Month: May 2007

Liberation

by digby

The video is shaky, but the brutality is clear.

A slender, black-haired girl is dragged in a headlock through a braying mob of men. Within seconds, she is on the ground in a fetal position, covering her head in her arms in a futile attempt to fend off a shower of stones.

Someone slams a concrete block onto the back of her head. A river of blood oozes from beneath her long, tangled hair. The girl stops moving, but the kicks and the rocks keep coming, as do the victorious shouts of the men delivering them.

In the eyes of many in her community in northern Iraq, 17-year-old Duaa Khalil Aswad’s crime was to love a boy from another religion. She was a Yazidi, an insular religious sect. He was a Sunni Muslim. To Aswad’s uncle and cousins, that was reason enough to put her to death last month in the village of Bashiqa.

Women’s groups say the video shows Iraq’s backward slide as religious and ethnic intolerance takes hold.

“There is a new Taliban controlling the lives of women in Iraq,” said Hanaa Edwar, a women’s activist with the Iraqi Al-Amal Association a non-governmental group in Baghdad. “I think this story will be absolutely repeated again. I believe if security is not controlled, such stories will be very common.”

You can view more of the video at this Chicago Tribune link. WARNING: the video at the Trib is much worse than the one above.

I think what is most amazing to me is that this doesn’t take place in some tent in the middle of the desert or a stone hut. These people are not dressed in tribal garb — they are wearing jeans and t-shirts and the whole thing takes place in a street in what appears to be a modern town. It isn’t the Moqtada al Sadr brigade or Al Qaeda extremists —it’s not part of the civil war although according to the article, many Iraqis are trying to rationalize it as such. This is nothing but barbaric patriarchal violence perpetrated by our alleged allies, the Kurds, toward a teen-age girl:

The story of the stoning still has received relatively little attention in Iraq. The news of the killing of the Yazidi men two weeks later in apparent retaliation for Duaa Aswad’s death drew more attention from the local media. Iraqi women say that’s a sign of the country’s obsession with the sectarian and political implications of violence at the expense of concern about women’s rights, and particularly a girl’s death.

“I am really sorry that we have turned to processing issues this way,” said Ghasan Alyas, a Yazidi teacher living in Bashiqa.

“Some say that external forces are behind what happened,” she said, referring to the accusations of Arab meddling. “But I think this is an illusion. The thought of a third party invisibly involved in whatever is happening is just a way of excusing ourselves and our ignorant culture from its responsibilities.”

I have to agree with this. It isn’t political, at least in the typical sense and it isn’t even a result of the invasion, although the chaotic atmosphere surely fuels the behavior. This is the fault of primitive religious fundamentalism, which is across the board, in every culture, contemptuous of women.

This is why I have contempt for tribalism, fundamentalism and authoritarianism. When it gets right down to it, it’s always, in the end, about mob rule. A gang of violent bullies, often at the behest of some authority figure, “sends a message” by publicly humiliating, maiming or killing one of their own who had the temerity to fail to properly conform. Whether for God or country or tribe, it’s always some poor victim, lying on the ground, covering his or her head, surrounded by people who have turned into animals.

There are a lot of manifestations of this particular human organizational style, some much more sophisticated and stylized. The violence becomes more ritualized and the humiliation takes other forms but underneath it all, the same impulse to dominate drives a fair number of people of all cultures. It’s just a matter of degree.

This is the reason why it’s so important to preserve our secular, reason-based constitution and fight against this horror of government endorsed torture and indefinite imprisonment. It is a very, very thin line between civilization and barbarism and every step we take away from the rule of law is a step toward becoming that primitive mob of killers. After all, I’m sure they felt justified too.

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Sacred Spending

by digby

In this article about the search for the missing soldiers in iraq, I came across this astounding figure:

The military still spends about $100 million a year finding fallen soldiers from earlier wars—a B-24 navigator shot down in 1944 was recovered in Croatia and buried in Michigan just two weeks ago. Before the Korean War, though, American GIs—like British colonial soldiers—were buried in foreign lands where they fell. Bringing home the dead for burial is a relatively modern phenomenon.

Can that figure be true? If so, it’s completely irrational.

I certainly have no problem bringing home the bodies of fallen troops but $100 million for earlier wars? What on earth could they be spending it on?

There is simply no way that they can be legitimately spending that much money to search for missing bodies in Vietnam and Korea. This sounds like a good old Military Industrial Complex scam to me. Does anyone know anything about this?

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The Mid-Wife Defense

by digby

Those of you who’ve been following the saga of that paragon of family values, Ted Klaudt, will find this deeply ironic.

The very conservative, traditional Klaudt, you will recall, got his teen-age foster daughters to agree to sell their eggs for $20,000 and then proceeded to perform the necessary “exams” himself. Here’s Ted:

Tristero did a nice rundown of the legislation the highly moral, upholder of traditional family values sponsored when he was in the legislature. But he missed one:

HOUSE BILL NO. 1294

Introduced by: Representatives Begalka, Bradford, Elliott, Fryslie, Hackl, Klaudt, Lange, McCaulley, Olson (Ryan), and Valandra and Senators Koskan, Apa, Duenwald, Greenfield, Kooistra, Moore, and Napoli

FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to define midwifery and to prescribe the relationship between midwives and nurse midwives.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That § 36-9A-1 be amended by adding thereto NEW SUBDIVISIONS to read as follows:

“Midwife,” a woman who assists other women during pregnancy and childbirth;

“Midwifery,” the work of a midwife;

“Non-nurse midwife,” a midwife who is either not a nurse, or who, if she is a nurse, is not holding herself out as a nurse midwife practicing pursuant to § 36-9A-13.
Section 2.
That chapter 36-9A be amended by adding thereto a NEW SECTION to read as follows:

The provisions of this chapter do not apply to the practice of midwifery by any non-nurse midwife.

Perhaps Klaudt thought of himself as a non-nurse midwife?

In any case, his record shows a man obsessed with legislating a woman’s “area” in a variety of ways. I think psychologists could probably add this sort of thing to a profile. It certainly seems to be a common element of conservative Republican perversion.

H/T to Jane Hamsher and her reader Bill S

Loudmouths

by digby

Following up on his earlier post about the American Legion (which I also wrote about here last week) Rick Perlstein reminds us all that the dirty hippies weren’t the only ones who treated the Vietnam Vets like dirt. Indeed, the American Legion was among the worst offenders:

They were the kind of veterans who – Gerald Nicosia tells the story in his history of Vietnam Veterans Against the War – greeted the antiwar veterans who had marched 86 miles from Morristown, New Jersey to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, just like George Washington’s army in 1877. The World War II veterans heckled them:

“Why don’t you go to Hanoi?”

“We won our war, they didn’t, and from the looks of them, they couldn’t.”

A Vietnam vets hobbled by on crutches. One of the old men wondered whether he had been “shot with marijuana or shot in battle.”

I forgot, too, about their political interference in a prominent trial. The Legion post in Columbus, Georgia, home of Lt. William Calley’s Fort Benning jail cell, promised they would raise $100,000 to help fund the appeal of the man convicted of murder in the My Lai Massacre “or die trying”: “The real murderers are the demonstrators in Washington,” they said, “who disrupt traffic, tear up public property, who deface the American flag. Lieut. Calley is a hero….. We should elevate him to saint rather than jail him like a common criminal.”

One thing I would take issue with about this (sorry Rick) is the idea that these were “old men.” Most of them were in their 40’s and early 50’s, and in our culture of the time they were supposed to be the masters of the universe — the Husbands and the Dads who fought the Big One and came home to take back their role as the Big Boss, at least in their own lives. They had sacrificed much and here they were, at the height of their power, watching the edifices of a whole lot of heritable prerogatives falling down around them. Many of them were very, very pissed.

And you have to be a little bit sympathetic. Their youths were spent fighting a truly vicious, if righteous, war. They saw things. As a result, despite their recent Disneyfied canonization at the hands of the Monsignor and Tom Brokaw, they were not the healthiest individuals in the world: they were extremely complicated people. And they certainly weren’t innocent or silent.

I remember hearing in my own home that Calley was a hero, which was the kind of thing you heard all the time coming from some Greatest Generation guys. The gay-baiting was also entirely common, as was the assumption that Vietnam vets were all cowards. These particular WWII vets were not a monolith, of course, and there were many who were able to see the moral ambiguity of the situation and who granted respect to those who served in Vietnam (and even some of the college kids and draftees who were sincerely trying to end the war — and change the world.) But don’t kid yourself. There were tens of thousands of WWII vets who were just this side of fascist and who considered anyone who didn’t follow their government with a crisp salute and click of the heels to be a commie or a “fag” or both. They were a common and dominating feature of living through the 1960’s and 70’s.

As someone who grew up listening to vile characterizations of vets from other vets, and who witnessed first hand the macho denigration of anyone who failed to toe the line, I can’t help but be stunned to see how the history of the era has been rewritten to reflect that it was solely the unruly college kids who destroyed the Democrats. Talk about blaming the victims — there was an amazing amount of blind malevolence and sheer hatred that emanated from the vaunted silent majority during those times. They had plenty to say and they said it — as loudly and obnoxiously as the hippies ever did. The 60’s were a two way street.

(Perhaps if the Monsignor weren’t making millions writing Hallmark Cards and patting himself on the back, he might be interested in writing about what these people really thought about the amazing times in which they lived — with all the self actualization and loss of pretension that only very old age can sometimes bring. Ask Jimmy Carter…)

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Are You A Total Asshole?

by tristero

Don’t worry about it, these days it won’t affect your ability to get an important job. ‘Cause the more of an asshole you are, the more likely Bush’ll hire you:

Karl Zinsmeister is currently President Bush’s chief domestic policy adviser, hired when Claude Allen stepped down after being charged with shoplifting.

Before joining the White House, Zinsmeister was editor in chief of The American Enterprise, the conservative think tank’s magazine. In a piece he wrote in 1996, Zinsmeister stated, “[C]olorblindness has become a real risk today. … The penalty for the person who, ignoring race, turns down the wrong street today can literally be death.”

A new article in The New Republic shows that Zinsmeister was also hostile toward women…[from the article]

But the biggest grievance harbored by the magazine’s staff concerned Zinsmeister himself. “He went to his son’s basketball game, and then he would give Jo [Roback-Pal] a hard time about a doctor’s appointment,” Rollins says. … While Zinsmeister frequently complained about Roback-Pal to other staffers at the magazine — telling [then-business manager Garth] Cadiz that she was “useless” and “never there” — her former colleagues say that she never missed a deadline and that he was “abusive” toward her. When she angered him by taking a four-month maternity leave, Zinsmeister told Cadiz, “I am never going to hire another woman because they just get pregnant and leave.

Holding Hans

by digby

My favorite election suppressor Hans von Spakovsky caught the attention of McClatchy this week-end:

Von Spakovsky, who had been a longtime voting rights activist and elections official in Georgia before serving at Justice, accepted a presidential recess appointment to a Republican slot on the Federal Election Commission in December 2005. He is scheduled to appear at a June 13 confirmation hearing before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.

Calling Orville Reddenbacher.

Here’s the committee:

Dianne Feinstein, CA
Chairman

Robert Bennett, UT
Ranking Member

Robert C. Byrd
Ted Stevens
Daniel K. Inouye
Mitch McConnell
Christopher J. Dodd
Thad Cochran
Charles E. Schumer
Trent Lott
Richard J. Durbin
Kay Bailey Hutchison
E. Benjamin Nelson
C. Saxby Chambliss
Harry Reid
Patty Murray
Lamar Alexander
Chuck Hagel
Mark L. Pryor

I think I’ll send along a little note to my senator Dianne Feinstein. And I think it would also be a great opportunity for presidential candidate Chris Dodd to step up and take on this very important issue of vote suppression. I think I’ll send him a note too. Chuck Shumer and Harry Reid will obviously want to have a good chat with Hans, as will Dick Durbin, so I’ll send along a note to them too. I might even give their offices a jingle before the committee meets just to let them know how much I appreciate that a right wing hit man like Von Spakovsky is thoroughly questioned and hopefully removed from the FEC.

Von Spakovsky has been at the very center of everything the Republicans have been doing to rig the vote for the past decade. He was with VIP when they launched the drive to “purge ” the voter rolls in advance of the stolen 2000 election. He was the main hack the Bushies installed in the civil rights division at the Justice Department to set them up for 2004 and beyond. He is now on the FEC, where Bush put him in a recess appointment. He’s been busy there too:

The House Administration Committee is also inquiring into von Spakovsky’s communications with the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that implemented a 2002 election reform law and serves as a national election information clearinghouse.

The bipartisan, four-member commission stirred a political tempest last year when it delayed the release of voter fraud and voter ID law studies, saying that more research was needed. A House panel revealed last month that the fraud study’s central finding – that there was little evidence of widespread voter fraud – had been toned down to say that “a great deal of debate” surrounded the subject.

Commissioners rejected as flawed the second study’s finding that voter ID laws tend to suppress turnout, especially among Latinos, and ordered more research.

Rich said that von Spakovsky usurped his seat on a commission advisory panel in 2004, although the law creating the panel allocated that spot for the Voting Rights Section chief “or his designee.” Rich said he was not consulted.

After the commission hired both liberal and conservative consultants to work on the studies in 2005, e-mails show that von Spakovsky tried to persuade panel members that the research was flawed.

In an Aug. 18, 2005, e-mail to Chairman DeGregorio, he objected strenuously to a contract award for the ID study to researchers at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, who were teaming with a group at Rutgers University.

Von Spakovsky wrote that Daniel Tokaji, the associate director of Moritz’ election program, was “an outspoken opponent of voter identification requirements” and that those “pre-existing notions” should disqualify him from federal funding for impartial research.

The criticism was ironic coming from von Spakovsky, who a few months earlier had written the anonymous article for the Texas Review of Law and Politics, in which he called voter fraud a problem of importance equal to racial discrimination at the polls. Von Spakovsky acknowledged writing the article after joining the FEC.

Months after its publication, he participated in the department’s review of Georgia’s photo ID law, as required under the 1965 Voting Rights Act for election laws passed in 16 Southern states. After the department approved it, a federal judge struck it down as akin to a Jim Crow-era poll tax on minority voters.

Rich called von Spakovsky’s failure to withdraw from the case “especially disturbing, given the clear ethical concerns” over his prior work as a Georgia elections official and the bias in his article.

Von Spakovsky’s tone toward DeGregorio grew increasingly harsh in 2005 as the chairman refused to take partisan stands, said two people close to the commission who declined to be identified because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Their differences seemed to come to a head last year over two issues raised by Arizona’s Republican secretary of state, Janice Brewer, who was implementing the toughest state voter identification law in the nation. In April 2005, the Justice Department erroneously advised her that Arizona did not need to offer a provisional ballot to those lacking proof of citizenship.

E-mails suggest that von Spakovsky contacted an aide to Missouri Republican Sen. Kit Bond, who inquired of DeGregorio whether the commission was “seriously considering taking a position against” the department on the provisional ballot question.

DeGregorio sent a testy message asking von Spakovsky if the note from Capitol Hill was “an attempt by you to put pressure on me.”

“If so, I do not appreciate it,” he wrote.

The next day, von Spakovsky wrote DeGregorio that he thought they “had a deal” under which the department would reconsider its position on provisional ballots if the commission would allow Arizona to modify the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship.

“I do not agree to `deals,’ especially when it comes to interpretation of the law,” DeGregorio replied.

Last September, the White House replaced DeGregorio with Caroline Hunter, a former deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee. DeGregorio confided to associates that he was told that von Spakovsky influenced the White House’s decision not to reappoint him, said the two people close to the panel.

Asked about his ouster, DeGregorio said only that he “was aware that Mr. von Spakovsky was not pleased with the bipartisan approaches that I took.”

If the Democrats want to get to the bottom of the GOP voter suppression program, they might want to prepare for a very intensive hearing. He’s one of the top go-to vote rigging guys in the Republican party.

Update: Maha has some more good stuff on Von Spakovsky.

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Leading Man

by digby

This is probably not the smartest choice of words:

“I, frankly, view what’s taking place in Washington today as pure political theatre. And it is this kind of political theatre that has caused the American people to lose confidence in how Washington operates,” Mr Bush said.

He would know:

Historians will wonder if he was president or the first lady of the American theatre.

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Believe Me

by digby

Don’t you just hate it when people lie to your face about something about which you both know the truth? It’s often the kind of thing a boss will do to find out how far you are willing to go to stay in his good graces — another version of the old “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes.” Will you defend your own sanity or will you tug your forelock and agree to an absurd assertion in order to show fealty to your liege Lord? It’s a way of keeping people in line — force them to abandon their principles and even their notion of truth in order to keep their jobs. It’s quite effective.

That is apparently what happened to the senior members of the Justice Department after the hospital drama:

May 28, 2007 issue – Former deputy attorney general James Comey gave a riveting account of a hospital-room confrontation over President George W. Bush’s warrantless-wiretapping program. But Comey’s testimony last week told only part of the story of the clash sparked when Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel, and the then White House chief of staff Andrew Card tried to get an ailing John Ashcroft to recertify Bush’s supersecret surveillance activities…

After the incident, there were recriminations over what Comey portrayed as an attempt by Bush’s top lawyer and chief of staff to “take advantage” of a very ill man. Comey didn’t tell the Senate panel that the bad feelings were stoked even more the next morning when White House officials explained the hospital visit by saying Gonzales and Card were unaware that Comey was acting A.G. (and therefore the only person authorized to sign off on the surveillance program), according to a former senior DOJ official who requested anonymity talking about internal matters. Top DOJ officials were furious, the source said. Just days earlier, Justice’s chief spokesman had publicly said Comey would serve as “head of the Justice Department” while Ashcroft was ill. Justice officials had also faxed over a document to the White House informing officials of this. When a Gonzales aide claimed the counsel’s office could find no record of it, DOJ officials dug out a receipt showing the fax had been received. “People were disgusted as much as livid,” said the DOJ official. “It was just the dishonesty of it.” A Gonzales aide at the time (who asked not to be ID’d talking about internal matters) said there was a “miscommunication” and “genuine confusion” over who was in charge. Democratic senators plan a no-confidence vote in Gonzales. They also want him to explain his testimony last year that “there has not been any serious disagreement” about the terrorist-surveillance program.

This is so lame that you have to believe it was one of those tests. The White House counsel didn’t know that the Attorney General, who was in the ICU, had officially turned over his duties? Please. If he didn’t he should have been fired for incompetence.

But this whole thing fails to account for the shocking fact that in this event, they were willing to have a man who was extremely ill and high on drugs sign off on a secret program that was so controversial that the upper echelon of the DOJ were all refusing to recertify it (including, as it turned out, John Ashcroft himself.)Is that supposed to be acceptable even if he hadn’t technically turned over the office to his deputy? Who are these sick people?

This was a typical Bush/Cheney/Rove style power play. They tried a completely unethical end-run that didn’t work and then they attempted to make the Justice Department swallow a lie that was so lame that it could only have been a loyalty test. How infuriating.

It’s a shame they all didn’t resign anyway. An awful lot of damage could have been avoided if more people had. I’m sure it seemed important to stick — post 9/11 was a stressful time and a lot of people were unsure of their bearings. Still, as more time passes it has become clear that it would have been better if they had all quit.

It’s a hard thing to do — whistleblowers are often somewhat eccentric, because you have to be the kind of unusual person who is willing to go against the prevailing wisdom and throw yourself in front of extremely powerful institutions and people who are deeply threatened by what you have to say. I get why so few people ever do it. And I also get that for many law and order types especially, they may have felt that they were needed on the inside both because of the threat of terrorism and the threat of the rolling constitutional coup that has taken place under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. (And it’s not as if the congress or the press were backing up those who did speak out.)

But looking back I still wish they’d all resigned. There are far worse things than being vilified by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter — and we should all be willing to be called fools if it might save the constitution. Still, I’m grateful to those who are speaking out now. Better late than never.

Update: Dover Bitch reminds me that this is not the first we’ve heard of Card lying about the matter. Oh my:

“What conduct? We were just there to wish him well.”

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The Fetus Stands Alone

by digby

Here’s an interesting op-ed from Hugh Hewitt’s blog partner explaining why he is “pro-life” even though he is not religious. It’s very simple:

The big moral question regarding abortion is, “When does life begin?” …

You might expect that since I’m pro-life, I would argue that life begins at conception. Actually, that’s not quite right. In answering the question of when life begins, the best I can do is say “I don’t know.” Life may begin at conception. It may begin during pregnancy. Or it may begin at childbirth. While I have a feeling that life begins at conception, I certainly can’t prove it.

The only people who can say with absolute certainty and total conviction when life begins do so as a matter of faith or belief, not as the inevitable result of a logical process. This is every bit as true for the pro-choice absolutists who feel that life begins only at birth as it is for people who believe that life begins at conception. Indeed, I would argue that the pro-choice absolutists rely much more on something unknown and unprovable than their pro-life sparring partners.

Even though my “I don’t know” answer may be frustratingly inconclusive, it does have clear moral and policy implications. In our society, Roe v. Wade drove us to a court-ordered “consensus” that life doesn’t begin until close to birth. But what if that “consensus” is wrong? What if life begins earlier? What if it begins at conception? If that’s the case, then the implications are beyond horrifying. It means that our country has taken 45 million innocent lives through abortion since Roe v. Wade, all with the explicit sanction of the law and therefore the implicit sanction of the rest of society.

Because we don’t know where life begins, the only logical thing to do is to err on the side of caution — the side of life. In other words, because an abortion might take an innocent life, it should be avoided. It should also be illegal in most cases.

This is not the first time I’ve heard this argument and it’s always quite compelling to hear a man make such a stark and simple logical argument about something which others seem to find so complicated. I suspect that is because there is one person involved in this great moral question who is rarely mentioned in such pieces. In fact, if you read the whole thing you will find that this man has managed to write an entire article about fetuses, pregnancy and abortion without even noting in passing the fully formed sentient human being involved so intimately in this that the whole argument takes place inside her body.

The “great moral issue” of when life begins is fascinating I’m sure. Much more fascinating than whether the state can compel people to bear children against their will. But I guess that’s an argument for another day. Today, we are talking about the meaning of “life” and that has no bearing on the vessel that contributes its DNA and lifeblood, incubates it for nine months inside itself and potentially bears its siblings. Certainly that vessel’s personhood and agency is irrelevant to the much greater issue of blastocyst rights. Why even bring it up?

H/T to BB

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The Problem With Selling Out

by tristero

Atrios finds nothing wrong with bands selling their tunes to the movies or to commercials, given that it is, after all, important for musicans to make money and making money with your music isn’t that easy. Well, on that point, Duncan will get no argument from me.

But I think he over-simplifies the issue. There is music to make a buck with. And then there is music. Rarely do the twain meet.

Some examples: it’s a little known fact that the “World’s First Supergroup” – Cream – did a beer commercial. Yes, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker wrote and recorded a beer jingle. Frank Zappa – yes, that Frank Zappa, did anti-drug PSAs (public service announcements) in the late 60’s (he was a well-known tee-totaler). And why not?

OTOH, there’s something a little…icky about the thought of Nirvana licensing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as the soundtrack for a Right Guard commercial. Or the Daily News grabbing the rights to “A Day In The Life” for a tv spot (“I read the news today, oh boy.” That’s right, folks! Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Read the news today. The Daily News! Now, with expanded sports coverage!). And as far as I know, neither Cream nor Zappa have licensed their “real” music for commercial purposes (or have done so very rarely.

In fact, this is a situation I have found myself in several times. And sure, I’m more than ready to license my music. With a few exceptions, notably Voices of Light, which simply is not available for commercial exploitation at any price. Why? I don’t know. I just feel uncomfortable about it.

But even that has an exception because there was indeed one time that I did license the piece. There lies a tale, because it was one helluva exception.

Kathryn Bigelow and Walter Murch wanted to use excerpts from VOL in a new film, called K-19: The Widowmaker. I had met Bigelow and respected her enormously as a director. And Murch – my God, Walter Murch! – in the film biz, Walter Murch is one of a handful of Real Ones, a poet, a genius, a savant. It was Murch who, legend has it, edited a film Coppola had written off as an unreleasable disaster, lived and even slept with the film for months on end, and the result was The Conversation, one of the great masterpiece of 70’s cinema. It was Murch who edited the sound on Apocalypse Now with such beauty and musicality it was almost symphonic – I once attended a lecture he gave on the helicopter scene where he played only the four-channel machine gun effects and then showed how the helicopter sounds were blended in. It was absolutely mind-boggling). And that’s only two random highlights from one of the greatest, most productive careers anyone has ever made in film.

And Walter Murch was interested in my music! Of course, I wanted Kathryn and him to use whatever they wanted. I almost felt under an artistic obligation.

And how did they use my music? Did they respect its integrity and careful construction? Of course not. We’re talking about artists here. Walter hadn’t edited my music. He had recomposed it, overlaying entirely different sections on top of themselves. He had also gone to the trouble of re-mastering some of the mixes. It was an entire re-imagining of my piece.

Now, I would have retched had a commercial producer dared to alter even a millisecond of my music. And believe me when I say that retching all the way to the bank – no amount of money makes it worth it (well, almost). But Murch and Bigelow – not only did they dare, they flaunted their alterations. If I had been truly horrified, I certainly would have said so, although I truly was flabbergasted when I heard what they did (mostly amazed that Walter had found wonderful harmonies that hadn’t occurred to me). But they are deeply accomplished artists that I love, they knew what they were doing, they wanted to use my work, and that, as far as I was concerned was the end of it.

Yes, of course I was paid decently – not extravagantly, as these things go – for the license. And of course, the payment was a factor in letting them use it. After all, I don’t run a charity organization that donates to Hollywood films. But it was hardly THE factor. That was Murch and Bigelow.

I totally understand being angry when a piece of music you love turns up as part of a soundtrack hawking doggie yum-yums., even if I might have trouble articulating a plausible reason. Interestingly, The Doors are famous for having a very strict policy regarding the licensing of their music which has led to much bad blood between John Densmore (the drummer who insists “JIm wouldn’t want the music exploited”) and the other surviving Doors. But many of you know that there’s one conspicuous exception when a Doors song was licensed. It’s heard prominently at several points, in a great film that benefitted tremendously from the contributions of one Walter Murch.