Help Wanted: Media Whore
You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps
Immediate opening for on-air talent willing to justify alleged rapes and murders by U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. Military background and/or Feminist credentials preferred, although candidates need not be female. Prefer experienced candidates, but will train fresh talent with unique perspectives. Credentials optional, scruples not required. Equal opportunity employer.
Dear Sirs:
I was extremely pleased to learn of your need for an expert to appear on Cable News Programs. I have been seeking just such an opportunity, and I think my background and your requirements may be a good match.
It seems like a statement of the obvious, but the men are in a wartime situation. Full of the fear of being killed, the frustration of having to deal with this enemy they don’t know or understand—Iraqi culture is incredibly different from ours. They see their friends killed. They could get maimed, disfigured, have their legs blown off at any moment. They’re in the middle of this awful heat and loaded down with 50-100 lbs. of gear and angry as hell. Maybe rape and other atrocities are understandable responses? Maybe I would behave in a really savage way, too, if I were faced with what’s hitting these boys everyday?
If the six soldiers implicated in the March rape-murder of the young Iraqi girl and her family are guilty, we should remember that they are ordinary men pushed to extremes. They are just like the men around us everyday—just like our boyfriends and brothers.
How can I condemn any soldiers for wartime rape-murder if I can’t answer for myself? What kind of savagery might I inflict on a woman or child if war pushed me far enough?
While I haven’t served in combat, I’m willing to cheerfully (or tearfully – that’s your call) exploit my past tragedies in service of your agenda. My PhD adds a patina of credibility at the end of my name and my victim status places me well beyond the reach of criticism. My writing has been syndicated in a number of newspapers, including the Los Angeles Chronicle, San Diego Chronicle, Long Beach Chronicle, Florida Chronicle and Illinois Chronicle.
You’ll find I have much to offer your organization. As a rape victim and former prostitute, I am uniquely qualified to help viewers overcome their discomfort over alleged war crimes committed by our troops, and my somewhat Dworkinesque approach to sexual politics will no doubt cause most viewers to assume I’m a liberal. Think of it as a win-win situation: Your message is transmitted as apparent bipartisan consensus, and if focus groups are turned off by my television appearances, conservatives can denounce me as a liberal wacko.
In closing, I believe Hilary [sic] Clinton should take a world-wide trip with the specific purpose of visiting the brothelized, the trafficked, the sexually enslaved. She could call enormous attention to their plight.
Would that I had her power to make the world notice the soft and the ravaged. I would like to see a Tomb for the Unknown Prostitute, and a Monument to the Forgotten Raped Woman. It’s time their voices (and mine) were heard.
Yours truly,
Suki Falconberg, PhD
PS – Head shots available at your request.
!!!
Coming to a news stand near you.
Not fair, Travis. Get me sputtering mad while I’m up to my ass in deadline-driven alligators. So I won’t rant (yet – I have a bottle of scotch at home and I’m not afraid to use it). But two things.
1. Everything in war is brutality. There is no joy, no beauty, no pleasure. All you have is your buddies and who you are inside. These thugs are NOT like your boyfriends, or your brothers. Whether they exploited the situation to wallow in savagery, or they just didn’t have enough sand to try to stay human in all the horror. If you want to identify the dregs, put them in combat. Their true colors will come to the surface quickly.
2. Head shots. Heh heh. Like that 14 year old iraqi girl’s head shots?
mikey
Goddamn.
That is twelve kinds of creepy. Wow.
Bitch! I read the first article with my heart in my throat. Then I read the 1st 2 paragraphs of the second and started to scream. How she could possibly justify her stance in the 2nd article after what she claims to have been through and seen…it makes me want to punch someone.
I can sort of understand why Falconberg tries to humanize wartime rapists; why she accords these individuals a certain amount of sympathy. It’s harder – and less accurate – to imagine you’ve been brutalized by inhuman monsters rather than by psychologically damaged men.
I part company with Falconberg, however, in that she has managed to disconnect rapists from the consequences of their acts. She owns that rape is a terrible thing, but she’s willing to excuse those guilty of that crime by appealing to extenuating circumstances: Rape is bad – so bad Falconberg gets to slam ordinary women for being more concerned with what’s in Cosmo than with the plight of their sisters in Darfur – but rapists aren’t bad.
By that logic, murder is bad, but murderers – and in particular, those guilty of war crimes (a la My Lai) – can be neatly excused for their acts.
And while I have sympathy for war criminals – more than you’d care to guess – that doesn’t mean they can get away with it.
I suppose the author is right: some people are more concerned with punishing the perpetrators than with comforting victims. But that means we should be doing more of the latter, not less of the former.
I suppose the author is right: some people are more concerned with punishing the perpetrators than with comforting victims. But that means we should be doing more of the latter, not less of the former.
Yeah, I guess. I just thought that we’d move toward a time and a place where there would be less (no?) war, not more. That war would be recognized for the wasteful insanity that it is. But instead, every nation seems to have grasped war as their last real chance to matter.
It gets harder every day to understand how we got here. How we got to this point where hate drives decisions and killing is the first, best option in every dispute.
Forget the sixties. Forget any promise of a world that valued creation over destruction. That thought sex was better than killing. That felt, somehow, that humans could rise up and be more than their history.
Go ahead. Laugh. Vietnam era hippie motherfucker. Yeah, I know. I’m crying. It’s your world, you’ve got it now, and it’s completely out of control. Y’know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna drink and smoke my way through my “twilight years”, and I’m going to die knowing I’ve seen the worst that humans can be, and the best. And if you don’t get what was accomplished by the people who stood up to their government and their “establishment” in those days, if can’t understand that they were our last, best hope, and the overwheleming impossibility of their task defeated them, then you’ll die (sooner more likely than later, if current events are any guide) without understanding that humanity had one real chance. And we missed it…
mikey
Boy, it’s a laugh-riot round this thread today! Hahaha, rape.
/sarcasm
She does not deserve this. Fuck off. You’re on a whole nother terrain here. I can’t even think straight. I’ll drop it for now, but good lord, read more.
Mikey you take so much to heart, your posts make me light candles for you.
“And if you don’t get what was accomplished by the people who stood up to their government and their “establishmentâ€? in those days, if can’t understand that they were our last, best hope, and the overwheleming impossibility of their task defeated them, then you’ll die (sooner more likely than later, if current events are any guide) without understanding that humanity had one real chance. And we missed it…”
mikey
Some of us are old enough to remember that, and the feeling of promise and a better future those times held out to the world. That missed chance – I guess that explains why it feels like a piece of my soul has been forever lost…
(Dammit Mikey, you made me cry!)
Hm. Mikey, you didn’t make me cry. I like folks who talk the way you do, but I disagree about the utility of the movement of which you were a part. Or movements, since it was composed of a lot of factions. For one thing, a lot of the people in those movements advocated violence against the government of the United States — some as early as 1968, others not until the ’70s. For another, it was a movement that broadly embraced anti-rationalism, and condemned liberals for their commitment to procedural democracy and rational debate. It elevated appeals to emotion above reasoned discourse, and it created a dynamic in which to maintain credibility, one had to be ever farther left and ever more radical — as though politics were like music, demanding constant progress and rebellion.
The US has, indeed, come to worship warfare; it has lost its collective mind. But that was not the case on September 10, 2001. What has happened over the last 5 years is a tragic political devolution set in motion by a strange and terrible event.
brooksfoe: I don’t know how old you are, but I have two words for you – Kent State.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something similar soon…
I wish Dr. Falconberg well, and hope the best for her. I have never had any experience like hers, and I will in no way condemn her response to it and the manner in which she copes with it, no matter how much I would disagree with broadly applying some of her thinking.
What a mess. So, how would Suki, PhD justify the Iraqi reaction? Which was horrible…
Warning, very graphic images, but this is what’s happeing to our soldiers in Iraq.
http://www.ogrish.com/archives/us_soldiers_kidnapped_in_iraq_shown_dead_in_video_Jul_10_2006.html
Draft Suki! (sorry, i’m under a lot of stress).
I don’t know what to make of Suki.
“The US has, indeed, come to worship warfare; it has lost its collective mind. But that was not the case on September 10, 2001. What has happened over the last 5 years is a tragic political devolution set in motion by a strange and terrible event. ”
Horse potatoes. The 90’s were looney as hell, with the rise of the Religious Right and it’s message of hate, and the Empire-seeking neo-cons that fed that hate to get power. The “need” to invade Iraq was promoted by William Krystol and Paul Wolfowitz via PNAC in the early 90’s.
If America had been sane in 2001, Osama bin Laden would be caught, the Taliban under siege, a Marshall plan in place to win hearts and minds in the Middle East, and there would be a big new tower in NYC today.
Osama won, but not because he blew up a building.
I’m sorry, it’s a little difficult to comprehend her. Is she saying women have the duty to expect to be raped and there should be no hard feelings? And then, further, satisfy the voyeurism of others by revealing your own personal horror to the public?
My mind is boggled.
Thank you SN! for adding the headline. She is crazy. We can condemn what she’s putting out but it’s good to consider what led to it.
There, peace and I’ll shut up now.
brooksfoe:
That’s ok, dood. You can buy it or not, like any other piece of history, all that’s left is for it to be interpreted, revised, worshipped or reviled. If you were there, and you feel that way, I’m genuinely sorry for you. If you weren’t there, well, no old fart talkin about the “old days” is gonna make you feel it. But I’ll give you one more piece of contraversial belief system. I didn’t go to Canada. I saw some monumental acts of bravery in the nam. But the people who forced this government to it’s senses, that made it politically untenable for the United States to stay in Vietnam, THOSE are the real heros. That’s me saying it. It would have been braver of me to go to canada.
Celticgirl:
but I have two words for you – Kent State.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something similar soon… +
I wouldn’t be surprised either. But you know what? If we do, the appalling thing will not be the event itself, but the reaction. Or rather, the lack of reaction. When the massacre happened (I heard about it on the radio while I was vacationing in Cambodia), America as a whole gasped and took a collective step back. Today, sure, there’d be an outcry, but there’d also be a very strong set of voices (I think we can predict who they would be) who would say “The fuckin traitors deserved it. Shoot a few more and the problem will end.” And that’s the real sadness. Not that we are capable of murdering our own, all nations are capbable. But that we are capable of turning so quickly on one another – a nation of hyenas…
mikey
Mikey: word.