John Steppling

May 13, 2005...Pope Benedict beatifies the late Pope John Paul in a ceremony at the Vatican. Child killer Michael Ross is executed in liberal Connecticut. First execution in that state since 1960. Condi Rice is promising prompt action if it turns out U.S. soldiers did indeed desecrate copies of the Koran in Guantanamo Bay. Meanwhile in Andijan, Uzbekistan, that morning, troops on direct order from President Karimov, open fire on peaceful, quietly standing protesters. It is estimated that a thousand were shot dead. No exact figure is possible because the bodies were carried off to mass graves by government troops. The United States continues to bestow aid and love on President … [Read more...]

One of the things that has occupied my thinking recently, is the idea of how enclosed narrative has become by the rigid cliches and structural limits of corporate produced film & TV. One can feel the desire to break away from this in the expanded narrative form of certain otherwise kitsch shows such as The Sopranos or Homeland, The Killing, or Breaking Bad. The network formula of the one hour form that stands alone as a narrative with a beginning and end was being challenged to some degree by simply allowing each one hour installment to be part of a season long narrative. The experience felt much more liberating than it actually was, of course. This inevitably leads to thoughts about … [Read more...]

I am always struck by how common the refusal to question. This has come up recently with a sort of mini- war in the media regards conspiracy and the Boston Marathon Bombing. Rachel Maddow, the branded "out" lesbian liberal at MSNBC, established clearly that she knows who signs her paychecks. (see below). The Gay Pride parade announced that this year's Grand Marshall was Bradley Manning, only to very quickly announce that no, that was a mistake and the perpetrator of said mistake was being disciplined. No word yet on who Bud Light and the other corporate sponsors DO want as Grand Marshall. I was reading a number of responses at a number of places on the topic of the withdrawal of … [Read more...]

Tom Brokaw of NBC news: no question about it. we're so an open society and vulnerable to attacks every day. everyone has to understand tonight, however, beginning tomorrow morning early there's going to be much tougher security considerations across the country. however exhausted we may be by them. we have to live with them and get along and go forward and not let them bring us to our knees. you will remember last summer we were unhappy with the conventions. now i don't think that we could raise the complaints of what happened today in boston. It seems clear that whether or not the government had anything to do with the Boston Marathon Bombings (more on that below) the state will seize … [Read more...]

I keep having this strange sense of the hallucinatory as I follow the Boston Marathon story. And then to follow or attempt to track the public response to the entire city of Boston being under martial law. The docility with which this was accepted is pretty alarming. The public response though cannot be separated from the public's consumption of Hollywood film, and/or TV and corporate news. The story of the Tsarnaev brothers increasingly resembles a film script. And people increasingly "watch" it as they watch a movie. But when I say movie, I suppose it's important to differentiate between corporate product and not corporate --OR--maybe it's not. The landscape portrayed in media, … [Read more...]

This is now the week of the Boston Marathon bombings. So all discussion takes places from within the shadow media has created. This is the shadow of american exceptionalism. U.S. lives are worth more. This topic is now so boring, so utterly idiotic that I don't think I can have it here. What is more interesting are the pronouncements of a new reactionary "left" that seems to be growing. For this is also still a week in which the dead Thatcher meme collides with domestic terror in the U.S. The recent covers of the New Economist: The real levels of domestic oppression continue to get ratcheted up. Over at Dissident Voice, Ajuma Baraka writes of a new report on state … [Read more...]

Random thoughts. Margaret Thatcher dies. There are the usual fawning obituaries, but also more than the usual number of attacks, which really speaks to just how widely hated she was, by even those seemingly close to her. At least on a personal level. One gets no sense of her personal appeal, of any intimate attractiveness. She was a repellent sort of lizard-person. Her spawn was feckless inbred and of weak character. Mark Thatcher made news ten years ago when he tried to organize a coup in Equatorial Guinea. First, Equtorial Guinea is a tiny dot of land on the west coast of Africa. It is a former Spanish colonial holding, and ranks as among the twelve most corrupt and repressive countries … [Read more...]

“The deviant male was above all a bourgeois, egoistic and unpatriotic as well as scarcely virile (because he was unfit or reluctant to repeatedly impregnate the female)l the deviant female was the too ‘modern’ woman, Americanized, independent and masculinized." Critica fascista (1937) "Man's authoritarian structure-this must be clearly established-is basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living substance of sexual impulses." Wilhelm Reich One of my first experiences with institutional enforcement of masculinity was in junior high school. Two incidents occurred in 7th grade; the first in gym class with one of the boy's gym teachers. Actually, … [Read more...]