The extent to which "Radio Nowhere," the signature song of Bruce Springsteen's new album, "Magic," is a pessimistic commentary on present-day America seems not to have been widely appreciated.  --  The lyrics of Radio Nowhere, as performed by Springsteen and the E Street Band in the linked Sept. 28, 2007, performance on NBC's "Today" show, are reproduced below.[1]  --  A line-by-line annotation follows.[2]  -- The analysis demonstrates that "The message [of the song] is clear: Life in 21st-century America is not life, but a form of Death in Life, or spiritual death. The radical pessimism of Springsteen's song has not provoked adequate comment, but this is itself symptomatic. It is notable in Springsteen's Sept. 28, 2007, performance, which can be viewed at the link above, he fails to interact with the crowd and keeps his eyes closed as he delivers his dire message." ...

At a recent meeting of United for Peace of Pierce County, David Lambert shared some valuable communications tips for use at vigils and other peace events.  --  He's generously agreed to make them available to others through posting on the UFPPC web site.[1] ...

This video shows Dick Cheney speaking on Apr. 15, 1994.  --  Asked whether the U.S. should have "moved into Baghdad" in the 1991 Gulf War, Cheney explains why the answer was no, for these reasons:  1) "We would have been all alone."  --  2) "Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place?"  --  3)  "You could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off."  --  4) "It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq."  --  5) "How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?  Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right."  --  At the time this footage was recorded, Cheney was at the American Enterprise Institute; the following year he would become CEO of Halliburton....

After reading news of the 41st, 42nd, and 43rd deaths among the soldiers of the Third Stryker Brigade, Second Division, Tacoma poet Maggie Kelley wrote the following poem, entitled “Plea.”[1]  --  The poem begins:  “Tell me/tell me    please/who is it that is not listening/did not whisper/into the ear of God?/did not say that a 15-month/deployment is far too long?” ...

In an interview published in the August 2007 number of Le Monde diplomatique, Noam Chomsky discussed a set of ideas for which he is well known, his “propaganda model” of the mass media.  --  “The line [that established commentators must follow] is never presented as such, merely implied,” he said.  --  What results, Chomsky believes, is comparable to brainwashing: “Even the passionate debates in the main media stay within the bounds of commonly accepted, implicit rules, which sideline a large number of contrary views.  The system of control in democratic societies is extremely effective.  We do not notice the line any more than we notice the air we breathe.”  --  Chomsky’s view is that mass media propaganda developed as a means of “manufacturing consent” in an era when “progress in democratic rights (women’s suffrage, freedom of speech)” means that “state violence was no longer sufficient to contain the desire for liberty.”  --  The “PR industry” achieved social control by producing “in the true sense of the term, concept, acceptance, and submission.  It controls people’s minds and ideas.  It is a major advance on totalitarian rule, as it is much more agreeable to be subjected to advertising than to torture.”  --  Discussing the terms “globalization” and “anti-globalization,” Chomsky said:  “[Ideological propaganda in democratic societies] is so effective that even WSF [World Social Forum] participants sometimes accept the ill-intentioned ‘anti’ label. . . . Once democracy has been enlarged far enough for citizens to control the means of production and trade, and they take part in the overall running and management of the environment in which they live, then the state will gradually be able to disappear.  It will be replaced by voluntary associations at our place of work and where we live.”  --  Chomsky was asked, “You mean soviets?”  He replied:  “The first things that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed, immediately after the October revolution, were the soviets, the workers’ councils and all the democratic bodies.  In this respect Lenin and Trotsky were the worst enemies of socialism in the 20th century.  But as orthodox Marxists they thought that a backward country such as Russia was incapable of achieving socialism immediately, and must first be forcibly industrialized.  In 1989, when the communist system collapsed, I thought this event was, paradoxically, a victory for socialism.  My conception of socialism requires, at least, democratic control of production, trade, and other aspects of human existence.  However the two main propaganda systems agreed to maintain that the tyrannical system set up by Lenin and Trotsky, subsequently turned into a political monstrosity by Stalin, was socialism.  Western leaders could not fail to be enchanted by this outrageous use of the term, which enabled them to cast aspersions on the real thing for decades.  With comparable enthusiasm, but working in the opposite direction, the Soviet propaganda system tried to exploit the sympathy and commitment that the true socialist ideal inspired among the working masses.”  --  Chomsky’s own ideology is, ultimately, anarchism.  --  On this doctrine, he said:  “There are no set anarchist principles, no libertarian creed to which we must all swear allegiance.  Anarchism — at least as I understand it — is a movement that tries to identify organizations exerting authority and domination, to ask them to justify their actions and, if they are unable to do so, as often happens, to try to supersede them.  Far from collapsing, anarchism and libertarian thought are flourishing.  They have given rise to real progress in many fields.  Forms of oppression and injustice that were once barely recognized, less still disputed, are no longer allowed.  That in itself is a success, a step forward for all humankind, certainly not a failure.” ...

"La Chanson de Craonne" was banned for many years from French airwaves, for reasons that will be obvious.[1]  --  It celebrated French soldiers who in May 1917 refused to return to the trenches after the disastrous April-May Chemin des Dames offensive of Gen. Nivelle, in which more than 30,000 French soldiers died and 80,000 were wounded to no good purpose.  --  In many of the French Army's 110 divisions, troops mutinied (2,000 in the 41st Division alone; eight other divisions were also severely impacted by mutinies, which usually took the form of refusing to return to the front lines; a total of about 30,000 troops seem to have been involved).  --  This resistance to senseless slaughter arising toward the end of World War I's third year was brutally suppressed by Gen. Pétain, who replaced Nivelle.  --  Pétain ordered to be executed by firing squad several dozen (25? 26? the number is uncertain) of some 500 soldiers condemned to death.  --  Who wrote the song was never discovered, though a reward of a million francs in gold was promised to anyone who would denounce the author.  --  The song was sung to the tune of Charles Sablon's "Bonsoir M'amour" by the mutineers, and was preserved by Paul Vaillant-Couturier (1892-1937), a WWI veteran who was also a writer, journalist, and political figure.  --  Vaillant-Couturier published the words to the song in a book he co-wrote entitled La Guerre des soldats ('The Soldiers' War').  --  On Nov. 5, 1998, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said at Craonne that he thought those who had mutinied should be "reintegrated into the nation's collective memory"; his remarks proved controversial.  --  "Craonne" is pronounced, locally, like the word 'crâne'.  --  Links to a web site with commentary (in French) from a documentary devoted to the song in the 1990s is included below.[2]  --  The translation is followed by the French text (as it appears on the French Wikipedia site, where the song is called "one of pacifism's great hymns")....

This now famous letter was written in 2005 to Laura Bush by Sharon Olds, then 62, the winner of many awards for her writing, including The National Book Critics Circle Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize.  --  It was later published in the Nation.  --  She currently teaches creative writing at New York University.  --  Sharon Olds is known for a series of collections that describe what Alicia Ostriker has called an "erotics of family love and pain."  --  Some of her poems can be read here....

These remarks were Chris Hedges's opening statement in a debate with Sam Harris on "Religion, Politics, and the End of the World" that took place at UCLA on May 22, 2007, and was moderated by Robert Scheer.  --  War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs, 2002; Anchor paperback, 2003), Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America (Free Press, 2005; paperback 2006), American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2007), and Hedges's many articles have made him one of the most important writers to have emerged from the post-September 11 American crisis.  --  In this debate, Hedges asserts "the supreme importance of the monotheistic traditions in creating the concept of the individual."[1]  --  "To argue about whether God exists or does not exist," Hedges says, "is futile.  The question is not whether God exists.  The question is whether we concern ourselves with, or are utterly indifferent to, the sanctity and ultimate transcendence of human existence."  --  Hedges denigrates what is usually identified as religion, which he calls "professed faith," disassociating it, paradoxically, from "authentic religion."  --  "Professed faith — what we say we believe — is not faith.  It is an expression of loyalty to a community, to our tribe.  Faith is what we do."  --  Hedges, a considerable writer, distrusts writing:  "Most moral thinkers — from Socrates to Christ to Francis of Assisi — eschewed the written word because they knew, I suspect, that once things were written down they became, in the wrong hands, codified and used not to promote morality but conformity, subservience, and repression.  Writing freezes speech.  George Steiner calls this 'the decay into writing.'  Language is turned from a living and fluid form of moral inquiry to a tool of bondage."  --  Turning to matters at hand in the contemporary world, Hedges refutes Sam Harris's claim that "We are at war with Islam" and that "the problem is with Islam itself."  --  "The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion.  It is the human heart — the capacity we all have for evil."  --  And the danger is the externalization of evil, which licenses the unleashing of every form of violence upon others.  --  "The point of religion, authentic religion, is that it is not, in the end, about us.  It is about the other, about the stranger lying beaten and robbed on the side of the road, about the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, the sick, the destitute, about those who are being abused and beaten in cells in Guantanamo and a host of other secret locations, about what we do to gays and lesbians in this country, what we do to the 47 million Americans without health insurance, the illegal immigrants who live among us without rights or protection, their suffering as invisible as the suffering of the mentally ill we have relegated to heating grates or prison cells.  It is about them.  --  We have forgotten who we were meant to be, who we were created to be, because we have forgotten that we find God not in ourselves, finally, but in our care for our neighbor, in the stranger, including those outside the nation and the faith." ...

Nickelback is a successful rock band from Alberta.  --  This video of the song "If Everyone Cared" was nominated for the 2007 MuchLoud Best Rock Video award.[1]  --  The lyrics of the song are posted below.[2] ...

In discussions of President George W. Bush's proclamation on Jul. 2, 2007, to commute I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence, we are told again and again by commentators in the media that the power of the president to pardon crimes against the United States and commute sentences is absolute.  --  Thus:  "The power [to grant reprieves and pardons] is absolute," says John Van Deerlin (Bend [OR] Weekly, Jun. 15, 2007).  --  "Since clemency powers under the constitution are absolute, all lawmakers can do speak out against it," says George McGinn of AHN. -- ". . . an absolute Presidential power that is beyond Congressional review," says John Bambenek.  --  "This power is absolute, and a pardon may not be blocked by Congress or the courts," say Ron Hutcheson and William Douglas of McClatchy Newspapers (The State [Columbia, SC], Jul. 4, 2007).  --  While this is technically true in the sense that no one can reverse a presidential pardon, it is important to note that James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, said explicitly on Apr. 6, 1796, that under the U.S. Constitution there is, after all, recourse available for the abuse of this power:  impeachment.[1] ...