Racism

My girlfriend's mother recently took a church-sponsored trip to Cuba and brought me back a very nice t-shirt:

Cuba/Imagine by Ares

She also found out more about the artist, Arístides Hernández, and boy am I happy she did! His stuff is kick ass. The imagery is grotesque and beautiful. On one hand my eyes want to move away from the imagery but I also want to pore over every detail. The political images are even more potent:

This image on racism is devastating:

Racism by Ares: By permission of Aristides Hernández

This image on justice brings me to tears; so simple but so deep:

Justice by Ares: By permission of Aristides Hernández

Check out Arístides' site and if you have more information about him, let me know.

Ha'aretz has an interesting article on Israels' image problems in the USA.

Let me give some excerpts that are interesting:

The article talks about the group of professionals starting to deal with Israels image problem in the USA, they include such illustrious people as:

... Elias Buchwald, one of the founders of Burson-Marsteller, the second-largest PR firm in the United States; Fran Oppenheim, the owner of a consulting company and formerly brand director at the food giant Kraft General Foods; Helen Marlow, formerly Phillip Morris spokeswoman and vice president in the giant tobacco firm, who dealt with the "anti-tobacco" wave

Let's take for example Fran Oppenheim:

One right-wing, zionist organization reports she is a "representative for The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations". This is no big surprise, they aren't going to tap people to market Israel in the USA that are just middle of the road Americans. She'll be a true believer, or better yet, somebody who has totally bought into Israel as necessary for her social and political well being. Not that Israelis are necessary, just Israel. I doubt her Ashkanzi sensibilities really make her care about the unwashed masses our Arab Jewish Israeli immigrants. If the Israeli establishment doesn't care, I doubt these milquetoast-toast American Ashkenazis care.

The true believers are settlers. Not that I find settlers to be respectable people, but you gotta respect that sort of cheap commitment they have; Living in subsidized housing, getting what amounts to free water and power, and getting to shoot all the darkies you want without ethical or legal repercussions is hard living. By comparison this Fran Oppenheim really represent a weak commitment to Israel, living in the USA, being wined and dined by the cream of Israeli and American society, jetted here and there, without having to endure dealing with us smelly Palestinians.

I don't doubt she is a good marketer. After all it must take a wizard to try to sell utter crap. Just imagine what kind of integrity you must have as a person to stand in front of people and tell them that the rubbery piece of shit with a slightly yellow color is cheddar cheese?

That's right, she made her name selling crap and now she can cement it on the sidewalk of shame by trying to sell Israel, a racist, apartheid state that keeps ten million Palestinians under occupation, imprisonment, and terror, as a haven of not only democracy but good living and open-ness.

Next we have Elias Buchwald:

SourceWatch notes:

For the last 20 years Buchwald has been a volunteer media trainer at an annual program organized by the the American Jewish Congress and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

A racist zionist crazy person has a mirror of previous article mentioning Buchwald:

The program is designed to improve the primary task of the foreign ministry representatives: hasbara - that peculiar Israeli word that is a hybrid of information, public relations and propaganda.The chief exponents of this craft are supposed to be the prime minister and foreign minister, but their English, ability to express themselves and the content of what they say does not exactly help to promote Israel's hasbara efforts, say Buchwald and Greenberg.

As a side note it is amusing to me to note that the same kind of people who have no problem breaking every international human rights law also have no problem breaking copyright. Not surprised, just amused.

Here is an interesting tidbit:

Buchwald senses that the terror mantra may have worked last year but is no good anymore, given Arafat's death. He suggests delivering a positive message: telling the Palestinians, "Come, let's make peace. We want a good economy for you. We want a good economy for us. We've had enough war. Let's live together."

That old Elias, he is a funny man. Disingenuous shit that he is. You do not work for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs then preach peace with us Palestinians when the mission of the Israeli government, and Prime Minister after Prime Minister is to eradicate the last traces of Palestinians off the land of Palestine. Maybe Elias Buchwald knows something about Israeli policy we do not? Perhaps Elias Buchwald now makes Israeli policy with regards to Palestinians and not the Prime Minister. I doubt that. He says "Let's live together" as if the barrier to Israelis living amongst Palestinians has been Palestinians and not the pervasive destruction of Palestinian homes, the rape of Palestinian resources, the imprisonment of Palestinians, and slaughter of Palestinian refugees.

Lastly we have Helen Marlow. Her name doesn't bring up much usable data, but "formerly Phillip Morris spokeswoman and vice president in the giant tobacco firm, who dealt with the "anti-tobacco" wave" should be sufficient to show what her merits are to the campaign. She defends selling deadly poison to an increasingly anti-smoking USA. That's right, she defends causing cancer, arteriosclerosis, emphysema. Hell, by comparison defending genocide, breaking international law, and torturing children should be easy for her. Maybe her epitaph will say "I was doing a job. I was just following orders."

Let us review:

Elias Buchwald is a professional salesman. His job is to sell anything to anybody. We know he is a long time media volunteer for Israel, but aside from that his credentials are selling the unsellable.

Helen Marlow a shill for the tobacco industry.

Fran Oppenheim salesperson for Kraft Foods. Selling the crappiest food in the world.

If this is Israel's Branding Dream Team then you know that Israels case is extremely weak. It is like getting represented by Johnnie Cochran, you know the perp is guilty when Cochran represents you. We know Israel is a genocidal, law breaking, occupying country, which is only reinforced by the presence of Buchwald, Oppenheim, and Marlow who come to whitewash and prettify the strange fruit hanging from the trees.

Even though I am an American citizen, and currently reside in the US I am a perpetual foreigner. I look at the US through the eyes of a well-informed outsider, almost an insider, yet always evaluating things from the outside. I don't identify as US citizen except in the legal sense, and US citizens don't necessarily treat me like fellow US citizen.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I keep looking at people around me and I do not see any undue horror that thousands of their fellow country people are dead. This in itself is somewhat incomprehensible to me, but hey, judge not lest you be judged says the good book. Perhaps millions of US citizens just keep their emotions hidden. Or perhaps the sadness is just too much, or whatever, I can't come up with more excuses.

OK, so maybe sadness is the wrong angle. Maybe I should be looking for different reactions. Should US citizens be outraged? Maybe not. It isn't like any government can do anything about natural disasters. They just happen, right? And New Orleans being hit with a category 4 hurricane is not something that was ever predicted, right? Hell, this storm was such a fluke, a one in a billion chance of this happening. Nevermind that scientists have been talking about this for years. Articles have been written, scenarios drawn up, and recommendations made. Nobody took it seriously enough apparently to do something about this.

At this stage I don't know whether people in the USA even get outraged about anything except their precious little right to bear arms and the price of gasoline. Well good, now they can take their SUV's and their rifle and drive through New Orleans.

OK, so outrage is beyond the emotional repertoire of US citizens. Maybe fear is something they understand. After 9-11 every red-blooded American was out to go get somebody for New York. Never mind that many US citizens avoid anything related to New York like the plague, probably would never go anywhere near the Twin Towers, and generally speaking despise the self-absorbed, provincial, and somewhat snooty denizens of New York City. I can't say I blame them; that garbage-strewn, rat infested shithole called Manhattan gets way too much play in the news anyway. Yet after 9-11 everybody was embracing New York City like a long lost cousin they secretly had a crush on. Hell, for some people New York only became as a real place when 19 shitheads decided to murder several thousand US citizens, and do some charity demolition work by removing two eye-sores from the NYC skyline. Suddenly New York stopped just being a set for Law and Order and became a city, not just any city. A city for all Americans.

For a while the getting was good. Some sheep herders in some country most US citizens can't spell, never mind find on a map, got killed from afar. Towel heads, camel jockeys, and other assorted 'Arab' looking people got shot, and that seemed to do wonders after the big bummer of having a US city bombed.

Let us contrast this with New Orleans. Perhaps up to twice the number of people killed in NYC are dead and dying in New Orleans. Over a million US citizens are internal refugees. A city is close to being wiped out. Yet the response is somewhat tepid. That's right, after having a US city bombed once all of the USA is jaded. So tragically hip they can't even scrape enough wits together to contemplate their own danger.

The Massacre of New Orleans is a study in how a system does not work. Ultimately it is not important whose jurisdiction is preserved, what authority is granted, or which agency is responsible. From the city government up to state government all the way to the top office in the federal level there has been a massive dereliction of duty. Thousands of US citizens were left to die due to the incompetence, negligence, apathy, and sheer stupidity of all the systems involved. The lack of a systematic, thorough, and pre-prepared evacuation plan points to the willful negligence of the responsibilities that are inherent of governing bodies. The sheer amount of deaths was preventable, and as it was not prevented responsibility for the dead lays on the shoulders of so many governing bodies.

OK, so as a country the USA says, OK screw the New Orleans people, that's what you get for living in a city under the sea level. OK, but that is not the point. The point is that despite the bad location of New Orleans, disasters of similar magnitudes can happen at a number of places, and yet people are not putting one and one together to understand that a repeat of the negligence of New Orleans can happen in any city. Hell, New Orleans would have been better off had it been a terrorist attack, maybe then the cowboy Administration of George Bush would have ridden in with horses and six-shooters to make the bad guys go away.

What is so tragic is that this is a systems failure. It is never beautiful when systems fail because for the most part the idea is that you design a system not to fail, or if they fail for unforeseen circumstances that they fail in a gradual manner so as not to take out everything lest the failure of the system be more catastrophic than the even itself. Having proper evacuation plans is not something governing bodies can ignore, especially as cities get bigger and bigger and evacuations become more difficult.

The biggest tragedy of it all is that several thousands of US citizens were allowed to die in such a cruel and callous manner in the richest nation on the planet. Calling it anything less than a massacre is not possible.