Spidergrrl's Web

death in two lands

My browser opens up to http://apple.netscape.com/apple.adp mainly because I'm too lazy to change it. This morning I was hit by a weird juxtaposition of headlines. First in red print came "CNN - U.S. Blamed as Mosque Mortar Barrage Slaughters 25." Below that headline was this article, flanked by an idyllic cemetery picture complete with sunset: "The Best Places in the U.S. to Die --
When it comes to estate taxes, states can vary greatly. Find out where the tax burden is lower." I dunno. I felt that strange broiling in my gut that means something's off. I guess I couldn't put the two things together in the same world. I couldn't move from the U.S. slaughtering to the U.S. dying peacefully and financially well off. I kept thinking of the unbridgeable schism between the two kinds of death. And that the second death, the daily mundane stuff of keeping our affairs in order, somehow obscures the first death, that as citizens of this country, we each bear responsibility in each individual slaughter. Not sure how to walk through the day with that kind of schism.

Iraqi Olympic soccer team

On RFP, someone posted a piece by Dave Zirin, who writes a column for The Prince George's Post. I can't yet point to a URL for the piece, but I'm assuming the column will be up either on the current article page or on the archives soon. If all sports writing were this insightful, I'd have a subscription to Sports Illustrated. My sports knowledge and reading only gets augmented by my 12 yr. old son, who corrects me when I think the Cubs are the Giants (ok, I'm not quite that bad). I tend to favor geekyness and tai chi. When I worked at the Center for Women and Information Technology (at University of Maryland Baltimore County - UMBC) and had the honor of meeting Anita Borg who came to the Center to speak, I also took her to visit UMBC's president. Freeman Hrabowski told Anita that we didn't have a football team, but our chess team was kicking butt. That's also my idea of a great university. But I'm realizing that my sports brouhaha antipathy is keeping me from reading some excellent political analysis. I like Zirin's piece a lot:

Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
By Dave Zirin

Sometimes we are reminded that the Olympics can serve as an international platform not only for nationalism and truck commercials, but also resistance. In an incredible piece on Sports Illustrated.com, Grant Wahl reports that the Iraqi Olympic Soccer team has issued a stinging rebuke to George W. Bush's attempt to use them as election year symbols. Iraq's soccer squad is perhaps the surprise of the entire Olympics, advancing to this weekend's quarterfinals despite the war and occupation that has gripped their country for the last 17 months.

Yet amidst cheers and triumph, they were infuriated to learn that Bush's brain, Karl Rove, had launched campaign ads featuring their Olympic glory as a brilliant by-product of the war on terror. The commercial, subtle as a blowtorch, begins with an image of the Afghani and Iraqi flags with a voice over saying, "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations -- and two fewer terrorist regimes." Bush has also been exploiting their exploits in stump speeches. Much more comfortable talking sports than
foreign policy or stem-cell research, Bush brayed with bravado in Oregon, "The image of the Iraqi soccer team playing in this Olympics, it's fantastic, isn't it? It wouldn't have been free if the United States had not acted."

This has compelled the Iraqi soccer team, at great personal risk, to respond. Mid-fielder and team leader Salih Sadir told Sports Illustrated, "Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign. He can find another way to advertise himself."

Sadir has reason to be upset. He was the star player for the professional soccer team in Najaf. Najaf has in recent weeks been swamped by US troops and the new Iraqi army in an attempt to uproot rebel cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. Thousands have died, each death close to Sadir's heart.

"I want the violence and the war to go away from the city," said Sadir, "We don't wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away."

Sadir's teammates were less diplomatic. Midfielder Ahmed Manajid, told Wahl angrily, "How will [Bush] meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes."

Manajid understands Sadir's pain because he is from another Iraqi city that has been in a state of siege, Fallujah. Manajid told Wahl that his cousin Omar Jabbar al-Aziz, who was a resistance fighter, was killed by the US, as were several of his friends. Manajid even said that if he were not playing soccer he would "for sure" be fighting as part of the resistance. "I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists? Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq."

Usually when there is political unrest on Olympic teams, the coach tries to be a mitigating force with the media. But not here and not now. Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad also went public to Sports Illustrated saying, "My problems are not with the American people, They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq."

To be clear, Iraq's team is not pining for former Olympic head Uday Hussein, notorious for torturing athletes that under performed. Yet they don't feel their choice has to be between Uday's way and the bloodbath that has been visited upon their country. As Hamad said, "What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"

The ideas expressed by the Iraqi soccer team are by all counts commonplace in Iraq yet find little expression in the mainstream media here at home. It is critical that their words find ears. Without WMDs, Al-Qaeda connections, and with an Iraqi populace that overwhelmingly views the U.S. as occupiers and not liberators, what possible justification does Bush - and Kerry - have for supporting this invasion that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives?

Take time this weekend to root for the Iraqi soccer team. Their ascent will accompany a platform for ideas that demand to be heard.

Dave Zirin can be reached at editor@pgpost.com. His book "What's My Name Fool": Sports and Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books) comes out spring 2005. To get his column every week, e-mail edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com

que notre President soit un idiot...

This image was posted to RFP and I got a huge amount of solace and chuckles from it. The label is apparently from a small American company that sells its products in France. After all the cleaning instructions, the label reads: "We're sorry our President is an idiot. We didn't vote for him."

shifting text - writing as revision

Here's a cool thing -- on Bintibop, which I co-author with my sister, I just re-read an earlier post of hers and noticed it was completely different. "Whoa, there," I said to myself. "What's this?" So MJ's first post had included a letter she'd sent to someone; her revision simply referred to the letter and then went on to discuss racist conceptions of Palestinians and what it means to believe in a top-down approach to information. If I hadn't been reading everything MJ posts, I would never have known.

Books have always comforted me precisely because of the fixity of text. The web thumbs its nose at such intransigence. The web takes text, throws it up in the air every once in a while, and watches as words and ideas fall differently.

How does someone who's been brought up on the Web read? What's the relationship to story and knowledge when text can be edited by many?

"Planet Reagan"

Another good article, Planet Reagan, by William Rivers Pitt, starts by acknowledging the horror of Alzheimer's. Powerful writing -- Rivers Pitt ends his article with this: "We are a badly damaged state, ruled today by a man who subsists off Reagan's most corrosive final gift to us all: It is the image that matters, and be damned to the truth."

trolls/free speech/mythologizing Reagan

wow - the Rhetoricians for Peace (RFP) list has been invaded by its first troll. i keep wanting a psychological profile of the type, although i'm thinkin' i can deduce my own profile from the current example and others i've met. hmm...narcissistic is the main characteristic that comes to mind. egocentric. mediocre intelligence. extreme ignorance -- proudly maintained -- of diverse cultural and ethnic groups. misogynist. i'd like to say sociopath, but i think they're smarter than trolls. condescending. patronizing. ethically suspect. ok, that about does it.

while the troll plays havoc, who else dies? that's all i can wonder.

the list has engaged in an extended conversation about the mythologizing of Reagan and someone posted a link to a Salon article, that i think is excellent. Check out Eric Boehlert's Reagan Worship (although I've seen the title as "Reagan Porn" -- which might be more appropriate, given the obscenity of the mythologizing).

blogweave

The panel at the Rhetoric Society of America conference went well, I think. Julie gave her kickass paper on analyzing Munchausen by proxy syndrome -- and gave me lots to think about regarding multicultural texts. How does that work, one might ask? Julie's point is that students often overidentify with texts by authors who are from different cultures, ethnicities and thus elide any points which might put the student's own identity or ethos into question. For instance, a white female student might overidentify with a feminist text by a woman of color by claiming the feminist analysis and ignoring the critique of race or class. That's simply put and gives too essentialist an example -- nevertheless, Julie's main point is that simply dis-identifying with the text and/or author is not enough; readers must question their own ethos, their own stake in the points they both claim and ignore.
I was satisfied with my paper on blogging, even though it had absolutely no ending. I'm itching to redo this template so I can put the blogging paper up and find a clearer way to link to my more academic writing. Jan Fernheimer at UT pointed me to a white paper she and another instructor have done on blogging, and I'm looking forward to reading it. But perhaps the most provocative moment was when Jan challenged my use of the term zionist. But I'll talk about that on bintibop, and that brings me to blogweave. In Julie's reading of the draft of my paper, she questioned why I wanted to bring all my blog writings together. Here's the line from my blog posting of 5 July 2003 at my Easyjournal blog: "I still can't coalesce this thing. Seems like it's either politics and culture OR talking about blogging. Can't seem to get the two together in this one blog. Dunno how I'll solve that."
I've been dissatisfied with a kind of fragmentation. Just like what happened in the paragraph above -- I'm writing about blogging, the loose topic of Spidergrrl's Web, and I've got a comment about Palestinian stuff, so I will go to bintibop and post there. Why don't I have everything on one blog? I've begun to think of my separate blogs as strands in one weave. Still makes me feel a bit fragmented. But that concept will have to hold me together for now.

um, well, um...

time to blog again...i am just finishing printing out all postings to all my blogs. still have to do the eng304classblog, blip, blog, bleep, which will take some time. also need to print out student blogs. why this need for hard copy? because i like the feel and look of paper, like to turn pages, like to hold the words in my fingers.

julie and i have promised each other to email our conference papers to each other by this saturday. we'll talk sunday afternoon and then go to our revisions. i'm leaving next thursday to drive to austin and have a gazillion other writing commitments, but i need to finish the rsa paper. so that's what i'm working on.

cool to be thinking about blogs. i've been reading some of the basic blogging books, and i like We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs (Indianapolis IN: Wiley Publishing, 2002) a lot --- there's a good bit of discussion about blogging community and theory. authors have nice weave of backgrounds: Paul Bausch -- co-creator Blogger, B.A. in journalism; Matthew Haughey -- started MetaFilter.com, B.S. and M.S. in environmental science; Meg Hourihan -- co-founder Pyra, B.A. in English. I love that their degrees are in journalism, environmental science and English.

an interview with Cameron Marlow (MIT Media Lab, built Blogdex) discusses "the current memes of the moment" (67), and anything that mentions memes has got my attention, just cuz the greekiness of the term intrigues me. "The term meme refers to ideas or behaviors that spread from one person to another" is the inserted note that We Blog offers (67). My OED tells me that meme is "[f. Gk mimema that which is imitated, after GENE.]" I don't get the "after GENE" part. Then there's the definition: "Biol. An element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, esp. imitation." I am convinced that I HAVE to have the word "meme" in my conference paper title on blogging. "Meme" is clearly the unifying concept I've been searching for all along, the one crucial piece of analysis that will clarify the entire blogosphere. And I missed the boat...ah, well.

i'm still puzzling over the "after GENE" phrase and have checked the front of the OED. still unsure if it means that "meme" is patterned on the word "gene" -- mebbe i'll go look up "gene" --- can i get any more distracted? probably.

to blog, oh, to blog...

Yipes Stripes!!! Anybody remember that commercial --- Beechnut Gum? Are these early signs of senility? I prefer to think of these inadvertent somewhat spasmodic grey matter connections as creative brain burps.

I don't like not writing here. Time. More time. More judicious parceling out of nanoseconds. I think that's called prioritizing.

So whazup? This is my second semester blogging in advanced comp. class. Need lab time. But setting up blogs this time went much more smoothly for students; I had a pretty decent step-by-step handout to get them set up on Blogger. We are going much more slowly this semster with the writing. I love that writing is a process, a recursive process all about discovery. Mebbe that's why art grows --- image, sound, touch, taste, movement, cell-heart-soul weave into surprise, quiet, one breath. After another.

What else? I continue to work with and meet some fantastic folk at Tapped In. Merilene Murphy, prez of Telepoetics, poet & educator, talked about Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival. BJ Berquist, artist/educator/Tapped In cyberdiva, introduced me to the Center for Digital Storytelling and to Silence Speaks - digital storytelling in support of healing and violence prevention. Ana, my main resource for art/activism/technology at mermaid hips, just introduced me to Big Bad Chinese Mama, which not only flips the script on porno/Asian bride sites but also takes the script, raises it up a couple feet, and smashes it down on ethnocentrism, racism, marketeering of women, all the while swearing and cracking jokes. It's a great read.

I wanna talk about the Palestinian swimmer. But I guess I gotta go to my blog for palestinian american stuff. Whazup with this compartmentalization?

pressure CBS