In Praise of Drab
By Jim Washburn
You know those Halloween witch hats with the stringy silver hair that hangs down the back and sides of your head? Amy Goodman’s hair is sort of like that. She and her Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez dress like they last shopped in 1979, at Fedco. On camera, they appear fidgety and grim.
Glitches abound in the Democracy Now! studio. Satellite feeds are lost. Audio levels lurch or vanish. In one recent broadcast the image got stuck in a video loop that had Amy hiccupping the same four syllables over and over, like the Bride of Max Headroom. You have to wonder sometimes if the CIA is waging biological warfare on her: Amy coughs; she gags; she loses her voice; for a couple of months she had Bell’s Palsy and half her face drooped.
And, throughout, she and Gonzalez consistently deliver the best news program on TV. You get more real information about your world in the first 10 minutes of Democracy Now! than you’ll find in a 24-hour cycle of cable news.
That’s if you can find Democracy Now! If you’re in Nevada City or other leftie hamlets, it’s on local cable or broadcast TV. In L.A., you’ll find it in the hinterlands of satellite TV, on DirecTV on the Link TV channel, and on Dish Network on Link and on Free Speech TV, at channels 9410 and 9415 respectively. Satellite providers are required to carry a small amount of public interest programming, but they don’t seem anxious for you to know it exists. Channel 9415? You’d have to fall asleep with your head on the remote to ever click that high.
It’s the same Democracy Now! broadcast weekday mornings on KPFK radio for years, but for those of us who forget radio exists when we’re not driving, the TV version is a real boon. It’s also building a new audience for the show. My wife, for example, likes to watch just to see what outfit Amy pulled out of the hamper that morning.
Do you know much about the “status for forces” agreement the U.S. is trying to hammer out with – i.e. hammer upon – Iraqi lawmakers? The U.S. press hasn’t reported much on it, and what little detail they’ve provided has been entirely due to reports in Britain’s Independent newspaper by Patrick Cockburn.
While the Bush administration has been saying “it’s just routine, nothing to see here, folks, move along," Cockburn revealed that it could well lock us into Iraq for McCain’s 100 years, with the U.S. maintaining 58 permanent bases, controlling the airspace, and able to conduct military operations and arrests without regard to the Iraqi government, while all U.S. personnel and contractors would be immune from prosecution (as apparently are the Blackwater forces who shot 19 innocent Iraqi citizens in one incident last year).
Iraqi leaders balked at this, since – as Cockburn pointed out on Democracy Now! – it requires the ostensibly sovereign nation to relinquish every aspect of its sovereignty to its occupiers. Cockburn also broke the news that the U.S. is blackmailing Iraqi legislators, threatening to permanently withhold access to tens of billions of dollars in Iraqi funds that have been locked up in the Federal Reserve since the first Gulf War.
You don’t read much about this in the L.A. Times (which devoted near-equal space to op-ed columnist Max Boot bitching about the ingratitude of objecting Iraqi leaders), but this is major stuff: a treaty in all but name (because, shhhh, the president is usurping Congress’s right to make treaties), negotiated in secret but for the diligence of the non-U.S. press, that goes against the majority wishes of both the American and Iraqi peoples and might mire us in Iraq no matter who the next president is.
It may just impact your lives more than the R. Kelly trial, and Goodman and Co. are giving it due coverage, as they do most of the major issues confronting us, in their direct, banter-free manner.
Their newsroom, rather than looking like a game show set, centers around a battered oval dining table. Has there ever been a news program so drab, so humorless, so thoroughly leached of glitz? Sure, plenty of them, and you might start with the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. You know, back when delivering news was a respected cornerstone of our democracy.
Published: 06/18/2008
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I learn so much from this show. I live in Paris so I watch it online: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/24/st...