My Tribute to Ronald Reagan

BY MARK VALLEN
[print_link]

would have turned 100 on Sunday, February 6, 2011, and many U.S. citizens are celebrating this centenary from coast to coast with frenzied idolization, praise, and adulation for the “Great Communicator.”

As my beloved country undergoes another bout of historical amnesia that is every bit as debilitating as the Alzheimer’s disease our acclaimed 40th President was known to have suffered from, a comforting blanket of forgetfulness descends upon the land. As Reagan himself affirmed in 1988, “facts are stupid things,” but oh what the passage of time and a little bit of corporate propaganda can do to wipe away silly truths.

Lending a helping hand to relieve us of historic recall, is none other than that newly celebrated orator, President Obama. A day before his 2011 State of the Union address, Mr. Obama published an op-ed piece in USA Today that praised “the sense of confidence and optimism President Reagan never failed to communicate to the American people (….)

He understood that it is always ‘Morning in America.’ That was his gift, and we remain forever grateful.” Who can resist our Nobel Laureate President’s inducement to fall into deep, unwakeable slumber? Certainly not America’s feeble liberal class, now falling all over itself in order to sound “Reaganesque.”

It is difficult to avoid being caught up in the hero-worship surrounding Ronald Reagan, and I feel compelled to deepen the national exaltation of the “The Gipper” with my own burnt offerings. But I must warn you dear reader, my version of the Reagan chronicles might seem decidedly heretical. My alternate take on his saga is here conveyed through the graphics I created during his time in office. Mind you, the images I have selected for this article are but a smattering of the anti-Reagan artworks I created during his ignoble reign, yet they help provide a more complete picture of the period, for the so-called “Teflon President” faced broad, implacable, and widespread opposition to his backward-looking and retrograde policies.

My intentionally crude Xerox photomontage, Nuclear Cowboy (see above), was used as the central image for a flyer that announced a mass protest against President Reagan at a $1,000 dollar a plate fundraising dinner for the G.O.P. at the L.A. Century Plaza Hotel, August 22, 1985.
The text outside of the image running up the left-side of the flyer reads, “There will be a soup-line for those who cannot attend the G.O.P. dinner.”

The protest was organized and sponsored by a variety of organizations, from the Alliance For Survival and the Coalition For A Free South Africa, to Jews United For Peace and Justice and the Committee In Solidarity With The People of El Salvador (CISPES). Reagan addressed the fundraiser, and the demonstration was attended by approximately 10,000 protestors, making it one of the major rallies against the policies of Reagan to be held in Los Angeles during the 1980s.

Just two months prior to the protest, Reagan escalated his illegal and unilateral war against Nicaragua by declaring a crippling economic embargo against the Central American nation, accusing its leftist Sandinista government of backing “armed insurrection, terrorism, and subversion in neighboring countries.” Reagan declared his embargo after the U.S. Congress had rejected his request for tens of millions of dollars for the “Contra” guerrillas the White House had organized, financed, armed, and directed in military attacks against Nicaragua.

Soldier Of Fortune was my parody photomontage flyer lambasting the militaristic policies of the Reagan administration. I altered a cover of the rightwing magazine, Soldier of Fortune (an extreme rightist publication in the U.S. that openly recruited American mercenaries in the early 80s to fight in South Africa, Afghanistan, and Central America), inserting a photomontage of Reagan as the supreme mercenary commando, along with some tantalizingly jingoistic headlines. The tagline of “Shock Battalion” appearing at the bottom of the photomontage was the name of an arts collective I founded in the 1980s that primarily unleashed anonymous creative acts. The flyer was published as a color Xerox print.

Bedtime for Bonzo.


At the time students throughout California were engaged in an aggressive campaign to force the UC system to “divest,” i.e., to withdraw the huge financial investments made in the apartheid regime of South Africa.

The UC Regents supported apartheid by investing 30% of the UC system’s portfolio in corporations and financial institutions that conducted $1.7 billion worth of business transactions with South Africa.

Through unrelenting militant struggle the students eventually forced the UC system to divest their holdings in South Africa, helping to pave the way for the total collapse of the rotten apartheid regime.

My flyer announced an “Evening of Cultural Resistance” in celebration of the student occupation of the UCLA administration building, a takeover that demanded divestment, the release of Nelson Mandela, and an end to all U.S. military and financial support to the racist South African regime. The event took place in “Mandela City,” a tent encampment students had illegally set-up adjacent to the administration building. During that evening’s staging in front of a hundred striking students, I performed a multi-projection antiwar slide show, and singer-songwriter Carole King dropped in unannounced to lend her support and sing a few songs. The performer listed as “Hollywatts,” would in the future go on to use his real name, Roger Guenveur Smith, appearing in several productions by Director Spike Lee.


We Abhor Apartheid was another street flyer I created in 1985 as a satirical barb aimed at Reagan’s policy of propping up the South African racists.
I self-published five thousand copies of this flyer, all of which were distributed throughout Los Angeles.
By depicting Reagan in the company of other well known “opponents” of racism, the mocking image made fun of Reagan’s hypocritical avowal “that apartheid is very repugnant to us.”

In a 1985 radio interview with WSB Radio of Atlanta, Georgia, Reagan said the regime in South Africa had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country, the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated, that has all been eliminated.” That was of course a bald-faced lie. In the same interview the “Great Communicator” went on to sound off about South Africa, “I have to say that for us to believe the Soviet Union is not, in its usual style, stirring up the pot and waiting in the wings for whatever advantage they can take, we’d be very innocent, naive, if we didn’t believe that they’re there.”

Poster announcing a mass antiwar demonstration in downtown Los Angeles.

Stop The War in Central America was originally a large pencil drawing I created in 1986 to express my opposition to Reagan’s policy of military intervention in Central America. The focal point in the artwork are three skeletal figures inspired by the Dia de los Muertos drawings of the great Mexican artist, José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), only my skeletons represent the Escuadrones de la Muerte (Squadrons of Death) unleashed by Reagan in the nations of El Salvador and Nicaragua. They are clothed in U.S. supplied military uniforms that have dollar signs as their camouflage pattern. Clutching U.S. supplied M-16 automatic rifles in their decomposing hands, they move threateningly towards the viewer. In the wake of the deathly trio one can see the graveyards of countless victims, the skyline blackened with acrid smoke and bomb-blasts. I published this unsettling image as a flyer and a poster.

My silkscreen image, No Aid For Contra Terror, was also created in April of 1986. Around 200 of the 18.5 x 22.5 inch posters were printed and distributed across Los Angeles.

The works shown in this essay were of an activist nature, made for the street, mostly displaying a rough and ready, unrefined angry aesthetic born of urgency. These works of mine were part of an avalanche of protest art created by dissident artists during the bleak days of “Reaganism.” We are today revisited by that miserabilist political philosophy, and contemporary artists must meet its rising challenge.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Art for Change, in his own words, “is not about the art scene in my city, nor does it specifically focus on my own works. My writings on art exhibits, theory, philosophy, history, news, other artists, and a myriad of topics related to aesthetics, spotlight the role art and culture plays in shaping society.  What differentiates my web log from other sites dealing with art is not just the emphasis I place upon social engagement and activism, but the fact that I am a painter who writes about and advocates a new social realism for the 21st century. This could not be otherwise, since I am an artist deeply influenced by the likes of Goya, the German Expressionists, the Mexican Muralists, and the American social realist school of the 1930s and 1940s.”  Mark’s main site, which displays more of his art, is located at http://www.markvallen.com/ .



The New York Times’ Bill Keller on WikiLeaks: A collapse of democratic sensibility

The US has a controlled, entirely tamed mass media. State censorship is largely unnecessary, the major news outlets carry it out themselves. Were a military-police dictatorship to be established in America, what serious changes, if any, would have to be made in the personnel of the New York Times?

By David Walsh 

BELOW->BILL KELLER: The cleancut, all-American granite-jaw golden boy on the outside, but a tower of moral jelly on the inside. 

The New York Times posted a lengthy piece January 26 by Bill Keller, its executive editor, on the subject of the newspaper’s relations with WikiLeaks and its co-founder, Julian Assange. The Times is one of the media outlets that has published excerpts from WikiLeaks’ material on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and its mass of secret US diplomatic cables.

Keller attempts to cover all the bases in his essay, defending himself against accusations that the Times has endangered US “national security”—defaming Assange in the process—and making the case for a “responsible” (that is to say, compliant) media, while at the same time hypocritically opposing government prosecution of WikiLeaks.

Whatever he thinks he has done, Mr. Keller has in fact produced a devastating self-exposure. He has offered us a portrait of the journalist as a quasi-state official and propagandist.

Along these lines, Keller boasts about his efforts to vet the WikiLeaks material with the US government, and acknowledges that the Times collaborated on a daily basis with the State Department after it came into possession of the hundreds of thousands of secret American embassy cables in November 2010.

Above all else, Keller’s essay reveals the collapse of democratic consciousness within the American media and political establishment. The most extraordinary feature of his 8,000 word article is the shamelessness with which he spells out that the Times’ central concern is not enlightening the public, but concealing anything that might damage the US government, its foreign policy and its war aims.

Here is a spokesman for the leading newspaper in the United States who makes clear that he has no commitment to and no understanding of freedom of the press. For Keller and his Times colleagues, the freedom to publish means the freedom not to publish.

The emergence of WikiLeaks has proven an unpleasant turn of events for the Times and the American media as a whole. This small organization, with limited resources, has done what the major news outlets should have been doing for years and deliberately refused to do: shed light on the massive criminality of American diplomatic, intelligence and military activity around the globe.

How to respond to the WikiLeaks phenomenon has obviously been a vexing issue for Keller and the Times’ hierarchy. If they have reacted in part by serving as a conduit for some of the leaked material, it has been in the interests of controlling the exposures as much as possible, limiting their impact and preventing—in Keller’s phrase—“a state of information anarchy” (i.e., widespread access to news outside the official channels) from arising.

Moreover, through its numerous attacks on Assange, the Times has sought to divert attention from US war crimes and portray the WikiLeaks leader as the suspicious, if not outright criminal party.

Keller intends to strike a pose of balance and moderation, but crass class interest in the form of hostility toward the WikiLeaks project makes its way into paragraph after paragraph of his essay.

The Times’ executive editor is unsparing in his personal attacks on Assange. Keller first presents the WikiLeaks co-founder to the reader as “an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence.” We learn next that Assange “was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian).”

In his chronological account of the Times’ relations with Assange, Keller quotes the first impressions of Eric Schmitt—from the newspaper’s Washington bureau—upon meeting the WikiLeaks founder in London:

“He [Assange] was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”

This is simply a slur, intended to prejudice the delicate reader against Assange. What does it have to do with anything? Keller’s later claim to be “impartial in our presentation of the news” is meaningless in the face of such comments.

Keller doesn’t let up: “The reporters came to think of Assange as smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous. … Assange was openly contemptuous of the American government and certain that he was a hunted man.”

Keller, in keeping with the general line of the liberal-feminist campaign against Assange, chooses to ignore entirely the abusive and violent nature of the threats against the WikiLeaks founder. The CIA and US military no doubt track his every move. He has been denounced as a “terrorist” (including by the vice president of the United States) and calls for his physical elimination proliferate in ultra-right circles in the US.

Instead, Keller (along with Katha Pollitt in the Nation and others) finds it useful to paint the WikiLeaks co-founder as a sort of international playboy-adventurer belonging to some imaginary radical-chic milieu (or “a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller,” as Keller insightfully claims at one point).

Keller finally recounts how the newspaper’s relationship with Assange went from “wary to hostile.” First, Assange was rightly angry that the Times refused to link its online coverage to the WikiLeaks website. Furthermore, Assange objected to the Times’ profile of Bradley Manning, the army private suspected of being the source of much of the WikiLeaks material, which essentially attributed Manning’s alleged actions to psychological difficulties early in his life.

Finally, there was the scurrilous profile of Assange by John Burns and Ravi Somaiya published October 24, 2010 (See “New York Times tries character assassination against WikiLeaks founder Assange”.) Keller tells us that “Assange denounced the article to me, and in various public forums, as ‘a smear,’” which it manifestly was.

The “responsible” New York Times

That part of Keller’s essay not devoted to abusing Assange and WikiLeaks is largely directed toward proving how “responsibly” the New York Times has acted throughout this entire episode. One of the most revealing sections deals with the Times’ collaboration with US officials once the newspaper came into possession of the secret embassy cables.

The Times informed the White House about the cables on November 19, 2010 and on November 23, reports Keller, three representatives of the newspaper held a “tense” meeting with White House, State Department, Pentagon, CIA and FBI officials. “Subsequent meetings,” he notes, “which soon gave way to daily conference calls, were more businesslike.” No wonder.

This is the remarkable process Keller describes: “Before each discussion [with government officials], our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets.”

Keller asserts that the Times rejected some of the concerns and agreed on others. In regard to “sensitive American programs, usually related to intelligence,” he explains, “We agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed.”

Keller takes for granted the legitimacy of US intelligence operations, whose primary purpose, the historical record shows, is to shore up repressive regimes around the globe.

The Times executive editor also brags about the newspaper’s relations with the Obama White House, observing that “the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or to the national interest.”

There is no hint here that the role of the press in a nominally democratic society is to inform the public. A considerable portion of Keller’s labor seems focused on what does not go into the Times.

Toward the end of his piece, Keller spells out his political thinking a bit more openly. He writes: “Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here.”

To begin with, the tone of self-pity and self-aggrandizement is unpleasant and inappropriate. Keller, as always, can only think of American suffering, and, more especially, his own personal discomfort. As a city, Baghdad has suffered many, many times the death and destruction inflicted on New York since the US seriously set its sights on plundering Iraqi oil reserves through the first Gulf war in 1990.

Of course, along with the US media as a whole, Keller, in his demagogic references to the terrorist attacks leaves out the decades-long history of American imperialism’s tragic and bloody encounter with the populations of the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Times editor goes on: “We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.”

This is filthy nonsense, worthy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The WikiLeaks exposures have demonstrated that official US propaganda about democracy and human rights and self-government is a fraud. Washington backs and arms dictatorial regimes, regimes that torture and murder, in every part of the globe.

The anti-democratic implications of Keller’s essay render his supposed opposition to the prosecution of WikiLeaks quite unconvincing. In fact, the Times has worked assiduously to discredit and isolate Assange and WikiLeaks, making government prosecution more likely.

Keller’s real aim is to make the case that “gatekeepers” such as the Times are important and necessary to control the information-news stream and forestall the “state of information anarchy” that he finds so threatening.

He comes closest to making this explicit when he comments on the Times’ obligation “as an independent news organization [independent of whom?] … to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it.”

Keller assigns himself the responsibility, along with the administration in power, of ensuring that the population does not know too much. He clearly sees the Times as a central instrument of official propaganda and conceives of his editing as an integral part of the war effort.

The US has a controlled, entirely tamed mass media. State censorship is largely unnecessary, the major news outlets carry it out themselves. Were a military-police dictatorship to be established in America, what serious changes, if any, would have to be made in the personnel of the New York Times?

In the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sydney Pollack, a low-level CIA researcher stumbles upon a secret plan by “rogue” elements within the agency to seize Middle East oilfields. Having survived various attempts on his life, the central character (played by Robert Redford) finally arranges to meet a CIA deputy director outside the offices of the New York Times in Manhattan and informs the latter, significantly, that he has told the press “a story.” We are meant to be reassured by the fact that the Times alone has the “story.” No one in his politically right mind would take the same course of action today.

That the liberal newspaper of record has become little more than an organ of state propaganda speaks to the crisis and decline of American capitalism, on the one hand, and the increasingly favorable conditions for the development of an avowedly socialist and revolutionary political current, on the other.

“Ask Not What Your Country Blah Blah Blah,” and Other Ridiculous Memes

TBy Gary Corseri  [print_link]

What it’s not

Even in herspeak, that don’t get it.

What it is

A little more from Wikipedia: “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices [and, of course, values!—GC], which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. … Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.”

1. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

But… fifty years later, hearing the words repeated incessantly by every 2-bit MSM newscaster, hearing the dissections and bifurcations and vivisections, all I can say is “Bullsh*t!”

Kennedy was spewing one meme after another—or Ted Sorenson was… or both of them—and its doubtful that he—or they—ever realized the extent of their misdirection.

interrogate my “leaders.”  As an adult, I recognize my obligation to be informed and to hold my “leaders”—political, economic, social and cultural—accountable for their expressed ideals. 

happiness.  The next night, the moon was about as full and the weather the same, and he went out along the path, came to the same clearing, looked up—and felt nothing. 

th, 19th and 20th centuries, exacerbated, no doubt by the smokestack industries popping up like pimples all over the land.  Consumption then; consumerism now.  The same wasting disease.

unhappy times! 

nd Commandment, and those who worship it will defend their right to do more truculently than those who subscribe to the Mosaic Code.  It holds its place with those few memes identified by numbers: The First Amendment; 911; 1776.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Might not one argue that the seizure of personal firearms would be the least likely act of a tryrannical government… that anarchy would work just fine for controlling a Mad Max world in which the authorities could bring jets and predator drones, tactical nuclear weapons, etc. against an army of gun-slinging cowboys?

Okay, forget that!

The assassinations of JFK, Bobby K, MLK and Malcolm X.

“American exceptionalism”. … “We’re number one!”

“The wisdom of the voters.”

“Change you can believe in.”

“The War on Terror.”

Not just words, but a panoply of figures marching across the TV sets of our minds, the movies, the political rallies, demonstrations, electronic imagery meshed with e-mail conversations, infiltrating every neuron—memes define, refine… and devour.

“Move on,” for example.

A beloved child dies, 31 students are massacred, and we are exhorted… to “move on.”

And so Obama, master of ceremonies, magician of memes, declaims in his State of the Union, “The future is ours to win.”

Except that… eleven years into our new millennium, one hopes for something more!

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child. … But now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.”

“The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

And…,

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

The Greanville Post, Global Research, CounterPunch, L.A. Progressive, The Smirking Chimp, Dissident Voice, The New York Times, Village Voice, and hundreds of other venues.  His dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and at universities.  His books include the novels, Holy Grail, Holy Grail and A Fine Excess, and the literary anthology (edited), Manifestations.  He has been a professor in the U.S. and Japan, taught in prisons and public schools, worked as a grape-picker and furniture-mover in Australia, a gas station attendant, a door-to-door salesman.  He has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum. He can be reached at gary_corseri@comcast.net or garyscorseri@gmail.com.



CRITIQUE FROM THE LEFT: Maddow vs. Assange—the limits of mainstream liberals

A SPECIAL PRESENTATION WITH VIDEO AND COMMENTARY

All annotations in brackets [   ] by the editors.

BACKGROUNDER

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/404550/) 


Maddow blog:

respect  for the women making these accusations against him and with a commitment to take rape allegations seriously, even when the person accused is someone that for other reasons you like? [What PC liberal or person with any sense is going to declare that he “doesn’t respect women” in front of a whole audience of liberals?   These are strawmen questions, marshalled for pure rhetorical effect.]

[This is something of a non-issue. But, “every woman”??? What about a woman who has been paid or coerced into false accusations? Police and intelligence services have a long tradition of doing exactly that, under a variety of ruses. And obviously neither Moore nor Maddow have heard of J.P. Sartre’s ]   Those charges have to be investigated to the fullest extent possible,” Moore said. “For too long, and too many women have been abused in our society , because they were not listened to, and they just got shoved aside. . . .So I think these two alleged victims have to be taken seriously and Mr. Assange has to answer the questions…” 

Watch the video:

 

By GUI ROCHAT AND PATRICE GREANVILLE

If for no other reason, the Maddow show was useful in exposing, once again,  the miserly, treacherous limits of mainstream liberalism.  

Judging from the above display, our enthusiastic cable television commentator, the maddening Ms Maddow has apparently branched now into public performances like her antagonist Mr. Beck, proselytizing however for the establishment flavor of the liberal cause. Praising our dear leader Obama who, following his conservative policies, has traded away his campaign promises of not enriching the rich even more in order to gain political advantages into two main propaganda issues. All this was discussed at the New York YMCA at 92nd street.

Cindy Sheehan, which we also carry on our sites.) Nevertheless our liberal heroine Ms Maddow rejoiced over this ‘great’ success of Mr. Obama as if he was our greatest emancipation hero. The army has been complaining that the majority of discharged gay soldiers were linguists who could help in the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan etc.

Ignored by Ms Maddow is the fact that soldiers are there to fight and kill (or to assist those who do), so now we can openly recognize that the LGBT population can not only be used as cannon fodder or criminal accomplices but also as additional cogs in the machine of the empire’s conquests. Though gay people have long been assimilated into most armies of the Western world, America can pride itself of following (some twenty to thirty years too late) the same policy that anyone who wants to serve its empire can do so. Lachai’im.

, and by an even better interview he did with Cenk Uygur on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show (12.22.10 — See https://www.greanvillepost.com/?p=10880)

After that Ms Maddow ruminated about the great advantages for world peace that the by now hopefully passed Start Treaty would bring to the US and Russia. One Republican senator stated openly that it would make little difference in the overwhelming military might of the US to destroy any country that would dare to stand up against the empire. The Start Treaty may be signed but nevertheless the government is spending many billions of dollars for new strategic nuclear warheads for artillery and for the ultimate weaponization of space. (See S. Lendman, https://www.greanvillepost.com/?p=11025)

As long as we listen to liberal talk, we are doomed because no real solutions are being proposed, only endorsement and endless adaptation to existing bad circumstances and the danger in that respect of such as Ms Maddow and Mr Moore cannot be underestimated. Their positions undermine any kind of possible resistance.



Assange Won Readers' Poll, But TIME Chooses Zuckerberg for Person of the Year

[print_link]

It’s certainly true that Assange–a top runner up along with the trapped Chilean miners and the Tea Party  makes the young Zuckerberg look like a docile choice in comparison.

Read more at Time Magazine.


Posted at December 15, 2010