Echoes of Vietnam: "Cheeseburger," Sandy Bull, Hamza El Din

 

I only "discovered" (really, because a friend turned me onto him) Sandy Bull fairly recently.  My pal burned a CD or two of Sandy Bull for me, and then I found his 1972 Demolition Derby at a vintage record store, and of course bought it. What had intrigued me about Bull was that he was very eclectic and that his eclecticism included playing the oud, in addition to his basic folk instrument, the guitar.

I was intrigued by this note from the back of the Demolition Derby album. 

 

 

 Just a small anti-war message, from the era of massive opposition to the Vietnam War, on a modest "folk" album. When you hear the album, you hardly notice it, it's just 2 seconds long, and sounds like a scratch, or a quick movement of the needle across the vinyl.

I did some hunting around, and it turns out that the "Cheeseburger" is better known as the "Daisy Cutter," the name for the BLU-82, a 15,000 pound "conventional" bomb. According to wikipedia it was used in Vietnam to flatten a section of forest into a helicopter landing, hence the name "Daisy Cutter." (This of course was how the US military described its uses, and you can find video clips on the web that describe it in this way.) But wikipedia also tells us that it was used against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese troops in Laos in 1971, and by the South Vietnamese army in 1975. They were later used in the Gulf War in 1991 -- "as much for their psychological effects as for their anti-personnel effect." 

Check out what Newsweek wrote about the BLU-82 and its effects in Kuwait in 1991.

"The men of the Eighth Squadron believed that the BLU-82 bomb could send an even more powerful message. In the early-morning hours of Feb. 7, Maj. Skip Davenport's MC-130E Combat Talon cargo plane lumbered off the runway. In its belly sat the massive bomb. Behind Major Davenport, a companion plane lifted off, carrying another BLU-82 (Davenport and his wingman became known as the Blues Brothers).

The day before, their target area had been rained with leaflets warning the soldiers below: "Tomorrow if you don't surrender we're going to drop on you the largest conventional weapon in the world." The Iraqis who dared to sleep that night found out the allies weren't kidding. The explosion of a Daisy Cutter looks like an atomic bomb detonating. In the southwest corner of Kuwait that night, an enormous mushroom cloud flared into the dark. Sound travels for miles in the barren desert, and soon Iraqi radio nets along the border crackled with traffic. Col. Jesse Johnson, Schwarzkopf's special-operations commander, cabled a message back to the U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters in Florida: "We're not too sure how you say 'Jesus Christ' in Iraqi." A British SAS commando team on a secret reconnaissance mission near the explosion frantically radioed back to its headquarters: "Sir, the blokes have just nuked Kuwait!"

The next day a Combat Talon swept over the bomb site for another leaflet drop with a follow-up message: "You have just been hit with the largest conventional bomb in the world. More are on the way." The victims below didn't need much more convincing. The day after the BLU-82 attack, an Iraqi battalion commander and his staff raced across the border to surrender. Among the defectors was the commander's intelligence officer, clutching maps of the minefields along the Kuwait border. The intelligence bonanza enabled Central Command officers to pick out the gaps and weak spots in the mine defenses. When the ground war began Marine and allied forces breached them within hours." (emphases added)

It was also used against the Taliban and al-Qaida early in the Afghanistan War, in an effort to destroy cave complexes as well as to demoralize enemy fighters. It was used at Tora Bora! Last dropped, in testing in Utah, in 2008. 

What about Sandy Bull and the oud? He picked it up after he met Egyptian Nubian artist Hamza El Din in Rome in the early 60s (Hamza was studying music there at the time). They met up again in New York City, roomed together for five years, and in that apartment Hamza El Din recorded his second album, Al Oud (Vanguard, 1965) and Sandy Bull recorded his second album, Inventions for Guitar & Banjo (Vanguard, 1965). As Hamza El Din told SFGate in 2001, Bull was far ahead of his time, doing what we would term "world music" long before it became a popular genre, by the 1980s. His experimentations were not all that successful, at least in the marketplace, and his recording career was in hiatus from the mid-seventies until the late 1980s. He passed away in April 2001. (For more details on Bull, please consult the SFGate article, linked abovve.)

drone life 3: Lynn Hill on "Capacity" (Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd's Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project)

I learned of this thanks to a tweet of Teju Cole.

As you no doubt know, the great jazz pianist Vijay Iyer just received a prestigious MacArthur Award.

You will find him even more deserving when you learn, as I just have, of his recent release, with Mike Ladd, of Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project. I've only listened to a few tracks (it came out on September 24) but what I've heard is great. The publicity from Pi Recordings describes the album as follows: "a thought-provoking, sometimes frightening, and ultimately exhilarating combination of music, poetry and song, created from the actual dreams of young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars." And check out the vid below that introduces the project.



But because I sometimes blog here (not very profoundly) about drones, I was particularly interested in the track "Capacity" (which you can listen to here), featuring the poetry and recollections of Lynn Hill, who worked as a drone operator, firing missiles remotely into Iraq from her base in Las Vegas. "Soft kill," she calls it. It's very powerful stuff.

Here's a section of her poem:

I have a capacity for war. I have a capacity for hate. I have a capacity for insanity. For anger. For lies. 525,600 minutes times 2, before I break into an explosion of thoughts, of insurgents and soft kills, and career moves. Capacity for destruction. Capacity for loss. Capacity for death, violence, nothingness. 24 months of pain and disgust. Actions of my hands accuse me. Guilty, charge. Unclear clear details and shaky intell, but still I pull the trigger. There’s a limit to madness. Gague clocks out at two years, but they serve up poison like entrees at Blueberry Hill. Crazy with a side of numb. It took 63,720,000 seconds to go from me to somebody else. 

And check out the NEA interview with Lynn Hill, where she reflects more on her poetry and her work as a Predator Drone operator.

I have a capacity for war. I have a capacity for hate. I have a capacity for insanity. For anger. For lies. 525,600 minutes times 2, before I break into an explosion of thoughts, of insurgents and soft kills, and career moves. Capacity for destruction. Capacity for loss. Capacity for death, violence, nothingness. 24 months of pain and disgust. Actions of my hands accuse me. Guilty, charge. Unclear clear details and shaky intell, but still I pull the trigger. There’s a limit to madness. Gague clocks out at two years, but they serve up poison like entrees at Blueberry Hill. Crazy with a side of numb. It took 63,720,000 seconds to go from me to somebody else. To change. - See more at: http://arts.gov/audio/lynn-hill#file_audio_default_group_audio_transcript

I have a capacity for war. I have a capacity for hate. I have a capacity for insanity. For anger. For lies. 525,600 minutes times 2, before I break into an explosion of thoughts, of insurgents and soft kills, and career moves. Capacity for destruction. Capacity for loss. Capacity for death, violence, nothingness. 24 months of pain and disgust. Actions of my hands accuse me. Guilty, charge. Unclear clear details and shaky intell, but still I pull the trigger. There’s a limit to madness. Gague clocks out at two years, but they serve up poison like entrees at Blueberry Hill. Crazy with a side of numb. It took 63,720,000 seconds to go from me to somebody else. To change. - See more at: http://arts.gov/audio/lynn-hill#file_audio_default_group_audio_transcript

I have a capacity for war. I have a capacity for hate. I have a capacity for insanity. For anger. For lies. 525,600 minutes times 2, before I break into an explosion of thoughts, of insurgents and soft kills, and career moves. Capacity for destruction. Capacity for loss. Capacity for death, violence, nothingness. 24 months of pain and disgust. Actions of my hands accuse me. Guilty, charge. Unclear clear details and shaky intell, but still I pull the trigger. There’s a limit to madness. Gague clocks out at two years, but they serve up poison like entrees at Blueberry Hill. Crazy with a side of numb. It took 63,720,000 seconds to go from me to somebody else. To change. - See more at: http://arts.gov/audio/lynn-hill#file_audio_default_group_audio_transcript

PS: Vijay Iyer's 2003 collaboration with Mike Ladd, In What Language?, is also terrific.

Time's Joe Klein on why we kill 'their' 4 year olds with drones

Joe Klein really said this. On MSNBC's Morning Joe on October 23. From a recent piece by Vijay Prashad:

'On Oct. 23, Time’s Joe Klein was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Host Joe Scarborough spoke passionately against the use of drones, saying “it seems so antiseptic and yet you have 4-year-old girls being blown to bits because we have a policy that now says, ‘You know what? Instead of trying to go in and take the risk and get the terrorists out of hiding in a Karachi suburb, we’re just going to blow up everyone around them.’”

Klein, a defender of the Obama record, answered emotionlessly, “The bottom line in the end is — whose 4-year-old gets killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.” (emphasis added)'

Meanwhile, 178 children have died in US drone strikes on the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands.

Rihana Arabic Tat Reprise: "Numb"

"Numb" is a fantastic song. Let's just get that out there at the outset.



The video is great too. It's also an occasion to for Rihanna to show off all her tattoos as well as lots of flesh.

At 1:43 you can spot her tat which reads (though you can't in fact read it) in Arabic (roughly translated) "Freedom in Christ/the Messiah." Viewers might not have noticed because they were looking at something else. Or maybe at her new Isis tattoo. (For a better view of the Egyptian goddess Isis tat and the Arabic one, go here.) Another view of the Isis tat is: here.

I've blogged about these Arabic tats before. And about Rihanna's pro-imperialist vid, "Hard," too.

I just thought you Rihanna heads should know about this latest sighting. Don't forget to listen to the song. (I want to know who is rapping early on. Before Eminem kicks in.)

Kufiya'd vet at NATO protest in Chicago

At least one of the fifty some vets of Afghanistan and Iraq who tossed away their medals on Sunday, May  20, as part of the anti-NATO demonstrations in Chicago, wore a kufiya. Not one of those military-issue khaki ones, but a red one.

The photo above is a screen save from the following report on the event. Please note the vet who tosses his medal, starting at 0:37. That is Jacob George, from my hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas, who has been riding around the country on his bicycle for two years, organizing against the war and playing banjo. Read about his project, called A Ride Till the End, here.

 

Forty one years prior to this event, on April 23, 1971, as part of an anti-war action organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, over 800 Nam vets tossed their medals, ribbons, discharge papers, and the like, at the US Capitol. The event was widely covered, and part of a major, ongoing mobilization against the Vietnam War. Alas, the anti-war actions in the US these days are, by contrast to those events, are a whimper.

Here's a video of that dramatic event:

Footnotes on Rihanna

Courtesy of what I've learned from friends, some more commentary on Rihanna and her notorious "Hard" video.

First, and I found this rather astounding, among Rihanna's 13 tattoos (I think that the count is correct) is one written in Arabic script! It reads, as far as I can tell, al-hurriya fî masîh (الحرية في مسيح) or maybe al-hurriya fî al-masîh (the latter would be more correct), that is, "freedom in Christ" or more literally, "freedom in the messiah." Christ/masîh appears right under her left breast, so it's not seen all that often. These are the two shots I could find.


This looks like it says al-hurriya fi masîh.


This one, curiously, makes it look as though the original had been altered slightly, so that the article al- had been added. It doesn't show masîh (Christ), just al-hurriya fi-al.... Those of you who know Arabic will note that there should be no link between the fi and the al. So it's corrected incorrectly.

The statement of course is not one that you would probably want display when prancing around in your porno-military outfits on your invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan. It would make you appear as if your campaign for freedom/democracy was in fact a Crusade. But in fact, my friend Robin said that she thought she spotted an Arabic tattoo, in the late sequence where Rihanna carries the banner. (Here's the shot from my original post.) Given, Robin says, that the banner is black, might it be Shi'ite/Abbasid?!!

Keen eyes, Robin! Here's another shot, with the banner.


The friend who brought Rihanna's Arabic tattoo to my attention said that he had thought it might mean that Rihanna was not imperialistic in her views, in contrast with the very patriotic, and Walmart-friendly, Beyoncé. Turns out not to be so.

(Did Rihanna get the idea of an Arabic tattoo from Angelina Jolie, whose right arm is adorned with a tattoo that reads العزيمة, "al-'azeema" or determination?)

Second, Robin comments on the Arabic that appears on the wall of the house. 'The arabic graffiti on the wall reads: "li-llah [can't see] ilayhi raji'un," which is for some reason broken out from the expression "*inna* li-llah wa-inna ilayhi raji'un," "we belong to god & to him we return," from Surat al-Baqarah, verse 156 [the Qur'an], what you say when you hear that somebody has died. it's interesting in the context of the song; hard to believe that anybody involved in the production had thought it through that much, though maybe somebody had.'

Thanks to Robin and her keen eyes and superior (to my own) Qur'anic knowledge.

ADDENDUM, Jan. 7, 2010. Iraqiguy put up this comment on the original Rihanna post:

...the expression "انا لله و اتا اليه راجعون" meaning "we all belong to Allah and verily to him we shall return"

It's usually written on the walls of houses where people would have just passed away. It's arabic and islamic etiquette for what to say when you hear about a death.

this expression is ofcourse very prevalent in Iraq and Palestine and every arabic country involved in war or civil unrest, where death is a common occurrence.

Thanks! I would only add that, in the context of the vid, it's interesting that the soldier walks by that written on the wall. When the perpetrator of the death being commemorated may, in all likelihood, have been the US military.

Third, Geoff says: "the hat in the card-playing still looks VERY much like a WW2-era German military cap; note the eagle ... maybe Afrika Korps? Disturbing."

I think he's right, especially about the eagle. See here.

Rihanna's "Hard" Video: Supporting the Afghan Surge

Over the past year, I've heard my MERIP comrade Moustafa Bayoumi give the same, great, paper twice, at last year's MESA (Middle East Studies Association) conference, and at this year's American Studies Association (ASA) conference. It's entitled, "The Race is On: Muslims and Arabs in the American Imagination," and I hope it's published soon. He argues that, since 9/11, the formerly mostly invisible Arabs and Muslims in the US have become massively visible, and increasingly, racialized. And racialized in a particular way: associated with blackness, and hence, turned into a social problem.

At the same time, Bayoumi argues, "African Americans have emerged in popular culture in recent years as the leaders of an American nation and an American empire." Moreover, he says, " this image often revolves fundamentally around the idea of black friendship with Muslims and Arabs, a friendship not among equals but of a modified projection of American power." To simplify, then, the long and venerable tradition of African-Americans opposing US imperialism is increasingly abandoned in favor of a civil rights position of actively participating in all aspects of US life, including US imperialism. Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama: all faces designed, or used, to make our empire acceptable, at home, and abroad. (Of course it's not just "faces." It's active involvement and even policy determination.)

And so we come to Rihanna, whose new "Hard" video I found shocking, even though I was very familiar with Bayoumi's argument. But no doubt it's my residual and very out-of-date expectations that African-American popular culture should somehow be oppositional that makes me outraged at how pro-imperialist Rihanna's vid is. And how it deploys so many signs of "coolness" to push the imperial agenda.

I would like the song a lot if I had not seen the vid. Now I cannot listen without seeing it. Militaristic and battlefield scenes (which are made to look like they are shot in Iraq) serve as a kind of runway for Rihanna, where she can display various outfits and demonstrate her "hard"-ness. "Yeah yeah yeah, I'm so hard," she sings over and over again in the chorus.

Rihanna appears in various outfits and scenarios.

In bright red lipstick, in GI fatigues, as if on the set of a GI-themed porn shoot. Her mouth ready to receive...what?

More is revealed, and we see black tape over her nipples. At least that's what it looks like at first glance, but then we notice it's actually over a low-cut, skin-colored tank top. The tape over nipples stunt was done recently by Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse. But I think it was Wendy O of the Plasmatics who was most famous for this look.

Rihanna is also shown as if she were the commander, inspecting her unit of (all-male) troops who are in formation. Here she looks like classic Grace Jones.

Later we see Cmdr Rihanna before "her" troops, shouldering a heavy weapon. If you watch the vid (and you must) you'll notice that this outfit includes a bikini bottom showing off a very shapely booty.

Here, she looks something like Nona Hendryx in '83-'84, when she was all about that sci-funk look. I saw Nona in concert back then but can't find a good photo of what she looked like. The outfits looked aluminum. This is more or less it.

Garbed in her sci-fi gear, "hard" Rihanna strolls through the desert, unconcerned by the explosions going off around her.

We also see Rihanna with bandoliers over either shoulder. And without them, but in the same outfit, atop a pink tank. Between her legs. Really hard, a for-sure phallic female here. I guess the pink tank makes it feminine. And the Mickey Mouse ears on her helmet--is that supposed to be funny? If so, it's about the only element of humor in the vid.

And there is the Madonna-esque outfit--the bronze bikini top. In which Rihanna is variously displayed strutting atop a sandbagged position with some GIs.

Or lying supine.

There are other outfits whose referents are less clear to me. Rihanna plays poker with the guys in this one. And she wins. Because she's hard. "And my runway looks so clear," she sings. "But the hottest bitch in heels right here."

Here, she's wearing a camouflage/net thing. And her weapon.

This outfit, which appears towards the end of the vid, also escapes me. A leopard-skin Prussian looking helmet? And the black banner she is waving?

Young Jeezy appears in the video with a guest rap. He's in GI gear, smoking a cigar, but he is much more relaxed in his poses. He's already hard, just puffing on the blunt.

In case it wasn't clear, the video also clues you into the fact that this is the Middle East, and probably Iraq, that we're in. The Arabic script is sort of passable. This last word here reads raj'iun, or 'returning.' An important slogan for the Palestinians.

As I read this vid, it all adds up to an articulation of support for the upcoming Afghanistan surge. The militaristic poses make Rihanna look hard. Alternatively, they help make her look freaky and kinky. At the same time, she, by her very presence on the battlefield, makes the US military invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan look sexy. And bloodless. There are no 'bad guys.' There are no civilians in the desert. No one gets injured. It's all fabulous.

The US military and African-American r'n'b and fashion and sex are all in synchrony here.

I cannot imagine Grace Jones ever performing in such a blatant display of support for US imperial adventure. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, African-American musicians like Nas, Outkast, Mobb Deep, Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, George Clinton, Raphael Saadiq, Missy Elliott and others came out to express their opposition, as part of Musicians United to Win Without War. (They signed an ad that appeared in the New York Times on Feb. 26, 2003, among other things.)

Where is the "cultural" opposition to the Afghan surge?

The stylish kufiya in "Iron Man"

I finally got around to watching this thoroughly enjoyable film last night, and even though its liberal political turns are somewhat hokey and predictable, I appreciated (a) Tony Stark's "moral" decision to turn away from war profiteering and (b) that the film represented the Afghani "bad guys" as being in cahoots with US weapons producers. I suppose the latter represents a kind of backhanded acknowledgment of the CIA's role in helping create and strengthen those "bad guys" during the struggle of the Afghani mujahideen against the Soviet occupation.


But here's one thing I didn't like, seriously. The real "bad guy" of the film, Raza (played by Faran Tahir), who leads the terrorist group, wears a kufiya around his neck. And not only does he wear it in the manner of the Western hipster--more typically in Afghanistan it would be worn it as a turban--but the colors are straight out of...Urban Outfitters. It's tan. But it should (if verismilitude is the aim) be black-and-white, or maybe red-and-white.

So, Iron Man manages not only to associate just kufiyas with terrorists, but hipster kufiyas as well.

The semiotic war continues....