Reporting the Business of War

March 31, 2003

The way to play it on the air for Morning Shows right now is “What’s hot and what’s not?” Relate to the news as you have always done. That would lead humor to decrease in amount, but not in totality. Relate, but do not create. That means that you should not create a “funeral-like” atmosphere during an ongoing war.

Mike McVay
McVay Media

While most of the most poignant parts of the war are happening at its center, the most interesting parts are happening at its periphery. What does someone as intelligent as Colin Powell really think about the wisdom of this conflict (let alone the wisdom of the President and his other advisors)? I’m watching Donald Rumsfeld dodge his own bullets. And, just how are we citizens supposed to react to the information and images we are being given from our self-described “most trusted” news outlets? The rules of engagement on the home front have my mind working in overdrive and my fingers riveted to my keyboard.

Last week I ramp it up. Their message: anti-war is bad business. And, by extension, pro-war is good business.

McVay Media, a Cleveland-based consultant, has issued a “War Manual” for its clients. Among its list of recommendations it suggests “ASK CALLERS ‘HOW DO YOU FEEL?’ Not “What do you THINK?” In addition: “Air the National Anthem at a specified time each day as long as the USA is at war. Get the following production pieces in the studio NOW: …Patriotic music that makes you cry, salute, get cold chills. Go for the emotion.” It is advising its talk show stations to “make sure your hosts aren’t ‘over the top.’ Polarizing discussions are shaky ground. This is not the time to take cheap shots to get reaction…not when our young men and women are ‘in harm’s way.’”

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A Prayer for Empire

March 27, 2003

Abe Golam
Director of the Office of Political and Economic Insecurity
US Department of Art & Technology

A Prayer for Empire (excerpt)

Our Father Utopia and Our Forever Deceased God,

We praise You for Your goodness to our nation, giving us the appearance of Empire. With Empire we can turn sugar water into profits and software into gross national product. With Empire, we can turn soft core beauty porn into commercial advertisements and yet still claim the moral high ground for our economic production.

With Empire, we can infiltrate the bowels of the Everyman and insert a laxative of pseudo-leisure so that we may play the stock market and eat our mad cows with drooling rapture.

With Empire we can rid the world of nations and institutionalize a social bureaucracy of networked alliances determined to rid the world of borders.

Finally, with Empire, we can transmit our radioactive waves into the atmosphere of whatever geopolitical location that dares threaten the economic prosperity of our People as it attempts to annihilate whatever social difference there may be among us.

We need not practice what we preach. We need only preach what we want the television to transmit to our robotic brethren. For it is our nation of robot worshippers that reigns supreme.

Our operating system is sanctioned by the One God of Code,

YOUR one code of greed and material lust, salivating Lord. Amen.

Secretary Rallies Artists

10:42 A.M. EST
Washington, DC

Randall M. Packer
Secretary, US Department of Art & Technology

THE SECRETARY: Thank you, all. (Applause.) Thank you, all, very much.

I am really proud to be here with the good men and women of the USA Exquisite Corpse, the artist’s call to service. (Applause.)

We’re also proud to be here today with our artist friends who have joined Operation Artistic Freedom. (Applause.) Over the last week the world has witnessed the skill and honor and resolve of the cultural community engaged in passionate dialogue and acts of artistic mediation. We have seen the character of a new generation of artists. Millions of Americans are proud of our artists, and so am I. I am honored to be the Secretary-in-Chief. (Applause.)

Every artist in our coalition of the willing understands the terrible threat we face from our government-in-action. Every artist here refuses to live in a future of fear, at the mercy of politicians and the corporate oilgarchy. And every artist here today shares the same resolve: the only valid experimental approach is one based on the uncompromising critique of existing conditions and their conscious intervention.

Our artists are making good progress; yet the war on war is far from over. We cannot predict the final day, but I can assure you, and I assure the long-suffering people of America, there will be a day of reckoning for the President, who has revealed the principles of arrogance, abuse of power, personal gain and a frightening lack of charisma, through his contempt for the opinion of the world.

Day by day, George W. Bush is losing his grip on reality; out of fear of the unknown, pain, and death - the Gods, surfacing from the immemorial depths of time and space - he has used his lethal weapons to bring down fire from the heavens, death and destruction that devours us all.

In the early stages of this war, the world is getting a clearer view of a terrible and deep anxiety resulting from self-created and deadly dangers that are growing beyond our control.

Our enemy in this war on war is the existential darkness that has possessed our government, that grips its soul. (Applause.)Ý

The goal of artistic freedom unites our coalition. And this goal comes from the deepest convictions of the avant-garde. The artistic freedom we defend is the right of every artist and the future of our nation.

The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is the artist’s gift to humanity.

That’s what we do. That’s our job.

Thank you.

(Applause.).

Operation American Freedom and The Call to Empire

In his speech on March 21, Gunter Grass invokes Albert Camus and the myth of Sisyphus. The patient and enduring forces of culture and civilization push the boulder up the mountain. Slowly, slowly. Only to have it roll down again. Yet we are obliged to start again, knowing that is our task and duty—as citizens, as artists, as humans.

The US, historically evoked as the City on the Hill, the land where life can dare to be different, unmarked by the recurrent and shrill calls to empire that have darkened most of human history, is led by a government that wants us—the American people—to give up this brighter side of our heritage, patiently constructed over the decades, and return instead to the 19th-century notions that plagued us. “Westward the Course of Empire” is the title of Emanuel Leutze’s huge painting hanging prominently in a stairwell in the US Capitol. Now, it seems, it’s “Middle-Eastward.” Already in 1848, as the Congress prepared to vote on California’s petition for statehood, W. H. Seward spoke dramatically: “The unity of our empire hangs on the decision of this day.” You can read these words today on a monument in downtown San Francisco.

We have tried to reject military empire in the past. We thought perhaps we were over the experiments with colonies following the Spanish-American War. Our energies turned instead to economic instead of military domination—with a different set of issues.

Yet, last week in San Francisco, people were staring at Seward’s words on the monument and defacing them. They were shocked by these words. They were becoming conscious of what is possibly on the horizon after we “do” Iraq. With the beginnings of that consciousness, we stand together and start pushing the boulder back up the hill. The solidarity of humankind hangs on the decisions of these days.

On Being an American in America

March 26, 2003

The authority of a king is physical and controls the actions of men without subduing their will. But the majority possesses a power that is physical and moral at the same time, which acts upon the will as much as upon the actions and represses not only all contest, but all controversy.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America

Michael Moore held nothing back when he took his opportunity to “thank the Academy” for his Oscar Sunday night. Neither did the audience when it tried to boo him off the stage for candidly stating his sentiments about America’s recent foreign policy. While Adrien Brody was more elegant and Susan Sarandon was elegantly minimalist, each found a way to speak up about the Iraqi War.

Whether you agree or disagree with their beliefs or methods each, of course, has the right to state his or her opinion. But I’ve become increasingly concerned about the less-than-subtle pressure and psychology behind voicing a minority viewpoint during these dark and intense times. Once again the definition of patriotism is up for grabs. Some would say the freedom to express unpopular beliefs is what makes this country great while others question the loyalty of those who do.

Celebrities, familiar with the public stage, often have little problem expressing difficult points of view. Moore knew what he was doing and was willing to take the heat for what he said. But what about people like you and me? What about children, smart children who think about the issues and come to similar conclusions? What message are we sending to them about our notions of freedom of speech when the debate is reduced to black or white and loyal or unpatriotic sides?

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