I'm back

I was gone for four days....four very enjoyable days...(except for the 12 hour "bug" that got me on Saturday morning)...

I'm luckier than most people, I think.

I have family who I actually ENJOY spending time with...I couldn't ask to have married into a better family of good, honest, moral people(not religious, mind you, MORAL...there's a big difference). I enjoy being in the company of people who read; who create; who understand creativity and perspective; who understand philosophical concepts and are capable of seeing those concepts at play in the larger society as a whole; who know the lessons taught to us by the great writers and artists of the past and who can apply them to modernity.

Yeah...

It was great.

Now if somebody could do something about the Illinois Tollway traffic.............

Because I'm lazy, that's why.....

I'm going to cross post this because...

well, because I'm too damned lazy to clip and paste and edit.....

here's the linky-thing


Oh yeah...neat picture huh?











But personally, I like this one too...from the Japanese Anime'

Sumari Champloo

"the Battleship Potemkin"

This story in the Washington Monthly doesn't surprise anybody....even the press is starting to recognize that the visits by "dignitaries" to Iraq are nothing but well-staged dog-and-pony-shows. This article points it out well but puts it in a context that resonates with me and points to a much bigger problem...

first..lets look at a snippet or two from the article about the Dora Market in Baghdad:

....After the delegation left, Maj. Ron Minty , 36, said that the generals had wanted 300 shops open for business by July 1. By the day of the delegation's visit, 303 had opened....Still, the Dora market is a Potemkin village of sorts. The U.S. military hands out $2,500 grants to shop owners to open or improve their businesses. The military has fixed windows and doors and even helped rebuild shops that had burned down, soldiers and others said...."The Americans are giving money, so they're opening up stores," said Falah Hassan Fadhil, 27, who sells cosmetics.

We knew that the markets were "fixed" in the sense that they were show places that received special treatment....even when Lieberman and Senator Lindsey (Huckleberry) Graham visited the market, they had to wear flak jackets and be accompanied by a platoon of Marines...even in a false environment created by the military. But this is beyond what I imagined in my most paranoid dreams.

The phrase Potemkin Village rings a bell with me and I think I should explain exactly why it does.

Here's the "wiki" site for Potemkin and here is some info:

The Battleship Potemkin (Russian: Броненосец «Потёмкин», Bronenosets Potyomkin), sometimes rendered as The Battleship Potyomkin, is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a glorified version of the Battleship Potemkin uprising, a real-life event that occurred in 1905 when the crew of a Russian battleship rebelled against their oppressive officers during the Tsarist regime.

Potemkin has been called one of the most influential films of all time, and it was even named the greatest film of all time at the World's Fair at Brussels, Belgium, in 1958.

snip

Eisenstein wrote the film as a revolutionary propaganda film, but also used it to test his theories of "montage". The revolutionary Soviet filmmakers of the Kuleshov school of film making were experimenting with the effect of film editing on audiences, and Eisenstein attempted to edit the film in such a way as to produce the greatest emotional response, so that the viewer would feel sympathy for the rebellious sailors of the Battleship Potemkin and hatred for their cruel overlords. In the manner of most propaganda, the characterization is simple, so that the audience could clearly see with whom they should sympathize.

Are you beginning to understand why the film is considered so influential? Film makers of the time (1925) were just beginning to understand the power of the new media...this thing called "movies"...and Eisenstein sensed, quite correctly, the power that editing could have in evoking emotions from the audience. In fact, he understood that a story edited with simple images could evoke incredible responses.

The event that the movie was based upon, the uprising of sailors on the Battleship Potemkin, actually happened, but the images Eisenstein created, the sympathetic and lovable leader of the rebellion, the cruel and immoral officers and petty officers, the heart rending funeral of the leader of the rebellion, the bloody and (at that time) terrifying Odessa Steps sequence (which has been copied in thousands of movies in one version or another since 1925)..all those were fabricated to evoke the emotional response that Eisenstein wanted the audience to experience.

But Eisenstein wasn't the only one wanting that response...the Bolsheviks wanted it more than anything to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the uprising and remind the masses of exactly why they had to sacrifice under the new regime.

By now you've guessed my larger point.....

Everything the Bush Administration has presented to us has been a staged "Potemkin Village" event. And I'm not talking just about Iraq either...it has been everything...every speech is properly staged with the appropriate props....and on the "prop" front the Bushites have absolutely no shame...they'll use Soldiers (a favorite of the "War President"), children and also the BUF....which stands for BLACKS UP FRONT,(where the camera can see them) in order to prove that he's "the Civil Rights President".

But it's all a sham.

It's all staged for our uncritical, undemanding, uneducated masses. We're not supposed to question anything we see. We're not supposed to look for substance behind the image...we're only supposed to look at the image.

And emotion.

Today is September 3, 2007. In one week we will be observing the 6th Anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our emotional strings will be pulled hard and the Bushites will remind us in so many subtle (and some not-so-subtle) of the images, techniques, and ethic of The Battleship Potemkin.

We can safely predict:

The term "hero" will be thrown around cheaply to evoke the same sympathetic images that Eisenstein put forward in Potemkin.

We will see countless replays of the towers collapsing in much the same way that we see the "Odessa Steps Sequence"* in Potemkin.

We will see our wise, sorrowful, and valiant leader offer us words of encouragement.

We'll see false, misleading and deliberate attempts to link Iraq to the fall of the towers and we will hear, once again, the chorus of right wing radio talk hosts, parroting the "We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." bullshit.

Finally, we are seeing some in the media....like the Washington Weekly article challenge the Potemkin Village that Bush has created for us.

Maybe....and just Maybe...we'll become a "reality-based" country yet.

*About the "Odessa Steps Sequence". Here is Wiki's excellent description of it:

The most famous scene in the film is the massacre of
civilians on the Odessa Steps (also known as the Primorsky or Potemkin
Stairs). In this scene, the Tsar's Cossacks in their white summer tunics march down a seemingly endless flight of steps in a rhythmic, machine-like fashion,
slaughtering a crowd, including a young boy, as they attempt to flee. After the
boy falls, his mother picks up his body and yells at the soldiers to stop firing. They do only to shoot her minutes later. Toward the end of the sequence, the soldiers shoot a mother who is pushing a baby in a baby
carriage. As she falls to the ground, dying, she leans against the carriage, nudging it away; it rolls down the steps amidst the fleeing crowd.
snip

The scene is perhaps the best example of Eisenstein's theory on montage, and
may have influenced many of Leni Riefenstahl's similar images in the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. It has been endlessly referenced in many motion pictures, with famous homages occurring in Francis Ford Coppola's The
Godfather, Brian De Palma's version of The Untouchables, and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. It was also spoofed in Woody Allen's Bananas and Love and Death, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and the ZAZ film Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult

I was privileged to see "Potemkin" in college in a History of the Motion Pictures class. It was unforgettable. It was made even more remarkable when we understood the state of the technology in 1925 and the imagination of Eisenstein and his willingness to experiment. Who knew that it would become the template for all propaganda films to follow?

Really, really busy...

And this week is going to get worse....much worse.

In the meantime, please check in with The Existentialist Cowboy and this great post about the upcoming Petraeus report.

Also...Bush made a "surprise visit" into Iraq today...Into Anbar Province where relative peace has been achieved by arming the Sunni Faction to fight the AQ faction and "other hositle forces" (according to NPR.)

uMMMMM....so we're arming the Sunni faction in Anbar...and the Shiite faction in Baghdad....

The Sunni and the Shiia are "at war" with each other.

Gee...

This should turn out well (insert sarcasm logo here)

The epidemic of DUMBASS spreads.....

Thanks to Digby for this one...I would have missed it otherwise...

Here's a blub, appearing in Digby from the original MSNBC Michael Vick/Al Sharpton story:

Most recently, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a two-time Democratic presidential
candidate, charged that a star white athlete never would have been prosecuted
for the same crime.

snip

If the police caught Brett Favre (a white quarterback for the Green Bay
Packers) running a dolphin-fighting unit out of his pool, where dolphins with
spears attached to their foreheads fought each other, would they bust him? Of
course not," Sharpton wrote Tuesday on his personal blog.

They would get his autograph, commend him on his tightly spiraled
forward passes, then bet on one of his dolphins.

Pretty inflamatory huh?

How could Sharpton defend Vick?

Well, actually, he didn't: read on:

Turns out that Sharpton quote, allegedly from his "personal blog",
actually came from the parody
site News/Groper. Who would have ever guessed?

The editor of the site, terribly impressed with MSNBC's investigative
skills as you might imagine, wonders which one of these clues finally tipped
them off:

1. The words "fake parody blogs" in the titlebar of every page of our
site

2. Our logo

3. Al Sharpton blogging on the same site as Lindsay Lohan, George
Bushand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

4. Our about page www.newsgroper.com/about/

5. Al Sharpton referring to himself in his bio as an
"EmancipationProclamation enthusiast"

And of course....we can't forget Miss South Carolina in the "Miss Teen USA Contest". Here's the Youtube of the event...

After you watch it, try to determine if you're torn between sympathy for the poor girl or disgust at her shallowness, or perhaps you're appalled at the ignorance. By the way, that's her, Caitlin Upton on the right in this picture....(note: she's only 17?!?!?!?!)

I posted some time ago that I thought the dumbing down of America was getting out of hand....I now think it's running rampant.

Local government....advanced degree?

I saw this quote over at firedoglake.com. It appears to be a quote from Christy Hardin Smith (aka The redhead). I've seen parts of it before but never put together in quite this way. Anyway, here's the quote we'll be riffing on.

Politics is the art of making the impossible possible, of bringing to life theories and finding a pragmatic way to implement them to sustain a particular view of the world. In short, it is about priorities

I think the business about priorities is important...especially in local government. In some local government settings, it's hard to tell what their priorities really are as they seem to pander to damned near every interest and they can't seem to say "no" to anybody or any interest.

Just recently, I was at a meeting where an alderman complained about having to mow ditches because the city had done an asphalt street with ditching as opposed to concrete curb and gutter. A staff memeber jumped to the opportunity to chastise the common council for not either borrowing enough money or raising taxes high enough to provide the more expensive curb and gutter. I couldn't contain myself.....

I jumped in and suggested that it wasn't a matter of borrowing more or taxing more but PRIORITIZING the funds that you do have.

There are choices to be made.

Do you want a "build-it-and-they-will-come (maybe) $2.5MM industrial park or more curb and gutter streets?

Do you want $500K worth of bike and walking trails or do you want more curb and gutter streets?

The choices go on and on but the "free ride" days for public officials are over. The days when you could say "yes" to everybody, raise taxes to cover it, and nobody would notice because everybody was rolling in money because of the great economic conditions, well...those days are over.

We have to decide what's important and what's not. We have to decide what the "absolute ability to pay" really is and deal with it honestly.

We need political leadership to establish priorities and stick with them.

t

Politics and dead squirrels....

I had the opportunity to visit the Madison again yesterday and visit with some old friends and some relatively new acquaintances. I guess it's because the friends I have chosen are mostly political junkies like myself that whenever we gather, we talk...politics....(who'da thunk, huh?)

So we talked "politics" for a while and the Governor's proposal to ban indoor smoking, statewide with no exceptions, came up in two separate conversations.

Now, understand, I am a cynic, but I'm also "no body's fool" when it comes to politics. I know there has been intensive lobbying....I know who is doing most of the lobbying...I've checked out the web sites and I know that a certain tobacco company is ranked 3rd among all lobbying groups(first is Wisconsin Hospital Association....Healthy Wisconsin?) in expenditures during the last quarter. I've also seen the Tavern League posters (I'm told that they have matching drink coasters for bars too....clever...great marketing actually) .

Yeah, I know all that. And I know it's "normal" or at least, "business as usual" but I was absolutely amused when I heard my friends toss around the phrase "local control" in regards to the smoking ban. Let's face it. With a few exceptions, hearing a denizen of the halls of the State Capitol embrace "local control" is about like learning that Colonel Sanders has given up chicken.

The only reason I think the term "local control" is being bandied about is because politicos (those who participate in and advise politicians) are caught in a tough position. They know that smoking and second-hand smoke is a health hazard and they really want to get rid of it, but the tobacco industry and the tavern league are very formidable opponents which no sane legislator, advisor to a legislator, or staffer looking for job security, looks forward to confronting. Let's face it, having an opponent in the next election with a virtual blank check from either of those organizations is not a healthy prospect.

Hence, the dead squirrel option starts to look pretty attractive.

The Dead Squirrel Option relates to an old Wisconsin axiom that revolves around the question, "What do you do if you find a dead squirrel in your yard?" Answer: "Heave it over the fence into your neighbor's yard...preferably when no one is looking."

That's right....all you local officials get ready....the Legislature would like to hurl this dead squirrel right back in your yard. But they can't do that with impunity.

So far the smoking ban proposal is stuck in committee and pretty much stalemated, but remember, there is a huge economic component to the smoking ban proposal. It's tied to a $1.25 per pack increase in the cigarette tax. If the legislature decides to defeat the proposal (under the guise of "local control") then there is a huge hole in the budget that will need to be filled with either additional revenues (coughtaxescough) or cuts in expenditures (coughsharedrevenuescough) in order to balance the budget. So as you see, there's a cost to heaving the squirrel over the fence and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.