A sign in Brooklyn (via thenewephemera)
Glad someone finally quantified it. Resting easy now.
— UC-Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, explaining why she shouldn’t be held accountable for the UC Davis pepper spray incident (numerous videos available at the above link, if by some strange chance you haven’t seen one yet).
“Moving forward” has become a handy euphemism for ignoring abuses of power and shielding the people responsible from consequences. (Though the call for starting the healing process and moving forward is strangely absent when the accusations are against, say, young people of color or non-citizens.)
Katehi’s call to move forward is hardly the first time the language has been code for free pass. As Glenn Greenwald wryly notes, that same day, Vice President Dick Cheney publicly lauded President Obama for not prosecuting people responsible for the Bush administration’s “enhanced-interrogation” policies, itself code for torture. (Just like “Iraq has WMDs” was code for “No it doesn’t.”)
Obama himself has used these words like a mantra, and even gained some devotees:
April 2009, when asked about a Spanish investigation of US abuses at Guantanamo (“I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards”)
July 2009, Senator John McCain agreeing with Obama (“it’s time to move forward and not go back”)
January 2011, on appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Bush-administration crimes (“I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”)
March 2010, on an investigation into the abuses of an ex-President’s human rights abuses (“”We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed. We can’t go forward without looking backwards…”)
Oh wait. The last one was Obama referring to ex-Indonesian President Suharto. Apparently we only look backwards when we’re talking about some one else’s skeletons.
CLICK HERE and read more by Jeannie Rose Field on the topic.
Let’s weave this into my political platform…. Truth and Reconciliation? Fuck, who needs that, we are people of the Future. Look at that great big Future out there. Keep looking! Nevermind the past. Forget about the present. Look on to Forever, where the Future is, keep reaching for it as it keeps receding into the distance. Don’t look at the Present, that’d be like when the cartoon runs of the cliff and then it looks down to notice that there’s nothing there. CERTAINLY don’t look to the past.
As long as we’re at it, anything I’ve ever done wrong, let’s just forget about it. Let’s look forward. Again. Forever. why’d you even ever stop? As a friend suggested “I may have messed up all those times I suggested we just move forward, but let’s look ahead and not back to here.” and that time, just now (see there you go again with the Present), that I again said let’s look forward? Well NOW that’s the past, so let’s move forward. Again. Forever.
oh uh, but I just wanted to point out one thing before moving forward. That thing that you did terribly and horribly wrong that you need to be held accountable for. I’m sorry, but we simply can’t look forward without looking back. I know what I said, but that’s for you, YOU look forward, but I must look forward and back because I am like Janus, I am god-like, you’re a fucking mortal. So fuck you. And keep your eyes on the fucking future prize.
Ennio Morricone’s tribute to Sacco & Vanzetti, “Here’s To You…” as preformed by Joan Baez. Posted rather than the orchestral version becuase of the use of archival docs, of course. See also Morricone’s “The Ballad Of Sacco & Vanzetti”
The lines used in this song are adapted from Vanzetti’s statement to a reporter before their execution, but it was his statement in court which codemned the injustice within the system that America still struggles with:
I would not wish to a dog or a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth — I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical, and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian… If you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already
As I just found out, Morricone and Guthrie weren’t the only ones to beautifully pay tribute to Sacco & Vanzetti through music.
Joel Tenebaum on how it feels to be sued for $4.5m
Good god, but are our mechanisms of prosecution and justice (and, needless to say, copyright) fucked beyond all measure.
