kw: book reviews, nonfiction, journalism
It has been said in several ways; in the instance I know, a good friend was advised, "A real journalist must be prepared to spend time in jail." Baronet Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." The logical conclusion is that all those in power are corrupt. It is the experience of any who have in any way embarrassed a powerful person that this is totally true. Of course I understand that being opposed or jailed by officialdom is no proof that you are right. But a lifetime spent as a "journalist" while never ruffling the feathers of the powerful is a certain proof of being, as O'Keefe names such people, an "anti-journalist".
Now, suppose you were to make it your business to be a modern Diogenes (he of the lantern, looking for "an honest man" — one who could gaze without flinching). You shed the light of day upon what you find. Maybe you submit your videos, uncut, to YouTube. What will be the result?
Just ask James O'Keefe, founder of Project Veritas. He has a few years of this under his belt, as he describes in Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy. Since he began practice as a citizen journalist (that is, self-funded), he has spent about half the time under house arrest, and odd bits of time jailed here or there.
From the beginning, O'Keefe and his allies have carried out their investigations without breaking any laws, and recording every bit, and posting every bit, which demonstrates that. For example, while testing the ease of committing voter fraud in several states, none of them ever actually took in hand a ballot offered in response to a carefully worded request in the name of a dead person or of a non-citizen who was registered to vote. In most cases, the operative would say, "Wait while I go back to my car for my passport" or "...driver license" or whatever. They were always (always!) assured, "You don't need that. We take your word." This was true even when one of them approached a poll worker in D.C. and asked, "You got a ballot for Eric Holder?" Offered the ballot, he demurred, and left. Amazingly, Holder (you know, the U.S. Attorney General) later said no law had been broken. That punctured the sails of numerous pompous officials who wanted the operative, and O'Keefe, and anyone else they could get their hands on, "prosecuted to the full extent of the law." That is what such folks say when they have been blindsided.
The breakthrough of the title is described in detail in the closing chapters of the book. Project Veritas folks shined the light of truth on the mainstream media, and found them wanting, found them as corrupt as the governmental officials they had been steadfastly refusing to investigate, even as they persistently hounded O'Keefe and his allies, endlessly recounting crimes that had not actually been committed.
You have to read it to believe it.
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Monday, February 17, 2014
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Possibly the luckiest man still alive
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, war, journalism
It is amazing that I can read two books, very similar in size, but I finish one in two days and the other takes a week or more. I usually get through fiction faster than nonfiction, but not always. The current two-day marvel is In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars by Kevin Sites. The book comes with a 90-minute DVD that covers about half the wars, and the videography and editing make it even more compelling. I managed to survive watching it while eating lunch; not a practice I recommend...
A summary of the wars, not in the order presented:
With the exception of a very few of the very rich, war makes all into paupers. It may seem that the fighters, at least on the stronger side, are able to live relatively well, but they suffer a relentlessly growing poverty of spirit. Nobody really wins a war.
The book is full of personal stories. A dying old man in Iraq whom the author could have at least comforted a little, but did not. He accuses himself for that, and is much comforted when he is able to render help to another, though he must break the journalist's code of noninvolvement to do so. As the segment in the DVD makes clear, all the journalists got involved that time, carrying people out of the rubble on doors made into stretchers. A child bride in Afghanistan, who suffered more tortures in six years with her "future father-in-law" than nearly any abused prisoner of war. This woman or that one, a victim of "rape as a weapon of war". Terrorism isn't just bombings.
In fact, since the old rules of gentlemanly engagement (which were honored mostly in the breach anyway) were swept aside in favor of "total war" just over ninety years ago, every war has been carried out primarily by terrorist methods. The "shock and awe" campaign that began the most recent Iraq war was intended to terrorize. I have read that the 21st Century American "battlespace" is a defined zone in which no opposing force can survive more than a few minutes.
Yes, indeed, we're getting better at war. At least during the two Great Wars of the 20th Century, slightly more than half the total casualties were military forces, for most countries involved (no, I'm not forgetting the Holocaust, and there were actually three of those). These days, a civilian population needs to count itself lucky to "only" have ten to one hundred civilians killed per military casualty.
Kevin Sites must count himself very fortunate to be among the living. To spend ten to twenty days in each of the war zones mentioned above, and survive, is so stunningly against the odds, I'd have to say God had something to do with it. This book is full of stories that need to be told. I am thankful that the Kevin Sites blog and Hot Zone web site are presenting them to anyone with an internet connection.
It is amazing that I can read two books, very similar in size, but I finish one in two days and the other takes a week or more. I usually get through fiction faster than nonfiction, but not always. The current two-day marvel is In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars by Kevin Sites. The book comes with a 90-minute DVD that covers about half the wars, and the videography and editing make it even more compelling. I managed to survive watching it while eating lunch; not a practice I recommend...
A summary of the wars, not in the order presented:
- Hot shooting wars ongoing [9]: Afghanistan, Colombia (50+ years, continuing), Iraq (& West), Kashmir, Israel (& Palestinians + allies), Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda
- Unstable but not currently active [1]: Haiti
- Cease-Fire or under negotiation [5]: Congo, Lebanon (Hezbollah & Israel), Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka
- Conflicts of the somewhat recent past [3]: Cambodia, Lebanon (& Syria), Vietnam (& West)
- Potential [2]: Iran (& West), Syria (& West)
With the exception of a very few of the very rich, war makes all into paupers. It may seem that the fighters, at least on the stronger side, are able to live relatively well, but they suffer a relentlessly growing poverty of spirit. Nobody really wins a war.
The book is full of personal stories. A dying old man in Iraq whom the author could have at least comforted a little, but did not. He accuses himself for that, and is much comforted when he is able to render help to another, though he must break the journalist's code of noninvolvement to do so. As the segment in the DVD makes clear, all the journalists got involved that time, carrying people out of the rubble on doors made into stretchers. A child bride in Afghanistan, who suffered more tortures in six years with her "future father-in-law" than nearly any abused prisoner of war. This woman or that one, a victim of "rape as a weapon of war". Terrorism isn't just bombings.
In fact, since the old rules of gentlemanly engagement (which were honored mostly in the breach anyway) were swept aside in favor of "total war" just over ninety years ago, every war has been carried out primarily by terrorist methods. The "shock and awe" campaign that began the most recent Iraq war was intended to terrorize. I have read that the 21st Century American "battlespace" is a defined zone in which no opposing force can survive more than a few minutes.
Yes, indeed, we're getting better at war. At least during the two Great Wars of the 20th Century, slightly more than half the total casualties were military forces, for most countries involved (no, I'm not forgetting the Holocaust, and there were actually three of those). These days, a civilian population needs to count itself lucky to "only" have ten to one hundred civilians killed per military casualty.
Kevin Sites must count himself very fortunate to be among the living. To spend ten to twenty days in each of the war zones mentioned above, and survive, is so stunningly against the odds, I'd have to say God had something to do with it. This book is full of stories that need to be told. I am thankful that the Kevin Sites blog and Hot Zone web site are presenting them to anyone with an internet connection.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Equal-opportunity hater on the loose!
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, political campaigns, journalism
The book is Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season by Matt Taibbi. I put a couple key words up top, but this one defies categorization.
Is this guy just a misogynist, or is he simply more extreme than the average burned-out citizen in his disdain for "politics as usual", with a large dollop of extra venom for President Bush? What do you call a journalist who alternates serious attempts at honestly seeking a real story, with blowing his mind on magic mushrooms, LSD, and cocaine? I don't know, either.
He can be very funny; his sidebar spoofs—interviewing a somewhat spacey Osama; proposing that America simply confer citizenship on the whole planet; his "Wimblehack!" competition for worst journalist of 2004—are hilarious and eloquent.
He spends much more ink on his rage...at everyone and everything having to do with the process of selecting candidates and electing them. He has a heck of a mind between his ears, whenever he can lay of the hallucinogens long enough to let it work.
After reading a chapter or two I could have set this one down without comment. But as Churchill observed, "Even a fool is right sometimes." I slogged on, and I am not displeased. I'll bypass detailed analysis (it'd be pretty poor, anyway...), and jump to the chase.
The book is Taibbi's memoir of coverage of the 2003-4 Presidential primaries and nationwide election for at least three progressive papers. Print may be a hotter medium than TV, but he knows how the media work: "You can get all kinds of things on television, but on balance, pretty much all content has to be rounded enough at the edges, unthreatening enough to the corporations ruling the airwaves, to serve competently in its only important role: a medium to sell advertising." [p141] So he knew what he was in for setting out.
He typically avoided the costly hotels most journalists indulged in, and escaped many of the staged "events", attempting to locate more peripheral citizens. They weren't hard to find: some semi-blighted neighborhood or near-ghetto was dependably within five blocks of wherever the candidate of the day was speaking, or throwing a football, or whatever.
He found in Dennis Kucinich the only thoughtful candidate, capable and willing to speak of issues. Naturally, he watched with growing horror as the Democrats dumped their candidates, almost from the top down in terms of qualification and quality, leaving John Kerry to lose to Bush. He spent a number of weeks, using an assumed name, working at a Republican campaign headquarters in Florida. Didn't help his frame of mind...
Finally, he ran his Wimblehack! competition, which ended almost as disastrously (from his viewpoint) as the election. Finally, he concluded, "...America's political problems are bigger than Bush. The real problem in American politics is the rule of calculation and money over principle..." [p193]
His 2004 election conclusion: "The Republicans won last week—let's face it—because they stand for something that voters can understand. A large number of them stand for being deranged lunatics who believe that the Bible was the last book ever written, and for being intellectual cowards who hide from the terrifying complexities of modern society by placing all of their beliefs in infantile concepts like faith, force, and patriotism.
"Our handicap, to which they are immune, is to understand that modern society is a machine that can operate seamlessly according to its own peculiar twisted morality without obviously interfering with the advance of those concepts that they consider important. ...
"...They're fighting for a simple path to heaven, while the rest of us are fighting for something a little less exciting: the desire to have a more rational and inoffensive political atmosphere within which to wrestle with the underlying problems of existential despair in a confusing secular world whose only offered paradises are affluence, sexual freedom, and consumer choice." [p323]
In other words, the great divide in contemporary America is religious in nature. So he writes, "The country is lonely and self-possessed, ... there seems to be no solution on the horizon that anyone is offering to bring us more together, to give us the things we really need: love and acceptance and community." [p324]
Here I see, more clearly than with any other secular writer, the churchless longing for a church! No other kind of human society offers love, acceptance, and community.
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