(no subject)
Oct. 22nd, 2004 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistMy morning started with this email from my advisor:
Hi anthrochica,
I've sent it off. Hope you are well, email aside. New York is going
well, still, but the election doesn't look so great. Good luck with
your movements down to the lowlands.
Best,
Chair
What does it mean, the election does not look so great? Could it be
this feel-good report from New Mexico?:
Kim Griffith voted on Thursday— over and over and over.
She's among the people in Bernalillo and Sandoval counties who say they have had trouble with early voting equipment. When they have tried to vote for a particular candidate, the touch-screen system has said they voted for somebody else.
She went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. "I pushed his name, but a green check mark appeared before President Bush's name," she said.
Michael Cadigan, president of the Albuquerque City Council, had a similar experience when he voted at City Hall.
"I cast my vote for president. I voted for Kerry and a check mark for Bush appeared," he said.
Or could it be the belated October surprise?
According to White House and Washington Beltway insiders, the Bush administration, worried that it could lose the presidential election to Senator John F. Kerry, has initiated plans to launch a military strike on Iran's top Islamic leadership, its nuclear reactor at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, and key nuclear targets throughout the country, including the main underground research site at Natanz in central Iran and another in Isfahan. Targets of the planned U.S. attack reportedly include mosques in Tehran, Qom, and Isfahan known by the U.S. to headquarter Iran's top mullahs.
The Iran attack plan was reportedly drawn up after internal polling indicated that if the Bush administration launched a so-called anti-terrorist attack on Iran some two weeks before the election, Bush would be assured of a landslide win against Kerry. Reports of a pre-emptive strike on Iran come amid concerns by a number of political observers that the Bush administration would concoct an "October Surprise" to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
And this just made me cry into my morning coffee because eff this shit, this woman
is 52 years old and she has spent 30 years of her life helping the Iraqi people; CARE is one of the only aid agencies that are still operating there, like what the fuck is wrong with the people who kidnapped her? This is not fighting the occupation, this is unforgiveable like the kids in the school taken hostage by the Chechen insurgents. This makes me scared for my friend who is in Iraq; the last time he was there he was kidnapped, but was able to negociate his own release, because at the time it seemed the insurgents weren't interested in killing people who were there to help, like for real, like independent journalists who were really trying to show the world the reality of the American occupation. But as freedom causes often do, this seems to be mutating into undifferentiated ugliness fueled by fanaticism.
Oh, and in more good news,
this op-ed was quite prescient: the IDF soldier who emptied his entire clip into Iman Alhamas, the wounded 13-year old Palestinian girl from Rafah, was
cleared of "unethical" behavior. And since we all heard John Edwards earnestly talking about the horror of Israeli children dying at the hands of terrorists, here is something he'd do well to read:
Killing children is no longer a big deal
By Gideon Levy
More than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of Operation Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip. It's no wonder that many people term such wholesale killing of children "terror." Whereas in the overall count of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1. According to B'Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.
Palestinian human rights groups speak of even higher numbers: 598 Palestinian children killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent. Take note of the ages, too. According to B'Tselem, whose data are updated until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were 10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died. The youngest victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during birth.
With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli. Yet it is not on the public agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.
The plain fact, which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian children is on our hands. No tortuous explanation by the IDF Spokesman's Office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations people in the Foreign Ministry about how the Palestinians are making use of children will change that fact. An army that kills so many children is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.
As MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) said, in a particularly emotional speech in the Knesset, it is no longer possible to claim that all these children were killed by mistake. An army doesn't make more than 500 day-to-day mistakes of identity. No, this is not a mistake but the disastrous result of a policy driven mainly by an appallingly light trigger finger and by the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Shooting at everything that moves, including children, has become normative behavior. Even the momentary mini-furor that erupted over the "confirming of the killing" of a 13-year-old girl, Iman Alhamas, did not revolve around the true question. The scandal should have been generated by the very act of the killing itself, not only by what followed.
Iman was not the only one. Mohammed Aaraj was eating a sandwich in front of his house, the last house before the cemetery of the Balata refugee camp, in Nablus, when a soldier shot him to death at fairly close range. He was six at the time of his death. Kristen Saada was in her parents' car, on the way home from a family visit, when soldiers sprayed the car with bullets. She was 12 at the time of her death. The brothers Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz were riding their bicycles in full daylight, on their way to buy sweets, when they sustained a direct hit from a shell fired by an Israeli tank crew. Jamil was 13, Ahmed six, at the time of their deaths.
Muatez Amudi and Subah Subah were killed by a soldier who was standing in the village square in Burkin and fired every which way in the wake of stone-throwing. Radir Mohammed from Khan Yunis refugee camp was in a school classroom when soldiers shot her to death. She was 12 when she died. All of them were innocent of wrongdoing and were killed by soldiers acting in our name.
At least in some of these cases it was clear to the soldiers that they were shooting at children, but that didn't stop them. Palestinian children have no refuge: mortal danger lurks for them in their homes, in their schools and on their streets. Not one of the hundreds of children who have been killed deserved to die, and the responsibility for their killing cannot remain anonymous. Thus the message is conveyed to the soldiers: it's no tragedy to kill children and none of you is guilty.
Death is, of course, the most acute danger that confronts a Palestinian child, but it is not the only one. According to data of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 3,409 schoolchildren have been wounded in the intifada, some of them crippled for life. The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don't have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child who is a "victim of anxiety"?
The public indifference that accompanies this pageant of unrelieved suffering makes all Israelis accomplices to a crime. Even parents, who understand what anxiety for a child's fate means, turn away and don't want to hear about the anxiety harbored by the parent on the other side of the fence. Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent? Even the Palestinian children have become part of the dehumanization campaign: killing hundreds of them is no longer a big deal.
I am so angry all the time, that the litany of reciting who I am angry about is no longer cathartic. I am surprised that people don't recoil from me when I walk down the street. I am surprised that the water in the sink does not boil when I look at it. This is not a God complex, I know, these are just the blood vessels rupturing around my temples.
On a semi-related note, I understand now how civil wars got started. Just like I find little use for irony anymore, the same goes for the tolerance of opposing views on an interpersonal level. When I don't have an active project of informing/educating like I did with Shocking & Awful, all I have left is an unceasing desire to slap anyone supporting Bush out of their idiocy and slap anyone supporting Nader out of their self-righteousness. Upon seeing my parents' friends, staunch Bush-supporters, the ones who advocate dropping the A-bomb on the Middle East ("it does not matter where, after we dropped it on the Japanese, they learned their place), I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from telling them "yes, keep encouraging your sons to enlist in the army, I'll see what tune you start singing after they are blown up in a roadside ambush, or blow their own heads off after they come home." I regard former friends as monsters, and no hyperbole is ever too extreme. You could power a city with my vitriol. And if you don't care as much as I do, if you are not as angry as I am, then fuck you.
Hi anthrochica,
I've sent it off. Hope you are well, email aside. New York is going
well, still, but the election doesn't look so great. Good luck with
your movements down to the lowlands.
Best,
Chair
What does it mean, the election does not look so great? Could it be
this feel-good report from New Mexico?:
Kim Griffith voted on Thursday— over and over and over.
She's among the people in Bernalillo and Sandoval counties who say they have had trouble with early voting equipment. When they have tried to vote for a particular candidate, the touch-screen system has said they voted for somebody else.
She went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. "I pushed his name, but a green check mark appeared before President Bush's name," she said.
Michael Cadigan, president of the Albuquerque City Council, had a similar experience when he voted at City Hall.
"I cast my vote for president. I voted for Kerry and a check mark for Bush appeared," he said.
Or could it be the belated October surprise?
According to White House and Washington Beltway insiders, the Bush administration, worried that it could lose the presidential election to Senator John F. Kerry, has initiated plans to launch a military strike on Iran's top Islamic leadership, its nuclear reactor at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, and key nuclear targets throughout the country, including the main underground research site at Natanz in central Iran and another in Isfahan. Targets of the planned U.S. attack reportedly include mosques in Tehran, Qom, and Isfahan known by the U.S. to headquarter Iran's top mullahs.
The Iran attack plan was reportedly drawn up after internal polling indicated that if the Bush administration launched a so-called anti-terrorist attack on Iran some two weeks before the election, Bush would be assured of a landslide win against Kerry. Reports of a pre-emptive strike on Iran come amid concerns by a number of political observers that the Bush administration would concoct an "October Surprise" to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
And this just made me cry into my morning coffee because eff this shit, this woman
is 52 years old and she has spent 30 years of her life helping the Iraqi people; CARE is one of the only aid agencies that are still operating there, like what the fuck is wrong with the people who kidnapped her? This is not fighting the occupation, this is unforgiveable like the kids in the school taken hostage by the Chechen insurgents. This makes me scared for my friend who is in Iraq; the last time he was there he was kidnapped, but was able to negociate his own release, because at the time it seemed the insurgents weren't interested in killing people who were there to help, like for real, like independent journalists who were really trying to show the world the reality of the American occupation. But as freedom causes often do, this seems to be mutating into undifferentiated ugliness fueled by fanaticism.
Oh, and in more good news,
this op-ed was quite prescient: the IDF soldier who emptied his entire clip into Iman Alhamas, the wounded 13-year old Palestinian girl from Rafah, was
cleared of "unethical" behavior. And since we all heard John Edwards earnestly talking about the horror of Israeli children dying at the hands of terrorists, here is something he'd do well to read:
Killing children is no longer a big deal
By Gideon Levy
More than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of Operation Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip. It's no wonder that many people term such wholesale killing of children "terror." Whereas in the overall count of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1. According to B'Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.
Palestinian human rights groups speak of even higher numbers: 598 Palestinian children killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent. Take note of the ages, too. According to B'Tselem, whose data are updated until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were 10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died. The youngest victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during birth.
With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli. Yet it is not on the public agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.
The plain fact, which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian children is on our hands. No tortuous explanation by the IDF Spokesman's Office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations people in the Foreign Ministry about how the Palestinians are making use of children will change that fact. An army that kills so many children is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.
As MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) said, in a particularly emotional speech in the Knesset, it is no longer possible to claim that all these children were killed by mistake. An army doesn't make more than 500 day-to-day mistakes of identity. No, this is not a mistake but the disastrous result of a policy driven mainly by an appallingly light trigger finger and by the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Shooting at everything that moves, including children, has become normative behavior. Even the momentary mini-furor that erupted over the "confirming of the killing" of a 13-year-old girl, Iman Alhamas, did not revolve around the true question. The scandal should have been generated by the very act of the killing itself, not only by what followed.
Iman was not the only one. Mohammed Aaraj was eating a sandwich in front of his house, the last house before the cemetery of the Balata refugee camp, in Nablus, when a soldier shot him to death at fairly close range. He was six at the time of his death. Kristen Saada was in her parents' car, on the way home from a family visit, when soldiers sprayed the car with bullets. She was 12 at the time of her death. The brothers Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz were riding their bicycles in full daylight, on their way to buy sweets, when they sustained a direct hit from a shell fired by an Israeli tank crew. Jamil was 13, Ahmed six, at the time of their deaths.
Muatez Amudi and Subah Subah were killed by a soldier who was standing in the village square in Burkin and fired every which way in the wake of stone-throwing. Radir Mohammed from Khan Yunis refugee camp was in a school classroom when soldiers shot her to death. She was 12 when she died. All of them were innocent of wrongdoing and were killed by soldiers acting in our name.
At least in some of these cases it was clear to the soldiers that they were shooting at children, but that didn't stop them. Palestinian children have no refuge: mortal danger lurks for them in their homes, in their schools and on their streets. Not one of the hundreds of children who have been killed deserved to die, and the responsibility for their killing cannot remain anonymous. Thus the message is conveyed to the soldiers: it's no tragedy to kill children and none of you is guilty.
Death is, of course, the most acute danger that confronts a Palestinian child, but it is not the only one. According to data of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 3,409 schoolchildren have been wounded in the intifada, some of them crippled for life. The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don't have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child who is a "victim of anxiety"?
The public indifference that accompanies this pageant of unrelieved suffering makes all Israelis accomplices to a crime. Even parents, who understand what anxiety for a child's fate means, turn away and don't want to hear about the anxiety harbored by the parent on the other side of the fence. Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent? Even the Palestinian children have become part of the dehumanization campaign: killing hundreds of them is no longer a big deal.
I am so angry all the time, that the litany of reciting who I am angry about is no longer cathartic. I am surprised that people don't recoil from me when I walk down the street. I am surprised that the water in the sink does not boil when I look at it. This is not a God complex, I know, these are just the blood vessels rupturing around my temples.
On a semi-related note, I understand now how civil wars got started. Just like I find little use for irony anymore, the same goes for the tolerance of opposing views on an interpersonal level. When I don't have an active project of informing/educating like I did with Shocking & Awful, all I have left is an unceasing desire to slap anyone supporting Bush out of their idiocy and slap anyone supporting Nader out of their self-righteousness. Upon seeing my parents' friends, staunch Bush-supporters, the ones who advocate dropping the A-bomb on the Middle East ("it does not matter where, after we dropped it on the Japanese, they learned their place), I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from telling them "yes, keep encouraging your sons to enlist in the army, I'll see what tune you start singing after they are blown up in a roadside ambush, or blow their own heads off after they come home." I regard former friends as monsters, and no hyperbole is ever too extreme. You could power a city with my vitriol. And if you don't care as much as I do, if you are not as angry as I am, then fuck you.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 10:05 am (UTC)I was leaving work the other day and saw a car with a Jackass Puppet campaign sign on top driving past, and I realized that I've gone numb these past few weeks. Like I've spent so much energy on this anger and fear that I'm no longer able to take seriously the possibility of another term. I just felt nothing at all.
I want a Central American amendment to the constitution: you know, one disqualifying anyone who has ever participated in a coup d'état from serving as president.
On the way home from the pub Wednesday night, watching Red Sox fans whoopin' and hollerin' and carrying on in the streets, I told J-P, "I want to see this again on the night of the second. With guns, if necessary." He said, "Guns still scare me." I'm not so sure anymore.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 11:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 11:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-24 11:01 pm (UTC)i just checked an old email account and found an entire discussion from my uncle and his friends (who apparently cannot restrain themselves from the reply-all button) about npr and its liberal lies. i also found out that a close friend of my family, to whom i had sent a personal letter earlier this year asking her to vote against bush, is indeed voting for bush. it is as simple as the fact that she believes that bush is telling the truth and kerry is lying.
honestly i don't know how i am going to be able to spend time and engage in conversation with these people again. really. i feel so alientated from them and their line of thought -- because if you ask me supporting bush requires the rejection of not just my fundamental beliefs, but a rejection of the processes that allow me to hold these beliefs and discuss them. it requires a rejection of the notion of subjectivity, and most emlightenment thought. and i don't know how to hold a conversation with someone who rejects the idea of reason. i could go on forever and ever on this one, but you know what i mean.
to some degree i take it personally, esp with my mom's friend since i feel like her decision to support bush means that she trusts his views about me as a person over my own (i sent her a letter about how he was crazy to try to amend the constitution with the gay marriage thing -- and for her to have total FAITH in him -- regarding any subject -- means she trusts him on this subject more than she trusts me).
i don't know where to go with this -- the two sides are so polarized that there is no commonality with which to breach the gap. it makes me sad, it makes me angry, and most of all it makes me so concerned about the future of the country/world. how did this happen? it's not so much that i am so alarmed with the huge shift to the right in this country over the last few years -- it is that that shift required a rejection of principles of reason. in other words, if it has been a shift to the right because everyone was just greedy and didn't want to pay higher taxes, i would be more comfortable because i feel like i could still speak the same language as those people -- a discussion could be had. but dicussion seems like it is no longer a possibility. it's like a case of he said she said with no other witnesses. i don't know how much longer this can go on without huge consequences.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 10:16 am (UTC)I'm worried now that if Kerry gets in this will be what will happen. It's not as easy to be a militia/heartland terrorist anymore (unless you're sending anthrax to abortion providers) but it's possible.
There was a show on the French news last night about the assault weapons ban being lifted (a month or so ago or whatever it was) and I was like, great, perfect timing.
Back in fall of 2001 one of my profs did a little consciousness-raising exercise by taking a bunch of us lefty students down to rural Washington state to hang out with the "natives" (loggers, gun owners, Bush supporters, etc.) for five days and get all open-minded about how their culture really was different and that it wasn't that they were intellectually deficient or anything. I'm supposed to be all relativist and everything because of my academic training and I'm supposed to try and understand why people from US states I'll never visit are the way they are and why my cosmopolitan nannyism is condescending and misguided. But when I see some big human potato explain why he sells assault weapons by saying "I sell guns, because I'm a gun vendor. Just like if I were a Starbucks, I would sell coffee"--like that explains it--I just feel like retreating into social evolutionism. Everyone on the show was talking in First Principles: "I sell guns because I'm a gun vendor". "I own guns because I was born in the United States of America." Not that this is considerably worse than "guns are bad because killing is wrong", but how can I take someone like that seriously? And then sit down and remember that they decide my fate?
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 10:44 am (UTC)I think if you think those attitudes are okay you basically are giving up on education as important. For instance, a lot of people in America don't KNOW about the rest of the world and need to learn.
I have a great-grandfather who worked tirelessly his whole life to extend the primary and secondary education system in Texas. I keep researching him lately because I want to recover the idea that Americans even in the so-called heartland have, in the past, cared. If everyone bought into that kind of thoughtless respect you mention we wouldn't have anything like the kind of public education system we DO have in America.
If I may presume...
Date: 2004-10-22 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 10:48 am (UTC)that pisses me off just to read
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 10:54 am (UTC)And our client states -- Israel, the "new Iraq" being only two -- are just as bad. The fucked-up voting situation is only the tip of the berg. And I just received a flyer in the mail from the "Republican Jewish Coalition", with a giant (fucking huge) picture of Ed Koch smiling at me saying "vote for George Bush, because even though we disagree on abortion and stem cell research, he's the right leader for terrorism and Israel and the Middle East."
Fucker. And he has the gall to put "lifelong Democrat" under his picture and to sign up to be part of this millenialist apocalyptic administration.
Well, that inspired a little rant of its own. Strength.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 11:43 am (UTC)We may still be fucked. The best among us are still the most vulnerable. But I really think that Chair is wrong, that come November 3, you will be weeping, and I will be drinking champagne as I run around outside naked with a flag, weeping and singing.
P.S.
Date: 2004-10-22 11:44 am (UTC)Re: P.S.
Date: 2004-10-22 11:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 12:59 pm (UTC)Maybe this whole T-11 crap is making me jittery, but this article from today really gave me an uncomfortable feeling
http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/3843181/detail.html
are you familiar with the bizzarre case of Vreeland? A lot of it ventures into conspiracy theory stuff that's too far out even for me, but the man did predict the attacks months beforehand in prison. Some of the other claims he made at the time that were dismissed as ridiculous have been substantiated since. The fact that he is being arrested on what seem to be bogus charges ten days before the election somehow dovetails in my head where I keep expecting the October Surprise to be really nasty, nasty enough to propel us to Code Red.
Sorry, I'm freaking myself out and no need to take anyone else on that journey with me.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 01:08 pm (UTC)Naw, go ahead, I'm not all that freakable.
The Vreeland thing doesn't look that real to me. It's a gut sense - the discursive tropes are all wrong. The code red thing in general -- yes, it's a concern. And here we take a deep breath, and repeat the two mantras
1. Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will
and, even more important
2. If I let these bastards drive me crazy, they will have had one more victory. I'll do my mourning at the funeral if I have to.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 01:10 pm (UTC)I tried to volunteer to do poll watching in WI. They want me in Chicago instead because they have too many volunteers in WI.
off topic, but can today get any worse?
Date: 2004-10-22 03:10 pm (UTC)Re: off topic, but can today get any worse?
Date: 2004-10-22 03:25 pm (UTC)Re: off topic, but can today get any worse?
Date: 2004-10-22 03:29 pm (UTC)Re: off topic, but can today get any worse?
Date: 2004-10-22 03:56 pm (UTC)Re: off topic, but can today get any worse?
Date: 2004-10-22 09:39 pm (UTC)Re: off topic, but can today get any worse?
Date: 2004-10-23 09:45 am (UTC)Sorry if I sound less than thrilled. As you know, I would love to meet you, but the circumstances of this switcheroo transpiring are appalling, as you may have surmised from my above entry.
But, if I am indeed there, and you are indeed there, that would be one plus of this whole fiasco.
Re: off topic, but can today get any worse?
Date: 2004-10-23 10:24 am (UTC)It's been a long time since I went back to ATL, but my parents would be really happy if I came back for part of winter break. If it overlapped with your trip, that would be fun.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 02:44 pm (UTC)Very good point. There is no proverbial town hall for the peasants to rally round with their pitchforks.
There is, however, HBO. I suppose this next revolution will be a cultural one.