On Thursday, the New York Times posted artist Maira Kalman's "At Ease," a graphic-art meditation on the significance of Memorial Day.[1]  --  Kalman's childish attitude toward U.S. power may be heart-felt, but it also illustrates the analysis of militaristic propaganda in Norman Solomon's War Made Easy (2005).  --  Here are some of the Solomon's tenets of war propaganda, followed by Kalman's words from her account of visits to Fort Campbell and the Pentagon:  --  (1) Solomon:  "America is a fair and noble superpower"; Kalman:  "Everyone is beautiful.  Everyone makes you proud."  --  (2) Solomon:  "Our soldiers are heroes, theirs are inhuman"; Kalman:  "A woman says to me of her husband on his fourth tour in Iraq, 'I walk with a hero.'  And it is true."  --  (3) Solomon:  "They are the aggressors, not us"; Kalman:  "And we go outside the building to see the precise spot where on Sept. 11 Flight 77 rammed into the wall."  --  (4) Solomon:  "This is a necessary battle in the war on terrorism"; Kalman:  "Can there ever be peace on this planet?  No.  Absolutely not."  --  Implicitly it also endorses these other propositions:  --  (5) Solomon:  "This is not at all about oil or corporate profits"; Kalman:  "There are 24,000 people who work at the Pentagon.  They are smart and serious and represent their country with honor."  --  (6) Solomon:  "The Pentagon fights wars as humanely as possible"; Kalman:  "[O]ften the enemy has surprised the soldiers by surrounding himself with women and children."  --  The childlike naïveté of both drawing and writing style endorses the myth of American innocence, even as it cunningly signals its own awareness by portraying the elegance of "The Hermitage, home of Andrew Jackson, who fought 14 duels, because he was a nut for honor or fighting or both."  --  Never mind that Jackson was a land speculator, slave trader and owner (with 150 slaves by the 1840s, according to the web site of The Hermitage), and perhaps the most aggressive enemy of the native Americans in early American history.  -- The responses to Kalman's piece are sobering.  --  For every person that sees its propagandistic nature, there are ten to sing its praises, sometimes with emotion (e.g. "Maira, you make my eyes fill with tears, every single time.  Simply beautiful")....

Staughton Lynd was the keynote speaker at the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the weekend before last.  --  This year's theme:  "Education, Empire, Economy, and Ethics at a Crossroads."  --  Lynd spoke on "What Is to Be Done?"[1]  --  The problem he addresses:  "Capitalist society in the United States offers very few opportunities to experience another way of doing things."  --  However, "people learn by experience."  --  Where, then, can people have the experience of "another way of doing things" in this society?  --  His answer:  at school.  --  The bulk of his Staughton Lynd's address is an account of his experience leading the Freedom Schools movement in the Civil Rights Movement in 1964.  --  NOTE:  Staughton Lynd, now 79, figures briefly in a recent book on John F. Kennedy's assassination:  "Inspired by the doctors' testimony, historian Staughton Lynd and Jack Minnis, research director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wrote the first published critique of the JFK assassination.  Appearing in the December 21, 1963, issue of the *New Republic*, their article concluded:  'The central problem — the fact that the President was wounded in the front of the throat, 'the midsection of the front part of his neck,' according to 'staff doctors' at Parkland Hospital on November 23 (New York Times, November 24) — remains.'  The problem that the throat wound raised, which Lynd and Minnis underscored, remains to this day" (James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008], p. 308)....

Norman Mailer died in November 2007.  --  Though fêted in his day as one of America's leading writers, his work seems to have been consigned posthumously to a sort of limbo.  --  We noticed today that Cannibals and Christians, for example, is now out of print.  --  That's too bad, because its pages resonate with present-day United States in interesting ways.  --  Consider, for example, the first twenty-odd pages of "In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964."[1]  --  Mailer wrote the piece for Esquire (it appeared in the November 1964 issue, just before Lyndon B. Johnson was reelected).  --  A biographer has called it "one of his finest political studies" (Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer [New York: Paragon House, 1991], p. 180).  --  This text is not, to our knowledge, available anywhere else on the Internet....

Philosophy begins in wonder (Plato, Theaetetus 155b), and this is the sentiment of a bemused Dave Matthews in "Funny the Way It Is," the third track on the soon-to-be-released Dave Matthews Band album "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King."[1]  --  But in Matthews's case, the wonder doesn't go very far.  --  Released in April, the song is constructed around antitheses that thematize ironies and paradoxes of the human condition.  --  Matthews adopts a cosmic perspective in which war and peace are "neither right or wrong," just tiles in the larger mosaic.  --  Of the contemporary world, Matthews says that "Now the world is small."  --  True to the complacent and narcissistic Carpe diem theme recurrent in Matthews's work, "Funny the Way It Is" ends by inviting his listeners to join him in his passivity:  "Standing on the bridge / Watch the water passing underneath." ...

In March 2009 Linda Frank went to Gaza with a CodePink-organized International Women's Day delegation, which succeeded in entering the Gaza Strip on Mar. 8, 2009.  --  While there, Linda met a young woman in her twenties who gave her a written account of the first day of the recent war.  --  This account, copy-edited here but not abridged, offers a firsthand eyewitness account to a major atrocity.[1]  --  The author prefers to remain nameless....

"Drums of War" can be found on Jackson Browne's "Time the Conqueror" album, which was released on Sept. 23, 2008, a few days before his 60th birthday.  --  In a video posted below, he can be seen performing the song eighteen months earlier at an antiwar rally in Hollywood.[1]  --  The song expresses Browne's disenchantment with the corporate U.S. national security state and asks questions that remain timely despite the change of administrations:  "Who beats the drums of war? . . . Who lies, then bombs, then calls it an error? / Who makes a fortune from fighting terror? / Who is the enemy trying to crush us? / Who is the enemy of truth and justice? / Who is the enemy of peace and freedom? / Where are the courts, now when we need them?"  --  The two questions Browne's song asks twice both deal with profit and loss, but they never appear in our business pages:  "Who are the profits for? and "Who are they who bear the cost / When a country takes the low road to war?"[2,3]  --  Browne's twelfth studio album, which has not received much airplay, includes songs like "Going Down to Cuba" ("People will tell you it’s not easy / You’re not supposed to go, they say / They say that Cuba is the enemy / I’m going down there anyway . . . They might not know the things you and I know / They do know what to do in a hurricane . . . I’m North American, you know / Don’t like to hear where I can’t go / Free people will insist on the freedom to travel ") and "Where Were You," about Hurricane Katrina ("We hold the truth self evident / The photograph of the President / From Air Force One he viewed the devastation / Shaved face and rested eyes / Looking down he circles twice / On the way home from his vacation")....

This powerful, eloquent text deserves an introduction explaining how it came to be posted here.  --  After a presentation on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in Tacoma, WA, on Apr. 24, 2009, Bernice Youtz rose to speak.  --  She described how, after having lived for many years in the Middle East, she had visited Gaza sixteen years ago (in 1993).  --  Shocked by conditions there, she had attempted to call the attention of elected officials in the United States to the plight of people living there, but to no avail.  --  She held up a manila folder, and said that she was still in contact with a woman in the West Bank who had written an extraordinary account of her thoughts and feelings during the 2008-2009 Israel-Gaza conflict.  --  I approached Bernice later, and she said she had the author's permisssion to post the text.  --  Tania Tamari Nasir has entitled it "The War on Gaza: In the Company of Stories and Images." ...

If you want, you can purchase Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Anansi, December 2008) for $15.95 and read it in paperback, or spend $40 for an Audio CD.  --  On the other hand, you can listen to audio recordings of the eminent 69-year-old Canadian novelist's extended meditation on the subject of debt "from the homely and familiar notion of fairness and notion of equivalent values in Kingsley's Water Babies to the thornier connection between debt and sin, memory and redemption in Aeschylus's Eumenides," as Publishers Weekly puts it, for free, at the CBC Radio One link below.[1]  --  Thanks to Marilyn Kimmerling for sending this.  --  Two critical discussions are posted below.  --  In the first, Sarah Shemkus of the Cape Cod Times summarizes the book's organization, and praises it highly except for the last chapter, which she finds "verging on silly."[2]  --  In a long and unusually probing review published in the new number of the New York Review of Books, British political philosopher John Gray discusses some of the fundamental moral and political issues dissected by Margaret Atwood, and concludes that Payback's final chapter (or lecture) contains Atwood's most important point.[3]  --  In addition, Gray observes, following Atwood, that "the shock that is felt when a major part of a lifetime's savings vanishes, seemingly overnight, does not come only from the prospect of a diminished standard of living.  It comes also from the collapse of the narrative according to which people have hitherto understood their lives." ...

Mike Whitney's interview of Prof. John Bellamy Foster of the Univ. of Oregon was posted on Friday on the web site of Monthly Review.[1]  --  Foster has been co-editor of Monthly Review since 2000 and sole editor since 2006.  --  A Marxian economist, Foster believes that the current crisis is not due to the moral failings and greed of the corporate class, but to deep structural issues that are "intrinsic to monopoly-finance capital."  --  "[W]hat you get from the élites and the media is mostly nonsense" on these subjects.  --  Foster told Whitney that "the best economists and financial analysts are now saying that when the recovery from this crisis begins, perhaps in 2011, it will be an L-shaped recovery, pointing toward long-term stagnation as in the depression decade. Without financialization there is nothing on the horizon to boost the U.S. and other advanced capitalist economies."  --  Foster reviewed the conclusions he lays out in his new book co-authored with Fred Magdoff, entitled The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (Monthly Review Press, 2009).  --  "[W]e are experiencing one of the greatest robberies in history. . . . The federal government is providing more and more of the capital and assuming financial responsibility for the banks.  However, they are doing everything they can to keep the banks in private hands, resulting in a kind of de facto nationalization with de jure private control."  --  "The fact that Geithner, Obama's pick for Treasury Secretary, is overseeing the enormous robbery taking place, probably exceeding any theft in history, with the ordinary taxpayers picking up the tab, should certainly cause one to ask questions about the 'progressive' nature of the new administration."  --  Foster concluded by saying:  "The robbing of public funds to bail out private capital is now on a scale probably never before seen.  A politicized, organized working class capable of understanding and reacting to that theft, and choosing thereby to restructure society, to meet real social, egalitarian needs is what is now to be hoped for.  The title of a recent cover story Newsweek declared:  'We Are All Socialists Now.'  As it turned out, Newsweek's editors were simply referring to the increase in public spending now taking place — hardly an indication of socialism.  But the fact that this is said at all in the mainstream media points to the fact that we are in a different historical moment in which radical forces have the possibility of moving forward." ...

French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 62, is well known for his stunning portrait of the planet, Earth from Above (2002).  --  But what would a portrait of global humanity look like?  --  Beginning in 2003, he undertook a project that is now approaching its culmination.  --  "6 Billion Others" is based hundreds of hours of videotape of people from around the world answering the same 40 questions.[1]  --  In 2009 the project went on display in Paris's Grand Palais.[2] ...