shamelessly defending himself......,
2008-05-01 17:17:16
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the war that keeps on giving...,
2008-05-19 08:16:11
Is it time to bomb 1 Time Warner Center, New York, NY 10019?:
Time Magazine - which has quite possibly never seen a war that it wasn't one of the first to promote, with
the record to prove it -
bears no small share of the blame for the invasion of Iraq. In the week to week comings and goings of one or another country we must invade, most of their promotional
efforts work as simple mouthbreathing pieces of administrative propaganda, or old fashioned eight minute hates about this or that dictator's
nefarious past. And if it's a slow news day there's always denouncing elected leaders
for volatile oil prices because this or that US-backed coup against them failed. 'He's out, he's back, he's exacerbating the volatility in oil prices, oh no!' There's no treasured human value
they're not willing to stab in the back for the right price.
That's why I appreciate it when Time just let their fangs hang out, like
they haven't had enough fresh blood lately, and publish straight advocacy.
Not just any invasion, either. It's not enough that the country was just hit by a devastating cyclone killing a hundred thousand people - no, Time's editors thought to themselves - rather than watching the ruling SLORC regime enact a US government-like response to a natural disaster a more serious option would be to publish a piece about how the US government should invade Burma. That would surely fix everything.
The disaster of Time Magazine presents Americans with perhaps their most routine moral crisis since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By most reliable estimates, over one million people are dead. Refusals to acknowledge the millions of displaced Iraqis have lead to hundred million dollar shortfalls in basic elementary relief for the victims, the inaccessibility of neighboring countries for asylum and non-existent state of Iraq's infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 5 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll, will, within years, exceed the numbers of any genocide you could name since World War II.
The cold truth is that Time magazine is almost entirely incapable of producing hard news that isn't just soul-sucking warmongering; news meant to produce news; a supply that creates its own demand. With thousands of years of the written record, or our own national history of nearly annual military adventures, or just our most recent episodes in Afghanistan, Somalia, and our universally acclaimed
humanitarian failure in Iraq, apparently the lesson that military force is not a humanitarian enterprise is apparently too complex for some institutions. Instead the lesson is that war improves the quality of our lives by giving us meaning, or at least stale neologisms like "give war a chance".
That's why it's time to consider a more serious option: bombing Time Warner. As its response to the Iraq war proved, the magazine's capacity for promoting violence is limitless, and the only time it ever denounces it seems to be when the subjects of its own media empire become the victims. In an effort to promote peace, then, perhaps it has become necessary to routinely subject them to the opposite.
