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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28642352
Clearwater, Florida businessman Herb Quintero spent $500,000 renovating his bait and tackle shop and the property it’s on, including commissioning a fish mural on the side of the building. Though the mural contains no text, the city of Clearwater determined he needed a billboard permit, because the subject matter is related to his business. They began fining him $130 for each day he left the mural uncovered.
So Quintero responded (rather awesomely) by covering the mural with a banner depicting the First Amendment. All of which sets up this beautiful line from a local news report of the dustup:
Meanwhile, the city’s legal department is looking to see what, if anything, it can do about the First Amendment banner.
Thanks to Clearwater for the object lesson in the banality of government thugs. Sometimes we argue and rail about the horrible things going on in distant lands, while our fellow citizens are being attacked here at home. Sure, a painting is not much (I have seen it and it is a nice piece of art as these things go), but local governments in the US will "Gitmo Your Ass" in their own way.
Does anyone doubt that many innocent men waste away in prisons in this country because all the prosecutors give a damn about is their conviction rate?
“Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people that governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They're just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go.”
Arundhati Roy
My favorite Roy still remains An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire. Consortium, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-727-1.
She is an impressive talent that needs to be interviewed more here in the USA.
Glenn?
Thanks for that quote, heru-ur.
I have no doubt Mr Roy has the right of it. When Mr Bush was long ago quoted as saying "they hate us for our freedom" (or words to that effect) my first thought was, well, that's the truth.
He just declined to identify the "they" in question.
Mr Roy has provided the answer.
Mona Tuesday, January 13, 2009 04:35 PM "To those posting in French"
"Speaking in French, or any language that most do not understand, demonstrates the need of a weak persons's fragile ego to build itself up."
Thanks for your contribution on this matter. I’m afraid that the fault is all mine. It was me that first mentioned the French writers Sartre and Camus and what they might have had to say about existentialism, torture and imprisonment and whether there might be some relevance there to the War on Terror and Gitmo. So being replied to in a language I barely understand I took as a salutary slap and a sad reminder that I have never in fact been able to read them in their original language.
This lack I lay firmly at the doors of my non native speaking French teachers when I was at school many years ago. I could never understand why the French used “le” or “la” in front of nouns. If there was any rhyme or reason to do so either my teachers didn’t know or in spite of my continually asking them just couldn’t be arsed to explain.
Given that, I decided quite defiantly that I couldn’t be arsed to learn the language of a nation whose anyway greatest contribution to rock & roll at that time comprised the “oeuvre” of Jonnie fucking Halliday.
I mean I ask you, could you, back in the sixties, at a time when Jagger’s moll, Marianne Faithfull was quite delightfully being nicked by the drug squad whilst wearing nothing more than a fur coat and a Mars bar, be bothered to learn a language you couldn’t use to write a rock song in?
It was only very much later that I came across the term “Le petite mort” (The small death) and learnt that it was the French term for those precious moments that follow an orgasm. Had the priest tutors at my Roman Catholic all boys school had the presence of mind to bring this term to my attention at a crucial stage of my adolescent development as they should have done I’m sure I’d have been all over the language like a fucking rash.
But even here the same difficulty would have arisen. You see I’d always have thought that the moment we expel our last breath would be more a feminine event rather than a masculine one. And that therefore it should read “La petite mort” rather than “le”. But then, what the hell would I know? Come to think of it, what the hell would any of us know?
As another French writer, Flaubert once wrote,
“Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, whilst all the while, we’d rather move the stars to pity.”
Sorry for that freudian slip.
I had a prof Roy in my politics class at university ... something slipped.
as so many of the writers went ice-skating. The grisly Guantanamo manifestation of American "justice" is a suppurating sore but people want to play word-games about Existentialism - and I refuse to call it Gitmo as that's what it's called by your security services.
It is an American problem but, from what I read on this thread, Americans don't want to deal with it. Obama is trying to hide this malignancy somewhere in Europe - it doesn't seem to matter where once it's out of sight. If those due for release are no threat to America's security, there's no convinving reason to refuse them re-location to the American mainland. They didn't seek to go to a Caribbean island thousands of miles away any more than the African slaves brought into the colonies of British North America. If they are perceived as a threat why wouldn't they be a theat in Europe where both the Madrid and London transport systems have already been attacked by bombers? I waited to see if any solution was being offered by AMERICANS but shoes and Sartre don't really cut it.
Alan Dershowitz was on BBC 2 last evening trying to convince a British audience that Israel's continuing and monstrous attack on Gaza is perfectly valid; he knows about "human shields" being used by Hamas etc. etc. and it was almost word for word in the casuistry of the extreme Zionists who've been trying to brow-beat Glenn Greenwald on the inferno that's now the Gaza Ghetto. British Jews, many of them very eminent, have deplored the blitzkreig in Gaza and are not on the raucous scale of American Zionists. Dershowitz is a lying toad, an ugly man in every aspect but had gone on British television to persuade an audience of the superiority of his views. I first became aware of this man's existence during the OJ Simpson trial. I didn't like him then and I despise him now. Of course, he's never been to Gaza any more than Condoleeza Rice or Tony Blair have been but Dershowitz believes he can speak with absolute authority on the matter as he is arrogance on legs.
Will Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East be different from Bush's? The opinion of those who should know, such as a former British ambassadoe to Washington, is that there will be a change in style but not in substance; the view of an Oxford professor of Jewish history, and a former member of the IDF, is that nothing will change until the American public will demand a more equable approach. This elderly professor was deeply upset about what Israel is doing in Gaza and fears the consequences. Maybe he uses the London Underground (subway).
Oxford/Cambridge professors aren't regarded with the same dererence as people of similar rank in Aamerica, there's far less fawning and the salary is not so high. It somehow seems appropriate that peasant is on the menu for the inauguration ball. Of course, the peasants are revolting but maybe not as revolting as a game bird that is hung for some days or weeks until it's sufficently "ripe" before being cooked. All those lamenting the fate of the moose might now take pity on the pheasant but I really don't expect that to happen. The target was bigger.
At a time when bubonic plague was ravaging Europe, the Venetians organised masked balls, the so-called "danse macabre" so that the inauguration ball in Washington D.C will have historical resonance.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
