Billed as "a technological phenomenon that was never possible before. It's both a movie and a movement", this documentary, Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War, was apparently shown at house parties around the country on December 7, 2003. Supposedly, 100,000 DVDs have been sold (source link below).
Lawrence Lessig says an updated version will be released in August. It looks like it will be shown on the Sundance Channel on September 6.
This review, Selective Intelligence On Road to Baghdad, of a Frontline episode, Truth, War and Consequences,
from last fall seems worth re-visiting, especially as more documentaries are on the way.
~ originally shared by Andres to the comm-grad listserv.
~ Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War in an article, Copyrighting the President, by Lawrence Lessig in Wired.
Study: Fear shapes voters' views
Responses to candidates differ after thinking about tragedy
7/30/2004 www.reuters.com
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- President George W. Bush may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the September 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
Talking about death can raise people's need for psychological security, the researchers report in studies to be published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science and the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
"There are people all over who are claiming every time Bush is in trouble he generates fear by declaring an imminent threat," said Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, who worked on the study.
"We are saying this is psychologically useful," said Solomon.
Mom had clipped an article from the Albuquerque Tribune about this "dynamic black Senate candidate" to share with me. Along with other tidbits on glbt stuff, such as Liturgy created for gay unions".
I've meant to post something since Gloria Anzaldua died in May. Her co-edited book, This Bridge Called My Back, not only launched my education but provided shape and direction to my activism.
~ I learned of her death via the social justice listserv, to which Elrey Mateo and Christopher McDonald-Dennis both forwarded email.
Well, the Senate may not have stepped up to the plate when black Americans needed it - I wonder if the shame from that fed their resistance to Bush on this one? Senate Blocks Bush Move to Ban Same-Sex Marriage.
It seems to me that I recall Vice-President Gore actually asked members of the Senate NOT to sign the complaint about the election results in Florida and the disenfranchisement of African-American voters there (shown in Fahrenheit 9/11).....something about the constitutional crisis it would throw the country into, no precedent or mechanism in place to deal with what that would mean. :-( Obviously an egregious error in judgment, whatever the reason someone should have signed along with a House member anyway. But it does cause me to wonder, now, about the cyclical nature of things and the distribution of bones to groups vying for legitimation by the powers that be.
~ article posted by Sonny Suchdev to the social justice listserv
"[Informant] Thomas Speigal['s] warning about judging the past from the perspective of the present, about the simultaneous solidification of boundaries and blurring of distinctions between victims and perpetrators" (p. 217).
This quote continues her analysis of the commemoration parade, in a chapter she calls "Dis-membered Border". This seems (to me, smile) to parallel my relational struggle - we are contesting who was/is "victim" and who was/is "perpetrator." I see the ways in which both of us did both, AND my "20/20 hindsight" perceives the discursive evidence (what was said and what was not said) in much sharper relief than I heard at the time. I need to learn to hear/interpret differently (or at least with other possibilities in mind) and I think this is the crux of acting into a new discursive future when one recognizes a PM.
Berdahl's work doesn't ground the discursive "collision" in any specific microsocial instant of real interaction - she juxtaposes what people said in one context with what they say in another context. This is what I hope to do with the critical discourse analysis paper that I intend to write analysing the key new finding (a discovery!) from the workshop in Alaska. At any rate, I'm also wondering if there is something here that might lend itself to James' and my history paper. I've been struggling with the Churchill/Bush examples and need to work out more clearly why I don't think they will work....or at least, that they represent a very different strategy/approach than anything we've done previously.
This book by Berdahl is amazing. I think it has some gems that James and I could use for the history paper. And the parallelism with/for me and [the FP] is serendipitous, to say the least. Check this out:
"..memory is an interactive, malleable, and highly contested phenomenon...asymmetrical...and the interplay between local and extralocal processes of remembering" (p. 207). And this quote from an informant in the study: "The further we come away, the more we scrub ourselves clean" (p. 215).
Berdahl is exploring the change between the lived day-to-day experience of residents of this small town on the border between East and West Germany and their later commemoration of it after �the Wende� � reunification. Many things have occurred in the larger national discourse that allows these residents to discursively position themselves as victims (and accuse others of perpetration)�.the parallels I see are simply around how each person constructs memory and how the telling of events builds toward stories which can become reified. The deepest level of struggle now, for me, is to resist the momentum of my own discursive story and find a way to hear and take in another story without overlaying an habitualized interpretation upon it. Just to allow the possibility would be a significant change�
Meanwhile, while political and moral discourses feed racism against American Indians for their economic success at providing gambling venues, Big Y (a grocery store chain) now promotes gambling when you check out! (The linked article doesn't specify the gadgetry I encountered yesterday, but you can see the connection.) Nice little computerized gambling option when you pay your bill - if you "win" you get a reduction in what you owe. If you lose....well, your bill doesn't go up, but your privacy takes a hit. While the US isn't using rfid - radio frequency identification chips - yet, there are numerous ways that our habits as consumers are getting pegged to us as individuals. Business is all for them, with a journal dedicated to so-called objective information (aka advertising). private citizens....? Katherine Albrecht says we need limits. I agree. An article in Wired Magazine quotes a marketer for rfid:
Introducing gambling games is a means of training consumers to "play along" without necessarily realizing what we're giving up. :-(
Reading this amazing book, Where the World Ended: Re-unification and Identity in the German Borderland by Daphne Berdahl.
She quotes Gupta and Ferguson (1992:18): "we want to contend that the notion of borderlands is a more adequate conceptualization of the 'normal' locale of the postmodern subject" (p. 6). Berhdahl continues: "In this view, the borderland is as much a metaphor as a physical space, or what Roger Rouse has called 'an alternative cartography of social space' (1991:9).
"[The borderland] is a site of cultural confrontation, articulation, and, to a large extent, penetration, where struggles over the production of cultural meanings occur in the context of asymmetrical relations between East and West" (Berdahl, p. 9).
While Berdahl is studying a particular and specific geophysical location (the town of Kella), the concepts upon which she founds her analysis could apply to cyberspace and other locations as well.
This book by John Lukacs has pointed James to a new focus for our PM paper for Rethinking History.
Some quotes: "...from macrocosmic to microcosmic history, of a sort" (p. xii).
"Tightly focused views are often useful, while there is a kind of broadmindedness that can be flat" (p. xiii).
The title of chapter one, "The Hinge of Fate" evokes a very PM-like imagery. :-)
"Any historian worth his salt knows how to eschew monocausal explanations of human events - that is, the attribution of a single motive to any given decision.* And there is another necessary distinction, the one between motives and purposes (the first a push of the past, the second the pull of the future), for rare are also those instances when the purposes of a decision are singular or exclusive" (p. 41-41).
*Footnote references Bond, Britain, France and Belgium.
