SYNDICATED COLUMN: Next Memorial Day, Remember America’s Victims Too

Self-Delusion and the Cult of Militarism

Memorial Day: our national celebration of charred meat (but the four contractors hung from that bridge in Iraq don’t count).

Hope you enjoyed the weekend.

However, as we begin the countdown to next year’s Warapalooza—only 362 more days before you fire up the grill or, if someone near and dear died in one of our wars, spend the day at the graveyard grumbling about the fact that too few Americans share your sacrifices—I’d like what’s left of the Left to stop missing a golden opportunity to protest, mock and undermine the cult of militarism.

Let’s make Memorial Day 2013 a day to remember all the victims of American warmongering. By all means, shed a tear for the 58,282 American men and women who died for transnational natural gas corporations during the 1960s and 1970s, and a patently absurd “domino theory” in Vietnam. But make sure you cry 35 times more for the 2,000,000-plus Vietnamese men and women our soldiers were sent to kill—people who posed no threat to us, who did us no harm.

Let’s build a wall for America’s war victims in Washington. It’s the least we could do.

That sucker would be big. Huge. Big enough to stimulate the local construction economy.

Hang a flag and place a flower on the grave of one of the draftees too clueless or afraid to evade service, of a rube so ignorant of history and politics that he enlisted to fight in one of our countless optional wars of illegal aggression, of a bloodthirsty thug who seized the chance to commit murder for the state. They were our brothers and sisters and sons and daughters, and we loved them. We miss their unfinished lives.

Our war dead deserve recognition for helping to expand the American empire, and for lining the pockets of the profiteers and their pet politicians.

But worry not: the right-wingers will never let us forget these heroes.

Those of us who stand on the Left have a different duty. We stand for the oppressed, the downtrodden, the abused. We defend the innocent. We care about the underdog.

We on the Left reject the idea of The Other. To us, no life has more or less meaning or value than any other life. Our dead or not worth more than “their” dead. There is no us and them, there is only us.

Her death is not counted by the Obama Administration; still, we mourn the Yemeni woman blown to bits in a Predator drone strike on her home as much as the young man from North Carolina who goes up in an IED blast in Helmand province.

And so we, the Left, ought to declare that Memorial Day 2013 should belong not just to the jingoists and war criminals and patsies, but also to their victims. We should hang banners and march on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans murdered by U.S. forces since 2001. Call 1-800-Flowers; ask them to deliver a bouquet to a cemetery in Fallujah.

I’m not a pacifist. Some wars—a few wars—must be fought. Invading armies must be resisted.

But not most wars. War is almost always a struggle of the rich and powerful fought by the poor and powerless. War kills, maims, and makes people crazy. It destroys infrastructure. It sucks away resources—money, technology, people—that would be better deployed somewhere else.

Most Americans know this—or they think they do. On a gut level, however, we’re sheepish and embarrassed about the crimes committed in our name. We’re in denial.

It’s understandable. We’re not insane. We’re in a state of cognitive dissonance; we want to be one thing—peace-loving, good people—but we know we’re the opposite—passive, tolerant and fearful of “our government” (which not only can assassinate any one of us at any time, for any reason, but actually asserts the legal right to do so as consistent with the democratic values to which we supposedly adhere).

“Our” leaders feed us mass delusion. “You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated,” President Obama told a group of Vietnam vets on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. “It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.”

And it didn’t.

As historians have proven, no one ever spat on a soldier returning from Vietnam. To the contrary: the antiwar movement was pro-vet (in part because so many servicemen were conscripts). The spat-on-vet story began circulating after—of all things—Sylvester Stallone’s character in “Rambo 2” talked about it. Obama knows, or should know, the truth. He’s old enough to remember.

“You persevered though some of the most brutal conditions ever faced by Americans in war,” Obama went on. “The suffocating heat. The drenching monsoon rains. An enemy that could come out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly.” Why was the weather so tough, the enemy so fierce? Obama left that, along with much else, unsaid: we were invaders and occupiers, half a world away, propping up tyrants in a place where we had no business whatsoever.

And finally, an outrageous claim, one so widely accepted that the media didn’t bother to quote it in news accounts, much less question it: “We hate war. When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it’s necessary.”

What a kidder!

We Americans have fought a handful of battles, much less entire wars, to “protect ourselves.” From the Barbary States to Latin America and Cuba to Grenada and Panama and Pakistan and Somalia and Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military has attacked without just cause, without legal justification, with impunity, 99 percent of the time.

It’s bad enough to live in a nation in thrall to the cult of militarism. It’s worse to lie about it. And it’s insane to believe the lies.

(Ted Rall’s next book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” out June 5. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

Funniest Obama Quote Ever

“We hate war. When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it’s necessary.”

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/28/remarks-president-commemoration-ceremony-50th-anniversary-vietnam-war

The Book of Obama: Out This Week!

The Book of Obama kicks off this week with a Pacific Northwest Book Tour. Check dates and times below.

If you live somewhere else, and you can help sponsor an appearance, now is a good time to get in touch.

For those unable to attend, books will begin turning up at stores early next month.

Thursday, May 31, 2012
7:30 pm
Powell’s Books on Hawthorne
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, Oregon 97214

Friday, June 1, 2012
7:30-10:30 pm
Live Wire Radio
The Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta Street
Portland, Oregon 97211

Saturday, June 2, 2012
7:00 pm
Elliot Bay Bookstore
1521 10th Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98122

Sunday, June 3, 2012
2:00 pm
Village Books
1200 11th Street
Bellingham, Washington 98225

Monday, June 4, 2012
7:00 pm
Kings Bookstore
218 Saint Helens Avenue
Tacoma, Washington 98402

Tuesday, June 5, 2012
7 pm
Orca Books
509 4th Avenue East
Olympia, Washington 98501

Thursday, June 7, 2012
7:00-9:00 pm
Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

Police Blotter

Rather than publish a story about last week’s Occupy the East End action against Bank of America, The East Hampton Star ran a photo of your humble narrator in the police blotter section.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Satire – The Revolution Will Be Digitized

This Time: Three Douches To Watch Out For

It sounds like the lede of another breathless Dot-Com Bubble 3.0 puff piece by David Carr.

Three douchebags hook up at a café-cum-gallery-cum-hacketeria in a section of Brooklyn so hip that hipsters can’t find it on an app. Eight minutes later, they’ve banged out a business plan. What for, they can’t say. All they know is, it’ll be wicked awesome sweet. They send out a few emails; before you can type 140 characters they’ve lined up $28 million in seed capital. (There’s also out-of-school chatter about off-the-book rubles. Whatever.)

Now everyone’s talking about Douchenet.

Not you. You’re not talking about Douchenet. No one you know is talking about Douchenet.

By “everybody,” we don’t mean “everybody.” We don’t even mean “a large number of people.” We mean “everyone who matters.” Which most assuredly doesn’t include you. Or, really, hardly anyone at all.

So.

What exactly is Douchenet? Who knows? Who cares? The point of a piece like this one isn’t to tell you what’s going on. The point is to blow some free publicity the way of well-connected 26-year-old friends of people who matter to people who matter. (Not. You.) Twenty-six-year-olds whose business ideas are obviously utter horsecrap, are clearly doomed to failure, but not before they walk away with even more cash, raised from unwashed small-time rube wannabe playas. That’s the point of a piece like this.

That, and to make you feel miserable.

You poor, stupid, underemployed schmuck. A schmuck who will never, ever come anywhere near millions and millions of dollars. No matter how hard or long you toil.

Id.

iot.

At first (and OK, 17th) glance, last week’s Facebook IPO looks like a fiasco. Federal investigators are looking into charges that Morgan Stanley knowingly set the share price too high in order to inflate its underwriting fees, leaving unsophisticated stock buyers holding the bag for an 18 percent plunge of a $16 billion offering. But that’s only half the picture.

Sure, millions of people lost their hard-earned savings. But three douchebags are rocking out.

Which is what matters.

Mark Miron, 26, got paid in Facebook shares for watching Mark Zuckerberg’s cat one summer. As of last week, he was worth $200 million. But he’s more than just another smug, Silicon Valley wanker with rich parents, who likes to wear blue shirts with white collars, and is smart enough not to let his friend’s friend’s cat die. I mean, he is that. But there’s other stuff too. Like, he made a name for himself at Google when he agreed with some other entitled kids-of-Boomers that having illustrators design the search engine’s front page for free (i.e. “exposure”) was a cool idea. (By “cool,” we mean cheap, cynical and exploitative.) Can you say moxie?

Marc Parker, 26, started out at Facebook.co.uk, where he came up with the idea to model the British version of the site after its American parent, down to using the same language. “I love the blue hyperlinks. The white background. So American. And yet so British.” Eager to be promoted from a prat or a git to a full-fledged douchebag, Parker moved to Palo Alto, California in order to relinquish first his British, then his American citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes on the £200 million he earned from the IPO.

Jeff Mark, 26, drifted from PayPal to Facebook to MySpace to Compuserve to Netscape back to Compuserve. (Though closed, he somehow managed to collect €200 million from the latter.)

The three men became inseparable—and insufferable—after a chance encounter at Bi-Nary, a macrobiotic air bar that caters to sexually indiscriminate coders on the edge of the foothills near the section of the Google campus where they test attack drones for corporations.

It was during a sex tour of the Bushwick section of Brooklyn that the three douches conceived Douchenet. “We were talking about how, even though douches run just about everything in multimedia, until recently there weren’t the authoring tools and the bandwidth and/or the tablet platform for douches to hook up to do douchey things,” said Miron.

“Yeah,” agreed Parker and Mark.

I reached out to (that’s e-talk for “called”) Margot Jefferson, an analyst at D-Freak, a firm that tracks douchebaggery. “Douches account for 33 percent of start-ups, which account for 82 percent of investor fleecing, which amounts to 126 percent of economic activity in the United States,” points out Jefferson. “So the ability to connect douches across digital platforms using digital things is a game changer,” she confirms.

Given the power and the track record of these remarkable entrepreneurs, Douchenet is a story about power, wealth, journalism—and yes, wealth and power—worth watching. Marc Miron, for example, wrote that article that appeared in Wired that time. And Parker’s dad is just ridiculously rich, so we know he’s smart. Douchenet brings to mind Wingnutnet, a website you’ve never heard of because it doesn’t exist, yet which I’ve been writing about forever, by which I mean 2011.

Sometime this summer, Android will release a free version of Douchenet, so people who sign up can begin registering their personal financial information for distribution to trusted sites in Belarus. Using the so-called “freemium” model, Douchenet will charge fees for actual features, like the ability to create an “avatar” that could be sold by Farmville, which would pay a fraction of a fractile of a percent back to the original user, i.e. Douchenet.

In a live Tweetathon, Mark said he was drawn to Douchenet less by the idea than by the people who came up with it. “When you make an investment, you are betting on the team more than the idea,” he said. “If the idea is wrong, but the team is right, they will figure it out.”

“Who knows where this will end up?” he added between tokes on a clove bong.

(Ted Rall’s next book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” out May 29. His website is tedrall.com.)

The Graphic Canon, Volume 1

A heads up for comics fans: Volume 1 of The Graphics Canon is out now. (I’m in Volume 3, not 1.)

They asked cartoonists to illustrate literary classics in their own styles.

Also worth noting, for New Yorkers, is the launch party tomorrow night at the Rubin Museum.

The Shape of Things to Come (updated)

(Sorry, the first version published defectively. I have no idea what happened. If I had been drinking when I hit “Publish” I’d just admit it. But the strongest thing I had that day was coffee. I removed some paragraphs that more or less repeated what I’d already written for this post. When I added material, I put it inside square brackets.)

So Ted’s latest project will not be forthcoming.

Recently, I had a fairly long back-and-forth about the Internet Model with some of the regular comment makers. I, playing the part of the cranky old man who simply doesn’t “get it,” was standing on the front porch screaming at the kids to get off my lawn while I refused to accept that the Internet Model made sense.

The Internet Model (according to its supporters) provides everyone a way to stick it to the corporations and their horrible products. Movie tickets are too expensive, concession stands charge way too much for popcorn, (and I’m the one who’s the old man?), so download for free. No one who doesn’t deserve it will get hurt.

A similar argument was made about music and the other main forms of media. The artists, if they’re making good music or good books, won’t lose because people who admire the artists’ works will buy things from the artists — T-shirts, credible default swaps, hair — and it will all, fiscally and karmically, balance out in the end.

Attempts to explain that a lot of other people besides the artist are necessary for the artist to produce the finished product were, similarly, just crazy old me not understanding how things work now. Sad old Alex the Tired. Time to send you to the old folks’ home, where the surly staff, making not enough to live on, will slap the sass out of you in no time flat. Don’t bother taking your iPod though, they’ll steal that within the first two days.

And now, in a particularly undesirable way, more evidence of how the Internet Model arguments simply don’t hold up comes along. Ted has a convincing record of writing worthwhile books. He’s been a cartoonist for years and years. Anyone who has gone through a bookstore can point to dozens and dozens of examples of less-worthy books that get published all the time. Why? Because it’s what people want to read. A paralogical evasion. Ted’s books occupy a niche that isn’t filled by a hundred different people. And they are on important matters. By any reasonable standard, Ted’s book ideas should be able to find a publisher [because they are not books that have plenty of other suppliers].

The publishers are scaling back, and the market for what Ted’s writing can’t compete, sizewise, with, say, dog memoirs or cookbooks. Newspapers, magazines, books, you name it, the information creators are still cutting back, and as they contract, each Internet [author or website keeps taking the final product and putting it out for free. Thus, the newspapers, magazines, etc., have to keep cutting.] If a million people buy the latest Dog Whisperer piece of crap, about 10,000 will probably buy the sort of book Ted would write. Mathematically, it’s almost a foregone conclusion.

The point is that Ted (and writers, editors, factcheckers, photographers, etc. — pretty much everyone who used to work at a print daily or weekly, a monthly magazine, or even a publishing house) are up against an opponent that can’t be stopped. [And that Ted can’t get funding for a project is a pretty disturbing trend.]

 

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