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CounterPunch
February
26, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
From
Nightclubs to Baghdad; Jesse Jackson Talks Out of ... (You Guessed
It); The Son House Rip-Off; Should We be Priggish About Booze?
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Crowds and fire; darkness and panic: they are
the currency of these weird times as Pentagon divulges its plan
to "shock and awe" the people of Baghdad with a 48-hour
barrage of missiles. Two weekends ago we had the unity of vast
crowds asserting life; and then, a few days later, we saw the
crowd in the guise of panic-stricken throngs, in Chicago and
Rhode Island, crushing each other to death and being burned.
At the start of the 1960s, another high
decade for crowds, fire and war Elias Canetti published his eerie,
eccentric book, Crowds
and Power. It has a brilliant opening passage how a man feels
amid the panic of a burning theater: "The people he pushes
away are like burning objects to him Fire, as a symbol for the
crowd, has entered the whole economy of man's feelings and become
an immutable part of it. That emphatic trampling on people, so
often observed in panics and apparently so senseless, is nothing
but the stamping out of fire."
Amid newscasts switching between newscasts
from Rhode Island of the charred club and Bush calling on Saddam
to lay down his arms, pending attack, can any decently sensitive
person not imagine Baghdad or Basra once the missiles start to
fall, and anticipate dreadful episodes like the careful targeting
of the al mariya shelter. because as one Pentagon man told the
press, they wanted to alert Saddam's elite that their wives and
children weren't safe.
Actually, the elites had left Baghdad
and the poor women and children were in the shelter when the
US missile penetrated the reinforced concrete roof and killed
them.
This brings us to the consoling topic
of luck: the mother who missed her chance to get to the shelter;
the fellow who
left the nightclub five minutes earlier. At some level we pay
hopeful respect to the whims of providence.
But in the bigger picture accidents turn
into certainties. Back in 1998 Deborah and Roderick Wallace published
A Plague on Your Houses, (Verso) a carefully researched book
about how, in the 1970s era of "planned shrinkage",
social engineers, some of them mustered in the Rand Corporation
Fire Project, supervised the deliberate degradation of fire control
resources, in areas the engineers of shrinkage had slated for
clearance.
About ten per cent of New York's fire
companies were eliminated, manpower cut back, emergency response
systems whittled down. After the inevitable fire epidemic, there
was an equally inevitable epidemic of housing abandonment by
landlords. Poor neighborhoods collapsed. When the dust settled,
the Wallaces calculate that about two million poor people had
been uprooted.
Those strategists of urban destruction
were never rushed into the pillory, the way Kyles or Rowe were.
True, they were exposed by the Wallaces, but that was many years
later.
Maybe, many years later, there'll be
a definitive account of why the Twin Towers fell as rapidly as
they did. As things stand, one can find accounts that it was
design incompetence and cost cutting, married to the desire to
maximize rentable space. Go to the scieneering.com website and
you'll find a compelling account of the extreme vulnerability
of the panels and square tubes.
Here's how the Science Engineering essay
concludes: "Weak floor-to-wall connections and missing connections
between segments of the exterior wall columns contributed significantly
to the collapse of the World Trade Towers. If these defects were
not present, the collapse of the towers might have been prevented
or delayed. However, the aircraft would still have penetrated
into the core, and the ensuing fire would have trapped the occupants
above the crash zone."
In other words, the odds were bad from
the very start.
There are some sure things in the gamble
called Life. Among them the following:
Unless they're so down on their luck
that the barman is playing solitaire, nightclubs are by definition
unsafe. You want to play by the odds, stay home and read Tolstoy.
In the event of panic or fire your chances
are going to be less than 50/50. Drunken revelers don't tend
to stand at attention singing Nearer My God to Thee, while the
women proceed at an orderly pace to the Exits.
There are other certainties: that the
club's promoters will have secured their liquor license, immunity
from complaints by the neighbors etc, by dint of bribery and
political clout. Duane Kyles, owner of E2, the Chicago club where
21 died last week, had the Jackson family, Jesse and Jesse Jr,
going to bat for him.
It was a busy week for Reverend, since he also assigned himself
the task of comforting the survivors and the bereaved. Jesse's
shuttle was too much for one Chicago city council member, Madeline
Haithcock, who called him a hypocrite: "He's with the victims
one minute holding prayer vigils ... and with his friends the
next. That's him. That's the role he plays. He likes to get in
the papers."
True. All politicians do. Back in the
fall of 1991, there was a fire in the Imperial chicken processing
plant in Hamlet, North Carolina that killed 25 workers, mostly
women on minimum wage.
Jackson rushed to Hamlet, bible in hand.
This being North Carolina and not the South Loop of Chicago,
there was no likelihood of Imperial being owned by a Brother.
There was an authentic villain in the form of plant owner Emmett
Rowe who had suspected the workers of stealing chicken and locked
or blocked doors. Rowe got sentenced to 19 years, 11 months,
but was let out after serving four.
Son House,
Alan Lomax and Who Exactly Owns What In the Library of Congress?
This just in from the great
blues photographer and producer
Dick Waterman, Oxford, Mississippi, who took in blues great
Son
House and so many other pioneers of the Delta Blues.
I had a call from Son House's daughter
this morning. I usually only hear from her after she has received
the semiannual check that she gets for Mister House's royalties.
The checks are not large but they come steadily (since I placed
his catalog with Bug Music) and the money is always needed.
She called because she and her husband
were in a bookstore and had noticed two CDs by Mister House
that they had never seen before. The first was "Son House"
Revisited" on Fuel 2000. I explained that two bootlegs that
we had previously discussed ("Oberlin College"
and "The Gaslite, 1965") were now reissued legally
by Fuel 2000 and that both artist and writer's royalties were
going to be paid on that. Then she mentioned "The Complete
Library of Congress Recordings" which apparently she had
never seen before. I told her that this was the material that
Alan Lomax had recorded in Mississippi back in the 1940s when
he was field recording for the Library on Congress. I told her
that some of the material had been out in LP format back in
the 1960s and that it had come forth in CD format on Biograph
and other labels.
Her husband came on the line and said
that material recorded by the Library on Congress should belong
to "everybody" and record companies should not have
access to that material to make a profit without acknowledging
Mister House in any way.
I told them that I had pursued this matter
for almost 40 years myself, and I kept getting the response
that it would take my money in lawyers to get a response than
the legal outcome would bring forth. That wasn't much of an answer
to give them, so I thought that I would put this question in
a public forum. Just what right does a record company have to
commercially release material from the Library of Congress without
any permission from the artist or the estate? Did Alan Lomax
have the legal right to make a 100 CD deal with Rounder Records
for releasing material that he had recorded while working for
the Library on Congress? I hope that someone can give me the
answer to the question that Mister House's family asked me today.
Dick Waterman
Oxford, MS
The Political,
the Personal, and the Purely Priggish
Maria Gatti From Montreal Writes:
Dear Mr McCarthy, dear friends at CounterPunch
I enjoyed Jack
McCarthy's pithy, admittedly ad hominem comments about Christopher
Hitchens making a pompous, drunken arse out of himself. However
I'd enjoy them more if they appeared in the press in Britain
or in continental Europe. Moralising about folks' personal habits
is deeply ingrained in US culture, even on the left. An Irish
friend of mine, who has lived for many years in France, almost
started a commotion by ordering wine with her meal at a party
in the States, despite the presence of a chemical-laden frosted
cake from a mix, "food" such as chicken nuggets, and
so forth. I find such "Thou shalt not" moralizing
even more frightening than substance abuse, although I have
worked in Northern Native reserves here and have certainly observed
the damage caused by the latter. John Calvin and his Islamic
counterpart Khomenei are pretty scary fellows...
yours from Montréal
Alexander Cockburn responds:
Hi Maria, What you say about us is not
entirely true about left culture. We've had several distressed
letters about our "personal" attacks on Hitchens as
though it is somehow out of place for the left to say anything
rude about a guy who has been viciously rude, often at a personal
level, about leftists in general. In other words our moralizing,
relished by many, still evokes a priggish reaction here.
As for personal habits, there's a truth
to what you so, but so what. There's a useful side to moralizing
too. I'm Irish and grew up watching the men sit, often silently,
in pubs without their wives mostly from 6ypm till closing time,
sloshing through life on Guinness. Not very attractive and no
fun at all for the wife, assuming she wanted to see his Nibs
at all.
As an ex-smoker of professional skills
(3 packs a day from 16 to 40) I can confess to perfectly respectable
dislike of 6 Britons or French or Irish at the restaurant table
puffing away.
The "priggishly" personal
is political at many levels as the women's movement said so forcefully
in the late 60s amid many shrieks from the men folk about "putting
the revolution first". As for the reproofs of your friend
drinking wine, yes that is silly. I've never seen it happen.
Maybe the company at her table was up in arms about sulfites,
or conditions in the vineyards, though I doubt it. They sound
foolish. Perhaps she shouldn't have been in their company, and
louchely taken herself off.
Point about Hitchens was that there was
something truly newsworthy about the levels of deception and
self-deception in that Vanity Fair piece. He went public about
his personal traits, but deceptively so. And as I've said, I
do think his gargantuan levels of drinking affect his journalism,
and his grip on the truth and that's a public issue too.
Best,
Alex Cockburn
Yesterday's
Features
Gary Leupp
The
Weekend the World Said No to War:
Notes on the Numbers
Jason Leopold
Powell Warned Bush About
Bloody Price of Unilateral War
Ross Vachon
Joe
Lieberman: Yankee Tartuffe
Ahmad Faruqui
Killing
with Sanctions, Then Bombs
Estimating Civilian Casualties in Iraq War
Reza Ghorashi
Why
War with Iraq?
What Should Iranians Do?
Craig Axford
Environmentalism as Homeland Security
Harvey Wasserman
There's
Nothing Patriotic About It
Ramzi Kysia
Dispatch from Baghdad:
Living Against Disaster
Charles Sullivan
The
Failure of Mass Education
Gilad Atzmon
The Birth of the Tragedy:
On Reason, Justice and the Victim Mentality
Website of the Day
Lysistrata
Project
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February 22
/ 23, 2003
Laura Flanders
Security Threat?
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey Barred Entry to US
Alexander Cockburn
The Trouble with E-Bombs
Kathy Kelly
Letter from Baghdad
Tight Squeeze
Subcomandate
Marcos
A Universal
No to the War of Fear
William Cook
Armageddon Anxiety
Jo Freeman
Conservative Women
Michael Colby
Howard Dean is No Green
Ben Tripp
Fact-Checking the Constitution
Joanne Mariner
Pets Unite!
Richard Falk and David Krieger
Iraq and the Failures of Democracy
Uri Avnery
War Crimes and Sharon
Ian Williams
John Bolton in Jerusalem
Michael Wolff
How Sanctions Destroyed Iraqi Education
William Hughes
The Zev and Ari Show
Susanna Sonnenberg
Boxing Missoula
Michael Ortiz Hill
Peace and Humility
Anis Shivani
When Kafka Aligns with Orwell
John Mihelich
The Hidden History of Butte's
Working Class
Rich Procter
Bush and His Fabled Gut
Adam Engel
Voice of the Nation
Becky Johnson
The Hopscotch Rebellion
Krieger, Tripp, Ashley
Poets' Basement
Website of
the Weekend
The
Pedro Martinez of Palestine
February 15
/ 16, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Colin
Powell and the Great "Intelligence Fraud"
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
The Whole World is Watching
Edward Said
A Monumental Hypocrisy
Wouter Hijink
Report from Amsterdam
"War: Do Not Feed!"
Linda Heard
At Last! Proud to be British
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Taking a Stand on Iraq
Robert Fisk
The Case Against War
Lev Grinberg
Lessons from Israel
A War Without Legitimacy
Chris Floyd
Cold Fronts:
Bush War Profits
Ahmad Faruqui
Stepping Back from the Brink of War
Norman Madarasz
French Kisses from the Citizens of France
Adam Lebowitz
Scott Ritter in Tokyo
Kurt Nimmo
Bring Us the Head of Osama bin Laden
Forrest Hylton
The Revolt in Bolivia
Col. Dan Smith
Irrelevance and Credibility:
Bush, NATO and the UN
Wayne Madsen
The Lies of Tom Lantos
Ranjit Hoskote
The Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
Emily Zitter-Smith
Who's Safe Now?
An American in Cairo
Rich Procter
Anybody Remember the Powell Doctrine?
Poets Basement:
Eliot
Katz, Scott Handleman, and Bruce Tomczak
Website of the Weekend
Anti-War
Posters
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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