Filed under: Blogging, Brian Williams, Citizen Journalist, Gun Control, Massacre, Media, NBC News, Steve Capus, Virginia Tech
This is the desperately ill and demented gunman who killed 32 Virginia Tech college students on Monday 16 April, 2007. I will not mention his name because there is no need. Any memory of him as a person should be expunged from our collective consciousness. Forever. He came, he killed, he should never have been, and we should not honour his crimes with recollections of him as a person.
However this is much harder to practice than it is to preach, as the gunman recorded a video manifesto in the minutes prior to his slaughter. In it he speaks, he rants, raves and outlines his ill-reasoned and psychotic logic. He ensured it would be seen by sending it to Steve Capus, the president of NBC News in New York. The shooter sent it after the first two killings at 7am, and prior to the larger massacre that was to follow. In an event that was made for mass media coverage, the gunman ensured his own notorious immortality by using digital media to further his pathetic agenda.
Time Magazine last year named the Person of the Year as you. They meant us, the bloggers, the myspacers and the creators of our own digital content. It was supposed to be a positive, with content being created by the people for the people. It reflected the growing importance of the citizen journalist, and their ability to cut through the spin. Time did not and could not foresee that we the people, the bloggers and the citizen journalists, would be taken down a peg or two by one of our own. This is why we should expunge the shooter from our memory. He had no place using technology to further his demented logic, just as he had no place owning a gun, and just as he had no right to take the lives of people going about their daily business.
I have watched the shooter’s video manifesto. I wish I hadn’t. I will watch it again. I would hope that NBC will treat the film in the same way it treated the film of the 9/11 attacks, by simply not playing it once its news value has passed. I understand why they played though. We all want to make sense of what happened at Virginia Tech and know what was going on in that cretins mind. And really, if I was Brian Williams, there would be no way I would be sitting on the scoop of the century.
In a nation that encourages death by enshrining the right to bear arms, another 33 people died seemingly senseless deaths today at the Virginia Tech University. And while it was a lone gunman that pulled the trigger; the US, its citizens, government and constitution must all share some responsibility for this tragic waste of life.
In 1999 in the USA there were 28,874 gun-related deaths. That is eighty a day! 80. And that is a fuck of a lot of dead people. Applying that rate of shootin’ and killin’ and suicidin’, more than 200, 000 people had died by the time Santa Claus came to visit last year. A figure that is truly appalling.
To those who support the right to carry guns I say to you that no amount of bleach will ever remove the bloodstains from your hands.
Guns don’t kill people, people carrying guns kill people, and those who support the right to bear arms may as well have pulled the trigger.
Filed under: ABC, Culture War, Janet Albrechtsen, John Howard, Keith Windshuttle, Media, Politics
I had an epiphany one day last year, and yes while I might be a slow learner I realised that Australia was in the midst of its own full-scale culture war. I would have been a warrior for the left, but I didn’t know I had to fight.
In 1994, as a citizen of the ACT and panel member of the ACT’s Cultural Council I was invited to the launch of Paul Keating’s Creative Nation. And while the policy had some flaws, it attempted to assert a role for government in promoting a vibrant arts culture. Fast foward in slo-mo to John Howard’s Conservative Nation of 1950’s values and social mores, and it is not hard to see how the Culture War has been lost.
In 1992 Paul Keating said, “the Commonwealth’s responsibility to maintain and develop Australian culture means, among many other things, that on a national level;
- innovation and ideas are perpetually encouraged;
- self-expression and creativity are encouraged;
- our heritage is preserved as more develops; and all Australians have a chance to participate and receive – that we invigorate the national life and return its product to the people.”
Since then, what? Well in the eleven years of Howard Government enlightenment, the arts in this nation have gone backwards. Not creatively, rather as a supported and encouraged entity to reflect the Australia of 2007, the arts have been relegated to those of cultural curios and blockbusting blockbusters.
Our national broadcaster, the grand old ABC has had the conservatives breathing down its neck, looking for bias and excuses to defund. They have appointed a commissioner for independent thought, err director of editorial policies to ensure that the Howard Government is reflected in all the glory of a better light. To do this the conservatives stacked the board with flinty and intellectually bereft numb-nuts named Janet Albrechtsen and Keith Windshuttle.
Albrechtsen writes a vile, nutty column for The Australian while Windshuttle is to historians as Joh Bjelkie-Peterson was to democracy in Queensland. Shallow and hollow cultural warriors whose appointments to the ABC board serve no purpose other than to promote the conservative ideology of Howard Government. Neither had experience in broadcasting and both had significant form in criticising the ABC for bias. Yes Keith, the ABC does believe in the stolen generation, as do many right thinking Australians.
In the end though, the culture war was not won by attacking bias, rather it was the Howard Governemnt’s Ministry of Fear that saw the great leap backwards.
Australian culture might not be dead, but it certainly is in hospital.
If I died last night I would have died a happy man as I saw the Pet Shop Boys headline the Best of V Festival in Melbourne. It was an extraordinary evening, with magnificent music and dreadful event management. And what could have been sour was soon forgotten with stellar performance by support artists Gnarls Barkly and Groove Armada.
But for me it was all about the Pet Shop Boys, as I suspect it was for the huge number of flamboyant men present at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
Singer Neil Tennant said at the start of the phenomenal Pet Shop Boys set that they would play some electronic music for us. And they did, and it went off, and I went off, and the crowd went off. It was quite simply amazing, and by far the best live event that I have ever been to.
It has struck me in the past few days as I hyped myself up for last night’s frenzy, that as well as writing simply beautiful and fantastic electropop, that the Pet Shop Boys are the funniest, most ironic, witty and erudite band around. Not bad for a couple of Geordies who have been plying their trade since 1981.
With twenty-six years of music and countless hits under their belt it was bound to be a big night with a set list that could only disappoint by omission. The Pet Shop Boys whipped the punters into a frenzy as they trawled through their lengthy back catalogue, and by the time they performed It’s a Sin and Go West the crowd were completely crack-a-dog. I wasn’t, as I had started to unravel with Minimal and got messier and messier from there. Not that the people standing next to me seemed to mind, well apart from that sour-faced bitch who shooed me away. But she was miserable and I wasn’t and I was dancin’! Actually, I should take this opportunity to again apologise to the nice lady I king-hit from behind. I really didn’t mean it, but by the end (and I cannot remember exactly which song it was that sent me right off), I just couldn’t contain myself much longer.
Really, it was very funny. I had absolutely no knowledge that body contact had been made but slowly became aware that the woman in front of me was leaning forward and rubbing her head. It was then that it dawned on me that she had been hit and that I was the only one who could have thumped her. She was a real sport and accepted my apology with grace, unlike that sour-faced bitch standing next to me. And sweetie if you are reading this, one piece of advice, stay home and watch Dancing with the Stars next time, if real people doing real dancing, doesn’t appeal to you.
The setlist as I remember it and gathered from the internet appears below.
Left to my own devices
Suburbia
Can you forgive her?
Minimal
Shopping
Opportunities (Let’s make lots of money)
Integral
Paninaro
Se a vida é (That’s the way life is)
Domino Dancing
Always on my mind
Where the streets have no name/I can’t take my eyes off you
West End Girls
The Sodom and Gomorrah Show
Encore:
So Hard
It’s a sin
Go West
Filed under: ALP, Camp Delta, David Hicks, George W. Bush, Guantanamo Bay, John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Politics
In the show trial of the 21st century Australian terrorist supporter David Hicks has been sentenced to seven years imprisonment, with all but six years and nine months suspended. And while it is a good result for David Hicks, it is a failure of process and further proof that the fascists are alive and well and live at Kirribilli House and on Pennsylvania Avenue.
As part of his plea bargain, Hicks had to agree to drop allegations of abuse and anal probing at Guantanamo Bay and declare the Camp Delta Hilton the best five-star resort this side of Austwich. In addition, he has also been prevented from speaking to the media for a further twelve months, something quite unconstitutional in the US and so very convenient for the Australian prime manure John Howard.
These acts ensure David Hicks will be banged up when the Australian federal election is held in October, and muzzle some of the well deserved criticism about the five plus years Hicks has been held without charge. It is all very convenient and cosy and just wrong.
In Melbourne’s The Age newspaper on Sunday April 1, leading QC Robert Richter wrote a most scathing article. I have taken the liberty of re-publishing it on oneplanetmikey and it appears below.
“DAVID HICKS is coming home. At what price? Let us take stock. The charade that took place at Guantanamo Bay would have done Stalin’s show trials proud. First there was indefinite detention without charge. Then there was the torture, however the Bush lawyers, including his Attorney-General, might choose to describe it. Then there was the extorted confession of guilt.
Whatever Hicks may have done, the theatre of a voluntary plea of guilty when the choice is “rot in hell or say it’s true so you can go home” is worthy of The Grand Inquisitor. In Stalin’s as well as the German show trials of the 1930s, the essence of the display was the public confession, followed by the sentence. The Iranians and al-Qaeda still practise it, but isn’t that why we declared a War on Terror?
Then there was the silence. In the show trials, it was enforced by execution. In this instance it is enforced by threats of further punishment in both the US and Australia. The implications of the gag are staggering when added to the wholesale destruction of the rule of law.
Hundreds of years of what constituted the rule of law have been jettisoned so that Howard, Ruddock and Downer can pretend that Hicks is off their election agenda. Forget habeas corpus. Forget retrospective legislation. Forget coerced evidence and confessions. Forget commissions in which guilt has been predetermined. Forget prosecutors being judges in their own cause.
It’s OK as long as those who aided and abetted the destruction of these principles are back in office and remain unaccountable and can perpetuate the lie. If they lose office, the true story will emerge — but may no longer have impact.
The deal was simple: Go home. Shut up. If you dare to say you had no choice but to plead guilty, the US Military Commission will find you guilty of perjury and will call in a full seven-year sentence, over and above the five you’ve suffered unconvicted and uncharged. That will mean the Australian Attorney-General may not release you on licence for another seven years, or will — with the additional gags of control orders and other available means — make sure you cannot tell anyone what happened.
Apart from the loss of fundamental guarantees of freedom, another freedom — speech — is garrotted.
The best thing one can say about the process is that one day there may be a reckoning for this despicable episode, in which Australian ministers, all the way down from the Prime Minister, have been party to the commission of grave crimes under the Australian Criminal Code 1995, divisions 104 (Harming Australians Overseas) and 268D (denying a fair trial), because they have been criminally complicit under section 11.2.
By the time the US Supreme Court strikes down the whole festering sore in a couple of years — which most constitutional lawyers believe it will — we can only hope there will be another attorney-general in Australia who will have the guts to authorise proceedings against those who “aided, abetted, counselled or procured” the commission of the crimes to which I have referred. Let us not forget the war crimes trials after World War II, in which the German Nazi judges who prostituted their duty in the service of the political ideology that put them there were put on trial for what they did.
It may only be then that the full horror of what we allowed to happen to the rule of law in the name of political expediency will be revealed.”
With that so eloquently expressed, it will be people like Robert Richter who will uncover the truth. Unfortunately this ain’t going to happen until there is a change of government in Australia, and then only if Kevin Rudd and the ALP have the guts to convene a Royal Commission into what David Hicks did, what happened to him after he was sold by the Northern Alliance to the US, and what role the Australian Governmet had in supporting both the military commission and Hicks’ egregious and criminal detention without trial. There will be a day of reckoning, but I fear it will only occur after little Johnny Howard and his coconut-headed cohorts have shuffled off this mortal coil and spend eternity knee deep in burning dog shit. Let’s hope.
