(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

shit i am so mad! AOL already changed its headline so i can't find the quote i wanted to post, i will look for it more later, but the gist of it was Tony Blair issuing a statement that "tough talk" was the only way to resolve the Iraq thing peacefully, it was the only language that Saddam understood.

Oh my god, how brilliant is that! I mean, that reaches new apexes (or would nadirs be more appropriate?) of Orwellian brilliance. so when the US/UK (he-he, try reading that phonetically) don't bomb Iraq, they save face by saying "tough talk was just our peaceful negotiation strategy--don't confuse the signifier with the signified!" well, they would not say that last part, but that would be the subtext.

i think this is part of this whole new thing going on since saturday. i mean, mass media has gone all "radical" what with political whore CNN doing positive coverage, the New York Post (!) doing a pro-demo story, showing an aggro cop on horseback about to hit a protestor, the comedy central re-running "That's My Bush" that has been off-air since 9-11 (it's my new favorite show by the way, after Buffy), and an anti-Bush opening SNL skit that is becoming bizzarrely more and more on point. okay, so the skit was basically "from the white house" dispatch saying "we lost interest in Iraq. We don't care if they have weapons" which is kind of paralleling what's been going on in the media. I mean, the panic-production machine is still working full force, except the new hot nouns to go with adjectives like "terrifying" and "deadly" is...the East Coast Blizard! tangent here--okay, first of all, it's fucking WINTER. OF COURSE there is a blizzard! this is not even a big blizzard or anything, and i say that not out of some I-Lived-In-Russia-Hence-I'm-Tough-As-Polar-Bears cred, no, shit, it snows MUCH WORSE than this and FOR MUCH LONGER every winter in chicago. but anyway, so the media is now producing a "terrifying" snowstorm. the terror alert is gonna be lowered, but now, even though it's still on orange, the Terrometor just kinda disappeared from CNN and MSNBC (as of yesterday it was only hanging around on Fox, the last bastion of sensationalist pulp journalism. how come there is no term "pulp journalism"? there should be. there is one now. so there.) it's like someone at the top is rapidly smoothing out the wrinkles.

Here is my prediction for what's gonna happen: Bush and Blair are busy PR-ing their way into a backtrack "tough speech is our stragegy, we never meant war!" there will be some sort of nominal face-saving reconcilation in Europe "at large" if not in the Security Council, where US will publically get support of the "voices of dissent" in exchange for non-publicized reassurance that it will allow the inspectors to work.

Am I right? The next couple of weeks will tell. In the mean time, thank god they stopped talking about duct tape.

Comments

[jvb419.livejournal.com]

I think you may well be right. I'd be willing to that Blair--whose own party can remove him from the Prime Ministership without calling a general election--is eying the exits and preparing some kind of bullshit face-saving posture. Bush... I'm less confident, in part because short of impeachment (which I don't see as a real possibility, not yet anyway) he'll be in office almost two more years. (He's already running for re-election, of course, but meanwhile he's solidly in office.) And the scary motherfuckers around him--Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz and Perle et al.--may well be willing to ignore everybody--you, me, Chirac--and plunge ahead. But I think the NY times articles I linked to indicate that the scale and stubbornness of the opposition have caught them by surprise and made them revise the plan, at least.

[(Anonymous)]

yes, the british people may save the iraqis from being bombed.

it appears highly likely -- "inevitable", as most people talking about the coming war say -- that france will veto any u.n. resolution, if it comes to that. russia and china might also, and bush might not even get a majority vote. then, if blair goes forward following behind bush, he might lose his office. then if bush goes forward (he only knows one direction, particularly when it comes to ordering people's deaths) both without a u.n. resolution and without britain, maybe some people will say "whoah", at least if the public opinion polls about lack of support for the war without a u.n. resolution are correct.

have you noticed how the media always attempt to put anyone who criticizes bush on the defensive by trying to get them to condemn hussein? ("are you now, or have you ever been a member of the communist party?") no one ever asks "should thousands of iraqis be killed in order to improve their lives?" formerly, this was "shouldn't we destroy the village in order to save it?"

one of the many despicable things about all of this is that it is all just a distraction to keep the voters minds off of the domestic disaster known as enron/worldcomm/cheney-gate/"job-less recovery"/deficits and "haven't found bin laden". you can't get much more despicable than using/destroying people's lives for political purposes ("the game is over").

i can't agree about the "radicalization" of the corporate media. if ever there was a "story" that deserved one of their week-long masturbations of saturation coverage, it was the occurrence of tens of millions of people in hundreds of cities around the world protesting against the Moron's march to war.

some recent facts i learned: 50% of the people in iraq are under 15 years old.

there are about 150 inspectors in iraq (land area approx. the size of california), while there were approx. 2,500 people in the search for pieces from the shuttle columbia. the inspectors are set up to fail.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

i did not mean that i really think that mass media has gone radical. but a) they could have downplayed the story like they did with the DC protests before, b) they could have milked the sensationalist angle of "protesters assault cops" or whatever. but they did not. they really showed the police brutality, and instead of just running "official" numbers of demonstrators, they also augmented it by publishing the organizers' estimates (that are more fair, obviously, because they don't just count the people in the "official" rally space, so, in NYC that was on 1st avenue, but the majority of people were on 3rd Ave). They did not downplay arrests--for me the most shocking instance was when the New York Post, the bastion of blind sensationalist conservatism wrote that according to the police there were 50 arrests made, but [they] themselves (Post staff) saw at least a hundred being taken away in jail vans.
sure, all this is a far cry from real radical discourse, but there is definitely more subversive shit going on in the media in the last couple of days than in the last godknowshowmany months.

"you decide"

[(Anonymous)]

more on this in the paper today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/opinion/18KRUG.html