Godzilla Haiku : no 7
“Loving Godzilla 17 syllables at a time.” By SamuraiFrog
 | Joseph Stack had barely finished flying his airplane into a Texas office building when the battle over his legacy began. Bloggers on the left asked why people — especially people on the right — weren’t calling him a terrorist. “If this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes,” wrote Matthew Yglesias, then right wingers would be “demanding that anyone who refused to label the attack ‘terrorism’ be put up on treason charges.” Bloggers on the right, such as Conn Carroll, asked why people — especially people on the left — were acting as if Stack was a “conservative Tea Party nut” when the anti-tax animus that led him to point his plane at I.R.S. offices was only one part of an eclectic ideology. These are arguments worth having, for two reasons. |
About Robert Wright :
“Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writes every Wednesday about culture, politics and world affairs. He is editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv and The Progressive Realist. He is the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and, most recently, The New York Times best-seller The Evolution of God. He has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Time, Slate, and many other magazines and has taught philosophy at Princeton and religion at the University of Pennsylvania.” (more)
The Big Picture - Boston.com: “Earthquake in Chile” Feb. 27th, 2010. Phptp by Marco Fredes for Reuters
“At 3:34 am local time, today, February 27th, a devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. According to Chilean President-elect Sebastian Pinera, at least 120 people are known to have been killed so far. The earthquake also triggered a Tsunami which is right now propagating across the Pacific Ocean, due to arrive in Hawaii in hours (around 11:00 am local time). The severity of the Tsunami is still not known, but alerts are being issued across the Pacific.” (more)
“A man in Ohio grew so angry at his bank for refusing to work with him to keep his home that he bulldozed it. He told WLWT News, “As far as what the bank is going to get, I plan on giving them back what was on this hill exactly (as) it was. I brought it out of the ground and I plan on putting it back in the ground.” (more)
On YouTube, someone left the following comment:
“I guess he couldn’t fly his house into the IRS office”
That’s the same model of plane as the one Andrew Joseph Stack III crashed in a IRS building last Thursday.
“Firefighters work on putting out a fire at a seven-story building after a small private plane crashed into a building that houses the Internal Revenue Service in Austin, Texas on Thursday Feb. 18, 2010.” (more)
“The 2010 Austin plane crash occurred on February 18, 2010, when Andrew Joseph Stack III, flying his Piper Cherokee PA-28-236 (Aircraft registration: N2889D) plane, crashed into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas, United States. Two people were killed (including the pilot), and thirteen injured. An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) field office is located in the four-story office building along with other state and federal government agencies. Prior to the crash, Stack had posted a manifesto dated February 18, 2010 to his business website.” (wikipedia)
Wikimedia Commons: Bomb in Wall Street, 1920
“The Wall Street bombing occurred at 12:01 p.m. on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of New York City. The blast killed 38 and seriously injured 143. It was more deadly than the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 and remained the deadliest bomb attack on U.S. soil until the Bath School bombings in Bath Township, Michigan seven years later.
At noon, a wagon passed by lunchtime crowds on Wall Street in New York City and stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District’s busiest corner. Inside, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of heavy, cast-iron sash weights exploded in a timer-set detonation, sending the slugs tearing through the air. The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments. The 38 victims, most of whom died within moments of the blast, were mostly young and worked as messengers, stenographers, clerks and brokers. It caused over $2 million in property damage and wrecked most of the interior spaces of the Morgan building.” (wikipedia)
| Perhaps a thorough investigation will reveal the “real” reasons for the murders. Perhaps Amy Bishop is mentally ill, or perhaps she is, quite simply, evil. |
David French starts by arguing against what he believes to be an overstatement published in a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website:
“Academic life as a “petri dish for madness”? We may have a winner for overstatement of the year. At this point, we don’t even know if Amy Bishop was mentally ill. Nor do we know if academic life had anything to do with her killing spree.”
On one hand, French is right : to suggest that academic life alone can explain Bishop’s behavior is to give way to much importance over this single factor while ignoring others. Though it’s true there has been at least one other similar incident (Valery Fabrikant) one needs to take into account multiple factors when trying to understand Bishop’s behavior (she killed here brother in 1986, was charged with assault on another woman in 2002, etc.)
On the other hand, while French condemns what he sees as the “overstatement of the year”, he goes on suggesting that Bishop is perhaps quite simply evil… Looks like a self-contradictory argument.
More importantly, it’s emblematic of what Dana L. Cloud calls a “therapeutic discourse” that is the “dislocation of social problems into a private, familial or psychological frame”. “Such discourse”, adds Cloud “emphasizes individual responsability for and the necessity of private rather than societal response to social problems.” (“Deranged Loners and Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973–2001” by Kristen E. Hoerl, Dana L. Cloud & Sharon E. Jarvis, Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 2, no 1, p. 84, March 2009).
Dana L. Cloud’s book Control and Consolation in American Politics and Culture: Rhetorics of Therapy (London, Thousand Oaks: Sage Press, 1998) is available online free of charge.
English edition (2009)
Gleen Beck on FOX News
Original French edition (2007)
Full English translation available online free of charge. Amazon link. Learn more about it on Wikipedia. Official website of The Invisible Committee
As of today, this book is no17 in the Amazon.com Books Bestsellers list. Explanation ? Glenn Beck hates it (and asked its viewer to read it) :
“It’s undoubtedly the last thing he wanted to happen, but when Fox News’s vocal right-wing presenter Glenn Beck described French anarchist revolution manual The Coming Insurrection as “quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read” he sent it soaring to the top of the bestseller charts.” (Guardian.co.uk)
The Guardian got it wrong on one point : Glenn Beck did ask its viewer to read the book. Here’s what happenned to the book :
“At the time he mentioned the book (5:13pmET on February 10), the edition of the book Beck held up was ranked #432 at Amazon and #20,609 at BN. 24 hours later, the book had moved up to #7 at Amazon and #14 at BN.” (more)
It happens last week, on Feb. 10 (watch it on YouTube @ 3’44”), but Glenn started to talk about this book back in July 2009.
Beck actually use the book as an example illustrating the 20th “global debt time bombs that could go off and change the world” listed by Paul B. Farrell. Here’s the full quotation from the show aired on Feb. 10, 2010:
“20. The Coming Populous Rebellion Bombs: This one I love because those in the media are gonna tell you it’s the Tea Parties. Well let me show you what it really is. It’s Van Jones: […] A 9/11 Truther, radical communist who set up organizations to defend cop killers. He was in the White House and now is going out on a speaking tour with a senator from New York. […] Let me show you what it looks like — the finished product — I told you last summer, to read this book: “The Coming Insurrection” by Invisible Committee. This is quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read. It’s about to play out in the streets of Greece. It’s been played out in France. What’s the story? […] People who are actual communists have been masquerading as Democratic socialists: We’re not Marxists, we’re just like you. They fell into bed with their politicians […] and they were backed, and according to the book […] there was an unspoken understand: Bring the socialist utopia. This is their manifest. Message is: Everyone in government has been lying to you. That’s why they call for an insurrection. This is evil stuff. These are the things that will free the worker.” (the transcript on fox news webiste is inaccurate)
It shouldn’t come as a suprise for those familiar with Tiqqun and the Tarnac affair. One could safely predict that the book will fall off the English bestsellers list in a few weeks. We should just remember that the social phenomenon this book takes (or is trying to take) into account is in no way limited to the sales of the book itself.
Strange tales of silent destruction and partial fragmentation in Grasso’s work. Here’s what Ed Schad (curator and independant writer working over at ArtSlant) had to say about it:
“Ben Grasso, like many contemporary painters, takes decay as his subject matter, but unlike those painters (often eager to watch the world burn), Grasso seems to follow the enthusiasm of his brushstrokes and the buoyancy of his color into realms laced with whimsy and imagination. His houses are in shreds and crumbling, you see a white flag of surrender, he dashes off a couple of shacks in the jungle, but Grasso doesn’t believe that these ruins denote the end of things — flickers of light shimmer and whirls of white burst into the air.” (read more)
