Letters to the editor

The meaning of Jar Jar. Plus: Finally, a paper conservatives can call their own; is the Iditarod animal cruelty?

Monica’s got a brand-new bag

BY ANA MARIE COX
(03/23/00)

Shame on your journalistic standards to refuse to set the record straight after your reporter admitted to me on the phone that, not only did she “misread” her notes on what I said to her in more than one place, but “isn’t sure” she heard me yell “Bitch.” Upon being confronted with my assertion that I have never yelled such a word at anyone in my life she immediately admitted that what she may have “heard” was someone in the crowd yelling “Bitch” at me.

It’s bad enough that you are doing your fact-checking after the fact of putting in my mouth such a demeaning word. But what beggars belief is that after being caught in errors on several fronts, you still don’t come clean. Your own published story, a report that ran on CNN, and eyewitness accounts testify to the fact that as I was being dragged out I said nothing to, or about, Monica.

Rather, I spoke only of my First Amendment right to free speech being abridged. Yet you claim that I suddenly completely changed character and yelled “Bitch” with the implication that I was yelling it at someone. Who? Monica? I was whisked away from that poor exploited girl in about two nanoseconds. And was rather more concerned with the two hulking security guards pulling my arms from my shoulder sockets then a portly pepperpot who I feel nothing for but pity.

Your gross and malicious misquote, that I yelled “Bitch,” works to characterize what went on as some kind of cat fight. In fact it was the life-or-death national issue of an American citizen — a registered Democrat, in fact — being violently dragged away for the “crime” of politely asking Monica why she didn’t seem to think that the American people had a right to know what the president was doing on the taxpayer’s money.

I thought I lived in America, not Russia or China. I thought my right to free speech was protected by the Constitution. I thought Salon.com tried to write what actually happened, not what would make the most pleasing story for the political makeup of its readers.

Yours in great disappointment,

— Betsy Gibson

LibertyWorksRadio.com

Writer Ana Marie Cox responds: I would like to apologize to Ms. Gibson for mistakenly reporting that Linda Tripp had appeared on her talk show. As for her other complaint, Ms. Gibson did call me Thursday morning, sounding extremely upset. She claimed she would never yell such an epithet at Monica Lewinsky. I tried to assure her that not only had I heard the word, but that I could track down other attendees who witnessed her saying it. In fact, since talking to Ms. Gibson, I dutifully confirmed the quote with others there at the time, as well as with a Salon reader who sent an unsolicited email saying that she, too, observed the same incident — and heard the same pejorative coming from Ms. Gibson.

Ms. Gibson should also know that my story was not alone in its account of the events. Reuters reported Thursday that after confronting Lewinsky, “Gibson was quickly grabbed by security guards and dumped unceremoniously onto Fifth Avenue, although not before she let loose a few unprintable insults toward the former intern.”

George Lucas’ Jedi mind trick

BY ALYNDA WHEAT
(03/22/00)

Wheat fails to understand that she’s the one creating the stereotypes. None existed in that movie before people such as her started making them up. I would never even have considered the Jar Jar Binks character to be a stereotype of any real person or type of person. Her suggestion that “buffoonery, gait, appearance” makes a character appear African-American is patently offensive and disgusting. If she is honestly concerned about racial stereotypes (and I’m not convinced that she is), she should stop spreading them.

— Frank Papa

It is painfully obvious that Jar Jar, with his crazy antics and high-pitched, funny voice, is a comic foil intended to entertain — and hopefully sell millions of toys to — all the little kids in the audience. Is it not more likely that Jar Jar is an assemblage of elements that Lucas thought little kids would enjoy rather than a recast historical stereotype belittling a particular ethnic group?

For the record, I disliked “The Phantom Menace.” However, I am willing to throw the man a bone — that he was playing the dual role of artist and marketer when crafting his characters and free from any intention of racial injustice.

— Stephen Waters
Austin, Texas

I‘m a serious “Star Wars” fan, and I run a largish “Star Wars” fan Web site. I have talked with literally thousands of people about “The Phantom Menace,” out of which perhaps two or three were adamant that there was something racist about Jar Jar, and maybe another half dozen thought he could reasonably be interpreted that way.

I think it’s abundantly clear that George Lucas wasn’t trying to emulate any particular racial category, and the fact that Jar Jar has been accused of being everything from American black to Jamaican and more indicates even his critics can’t pin him down. Jar Jar is an ethnic Gungan. You might as well suggest that Luke Skywalker is a stereotype of whiny farm boys, C-3PO of paranoid, overly fastidious Brits, that Darth Vader portrays asthmatics as evil, Jabba the Hutt implies fat people are decadent and depraved, and so forth.

It’s easy to find things to be offended by. Sometimes the hard thing is letting go of one’s own preconceived notions and enjoying the movie. I see Jar Jar not as a stereotype but as an archetype of the underprivileged outsider who proves himself through pluck and luck. Is that such a bad thing to be identified with?

— Elizabeth Durack

George Lucas’ racism (for the sake of fairness, let us assume it is unconscious) is secondary to his real crime: his contempt for the audience. Despite having total creative control, answerable to none of the bean-counters and marketing nabobs that plague that industry, “The Phantom Menace” lives up to every criticism of modern moviemaking: shallow, two-dimensional, effects-driven drivel with wooden characters, first-draft dialogue and relentlessly predictable plot regurgitated from his own best work. He took what most filmmakers can only dream of having — unlimited funding, creative control, a strong back-story, popular characters and a huge audience lining up for months to buy tickets — and somehow turned it into a monumental turd of a movie.

— Tim Moerman

I am a lifelong “Star Wars” fan. I am also a lifelong movie fan and I consider my knowledge of movies as well as the world around me to be very extensive. When I saw “The Phantom Menace” for the first time I was dumbfounded by the portrayal of Jar Jar Binks. I remember looking at my two Star Wars fanatic friends who had braved the 3 a.m. showing and seeing the same look of amazement at the stereotype that was being portrayed that we saw. To deny that Jar Jar, as well as numerous other characters in the movie, project racial stereotypes is naive for even the most dimwitted movie critic, much less for one of the supposed preeminent directors of his generation.

— Ian Reynolds

No gays or abortions allowed in my papers!

BY STEPHEN LEMONS
(03/20/00)

There are a huge number of people in this country who believe homosexuality and abortion are wrong. Are their views represented in the media in a positive manner? Of course not. It is time for liberals to wake up to the fact that you can be against homosexuality and not be a bigot or violent and be against abortion and not anti-feminist.

I’m not asking for the media to be against homosexuality or anti-choice. I’m just asking for neutrality and not to represent biased opinion for news. Keep the opinions to the opinion page.

— Brian Ellenberger

I find it rather amusing that the same people who hide behind freedom of speech put their own spin on the term: “You can say it, as long as I like it.”

If the Weyrichs choose to produce a paper that reflects their ideals and beliefs, so be it. People are going to find something to get offended by no matter what the content is. By the same token, if you don’t like what they have to say, don’t read it.

Tolerance should be preached, but only if it is all encompassing.

— K. Trautmann

I don’t get it. Every newspaper I read presents abortion and homosexuality as acceptable lifestyle choices. The articles on these topics are overwhelmingly positive. Anti-homosexuality advocates are “bigots” and “hate-mongers” who perpetuate a “climate of violence.” Pro-lifers are “anti-choice.” Of course, we’re told that the reporters and editorial staffs of these papers are “neutral.” They don’t take sides. Give me a break. The Weyrichs are being honest about their views, not masquerading beyond the neutrality myth. Where can I get a subscription?

— Gary DeMar

Monster mush?

BY SALLY ECKHOFF
(03/22/00)

If you have ever stood on a sled pulled by sled dogs, you would know the truth. I have had the privilege to not only ride on a dogsled, but also to drive it for a short while and I testify that these dogs run because it is what they do — it is all they want to do.

When a team is assembled, they all make it known that they want to go; the dogs left behind are disappointed in the extreme. There is nothing cruel about the way these dogs are treated and trained, nor is the dog yard inhumane. Huskies and the like have lived for centuries in the cold and I have watched them outside at -30 or -40 degrees and they don’t even notice.

As someone from outside who has seen and experienced it up close, dog sledding is an everyday part of life in Alaska and Canada and these dogs would have it no other way.

— Chris Eaton

Sally Eckhoff breezily dismisses criticism of the Iditarod on the grounds that it is inaccurate. But while it may be true that 120 miles times 10 days exceeds the length of the race, the mathematically accurate daily average is still a cruel distance to make an animal run or even walk.

Additionally, Eckhoff fails to realize that the dogs’ excitement is due to the sudden change in environment, the sudden contact with other dogs after months of isolation and the excitement of the people around them. The fact that the dogs are barking and wagging their tails in no way means that they understand and look forward to being forced to run 1,000 miles.

From a physiological viewpoint, extreme, sustained exertion requires a careful pacing of a body’s energy. This pacing varies from body to body, and is impossible to maintain and control when bodies are tethered together.

I have little sympathy for the extremism of some animal rights groups, but Eckhoff’s attitude is callous and insensitive. Perhaps she should be tied to an automobile and made to run several miles at a pace she cannot control.

— Walt Roberts

My dot-com business mags have fallen on me and I can’t get up!

BY KATHARINE MIESZKOWSKI
(03/21/00)

I, too, have noted the annoying bloat of the dot-com magazines that I read and have noted that the signal to noise ratio (news vs. ads) has gotten way out of hand. Worse, it is sometimes difficult to figure out what the heck the advertisers are selling, and how it relates to my needs.

So, I have taken the simple solution: I’ve stopped purchasing the paper magazines and instead read their electronic counterparts. Online, the ads are much easier to ignore (or peruse) and I don’t have to schlep 20 pounds of dead trees around.

Kudos, however to a couple of excellent mags: Shift, a slim, but pithy Canadian newcomer that reminds me of Wired when it first came out; and Maximum PC — maximum geek content, minimum ads and the ads are to the point.

— Lorie Johnson

Readers may lament the magazine bloat now apparent to anyone attempting to heft the latest Business 2.0, but it’s advertisers who have the real problem. If readers have to struggle to prioritize their intake of editorial content, imagine how they strategize their intake of ads. They skim right past them. These trades are going to have to do what the Wall Street Journal or the New Yorker do when they sell an edition out — stop saying yes to advertisers. Raise rates if you must, but if people can’t see the ads for the clutter, eventually competitors will shrink your book for you.

— Clay Edmunds

That story could usefully have been shortened by about a third.

— Teemu Leisti

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TV’s golden age of opening credits

Goodbye, theme songs. Now, title sequences for "American Horror Story," "Homeland" and others are required viewing

By John Sellers

Clips from the opening sequences of "Homeland" and "Mad Men"

Topics:Television, TV, Homeland, Mad Men

One of the new television season’s most unsettling moments took place, as unsettling moments so often do, in a basement festooned with jars of pickled human fetuses.

Twenty seconds into a tour of this gruesomely decorated cellar, our skittery camera feed abruptly cuts out and, with an accompanying crunch of industrial music that could only have been composed by some dude wearing a black trench coat, we’re visually assaulted by an image that will haunt us forever: Connie Britton’s name, typeset in a bold, gothic font.

Now, the words “decidedly unscary lead actress provides unexpected fright” might very well appear somewhere in the series bible for “American Horror Story,” Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s gonzo FX drama set in a house in dire need of that diminutive psychic from “Poltergeist.” But deploying the tactic during the show’s main title sequence, using just Britton’s name? As her calming “Friday Night Lights” character, Tami Taylor, might have said, “That’s just clever, y’all.”

Not that anyone should be surprised when wildly imaginative content turns up during a program’s opening credits; these days, eye-popping intros can now be found on virtually any channel not named C-SPAN. And they aren’t picky. You see them setting up everything from big-budget premium-cable series such as HBO’s “True Blood” and Showtime’s “Dexter” to cultish hits such as IFC’s “Portlandia” and FX’s “Archer.” Reality and talk shows have them, and they even cling like remoras to the carcasses of the recently departed, as proven with NBC’s “Chuck” and Fox’s “Human Target.” While there are still many opening sequences that are as irritating as anything that has graced our sets since the dark, final days of “Small Wonder,” it’s also true that some of the best work being done on television today occupies the space once reserved for cheesy cast montages and explanatory ditties written by Alan Thicke.

“A lot of television main titles, from a design standpoint and a typography standpoint, are [still] profoundly mediocre, because they’re for goofy, silly shows,” says Kyle Cooper, the founder of Prologue, the influential design collective behind the instant-classic “American Horror Story” opener, as well as the one fronting its somber cousin “The Walking Dead.” “But mixed in, there’s some good things that get through.”

An increasing amount, actually. For those of us raised on a gluttonous diet of the programs now found on TV Land and conditioned to expect little more from opening credits than “… and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver,” flipping around the dial can make us feel as if a brave new world has sprung up overnight. And, even though the art of main title design on television has, in fact, been in the midst of a full-blown renaissance ever since Tony Soprano took his first drive through northern New Jersey in 1999, the number of quality openers seems to have skyrocketed on the sly. How else to explain that, in just 20 years, NBC has gone from the corny third-season main title sequence of “Blossom,” with its unfortunate misuse of flowery hats and Joey Lawrence, to the inspired paper cootie catcher gimmick of “Community,” which not only reveals the cast members’ names but also contains appropriately immature jokes, such as a drawing of a topless stick figure lady? And how is it that, in 1990, the painfully hideous bumper promo for the hideously painful “Club MTV With Downtown Julie Brown” was nominated for an Emmy — in the same category won in 2008 by the sublime animated opening sequence for “Mad Men”?

I may still be suffering from the concussive blow dealt by the intro to “Suddenly Susan” — a super-sized Brooke Shields stomping through San Francisco — so forgive me if I sound groggy when I ask: How exactly did opening credits become essential viewing?

“You could make a few different arguments,” says Chris Billig, executive producer at TCG Studio, the firm responsible for, among many other things, the purposefully discordant main title sequence of Showtime’s “Homeland.” “But I would make the argument that as television has become a more creative medium, it has drawn better talent. A lot of feature guys are willing to get involved in the creative process of television now. When you have that transition, you ultimately have a higher bar for your creative delivery.”

In recent years, of course, a number of directors and actors more often associated with cinema have dipped their toes in the foreboding waters of series television: notables like Martin Scorsese and Steve Buscemi (“Boardwalk Empire”); Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte (“Luck”); and Don Cheadle (“House of Lies”). But it has been a slow build to get to the point where a hugely successful movie guy like David Fincher would be willing to commit to the open-ended rigors of episodic storytelling, let alone with two-time Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey in tow. A film-to-TV transition by an A-lister would have been hard to fathom even just a dozen years ago, when networks were still the primary source of entertainment on the small screen. But then came “The Sopranos.” Fueled by its unprecedented success, HBO and other premium outlets, which aren’t as concerned about advertisers or the FCC, began rolling out the welcome mats — and wheelbarrows of cash —for creative types. A trickle-down effect soon extended to basic cable, broadcast television and beyond, and here we are at a moment in history in which a bidding war for the exclusive rights to air 26 episodes of Fincher’s upcoming political drama “House of Cards” ends with upstart Netflix ponying up $100 million.

With that kind of cash at stake, the folks from film have been arriving in droves. And not surprisingly, they’re refashioning television in their own image. “In features, people realize that every minute of screen time is precious,” says Cooper, who became a hero of typography fetishists everywhere for his meticulously crafted title sequence for the 1995 Fincher mindbender “Se7en.” “The titles can do more than just setting up people’s names.”

Like many others in his field, Cooper subscribes to the philosophy popularized by Saul Bass, who almost single-handedly created the art of main title design in the 1950s and ’60s with his stylized sequences for Alfred Hitchcock (most notably “North by Northwest”), Stanley Kubrick (“Spartacus”), Otto Preminger (“The Man With the Golden Arm”) and other auteurs. His theory: “You try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story.”

Evocative brevity is very much on display in Cooper’s masterful opening credits for “The Walking Dead.” In just 35 seconds, viewers learn pretty much everything they need to know about the series — namely, that it’s a creepy, yet frustratingly slow-moving, zombie drama set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the zombies are rarely the focal point.

Bass’ philosophy is also in play during the opening sequence for “Boardwalk Empire.” Karin Fong, a director and designer at industry alpha dog Imaginary Forces, worked closely with series creator Terence Winter to find the best way to clue in savvy HBO audiences to the world they’re about to enter. Ultimately, they decided on an impressionistic approach that might have left Sherwood Schwartz scratching his head: shots of Steve Buscemi, dressed in period garb, standing alone on a beach surrounded by bottles of liquor. “I think many of the best titles don’t duplicate what is shown in the narrative that follows but instead serve to intrigue and pull in the viewer with emotional impact,” says Fong.

Essentially, she’s talking about content branding, or creating images that will emotionally adhere viewers to a particular show, a once-flourishing technique that had been in hibernation on television for many years. During Saul Bass’ heyday, visually compelling intros weren’t uncommon (e.g., the cartoonish opening for the 1965-69 CBS series “The Wild Wild West”). But with rare exceptions — “Miami Vice,” for one — networks went in a different, more utilitarian direction with opening credits in the 1970s and ’80s. “Maybe people chose not to put their money into that part of the show, or they forgot that you can do a lot of other business there,” says Cooper (who, perhaps not coincidentally, did the main titles for the 1999 film adaptation of “The Wild Wild West”).

Business, of course, explains the general trend over the last few decades, especially on networks, of marginalizing opening credits. You can’t blame the suits for wanting to truncate the stale convention in favor of a few more seconds of advertising space each week. By the mid-1980s, main title sequences on television had become entirely predictable: neatly explain the premise of the show or the characters in 30 seconds or less, hopefully via an insidiously hummable theme song, à la the ragtime “Mr. Belvedere” tune that still rattles around in my head daily and drove one should-be YouTube star crazy enough to lip-sync it while sitting on the toilet. Even programming honchos knew that, by and large, opening credits had become something to skip over — or, worse, given how rapidly the cable universe was expanding, something to flip away from. The fear of viewer flight got so bad that one fed-up ABC executive, perhaps after seeing the intro to “Full House,” suggested that the network eliminate them all together.

In the late-1980s, when “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” savaged tired openings on his groundbreaking Showtime series with lyrics that literally went “This is the theme to Garry’s show/The opening theme to Garry’s show/This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits,” the death knell had tolled for earnest title sequences. Producers who wanted their shows to land with Gen X — the target demographic advertisers coveted most at that time — needed to inject them with winking humor (e.g., “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”), genuine genius (David Lynch’s iconic lead-in to “Twin Peaks”) or extreme brevity (“Murphy Brown,” “Seinfeld” and “Frasier”). For the networks, the last technique resulted in slight upticks in viewer retention and ad revenue, and helps explain why shorter titles and cold opens are so prevalent on broadcast television in 2012.

“At the end of the day, the networks are about selling soap and shampoo and stuff like that,” says Billig, whose company worked with J.J. Abrams to devise the famously brief “Lost” sequence. “There’s always the question of ‘How much time do we allow for the main title?’” In the case of “Lost,” the answer is 12 seconds.

Since it’s unlikely that the networks will ever be able to greenlight show openings as daring as the ones increasingly found setting up the likes of “American Horror Story” and other cable shows, and since the threat of viewer retention still gives them nightmares, maybe ABC and its broadcast rivals should strive to lead the charge in a promising sub-development: main title sequences that change from episode to episode. “Weeds,” for instance, produces a completely original vignette each week that not only cleverly incorporates the show’s title but also hints at the content of the episode. The ridiculously ornate maps concocted for the “Game of Thrones” opening sequence, which won the prime-time Emmy for outstanding main title design last September, change from episode to episode, depending on where the action takes place. Of course, those perpetually watchable credits sequences are just variations on a hugely successful long-running gag from a network show. What fan of “The Simpsons” hasn’t sat through the opening credits hundreds of times to see what Bart Simpson writes on the chalkboard or what happens with the couch?

For now, those of us whose brains are still playing “The Brady Bunch” earworm on repeat can rest easy knowing that the trend toward more visually sophisticated opening credits should prevent the unironic explanatory theme song from making a comeback — although Zooey Deschanel’s adorkable throwback “New Girl” intro is a near-miss. Of course, this may dismay fans of shows sporting inscrutable main title sequences, and fans of camp, for that matter. In other words, “Homeland” viewers shouldn’t expect to hear Claire Danes rhyme “She knows her Hezbollah” with “Despite being bipolar” when the show returns for Season 2.

“That would be awkward,” says Billig.

: More John Sellers

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Anthony Shadid yearned for home

In a soon-to-be published memoir the fallen war reporter told the story of rebuilding his grandmother's house.

By Jefferson Morley

Anthony Shadid (Credit: AP)

Topics:Writers and Writing, Anthony Shadid, Editor's Picks

Anthony’s Shadid’s now unbearably poignant book, “House of Stone,” opens with a scene of carnage that will be familiar to anyone who read his coverage of the wars of the Middle East. As a reporter for the Washington Post in the summer of 2006, he arrived in the devastated Lebanese town of Qana to find that “Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning’s work … the dead standing, sitting looking around, the village, its voices and stories, plate and bowls, letters and words, its history, obliterated in a few extended moments” of indiscriminate violence perpetrated by America’s favorite ally. As he wandered amid the devastation, he found a man mourning the death of his wife and five children. “‘I wish God would have left me with just one child,’ said the bereft former father.”

In its sympathetic detail, rhythmic language and political realism, the passage is pure Shadid. But the book quickly pivots from war into a ruminative “memoir of home, family and a lost Middle East.” From Qana, Shadid went on to visit Marjayoun, a village in southern Lebanon where his grandmother had lived as a girl before emigrating to the United States. When he saw that a half-exploded Israeli rocket had wrecked the abandoned house where she grew up, he promised to himself that he would rebuild it, to create what Arabic speakers call a bayt, not just a house, not just a home, but the enduring edifice of a family.

He needed one. Shadid’s success in becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for the Post and New York Times had cost him his marriage and most contact with his 6-year old daughter. He took a leave from his job and launched on the project of rebuilding the house of Isber Shadid, his great-grandfather. It was a therapeutic venture in genealogy and home improvement intended to repair himself.

“House of Stone” is the very opposite of the war stories he told so well. As Shadid hires the workers and supervises construction, he excavates the history of his family and why they left the region once known as the Levant. The result is a braided tale of becoming and going. The story alternates between tales of his slow-motion construction project, with its tragic-comic cast of male artisans and suppliers, and finely etched flashbacks of the Shadid clan making its way in America in the 1920s, with the focus on his grandmother Raeefa, went on to become the wealthy matriarch of a family of strivers in Oklahoma.

Shadid starts his project by hiring Abu Jean, a master tradesman (maalim) whose prickly pride and constant promises to get the job done “tomorrow” leave Shadid smoldering with rage. But when Shadid realizes that Abu Jean actually cares more about him than the job, he finally understands the man. “He showed up every day to make me happy,” he writes in wonder. “Abu Jean cared about me.”

He discovers the rewards of small town life. He savors the local expressions (“Coffee without cardamon is like a bride without her gown,” a cousin tells him) and slows down to tend his small garden (hoquora). As the grounds around the house take shape, he marvels:

The olive trees were full of buds and the three pomegranates that Cecil had given me had managed to survive, sprouting a few leaves. I learned to respect the garden, where rituals and right action prevailed. Patience was requisite. There was redemption in silence. Seasons were restorative. A garden, I realized, heals.

But he admits he never quite feels at home. The people of Marjayoun take great pride in what their disapora had done, with different families accumulating fortunes in the Persian Gulf and the United States. “Yet there was a hint of resentment over their abandonment of their homes,” he writes. “No one came back to Marjayoun.” And still he tries. He thinks of Raeefa, crossing the ocean without her family. “Like my grandmother, I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one.”

When the house is done, he goes back to reporting. He goes to Libya where he is stopped by soldiers, thrown face down in the dirt. He hears one of them say, “Shoot them.” Expecting to die, he feels “emptiness, aridity, hopelessness, the antithesis of creation and imagination.”

He lives and has no thought but to return to Marjayoun and his finished home. Back among the olive trees, he exults in anticipation of his daughter’s imminent arrival, picturing her “suddenly grown, beside these trees and saying the words that I would one day teach her, words that would take her back to Isber’s world.”

That day will never come. On Feb. 16, just a few weeks before the publication of “House of Stone,” Shadid died while on assignment in Syria. This is the last testament of a superb reporter and citizen of the world who had the wisdom to find his bayt.

: Jefferson Morley is the Washington editor of Salon and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday). More Jefferson Morley

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When I was captured by Gadhafi’s forces

After the Libyan rebels we were embedded with came under fire, we became hostages of the regime

VIDEO

By James Foley, GlobalPost

Libyan rebels head towards the front line outside the eastern town of Brega, Libya Friday, April 1, 2011 (Credit: AP)

Topics:GlobalPost, Libya, Arab Spring, Middle East

GlobalPost correspondent James Foley spent 44 days in captivity inside Moammar Gadhafi's Libya. This first chapter of his story originally appeared on GlobalPost. For the full series, click here.

There is a single main highway along which lies every major city between the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in the east and the capital Tripoli in the west. It snakes along the coast and passes through Ajdabiya, Brega, Sirte and Misrata, cities made world famous by months of back and forth, and deadly, conflict.

The four of us were riding in the back of a blazing red minibus at the beginning of April, approaching the strategic oil town of Brega, where the worst fighting of the conflict had been taking place. Our driver was a teenage boy, like his friend in the passenger’s seat. The so-called front in this war was always changing. But we had already passed the last rebel checkpoint and we knew whatever front existed was beginning to reveal itself.

Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.

We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.

Two armed trucks raced toward us from behind, filling up our back window before soaring past. This was how the rebel convoys seemed to form, like schools of fish that hunted together, but have no clear leader or command structure.

Over a small hill we saw some men, boys really, standing around a sedan. We leaped out to do some interviews. Clare asked how far away Gadhafi’s forces were. The boy said 300 meters. 300 meters? I looked at Clare. It seemed impossible. But as a precaution, we hustled off to the side of the road. A static mortar or a rocket position could have easily dialed in on us from that distance. The small convoy rolled ahead, leaving us behind in what we thought was relative safety.

We watched the rebels push forward. They weren’t 200 meters away, at the rise of the next hill, when they sped back around. We watched for a second as they beared back down on us, followed by a barrage of machine gun fire. The loudest I had ever heard. Our small group of journalists — Anton, Clare, my fellow American, and Manu, a Spanish photographer — took off running.

“We need to get to the vehicles,” Anton shouted. But the rebel trucks were retreating too fast and the ones in pursuit were firing wildly. There were two Gadhafi military pickups — tan with large machine guns mounted on the back. The trucks were overflowing with armed men.

With all the bullets flying, we pressed ourselves as close to the ground as possible. The rebels faded into the distance and the Gadhafi trucks slowed to a stop. The shooting continued. The roar of bullets overhead sounded like machines eating up metal. AK-47 rounds ripped past us from less than 50 meters.

Libya: Tripoli scenes from the uprising:

I crawled back toward Clare and Manu, who were under several small trees. The shooting intensified. We tried to speak, to yell for each other. But the bullets tearing overhead deafened everything. In a corner of my mind I hoped that we were in a cross fire, that behind us the rebels were shooting back. I crawled forward toward a larger sand dune with my camera rolling. Anton crouched in front of me. The bullets streamed directly over my helmet and shoulders. This was no crossfire. They were shooting at us, and they were shooting to kill.

“Help, help,” I heard Anton cry. His voice was weak. My mind tried to convince me of something I knew was not true. Maybe he had just fallen and twisted something. Another barrage of bullets passed over me. “Anton, are you OK?” I shouted between bursts of fire.

“No,” he said, in a much weaker voice.

****

I’ve heard journalists say that Libya was the perfect war. A reporter could get to the front line, close enough to hear the shells coming in, and back to a comfortable hotel in Benghazi, with a solid Internet connection, by evening.

But in reality, this war was anything but perfect — something I’d soon come to learn. It was a war led by confusion, abductions and an oppressive sense of the unknown. This latest spasm of the Arab Spring had none of the idealism of Tunis or Cairo. For me, it began with a rifle butt to he head, which bled into weeks of uncertainty, crushing captivity and ended, however improbably, in a four-star hotel in the besieged Libyan capital.

Along the way, between blindfolds and quiet conversations with fellow captives deep inside the country’s brutal prison system, I witnessed the last gasps of the Gadhafi regime — a corrupt and corrupted system that for more than 40 years ruled this tribal, oil-rich land.

I had done several tours as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for me, the frontlines felt natural. And I believed it was my job. But the freedom with which you could maneuver was deceptive. There was no highly-trained U.S. platoon to escort you. And the rebels were said to be some of the worst trained soldiers in the world. Most had never held a gun before the end of February, when they stormed Benghazi’s “katiba” and took them by force.

I tried to hold farther back after a few close calls — a near miss by a Girad rocket, for instance, or a tank shell ripping over the heads of Manu and I outside Ajadibya. Our ears popped. But the front kept calling.

As is common among freelancers, Clare Gillis, a 34-year-old from Connecticut, Manu Brabo, a 29-year-old from Gijon, Spain, and myself had been sharing rides and interviews together for several weeks. Anton Hammerl, a South African photographer who covered much of Africa — from the townships during Apartheid to child soldiers in the Congo — came late to our little group.

With all the rebel offensives and retreats along the coastal highway, we felt we had to get to the front every few days or risk completely losing track of the story. So on April 5, we headed out.

Our plan was to try to get a sense of who was really controlling Brega, a strategic oil town that had been the scene of some of the most deadly fighting since the uprising began several months earlier. A rebel general told us that if the rebels took Brega, they would hold it without advancing right away, thus learning from earlier mistakes where they stretched themselves too thin and were forced into whole scale retreats.

But Brega was dangerous. Manu and I had been caught in heavy shelling outside the town days before. I had seen two shells bounce off the ground a hundred meters away. A rebel was killed by shrapnel to the head in the truck Manu and I had leaped into for escape. We went with them to the hospital, hugged the bawling comrades afterwards and shot some eerie photos of them washing blood off their grenades.

Still, Brega was where the front was, so we woke up early to beat the crush of reporters. The four of us went in a Mercedes van piloted by a teen. We stopped at the only manned checkpoint some 20 kilometers outside town, where a crowd of the usual disheveled men, many of them teens, milled about waiting for the real fighters to assemble. We got out into the early sunshine and told our driver he could leave us there. It was just after 10 a.m.

We waited. Usually, with shouts of “Allah Akbar,” a convoy would push ahead, and we’d jump into one of the rebel vehicles heading to the front.

The red minibus started moving and we hustled on. It drove ahead with us as its only passengers, the young driver and his friend in front looked nervously from side to side. We stopped after a kilometer to inspect two smoldering pickup trucks, blackened crisps in the road. It appeared to have been a rebel ambush.

“Hit by a Sam 7,” Anton said pointing out the expended launcher and wire guidance system leading to the cindered vehicles. I took note of his wealth of knowledge. He’d been forced to join the South African infantry as a young man and hadn’t relished it.

****

The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent. The terrifying reality grabbed hold of me. The soldiers firing probably didn’t know that we were reporters. Rebels didn’t dress in regular uniforms and many were often not even armed. I had to surrender or we’d all be gunned down.

I leaped up from where my head had been buried in the sand to face the group of wild men shooting uncontrollably — it seemed our only hope. I held up my hands and yelled, “Sahafa! Sahafa!” It was one of the few Arabic words I knew. It means “journalist.” I walked slowly toward them.

There were three or four skinny, Arab-looking soldiers carrying AK-47s and a larger, darker one to the right. My eyes drifted toward Anton as I stumbled past the dune ahead of me. He was lying face down in the sand, his body askew, cameras still strapped around his shoulders, his legs splayed out.

As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head. My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47. All my instincts for self-preservation gathered within me. I went completely limp and complacent. The adrenaline was coursing so heavily through my body. I felt no pain.

I was thrown into the back of one of the pickup trucks. An Army boot pushed my face onto the floor. I glanced back and saw Manu and Clare being pulled off the ground.

A crazed looking soldier looked down and jeered at me in English, “You go on patrol! You go on patrol!” as if he knew exactly what we’d been trying to do. A cell phone was pushed close to my face. A picture was snapped. “Gadhafi Meia Meia,” a younger one said, thumping his chest, “Gadhafi 100 percent.” These words terrified me. After weeks of being with rebels who said things like, “Fuck Gadhafi,” with regular consistency, we had now found ourselves with the other side, the ones who had pledged their dying allegiance to the country’s dictatorial leader of more than four decades.

Clare and Manu were also forced down into the bed of the truck. Manu was face down and Clare, pushed against his side, was facing me. I looked at her for the first time. She had a purpled eye. She saw blood running from my scalp.

“Jim, are you OK?” she said, pleadingly. I nodded, and took stock of the blood pooling in the back of the truck. With a boot again on my face, my hands were bound behind me with a plastic cord. We sped away from the scene.

You can read Part 2 of James Foley’s story here.

: More James Foley

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Rush Limbaugh, secret Democrat

That's the only explanation for why the right-wing blowhard is leading the GOP off a culture-war cliff

VIDEO

By Joan Walsh

Rush Limbaugh (Credit: AP/Chris Carlson)

Topics:Rush Limbaugh, 2012 Elections

I’ve decided Rush Limbaugh must be a closeted Democrat. I can’t think of any other reason he would be leading the Republican Party over a political cliff by advising that they double down on the culture wars.

With new poll data showing that President Obama is quickly gaining ground among women voters, at least partly due to Republican extremism on contraception, Limbaugh told his listeners Thursday that the GOP would win the election if it’s decided on culture-war terms.

“Something tells me, that if the upcoming election could be decided on social issues, the Republicans could win that in a landslide, because we are on the right side of the culture war,” he said. “The problem is, we’re scared to death of it. The Republican establishment wants no part of it.”

Smart Republicans are indeed afraid of the culture wars – because they know they’re on the losing side. Sadly, there aren’t very many smart Republicans anymore; or at least there aren’t very many who will stand up to extremists in their base and say enough is enough on their jihad against birth control.

A majority of women voters, 51 percent, now approve of the job Obama is doing, according to the weekly Gallup tracking poll, up from a low of 41 percent last August (only 43 percent of men approve.) A Democracy Corps poll taken from Feb. 8-13 found Obama now leads Mitt Romney 65-30 among unmarried women, an 18-point swing since November. (Yes, Democracy Corps is run by Democrats, but they regularly deliver bad news for their party when their polls require it.) Women may also be behind some more bad news for Republicans: A majority of seniors, thought to be the party’s base, now view the GOP negatively, according to Democracy Corps. Most seniors happen to be women.

It’s not only women who disapprove of Republican extremism on contraception, though: a New York Times poll this week found that two-thirds of all voters support requiring health care plans to cover the whole cost of birth control – including almost three-quarters of women. By the way, Catholics support the measure 67-25. The only group that has a problem with it is evangelical Christians, the core of the GOP base.

Please remember that all three of those polls were taken before Thursday, when Rick Santorum’s money man Foster Freiss made his idiotic joke about aspirin serving as birth control (if it’s held tightly between the knees, a joke straight out of a ’50s locker room) and Darrell Issa assembled only men on a panel to talk about what women can do with their bodies.

That’s why Rush Limbaugh can’t even keep up the pretext that contraception is a winning issue for his party throughout an entire broadcast. During the very same show in which he told Republicans they’d win if the election was decided on culture-war issues, he also accused Democrats of starting the birth-control debate to hurt Santorum. But how can it hurt him if a culture war is good for Republicans? None of his callers asked him that question. Here’s more of what he said:

The whole point of bringing up contraception and trying to make it look like the Republicans want to ban birth control is simply something to excite the Democrat base, which has been depressed as it can be because their president has done a rotten job. The economy is in the tank.

Of course, Limbaugh is wrong about that too. The economy isn’t great, but it’s improving and voters are giving the president better marks for that, too. Also: the base isn’t depressed. The Democracy Corps poll found that Republican Party extremism combined with the improving economy is revving up the Democratic base again, pulling what they call the “Rising American Electorate” of young people, unmarried women and non-white voters back behind Obama and his party. Meanwhile, it’s the GOP base that appears depressed, with turnout either flat or down in every primary and caucus except South Carolina.

Even Michael Steele didn’t try to spin the bad news for his party on “Hardball” today. I did catch him trying to blame Obama for craftily making the contraception debate about…contraception. How dare he?

Here’s my “Hardball” conversation with Steele. I had the easy side this time.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

: Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh

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The factory jobs aren’t coming back

Romney, Santorum and Obama all vow to fight for U.S. manufacturing. It's not just a lost cause; it's the wrong one

By Robert Reich

Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama (Credit: AP)

Topics:2012 Elections, U.S. Economy

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.

Suddenly, manufacturing is back – at least on the election trail. But don’t be fooled. The real issue isn’t how to get manufacturing back. It’s how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren’t at all the same thing.

Republicans have become born-again champions of American manufacturing. This may have something to do with crucial primaries occurring next week in Michigan and the following week in Ohio, both of them former arsenals of American manufacturing.

Mitt Romney says he’ll “work to bring manufacturing back” to America by being tough on China, which he describes as “stealing jobs” by keeping value of its currency artificially low and thereby making its exports cheaper.

Rick Santorum promises to “fight for American manufacturing” by eliminating corporate income taxes on manufacturers and allowing corporations to bring their foreign profits back to American tax free as long as they use the money to build new factories.

President Obama has also been pushing a manufacturing agenda. Last month the president unveiled a six-point plan to eliminate tax incentives for companies to move offshore and create new lures for them to bring jobs home. “Our goal,” he says, is to “create opportunities for hard-working Americans to start making stuff again.”

Meanwhile, American consumers’ pent-up demand for appliances, cars and trucks have created a small boomlet in American manufacturing – setting off a wave of hope, mixed with nostalgic patriotism, that American manufacturing could be coming back. Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl “Halftime in America” hit the mood exactly.

But American manufacturing won’t be coming back. Although 404,000 manufacturing jobs have been added since January 2010, that still leaves us with 5.5 million fewer factory jobs today than in July 2000 – and 12 million fewer than in 1990. The long-term trend is fewer and fewer factory jobs.

Even if we didn’t have to compete with lower-wage workers overseas, we’d still have fewer factory jobs because the old assembly line has been replaced by numerically-controlled machine tools and robotics. Manufacturing is going high-tech.

Bringing back American manufacturing isn’t the real challenge, anyway. It’s creating good jobs for the majority of Americans who lack four-year college degrees.

Manufacturing used to supply lots of these kind of jobs, but that was only because factory workers were represented by unions powerful enough to get high wages.

That’s no longer the case. Even the once-mighty United Auto Workers has been forced to accept pay packages for new hires at the Big Three that provide half what new hires got a decade ago. At $14 an hour, new auto workers earn about the same as most of America’s service-sector workers.

GM just announced record profits but its new workers won’t be getting much of a share.

In the 1950s, more than a third of American workers were represented by a union. Now, fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers have a union behind them. If there’s a single reason why the median wage has dropped dramatically for non-college workers over the past three and a half decades, it’s the decline of unions.

How do the candidates stand on unions? Mitt Romney has done nothing but bash them. He vows to pass so-called “right to work” legislation barring job requirements of union membership and payment of union dues. “I’ve taken on union bosses before, ” he says,” and I’m happy to take them on again.” When Romney’s not blaming China for American manufacturers’ competitive problems he blames high union wages. Romney accuses the president of “stacking” the National Labor Relations Board with “union stooges.”

Rick Santorum says he’s supportive of private-sector unions. While in the Senate he voted against a national right to work law (Romney is now attacking him on this) but Santorum isn’t interested in strengthening unions, and he doesn’t like them in the public sector.

President Obama praises “unionized plants” – such as Master Lock, the Milwaukee maker of padlocks he visited last week, which brought back one hundred jobs from China. But the president has not promised that if reelected he’d push for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to organize a union. He had supported it in the 2008 election but never moved the legislation once elected.

The president has also been noticeably silent on the labor struggles that have been roiling the Midwest – from Wisconsin’s assault on the bargaining rights of public employees, through Indiana’s recently-enacted right to work law – the first in the Rust Belt.

The fact is, American corporations – both manufacturing and services – are doing wonderfully well. Their third quarter profits totaled $2 trillion. That’s 19 percent higher than the pre-recession peak five years ago.

But American workers aren’t sharing in this bounty. Although jobs are slowly returning, wages continue to drop, adjusted for inflation.

The fundamental problem isn’t the decline of American manufacturing, and reviving manufacturing won’t solve it. The problem is the declining power of American workers to share in the gains of the American economy.

: Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." More Robert Reich