FS & Praxis

[Jim Rovira]

Those are good observations.  I appreciate this conversation.  I think an
important thing to point out was that Michael Moore was allowed a microphone --
heck, won an award -- even though he'd warned people ahead of time about what he
was going to say.  Even if he hadn't, don't you think his speech was
rather...predictable?...given his political polemic over the last two years?
You really think no one knew what he was going to say?

The effect of his words?  New York DJs complained about him being "tacky."

New Yorker magazine ran a pretty interesting article on Chomsky just last week.

Alex Haley and Spike Lee collaborated on a movie about Malcolm X.   MLK is a
cultural icon.

There are parameters on free speech, but criticism of the system doesn't
determine these parameters.  Content doesn't determine these parameters.
Saleability determines the parameters, and some scandal sells.  Jokes about 9/11
are still considered "in bad taste," but don't worry...eventually we'll have
some distance and those will be circulated too.

Jim Rovira

bob scheetz wrote:

> eg, Michael Moore's lese majeste at the Academy Awards did real hurt to Power,
> ...no wise compensated, let alone
> strengthened, in the being able to boast its magnanimity of free speech.
> nor there's been no pac-man effect here? ...rather a deafening silence,  no?
> There certainly are very straitened "parameters of permissable discourse".
> Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, MLK, very likely Sen
> Frank Church, Stoughton Lynd, Ramsey Clark, Noam Chomsky,..., ...FBI has
> always been a political police, and Hoover,  nothing if not an american
> Beria.  Last year  Harvard prez, Laurence Summers, threatened to fire
> faculty if they continued organizing an effort to pressure Israel toward
> justice for the Palestinians.  And within last few weeks the hse minority
> whip (name escapes me, ... "mc" something) got canned from the leadership
> and will likely be targeted, for pointing out the obvious, the significant
> american jewish influence at the highest levels of US mid-east policy and
> the Iraq gambit.  Try doing nuanced analysis of OBL, ...or even Castro, or
> even still of Nazism, ...all forms (at least) of guaranteed professional
> auto de fe.  And on the periphery, as for eg El Salvador during the 80's
> Central American War, the CIA and Mossad and Ollie North, Eliot Abrahms, Jn
> Negroponte, GWH Bush, etc., it was flat out death-squad city.  so, nothing
> but bourgeois liberalism allowed, cujus regio ejus religio, political
> totalitarianism.
>      ...and then there's culture, the ubiquitous white-noise, crass and
> insipid juvenility of lowest common denominator commercial culture,
> ...radio, tv, papers, cinema, public landscape...the tyranny of the teenie
> market. and on and on and on, eh?
>
> nor are we in any meaningful sense, as a body politic, even "free to think",
> so overwhelming is the apparatus of indoctrination and thought control,
> ...the techniques of madison ave, ...have perfected a pop consciousness of
> abject superficiality and conformity, ...pavlovian regurgitation of the mass
> media party line, ...brokaw says it at 6 pm in the east and by 9 its gospel
> coast to coast.
>
> anyway, a monster polemic, Jim, ...and rife with potential for semantical
> speciousness, but i'd hold for the vast superiority of merkan
> totalitarianism over all comers.  USA, number 1!
>
> thanks,
> bob