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M.T. Karthik

~ midcareer archive, 1977 – 2017 plus 2022

M.T. Karthik

Tag Archives: Bush

The Rebirth of Peace – Five Moves Obama Should Make Now

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, public letters

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

5, accords, actions, agenda, antiwar, Bush, cabinet, change, Clinton, close, Democratic, Dennis, department, drone, electorate, end, five, free, geneva, GOP, Guantanamo, Hilary, hope, Iran, iraq, Kucinich, leonard, moves, Nate, obama, pakistan, party, peace, peltier, president, progressive, rebirth, safe, Silver, things, treaty, war, warsaw

The re-election of President Obama has opened a door for believers who bought into the President’s original message of hope and change when he was elected in 2008.

Much of Obama’s support then was a direct result of his vote against the Iraq War. Democrats chose Senator Obama over Senator Clinton for many reasons, but the “Iraq War vote” was an important one that has been wrongly dismissed – it’s what tens of millions with many other differences were agreeing about.

The Iraq War vote was a symbolic difference between Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama, but with so few opportunities to truly understand our candidates in modern Presidential elections, it became a significant statistic for a large demographic of US voters who have been dismissed and reduced by mainstream media and the two major parties for more than a decade.

There is an anti-war electorate, and it’s a sleeping dragon in the USA.

Millions came out on February 15, 2003, in opposition to George W. Bush’s plans for War on Iraq. The vast majority of these then came out for Barack Obama five years later seeking an anti-war candidate, only to be disappointed by the last four years of capitulation, centrism and even rightist approaches to foreign policy by the President.

Now Obama has been re-elected by the exact same margin that George W. Bush was and the political obligation for standing up for the anti-war and progressive electorate that helped put and keep him in the White House must be addressed.

Here are five simple yet powerful moves Obama can and should make right now – while the political capital exists and the GOP is reeling from the smack in the face of the demographic and ideological realities of the election.

1. Close Guantanamo Bay Prison

2. End the Drone attacks on sovereign Pakistan and elsewhere.

3. Take a strong, open and progressive stand to approach Iran intellectually through discourse rather than via military options.

4. Create a Department of Peace, as first proposed by Representative Dennis Kucinich: taking just .001% of the defense/military budget to finance the creation of a cabinet position dedicated to peaceful outcomes to conflict. Appoint Mr. Kucinich as the first Secretary of Peace in U.S. history.

5. Pardon and Release Leonard Peltier – do it now ,Mr. Obama, at the beginning, rather than at the end of your term. Take a stand for prison reform.

I will not defend these points here, because I’m proposing them for purpose of discussion. Please read, consider, forward and comment.

Rather, I defend the idea that there would be very little or even NO political cost for taking these steps and that the benefits politically, socially and culturally would be immense.

Nate Silver has already pointed out that Obama’s margin of victory in the popular vote is almost exactly the same as Bush’s over Kerry in 2004.

Bush claimed a mandate and bombed and obliterated Fallujah! The triumphalism of the Republicans in 2004 was intensely exaggerated by FOX and the rest of television media. This is what contributed to the views of an ever-shrinking minority being allowed to dominate policy.

This is Obama’s chance to start the clean-break from the policies of Bush/Cheney and in particular the Foreign Policy, which was dominated by aggression, war and violations of every major peace treaty signed in the 21st Century: The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, The Geneva Peace Accords, The Warsaw Accords – Putin said, on the morning that Shock and Awe began in Baghdad, “It violates the U.N. Charter.”

Millions of Americans were the ones in Shock and Awe.

If Obama stood up for peace in the 21st century, tens of millions of voters and hundreds of representatives at all levels of government would support him.

It would also set a tone for his ability to work on topics which Republicans have rigidly blocked for the past four years. Obama could put the GOP way back on its heels.

Progressives would rise to support Obama for being a strong leader and taking steps to better our national character. The Democrats would gain millions who have felt left out by the centrism of the party over the last 20 years.

That is the point of this post: to create a huge groundswell of public support for these five ideas as a part of a National consciousness. That we, the 21st Century Americans, the Digital Generation, the new Americans, stand for a more peaceful relationship with the world.

It’d be easy to sell. The race between Obama and Romney was only close because so many millions did not participate. Many who did vote for Obama before left in disgust, but weren’t willing to cast a vote for the Republicans who do not share their values. These are the one Obama would attract. People longing to believe again.

Less than half the electorate votes. Obama could make huge strides among the disenchanted with principled action.

These are important stands for getting back our dignity as a nation. I firmly believe they would have very little political cost.

One way to measure if I am right is by memes, so if you’ve read this far and agree, I am asking all producers and hype-masters and friends and like-minded thinkers to tweet these five points and use the hashtags #Peace and #FreeLeonardPeltierNOW respectively as means of creating a measure of support.

Please do blog and produce work that promotes these ideals of peace that we all share.

Let’s push this country back on track by letting President Obama know he can be far more progressive without concern for political liability.

Start talking peace and Free Leonard Peltier Immediately – it’s the right thing to do.

21st Century Elections

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, NYC, S.F., San Antonio

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

2000, 2004, barack, Bush, chief, City, count, editor, F.Kennedy, fiasco, Filippacchi, Florida, frank, George, Hachette, in, Jeb, John, Jr., Karl, kerry, Lalli, lawsuits, loss, magazine, manhattan, new, obama, publisher, Rove, swiftboat, vote, W., york

In Spring of 2000, Hachette-Filippacchi Inc.,hired me and a half-dozen others to work as independently-contracted temporary employees to fact-check and conduct research for George magazine – whose founder and editor-in-chief John F. Kennedy, Jr. had been killed in a light-plane crash amidst fog off the coast of Maine eight months before. They hired us to ensure George remained, in the wake of its founder’s passing, an audible element of the political discourse during the Election of 2000.

As a national magazine which was read by hundreds of thousands of voters in many states, particular focus was paid to the Presidential Election between Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush, the Governor of Texas.

My fellow employees, under Editor-in-Chief Frank Lalli, were a tight-knit, smart and savvy crew. In fact, on Election Night we were all together at Mr. Lalli’s beautiful upper westside home where he had invited us to watch returns. But Karl Rove’s fat face and a flipped state later, many of us were back in the office. A few of us stayed up most of the night and by 10 a.m. I was not alone in the office when I was posting coverage of Florida on the George website.

Though admittedly not a heavy-hitter politically, George was engaged throughout the Election and maintained an immense audience of voting readers before the magazine was finally brought to an end in 2001.

In 2003 I covered Schwarzenegger’s Election via Recall of Davis for KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles.

I also covered The Election of 2004 and the Presidential Race between George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry for KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles and in part for Pacifica Radio. Some of that 2004 Election work exists here and online at Pacifica’s Audioport and in the Pacifica Radio Archives, but I have complete digital copies of everything I did for KPFK and Pacifica between 2003 and 2005 backed up on disc in my studio as well.

In 2008, I was no longer working as a journalist, but did cover Obama’s Victory in Iowa for KPFK and produced short Audio-Visual Installments for Freshjive on the Internet. These were amateurish and clunky by design, yet carried considerable data for anyone who had tuned in to the broadcasts I produced for KPFK four years before.

When Obama won in ’08, I was with Lloyd Dangle, who hosted a book signing and Election Night Returns Party at the Riptide in San Francisco. Earlier in the day I had a drink with former SF Mayor Willie Brown at the St. Regis – we discussed Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s plans for appointing a Senator to replace disgraced Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, forced to retire.

This year,I did not work as a journalist, but rather observed as a reader of the news media and a regular Californian voter.

The biggest single predictor of the elections of the 21st century has to be the margin of difference in registrations for the two major parties.

There are many reasons for this: smaller parties are being absorbed and disappearing for lack of membership, corporate interests fund the two major parties only, people threatened by one of the two parties runs to join the other and the demography of the nation is changing.

I have successfully predicted the last two elections as a result of my study of data and my knowledge of voting history. I think I see the electorate again.

Some points on 21st Century US Elections:

It’s impossible to write a blog about all my experiences voting and covering General Elections in the United States in the 21st Century, but suffice it to say there is a distinct difference between these and the Elections of the latter half of the 20th century, in which I also participated.

Much of this is discussed in my talk Political Media, Messages and More.

2003 was the Recall Election and spawned recalls in the 21st Century because of Schwarzenegger’s success.

2008 was the Youtube Election.

2012 was the Twitter Election.

Money and media are the driving forces of what has become a political system mired in divided, brutal contests between two immense parties which are financed primarily by corporations and special interest groups that define their policies.

We are in desperate need of a new Federal Elections Reform Act, as was passed in the early 1970’s.

Our democracy is sick. Hardly half the people with the right to vote even participate.

We need to update, nationalize and standardize voting procedures and make them more secure. We need to increase registration and participation. We need to subsidize the creation and maintenance of additional parties in the face of the massive expenditures made by Republicans and Democrats that have taken elections out of the reach of the common person. We need proportional representation in Congress.

Have been saying all of this for years, and it has only gotten worse. Here’s hoping the young people who are increasing in numbers at the polls pull off what my generation couldn’t.

Political Media, Messages and More

03 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, essay, journalism, press clips, reviews, social media, talks

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bush, cable, history, internet, Jefferson, limbaugh, m.t. karthik, media, message, mtk, newspaper, orwell, pamphlet, politics, presidency, president, radio, Reagan, rush, States, talk, television, television presidency, U.S., United

( a one hour talk delivered to students at Academy of Art University in San Francisco on Friday, March 1, 2012. There was no recording. Slides appear in order here as images, and some video clips and links have been added to this online version).

Good afternoon, I am M.T. Karthik.

I’ve organized this talk chronologically, and into three general parts, starting first with historical examples of mass media used for sociopolitical language here in the US;

then second, a line between politics of the past and the present drawn by the invention and use specifically of television,

and finally politics in the Digital Age, which will conclude with some discussion of the contemporary situation.

The largest arc of this one hour talk is pluralism of mass media in sociopolitical language – from pamphlet to newspaper to radio to television to cable television to the Internet to FB to Twitter over the last 236 years.

In the last part of the talk, I will also be sharing some of my original work in the field. I have sought to report upon, document and portray through art, certain social interests primarily because I believe they are being written out of history, even covered-up by specific interests and aggregation of public opinion around a monocultural viewpoint of our nation’s political past.

No discussion of American political thought and expression can start without the Declaration of Independence –

– Thomas Jefferson’s seminal document authored against the monarchy in England, which set off an age of revolution on behalf of individuals against kings and nation-states and which, with the U.S. Constitution, created the bond between the Colonies that holds as Federalism to this day.

It’s important to read the Declaration in context, because of the scale of Jefferson and the Colonists’ reach.

Jefferson was influenced by the French and other European thinkers as a result of visits there, but really, the scale of the task was unprecedented.

How would you author a letter to all the Kings and governments of the nations of the world declaring the creation of your own new country – led collectively – with an unprecedented democratic governmental structure set up by its citizens?

It’s said Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, has supported secession of Texas from the United States. How would his Declaration of Independence read, today? Would he address it to the UN, the Senate, the President, the Supreme Court? – none of these institutions existed for Jefferson to appeal to. He was writing to the nebulous notion of a “world at large” and against the British Monarchy.

What kind of persuasive language do you use in such a context?

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Epic.

But how was it possible for Thomas Jefferson to set down these words in Virginia with such confidence? The seeds had been sown by a Philadelphian, who wrote and published a pamphlet which became an instant best-seller here and abroad.

Perhaps more than any text in that nascent revolutionary period, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense – addressed audaciously to “the inhabitants of America” – pushed the colonists toward independence. The text demanded an immediate declaration of separation from England a full year before Jefferson sat down to write the great document.

With Common Sense, began the era of the political pamphlet in the United States. The authors of the Revolution used the format in the next ten years to author the Constitution. Should we refer to the American political pamphlet as a medium?

Here’s a recent one:

The pamphlet brings with it the creation of whole industries: printing, typography, stenography, journalism, cartooning, and begins an arc of American sociopolitical language that pluralizes to include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cable television and the Internet. This talk will discuss the use of all of these and pluralism of media over the 236 years since the Declaration of Independence was written.

The serial publication of essays, viewpoints and even texts of speeches became the normative method for political discourse in the Colonies. It birthed the centralization of thought in new-born cities and the media channel of our oldest newspapers and journals.

The Federalist Papers were a series of 85 articles or essays promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution.

77 of these were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of the 77 and eight others were published as The Federalist or The New Constitution in two volumes in 1788.

From these documents and the discussions they generated, came our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Promptly thereafter, colonial cities birthed the “two-paper town” as the newly minted First Amendment of the Constitution produced contrasting viewpoints in the form of newspapers, which bore, defined and built the “constitution” of American political thought for a hundred and fifty years.

The era made editors-in-chief men of great power a hundred years before Citizen Kane.

Note that the Presidents of the US at this time are mostly forgettable bureaucrats. Perhaps Van Buren stands out for his hemispheric reach, but great debate and intellectual work wasn’t being done by the President. It was occurring in the Senate, at the level of the Supreme Court and with the birth of newspapers’ Editors-in-Chief like Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune – who began to take on greater responsibility for political language.

During the period of 1840 – 1860, after years of the establishment of new civic centers and States, with their own newspapers and journals, the country faced its greatest sociopolitical unrest. Correspondingly, an era of great newspaper publishers and editors representing contrasting viewpoints emerged.

By 1858 it was common for newspaper-editors to employ stenographers to attend speeches and to publish the speeches in totem in their papers.

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, US Senators were elected by state legislatures so Lincoln and Douglas were vying for control of the  Illinois legislature.

The main issue in all seven debates was slavery and ultimately all of the issues Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 Presidential Election – issues which would lead directly to the first dissolution of the Union and the first Civil War in U.S. History.

The debates were held in seven towns in Illinois, but became so popular that they were distributed by papers elsewhere.

But editors of papers who favored Douglas would take the stenographers’ notes and clean them up, fixing errors of notation, context or even meaning only in Douglas’ words. Papers that favored Lincoln did the opposite. The power of the Editor was never before so clearly visible.

Lincoln lost the Senate election, but afterward he had all the texts cleaned, edited properly and republished as a single book – which was read broadly and helped lead him to the nomination in 1860.

The issue of Slavery was defined for vernacular discourse by the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, a remarkable moment in U.S. political history and language. Here’s the Centennial Stamp:

And so for long years newspaper men and politicians were bound in this country and great cultural and social consciousness that helped define the nation emerged through muckraking and whistle-blowing, but also, inevitably, corruption and yellow journalism.

The Spanish-American War may have been born from such yellow journalism, as the sinking of The Maine, falsely attributed to the enemy by papers in the U.S., pushed Americans into the war. More examples exist, and indeed as media pluralizes over the next century, this cozy corruption between politicians and journalists has been exacerbated by new media.

By the turn of the 20th century, the dominant medium was the printed word, and then, the word as heard through radio and both were being used to push political interests and social agendas.

Radio, a warm medium, a tribal medium with which President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the fireside chat, became the primary media tool for information about the wars abroad that defined the century. As Wiki points out, Every US President since Roosevelt has delivered a regular radio address.

News and official information delivered by voice over the airwaves is warm and available, lucid by the intimation of the sound of the voice, not subject to interpretation of the reader. Baseball and music and DJ’s sounded great on the radio and political communicators quickly recognized it.

Writing for broadcast began.

An excellent metaphoric example of the power of radio before television as a vernacular medium in politics can be found in the Coen Brothers musical film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

Set in the southern state of Mississippi before television, one narrative thread of the film follows a Governor’s race. Throughout the film, various people in the State are shown at home following the Election by listening to the radio.

Three escaped state prisoners form a musical group on the run, and anonymously record a single at a rural radio station which becomes immensely popular throughout the state through the power of radio. The men appear in disguise to perform their song live at an event which both candidates are attending.

The Governor’s opponent is insensitive to the popularity of the group, focusing instead on denigrating the men for both their fugitive status and their race. In a moment that predates television’s power in this regard, the challenger is revealed to be a racist statewide over the air. The challenger, unlike the incumbent, has no grasp of the power of the radio.

In the climactic scene, the incumbent Governor of Mississippi, seeing the immense popularity of the three escaped state prisoners, pardons the musical phenomenon the ex-convicts have become. The whole of the dialogue is shown to be carried out on radio throughout the State to the folks listening at home, who even hear the challenger run out of the hall on a rail as the Governor leads the crowd in a rousing chorus of “You Are My Sunshine.”

The entire scene is here:

[with respect to the Coen Brothers]

These scenes are remarkably faithful to the truth. In Louisiana, Jimmie Davis, a popular singer and the attributed author of the song, “You Are My Sunshine, became Governor.

The blogger LaLouisiane is eloquent on this matter:

“I remember my granddaddy saying that if Jimmy Davis would come around and sing “You Are My Sunshine”, (he wrote it you know), that everybody in the state would vote for him and never even ask him about a policy, a road, a bridge, nothing. We just really like that song down here, I guess.”

This talk, Political Media, Messages and More, is a follow-up to a talk I gave as News Director and Elections Coverage Producer for KPFK 90.7fm in LA, seven years ago at C-Level Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, which was subtitled, Pluralism of Media in the Age of Surveillance [mtk 2005].

Pluralism of media is evident at the addition of each new mass medium – radio doesn’t arrive at the newspaper’s exclusion or the pamphlet’s exclusion.

The pamphlet and certain newspapers remain significant modes of sociopolitical communication. They are at the heart of some, arguably all, of the United States’ greatest movements. Women’s Suffrage,

Socialism, the Labor movement’s successes in the first half of the 20th century.

So Pluralism of Media means we media-include, not media-exclude.

Where before you read pamphlets, now you read pamphlets and newspapers. Where before you read print, now you read print and listen to the radio – you add TV.

We add each medium and the media morph to fit our desires of them. Talk radio, drive-time radio, live radio, each is its own form.

This is what Marshall McCluhan meant when he said any new medium contains all previous media in it.

This is all changing now, of course, as Pluralism of Media has matured since 2005 to become the fluid, the cloud, the totality of data that we swim in today, post-TiVo, at the dawn of the streaming era of the web.

END PART ONE

Part Two: THE TELEVISION PRESIDENCY 1945 – 2008

The Television Presidency, born when Truman used it to announce the end of World War II , instantly made the Office of the President of the United States different from every presidency before TV – and television dominated until the Internet and the digital age, a period of twelve presidents.

Ike was the first President on the tube, and in his most important moment on TV, his exit speech, President General Eisenhower famously warned against the growing presence of a “Military-Industrial Complex”

… perhaps it would have worked in color.

But forever the line that defines the Television Presidency will be the Kennedy-Nixon Debates of 1960.
If you’ve seen Frost/Nixon you know that Nixon to the end of his days considered television, and the close-up, his undoing.

In the televised debates with Kennedy, Nixon’s problems with perspiration accumulating on his lip and his jitteriness in general on TV, came over as nervous and untrustworthy – on radio or via text this would never have been transmitted to the public-at-large. Nixon was ridiculed mercilessly for it by critics.

Imagine the contrast, Kennedy’s cool, youthful good looks and Nixon’s shiftiness.

Kennedy garnered the potency of the new medium, and, thanks in  part to the work of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Baines Johnson in delivering Texas, won the election by a slim margin.

I really like the blogger J. Fred McDonald’s take on this, who states, in his excellent essay on Kennedy’s relationship with TV: “For JFK, television could turn defeat into victory.”

Kennedy addressed the people of the country often and personably, but politically used the tool at critical junctures to save himself: after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s use of television was pitch-perfect.

So, the relationship between live color television and the Presidency began with Kennedy’s handsomeness but then, typically of all things new, was taken promptly after discovery to the other extreme, the visual abuse of his savage assassination.

TV then exposed LBJ and Nixon and Kissinger’s dirty wars and the ugly side of the USA: repression, corruption, racism.

The 1968 Olympics were the first televised live and in-color around the world. They took place at the end of one of the most tumultuous years in history, a year I refer to as The People’s Year. This image of a staged protest against race and class oppression, thanks to live television, was impossible to stop:

I participated in making a monument to this moment on the campus of San Jose State University, when in 2006, I worked intimately with others assisting the artist Rigo 23 in the creation of this:

(At this point in the talk, I describe the Tommie Smith/John Carlos statue project anecdotally and include personal, non-published images of the construction of the statues.)

The impact of the moment as seen on television is described well by this Mormon blogger, who tells of being young and white and American and watching with her father. She describes his reaction both at the time and after watching ceremonies of the courageous act on video 20 years later – his change of heart is set in universal terms.

TV was the king of the failure that was The Vietnam War. It ended the Nixon Presidency. But politicians, as they had in the past, reacted by learning to manipulate the new medium to their advantage. Predictably, it was an actor who synthesized the power of the “small screen” for political propaganda.

Ronald Reagan overcame the tool’s power to reveal – with charisma. TV’s investigative potency withered with the mic in his hands.

TV buoyed Reagan into the White House with a full eight-year script, designed just like a Hollywood movie, with a brilliant new dawn at the front and a cowboy riding into the sunset at the end.

Reagan and TV media convinced most Americans that people in Russia lived in a dreary, black-and-white reality, trudging when they walked, standing in interminable lines as black-booted officers of the Kremlin marched past with truncheons to beat them if they acted out.

Reagan asserted our freedom to shop and drive and declare vast spaces ours to tame. Trained and experienced for fifty years in delivering lines written by others, he powered through TV.

Consumer technology was represented in its farthest reach by television, broadcast into millions of homes then on four channels, perhaps a fifth. It was a medium dominated by the Networks, and owned by private corporations. The unholy alliances between corrupt newspaper men and politicians had become de rigeur for relationships with corrupt television execs.

TV was manipulated on the greatest scale by Reagan. In those days, to be broadcast all over the world on US television was as close to “global communication in real-time” as existed and, on the evening of my sixteenth birthday, the actor-president went on television and gravely told us it was imperative to invest our tax dollars in a Strategic Defense Initiative to protect us from nuclear war. Reagan described this SDI as “Star Wars” technology, in the vernacular of the pop-movie phenomenon.

Every legitimate scientist in the world knew SDI was a ploy of language, a technical and political impossibility to deliver, and indeed, it was later revealed that Reagan’s own speechwriters had advised against his including it in public presentation – he’d made the decision on his own that day to do it. Generals, scientists, politicians and writers protested; others were put on the spot, but somehow the language was never exposed.

A naïve public wowed by Reagan, Star Wars, computers and technology in general – and without the Internet to look up the reaction of scientists and writers – ate it up.

Conservatives have used the phrase to justify defense spending for offensive weapons for decades – even now in Europe. Years later we live with these  TV-generated myths, like the “dirty bomb”. (cf. The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis)

It was 1984, and the United States was described by most as being a free society, totally unlike the one in George Orwell’s prophetic novel named for that year.

That image – of totalitarian fascism that produced false-flags and enslaved citizens to a national narrative – was projected by the U.S. President onto the Soviet Union, a country he called “The Evil Empire”. It was a term taken directly from popular movies and, wielded by a movie actor through the ubiquity of the medium of television, it became successful political propaganda.

Reagan used his charisma on the small screen to push corporate, private, and even illegal agendas, until the veneer finally broke in the Iran/Contra hearings. But even then, his “I can’t remembers,” delivered pitch-perfect on national television, got him off the hook.

The Dawn of “Pluralism of Mass Media”

By my senior year of high school in 1985, say 10% of students were writing papers with word processors and printing them dot-matrix to take to our teachers. The movement started with stand-alone word processor devices, which were typewriter-like machines that had single-line or paragraph-wide monitors at the top of the keyboard, allowing writers the ability to read what they were typing without printing it first, for the first time ever.

Looking back it seems both obvious and amazing how quickly we made the transition to using the word processor and eventually software on a pc to write. It was a natural step that changed writing forever. Cursive and the typewriter are all but dead. Content began its high-speed ascent. USA Today and CNN were born.

But though the computer was on the verge of changing writing, publishing, and expressing with text and image forever, the single most dominant force of mass media technology wasn’t yet the computer. It was still television, which had expanded through digital technology that created cables delivering far more visual information directly into American homes.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the former head of the CIA, wasn’t close in the primaries when he ran for President in 1980, but was appointed to the bottom half of Reagan’s ticket and became Vice President. Now the actor was termed out.

The Republican Party seized the lessons of the small screen, and having had eight years of method  training by a great actor, extended that training to a former serviceman. George H. W. Bush’s team was precise and almost militaristic at staying on message.

Bush repeated phrases without giving policy details, promised Americans more of what Reagan gave them and then repeated the same two or three positive phrases again.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis’ imagery was by contrast horribly clunky – footage of him in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet had the opposite effect of projecting the desired image of a strong leader.

Bush had the immense advantage of the Office of the Vice President for air-time, but used it sparingly, with few details. When Bush’s campaign did use TV ads, it was to attack – the Willie Horton ad ran ad nauseum and painted Dukakis as a bad judge of character.

This was the beginning of catchphrase culture.

A culture manifest most strongly on television by ads, and in political communication as satire of the timeliest manner on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, featuring Dana Carvey as a repetitive robotic message man George H.W. Bush against John Lovitz as an exasperated Michael Dukakis, who finally shrugs, and delivers the punchline:

“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy”

[click that link above to see the bit … Chevy Chase birthed portraying the President on SNL, but Dana Carvey nailed it before Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell]

Though we have been pluralizing mass media from the pamphlet to the television, this era is the dawn of the Pluralism of Mass Media that delivers us to the Internet Era of sociopolitical propaganda – not only because of the birth of word processing and cable television, but because radio returns for what it’s good at.

RADIO and TV in concert

Radio broadcasting shifted from AM to FM in the late 1970s because of the opportunity to broadcast music in stereo with better fidelity.

Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show was first nationally syndicated in August 1988, in a later stage of AM’s decline. “Limbaugh’s popularity paved the way for other conservative talk radio programming to become commonplace on the AM radio,” states his Wikipedia entry.

Radio became the drumbeat for the President’s made-for-TV messages. The cool medium was used sparingly for headings and rubrics and catchphrases, while radio was used for tribal intercommunication of long, warm discussion of the message.

Limbaugh had an immense following and Bush made sure he got as much access as he needed. My father remembers seeing footage on network news of President George H.W. Bush welcoming Rush Limbaugh, shaking his hand and then picking up his bag for him before turning to walk into a personal meeting.

This potent image deliverable only by television (wordless communication in background footage, not a press conference with the President) was transmitted for the conservative President and his media agent on ABC, NBC, CBS, and perhaps PBS and the TV message – short, cool, specific – conjoined with the radio message, long, rangy, warm – to create a uniform statement.

The 1988 Election was the last Network News Election. The four-channel era of television was over.

Cable News Network, CNN, began and had its watershed moment by being the first embedded network live during wartime. At last, TV had provided war,itself, live and in-color.

George H.W. Bush and his Gulf War versus Saddam Hussein over Kuwait gave CNN more than a billion viewers worldwide, birthed CNN International and pushed Cable News past Network News in terms of relevance.

Television production became tighter, faster, snappier, with jump-cuts and camera motion. Technology was on the cusp of the fluidity of digital. The TV talk show incorporated radio stylings.

The cable news era, which is only just winding down, began with The Gulf War, and the 1990’s are littered with what cable TV invented: Newstainment, and, critically because it signals the demise of the Academy, the creation of star faculty and pundits.

These define cable TV in the 90’s, composing formats used today by Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and so many more pseudo-intellectual, corporate-financed, opinion-making cable TV “shows,” designed by marketing and legal teams, by groovy execs and demographers more than journalists.

Whole channels have emerged – and here the Daily Show/Colbert are uniquely successful – from what was drawn so poorly in the 1990’s. The medium’s highly refined message delivery system operates full-tilt, 24/7, and millions call it real-time.

[END PART TWO]

PART THREE:

The21st Century : The Internet Meets the Television Presidency

Part Three notes are much less formal as the latter part of the talk is filled with anecdotal descriptions of several projects I have engaged in. However, I am writing it up cohesively and will add it here when finished.

This section starts with the 2000 Election that ended in the Florida Fiasco and into Howard Dean’s successes with the Internet, then moves through the Kerry-Bush Election, the first-ever Congressionally-contested election and then the Obama-McCain election, ending finally with the unique situation of politicians in SF running for Mayor and using Twitter for the first time even as they granted Twitter a huge tax-break to stay in the City. I reference works of my own that parallel these circumstances.

Letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 2007

19 Monday Nov 2007

Posted by mtk in elections, public letters

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Tags

2007, Bush, cheney, impeachment, Karthik, letter, m.t. karthik, mtk, Nancy, Pelosi

AN OPEN LETTER TO NANCY PELOSI, SAN FRANCISCO 2007
To: U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi:
You are the only person of power we on the progressive left can approach, because of your position as Speaker of the House: you could re-structure the dialogue in this nation, and some would say you could single-handedly save it in a totally unique and American way.

We beseech you to ignore Republicans, Democrats and so-called Progressives who have conceded impeachment in toto.

Impeachment, Censure and Congressional Investigation allow us as citizens to monitor our leadership. They are important tools of state that must be exercised actively to keep balance. We feel you know this, but are being roped into a position of pseudo-neutrality by National and Federal pressures in your role as Speaker, and so, as constituents, here in the Bay Area, we urge you to reconsider, to take a new approach and to save this country from despotism.

Representative Pelosi, you will be greeted by a flood of support from the grassroots level if you take this on. You could revolutionize the argument. You could be the one in Washington who says, “This has nothing to do with the upcoming primaries or the Election of 2008 – this has to do with what this country wants revealed by this Administration now, before another can take over, before they are out of the reach of public accountability.”

Make History: We ask you to have a public change of heart and to step up to being the ethical and cultural conscience of our nation at this tense moment in history when this very unpopular administration has us poised to begin world war against Russia and Iran on bogus intelligence and false claims against another of West Asia’s ancient centers of culture.

The Cheney/Bush agenda for tactical nuclear strikes on Iran is aggressive, frightening and – exactly like the agenda against Iraq was – illegal, unconstitutional and against our country’s fundamental values. Yes, Ms. Pelosi, I am accusing them of lying and deceit in the engagement of their war in Iraq – the Persian Gulf War Two. I accuse them of great, staged manipulations in their idiotic War on Terror. Many at home and abroad fear greatly that they are engaged secretly in practices to do this again, thus: If we do not impeach Cheney and Bush then they will bomb Iran … with or without our sanction.

The only way to regain control of the U.S. American government from this kind of despotism is to actively promote transparent investigation of every single corner that Bush/Cheney has labeled “National Security,” to do the same with this War on Terror.

Demand the Administration open these to Members, in private or a special committee, if not publicly. Look into the requests of Constitutional scholars and others who see criminality in their behavior. Yes, definitely Investigate and Impeach Cheney; and be proud of taking this Bush government up loudly and on the record, because future generations will vindicate you. The lies, conflicts of interest and criminal acts are provable, apparent.

Bush, Cheney and the Neoconservatives:  Rumsfeld,  Ashcroft, Perle, Wolfowitz et. al., must be questioned. They have lied to the United Nations and our own people, and are universally being condemned for this. Our only hope is to show the rest of the world that our system here in the United States does have in place the means to check itself, when it is so obviously occupied by despots. That is what Impeachment and Censure are for. The world waits for us to take these people to task. Congress must open up the Bush/Cheney administration before it leaves office.

It is imperative to the future of our country that we force them to testify and tell us what has been going on in our name in their so-called war on terror. The successes they trumpet turn out to be staged and often involve terrified innocents. Their failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are riddled with criminal activities in prisons, in the field of battle and in the streets. There are hospitals and villages where our soldiers are feared and despised.

Please, Representative Pelosi, look deep into the future of this country, summon the courage and do what you do so well. Stand with your colleagues in the House who cry for Congressional Investigation of Cheney/Bush – that includes Impeachment and Censure, if necessary. It is an absolute necessity before the U.S.A. can pass one more law or engage in one more battle.

No, Ms. Pelosi, Impeachment, Censure and Congressional Investigation of Bush/Cheney have nothing to do with the Election of 2008. They have everything to do with the soul of our nation.

Respectfully,
M.T. Karthik

Letter to Senator Boxer Protesting Election 2004

26 Friday Nov 2004

Posted by mtk in elections, Los Angeles, public letters

≈ 1 Comment

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2004, 90.7fm, angeles, Barbara, Boxer, Bush, contest, director, election, federal, fraud, investigation, kerry, kpfk, L.A., LA, letter, los, los angeles, miscounts, missing, news, problems, protest, Senator, statistical, vote, votes

Senator Boxer:

Let me begin by saying I voted for you. And that you may now be the only person that we on the progressive left can approach, because you are in many ways a part of power and the ruling class in the United States and you are a well-respected member of one of the major parties.

We beseech you to ignore Republicans, Democrats and so-called Progressives who have conceded this election as accomplished fairly and to independently look into the matter.

Please, Senator Boxer, take up the call for Investigation of the Election of 2004. Do it now; before the Electoral College votes and before the Inauguration of the President.

At this moment – as in 2000 – colleagues of yours in the House are prepared to contest and investigate the election for fraud. One Senator willing to ask is all they need to achieve such a request. Only one single Senator who is politically safe, who has the support of a Progressive community, and who has the courage of conviction to stand up and say simply that:

decisions regarding how we vote and for whom are being made too quickly, and as a result carelessly, and perhaps erroneously;

that our democratic processes are being rushed and hurried by the Republicans led by Karl Rove [called the “architect” of the re-election by Bush] and;

that democracy in the U.S.A. is suffering terribly, if not critically.

As a woman and a progressive Democrat, you have won re-election easily. People here support you for your ideas and values. You are in a safe state among people who share your beliefs.

After hearing four weeks of testimony from key states [especially Ohio] and after reading horrifying stories from around the country as to what happened on Tuesday, November 2, I and many of your other constituents believe that the results of the 2004 election are significantly riddled with errors, many of which circumstantially point to the STRONG possibility of FRAUD and vote fixing.

Senator Boxer, changing the outcome of the election is NOT our interest in asking this of you.

The desperate and fundamental need for a fair elections process and real democracy DEMANDS a slower, more measured, piece-by-piece investigation – conducted by Congress – of the Election of 2004 and in particular of the votes cast via electronic voting machines.

It is now clear that George W. Bush’s falsely named Help America Vote Act written to address the many issues that resulted from the 2000 election, served only to rush US counties and states into purchasing machines that have become black holes for American votes.

California’s Secretary of State Kevin Shelley was admired by people across the State for standing up to the manufacturers who were clearly complicit in rushing these devices past proper standards and though now he is being attacked within the system by the powers that be, it is clear he has TREMENDOUS public respect for his forward-looking actions on e-voting over the past year and a half.

By setting an aggressive calendar for hearings and for public and private input, Secretary of State Shelley was able to decertify machines and to put out a detailed list of 23 conditions for the use of other machines to make them safer and more accurate for Californians. He said when doing this that cheating wasn’t going to happen on his watch.

He then testified before the Election Assistance Commission and at both the Democratic and Republican Conventions, that other states should earnestly learn from California’s experience and institutionalize protections … but it was too little, too late.

Other states and indeed Bush’s White House and the GOP-controlled Congress diminished the significance of Secretary of State Shelley’s very hard work.

Senator Boxer, you will be greeted by a flood of support from the grassroots level if you take this on. You could revolutionize the argument.

As our Senator won’t you chastise them for what they did to our Secretary of State? Won’t you stop their stampeding toward re-election for long enough to examine the facts and the data? Won’t you please tell the rest of the country that Californians were very relieved to have had a Secretary of State who cared enough to demand protections against problems suffered in other parts of the country?

Please, Senator Boxer, look deep into the future of this country, summon the courage and do what you do so well.

Stand with your colleagues in the House who believe a Congressional Investigation into the Election of 2004 is an absolute necessity before the U.S.A. can pass one more law or engage in one more battle.

Only one Senator is required … it would make us all proud if you were first.

Respectfully,
M.T. Karthik

originally sent to: http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm
26 November 2004

The Judge Who Holds the President-Elect in the Balance, 2000

13 Monday Nov 2000

Posted by mtk in clips, elections, journalism, NYC, press clips, social media

≈ 1 Comment

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13, appointed, Bush, Donald, election, Election2000, Florida, George, Gore, judge, Karthik, magazine, Middlebrooks, mtk, november, recount, State, stopped, thyagarajan, vote

The Voting Chamber, installation, 2000

01 Wednesday Mar 2000

Posted by mtk in Austin, collage, elections, installations, journalism, MTKinstalls, protest

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1st, 2000, austin, Barnes, Bush, canvas, chamber.movements, currency, death, gallery, George, John, Karthik, killed, logo, m.t., March, McCain, mtk, No, Odell, painting, party, Penalty, primaries, Primary, real, Republican, rights, State, super, texas, the, thyagarajan, timeline, Tuesday, voter, voting, W., wrongly

The Voting Chamber was an art installation at Movements Gallery in Austin, TX, six blocks from Governor George Bush’s Mansion, and the exhibition was open during the Super Tuesday Presidential Primaries of Election 2000 and the South x Southwest (SXSW) Arts and Music Festival of that year.

COMPONENTS:
No Real Choice [2000], 5’ x 3’8”, acrylic, currency on canvas
The Voting Chamber (metal rods, fabric curtain, tabletop, audio component
Civic Dimension (acrylic on stairwell walls; chalk on pavement
Internet Component, including data from State Website and Death Penalty Opponents

I flew into Austin from Brooklyn and immediately went to a local chapter meeting of an anti-death penalty group and introduced myself publicly as an artist planning to do an installation at Movements Gallery on 6th Street:

installed for about ten days:

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OPENING RECEPTION: FEBRUARY 22, 2000
GEORGE WASHINGTON’S BIRTHDAY
6-8 P.M.
MOVEMENTS GALLERY
SIXTH STREET
AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA

“THE VOTING CHAMBER”

FEBRUARY 22-APRIL 22, 2000

A MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION IN PROXIMITY TO THE TEXAS GOVERNOR’S MANSION

THE STATE OF TEXAS EXECUTES MORE PEOPLE THAN ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN THE WESTERN WORLD. THE CURRENT GOVERNOR OF TEXAS (1994-2000) HAS OVERSEEN THE EXECUTION OF MORE PEOPLE THAN ALL FIVE PREVIOUS GOVERNORS TAKEN TOGETHER. HE IS CURRENTLY RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND EXECUTING AT LEAST 18 MORE PEOPLE.

ACCORDING TO A TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY STUDY, MOST TEXANS FAVOR ALTERNATIVES TO THE DEATH PENALTY OR ARE UNDECIDED:

47.5%    FAVOR LIFE SENTENCE
39.5%    FAVOR EXECUTIONS
13%     ARE UNSURE

Source: http://www.lonestar.texas.net/~acohen/tcadp

“THE VOTING CHAMBER” HAS BEEN DESIGNED BY NEW YORK-BASED FORMER TEXAS RESIDENT AND UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS GRADUATE M.T. KARTHIK, TO PROVIDE A PLACE TO REHEARSE FOR THE UPCOMING PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES AND ELECTIONS.

The State posts the Execution Schedule online

Texas State Execution Schedule: 23 Feb – 27 APR 2000

23 FEB 2000 Cornelius Goss, born May 25, 1961
24 FEB 2000 Betty Beets, born March 12, 1937
01 MAR 2000 Odell Barnes,Jr., born, March 22, 1968
15 MAR 2000 Timothy Gribble born, August 27, 1963
22 MAR 2000 Dennis Bagwell born, December 27, 1963
12 APR 2000 Orien Joiner, born, October 27, 1949
18 APR 2000 Victor Saldano, born October 22, 1971
26 APR 2000 Robert Carter, born March 7, 1966
27 APR 2000 Robert Neville, born October 5, 1974
27 APR 2000 Ricky McGinn, born March 11, 1957

Source:  http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/statistics/stats-home.htm

OUTLINE FOR INSTALLATION

COMPONENTS:
“No Real Choice 2000” (5’ x 3’8”, acrylic, water, American currency on canvas)

“The Voting Chamber” (metal rods, fabric curtain, tabletop, agit-propaganda, and audio component)


“Civic Dimension” (acrylic on stairwell walls and sheetrock; chalk on pavement)
4.  “Internet Component”

THE INSTALLATION:

“No Real Choice 2000” was installed on the wall opposite top of the stairs to Gallery space. The 33’ wall was painted sympathetic to currently existing artwork in gallery while extending the theme of the canvas, including:

“The Voting Chamber,” a simulated voting booth: U-shaped curtain rod with a red curtain. This curtain is to be drawn around individual viewers to simulate a voting booth and allow a private viewing space of the canvas and of specific propaganda material. A looped, repeating audio component of the attorney of one of those on Death Row was played next to an empty chair.

The stairwell from the street to the Gallery floor and the sidewalks from the Governor’s Mansion to the gallery door (as practicable) were marked to point to the booth and to present statistics (see Statistics that follow) regarding the death penalty in Texas.

The Internet component contained elements: from http://www.georgewbush.com, the “Calendar of Events” describing the Governor’s current itinerary, and from http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us, the “Calendar of Executions.” and etc

CONCLUSION, 2008

It’s taken me more than eight years to write anything of what happened in Austin in the Spring of 2000. I installed The Voting Chamber and came to find out that Odell Barnes, Jr., was scheduled to die though likely innocent of the murder of which he was convicted.

The installation included an empty chair with the name “Mr. Bush” taped to the back, sitting beside a cassette player that continuously played a ten-minute audio loop of Mr. Barnes’ lawyer explaining that he needed more time to present the strong evidence of a frame-up he had discovered in Odell’s case.

The installation inspired a march of hundreds in Austin who chanted as they marched around the Governor’s Mansion against the Death Penalty:

This all occurred during the Super Tuesday Presidential Primaries as George W. Bush, the Governor of Texas, fought Arizona Senator John McCain for the Republican nomination, Spring 2000. The installation was up during the SXSW music festival, and the venue was a site for the Austin festival so thousands saw it.

George W. Bush and The State of Texas murdered the innocent 22-year-old, Odell Barnes, Jr. on March 1st of the year 2000. The message was clear as Bush ran for President on an active record of becoming the single individual Governing the execution of more people in U.S. history.

Odell Barnes, Jr.s’ last meal request was for “justice, equality and world peace,”

and his last words were:

“I thank you for proving my innocence although it has not been acknowledged in the courts. May you continue in the struggle and may you change all that’s been done here today and in the past.”

Nine months later, George W. Bush was appointed President of the United States by the Supreme Court – contravening democracy at the most basic level –  thanks to massive problems with vote counting and issues of voter suppression in the State of Florida, where Bush’s own brother, Jeb, was Governor.

The canvas “No Real Choice 2000,” finished two months before the election, was startlingly prophetic.

M.T. Karthik

This blog archives early work of M.T. Karthik, who took every photograph and shot all the video here unless otherwise credited.

Performances and installations are posted by date of execution.

Writing appears in whatever form it was originally or, as in the case of poems or journal entries, retyped faithfully from print.

all of it is © M.T. Karthik

a minute of rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYLHNRS8ik4

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