No one knows provocative quite like Karen Finley. The artist’s politically charged writing and performances have brought her both admiration and notoriety since the early 1980s. Her ninth and most recent book, Grabbing Pussy, is an outrage-driven, anger-filled, yet often satirical examination of the psychosexual obsessions of men in power. Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Harvey Weinstein and, of course, President Donald Trump all get the Finley treatment.
Read the full interview here.
Time stood still! Fright kept the eyes behind drawn shades fastened over the windows. The wheels crunched into the ruts and the horses’ hooves beating rhythmically against the ground were never lost to the other sounds of the more powerful elements. Blackness and total despair took its toll of mind-bursting horrors.
Then the wild, terrifying ride into darkness was over. There had never been a sign of the vintage vehicle slowing nor was there a change of pace from the horses. The coach simply was speeding into infinity one moment and the next it had come to a complete stop. Then there was only complete and total silence. There was not even the sound of the thunder or the heavy breathing which should have been audible form the horses after their long run. It was as if one had entered completely into another world… a foreboding void where neither sound nor light existed. This is an experience only the deaf and blind could fully comprehend… or the dead!
The silence was not to last long. It was an eternity in one’s anxious mind, but only moments in reality. The first sound was the opening of the carriage door from the outside. And the remaining sense speedily returned into their proper place with the human sphere. It was a beastly cold wind which poured through the door… bitter, mountain cold and it was not soundless. There was an eerie quality which could only have accompanied the wind when it had crossed through the tombs and markers of some ancient, musty cemetery. It was the crying of lost and damned souls. The screams for release from their everlasting pits of hell.
………
And the hour of midnight silently overcame me. The coffin lid had a strange sound as it opened… a sound like the beating of my own heart back in the black carriage. It was all together yet separated… both were there… and the fingers came out of the slight opening.
The last of the twelfth minute enveloped me as I hynpotically held my gaze on the raising coffin lid.
The legend had been dispelled as a legend. The realness of reality had to leave my mind. There was no longer any reason for being. The dead arose from his coffin. His funeral suit was as it had always been described. His lips were red. His fangs were those of the wolf. His blue eyes were mirrors…
BLOOD SPLATTERS QUICKLY
The Collected Stories
Even if you think you don’t know him, you know him. Few in the Hollywood orbit have had greater influence; few have experienced more humiliating failure in their lifetime. Thanks in part to the biopic directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp and bearing his name, Ed Wood has become an icon of Americana. More |
McDarrah had an inflamed curiosity, great feelers and an ability to capture liquid moments. He was in the right place at the right time, for sure, and caught a subculture in situ. He also had hustle. “When the chance came for him to make the most” of his moment, the historian Sean Wilentz writes in his excellent introduction, “he didn’t blow it.”
Read the full profile at theNew York Times.
When author and journalist Lewis Lapham, founder of Lapham’s Quarterly and former editor of Harper’s, turned his shrewd gaze on the go-go ‘80s in “Money and Class in America,” he never imagined the era’s avatar of greed would one day become President Donald Trump. Three decades later, Lapham shares his views on the decades-long deterioration of democracy in an interview with INET’s Lynn Parramore. An expanded and revised edition of his book is now available with a new foreward by Thomas Frank from OR Books.
Watch the full interview here.
The desert that extends toward the south of this city is an immense graveyard. Thousands and thousands of Mexicans and Latin Americans have been left to die of hunger, thirst, or exposure. Miguel Méndez, born here, in Arizona, to Mexican parents, migrants from Sonora, spoke of the border thus.
Read the full excerpt here.
Read the full article here.
Fifty years ago this coming June, the Stonewall uprising occurred in Greenwich Village — an event that marked the coming-out of New York’s gay community and a refusal by gays to accept underground status that was as important in its way as the Montgomery bus boycott was to the civil rights movement..
Read the full article here.
Written in Chile in 1971 by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic has had a troubled existence. Copies were burnt in Chile following 11 September 1973, when the Popular Unity government led by Salvador Allende was overthrown..
Read the full review here.
As the US tries to keep countries such as India from dealing with Iran and Russia, it is driving more and more countries to seek alternatives to the US dollar, threatening the dollar’s hegemony, says Vijay Prashad.
Watch the full interview here.
Hancock is an interesting figure. To me he is one of the very good JFK
researchers. His Someone Would Have Talked would be be on my list of 2
serious JFK assassination books. On his blog he begins his self-description 3
thus: ‘Hancock is a leading historian-researcher in the JFK assassination.’
Read the full review here.
In 1994, photojournalist Fred W. McDarrah published the book Gay Pride: Photographs from Stonewall to Today, which would later go on to become a classic. As the first staff photographer for the now, sadly shuttered Village Voice, McDarrah was present in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when riots broke out following a police raid at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, which in turn led to the rise of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
Read the full article here.
In the swirl of controversy over ‘Labour’s anti-Semitism problem’ that has
followed Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015, the complex subject of
Israel and Palestine has rarely featured in popular discussion. These three
books offer those who wish to move beyond this largely faux confection more
understanding of an issue that has dogged international affairs since the
foundation of Israel in 1948. .
Read the full review here.
The fact that, after fifty years of Palestinian support efforts, the Israeli occupation is more entrenched than ever should inspire some intellectual humility among those hawking solutions to the conflict, notes Jamie Stern-Weiner in the introduction to his edited collection Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions. It is humbling as well to read through the volume, with more than seventy essays and rejoinders by more than fifty different authors, from almost every one of which something new can be learned.
Read the full review here.
Raymond Bonner’s classic Weakness and Deceit chronicles Central America in the 1980s, a time when El Salvador was the centerpiece of the US’s disastrous “domino theory”-style foreign policy in the region. Here, amid news that the Vatican has this week canonized Archbishop Óscar Romero, Bonner recounts Roberto D’Aubuisson’s cozy relationship with the US up to and after the archbishop’s assassination by D’Aubuisson’s death squad.
From Weakness and Deceit:
[Archbishop Óscar] Romero was considered the enemy by the oligarchy and the military, a voice for the poor and repressed. El Salvador’s leading conservative newspaper called him “demagogic and violent,” and accused him of preaching “terrorism from his cathedral.” He had received many death threats, but it was his sermon the Sunday before he was assassinated that may have propelled [Roberto] D’Aubuisson and the right wing into an unspeakable crime. Addressing the country’s soldiers, Romero’s call from the pulpit rings through the ages:
“In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.”
(Those words, that plea, have played in my head over the years—as I looked at the skulls and skeletons lying in churches in Rwanda, the Tutsi victims of the genocide there; as I watched the exhumation from shallow dirt graves of the Kurdish victims of Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks; and as I interviewed survivors of the massacre in Srebrenica. In the name of God, stop the repression). Thirty-five years after Romero was assassinated, Pope Francis declared that he had died a martyr and would be beatified, the final step before sainthood.
We now know, from documents released in 1993, that Washington had evidence early on that D’Aubuisson was complicit in Romero’s assassination, and the question has to be asked whether the murder of the priests ten years later might have been prevented had Washington worked to rein in D’Aubuisson, treating him as a pariah instead of covering up for him and praising him.
Elliott Abrams, the head of the State Department’s policy planning bureau, said during congressional testimony in August 1982 that he did not consider D’Aubuisson an extremist, that D’Aubuisson would have to have “engaged in murder” before he would say that. At that time, the embassy in San Salvador had sent at least three cables containing exactly that evidence.
How the American government acquired the evidence of D’Aubuisson’s involvement in the assassination of Archbishop Romero is a story that hasn’t been told. It is a story of skulduggery and intrigue, the story of a young American diplomat with a moral conscience who cultivated an unlikely and unsavory source with a guilty conscience, a source who eventually also provided the embassy with critical evidence about the murder of the four American churchwomen in December 1980. It begins in November of 1980, eight months after the archbishop’s assassination, when the American military group commander, Colonel Eldon Cummings, asked a junior political officer, H. Carl Gettinger, to meet with a lieutenant in the Salvadoran National Guard. Cummings considered the 26-year old Gettinger a leftist sympathizer—after all, he had a beard and he believed in Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy—and wanted him to hear from the lieutenant about the depredations of the guerillas. Gettinger assured Cummings he was well aware of guerrilla atrocities, but agreed to meet with the officer. Gettinger was not prepared for what followed.
The lieutenant hated the left—his father and a brother had been killed by the guerrillas. But he seemed to have a lot that he wanted to get off his chest. He confessed to Gettinger that he had ordered the execution of three young men who had been captured, and whom he had initially considered releasing. He had also killed several other individuals whom he thought were a threat to his own life. How could he be sure. And if they weren’t, “I would have made a mistake,” the lieutenant replied. The embassy reported all this to Washington in highly-classified cables Gettinger gave him the sobriquet “Killer.”
The expletive-filled language, the “Killer” expressed equal loathing of the right. He was resentful that the oligarchy was using the military to do its dirty work. The death squads were not independent entities, he explained, but were made up of members of the security forces operating in civilian clothes. The lieutenant, whom Gettinger colorfully described as “a man with the flattened face of an unsuccessful boxer,” was possibly one of the best sources ever developed in El Salvador, including by the CIA, and the embassy was careful never to put his name in a cable. He was referred to only as “the source.”
The lieutenant had been a member of D’Aubuisson’s right-wing cabal, had carried out bombings as well as murders, but he had become disillusioned and disenchanted. D’Aubussion and his followers had degenerated into gun runners and smugglers, motivated by money and not political ideology, he told Gettinger.
“The source” proceeded to give the United States the first concrete evidence that D’Aubuisson was the mastermind behind the assassination of Archbishop Romero. The lieutenant described to Gettinger a meeting chaired by D’Aubuisson during which the soldiers had drawn lots for the right to kill the archbishop. A few months later, Gettinger met again with the lieutenant, and he provided more details about the planning and execution of Romero, including the names of the military officers who had been involved. In reporting this meeting to Washington, the charge d’affaires, Frederic Chapin, noted that the political officer (Gettinger is never named in the cables) “believes that his interlocutor reports accurately.” Chapin closed the three-page, nine paragraph cable with a chilling revealing Comment. “Though much of what the EMBOFF [embassy officer] was told may appear incredible to someone outside of El Salvador, the events described and the the alleged participants would raise few eyebrows here. Unfortunately, for fifty years the Salvadoran security services have engaged in kidnapping, murder, bombings, torture and assorted mayhem at the service of the wealthy families.” (These cables were heavily redacted when given to me, in response to a FOIA request, when I was writing this book. In 1993, they were released with few if any redactions.)
In 1984, at the request of Vice President Bush, the CIA prepared a four-page memorandum, “El Salvador: D’Aubuisson Terrorist Activities.” The evidence that D’Aubuisson had been complicit in the murder of Archbishop Romero, that there had been a meeting to draw straws, was “credible,” the agency said. “While any number of rightwing death squads could have planned and carried out what was a relatively simple execution… there probably were few so fanatical and daring as D’Aubuisson to do it.”
A year later, when D’Aubuisson applied for a visa, Gettinger was on the El Salvador desk at the State Department. Over lunch, he and two colleagues began to look for ways to deny the visa. They discovered that under the immigration law, a visa could be denied if there was a reason to believe that the applicant had engage in acts of terrorism. The murder of Archbishop Romero was certainly such an act. They began drafting a memo for Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The memo worked its way through State Department bureaucracy, slowly and quietly lest it come to the attention of Senator Jesse Helms, the arch-conservative and powerful chairman fo the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who considered D’Aubuisson a friend and good ally of the United States; he had successfully interceded on D’Aubuisson’s behalf to get a visa a year earlier. The American Ambassador in El Salvador was now Thomas Pickering, a diplomat’s diplomat, who held more ambassadorial posts in his career than anyone in history, and who had an unimpeachable reputation for honest reporting. He also recommended that the visa be denied. Based on the reporting from the American embassy, the Latin American bureau at State agreed. “We believe it is highly likely that Roberto D’Aubuisson was an active participant in and very possibly at the head of the meeting during which Archbishop Romero’s murder was planned,” Elliott Abrams, who had become head of the Latin American bureau, wrote in a memorandum to Michael Armacost, under secretary of state for political affairs. This was based on information from a source who had “demonstrated his reliability,” Abrams wrote. It was obviously the National Guard lieutenant.
Abrams and the State Department had come around, partially. In effect, they now accepted that D’Aubuisson was, as former Ambassador Robert White had said, a “pathological killer.” But the cables were stamped Secret; the views were privately held. No American official publicly condemned D’Aubuisson, and he continued to operate openly in El Salvador, eventually plotting the killing of the Jesuit priests as he had of Archbishop Romero. (D’Aubuisson died of throat cancer the year before the documents’ release, at the age of 48.)
WEAKNESS AND DECEIT
America and El Salvador’s Dirty War
Now supplemented with a epilogue drawing on newly available, once-secret documents that detail the extent of America’s involvement in assassinations, Weakness and Deceit is a classic, riveting and ultimately tragic account of American foreign policy in El Salvador in the 1980s—gone terribly wrong. More |
In the third segment “By Any Means Necessary” is joined by Dr. Greg Shupak teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto to talk about his new book “The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media”, the reasons why the media is pro-Israel, the biggest fallacies around the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, and the role of US imperialism in advancing Israeli political and economic goals..
Listen to the full interview here.
Originally published in 1971 in Chile, where the entire third edition was dumped into the ocean by the Chilean Navy and bonfires were held to destroy earlier editions, “How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic” by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart reveals the imperialist, capitalist ideology at work in one of Walt Disney’s most beloved cartoon characters.
Read the full review here.
Liza Featherstone in Divining Desire: Focus Groups & the Culture of Consultation shares with journalist Chris Hedges how advertising techniques developed by early Viennese intellectual elites were adapted and coopted by US elites to control politics, consumption and opinion.
Watch the full interview here.
Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who went missing October 2 after having entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, was “a mild critic” of the Saudi government, peace activist Medea Benjamin told Radio Sputnik Tuesday. Nonetheless, “the royal family makes sure” dissidents are rarely heard, she said, even abroad.
Listen to the full interview here.
Where is Yams Up My Grannie’s Ass? When Maggie Nelson mentioned Karen Finley’s 1986 performance piece in Art of Cruelty, I plunged into internet research. Yams is nowhere on Google. As a millennial, it has taken a while for me to realize that not everything is compatible and available in digital format, particularly performance art. When I saw Finley on ISSUE Project Room’s calendar, I pushed the keyboard aside, eager to witness the salaciousness off-screen.
Read the full review here.
Fears are growing over the fate of missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who Turkish officials say they believe was murdered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last week. Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post who had been living in self-imposed exile in the United States, entered the Saudi Consulate in Turkey seeking a document he needed to get married and has not been seen since. .
Watch the full interview here.
In July 1975, the United States Customs Service seized thousands of copies of “How to Read Donald Duck,” first published in Chile in 1971. The book fared no better in its home country. During the political turmoil after the coup that removed Salvador Allende from office, the Chilean Navy threw thousands of copies of the text into the Bay of Valparaiso; still others were burned in protest.
Read the full review here.
In today’s episode of Going Underground, we speak firstly to Medea Benjamin, the fearless anti-war activist who stormed a Trump official’s stage to denounce US attempts at inflaming tensions with Iran. Among the issues we discussed with her were the Iran deal, Trump’s sanctions on Iran, and the US-Saudi alliance. Plus we speak to John Duffy, author of the book ‘The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark’ talks to us about 9/11, the CIA, and NSA mass surveillance. Lastly, Elliot Grove, the founder of the Raindance Film Festival, talks to us about the importance of independent films for democracy as well as persistent American propaganda in Hollywood films.
Watch the full interview here.
The title of this book refers to a line in Mike Marqusee’s poem ‘Egypt’. In it, Egyptian people are filling a public square, presumably Cairo’s Tahrir Square, their images captured on TV. Much like a dream, Marqusee writes, what is happening is ‘turbulent and calm, much wished for, full of surprise.’ But unlike a dream, this is a revolution that will leave ‘definable traces in the atmosphere, like incense.’ He concludes: ‘I know this is not a dream because like a dream / everything is changed in its wake.’
Read the full review here.
To understand why Western news outlets proffer narratives about Palestine-Israel that favor Israel, it is necessary to consider these media outlets’ political function. Joseph Uscinski explains that, “There is no doubt that systemic economic forces such as the need to sell advertising space and manage expenditures, determine the actions of news firms.”
Read the full excerpt here.
Iran and the EU have come up with a payment system to work around the US’s sanctions against Iran and anyone doing business with Iran. This is yet another fracture of the EU and US’s relationship. Meanwhile, National Security Adviser John Bolton said in a speech that there would be hell to pay if Iran harmed the US. Medea Benjamin, an anti-war and anti-torture activist who is the co-founder of Code Pink, and whose most recent book is “Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”, joins Brian..
Listen to the full interview here.
BackStory is a public radio program & podcast that brings historical perspective to the events happening around us today. On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths. Over the course of the hour, they are joined by fellow historians, people in the news, and callers interested in exploring the roots of what’s going on today.
Watch the full interview here.
