Internet Freedom Act and Net Neutrality

No, no, no. The Internet Freedom Act isn't about freedom for you as an internet user and you should know by now that when a Republican uses the word Freedom it's about corporate control over your options. John McCain's "freedom act" appears now, after we've just begun to recover from eight years of the Bush FCC acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of big communications corporations; fudging the science and ignoring its own rules with impunity. Under Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, the Commission has stifled, hidden and falsified studies concerning the adverse effects on the public airwaves and even disaster relief services, of using power lines as a conductor for broadband internet and has made censorship of "indecency" a prime directive. It's high time they were prevented from protecting the public interest rather than the power of the telecommunications industry and the religious right.

If McCain's legislation is passed, the Internet Service Providers will have the power to limit your web bandwidth and mine and give preference to - you guessed it - the people they like, the people they own and the people who say what they want said. Have a blog that criticizes Comcast? Back to the days of 300 baud for you old chap! Fox News can blaze along at any speed they like with all the streaming and screaming video and Glennbeckery they can produce and the FCC won't be able to represent you. The freedom of giant corporations and puritanical moralists to censor you -- that's the kind of freedom John McCain thinks is worth fighting for!

Waiting for Ann

Oh goody! The Republicans on the Supreme court have handed down another victory to the Republicans here on Earth who think we need to punish people who say "indecent" things like "shit" and yet want to "move on" when it comes to punishing people for lesser indecencies like torturing suspects to death.

Now any minute now, Ann Coulter will be calling for these "activist judges" to be poisoned, won't she? After all, if it's Communism (or Fascism on alternate Tuesdays) to let a 3% tax cut expire and Fascist censorship to restore the Fairness Doctrine, how bad must it be to allow Federal censorship over broadcast TV? Any minute now, I'm sure. Ann and Godot -- any time now.

Hostages, martyrs and liars

If William Randolph Hearst had had television, I'm sure it would have been necessary for the US to attack some crumbling empire less pathetic than Spain's. As it was, the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor was the 9/11 of its time that allowed the media and McKinley to contrive a reason to bring freedom and American values to Cuba and the Philippines and annex the country of Hawaii.

If Fox News and Freedoms Watch.org had been there, I'm sure they could have challenged France or Germany or England, if not all three. Hearst didn't have slick Ads using one-legged Judas goats to lead more people to martyrdom and he didn't have the families of the fallen to persuade us that to die a martyr for commercial interests and a president's ambition is sacred.


The lesson of the 1960's, for me, was that any war is sacred and once it's begun, reasons for its continuation will arise. Protest is bad because it decreases the morale of those being martyred for the cause that may not be questioned. Now as in the dear dead days of Vietnam, we have people who want to hold our democratic process and free speech hostage so that they can maintain the comforting illusion that their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers died for a noble cause. So it is that Merrillee Carlson, national chair of Families United for our Troops and Their Mission, went on Fox News to protest the use of the names of the dead in a protest against the continuation of the War for Oil.

"When somebody goes and abuses our son's courage and heroism by using it in this manner, it just strikes right to the heart and causes such pain that is unbelievable"

said she to Tucker Carlson. I'm sure her son had courage and he may or may not have been a hero; he may have thought George's oil grab really was a cosmic Manichaen struggle between Good and Evil, but my need to believe that and Merrillee's differ. Indeed if she believes he was abducted by aliens because it eases the pain, it is not America's problem nor is it America's duty to kill more and more and more so that she can sleep at night free from the suspicion that it was George W. Bush and his gang of Neocons who abused his courage and heroism, not the rest of us.

Barbie's Ban

There was a time when legal terminology was larded with Latin, but of late we have laws enacted as a response to a personal grievance with names like Megan's Law, named after someone's murdered child and the result of one man's efforts and one man's grief. The desire for justice, tolerance and a harmonious society, although it takes both authoritarian and libertarian forms, often seems more of an institution than a popular or private movement; an institution that has produced some odd and occasionally disturbing children of it's own.

Mark Twain wrote many of his books in the dialect of the time, which includes the now infamous but then universal "N" word and so many schools refuse to allow the books of one who dedicated his life and risked his livelihood championing minority rights. Of course our literature is full to the gunwales with books of more or less malicious depictions of racial and ethnic groups like Sax Rohmer's once popular Doctor Fu Manchu series and Joel Chandler's Uncle Remus tales. In the last few days there has been an ad hoc ruling by the nameless institution that rules on these things, and booksellers like Border's are taking a comic book style publication in the popular European series Tintin out of the children's section because depictions of Africans therein seemed undignified to an irate customer. The book was first published in 1931. All these things are in a sense relics. The message has got through to most people that our smug Eurocentric attitudes are something worth leaving in the past, but is it going too far to insist that we redact the literature and the culture that produced it so that historical attitudes are no longer visible? It is, in my opinion. Having read all these things as a child doesn't lessen my loathing for racism any more than having read the Bible has interfered with my contempt for the ethnic, racial, class and religious bigotry enshrined therein.

I think there's a danger both in the "ban it" reflex and the tendency of one perceived grievance to set it off. We are far too ready to ascribe the opinion of one man to the kind of "communities" we invent so that we don't sound racist by talking about "the Jews," "the Chinese," etc. Sometimes it's not a community, it's a professor, it's just teacher or some irritable guy with a grudge who can wield unchallengeable power. Perhaps if we began to adopt the current legal fashion and called it, for instance, Mrs. Appleby's Ban or Reverend Plushbottom's Censorship, some perspective might be restored.

A society that buries its history creates dangers for itself which include repeating that history as well as acquiring the ability to bury any part of history, such as the secular origins of the USA and gains the ability to create a fictitious history as is being demonstrated today.