purposeless by design

1545-november06-2007

empty one-liners, stilted paragraphs, the occasional link - welcome to elscorcho post-college. i don't have the time nor the inclination to write here anymore it seems, and i think that is sad. this is absurd though - i still have feelings, i still have intellectual curiosity, and you know, things still happen from time to time. so let's turn it around. what better way than to get political.

there is a strange triumvirate working in america right now. the government has taken the lead, but the media and the public are close behind in an epic attempt to turn this wonderful country into a second-rate locale. the torture debate is a microcosm of this. the government has taken to torturing people by order of ... someone very high up, possibly the president. a well-documented, thoroughly proven method of torture used by the government is waterboarding. rather than ask why we are doing something has historically only been found in authoritarian societies and used by nations that we considered enemies to freedom, this is what has happened:

the president has turned the question into "is waterboarding torture?"
republicans have argued that the line between strong questioning techniques and torture is a vague one (when in fact actual army interrogators disagree)
the press has run with this narrative
the american people continue to do nothing, which is my only fucking explanation for why their senators (on both sides of the aisle) act like complete chickenshits
america now waterboards, something the future attorney general has testified under oath is not necessarily torture, making it an extremely small jump to arguing that torture is legal under american law
america has become second-rate

this is atrocious. and i feel completely helpless. what can a person do faced with this tidal wave of stupidity and moral depravity? this country used to stand for something great, and with some work it can again stand for something great, but this current state is unacceptable to me. if you have ideas on how to stand up and say "no" to these events and make yourself heard in a tangible way, i would love to hear them.

UPDATE: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/horsesmouth/2007/11/after_confirmin.php - please take the time to read this, and please contact your senator's office and show your support for these bills. i think it is imperative, before this issue turns into abu ghraib on a large scale.

comments

re: a response in two parts

from: chad (2007-11-06 13:06:08)

part one - love seeing this kind of stuff back up at the scorch. good work.

part two - while i agree that the overwhelming majority of our current government officials are, as you so eloquently put it, acting "like complete chickenshits," i think that they are actually the least to blame for what is happening these days. the media and the populace are the ones who have an opportunity to change the government (just as the government and media can impact the people and the people and the government can impact the media...its checks and balances on a grander scale!). but they aren't making any major differences.

the last time the country was really pissed off with what our government was doing (60's/70's, Nam/Nixon), the people didn't take it and the media acted as a public investigator, questioning everything the government did. the result was that the media was able to actually uncover some undeniable forms of corruption, which was basically all the public needed to push the president and his administration out the door. it took a long-ass time (nixon, keep in mind, served 6 years as a president, and the distrust and unhappiness certainly predated him), but change was affected.

anyway, if you consider the period of distrust to start with kennedy's assassination (11/22/63) and end with nixon's resignation (8/9/74), you are basically talking about an 11 year period of people fighting the government. and keep in mind that the real fight was only a portion of the people (liberals/progressives) fighting against the government...nixon slaughtered mcgovern in '72...this isn't bush edging kerry we're talking about.

comparing that to the present circumstance, i think you can make the case that this current state of distrust started with the 2000 election (11/7/00) and obviously continues today. but based on a similar time-line to the 60's/70's, we are still about 4 years (mid-2011, i suppose) from having "fought" this situation as long as those in the 60's and 70's fought their fight. and really, i see no reason to think that over the next 4 years, we wont see significant changes. the democrats seem to be regaining control of the government, and they are likely to continue that in 2008.

the difference, however, is that no one is making the kind of noise that was being made in the 70's. there is such an overwhelmingly large number of media outlets out there today that basically anyone with a thought can get it expressed in a public manner, and anyone who wants to can find a media outlet willing to pander to their view point. during vietnam, nightly newscasts regularly reported death tolls and the media, generally, was against the war. today, we hear death tolls, but we also hear endless support for the war in the media. in simple terms, if you hate the war, watch MSNBC and Keith Olbermann will tell you that you're right. Love the war? Fox News and Bill O'Reilly are happy to accommodate you. so no one is being pushed to face opposite viewpoints.

while the media is split, i actually think the progressive factions of society are almost silent. the plethora of new media options (blogs, podcasts, social networking, etc.) allow us to show our disgust by writing a scathing blog entry or putting the "i hate the iraq war" facebook application on our profiles. the problem is that we are basically preaching to the choir. instead of protesting, boycotting, etc. and making real noise that people can't ignore, we're keeping our protests within our own social circles, which is a waste.

so what do i think we should do: 1) stop doing stupid facebook groups and thinking you are supporting things. i hate getting those dumb emails asking if i want to join the "support _______" group. it's idiotic. 2) do something real. i think there needs to be a concerted effort to actually boycott companies and people who are in a position to make changes and aren't doing it. this includes not supporting companies that are participating in the war effort, picketing media outlets that are passing along slanted and untrue information (on BOTH sides of the issue - open, fair reporting should be our goal, not anti-war/anti-torture reporting). 3) force candidates to answer real questions. i am not actually sure how we do this. the only think i can think of is starting a movement to refuse to vote for any candidate who doesn't make real statements. for example - if a candidate doesn't flat out say, "waterboarding is torture and i am against it," you don't vote for him. problem is you need a big-time critical mass for that to be effective.

so who's with me?

re: rallying cry

from: =z (2007-11-06 13:39:20)

civil activism in the sixties and seventies worked because the problems being faced were cross-demographic and indiscriminate. the question of torture is the same way, but among this apparently vast group of people that oppose torture, there are dozens of subsets of people with vastly divergent opinions on other key issues. how are you going to get pro-lifers to stand next to pro-choices to push this issue? how are you going to get veterans that oppose torture but have no problem with the war as a whole to join forces with the liberal anti-war masses? its next to impossible.

the only way i can think of that it would ever happen is to find a figurehead. there has to be a leader that the ruling party can't turn into a punchline to galvanize all these people around this one important issue. and when i say leader i don't mean president. a major and obvious problem is that all the people visible enough to do this job are too concerned with their careers to risk falling out of favor with DC insiders. john mccain is the perfect example. he is the obvious choice to lead this fight, but even he, a man who has faced this horror himself, is too much of a coward to muster anything more than a whimper on sunday morning talk shows.

so what's the rallying cry to make us forget our differences? and who's the one that can be the first to shout it out?

re: john mccain

from: niv (2007-11-06 13:50:29)

he's the answer and he's fucking blowing it. talk about a chickenshit.

re: chad

from: niv (2007-11-06 13:52:50)

i agree with most of what you said chad, and i might have undersold the complacency slash willful ignorance of the american people. however, when i was talking about the senate being a bunch of chickenshits... well, that's a subset of the problem, a problem created by 'government' which i put in quotes because really it was created by a concerted effort by a set of terrible people that somehow were put in power not once but twice illegally.

re: sooooo true...

from: chad (2007-11-06 16:43:20)

that is directed at both Z and Niv - Z is right that we need a leader of some sort. the 60's and 70's actually turned to celebrities more than anyone else (I mean, I think you'd have to consider the combination of Lennon, Dylan and Ali three of the big names that made the entire anti-war, progressive movement popular. And there were plenty of others. But today's celebrity obsessed culture actually makes it HARDER for any of these people to be true leaders, because, rather than holding them on a pedestal as examples, we mock their foibles. so...yeah. just not going to happen.

and as for the other major leaders of the era, most were rallying around causes that became SO universal as to trump everything else; specifically racism. my guess is that if you sat down with almost any progressive in the late 60's, there would have been general agreement that race was the number one issue, so what someone like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X thought about issues like the war, or abortion, or anything else was generally accepted as secondary to the push for equal rights. and THAT gave them a pulpit (figurative, not literal), from which they could lead people who generally accepted them as leaders.

the problem today is that if you sat down with 20 progressives, you would probably get 20 answers as to the most important topic of the day, ranging from equal rights (now moving from race to sexual orientation, among other things) to abortion to immigration, with torture and the war as two of the more common answers. as a result, even if an acceptable leader stepped to the forefront on one topic (like mccain on torture, who is the OBVIOUS person for this cause), his stance on 19 other issues would result in a LARGE number of people refusing to follow him.

in the end, I think the BEST shot we had was about 3 years ago, when mccain could have stood up and said, "i dont care if you are pro life or pro choice, for or against gay marriage, etc. all i am talking about today is torture - here is what happened to me, and now america is treating prisoners the same way and it is wrong." except with more eloquence. today, the person who is in the best position to lead is barack obama (although that may be my personal bias towards him coming out). but i am less and less convinced that even he can do this. really...i dont know who could step up...