Woman

Installation in Motion

 

irrefutable

We can easily reduce our detractors to absurdity and show them their hostility is groundless. But what does this prove? That their hatred is real. When every slander has been rebutted, every misconception cleared up, every false opinion about us overcome, intolerance itself will remain finally irrefutable.

Moritz Goldstein "Deutsch-judischer Parnass"
 

God Damn America—Especially Pennsylvania

By Greg Palast

[Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]

The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.

I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.

At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page—the closest thing I've got to a religious ritual—then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.
One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff's Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.

God damn America.

I know that's what Obama's spiritual guide would say.

But why? It seems likes He's already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.

And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.

The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York—until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous.

That leaves Forest City's one industry, lumbering—which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.

Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday's bombing are, "pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000"—which is true if you don't count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)

Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,

    "This is a land full of power and glory,
    Beauty that words cannot recall.
    But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
    Her glory shall rest on us all."

Whatever. It's a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It's as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.

There's one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.

Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, "Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer." She’s a, "Single mother of two—Tony and Brandon—and Grandmother of one—Jason."

And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town's hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, "including Food and Beverage" and a "Chinese auction."

(I'll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here—if Osama would offer health insurance.)

Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska's coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon's promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon's man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck—and you don’t realize it."

I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don't feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon's latest stall on payment. They've seen plenty of Sheriff's Notices these past 19 years.

So Happy Easter.

George Bush tells us he's, "feeling just fine." And we should be glad for him, I suppose.

Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”

So, why hasn't He?

Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn't He?
 

So?

A Note from Michael Moore
Monday, March 24th, 2008


Friends,

It would have to happen on Easter Sunday, wouldn't it, that the 4,000th American soldier would die in Iraq. Play me that crazy preacher again, will you, about how maybe God, in all his infinite wisdom, may not exactly be blessing America these days. Is anyone surprised?

4,000 dead. Unofficial estimates are that there may be up to 100,000 wounded, injured, or mentally ruined by this war. And there could be up to a million Iraqi dead. We will pay the consequences of this for a long, long time. God will keep blessing America.

And where is Darth Vader in all this? A reporter from ABC News this week told Dick Cheney, in regards to Iraq, "two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting." Cheney cut her off with a one word answer: "So?"

"So?" As in, "So what?" As in, "F*** you. I could care less."

I would like every American to see Cheney flip the virtual bird at the them, the American people. Click here and pass it around. Then ask yourself why we haven't risen up and thrown him and his puppet out of the White House.

The Democrats have had the power to literally pull the plug on this war for the past 15 months -- and they have refused to do so. What are we to do about that? Continue to sink into our despair? Or get creative? Real creative. I know there are many of you reading this who have the chutzpah and ingenuity to confront your local congressperson. Will you? For me?

Cheney spent Wednesday, the 5th anniversary of the war, not mourning the dead he killed, but fishing off the Sultan of Oman's royal yacht. So? Ask your favorite Republican what they think of that.

The Founding Fathers would never have uttered the presumptuous words, "God Bless America." That, to them, sounded like a command instead of a request, and one doesn't command God, even if they are America. In fact, they were worried God would punish America. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington feared that God would react unfavorably against his soldiers for the way they were behaving. John Adams wondered if God might punish America and cause it to lose the war, just to prove His point that America was not worthy. They and the others believed it would be arrogant on their part to assume that God would single out America for a blessing. What a long road we have traveled since then.

I see that Frontline on PBS this week has a documentary called "Bush's War." That's what I've been calling it for a long time. It's not the "Iraq War." Iraq did nothing. Iraq didn't plan 9/11. It didn't have weapons of mass destruction. It DID have movie theaters and bars and women wearing what they wanted and a significant Christian population and one of the few Arab capitals with an open synagogue.

But that's all gone now. Show a movie and you'll be shot in the head. Over a hundred women have been randomly executed for not wearing a scarf. I'm happy, as a blessed American, that I had a hand in all this. I just paid my taxes, so that means I helped to pay for this freedom we've brought to Baghdad. So? Will God bless me?

God bless all of you in this Easter Week as we begin the 6th year of Bush's War.

God help America. Please.

Michael Moore

My Kind of Person

He's the kind of person who reaches behind him after stepping off an elevator, extending his arm to hold it open for you. As if it was a grocery store entrance, and you, arm-full of packages. As if the elevator wouldn't have waited its usual ten seconds before contracting its doors. He's that kind of person. You know, the extra nice kind.

The kind that does it just for the gesture of it, for the sentiment.

I am not that kind of person.

My deal is watching. When I have to, I'll listen—but it's much more interesting to watch.

I've named him Phil, this pudgy fellow with an ageless face—a face I imagine is shaped from dough each morning at first light, and rubbed with oil before meeting the heat of day—because it is a soft, round name. Every afternoon he passes, sometimes hurrying along towards the crosswalk, sometimes observing his feet or pausing, as if remembering a poem. Always, he wears a tie—even on Fridays when men usually go open-collared.

Phil owns two pairs of shoes. He alternates between brown and black slacks, with coordinating shoes and like-minded reversible belt. He enjoys the color blue, but his favorite tie is yellow.

All of this I can tell because I watch. No, more to the point, I observe.

And I’ve come to observe there is something specious about Phil. It's something in his walk, in the way he is so quick to smile at a passer-by. His motives escaped me for months until I recognized his kindness as a Band Aid to his wounds—injuries that drag his eyes to his feet, distract his attention from the wind-blown clouds or the noisy traffic, keep him noosed in a necktie all week long.

It makes me wonder, is Phil the kind of person to hold my kind of secret? Is he, also, haunted? Is there an unspoken understanding between us, an intimate knowledge which pushes Phil along, hustling by never once to notice me sitting day after day on the Peterson's bench? Am I his shadow?

And I wonder once again what kind of person we are.

Phil moves across the street and gestures hello to another stranger.
 

An Old Poem I Found from My College Days

Liquor is best
On an empty stomach

Where it lands
With the weight
Of a thousand heartaches,
Where it smolders
Defiant like a child
Who has broken her curfew
Dizzyafying
Tantalizing
And so much more efficient

Yes, on an empty stomach
Liquor is best
 

Ghosts

 

not a surprise

Putin's successor has been elected

Now, in a rehash of what Russia did in Ukraine with Yanukovych and Kuchma, Putin will be named Prime Minister (as he is constitutionally barred from running for president again). Of course, with that, most of the presidential powers shift to the PM.

So Putin will continue to run Russia until the oil dries up.

Any bets on how long it takes Bush to decide he wants to run as VP?