Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back

We now stand at a zero point of possibilities for continuing the momentum that has been stimulated by people like Amy and DAvid Goodman through books like this. The book represents tireless and countless hours of work by the Amy, David, and the staff of DemocracyNow! in New York City. I pay tribute to all that it takes behind the scenes to bring forth information with the depth in this book. It is passionate, piercing, and poignant, calling each of us to a courage and compassion for the process of evolving life on this planet. Bravo to all of us on this path, who have had our eyes opened by people like Amy and David Goodman.

Who should read this book? Anyone with a conscience and a brain and a beating heart who cares about the United States and its place in the world. Anyone who is frightened about rapidly disappearing concepts like truth, justice and due process. Anyone who understands that our fragile democracy is vitally dependent not only on verifiable elections, but also on a voting public well informed by aggressive, independent, skeptical journalists rather than embedded reporters who regurgitate self-serving, manufactured reality and trade truth for access. "Static" is not mere polemic. Everything is extensively documented. It's impossible to put down, yet it's equally difficult not to come up for air while you're reading it. It will make you very angry. So, hooray for Amy and David Goodman! They provide hope that real journalism has not been completely extinguished and that we may one day again appreciate what patriotism truly means. Read this superb and courageous book today, and buy copies for your friends and especially for those who might not read it otherwise. Before it's too late.

I recently shared a day with fellow progressives at The Fighting Bob Fest in Baraboo, Wisconsin and one of the speaker was Amy Goodman. I was delighted to discover she and David had written this book. Sometimes I find it hard to listen to "Democracy Now" daily because often the truth is hard to hear. The beauty of this book is there are two sections. The first lays out the lies and destructive policies of the government and the inbededness of most of the media and the loss of truth telling. The second section tells the stories of those who are standing up and saying no and are the "voices of hope and reistance". It would be hard to read this book and not be committed to join those voices. Amy and David quote Alice Walker. "I asked Alice Walker what good is the antiwar movement if it has failed to stop war?" "Sometimes you can't see tangible results," she explained. "You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal. And a lot of it has to do with the ability to express yourself, your own individual dream and your own individual road in life. And so we may never stop war. It isn't likely that we will, actually. But what we're doing as we try to stop war externally, what we're trying to do is stop it in ourselves. That's where war has to end. And until we can control our own violence, our own anger, our own hostility, our own meanness, our own greed, it's going to be so, so so hard to do anything out there. So I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spriit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one that we have dominant today."

Unlike the proverbial lone voice in the wilderness, Amy Goodman's is sounded every day on Democracy Now! with a partner, Juan Gonzalez. Even in New York City, Ms. Goodman and Mr. Gonzalez are hardly able to raise their voices above the media trash heap filled by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, the increasingly sensationalist CNN (whose kidnapped baby can we bloviate about today?), the disappointingly ineffectual New York Times, the superficial Brian Williams, and everybody's oh-so-cute CBS newcomer, Sally Fields (You like me! You really like me!). Oops, make that last one was Katie Couric. Democracy Now! languishes in NYC, nearly invisible on public access cable every morning at 8:00. As they did with their last book, THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULERS, Amy and her brother David have once again provided "the other side of the story" on numerous topics. Their basic premise in STATIC is that the mainstream media have failed miserably in their primary duty - to inform the public while serving as a check against government overreach. Important stories are missed because the media has too often parroted the official government line; in other instances, stories are underreported or simply ignored. Do you know the story of the shameful rendition by the U.S. government of Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syra for torturing? Or that of FBI spying on Sarah Bardwell of the American Friends Service Center in Denver? How about those of Karen Ryan, Jennifer Morrow, Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, and James Guckert - all pseudo-independent journalists paid by Bush II to churn out propagandistic pseudo-news reports? Or Ken Tomlinson's shameless attempt under Bush II's behest at a right wing coup of PBS? Or the American government's appalling record of democracy subversion in Haiti? Or the witch hunts against supposed Chinese spy Wen Ho Lee and Chinese-American Captain James Yee? Or U.S. Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis (who served in Iraq and worked at Abu Ghraib), Craig Murray (former British ambassador to Uzbekistan), and Karen Bauer, Leslie Weise, Alex Young, Steven Gerner, and Sue Niederer (among the thousands who have in various ways been kept away or thrown out of Bush/Cheney scripted and stage-managed public appearances because they MIGHT object or disagree with the Party line)? If you've never heard of most or all of these people, you can thank NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and the NY Times and their ilk, or you can read Amy and David Goodman and learn what's really going on in what's left of the once-hallowed American democracy. STATIC admittedly draws heavily from the "below the radar" public record and the transcript archives of Democracy Now! Yet while this book could certainly have used some original muckraking or revelations to freshen its content, it nevertheless provides a disturbing recap of government policy and American life during the last five years. In the Orwellian world of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove -- where spin is truth

While I appreciate Siegfried Sutterlin's observations on this work, he misses the mark in his characterization of some of the points of the book. In writing for a mass audience, it is the Goodmans' purpose, as it is Amy Goodman's purpose in doing the Democracy Now! radio show, to expose the public to information that has previously not been revealed due to the media's obfuscating role that often separates the American people from factual information about domestic and foreign affairs. The "disconnected" nature of the writing has less to do with a lack of organization than it does with the authors' attempt to expose their audience to a number of different issues within the context of a relatively short book. With regards to scholarship, Amy Goodman does not need to include a bibliography or resort to quoting scholarly sources partially due to the fact that this is a commercial publication, but also because she actually speaks to people who are involved in the very issues she writes about. The primary feature that draws me again and again to both Ms. Goodman's radio program and her books is the fact that the exposure to this information nearly always leaves one able to predict the course of future events. Listening to the conventional conservative media and the misinformation forwarded by the U.S. government leaves one in the dark as to why events are happening or what prompts certain reactions from other nations. While I agree that polarizing politicization does not always create positive results within a political system, sometimes politicization is the only alternative. People can't rely on diplomatic historians to be of much use in altering the destructive path of a nation's ideologies. Scholars tend to be observers and chroniclers, not agents of change. To oppose a wrong-headed political system is in itself a political act, even when that opposition is warranted. It is not a matter of fascism to oppose the violation of human rights. The civil rights movement in the United States, the abolition movement, the women's rights movement, and the struggle for workers' rights in the face of corporate abuse were all overpoliticizations of one sort of another, but I would argue necessary ones. It is rather non-productive and unscholarly to heave around loaded words like fascism without explanation or evidence. For example, one may be able to offer proof that the Bush administration has fascist leanings, but you would be hard-pressed to justify calling small pockets of resistant voices who are generally (and non-violently) standing up for their rights and the rights of American citizens fascist. People who enjoyed the Goodmans' last book will more than likely enjoy this one, although it's my hope that those least likely to read the book are those who, in fact, do so. The issues here go beyond simplistic labels of liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican.