4A - TheMichiganDaily-_Tuesday,_September_7,_2004 1 OPINION (The £iip ig JORDAN SCHRADER Editor in Chief JASON Z. PESICK Editorial Page Editor 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other pieces do not necessar- ily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE 'W' stands for wrong: wrong choices, wrong direction." - Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry, at multiple campaign stops in Pennsylvania, as reported yesterday by The Washington Post. Co''-LIN DALY 1 ,w EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 War porn STEVE COTNER RED ALERT ast week I was speaking to David Enders, who has covered the Iraq war on the ground for the past year, and he said this about the events at Abu Ghraib: "We knew about the Abu Ghraib torture eight months before it hit major American media sources. We'd collected widely corroborated testimony from all parts of the country, we'd seen evidence of torture, we'd seen evidence of electrocution, we'd seen evidence of beatings, we heard the stories of people forced to stand naked, rape each other, all this bullshit. And it didn't make headlines until there was actual porn to go with it." Yes, he said porn. And it made me wonder, for how much news and entertainment could we say this? The answer is simple: If it is not wholly critical, if it does not speak to the bru- tality that happens every day in that country, and if it does not look Iraqis in the eye, ask what they are thinking and what they want, then it's nothing but war porn. It can be soft, like a reporter describing bombs arcing across the sky as the "terrible beauty" of war. Or it can be hardcore, like the U.S. Army using $8 million in taxes to devel- op "America's Army," an online shoot-em-up videogame where killing civilians is perfect- ly alright. The army was also behind "Full Spectrum Warrior" for Xbox, which simu- lates combat in the fictional "Tazikhstan" (not Tajikistan), so that players can kill foreigners of no particular nationality. And let's not for- get those Army ads where teens morph into video game characters and launch "Let's Roll" mortar shells. Ah, the discoveries of youth. But real porn involves a plot, albeit a total- ly ludicrous one. So we wrote a few scripts - WMDs, Democracy by Gunpoint, They're Terrorists Too - and then just tore them up. There were a few photo-ops along the way, like Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech on that ship, which was positioned for "the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the vast sea as his background instead of the very vis- ible San Diego coastline," according to the Associated Press. And don't forget Saddam's statue falling over, which was attended by a couple hundred Iraqis corralled by the United States and guarded by tanks, while the entire block around them stood vacant. More than 10 million people on five continents orga- nized themselves and marched against this war on Feb. 15, 2003, and all we could do was find a handful of Iraqis to wave the flags we were handing out. War is much more than a script though. It is the destruction of a place and a people. Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Sallah reported the atroci- ties of the Vietnam War, as did John Kerry when he spoke to the U.S. Senate in 1971, reporting on 150 soldiers who "told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off the ears, cut off heads, taped wires from por- table telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular rav- aging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country." Today we have the normal ravages as well as Abu Ghraib and incidents like it all over Iraq. We have soldiers electrocuting Iraqis' genitals, blindfolding them, beating them naked. We have troops shooting Iraqi civilians for target practice as they drive by, like buffalo from the train as the settlers made their way west. How can a person live with all this violence? On our end we're lucky; the news scores the action with patriotic music, so we know it's alright. On the soldiers' end, the scoring is less about brass and tympani, more about death metal. Just think of the soldier interviewed in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" who listens to The Blood- hound Gang sing "Burn motherfucker, burn" while destroying people with his tank. Who can blame him? He's in the shit. But this is what porn does: it diverts you from real people and numbs you with a maga- zine or a video screen or a pair of headphones. It removes a person from reality by insulat- ing them with representations of reality. The soldier blowing up people while listening to headphones is not really blowing up people. He is not even a soldier. He is the army ad itself, the video game, the movie. Everything is tricolor light from a cathode ray tube. Explosions are subwoofer blasts. Bits of peo- ple are digital bits. Soldiers no longer need marijuana, as they did in Vietnam, to elevate themselves out of the horrific scene in front of them. The conditioned response to consumer technology does this much better, and without the risk of introspec- tion. They are button pushers and trigger pullers navigating an array of image and sound. But the soldiers storming houses with cameras on their helmets are nothing like videogame characters or action-film producers. They are porn stars with point-of-view camcorders. Erotic porn is almost always the male eye on the female "Other." The woman is impaled, gagged, slapped, spat on, anything to remind her that she is nothing but a woman. If she speaks, it is only to say what she can do for the man. In war porn, it is the American eye on the foreign Other. Iraqi children are handed guns by reporters and told to pose with them. Young girls are shown smiling at the strong American men. And in this porn, it is all of them - men, women, and children - who cannot speak. Ah Iraqi man-on-the-street has never been heard in this country. When his marketplace is bombed, we hear from our own generals, not from the woman who has lost her husband (our Defense of Marriage Act does not extend to Iraqis). The Iraqi citizen is impaled, gagged, slapped, spat on. The banners he hangs are torn down, his throat stomped on, his doors kicked in, his house turned over. George Bush dons a flight suit with a crotch full of timber, and Iraqi men are stacked naked in a pyramid, raped, forced to rape each other. These are the money shots. Unspeakable acts in rooms with blank walls. We watch. The war goes on. Corner can be reached at cotners@umich.edu. VIEWPOINT When women vote, women win BY JENNIFER NATHAN As the United States and United Nations have helped Iraq and Afghanistan form new governments, they have taken steps to ensure that women will be proportionally represent- ed. Meanwhile, here at home, the total num- ber of women in the federal legislature barely hits 14 percent of Congress. While women in America have made enormous strides over the last century in higher education and expand- ing job opportunities, we still live in a coun- try where the men make the rules. How do we level the playing field? First, let's vote. Remember 2000? Remember those 537 votes that determined who would be our president? Well guess what: On election day four years ago, six million women stayed home. And since then, we have watched the administration turn back the clock on our rights as women, at home and abroad. We have seen the loss of millions of dollars of funding for family planning and educa- tion for women overseas. We have seen limitations on the ability of women serv- ing our country in the military to receive medical abortions. We have seen hundreds of thousands of women across the coun- try fall deeper and deeper into poverty as unemployment rates skyrocket and welfare funding remains stagnant. And we have seen our government redefine comprehensive sex education as "abstinence only," limiting the ability of young women to even learn that they have options. Without delving into party politics, we as women need to ask ourselves: does this administration represent our values? We need to think long and hard about what will be at stake in the next four years. One retire- ment on the U.S. Supreme Court means that our right to control our own bodies could be gone in an instant. Title IX - which grants us equal rights and protection in areas including but not limited to high school and college athletics - could well be eliminated by those who define female athletic pro- grams as "special rights for women." On an economic level, we live in a country where a woman with a college degree makes less money on average than a man who dropped out of high school. We need an administra- tion that will focus on the issues of equal pay, equal education, health insurance for all (including coverage of contraceptives), and the promise of a living wage. We believe in national security and appropriate defense spending, but we cannot continue to sacri- fice every domestic initiative that may allow women to continue to make the hard-earned gains that we deserve. When women vote, women win. It's a slo- gan that you will likely see in various forms throughout the next two months. While I encourage every woman to take it literally - to run for office, to get into that "Old Boys"' network and shake things up-you can start by casting your ballot on Nov. 2. Too many women fought for our right to vote, only to die before we achieved it. We owe it to them to exercise this crucial right, at this crucial time. In the upcoming November election, our lives and the lives of our sisters world- wide depend on it. Nathan is the vice president of the Michigan Student Assembly and an LSA senior. I I TO OUR READERS: WELCOME BACK TO ANN ARBOR AND ANOTHER YEAR OF CLASS. AS THE LECTURE HALLS AND STREETS ONCE AGAIN FILL WITH STUDENTS, THE DAILY EDI- TORIAL BOARD WILL BE HERE, REPRESENTING YOU EVERY DAY ON THIS PAGE. LETTERS POLICY The Michigan Daily welcomes letters from all of its readers. Letters from University stu- dents, faculty, staff and administrators will be given priority over others. 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