Two decades ago I had the odd and daunting experience of defending
my undergraduate thesis, on several of Shakespeare's plays, before a
panel of scholars. While hardly as rigorous as the real orals a PhD
thesis is supposed to be subjected to, this encounter was part of what
my department at Harvard required for graduation, and I faced it with
some trepidation.
When I walked in, I was introduced to William Alfred, the
playwright, poet and English professor. I hadn't studied with Alfred,
and had no idea what to expect from the rumpled man. He broke the ice
with a simple question: At the start of "King Lear," Cordelia refuses
her royal father's demand for a profession of love. There's a foreign
phrase that describes her act in legal terms -- what is it?
I'm not sure how many layers of my brain I had to dig through to
find it, but somehow I retrieved the desired answer, the medieval
label for an injury to the royal office: "Lese majeste!" Alfred's eyes
twinkled; my response seemed to satisfy my interrogators' basic
requirement of literacy, and from there, all went swimmingly. (Alfred,
a brilliant and generous soul with whom, alas, I only had a handful of
further conversations, died in 1999.)
Of all things, this distant recollection popped into my head after
I finally caught up with Michael Moore's much-debated "Fahrenheit
9/11." Many words have already been flung across the political
spectrum about the movie. I will limit my contributions to this one
phrase: What Moore has, I think, accomplished, particularly in the
movie's more coherent and better-assembled first half, is an
outrageous and highly effective act of lese majeste.
George Bush campaigned as an informal man of the people, and he did
not carry a very dignified bearing into the Oval Office. (Remember
that strange boil on his face during the Florida recount?) But from
9/11 on, his team of handlers began to weave a cocoon of
larger-than-life pomp around him. Partly, it was what the nation
wanted; it was also smart political opportunism. It has, to be sure,
frayed some since the Iraq war and its attendant scandals. The "Henry
V"-style bullhorn at ground zero struck a chord with many Americans;
the "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier stunt backfired.
But "Fahrenheit 9/11" methodically dismantles this president's
carefully manicured dignity: It says to the viewer, "Pay attention to
the man behind the curtain -- he's smaller than life." The
movie's most indelible sequences are those that show our president as
he really was in the face of the great crisis of 9/11: Not, as we were
told by Showtime'
s "DC 9/11," a stirring take-charge commander, but a passive
photo-op participant who sat paralyzed for achingly long minutes of
"My Pet Goat" rather than take the initiative to say "excuse me" to
the class and leave the room.
My colleague Andrew O'Hehir drew a connection between Moore and Dario Fo, the Italian
playwright/performer most famous for his assaults on the dignity of
the papacy. To be sure, Moore has none of Fo's skills as a physical
clown and only a fraction of his instincts as an entertainer; Fo is an
artist, while Moore is chiefly a propagandist. Still, it's a good
comparison: The two men share a willingness -- more than that, a
ferocious determination -- to strip away the niceties of ceremony from
powerful men so that we can see their misdeeds.
That refusal of deference is, after you get past all the various
problems with "Fahrenheit 9/11" as documentary and as history, what
counts. The TV networks (though they thought nothing of rummaging
through the details of Bill Clinton's tawdry sexual escapades) have
decided to protect Bush from unflattering images. It falls to Moore to
dig up the footage of protesters pelting his inaugural limousine with
eggs, and play it for us again.
By the end of "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore has flung his own messy
indictment at the presidential portrait, and it won't be easily
cleaned up. The filmmaker is deliberately, methodically,
overflowingly disrespectful at a moment in our history when there's
far too much respect in the land. When the throne holds an ignorant,
incompetent, profligate pretender, lese majeste becomes a patriotic
duty.
whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040602.html track this
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but for the fact that the president had so explicitly said that there were weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to citizens of the United States
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McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Quotes from Either President of the United States George W. Bush or Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars Movies
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"The President of the whole entire United States makes a July 4th speech about national security on state property and it's a private campaign rally with a dress code?"
For years I have been amazed as I’ve listened to people here
in the United States demonstrate their complete ignorance of the
purpose and tremendous value of the United Nations, even to the point
of our country not paying dues to the organization. Ambassador to the
United Nations havs often been viewed as second-class or B-level
diplomatic job and with the current presidential perspective, the UN
has become a troublesome entity and the appointment of…
The United States, Backed By The European Union, Japan And Canada, Has Turned Back A Bid By Developing Nations To Place The Internet Under The Control Of The United Nations Or Its Member Governments
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united we stand
united we stand01/01/2004 07:26 PM Check this out: In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it
in a shameful way--by dividing Americans...
FCC: States can't order Bells to sell stand-alone DSL
FCC: States can't order Bells to sell stand-alone DSL03/28/2005 06:49 PM The FCC has approved a request from BellSouth to stop states from
forcing local U.S. telephone carriers to offer stand-alone DSL service
to customers who get voice service from a competitor.
The United States Is In Deep Doo doo!03/14/2003 05:07 PM The United
States Is In Deep Doo doo! In the end, there is no such thing as a
free lunch. You cannot make money grow in value by shaking it back and
forth from one bank to another. You cannot prosper a nation by doing
each other's laundry, or filling out their government mandated and
greatly obfuscated paperwork, or flinging stock certificates around
which may have as little real worth as Federal Reserve Notes. To make
money, to show a profit, you must make products that somebody else
wants to buy, and sadly, that is a capability the United States has
allowed to slip away in great measure.
States Cannot Order Bells to Sell Stand-Alone DSL (Reuters)
States Cannot Order Bells to Sell Stand-Alone DSL (Reuters)03/25/2005 06:44 PM Reuters - BellSouth Corp. and the
other big local U.S. telephone carriers on Friday won a
decision barring states from requiring them to offer
stand-alone high-speed Internet service to customers who buy
voice service from a competitor.
United Methodist Church Divided on Homosexuality Stand
The goal of the project is to produce
an updated, expanded, and thoroughly revised edition in print and
electronic formats of various historical statistics of the United
States, to be collected from the Historical Statistics of the United
States, Millennial Edition, Colonial Times to The Present (Cambridge
University Press). The Historical Statistics of the United States was
first published in 1949 by the Bureau of the Census with the advice
and assistance of the Social Science Research Council. A second and
much larger edition appeared in 1960 under the same auspices. The
third edition, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial
Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, was published by the Bureau in
1975 and was expanded to two volumes. In the year 2005 Cambridge
University Press will publish the fourth, millennial, edition of this
classic reference work. This has been added to Reference Resources
Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.
Annual reports that present detailed vital statistics data,
including natality, mortality, marriage and divorce. These reports are
available for download or as bound volumes in many large public and
university libraries. This has been added to Statistics Resources
Subject Tracer Information Blog.
won't end the world's distrust of the United States
won't end the world's distrust of the United States03/19/2003 10:46 PM NYTimes - Krugman is worried about Things to Come .. Paul Krugman's
current column .. Register at NYTimes.com .. for future d .. op-ed
piece .. NY Times .. Click .. column .. more
Al Capone shouldn't represent the United States03/19/2003 10:25 PM Fareed Zakaria has a great article, The Arrogant Empire, in this
week's Newsweek. Answers the questions, "why are all those foreigners
against us?" and "how can they think that George Bush is a bigger
threat than Saddam Hussein?" I learned a lot from reading it. Highly
Recommended.. Some quotes: In fact, while the United States has the
backing of a dozen or so governments, it has the support of a majority
of the people in only one country in the world, Israel. If that is not
isolation, then the word has no meaning.... the United States will
spend as much next year on defense as the rest of the world put
together (yes, all 191 countries... go back to 1945. When America had
the world at its feet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman
chose not to create an American imperium, but to build a world of
alliances and multilateral institutions. They formed the United
Nations, the...
Massachusetts has become the first state in the US to allow
same-sex couples to get married. Whether it will last or be
crushed under the weight of a Constitutional amendment I don't know,
but it's bloody wonderful in the meantime:
Other towns and cities across the state were also prepared
to wed large numbers of same-sex couples as the law came into force.
The Supreme Court ruling upheld a decision by the state's highest
court. It said that denying marriage licences to same-sex couples
violated anti-discrimination laws.
The Massachusetts ruling has fuelled heated debate across the country
- and the controversy has been particularly intense in an election
year. In a statement, President Bush said he had called on the
Congress "to pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an
amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a
union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. The need for that
amendment is still urgent, and I repeat that call today." His rival
John Kerry - who is a Massachusetts senator - is also opposed to
same-sex marriages, but favours a more limited form of legal
recognition.
I think the issue of gay marriage only started to matter to me when
I realised that many of my gay friends actually wanted to get married.
And on the day when a friend of mine showed me a marriage booking form
online in San Francisco and I started looking for the section for gay
people and there wasn't one - It was all the same form... That
affected me too I think - to realise that while it was clearly an
issue at the moment, the whole point of this battle was about
completely collapsing that difference around relationships. That's a
pretty cool goal...
telefrog.com is one of the best communication opportunities in the United States.
telefrog.com is one of the best communication opportunities in the United States.09/16/2004 03:12 AM Mary Stevens, CEO of telefrog, goal was to find an exceptional
moneymaking opportunity for telecommunication who wish to realize
their financial dreams while spending more quality time with their
families. Criteria for selection included stability of the company,
experience of founders, lack of risk, and ease of succeeding in
starting and operating an independent, telecommunication industry.
[PRWEB Sep 16, 2004]
What's really wrong with the United States medical system?
What's really wrong with the United States medical system?10/30/2003 09:20 PM The United States health care system is sick. The prices of health
insurance are skyrocketing, 40 million Americans are uninsured, and
more join them every day. The uninsured are often charged
extortionate amounts of money for emergency care and forced to do
without any other kind, doctors are often squeezed to the point of
barely making a living, and the result is unnecessary deaths and
bankruptcy for many. What can be done about this? Some suggest that
the government completely socialize health care, becoming the only
payer for medical goods and services in the United States. Others
suggest "market-based" solutions incorporating tax credits for health
insurance, tort reform, medical savings accounts, and other
"conservative" ideas. However, neither of these solutions address the
real problem. Health care is already a market in the United States,
and a reasonably free market as well! However, it's the wrong type of
market. In this article, I discuss the situation as well as I can
understand and suggest some possible solutions.
The 2003 Statistical Abstract of the United States is now online and
continues to gives us access to very valuable demographics and
economic information on the United States. I have addded this to my
Subject Tracer™ Information Blog Business Intelligence and will
be adding this to my Business Resources
2004 Internet MiniGuide.
appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p
=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&
s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741 track this
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CNN.com - Syria preparing sanctions against United States - Jun 19, 2004
United States House of Representatives - 107th Congress
United States House of Representatives - 107th Congress04/15/2005 12:23 PM US House of Representatives website .. Contact your congressman ..
representatives .. congress person .. www.house.gov .. Representives
.. Capitol Hill .. C‘mara Baja .. them .. Re
Grok Description matches for Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked GrokA matches for Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked
Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked
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