Spidergrrl's Web

Amy Goodman

Last night I sat with over 400 other people from the northern Alabama area to hear Amy Goodman give her talk entitled "media-ocracy: How the American Media Compromises Democracy." It was Goodman's Alabama debut, as one of the introducers said. I wanted to stay home and just read, relax. I knew I had to go. I am grateful I went.

This is a brilliant, ethical woman and a master storyteller. She deals in facts: Steve Biko died the morning of September 12, East Timor became an independent country on 20 May 2002, a reporter in New Orleans reported on air as a dead body floated by behind him. But the way she tells those facts is storytelling. She uses poetry -- mainstream media as "the stenographers for power." She weaves the story across huge distances and time -- Democracy Now news on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the pro- and anti-war guests on the Sally Jesse Raphael show during the Gulf War, the U.S.-backed Indonesian massacre of East Timor, a story that spanned three decades and one which Goodman reported on in 1991, when a UN delegation was supposed to visit, and she and Alan Nairn were beaten and almost killed along with close to 300 Timorese who were shot as they mourned the government murder of one of their community.

One of the most powerful moments was when Goodman recited a list of September 11ths - Biko, Pinochet, East Timor, and many more...and ended by saying that Sept. 11, 2001 was not the first time the U.S. was involved in terrorist attacks. She began each instance by saying "September 11, 1970" or "September 11, 1971," and the iterative moment, the repetition of the day followed by different years, shifted the current September 11th icon into context, out of mythology, away from propaganda.

Goodman talked about the difference in media between the invasion of Iraq and the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She talked about how the invasion of Iraq became the "General Media," in which generals were paid consultants on mainstream media, and embedded journalists responded to questions with "Yes, sir." She told how the media titled its broadcasts with the exact same name the Pentagon used for the invasion: "Operation Iraqi Freedom." There is no democratic media when the military and the government dictate the script and the media reads it unedited. She talked about Cindy Sheehan in Crawford and other mothers who dared to go against the governmental ban against photographing the coffins of their dead children returning from war. And she contrasted the coverage of Katrina, where reporters were on the ground before the military, before FEMA, and were able to report without government muzzles. She told of being in Algiers this past week and interviewing a New York City firefighter who was on a firetruck with a local firefighter and asking him if he'd been at ground zero in New York, and he had. And she asked which ground zero was worse -- NY or New Orleans and he answered, "This one." Goodman quickly said "Not to compare disasters..." and she was clear that she believed Osama bin Laden should be found and tried and punished...but she said that Henry Kissinger should also be tried and punished for the invasion of East Timor and other crimes against humanity.

Goodman used humor ... when she was on the Sally Jesse Raphael program and Sally pointed to picture of people in NY City demonstrating against the Gulf War and then asked Goodman, "Who are all these people?" and Goodman replied, "Well, I don't know all their names..." At one point, Goodman was talking about the almost 340 days of vacation Bush has taken and the latest one that started the beginning of August when he spent his time relaxing, and fishing, and reading.. and some female voice in the audience, not too loudly but just audible, said "Reading?" and the whole place cracked up.

Some poll checked the four major news shows during the invasion of Iraq -- NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS (Macneill/Lehrer) -- for a period of time and out of almost 400 guests, a total of 3 represented anti-war/peace voices. That means that less than 1% of all guests/experts on all major news shows represented the non-governmental side. And that's her point. There is no democracy in media and it's our job, as she ended her talk, our job as citizens who wake up each morning and decide every day, every hour whether we will side with our country as a sword or as a shield, whether we will maintain that "war is not a solution to conflict in the twenty-first century."

The talk began with a showing of the DVD that features Goodman discussing coverage of the Iraqi invasion. This is the point: for every embedded journalist in the military, there needs to be an embedded journalist with the Iraqi people. And we must demand that democracy in media.

At one point, she said something like, "As the granddaugher of a rabbi, I am appalled at seeing Israeli children with gas masks. But I am more appalled at seeing Palestinian children without gas masks." She mentioned that her grandmother is 108 and still going strong. I'm hoping Goodman has her grandma's genes.

wireless & Katrina

Sitting in a multinational coffee shop...ya know the one... the colloquial term for "dollars" constitutes the second syllable of its name...the wireless is fine, I'm happy with caffein, and gas is $3.24/gallon. Refrigerated inside bliss belies the over 90-degree temperature outside, and I think of all those on the Coast without electricity. My mom sent me a link to Mississippi's Morning After, today's Op-ed in the NYTimes by Rick Barthelme. Gives a quick and deep picture from someone sitting 70 miles inland. We've got the Red Cross offering free shelter at a local church. NPR this morning talked about help through internet connections...folks offering rental properties for free, travel fare to get there. I really hate that feeling of Schadenfreude that catastrophes elicit...."So glad it wasn't me or mine," as I commiserate.

hazel crazy

I'm going to try my own hand at sketching a clump of hazel nuts, but until that happens, here's a nice sketch from the Trees for Life website. I'm turning into a hazel maniac...aside from my love of hazelnut ice cream, which I've only found in Germany...I now have Celtic mythology to thank for pointing out that cutting down a hazel tree was punishable by death...one of the sacred trees, as Karen Bledsoe pointed out...and hazel wood was used for divination rods. Hazel signifies wisdom and  poetic inspiration...and ya know, that's just too cool when you think about a National Writing Project writing retreat.

trees & writing

I'm at Lied Lodge, a conference center at Arbor Day Farms, part of The National Arbor Day Foundation...way cool place to find out a lot about trees, J. Sterling Morgan (who founded Arbor Day and whose white mansion is visible out of our conference room window), biomass energy, and Nebraska marble (sod). I'm co-facilitating a National Writing Project Professional Writing and Technology Writing Retreat (gesundheit), and I love that we're saving trees by using technology. Borders painted midway up the main hall walls consist of quotations about trees by writers like Rabindranath Tagore ("Trees are Earth's endless effort to speak to the listening  heaven"). Each room contains three to four small gray wastebaskets labeled "Aluminum Only," "Glass Only," "Paper Only," and "Trash Only." When someone asked for the "Plastic Only" wastebasket, we found out that the rugs are made out of recycled plastic.

I went out to the hazel trees and touched a clump of nuts that fell off into my hand. The tree's flower turns into five or six tightly bonded hazel nuts. And since 90% of hazel nuts are imported, finding ways to grow them here is good news for some farmers.

OK, I'm tired. And my writing feels tired. Time for coffee.

a quiet revolution

Getting ready to hit the road again. Logging in through Days Inn's wireless. Yiha. How did I live without wireless before? Inconceivable, eh?

Back from a conference through the National Writing Project, the organization that I think is transforming schools and universities more than any other. I'm ashamed to say that I first found out about the National Writing Project in 2003, when Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi, director of the Alabama A&M University Writing  Project, recruited me for the Summer Invitational Institute. I'm not ashamed of being recruited...that was a watershed moment  in my teaching career...but that I hadn't yet heard of this organization that incorporated so many of my  writing/pedagogical ideals and practices.

Already I'm thinking I need a separate blog just for writing project stuff. Again,  this concern with compartmentalization/interweaving in my blogs, writing. That is, I've got not problem writing whatever in my paper journal. But here...I worry that readers need to be directed to their interests. And my whole person needs to have a table of contents, hyperlinks to the various parts...so readers can skip over the uninterestings, go directly to the relevant. I guess a wholistic approach means paying attention to what doesn't interest us, what we avoid. A holistic approach means delayed gratification...being present. Attending to the glitches. As well as racing to the pleasurable. Wow. I'm hoping this will make sense when I read it again.

Time to hit the road.

is she back?

Ask me why I'm referring to myself in the 3rd person...no clue. It's been how long since I last posted? I have come close, so close, to closing down this blog...but I couldn't do it. I remember how writing here has saved my political sanity occasionally. I could use a bit more of that sanity.

I'm in Wellesley at a National Writing Project conference at Babson College, a gorgeous campus...business money. OK, I've gotten this far and now I'm stalled. I have absolutely nothing to say. But perhaps it's enough just to type these few scratches after so long.

election fraud Ukraine/US

I've been fascinated by the amount of NPR news time that was spent on the Ukrainian elections, mainly because the absence of any reporting on the groups investigating U.S. election fraud was so deafening. I'm not objecting to the reporting on the Ukraine; our press is still too U.S./western-european-centric. I'm just noticing the disjuncture. Listening to NPR felt surreal -- because I kept expecting the reports of election fraud to slip from the Ukraine to the U.S. But that didn't happen. What's up with this void in the mainstream media? Not surprising. But certainly frustrating and illuminating.

Derrida & Arafat

These two deaths this fall (Derrida on 8 October of pancreatic cancer and Arafat on 11 November in a military hospital in Paris) change the world, change my sense of the world. No. That's not what I want to say. I want to pay hommage. Both figures have been powerful figures threading through my spheres of academia, writing, self- & world-reflection. Arafat because he is the icon of Palestine, or as Hanan Ashrawi put it, Arafat "is the one who personified the Palestinian people.... He will stay a part of our memory but also be an incentive for the future." Arafat passes on, ceding his iconic spot to a younger generation, who will not be drawn in his shadow's outline. Derrida because his writings rewritten by Spivak, the literary theory teacher I encountered in my first year of graduate school, shapes much of my ways of seeing and understanding. Until I first heard Spivak in that initial class, where she situated New Criticism in its cold war webbing, and I heard postcolonialism, feminism, race, gender, & class all discussed in one breath...I did not know there were such clear words and terms for the things I'd been tumbling in my mind. Two powerhouses of the African Arab world leave us this past fall.

Red Sox & Kerry, Bush & Creon

According to an NPR segment I heard this afternoon, John Kerry showed up at a gathering in Ohio wearing a Red Sox hat. He said that a year ago when the campaign wasn't doing so well, a snide listener called up a radio show host and said, "John Kerry will get elected president when the Red Sox win the World Series!" There ya have it. Complete with lunar eclipse? What could be more fortuitous.

Report today from health officials...I've got to find the source...that says over 100,000 civilian Iraqis killed in the last 18 months -- mostly due to U.S. air raids. We should be a nation in mourning.

During the first presidential debate, all I could think of was Bush as Creon. We were doing Antigone in my world lit. I course, and Creon lived in George W. The leader of the state who demands unquestioning loyalty, who refuses to change any decision even with new information, who believes certainty is strength...who belittles women, doesn't listen to the people, and imputes motives of greed on seers and sentinels.

Now we're finishing up Douglass's Narrative in my world lit. II class and I'm struck yet again by the Appendix, in which Douglass explains his perceptions of slave holding Christianity and Christianity proper. Again, slave holding Christianity is Bush's faith, the Christianity where the church bell and the slave auctioner's bell ring in unison. Where practitioners of a faith that says "Thou shalt not kill" decide that commandment surely must not apply to Iraqis.

Mark Danner's "Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story"

In The New York Review of Books (volume LI, no. 15, 7 Oct. 2004), Mark Danner has a powerful piece reviewing the Abu Ghraib documents (Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (The Schlesinger Report) and AR 15-6 Investigation of Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade). Here's a line that hit me:

The fact that the legal trail at Abu Ghraib has been directed toward the abuses that appear in the photographs means that the question of policy -- of whether the United States should be torturing prisoners, of what the political and moral costs of this will finally be, and of what responsibility those who ultimately direct that policy really bear -- has hardly been seriously debated, whether in Congress or anywhere else. ... So far, officials of the Bush administration, who counted on the fact that the public, and much of the press, could be persuaded to focus on the photographs -- the garish signboards of the scandal and not the scandal itself -- have been proved right. This makes Abu Ghraib a peculiarly contemporary kind of scandal, with most of its plotlines exposed to view -- but with few willing to follow them and fewer still to do much about them. As with other controversies over the Iraq war, the revelations have been made, the behavior exposed, but the moral will to act, or even to debate what action might be warranted, seems mostly lacking. (50)

I still haven't seen the pictures, but Danner's article makes that unnecessary. He describes the visuals, but the main obscenity he outlines is the administration's responsibility for policy and its attempt to scapegoat those lower in rank.