maya deren

Have I mentioned how much I love the work of Maya Deren (1917-1961), avant-garde film maker, a major, radical figure?
My favorite of her works is the early Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a surreal noir melodrama that I like best silent, without the later-added music. It tops Senses of Cinema's list of best films by women directors. I also like At Land (1944). I'm less fond of later works like Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) or her film about voudoun, Divine Horsemen. I guess I like best the films on which she collaborated with Alexander Hammid, who also made The Private Life of a Cat. Her statements on her work tend to be a bit too arty and mystical for my taste, though the films make brilliant use of the medium. Most of her films can be seen on DVD, and there's a very good documentary about her life & work, In the Mirror of Maya Deren.

if you can't stand the heat. . .

. . . get off of the planet.

Around 55 record highs were shattered on Friday. Phoenix, Ariz. had its hottest day in almost 11 years (118). Hillsboro, Ore. set an all-time record high of 108. San Jose, Calif. may have recorded its hottest morning low on record (74). Even more amazing is that Needles, Calif. had a morning low of 100 degrees, which was an all-time hot low temperature.
Records were set or tied Saturday at all five of the National Weather Service's recording locations in California Central Valley: 109 degrees in Sacramento, 111 in Redding, and 112 in Red Bluff, Stockton and Modesto.
Emergency workers scrambled to help heat exposure victims in downtown Los Angeles, where 99-degree temperatures broke the 96-degree record set in 1960. Temperatures in the city's Woodland Hills section hit a record 119 degrees, topping the 116-degree high set in 1985.
Records were also set throughout the San Francisco Bay area, including Livermore at 115 degrees, San Rafael at 108 degrees and San Jose at 102 degrees, according to the weather service. San Francisco's 87 degrees topped an 81-degree record set in 1917. (Note: San Francisco is suppoed to be FOGGY alla time.)

equality of suffering

Last week in TomDispatch, Ruth Rosen discussed “The Hidden War on Iraqi Women” To the roster of American shame that includes Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Guantanamo, Rosen notes, we can now add “Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of Baghdad. There, this March, a group of five American soldiers allegedly were involved in the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza, a [fourteen year old] Iraqi girl. Her body was then set on fire to cover up [the] crimes, [and] her father, mother, and sister [were] murdered.”

Rosen discusses in detail the ways that “the invasion and occupation of Iraq has had the effect of humiliating, endangering, and repressing Iraqi women in ways that have not been widely publicized in the mainstream media: As detainees in prisons run by Americans, they have been sexually abused and raped; as civilians, they have been kidnapped, raped, and then sometimes sold for prostitution; and as women -- and, in particular, as among the more liberated women in the Arab world -- they have increasingly disappeared from public life, many becoming shut-ins in their own homes.”

Tom Engelhardt, in his preface to Rosen’s essay, quotes Riverbend, who writes the “girlblog” Baghdad Burning from Iraq:
"Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest -- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"

Engelhardt suggests that the secrecy around rape as a taboo subject marks an area where the US is more enlightened than Iraq.
“In the United States,” he says, “rape is now a public crime. Cases are regularly discussed and followed in the media; victims are far less often blamed; if you turn on a TV program like Law & Order: SVU, rape cases are national drama and even entertainment.”

The idea of rape cases as entertainment seems not to strike Engelhardt as troubling.

Lucinda Marshall in Counterpunch sees coverage of the Mahmudiya story some what differently:
“despite the enormous press coverage and airplay that this story is getting, the context in which the atrocity took place will only nominally be examined, if at all. That aspect of the story is not what is newsworthy. Or to be a tad more crass and honest, it is not what sells. And the dissemination of news is most definitely a business, one that is now owned and controlled primarily by large corporations who are far more concerned with the bottom line than with truth and integrity.

“. . . . it should not be at all surprising that when a news story that contains the same elements as a . . . porn plot occurs, the media doesn't hesitate to frame the story from that angle. Sex sells. . . .

“Like Abu Ghraib, the brutal rape and murder of . . . Abeer Qasim Hamza was just such a story. Young soldiers, the supposed . . . defenders of our rights and values, in a premeditated act of sex and violence against a . . . girl who had earlier refused their taunts and advances at a checkpoint. . . . In [a] sense, this story bears a resemblance to the coverage of cases such as the . . . the Duke University rape allegations. Virile young men [behaving] . . . in sufficiently obscene ways to be titillating and very marketable stories.

“None of this is lost on news producers. . . . [and it] impacts how the media frames the story, even to the extent of editing the facts to fit the story. In an Op Ed piece about the Duke rape allegations, David Brooks waxed poetic about the reputation of the Duke Lacrosse team--their good grades and community service; That the alleged victim was an honor student and a military veteran was conveniently omitted from his piece. To have included that information would have damaged the media portrayal of the alleged victim as being deserving of whatever may have happened that night by virtue of her 'behavior'.”

The hidden war on women, or its repackaging as entertainment, brings to mind the question that forms the title of Catherine MacKinnon’s latest book, Are Women Human? According to reviewer Martha Nussbaum, writing in the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the book argues that “women suffer aggression and exploitation, "because we are women, systemically and systematically,"” and considers the “hypocrisy of the international system when it faces up to some crimes against humanity but fails to confront similar harms when they happen to women, often on a daily basis.”

“Similarity of treatment, [MacKinnon] has argued throughout her work, is not sufficient for the true "equal protection" of the laws. Mere formal equality often masks, or even reinforces, underlying inequalities. We need to think, instead, of the idea of freedom from hierarchy, from domination and subordination. . . . To deny women benefits that they need in order to function as equals (medical pregnancy benefits, for example) is to violate equal protection, even when the treatment of men and women is similar (no men get pregnancy benefits, and no women get them either).”

Another example would be abortion rights. In an essay on Alternet.org, Carmen Valenzuela argues that a woman's right to end her pregnancy must be considered an international human right. As 70,000 women die each year around the world as a direct result of unsafe abortion, and 600,000 more are seriously injured, Amnesty International is currently considering adding a woman’s right to safely terminate a pregnancy to the rights that they support. Denying men the right to abortion would not make its denial to women equal.

Conversely, that suffering is shared by men does not make it of less concern to women. Judy Martin, writing for Women’s eNews, reports on a conference of Iraqi women sponsored by the NY-based group Global Peace Initiative of Women, at which women from Iraq cited as their chief problems violence against civilians, widespread infrastructure damage, and the consequent instability of daily life. They noted the need for potable water and for health care, the shortages of electricity, and the lack of social services.

Reporter Nir Rosen on Truthdig suggests that "Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the [US] occupation [of Iraq]. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."

photo op

daily mail via commondreams

have his carcase

In 1866, the Supreme Court overturned Lincoln’s wartime suspension of habeas corpus. In that ruling, Justice David Davis wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false, for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence, as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority. (Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866))

Dave Lindorff in Counterpunch comments, Those stirring words should be mailed to every member of Congress as they now consider the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling, with many Republicans clamoring to pass a law exempting the Guantanamo detainees from the Geneva Convention's jurisdiction.

hindsight

Virginia Governor Timoth M. Kaine has pardoned Grace Sherwood, who was convicted of witchcraft in 1706. "With 300 years of hindsight, we all certainly can agree that trial by water is an injustice," Kaine wrote.

On the other hand, without the retrospective view it's not so certain we can all agree that it is torture:

CIA DIRECTOR Porter J. Goss insists that his agency is innocent of torturing the prisoners it is holding in secret detention centers around the world. "This agency does not torture," he said in an interview. "We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information, and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture." One of these techniques is "waterboarding," in which a victim is strapped to a board and lowered into a vat of water until he or she believes that drowning is imminent. The subject is then removed from the water and revived. If necessary the process is repeated. The torture is designed to be psychological more than physical, as the victim is led to believe that he or she is being executed. This reinforces the torturer's control and makes the victim experience mortal fear. Here's What's Left also noted the connection.

lightbulbs, no joke

Amy Belanger complains helpfully about the limits of Gore’s film and its overemphasis on turning off the lights instead of taking political action. She also points to this site touted by Oprah and which does advocate lobbying your mayor to sign the Climate Protection Agreement, which ours has. But there, too, with the lightbulbs. And apparently Leonardo diCaprio also has a little global warming movie, which has some suggestions other than changing bulbs. But commondreams also reprints the lightbulb idea. So, ok, ok, I'll change the lightbulbs. But where to get them made by someone other than the evil GE? More bright ideas to come. . . . (photo by Will Pate.)

update on the bare bear

Talking with A. about the poor drowning polar bears, he pointed out that what's so distressing about that image in the movie is its suggestion of homelessness and abandonment. Which is of course what the sentimentality of the image taps into: one can project one's own feelings about that onto the cute cuddly animated bear. Poor bears. Poor us.

just unjust powers

Oh, for the days when government derived their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Chris Floyd in the Moscow Times points out

That the United States, once touted as the "world's greatest democracy," is now ruled by a presidential dictatorship is a fact beyond any serious dispute. . . . The Bush Administration no longer bothers to hide the novel theory of government upon which its rule is based, but declares it openly, in court, in Congress, everywhere.

The theory holds that the president has the arbitrary right to ignore any law that he feels is an unconstitutional infringement of his power -- and a law is automatically unconstitutional if the president feels it infringes on his power. This neatly squared circle makes Congress irrelevant and removes the judiciary from the loop altogether. Thus, the only effective instrument of power left in the land is the "unitary executive": the fancy modern name that the legal minions of President George W. Bush have given to the ancient concept of "tyranny."

Which pretty much sums it up. Except of course that dictators tend to rule indefinitely.


Bob Cesca in HuffPost suggests the inscription on this bust of Bush is evidence of plans to cancel the next presidential election. But Raw Story cites a source saying it’s just because it was completed during Bush’s first term. We shall see. Though it's not as though they can't rig the election to replace him with some other, equivalent, figure. The problem of course is systemic (especially now that the machinery is in place with the supremes), not individual. And anyway Cheney could stay on as Dicktator.