The Question in all journalism school grads' minds tonight:
Let's see, Pulitzer Prize on one side of the scale, or being disappeared for a session of waterboarding torture on the other side.
Hmmm, is a story worth it?
Shouldn't you just get into advertizing or government work?
It would be more LUCRATIVE than journalism.
It would be so much EASIER to write the party line.
All our Republican friends are getting cushy jobs in government and with gov't. contractors.
Let's weigh the options once more:
Journalism: start at the bottom, bad hours, bad pay, no bennies, Big Brother stonewalling, Big Brother watching, and even, now, threatening...
versus
Advertizing/government: my own office with an assistant (I know of a spoiled rich kid kid who got this Federal job right out of 4 years of college), great pay, travel, a social life, raises, vacations, the story of the week already decided: just plug in the Luntz-code words that the focus group will respond to, and add my by-line.
Hmmm.
Decisions.
Alberto "Torture Boy" Gonzales is threatening our very best journalists for doing journalism.
What does that say to you?
(Hint: read "Mein Kampf")
Good Night, and Good Luck to any kid who still wants to be a journalist.
Oh, and that reminds me... if you want to know how upside down world - American values are different (NOT) from the old Soviet Union during Commie Stalin's days, read Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago".
Make a note:
In the paperback copy of Gulag I picked up at the used bookstore pages 103 through 117 (the passage begins with "1. First of all: night."), these pages list and describe the very techniques for torture that we use daily at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, and, since the other torture chambers are at hidden "super double secret" undisclosed locations and we can't imagine what goes on there (unless you are a perv- in-training who blew up frogs with firecrackers as a kid, like Dubya did) I assume the torture techniques we use at those locations are even more unspeakable... and would really be a best selling novel and movie in torture lovin' America.
(Did I say, "Torture lovin' America?" Well what would you call a nation who went to the movies with tubs o' buttery popcorn and soft drinks to see their God's Son whipped and scourged for three hours? That's 3 hours they could have spent watching a movie about the Beatitudes and other teachings, but Torture, NOT pacifist philosophy, is what they call Entertainment in good ol' hometown America.)
(And the timing! We should expect another blockbuster Christo-patriotic-horror flick or maybe the introduction of another sex-enhancing pharmaceutical wonder pill just before we do our next invasion.
Or pehaps a message from the animatronic Osama timed to a tee, or a conveniently timed terrorist attack/plague that'll rouse the base at the right moment. Are you seeing the pattern yet?)
Where am I meandering with this screed?
I read from some human rights organization's news release that over 600 American soldiers are directly implicated and/or involved in the torture of prisoners (I'm sorry, I meant "detainees"), not counting the aformentioned secret and 'rendered' prisoners.
(I always though rendering had a different connotation, something to do with butchering, or cooking.)
Excuse me, how many of our proud American torturers have been convicted?
How many torturers are 'doin' fine thank you'?
Do they get a ribbon on their uniform for torture expertise?
Elie Wiesel, author of an autobigraphical semifictionalized account of survival through the extermination camps, the seminal book of holocaust literature, "Night", said in his speech on the 'Perils of Indifference' (that you can listen to from the link at the right)- he said that there were three kinds of people in the extermination camps.
The killers.
The bystanders.
And the victims.
And he has said: do not be one of the killers, do not be one of the bystanders, and do not be a victim.
"'The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it....'" Chapter 1, pg. 9
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