May 05, 2004
Bowling for Bush
Posted by nerdling | May 5, 2004 01:43 AM
Since I am well and stuffed from a monster fruit salad, here is some interesting food news: social accountability for food production is on the rise, as are "healthy" choices at fast food restaurants.
"They have said one mechanical royalty isn't enough." Even though an artist is lucky to get much in the way of royalties at all, record companies want to jack up the prices of digital downloads so that the growing trend in downloading will make the industry more on a per-song basis. As a business model, this should sink more spectacularly than the Titanic.
Thank God dissent is still alive and well: "Metallica display, you get it first, and with good reason." Go visit the surly, irritable and righteously indignant folks at Downhill Battle and bannedmusic.org. The kids at Downhill Battle are fighting the good fight for Voluntary Collective Licensing, a flat-fee solution that would allow legal downloading while compensating musicians for their work.
Disney is forbidding Miramax, its subsidiary, from releasing Micheal Moore's new documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, because it is critical of President Bush and his relationship with the ruling family of Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor.
"Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn't mean I listened to him," Mr. Emanuel said. "He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that's why he didn't want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn't want a Disney company involved."
I don't think I even need to comment on this one. It speaks for itself.
I'm going to follow up that particularly American piece of news with a link to the photos of abused Iraqi prisoners. I've been following the story with a mixture of trepidation and disgust—on one hand, I don't find it at all hard to believe that these things are going on; I had already assumed it was going on. On the other, I didn't want to see the pictures because I still want to think that no matter how bad things are, the blame is all lodged somewhere in the top levels of government. As the pictures show, I was being foolish and naive.
Perhaps that foolishness is what made the evidence so upsetting, or perhaps it is the entire situation. Regardless of the cause, photos of bruised, beaten men tied up and covered by hoods and thrown into heaps while laughing soldiers pose and joke is disgusting. The photo of a bruised, beaten corpse, wrapped in cellophane and left on ice like some demented, barbaric cryogenics experiement nearly made me want to scream and rage. Who are these people? Why would you do that to anyone? But most of all, where did my country go wrong, and why is it failing us all so terribly?
It isn't a failure of country, but rather a failure of simple human civilization. I put the link to this up one my site a bit ago, but in the Stanford Prison Experiment they took twenty-four young men with no violence in their records, no chemical or other imbalances, and put them into a two-week prison simulation. Half were put as guards, half as prisoners. The whole thing lasted only six days, and came to chilling results -- including the psychology professor in charge of the experiment accidentally getting involved and forgetting it was just an experiment. You really should read it.
Posted by: Jim at May 6, 2004 10:05 AM
