Feb
27
Michael Winship
In the late spring of 2004, when I was in Jerusalem, a white Episcopalian minister who had grown up in the deep South told me that if he had the choice of being a black man in the 1950’s Mississippi of his childhood or a Palestinian man in the West Bank today, he’d choose life in Mississippi.
That’s how bad it is here, he said. Admittedly, he was showboating a bit for the benefit of my pad and pen, but the point survives his embroidery. His words came back to me in the midst of all the sturm und drang over former President Jimmy Carter’s best-selling book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”
President Carter has taken an enormous beating from many for using the provocative word “apartheid.” Provocative because it conjures images of the cruelest, inhuman abuses of South Africa before the freedom of Nelson Mandela; of inflamed bigotry, violence and forced separation of the races. Yet anyone who has spent even a small amount of time traveling in the Palestinian villages and towns of the West Bank can attest that if it’s not apartheid in the worst, old Afrikaner sense, it’ll do until something more invidious this way comes.
Jan
30
Michael Winship
Last week, I attended a reunion of “The 51st State,” a robust, local public television news and public affairs program that graced the airwaves of New York City’s Channel Thirteen back in the early 1970’s. I didn’t have the pleasure of working on the show — it went off the air shortly after my arrival in Manhattan — but a lot of my friends and colleagues did, and it was a treat to see all of them again.
The reason for the gathering was the launch of an effort by Thirteen to rescue and restore old videotape from its four-and-a-half decade past. Better late than never. Over the years, as a frequent public television writer/producer and a sometime television historian, I’ve bemoaned the loss of thousands of hours of videotape, significant history, much of it erased or simply tossed into dumpsters.
Clips were shown from old “51st State” broadcasts, eliciting hoots of recognition, laughter, pride and not a few tears. What we saw was a raucous, lively, offbeat, iconoclastic, funny, rough and tumble TV program, a newscast not unlike the city it covered but totally unlike any local television news show since.
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Jan
16
Media Reform: Arming the Lambs
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by Michael Winship
MEMPHIS, TENN. — Asked his opinion of western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied he thought it would be a good idea.
You could say the same of media reform. A good idea, far more easily said than done.
But hang on. There’s a growing populist movement out there, working to achieve the goal of a more responsive, independent and accessible media. Over the weekend, 3500 advocates, an empowered array of women and men of all ages from across the country, came to Memphis, Tennessee, to attend the third National Conference for Media Reform. They made for a committed and impressive, ruly mob.
(The event was sponsored and organized by Free Press, the national organization promoting “diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications.”)
Jan
10
It’s Official: New York Stinks
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by Michael Winship
I was awakened Monday morning by the smell of gas.
My first impulse was to go to the kitchen and check whether any of the knobs on the stove accidentally had been opened, leaking gas into my Manhattan apartment. Nope. Then I opened the front door to see if the heavy smell was out in the hallway, too. It was.
I cracked the windows and turned on the radio. Reports were coming in from all over midtown and downtown, even New Jersey. The odor was pervasive, held down over the city by a temperature inversion, so strong and pungent that several people were hospitalized and many others complained of nausea, dizziness and headaches. Briefly, some buildings were evacuated and subway and commuter train service was slightly disrupted.
Dec
5
Is It Hot in Here or Is It US?
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Michael Winship
This weekend, former presidential and vice presidential candidate John Edwards was out in California’s Silicon Valley talking sense.
His words weren’t all that radical and his motives weren’t entirely pure. He was flogging his new book, “Home: The Blueprint of Our Lives,” and testing the waters for another possible White House run in 2008.
Nonetheless, sense was talked at the Commonwealth Club in Santa Clara: “We have issue after issue after issue that are very important here at home, but the overriding responsibility of the next president is to try to restore America’s leadership in the world,” Edwards said.
“We didn’t use to be the country of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. We were different. We were the defender of human rights. We were the country that everyone looked up to and respected, and I want to see us be back in that place.”
Nov
28
Throwing Iraq into Reverse
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Michael Winship
You probably know that joke about the only way for a country music song to have a happy ending.
Play it backwards. You’re let out of prison, your wife returns, the dog comes back to life and your pickup gets fixed.
I’ve been feeling that way the last few months working on a documentary about Iraq. We have hours of home video shot by a Baghdad cab driver who worked as a translator for a western news crew. The tapes start just a couple of days before the war began and continue over months and months of the American occupation.
I can easily conjure up what sounds like a happy ending. All I have to do is back up to a tape dated, say, May 28, 2003 — four weeks after President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech — and there’s our taxi driver saying, “I think the future of Iraq will be very good… If disagreements and divisions will not occur and factions unite to form a free democratic country, all good will come.”
Sep
11
As American as Apple Pie
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Michael Winship
We are a city of incongruities. So I guess I shouldn’t have thought it odd when, early Sunday evening, I ran into two London bobbies, in full dress uniform, walking up Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue, as if they were patrolling Piccadilly.
They and 65 other British policemen were here to attend a ceremony at Battery Park City downtown, representing the 67 UK citizens killed on 9/11. Their presence has become one of our new annual traditions, like the enormous American flag that hangs overlooking Ground Zero every year, the Tribute in Light memorial that for one evening illuminates the night sky of lower Manhattan, the reading of the names of the dead.
This year, I set out just minutes before the first moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower. For most, it was a regular workday — over at the 6th Precinct on West 10th Street, the service remembering the two neighborhood policemen who died on 9/11 seemed briefer than in the past. At the ceremony’s conclusion, after a minute of silence, a young policewoman piped up, “Well, back to business,” and the gathering quickly dispersed.
Yet, everyone seemed quieter than usual as they walked to work or rode the buses and subways. Friends confirmed the feeling. And were more people wearing black, or was it just the usual, New York City fashion statement?
All seemed normal at the Christopher Street PATH train station. Five years ago, with the destruction of the PATH station at the Trade Center, Christopher Street became the southernmost hub and commuters silently lined up around the block to get in, like Londoners during the Blitz.
Traffic on the West Side Highway seemed normal, too. After 9/11, television microwave trucks had lined the road and for months, 24/7, an unending procession of trucks unloaded debris here onto barges docked along the Hudson. Now a man walked along carrying a painting of a blonde woman in a pink kimono holding a lily. A motley crew of eight or so gathered on a traffic island, veterans of “Point Thank You,” the meeting place for folks who used to cheer the fire trucks, police cars and ambulances as they sped up and down the highway.
But as I got closer to Ground Zero, police had closed half the road and blocked off many of the streets leading into the site. I walked over to Church Street and worked my way through the crowds on the east side of the pit. There were fewer flowered wreaths and photos, but every year the scene seems to get a bit more zoo-like. A man dressed in a bird suit urged passersby to “Have a Kind Day.” A group of Buddhist monks in saffron chanted and beat drums, but above the din, I could start to hear the families reading the names of their loved ones.
The inside perimeter of the site was lined with black tarps so those on the outside couldn’t peer in, but the voices rang out. By the time of the fourth moment of silence, marking the minute when the second tower fell, they barely had made it through the first half of the alphabet. “I hope the golf courses are great in heaven,” one family member signed off. “Baby, save a spot for me. I love you,” said another. One woman recited the lyrics of an old popular song: “How far would I travel to be where you are? How far is the journey from here to a star?”
Across the street, four replicas of the Liberty Bell, trucked in from Wilmington, Delaware, tolled in succession, and scores of people, mostly young, clad in black tee shirts with the slogan “Investigate 9-11!” got in people’s faces like Scientologists. They thrust out pamphlets and DVD’s declaring the 9/11 Commission Report a fairy tale, the terrorist tragedy the work of a dark government conspiracy.
On this day, it felt wrong, disrespectful. Besides, believing in such a conspiracy assumes a level of competence not evidenced by this government. Just ask the denizens of Baghdad or the bayou.
It seemed as egregious as that ABC TV “Path to 9/11″ movie this week, the one that posited a conspiracy of dunces, primarily in the Clinton White House, bobbling all attempts to get Osama before he got us. Not that dumb mistakes weren’t made during those years, but the screenplay was factually, intellectually and emotionally dishonest, distorting truth beyond the precipice of libel.
Directed and written by men with strong, right-wing, evangelical ties, the film pilloried Clinton’s administration but barely managed to reference such things as the infamous August 6, 2001, intelligence brief warning President Bush, “Bin Ladin (sic) Determined to Strike in US.” (And, of course, made no mention of the president’s dismissive response — according to Ron Suskind’s book “The One Percent Doctrine” — “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”)
I’d rather remember the pies. You heard me. Pies. Apple pies.
In the wake of the disaster, Pam Post, a woman in my upstate New York hometown, decided that what the search and rescue workers at Ground Zero needed was something as American as, well, apple pie. All the businesses, schools and churches joined the bakeoff. Volunteers chipped in with their time, ovens, ingredients and pie tins. Kids decorated the boxes and in the end, some 800 pies were loaded onto a truck and pointed toward Manhattan.
I got a phone call asking for help. The Red Cross and Salvation Army had turned the pies down — charities were overwhelmed with contributions. I was useless, but eventually, the desserts made their way to the Episcopalian Church’s General Theological Seminary and other appropriate downtown destinations. They were, one worker declared, “The best pies ever.”
A small gesture, perhaps, but those pies are representative of the spirit we’ve lost. In the face of adversity, instead of undaunted and defiant hope, sacrifice and FDR’s famous “warm courage of national unity,” we’re fed a recipe of recklessness, fear and hate that runs counter to the core values of our democracy. Is there an enemy out there? You bet. But many of our wounds are self-inflicted.
copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers
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Aug
9
Israel: Two or Three Things (I Think) I Know about Her
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Michael Winship
Two years ago, my friend Anne and I were in northern Israel, where, for the last month, Hezbollah missiles have been falling and killing. We’d just had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the coastal town of Tiberias and were driving back to the kibbutz bed and breakfast at which we were staying for the night.
It was dark and we got lost. Finally, we saw a light on the side of the road. I got out and walked up to the dilapidated guardhouse of what claimed to be — I am not making this up — a paintball camp.
I explained our plight to a grizzled old man in a beret. He looked at me with a mixture of contempt and incredulity. You know, he said, you’re almost in Lebanon. It’s less than half a mile away.
All things considered, it’s hard not to be “almost” in Lebanon anywhere in Israel. Unlike the United States, drive three hours in any direction in Israel and chances are, you’ll be in the custody of somebody else’s army.
It’s a pocket-sized country, usually referred to in the press as “approximately the size of New Jersey.” And Lebanon is about the size of Connecticut. Amazing that two such relatively small pieces of the planet can be the focus of so much carnage, hate and international consternation.
Trying to make sense of it in the even teenier space of a column such as this would be a fool’s errand (hey, pal, I heard that). Nonetheless, watching and reading about the current fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, two or three, random observations occur.
In anticipation of various grinding axes hurled in my general direction, let me preface them by saying Israel’s right to exist as a democratic, Jewish state is not in question. But for it to continue as a democracy requires an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and not the proposed, isolated, non-contiguous “cantons,” that are more like the apartheid era Bantustans of South Africa.
Nor can Israel continue to enjoy the goodwill of other free nations if it insists on responding to Hezbollah’s undeniable terror with such an asymmetric excess of violence. Overkill has caused the death or displacement of innocent civilians and destroyed the infrastructure of Lebanon’s messed-up attempt at democracy. And it happened just as that nation was getting back on its feet after a decade and a half of reconstruction.
The damage and pain done to Israel in lives and property and the fact that Hezbollah often hides among the Lebanese population are indisputable. But these realities don’t excuse the bombing — accidental or otherwise — of so many civilian targets. Israel cannot win this way. It turns enemies into heroes and eats the soul.
Given the legendary superiority of Israeli intelligence, it’s surprising how they underestimated the ability of Hezbollah to fight with such ferocity, strength and resilience. One could argue that, lulled into complacency by its equally renowned military strength and the frequent haplessness of the Palestinian resistance, Israel has been blindsided by how well-armed and trained (yes, by Syria and Iran, among others) Hezbollah has proven to be.
Yet an obsessive nationalism contributes to the problem, too. As Henry Kissinger once said after a meeting with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, “We see in Israel a society so traumatized by a generation of war that its leaders are no longer capable of making strategic judgments about their country’s survival.” Nationalism, former Middle East correspondent John Barry wrote in Newsweek, “has blinded Israel to the long-term consequences of a campaign that is practically guaranteed to fail, no matter what level of military effort the country commits.”
They are abetted by our own country’s ignorance, misinterpretation and avoidance of the issues. As Israel behaves without restraint, we look the other way and in the name of spreading democracy and fighting terrorism give our tacit approval. We do so at the peril of the entire world.
Some say that if we’d paid more attention and hadn’t been so preoccupied with Vietnam in the period following the Six Day War in 1967, Israel wouldn’t have been so confident about hanging onto all the territory it seized during its fabled, lightning round of fighting; the source of so much grief.
Now it’s happening again, as our obsession with Iraq and the war on terrorism has distracted and blinded us to reality. By lumping all forms of Islamic resistance into one great “Islamo-fascist” threat, making little or no distinction among Hezbollah, Hamas or al Qaeda, we create the very monolith we fear. We succeeded in doing so in Iraq: we’re in danger of repeating the mistake in Lebanon.
In his book “America at the Crossroads,” erstwhile neoconservative Francis Fukuyama writes, “Before the Iraq war, we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United States. The scale of the problem has grown because we have unleashed a maelstrom.”
A popular joke at the time of the ‘67 war has an Israeli sniper opening fire from a hilly hideout on a large company of Arab soldiers. One by one, the soldiers climb the hill to remove the sniper and one by one they vanish.
Finally, one mortally wounded Arab stumbles down from the brush and gasps to his comrades, “Go back! It’s an ambush — there’s two of them!”
This time it’s the pair Israel and America that are stumbling into an ambush, one that’s largely of their own making and hazardous to the very health of each.
copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers
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Jun
27
Vandals in the People’s House
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Michael Winship
A recent trip down to Washington, DC, where I used to work and live, reminded me once again how much has changed in the capital since 9/11.
When I first moved there to go to school — back in 19-mumble-mumble — you could roam the Capitol and the Senate and House office buildings freely, say hello to members like Barry Goldwater and Bella Abzug as they passed in the hallways, walk into offices unannounced, ride the little subway that runs underground between the buildings, try to digest the thick bean soup in the Senate cafeteria.
You could do all of this unaccompanied, which was remarkable, for even in those days there were occasional threats, foiled plots, and, back in the fifties, an armed attack on the House chambers by Puerto Rican nationalists. They opened fire with automatic weapons, wounding five congressmen.
This lack of overt, heavy security made the Capitol and its offices feel like they truly belonged to the people, but over the years, things tightened up, especially after the July 1998 shooting incident that took the lives of two Capitol policemen.
First came the metal detectors and x-rays; then, following September 11, your basic, total lockdown. Shortly after 9/11, I remember sitting on the Metroliner in Washington’s Union Station, waiting to head home to New York. I looked out on the platform. Suddenly, it was swarming with guys in gasmasks and HAZMAT suits. We were only a few blocks from the Capitol and anthrax had just been found in the office of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.
Now, unless you’re there on business, you can only visit the Capitol on a guarded, guided tour. Pockets have to be emptied out when visiting any government building, even the National Archives and the Smithsonian. And concrete barriers and blocked off DC streets make it virtually impossible anymore to travel in a straight line from Official Point A to Official Point B.
Monday morning, however, you could walk a straight line from the front door of the Supreme Court to the east side of the Capitol, literally and metaphorically. Monday’s decision by the highest judiciary in the land to strike down Vermont’s campaign finance law is directly relevant to our Federal legislative body’s inability to deal with measures that would help the majority of the people to whom the Capitol — hell, the entire government — is supposed to belong.
In what both the Washington Post and New York Times described as a “splintered” 6-3 decision (six separate opinions accompanied it), the court overruled the 1997 Vermont law — the strictest in the country. The Post reported, “Although the court said the government retains the power to restrict contributions, for the first time it declared specific limits to be too low — perhaps opening the way to challenges on some long-standing restrictions, such as the 30-year-old $5,000 contribution limit for political action committees.”
The Vermont legislature passed its bill as an intentional challenge to the Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision which, as the Post’s Charles Lane wrote, “has generally been read to permit limits on campaign contributions, for the purpose of stopping corruption or apparent corruption — and to bar limits on candidates’ spending as a violation of free speech.”
While it’s true that the Vermont law may have set the bar far too low — even the cost of a box of Krispy Kremes for a campaign kaffeeklatsch could be applied against an individual’s $200 contribution limit in a local state house race — the need for further campaign finance reform remains. In the words of Common Cause President Chellie Pingree, “This court is out of step with the vast majority of Americans who want to take back their democracy from wealthy special interests and strongly support spending limits.”
That’s why Common Cause and so many others favor public financing of all state and federal campaigns. As Pingree noted, “Given the Abramoff and other recent scandals out of Washington, and Congress’ refusal to address its lax ethics system, public financing is a way for the public to get its concerns back at the top of the national agenda, where they should be.”
In support of Common Cause’s argument, let’s introduce into evidence Monday’s Washington Post story headlined, “Call for Lobbying Changes Is a Fading Cry.” Those vocal demands for reform that accompanied Tom DeLay’s resignation in the spring have vanished in those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.
The Post reports, “Legislators and public-interest group advocates say the most likely result this year is a minimalist package that would allow members to say they have responded to the Abramoff situation and other scandals but would do little to crimp their ability to accept lobbyist favors. The change, these people say, reflects a calculation that the political storm has mostly passed and that the need for more intrusive efforts to alter the congressional culture and the lobbyist-lawmaker relationship is less urgent.”
So the big money lobbyists get to continue to wine, dine and bribe with few if any new constraints. And you wonder why it’s so hard to get a minimum wage increase through Congress. Or to legislate restraints on government waste, compounded by corruption in the dealing out of contracts. Or to pass environmental restrictions on industries slowly choking and parboiling us to death.
But the problem isn’t just greed, lobbyists and the need for the public financing of campaigns. Alas, it’s also our own continuing, goddamned indifference.
Speaking of the need for wider reform, John McCain told the Post, “The reason why it didn’t happen was that members didn’t feel a sufficient amount of pressure to change the way they do business… There’s a belief among my colleagues that our constituents are not concerned.”
After the 1998 deaths at the Capitol, President Clinton and several congressional leaders went to great lengths to condemn the despicable violation of what they called “the people’s house.” We do it a further desecration with our apathy. We’ve let vandals enter the people’s house. The damage they cause is as much our fault as theirs. If we don’t demand and support a floor to ceiling cleanup — indeed, a thoroughgoing, gut rehabilitation — we don’t deserve to call that house democracy’s home.
copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers
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All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor.
Jun
18
06.17.06 Segement 5
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12:30-1:00
Senior Political Correspondent Michael Winship is always well informed and cogent but seemed particularly sharp today.
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