CSotD: It can’t happen here, but it is
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I usually find rants about Big Government Conspiracies tiresome, paranoid and self-important. Last night, I was watching an excellent documentary about OWS on Current TV, and someone being interviewed linked the movement to the Arab Spring, declaring that she and her fellow protesters were putting their lives on the line.
No. You're not. Comparing OWS with what has been happening in North Africa and the Middle East insults the intelligence of your listeners and, more to the point, it insults the people who have risked their lives in those far more perilous movements.
But another person interviewed in the film pointed out that the media only concentrates on the dredlocked drummers and ignores the more conventional people who make up the bulk of the OWS crowd.
Now, that's not a conspiracy. It's simply the way media works, which is to capture the most interesting images, often at the expense of the Big Picture: As I've noted many times, the average Woodstock audience member looked like Potsie Weber, but you wouldn't know that from the coverage.
Distorting Woodstock, however, was relatively harmless. Distorting OWS is, by virtue of its impact on the conversation, a political act.
Interviewing and photographing the most extreme at the expense of accuracy can be innocent or it can be done on purpose but the bottom line is that the media doesn't always get it right, and, when that happens, those involved can become frustrated and vocal.
Which brings us to Tom the Dancing Bug and this devilishly, hilariously straightforward "Information Sheet."
Since the "War on Terror" began, I've been thinking about my own actions back in the late 70s and early 80s, when Ulster was burning and I was singing lead in an Irish ballad group in Colorado.
We weren't naive. We all knew that Noraid was an IRA front and that people who gave to Noraid were buying guns.
We also knew that Britain had their own version of Guantanamo in the H-Block section of the prison at Long Kesh, where suspected terrorists were held indefinitely without charges and subjected to torture. And that some of those "terrorists" were just young unemployed men who lived in the wrong neighborhoods and hung out with the wrong people.
And we knew that the tightly controlled press was not telling the story, not simply because we believed this or that but because some of the people in our following had come from Derry and Belfast recently, and others went home to visit and heard from family regularly.
We knew there was plenty of propaganda around, but we also knew that the mainstream press wasn't getting it right, either.
We didn't sing the most militant songs but we certainly sang plenty of nationalist songs, including some that protested internment and the continuing presence of British troops. And some people in our crowd sent money back to the Catholic ghettoes, to family or to support the work of people like Father Dennis Fall, who ministered to the prisoners at H-Block.
When Bobby Sands died, I was interviewed on a local radio talk show and by one of the two newspapers in town. I never advocated violence, and I said that I didn't advocate violence, but I did advocate finding a solution that did not mean going back to the Jim Crow-like situation that obtained in the Six Counties prior to the modern Troubles.
Thirty years ago, that was called "Free Speech."
But I watch what's happening now and I sympathize with anyone from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan or, really, any Muslim country, because what I was doing back then — simply explaining a point of view that differed from the shared storyline — could earn someone an orange jumpsuit today.
That's not self-importance and it's not paranoia. It's knowing that Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was sent to Syria by the US government to be tortured without any apparent cause other than his dual citizenship, and that a lawsuit over his rendition was blocked for reasons of national security.
I was a far greater "terrorist" in 1981 than Arar was 20 years later.
Last week, a bus with a high school ski team returning from a trip to Quebec was held up at the border for two hours by US Customs because one of the team members was an exchange student.
She had her passport and the requisite papers confirming her status, and the girl whose family she stays with is also a team member and was there. Of course, the coach could vouch for her. But they called both her host family and her own family in Denmark before they would release the bus.
Yes, Denmark. No racial profiling here. We're scared of everybody.
Maybe they were afraid she'd start drawing cartoons. You've heard about those Danes and their cartoons.
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