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Thursday, August 19, 2004 |
Ian Masters: "A unique radio program featuring international and national news, expert guests, policy makers and critics with analysis and insight on national security, foreign and domestic policy, political, cultural and social issues. This program goes far beyond the headlines and deep under the radar to bring forward truths unheard in the American media."
The link is in the yellow bar under Audio News ('Masters') for your future reference.
8:14:56 PM 
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Yesterday night I was a bit late with my dinner and washing up, so when I sat down to relax a bit, I turned on the tv just at the moment when on Belgian tv the film Ghost Dog by Jim Jarmusch started. I am not a tv watcher, but I like Jarmusch. So I saw the film. It's wonderful, it's a good film.
Ghost Dog is about a mafia hit man and the chain of violence that ensues. Two books play an important role in the film. The first is Hagakure, the Way of the Samurai. The second is Rashomon, the story of a violent crime as seen from the viewpoint of different persons.
Rashomon [the film by Akira Kurosawa] is adapted from two very short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). The first, 'In The Grove', provides the basis for the main body of the film; the second, 'Rashomon', (the name of a gate in Heian, a symbol of flowering Japanese culture in 784, a symbol of decay in the twelfth century) is the framing story; the two are brilliantly tied together by the woodcutter's narration of the final version of the story."
Much has been written about Ghost Dog. But I do not think it is a tribute to a traditional philosophical way of thinking, nor a celebration of a war code of honour, a bushido. On the contrary. Although we may feel a lot of sympathy for Ghost Dog as a person - and he probably felt he did the right thing, died in the right way - he failed. Ghost Dog lived his own version of Rashomon, the mob their version. And the most painful aspect of it is that violence breeds violence, because everyone has his own code to live up to, his own bushido, his own story to tell. The film ends with the young generation taking over, two girls, two children. And that's what it's all about. It's about a continuous chain of violence and we are writing stories around each incident to make them glamorous. We make up codes of honour to justify our and others' deaths. But the codes are not universal, we make them up ourselves. These codes are essentially false codes, they are the codes of violent death.
"The end is important in all things." Now it seems the end, death, has become an end in itself, but one that is perpetuating itself and is turning into a juggernaut.
12:10:44 PM
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Karen Kwiatkowski: "For every man or women who dies in Iraq or Afghanistan, seven to ten others are evacuated and receive some type of medical or psychological treatment, often including the long term physical therapy and the fitting of prostheses. Of those who return in one piece, many have been exposed to depleted uranium or have long term reactions to the various inoculations received prior to and during their deployment."
11:01:32 AM
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Arizona Daily Star: "A federal judge has ordered the state to do a better job of providing home health care to the poor, including several plaintiffs from Tucson.
Ruling on a lawsuit filed in Tucson, U.S. District Court Judge Earl Carroll said the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System was not paying enough to attract and retain workers who provide services for the elderly and the disabled in their homes.
The result, the judge concluded, is that people went without some of the care to which they are legally entitled."
10:51:44 AM
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