| |
|
A three-part UPI series by Martin
Sieff on how some mainstream media were bamboozled about a massacre that
had never happened:
Part
One: Documenting the Myth (05/20/02)
“After the Israeli Army attacked the West Bank Palestinian city of
Jenin on April 2, the Western European media fell for the ‘Massacre
Myth’ in Jenin in a big way. Even though the final Palestinian Authority
figure acknowledged only 56 dead in Jenin, media coverage in major Western
European nations gave credence to early claims by the PA’s top officials
that as many as 3,000 civilians had been killed in the fighting there.
Israel’s own actions led credence to the myth. The Israeli army barred
the international media from Jenin as its forces drove into the city.
The only sources that the media then had for what was going on there were
from the Palestinians themselves. And in the inevitable confusion of battle,
what the great 19th century military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz
called ‘the fog of war’ applied. At the time, both the Israeli
and Palestinian authorities appeared unclear what was actually happening
on the ground. However, even allowing for these factors, the Western media
coverage of Jenin, espically in the Western European press and broadcast
media, largely proved to be factually wildly inaccurate in the light of
what later emerged. And there was also a hysterical tone to many of them.
What made these unreliable and misleading reports all the more remarkable
was that many of the worst of them emerged in the most respected and influential
organizations in the British media. The British Broadcasting Corporation
and three of the four so-called ‘quality’ daily newspapers —
The Times, The Independent and The Guardian — fell for the ‘Massacre
Myth’ hook, line and sinker. Even the more cautious and — as
it proved — reliable ‘Daily Telegraph’ was not entirely
immune either.”
Analysis:
Why Europeans bought Jenin myth (05/21/02)
“Why were reporters and news editors of so many of the biggest and
most prestigious Western European newspapers and broadcasting networks
ready to believe that the Israeli Army had committed a massacre in the
Palestinian West Bank city of Jenin when no massacre had in fact occurred?
The reasons were many. First, everyone was prepared to believe the worst,
because the worst had already happened. It was all too credible to believe
that hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians had been massacred in
Jenin because they had been massacred before. The 20-year-old shadow of
Sabra and Shatila lay across the international media’s initial perceptions
of Jenin.... Second, the Israelis haplessly and inadvertently dug a public
relations trap for themselves and then promptly fell into it. They prevented
the international media from covering what was certainly extremely fierce
fighting in the refugee camp and streets of Jenin.... Third, even when
the worst fighting was over and the Israelis finally allowed reporters
into Jenin, a ‘rat pack’ psychology, even hysteria, appears
to have taken hold. People saw what they wanted to see and they mutually
reinforced each other in their perceptions.... Fourth, almost none of
those present had covered serious urban conflicts in Lebanon and Northern
Ireland during their worst phases in the 1970s and early 1980s. Almost
none of them were old enough to have experienced full-scale battle reporting
first-hand in Vietnam. This led them to vastly exaggerate the scale of
destruction and death they were seeing.”
How
Europe’s media lost out (05/22/02)
“The credibility of state-run or supported national broadcasting
organizations took a huge hit. The principle of having a free market in
broadcasting as well as print media outlets in order to ensure more fair
and balanced overall coverage got a big boost. This was humiliating to
the Europeans, who have long sneered in their dominant broadcast media
culture at what they regard as the crass commercialism and vulgar pursuit
of profits of competing U.S. broadcasting networks. It was also a blow
to those who would like to expand National Public Radio’s small-scale
radio news operation in the United States into a radio-TV news empire
on the lines of the BBC or other European outlets. The reporters and editors
of NPR appeared far more prone to swallow the wild allegations about Jenin
than most of their U.S. media colleagues did. The controversy also underlined
the value of having widely read and circulated columnists who can act
in the media like the Senate does in Congress or other ‘upper’
houses of parliament do in Western Europe and Japan. Such columnists at
their best can act like deliberative parliamentary chambers not subject
to the pressures of repeated re-election campaigns. They can take a longer
term view of things. They can act as cautious, more thoughtful voices
expressing caution or doubt about emotional hysteria sweeping the news
pages. William F. Buckley’s May 4 editorial ‘Did the Israelis
Do It?’ serves as a model for this kind of writing.”
A three-part essay “How Contemporary
American Poets are Denaturing the Poem” by Joan Houlihan @ Web Del
Sol:
On
the Prosing of Poetry
“Before writing was invented, poetry was used to mark special occasions
and strong emotions and to burn the necessary stories — the myths
and truths of a culture — into the memories of the people. Mnemonic
devices such as sound, rhythm, and heightened, pictorial language, economy
of expression (‘epigrammatic’ speech that encodes many meanings
in as few words as possible) and assonance, consonance, alliteration,
parallelism, were the branding irons used for the task. As well, these
devices were incantatory, stirring primal responses to their sound and
rhythm, and creating an atmosphere for the sacred and magical. Although
spoken, poetry was not common; it was instead, a singular kind of speech,
reserved for relaying important or sacred events, ensuring that such events
would be remembered almost in a physical way, in the body’s deep
response to sound, rhythm and imagery. Speaking poetically served a purpose.
Speaking prosaically also served a purpose — to negotiate everyday
reality, to speak of those things which were common to all and not worthy
of long remembrance — to speak of the world in transit. Our ability
to write did not erase the distinction. It took contemporary American
poets, writing in deliberately flat prose about insignificant personal
events and feelings; and editors, publishers and critics dubbing such
anecdotes and everyday journal entries ‘poems,’ to erase the
distinction. We have reached the point we are being asked to believe that
a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem.
We are told to kneel and stare at this specimen of dead lines laid out
in its little coffin on the page, and declare it alive. What do we say?”
I=N=C=O=H=
E=R=E=N=T
“The need for coherence appears to be basic, perhaps even neurological.
Science has proved the human brain strives to find a pattern, an order,
a meaning in chaos. What isn’t coherent, we strive to make so. It
satisfies us. Thus, before settling for separate, unconnected pieces,
beautiful as they may be, we will look hard for connections. While shapes
and colors can become untethered from their representation, or meaning,
a poem can only become fully untethered from meaning if it is without
words. This is because the smallest irreducible piece — the word
— retains meaning, in and out of context. A totally meaningless poem
would logically consist of a blank page. In spite of this difficulty,
some poets do manage to make extremely close approaches to the state of
meaninglessness while still using words.... In order to save us from the
Western capitalist construction called a poem, the Language Poets had
to destroy it. But two other possible reasons for writing Language Poetry
come to mind: [1] The poet cannot succesfully create a coherent poem and
so makes a virtue of his failure. [2] The poet cannot successfully create
a coherent poem and so uses poem-as-pretext for expounding critical theories
— something he or she can do, and that, happy coincidence, ensures
an academic career.”
The
Argument for Silence: Defining the Poet Peter Principle
“The tension between ‘career’ and ‘vocation’
in poetry is nowhere more obvious than in academia where poets take a
sabbatical in order to write poetry, but never take a sabbatical
from writing poetry. I believe that a certain variety of established
poet, perhaps those with a substantial number of books, would benefit
greatly from a poetry sabbatical. There is evidence of a need for poetic
silence all around us. We see it every time we read a denatured poem by
a renowned poet, usually in a renowned publication; evidence that the
enabling editors of such publications have failed in their duty to enforce
last call. For example, poets James Tate, Philip Levine and Mary Oliver
have each produced more than 16 books of poetry. Whatever has driven this
production, it is clear from the trajectory of all three poets that something
must stop it. In all three cases, a windiness, a wordiness, a kind of
poetic logorrhea can be found in their latest work in contrast to the
fire and compression in their early work. Flatlined, barely pulsing, their
latest work is being kept alive by extraordinary means: the artificial
resuscitation of continuous publication.”
A two-part article @ Salon, by Andrew
O’Hehir, on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings:
The
book of the century (06/04/02)
“It’s unwise to read The Lord of the Rings as allegory
in any strict sense, but this commonplace personal odyssey, one shared
by millions in the modern age, is strikingly echoed in its plot. Frodo,
the child-size hero, must leave his beloved Shire and travel into Sauron’s
domain of Mordor, with its slag heaps, its permanent pall of smoke, its
slave-driven industries. When he returns after much danger and difficulty,
he discovers that the malicious wizard Saruman — as Shippey points
out, a techno-Utopian who began with good intentions — has industrialized
the Shire itself, cutting down its trees, replacing its hobbit-holes with
brick slums and factories and poisoning its rivers. In this regard, then,
The Lord of the Rings belongs to the literature of the Industrial
Revolution, a lament for the destruction of England’s ‘green
and pleasant land’ that belongs somewhere on the same shelf with
Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and William Blake. But Tolkien saw something
wilder and stranger in the Sarehole of his childhood, and in himself:
a fading but still tangible connection to the distant, mythic past. If
his Shire hobbits are the West Midlands rural bourgeoisie of 1895 or so,
they have been catapulted backward into a world where they themselves
are the anachronisms, a realm of elves, dwarves (Tolkien insisted on this
nonstandard but ancient plural, although he would have preferred ‘dwarrows’),
wizards, dragons, goblins and black sorcerers.”
A
curiously very great book (06/05/02)
“It is not merely the scale of mythic invention or the grand storytelling
that distinguishes it but also its tragic vision, the profound melancholy
mentioned by Lewis. Few if any heroic quests have ever had such a sense
of human frailty and weakness; although Frodo brings the Ring all the
way to the Cracks of Doom where Sauron forged it, in the end he is overcome
by temptation and claims it for his own. He is redeemed only by chance,
or by divine grace, which in Tolkien’s world comes to the same thing.
He has shown mercy to the treacherous and miserable Gollum, who becomes
the accidental agent of Frodo’s and the world’s salvation. But
Frodo, the book’s ostensible hero, fails in his quest and is left,
like the knight who guards the Holy Grail, with a grievous wound that
can never heal (an Arthurian parallel Shippey has not noticed). Even the
victory wrought by the Ring’s destruction is a sad affair, in many
respects closer to defeat. Much of the magic and mystery drains out of
Middle-earth after Sauron’s fall, leaving behind an ordinary, only
slightly prehistoric realm dominated by human beings. Tolkien’s most
beloved characters — Gandalf, the High-Elves Elrond and Galadriel
and the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, both of them indelibly marked by the
Ring — depart over the western seas to a paradisiacal nowhere that
none of us on this shore will ever see. Tolkien liked to present himself
to friends and readers as a contented fireside hobbit, fond of tobacco,
simple food and late mornings in bed, and there can be no doubt, reading
his letters, that he was immensely gratified by the outpouring of love
and enthusiasm his work engendered. (And immensely irritated by some of
it; when a woman wanted to name her Siamese cats after his characters,
he replied that they were “the fauna of Mordor.”) But in reality
he was a strange and complicated man who wrote a strange and sad book,
whose complex of meanings we will likely never determine.”
A two-part article on Economists
& Ecologists by Arnold Kling @ Tech Central Station:
Common
Sense and Sensibility (03/28/02)
“Economists are not well thought of these days by environmentalists.
Or so it seems from accounts such as a recent Scientific American excerpt
of Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Future of Life. He characterizes
economists as narrow, myopic environmental ignoramuses.... It’s true
that economists have trouble with the views of many environmentalists.
But this just reflects our frustration with the ecologists’ use of
the most naive and inappropriate economic models and assumptions in their
forecasts and policy prescriptions. That’s why Bjorn Lomborg’s
new book The Skeptical Environmentalist is such a distinctive,
rare, and important work. In addition to sharing the ecologist’s
concerns about aquifers, sustainability, and global warming, Lomborg accepts
the economist’s paradigm. By combining economics with ecology, he
comes up with a rational, balanced analysis. Unfortunately, environmentalists’
denial of the validity of economic analysis runs through much of their
criticism of Lomborg’s work.... Environmentalists tend to assume
a constant relationship between inputs and outputs. If you are going to
produce X tons of grain, then the acreage of land required will be X/y,
where y is the average yield of an acre of land. Economists call this
the ‘fixed-coefficients’ model, because the relationship between
acreage and grain is governed by the coefficient y. Simply put, this is
not a realistic model. In practice there are always a variety of production
techniques that use different combinations of inputs to produce the same
output. The fixed-coefficients model applies, if at all, only in the very
short run. In the long run, there is substitution and technical change.
Substitution means that producers will vary the inputs used in production,
depending on changes in the cost of various inputs. For example, if land
becomes more expensive, producers will substitute capital, labor, fertilizer,
or other resources in order to utilize the most efficient combination.
The other long-run factor is technical change. As we accumulate knowledge,
we come up with ways to produce more output with fewer resources.”
Lomborg’s
Lessons (04/02/02)
“Economists use interest rates to discount future benefits and costs.
Because of discounting, environmental costs that are out in the future
are given less weight than today’s economic goods, including today’s
environment. Ecologists suspect that economists are being short-sighted,
when in fact we are being rational. The interest rate represents the price
at which the economy can trade off future output for present output. What
discounting says is that tomorrow’s output is ‘cheap’ in
today’s terms. Undertaking a large expense today to avoid the same
expense tomorrow is inefficient. Ecologists worry that we are consuming
too much now, while depriving future generations of resources and leaving
them with large unpaid environmental bills. Economists, on the other hand,
argue that by investing in science and research we are providing a legacy
of wealth to future generations. The assets that they inherit in the form
of capital and know-how will be much greater than any environmental liabilities.
In The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg makes a
strong case against the Kyoto Protocol, which attempts to restrict carbon
dioxide emissions in order to forestall global warming. Even as one who
accepts the thesis of global warming, Lomborg suggests that the Kyoto
Protocol is a bad idea. Lomborg estimates a finite (albeit large) cost
to global warming. Also, because this cost will be borne in the future,
he applies a discount rate. If the present value of the cost of global
warming is finite, then it becomes possible to estimate the benefits of
policies to forestall global warming. Next, it follows that we can compare
benefits to costs. It is on the basis of these cost-benefit comparisons
that Lomborg is able to show that the Kyoto Protocol approach is unwise.”
A three-part article on some current
thinking on the Koran in The Atlantic:
What
is the Koran? Part 1 (Jan. 1999)
“Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back
to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam’s first two centuries
— they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans
in existence. What’s more, some of these fragments revealed small
but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations,
though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with
the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is
quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.”
What
is the Koran? Part 2 (Jan. 1999)
“Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Koran, says the
Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, a professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the
University of Paris, is ‘a very sensitive business’
with major implications. ‘Millions and millions of people refer to
the Koran daily to explain their actions and to justify their aspirations,’
Arkoun says. ‘This scale of reference is much larger than it has
ever been before.’”
What
is the Koran? Part 3 (Jan. 1999)
“Gerd-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness,
on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional
understanding of the Koran. ‘The Koran claims for itself that it
is “mubeen,” or “clear,” he says. ‘But
if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply
doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims — and Orientalists — will
tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic
text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional
anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible —
if it can’t even be understood in Arabic — then it’s not
translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly
to be clear but obviously is not — as even speakers of Arabic will
tell you — there is a contradiction. Something else must be going
on.’”
|
|
|
