Things That Make Me Sad

Yesterday, I posted about the worsening crisis in Congo. This afternoon comes this news.

Government officials said two mass graves were discovered in eastern Congo containing as many as 2,000 bodies.

Here’s the video I posted yesterday from Doctor’s Without Borders new campaign, Condition:Critical.

Alan Taylor writes:

Eighteen days ago, I published an entry titled “Conflict in Congo, refugees on the move“, which showed some of the initial chaos resulting from the war erupting once again in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). In the days since, the civilian population has endured more continued fighting amongst multiple factions, cholera outbreaks, separation from family members, hunger, and further losses (of life, property, safety and trust) as both rebel forces and government soldiers have committed many acts of theft, rape and murder while thinly-stretched UN forces have been unable to provide much help. The organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) has recently launched their own multimedia initiative to “bring global attention to the humanitarian consequences of the intensifying war in eastern DR Congo”, called Condition:Critical …

Mark Danner examines “frozen scandal“:

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

… Journalists as the self-abnegating seekers after truth, defenders of society’s conscience: had this happy description ever been true, even during Watergate, it now bears little resemblance to the scandal-mongering world of cable news shows and gabfests, for which scandal, the gaudier the better, provides the vast and complicated narratives that are the lifeblood of the twenty-four-hour news cycles. As the first Persian Gulf War begot CNN so did Monica Lewinsky’s pouty lips beget Fox News.

Scandals, the more complicated and richer the plotlines the better, have above all to endure. Scandals provide the fodder for on-air confrontation, the verbal slash and parry—which is what television, a terrible medium for conveying information of any complexity, does best, and does most cheaply. Scandals provide subplots and minor characters and spin-offs. They offer, to the post-Watergate, high-profile, well-coiffed, colleague-of-the-powerful journalist hero of today—could anything be further from the deeply irreverent working stiff cracking wise in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940)?—the true venue for the highest practice of his art, the television studio.

That art relies on, or anyway thrives on, scandal. Scandal denotes success. Scandal shows he is doing his job. Scandal means pay dirt. And scandal represents that media-age dream, the perpetual story. Scandal can be rehashed, debated, photographed, from initial leak, to perp walk, to hearing, to trial, to appeal. Scandal offers an endless stream of what the business is after all supposed to be about: news. As in: what is new. Scandal brings the heart-pumping, breath-gulping surge of stop-the-presses excitement, letting us know that into our fallen world the Gods of Great Events have finally come down from on high to intervene. Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped “breaking news,” beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis. Everything changes and nothing does.

*
Sadly, so very true. But this phenomenon is certainly not confined to the mainstream news outlets — newspapers, network news organizations or the cable news networks. Blogging has facilitated and exacerbated this scandal industry to virtually epic proportions. (The Obama citizenship “scandal” is just the latest example.)

Beginning tomorrow evening, HBO will be showing the 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. “a compelling and illuminating expose of the US-sponsored policy of torture which emerged after 9/11,” as described by the advocacy group Reject Torture. Here’s the program description from the HBO website:

Not long ago, the United States was viewed around much of the world as the good guys. But the appallingly inhumane tactics used by military prison guards changed all that. This is the story of how America lost its dignity in its zeal to win the War on Terror. This 2007 Oscar®-winning documentary takes a disturbing, in-depth look at the highly questionable interrogation practices used by the U.S. military on prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in the years following 9/11. Beginning with the story of an innocent Afghan taxi driver who was killed while being held in a Bagram prison in 2002, the film tells the grim, cautionary saga of how the U.S. government–desperate to draw information from a top Al Qaeda leader–approved the use of cruel and unusual interrogation techniques that were later imported to U.S. prisons abroad.

Here’s the trailer.

*

*

I encourage every American citizen to watch this documentary to better understand what our government does in our name. The first airing on HBO is Monday at 8pm our time. Here’s the complete schedule of its airing.

*

This just plain irritates me. Jesus is not a Republican (or a Democrat). I believe with all my heart that He cares about more than just the abortion issue and the gay marriage issue.

Indeed, Jesus is pro-life, but pro-life is more than just about pregnancy and birth; pro-life extends beyond the womb and encompasses all the life issues each and every individual all around the world faces, including extreme poverty and obscene disparity of wealth, famine and hunger, genocide and war.

Jesus certainly cares about the sanctity of marriage, but that extends beyond the issue of a union between homosexual couples and encompasses the union and marriages of heterosexual couples, including fidelity and marriage “until death do us part.” Why do the divorce rates within the Christian Church so closely mirror that of divorce rates outside the Church? If fundamentalist Christians, like the gentleman in the video, care so much about the sanctity of marriage, why doesn’t he focus on the truest threat to the “traditional marriage” — rampant divorce rates among heterosexual couples who even occupy our church pews?

Do I condemn those who have been divorced? Absolutely not. I simply want the same standard of “sanctity” to apply to heterosexual couples as these Christianists want it to apply to non-heterosexual couples. I do not oppose civil unions between two adults, heterosexual or homosexual. Marriage is an institution that should remain within the religious context, and it can be defined by the respective religious institution.

What irritates and frustrates me most are that Christianists like this gentleman continue to reduce every election down to these two issues. And how successful has that proven to be. They’ve had eight years of a pro-Christianist presidency with control of at least two branches of government for the first six years. Look at where it has gotten us.

Has there been significant improvement in our nation and in the world with these two issues? Has the Christianist agenda really worked?

There are more issues than just these two that devoted followers of Christ should consider when voting this November. Failing to consider the other bigger issues — poverty, hunger, war, the Gospel message of faith, hope and agape love — is ignoring the larger messages of Jesus and the Bible.

*
[Stepping down from my soapbox now.]

UN—[CENSORED]—BELIEVABLE!

For the second time this week (that I know about), Oklahoma is again in the spotlight. Earlier this week, it was about a church giving a way an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at a youth conference. Now, it is one of our own county commissioner’s insane campaign materials garnering attention from those outside the state… again …

Oklahoma County, Oklahoma Commissioner Brent Rinehart is facing a tough reelection campaign.  He’s been accused of abusing his office for personal gain, and will go on trial in the fall on felony campaign finance charges.  But apparently, this is all a conspiracy of homosexuals, liberal do gooders, and good ol’ boys to force Rinehart out of office.  Rinehart lays out his case in a comic book he’s sending out to voters, which—you may be surprised to learn—he wrote and illustrated himself.

Are you ready for this?

For those outside our community who may not have all the background, Jim Roth who is mentioned in the cartoon was one of Rinehart’s fellow county commissioners before he was appointed to the state corporation commission, and he is openly gay. Rinehart, being the close-minded bigot that he is, made this an issue during the time they served together and he is certainly making it a major issue now. Meanwhile, as he points out all the faults of others, he faces felony charges for illegal campaign contribution schemes.

“Let him who is without sign cast the first stone.” Rinehart should definitely drop all those rocks he’s been hurling. You can read more about it here and here.

Unfortunately for the rest of us who call Oklahoma home, there are a sufficient number of idiots, bigots and hatemongers around to make this a regular feature. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Oklahoma, it really is a great place to live and be proud of; we just have more than our fair share of morons crapping on our parade with their idiocy, lunacy and tomfoolery.

A reader named Oliver left a comment over the weekend about one of my older posts about McDonald’s iced coffee. Rather than just describing how his experience was different than the one described in the post — which, incidentally, was actually the testimony of fellow Okie blogger and friend BritGal Sarah — Oliver, in the midst of an otherwise reasonable comment, chooses to interject a disparaging remark:

Brad probably just has bad digestion and a bad metabolism from years of poor eating choices which has left him quite obviously obese.

Now, being a large man for nearly all of my life, I’m certainly not unaccustomed to insults and prejudice about being “fat” or “obese.” Certainly during my school years, other kids could be pretty cruel. But I’ve been amazed that some kids never outgrow their mean-spiritedness. Some go out of their way to insert an insult or disparaging remark into a conversation, especially when they are strangers hiding behind relative anonymity — i.e. most people don’t say it to my face; it’s been typically by email or online comments from a safe distance.

Oliver’s comment reminded me of an email I got a few years ago from a reader of a magazine that I formerly published. Continued

NBC’s Tim Russert dead at 58

*

*

I was shocked when I read the news and deeply saddened. He was one of my favorite journalists. He will be truly missed. Washington D.C. has forever lost one of its icons.