DEAD PARROT

Number 34 -- Saturday, July 19, 2003

DP FOLLOWS UP

One of the disturbing features of American journalism is the way stories seem to appear from nowhere and then disappear before they are really over. They manifest themselves as meteors--brief, random flameouts in the night sky--rather than as what they are: figures in a slowly evolving and causally patterned celestial map. The meteor effect ("Did you see that one, Mildred?") works to the advantage of those who wish to keep us titillated rather than thoughtful. Within the limits of a weekly newsletter, Dead Parrot has tried to offer more than the average sense of continuity and context. In keeping with the effort, we lead this last issue with updates on some of our earlier stories. You can read the originals at

[#3] December 14, 2002: Quote of the Week

This was Trent Lott's maudlin, might-have-been commentary on life in America under a Strom Thurmond regime. DP correctly anticipated that breaking cover on the Republican "Southern strategy" would lose Lott his job as Senate majority leader. We did not foresee his replacement by the bland, plausible "Dr. Bill" Frist, who quickly succeeded in positioning himself as the soul of discretion and the exemplar of compassionate conservatism. So winning is Frist's record as a Samaritan at the scene of auto wrecks and Capitol Hill shootouts that no one seems eager to address the conflict of interest in his playing point man on Medicare legislation while his family owns one of the largest hospital chains in the country--one that recently copped a plea bargain of at least $600 million for defrauding Medicare (NY Times, 12/21/02). Cracks in the compassion also began to show after the Supreme Court's gay rights decision, when Frist joined those thumping tubs for a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage (Times, 6/30).

[#4] December 21: Who's Got a Secret?

to provide useful facts about people in power, such as how they've voted and where their money comes from. Still a-building and slowed by heavy traffic, the site has great promise. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney's long-running campaign to conceal the records of his energy "task force" has run afoul of a federal appeals court (Times, 7/9). A judge must still decide exactly how much we are to learn about the Cheney love-in with heavyweights of the extraction business, but the principle of popular oversight seems to be gaining ground. A 7/17 release from Judicial Watch

reveals that maps of the Iraqi oil and gas fields were among the documents that the task force collected in March, 2001.

[#7] January 11, 2003: South of the Border

Brazil's new working-class president, Lula da Silva, began his administration by canceling a $760-million fighter plane order. This refusal to invest in militarism, together with Lula's campaign pledges to see that 24 million destitute Brazilians had enough to eat, marked him as a dangerous radical who might, in the words of Republican congressman Henry Hyde (IL), take Brazil into a western hemisphere "axis of evil." Indeed, the Times soon headlined a story "Latin America's Political Compass Veers Toward the Left" and displayed a photo of Lula whispering together with Castro at the inauguration of yet another populist leader in Ecuador (1/19). But before the revolutionary columns could converge on El Paso, reality took hold. Brazil is shackled to a crushing load of debt, and Lula showed a willingness to play ball with the International Monetary Fund, even if the game required him to postpone his social agenda. A story by Marc Cooper and Tim Frasca in the Nation (3/10) sketches in both the powerful symbolism of the background from which Lula rose to the presidency (he left grade school to become a shoeshine boy and became an apprentice metalworker at 14) and the thicket of complications, domestic and foreign, that constrain him from bringing full-fledged social democracy to his country. By May, the left wing of his own party was blasting him for making too many compromises (Times, 5/29).

[#14-16] March 1, 8, & 15: Tin Man and the Environment

The assaults on nature chronicled in this three-part series have continued remorselessly. The EPA's inspector general reports (Times, 5/27) that the computer system the agency uses to monitor water pollution is out of date. Data must be entered manually, at a cost that depletes funds for modernizing. Thousands of pollution sites are completely uncovered. Deregulation by neglect perfectly suits the Bush style, achieving the ends while minimizing the political exposure that would accompany legislation or even executive orders. The same ploy is working at the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has run out of the money it needs for designating critical habitats (Times, 5/29). Thirty-three species will go unprotected for want of a paltry $2 million--substantially less than the cost of one bogus carrier landing and its associated pageantry. And, even as new tax laws were offering big deductions for businesses that buy heavy, fuel-inefficient cars and trucks, "White House officials" stepped in to rewrite an EPA report on climate change (Times, 6/18), substituting a tangle of evasive jargon for the straightforward acknowledgement, supported by numerous scientific studies, that smokestack and tailpipe emissions are an important cause.

[#21-22] April 19 & 26: Tin Man Triumphant

[#28] June 7: Busting Labor's Chops

As this story pointed out, devaluing workers and their unions has been a theme of the Bush administration from Day One. The aim is a docile, "flexible" labor force with no leverage to assert its rights or claim more than the most meagre share of a company's profits. Bush sets the tone for the private sector by aggressively seeking to de-unionize the federal government. Having campaigned successfully on the specious proposition that "homeland security" would be threatened if the 180,000 members of the new department could engage in collective bargaining, he has now moved on to the Defense Department and its 746,000 civilian employees--again with the phony anti-terrorism rationale (Washington Post, 6/8). But no work force has been as cynically manipulated as the military itself. Week after week the Rove PR mill grinds out idealized images of Bush cocking his pelvis among eager soldiers and sailors, while at the very same time the administration is stingily shrinking their benefits to make room for tax cuts. An editorial in ArmyTimes (7/2) details this economy drive, which includes rollbacks in both imminent-danger pay and the family-separation allowance. (Congress later insisted on restoring this money.) The White House has even opposed as too costly an increase (from an appalling $6000 to a merely insulting $12,000) in the compensation paid to families of those killed on active duty. Heroes they may have been, but someone has to watch the bottom line.

REFLECTIONS IN A HOSPITAL WINDOW

The hospital in my home town of Milton has recently become a New England Santiago de Compostela, the terminus of a pilgrims' trail. It all began about a month ago when someone noticed that a second-floor window had a ghostly image on it and that the image was none other than that of...the Virgin Mary. (Or at least of Mary as she is conventionally represented in church iconography.) Within days the Globe reported that 25,000 had made their way to Milton to witness the miracle. The town had to lay on overtime cops to direct the traffic, and the commotion became such that the hospital limited viewing to three hours a day, drawing a tarp over the Queen of Heaven when time expired. I walked up there one hot evening, past a large, flashing highway sign that announced the restrictions. About a hundred people had gathered and more were arriving. There were people in wheelchairs and kids in strollers and teenage girls with bare midriffs. An old woman sat on the curb and inhaled from the oxygen tank she had brought along. Mary was exactly what the hospital spokesman had declared her to be: a deposit of salts that had formed when the seal on the double window gave out. No one seemed to find her less miraculous or less worthy of a visit for that.

"Compassionate conservatism," as designed by Karl Rove and fronted by George W. Bush, has all the depth and substance of a salt deposit between defective thermopanes. The credulous may find it comforting, but anyone who stops to examine the evidence sees it for the fraud it is. Last November, in Dead Parrot #1, I wrote that "the Bush administration is intent on working a fundamental and long-term change that will be catastrophic for our country." The subsequent 33 issues have tried to define the exact nature of this catastrophe and to document its progress. Working in the mode of my patron saint, I. F. Stone, I've used the public record and cited my sources. It is always necessary to read the fine print and the back pages. Stone once said that he enjoyed the Washington Post because he never knew where in the paper he would encounter a front-page story.

Though I must discontinue DP for the time being and may or may not be able to resume reporting later on, I hope that the outlines of the argument are clear. The Bush administration is a juggernaut fueled by unprecedented sums of money from sources that expect payback, in the form of compliant public policy, for their expenditures. It is profoundly dishonest, not only in its willingness to lie outright when need be but also in its systematic distortion of language and its cunning manipulation of imagery. It seizes every opportunity to advance the interests of the rich, the powerful, and the well connected; it expresses its "compassion" for the others by stripping them of their rights, demeaning their morals, and softening them up for exploitation. We need to fight back relentlessly: by organizing, by voting, and by getting the truth out.

In 1871, Henry Adams was editor of the North American Review. That the magazine's circulation numbered only 400 or so didn't bother Adams, Anthony Lukas tells us, because "he believed that everyone who mattered was on the list." Dead Parrot, with 353 subscribers, may fall a bit short of "EVERYONE who matters," but I want you to know that you all matter very much to me, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening.