The Canadian author’s insistence that refusing the blood-spattered trophy would be tantamount to “censorship” rings as false as her commitments to justice as an anti-apartheid activist, and as a writer who has made tyranny and oppression recurring themes in her novels, elevating her from fiction writer to public intellectual. I say “false” because “justice for some” is hardly an ethical stance with any merit, and certainly not one that will maintain her status as an “oppositional intellectual”. Sadly, this “intellectual” has made no effort to research the subject of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and its unyielding, systematic oppression of the Palestinian people (as many Jewish and Israeli scholars and activists themselves have bravely condemned). Otherwise, she would use the occasion of the invitation to condemn an increasingly murderous regime and call upon its people to support sanctions, boycotts and divestments until their government accepted the rule of International law and reversed its policy of displacement and expulsion of Arab people from their ancestral lands. Instead the once outspoken author has chosen to put monetary interests ahead of the principled moral stances she has taken in the past, in order to lay claim to a tainted prize given each year to fame-hungry “artists” looking to boost sagging sales of their product while making all the appropriate noises to the press about free speech.

Ms Atwood’s blandly centrist posturing is symptomatic of a malady particular to the cosseted and fossilized members of a wealthy nation’s cultural elite, for whom “free speech” is a largely unexamined term that by default, advocates the right of establishment opinion makers laboring for the warlord and robber baron class to set the agenda for public discourse. Thus the multi-billion dollar media conglomerate behind South Park and its wealthy creators are portrayed as underdog champions of free speech, bravely confronting an encroaching Islamic Goliath, just as the Canadian author’s flaccid, self-serving justifications for fence-sitting is spun into a battle against “censorship”. It’s hard to pinpoint Ms Atwood’s definition of the word “censorship” unless it means, “Can I just enjoy my windfall without having to listen to a howling mob of Debby Downers”?

On the surface, Ms Atwood’s Tel Aviv itinerary seems a worthy endeavor undertaken by an energetic senior citizen who has put aside her basket of knitting to embark on a fact finding mission devoted to sniffing out the roots of a decades-long conflict, while indulging her recent interest in issues related to water scarcity. How she will gather facts on the ground from a plush Tel Aviv hotel suite surrounded by her sycophantic handlers remains to be seen. Her new friends at the cosmopolitan gathering place will likely remind her that “Jews made the desert bloom”, omitting the part about how Israel diverts water supplies from the Palestinians to nourish the soil beneath its illegal settlements. Unlike Ms Atwood, I am no poet. However, I can’t help but indulge the thought that so much spilled blood must have had a hand in making Israel’s ill-gained desert outposts a shimmering oasis of well-watered lawns, swimming pools and flower beds on one side, and a parched, barren human cattle pen on the other.

Last year Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami defended his decision to accept the Jerusalem Prize in a rambling, incoherent public statement to his detractors that ultimately demonstrated his worthiness to be be recipient to this dubious honor. As this year’s winner of the Dan David Prize, Ms Atwood is Israel’s most recent stooge-laureate of a cynically motivated, prize-giving institution that lures artists from overseas to be unwitting apologists for its government’s long standing system of ethnic cleansing. Sadly, Ms Atwood has fallen into the same trap, and like her Japanese prize-coveting counterpart, has released a factually deficient statement accusing her critics of being intolerant, politically motivated advocates of censorship, while she, the feisty Grande Dame of capital ‘L’ literature rises above her host nation’s open air prisons where the view on the ground reveals deficiencies on both sides of the conflict. Something tells me the feminist author would take a less even-handed approach to the subject of domestic violence.

It’s from this lofty perch that Ms Atwood declares herself an “artist” (emphasis on the last syllable) and more importantly, an “individual”. Unlike her more earthbound detractors, this ethereal entity insists, by virtue of her divinely held privileges, that she is a “neutral observer, and as such, more intellectually equipped to observe the situation on the ground as one who hovers celestially above the rest of humanity. She might want to consider the possibility that those pretty cloud-like bursts of white phosphorous dumped on civilians fleeing from relentless ground and air assaults are anything but neutral — as are the well-heeled and carefully vetted representatives of Tel Aviv’s cultural elite with whom she will have lively discussions over tea and crumpets about scarce water resources, global warming and the burdens of being the Mideast’s only “democracy” (sic). Throw in a Palestinian bird enthusiast and score valuable PR points for demonstrating your nation’s “diversity”. (“See? We don’t discriminate against our non-Jewish (non) citizens. We grant special privileges to a handful of them, allow them access to water, even sparing them the cattle prods when they wander without permits into our cocktail parties”.) While ‘bird enthusiasm’ is a noble and worthy career choice, you have to wonder why Palestinians engaged in fields closer to Atwood’s own were not on the guest list. In the words of the Palestinian students she saw fit to ignore, it might be because:

“In the Gaza concentration camp, students who have been awarded scholarships to universities abroad are prevented every year from pursuing their hard-earned opportunity for academic achievement. Within the Gaza Strip, those seeking an education are limited by increasing poverty rates and a scarcity of fuel for transportation, both of which are direct results of Israel’s medieval siege. What is Tel Aviv University’s position vis-a-vis this form of illegal collective punishment, described by Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, as a “prelude to genocide?” Not a single word of condemnation has been heard from any Israeli academic institution!”

Ms Atwood, who scholarly credentials on the subject of conflict in the Middle East has so far been limited to glancing at the op-ed columns in her daily newspaper, repeats the same half-truths, obfuscations and outright lies that are routinely and mechanically recited in the establishment media — namely, that the crisis currently playing out in the Middle East is the result of two warring powers of roughly equal stature stubbornly rejecting compromise.

I sympathize with the very bad conditions the people of Gaza are living through due to the blockade, the military actions, and the Egyptian and Israeli walls. Everyone in the world hopes that the two sides involved will give up their inflexible positions and sit down at the negotiating table immediately and work out a settlement that would help the ordinary people who are suffering. The world wants to see fair play and humane behaviour, and it wants that more the longer the present situation continues and the worse the conditions become.

According to this cursory, lackluster analysis, the people imprisoned within the occupied territories have had a hand in creating the intolerable conditions they live under despite the fact their free and fair elections have been overturned by Israeli authorities, their leaders routinely imprisoned or targeted for assassination, or installed as paid stooges to carry out Israel’s security operations. By Ms Atwood’s lazy reckoning, the Palestinians themselves are somehow complicit in their own misery. Never mind that one side has no military, no air defenses, only limited and largely illusory political autonomy, and whose already scant institutions and infrastructure lie in a still smoldering pile of rubble. Meanwhile this deliberately starved population only survives on the meager, “diet”-inducing rations their Israeli occupiers call “humanitarian assistance”. Inflexible indeed. Israel’s long standing commitment to derailing every attempt to negotiate a peace settlement by refusing to halt or dismantle settlements is yet another inconvenient fact Ms Atwood prefers to overlook in a statement that reads more like a hastily signed condolence card than confirmation of a principled, well-reasoned stance.

Ms Atwood’s powers of keen and relentlessly fine-tuned observations — the hallmark of her deservedly lauded fiction — are nowhere in evidence outside the rarefied air of her novel writing efforts. When it comes to facts (Israel is guilty of war crimes and is in violation of countless UN resolutions, not to mention its Apartheid style of governance that grants democracy for a few and apartheid for the many) the Canadian novelist has a tin ear, playing mostly deaf to the chorus of condemnation that has dogged her since accepting the prize. Antoine Raffoul, a London based architect and founder of ’1948: Lest We Forget’ — a Palestinian rights organization publicly addressed her (and co-laureate Amitov Ghosh) in an open letter, politely pleading the case that their presence in Tel Aviv was in opposition to the values that the two authors presumably uphold as human rights advocates.

“We writers belong to a space one can call ‘Republic of writers’ and do not do cultural boycotts,” Atwood sniffed in response, conveniently overlooking her support of sanctions and cultural boycotts of Apartheid-era South Africa. More recently, the author pulled out of the fledgling Emirates Airline international festival of literature to protest the organizers’ decision to withdraw their invitation to an author whose book was considered too controversial. Curiously, the free speech advocate couldn’t spare a similar show of solidarity with the blacklisted Palestinian writers whom she is unlikely to meet in Israel.

According to Atwood, “writers” are members of that elite, oft-awarded coterie of establishment liberals who lend their support to fashionable causes while attending cocktail receptions in their honor; a term that in other words doesn’t apply to rabble like Mr Raffoul, or the group of Palestinian students whose passionately articulated open letter to the author was greeted with a dismissive acknowledgment of having received it. Not surprisingly, The Republic of Writers, like its warm ally Israel, doesn’t grant citizenship to its Palestinian members, or anyone outside the highly fortified, well-appointed compound where Queen Margaret reigns as self-crowned head of state.

The prickly monarch goes on to dismiss criticism of her decision to accept half of a million dollar prize from a foundation run by a photo booth tycoon with ties to Zionist organizations. Dan David, the billionaire philanthropist for whom the prize is named, was overruled by his foundation’s board of trustees when early on in his philanthropic career he nominated Muslim bashing Italian xenophobe Oriana Fallaci a prize for journalism. Clearly, the choice of Margaret Atwood as blood money beneficiary for her “moderate” (but no less ideological) brand of selective advocacy for human rights is meant to thwart unwanted scrutiny on this generous endowment at the hands of a right wing entrepreneur who conceals his zealotry behind a blandly institutional cloak of high culture. Mr David’s critics allege the tycoon is aiding and abetting his government’s propaganda efforts by dipping into his own personal slush fund to launch a charm offensive aimed at silencing Israel’s critics.

It’s probably too late to hope that Ms Atwood’s atrophied powers of reasoning and compassion will compel her to recognize the ironies inherent in her host nation’s insistence that “Never Again” means business-as-usual when applying Nazi methodology to rid one’s country of a despised ethnic group. Based on her own reasoning, Ms Atwood might consider attending the next conference Iranian president Ahmadinajad hosts, where invited dignitaries debate the existence of the Holocaust. After all, how is this Iranian-led peanut gallery aimed at burnishing its president’s standing among anti-US allies any different from the political stage craft Israel is orchestrating to shore up international support for its own beleaguered leadership? By her own admission, there is no topic off-limits to “dialogues across borders”, so why draw the line at holocaust denial? Or for that matter, a Dubai book festival?

Ms Atwood’s disingenuous claims that the prize is “is a cultural event” and not “as has been erroneously stated,” an “Israeli” prize from the State of Israel, nor is it a prize “from Tel Aviv University, but one founded and funded by an individual” proves she is either woefully unskilled at using a search engine, or that she has deliberately overlooked her billionaire benefactor’s unsavory, or at least questionable business and political ties in order to claim a cash prize. With its lucrative ties to the Israeli defense industry, Tel Aviv University is hardly a benign institution, nor one that is unaffiliated with Mr David’s philanthropic enterprises. Dan David laureates, according to their contractual obligations, are required to donate ten percent of their prize money to the university.

Margaret Atwood and Amitov Ghosh are not only aiding Israel’s propaganda efforts, but helping to directly fund its war machine. Whether they realize it or not, Ms Atwood and her prize sharing cohort-in-hypocrisy have earned a black mark on their legacy by putting a price tag on their principles.

So now American voters have the choice between a government that will destroy the nation quickly (“You Betcha”!) or one that will perform its controlled demolition of the economy and all its remaining institutions more gradually. For some, meaning those who have the luxury of being insulated from the scorched earth reality of American Empire, this toxic equation is perfectly acceptable. As long as it’s ‘their’ guy in the Oval Office, it speaks of loftier ideals like “compromise”, “bipartisanship” and cold hard number crunching (30,000 additional troops over a two year period … yada yada yada.) It avoids the embarrassing cowboy exuberance of Dr Strangelove and instead lays out a point by point plan to further destabilize and impoverish a traumatized region, spelling out its ultimately violent objectives with the overflown, platitudinous language of a precocious high school Valedictorian.

The standard by which Obama’s liberal supporters measure his “success” (It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it) has been significantly lowered since the reign of little King George when his universally discredited world view outlined the necessity of killing millions in order to avoid a “bloodbath” later on. In a curious reversal of logic and principles, this crackpot notion is what the nation’s hope smokers are now stuffing into their pipes to neutralize the bitter, lingering aftertaste of disappointment and dashed hope. In a position that could be best summed up as “Bush foreign policy bad. Obama’s good”, these one time “anti-war” voters now embrace the same delusional, unprincipled logic that insists the carnage and bloodbaths of the present are somehow preferable to the ones that will ensue if US forces withdraw from the battlefield. It is enough for them that the president avoids the rhetorical gaffes of his neo-con predecessors, even if his actions mirror them precisely.

Bush gave away the Imperial game plan with his inept swagger, revealing the gulag casino state at the heart of his vision of ‘freedom’ both in the US and abroad, while Obama’s more prudent delivery of the same talking points provides a bloodless analysis of his government’s equally murderous objectives. Little King George had the disadvantage of a coronation ceremony that publicly dispensed with any illusion of democracy, and made no secret of his servitude to the crude ‘oiligarchs’ who greased his way to office. Likewise, Obama made his allegiances clear in his first month of office, transferring the entire contents of the treasury to his bosses at Goldman Sachs, while adopting Bush’s global strategy to keep Wall Street coffers stuffed with the spoils of war. Again, the policies of this president hardly differ from those of his predecessors over the last 60 years, most of whom were vetted and groomed for office by the lobbyists whose interests the puppet-in-chief ultimately serves.

Unlike the “despots” and “gangsters” we seek to uproot in ‘Bushbamastan’, our leadership’s more refined methods of impoverishing and terrorizing the populations overseas are preferable (honorable even) owing to our success in projecting our barbarism through an upgraded and more attractively packaged hologram. It’s enough, the Hologram’s supporters insist, that its empty, bellicose rhetoric simply mimics the cadences (rather than the content) of a beloved slain civil rights leader. Anyone who endured Obama’s insufferable Nobel acceptance speech (the one where Bush Jr’s crayon doodles, scribbles and Jell-O pudding stains were not too much in evidence) can recognize the familiar, chest pounding refrain of endless war, and the attendant infantile platitudes about the ‘justness’ of military aggression.

Awarding the current US Murderer-in-Chief the same prize that was bestowed upon Dr Martin Luther King Jr in 1964 is yet just another example of the Corporate State’s ability to subvert dissident thought and action into establishment enabling PR. The same institutions that rely on Bono to lend legitimacy and rock star “cred” to their violent neo-colonial agenda have now appointed a youthful former community organizer to head their global operations. In Bono’s case, the peace activism of John Lennon was successfully reconfigured to serve the interests of the ruling class as ‘New Labour’ rallied rock stars and other “anti-Establishment” figures to rise up and allow a new super elite to emerge. We can see the same brain trust at work as neo-cons embrace ‘feminism’ to justify their unending war on the Muslim world, invoking the dreaded veil to get western women on board with their military objectives.

“The Saviour of Hope” by virtue of being an African American man with much lauded oratory skills not so subtly evokes Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the same way a carbonated beverage laden with high fructose corn syrup can be associated with sex appeal. Image trumps substance in every political PR campaign and consumers can be relied upon to put wishful thinking ahead of common sense and reason. Where MLK’s Nobel acceptance speech was unequivocal in its denunciations of using violence to bring about peace and justice, Obama by contrast, used the Oslo stage to justify colonial aggression. The most cringe-inducing part of Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech was his perfunctory, condescending little nod to Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Ghandi — peacemakers infinitely more deserving of the honor than the preening prize winner on the Oslo stage in terms of character, courage and integrity. After giving them a verbal pat on the head, he went on to drone that unlike them, ‘He’ actually “governs” and therefore must deal with “the world as it is”. The implication here is the sacrifices of these great men in the name of peace and justice occurred in a less significant fantasy world that “legitimate” leaders like him don’t have the time to indulge. You could say that it was the first time the American president actually demonstrated any of his much vaunted and sorely lacking O-dacity. Sadly, this sudden outburst of “ballsiness” is the kind most often associated with “WTF?” (as in “Did he really just moon his audience and say ‘Kiss this’ to his peace advocating Nobel predecessor?)

In his pre-Oslo speech on the subject of escalating the violence against the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan by committing more troops to the already war-ravaged region, he erroneously cited Al-Qaeda as a threat to the region’s security, despite Al-Qaeda’s mostly chimerical presence in Afghanistan. It should be noted that the Taliban, contrary to the president’s knowingly false assertions, does not have a global agenda, but merely a domestic one. It seeks to remove US forces from within its borders, whereas Al Qaeda is a borderless, loose knit band of brothers atomized throughout the Muslim world, and whose threat to global security is largely dependent on our fluctuating quotas for turbaned scapegoats. For Obama to deliberately conflate these two entirely different entities, while insisting that US security hinges upon our ability to kill anyone who stands in opposition to our Imperial aims, is an unconscionable and egregious act of cowardice, right up there with Colin Powell knowingly making the case for the invasion of Iraq with false intelligence.

Any way you look at it, military occupations are doomed to fail by their very nature — a fact that our educated and well-read president is undoubtedly aware — making his case for escalating his war of choice all the more reprehensible. Just as there is no correct or proper way to administer slavery, or carry out acts of rape or torture, there is no “wise” or “judicious” way of using military force for non-defensive purposes. It’s convenient to label every individual who actively opposes the presence of these troops in their region ‘Taliban’ (“enemy combatants” we don’t have to add to any civilian casualty lists) when in fact, active and often violent opposition to the US led occupation is not limited to these bearded bogey-men, but carried out by ordinary people defending themselves against foreign occupation of their land. If anything, the Taliban are the tragically inevitable outcome of the political vacuum that emerged as a result of centuries of Imperial misadventures in that particular region and elsewhere in the Muslim world. They are not, as the president falsely implies, some virulent manifestation of mental illness brought about by “incorrectly” interpreting the Koran, but a desperate response to a complete breakdown of Afghanistan’s civil society, thanks to decades of colonial subjugation. The continuing presence of foreign troops only ensures more violent resistance to the values and institutions we seek to impose through military force, whether it is Taliban-led opposition to the occupation or some hastily formed militia without a globally recognized brand name. Against all reason, we believe that the defeat of the gangsters and warlords overseas is a necessary and just cause, while ignoring the threat posed by our own criminal class to the economic, political and social well-being of our plundered “Homeland” as rogue banking institutions (enabled by their political and military counterparts) use global financial markets as incendiary devices to destroy competition.

We look back in horror and astonishment at the brutal methods Latin America’s Generallissimos applied to terrorize their own citizenry, when thousands of innocent civilians were “disappeared”, yet we seem unable to summon similar outrage as thousands of our colonized subjects are mercilessly slaughtered, confident that our murderous rampages somehow fall into the “lesser evil” category. We are similarly reassured by Obama’s reliance on anonymous drones to kill villagers in remote mountainous areas as opposed to the cruder methods of mass murder as applied in Iraq, where the poor, dumb grunts on the ground have to brutalize the populace at gunpoint in order to “secure the peace”.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the American middle class is similarly ‘disappeared’. We applaud with one hand gripping the remote control and the other clutching a box of Krispy-Kremes as the Dow Jones responds positively to a “jobless recovery”. We further apply our intellectual laziness to the task of justifying yet more power-enabling double standards as our leaders institute socialist safety nets for Wall Street’s money hemorrhaging casinos under the banner of “Too Big to Fail”. Now that Goldman Sachs has appointed one of their own to the nation’s highest office, its well-heeled Ponzi schemers will never have to adhere to the rules of a so-called ‘free market’ economy, unlike the rest of us fattened, slaughter-ready serfs who have to bear the costs of rewarding corrupt financial institutions for their failures. Luckily for them, Wall Street’s top tier risk takers won’t have to face the consequences of their greed-motivated acts of terrorism, owing in large part to their success in having their own profiteers serve as government appointed ‘watchdogs’ and ‘regulators’ to facilitate the smooth and endless flow of public funds into corporate coffers. We have learned too late that the president’s much vaunted “O-dacity” is just another term for his jaw dropping displays of “unmitigated gall”, whether it’s accepting a peace prize while waging war, or overseeing the fraudulent bank bailout and comparing this act of government-led larceny to FDR’s New Deal.

We are a nation of hypocrites, cheering on acts of resistance and civil disobedience overseas in one of our branded color ‘revolutions’, while remaining fearful and compliant at home, unwilling to take on the the dirty work required to maintain a democracy. Our apathy only ensures that we are beholden to a system whereby consumers can ‘choose’ between a Mccandidate who drives a fuel inefficient clown car or one who is chauffeured in a hybrid limousine; where one party belligerently institutes corrupt, wasteful policies and the other one entrenches them further under a subverted slogan of “Change”. By justifying our knee-jerk support for the President and his misguided policies with the excuse that our dissent would only empower the clown car contingent, we have become the Kool-Aid drinking alternative to the Teabagger Party.

And when the subject of the conflict in the Middle East is broached, I should manage a discreet and “knowing” little sigh, having recognized the signal to return to the much more pressing topics of the day like gay marriage or this year’s Oscar nominees. Unluckily for me, I have no intention of being a “fair and impartial” observer of anything — least of all injustice. After all, “objectivity” in the political context usually functions as passivity and an inability (or unwillingness) to confront power, which is never “objective” about anything. Truth, on the other hand, can never be underestimated, however much its detractors protest the unwelcome incursion of inconvenient facts into their power-serving narratives, using subterfuge and fraudulent notions of “objectivity” to defend the indefensible. Worst of all, truth provides the basis for courage, and without courage, power cannot be confronted.

Indeed there is no shortage of facts that could lead one to conclude that the unmitigated tragedy that is unfolding right now in Gaza is anything but a singular act of violence and state terror perpetrated by a heavily armed and funded military power against a defenseless and imprisoned population — as opposed to a two-sided, evenly matched conflict between equal powers as our fact-filtering media takes great pains to imply, even insisting in some cases that small, fertilizer-based Qassam rockets launched over a prison wall pose a credible threat to Israel’s continuing existence as a political and geographical entity.

But for now, I will leave the heavy lifting required to properly analyze the unfolding and escalating atrocities being inflicted upon the people of Gaza in the capable hands of all the worthy scholars and activists who provide a much better service to the cause of justice than I ever will. In fact, I will be the first to admit that I lack the brainpower to truly grasp the scope and complexity of this horror, or the imagination to fully appreciate the depraved ingenuity of its architects. In many ways, I am even thankful that I don’t have the faculties necessary to truly comprehend the levels of fear and despair every Palestinian is experiencing right now, as their homes are being rubbled, their children slaughtered, and their dignity and honor defiled by the monsters who wear the Israeli army uniform.

These seemingly endless reserves of contempt (not to mention, bewilderment) I am learning to live with are no match, either, for how the Palestinians (and Israelis of conscience) are feeling towards the leaders who robbed these soldiers of every last shred of their humanity in the first place. Nor do I have the stamina to endure even for a day the frustrations and humiliations the Israelis relentlessly inflict upon Palestinians in the “best” of times, whether it’s through direct intimidation, harassment, or just as brutally, all those punishing bureaucratic procedures like checkpoints and constant demands for documentation, the interminable waiting, the endless lines . . . We can only interpret the ever-changing and maliciously implemented rules Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have to submit to, even as they are being denied a human being’s most basic, fundamental needs like going to work, visiting nearby friends and relatives, or seeking medical services, as constant reminders that they are not merely prisoners, but a contained “livestock” herd facing the same fate as farm animals suspected of posing the risk of contagion to “human” populations.

I don’t have the expertise, so to speak, (or even the bandwidth) to list every “minor” act of cruelty that is inflicted upon the Palestinians as collective punishment every day for the crime of not being Jewish in the “”Holy Land.” Comparing this system of state brutality against an ethnic “other” to Apartheid is a euphemistic understatement. Holocaust is a more accurate term, but this holocaust, unlike its more famous predecessor with a capital ‘H’, has continued unabated for sixty years and intensifies every passing day, while we wring our hands and mumble some platitude about the failures of both sides to seek more peaceful means towards ending the conflict. Implicit in this simplistic view of the situation is the notion that total submission to Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian land and its brutal control over every aspect of Palestinian life is the only course of “action” Palestinians should pursue if “peace” is to be achieved.

Let’s not forget, though, that “peace” in this context is a subterfuge term to describe the abject capitulation to the enhanced measures of domination that is incumbent upon Palestinians to submit to, with little or no regard to their rights to self-defense. What well-meaning hand wringers most conveniently overlook as they lament over the wrongs inflicted on and by both sides (in the name of “objectivity”, of course) is the seldom discussed fact that Israel had already violated the terms of its illusory “ceasefire” with Hamas when it implemented its deadly blockade of Gaza six months earlier — an internationally recognized violation of its responsibilities as an occupying power — and an obvious attempt to provoke a cross “border” assault by Hamas militants in order to justify its own brute measures of “containing” its unwanted and slaughter-ready “livestock” population. Never mind, either, that Israeli soldiers murdered six Palestinians during this so-called ceasefire in November 2008, citing the victims’ affiliation to Hamas as a justification for this slaughter.

Again, the “objectivity” our society’s privileged sector insists is integral to our understanding of the conflict merely stands as tragic testament to the American media/military/entertainment complex’s success in shaping public discourse to serve the needs of wealth and power, providing an exclusive, cushy forum from which war criminals can air their grievances 24/7.

For those who don’t enjoy the luxury of inhaling the fine cigar aroma of the nation’s op-ed pages and get their “news” first hand from the mortar shells raining down on their homes, “objectivity” is merely an other rhetorical ploy to bring them in line with Tel-Aviv and Washington’s larger aims of expanding their sphere of dominance in an oil rich region.

We shouldn’t be surprised at the scale and scope of this tragedy since it goes back decades with the slow destruction of the economy, infrastructure, institutions and overall sustainability of the occupied territories, the fragmentation of Palestinian land into isolated and locked down Bantustans disconnected from the surrounding economies of its neighbors. So far Israel has achieved its intended goal of creating a failed non-state almost wholly dependent on the scant food aid “allowed” in at the whim and mercy of its jailers. Adding insult to injury, these starvation measures are lauded in the media as “humanitarian” interventions, carried out under the auspices of an International law-abiding nation, going that extra mile to observe the protocols of the Geneva Conventions.

Worse even, this deliberate dismantling of Palestinian society and the institutions that sustain it has been carried out with the full cooperation of the so-called “International Community.” Even among Arab leaders in the region, corrupt politicians offer their complicit support to the genocide through discreet diplomatic channels. In the meantime, the criminals we have elevated to levels of leadership stand united in condemning the Palestinians for the least resistance to their worsening plight, while condoning Israel’s war crimes as acts of “self defense.” I could go on, but I know I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.

I will also be the first to admit that I am neither burdened by history or displacement, but merely a casual observer with the remote control easily within reach. And to my shame, I don’t hesitate to use it. It’s hard enough to fathom any of the atrocities going on in the world on any given day, let alone imagine one that is endless, deliberately worsening, and with the intended goal of provoking a humanitarian crisis. It is no longer possible to deny the fact that Israel’s long standing strategy is to derail the prospect for peace with the Palestinians altogether in the belief that a viable, democratic Palestinian state would only impede its ultimate geopolitical aims of further expanding its ill-gained and legally unrecognized borders. For all its talk of “peace” and “coexistence”, Israel’s road maps only lead to more enhanced measures of forced expulsion of the human shaped potholes its artillery tanks absorb along the otherwise smooth paths leading to its targets of annihilation.

If I only knew how to compartmentalize my empathy (and yes, my sense of outrage) into neat little packages to be doled out on a “time and place” basis. And again, only to those who “deserve” it most, based on their proximity to high profile advocates like Bono and the Dalai Lama. Or at least conform visually to our standards of “victims” like those wizened, semi-comatose African babies whose blighted existence can never be expressed through acts of defiance or resistance, but rather compliancy and helplessness in the face of “unavoidable” tragedy. We in the West approve of these kinds of victims because they pose no threat. On the contrary, they remind us how “good we have it” and provide countless opportunities to throw a celebrity-studded shindig in their honor. For the bargain basement price of what it would cost to feed and educate an African child well into adulthood, we can pick one up as the ultimate red carpet accessory. Conveniently, we read only gratitude for our beneficence in those terrified, staring eyes, rather than see a mirror upon which are own depravities are reflected. When Palestinians are reduced to this state, perhaps then we can spare a thought to their predicament.

As the images of terrorized and slaughtered children make their way out of Gaza through some of the more unfiltered media portals, the endless litany of absurdities dribbling from the mouths of Israeli government officials and their faithful scribes in the US media in the meantime, have become as blood chillingly surreal as any government radio broadcast in Rwanda during another genocide the world just happened to tune into between sit-coms and commercials for suppositories and teeth whiteners.

In the face of this ceaseless barrage of misinformation, we can only exercise our own right to self-defense against these relentless assaults to our intelligence and integrity before we become casualties ourselves. After all, when we choose to put our humanity on hold by adhering to some self-serving notion of “objectivity” in the face of avoidable tragedy, doesn’t that count as a death of sorts?

(With special thanks to Carl Kandutsch and Zeljko Cipris)

This time around, GW played the unenviable villain role of the Coca Cola exec responsible for his company’s disastrous decision to tamper with the formula and packaging of a beloved, much touted brand of carbolic soda, while Barack Obama played the dissenting marketing genius who comes to the rescue and restores the poisonous product back to its original flavor. Having put the genie, so to speak, back into the bottle, the whiz kid replaces the despised and disgraced CEO much to the relief of customers and shareholders alike. In this fictionalized retelling of the story, the youthful upstart’s deceptively bold campaign to oust his former boss is launched with the support of his enthusiastic and idealistic marketing team, most of whom were eventually given the pink slip once the new CEO settled into his upper floor suite. McCain’s minor role as hired mouthpiece attempting damage control for the outgoing CEO was a comical and insignificant aside to bigger picture premise of an arrogant and deluded leader being challenged by a charismatic and visionary upstart. Never mind that the “visionary” envisioned nothing more radical than a return to the recent past of putting the requisite amount of high fructose corn syrup in aluminum cans.

While Pepsi may have profited handsomely in the short term from Coca Cola’s mishandling of its newly launched product and the public relations fiasco that followed, it was Coca Cola that ultimately prevailed, outselling the rival brand two-to-one within six months of reintroducing the old formula as “Coke Classic.” In subsequent retellings of the events in 1985, Coca Cola’s swift and repentant capitulation to consumer demand would be upheld as an example of “the power of the people” in shaping corporate policy, citing the example of millions of angry Coke drinkers bombarding the company’s Atlanta headquarters with angry letters and staging public events to express their anger over what they felt was the company’s arrogant disregard of customer loyalty. What is most often overlooked in this updated David vs Goliath parable is how the beleaguered Behemoth, while publicly licking its wounds, was in fact, laughing all the way to the bank, even as the competition gained short term windfalls over the ensuing “scandal”. Also absent from this feel good retelling of “The People vs New Coke” is how this so-called consumer movement was not in fact a spontaneous rising up of angry citizens against an arrogant giant but a mostly media-generated spectacle that took its talking points from Pepsi’s PR department, hoping to cash in on the “controversy”.

The media/entertainment industrial complex pushes forward these faux story lines, substituting substance with empty calories while prioritizing the trivial at the expense of truth telling. Our system of governance in collusion with its corporate overseers relies on a lazy and willfully misinformed citizenry to effectively function. Like the carefully orchestrated spat between the identical blonde “frenemies” of The Hills, the presumed enmity between Team Obama and Team Bush (and even Team Clinton) was merely a plot device to enhance the selling points of deodorant and hybrid cars during a profitable election cycle.

Voters, not unlike soft drink aficionados, can be counted on to rally around a non-cause perpetrated by multiple corporate entities all profiting from a well orchestrated marketing blitz — just as they can be counted on to take these falsely constructed narratives and marketing campaigns at face value, eschewing facts for factoids, truth for “truthiness” and reality for the MTV version. Coverage of November’s landmark presidential election puts forward a similar feel good spin on what really amounts to a staged confrontation between costumed rivals. Admittedly, it’s difficult not to applaud the triumphant outcome of the “underdog” in this elaborately choreographed “battle”. The poised and telegenic President-Elect is a flawless package, even if his sleek exterior conceals the same corrosive elements that defined his predecessors. Once again, a multi-lateral marketing campaign yielded a simulacrum democratic movement under a new slogan. “Yes, we can!” heralded as a stroke of (marketing) genius on par with “I have a Dream” (but without all the pesky nuance, intellectual depth and angry black guy connotations) was less a continuation of Dr King’s groundbreaking speech than having evolved from the brain trust that once declared Coca-Cola “The Great National Temperance Beverage.”

By the time he officially enters the White House with his revived cabinet of Clinton appointees, President Obama will have calmed the angry public backlash at the executive responsible for tampering with an established brand of “soft” Imperialism and exposing it as a crude, corpse strewn land grab. Like the subsequently re-branded “Coke Classic,” Brand Obama has never been about “change” but merely reversion to an executive branch that pretends to “feel your pain” while continuing to inflict it even more brutally on vulnerable and impoverished populations overseas.

Still weeks away from officially taking office, and already President-Elect Obama’s early supporters — those insignificant and ultimately embarrassing hordes of anti-war “progressives” who dug into near empty pockets to launch his grassroots campaign — are feeling the sting of betrayal with each passing news cycle announcing his cabinet picks. Perhaps we should not be surprised by his choice of hawkish economic and foreign policy advisors and “experts”, or the appointment of Lady MacClinton herself as Secretary of State. After all, contrary to popular belief, no one at Coca-Cola was fired or otherwise penalized for their role in perpetrating what is widely perceived as the worst marketing decision ever made for the simple reason that for all its bad publicity, the “miscalculation” proved ultimately beneficial to the architects of this “failure”. “Catastrophic success” then as now describes the unintended benefits that befall the mighty in the wake of a seemingly insurmountable setback.

Presidential candidate Obama might have questioned Senator Clinton’s judgment in authorizing the war in Iraq with her “yes” vote, but having measured the decorous curtains in his plush new quarters, perhaps he can afford to be magnanimous towards his former nemesis Bill Clinton. No doubt the old horn dog is salivating over the prospect of spending quality time with his next booty call while the Missus waddles across the world stage to collect her next consolation prize.

What pundits describe as the “seamless” White House transition currently underway should give us more reason to despair than hope. This smooth and apparently amicable transfer of power that the pundits insist is proof that civility and pragmatism are being restored to the nation’s highest office merely confirms that “change” and “hope” are, and always have been, euphemistic terms for “Business and Empire as Usual.” That should have been obvious when the “anti-war” candidate shifted his rhetorical stance from ending the bloodshed in Iraq to escalating the US military presence in Afghanistan. His groveling campaign speech to AIPAC was another indication that his conscience and intellect were impediments on the path to his “historic” presidency; short-term glitches in an otherwise flawlessly executed marketing campaign. His swift post-election appointment of Likud Party poster boy Rahm Emanuel as Chief-of-Staff, Joe “I am a Zionist” Biden as Vice-President, and of course, the selection of Hillary (“I will obliterate Iran”) Clinton to lead the State Department are further indications that the next US president is gearing up to serve as Israel’s next outsourced leader.

As he prepares to fulfill his duties overseeing the vast corporate/ military apparatus required to sustain his newly adopted homeland, the last thing we should expect from this “agent of change” is, say, a rational and humane response to the humanitarian crisis currently playing out in Gaza as Israel’s deadly blockade of the occupied territories intensifies, or a swift withdrawal of US troops from Iraq as promised early on his campaign. Nor should we expect the media under an Obama presidency to relinquish its role as the propaganda arm of an National Security State comprised of a willfully misinformed electorate unable to distinguish between Brand A Cola and its political counterpart. After all, voters, content to passively adore their beloved candidate from a viral YouTube video or a Huffpo blog post extolling his sterling qualities, did not set a mandate for their “agent of change” or otherwise instruct him to implement policy that represented a significant departure from the current one. It was enough, it turns out, to project one’s hopes on to an abstractly held notion of “change” and bask in the warm glow of being part of a movement, even if the movement was little more than a disgraced brand’s temporary recall of a product tainted by bad publicity.

The one time community organizer turned politician has finally revealed himself as a viral marketing phenomenon on par with Max Headroom, Coca Cola’s virtual, lantern jawed mascot whose appeal rested on his ability to convey nothing and everything simultaneously. Depending on the psychological profile of the consumer, the remote, disembodied Cola mascot was either a figure of strength and authority or a “new wave” icon thumbing his digital nose at the old order. This enigmatic shape shifter was reborn in the Senator from Illinois who similarly and deceptively conveyed youth and rebellion while advocating the same kind of muscular foreign policy of his predecessors. This cynically contradictory message did not appear to cause discomfiture among Obama’s centrist base, who insist to this day that the “grassroots” nature of his early campaign and the “cool” factor he was able to engender in a process that traditionally overlooks the role of young voters somehow mitigates the President-Elect’s transformation from agent of “change” to establishment hawk waiting to serve out Bush’s third term.

Where “Classic” was once stamped on a hastily reconfigured pop can to distinguish it from its internal rival, “Hope” became the official slogan of a disgraced brand desperately seeking to re-establish its dominant market share with a quick fix solution. Just as consumers never noticed that the cheaper sweetening agent that had replaced liquid cane sugar in the “old” Coke was now the staple ingredient of “Classic” Coke, most of us remain blissfully non-cognizant of the sleight of hand deceptions going on behind the scenes as Brand USA relaunches itself as a continuation of the status-quo.