Political Culture: The Last Good Bombing
Thursday, July 24th, 2008 by Jon Cummings
Nearly lost amid the fantastic PR (so far) and blind luck of Barack Obama’s Middle East tour – and the horror show that has been John McCain’s pathetic, flailing response to it – an astonishing story has developed in deepest Serbia this week. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who oversaw the rape of Sarajevo, the massacre at Srebrenica and the slaughter of more than 100,000 Muslims during the early 1990s, was finally captured in Belgrade after years in hiding.
The sizzle in this steak is partly in the circumstances: Karadzic, living under the name Dragan Dabic, was masquerading as a long-haired and bearded alternative-medicine guru who claimed to be able to treat everything from impotence to autism. (Thank goodness for that client who demanded an investigation after his erection not only lasted longer than four hours, but spent the whole time watching Judge Wapner and insisting it was “a very good driver.”)
Seeing Karadzic’s pompadour and sloe-eyed mug again, after all these years, couldn’t help but place Obama and McCain’s squabbling over Middle East politics into a fresh context. After all, here was a guy who, at the time of his disappearance in 1995, had been supervising a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing for four years. Here was a guy who, in cahoots with his buddy Slobodan Milosevic, brought nearly a decade of war, rape and outright genocide to the former Yugoslavia in order to make that land safe for a single ethnic group.
These were guys, in short, who needed to be Gotten Rid Of, and fast. Sounds a lot like the argument against Saddam Hussein, doesn’t it? Sure, if we’re talking about the aggressive, gassy Saddam of 1990-91, and not the boxed-in, sanctioned-to-his-eyeballs, no-fly-zoned (and, let’s not forget, no-WMD’d) Saddam of 2002-03. (more…)
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Harrison Ford turns 66 today. (Are you impressed with how I trivialize the category of Current Events in this space week after week? I know I am.) This summer the actor is starring in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth film in the lucrative franchise created by producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg on a beach in Hawaii in 1977 the week Lucas’s Star Wars opened. So far it’s earned roughly $310 million, only a few million behind Iron Man, making them the two leaders at the summer box office up to this point. Both films were distributed by Paramount Pictures, a studio that’s happy to have something to celebrate along with last year’s Transformers and Shrek the Third after a long box-office dry spell earlier this decade, but I wonder how much money they’re making off of Crystal Skull and Iron Man. The former was financed by Lucasfilm Ltd., the latter by Marvel Studios, meaning those companies — and particularly Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford for Crystal Skull — will reap most of the profits, not Paramount. Similarly, Transformers and Shrek the Third were inherited by Paramount after it bought DreamWorks (Spielberg’s a cofounder and co-owner) in 2006, meaning they can’t call those their own either, not to mention this summer’s animated DreamWorks hit, Kung Fu Panda. But they can take full credit for Mike Myers’s latest comedy, The Love Guru! Oh, wait, that one bombed. Sorry, Paramount. (If you had no interest in that tangent about Paramount and its box-office bragging rights, then you should be done singing “Happy Birthday” to Mr. Ford right about now, so we can move on.)
In my continuing consumerist sprint to reject Robert’s admonition, last month I took Catie (now 6) to see an opening-weekend screening of Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. And what a glorious day it was! Having already dressed ourselves up and taken ourselves to a matinee of Wicked at Hollywood’s legendary Pantages Theatre, Catie and I booked across town to the Grove for the perfect nightcap to our daddy-girl culture-fest. After a leisurely and purchase-filled roam around American Girl Place, the colossal retail center of the AG empire, we crossed the street and settled into a pair of newfangled multiplex stadium-seats to take in the doll franchise’s first big-screen adventure.
Now, pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and if God would get off His duff and revise His original list, I’m sure He’d add a space for homosexuality at number eight, as fundamentalist Christians have requested via prayer and daytime talk shows for years now. (In a recent e-mail God told me, “Rob, I got paperwork that stretches back to the 1400s — and I’m talking B.C., my friend — so don’t expect any amendments or late additions anytime soon. Also, you should probably get that mole on your neck checked out.” I don’t like when He calls me Rob, but He’s God, so I let it slide. And it’s a skin tag, not a mole.) But until that day it’ll have to remain a nonfatal sin, and if something like a gay pride parade offends you, just call it a “double whammy” parade and see if that suits you better. We’re never going to be able to make everybody get along with everybody else, but as long as we can find nonviolent ways to help each other ignore the people we can’t tolerate, then that should be good enough.
The seven words you can’t say on TV. There. The thing that every blobit (blog + obit = blobit) is going to focus on is out of the way and we can get to what George Carlin really was on about. It wasn’t curse words. It wasn’t drugs. It was freedom.
Earlier this month New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo reported that he had sent his staff to 1,000 pharmacies across the state in March, April, and May and found more than 250 that were selling expired milk, eggs, baby formula, and over-the-counter medication. The two biggest culprits were the CVS and Rite Aid chains. So what else have these drugstores not been telling consumers?
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