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Today's
Stories
June 19 / 20, 2004
Diane
Christian
Morality and Death: a Meditation on
Bush and Blake
Walter
A. Davis
Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib
Josh Frank
How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother Nature
Col. Dan
Smith
Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis in Sudan
Brian
Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses
Bruce
Anderson
Frozen Gringos
June 18,
2004
Chris
Floyd
Blood Victory
Dave Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player &
Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American Politics
Gary
Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
June
14, 2004
John
Stanton / Wayne Madsen
Torture, Inc: Oliver North Joins
the Party
Kathy
Kelly
Requiems: What Happens When Compassion Dies?
Bruce
Jackson
Bush Gets Testy About Torture
Lee
Sustar
Strikers Defy Visteon's Company Thugs
Kurt
Nimmo
The Desperate Censors: the Republican Plot to Kill Farhenheit
9/11
Jim
Davis
Hard Right Nativism
Eliot
Katz
Death and War
Uri
Avnery
The Nightmare Comes True
Website
of the Day
Instruments of Statecraft
June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
Team
CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary
Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe
Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt
Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg
Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st
Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
| June
19 / 20, 2004
Frozen Gringos
The Day
After Tomorrow: Don't Go There
By
BRUCE ANDERSON
The
movie "The Day After Tomorrow" is the single most moronic
film I've seen since "Bill and Coo," an epic I was dragged
to as a child, circa 1950. Bill and Coo were talking parakeets, The
Day After Tomorrow is talking cretins.
The
subject is global warming, kind of, which results in an overnight quick
freeze of the northern hemisphere. As New York City is hit by serial
tsunamis which overnight turn millions of people to multi-cultural ice
cubes (all of it reported by the Fox Network whose logo appears constantly
on screen in all kinds of contexts because Rupert Murdoch owns the Fox
Network AND the movie) a cast of imbeciles sets out to save us from
ourselves. But it's too late. The lands of the white man are now subject
to such severe weather they are rendered uninhabitable. Not that there
are many whiteys left to inhabit them. If the sudden freezes don't get
them, the high tides and the tornadoes will. (It occurred to me that
The Day After Tomorrow will undoubtedly be very popular in the Arab
countries.)
The
sole opportunity for something interesting to happen in the movie occurs
near the end when our president freezes to death trying to get out of
popsicle-ized DC and his successor, made up to resemble Dick Cheney,
orders Americans to haul ass south for the border. Now if Anderson Valley
Advertiser or CounterPunch readers had made the film, our fellow citizens,
upon reaching San Ysidro, would have been turned back by the Mexican
Army. "Tough tamales, gringos. You bastards think you're going
to get into the warm weather after what you've done to us all these
years?" But in this thing, the Mexicans are happy as hell to take
on a two hundred and fifty million of US as President Cheney advises
Americans to hit the road for Mexico and points south for "what
we used to call the Third World."
Nice
bit of straight-up racism in that one, but it's read off without so
much as a hint of irony. What we used to call the Third World! The gringos
have arrived so you folks just got promoted to the First World! If you're
thinking of paying your way into seen "The Day After Tomorrow,"
you might want to think again.
Here's
the story line: Dennis Quaid and a Scotsman are the only two scientists
in the world who understand why LA is suddenly besieged by serial tornadoes.
Nobody will listen to the only two guys who know the deep freeze is
next. Quaid's son and the kid's love interest, both of whom are beyond
vapid, are first stranded by tidal waves sweeping clean over the Big
Apple and, when the high tides freeze over in 15 minutes, sonny boy
and sweet thing hole up in the New York Public Library with exactly
one black street person, the street guy's dog, and a bunch of generically
presentable white people. (More racism, but who's counting at this point?)
When the kid gets real cold, sweetie pie saves him from hypothermia
via -- you guessed it! -- a prolonged round of rubbsies, solemnly explaining
that as a high school honor student she'd learned in her advanced placement
physiology class that a freezing man can quickly be thawed out if a
19-year-old girl with large breasts and bee stung lips dry humps him
in front of a roaring fire.
Everyone
outside the library had frozen to death early on, and not for lack of
nymphets either. It was real cold, colder than it had ever been anywhere
on earth, even way the hell up north at Santa's workshop. The people
who'd frozen to death outside had been too damn dumb to retreat to the
top floor of the library when the water rose above their arm pits, so
Darwin got 'em.
When
the big waves froze and every living thing died except a pack of wolves,
Quaid's kid and a couple of his underwear ad buddies fight them off,
naturally, while botox lips and the nice white people inside the library
feed their life-saving fire in the library's huge, decorative fire place
with rare books. The black street guy and his dog, incidentally, never
get close to the fire; they stand watch at the door, reporting on the
latest catastrophe outside, like when an ocean liner becomes part of
an iceberg on the front steps. A skinny, effete guy with big glasses
-- guess who he is -- gives a speech about how he'll freeze to death
before he tosses the Gutenberg Bible into the fire. Who else besides
skinny, effete guys with glasses read books or care what happens to
them? Fat beatniks, that's who, but no complications, no ironies were
allowed into this filmic extravaganza.
No
sirree. Anyhoo, because the librarian is a librarian, he's responsible
for Western Civ's key artifacts, and he draws the line at the Gutenberg.
(Actually, THIS movie is a lot more representative of Western Civ's
net accomplishment than the printing press, but there's probably some
dissent on the question, the issue being relative value in a value-free
epoch.) Quaid sets out on foot in sub-Arctic conditions to check on
his son. Dad says he wants to forgive the lad for flunking a high school
math test. Most parents, of course, would settle for their kids not
flunking drug and drunk driving tests, but we're talking scholars here,
and scholars and other securely upper-middle-class people are not only
very nice people, so are their kids.
"I've
walked farther than this in the snow," Quaid says, setting out
from the DC 'burbs for a snow shoes and family values hike to Manhattan.
Mrs. Quaid is a doctor, occasionally assisted by an Asian woman with
timely references to Native American prophecies. My fellow movie goers
I am here to tell you that no major ethnic group goes unrepresented!
Mrs. Quaid, MD, looks very, very concerned and very, very compassionate.
I could tell because her eyes got bigger and wetter the colder it got
and the longer she was left behind in a frigid hospital ward with an
eight-year-old leukemia patient while everyone else got into their LL
Beans and highballed it for Ensenada and Sao Paolo. Mrs. Q. and the
bald kid are presented for no other reason than to demonstrate that
the Quaids are nice people, and Mrs. Q is double nice. The emphasis
throughout was The Tragic Effect On Nice White People Caught Up In A
Cataclysmic Event. I felt like laughing out loud a whole lot of times,
especially when LA was wiped out, but I was in a mall theater in Springfield,
Oregon, surrounded by solemn viewers who seemed to think they were watching
a documentary. Audible laughter while the end of the world was under
consideration might have been severely misunderstood.
The
only good thing about the movie was an on-screen blurb at the end that
said our fatso-watso ways of living were killing the planet, a statement
of the obvious to everyone in the world except George Bush. But I was
so upset by "The Day After Tomorrow," as apocalyptic a viewing
experience as I've ever had, that I walked briskly from the theater,
pushed my way through the double-wide fatso-watsos thronging the mall,
and strode directly to a shop specializing in negative food value items
where I ordered myself a double-bubble mayonnaised banana split.
Bruce
Anderson
is the publisher of the Anderson Valley
Advertiser, America's best weekly newspaper.
Weekend Edition June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto and Runnymede
Team CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
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