Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Celebrating 20 years, Z-Net gets makeover

But the ultra-drone rad mag needs money, or they might have to cut back again. Especially wanted: sustainers (even socialists need to budget). Pretty good deal, too. At the $3-a-month level and above you get your own personal blog "space" on which you can post your own personal picture, like this (dude), or, if you think you have a dramatic profile, this.

The makeover is nice, too; sad that the content is so stupid. In this month's Z, por ejemplo, there's a sort of review of last year's anti-war protests (upshot: they weren't pathetic. The corporate news media made them look pathetic). Fave anecdote, from the September 15 D.C. protest:
In one of the more iconic examples of civil disobedience, a man stepped onto a barricade and shouted, “What do we want?” to which those behind him replied, “Peace.” Thrusting a sign that read “Support the troops, bring them home,” he called out: “When do we want it?” “Now,” they shouted. Wearing a pink crown and looking something like a 21st century Christ, the man jumped into a group of swarming officers. It took four of them to wrestle him to the ground. Still he held his sign and called out, “What do we want?” Even when they ripped the sign from his grip and put a knee in his back, his voice persisted: “When do we want it?” “Peace…now,” replied his fellow protesters.
Iconic all right. (Interesting fact: several European churches still have treasured pieces of Jesus' (perhaps legendary) Pink Crown mouldering in their reliquaries.)
A subset of marchers scolded the police, chanting: “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”
God, it's embarrassing just to read that. Recreate 68! Recreate 68! Losers.

This month's issue also has a (big) dose of Chomsky on Iraq. Many familiar lies and truth-twistings, expressed in the familiar arrogant style. Strangely, the piece is from a speech from June 2007, which makes C.H.O.M.P.S. sound even more crazily out of touch than usual. His family must fight over who has to invite the senile old bore for Thanksgiving.

Speaking of bores, Arundhati Roy gets all Churchillian on the U.S.:
Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier ["WNOGD", pronounced "Dub-Nog"--ed.]. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas [oh--ed.], which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population. (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him).
Lord College in Lord, Massachusetts. More interestingly, Z-Net is still using that 20-year-old picture of Roy which makes her look, irkingly, like a hot patootie. (Update: she's still got a certain hot patootishness, damn her.)

Speaking of hot patooties, Ward Churchill still has his Z Space page ("messages from friends (0)") even though, after contributing dozens of articles in the decade-and-a-half before 2005, he's written nothing for the mag since April of that year. Z founders Michael ("God, I'm Dull") Albert and Lydia Sargent must have been mightily displeased when Ward blamed them for (one instance of) his plagiarism of the Canadian group Dam the Dams (p. 83 of the Chutch Report (pdf)).

(By the way, did anyone ever, like, ask Albert and/or Sargent about Ward's version of that incident? The Chutch Report says only that Churchill's claim that Z left off Dam the Dams' author credit when they published "The Water Plot" in 1993, and wouldn't fix it even after Ward asked them to, was, "like many of Professor Churchill's claims . . . difficult to disprove. . . " (p. 87). One possible way would have been to ask the poor schmucks he blamed.)

(Another question: Are Albert and Sargent on CU lawyers' list of people to depose for the school's defense against Churchill's lawsuit?)

What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, Z-Net. Screw 'em--but be sure to read the testimonials on the begging page (first link).

No comments: