"Scream for Freedom"

The above picture, entitled "Scream for Freedom," is a reproduction of a cartoon drawn by Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for news agency al-Jazeera, while he was imprisoned in the Guantánamo prison facility.  It's a reproduction because the original cartoon drawn by al-Hajj's own hand has been banned from publication in the United States.  Al-Hajj had to describe the drawing to a Canadian artist, who was able to re-produce it from his detailed description.  Freedom of the press is a wonderful thing - remember to cherish it always.

Al-Hajj was just released from prison today, having been incarcerated at Gitmo for seven years.  He was, like all detainees in the prison, labelled an "enemy combatant," but never charged.  That's right: he was in prison for seven years and was never charged with a crime.

He was, however, encouraged to spy on al-Jazeera, and most of his questioning did not refer to his own purported "terrorist links" (he was accused of having al-Qaida training and supplying some Chechnyan rebel groups) but rather to the actions of the Qatar news network, according to al-Jazeera itself.  I hesitate to use al-Jazeera as my only source on this, and I think we should take the network's assertions with a grain of salt, considering the fact that al-Hajj is their employee.  I actually have no choice, however: BBC and CNN only give al-Jazeera's account, and FoxNews doesn't have a clue that this has happened at all (or, more likely, doesn't want us to have a clue).

I think there is plenty of information out there, from the New York times to Slavoj Zizek, about the chargeless detention of these executively labeled "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo; I don't feel there's anything for me to add.  Just be aware that this guy was a cameraman and had a legitimate work visa with a respectable international news agency; he now has gone on hunger strike and been force-fed, interrogated regularly, acquired a kidney infection and throat cancer, and has not seen his young son since he was a toddler.  He's 38.  And he was never charged with any crime.

And second, what about his drawing?  Banned in the United States?  Let me just say this: if America is so afraid of a cartoon of Guantánamo being released, then our government had damn well better clean up whatever the hell is going on in there, because this whole situation is worthy of absolutely nothing better than a fascist state.  I'm thoroughly disgusted.

Election '08; or, the tricky correspondence of image and ethos

The New York Observer recently published an article contradicting, to some degree, the received wisdom among nearly all conservatives and a number of liberals: that Barack Obama is all flash with no content.

The article isn't a perfect defense of Obama's campaign style, and perhaps it would be unhealthy to spend too much sweat and tears defending anybody's political campaign. With the (possible) exception of that of the maverick Ron Paul, every political aspirant will de facto indulge in some image-mongering and dishonesty in the interest of saying things that will get votes, rather than lose them. This is just human behavior, and we see it in corporate meetings, at dinner parties, and on blind dates every day. Nobody is deliberately going to create a repulsive image for himself/herself.

However, it is fairly evident that Obama is coming in for more than the usual rueful/sarcastic "oh, those politicians (pat pat)" criticism. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that opposition media (and the Clinton campaign) are trying to torpedo his candidacy with this accusation of insubstantial posturing and hope-mongering. I won't linger on the depressing idea that "Hope" is evidently a commodity we can no longer deal in, or the implied preference for candidates who hawk More War, Tax Burdens for the Middle Class, Corporate Dominance of the Polity, Pervasive Surveillance, Torture, And So On. I'd personally take vacuous Hope any day.

I would like to linger a little, however, on this idea of "image" and how an image might relate to "ethos," which I here take to mean the "true truth" about a person and his/her views (insofar as that is even knowable). According to the New York Observer's article, "the style is indivisible from the substance" in the case of Obama. His "oratory" and "inclusivity [...] signify profound differences in approach and philosophy from Mrs. Clinton." Gasp. The idea! That an oratorical style might actually "signify" something! The point, as the article mentions and as we've all known for a long time now, is that the policy differences between Clinton and Obama are relatively insignificant. The angle from which they approach these views, and the image-construct via which they present them to the constituency, is where the difference lies. Hillary Clinton's approach has been far more "traditional" thus far, emphasizing (as has been repeated by pundits ad infinitum) long-term political conflicts and the division-lines between parties. Obama consciously seeks out common ground with Republicans and Independents, and even (notoriously) with "Axis of Evil" leaders like Hugo Chavez. Although his message about the state of America isn't always a sunny one, he offsets it with tremendous optimism, which has been the hallmark of many of our greatest 20th Century leaders.

I also want to emphasize that *all* of the '08 candidates, and all the candidates who have ever run for office in any public arena, have constructed images for themselves. Clinton, as the article points out, "proudly referred to herself as [...] 'battle-scarred.'" John McCain is the dogged, uncompromising veteran; John Edwards was the Common Man (who just happened to make millions as a lawyer, ehm); Mike Huckabee is still the divinely-inspired prophet who's cool enough to play the bass; Giuliani, in Joe Biden's wonderful quip, was "a subject, a verb, and 9/11." Some of these might be more ingenuous than others, but the point is that Obama is not the only candidate occluded in a mantle of hoopla and linguistic prestidigitation. Every candidate presents himself/herself in a manner that is delimited by a hundred factors, including genuine personality, well-paid image consultants and campaign managers, media bias, etc. Our job is to look at real statements from these candidates to determine how well they line up with the image. I suggest skepticism of these images, but we also must remember that they give some indication of each candidate's fundamental attitude. And after George W. Bush's attitude of insolence, arrogance, and confrontation, a more conciliatory approach looks more appealing than I can say.

"Political Correctness"

I was reading over a couple of articles recently that brought to my mind the slippery and oft-cited concept of "political correctness." One of them, about a Seattle public school teacher who asked her pupils to remember that Thanksgiving is not a happy time for Native Americans, comes from the FoxNews Network, which like all media has a radical left-wing bias. The other, an opinion piece by Michael Medved, gives historical evidence for a unicultural America.

I don't mean to interact with either of these articles point-by-point, but each is worth reading, and I do not wholly disagree with either. However, I have a bone to pick with some assumptions that underlie each article. The former asks us to share a laugh (or a scandalized ubi sunt?) over the state that this country (or at least its radical coasts) has come to. Apparently, the idealistic teacher tried to build a case for Thanksgiving being a time of sorrow and lament among the Native American community, which is apparently not quite factual. My response to this would be "stop being silly and try to make your otherwise good point without recourse to inaccuracy." The article (I read between the lines here a little) asks us to gripe "Look at that. Undermining our sacred values, by God."

Medved argues for some kind of "melting-pot" uniculturalism by stating, among other things, that the Know-Nothing party's machinations against Catholics demonstrate an American unwillingness to accept the unassimilated other. All he really seems to prove is that yes, in the past, immigrants to America were expected to "Americanize" and desist from their bizarre foreign behavior. True enough; people in this era also sold cocaine as children's headache relief and believed the Negro to be closer to the original ape than the enlightened whitey, so I'm not sure that archaic views on society and culture are appropriate corroborations for one's argument. All of this aside, however, I was still left wondering what the fundamental reason behind this argument was; why, after all, are we so against multiculturalism or cultural diversity?

I think the answer lies in this vague and mutable little concept of "political correctness." The term originated from the well-known early 20th century totalitarian regimes that forced individuals to either spout the party line or risk being "purged." No one would argue that this is going on in the USA as of now, so a new definition came about: basically, the ridiculous stuff that the Left wants to replace our values and heritage with. Hyphenated names, gay pride, class consciousness, the right of women to vote ... etc.

I am more than willing to concede that some of these concepts, and the people who push them, have significant cloud of the ridiculous hanging about them. But so does any political ideology. My problem is when anything that seems to smack of social justice for any minority, or of an attack upon corporate misdeeds, or even the vague and demure suggestion that sometime, somewhere, in all the decades since Jamestown, it is possible that misdeeds have been committed on the American continent by white men of British descent, is instantaneously branded "PC," which apparently then gives us license to ignore it and/or rail against it. The Right, by fostering an almost paranoid skepticism of government (but not big business, for some reason) and then trotting out this label, has conveniently found a way to ridicule many voices that, despite any attendant silliness, are really quite well-intentioned and helping fight the battle for justice and equality. All this based on the assumption that rights are somehow a zero-sum game, and that if Native Americans or homosexuals are freed from discrimination, then somehow white, straight Evangelicals will be in for a round of persecution.

Instead of the paranoid and perjorative definition of "political correctness," I would like to offer a re-contextualization. "Political," at heart, just means "social" or "pertaining to the polis." What if PC could just mean acceptable in the polis -- i.e. polite, just, non-discriminatory? It doesn't have to mean that we hate America or white people, or that we intend to establish draconian racial quotas, or make Spanish an official language, or condition our children to be gay. It does mean that we should treat everyone with respect, whether in speech, or hiring, or education; and that applies to a lesbian Khazakh-American muslim just as much as it does to me.