Noam Chomsky Responds to Osama Bin Laden Killing

This is one of the best responses to Bin Laden's assassination that I've read. 


http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2652/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/

'Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”'
-Noam Chomsky

A skyline like bad poetry

I recorded these songs in the Jackson Bandshell with a casio, my mac, and a guitar. Here's to all the Jackson kids.
   casiojackson by Wes Swartz

Maybe some day i'll die

One day when im 59

Then I will learn to fly

up into the alleyways into the night

I am like a mountain range

with pockets full of chump change

writin bad poetry.

Standing in the street light

with hands in my pockets

trying to bum a ride to the coast

if this is my town

this is where I used to play

not in Cougar Mellancamp way.

just the kind of way where you know

doesn't matter if you stay or if you go

you are already here

always gonna be here

In summer there's an open door

with faces looking out to the street

Heart skips another beat

An accident on first street

One car into another

And death to both their bodies

there's Jesus Christ in Jackson kids

with golden eyes and heavy lids

they don't know if they can take it

scrawny arms resolved to make it

Plastic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EqQIaA7WvI

So this is a handmade 16mm film of mine. ROUGH CUT! so please excuse any mistakes (especially the mistake with the french. Yea, I know "photo" is feminine.) spray paint, stencil, dry adhesive letters, inks, scratch, etc. Here are some stills:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EqQIaA7WvI
I'll have an HQ final done eventually and uploaded on vimeo.

Enjoy!

Apartment number Three

Day one without a Facebook, I'm back in ann arbor, taking stock of everything. Got a new neighbor today. He's a seemingly dimwitted kid, but nice enough. Funny how it works, each time someone new comes along someone old has to go. I had come up through the fire escape and gone straight to my room. As such I had not noticed the situation on the second floor till I ventured out to pay the rent, late. Plue plastic gloves and police investigators on the stairs and a dead man in his room, that's all. I got on my bike and rode down William to State street.

It would rain, cooling the dense heat, dulling the intense flavors of the flowering trees and that hint of death smell which was still stuck in my nostrils. I would all but slice through the hot air, followed by a junket through the cool, damp, rain and...It occurred to me, I never knew the guy. There he was, dead and I was lolling around.

There was that one time, a couple months ago when to my surprise I discovered that an old bearded man lived in apartment #3, not an asian grad student like I had previously thought. That one time, I hauled several hundred pounds of film equipment up the stairs to my hovel, the bearded man held the door in silence. “Thank you,” I uttered. If speech was a heartbeat he'd have already been dead back then.

The investigator stopped me to ask a few questions. “That's about it,” I said to him. “I only met him that one time.” Wonder how long he sat there. It seemed to me a man who lives alone in a house full of college students in a town like Ann Arbor is bound to do some rotting before his death is discovered. I suspect only a shallow depth of loneliness will drown a man, and in our own private isolations, the ten or so other people in the house could not have noticed the breadth of this man's existence, let alone it's abrupt edges.

Come to think of it, sound seems to greet you more than people do, living in a place like that. Late at night, in the clutches of insomniac happenings I would startle at an habitual cough, rattling through the heat vent. It was a sorrowful hack. Sometimes I wondered if I was the only other person alive who could hear it, that cough that would be carefully inspected by blue-gloved hands and packaged under a white sheet, the remnants condensed into several pages of legal pad notes or Febreezed into deep, dark corners to diminish and degrade.

To the attendees of The Bin Laden White House Lawn Memorial Wake and Jubilee, Go Home.

With help from Mark Twain, who as a dead man, speaks the truth, a prayer for those of you keeping vigil tonight;
"O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it,"
Do you scream tonight like one thousand Afghan and Iraqi children, your bodies covered in ash, moments after the luminescence and sound? The war isn't over so go home till we kill another 1,000 then have a reunion, but this time bring the grill and listen to the sound of that raw meat sizzle. Serve with ketchup and devour. You earned it. Have a beer! I'd spring for a Sam Adams tonight, and flip that hat around bro! You might get some head after this!
If you're lucky you might even get to see a picture of his corpse though I realize you have delicate stomachs and are still getting over the shock of the wedding. But weddings so close to funerals can only mean great things, right?

Here it is!

My pointless blog I started when in the midst of a stifling depression; Summer 09. Hope I can create something interesting for everyone.
-wes

greatness

Here I stand blindfolded against against a wall of pretty words like, "oh, when my love filled reality rivals even dreams!" "try hard and you'll succeed!" and "God is Great!" I am one, Nancy, Negative, up against the firing squad. "But you've got the wrong person entirely! I'm not Nancy! I'm not even a woman!" When the others kissed the wall, i refused. I have no attraction to you wall. They made us dig trenches. Head Hancho decided against the crucifixion. That's ok, cause Jesus has some pretty big shoes to fill. They wanted to burn me at the stake but needed a more grandiose spectacle for my tender ass. They talked for years. Now i have a large gray beard (strange for a woman you would think). They decided it would be best to kill me before I died, the subtitles broadcasting my headline transcontinental.

We interrupt this program to tell you of the death of one bad, bad person. That is all. We now return you to your program.

(music playing)
John: "Veronica, I love you! Kiss me!"
Veronica: "No John. I...just can't!"
(door opens to reveal the witchdoctor from Nollywood videos, Hot Money, 1, 2, and 3! He turns them both into vultures and then sacrifices a goat.)

So after decades of drawn out goodbyes, here comes the "ready aim fire." You can play it over and over in your head when you imagine your own execution. I know from movies that this precedes the shooting. Pavlov's dog, I salivate on the verge of execution. Just to tickle my fancy, I imagine their shadows, long strips of bacon drawn over the polished silver knife of a wall. And next they will scramble the eggs. Too heavy a breakfast for me.