by Richard Gowan | Aug 26, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, North America
Do you know who these people are?
You do? OK, get off this blog and play outside. You don’t? Then you’re over 16. They are the Jonas Brothers, a Disney-produced band with an enormous following among early teens in States. Last week, we found out that Dick Cheney’s a fan too, as the lads visited the White House to make a public service film about national parks and the Veep brought his granddaughters by to say hello.
About time. The Brothers have “visited the Bush White House three times, and are noted Evangelical Christians”. This leads us to the all-important question of which celebrities we can expect to see in the White House as of January next year. I’ve highlighted Barack Obama’s success in bringing RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan into public politics, but musicians up to and including Kanye West are descending on the Democratic Convention in hordes like never before. That has not, of course, stopped the Democrats from reportedly booking Springsteen and Bon Jovi to headline before Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday – they may have a fifty-state electoral strategy, but musically they’re all New Jersey.
The real question is, however, what the celebrity coterie hanging around a McCain White House might look like. The candidate launched a small war with Paris Hilton, and is trying to spark something similar with Madonna. Earlier this year, Doonesbury ran a great series of comic strips about a Hollywood fixer trying to recruit stars for the Republicans, settling for a lesser Baldwin brother. Now, the NYT blog reveals, politics is imitating satire, but at a sub-Baldwin level. Here’s its account of a recent fundraiser in Hollywood, oddly entitled “McCain’s celebrities”:
The (press) pool reported that the actors in the crowd included Gary Sinise, Dean Cain, Jon Voight, Jon Cryer, Angie Harmon, Craig T. Nelson and Lorenzo Lamas, among others.
Shouldn’t that be “McCain’s celebrity“? Jon Voight is, of course, a big name. The rest? Gary Sinise was good as the guy left on the ground in Apollo 13. Erm, Dean Cain was solid in the Superman TV series in the mid 1990s, but let’s face it: co-star Teri Hatcher has gone further. So what are we to make of this?
Mr. McCain was cheered when he told the crowd that he “would like to thank so many brave and courageous people who are here that happen to be in the business of Hollywood who are risking their entire futures and careers.”
He must be thinking of Dean’s rumored involvement in Maneater, in pre-production:
A former FBI profiler, now a sheriff of a small town and a single parent of a high school aged daughter, begins to profile a series of unexplained murders only to learn that the monster he’s profiling may be himself.
Ooh, I’m looking forward to that. If nothing else, Mr. Cain hamming it up sounds more fun than a celebrity gala at the McCain White House.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 25, 2008 | Global system, North America, Off topic
Enough with the NYT op-ed page! My main point of reference in the U.S. election will be the Wu-Tang Clan. In an interview with New York magazine’s Denver bloggers, RZA goes places that Dowd, Herbert et al have never been…
What do you think of Biden?
I don’t know Mr. Biden. I just saw him on TV yesterday.
He got in trouble last year for saying Obama was the first “clean and articulate” African-American candidate we’d ever had run for president.
He got in trouble for that?!
I guess it was seen as stereotyping.
A lot of us ain’t clean and articulate, because we grew up in harsh conditions. So Mr. Obama is clean and articulate. I’m actually proud to watch him on TV, myself, as a black man, because I think we hold our dicks when we walk — know what I mean? — and he got something about him that’s really classy. It’s like in every nation and every race, you have some people that are born as a prince because of the natural way they are.
Do you support him because he’s the first black candidate or for other reasons?
I’m not really a political guy. Some of my friends were supporting Hillary in the beginning, and I do what my friends do. I was trying to help Hillary in the beginning.
Really? Why?
Because I thought, When the Clinton family was in office, my family had better food in their house. I could call my aunt up and she could say, “Yeah, things is good.” Now everybody calls me for money. So I thought that Clinton could help out families better. But when she moved out of the race and I started watching Mr. Obama, I actually became a fan of his. You know, this man has something elegant about him!
And I watched Mr. McCain, too, and I know he went through a struggle with the war and all that. But in all reality, if you’re a P.O.W., it means you’ve been locked up and in jail. And in our country, you can’t vote as a felon. A lot of people can’t vote because once you’ve been locked up and incarcerated, it changes your mentality. He did that for his country. That’s a great thing and a great sacrifice. But people I know have been making comments, saying, “You know, a man who’s been through that … Rambo was crazy!”
by Alex Evans | Aug 25, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development, Influence and networks
From BBC Focus on Africa, via the excellent Chris Blattman:
Each morning the 36-year-old powers up a small United Nations radio transmitter and starts broadcasting from his mountain shack. His antenna points directly at the rebels in the bush. They know him by his call name “Mike India”.
…every so often, he reads out his phone number. Between the hours of 1am and 4am — when mobile minutes are free — his phone is deluged. Some rebels want to know where to demobilise, others rant about Paul Kagame, the current Rwandan president and former Tutsi rebel leader. Some just want Mike India to play different music.
These conversations are particularly extraordinary because neither the United States nor the United Kingdom- key Rwandan allies – have any official dialogue with the Hutu rebel groups (something diplomats from both countries complain about in private). Mike India not only talks to the rebels, he exchanges texts with them.
by Alex Evans | Aug 24, 2008 | Global system
This is the third most emailed story on the NY Times site today. Great.
by Daniel Korski | Aug 24, 2008 | Conflict and security
Since the Russian invasion of Georgia there has been a lot of discussion about the media war and who won it. The Guardian’s Peter Wilby, like many others, think “the Georgians played the PR game more skilfully.”
But another aspect seems to have received a little less attention – namely the nature of the media’s coverage and how it differed from other wars. Or, as a future PhD thesis might be titled: “The Media Coverage of the Georgian War: A Comparative Perspective.”
Let’s start with the Iraq War, which, like the Bosnian War before it, was a milestone in journalistic history. The tactics of the early Iraqi insurgency – indiscriminate killings, road-side bombs, kidnappings etc. – as well as the occasional Coalition aerial attack made the war the deadliest for the media. The war and its deadly aftermath have cost more reporters’ lives than any other conflict.
But reporting, too, seemed to undergo a transformation from its earlier Balkan incarnation. The Iraq War initially took the embed concept to the extreme. Viewers were up, close and personal – yet at the same time removed, as reporters were placed under different forms of censorship. We, the viewers, knew what the soldiers felt, could hear the whizzing bullets and could see their ghostly green silhouettes during night-time raids, but were left in the dark about the larger picture.
As post-combat stability gave way to violence, insurgency and chaos, it became too difficult to report outside Baghdad’s Green Zone. Suddenly we were looking down the other end of the media telescope: it became easier to understand the big picture – the missing WMD, the faltering reconstruction, the developing insurgency – but much of the detail was became, or at least fragmented. Relationships and personal stories – a stable of Balkan reporting – seemed rarer. Footage was usually after the event; a bomb would go off, but by the time the crew would to shoot the scene the bodies had been removed.
But in Georgia, the business of war-reporting seemed to take a step back to its Balkan version. Reporting was on the spot and live again. Really live. Pictures were not only after the event, but during the happening. We saw the footage as it happened, to the people, to the journalists. Even to the soldiers. “Embedded journalism” was live, but controlled. This was live and uncontrolled. David Chkhikvishvili’s video images of Georgian rockets being launched towards South Ossetia were live – and the first most people heard of the conflict.
But the war also seemed a little grittier, a post-Iraq kind of Balkans War – more indiscriminate, and more dangerous for reporters. Before the Russian suspension of hostilities, a Reuters reporter’s vehicle narrowly escaped bomb blasts near Gori. Jon Williams, an editor for BBC News, went so far as to call the safety situation during the conflict “catastrophic”.
As the prospect of state-to-state conflict seemed outdated before the Georgian War, so journalism seemed to be in a permanent post-Iraq state. Things have changed and it will be interesting to hear the progression reflect on these changes in the weeks to come.
