March for Choice on April 25!

One more week until L. and I are headed to Washington DC, to join what is likely to be the largest pro-choice march in the nation’s history. The hotel reservations have been placed; breakfast will come from Food Not Bombs; all that we need now is an oil change for the car and some posterboard for the signs. I’m getting really excited about the march: Washington is a great place to visit, the march will be an awesome experience, and I hope that this will be an important step towards lighting a fire under John Kerry and the Democrats to start pushing abortion rights, hard, to defeat George W. Bush. (And yes, I said abortion rights–not some mealy-mouthed incantation of the word choice that actually means nothing. We don’t need more of that after 8 years of Clintonian apologies for being pro-choice. We need a movement, and pro-choice politicians, who will be unapologetic about supporting women’s rights to control their own uterus. Morality is on our side, not the side of male power and coercion.) The fact is that if the Democrats made the upcoming election a referendum on abortion rights, they would win easily; and with this election season march we have a chance to catapault the issue into the center of the debate. Let’s hope that our putative allies have the sense to pick up the ball and run with it.

I want a sign just like this one.

Above all else, let’s make this March everything that the pro-choice movement should be: radical, agitating, unapologetic, aware and proud of the radical feminist movement that fought and won the first battles only thirty years ago. These are women’s lives, people, not something that we should have to bandy crooked words with a bunch of dickheads in government office over, or quibble with men in black robes over compelling State interests to justify. Let’s move the movement back to the passion, conviction, energy, creativity, and justice of its radical feminist roots. L. and I are making up our own signs (I’m sure there will be more than enough people to carry NOW and FMF banners without our help…); we haven’t made a final decision on the slogans yet, but here’s some ideas we’ve been mulling over:

What do you think? And who else is coming to the March next weekend? Let me know and maybe we can grab some dinner together in DC. Hope to see you there!

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

(recommended in an excellent post by Billmon)

According to Salon, some Democratic Party media flacks are wringing their hands over ads from MoveOn, the Media Fund, and others. The fear? No centralized command-and-control. Thus, they worry, Liberal group ads may muddy Kerry message:

Liberal interest groups are running television ads meant to hurt President Bush and, in effect, help Democratic rival John Kerry. But some media strategists say such efforts could backfire by muddying Kerry’s message of the moment with the electorate.

Interest groups can’t legally coordinate advertising with political campaigns. That means their ads could address different issues than Kerry’s commercials, be nastier than his advisers prefer, clutter the airwaves, stray from obvious themes — the economy and national security — or politicize issues Kerry would rather leave alone.

[N.B.: issues Kerry would rather leave alone is short for the war —Ed.]

If I were Kerry’s folks, I’d be up nights worrying about this, said Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic media consultant.

Personally, if I were Kerry’s folks, I’d be up nights worrying about the logically prior question: doesn’t Kerry need to have a message before anyone could count as muddying it?

Besides doing the good deed of using his web space at Austro-Athenian Empire to support the GoogleBombing for objective, sane information in searches for Jew, Roderick Long also reports a facet of the site that shan’t be linked which I hadn’t noticed before. Not only is it a raving anti-Semitic conspiracy site, but it also lists the following devilries as Jewish Mind Control: anarchism, unionism, civil rights, and homosexuality. (Feminism is not explicitly listed here, but it is described elsewhere as a cultural concoction of the ADL (!)–which I guess amounts to reproach beyond any possible appeal in Nazi Bizarro World.) So by supporting the GoogleBombing you are not only striking a blow against anti-Semitism; you’re also striking a blow against its kith and kin–patriarchy, homophobia, racism, statism, and the oppression of workers.

So fie on fascism, and here’s to Jewish Mind Control!

At last, a bombing campaign that I can support.

As it turns out, certain anti-Semitic imbeciles have gotten their nutsoid conspiracy site (charmingly entitled JewWatch, which I shan’t link here, lest it throw off the GoogleBombing) listed as the number one site returned by a Google search for the word Jew.

But there’s a campaign afoot–just in time for Passover–and that is about to change.

Sporadic GoogleBombing sorties have been lighting up LiveJournal for a the past few days; today, Alas, A Blog is letting loose, and the campaign is spreading out through other political weblogs. It’s time for a ruthless carpet-bombing of the whole area. So, if you have a web page or weblog, and if you prefer objective, factual information about Jews to raving fascist conspiracy theorists, here is how you can help out:

1. Go to your webpage, weblog, LiveJournal, or anything else that Google can see. If you don’t have one, get one — set up a free website from Geocities, Angelfire, Pitas, BlogSpot, or wherever you like. It doesn’t matter where. Just sprinkle it with a bit of personal information (or put up that huge site you’ve always dreamed of), and remember to add the Google bombing code somewhere on your page (see below). You can help even more by helping to spread the idea further: provide a link back to this page or to the post from Alas, A Blog, or provide your own explanation of what the GoogleBomb is and how people can get involved.

2. Somewhere in the HTML on your site, include the following snippet. You can either include it in the HTML of updates themselves, or in the linkroll. The more frequently you update your site with this HTML snippet present on it, the better the results:

   <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew" title="WikiPedia: Jew">Jew</a>

   Which will result in a link like this:

   Jew

3. Add the URI for your website to Google if you haven’t already.

And from there, watch the magic of precision GoogleBombing work!

Onwards!

–The Management

P.S. You may notice that I have added a Precision Bombing section to the linkroll for all my pages; this drastically boosts the number of pages supporting the GoogleBomb, and also ensures that the support won’t drop when my initial post scrolls down past the bottom of the front page.