I suspect that there are quite a few politically conservative stars out there - they're simply smart enough to keep quiet about it.

Anti-abortion songs are occasionally successful in playing to a niche (Flypside's repulsive Happy Birthday, for example) but if a large percentage of your core audience is young and liberal it makes sense not to alienate them.

Bands taking a pro-life position (like P.O.D and Symposium) are so roundly trashed in the music press it acts as a strong disincentive to signing silly petitions.

Rock stars may well have learned the lesson that dance-hall acts are struggling with - hold all the objectionable opinions that you want, just don't spout off about them.   more »

Military recruitment on campus might be less problematic if recruiters told the truth about military life and the realities of war.

Instead of utilizing laptops to screen glamorous movies about basic training, how about showing the destruction of Fallujah through the use of chemical weapons, dropped by U.S. forces in 2004 (though the U.S. officially denies this claim)?

Instead of false promises about signing bonuses, how about explaining what it's like to lose a limb, or worse yet, a friend in combat?

Perhaps, in place of promising high school kids that they will become fighter pilots, they could attempt to explain how to deal when bombs fall on the houses of innocent Iraqis and their loved ones perish.   more »

This work is concerned with relationships between contemporary popular culture, and the futures we (for better or for worse) create.

It is not intended as a statement but rather as a means to ask questions. In particular, I’m questioning the relationships between media, popular culture, and the development of truth, history and ideology.

When you observe these two people, Osama Bin Laden and Jesus, their ethics could not be more different. The only comparison that can be made is historical: both pursued by two of the world’s most powerful armies – the US and the Roman armies.

Jesus is clearly defined by history, but I am interested in how history will treat the image of Osama.   more »

One of the most significant features of the present crisis is the utter perplexity of the media commentators who seek to explain the workings of the global capitalist economy and who insist that, whatever its faults may be, it is the only possible form of economic organisation.

The Washington Post economics correspondent Robert Samuelson, writing in Newsweek on August 22, recalled the experience of the Great Depression and then noted that today’s global economy undeniably faced “some big, potentially destabilising threats” of which global finance was one.

However, anyone claiming to understand today’s world financial system was either “delusional or dishonest.”

Not wishing to go too far, Samuelson left unexplored the implications of his own comments: that the lives and well-being of tens, hundreds of millions of people, are threatened with devastation by an economic system, which the powers that be cannot even understand, let alone control.   more »

Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction.

It has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’.

In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved.   more »

President Bush wants to shore up national resolve to keep troops in Iraq by invoking the past struggles that yielded alliances.

“We fight for a free way of life against a new barbarism,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Tuesday. A friendly Japan and Vietnam that now sell us T-shirts show “that the heart’s desire for liberty will not be denied,” the president added.

In a nutshell, this is why America is in trouble in Iraq.

President Bush can’t reel himself in out of the clouds - where he imagines himself leading a great ideological struggle for the generations - to confront the ugly realities of Iraq.   more »