One Hand Jerking (20 page)

However, when an editorial in the
Los Angeles Times
called for the closing of sex clubs, Weinstein complained that “Prohibition didn't work for alcohol, and it won't work for safer sex. Closing the bathhouses in San Francisco did not have a significant impact on new infections and . . . there are many places where bathhouses operate and promote safer sex.”

In July 2004, Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Los Angeles county health director, called for the licensing of the county's eleven gay bathouses and sex clubs. The new rules include a requirement that require such establishments to be well-llighted so that inspectors can see what patrons are doing. Hey, isn't that Bill O'Reilly there, the guy who's putting on a red-white-and-blue condom?

If you search for
The O'Reilly Factor
on the Internet and then find the archive
link to Dan Savage, you'll notice that the second half of their interview has been erased. Instead of hearing Bill O'Reilly shout, “I want to go to a gay bathhouse,” you'll hear three minutes of a test pattern.

When informed of this, Savage commented, “Either Bill O'Reilly doesn't want people to think that he wants to go to a gay bathhouse, or the folks at Fox News don't want DJs all over the world sampling O'Reilly and making ‘I Want to Go to a Gay Bathhouse!' a dance sensation this winter in Ibiza. Well, it's too late. I know of three or four DJs who are already hard at work on Bill O'Reilly's breakthrough dance track. Stay tuned.”

Groucho Marx said in an interview with
Flash
magazine in 1971, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon's assassination.” Yet he was not subsequently arrested for threatening the life of a president. In view of the indictment against David Hilliard, chief of staff of the Black Panther Party, for using similar rhetoric, I wrote to the Justice Department to find out the status of their case against Groucho. This was the response:

At the time, I was the host of a radio talk show on ABC's FM station in San Francisco. Naturally, I went on the air and read that letter. And then I added, “Well,
I'm
an alleged comedian. Kill Richard Nixon.” But I would never get away with doing something like that in these ultra-fearful times.

In July 2003, the
Los Angeles Times
published a Sunday editorial cartoon by conservative Michael Ramirez. Depicting a man pointing a gun at President Bush's head, it was a takeoff on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo from 1968 that showed a Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong lieutenant at point-blank
range. In the cartoon, the man with the gun was labeled “Politics” and the background was labeled “Iraq.”

“I thought it was appropriate,” said Ramirez, “because I was drawing a parallel between the politization of the Vietnam war and the current politization that's surrounding the Iraq war related to the Niger uranium story.” He said that he was not advocating violence against Bush. “In fact, it's the opposite.” He explained that he was trying to show that Bush was being undermined by critics who said the president overstated the threat posed by Iraq and lied in his State of the Union speech about Saddam Hussein's alleged effort to illegally obtain uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons. Bush has since admitted that the accusation was based on faulty intelligence. “President Bush is the target, metaphorically speaking,” he said, “of a political assassination because of sixteen words that he uttered in the State of the Union. The image, from the Vietnam era, is a very disturbing image. The political attack on the president, based strictly on sheer political motivations, also is very disturbing.”

Nevertheless, the cartoon was enough to prompt a visit the next day by a Secret Service agent who asked to speak with Ramirez. He was turned away by an attorney for the
Times
. The agent had called Ramirez and asked if he could visit. Ramirez assumed it was a hoax and jokingly said yes.

“How do I know you're with the Secret Service?” he had asked.

“Well,” replied the agent, “I've got a black suit and black sunglasses and credentials.”

“Sure, come on down, and make sure you bring your credentials.”

The agent arrived half an hour later. However, in an interview by Brooke Gladstone on WNYC radio, Ramirez said, “The firestorm began actually with Matt Drudge's report on Sunday evening, which was a little interesting because he had the headline on his report that said that I was being investigated by the Secret Service. And I really wasn't contacted by the Secret Service until the next morning at 10:30.”

Gladstone: “Sounds like he has a line in to the Secret Service.”

Ramirez: “I think Matt Drudge is
with
the Secret Service.”

Gladstone: “Now, threatening the president is against federal law, and it's the Secret Service's job to protect the president against potential threats. Do you think that Bush's security detail should have felt threatened by your cartoon?”

Ramirez: “No, I think that this is a pretty famous image, and I think the use
of the metaphor [is justified] especially in light of the fact that it really is a cartoon that favors him and his administration.”

That irony aside, if Bush were actually assassinated, then Vice President Dick Cheney would be demoted to the presidency.

Other examples of the thought police in action:

A man who shall remain anonymous sent Bush a letter saying that if he required a smallpox shot for the troops, he should get a shot himself. He was visited by a Secret Service agent.

Another man, Richard Humphreys, happened to get into a harmless bar-room discussion with a truck driver. A bartender who overheard the conversation realized that Bush was scheduled to visit nearby Sioux Falls the next day, and he told police that Humphreys—who was actually making a joke with a Biblical reference—had talked about a “burning Bush” and the possibility of someone pouring a flammable liquid on Bush and lighting it. Humphreys was arrested for threatening the president.

“I said God might speak to the world through a burning Bush,” he testified during his trial. “I had said that before and I thought it was funny.”

Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to more than 3 years in prison. He decided to appeal, on the basis that his comment was a prophecy, protected under his right to freedom of speech.

In August, Donnie Johnston, a reporter for the
Free Lance-Star
in Fredericksburg, Virginia, wrote about the trickle-down effect of such official repression:

“A few days ago, a public official called me over to his car to discuss his displeasure with the war in Iraq and the way the Bush administration is handling the nation's economy. This well-respected man would talk only from his vehicle, saying he was fearful of criticizing the president or his policies in public. Before our conversation ended, the man told me of other public officials who also are fearful of speaking out. ‘You have to be careful what you say in public these days,' he added. . . . Almost daily, someone informs me that he is scared of openly expressing his views. Even those who do dare to speak out do so in hushed tones, fearful of what ears might overhear. In the politically charged atmosphere that exists in America today, having the wrong person hear criticism of the government can lead to trouble. That became evident recently when an entertainer [a singer] who innocently joked that President Bush had ‘chicken legs' was banned from performing further at Borders Books and Music in Fredericksburg.”

The nation continues to gallop toward a police state in the guise of security. And, in the process, rampant paranoia has now become our Gross National Product. Some elementary schools have even gone so far as to ban parents from bringing cameras to record their children performing in the annual Christmas pageant, because authorities are afraid that those videotapes might somehow find their way into the horny hands of breathless pedophiles.

 

The capture of Saddam Hussein is serving as an orgasmic propaganda victory justifying American imperialism. But propaganda is a many-splendored thing.

Image Manipulation
: George Bush gave a speech in Indianapolis to promote his economic plan. White House aides asked people in the crowd standing behind him to take off their ties so that they would look more like the ordinary folks that Bush said would benefit from his tax cut.

Demonization of Enemy
: Alternet reports about the police beatings of demonstrators against corporate globalization: “For months beforehand, Police Chief John Timoney had portrayed protestors as terrorists and the gathering in Miami as a siege of the city. Not only were the public and media frightened by Timoney's depiction of the planned protests, there's little doubt that the police themselves buy the propaganda. Having been thoroughly indoctrinated on the threat posed by protesters, and emboldened with new quasi-military equipment, the police were, to say the least, overeager to lunge at protesters.”

Obfuscation of Issues
: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has won the 2003 “Foot in the Mouth Award” for his comment on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: “Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we
know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”

Ulterior Motivation
: The
New York Times
reports that “a leaked CIA report warned that resistance to the U.S. occupation is growing among ordinary Iraqis, leading to a new U.S. plan to speed up transfer of power to Iraqis. . . . Even long-time CIA and Pentagon operative Ahmed Chalabi is accusing Bush of letting his re-election concerns determine policy in Iraq, saying, ‘The whole thing was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October [2004] for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government. When you work backwards from that, you understand the dates the Americans were insisting on.'”

Covering Up Reality
: Referring to the president's surprise visit on Thanksgiving day to U.S. troops in Iraq, Mike Littwin reports in the
Rocky Mountain News
: “Before the press was herded into the giant hangar in advance of George W. Bush's pep rally/photo op with the Fort Carson troops, we were given the rules. No talking to the troops before the rally. No talking to the troops during the rally. No talking to the troops after the rally. . . . But even here, or maybe especially here, a soldier or two might have, in conversation, questioned the need for the war in Iraq. This is not exactly a welcome notion in the White House. The Bush campaign has put up an ad in Iowa saying that certain of his opponents are ‘attacking the president for attacking the terrorists,' as if opposing the war in Iraq is the same as opposing the war on terror.”

The book
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
is by the co-editors of
PR Watch
and co-authors of
Trust Us, We're Experts!
and
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You!
Since the production of propaganda is accelerating so rapidly these days, I wondered what they would like to have included in their book if it hadn't already gone to press.

“The main thing that stands out in my mind,” Sheldon Rampton told me, “has been the progressive unraveling of the propaganda campaign and the efforts by the government in Britain, Australia and the United States to paper things over. On the one hand, there has been a steady trickle of whistleblowers [who] have come forward and declared that the intelligence information was selectively interpreted, manipulated, cooked, and falsified. The Bush and Blair governments have responded by retreating into minutae and by attempting to re-spin these exposures as a simple question of whether they ‘lied' or not. . . .

“Other things that I find interesting from a propaganda perspective recently: The renaming of ‘Total Information Awareness' as ‘Terrorism Information
Awareness'; and Bush's repeated charge that his critics are trying to ‘rewrite history. ' I find this phrase interesting at several levels: First, it says something about the shallowness of the man that he thinks of events from only a few months ago as ‘history.' Secondly, it is a patent attempt at reversal, since the Bush administration has been trying to rewrite history by shifting attention away from the issue of weapons of mass destruction (one of the core claims of its argument for war). What Bush is really trying to do is claim that as the winner of the war in Iraq, it is his prerogative to write the history. Of course, he really
hasn't
won the war yet. . . .

“I was struck recently by reading a letter to the editor in an Arizona newspaper by a woman named Carol Drew. She began by complaining that the people of Iraq are ‘selfish and thankless' for ‘crying and whining about how little food and water there is, and blaming it on America.' She then went on to say that she has a niece stationed in Iraq as a soldier. ‘The soldiers are suffering diarrhea,' she reported. ‘They sleep on the ground in ditches to cover themselves from constant gunfire from the Iraqis. . . . She has lost 15 pounds and is weak from lack of proper nutrition and water, but is adamant about being there to do the job that her government has required her to do.'