NEWS DISSECTOR IN MOTION:

FROM YANKEE STADIUM TO PAKISTAN
FROM FALUN GONG TO BEANTOWN
DEBATING THE CREDIT SQUEEZE

There is a famous song about the city I am writing from, a show tune really. The memorable lyric is, “The Bronx us up and the Battery’s down and New Yorkers ride in a hole in the ground.”

That’s what I did last night in one of those evenings when world’s converged for me for reasons I will spare you. I started by taking the D Train up to Yankee Stadium in the borough I grew up in. A TV newscast called the weather “beautiful.”

A generous benefactor dropped a ticket on me for a cushy seat right behind home plate— literally. It was up against the fence in the season ticket holders section, a community of well to do baseball fanatics who live for The Game, and who know every stat by heart. I met someone who can tell you who threw what to whom in the outfield on a certain day in 1996.

I came up from underground, from that hole in the ground, right on River Avenue in Yankee Nation with its endless souvenir stands and paraphernalia stores that brought me back to my own youth when I had a Yankee cap that seemed to have been surgically implanted in my head. I once saw Joe DiMaggio run the bases and could name all the greats who played in those years in the House that Ruth built.

I started having flashbacks as I surged with the crowds surging towards THE stadium and watched grown men carrying baseball gloves in to the stands in hopes of catching a wayward fly. It was a familiar scene and I fell right into step. Go Yankees.

The Marine band played the Star Spangled banner and its been obvious that the patriotically correct part of our culture seized on fusing their propaganda into baseball by adding more anthems to the program and more security people at the door to stoke our fears in the name of security.

Bush world targeted the seventh inning stretch to target us with renditions of God Bless America. Their subtext is not so sub. Sports is no stranger to nationalism as every World Cup shows us. And don’t forget Moscow in 1980 or Berlin in ’36.

It’s also still a macho world but a NY tabloid recently reported that the Yankees now have more female fans then males. I saw one of them, right behind me—a lady in waiting—Derek Jeter’s girl friend. We even shook hands. I won’t wash my hands for a week.

By the time the fourth inning rolled around with no score, I was almost getting bored even as I marveled at my good fortune in the best seats in the house, right on the field of what was once the national pastime and is now a humongous high priced and highly paid industry. As someone making a film about credit cards, I was struck that MBNA was out front shilling for the Yankees’ own Credit Card. They have no shame. They even give you a free gift for joining up…..mmmm.

It was soon back into the hole in the ground. It was on to the next event. From the Bronx I headed back downtown, from the D to the A and to another world and another game, The Tribeca Film Festival in the posh environs of Battery Park City, a far cry from the Apartments on 161 St, across the street from where they finally decided to build the Freedom Tower. Work started yesterday once it was decided how much everyone would make. Brace yourselves for the cost overruns.

I went to see a film I helped make at its premiere directly across the street from Ground Zero. That was the perfect location for the Jihadi and the Journalist, the story of the murdered and martyred reporter Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal journo but a man who had transcended so many categories while he lived, using his pen and his music to promote understanding and tolerance.

In a world where the two fundamentalist forces at war seem to believe we have to live in a back and white version of reality. Thus people like Pearl stood out as models of independence and the possibility of reconciliation and peace and so had to be stomped out. It was the same logic that led nationalist Serbs to declare war on Sarajevo to make an example out of a multi-ethnic success story that offended their ideology and worldview.

HBO has bought the film directed by Allu Jamal, a Pakistani and Ramesh Sharma an Indian, who courageously transcended their own national suspicions to work together in the spirit of Daniel Pearl to shed light on his senseless murder and the geo politics behind it.

I was privileged to work on it thanks to the intervention of South Africa’s Anant Singh who helped produce the movie. The crowd seemed to love it. The audience included executives from Reuters and MTV and the Journal. Everyone was moved.

I am not supposed to enthuse about the film until HBO airs it but if you live in NY, you can see it one more time on Saturday at the AMC theater on 34th Street. If you do, tell me what you think.

I am sure the fans that packed the stadium and pledged allegiance to the star spangled one more time uptown know very little of what was behind the events of 911 that figure in this film. No one has done this kind of investigation. Christine Amanpour narrates.

Our country has become more and more sports focused and depoliticized. Back in the 60’s after I evolved from my Bronx Bomber fetish, I began to realize that the World Series was not really a world series but an America-only event. I also started hearing slogans from the world, especially out of Latin America that said YANKEE GO HOME. The Yankees had been my home until I moved away from their seductions into a larger world.

It’s too late to go on and on in this vein but the relationship between sports and politics and news is a tangled one. To understand our culture, you have to try to penetrate it. The man who set Daniel Pearl up for slaughter was a sportsman in his own way. More on that later.

Today, I start the day in New York and end it in Boston. I have been asked by the colleagues of Dr Wang, who screamed at the Presidents of China and The United States of Amnesia to come to a press conference defending her. Obviously, her emotional outpouring was considered unprofessional by journalists and there has been no shortage of commentary on how improper it was, and how stupid for our security obsessed White House to allow her near such powerful people. The implication is that the newspaper she worked for should not have been allowed in the White House. That sounds like the way China treats media its officials want silenced,

Obviously we don’t expect journalists to freak out that way but in our climate today when so many in the White House press corps are so deferential and cowed, it was a refreshing to see someone with a heart and a passion on the scene. She is not really a journalist as much as doctor and PhD Scientist and her point was to call attention to claims that the Chinese are “harvesting” live organs from political detainees, fellow Falun Gong members.

Can this be?

I don’t know but shouldn’t our media try to find out? There has been too much dumping on the gutsy messenger and not enough exploration of her message. That’s what I am going to say. The story in its own way is as ghoulish as the beheading of Daniel Pearl. I was told that the White House asked Dr. Wang not to talk about it even AFTER she was arrested.

Isn’t that interesting and worth reporting, if true?

I was in China not long ago and there’s a lot about the country that is moving and memorable. Human rights abuses are not among them. So let’s defend Dr.Wang’s right to free speech even if some us disapprove the scene she made. She’s a bit like that Chinese hero who stopped a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. By breaking the rules, he made history. And so has she.

You don’t have to agree with everything Falun Gong believes. I don’t and I wrote a whole book about their emergence (”Falun Gong’s Challenge to China,” Akashic Books 2000). I concluded they are not an evil cult as Beijing charges. Are they any more of a sect, say than the Neo Cons? Are they a sect at all? Do they deserve to be marginalized and ostracized like lepers? What if they are right?

As I wrote the other day quoting Chairman Mao: “No investigation, no right to speak.”

To the media gang: how about some investigations?

Here are their reports. Where are ours?

http://clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2001/7/28/12594p.html

http://www.theepochtimes.com/211,111,,1.html

Later in the day I am off to Boston to speak and show WMD at Emerson College on Tremont Street at 7 PM. Then I will be back in NYC for the peace march Saturday. I plan to sell some books and DVDS at a table in Foley Square. If you are around, stop by and say hi and help out.

And if you missed us on CSPAN, BOOK TV to their credit is rebroadcasting Rory O’ Connor’s conversation with me on Saturday night about “When News Lies.” 7PM PST and 10 PM EST Check it out and tell your friends.

Thats all the promotion commotion I have time for.

Whew! This is exhausting just to talk about.

Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org