Color Commentary: Beyond Comment

This was in the New York Times on Saturday:

"This is the biggest, ugliest desert I've seen in my life," Ted Koppel told Peter Jennings on a special extended ABC newscast on Friday night. He said his convoy had made no contact with the enemy, "only a few Bedouins and their sheep."

--I, I just can't think of what to say. No wonder all my friends with TVs are so depressed. It's not so much the "incorrectness" of the Bedouin & sheep comment, though that's bad enough. Just the unashamed Ugly-Americanism of it.

(I have to acknowledge again The Pinocchio Theory of March 21 for the spot-on sportscaster/warcaster analogy.)

Off to protest, again. Yes, I know, the whole world protested yesterday, as did the whole nation, but here in Rhode Island, we're picking pious, church-y Sunday on which to stand around looking sad and morally superior. What can I say? My taste in protest runs to chanting ("Osama, Saddam, Pinochet/ All creations of the CIA!"), absurdity ("chair not war" [see entry for March 21], "drop pants not bombs"]), music/noise (Infernal Noise Brigade, the Anti-Fascist Marching Band), and Foucault ("no more sad militants"). And, um, also mobile shifting groups of anarcho-vomiters who go around the city not getting arrested.

This last, not getting arrested, may become more and more important as fresh hells like the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (DSEA) get under way, I mean if they do. Everybody's all up in arms, so to speak, about Patriot II's assault on privacy; it's the extension of secrecy that worries me. According to warblogging "The legislation would allow the Justice Department to 'detain' anyone secretly indefinitely, at least until an indictment is secured against the person. It would make it a crime to reveal the identity — or even existance — of such a detainee."

As my friends and I wrote last fall in 23 Theses on the History of the Secret: "But nowdays the locus of secrecy has been radically reversed: it is no longer the individual that has a 'right to privacy' but the state that has the power of secrecy. It’s not only the kind of power you think it is: taking prisoners of war, locking them up at Guantanamo Bay and torturing them for six months, or imprisoning thousands of immigrants but keeping their identity secret. It is also waging publicly secret wars: wars whose bare factuality is common knowledge but whose events are invisible, even to the most vigilant 'public.' We live in the age of the public secret."

(though I admit there's some collusion in the secrecy of the publicly secret war: I could post links to the Al-Jazeera photos of Iraqi corpses, but... you can find them if you want to.)