Category: Aesthetics

Public Dancing

June 13, 2011: rosencrantz

Consider this recent AT&T commercial:

Set in NY’s Grand Central Station, a man in a trench-coat anxiously watches the clock, tick-tock, until it strikes 12, whereupun he throws his coat to the floor and dances.  After a while he realizes that he is dancing alone, and then he gets a text — the flash mob has been moved to 12:30.

Still undercover, the other flash mobsters shake their heads at him in disappointment.

“Don’t be the last to know,” asserts the voiceover/spokesman, “Get it faster with 4G.”

Mildly amusing commercial, I suppose, abstracted from its source and function.

Seen in context, however, and particularly in relation to the recent spate of arrests and tacklings of public dancers at the Jefferson Memorial, the commercial exemplifies a disturbing trend of the corporatist hegemon.

Compare commercial fantasy with political reality:

In the ATT commercial, you have one of the most powerful corporations on earth, whose political donations and army of lobbyists tether elected officials “right” and “left” to its private interests, selling their (possibly brain-carcinogenic) tracking devices smart phones to a thoroughly consumerist populace by means of the dream of dancing publicly without being arrested and violently tackled to the ground by organic drones.

In the video of the Jefferson Memorial dancing arrests, on the other hand, you have actual human beings (including an Iraq War Vet) dancing publicly only to be arrested and violently tackled to the ground by organic drones.

These dancers were motivated by an earlier Jefferson Memorial dancing arrest, and culminated in yet another dance protest at the same site which resulted in no arrests — a mild victory for the protesters.  Perhaps too mild to celebrate, according to one fellow traveller:

If the world were watching, the reaction might be a little like mine—that US Empire continues to exact unbearable human suffering throughout the world in the name of democracy. Compared to the atrocities being committed in our names, crowing about not getting arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial is supercilious and obnoxious.

Nevertheless, the comparison between the ATT fantasy and the political reality indicates the growing chasm between the relative rights of corporate and human “persons”.

Barack and Bradley

May 1, 2011: rosencrantz

The case of Bradley Manning  has exposed much about the hypocrisy and incoherence of the Obama White house.

After Manning had spent the better part of a year in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, much of which time stripped naked and constantly surveilled — all without trail — Obama, the former Constitutional Law professor, assured the press that he had checked with the Pentagon, which assured him that everything being done to Manning was “appropriate”.

Meanwhile, over 250 U.S. legal scholars, including Obama’s former Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, denounced Manning’s detention as torture.

It is hard not to concur with IOZ’s assessment, who characterizes Obama’s response to Manning’s pre-trial torture as “the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate’s expense report”, and as Obama himself as “an asshole of the worst order” who, though he doesn’t “delight in cruelty like his predecessor”, is nevertheless “grossly indifferent to it”.

Since then, the U.S. King Commander of Chief has publicly judged Manning to be guilty without trial, in the same breath as he maintained that the U.S. is a nation of laws. This is especially disturbing because even if Manning ever gets to have a trial, he will be judged by Obama’s subordinates. Greenwald asks: “How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”

Something about this situation reminds me of Prince Buster’s Judge Dread (as well as Megacity One’s Judge Dredd):

It is important to remember that, according to the chat logs obtained by Wired, Manning was motivated by a concern for transparency and the “public good”:

i want people to see the truth . . . regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

This weekend, Democratic partisans have been beaming that Obama was able to best birthers in a war of wits at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.  But after his war on whistle-blowers, and especially the pre-trial detention, torture and judgment of Manning, the funniest line might have been when the President praised the “daring men and women” who “risk their lives for the simple idea that no one should be silenced and everyone deserves to know the truth.”

Other notes:

Although Manning is now being transferred to medium security prison in Kansas, the Pentagon is planning on holding Manning in “pre-trial confinement” for the indefinite future.

The Obama White house has tried  to banish reporters from official print pools for merely reporting on a protest in support of Bradley Manning.

Here is the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg discussing Obama and Manning.

Taxes for Chumps

April 18, 2011: rosencrantz

As corporations and the rich become expert at tax avoidance, the bill for Washington’s Imperial Swan Song gets passed along to chumps like you and me. Consider these stats:

Over the past 12 years income for the richest U.S. Americans quadrupled as their tax rate was almost cut in half.

Corporations and the wealthy use offshore banks and tax havens to avoid paying taxes and other government regulations.

Many of the largest corporations avoid paying any taxes at all.

Half of your income taxes go to pay for the Imperial military machine.

And here is 9 other things the rich don’t want you to know about taxes.

Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings asks a relevant question:  What if we all stopped paying taxes?

Here are some charts come (from a collection at Mother Jones and the WRL) to help visualize:

PS: Here are ways to resist war tax, from the War Resisters League.

Rap News 7: #Revolution

March 20, 2011: rosencrantz

From The Juice Media:

Rap News, Episode 7: It’s 2011 and amid a flurry of political leaks and revelations, revolutions have rolled across North Africa and The Middle East, sweeping regimes and dictatorships before them. Join your host Robert Foster for long overdue analysis of these events, asking the question that’s on everyone’s lips — where will revolution spark next? But when a news flash comes in from a special embedded correspondent, the episode takes an unprecedented turn, as that very question is answered in dramatic fashion. How will the world treat the latest courageous country to throw off the yoke of oppression? Is any cow sacred in this time of massive upheaval? Can there be any doubt that History Is Happening?

We almost lost [your city here].

March 16, 2011: rosencrantz

In October 1966, there was a partial meltdown of the Fermi I Breeder Reactor in Michigan. Gil Scott Heron wrote a song about it.

As the news from Japan becomes more dire, what else is there to do but turn to a bluesman:

Read about this and four other times “we almost nuked ourselves by accident.”  A fuller list of “civilian nuclear accidents” worldwide is here.

Solidarity

February 19, 2011: rosencrantz

“Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers: One World, One Pain”

Found at Mother Jones, from Muhammad Saladin Nusair’s FB photo album.

The Hollywood / Pentagon Axis

December 30, 2010: rosencrantz

In a discussion with Oliver Stone, Micheal Moore and Christopher Hedges, Al-Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara “examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex”:

And here is another relevant quote from an older article by Normon Solomon on the same topic, “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex“:

In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”

Rap News 6: Cablegate

December 19, 2010: rosencrantz

Some source material links from The Juice Media:

View from Outside II

December 10, 2010: rosencrantz

This vid from Taiwan summarizes recent wikileaks-related events quite nicely:

Nuclear Explosions

November 16, 2010: rosencrantz

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has made a beautiful and terrifying video mapping the 2053 nuclear explosions that have taken place on our planet between 1945 and 1998. Enjoy!

I wonder if this has anything to do with cancer rates?

(video via C&L)