President, War Criminal

In an opinion piece published Tuesday, Joe Scarborough writes:

I suspect [history will be unkind] to those “progressives” horrified by George W. Bush’s anti-terror campaign but mute to the terror of the Obama administration’s savage drone wars. These sensitive souls, so repulsed by the waterboarding of three terrorists ten years ago, now celebrate their administration’s version of a war on terror that swapped out the targeted capture of terrorists with a drone program that all too often kills children, women, grandparents and scores of innocent young men.

Fair point. Barack Obama's record on civil liberties and executive privilege in the so-called war on terror is as bad as Bush's was. He has expanded the use of drones, which, yes, often kills innocent people and serves as a recruiting tool for terrorist groups, and has "embraced" a policy where all "military-age males" in a strike zone are presumed combatants, effectively rendering them guilty until proven innocent. He oversaw the passage of a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that includes, in the words of the ACLU, "an extraordinary expansion and statutory bolstering of authority for the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world." He even sidestepped the War Powers Act, the most symbolic and perhaps the most unequivocal restraint on executive power, during NATO's intervention in Libya.

Granted, not all liberals have been quiet about Obama's use of drones or other worrisome aspects of his civil rights record. (Glenn Greenwald immediately comes to mind.) But we on the left have far too often been quiet, when loud political pressure is needed if we ever want these policies to change.

So mea culpa, Joe, you are absolutely correct. Until you write:

The release of the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" will surely lay waste to at least one of the left wing's lies: that the CIA's enhanced interrogation did nothing to gain actionable intelligence. “Zero” is generating angst amongst movie reviewers and essayists who were swept away by the film but left conflicted and uncomfortable specifically because this first draft of history accurately shows how the CIA's program played a major role in finding and killing Osama bin Laden.

So let me get this straight. Shame on liberals for being silent on Obama's unacceptable use of drones while loudly decrying Bush's apparently acceptable use of torture? I suppose you could make the moral case that drones are worse. But you cannot claim that torture is acceptable. You can't even claim that torture was effective in gathering intelligence (unless you want to believe a Hollywood movie over a report approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee).

Doing so makes you guilty of the same intellectual dishonesty you just accused us of.

Until the Lion Learns to Speak (and Listen)

 

Until the lion learns to speak

The tales of hunting will be weak…

K’Naan, a Somali rapper now living in the United States (with a pretty amazing background), recently published a beautifully written piece in the New York Times about the kind of self-censorship in which  artists in the American music industry must engage in order to maintain success on the charts.  From his op-ed: 

I could reach more people, it told me.  Was it right to spit in the face of fortune, to not walk in rhythm with my new audience?  Didn't all good medicine need a little sugar before it could be swallowed?

So I began to say yes...some songs became far more Top 40 friendly, but infinitely cheaper.

K'Naan's article calls to attention a crucial problem in American [popular] culture today - the self-indulgence and the need to be sheltered and isolated from the less than stellar realities that many people around the world, and even within the United States, face on a daily basis.  Lupe Fiasco, an American rapper, writes frequently about social issues within the United States and has also critiqued the music industry and popular culture's will to "dumb it down" (Different is never good, good is only what we pick/You ain't got a hit unless it sounds like these did...).

Music indeed serves many purposes.  Music is a form of expression and entertainment that conveys a message through the lyrics, tone, rhythm, melody, harmony, breaks, and a variety of other aural rhetorical tools.  Sometimes, music can provide the listeners with a temporary escape from reality - the glamorous lifestyle of constant partying and financial success that many pop stars write about is an understandably appealing subject matter for listeners today living in a world struggling to emerge from a global economic crisis leaving many with economic troubles of their own.

However, the problem is that constant escape through these types of messages results in a willful blindness to and ignorance of crises in the real world.  A flat-out refusal by record labels to promote and radios to play songs that actually attempt to address these issues serves as a cultural tool of collectively devaluing the lives of those human beings caught in rough situations where music can actually have the power to make a positive difference.  And there is something seriously perverse about mass acquiescence to the willful devaluation of another human being's life.

This is not to say that music has to be serious and contain socially critical messages all the time.  As previously stated, music serves many purposes, but it is important to remember that music always contains a social message.  The question now is, what are the messages that we as a society collectively value?

Do we choose to turn a deaf ear to reality and remain immersed in 3 minute - 40 second escapes?  Or can we decide that other messages are important too, that the suffering experienced by others is real and their voices are worth our brief attention?  By constantly dumbing down the messages to which we are open to receiving, we dumb down our own humanity.

Here is a story about fame.  I heard it first as a fable in Somalia, before living it out in America.

The fox, they say, once had an elegant walk, for which the other animals loved him.  One day, he saw a prophet striding along and decided to improve on what was already beautiful.  He set out walking but could not match the prophet's gait.  Worse, he forgot his own.  So he was left with the unremarkable way the fox walks today...

So I am not the easiest sell to Top 40 radio.  What I am is a fox who wanted to walk like a prophet and now is trying to rediscover his own stride.

I may never find my old walk again, but I hope someday to see beauty in the graceless limp back toward it. 

So beware what's on the airwaves

And be more aware of what's not getting airplay...