Guest blogged by Winter Patriot
In a previous post, I highlighted Manuel Valenzuela, one of my favorite writers who did not make John Kaminski’s Top 25. Valenzuela writes long essays composed of long sentences; his pieces require substantial time and effort — to read! Imagine what it takes to write them…
Let’s go a different direction this time: Robert Parry writes fairly short pieces using short and simple sentences. But that’s not why I like him so much. I like him because he never seems to get distracted from the major issues. He just keeps pounding away, hoping that eventually some of it might start to sink in. And maybe it will. Someday.
Most of what Parry writes, most of what we read and see and think every day, every little bit of what we think of as ‘political reality’, can be better understood against the backdrop of Bush’s ‘Perception Management’ Plan. If you haven’t read this important essay yet, please do so.
You can find Robert Parry at Consortium News. Or you can click on the links here to read his most recent columns:
Your comments, as always, are invited, and welcomed…
Here’s another Robert Parry, from AlterNet via Truthout – more on media micromanagement by the GOP, from Reagan on.
Excellent selection WP. The Robert Parry piece is "right on the money" (pun intended).
"Valenzuela writes long essays composed of long sentences; his pieces require substantial time and effort — to read! Imagine what it takes to write them…"
LOL! Some would argue that paring it down is the trick. Especially editors. We can debate that sometime. I forget what the longest sentence ever written was, some one told me once. I like ee cummings approach to punctuation.
LGM – Someone is either an English professor, an editor, or a pedant. 😉
Valenzuela says a lot in his convoluted prose; and he gets his angry message across. I applaud him.
"LGM – Someone is either an English professor, an editor, or a pedant. ;-)"
alasiamnoneoftheabovejustanordinarylunatic
thatthinkspunctuationisforthebirdsbuthasfound
itusefulforreadingthelongrunonsentences
thatiampronetowritelikethisword.
"Editing is a fine, fine art itself."
To the editor, it is a fine art, but not always to the victim of the red pencil.
I read one Valenzuela piece and I found it emotional and moving. I have not read another, however. It could be condensed to one paragraph for the message, and I am not sure how much editing would still keep the emotional effect intact. But some, I think, would be good. I also felt in retrospect that the emotion was a tiny bit excessive. A tiny bit too desperate. For me.
Editing is a fine, fine art itself.
Who is the victim, LGM? The reader or the writer?
Here’s another writer that I like. Short, simple sentences and easy to comprehend what he is saying.
Charlie Reese
Parry is da man.
I doubt people understand how much heat he took over accurately reporting atrocities committed in Central America by our valiant allies, d’Aubuisson, Rios Montt and the Contras, and their assistants in the rightwing death squads.
Parry was at AP. Then Newsweek. Then PBS’ Frontline. Harried and pursued at every step by Reagan and then Poppy Bush, all for telling the truth.
And then he had no job at all.
All thanks to our free press, which is only free if you print what the government lets you.
This man is a hero. He has hung in, suffered the devastation to his career, and continued to tell the truth.
If God doesn’t bless him, there’s no hope for the rest of us.
Many thanks to JS for comment #9. I should have mentioned all this in the original post, and I can’t figure out why I didn’t. Perhaps we can ascribe it to temporary brain damage caused by two weeks of double-blogging. 😉
After reading Manuel Valanzuela’s A look in the mirror I sent him the following E-mail:
It was a diatribe worth reading nd writing because it is truth. Perhaps as an exercise it value as a wake up call but it lacks a solution. Your used the second person "we" so I imagine that you are one of the "wicked ones". The problem is that we need more than breast beating and moralizing to change the situation. I found myself nodding and agreeing with every word you wrote but my reaction was the same as a freind of mine who when confronted with his misdeeds retorted: "What do you want me to do-take a gun and shoot myself?"
When you get to the essence of the thing you blame capitalism, but its antithesis socialism has even been dropped by the children of Mao along with their cultural revolution. Hee and there you mention the corporations, but neglect to mention that this business form is an illegal attempt to avoid liability by seperating it from ownership. The problem is not greed it is the bottom-line. If there is anyone guilty of apathy and complicity i must include everyone except myself and The Mondragon Cooperatives of Spain. Mokhiber from POCLAD lists the crimes of the corporations. Crimes that they have committed as a result of cost-benefit analysis. This means that if the benefit of the crime outweighed the cost of paying fines and setteling lawsuits then he crime was necessary. Read The Corporation by Joel Bakan, Unequal protection by Thomm hartman, and The War on Truth by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. No one questions the right of a corporation to own patents even though the very idea of a patent was to protect the creator of an invention to own it for a long enough period of time for him to profit. Coporations, (fictitious persons) do not invent anything. A patent is not a normal commodity and the inventor should be prohibited from selling it. It is a violation like a person selling themselves into slavery. One can not sell one’s self. One can rent oneself out as a worker and if he quits taske his body with him. When he sells his patent he is selling a monopoly–a monopoly that only he deserves and a monooly that will not be used by him for the purpose of avoiding the ompetition of the marketplace.
Soneone once said that if you are not a communist as a youth–you have no heart and if you are still a communist in old age–you have no head. When the CP disappeared around me in the fifties I got drunk and stayed drunk for fifteen years. When I sobered up i recognized that it wasn’t "capitalism" at all, it was the corporation. We need a revolution against the corporations. Common law says that if you own a dog and it bites a child the dog is not guilty, the owner of the dog is.
But the corporation has it fixed so that when its dogs bite us, the CEO dogs are guilty and not the organization. We need a group like the old Communit Party on the left end of the political spectrum. it must be a party that calls for the unowned robot, (the corporation) to have owners and the owners should be the people who now completely occupy the business–the workers. The communist party with its mistaken ideology and all of its faults managed to succeed at the business of revolution because it had an answer, a wrong answer, but an answer. We need an answer and the only answer is to turn the corportion into a cooperative. The socialists gave the tools of production to the government under the rubric that it was the vangaurd of the working classs. Let us organize a party that demands an investor be an investor and an owner be an owner. Let us organize a party that demands that the un owned robot calledd a corporation be given to the workers.