bible with keen anti-imperialist sarcasm which rings too true today. [Anderson Valley Advertiser] Maggie Morgan  All Strings Attached Ahdaf Soueif came to speak at the American University in Cairo (AUC) on Thursday, 6 April, accompanied by her son and her mother.... In some ways Soueif abandoned her hyphenated persona and took sides -- with the Arabs, Palestinians, and the misrepresented. All strings attached. Maybe she would say that she was always on this side, maybe others would say it was the natural side for her to take. No matter. Her own journey and politicisation, so to speak, mirrors, and perhaps will serve as, a catalyst for a similar journey into the light among her readership. It was almost predictable that she would translate I Saw Ramallah, the memoir of Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian writer and poet. It was just as fitting that she would accept the Guardian 's offer to go and write about Palestine. Soueif is a testament to the ways in which a radically anti-Arab political climate can force a reflective intellectual to let go of the intriguing questions and adopt an agenda. An activist has a plan of action, because she answers the question "What can we do?": "We don't have to make nice to the West, but we have to be agents, each in his field, each one to do what he or she does best. And you here, as inhabitants of a common ground, must act." Dave Chappell Talks About His TV Exodus Dave Chappelle says in a new interview that he had several reasons for walking away from his cult-fave "Chappelle's Show" — and a deal worth more than $50 million. His decision to leave the Comedy Central series last May led fans and industry executives to question his motives, and his sanity. But in a 10-page spread in the Esquire magazine arriving Saturday, he says he closed "Chappelle" for reasons cultural, professional and personal. Culturally: "The bottom line was, white people own everything, and where can a black person go and be himself or say something that's familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize?" Professionally: "I felt like I was really pressured to settle for something that I didn't necessarily feel like I wanted." Personally: "The thing about show business is that, in a way, it forces dysfunctional relationships in people." Chappelle tells the magazine that putting on "Chappelle's Show" was the best television experience he ever had. He plans to continue telling jokes and entertaining audiences, he says, so long as he can retain a degree of personal and creative freedom. Billie Cohen  Beat Nix The Underground Literary Alliance has thrown down the gauntlet. On Monday 17, the antiestablishment writers’ group will rally at a 50th-anniversary celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” at Columbia’s Miller Theatre, where they’ll challenge participating mainstream authors to a read-off. “You’ve got a bunch of insiders celebrating one of the ultimate outsiders. And we’re outsiders,” says ULA cofounder King Wenclas. “‘Howl’ was written as a scream of pain from a guy who was beat down by society, just like the ULA.” Bob Hoover  What Happened Here / Bush Chronicles by Eliot Weinberger -- War Critic Uses Administrations Own Words Against It ...now a play, "What I Heard About Iraq: A Cry for Five Voices," adapted by Simon Levy and first performed last year in Los Angeles and later at Hartford, Conn. It was also used at protest events marking the third anniversary of the war last month. Tony Christini   Orwell's Problem and Partisan Fiction  [with links] Is the antiwar movement "flat on its back" as some fairly prominent progressive workers have commented? If so, or if it is at least less effective than it could be and should be, is this due in part to the fact that the antiwar movement (like progressive movements generally) fails to take much advantage of fact-based partisan fiction? Fails to produce fiction that might more fully and powerfully reveal reality and possibilities for change than the comparative flood of essays and commentaries and nonfiction books currently produced? Isn't there an extreme and indefensible imbalance between the types of progressive writing available to not only progressive workers but to the entire society and culture itself? In the dominant media, novelist Joseph Finder wonders why the pursuit of success is not much portrayed in literary novels currently. Of progressive media and publishing, a crucial question seems to me: why the failure to produce much fact-based, socially and politically powerful, partisan fiction? Thom Hartmann  Democracy Be Damned - Republicans Need Another War  In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by keeping the nation in a constant state of war. Cynics suggest the lesson wasn’t lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both, they say, extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime President’s party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a President in peacetime. Noam Chomsky  On Hegemony And Disarmament The element of paranoid fear is very old. There is a very good study of these matters in popular American literature, from the earliest days, by literary critic Bruce Franklin (War Stars) [Franklin's provocative study underscores the dialectical relationship between ideology and the popular with its bearing on the national self-image and obsession with super-weaponry]. He finds a persistent theme: we are just about to be destroyed by evil monsters, when at the last minute we are miraculously saved by a superhero or a super weaponry. Furthermore, rather typically, the evil monsters are those we are crushing under foot: Indians, Blacks, Chinese coolies... Some of the examples are quite startling. Take Jack London, a very progressive populist figure, a socialist writer. In one of his novels he calls for the extermination of the people of China by bacteriological warfare, to protect ourselves from their insidious campaign to wipe us out. It continues to the present, and relates in complicated ways to the extremist religious fundamentalism that is also unique to the U.S. among industrial societies. Cynical political leaders exploit these fears constantly. The Reaganites were masters of it. Every year or two the U.S. was facing some dire threat. It didn't matter how crazy it was: Libya, Grenada, Nicaragua, Arab terrorists, crime (by implication Blacks), drugs (Hispanics)... Reagan himself may even have believed it; some of his performances were astonishing. It's an efficient way to mobilise people, and important when carrying out policies that are harming them. The current administration, drawn from the same circles (often the same people), simply inherits the technique as a reflex. And paranoia combined with immense power and an extremely cynical and violent leadership is a dangerous combination, no doubt. Terrence Rafferty  Every Nonvote Counts: Seeing, by José Saramago [If link fails, see here] Saramago, crafty old lefty that he is, understands that ridicule is a terrifically effective political weapon, and in "Seeing" he makes it his business to turn repression into farce. Underlying everything is a nice mordant joke about the gamesmanship of Western democracy: the "blankers," as the stubborn nonvoters are called, are quiet and even docile, just the way a government ordinarily likes its citizens to be, but their refusal to pretend that the electoral process gives them a choice worth making is deeply subversive — an unpardonable sin, a flagrant foul. Gary Levin  '24' prez pivots from weasel to evil "How many times have we been duped by someone we thought was stupid?" says star Kiefer Sutherland. "When people are underestimated, it becomes very dangerous; it gives them a sort of cover." He says the shock owes much to Itzin's layered, gear-shifting portrayal, and his story line "has really been, for me, the real great aspect of Season 5." In prime-time dramas, "nobody's ever made the president the villain," Katz says. "The shock of that really appealed to us." So with the nerve-gas threat eliminated, eight remaining episodes will focus on Logan's attempt to thwart Jack Bauer's effort to unmask him. ... In the latest of 24's sharp left turns, the weasel turns out to be the villain. Ineffectual, weak-kneed President Charles Logan was the man responsible for putting deadly nerve gas into the hands of Russian terrorists. As usual, the plan went horribly awry. But the complicit commander in chief provides the fuel for this season's final third, beginning tonight and shines a spotlight on Gregory Itzin, 57, a veteran character actor who has made Logan a career-defining role. He says fans call Logan "prickly, irritating, vacillating and worm-like. All that sort of stuff has been thrown at me." Itzin loves every minute of it. The role marks "the culmination of a long TV political career" playing countless district attorneys (Matlock, The Practice), the FBI director (NCIS), a State Department rep (The West Wing) and other "wordy mouthpieces" on law and crime shows. Usually, "I am a foil or information pusher or nemesis. This is the first time I have been allowed to create a character with many facets." Tony Christini  The Bush Plan (to Abolish America) President Bush announced today that he expects to find a congressional sponsor for a bill that would abolish Congress as it is currently known. The Old Congress would be replaced by the New Congress which would consist of two and only two Senators, one from the North and one from the South, and three and only three Representatives -- one from the North and one from the South and one from the Middle of the country, to break ties. In the Senate, per tradition, the Vice President would continue to break any tie between the two new Senators.... Alan Maass  Week of the Walkouts: Immigration Rights Battle Comes to US Schools Another influence pointed out by New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzales was an HBO movie called Walkout that premiered last month. The film depicts the 1968 school walkout by some 20,000 Chicano students in Los Angeles against discrimination and racism. The walkouts had an electrifying effect on those who participated. "It was great to have all of us unified, and fighting for something we believe in," said Stephanie, a lead organizer of the protests at Wakefield High School in northern Virginia. The wave of walkouts reached beyond the Southwest. For example, on the other side of the country, in the northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., walkouts snowballed through the week, culminating March 30 in a march through Arlington, Va., for a 1,500-strong rally at the county courthouse. Students waved flags from their countries of origin. Those without flags used markers to spell the names of countries on their bodies. Reports from activists said the protests were organized mostly through word of mouth. In many places, students relied on e-mails, text messaging and the myspace.com community Web site to spread the word. "All these politic officials are trying to make their dreams come true by destroying ours, AND THEY WILL, unless we do something about it!!" read a call for a walkout in Orange County, Calif., posted on MySpace. The appeal convinced more than 1,500 students to leave classes at Garden Grove High School, according to the LA Times. Alexander Cockburn  Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber? Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel's Night: Is Frey or Wiesel the Bigger Moral Poseur? Jill Lawless  'Corrie' Opens in London Instead of N.Y. A play about an American peace activist killed in the Gaza Strip has opened in London — 3,000 miles from its previously planned off-Broadway home. "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," a one-woman show starring Megan Dodds, began a six-week run this week at the Playhouse Theatre in London's West End. Danny Schechter  The Fear is in the Room: Inside Our Unbrave Media World  There is a scene in the movie Good Night and Good Luck about an outbreak of insecurity that nearly ended the late CBS News legend’s broadcast challenge to red-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy before it aired. ________________ V.F. Calverton  The Liberation of American Literature (1932): That the attempt to be above the battle is evidence of a defense mechanism can scarcely be doubted. Only those who belong to the ruling class, in other words, only those who had already won the battle and acquired the spoils, could afford to be above the battle. Fiction which was propagandistic, that is, fiction which continued to participate in the battle, it naturally cultivated a distaste for, and eschewed. Fiction which was above the battle, that is fiction which concerned only the so-called absolutes and eternals, with the ultimate emotions and the perennial tragedies, but which offered no solutions, no panaceas -- it was such fiction that won its adoration. "It is possible that we are growing a bit tired of the novel with a purpose," The Nation declared in its issue of April 18, 1912, reflecting that change in the process of consummation, and then adding in a carping vein that the "American novelist, like the American playwright, has listened to the counsel which urged him to look for his materials in problems of the nation and the day." The new aim was to escape social reality and to exalt individual emotionality. In short, this new ideology, like that of all leisure classes, sought to cultivate literature as a form of escape -- escape either from boredom or from its own limitations of self and soul.... Most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another.... In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.

 

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