Friday, January 07, 2005

Prophets from Vaudeville

(Disclaimer: I’m reading a fun book at the moment: “Mixed Nuts: America’s Love Affair with Comedy Teams” by Lawrence J. Epstein. It provoked me to dig out something silly I wrote about 10 years ago for Curio Magazine.)

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were light years ahead of their time and for that, they suffered the scorn of their jealous peers. Today, however, we are just now beginning to appreciate their masterful interpretation of this kooky thing we call “Art.” With the benefit of hindsight, we can marvel at such intellectual, surreal wordplay games as “Who’s on First?”



We can set up discussion groups and analyze the recurring use of “Stinky” as Christ figure. And what about the ever-present “Mr. Fields”? Surely now we can all recognize his status as a mere smoke screen for the rampant anti-communism that Abbott & Costello saw looming on the horizon.

So, the next time you see “Buck Privates” sitting their on the shelf of your local video store, you can smile to yourself about how these two amazing artistes were able to meld their humor and pathos to mask their stance against the Vietnam War. Sure, “Buck Privates” was filmed in the ‘40s…but that only proves precisely how far ahead of the curve Bud and Lou truly were.

“Prophets from Vaudeville,” I like to call ‘em.

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Posted on 01/07 at 07:49 PM
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Tsunamis, tribes, and tossing your cookies

A CBSNews.com item out of Jirkatang, India announced: “Ancient Tribe Survives Tsunami.” The piece begins:

“Members of the ancient Jarawa tribe emerged from their forest habitat Thursday for the first time since the Dec. 26 tsunami and earthquakes that rocked the isolated Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and in a rare interaction with outsiders announced that all 250 of their fellow tribespeople had survived.”



(photo found at: http://www.survival-international.org/jarawa.htm)


A Jarawa man named Ashu (described here as “arrow-wielding") explained:
“We are all safe after the earthquake. We are in the forest in Balughat.”

From there the fetishizing of indigenous people hit full stride: It seems “government officials and anthropologists” credited “ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds” as saving the Jarawa from the tsunami. Their garb and behavior were described in intimate detail:

“wearing only underwear and amulets”
“carrying bows and five arrows each”
“wore colored headbands with leaves”
“a metal box tied around his waist with a thread containing ash with which he smeared his face and forehead during ceremonies”
“The men stopped an AP photographer from taking pictures” ("We fall sick if we are photographed,” Ashu said.)

After that, things took a fascinating turn:

Ashu explained that tourists sometimes “throw packages of cookies” at the Jarawa from tour buses, but the packaged food upsets their stomachs.

Let’s take a second to digest (sorry, couldn’t resist) this situation:

1. Ecocidal buses are driven through indigenous peoples’ land so tourists can gawk at the savages.
2. It’s acceptable—or at least tolerated—for said tourists to throw packages of cookies from the buses onto that land.
3. The processed food makes the indigenous people sick.

Goddamn...I could write an entire book based on those three sentences alone.

“My world is in the forest,” Ashu summed up wisely. “Your world is outside. We don’t like people from outside.”

Can you blame him?
===

Speaking of upset stomachs, here’s an interview I did that’s been re-posted by a vegan/AR site:
http://www.animal-lib.org.au/more_interviews/mickeyz

It originally appeared in Vegan Voice.

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Posted on 01/07 at 05:27 AM
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Thursday, January 06, 2005

Social (in)Security

Dubya has Social Security in the crosshairs and the plan is simple: Scare the public with bogus statistics...and then hand the whole thing over to his rich owners while we hail him as a savior.



But as Doug Henwood (http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com) has pointed out, predictions of doom are based on an average annual economic growth rate of 1.5 percent over the next 75 years.

The average rate over the past 75 years is 2.9 percent, and even in the slow-growth years since the 1973 oil shock, the rate has been 2.4 percent.

If the economy were to grow at an easily sustainable 2.2 percent a year, Social Security would remain solvent as far as the eye can see.

Get it? Corporate America and its playthings in Congress create false predictions, frighten us with lies based on those false predictions, and get our approval to hand over Social Security to the billionaires on Wall Street through privitazation.

You can get away with transparent bullshit like that when you’re dealing with a society so heavily conditioned, programmed, and indoctrinated.

Spread the word: Social Security is not in trouble and even if the skewed prediction of a 1.5 percent growth rate were to come true, Wall Street would be too busy scraping executives, brokers, and traders off the pavement to worry our retirement $$$.

This is an old article, but much of its basic premise remains true:
http://www127.pair.com/critical/myth-06.htm

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Posted on 01/06 at 08:15 AM
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