Howard Zinn: US ‘In Need of Rebellion’

Al Jazeera speaks to Howard Zinn, the author, American historian, social critic and activist, about how the Iraq war damaged attitudes towards the US and why the US “empire” is close to collapse.

Q: Where is the United States heading in terms of world power and influence?

 

HZ: America has been heading – for some time, and is heading right now – toward less and less world power, less and less influence.

Obviously, since the war in Iraq, the rest of the world has fallen away from the United States, and if American foreign policy continues in the way it has been – that is aggressive and violent and uncaring about the feelings and thoughts of other people – then the influence of the United States is going to decline more and more.

This is an empire which is on the one hand the most powerful empire that ever existed; on the other hand an empire that is crumbling – an empire that has no future … because the rest of the world is alienated and simply because this empire is top-heavy with military commitments, with bases around the world, with the exhaustion of its own resources at home.

[This is] leading to more and more discontent and home, so I think the American empire will go the way of other empires and I think it is on its way now.

Q: Is there any hope the US will change its approach to the rest of the world?

HZ: If there is any hope, the hope lies in the American people.

[It] lies in American people becoming resentful enough and indignant enough over what has happened to their country, over the loss of dignity in the world, over the starving of human resources in the United States, the starving of education and health, the takeover of the political mechanism by corporate power and the result this has on the everyday lives of the American people.

[There is also] the higher and higher food prices, the more and more insecurity, the sending of the young people to war.

I think all of this may very well build up into a movement of rebellion.

We have seen movements of rebellion in the past: The labour movement, the civil rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam.

I think we may well see, if the United States keeps heading in the same direction, a new popular movement. That is the only hope for the United States.

Q: How did the US get to this point?

HZ: Well, we got to this point because … I suppose the American people have allowed it to get it to this point because there were enough Americans who were satisfied with their lives, just enough.

Of course, many Americans were not, that is why half of the population doesn’t vote, they’re alienated.

But there are just enough Americans who have been satisfied, you might say getting some of the “goodies” of the empire, just some of them, just enough people satisfied to support the system, so we got this way because of the ability of the system to maintain itself by satisfying just enough of the population to keep its legitimacy.

And I think that era is coming to an end.

Q: What should the world know about the United States?

HZ: What I find many people in the rest of the world don’t know is that there is an opposition in the United States.

Very often, people in the rest of the world think that Bush is popular, they think ‘oh, he was elected twice’, they don’t understand the corruption of the American political system which enabled Bush to win twice.

They don’t understand the basic undemocratic nature of the American political system in which all power is concentrated within two parties which are not very far from one another and people cannot easily tell the difference.

So I think we are in a situation where we are going to need some very fundamental changes in American society if the American people are going to be finally satisfied with the kind of society we have.

Q: Do you think the US can recover from its current position?

HZ: Well, I am hoping for a recovery process. I mean, so far we haven’t seen it.

You asked about what the people of the rest of the world don’t know about the United States, and as I said, they don’t know that there is an opposition.

There always has been an opposition, but the opposition has always been either crushed or quieted, kept in the shadows, marginalised so their voices are not heard.

People in the rest of the world hear the voices of the American leaders.

They do not hear the voices of the people all over this country who do not like the American leaders who want different policies.

I think also, people in the rest of the world should know that what they see in Iraq now is really a continuation of a long, long term of American imperial expansion in the world.

I think … a lot of people in the world think that this war in Iraq is an aberration, that before this the United States was a benign power.

It has never been a benign power, from the very first, from the American Revolution, from the taking-over of Indian land, from the Mexican war, the Spanish-American war.

It is embarrassing to say, but we have a long history in this country of violent expansion and I think not only do most people in other countries [not] know this, most Americans don’t know this. 

Q: Is there a way for this to improve?

HZ: Well you know, whatever hope there is lies in that large number of Americans who are decent, who don’t want to go to war, who don’t want to kill other people.

It is hard to see that hope because these Americans who feel that way have been shut out of the communications system, so their voices are not heard, they are not seen on the television screen, but they exist.

I have gone through, in my life, a number of social movements and I have seen how at the very beginning of these social movements or just before these social movements develop, there didn’t seem to be any hope.

I lived in the [US] south for seven years, in the years of the civil rights movements, and it didn’t seem that there was any hope, but there was hope under the surface.

And when people organised, and when people began to act, when people began to work together, people began to take risks, people began to oppose the establishment, people began to commit civil disobedience.

Well, then that hope became manifest … it actually turned into change.

Q: Do you think there is a way out of this and for the future influence of the US on the world to be a positive one?

HZ: Well, you know for the United States to begin to be a positive influence in the world we are going to have to have a new political leadership that is sensitive to the needs of the American people, and those needs do not include war and aggression.

[It must also be] sensitive to the needs of people in other parts of the world, sensitive enough to know that American resources, instead of being devoted to war, should be devoted to helping people who are suffering.

You’ve got earthquakes and natural disasters all over the world, but the people in the United States have been in the same position as people in other countries.

The natural disasters here [also] brought little positive reaction – look at [Hurricane] Katrina.

The people in this country, the poor people especially and the people of colour especially, have been as much victims of American power as people in other countries.

Q: Can you give us an overall scope of everything we talked about – the power and influence of the United States?

HZ: The power and influence of the United States has declined rapidly since the war in Iraq because American power, as it has been exercised in the world historically, has been exposed more to the rest of the world in this situation and in other situations.

So the US influence is declining, its power is declining.

However strong a military machine it is, power does not ultimately depend on a military machine. So power is declining.

Ultimately power rests on the moral legitimacy of a system and the United States has been losing moral legitimacy.

My hope is that the American people will rouse themselves and change this situation, for the benefit of themselves and for the benefit of the rest of the world.

Interview with Orhan Pamuk: “Winning the Nobel Prize Made Everything Political”

Qantara.de September 2008

Ahead of the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair in October with Turkey as the Guest of Honour, Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk spoke to Rainer Traube about his latest book and unwanted political attention.

According to Orhan Pamuk, “Turkey will be part of the European Union sooner or later”

About two years ago you learned that you would be the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Looking back over the past two years, has your life as a writer changed?

Orhan Pamuk: When I heard about the Nobel Prize, my first instinctive, strong impulse was to say to my agent who gave me the news that this would not change my life. I now understand that I was optimistic – it changed my life, but it did not change my working habits. I’m still dedicated to my strict discipline of waking up early, writing, keeping up the schedule and so on. 

But then, yes, it did change my life. It made me more famous, it brought me so many new readers and it made it slightly difficult – it made everything I do more political than I’d expected.

Years ago in Frankfurt you gave a speech when you received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and then you were talking about Europe and Turkey. You said Turkey dreams of Europe and Europe cannot define itself without Turkey. Is this an opinion you still hold three years later?

Pamuk: Unfortunately the negotiations in the last few years between Europe and Turkey have mellowed down a bit. Perhaps this is because of the ultra-rightwing and the establishment and armies blocking off Turkey’s road towards the European Union. And also the resistance in European nations: among the conservatives of France and Germany, who of course resist Turkey becoming a full member.

So the issue is troubled and it is not as sunny as it looked two years ago. Sooner or later I strongly believe that Turkey will be an integral part of Europe, but now the situation doesn’t look so good, so it worries me – but it does not make me cry because I am essentially a fiction writer, and if I ever cry, it’s because I am worrying about the beauty of my book.

In spite of the beauty of your books there is a lot of intimidation going on against you and others in Turkey from ultra-nationalists or ultra-religious groups. Does that have an effect on your life here and on intellectual life in Turkey at the moment?

In 2005, Orhan Pamuk was charged for “denigrating Turkishness”. The lawsuit was later abandoned.

Pamuk: Yes, of course. It has an effect on my life, I practically live with bodyguards and living with bodyguards is not a nice thing. So I’m worried that again the ultra-rightwing and sometimes established newspapers still continue to attack me, with campaigns against me that worry me. 

Besides that, because I teach at Columbia University one semester per year and now that my books are being published, I like to go to conferences. I’m traveling outside Turkey and teaching around half or more than half my time unfortunately – or fortunately, whatever. 

I’ve spent the last two years outside of Turkey. This is perhaps partly related to the Nobel Prize. My fame grew and grew, but then I moved back here. I have witnessed humanity in Istanbul. Oh I know what humanity is in Istanbul. I cannot think of life without Istanbul – with bodyguards in the middle of the night, by myself alone, whatever. I am still in the streets of Istanbul and observing and enjoying it and I’ll continue to write stories about the true Istanbul.

It seems as though you’re trying to find a balance in your life between living in Istanbul and traveling, between being a political person and being an artist?

Pamuk: Yes, I have to do that. I’m not an exile for example, and they try to pigeonhole me as an exile. “No,” I say, “I’m not an exile.” I go outside of Turkey by myself, if I want I can live here 365 days a year if I enjoy it. 

Living in New York during the semesters that I stay there and traveling is a nice thing, but I don’t want to undermine and make a victim of myself. One reason perhaps is that I come from a culture that was never colonized and never victimized. I don’t enjoy representing myself as a victim of international powers, nor the victim of a Turkish state. I am on my feet, happy, living, enjoying writing books, and so on. That is how I look at my life.

And you don’t want to be a bridge builder?

Pamuk: Bridge is a cliche imposed on me just because I’m a Turk and of course the first thing everyone says about Turkey is that it’s between east and west. But before being a bridge, you have to understand the humanity of the culture, its shadows, dark places, unreasonable sights, its aspirations, its hopes for the future, its daily moments, its weaknesses, its misery.

My job is to see that before saying “I’m a bridge” or something like that. That kind of political representation or agenda – I don’t have that. I am essentially a literary person, who writes stories. Yes, in my books there is also a philosophical side. I’m an essayist, I also make judgments about cultures, politics, but essentially I am a storyteller first, and mainly of stories about people.

And now you are bringing a wonderful new story to the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair which is called “The Museum of Innocence.” It’s a novel about love, a wonderful love story about Istanbul of course, and also about museums. And it’s the first novel in the history of literature, I think, which has its own museum.

“I cannot think of life without Istanbul”, Orhan Pamuk says.

Pamuk: Yes, “The Museum of Innocence” chronicles the love story of Kemal, an upper-class person, a person who is occasionally described as high-society. He is 30 years old in 1975 and chronicles his infatuation with a distant relative, a twice removed cousin, Fusun, an 18 year-old shop girl, but very beautiful. As sort of a compensation for his failure to get her hand, he collects everything he can get that Fusun touches, and in the end he makes a museum of the objects that their story is associated with.

My “Museum of Innocence” is a real museum too, which tries to pin down all these objects. I’ve been collecting things for this museum almost for six years. I bought a house which is actually where this part of the story has been taking place since about ten years ago. I converted it into a museum so the “Museum of Innocence” is both a museum and a novel. 

The enjoyment of the novel and the enjoyment of the would-be museum are two entirely different things. The museum is not an illustration of the novel and the novel is not an explanation of the museum. They are two representations of one single story perhaps. 

And when we go to the museum we can relive the story just by touching and seeing the little things that appear in the book. It’s like a lived memory. And in the end your hero says that everyone should know that he led a happy life. Are you leading a happy life Orhan Pamuk?

I’m leading a very happy life. I’m happy that I’m addressing readers of 58 languages, millions of readers, that I’m writing my books from the heart and they are reading whatever I write. Can there be any happier life, I thought when I was 25, and I decided to stop painting and become a writer. 

I think sometimes that all of my fantasies about fame and success – which is more than I expected – are satisfied. I should confess that I am a happy author.

Interview: Rainer Traube 

© Deutsche Welle 2008

 

Sexpot Virgins: The Media’s Sexualization of Young Girls

 

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet, May 24, 2008

In 2006, the retail chain Tesco launched the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a play set designed to help young girls “unleash the sex kitten inside.”

Perturbed parents, voicing concern that their 5-year-olds might be too young to engage in sex work, lobbied to have the product pulled. Tesco removed the play set from the toy section but kept it on the market.

As M. Gigi Durham points out in The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It, Tesco’s attempt to sell stripper gear to kids is just one instance of the sexual objectification of young girls in the media and marketplace. Some of the many other examples include a push-up bra for preteens, thongs for 10-year-olds bearing slogans like “eye candy,” and underwear geared toward teens with “Who needs credit cards … ?” written across the crotch.

Targeted by marketers at increasingly younger ages, girls are now being exposed to the kind of unhealthy messages about sexuality that have long dogged grown women. Girls are told that their worth hinges on being “hot,” which in mainstream media parlance translates into thin, white, makeupped and scantily clad. Meanwhile, acting on their sexual impulses earns them the epithet “slut.” Teen magazines advise girls on how to tailor their look and personality to please boys (in order to entrap them in relationships). Advertisements present violence toward women as sexy.

According to Durham, the regressive messages about sexuality that circulate in mainstream media hamper the healthy sexual development of kids and teens.

Durham’s critique does not end with the corporate media. She also faults adults for failing to engage in reasonable, open dialogue with teens about sex — thus leaving the sexual education of young people to a media primarily concerned with generating profit, as opposed to, say, selflessly helping young people develop healthy ideas about sexuality.

AlterNet talked to Durham on the phone about the sexual objectification of girls in the media and how to help them challenge regressive messages about their sexuality.

What’s the “Lolita Effect,” and why is it harmful?

The Lolita Effect is the media’s sexual objectification of young girls. In the Nabokov novel the protagonist, who is 12 years old at the start of the book, is the object of desire for Humbert Humbert the pedophile. In the book you’re put into the mind of the predator; Lolita, in Humbert’s view, initiates the sex and is very knowledgeable and all that. Nowadays the term Lolita has come to mean a little girl who is inappropriately sexual, wanton, and who sort of flaunts her sexuality and seduces older men. I’m very critical of that construction in the novel and in real life because little girls can’t be held responsible in this way. They’re not born with the understanding or intention of seducing older men, and the burden of responsibility can’t be placed on children. They’re just too young to knowingly enter into these kinds of relationships. The Lolita Effect is the way our culture, and more importantly our corporate media, have constructed these little “Lolitas” by sexualizing them and marketing really sexualized items of clothing and behaviors to them — constructing them as legitimate sexual actors when they aren’t.

In your book you talk about how over the past 50 years female sex symbols have gotten a lot younger. In the 1950s you had people like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, who reached the peak of their popularity in their mid- to late 20s. Now there are 12-year-old models. What accounts for this shift?

That’s interesting, isn’t it? Marilyn Monroe was 27 when she starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It’s a lot easier for me to accept someone pushing 30 as a sexual being. What accounts for this shift? I can make educated inferences even though of course we have no hard data about what actually caused it. Part of it is that marketers caught on, somewhere in the 1990s, which was a very prosperous time economically in the United States especially, that young kids, tweens and children had a lot of disposable income and were spending a lot of money. Last year the market research firm Euromonitor said that worldwide tween spending reached 170 billion dollars. I think a large part of it was the marketers’ realization that they could cultivate cradle-to-grave consumers by targeting very young kids by getting them to buy into the frames that older women have been persuaded to buy into for a long time, such as trying to achieve unattainable bodies and present themselves as highly desirable to men. They could get little girls to start consuming cosmetics and fashion and even diet aides at very young ages and then hold onto them for longer. So I think a lot of it was a marketing impulse.

I think there are a few other factors at work as well. Women have entered the public sphere more and more and have become much more accomplished and successful in the workplace and economically and in terms of assertiveness within their relationships. Little girls still represent a traditional version of femininity: They’re docile, they’re passive, they’re easily manipulated, and I think that’s being held up as an ideal of femininity, which to me is kind of scary.

One of the marketing messages geared toward young girls is the idea that being “hot” and “eye candy” for boys is of paramount importance. How does this emphasis on “hotness” hinder girls’ development of healthy ideas about sexuality?

Let me say first that I think sex is great. I think sex is a wonderful, totally natural part of growing up. I think children are sexual — and that’s not just me; all of the research points to that. Adolescents are trying to understand their sexuality. And I do think that wanting to be sexually desirable is part of being a human being.

But at the same time this construction of “hotness” is rigidly and narrowly defined by the media. And there’s so much emphasis placed on it that it becomes the only thing that’s important in girls’ lives — or at least that’s what the media would have you believe. Because achieving the mainstream media’s version of “hotness” demands being a consumer.

If you’re trying to be “hot” in the ways that they prescribe — conforming to a specific body type, wearing a certain type of clothing — of course you are going to be spending a lot of money trying to achieve it. So there are problems with it. For one thing, it negates and devalues all of the other aspects of a girl’s personality. Sex is good, but it’s one aspect of being a human being. A lot of other things are equally important, like your intelligence, creativity, spirituality and community involvement. All of these things are equally important in terms of being a fully fledged human being. But in many media, girls are told that only being hot matters. So it can warp them into skewed, one-dimensional people, where all these other aspects of their personalities aren’t being developed. So that hampers them, as people.

In terms of sexuality, they can’t experience their sexuality fully and joyfully and individually and diversely because they’re being held up to this very narrow, very restrictive definition of what sexiness is about. So I think it’s problematic on both of those fronts.

Can you talk about the idea that girls have to be “hot” but not “sluts”? Why do you think that this is such a deeply ingrained, pervasive construct?

That’s not new. Girls have had to walk that line for quite a while now, where the emphasis is on being sexually desirable but immediately being condemned if they actually act on their desire. Girls are expected not to have desires of their own. The scholar Deborah L. Tolman identified this — she called it “the missing discourse of girls’ desire” — I think sometime in the mid-’80s. This has been a problem for girls and women all along: They have not been allowed to express their own interest in sex or express their own desires or seek their own pleasure for quite a long time. … It’s a terrible mixed message, and it’s almost impossible to achieve it — to walk around projecting desirability but to never be able to act on it, never be allowed to engage in it. One of the other problems is that because of this idea, girls aren’t given good information about actual sexual activity. They are not given information to make them understand the risks and responsibilities, how to be in control, protect themselves against STDs, unintended pregnancies — that’s missing from the way they understand sex.

Is there a comparable set of messages about sexuality aimed at boys?

It’s not as pervasive. Here’s what I think about boys. I think they’re getting a lot of messages about girls as sexual objects, in music videos and in video games. In most of the media targeted to teens and even to tweens, girls are always presented as eye candy and sexual objects. Both boys and girls are getting that message. Now, the message that boys are getting about sexuality and masculinity is that male sexuality is predatory, often violent and not emotionally engaged. Those are problematic constructions too. But in the end, girls bear the brunt of those constructions because they give boys an awful lot of power. They don’t really put boys in vulnerable positions; they put boys in more powerful positions. In the end it harms both boys and girls. They are not getting good information. They’re not getting an ethical, mutual understanding of sex and sexuality, where it’s about consensus and cooperation and understanding each other on some human level. It’s all about predation and submission.

You emphasize throughout the book that girls are not zombified, unthinking consumers of media but tend to be very critical of media representations. So to a certain extent, these offensive images and messages must resonate with the desires of many girls. How do we deal with the fact that sometimes sexuality isn’t very P.C.?

In the sense of wanting to adopt some of these (sexual) costumes and things like that? I think there is a playful side to it. And I’m not criticizing out of hand. I’m not saying that girls shouldn’t wear makeup or high heels. I don’t think any of that is true. Because I do think that there is a lot of fun and playfulness involved in some of that. But I do think that girls need to think about it and to make sure that what they’re doing is intentional and is making them feel good about themselves and good about their bodies and knowing that they have a lot of different choices. If they want to adopt a certain type of costuming one day that’s OK, but they can go out in their baseball hats and blue jeans another day. They should be allowed to make informed choices about how to present themselves to the world, and they need to understand the consequences of those presentations. I think we need to have a lot of discussion about that with girls, just as long as it doesn’t become a type of obsession that limits their views of what it means to be a girl.

The other side of it for me is that they should always feel like they’re safe when they do that. As long as they feel like they’re making choices that don’t put them in a bad position, and also the adults around them don’t feel like they’re putting themselves in a vulnerable position. But one of the problems is that for many, many girls those choices are not completely safe, especially if they are in a situation where they could be at physical risk. We just need to be thinking really hard about how they’re choosing to make these kinds of moves.

In the book you describe yourself as a pro-sex feminist. How did this perspective inform your approach to the topic?

It was very important to me not to be moralizing and coming across like I was policing or repressing girls’ sexuality. I wanted to make it clear from the start that sex is a good thing and a really normal part of being a human being, and that we ought to acknowledge that children and teenagers are sexual and we shouldn’t draw back in horror. One of the problems for me is that in the U.S. we have such a puritanical view of sex — we absolutely refuse to talk about it, we don’t have good sex-ed in schools, we don’t give kids straightforward, accurate information about sex.

I wanted to, in a way, redefine the term pro-sex. I’m pro healthy, progressive ideas about sex. And I’m totally opposed to regressive or restrictive ideas about sex. I think that’s a little different from the way it’s normally defined.

You discuss how conservatives as well as progressives often talk about the wrong things and jump to faulty conclusions about young people’s sexuality. What are some of the things that both sides get wrong, and what’s a good middle ground?

One of the things that at least one of the sides gets wrong is this abstinence-only business. Realistically, it’s really hard to stop kids from thinking about and experimenting with sex. That doesn’t mean that I think 12-year-olds ought to run out and have sex. But only and always making it taboo, wrong, scary, terrible is going to mean that children don’t feel like they have the safe spaces in which to express sexual feelings and ask the kinds of questions they need to ask to get the information they need. A lot of studies show that kids in the U.S. don’t know where to go for contraception, for example. They don’t know where to get counseling if something goes wrong. They don’t know how to express their needs in sexual encounters — their comfort levels of where to stop and things like that. I think it’s a problem that we don’t have a matter-of-fact approach to sex and treat it like a normal part of public health and humanity and talk about it a lot more.

But on the other hand, on the more liberal side, there’s this “anything goes” attitude where “it’s all great” and we should never say anything about it because somehow that translates into being anti-sex or being repressive or for censorship. I don’t think that is true either. I think we need to understand that sometimes critique is necessary, that children are children and that they need some guidance and that caring adults do have a role to play in terms of helping them through these really difficult issues that are very hard for kids to navigate on their own. So I think there are problems on both sides. I don’t think we should say anything goes, and I don’t think we should police kids.

In terms of the pro-abstinence crowd, there seems to be a lot more outrage over things connected to sexual health, like the HPV vaccine, sex-ed, and condoms in schools, than there is about sexual media images.

Yes, absolutely, which is crazy and hypocritical. That’s really at the core of what I’m writing about. We applaud all of these sexualized representations out there that I think in the end are very exploitative and really regressive. But then we won’t deal in a straightforward way with the real-world issues that need to be addressed, like children understanding contraception and understanding STDs. So it’s just nuts that the abstinence-only movement turns a blind eye to the really problematic representations of sexuality in the public sphere.

Why do you think that is? Do people just not realize how influential media are?

There might be some of that. Sometimes people dismiss the media as being unimportant or trivial or just entertainment with no impact whatsoever. For people that study the media, it’s clear that it’s not just background noise, that we live in a media-saturated environment, that media shape our understanding of the world. So I don’t think that we should just dismiss it. I think that we ought to take media seriously.

Do you think that these media images are consonant with regressive attitudes about sexuality?

I think so. It’s awfully hard to pinpoint causality, but certainly in some ways media reflect cultural, very patriarchal attitudes, where women are sexual objects and nothing more, and only certain types of bodies are presented as sexual. But at the same time, media are recirculating and reinforcing these attitudes. So there’s a vicious cycle going on. For example, with violence against women: I completely understand the argument that these media reflect and in some ways are cathartic because they represent these social problems. But then at the same time they’re recirculating them and reinforcing them.

What do you think about the controversy over the new “Grand Theft Auto” game?

I do have issues with violent video games, because the way gender is presented reinscribes these really traditional and polarized views of masculinity and femininity, where men are violent aggressors and the women are almost always presented as sex workers — they’re always strippers or prostitutes. So there are almost no women with agency or power, who can command actual respect from men. And again, there aren’t men who could work things (nonviolently), for example. So I definitely don’t see them as progressive representations.

Can you talk a little more about the profit motive in media that in part drives these regressive representations of sexuality and sexiness?

That’s a really key point in my argument. The media are for-profit enterprises, and we need to recognize that from the start. Whatever they do to represent any aspect of human experience, it’s going to be connected to generating revenue. When they represent sex and sexuality, very obviously it’s going to have a commercial motivation behind it. So we get these definitions of sexuality that are yoked to consumerism, and sexuality is only represented in a way that will stimulate consumption. So they’re not acting in girls’ best interests, and they’re not acting in society’s best interests; they’re acting to generate profits. We ought to understand that however media represent sexuality is not going to be in ways that is good for anybody but the corporations!

What happens, though, is that media are influential in teaching kids about sex. There are studies indicating that because we don’t have discussions about sex anywhere else in society — most kids don’t get it at school, most of them don’t get it at home — kids get a lot of their sexual understanding from the media. So they’re going to only get corporate representations. They’re not going to get alternative ideas about sexuality or counter-messages or scripts that could challenge some of those types of representations.

You also make the point that we can’t blame everything on the media. What do you think of the tactics of conservative watchdog groups like the Parents Television Council?

Some of them are very censorious in their approach. I think there are some watchdog groups that are really helpful. One group I go to a lot is Common Sense Media, because I think their movie reviews are good and fair and they give you a lot of information so that you can make decisions about the media. But others are really inclined to repress representations in ways that I think are problematic. So I think we ought to be careful about that. I’m totally opposed to censorship. But I do think that parents could, and should, monitor their kids’ media consumption, because not everything is appropriate for children of all ages. Even recently in my own life I’ve seen little kids traumatized by watching violent media. But you can’t keep kids in a bubble forever. As they get older, they’re going to be exposed to these things, and the most helpful thing that anyone can do is talk about what’s going on in the media with children and offering them ways to maintain distance and be critical of these representations and understanding the selling intentions behind them and all of those things. But I know that not all parents or counselors or teachers are informed enough about media studies or media literacy to be able to bring these things up or to offer these perspectives.

So one of the things I argue for in the book is media literacy education in the schools. I really think that in this world it’s as important as reading and writing, maybe even more important, for kids to understand the media.

But there’s probably about as much funding for that as there is for sex-ed.

Yeah, totally. At the same time I think parents can go to these watchdog organizations, but to use their own judgment in terms of which ones they’re going to rely on. They can cobble together different perspectives and make good decisions. And the third thing is, in my book there’s a sort of DIY media literacy for everyday people because I think a lot of these analytical strategies in the province of media scholars that are talked about in academic journals and conferences — these never get out to the general public, who need them more than we do. One goal of the book is to offer those strategies to people in the real world.

Is that basically what you would tell a parent who is concerned about overly sexualized media images but doesn’t want to send the message to their kid that sexuality is bad?

Yes. Share values, talk about them, critique them. What I’m arguing for is the exact opposite of censorship, which is just a lot more critique and public discussion and debate about all of this.

Should we be trying to change the media, or is it best to stick to informing people and kids about it so they become more critical consumers?

To me the most important thing is to develop critical consumers, to put agency in the hands of consumers. There are a lot of interesting groups out there working with the media. For example, there’s a group called the Media Project, and they work with TV writers to try to put more factual, more diverse information about sexuality into TV shows. Not in a preachy kind of way, but in a way that would expand ideas about sex.

The thing I want to emphasize is that any adult can start a conversation with their kids, even when they are really, really young, even as young as 2, which is what I’ve done with my kids. Not even specifically about sex, but about the selling intent behind advertising and comparing what goes on in real life compared to fiction and helping them sort out facts. You can start getting them to be critical of the media when they’re very young.

 

Singing to a Political Beat: Interview with Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour

BRUSSELS, Apr 28, 2008. Inter Press Service – If a European rock music fan has just one album by an African artist in his or her collection, there is a higher than average chance it was recorded by Youssou N’Dour. The Senegalese man’s status as his continent’s most lucrative cultural export was underscored in 2005, when he was the only African to appear at the main Live8 concert in London’s Hyde Park, an event that attracted several billion TV viewers, according to its organisers.

As well as delighting audiences with his ebullient live performances, N’Dour regularly lobbies world leaders, urging them to show greater resolve in tackling African poverty. At last year’s Group of Eight (G8) summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, he joined Irish rock stars Bono and Bob Geldof in protesting at how pledges made by top industrialised countries to increase development aid are not being honoured. A goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Children Fund (Unicef), he has been especially eager to see international efforts to combat malaria intensified. 

N’Dour spoke to IPS Brussels correspondent David Cronin. 

IPS: Data published in the past few weeks indicates that the amount of aid that rich countries give to poor countries is falling. Does that distress you? 

YN’D: If G8 countries decide to reduce their aid for development, that would be a catastrophe. With the increase in the cost of living, especially in poor countries, we need more aid, especially because children are more exposed to diseases like malaria. I’m very disappointed by the reduction in aid. 

IPS: Louis Michel, the European commissioner for development, said last week that he does not believe European Union governments regard development aid as a priority. Do you agree with him? 

YN’D: What Louis Michel says is the truth. But it is not enough. The European Union must maintain its leadership on aid. 

IPS: But is that undermined by its efforts to foist trade liberalisation on Africa? And do you agree with Abdoulaye Wade, the President in your native Senegal, who has been very critical of the Economic Partnership Agreements that the EU wants to conclude with Africa? 

YN’D: I agree completely with Wade. The agreements between Europe and Africa must be changed. 

Everyone knows that the system of trade is not fair. Take the example of agriculture. Europe can subsidise its farmers but farmers in Africa are not subsidised. When European farmers sell their products, they sell them at a cheaper price than our agricultural products. That is not fair. 

IPS: European vessels operating off Senegal’s waters have been accused of causing a great deal of damage to the fisheries sector in your country. The old fisheries agreement between the EU and Senegal has expired and not been renewed. Is that a good thing? 

YN’D: For the past eight years, the government in Senegal has tried to pursue a certain vision. It is right to try to change the historic accord. A government that enters power without trying to change things should have to jump. 

IPS: How do you feel about the electoral impasse in Zimbabwe and the challenge it presents for Africa? 

YN’D: The problem in Zimbabwe is one of courage. There are good things happening in Africa but we are a continent of contradiction. We have seen democratic elections in some countries. But when the world sees an advance for democracy, we then see something like what has happened in Zimbabwe. It is tragic. 

The world must help to advance democracy. There must be transparent elections. And when somebody wins an election, they must be able to govern. 

IPS: Your 2004 album ‘Egypt’ addressed your Islamic faith. You have described Islam as a religion of peace but since the disc was released we have seen atrocities like the London bombings in 2005. What is your response to European politicians and some commentators who equate Islam with terrorism? 

YN’D: Islam is a religion of peace. But every religion has a minority of extremists. The media gives the impression that extremists represent the totality of Islam. The reason why I made ‘Egypt’ was to show another side. 

IPS: You have worked closely with Bono and Bob Geldof. How do you feel about the criticisms they have received, the allegations that they have become too friendly with world leaders, such as George W. Bush? 

YN’D: Bono, Geldof, Youssou N’Dour: we have created a new type of diplomacy. A cultural and artistic diplomacy. We are not for either the left or the right. 

If leaders do things that should be encouraged, we should encourage them. If they do things that should be denounced, then they should be denounced. 

I have never been in favour of the war in Iraq. But I do agree that Bush has done good work on malaria and AIDS. We are not only here to criticise. We are also here to encourage. (END/2008) 

John Cusack: Outsourced Warfare Represents a “Radical, Dangerous, Disgusting Ideology”

 

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet, May 19, 2008

John Cusack’s new film, War, Inc., is set in a fictionalized Iraq. It’s a funny film. It might have been tough to watch if it weren’t, given the level of destruction that five years of occupation have wrought on the real country.

Cusack, along with co-writers Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, offer up a dystopian vision of the future of privatized warfare set in “Turaqistan,” a presumably oil-rich country that, if it really existed, would surely be somewhere that most Americans couldn’t find on a map.

Watch the trailer of the film.

The film’s humor rests on very real and demonstrably disastrous trends in neoconservative foreign policy of recent years — a lethal war of choice and profit, the dismantling of states and plundering of their resources, a profound cultural insensitivity, lack of accountability and reckless disregard for easily-predicted consequences — which are then pushed to the absurd.

In Iraq, journalists are embedded with troops and tour Potemkin villages to demonstrate progress; in Turaqistan, they’re given virtual-reality tours of combat without leaving the cozy confines of “Emerald City,” War, Inc.’s version of Baghdad’s Green Zone. In Iraq, contractors like Halliburton have squeezed billions out of the treasury for substandard work that has left the country’s infrastructure decimated; Turaqistan is wholly-managed by the Halliburton-esque Tamerlane corporation, and the tanks that patrol the country’s burned-out streets are covered with NASCAR-style logos for everything from Popeye’s Chicken to Golden Palace online gambling.

Fans of the underground classic Grosse Pointe Blank will find much that is familiar. Cusack plays a conflicted killer — this time a lethal assassin — an extreme kind of corporate fixer — whom Tamarlane dispatches to far-flung locales whenever someone of influence threatens the company’s bottom line. The film has the same kind of sardonic and referential humor, and employs the same over-the-top ultra-violence pushed to comic extremes. Joan Cusack, in a role reminiscent of the one she played inGrosse Pointe Blank, again steals the show with her few minutes of screen time.

With sharp writing and strong performances by Marisa Tomei, Hilary Duff and Ben Kingsley, War, Inc. is provocative and satisfying. But it may have failed in one notable regard. Turaqistan, for all its insanity, is not all that much crazier than the reality of post-invasion Iraq; a week after the film arrived at AlterNet’s office, and with mortars raining down in Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone, a Los Angeles-based company announced that it’s planning to build a Disney-like skateboard- and theme-park in Baghdad. Never mind that most Iraqi kids have never seen a skateboard — a spokesperson for the company promised that a shipment of free boards would arrive in Iraq before the park’s opening.

AlterNet caught up with John Cusack recently to discuss the inspirations for his film.

Joshua Holland: Tell me a little bit about your new project.

John Cusack: Well, we thought of it as an incendiary political cartoon that would hopefully put America’s current imperial adventures in Iraq into a kind of a larger context. And maybe put a different lens on what privatization means; what this plan has been and what it’s been like when people try to privatize the very core things it means to be a state. And what it means to spread an ideology like that across the globe.

There are 180,000 contractors in Iraq and about 160,000 troops, right? And if one just takes that trend to its logical conclusion, well that’s where “War, Inc.” is set. It takes place at a time in the near future when warfare us an entirely corporate affair.

Holland: As a political nerd, it struck me as a highly referential film. I felt like your character, to some extent, was loosely patterned maybe on John Perkins, who wroteConfessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Cusack: You know, that book came out when we were already making the film, I believe. And I know we were writing it when Naomi Klein’s groundbreaking piece called “Baghdad Year Zero” came out in Harper’s. She’s a journalist I’ve always greatly admired and respected. And then as we were making the movie, she was writing the Shock Doctrine. I remember being aware of it while we were writing it. And I remember talking about it. But you know, this character was also based on [former U.S. Envoy to Iraq] Paul Bremer flying in while Baghdad was still burning and literally ruling by Fiat. Sitting down in Saddam’s old palace and banging out 50 or 60 new laws that would allow 100 percent foreign ownership of previously state-owned industry by these outside corporations. And he was running around in those Brooks Brothers suits and the military boots when he did it.

Holland: I thought that I saw a lot of Naomi Klein in Marisa Tomei’s character.

Cusack: Yeah, I think it wasn’t Naomi straight up, but I think it was Katrina Vanden Huevel. It was Laura Logan and it was Naomi. It was, you know, any of the great journalists out there who are women … Christiane Amanpour.

Holland: Now, the film presents kind of a dystopian vision of where we’re at or where we’re heading — tell me a little bit more about this central theme, this idea of outsourcing warfare to this kind of Halliburton-like mega corporation.

Cusack: Well, it was an ideological viral disaster — that’s what this war was. It wasn’t Paul Bremer, although a lot of people would like to paint him as the fall guy. It’s the entire system of thinking that is insane. The Shock doctrine does a good job chronicling what’s essentially been a 35-year campaign to destroy the New Deal and privatize everything, and the use of disasters and wars to justify “shock therapy” — to pass legislation that would never get passed in any country that wasn’t reeling from trying to bury their dead or stop from being tortured or killed or trying to get water or food.

So I think it’s really about the entire system and that entire ideology. There seems to be these companies that helped create a new market by creating a war, and then they bar the competitors from entering into the clean up. In the meantime, they’ve privatized the entire country, which is basically strip mining it. Basically, it’s a land-grab. So not only are we looking at a murder scene, but it’s the scene of an armed robbery.

And that’s the version of democracy … the version of a free market that we’re not only supposed to worship, but into which we’re also supposed to keep feeding bodies. We have to kill to feed this kind of twisted version of their free market. And [American political leaders] seem entirely unconcerned that Halliburton and Bechtel — and Parsons and KPMG and Blackwater and the rest — are kind of madly gorging off of this protectionist racket.

If you really think about outsourcing all the essential things it means to be a state, like armies, disaster relief, interrogation, border patrol — all of these functions — then I don’t really know what’s left in terms of the sovereignty of a country. I don’t really know what’s left.

So it’s not even about free markets. I mean, if these [corporations] want to just go invade a country and take it over, and take their chances on the open market, that’s one thing. But to use the U.S. military and our Treasury Department as their ATM to do it — that’s … that’s cause for revolt.

I just don’t know where it stops. Should anyone who has a corporation be allowed to hire private mercenaries? I mean, I have a corporation with three people in it. Should I be allowed to you know, have guys with flame-throwers follow me around Chicago?

Holland: Are you contemplating invading one of the studios?

Cusack: I don’t think so. I’m saying where does it end? It seems like we’re so far down the rabbit hole. Some people hear about this type of privatization, and think, ‘well it’s just an effective streamlined management technique.’ I’m saying: ‘no, it’s radically transforming and ruining the country.’

It’s like the state is the final frontier to be plundered. That’s really scary to me. And I don’t think people know about what’s going on. Because if they really did know about it, I think well-meaning Republicans, Libertarians and Democrats would band together and try to throw these people in prison.

Holland: I think that you captured that very well. It reminded me of something PW Singer wrote in his seminal book on this subject, Corporate Warriors. He argued that, whereas a national army is inherently … is by definition there to advance a state’s foreign policy, when you have these private militaries, their ultimate fealty is to the bottom line. And often, you know, advancing that bottom line is contrary to the so-called “national interest.”

Cusack: Yeah, I mean …

Holland: And those private contractors at Abu Ghraib are just a perfect example of that.

Cusack: Well, yeah, it’s just about making money. It’s about the shareholders. That’s an executive’s legal duty. But corporate profit is not the only national interest that a government has to advance. If it were, the military wouldn’t be accountable in our system, with its checks and balances. It would just be a free-roaming force for hire to whatever corporate interest could pay the bill. Right?

Holland: Yeah.

Cusack: And this notion of privatizing the Army should be the last line of defense.

The thing about this ideology is that it’s a triple whammy, because there’s supposed to be Republicans who believe in restrained government and individual liberties … you know, libertarians who want to get the government off our back — the frontier libertarian cowboys. But then anytime they can expand the reach of the state and scarf up public money and violate individual privacy, they’ll do it. They’d do anything as long as there’s profit in it. So they don’t even adhere to their own principles. To even call them ideologues is wrong — they’re crooks, not ideologues.

All these guys are socialists on the way down. Like when it’s a fuck up, they always take the state’s money — they’re always happy for a bail-out, and then they hand the bill to the rest of us. When they finish gorging off the state like welfare freaks, then they embrace socialism.

Holland: Well, we’re seeing this with Bear Stearns and the housing crisis, as well. It’s socialism for the top two percent. Fuck you for all the rest.

Cusack: Yeah, the hypocrisy and the lies around it are so massive it just makes your eyes start to water. You know, the movie is not a partisan movie. It’s not Democrat or Republican.

Holland: No, no. Democrats are complicit in all of this. Let me push that: what are your thoughts about the Democrats’ unwillingness or inability or hesitancy to go after real accountability for these issues? Is there an opposition party, in your view?

Cusack: It sure … it doesn’t feel like it. You know, there are individuals in the party who have done important work. But I think when Pelosi took impeachment off the table it was a disastrous development for the Democratic party. I can see how they thought they were going to just ride out the election and take power. But if they’re going to let the administration commit war crimes like this … breaking U.S. and international law on this level without any accountability, I don’t know what kind of authority the Democratic Party has left.

Holland: Let me switch gears a little bit. You’re no doubt going to come into a lot of fire from our lunatic friends on the right. And they’ve done a pretty good job of portraying Hollywood as kind of a bastion of anti-Americanism.

Cusack: Well, I think you have to always consider the source. Strangely, I haven’t really been attacked at all yet for this. But I would find it interesting that the people who would criticize me … what do they do? They read. They write. They talk to interesting people and they deal with ideas. And they put on make up and they go in front of a camera. And sometimes, they read their own lines. Sometimes, other people write their lines for them.

That’s what I do, too. But because somebody gets a cable slot and they put a bunch of make up on and they pretend that they’re journalists, I’m supposed to take shit from them? That argument is … I mean, it’s so absurd I don’t even know if you can really have the argument.

People can say that films have no merits or they don’t — or they can attack the aesthetics. But to say that some kind of ultra right-wing talk-show host has more of a right to an opinion than I do is ridiculous. I mean, why?

Holland: Well, I think it’s because they’ve spent 25 years in a concerted effort to poison the well when it comes to Hollywood.

Cusack: Okay, yeah, well …

Holland: I mean, it’s been a concerted campaign. It’s not an accidental coincidence that all of these people decided to condemn “Hollyweird” at once. They know that it has a significant impact or capacity to impact the political debates and the political culture.

Let me ask you a related question — about the climate in which you were working on the project. There was a period when they were burning Dixie Chicks CDs and I wonder of this is a film that you would have had significant trouble making just a few years earlier?

Cusack: Well, when you make something like this, you write it and then you have to sort of get the script good enough to present. And we did that. And I can’t remember the exact timing of it, but yes, the Dixie Chicks were getting their records burned. So we sent it around to all the studios and they all passed and said, you know, ‘we’re not going to do something like this because it’s going to be seen as anti-American or anti-corporate.’

I said no, it’s an incredibly patriotic satire. Dissent is an incredibly patriotic thing to do. I’m not going to cede my patriotism to anybody. I refuse to do that and I won’t be cowed — I won’t be obedient, because that’s unAmerican. All the cast jumped on board right away. And I think everybody wanted to be a part of that sort of defiant spirit of the piece.

Anyway, the studios all took a pass, but we found a small studio that does a lot of foreign sales, and they gave us about a third of the budget we had for “Grosse Pointe Blank,” ten years ago. And we went to Bulgaria to shoot.

But then even last year when we were just beginning to screen it, the reaction was a lot different than it is now. Today, everybody seems to want to have … maybe not as in depth a discussion as the one I’m having with you, but everybody wants to talk about these ideas and use the film as a springboard to talk about what’s going on. And that’s very different than even six months ago. So I find it a cause of some optimism that people are talking now.

Holland: What is your position on how the United States should move forward in terms of Iraq? The $64,000 question, if you will.

Cusack: Well, I think we have to get out of there and get all the contractors out of there — we just have to reverse these disastrous, disastrous last seven years. And I don’t think there’s going to be an easy, nice way to do that.

Holland: My last question is always the same: is there something that you would have asked yourself if you were me that I didn’t ask?

Cusack: You know, maybe the only thing I would ask, or rather what I would say is America has been an empire. And America has done a bunch of horrible things to build that empire. A lot. But there’s also so many great things about America and there’s so many great things that America has done … you know, like the GI Bill and the rise of the middle class or the Marshall Plan after World War Two.

And what I think what this neo-conservative movement is, is a way to sort of re-make the world. And it’s a radical, fundamentalist attempt to re-make the world. It’s a reverse New Deal. Where the New Deal used public money to lift up the citizenry and build stability across the world, this thing is a way to cripple governments from doing any of that — it’s a radical, dangerous, disgusting ideology.

We need to lay siege to empire with everything we’ve got. You know? Deprive it of oxygen, shame it, mock it, tell our own stories. This corporatist revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they’re selling … their ideas, their wars, their notion of inevitability.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.