Anyone who has watched old American westerns - movies about Cowboys and Indians - will recall the popular phrase uttered by many an Indian, ‘pale face speak with forked tongue.’ Along with several other Indianisms, this one entered into American popular culture to such a degree that it lost its original rhetorical strength.
Moore’s recent book, Downsize This!, takes its title from the corporate euphemism for firing workers. Originally published in 1996, and updated for the paperback edition a year later, Moore’s latest assault on corporate America is a biting satire of all that is wrong with an America under ever increasing control of business interests, ranging from the national corporate media to multinational and transnational corporations.
When Alex Haley asserted in his 1976 novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, that its main character Kunte Kinte was a Muslim, he was dismissed by many American historians.
In his writings about technology, Jerry Mander, an ecologist and former advertising executive, is on to something when he suggests that television is a training mechanism for some subtle yet invasive forms of social control.
In his autobiography, the American industrialist Henry Ford wrote, ‘Repetitive labor... is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind... but to other minds, perhaps I might say the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors.’
A key document for understanding Malcolm X is his Autobiography, published posthumously by Alex Haley. The Autobiography highlights the changes Malcolm went through during his life while also maintaining several consistent concerns. However, despite its usefulness, this document needs to be viewed in the context in which it was produced.
Conventional wisdom views childhood as a set stage of life through which all human beings pass on their way to adulthood. In the west, psychology since the 19th century has attempted to discern and delimit the various stages of child development.
In its 1997 report, the United States Agriculture Department revealed that, ‘Americans routinely toss away uneaten vegetables, day-old bread and other pantry items, wasting one-fourth of the nation’s total food supply.
Living under occupation can be quite boring at times, especially during lockdowns and blockades such as those on the West Bank following last summer’s bombings in Jerusalem. But no fear, television is here to ‘occupy’ your idle hours.
The trilateral ruling elite of America, Europe and Japan is in a quandary. Their industrial-based civilization has created tons of extremely toxic wastes. Many are by-products of cold war military industries. America and Russia currently lead the pack in nuclear waste.
Since their occupation of Palestine, the Israelis have disrupted the Arabs’ olive and related industries badly.
Western civilization was built on the intersection of war and commerce. But since the seventies, in the wake of the unwinnable Vietnam War, increasing cold war tensions threatening the planet with nuclear immolation, there began a concerted effort by the trilateral ruling elite...
