PLANETIZATION and the Human Union

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Ramadan Reflections

Truth is our Trench

Hollywood recently announced a barrage of 9/11 movie projects--as if the original cheesy disaster film, somehow marketed to the American people as an actual attack by foreign terrorists, weren't enough.

In Gravity's Rainbow , Thomas Pynchon takes us from World War II to the end of the world by way of Hollywood film references. Pynchon's insight--that we're living in a bad movie about the end of the world-- seems as applicable to Bush's Reign of Terror as it was to the World War II - Cold War period Pynchon wrote about. So I hope my Broadway play-in-progress, entitled 9/11: The Musical Comedy , somehow makes the transition to the silver screen as effectively as Springtime for Hitler did in Mel Brooks' The Producers . (I wonder if Brooks' producers, those experts at turning massive disasters into even more massive successes, were responsible for that even more wildly successful disaster, the "New Pearl Harbor" of 9/11. Come to think of it, wasn't confessed insurance-fraudster and WTC-demolisher Larry Silverstein one of the producers in Brooks' film? Or does life just continue to imitate art, as fiction and history keep repeating themselves first as farce, then as tragedy, then as tragic farce, farcical tragedy, and God knows what next?)

Here is the theme song from 9/11: The Musical Comedy :

Usama the Magical Ay-Rab

Usama the magical Ay-rab
Lives in a cave far away
Eats little Amerikkins for breakfast
Sure hope you don't get in his way

Usama the magical Ay-rab
Has a magic dialysis machine
It works without electricity
And keeps his bloodstream clean

(chorus)
So hooray for Usama Bin Laden
He's long tall handsome strong and brave
His four bitchin' wives
All fear for their lives
When he takes turns with them deep in his cave
(barbershop quartet style harmony echoes: "deeeeep innn his caaaaaaave")

Usama the magical Ay-rab
Flew his magic carpet to Dubai
Got treated in the American Hospital
And met the CIA back in July...2001...two months before 9/11

Then Usama the Magical Ay-rab
Kept our whole Air Force on the ground
Except the magic plane that hit the Pentagon
And the one that shot Flight 93 down

(repeat chorus)

Usama the Magical Ay-rab
Knocks down tall buildings with a single bound
Fires his missiles deep into our Pentagon
And keeps our fighter planes down on the ground
(how? it's magic!)
Usama the Magical Ay-Rab
Hates our freedoms and took them away
I still can't figure out just how he did it
It must have been Usama's magic day

(final chorus)
So hooray for Usama Bin Laden
He's long tall handsome strong and brave
His four bitchin' wives
Need not fear for their lives
Because he runs the world from his cave
(barbershop quartet style harmony echoes: "frrrrommm... deeeeep...innn...his... caaaaaaave")

And speaking of 9/11 as theater-of-the-absurd...

The blond California al-Qaida kid threatening LA and Melbourne-- Melbourne!! --with a histrionic finger-across-the-throat gesture and mangled Islam-speak is beyond hilarious. Somebody should hire that kid for a remake of Penelope Spheris's punk rockumentary The Decline of Western Civilization . This time it will star a bunch of blond jihadi teens with safety pins through their noses and mohawks sticking up through their turbans screaming "get ready for the wrath of Allah, dude!" over the wail of electric guitars.

But seriously: So much of the "terror threat" footage we've seen is SOOOOO bad. Even their best special-effects effort, the live-on-camera controlled demolition of the Twin Towers, turned out to be almost as cheesy as one of those old sci-fi films where you can see the string dangling from the monster's jaws. The use of explosives was way too obvious, and the whole "19-Muslim hijackers" story turned out to be an absurdly improbable B-movie script at best--hardly worthy of that bestselling work of pulp fiction, novelist Phil Zelikow's grippingly imaginative page-turner The 9/11 Commission Report .

And if you haven't seen it yet, be sure to check out Paul Thompson's The Terror Timeline on the "arrest footage" of Khalid Shaikh Mohamad or "KLM", the alleged 9/11 mastermind whose "confessions"--whether extracted under torture, or scripted for his job as a CIA asset--were virtually the only source for the "19 hijackers" legend of the Zelikow Report. When they showed the film of KLM's alleged arrest to an audience of journalists the whole room erupted in laughter at the ineptly-done "reconstruction" being presented as actual arrest footage. (Thompson has archived mainstream media stories about the journalists' hilarity in the face of the KLM-arrest-film hoax, alongside other mainstream stories suggesting that the KLM arrest never took place.)

Then there's the Disneyland vacation footage used to convict some Arab-American "terrorists", as seen on the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares . Check out the scene where the camera pans from a roller coaster to Mickey Mouse, passing by one of Disneyland's ubiquitous trash cans. The prosecutor/narrator says "it is believed that the terrorists were scouting trash cans as possible bomb locations." Never mind that the whole video is just typical Disneyland vacation footage given a sinister spin by a paranoid-lunatic narrator, turning this innocent family-vacation video into an unwitting surrealist classic: "Welcome to Terrorland--The Disney Version!"

And how about that stand-in stunt man known as "Fatty Bin Laden"--the actor we are supposed to mistake for the terminal kidney patient living in a cave for several months who somehow gained 40 or 50 pounds and radically changed his facial features as he "confesses" to 9/11 in ultra-grainy, low-sound-quality footage?

But for the ultimate 9/11 cheap thrill film segment, somebody should add a laugh track to Larry Silverstein's confession that he and his colleagues pulled WTC-7 and watched it come down: Larry delivers his confession, canned laughter erupts, and we see WTC-7 undergoing controlled demolition in slow motion as the laughter gets more and more hysterical.

In short, somebody--perhaps a Michael Moore who's grown some guts rather than a gut--should collect all the worst "war on terror" footage and make the Reefer Madness of the 21st century: A film to keep midnight moviegoers rolling in the aisles for the duration of the 9/11-inaugurated "war that will not end in our lifetimes." Call it Mondo Terror . We can pitch it to Hollywood as the BBC's The Power of Nightmares redone by the Mondo Cane film crew.

* * *
PS

While I was in the process of writing this essay, an email arrived calling attention to what appears to be a remake of the body-snatcher cult classic "worst movie ever made," Plan 9 from Outer Space , starring W and his friends at FEMA and SCI. If this one's true, Edward G. Wood must be rolling over in his grave.
================
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/FEMA_outsources_Katrina_body_count_to_firm_
implicated_in_bodydumping_scan_0913.html

FEMA, La. outsource Katrina body count to firm implicated in body-dumping scandals
Miriam Raftery

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Kenyon International to set up a mobile morgue for handling bodies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana following
Hurricane Katrina, RAW STORY has learned.

Kenyon is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a scandal-ridden Texas-based company operated by a friend of the Bush family. Recently, SCI subsidiaries have been implicated in illegally discarding and desecrating corpses.

Louisiana governor Katherine Blanco subsequently inked a contract with the firm after talks between FEMA and the firm broke down.
 
In other words, FEMA and then Blanco outsourced the body count from Hurricane Katrina -- which many believe the worst natural disaster in U.S. history -- to a firm whose parent company is known for its "experience" at hiding and dumping bodies.

The Menorah Gardens cemetery chain, owned by SCI, desecrated vaults, removed hundreds of bodies from two cemeteries in Florida and dumped the gruesome remains in woods frequented by wild hogs, investigators discovered in 2001. In one case, a backhoe was used to crack open a vault, remove corpses and make room for more dead bodies.

[This must be the same woods where Ed Wood filmed the zombie segments of Plan 9 from Outer Space . -KB]

SCI paid $100 million to settle a lawsuit filed by outraged family members of the deceased.

A secretary at the lawfirm that sued SCI over the Florida cemetery scandals gasped when informed that FEMA had outsourced handling of Katrina victims' bodies to an SCI subsidiary.

"Oh, good lord!" she said.

Peter Hartmann, general manager of the Menorah Gardens Cemetery chain, was later found dead in his car from carbon monoxide poisoning outside his parents' home in an apparent suicide.

RAW STORY calls to FEMA were not returned.

Waltrip, chairman of SCI, is a longtime friend of Bush's father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush. The firm's political action committee donated $45,000 to George W. Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign.

The company also contributed more than $100,000 for construction of the George H.W. Bush presidential library.

"It is appalling that the Bush administration – which has already badly bungled its response to hurricane Katrina -- would hire a company with a record of gross mismanagement of mortuary services," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a Washington D.C.-based watchdog group. "I can only imagine that this decision was made because of President Bush's long-time friendship with the head of SCI, Robert Waltrip."

SCI also owned fifteen funeral homes named as defendants in a lawsuit filed on behalf of family members alleging "macabre mishandling, abuse and desecration of bodies" by Tri-State Crematory in Georgia. The lawsuit accused SCI-owned funeral homes of sending bodies to the unlicensed, unregulated crematorium, where never-incinerated corpses were
found piled outdoors and stuffed in sheds in 2000.

Some vaults designed to hold one body each had 67 sets of human remains stuffed inside, investigators discovered. SCI was among the companies ordered to pay settlement fees to family members, a legal source has confirmed to RAW STORY.

Kenyon bills itself as the world's leading disaster management company. It provided morgue support services following the 9/11 plane crash in Pennsylvania and the Asian tsunami.

As North America's largest funeral and cemetery company, SCI operates 1,500 mortuaries and cemeteries nationwide.

The company's website claims the firm is dedicated to "compassionately supporting families at difficult times, celebrating the significance of lives that have been lived, and preserving memories that transcend generations, with dignity and honor."

SCI was also involved in an earlier scandal in Texas. Eliza May, former Texas Funeral Service Commission Director, filed a lawsuit accusing George W. Bush, then Governor, of obstructing an investigation into SCI license violations. May was fired following a dispute with Waltrip.

Waltrip and an SCI lobbyist met with Governor Bush's chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh (Allbaugh was later appointed head of FEMA after Bush became President, but left to become a lobbyist representing Halliburton, among other corporate clients).

According to Newsweek, Bush stopped by and said to Waltrip, "Hey, Bobby, are those people still messing with you?"

May, a Democrat, sought to force Bush to testify in the case, but in August 1999, a Texas judge tossed out a subpoena issued by May's lawyers for Bush to give a deposition. Bush, who was not a defendant, called May's claims "frivolous" and denied knowing the circumstances of her ouster.

In 1999, when Bush was gearing up to run for the presidency, Texas Governor Rick Perry approved a settlement for May. SCI paid $55,000; the state of Texas shelled out the balance without admitting wrongdoing in May's termination.

Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), expressed concern over FEMA's choice of an SCI subsidiary and questioned whether the selection was made through a no-bid process.

"The tragedy in the Gulf States must not be compounded by disrespecting those who have died," Crider told RAW STORY. "It's critical that government contracts be subjected to scrutiny to ensure that there has been no fraud or abuse of taxpayer money or interest."

Democrats have called for formation of an anti-fraud commission to investigate no-bid contracts awarded in relation to Hurricane Katrina, she added.

Why FEMA chose to outsource mortuary services to a paid contractor is also mystery to Dan Buckner, co-owner of the Gowen-Smith Chapel in the Gulf area. Buckner had planned to serve with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Responses Team, which reportedly told Buckner's partner, Gary Hicks of Paducah, KY, to expect up to 40,000 deaths from Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Upon learning of Kenyon's contract, Buckner expressed puzzlement. He told the Shelbyville Times-Gazette, "Volunteers would have gone at no charge."

Clarification: After FEMA began working with Kenyon, they were subsequently contracted by Louisiana Governor Blanco. It was Louisiana that signed a formal contract.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/FEMA_outsources_Katrina_body_count_to_firm_
implicated_in_bodydumping_scan_0913.html