Via Unfogged, pornish pages full of absurdist dittoheads displaying G’t’mo Pride sartorially. I guess I should get out more often. I’m the first to admit that the fat, greasy Limpopo has dropped off my radar, but I’d assumed he was dead, just another drug casuality, rather than a latter-day, born-again Malcolm McClaren pushing a t-shirt agendum.
Timothy Burke has written a nice little entry on neo-cons, the war in Iraq, and love poetry, triggered by this pæan to Paul Wolfowitz from David Brooks of the NYT. If only the evening news was so well written and reasoned.
This week’s news about the shooting of an Italian intelligence agent at a US-manned barricade is a good example. For months now, both Iraqis and observers have been talking about a pattern of reckless military aggression at checkpoints. They have often been met with overwrought, hysteric condemnation from pro-war pundits and bloggers, with accusations that showing concern over such incidents is just a tactic in a conspiratorial attempt to weaken the war effort. Hitchens hit the low note perfectly when he declared that the US can only lose in Iraq if it defeats itself, with the clear suggestion that any and all criticism of the war effort is a form of treason. Sorry, but that’s got it exactly opposite. If the war really is following the most generously constructed version of the neocon argument, it is absolutely crucial to treat every Iraqi citizen with the same presumptive respect as the US Constitution instructs the US government to treat its own citizens.
The whole point of the occupation is to demonstrate the virtues of the rule of law, to move Iraqis from subjugation to autocracy to a society in which their rights-bearing humanity is fully recognized by the state. I’m absolutely in sympathy with the soldiers at those checkpoints, with their legitimate anxieties and fearfulness, facing the very real possibility of death from suicide bombing. They’re not monsters when they shoot quickly at any possible threat. But at the same time, if you hand the men and women on those dangerous, deadly firing lines a ready-made alibi, if you don’t have meaningful oversight or a demand for restraint, even saints in time are going to pre-emptively open fire on anything that even vaguely concerns them, and more orphans and even allies are going to tumble out of the back of cars coated in the blood of their loved ones and associates. And afterwards, they’re going to say that the car was speeding, or failed to respond to commands, when very possibly the car and its inhabitants were guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the uncritical, unthinking defenders of the war habitually froth at the mouth every time this happens and cry “Rally round our troops, boys!”, presumptively believe that whatever the Pentagon is serving up today must be true, they’re turning their backs on their own declared war objectives. The Iraqis are owed the same oversight, diligence and skepticism about authority that we would demand for ourselves.
[quoted from Easily Distracted]
I’m confused. Bush has a mandate with, er, from America. He won the election, but the Right’s still complaining like it’s 1999. Here’s the latest from a not-so-compassionate conservative:
- BUSH USA is predominantly white; devoutly Christian (mostly Protestant); openly, vigorously heterosexual; an open land of single-family homes and ranches; economically sound (except for a few farms), but not drunk with cyberworld business development, and mainly English-speaking, with a predilection for respectfully uttering “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir.”
- GORE/KERRY USA is ethnically diverse; multi-religious, irreligious or nastily antireligious; more sexually liberated (if not in actual practice, certainly in attitude); awash with condo canyons and other high-end real estate bordered by sprawling, squalid public housing or neglected private homes, decidedly short of middle-class neighborhoods; both high tech and oddly primitive in its commerce; very artsy, and Babelesque, with abnormally loud speakers.
[Declaration of Expulsion in Human Events Online via Chicken or Beef?
Does the author think that proposing an ideological civil war is really the solution? Is this what Bush meant by starting the healing? The country is almost evenly divided between people who voted for Bush and those who voted for Kerry. White and Protestant, what happened to the Anglo-Saxons over the last century? But still anglophone and there’s no need for those loud speakers of Babelese. Sad and strange, it’s going to be a long four years.
Well, this explains a lot: “Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda”.
One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them. Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree.
[via rc3 dot org]
I haven’t been blogging too much about politics here in the States. Mainly because it’s just too damned depressing to think that Bush might actually win another four years (I’ve always been a pessimist) and finish off the job of destroying this republic. Long-time readers (“Hi, Steve!”) have been chastizing me about my dereliction of duties. Today, I ran across this interesting article by John Eisenhower, Ike’s son, on why he is voting for Kerry. [via Pedantry]
Today many people are rightly concerned about our precious individual freedoms, our privacy, the basis of our democracy. Of course we must fight terrorism, but have we irresponsibly gone overboard in doing so? I wonder. In 1960, President Eisenhower told the Republican convention, “If ever we put any other value above (our) liberty, and above principle, we shall lose both.” I would appreciate hearing such warnings from the Republican Party of today.
You’ve all seen those red and blue maps of the US of A, right? Well, Ishbadiddle has created some alternate maps correlating size of state to number of electoral votes and then some. [via Kerim at Keywords] Wonder why the liberal media hasn’t picked up on it yet? Too busy running stories about cats stuck in trees and the latest diet fad murders no doubt.
And, while I was trying to ignore the failure of German Spelling Reform in the Bundesrepublik [via Arts & Letters Daily], I ran across these storm clouds boiling across the blogosphere: Steven Krause blogging about pseudonymous blogging. Read the entry it’s quite interesting. That reminds me, has the regime-in-need-of-a-change apologized to those who have been wrongfully arrested for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts and suchlike at any of the president’s pep rallies? NB: free speech has been suspended until morale improves. [via Frogs and Ravens]
The national media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) posted this alert about Ronald Reagan. It’s a nice antidote to the current crop of encomia issuing forth from the press.
“Ronald Reagan was the most popular president ever to leave office,” explained ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas (6/6/04). “His approval ratings were higher than any other at the end of his second term.” Though the claim was repeated by many news outlets, it is not true; Bill Clinton’s approval ratings when he left office were actually higher than Reagan’s, at 66 percent versus Reagan’s 63 percent (Gallup, 1/10-14-01). Franklin Delano Roosevelt also topped Reagan with a 66 percent approval rating at the time of his death in office after three and a half terms.
An interesting article on Fallujah [via Kerim at Keywords] written by Rahul Mahajan.
A gentle, urbane man who speaks fluent English, Al-Nazzal is beside himself with fury at the actions of the U.S. military. (When I asked him if it was all right to use his full name, he said, “It’s ok. It’s all OK now. Let the bastards do what they want.”) He talks of coalition snipers targeting ambulances, being hit, of them killing women and children. Describing the horror that the siege of Fallujah has become, he says, “I have been a fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European and American civilization.”
Mahajan is also running a blog called Empire Notes about the war in Iraq. On April 12th, 1:20 PM EST [no permalinks], he had this to say:
Let’s just call [what’s happening in Fallujah] what it is. It’s an incredibly brutal collective punishment in defense of a regime, that of the occupation, that is less brutal than Saddam was but more than makes up for that with its negligence. Fewer people in the mass graves, more children dying for lack of medicine, more people being murdered on the streets or kidnapped. Hard to weigh all of the factors, but I’ve heard so many say, including Shi’a, that things are worse now.
Amongst the answers the President gave in his press conference yesterday was this:
Q: April is turning into the deadliest month in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, and some people are comparing Iraq to Vietnam and talking about a quagmire. Polls show that support for your policy is declining and that fewer than half Americans now support it. What does that say to you and how do you answer the Vietnam comparison?
The President: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy. Look, this is hard work. It’s hard to advance freedom in a country that has been strangled by tyranny. And, yet, we must stay the course, because the end result is in our nation’s interest.
Lists, lists, lists.
If it weren’t so scary, it’d be funny. Minister of War Donald Rumsfeld caught lying on videotape about his statements of the immediate threats of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq to the security of the USA. [via De Rerum Natura]
1. K. A. Dilday has penned a provoking article on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Jackson’s movie version of the same. [via wood s lot] “I can’t lay the sole blame for the Lord of the Rings’ atavistic classicism, racism and xenophobia with either auteur or author. It was Peter Jackson, the director, who chose his alabaster cast and decided that the camera would lovingly caress their sky-bold eyes.” And while we’re on it, was anybody else disturbed that Ralph Bakshi used rotoscoped Zulus for orcs in his animated travesty? 2. McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed / There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head / There’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands / You need one more drop of poison and you’ll dream of foreign land. [The Pogues, Shane MacGowan, The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn] 3. Who are these white male voters I hear tell of? Not sure I’d want to belong to any club, &c. [via Crooked Timber]
[Update 01/03/04: 4. Douglas Murray takes K. A. Dilday to task for her critique of The Lord of the Rings. Collapsing geography and race and describing how “every problem that has beset Britain has come from the East.”]
I ran across this statement on biological aspects of race by the AAPA (American Association of Physical Anthropologists) the other day, and I found it so reasonable, commonsensical, and counter to the general drift of things today. The statements eleven points are offered "as revisions of the 1964 UNESCO statement on race." I know it's not political correct, in the old sense of the term, to suggest that concepts like race, gender, and class are social constructs, but they are. Perhaps I'm just a bit old fashioned.
Well, my fellow citizens have gone and done it: they've dumped Gray "Mister Warmth" Davis and elected Arnold "the Gubernator" Schwarzenegger in his place. I guess all that mattered is that Arnold wasn't a professional politician, which translated means that his handlers will all be hand-picked political professionals. I don't know, governor of California seems like a step down from Mr Universe.
Speechless and chastened. [via Chicken or Beef?] The inventor of the B-Stik responded in a comment on the This Woman's Work blog.
So, it seems that GOP candidates have discovered the pleasures of learning a foreign language according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor. Though, I'd like to think that these guys are just expanding their horizons, it turns out that it's all a pragmatic issue: Hispanics are now the States' largest minority.
But for Republicans, language lessons seem especially important, as the ability to tap growing minority groups goes to the very future of their party.
"The Republican Party has been pretty homogeneous and white for a long time, and they are realizing that they are going to have to adapt to changing circumstances to stay in power," says F. Chris Garcia, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico.
[via Blogalization]
A twenty-year-old, Republican web designer is being sued by a former senator of South Dakota, Jim Abourezk, who also founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The web designer in question, Ben Marino, runs a website called ProBush dot com, amongst the pages of which is one with a long list of traitors. What is Marino's definition? If you do not support our President's decisions you are a traitor.
There is a disclaimer on the page, but Abourezk's attorney says that isn't enough. His client has been defamed. I was more concerned that the young man learn how to use the <img> tag so that his "traitors" all didn't look too fat or thin. If it's on purpose, maybe he needs another disclaimer. [via Beerzie Boy via Doughertyland]
Is diplomacy a kind of public relations? If you read John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton's new book, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, that's what you'd conclude. Jeffrey St. Clair, one of the editors over at CounterPunch wrote a review of the new book called: "War Pimps." Here's a taste:
To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spin meisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was either shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers who Powell tapped as Undersecretary of State in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was the grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses Ogilvey and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
Stauber and Rampton run a website called PR Watch. Reading the review, I ran across an interesting word: claque. A claque is a group of people hired to clap at a show. Well, the ancient Romans hired professional mourners to wail at their funerary rites.
I was looking for a picture of Otto Jespersen, the Danish linguist, when I came across a website for Otto Jespersen, the Norwegean comedian. I'm probably the last person in Blogovia to hear about his "controversial" US flag burning on TV back in February, and I was shocked and awed to read that he might be fined for it, but it seems the police decided to let him off with some choice publicity. I hear he also said something that upset the Crown Princess Mette-Marit's father Sven O. Hoeiby. (Better not let Desbladet hear about this, though somehow I'm sure he has.)
As the result of some playful commentary over on Desiderata, I've been trying to come to terms with the concepts of Northern and Southern California, as opposed to the mythical states of North and South California. It's all just a matter of physical, cultural, and political geography. Objectively, splitting the state in half physically would involve drawing a line west to east beginning somewhere around Monterey on the coast over through Clovis and on to the Nevada border near Death Valley somewhere west of Beatty. AJ, up in Chico, thinks that Northern California ends somewhere north of Sonoma county. Another concept thrown around was Central California. This would run north from Sonoma county down south to San Luis Obispo. There are even some people up in the Far North have kept the idea of a separate state alive. I always felt that while Del Norte and Siskiyou had more to do with Southern Oregon than California, Modoc had closer ties to Northwestern Nevada. Back in the '60s, state senator Richard Dolwig of San Mateo, introduced a bill to split the state in two, with South California being those counties south of the Tehachapi mountains. I suppose we could just succeed from the Union and reconstitute the Bear Flag Republic. Being a Sonoman, I'd approve of that. Meanwhile, politically, now we have to vote on whether or not we want the sitting governor to remain sitting.
[Addendum 07/27/03: Ernie, over at little. yellow different. has a whole different take on the whole North-South California thing vis-a-vis the Bay Area. Good Old Gold Mountain / Saint Francis; brittle, brittle. As for famous Oaklanders there's, of course, no-there-there, Dirty Gurdy Stein. via Chicken or Beef?]
Read my lips: "It ain't about the oil, stupid!" Maps and everything. Imagine Cheney et al. planning for the invasion of Iraq in March of 2001,and most importantly, the division of the spoils of war. [via Rafe Colburn's superb blog]
Gaius Publius, over on Counter Punch, has written a provocative moral indictment on the citizenry of the US of A. [via wood s lot]
So are the American people just stupid ("addled" as one commentator puts it), or is something else going on? Unless you really believe that Americans are less smart than the whole rest of the world — in fact, are less smart than you yourself (such an elitist thought!) — one can't help but consider the other conclusion, that things are exactly as most people want them, and if the facts are in the way, then goodbye facts.
In other words, one must consider that not only are the press and whistle-blower announcements swimming up the stream of Bushist damage control; they also swim up the stream of what the public, or a good part of it, wants and is determined to believe.
There are times when my hard-earned cynicism in the face of political reality fails me.
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity call for VP Cheney's resignation. [via rc3 dot org]
Dave Lindorff has written an article on some "new" terms to memorize for use during the current conflict in Iraq. (I see he's a fellow member of the National Writers Union.) Everything old is new again.
It's a rare time when linguistics and politics intersect on this blog, but now's the time. Ari Fleischer seems to have rewritten the rules of logical argumentation.
I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find. I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.
[Ari Fleicher, 07/09/03 press briefing]
Jim over on Everything Burns thinks it depends on what "is" means. I think it has more to do with what the antecedent for "they" is. The WMD-doubters? The WMD? Something else? Fleischer goes on to qualify:
We know he had them in the '90s, he used them. So just because they haven't yet been found doesn't mean they didn't exist. The burden is on the critics to explain where the weapons of mass destruction are. If they think they were destroyed, the burden is on them to explain when he destroyed them and where he destroyed them.
No, we didn't know he had them in the '90s, and therein lies the Bush regime's burden of proof.
[Addendum 07/12/03: Ian over at Desiderata has his take on Humpty Dumpty Fleischer semantics]
Here's the state of language legislation in France at the moment.
It seems a bit extreme to me, because I really don't think that French is in any danger of being replaced by English, now or in the foreseeable future. I wouldn't want my government telling me how to speak and write, which is why I don't care for the English as the official language legislation that is afoot here in the States either. (Here's a good set of links for those curious about US language politics.) It's ironic that a Canadian-Japanese immigrant linguist turned senator was involved.
Notre définition de la langue suppose que nous en écartons tout ce qui est étranger à son organisme, à son système, en un mot tout ce qu'on désigne par le terme de linguistique externe Cette linguistique-là s'occupe pourtant de choses importantes, et c'est surtout à elles que l'on pense quand on aborde l'étude du langage.
Ce sont d'abord tous les points par lesquels la linguistique touche à ethnologie …
En second lieu, il faut mentionner les raltions existant entre la langue et l'histoire politique …
Ceci nous amène à un troisième point: les rapportes de la langue avec des institutions de toute sorte, l'Église, l'école, etc. Celles-ci, á leur tour, son intimement liées avec le développement littéraire d'une langue, phénoméne d'autant plus général qu'il est lui-même inséperable de l'histoire politique. La langue littéraire dépasse de toutes parts les limites que semble lui tracer la littérature; qu'on pense à l'influence des salons, de la cour, des académies. D'autre part elle pose la grosse question du conflit qui s'élève entre elle et les dialectes locaux; le linguiste doit aussi examiner les rapports réciproques de la langue littéraire, produit de la culture, arrive à détacher sa sphère d'existence de la sphère naturelle, celle de la langue parlée.
[Ferdinand de Saussure. 1915. Cours de linguistique générale, introduction, chapitre 5]
Translation [Wade Baskin]:
My definition of language pressuposes the exclusion of everything that is outside its organism or system — in a word, of everthing known as "external linguistics." But external linguistics deals with many important things — the very ones that we think of when we begin the study of speech.
First and foremost come all the points where linguistics borders on ethnology …
Second come the relations between language and political history …
Here we come to a third point: the relations between languages and all sorts of institutions (the Church, the school, etc.). All these institutions in turn are closely tied to the literary development of a language, a general phenomenon that is all the more inseparable from political history. At every point the literary language oversteps the boundaries that literature apparently marks off; we need only consider the influence of salons, the court, and national academies. Moreover, the literary language raises the important questions of conflicts between it and the local dialects; the linguist must also examine the reciprical relations of book language and the vernacular; for every literary language, being the product of the culture, finally breaks away from its natural sphere, the spoken language.
Allan Miller sent me this great link for DIY posters to protest a Bush visit in Berlin on 22. and 23. May 2002. My favorite poster has a picture of Walter Brennan and says (in translation) Cowboys instead of War-mongers (it rhymes in German). It's worthwhile visiting just to download the international circle slash Bush sign. Reminds me how Reagan spoiled my exile in Bonn in 1985 by flying up and down the Rhine in a black helicopter. Oh, well.
Thomas L. Friedman has written a curious piece on why the US sent troops into Iraq, and it has little to do with WMD [via istori/blog]. According to the op-ed piece in the New York Times, there were four types of reason: real, right, moral, and stated. WMD was the stated reason, and it doesn't matter one way or another. The chilling "right" reason was the US needed to make a demonstration to the "Arab-Muslim" world that 9/11 was unacceptable. Who knows? He may be right, but I doubt that having a sitting president lie about the reason(s) for going to war, helps either here or abroad. Sure Saddam's a monster, but there's a bunch more where that came from. Sure it's about oil, as even Mr Friedman admitted grudgingly in a previous piece. So, who does Mr Bush think he's fooling? I think that there were more than four reasons for invading Iraq, and very few of them had neat and tidy categories to fall into like real, right, moral, and stated. Those are all just so many ethical weasel words, and whatever the reasons, ethics had little to do with it.
Weasel words are words that suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell. [Stewart Chaplin]
One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called weasel words. When a weasel sucks eggs, the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a weasel word after another, there is nothing left of the other. [Theodore Roosevelt]
And, in fact, a weasel word has become more than just an evasion or retreat. We've trained our weasels. They can do anything. They can make you hear things that aren't being said, accept as truths things that have only been implied, and believe things that have only been suggested. Come to think of it, not only do we have our weasels trained, but they, in turn, have got you trained. When you hear a weasel word, you automatically hear the implication. Not the real meaning, but the meaning it wants you to hear. [Carl Wrighter]
[via Virtual Salt: Critical Thinking Course]
And our appy-polly-loggies to Mr Benjamin Disraeli for the title munging.
The Engimatic Mermaid has posted an entry about how the government of Brazil is trying to legislate its citizens' language. The problem with language is that everybody speaks one (at least), and we all have opinions on ours. What's right? What's wrong? How the plebes are slaughtering our noble tongue. This relieves most people of their reason and allows them to discourse on matters better left undiscussed. This linguistic sickness is the goad that urges otherwise sane people to lobby for English First or English as the Official Language of the USA. I thought all those huddled masses yearning to be free of their ancestral languages and strange ways need only to be shown the blinding, political power of American English for them to come to their senses and assimilate. Why can't these pesky foreigners learn English like the rest of the world?
Surfing a blogroll [at Zizka] lead me to Orcinus and this article by David Neiwert on Eric Rudolph and the Face of Terror. Mr Neiwert ponders the differences and similarities between Islamic and Christian fundamentalist terrorism. Makes for a good, frightening read.
The Financial Times: "Jürgen Möllemann, former deputy leader of Germany's liberal Free Democrats, died on Thursday after his parachute failed to open during a parachute jump. Police indicated they suspect Mr Möllemann committed suicide. Mr Möllemann was an experienced hobby parachutist." [via a BBC radio news report]
Well, it turns out that the Second Gulf War was about oil after all and not about weapons of mass destruction or any of the other expediencies which the current regimementioned. Ipse dixit Wolfowitz.
Update: (Well, the link above is broken.) I, too, was fooled by reports in the press that quoted Wolfowitz as saying that Iraq was "swimming in oil." [via This Modern World] What Wolfowitz actually said:
Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.
The Swedish Minister of Migration, Jan O. Karlsson, was practising his idiomatic English the other day, and it's getting pretty good. Mr Karlsson joins a short list of foreign politicos (e.g., Canadian Françoise Ducros) who've been exercising their freedom of speech. Too bad the Prime Minister is not amused. [via Buttersquash Ranch]
"For bureaucratic reasons [the Bush administration] settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair. Does anybody care anymore? [via You Live Your Life As If It's Real via Wood S Lot] Sheesh!
It's been over a fortnight, and the neo-conservative libel against France continues, and yet it no proof has turned up. An article at CBS includes the text of a letter that the French ambassador Jean-David Levitte sent to members of Congress.
The President has a new mission: the Healthy Forests Initiative. You see the forests are overcrowded and need to be thinned out, i.e., logged. Reminds me of a movie my friend Eli Bleich made back in the late sixties called Let the Fires Burn during the Nixon administration. They never showed it. Meanwhile, up in the Redwood Empire, Arcata (in Humboldt county) has criminalized the USA Patriot Act. The EFF has this to say about the act itself.
Well, Rumsfeld wants Congress to lift a ban on studying the use of low-yield nukes in war. Not to worry, it's just a study, but if they got off the whiteboards they might come in handy in getting rid of biological weapons. Can you say "arms race?" Good, I thought you could. Just some more money down the rabbit hole of the military-industrial complex.
Using public transit to get home last week after teaching class, I saw this Tom Tomorrow cartoon in one of the local alternative newspapers. It is funny and probably the reason why Ari Fleicher is retiring from his office as President Bush's pie-hole (PR guy). When I was in the private sector, slaving away in the belly of the great software beast, we called it "pursuing other opportunities elsewhere." It meant you'd been downsized. You want fries with that pink slip?
According to an article by Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei in the Washington Post President Bush is suffering from little or no political fallout from his administration's failure to turn up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This had been reason number one for the urgency of going to war without an OK from the United Nations. Oh, well, apathy rules. One wonders what kind of ordnance would have been aimed at or dropped on the previous US president in the same circumstances. Oh dear, oh my. The Democrats in Congress seem to be suffering from the same malaise.
I've been waiting to see what the French would have to say, and they've finally said it. The ambassador, H. E. Jean-David Levitte, sounds okay to me: he's a linguist as well as a lawyer. Here's his warning from last February. With all the allegations flying in the neo-conservative press, you have to wonder what tomorrow's press will bring.
If, as Bill Gertz alleges, the French government provided passports to fleeing Iraqi officials during the second Gulf War, why hasn't the evidence (from US intelligence officials) been published yet? In theory, they are working for the US government, aren't they. Why didn't they pass the information on to their superiors, instead of leaking the story to Sun Myung Moon's employee at The Washington Times? So, perhaps we should just treat this rumor as a unsubstantiated until proof is forthcoming. Neo-conservative schlockmeisters are having a field day, though, whipping up the gullible into a fevered anti-France lather.
I, on the other hand, am reveling in a self-imposed francophilia. Here are some links that run counter to the current folderol:
Just who is this Karl Rove? College drop-out, power behind the throne, etc. Ron Suskind reveals a bit more about the most feared man in the White House man who orchestrates the all things Bush. Rove's been called the Goebbels of the Bush regime for his endless stream of Nixon-style dirty tricks. And just who was behind all the multi-colored jumpers the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln were wearing during Dubya's kick-off campaign ad. Of course, why isn't Bush's being AWOL for the more than a year during his military "service" in the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam War being played up more by the media? Where's the sport in shooting fish in a barrel? Sigh.
Betsy Rothstein has gathered together some funny and frightening things that our elected representatives say on a daily basis. I have a friend who served as a congressional aide way back when, and he told me that the House and Senate have been filled with foul-mouthed and horny good old boys from time immemorial.
Taxi driver Ratso Russo, passed along this article by progressive author Thom Hartmann describing how to take back America. It came over the transom about the same time I stumbled across this orphaned manfiesto by Greg Ruggiero. (The original website that published it has gone the way of many post-dot-com hosts, but using Google's cache, I was able to get a copy and store it locally.) I've been pondering our broken two-party, electoral system lately and Hartmann's text at least soothed my jangled nerves.
Funny thing how the tobacco and the alcohol industries had both escaped the rigorous moral criticism of William J. Bennett (ex-Drug Czar under Bush and ex-Secretary of Education under Reagan), while both marijuana smoking and peace marches were exhibited as examples of America's "erosion of moral clarity." Now it turns out that gambling happens to be one of those victimless peccadillos, too. "If it's a problem, you shouldn't do it." Strong words, indeed, but it probably wasn't Bill's fault, just something henky in his upbringing. It is a relief to know that while he may have lost upwards of $8 million dollars, he never really put his family at risk. Whew! Bennett's people are not hanging him out to dry yet. After all it's the man who has a little gambling problem, and that really has little to do with the validity of his argument. (Yeah, like that argument flies in Washington DC.) What they don't seem to realize is that Bennett's being a meally-mouthed hypocrite doesn't validate his argument either. They also don't seem to understand that there's a natural tendency of those so harshly chided to enjoy some Schadenfreude when a self-appointed virtues-monger fails so miserably to lead his community by virtuous example.
Some new examples of the baiting of the French (our enemies du jour) by Bill Gertz. Today he wrote in the Washington Times about the French selling Saddam a nuclear reactor back in the late '70s. The day before Gertz wrote an article alleging that the French issued passports in Syria to fleeing Iraqi officials so they could evade the American-British coalition and flee to Europe. (We'll have to await more proof on that one.) Gertz is a neo-conservative media darling. His latest book damns both the Clinton administration's foreign policy and the FBI's / CIA's / NSA's failures in detecting and preventing the events of 9/11.
Dennis Miller has written an op-ed piece in the WSJ [1] about an op-ed piece that Norman Mailer wrote in the London Times. (I wonder if it pays better than shilling for phone companies.) The American white male (AWM) has once again been assailed in his ivory tower. But fear not, Miller has allies: Rush Limbaugh and David Leibowitz have arrived to do battle with the aging Mailer. And it's not long before the conservatives' bête noir, Michael Moore, is trotted out to play his role as the Hobbyhorse of the Right. What these folks seem to miss amidst all the churning brouhaha is that it's an American tradition to hoist the status quo by their petards (in the etymological sense of the word) while cheering the underdog on. (Think of it as noblesse oblige.) Nobody has proven to me that AWMs, a set to which I may or may not belong depending on diverse environmental variables [2], are an underclass, no matter what Rush and his ilk screech.
If Michael Moore wants to write a humorous and over-the-top-rhetorically book on stupid guys generally in charge of things and if enough people buy it to put it on some kind of best seller list, then I say "All's fair in the mediawars." But if sour grapes Limbaugh and Leibowitz, with a wee, dank Miller in tow, want to fret and scorn, then I just want to ask them: "Aren't your AWMs made of stronger stuff?" And how about: "Aren't Mailer and Moore AWMs, and aren't they laughing all the way to the bank in spite of, or perhaps because of, their self-loathing?" Finally, Miller writes at one point that it's really Mailer who's hung up on color (race) because he's always bringing it up in his piece. Well, shucks, I'm not 100% sure about this, but the last time I checked there was still one or two racial problems in this grand land of ours.
[1] Unfortunately available online by subscription only.
[2] For example, just imagine my tender shock when I learned in grade school that because my name ended in a vowel I was most probably not white.
Fun article in the Guardian Unlimited on America's not-so-secret economy: pot, porn, and illegal alien labor. It's nice to see that the backbone of American economy in times past, our stalwart yeoman farmer, is making a comeback growing a fine, traditional cash crop, hemp. I wonder if the boys in Washington are planning on exporting these bits of democracy to the newly freed Iraq?
The Second Gulf War is over, and now the Bush administration has asked the IMF and the World Bank to step in and marshallize post-Saddam Iraq. Bruce Bartlett doesn't think that that would be a good idea.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that President Bush has let the UN know that the US-led Coalition doesn't need help searching for the number one reason for Gulf War 2, (AKA weapons of mass destruction). Hans Blix, on the other hand, argues that the UN weapons inspectors should be allowed back into Iraq to do their job. In another article, Dr Blix chastizes Bush, alleging faked evidence amongst other things.
According to E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post there are some pro-labor Republicans in DC.
Garance Franke-Ruta ponders the gender specifics of homeland security. All that talk about duct tape and plastic sheeting makes me think of victory gardens and aluminum drives during earlier wars. While I've read and like Deborah Tannen's socio-linguistic popular books, I never quite got into the whole Mars-Venus genre.
I ran across Lying in Ponds while googling for Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post. Any website that takes its name from a Monty Python skit is OK with yours truly. Ken Waight has combined a blog with a partisan rating of columnists service. It's funny and sad, all rolled up into one. I don't think the results will surprise anybody, but it's fun reading.
Timothy Burke, associate professor of history at Swathmore, writes one of the more lucid political blog entries I've read in a while. It's on the dangers of a "defective conception of how power actually works inside the Bush Administration." I love a good conspiratorial theory as well as the next person: it's really one of the better types of genre literature going these days. People just want to believe that higher powers (for good or evil) are in charge of their everyday lives. How else can one explain religion? The real injustice that most conspiracy theorists foist on the uncaring objects of their scorn is that of knowing too much. And this seems to be Professor Burke's point. You shouldn't call Bush stupid on the one hand, and assume he and his cohorts know what they're doing on the other. Well, most of the leftist rhetoric I've seen portrays Bush as an ignorant pawn of big business and definitely not the man in charge. But I may be wrong about that. As for the why of this Second Gulf War: I always assumed that because the US had helped Saddam gain power, and because he had subsequently turned around and spat in our collective faces, it was up to the US government to remove him: sort of like the Army terminating Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now with extreme prejudice.
On the lighter, linguistic side, Burke's use of the word agitprop in much the same way as I use the term regime in conversation when discussing Dubya's administration, sent me scurrying for a dictionary: a contraction from the Russian otdel agitatsii i propagandy 'department of agitation and propaganda.'
By not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, pulling out of the Anti-Ballastic Missle Treaty, and rejecting the Internationl Criminal Court, Dubya managed to piss off both domestic and foreign multilateralists. (That's okay, since it seems to be his mission in life.) But, listening to neo-conservative rhetoric, you'd think that this is the best thing to happen since Reagan was cast in last starring role. Even the sacred Geneva Convention of recent memory doesn't apply when it's inconvenient, and damn the rest of the world. Although, the Geneva Convention is still trotted out when paramilitary forces in Iraq pull the oldest trick in the book and pretend to surrender to US soldiers hopped up on homegrown propaganda. (This is not to say that civilians car-bombing soldiers or anybody torturing POWs is covered by the Geneva Convention: it's not.) Meanwhile, it doesn't look like Russia (our new ideological ally) is going to sign the Kyoto Protocol either. Hélas. Maybe John O'Farell is right, and we should just privatize war.
Also, in the news, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of using taxpayer money to fund religious halfway houses. Wonder if it would've passed if the religion is question were Islamic? Oh, rhetoric, thou art a harsh mistress. The Milwaukee Sentinal Journal has an article about how the plaintiff, the Freedom From Religion Foundation promises to continue fighting the case.
Brian Eno has written why America needs to open up to the rest of the world. Somehow, I can't see the cheermeisters Dubya and Rummy even smiling. Funny.
Seymour Hersch has a lucid article in the New Yorker on our Minister of War Donald Rumsfeld. My current favorite acronyme du jour TPFDL (time-phased forces-deployment list). Pronounced tipfiddle. Thanks to Allan Miller for passing it along. Here's another take by Wayne Madsen in CounterPunch. Ran across this link on a blog yclept Quotidian Doom via the Technorati überblog site. One thing that Technorati lets you see is how sites in the blogosphere are linking to one another. The CounterPunch site is run by Alexander Cockburn and Geoffrey St. Clair: names I had run across years ago while working in the belly of the great beast. Those were the heady pre-dot-com bust days of my slight flirtation with the Pynchon list. Years later, I ran into Ian Evans (Pynchon fan extraordinaire) at yet another KZ-lager in the software gulags, and we discussed the Tinasky letters. Ian is the only person I know of who actually subscribes to the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Itty-bitty world.
The New York Times Magazine had an interesting interview with historian John Dower on how the occupation of Iraq will differ from the occupation of Japan. Elsewhere, he has said: "We live in a world of spin and euphemism and, increasingly, plain anti-intellectualism, where people seem to be losing whatever capacity they may once have had for sympathetic imagination." I wonder, rhetorically, where all the critics of political correctness are when folks start dusting off their jingoism.
Compare this article in Reuters with this website in Germany. What would Charles C. Boycott [1832–97] of County Mayo have thought? Or, for that matter, his boss, the Earl of Erne? Freedom fries, salisbury steak, victory cabbage, and so on. Funny, and the Russians call sauerkraut kapusta (which is also a slang for money).
There's a quotation that floats around the net in mail signatures and on numerous web pages. It starts out: "First they came for the communists ..." Professor Harold Marcuse at UC Santa Barbara has an interesting page on the origin of this quotation with a life of its own. Martin Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor who spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps. In the First World War, he had been in the German navy.
A readable rant on an absurd war. The (then) upcoming Second Gulf War is compared to ritualized tribal warfare in the New Guinea highlands. With references to von Clausewitz, the ex-Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge, etc. While on the other side of the IP (intellectual planet), a Gil Scott-Heron homage / parody crystalizes the reductio ad absurdum of the thousand year copyright. Mickey Mouse in the public domain: not bloody likely. Of course, not many people realize that Steamboat Willie was ripped off IP from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Junior. Luckily, Keaton was a drunk heading south in his career and Disney was a ruthless animator heading north towards his regal cryogenic end. Strangely enough, they both passed in 1966.
U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff (retired) blasts our idiot prince who will have his war. His views on the complexity of the "Kurdish" issue are refreshing after the junkfood soundbites from CNN et al.
I've been curious about the references in the media to depleted uranium. Here's what the World Health Organization has to say about it. Ramsey Clark's International Action Center is more skeptical. A bishop in New Zealand is severely critical. For the Federation of American Scientists it's all a bunch of hooey. Who knows? Is the military use of DU a war crime in the making or perfectly harmless?
Awe. sb. [ME awe < ON agi; akin to OE ege 'awe', Gk achos 'pain'] Dread or terror.
Shock. sb. [< MFr choc < choquer 'to strike against'] A sudden violent or emotional mental or emotional disturbance; something that causes such a disturbance; a state of being so disturbed.
Harlan Ullman uses the term shock and awe for his strategy on how to win the second Gulf War: his position and another view.
Yesterday, in San Francisco, I found an anti-war protest marching down 2nd Street between Market and Mission. There was a lot of chanting, plenty of handmade signs, and a person or two with kerchiefs over their faces. All in all, the slice of protest that I saw was peaceful. Not so the reactions I witnessed to it. The first hint of discord was a twenty-something woman in a business suit standing alongside her taxi, half-in, half-out, in the open door, screaming incoherently in the direction of the march at the intersection of Mission and 2nd. "Get the fuck out of my way," was the jist of her freedom of speech. Overhead, police and news helicopters flew.
Later, at GGU, where I teach on Thursday nights, on the plaza level, getting a coffee, I noticed through a window, a large screen TV in the student lounge: on it, surreally, was a shot from a news helicopter shooting down on the march. I couldn't hear what the voice over was saying, but it was strange that folks would watch an event happening about half a block from where they were on TV rather than walk over and watch it for real, without apropos soundbites.
As I sat sipping my coffee and eating a cookie, one of my students, an American citizen, sat down, said hello, and then asked nobody in particular, why none of these rioters demonstrated after 9/11. I answered innocently if there were in fact no demonstrations after 9/11. He looked at me shocked, as though I'd spit on him. He thought it was worse than a shame that these rioters were getting all this attention. I asked him if he had a problem with the US constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, suggesting he move elesewhere if he was upset. This time he looked at me as though I'd landed from Mars and had just vomited on the flag.
Before class started, another one of my students wondered out loud in class about the violence of the rioters. I asked her if our anti-war demonstrations were more violent than political demonstrations in her home country of Peru (where I happen to have relatives). She started talking about how at home, the Shining Path (sendero luminoso) people don't demonstrate: they just blow things up. Things and people.
When I got home later that night, the news was all agog with ex-miltary consultants (who it seemed had all served in Gulf War I) explaining how Tomahawk cruise missles had improved in a dozen years of R&D. Shots of police facing off with angry, violent demonstrators in San Francisco looked more real than any of the folks I saw marching along, upsetting business women returning to their hotels in the early evening.
My rhetorical question: "Should people have demonstrated after 9/11, because their government was somehow involved in the acts of terror, as it is now involved in a war which they think is morally and politically wrong?"
Tom Daschle: "I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war."
Bill Frist: "I think Senator Daschle clearly articulated the French position ... I thank the Lord that at this moment of testing, this great nation is led by this great leader."
Jacques Chirac: "L'Irak ne représente pas aujourd'hui une menace immédiate telle qu'elle justifie une guerre immédiate."
Found this article while looking for some online information on Peter Handke. How are Kosovo/1999 and Iraq/2003 different? For that matter, how are Iraq/1991 and Iraq/2003 different? Other than the age of the Bushes involved. Watched Three Kings again last night. I wonder if Hollywood would have the temerity to produce and distribute this film today. Does it matter? Can art influence politics? We all know that politics can imitate art. Maybe it's time to emigrate ...
