Salon.com > Alexander Zaitchik

The NATO-industrial complex

Wed, 23 May 2012 21:35:00 +0000

“Optics!” hissed the NATO summit staffer. “Jesus Christ, optics!”

He was right to panic. It was Sunday evening, 6 sharp, the end of the first day of the NATO summit in Chicago. A swarm of global press was gathered around the convention hall’s lone display, a slick industry-sponsored video exhibit of NATO’s ballistic missile defense system. Any minute, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and his entourage would come sweeping out of a nearby tunnel for a tour the installation. It was the last photo op of the day.

There was just one problem. The televisions lining Rasmussen’s entrance path were turned to CNN and looping fresh footage of Chicago police raining nightsticks down on the skulls of protesters. The waiting press was glued to the screens, pointing and murmuring about the violence in a dozen languages. Also drawing attention was a very public huddle by NATO staff. “Shut off the damn TVs!” one of them said. “The optics might be worse if we shut them off now,” said another. But it was too late. Before a decision on the TVs could be reached, Rassmussen entered the hall trailed by a gaggle of attaches and military men. The world’s cameras snapped away.

Missile defense is back

Sat, 19 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000

NATO’s summit will open Sunday afternoon in Chicago as NATO summits do, with pomp and blather about a needed, purposeful, unified, stronger, more efficient Alliance. As austerity’s cousin, "efficiency" will receive buzzword status this year in the form of “Smart Defence,” NATO’s shiny new concept and the source of the sad, unintentional irony at the heart of this summit. This irony will become apparent when NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stands before the world and touts Smart Defence in the same breath as he applauds NATO’s commitment to an epically dumb Washington-led boondoggle called the European Phased Adaptive Approach Missile Defense System.

Protesters’ new front

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:11:00 +0000

Forget the ballerina on the bull. The iconic image of the Occupy encampments is a Zorro-masked Gan Golan as the Unemployed Superhero, caped but grounded by a ball and chain marked STUDENT LOANS. The costume contained the whole sprawling critique in one playful package: the recession, finance run amok, captured regulators, the betrayal and wasting away of the middle class. It was a comic book version of the message delivered by the Occupy kids who took a page from history and “did knowingly mutilate” their monthly student loan statements — from LA to DC like draft cards they burned.

A year ago, the student debt crisis was a quiet one. Default-triggered cascades of compounding interest and collection fees were matters of lonely shame and anxiety. Journalists writing on the issue networked through friends and family to find subjects willing to go on record. Then the debt-confession signs started popping up at OWS protests, and stories of debilitating student debt were everywhere. Numbers that had been a source of private depression became symbols of generational defiance. “I have $80,000 in student loan debt,” declared a typical sign. “How can I ever hope to repay that now?” Others demonstrated the vertiginous arithmetic of the classic default spiral: “Borrowed $26,000. Paid back to date $32,000. Still owe $45,000.”

Amazon’s $1 million secret

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

The Brooklyn Book Festival’s website debuts a new feature this year called OnePage. Every week from March through September, OnePage will post part of a previously unpublished work — chunks of correspondence, scenes from books in progress — by authors such as Darcey Steinke, Martha Southgate, Paula Fox and Stefan Merrill Block. There will also be mini-profiles of participating small presses, including indie mainstays McSweeney's and Akashic.

That a Brooklyn book festival would promote small presses and their authors isn't surprising. But the sponsor of OnePage has raised a few eyebrows. As the festival’s press release noted, “The project is made possible with a grant from Amazon.com.”

All-American occupation movements

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

When squaring off against unaccountable and abusive power, sometimes the only course of action is to plunk down and fix a stake. The history of social protest in the United States is the history of people taking a stand, but in the last century this has increasingly meant taking a seat. In response to injustice, Americans have learned to gather their fellow aggrieved, park somewhere symbolic, and make their lack of movement the message. Dissent transformed into a fixed community quickly becomes an object of orbit instead of a subject. It commands attention instead of pleading for it. As Occupy Wall Street has shown, occupation protests are young planets that shift gravity.

Flashback! Psychedelic research returns

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:45:00 +0000

Kristof Kossut arrived at an unlikely address for his first psychedelic experience. The 60-year-old New Yorker and professional yachtsman opened the door not to an after-hours techno party, but to the bright reception room at the Bluestone Center for Clinical Research, a large spa-like space occupying the second floor of New York University's College of Dentistry. Kossut was among the first subjects of an NYU investigation into the question: Can the mystical states of mind occasioned by psychedelic drugs help alleviate anxiety and depression in people with terminal and recurrent cancer?

Kossut had no idea, but in the spring of last year, he was looking for something, anything, that might improve his mental state. In 2008, he was diagnosed with cancer of the tonsils and put on a biweekly chemo and radiation regimen. He quickly lost his appetite, dropped weight and sank into a deep depression. When a friend sent him a news brief about the experimental NYU study, he applied.

Glenn Beck’s white nationalist fans

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:01:00 +0000

It's been a busy week for Glenn Beck watchers. On Monday, the Anti-Defamation League released a report warning of the paranoia and stridency that increasingly define the conservative grass roots. It echoed an April report issued by the Department of Homeland Security, but unlike the DHS report, the ADL named names, and fingered Beck as the figure most responsible for the unhinging of the right.

"Beck has acted as a 'fearmonger-in-chief,' raising anxiety about and distrust towards the government [which] if it continues to grow in intensity and scope, may result in an increase in anti-government extremists and the potential for a rise of violent anti-government acts," the ADL wrote.

Amazingly, just after the ADL report's release, Sarah Palin responded to a question about a possible Palin-Beck ticket by refusing to rule out Beck as a running mate. She praised him effusively, describing him as "bold, clever, and very, very, very effective."

Effective at what, exactly?

Glenn Beck rises again

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:22:00 +0000

It was 1990, the midpoint of Beck's career in FM morning radio. The morning zoo craze had peaked and the economy had stalled. Eight years after leaving Washington state with a suitcase full of skinny ties and dreams of working in Rockefeller Center, Beck was now a morning-drive journeyman with a family to feed and a reputation to save. Despite breaking quickly out of the gate at age 18, Beck did not enter the new decade within sight of the industry's front ranks. New York's Z100, the leading station in his world, was not calling him. Neither were program directors in L.A. or Chicago. There were no syndication offers to compete with national zookeepers like John Lander and Scott Shannon.

After his personal and professional meltdown in Houston, Beck found a new job in Baltimore at the city's leading Top 40 station, WBSB, AKA B104. This time, however, he wanted a partner.

Glenn Beck becomes damaged goods

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:22:00 +0000

When Glenn Beck assumed morning-show duties at KZFM in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1983, the zoo model was ascendant. It was the year Scott Shannon moved to New York to found Z100, where Shannon's "Z Morning Zoo" made the station No. 1 in the market within three months of its birth. Closer to Beck's new home, John Lander had just launched what would be a long-running and heavily syndicated morning zoo on Houston's KKBQ.

Like dozens of stations launching generic zoos around the country, Beck's first morning show was titled simply "The Morning Zoo." It wasn't a playbook zoo, as it lacked an ensemble, but it had a zoo spirit. It was fast-paced and featured skits and fake characters voiced by Beck. Beck's main cartoon character was named Clydie Clyde, a Muppet-voiced alter ego who sounds like the love child of Yoda and Kermit the Frog. Today the descendants of Clyde live on without names. Beck lapses into voices to imitate anyone he doesn't like, while going boggly-eyed and waving his hands around like he's slipping on a banana peel. (Clyde was based on the most widely imitated such character at the time, "Mr. Leonard" from Shannon's New York Zoo team.)

The making of Glenn Beck

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:19:00 +0000

Early one morning in May 1979, a 41-year-old divorcee named Mary Beck went boating in Washington's Puget Sound. Her companions on the expedition were a retired papermaker named Orean Carrol, whose boat she helped launch near the Tacoma suburb of Puyallup, and Carrol's pet dog. Exactly what happened next remains shrouded in morning mist, but among the crew, only the dog would survive the day. The boat was recovered late that afternoon adrift near Vashon Island, just north of Tacoma. It was empty but for two wallets and the frightened animal. Mary Beck's body was discovered floating fully clothed nearby. Carrol's corpse washed ashore at the Vashon ferry terminal the following morning.

The county coroner found no evidence of violence on either body. Police investigators told Tacoma's News Tribune that the double drowning appeared to be a classic man-overboard mishap -- a failed rescue attempt in which both parties perished.

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:18:00 +0000

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.