sounds like Thanatoids

[pynchonoid]

Advertisement
THE TOWN THAT TALKS TO THE DEAD
An award-winning journalist captures the life and
spirit of a 122-year
old town populated by people who believe the dead live
among them. 
Look for a 50-city NPR campaign and broadcast and
print throughout the
 spring.  "Royally Entertaining."-Dallas Morning News

Lily Dale:
The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead
Christine Wicker
$24.95, 0060086661
HarperSanFrancisco
www.lilydalebook.com

....On that contextualizing tip: Please note that this
is an "Advertisement" from the March 19, 2003 issue of
PW Daily.  Never heard of this book before.

The US is aleady helping, of course, to assure that
many Iraqi towns and cities will have plenty of dead
among the living.

>From the same issue of PW Daily:

More than 150 writers have signed a letter opposing
the impending War
in Iraq.

The letter reads:

Dear President Bush,

Iraq, while led by a tyrant, represents no clear and
present danger to
our shores. We therefore see no sufficient moral or
historical
justification for a pre-emptive war. We ask that you
refrain from
ending the lives of innocent Americans and innocent
Iraqis until the
inspectors have been given ample time to complete
their work and all
diplomatic measures have been exhausted. As you
yourself have noted,
there are evildoers in this world. Let the United
States not be one of
them.
See the list is signatories here:
http://www.nion.us/waw.htm


Meanwhile, back on that Who's-a-trustworthy-journalist
tip:

<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030320/RVDOYL/TPEntertainment/TopStories>

[...] By the time you're reading this, the attack
might well have begun. We might all know whether the
so-called "shock and awe" tactic has unfolded. It's
unlikely that we'll have a comprehensive picture of
what, exactly, is going on. The loss of human lives is
not what we're going to be hearing about.

In this context, it's still worth noting what happened
on TV on Tuesday afternoon. Out of the blue, Oprah
Winfrey strode forth with an unusual hour of
television. I knew something was happening because on
the on-line Drudge Report there was a frantic request
for people to contact the site if they had seen The
Oprah Winfrey Show. Tuesday's Oprah aired later in the
afternoon in Toronto, so I was glued to it.

By the standards of Canadian television, what happened
on Oprah wasn't amazing or groundbreaking. But on
mainstream American TV, it was extraordinary.

Winfrey's opening question, and the theme of the show,
was, "Why do so many hate the United States?" In the
studio, she had Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle
Eastern Studies, and Thomas Friedman, a New York Times
columnist. Friedman has just finished a documentary in
which he interviewed numerous Arabs in the United
States and around the world in search of answers about
why the Sept. 11 attacks happened. Oprah also
interviewed Michael Moore and aired a Moore-produced
video about America's double standards in
international affairs.

The hour was a galvanizing act of broadcast
journalism. It presented a distinct alternative to the
perspective presented by every mainstream American
broadcaster in the last few months. The message -- and
there certainly was a message -- was that this war
against Iraq will, as Winfrey put it, "trigger many
more problems in the long term."

The program wasn't antiwar, as some American
commentators are claiming already. It presented an
Arab perspective on American foreign policy in Iraq
and the Middle East. It asked the viewers to think
about the limits of the use of force. It required
viewers to absorb information about how other
countries perceive the United States. It created space
for dissent.

At a time when the consensus in American television is
that everybody should pull together and support the
men and women in the U.S. military, what Oprah Winfrey
did was outright subversion. In the last week, Clear
Channel Worldwide Inc., America's largest radio
conglomerate (and a company looking for a break from
the U.S. government), has been organizing pro-Bush and
pro-war rallies and then reporting on them. A
Nashville TV station has been charging local
advertisers to take part in an on-air,
support-the-military campaign and gloating about the
profits. That's just the tip of it.

Oprah Winfrey's show acknowledged a loathing for
American foreign policy in much of the world. It asked
viewers to consider such terms as "unilateral military
onslaught" and "an amorphous coalition forming against
the United States."

Winfrey is a fabulously rich and famous broadcaster.
It didn't take guts to present Tuesday's program
because she's hardly going to suffer from any
substantial backlash. But it did take smarts to do it.
In normal circumstances, the perspectives she
presented would not be truly notable, but in the
contemporary context, they were amazing. The problem
is that the program said more about the rest of
American television than it did about Oprah Winfrey.
[...] 

<http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2414892>
"Protests Flare Across Globe as U.S. Strikes Iraq"

<http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-scalia-rights.story>
[...]The government has room to scale back individual
rights during wartime without violating the
Constitution, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
said Tuesday. 
"The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia said
after a speech at John Carroll University in suburban
Cleveland. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way
beyond what the Constitution requires." [...] 


"Don't forget the real business of the War is buying
and selling. The murdering and the violence are
self-policing, and can be entrusted to
non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is
useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as
diversion from the real movements of the War. It
provides raw material to be recorded into History, so
that children may be taught History as sequences of
violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared
for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a
stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to
try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still
here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of
markets."
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105

... so, just turn on your TV, kick back, and enjoy the
show!

-Doug




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