| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
04 Dec 2004 09:09:11 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Mark Morford |
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/12/03/notes120304.DTL&nl=fix
Very, Very Dirty Pictures
You want explicit? You want raw and uncensored and free of media bias?
Here you go
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 3, 2004
This is what you won't see in the paper.
This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any
major media Web site anywhere and especially no ***** way ever in
hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News.
You aren't supposed to see. You aren't supposed to know. You are to
remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you
have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is
merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over
there, carefully orchestrated and somewhat messy and maybe a little
bloody but mostly still patriotic and good and necessary and sponsored
by none other than God his own angry Republican self.
And hence you and I both have no real idea what the hell goes on in
Iraq, no real images to gnaw on and be deeply horrified and saddened
by, except for maybe a tiny handful of carefully sanitized snapshots
of bombed-out Iraqi cities and maybe some grainy video of U.S.
soldiers enjoying a dusty game of pickup football and a turkey dinner
at the posh military digs way, way outside of Baghdad.
Or maybe you think war is manly and heroic and cool, as exemplified by
that now-famous shot of that macho "Dogface" Marlboro-smokin' Marine
whose dirt-encrusted mug was eagerly picked up by newspapers and media
Web sites across the nation (including this one),
{http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/18/MNG0Q9SM6B1.DTL}
and he became an instant icon for the war and the military was
positively giddy about using him an ideal recruitment tool, a model of
how to make soldiers look all studly and rugged and badass as opposed
to the often poorly educated, disposable hunks of politically abused
postpubescent meat BushCo considers them to be.
So then. Here is your uncensored truth: fallujahinpictures.com.
{http://fallujahinpictures.com/}
Real pictures from Fallujah. Real pictures of war. Brutal and explicit
and shocking and just one site of many. Be warned: this is very
graphic content. Horrific and deeply disturbing. No censorship. No
suppression. No Photoshop. No bogus shots of happy Iraqi children
running in the streets begging for candy from American soldiers. No
night shots of Marines in bitchin' night-vision goggles bustin' down
the door of some palace and then cheering.
Because if you think that's what it's all been about, if you really
think war is just this tragic but necessary evil that contains some
unfortunate violence and regrettable death but is nonetheless still
full of righteous democratic American truth, you have been wildly
misled and deeply deceived and might want to consider a nice
intellectual emetic. You and Dubya both.
Mind you, fallujahinpictures.com is not all gross-out shots of
imploded skulls or severed limbs or brutally decapitated children or
mutilated women or splattered brains or rivers of blood and intestine
and excrement lining the Iraqi streets. Those horrific photos are
indeed available (just Google "Iraq war pictures"). But, really, who
wants to see that? Not Dubya, that's who. Besides, that's what slasher
movies are for. Republicans and war hawks don't actually want to see
that stuff in, you know, real life.
And maybe you already know that our government instituted an
unqualified ban on pictures of all those flag-draped U.S. coffins that
are pouring into American Air Force bases by the hundreds. Maybe you
remember that cargo worker who lost her job last spring for leaking
such photos to The Seattle Times.
{http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001910594_pentagon23m.html}
Maybe you know how back in June the Republican-led Congress upheld the
ban on coffin photos, all under the guise of "respecting soldiers'
families,"
{http://www.pdnonline.com/photodistrictnews/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000552288}
which of course translates directly into "If the pubic saw all those
kids coming home dead, they might not wave that flag so wildly."
As the saying goes, Bush may be dumb, but he ain't always stupid. Even
he doubtlessly remembers the effect of watching TV in the '60s and
seeing all those American kids coming home from Vietnam in body bags.
Not exactly good for morale back home. Not exactly good for the
country's view of itself. And true poison to the pseudo-noble idea of
just what the hell it is we think we're doing by launching such brutal
and unwinnable wars in the first place.
Make no mistake, the government knows the power of the photo. Words,
it's not so worried about. After all, you can read the war
descriptions and you can check the appalling U.S. death stats and you
can scour the dour headlines and still most of us just shrug our
shoulders and say gosh that sounds bad and get on with our day.
But much like that other "un-American" site, sorryeverybody.com,
exemplifies so beautifully (in a wholly different but no less
effective way), sometimes words just aren't enough. You need to see
it. You need to feel it. Visceral and human and deep.
Funny thing is, many right-wing neocons consider the act of displaying
such pictures unpatriotic, even traitorous. As if revealing the true
horrors of war somehow disrespects our long-suffering soldiers,
somehow harms them by depicting the full violence of what they must
endure for Bush's snide and viciously isolationist policies. You think
soldiers don't want the folks back home to know what they have to deal
with? You think they want you numb to the truth of war and pain and
death? Guess again.
Maybe this should be the rule: If you can't handle seeing what really
goes on in a war, maybe you don't deserve to support it. If you can't
stomach the truths of what our soldiers are doing and how brutally and
bloodily they're dying and in just what manner they have to kill those
innocent Iraqi civilians in the name of BushCo's desperate lurch
toward greed and power and Iraqi oil fields and empire, maybe you
don't have the right to stick that little flag on your oil-sucking
SUV. Clear enough?
The major media, by the way, is often hamstrung and torn. They can
rarely run such photos. Newspapers and TV are hemmed in by
"no-sensationalism" policies and are often paralyzed by the notion
that if they ran such pictures, they would be called insensitive or
inflammatory or anti-Bush and advertisers and readers alike would run
away in droves. After all, most readers just aren't keen on seeing
gross-out pics of 19-year-old kids from Kentucky with massive bleeding
head traumas. It just totally ruins "Garfield."
You have to seek the facts yourself. You have to dare yourself to
click, to take it in, to see if you can, in fact, handle the truth.
It is not easy. It is definitely not pleasant. But in this time of
ever escalating numbers of war dead and flagrant BushCo lies and
sanitized BS about the real effects of war, all coupled with a
simmering plan to attack Iran and maybe North Korea someday real soon,
seeking out such visceral truth is no longer just optional. It is,
perhaps, the most patriotic thing you can do.
# Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
# Mark's column archives are here
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and
Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which
it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.
URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2004/12/03/notes120304.DTL
©2004 SF Gate
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
.
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| User: "johac" |
|
| Title: Re: OT: Mark Morford |
05 Dec 2004 01:59:32 AM |
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In article <hju4r0d1b2ogghgrsbcp7csh6vql2rvec3@4ax.com>,
stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/12/03/notes120304.DTL&nl=fix
Very, Very Dirty Pictures
You want explicit? You want raw and uncensored and free of media bias?
Here you go
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 3, 2004
This is what you won't see in the paper.
This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any
major media Web site anywhere and especially no ***** way ever in
hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News.
I saw those pictures. If there was any doubt that war is hell...
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently
in theVirgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened
nation?-Garry Wills, New York Times 11/04/04
.
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| User: "Daniel Kolle" |
|
| Title: Re: OT: Mark Morford |
05 Dec 2004 02:45:13 PM |
|
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On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 19:09:11 -0800, stoney <stoney@the.net> thought
hard and said:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/12/03/notes120304.DTL&nl=fix
Very, Very Dirty Pictures
You want explicit? You want raw and uncensored and free of media bias?
Here you go
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 3, 2004
This is what you won't see in the paper.
This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any
major media Web site anywhere and especially no ***** way ever in
hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News.
You aren't supposed to see. You aren't supposed to know. You are to
remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you
have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is
merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over
there, carefully orchestrated and somewhat messy and maybe a little
bloody but mostly still patriotic and good and necessary and sponsored
by none other than God his own angry Republican self.
I cannot stand Morford.
--
-Daniel "Mr. Brevity" Kolle; 16 A.A. #2035
Koji Kondo, Yo-Yo Ma, Gustav Mahler, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Geirr Tveitt are my Gods.
Head of EAC Denial Department and Madly Insane Scientist.
.
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| User: "Fred Stone" |
|
| Title: Re: OT: Mark Morford |
05 Dec 2004 05:37:17 PM |
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Daniel Kolle <DKolle@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:bqs6r09nqtsi08q233cdddv5ecct1bfhn1@4ax.com:
On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 19:09:11 -0800, stoney <stoney@the.net> thought
hard and said:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
f=/g/a/2004/12/03/notes120304.DTL
&nl=fix
Very, Very Dirty Pictures
You want explicit? You want raw and uncensored and free of media bias?
Here you go
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 3, 2004
This is what you won't see in the paper.
This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any
major media Web site anywhere and especially no ***** way ever in
hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News.
You aren't supposed to see. You aren't supposed to know. You are to
remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you
have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is
merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over
there, carefully orchestrated and somewhat messy and maybe a little
bloody but mostly still patriotic and good and necessary and sponsored
by none other than God his own angry Republican self.
I cannot stand Morford.
But Daniel, don't you understand? Ugliness and brutality are OK as long
as the US isn't involved. Saddam's torture chambers and mass murders
were excusable as long as he was only doing it to his own people...
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
Save Your Dixie Cups, The South Will Rise Again!
.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Mark Morford |
06 Dec 2004 10:05:24 AM |
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On Sun, 05 Dec 2004 14:45:13 -0600, Daniel Kolle <DKolle@hotmail.com>
wrote:
On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 19:09:11 -0800, stoney <stoney@the.net> thought
hard and said:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/12/03/notes120304.DTL&nl=fix
Very, Very Dirty Pictures
You want explicit? You want raw and uncensored and free of media bias?
Here you go
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 3, 2004
This is what you won't see in the paper.
This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any
major media Web site anywhere and especially no ***** way ever in
hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News.
You aren't supposed to see. You aren't supposed to know. You are to
remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you
have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is
merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over
there, carefully orchestrated and somewhat messy and maybe a little
bloody but mostly still patriotic and good and necessary and sponsored
by none other than God his own angry Republican self.
I cannot stand Morford.
So skip the thread.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
.
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