 | American Life and Letters, the continuing Marin-Pearlman Dialogue... Thanks for the long note. In general, for some reason, I think American fiction writers (tho not poets, for some reason) have no capacity/tolerance for tragedy, tho one can find it among Europeans and Latin Americans: a deep seriousness. We did have Faulkner and Hemingway and Wolfe and even Fitzgerald, and where that capacity went is beyond me. Maybe it's out there in writers we don't read. The Irish have it, tho I think maybe the British have lost it. Maybe it simply has something to do with fashion and style. I can't quite tell you WHY Pynchon seems childish to me it; it has something to do w/ tone. Even the passage you sent me, tho good, has to do w/ something so unreal when set beside, say, the events of the world -- Africa, China, AIDS, men and women and their various sufferings -- I can't see it as much but a rather monstrous (tho talented) vanity and egomania, perhaps, at bottom, a dream of constructing a private world to replace the real one, like a child w/ an imaginary friend. But that may be my own blindness. More importantly, the suggestions I make to you have very little to do with my own proper or improper solution to things, which is probably not reducible to judgements made from the outside, since those judgements are themselves limited by individual charactor traits and not a trajectory of pure and objective sight. BUT I TRY to suggest to you things based on my own (admitedly limited) impression of yr nature, and w/ Mer, I must say, you did seem ready to settle into a domesticity that was RELATIVELY untroubled by the appearance of sudden beauties. Indeed, yr great and lasting rage wld argue the fury of loss related not to Great Beauty but to Domestic Peace, which I believe you have become far more capable of than before. Even with Adele you were willing to make great compromises w/ her obvious foolishness (I almost sd stupidity) if only she wld stay the night and you cld have a warm body beside you, NOT just for fucking. I know the complexes arise, but I think NOW in yr half-dotage or near-maturity (sd w/ smiling irony) that the complex is strongest when noone real is near, and that what you miss (re Mer and Adele) is not the fictional beauty but a real companion. Whatever the failures or successes of my own solutions to life's quandaries, it does not occur to me, ever, that others should adopt them, nor do I thin that at my (or our) age, they work better than a profound companionship or a private relation to the benifisence or plenitude of the world, which remains, side by side w/ suffering, tho you cannot tell it from many of our (or your) favorite authors. In this regard, to slip away from you as a subject, what is it one gets, say, in Rilke or DHL not there in Pynchon? It is something American, which is at once quite witty and at the same time empty of some quality I can only call seriousness or gravity -- this despite the title of Pynchon's book. And somehow Rilke or DHL touch the soul of experience while Pynchon et all (I think Catch 22 the exception) touch only the surface of consciously shared experience, which makes it a consolation, not a revelation (ie, the passage you quoted). As I age I think the only bks worth reading are those that take me FURTHER than the point I have already reached, and are not about it. For the rest TV suffices, as bad as it is. Yet it seems to use only those parts of the mind Pynchon does, as good as he is. Well, that's enough. Cold and clear today. The thing is to have a way of living that brings you joy or a profundity of experience or a sense of at-homeness in the world (tho of course it shld not be at others' expense) If I sound critical of yr relational behaviors, it is mainly because they don't work for you, not from any moral highground, which I,long ago ceded to the puritans, at least in sexual matters.
Bill Pearlman <bdpearl@yahoo.com> wrote:
Peter--Thanks for yours. Yes, replacements for TV this
reading I do, but sometimes gets me stopped. Pynchon,
though certainly a puer, has the ability to create a
hip language of the wilderness of American life, not
too different from Heller his hero in Catch-22. But I
can get caught in his strange configurations of
Americana, his bad boys and weird supportive and
hateful women, his failed notions of life in the
badlands. It is at some level often slapstick, but
having known him 35 yrs back, I can sense the 70 yr.
old he is now, and sometimes a real feeling sense
comes through: 'Sometimes when he asked, one of the
newcomers would try to tell him where Stray was, but
he couldn't understand them, the words didn't fall
into any kind of sense. The town abruptly became an
unreadable map to him. Since Mexico he had been sorely
conscious of borderlands and lines crossable and
forbidden, and the day often as not seemed set to the
side of what he thought was his real life.' (p. 461,
Against the Day)...
But it's my entertainment for now, big books, what
I have, though tonight a woman is having (a jocular I
think, though painfully weird) Bush TV party, with
pizza and beer. Nice looking older woman who did a
documentary on H. Dean...Somehow often feel your take
on me does not realize your own solution would be
impossible for me and most of those I know, i.e.,
having a wife to fall back on, and the freedom to play
openly with whatever women come along. Would be for
most of us cruel and unusual, I think. So the
alternative in some sense is brief attachments, always
broken up in my case by some newcomer who looks a
certain way when my desire for my regular spouse is
weak and frayed, near death...I sometimes think Sharon
would have endured my departures and affairs, but I
couldn´t have lived with myself knowing I was
duplicitious with her. I know there is an old history
in the bourgeoisie and upper classes of mistresses,
etc., but in my lifetime what I´ve mostly seen is
serial monogamy and terrific problems with cheating,
affairs, etc. as women often don't countenance it and
men get conflicted and there is a crisis. That you
have your own solution is rare, perhaps has a good
side to it, but also what would appear a troubling
shadow as well...Not that that really has much to do
with my recurring complex that interferes with what
you call domesticity. But perhaps these recurrences
are after all not that amenable to change, though
heaven knows I would prefer to have an old lady (pun
intended) to grow old with than be like Fred or
endless other late-life bachelors (there are many down
here) resigned to a slow march toward lonely deaths.
So, in a sense, you beat the game, though perhaps that
doesn´t catch the depth of suffering involved or the
difficulties...
I like your recurring sense that there is a
response to suffering and evil that literature can
partake of, and the best of it probably will always do
so, but isn't comedy (viz Pynchon, Roth, etc., even
Bellow) somehow at the center of a concern that is
still remarkable resilient and meaningful? Not sure of
the answer, and probably Humboldt´s Gift or Malamud´s
Dubin´s Lives, both of which I love, probably don't
reach the heights of King Lear or Oedipus Rex, but
maybe that´s not the issue. I often lean toward the
idea of making a fiction that would sum up things I
care about, but somehow the effort seems
overwhelming...Somewhat hard for me to think of myself
as that bookish, to vault myself for years gathering
little elements for my big novel, etc...
Anyway, life. Sense of world here is escaping me
all the time. Yesterday, beers with Keith, listening
to his ten years in Paterson, N.J. and the life there,
'75-'85, after WCW and Ginsberg, but a good working
class town, and he had a studio for $100 a month, and
women and a working class bar scene, etc...He´s a
great talker, which is what I prize about him, and you
too, at the other end of this. Some conversations
become a kind of thickening of life, a scrambling into
and out of ideas, stories and the pleasure of
speech...Maybe that is what many of us are about,
artists of conversation, speakers who want a listener,
a small audience, interlocutors...Onward...
As ever,
Bill
--- Peter Marin wrote:
> Good you had a full day. Nice games to watch, I
> think. Drama. Class. The best, since the superbowl,
> which follows, has all that hokie hoopla. Too bad
> the season is over. Passes fast! Yes, I know there
> are a few poems of praise in yr book, and there may
> be many more, somewhere, you didn't choose. But I
> think it generally true that yr complexes, as do
> all, and everyone's, somehow slip between the self
> and the natural world, or the world of experience,
> and often interfere. Hard to bring oneself back to
> the pure pleasure(s) of Being -- those at least that
> exist in the midst of suffering and, yeah, Evil. How
> you can read Pynchon is beyond me, which is not a
> comment on his talent, but simply on the relation of
> talen, length and (reader's) effort required. Also,
> I cannot help but see him (as well as other writers)
> as an eternal boy -- strange, the extent to which
> our writers (American) remain, in yr terms, puers,
> not just in terms of endless rebellion against
> wind-mills and
> fictions, but also in terms of slapstick as a
> response to genuine suffering and evil, which is, of
> course, one among many possible responses, but which
> now seems to dominate a literature in which fewer
> men and women grow up than used to be the case. The
> disjunction, say, between Pynchon's book and your
> condition, or mine, or any human's, say, in Mexico,
> still seems to be to be immense; it is literature as
> escape from the world, which is of course not a bad
> thing at all, and sometimes works wonderfully (say
> in CATCH whatever-nine, can't remember) but in
> general seems to me a bother to read more than a
> deep experience. Of course I do not spend much time
> reading Pynchon so my opinion is admittedly founded
> on mainly ignorance. Now readin a Roddy Doyle novel,
> A Star Called Henry, the first pages of which seem
> to me quite serious, bright, witty and Good, all at
> the same time. But then I don't much read novels
> now. I find them deficient compared to life. It may
> be that the
> Pynchon tome like Proust all comes together in the
> end in the exhilaration of a profound ecstatic
> experience. But why bother w/ what isn't great?
> Well, you don't, it is true, have TV, and I must
> admit this has replaced all but first-rate
> literature, and poetry and philosophy, for me.
> Laziness, maybe, pure and simple! Will go back and
> look at the poems you mention. See that Snodgrass'
> book is up for the Critics' award. One of five.
> Think it's collected works or something. Ho hum. Not
> much vigor there. Or risk. Well, maybe you can tell
> me good things abt Pynchon. Not much else. Gonna go
> to late breakfast now. Town seems deserted. Ferry
> old Fred around, but he seems more tired each day.
> Wearing out, maybe. As are we all. Old cars. I will
> give you this: love (or its illusion) brings back
> youth, and something of the light. Be well. Enjoy
> each thing in the knowledge that someday it (or you)
> will be gone. Carpe diem. As shld we all.
>
> Bill Pearlman wrote: Peter,
> Rather full day yesterday, with the games, with
> Betsy and Marne from Boston area. Betsy totally into
> Patriots and was down as they went down. Sort of
> total
> involvement, sports fandom. Both women Jewish, Betsy
> (not Bonnie) the sleeker, but Marne an artist, both
> seem to like me, though somewhat at a distance,
> perhaps. But good company, and full of alert
> responses
> from the three of us. 40s I would think, the both.
> Yes, community is somewhat weak here for me,
> moreso
> with recent disengagements. Could think of returning
> to NM, not sure. Brought to the light. This morning
> wrote about Mexican world as I had a licuado in the
> big market, watched the Mexicans in their behaviors,
> bought a little sunmask made from coco shell.
> Theater
> may be a thing of the past for me, not seeking it
> really energetically, though occasionally get asked.
> Rode around streets of SMA early yesterday with old
> lover Becky, now Rebecca, now into AA, but sweet in
> her way. Another option//getting into AA and whether
> problem is serious or not, finding my community
> there
> as many here seem to do. Thought of asking Becky out
> again, but somehow probably best let go. Another AA
> woman, Judy, I dated some last year, with that
> squint
> about drink. I think it's either in or out, like
> Mormonism. Mixed marriage, mixed blessing. Do find
> simple things praiseworthy, and in book, there is La
> Playa, poem for Willems, Now Here, This, Roca
> Blanca,
> and I can find sweet intersections of the real world
> where I can celebrate the living elements. Think
> probably I have this life, as it is, and though
> recurrences keep me uneasy, it may be the odd
> condition of my own psyche that I must learn to live
> with...
> Anyway, another day, another round of...
>
> Hasta...BP
> --- Peter Marin wrote:
>
> > Rushed to day, since it is Sunday and the games
> are
> > on. Hope you have a good day w/ Bonnie. Here,
> > solitude will reign, w/ all its hidden and
> > interiorized connections. The odd thing abt SMA, I
> > see, is that you have very little sense of
> community
> > there, for all of your visits. I actually have no
> > idea abt how to make yrself a part of the life of
> a
> > (new) town, and for that reason I tend to stay
> here,
> > tho I do think sometimes of spending more time in
> > N.Y. -- that beside the notion of Mexico. But I
> have
> > in some ways, given my circumstances, far more
> > tolerance of solitude than you do, and all of yr
> > deepest pleasures (save sex) -- theatre, workshops
> > -- demand participants and an audience, hard to
> > build from scratch. And you are right: the
> > "blockages" have perhaps an etiology and source
> all
> > their own, buried somewhere out of reach. And yet
> > you have had, always, enough resources or recourse
> > to pleasure and hope to conterbalance them. You
> are
> > rather easily drawn back into the light:
> > not only by women, but by hope (sometimes of
> > women), by the sea, by company, by periodic senses
> > of community. There is that to remember. Yr moods
> > are various. And, yes, women are a way to attach
> > yrself to something that brings you into the
> light,
> > out of darkness. Got to add to that, somehow. In
> any
> > case, have a good day or, since you will probably
> > read this after, I hope you had a good day.
AN ONGOING DIALOGUE Dear RRR Readers, The following is an ongoing exchange of ideas between Peter Marin and myself about a wide range of subjects. I asked Peter to describe some of the directions he would want to take RRR and what thoughts about the current state of the world seemed important to him…We invite comments and plan to continue the dialogue… —Bill Pearlman
Peter Marin:
That good and evil exists, of this there is no doubt. It is astonishment at their existence that strikes me as naïve, i.e: the question, How Could The Holocaust happen? It happens because every human capacity is coded into us; we are not naturally good OR evil; we are naturally Men; and this is the realm we inhabit. This does not in any way excuse Evil or make it equivalent to good. But it denies each of us the smug perch we like to inhabit. WE DO NOT KNOW how we wld have behaved as Germans, or in Vietnam. Our capacity for culpability -- until proved otherwise in extremis -- is the same as anyone else’s. We participate in evil every moment, every breath, as you know, taking advantage of conquered lands, conquered people, human suffering. Even you there, in Mexico, an American. We can't squirm out of it, nothing relieves us of the burden, we cannot -- any of us -- claim a Virtue that makes us better than others. You and I: had we, for instance, been born German, raised in their schools, etc., might we not have thought, like Gunther Grass, the SS was as normal as UCLA volleyball? I do not say this is not Evil, only that we too are capable of it. A late stage wisdom merely acquiesces to the fact that good and evil will be with us always in the endlessness of a struggle that precludes a final victory and ought not to allow us surprise. In other words: get used to it, and then do something to alleviate suffering or counteract evil -- because this is a duty the doing of which, even as we do it, makes us no better than others. Easy to pick on the Nazis, of course. But what abt you and yr pals at The Thunderbird in New Mexico on land stolen from others and covered with blood? No worse than anyone else of course. My house on stolen land, Charles in Nova Scotia (and Oklahoma) on bloodied land, etc. It is not that the Nazis are not evil -- only that we are not stain-free or so good. How do we recognize this and perhaps change it while escaping the smugness and absolutely false sense of superiority we get by saying G. Bush is a bad man? You can't. You gotta live in the world as it is and breathe deep and seek joy and, at the same time, do Good w/o ever once thinking: What A Good Boy Am I! If you can... And what works, what is expected of us, how much should we do? Ah, here is the anguish of being a man. How do you decide what is sufficient, or which acts equal to an awareness of History and Others? Who can tell us? Not a God. Not Jung. Not even poets. Hah! Here is where men should sit late into the night, talking. Here is where we must find the meaning of an "open heart." Here is where a person yearning makes sense and her conclusions and private sense of virtue become insufferable, untenable. Here is another abyss, another edge to stand on, on the edge of the moral universe, coexistent with all others. Lear does not finesse this issue. Or maybe it does. The Tempest does. Bach does not. For him the "Beyond" is the space where God is or is not, and this must perforce be in the most general way a world of meaning and morality. Indeed I would argue the greatest beauty is not aesthetic but moral. Plato thought that. Hard for artists to acknowledge. But I believe it to be so; we have to be educated away from that -- a flaw in our deep superiority. Culture doesn't mean liking Shakespeare; it means in the end a generosity of spirit that acknowledges the Other as equal to the Self. Well, maybe that IS there in Shakespeare. Enough.
Bill Pearlman:
Sounds a lot like last thoughts, in Jung, and others...Final reconciliations...We may be too young for that, but will see about getting it into a form we can use. It's editing and a kind of tough job, but maybe worth it...Tempest is truly a sort of summing up play about a guy whose 'every second thought is his own death.' Final notes before the end...Chilena poet Gabriela Mistral has a poem, Pais de la Ausencia,
(Country of Absence) where she is really talking about the ineffable or a place where she will die, beyond lovers and the earth....'un pais sin nombre'...But yeah, there you are, we are...Can't quite get there yet, have to find an everydayness not quite as undistracted as some of what I think you propose...John, (theater guy) whom you met re a Beat Festival, has lost his lead actress for a show about Joan of Arc which has been doing well, (and which I wrote a review for in Atencion) to some guy who has taken over her life, and is now threatening John, probably for knowing too much. Saw this in action yesterday, and the woman is now pregnant and her family
wants him gone, but they are now legally married...First actual glimpse of potential violence I´ve seen in suave SMA....Now there's a subject with a test of the non-duality clause...How can you think this guy is ok? Or that the Nazis were doing the Jews an historical favor by cancelling them out? (An idea somewhat popular with certain new-agers) I mean to say life has a way of interfering with the
> Kantian/Keatsian capabilities...And applying theater to Bush, what could come of such an analogy: too deadly for comedy and yet the smallness of the character hardly makes for tragedy...It's more like a farce with deadly consequences....But perhaps I have too much sympathy for the idea that there are such things as good leaders...Roosevelt? But perhaps as you practically imply, the opposites come together in old age or death or the final reckoning with 'this great
> stage of fools,' as Lear howls toward the end...Mark it, nuncle...Perhaps the greatest wisdom is foolish, after all...
Bill: Have been reviewing the parts of our exchanges I have -- not all. I mean the recent ones you thought might make a piece. Why not keep it simple, make a little intro that these were culled from a correspondence, then leave them as fragments, each in itself OR perhaps better yet as answers to questions you insert between them. Certainly in at least a couple spots -- questions about evil & holocaust, directions of religions, etc -- these already exist naturally and gracefully. Then you'd only have to doctor yr side a bit, w/ some cutting down, and edit mine, which I could do, for grammar and coherence, not content much, and leave them as something like "Thoughts (or "late-night thoughts" on certainty, virtue and truth -- or whatever... I believe it cld be done easily if we acknowledge the source of the thoughts and leave them then in their original state. Or call them "Meditations on...etc." Wouldn't take much work at all. I cld do my part on my own messages, make yr job easier, IF I have or get messages in a way that I can edit them. Otherwise I can email editing details and you can change them in yr machine. Cld then be posted w/o delay. IN FACT, you could make a little introduction saying we were discussing RRR site or what I would want to do w/ it, or what I thought sld be done, etc and introduce it as an exchange about politics, ideology, virtue and thought. I think it always best to stick close to the truth of the source and leave it informal and avoid the work that might otherwise be done. Whadya think? Cool here, autumn on the way, Albanian yng woman comes and goes (no sex there), no Charles yet (I miss him), Willems okay, back from long vacation on the road w/o excessive pain, happy w/ his existence (settled at last w/ someone who loves him, etc), troops in Oaxaca, Thanksgiving almost upon us, will include a short poem you might wanna post on RRR, only because it's so short. Hope you are well and spirits are rising. What abt apt? You shld be in it soon. Where is it? A good spot? Hang in there. There's always the beach. Maybe yr correspondence will quiet things down; don't let anger get the best of you or it. Poem:
ALEPH The tide lifts
the ark of desire on the flood
of the blood, the shape
of an Aleph revealing
The All. Remember:
this is the world.
And the dream, of a dancer grows wings for the heart —
higher now, over the roofs! What you describe as "final" wisdom (tho who knows what lies beyond it?) can only be reached, MUST be reached, through experience and reflection, a transformation, as it were, of the cells themselves, and must ALWAYS be wrong if adopted wholesale from a master or as an ideology. Thought does tend in the same general direction for reasons we cannot quite fathom, though Plato, Hegel, Kant and others (including Marx) tried to explain that inevitability of direction, without, in the end, compelling success. As for our youth, ah, there we are allowed passion, conviction, intensity, even thoughtlessness and error -- remember Blake and the road to wisdom leading thry, was it, the Palace of Error? But we were never SMUG, we may have thought we knew more -- Freud, Raich, Marx, Jung, etc -- but II believe the intensity of passion, desire and adventure saved us from smugness, however much we may have been assholes. Moreover, our mode was ACTION, ie, a living out, out at least some risk, while all too often in people as they get older the pretensions to virtue remain while action dissipates, or what is natural to the young becomes, as we age, a perversion. Besides, our claim in youth was to Truth, not Virtue, about which we cared very little, and our errors were therefore both more natural and less ugly. But my general point here is simply this: that it is experience itself, as it honey-combs the cells and deepens both our anguish and joy, than can lead us to a wisdom partaking of Bach, Shakespeare and, yeah, perhaps the sages of any discipline. But these truths of experience must be FOUND, like the truths of love, and, in the finding, they always put to shame or turn to "dirty straw" (Aquinas' phrase) the disciplines by which we reach them. For they are in a sense not ideas "learned" but both a condition of the psyche and a great interior spaciousness of thought that must be "entered" as concretely as one enters a room or a woman. Thus we tend, occasionally, to meet men and women who have BECOME what they profess -- I can think, here, of Paolo Freire, Suzuki Roshi (the SF Zen master), John Seeley and maybe (maybe!) Thomas Merton (though he remains for me suspect) as the few living creatures whose presence seemed to me redolent and communicative of a genuine wisdom identical to the self. They are the only ones I have MET. And never, God help me, writers or poets, though I have surely heard claims made for them. This condition of being, when it occurs -- ah, does it come from thought or from something inside that guides thought? And would one call it sacred? Maybe. For surely it involves both passion and love and a recognition of the sublime that in its essence transcends the inviting distinctions inherent in thought. This does not mean that good and evil do not exist or that they are identical to one another or that they do not matter -- merely that in thought or being we can sometimes enter a realm where they are for the moment irrelevant, though that does not make them necessarily irrelevant in the world in which we live. If anything, as Plato thought, the far reaches of the journey in question may well bring us into the presence of the Good which shines as brightly as a sun, or brighter still, and illumines daily life as we live it. Plotinus wld say we are then close to God. And evil? One doesn't think of it, not for that moment, or in that space, which does not mean it is trivial or does not exist. It is, if you will, not unlike being (genuinely) in love, wherein the undoubted truths of the world are obliterated by what seems for the moment like a Greater Truth and probably is, though it ultimately vanishes, not because it ceases to exhaust, but because we are no longer in its presence. Perhaps there, in that place, is the wisdom towards which experience and contemplative thought can Lead (or MUST lead), and once having been seen -- directly, in a fashion unmediated by the advice of masters or the guidance of a text -- it stays with us when we return from it, as a living part (perhaps the heart) of the self. Who knows? But this is a journey that must be MADE, from youth to ripeness -another reason I always think, even here, of freight trains: a journey! From what is known to the unknown that lies ahead... Here we are, in transit! But how I hate disciplines and masters! The freights are open to all, the Great Democracy, what Whitman, bless him, understood. And DHL, writing abt Whitman. "The Open Road," they called it. Yeah. "The Open." And "The Road." Where else is a man supposed to dwell?
Bill Pearlman:
Peter—Quite a spiel, probably heartily felt and said. Amazing somewhat to me that the oldest mystical and spiritual traditions say similar things: that there is no judgment ultimately possible, as to the way things stand in terms of superiority; that human psyche at last is limited, unable to make final judgments as to what is good and evil. That we exist is the gist of what we know. Ram Dass had picture of Casper
Weinberger on meditation altar reminding him of what the negative looks like and to add it to his meditation on world & inner meaning...Not Hitler, mind you or even Rumsfeld, but Cap W. I think I will call these meditations 'Against The Smug Perch' because that is quite a sweeping indictment of all superiorities of position, all partisan angles...The best you can to relieve suffering, but everyone caught in limited private responsibilities. Everything finally reduced to a bunch of animals making sounds, no higher knowledge. But the sound of this to me is somewhat spiritual, not soulful, at some level. It is somewhat ascensionist (in Hillman's terms) because it asks us not to sink down into a messy argument about what is best in terms of politics or even morality. We could as easily have been killers, in fact are living out our lives on bloodied ground, all of us, etc...None does offend, Lear says, the beggar and the king are both culpable, the dog obeyed in office...Designer God and superior politics similar if I read you right, both claiming virtuous paths to a grace or knowledge we cannot assume, no matter how rationalized our motives. This becomes a little more complex when you add suicide bombers who apparently think that randomly taking other lives (and their own) is spiritually correct. But yr. Gunther Grass analogy would maybe allow that that is another form of happenstance. Grass, though an SS member, it's been pointed out, did not kill, and was very young at the time, and his ‘conscience of the German people’ writings have superseded his earlier choice, according to one piece I read lately....The Open Heart...Surely there is something there, and one feels it in those one looks to for wisdom, yourself on occasion, Ram Dass, Jim, Charles, also on occasion, myself on occasion in groups, but would this kind of late thinking not have been just as harmonious with truth when we were young and feisty, and why have to endure worlds and trials of what you now call false superiority of position when in fact these older traditions of spirituality (in yoga, Buddhism, etc) have been saying pretty much what I think you're saying, forever?...Didn't Huxley write about this somewhat in Perennial Philosophy? My question yesterday over a glass of wine with Deborah--the good looking retired dancer who lives down here with her mother, who, after a lifetime of heavy battling in several arenas in NYC (ballet, fashion photography, real estate) now wants to quiet her life, and though still attractive, seems like she can take or leave love relationships, though is not committed to celibacy as is H. in Merida; but what a quest to seek close relationship in the quietude of non-grasping, not even for sex--my question to her was when we leave these feisty combative senses of struggle behind, can we really live in a softness and care and equilibrium without that much trouble? These things somehow related, I think, but how to live them out? Is not life bound to be caught up in some kind of messy desire, struggle, forms of attachment that both attract and disturb? Surely there are ways out of struggle, out of dichotomy, out of duality, but what is the cost of that? Something close to death? Keeping still, making the heart quiet by subtle contrivance and an end to striving? Maybe so, and perhaps possible if a renaissance of potential were to become central in some quietly responsive but not embattled form... ...I will try to get these into some form when we have exhausted the topic...Or, as you said leave them in fragmented form....Hasta...BP
Peter Marin wrote:
Well, I leave it w/ you for the moment. Do what you will, let me check it out. I am not sure what I am saying is so different from what I sd in the recent past. I suspect -- I mean this as a compliment -- yr own circumstances and retrospection or reflectopn have moved you in this direction. But maybe that is wrong. I think the attitude I am describing comes naturally with, well, if not age, then "ripeness." Harold Bloom's Shakespeare is not so much Noone as Everything, that is, a psyche that contains within it all other possible psyches and that therefore can
tolerate the existence of apparently contradictory truths, allowing a fullness of Being to occur. Wasn't that Keats' "negative capability"? I vaguely remember that. Kant called these "antinomies": the ultimate questions and truths abt the universe or God or Good and evil in which contrary Notions seem equally true; if you hold them all in a single moment and let the light or the mind play among suddenly all takes on a dimensionality and depth perhaps indicative of the nature of the Sublime or the Universe itself: a vastness in which all things are held, a fecundity in which contrarieties are equally true. You are right that this not needbe tragedy; it is simply
that in Oedipus or Lear the tragic leads to the momentary and final apprehension of the truth of the Sublime (or the all) that renders trivial and unnecessary the preceding drama and suffering, which turns out to have been both necessary and
unnecessary and in some Existential way Absurd. Comedy wld be the joyous apprehension of the All and its beneficent return, a consciousness of the joyous
order of things in which conflict vanishes while we are still around to enjoy it: Pan entering with his flute, the dead restored to life, and all difference
both eliminated and made whole in the dance of life, perceived simultaneously from within it and above. The middle ground wld be The Tempest, perhaps, or this wld be a final statement, a music akin to Bach's, in which all opposition, all opposites, are revealed as passing fictions, distinctions imposed on the Wholeness of Mystery by minds and lives and languages that hold within them the almost necessary errors that limit vision and hide from us The Sublime. And our own lives? Ah, easy enough! The conscientious making whole in action and thought (as in Bach's music) all that presents itself to us as fragmented and opposed... Oh, there is a work for you! We may dream of finding it in women, where it is, no doubt, for a moment or two, but its truest state beckons from beyond evrey relationship, and it lies both inside us and outside us, waiting. Indeed, in place perhaps Jung (in his discussion of the Cross, say) is after just this, though I do not find the Sublime present in the work, only indicated -- though some of it creeps in, no?, in the final ruminations, where the theories themselves seem set aside in the aging consciousness of a mystery that calls into question all that has come before. It is there, in that ultimate Eden, we are meant to dwell, having learned there the lessons of relation, freedom, tenderness, generosity, friendship and, yeah, maybe love. Who knows? It may even be so.
Bill Pearlman:
I save everything. Here you come through with something quite strong, I think. Bach, the sublime, ´the pure poignancy of existence´ is very good. I think I see where you are...Yes, these last few statements, edited, I think would make a dialogue possible, with my questions somewhat edited, and perhaps even more extensive comment from you...I think it's there....Something outside of language. You know they say or Borges says--have been reading Borges personal anthology last few days--that Shakespeare was so many things so much of his creative career that he did not really have a self in some traditionally egoistic sense, that he was like the infinite grains of sand...Like Bach, maybe Goya, living in some kind of rapturous zone of creative power where contradiction is overcome with the integrity of the work...Was thinking of your propositions as somehow Borgesian where he cannot quite get himself out of his fiction, but is struggling for a form within a form....A classic pose for him, e.g., in the Aleph...All becomes a beautiful puzzle, an attempt at transcendent meaning, but of course there is an end to the story, sort of...I can imagine, as when Meredith's sister was dying, an endless loop of Bach playing well into eternity....I think one of the things I barely touched on with Marianela, a very soulful Chilean woman, is the seriousness of this vast potential you
come to here at the end of this note, 'a fidelity to the complexity of truth´ yes and that is what the best of it has been, poetry I mean, Neruda, WBY, WS, and apparently Marianela's favorite, Gabriela Mistral whose anthology I am going to try to read starting today, having taken it out of the library...Maybe there is a track here...I will begin editing the last few exchanges and see what we have and send them to you....But keep at it if you can...
Peter Marin:
Funny, was thinking my comments might make a preliminary piece for RRR indicating what I'd like to see in it in terms of deep reflection. When I talk abt great theatre I had in mind Kant's notion of "the sublime," which, for him, transcends beauty or representation and exists as a mystery apparently including both pleasure and pain (as one) or perhaps -- let us say -- good and evil: that is, a mystery that lies beyond all categories and out of which they come. I think you can hear it in Bach: the genuinely transcendental in the presence of which we are lifted outside of ourselves and our schematic thought and into the presence of mysteries which befuddle both reason AND myth or all attempts to concretize and manage it. It is there we swoon in awe, as it were, and where language fails us. I think Oedipus at Colonnus and Lear take us to this edge, wherein the value of even drama falls away and one is left only with the pure poignancy of existence, wherein the Nothingness to come, as we pause on its edge, renders inadequate every defence we have erected against it, including the meanings we assign to our lives and the virtues we claim. I have made this rather dense but think that is rewards a second reading. My own folly is that I expect men and women -- friends, lovers, TV commentators -- to speak out of this condition and recognition, as if they could! What a demand! And yet... What else is worth listening to? I venture to say it is yr own posture, on the edge of the Abyss, in proximity to Nothingness, that renders to Marianela’s presence and gaze the meaning you ascribe to it. Here we grow serious and demand seriousness in return -- as if we could get it! I want as I age to see it everywhere, even in pleasure and friendship: the deep gravity of a rich meaningfulness that requires of us a fidelity to the complexity of truth in all we say, even idly, and in every opinion... Hah! A modern inquisitor! The cruel Judge of Meaning. Yet here I am... Does that clarify anything. Save this, can you? I don't save all my messages. Maybe there is a piece her somewhere, or casual notes towards a consciousness that might, yes, be posted.
Shooting the Messenger The righteous right are raving again. This time it is about the NewYork Times for revealing the government's not so secret program to monitor our financial records, which for the record is no secret, it wasproudly presented to the press in 2003 by Treasury Secretary Snow. What is so hypocritical about the right's claim that this information puts our troops at risk, is their steadfast denial of who put our troops at riskin the first place. The New York Times did not use false and manipulated data to start the wrong war with the wrong enemy. The NewYork Times did not claim we were attacked on 9/11 by Iraq. This camefrom the President and his administration. Do those who criticize theTimes think for one moment the terrorists are so ignorant theydon't automatically assume their email, phone calls, and bank records arebeing intercepted and monitored? It's high time to stop blaming themessenger for the bad news and start putting the blame for thiscatastrophic war and tragic loss of life squarely where it belongs, with George W. Bush and his rubber stamp Republican congress. —Gary W. Priester Ritualized Stupidity: American Schools and the Culture of Vulgarity Allow me explain why I believe the American education system, at least in its present form, is doomed to extinction (for members of the religious fringe who believe dinosaur bones were placed in the earth to confuse scientists, you may substitute the objectionable Darwinian term “extinction” with something a little more innocuous like “hellfire”). In his latest tome The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a book that is impressive for its almost Tolstoyan length as well as its seemingly inexhaustible catalogue of plot summaries, British author and journalist Christopher Booker analyzes hundreds of novels and films and comes to the sad if obvious conclusion that American stories are lacking in themes of individual self-development and growth; the heroes of such stories fail to become fully mature adults capable of functioning in society in humane and meaningful ways and who seem to seek, as the highest prize, “the approbation of the crowd.” In Booker’s view, and who would argue with him on this point, the prototypical American novel is Moby Dick, an epic nightmare in which the main character, Captain Ahab, develops an unhealthy obsession with a whale and enlists the help of a crew and three seasoned harpooners to hunt down the accursed beast and destroy it. If Ahab is successful, he will be lauded throughout the Seven Seas as a great hero. If not…well, for Ahab failure is not an option. Is it ever in America? Extremism comes so naturally to us. The twist Melville gives to this otherwise typical “quest” story is this: Ahab is a dark, brooding character who has clearly come unhinged while the whale, let us not forget, is white and thus a symbol of all that is good and natural and at one with the cosmos. In a particularly vivid episode roughly midway through the book, we see Ahab pouring over his charts, trying to surmise the likely whereabouts of his nemesis based on currents and feeding grounds and so forth, and it is here that Melville describes the maelstrom of the captain’s mind: …a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.
Today the word we might use to describe Ahab is “neurotic.” It’s certainly a fitting word, and one we might use to describe Americans in general. We are a society of obsessives who yearn for the adulation of the crowd. In your mind right now go through a list of films and then think how often they end with the hero surrounded by a throng of beaming admirers. In Moby Dick, of course, there is no standing ovation for Ahab. Both the hero (if he can be called such) and his ill-fated crew are ultimately destroyed. Now, while failure of this sort is rarely treated in mainstream Hollywood movies or in mass market paperbacks and is something that Americans seem incapable of coming to terms with and shun as being needlessly pessimistic (I think the term being touted about these days is “defeatism”), the truly pivotal factor contributing to our collective neurosis is the utter futility of the mission itself. It’s infantile, is it not, for a grown man to seek revenge against a whale. Perhaps the reason so many Americans cling to unrealistic stories in which the hero is always successful in his mission (Melville dared to do things a bit differently), is because we do not have a valid mythological perspective in this country. According to Joseph Campbell, the noted mythologist best known for his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in most myths and folktales we encounter men and women who undergo trials, often horrifying in nature, that change them in significant ways and help them to become productive members of society. The traditional hero is scarred in some way and this scar unlocks the creative potential within. Not so with popular American characters. They rarely change and usually contribute nothing to the betterment of society. When we first meet Ahab he is already maimed, he paces the deck late at night with an ivory stump, and throughout the rest of story he learns little. The key word here is “learn.” Rather than learn any lessons from life’s traumatic twists and turns American heroes choose to make their injuries the focal point of their existence, turn them into self-destructive obsessions, and then demand to be worshiped as heroes for having vanquished them. Except, you see, most of us never do destroy our demons; the demons destroy us or least drive us to gobble jars of mood altering pills. The pharmaceutical industry couldn’t be happier about the current state of affairs. Campbell insists that one of the key functions of myth is to initiate us into the sphere of adult concerns. Without a valid mythological model to help us make the difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood we’re doomed to live out the rest of our lives as dysfunctional Peter Pans. As defined by Campbell, a hero is someone who leaves home, journeys into the underworld where he faces many challenges, eventually overcoming hardships, and then returns home to share his experiences with members of his group. In this way the adolescent is initiated into the world of adult concerns, and his triumphs are largely psychological rather than physical in nature. This motif, common to all cultures, has informed people seeking guideposts along the difficult and often treacherous road of life, but we Americans, never ones willing to accept the wisdom of the ages or the lessons of history at face value, place great importance on materialism, thus altering our concept of the hero. For us the hero is someone, preferably a man, preferably white, and preferably Ivy League educated, who escapes from humble circumstances and, once he has found what he is looking for, never returns to the place from which he came except perhaps to flaunt his newly acquired riches. Christopher Booker, having analyzed American literature and movies at some length, takes note of this trend and argues that this is precisely where our mythology has gone totally wrong. It’s a mythology that encourages us to abandon friends and family in favor of selfish concerns, fame and fortune and the like, and doesn’t stress the psychological and societal benefits of egalitarianism, altruism, self-sacrifice and so on. This, at long last, leads me to my first point about education and its inevitable demise. I teach English to freshman at a small private college near Cleveland, Ohio, and I find, having read hundreds of term papers (maybe it’s thousands now, god help me) that students have no concept, or perhaps no interest in, individual self-development and achievement. This is so because, at present, there is a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism running through American society. Because few people read challenging texts for pleasure and write not at all (except perhaps for the occasional angst ridden poem scribbled in a notebook) no one has the capability to think critically or analytically. This makes self-analysis a difficult if not impossible task. Instead of exploring their own individuality, students tend to adhere to and act out the stereotypes created for them by the American mass media, a mindless machine that, in the hands of the ownership class, has no intention of providing acceptable models of behavior for adolescents who are on the verge of assuming adult roles and responsibilities. Where’s the profit in that? In a recent PBS/Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool, the producers identified two basic stereotypes marketed to today’s teens, one for boys, the other for girls. For boys it is “the mook,” the eternal adolescent and prankster, the clown, the buffoon, the man-child lacking in adult sensibilities. He is Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame, Peter Griffin of The Family Guy, Tom Green, Howard Stern, Jimmy Kimmel--crude, obnoxious, vulgar, loud, moronic. For females there is “the midriff,” girls who use their sexual objectification as a form of empowerment. You’ve seen them--Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the like. Many such “cultural icons” have come and gone in America, true enough, but there have never been so many at one time and never without acceptable alternatives. One might argue that the current generation of teens has passed through a cultural bottleneck in which their “heroes” have been rigorously defined as the mook and the midriff. Real heroes do exist of course, there is a war on, but teens are unlikely to see any mention of them in the mainstream mass media. What’s more, the teens I teach express little interest in the war and prefer to show their patriotism by shopping. Well, who can argue with this logic? After all, Bush practically made it his strategy for winning the peace. Support the troops? No, support your local economy! So if kids don’t see real heroes--selfless individuals who are willing to sacrifice even their lives for a greater cause--what do they see? Noam Chomsky, the left wing firebrand, says the mass media is teeming with unsavory characters that can be labeled “anti-heroes,” people who have picked up on a trend and try to exploit it for their own benefit: [T]hose are the kinds of “heroes” that the culture is going to set up for you--the kind who show up when there are points to be gotten and power to be gotten, and who try to exploit popular movements for their own personal power-trips, and therefore marginalize the popular movements.
Chomsky gets right to the heart and soul of the American marketing industry. Find out what kinds of things teens like, set up caricatures to pose as their heroes, and then market the final product to them for obscene profits. You’d think kids would be savvy enough to pick up on the fact that they’re being horribly exploited, but I don’t think this is happening. From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of college kids try to live up to the stereotypes. Most dress alike and speak in maddening clichés, all of it learned behavior, yes, but these stereotypes have become so internalized that the kids now actually believe that they are true, real, cool, and as we all know if you live a lie long enough it becomes true. It’s very difficult to say one thing and think another. This is what Chomsky calls “cognitive dissonance,” and with the exception of career politicians, few people are capable of putting up a façade for very long. It’s quite unlikely, for instance, that a college freshman has the ability to strut around campus like a buffoon, acting the part of the mook, while suppressing his deep desire to study Shakespeare. This is what George Orwell’s 1984 is all about, Chomsky claims. Winston Smith, the main character in Orwell’s novel, is suppressing his true nature and playing a part to appease the people in positions of authority, but Smith is an exceptionally rare breed of man and realizes how difficult it is to keep up the act, to control the way he walks and talks, gestures and dresses. Orwell writes: It struck [Smith] that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body…And it is the same in all seemingly heroic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship...
A schizophrenic crackup can’t be long down the road for such a man, and anyone who has read 1984 has surely come away with an acute sense of paranoia. Each semester I do not read papers by individual human beings but by mooks and midriffs or people who, like Winston Smith, have managed to suppress their true selves in order to “fit in.” Most essays are completely vacuous. They are lacking in sincerity, intellectual curiosity, maturity, and meaning. The papers are often trivial, stringing together a series of facts lifted from inadequate sources like Wikipedia. The papers fail to inform the reader and never say anything new about the subject matter under discussion. The diction is often informal, consisting of colloquialisms and slang. Students show no understanding of the concepts of thesis, argumentation or persuasion. And because students are incapable of thinking critically about the subjects they encounter in the college classroom odds are they are unlikely to become critical of the consumer culture that is continually manipulating them. This mentality creates a vicious feedback loop: Teens are told that being stupid is a virtue; they then build up a resistance to learning; as a consequence of their resistance, they become stupid. This is not to say that college freshmen are entirely to blame. Some critics, like former New York City school teacher John Taylor Gatto, have likened the traditional classroom to a vast assembly line that mass produces a work force for the industrial sector. The goal is not to teach kids to think critically and independently but to make them submissive to authority. Teachers judge them not on how well they can analyze the world around them but on how well they are able to take orders and follow directions. There is a lot of truth to this. When I first started teaching six years ago I was aghast by what I saw when read the essays piling up on the corner of my desk. In a panic I turned to a colleague and said, “You know, I feel like I’m just teaching these kids how to follow simple instructions, not how to analyze complex texts.” My colleague had a sullen look in his eye as if to say, “Now he gets it.” Maybe I do. Mooks and midriffs. A society of vulgarians. And this vulgarity stems largely from indoctrination rather than education. Literacy can help. In December 2005 NBC Nightly News reported that 69% of college seniors are unable to read complex texts. In essence they are functionally illiterate. Apparently reading is of no use to them. In the preface to his book In Praise of Darkness, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges says that a book is merely an object like any other and until someone actually reads the book it will remain an object rather than something of aesthetic value. Unfortunately, for most college students books are objects, things to be abhorred and reviled rather than read, studied, and admired. Any so-called college level reading is purely trivial. The formula goes like this: Students read a book, memorize a portion of its contents, and then regurgitate the material during exam time. Students never actively involve themselves in what they’re reading. Noam Chomsky says: The point is, it doesn’t matter what you read, what matters is how you read it….Just reading does you no good: you only learn if the material is integrated into your own creative processes somehow, otherwise it just passes through your mind and disappears. And there’s nothing valuable about that—it has basically the effect of learning the catechism…
For any experience to be truly meaningful, including the experience of learning, it must be internalized. Joseph Campbell writes of this in regards to mythology. In the past people lived with their myths. Stories of heroic deeds gave them a model of behavior, a sense of place within the larger society. For them a ritual was a re-enactment of and participation in a myth. But today, since we have no myths to live by, nothing really resonates in a meaningful way. What we do have is a mass media controlled by mega corporations that teach kids to behave in crass ways. When it comes right down to it, Americans have ritualized stupidity on a mass scale. Of course kids always have the option of picking up a good book and reading about characters concerned with our common humanity, but mooks and midriffs, conditioned since their natal day to dismiss such pursuits, lack the motivation to venture into those uncharted waters, and so books remain objects, or worse, they become the white whale that must be destroyed at all costs. Regretfully, this will only hasten the destruction of the intellectually maimed heroes of the so-called Information Age, but when the drama is done we may find that a few lucky survivors have escaped to tell their tale. And perhaps the true purpose of college is to roam the incalculably vast wasteland of American culture in search of missing children in need of rescuing. —Kevin P. Keating Keven P. Keating teaches English at Baldwin-Wallace College near Cleveland, Ohio REPLY TO MR. COHEN In his recent Washington Post article, Richard Cohen laments the shallow mockery of Saddam Hussein’s trial in Baghdad, while chiding anti-war protesters for totally ignoring the “thug’s” removal as, at least, one real justification for the most recent Iraq war. I say “most recent” because Cohen completely overlooks the fact that war in earnest against Iraq began with Desert Storm in l991, and that was closely followed by severe sanctions and “coalition” bombing of Iraq’s superstructure throughout the subsequent Clinton administration, which meant that Bush’s (the most recent) moral authority was already non-existent in ‘03—particularly in light of the pre-‘war’ figure of almost 500,000 Iraqi deaths (mostly children) resulting directly and indirectly from those sanctions and bombing. I would suggest to Mr. Cohen that no single act of Saddam’s barbarism is credited with as many deaths, excepting, perhaps, the Iran-Iraq war. It is little wonder, when one ponders the wide-ranging pre-War publicity that revealed the ½ million figure, that Saddam’s atrocities almost pale in light of America’s. And I would also reiterate another point: namely that it has yet to be proven it did not require a cruel strongman to hold Iraq together as a state. It would be redundant to go into the sectarian fighting, etc., all over the Sunni Triangle, and elsewhere, that currently holds sway over the sad situation that is Iraq. The simple (and bitter) truth is that America instigated mass murder in Iraq well before G.W. began his own dirty, little war. And when he wonders, particularly out loud, why Hussein’s trial doesn’t inspire more outrage than it does, let’s recall the fiction proposed by an earlier PR campaign describing Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti infants out of their incubators. And before that, we had Grenada and Panama. And before that, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Before that, Chile. Vietnam. Ad nauseam. And Mr. Cohen might well wonder why Saddam is old hat and doesn’t make a more erstwhile villain. It is because our militarized Plutocracy, in concert with a popular culture and media dedicated to public policy amnesia and desensitization to violence via virtual reality war games, and such government prohibitions as disallowing photos of returning war dead and televisions’ proscribing grisly war violence from the idiot screen, has been making war on the globe since the end of WWII, and beyond: anything to get our two-cents worth. Or is it our 98% worth of the action? —Bill Dodd SPEAKING FRENCH Recent riots among Left Bank students in Paris against proposed government changes in labor laws revealingly reflect both strong social and political undercurrents in France. They are political insofar as the intellectual youth of the country are unwilling to easily let go one of the historically hard-earned benefits of their social democracy. And while it may not appear that significant to outsiders—lowering the bar on businesses’ flexibility in the hiring and firing of young workers—it is extremely important to the French who pride themselves on having a democracy by, for and of the people—and not of Corporatism, to which business there, and everywhere, has evolved. It is social protest in that Europeans, apparently unlike Americans, have a much more organic view of their culture, which simply means they view the corporate entity as something that roots in their society, feeding off its institutions and people, and not vice versa, and is therefore totally beholden to it. In other words, why shouldn’t a rich multi-national corporation absorb a few bad apples? Here, we’ve successfully learned not only to adapt to that but we find that they’re usually at the very top of the corporate food chain as CEO’s or CFO’s. And, contrarily, in the U.S. we go so far as to permit corporations to assume the same legal stature as a citizen. But then, too, culture, not business, is the business of France. As well, the two main dangers to any culture from Corporatism (government by and for corporations) are control of the political process and manipulation of the social dialogue. In the America of today, one sees the affects of their monolithic “campaign contributions” on the political scene, reducing the parties to policyless prattling at the uttermost and meaningless reaches of a government turned into a corporate vehicle. They, equally, control the social dialogue…by all but eliminating it. This is done through massive media blitzes, a “corporate” media that any longer is only about profit and not policy, and a public that is both pliant and compliant. And, of course, increasingly among the financial corporate moguls, the lines separating nations are increasingly blurred, if not altogether gone. In the money game, true globalization has arrived. Yes, one notes, the students in France are rioting, but what of their leaders? They are yielding, obviously, to those very anti-French forces of Corporatism much as the American Congress and Presidency yield to what are equally obvious anti-American Corporatism forces. No “respectable” political figures will any more talk about protecting American jobs or purely local business interests as this runs counter to the forces of globalization. In a curious and contradictory vein in contemporary American politics, on the one hand we excoriate the U.N., and on the other allow the prevailing business interests that make their home here do their utmost to undermine the nation. To interpose Biblically, if well beyond the canon, the Rapture—introduced sometime, I believe, around l960—will include only the Corporate Elite, in one scenario, who have no earthly place left to go from their skyscraper perches throughout the world and who are no longer responsible to any of the sad, bereft earthlings below them. GEORGE BUSH JOINS THE GREENS There is a widespread assumption in America that ethanol (alcohol fuel derived from about any biomass—corn, sugar cane, potatoes, biodegradable garbage, et al) can be used only in small proportions with gasoline to power internal combustion engines. This lie has, of course, been widely promulgated by the oil industry. The truth is, as with Brazil’s “flex” cars, ethanol can be burned wholly (100%) to power them, or in various combinations with gas, automobiles that are increasingly ubiquitous there—where their reliance on ethanol was recently highlighted on the weekly Australian journal, DATELINE, featured here on LINK-TV. This is particularly apropos the current robbery Americans experience daily at the “gas pump.” And it is in line with that quintessential oilman, George W.’s recent reflections on our “oil addiction.” He has not followed-up on those remarks, tellingly enough. Now this week, as the NY Times reports the 30-80B government giveaway to the oil giants’ deepwater extraction programs in the Gulf, it becomes increasingly clear Americans must demand major changes in our institutions—the oil business being one of the major ones—and begin to take matters into their own hands and petition even more vigorously our government for alternative energy sources. And I fervently hope the trust apparently placed by many in hydrogen power is not a red herring… According to the Brazilians, the “flex” car (one that runs on ethanol or gasoline or almost any combination of the two) is easily produced and, most importantly, relatively CHEAP. In fact, GM makes one of the most popular models to be found there. And ethanol, itself, is as easy to produce as a distillery is to run, and it is largely without toxic exhaust. There is no reason, then, especially given our enormous garbage problem and gigantic agri-business empire, we couldn’t all be driving on ethanol. It would obviously require investment, and who better to finance this fledging industry than the World Bank and IMF? We all know Wolfowitz; he’d go along. What better way to repay the American public for his cushy climb to the top. Come on! Give us a hand, people! There has to be a way to kick the oil habit, and ethanol is probably the likeliest candidate. And, of course, by far the greatest gain, for Americans as well as the rest of the world, is that there will be no need for future wars, or invasions and occupations, to secure our energy future…. LIAR, LIAR One can forgive the liar, but not the lie…perhaps. When it(they) emanates from some fool who has learned to hypocritically parrot cracker-barrel American laissez-faire entrepreneurial success anecdotes out of the mouths of Midland, Texas airheads and exploiters, it is hard to get in a forgiving mood. Particularly from this guy just out of Methodist re-hab repeating his heartfelt, redneck fixation on removing Saddam Hussein, at any cost, and from, as well, that witches’ brew of neocons who comprised the Likud-leaning Pentagon Office of Special Plans—Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Feith. History is unforgiving on the War Thing. And the dead are slow, if ever, to. Exactly why George, Jr., flew in the face of his father’s determination Iraq was too unstable to depose Hussein may forever remain a mystery. The Brits, who invented modern-day Iraq near the turn of the last century, knew they had cobbled together an aggregate of inherently unstable factions there. Now the new ‘Iraqi Constitution,’ simply sets out the ‘federalist’ terms for its dissolution. The Kurds, for example, having, under its terms, gained their own state and its Northern oil patch, form, unofficially, Kurdistan—as they loudly proclaim, except to the Turks who have sworn to destroy any such entity. The Sunnis, who presently make-up the majority of the insurrection against our occupation, are left completely out in the cold by the document. And they know it, and will violently reject these results. The Shia hopes for running a united, Iranian-style caliphate (leadership embodying both the secular and religious) is plainly a pipe-dream. Well, Bush is, figuratively, back to the scene of his earliest political embarrassment, Midland, speaking of his present plummeting in the polls, from the public’s firm conviction they were lied to. They were lied to. New Jersey gubernatorial candidate, Forrester, who lost last week, points to Katrina as the final straw in revealing Bush’s incompetency. I think that’s plausible. But be warned. The battle is not over. As I write, they’re making new noise over both Syria and Iran, and I’m certain that were it not for the huge overdraft they’ve written in terms of military and money for Iraq, they’d be back today campaigning for further adventurism in the Middle East. We have, however, won something. Kudos to all those both contemporary and who got on board this anti-War /Lie train by February 15, 2003. From Robert Scheer who fought the thing for years before a neo-fascist recently pushed him out at the L.A. Times, and now richly deserves his forced retirement, to all those nameless, but hardly soulless individuals, who’ve given of their time and talents to finally see his numbers go to 37% favorable ratings—or, correctly, unfavorable ratings. Time wounds all heels —Bill Dodd It’s the Economy Stupid! That was, of course, Clinton’s famous battle cry for an economy apparently so precarious (a ‘consumer’ economy, remember) that too much tilt and it goes into a tailspin of deficits that sends every true conservative yearning for democracy with a small ‘d’ pulling their hair. Now we learn, following Hurricane Katrina, the congressional Republicans plan a 35B cut in medicaid and food stamps—and a further 75B cut in taxes on the rich. Can we afford to continue to throw so much business (treasury notes) to a China that is despotic and censorious? Over and above such concerns, is the racial gulf in our country that Katrina reaffirmed—a racial gulf that is in actuality an economic one. While no one can accurately predict the outcome of interpersonal relationships, it is crystal clear that where there is economic equity the racial divide rapidly disappears almost entirely. White supremacy is an economic loop instigated two centuries ago. Break that replay and it all but vanishes. It not only goes a long way in explaining Bill Cosby’s lamented absentee fathers and unwed mothers, it’s banishment would largely eliminate these problems as they exist as matters of economic, mainly, learned practices and not, certainly, as innate social responses. Even with the radical right hard on his heels, Bill Clinton found the means to some degree of balance, despite his eventually kowtowing to them in such matters as AFDC. The real answer the Millions March seeks is the exercise of simple economic justice: a bit less wealth for the filthy rich and a bit more for the underprivileged. Yes, the radicals point to the poor of NO’s and declare they represent the failures of liberalism, but the truth is those poor people come from generations that were never given any real help (money) or any real hand-up. The same people point to the European welfare states and scream ‘stagnant’ when what they actually point out is a ‘balance’ somewhat more between the rich and the poor. As Chancellor Schroeder said, preparatory to turning over his office to a right-winger (but not most of the cabinet!), “The people do not want government in their face, but rather one walking beside them.” That is America’s challenge and crying need and cure: a government/economy that walks with the people. —Bill Dodd Play it Again, Sam Bush has got nowhere else to go. He’s got to resort to the BIG SCARE. Hence, his speech of 10-6. The shining democracy on the hill (Iraq) has given way to the terrorist den on the Tigris-Euphrates. I mean, his advisors (speech writers) are hard-edge. They (he) has it now comparable to the Cold War—the confrontation between America and al Quaeda. What would you do if you’d staked your fortune on a salted mine? And hard on the heels of his speech, NY’s mayor, to underline the Prez, Bloomberg has unabashedly described an imminent threat to his subway system. The story is some captive in Baghdad (Note: Baghdad) told them. You can very imagine the intimate communications that exist between low-level insurgents and al Quaeda operatives presumably in NY. They’re apparently going to frighten us into submission to their misbegotten policies regardless of our inclination to reason out some of the conflict. You will be scared, Mr. and Ms. America, regardless of your reasoned inclinations. If you don’t yield, you get a night with Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby from which no one ever returns the same. Wow? We’re really getting deep into this Orwellian (‘Manufacturing Consent’) stuff. They appear to think they can call up the bogeyman of terrorism anytime to obtain the desired results—acquiescence of the public. That’s a broad assumption. Oh, I realize many similar assumptions concerning opinion manipulation are sound and time-tested, but how long will the public actually take seriously comic figures like George Bush and Michael Bloomberg? I don’t know. For all their brilliance, I’m not sure Madison Avenue could any longer sell this pig-in-a-poke of the continued occupation of Iraq. No doubt, there are some terrorist figures out there, but, then, there have been for many years. And even passingly competent intelligence might have prevented 9/11. And there aren’t many avenues left for terrorists that are so ready-made as airplane missiles. I personally think the American public is just going to have to bear this hardsell for the duration of Bush’s term in office. We’ve certainly
going to hear it replayed over and over—at least through the ’06 elections. —Bill Dodd Bush Unveils New Deal By Bill Pearlman In a surprise move, the White House announced today that the president has appointed Karl Rove to lead the effort to implement what he’s calling The New New Deal. “I’m tired of hearing how the Roosevelts saved the nation,” said Mr. Bush in a Rose Garden ceremony flanked by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, and Mr. Rove. “If we’re going to have real security in our country, we need contented folks, not looters floating down Canal St. in a plywood raft. We’ve seen the chickens come home to roost, and we’re agin’ it, Mr. Bushed drawled. “You ask me how we’re going to pay for our program? Simple: We’re going to cut the prescription drug benefit and we’re going to double taxes on citizens making more than 2 million a year. We don’t think this will be an undue hardship on our richest folks. We’re about to prove we can fight the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on personal freedom, and the war on natural disaster at the same time. My predecessors, including Presidents Roosevelt, Stevenson, Kennedy and Johnson knew how to bring the country together, and I do not shrink from my responsibility as your commander in chief. Any questions?” —Mr.President, are you implying that Adlai Stevenson was elected president? —How’s that? Of course he was; my granddaddy Prescott Bush served as his minister of culture. —Oh? —You betcha. Any other questions? —Mr.President, isn’t this a reversal of your tax-cutting plan? —Let’s not start the blame game. We’ll have plenty of time to let think tanks study the world’s contradictions. My administration is dedicated to the peace, security and freedom of the entire world. We can do it. I’m a generous man; the United States is a generous nation. We owe it to ourselves to make small sacrifices for the benefit of our underprivileged citizens. And my good friend Karl Rove, who has amassed volumes of unfair criticism, has agreed to spearhead our New New Deal. This will mean school vouchers for our poorest children, soup kitchens in every town affected by the recent hurricanes, and free mountain bikes for citizens who can’t afford cars. Karl, would you like to say something to the press? —No, Mr. President, you’ve about covered everything. —Thank you, Karl. Doing a heck of a job. Mr. Chertoff? --I’d just like to say, Mr.President, that the levees at the 19th St. Canal are holding. The Army Corps of Engineers has finally done its job, proving that government can transcend the incompetence for which it is justly infamous. And you are to be congratulated, Mr. President, for personally coming to the rescue of our great nation. —Thanks, Mike. Doing a heck of a job. Good day, ladies and gentleman, and God Bless America. Dumbo Gumbo “That was a good speech, Mr. President. Not exactly your bullhorn moment in New York, but close…” “Thanks, Carl. By the way is that with a ‘C’ or ‘K’? ‘K’ sounds awfully European and existential, I think.” “You promised them much ado,” Mr. President. “Yes, I promised them Habitat For Humanity; every piece of federal land that doesn’t have either a mounted statue of Old Hickory or Lafayette on it; five thousand dollar educational amounts just like ones for enlisted personnel who plan on attending either Harvard or Yale; my fondest wishes and most fervent prayers; I’d have thrown in those two-thousand dollar debit cards but they went away with FEMA’s Brownie; I don’t know what else I could have given them?” “Kerry thought they should have gotten some of the 60B you ordered.” “You mean Kucinich?” “Maybe it was Kastenbaum?” “K,K,K, that’s all I ever hear. Besides, that’s all going to infrastructure.” “Our Contractors.” “The agreement says half is for ‘social services.’” “We’ll divert some of the sand bags from the levees; it’ll free up eventually. Anyway, it’s our man who’ll be ridin’ herd on the operation. I’ll have Dick overseeing the whole thang. The most transparent man in the administration, besides myself.” “Dick, the opaque, I call him, Mr. President.” “Quite right, Carl.” An analyst for CNN from Berkeley thinks the demographics of downtown New Orleans have forever changed (which polls bear out) , fortuitously for the rich, white city fathers, and the area will take on the character of another Disney World featuring the French Quarter. It’s only racist insofar as whites are completely at sea with poor, black culture and are terrified of young, black men from the ghetto. Toss in a similar sentiment concerning Hispanics, and you’ve pretty much summed up contemporary America’s political demographics. It’s separate and unequal, although abrogated to the extent minorities adapt and assimilate, and not dissimilar to what happens to poor whites in this culture, as well, of whom there is an ever increasing number. Unless they become televangelists. Scratch that, Scotty. Go to warp. Sadly, the truth is NO’s disaster comes at a propitious time for Bush. Things could hardly be worse in Iraq—so, naturally, things will shortly get worse. His popularity ratings are so low they actually appear to be eating into his base. It’s hard to tell if he’s been personally much affected by what he has seen from Airforce 1 and on TV, but he certainly hasn’t promised the poor anything. (And those that can and do always seem to be in the process of rethinking that decision.) The AG of Mississippi, and, I hear, now Louisiana’s congress, have probably done more real good for people by challenging the insurance companies to pay-up. At least, NO has diverted the media for the past two weeks from the focus on Iraq that Cindy Sheehan had brought to bear, and that must be a good thing for our Prez, particularly since the line separating the insurgency from general civil war is increasingly blurred. Which means if you’re an American soldier there—you’re surrounded. And the only way out is home. Underpinning the entire problem, of course, is a lesson to be learned of what happens to a society when the highest levels of its government mirror its lowest common denominators—which is precisely what has occurred in the case of our wealthy, fundamentalist President. Get that? And it can surely be effectively argued that when its culture falters, a nation begins to fail. When a country’s predominant shared goal becomes divine revelation, there are predictably hard times ahead. We’re seeing some of it now. A close conservative friend of mine believes the canary-in-the-mine for our economy—consequently our future—is OPEC’s recent decision to diversify their monetary base, in place of reliance solely on the dollar. (As I recall, possible plans for conversion by Hussein in Iraq from the dollar to the euro, was once offered as one of the “real” reasons for deposing him.) Perhaps these are divine revelations? —Bill Dodd Connecting the Dots It doesn’t make sense to blame Hurricane Katrina on the Bush Administration or even to directly or solely blame the Bush Administration for the tragic failure of government to protect New Orleans from flooding and the slow, ineffective response to Katrina. But it does make sense to connect this failure of government to the anti-government ideology and policy of the Reagan-Bush presidencies and to the incredibly distorted way in which our Federal government uses the $1.7 trillion it spends each year. The Bush Administration has done something which no other administration in the history of the country has done: cut taxes during wartime. That is a radical act, a full-blown attack on the ability of the Federal government to fulfill its obligations to the American people. Regardless of whether or not one believes the invasion of Iraq was warranted or wise, it is clear that making a commitment to spend one billion dollars a day on that war and, at the same time, cut taxes was foolhardy and irresponsible. It was the work of ideologues, people who don’t deal well with reality. This administration has crippled the Federal government, essentially thrown it into bankruptcy. No problem. This administration doesn’t believe that the government is a useful institution, at least not for anything other than waging war and providing welfare to private corporations. Its attitude towards government is consistent with the thinking of Bush supporter Grover Norquist who said, "I don’t want to destroy the Federal government. I just want to make it so small we can drown it in a bathtub." The problem with that policy is that there are certain, crucial functions that the Federal government is better able to perform than any other institution in the country. One of those functions is to finance the construction of flood control projects of the kind that could have protected New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. The experts have known for a long time that New Orleans was vulnerable to the devastation that occurred. They also knew what could have been done to protect it. But we didn’t have the public funds or the public will to do it. So the Bush Administration cut the flood control budget for New Orleans in 2005 from 110 million to 40 million. That’s a big cut. But even the 110 million wouldn’t have protected New Orleans from Katrina. But wait a minute. What if we could have devoted one or two billion dollars to protecting New Orleans? What if we could have built something on the order of the dykes that Holland has built to protect itself from gigantic storms? After all, two billion dollars is only 4 percent of what the United States spends each year on its war machine. Yes folks, yours and our government spends $500 billion each year on building and maintaining its war machine. If you count all expenditures for past, present and future military purposes, including the $157 billion of interest on the national debt attributable to past wars and military spending, the Federal government spent $715 billion for military purposes in Fiscal 2004. That is 42 percent of the money which the Congress has discretion over, i.e. excluding Social Security and Medicare which are paid out of trust funds. Our government spends more on defense than the next 19 countries in the world combined – that includes Russia, Germany, Japan, China and all of Europe. Compare that with Sweden which spends about five percent of its Federal budget on the military. No wonder we don’t provide healthcare to all of our citizens. No wonder 20 percent of our children live in poverty. Is it possible that this is a partial explanation for the fact that our murder rate is eight times as large as that of any other country in the industrialized world or that our incarceration rate is four times that of the next highest country -–Russia – and 12 times as high as that of the Scandinavian countries? If we weren’t using 42 percent of our Federal budget to finance our war machine, is it possible we could have built a flood control system that would have protected New Orleans from the disaster that we knew was going to occur sometime or other? Is it any wonder that an administration that doesn’t believe in the value of government would hide the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Department of Homeland Security and appoint a Director who had no experience in emergency management? Hey, let’s find a place for Brownie. He’s a good guy. Hell, it’s only a government job. No big deal. But, you say, it costs money to build and protect an empire. Yes it does. Lots of it. And historians are telling us that it is precisely the building and maintaining of empire that contributed to the downfall of the Roman, Spanish, French and British empires. A hundred years from now, people will look back at this with the same kind of wonder and incredulity we have about slavery. You mean a plantation owner could sell a woman’s husband to some other plantation owner? You mean the slave women were used as breeding stock? You mean the slave children were taken care of by their older siblings, not by their mothers who were too busy working in the fields or the big house? And in 2105 they’ll be saying? Are you kidding me? They were spending 42 percent of their Federal budget on killing people and bombing buildings? At a time when many of their citizens couldn’t afford decent healthcare and fifteen percent of their citizens lived in poverty and their infant mortality rate was higher than 35 other countries in the world? What was wrong with those people? They must have been really screwed up. Yes they were. But they didn’t know it. We’re all to blame for this situation – Democrats, Republicans, Christians, Muslims, southerners, westerners, bankers, teachers, cowboys, truck drivers, capitalists, tree-huggers, hawks and doves. To the extent that elections are fair – and I think they basically are - we have elected the people who have made these decisions. Many of the decisions that led to this were virtually impossible to avoid, given our ascendancy to the position of world’s only superpower. But let’s be honest about this. Let’s take to heart M. Scott Peck’s definition of evil as "people who don’t own their imperfection." Let’s look the truth in the face. In 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed and we no longer had any enemies capable of hurting us, we could have devoted ourselves to shoring up the United Nations and turning it into a truly effective mechanism for resolving inter-governmental conflict and for dealing with the threats of terrorism and ethnic cleansing. We would have had to give up some of our sovereignty and transferred some of those military expenditures to the UN. Had we done that we could have used the UN to track down Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice. Of course, we can always say, "Well, no other empire ever did that before." But we could have done it. And we didn’t. And we could have heeded President Eisenhower’s warning that we were in danger of falling prey to a coalition of the military establishment and the defense industry which would suck up funds that were needed for education, healthcare, employment programs, highways, bridges, schools and, yes, flood control. But we didn’t. We’re not nearly in as good a shape as we think we are. We aren’t even close to being the best country in the world. As Morris Berman has written in The Twilight of American Culture, we are a country that is in decline. We meet each of his criteria of a dying culture: - Increasing inequality of wealth and living standards.
- Diminished returns to society from investments in technology (e.g. spending 500 billion a year on the war machine instead of helping our people).
- A dumbing down of the citizenry.
- Decrease in spiritual sensibility
The first step in changing is being aware of what is true. It’s time we took the blinders off and woke up to a reality that is not all that pretty. And did something about it. The task before us is to gracefully give up some of our relative dominance in the world, allow other countries like China to have their place in the sun and begin to use our great people and resources to help our own citizens lead better lives. That will require making sure that our corporations are free to compete effectively in the world economy. But it doesn’t require that we push other countries around as we have been doing for the past 40 years. Al Galves
Las Cruces, NM 88011 The Battle of New Orleans Katrina (the Storm) goes, in part, a long way in illustrating just how a cautious military foreign policy can strategically prevent a nation’s flanks being exposed in the event of domestic catastrophe. There can be no doubt expeditious life-saving national guard response was delayed in going to the aid of New Orleans due to our huge commitment in Iraq. But particularly when one also considers the enormous pork barrel spending of the Republicans in congress recently, it is quite clear “conservatism” no longer equates with “caution.” To further illustrate this historic(al) incongruity, I was thinking about having grown up absurd on the Plains, baptized several times in a variety of Protestant denominations, as, I suppose, God sought to get it right in a problematic case. I, naturally, heard many things in those drab, dreary cathedrals, but I never heard even one of those relatively humble ministers ever approach espousing violence, much less the assassination of a national leader, as the Rev. Pat Robertson recently did for Pres. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela on his “700 Club.” Talk about throwing caution out the window. Underlying his call, of course, is the complete rejection of independence of both thought and action on the part of Latin American governments. We, meaning the U.S., has reacted phobically throughout our history to the least suggestion of any and all political self-determination on their part, excepting those that pass our scrutiny—while extolling “what we stand for”: which, apparently, is solely our own hegemony over not only the Americas but any of the rest of the world, when it comes right down to it. The real, endemic problem with the disaster in New Orleans is that it exposes our social Darwinism, which we have wrapped in the various success fables of bourgeois capitalism—the Horatio Alger myths, for example. I would certainly hesitate to call Bush a racist, but the whole fabric of our society is based, at bottom, on class, and class discrimination can rightfully be said to have begun in racism, even slavery, and it is not surprising if one is black and poor, or white and poor, that he or she might indeed die of thirst inside the Superdome during the dog days of summer. The South, especially, the Deep South of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are particularly egregious in this respect. In stopping and thinking about what has happened in NO since the Katrina landfall, can anyone be surprised that the gang underclass has not stopped looting and shooting? We have no apprenticeship programs in this country, at least worthy of the name, as is the case in, say, modern Germany. So one enters, to be successful at it, anyway, a trade through nepotistic machinations—and forever there afterwards can hypocritically claim he or she owes their relative success to their own hard work and industry. I will never forget the rich cotton farmers on those Plains excoriating our welfare system—while themselves pocketing, as they still do, huge U.S. treasury checks for not growing crops, or for crops that had no appreciable markets, etc., etc. My father would grimace when I would brazenly confront them at times with their hypocrisy and duplicity—and undoubtedly apologize for me when I was out of sight. So, they’ve finally moved, in any case, to get the refugees into the Astrodome and other similar venues, but I would strongly suggest they begin yesterday to assemble trailers or reconstitute the Projects in NO before too many more days pass. I’d give them 90 days, tops, before the riots or near-riots begin in the elbow-to-elbow cots and conditions of these very temporary arrangements. Long-term, I return to my theme about reviewing the social democracies of Europe for hints on how we might more humanely deal in our own country—for its own good, and the survival of us all as we might begin to see in them vital economic and social pacts, and the initiation of social equity as more a national survival strategy than as an enemy of the state, negatively characterizing it as “liberal,” “socialist,” or “communist” for political advantage. —Bill Dodd You're Damn Right I'm Mad! (A rant) Republicans, whose motto should be "Pass the Buck and Blame the Victims," frequently respond to Liberals who the criticize the President's policies and performance by asking, "Why are you so mad?" "Take a few deep breaths and relax," is the advice they offer. Well I have only two words to say to these conservatives, WAKE UP! And if I sound angry, it's because I am. I'm damn angry. The President continued his vacation for three whole days after hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. It was more important for the President to fly off to Arizona to share a bite of birthday cake in a photo op with John McCain, and then fly further away from the Gulf Coast where people were dying from neglect, to deliver a speech in San Diego in which he compared his war with Iraq with WWII! Only on Wednesday, did it occur to the President, the Commander in Chief to cut his vacation short and return to Washington DC to make an attempt to appear to be taking this disaster seriously. And even in the face of all this detestation, Bush could not resist the urge to make light of the situation, While thousands were dead all around him, he made a pathetic attempt to boost the public morale by telling them that Trent Lott had lost one of his homes but when that home was rebuilt the President was looking forward to sitting on the front porch. Not even a thought or care about the tens of thousands of poor who lost everything in this disaster and will be lucky if they can just find a place to live and get any kind of job. Does this make you mad? It makes me furious! If the President had really been concerned with coping with a disaster of this magnitude, should he not have appointed an experienced person to head FEMA, instead of a fellow underachiever whose previous job was coordinating Arabian Horse shows (a job from which he was apparently fired). This makes me angry. Does the fact that the President tried to hoodwink the American people by saying no one could have predicted such a disaster when weeks ago I watched a NOVA episode that predicted exactly what did happen based upon information that was widely known. Or the fact that the President did not give the Army Corps of Engineers the money they were so desperately pleading for to repair the levees and upgrade the pumps? But then to hear the head of FEMA and the head of homeland security agency openly admit they did not know there were people in the Superdome who were literally dying of thirst and hunger when the whole world knew this and could see it in real time on Television really makes me angry. Or that they could be so colossally insensitive and/or ignorant of the thousands of persons who were dying in hospitals for lack of water, medicine, or oxygen. This is way beyond incompetence. This is criminal neglect. Bush and Cheney can declare war on a country using a variety of lame excuses; they were responsible for 9/11, they had weapons of mass destruction, they were pursuing enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon, we needed to facilitate a regime change, etc., etc., etc. But do my conservative friends have a clue? No. They just nod their heads enthusiastically in agreement with everything the President says. They play back all the Republican talking points without understanding a word they are saying. They put those colorful ribbons on their expensive SUVs proclaiming their love of country and support for the troops. (As if we Liberals do not support our troops or love our country! As if we Liberals do not feel pain in our heart for every victim of this needless war?) But do they encourage their kids to enlist to help in this war in which they so fervently believe and support? Of course they do not. Do they encourage their kids to enlist so that the military personnel who are serving on their second and third tours of duty can come home and be reunited with their families? Of course they do not. But they tell me with a straight face and an indulgent smile, no need to, the troops are so happy with the military, they're re-enlisting in records numbers! Have I died and gone to hell? The Republicans openly destroy our environment and endanger the population with air and water pollution, open our national parks to all kinds of environment destroying off road vehicles (not to mention removing any reference to the time period when most canyons and land formations were created if the time span is greater than 6,000 years). They push for opening the Alaskan wilderness to oil exploration. And when I express my indignation, my conservative friends smile patronizingly and say, we need oil so that we have gasoline for our cars to get to work. for our [6 MPG] motor homes and our Hummers and Range Rovers. They tell me, as if they were talking to a child, that it will cost too much for the oil and energy companies to curb their emissions, it will cost too much for the auto industry to develop more fuel efficient automobiles, and the science is just not there that proves the existence of global warming. (And don't get me started on Intelligent Design! If there was such a thing as Intelligent Design, god would not have created conservatives). But what is the real source of my anger? I am angry beyond words at how insensitive and uninformed these so-called compassionate conservatives are. How un-Christian these faith and values-based Christians are. I spent half a day carefully responding to one conservative on a variety of topics using only the most main stream media for support: The London Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post. The response was that these are not fair and balanced publications but far left of center Liberal Media publications that tell us Liberals only what we want to hear. (As if FOX News and the vast Sinclair Network/monopoly of stations are not the equivalent of a state-owned media?) If we really had a Liberal Media in this country, and damn it, I wish we had, they would question and challenge this administration 24 hours a day, the way they did Bill Clinton with Whitewater and eventually with Monica Lewinsky. The difference between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush is a blow job vs a blown job. What Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was dumb. Really dumb. Because, had he kept his zipper locked, Al Gore would have been president and every bit of Liberal legislation enacted by Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson would still be in place. But what Bush and his band of rapacious Republicans has done to this country is criminal. And I don't mind telling you, it enflames me. What Bill Clinton did, hurt him, it hurt his family, it hurt Monica Lewinsky and it certainly hurt the Democratic party. But nobody died as a result of his lack of self control. No country was destroyed. And no gargantuan magnet created to spawn anti-American terrorists by the tens of thousands. Bill Clinton would have been on the case before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. He would not have waited three days to take charge. Bill Clinton would have been in the White House working 24 hours a day to make sure that the victims of the hurricane received immediate care and the states received every bit of support we could offer. Clinton would not have commended his chief of FEMA for doing a "great job" if that chief had claimed that the people in the city were told to evacuate and because they did not it was their own fault! (Rush Limbaugh, when informed that the some of the people could not evacuate because they did not own an automobile, quipped, well why didn't they buy a car?--and they tell us that Liberals are out of touch). If there was a screw up in his administration, Clinton would not have looked for a scapegoat. Clinton would not have passed the buck to save his ass. Clinton, or any real leader would have accepted responsibility like a man and made things right. Does the fact that the President and his White House could not or would not head the cries for help make me angry? Do you have to ask?! But try bringing these things up to these conservatives and they just smile at you condescendingly and ask, why are you so mad? To which I can only respond, WHY ARE YOU SO GOD DAMN STUPID? WHY ARE YOU SO GOD DAMN INDIFFERENT? Am I mad. You better believe I am mad. I think it is time we all got mad. —Gary W. Priester Goodbye Heather Our local congressperson, Heather Wilson, is not a bad person, despite her rather consistent Republican behavior. She does what she has to do, votes the party line most of the time, and ingratiates herself with all the special interests that Republicans depend on for campaign funds, although she does make an occasional gesture toward reasonable legislative behavior, presumably because she is aware that she does not represent a hard-right congressional district. So she’s not quite all bad. But she’s got to go. She’s got to go because control of the congress is essential if the disastrous direction if which our country is headed is to be reversed. The War in Iraq must be ended; Reckless tax-cutting for the benefit of the rich and rapacious must stop. Republicans in congress are under immense pressure to vote for George Bush’s program, even if they know that it is misguided and wrong. The leaders of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, led by Tom “the hammer” Delay are ruthless in their treatment of apostates who refuse to vote the party line. There is some reason to believe that Wilson has voted for legislation about which she had serious doubts, out of fear that her failure to do so would result in the loss of campaign funds, choice committee assignments, and other perquisites of office. The congresswoman has been enabled to fly under the radar in her support of various important issues because of the abject failure of local media—especially The Albuquerque Journal – to provide in-depth coverage of her congressional record. To take three important issues: Wilson has been an unremitting supporter of the Iraq War; she was a major contributor to the formulation of the misbegotten Medicare drug legislation, whose major benefits seem to be designed to flow to the pharmaceutical industry; she has waffled on Bush’s social security initiative (although in one of her early statements after taking office in her first term she advocated major “reforms” in the program); and there is no reason to believe that she is not a supporter of the administration’s intense and ideologically extremist moral conservatism. If she has made a statement about the current “creationism” controversy, for example, it has been kept under wraps by the local media. To her credit she voted with the House majority to amend the President’s policy of limiting stem cell research. But her half-steps toward moderation are beside the point. Heather Wilson’s vote with the majority in the organization of the House of Representatives helps grease the way for the repellent policies of the Bush administration. That’s reason enough. The search for a replacement should begin now. How about Attorney General, Patricia Madrid? —Richard Hopkins Let There Be Light The rise of the social democracies in Europe following WWII may be the most important event in world history. While each of them is economically patterned around modified free-market systems, each insures social protection for their populations all their lives. Due to a recent relative flat-lining in their economic growth, it is sometimes now argued that cutbacks in social programs will become necessary, but it is doubtful their populaces would stand still for significant reductions in social services. They have also come in for some criticism, internationally, for their practice of providing liberal subsidies to their agricultural and/or industrial sectors. So, there is an obvious need for tweaking these shortcomings; however, these nation-states stand almost alone in the world in affording their people the highest lifestyles and life-expectancy in the civilized, techno-industrial world; anywhere, really. Almost equally important today is the model they provide both advanced (America, take heed) and emerging nations to aspire to, while also helping undergird any cultural theory of a nation’s internal peace and international stability based on economic equity. Noam Chomsky argues that in America there is a long-standing class battle between the haves and the have-nots in which the rich abhor the notion of “solidarity” (of the people), and seek to maintain, at almost any cost, our mainly economic inequities. His point is seconded by many who have observed that in Western Europe the community is emphasized over the individual. Of course, Chomsky also champions libertarian, by implication, at least, (anarchist) socialism over these social democracies that have arisen in Europe, but I believe a realist reading of history supports the notion the public in most nation-states is ultimately passive, politically, and, except perhaps in rare instances such as the early Israeli kibbutzim, will not long remain dedicated and active in his libertarian socialist state. The bureaucratic programs in a social democracy perform a kind of “fail-safe” function that, while they may not always be ideal, remain functional for even the most isolated individuals. This is absolutely vital in preventing the dysfunction of the system supporting a thriving culture. Chomsky would obviously admit life in Israel is not what it once was, to say the least; while the standard of living there is, overall, quite high, in Western Europe it has also dramatically increased over these last sixty years—and without massive foreign aid. I suppose my view is, at bottom, rather conservatively liberal in basically accepting the rationale of these social democracies as something, that with really only moderate tweaking of our own system, could be implemented here, and certainly there is a great call made for that, at least indirectly. One hears everywhere, for example, the number 43-million, or some similar figure, as representative of those Americans who have no health insurance coverage. There’s an implicit demand here, as well; a demand for our government to come up with a system—usually, the single-payer system is the one mentioned—to correct this inequity. There’s a huge battle over this, of course. The radical Rightwing is not lying low any longer. W wants to dismantle social security—whatever his cover story, and the Republicans (alas, with the aid of many Democrats) try to siphon off as much of the treasury as possible to the Military-Corporate Complex and its fellow-travelers. I know specialists in the social programs of the various European countries involved will hasten to point out their relative shortcomings, but I would insist on the term “relative” to describe those shortcomings, especially when one considers how they compare to our tattered and ragged attempts to patch over the huge gulfs that exist here between those who are well-off and those who aren’t. In fact, I am astonished more comparative studies have not been done by our media on the subject—and then, again, I am not surprised. When Bill and Tommy went after welfare mothers little or no mention was made of either the fact they are treated far more sympathetically, financially and otherwise, in Western Europe or that many modern economists view the fact labor as a housewife and mother finds no valuation in our capitalist system as more an outrage than an oversight. And when this is viewed in light of the probably trillions in corporate welfare and tax loopholes, it is seen in the sorry light of the scandal it is. I mean, the meanness of it all—and the resentment of so many Americans, most of them—by definition—themselves poor, towards the AFDC mothers makes for a most unflattering portrait of who we are as a people. And there’s Big Bill Clinton grabbin’ aholt of those impoverished “welfare queens” by their gingham hems for political gain. I think he was richly deserving of his “Monica” fate—as is W, having wasted his presidency on a terribly wrong war that will haunt his history. —Bill Dodd The Blitz At the moment, I’m looking at a schematic of the London ‘Tube’ system following the terrorist bombings, musing that the schematic on its walls for the passengers there is considered a modern graphic arts classic. Today is the latest installment of the little “War of the Worlds,” that began in earnest 9/ll; I say “little” because it would be hard to compare it to, say, WWII. But significant. That tragic attack, of course, is the one W hijacked to, in large measure, justify his attack on Iraq. There had been global issues of social justice between America and the Middle East for years: the Palestinian issue, our exploitation of ‘their’ oil, and our political and military support of despotic reigns in the region, etc. It only took the one clever man in the right circumstances to fashion a jihad out of those prone to religious fanaticism. Who was bin Laden? Yes, it galvanized right wing support for W, and he ran with it, but there is also no denying that it finally awakened (in bold face) the left wing to the several decades of either neglect or exploitation of much of the world by a long series of American leaders, beginning most notably with Ronald Reagan. I do not think I am rationalizing when I claim the half-million who marched in N.Y., February 15, 2003, represents a remarkable reawakening and resurgence of millions—really, throughout the world—of strangely dormant liberals; Van Winkles, who, presumably, would have gone on sleeping, still dreaming lewdly of antics in the Oval Office. Now, it is claimed the conservatives were busy all along organizing politically. I’m not sure I buy that, or, at least, the part where it is argued they did so amazingly successfully. I mean, apart from the spasm of the Great Depression and FDR’s rise to power, our history doesn’t exactly argue a tremendous liberal past. And he was no comrade. At any rate, we are now—from a Progressive’s point-of-view—at a really delicious impasse. I mean, Bush barely beat Kerry, particularly if one factors in Ohio. Remember, the Red States are mainly small states, and most of them are truly Lilliputian in nature. When I first called Clinton a neo-liberal over three years ago, I heard a lot of groans. I wonder if there’s still any groaning out there. And Progressives now have a substantial grasp of what gives in the world, many of whom were in Never-never not so long ago. We owe much to W. The liberal wing of the American political scene has been re-tooled, re-invented, strangely re-invigorated, and in no mood for half-measures. It’s really amazing when one thinks about it, and this is not self-congratulatory b.s. Oh, yes, we have the three branches of government against us, and it could very well be argued, the judiciary, as well. But we are holding fast, and people are moving on several fronts to advance Progessive agendas as one can view from the efforts of the FreePress movement to place the actions of the FCC in full light. One of the real problems remaining, however, is the threat of the 2008 Presidential race to again place Progressives in the humiliating position they occupied in both 2000 and 2004 by forcing them to choose between who they want and who can win, or more accurately, who might win. This is humiliation the Democrats bring about by choosing a candidate from the duopolistic wing of the party, e.g., John Kerry, who was just so much ketchup spilled on our shirts the last time around. These kinds of “choices,” of course, reduce the Democratic Party to the level of Corporatism we all abhor. It is unapologetically neo-liberal and is indistinguishable from the Republican cacophonies. My backbrain sings, I can tell my brother by the flowers in his eyes, on the road to Shambala. I want to vote for my brother, as well. Not someone who echoes the old, dead materialism of a corporate America run rampant. Concluding, for now, if you grant the point there is a relative impasse in the American electorate, as a whole, what can we reasonably expect (from an optimistic point-of-view) in the near term? What I’m trying to suggest is there is real human improvement both in terms of the individuals involved and their involvement, itself, in our relative political condition. Wherever they marched in ’03, we have real friends. People who are the psychic lodestone of our earth. If there is anyway we can make it out of here, it will be through them. And we must not forget the dance—to dance. It may be our song and dance that leads the vote. If there are two bad candidates in ’08, we will dismiss them immediately as irrelevant, and continue to grow. Not only is it the only thing we can do, it is the fun thing. If one lists to the Right, we will forget him, fighting our rearguard actions as we go. If to the Left, we will encourage him(her) at every opportunity towards our p.v. One day, we will have our own—and the Maypole, besides. —Bill Dodd Report from Geezerville: Twenty Five Chips Short. Life in Geezerville revolves around little things—habits, schedules, expectations. Growing old, in case you haven’t heard, is difficult and full of discomfort, disappointment and loss. (It has its satisfactions, too, but that’s not what this piece is about, so save the lecture about your 95-year-old great aunt who runs in marathons, travels to Europe by herself, and mows her lawn with a push-type lawnmower.) One of the ways we geezers hang on to our sanity, to the extent we’re fortunate enough to do that, is to settle into routines, patterns of behavior, that are just short of obsessive-compulsive in nature. One of my routines has been to eat a small bag of Fritos at about three in the afternoon, just after I get up from my nap, (also a bit of patterned behavior) which has been taken in a large, wine-colored leather recliner. I also carry a bag of these salty little corn chips on my thrice-weekly golf outings, which I consume, along with a banana, “at the turn” from the first nine to the second. I also have an occasional bag at lunchtime with my bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. Fritos, in short, have been fully integrated into my life. I appreciate them, despite their excessive salt and carbohydrate content, and am grateful to the Frito-Lay corporation for making them available in such a convenient form. Now for some years I have purchased my Fritos in case lots from Costco—44 packages, 1¼ ounces each, a month’s supply. The other day, however, as I wandered the aisles of Costco and prepared to place the cardboard box of Fritos in my cart, I noticed that the box is slightly larger than before—in fact, it now contains 50, not 44, little yellow and red bags of Fritos. Also, the price has gone up from $8.59 to $9.59. I shrugged and moved on. How can we hope to understand the mysteries of corporate marketing decisions? Over the next few days, however, I noticed that the cute little bags of Fritos were not delivering their usual satisfying wallop. Something was missing. Consumption of a bag left me with an empty feeling. As I was eating my BLT one day, I dumped the entire bag on my plate, and realized that the bag was about 25 chips short. I examined the bag, and the secret was out! Frito-Lay had reduced the size of the minibag from 11/4 ounces to a single ounce—a 20% reduction! No wonder I felt this continued craving after I finished a bag. I had been victimized by the sleaziest of corporate maneuvers—raising the price of an item by stealthily reducing the quantity. Like George Bush’s administration, Frito-Lay had tried to put something over on me, and failed! Now what makes this revolting development so frustrating is that absolutely nothing can be done about it, short of giving up Fritos in protest. I can understand that Frito-Lay might feel constrained to raise the price of an item, although the profitability of its parent corporation, Pepsico, has been rising steadily, and along with it, the value of its stock. Perhaps the increasing cost of fuel makes deliveries more expensive. Perhaps the corn market is in a bullish phase. Perhaps the bonuses of corporate executives had fallen below seven figures. But why do it this surreptitious, undercover, way? Do they believe that those of us who have folded Fritos into our lives through consumption of the minibags won’t notice? Opening a second bag at a sitting, thereby consumimg two ounces rather than an ounce and a quarter, is no option, because it would be playing right into their greedy hands. So as you can see, life is tough here in Geezerville. Little things trump big things. This is a world in which the trivial becomes consequential and the consequential is relentlessly trivialized. Which leads me to more serious matters. Coping with the Frito-Lays of the world is as hopeless, apparently, as trying to bring down the Bush administration by pointing out its deviousness, dishonesty, and more outrageous manipulations This leads us to the problem we face when the world really is turning to shit and no one else seems to notice. Or care. Being ignored is a condition that older people must learn to live with—and why small bags of Fritos can loom large in our lives. However limited our long term horizon may be, however, we do have time on our hands to pay attention to the world. We have information, and in some cases, even wisdom. Younger people, given the conditions in American life, are busy getting and spending and raising their kids. They have no time for politics, economics, world affairs. They leave that to us, perhaps because we’re easy to ignore. We’re free to deplore; they’re free to ignore. Consider this passage from a recent article by Congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat: What worries me almost as much as our misguided policy in Iraq is the fact that so many of my colleagues and so many citizens have become resigned to the fact that the war will go on. Congress is not being inundated with letters and phone calls and faxes and e-mails and street protests demanding an end to our presence in Iraq. President Bush’s re-election seems to have taken much of the energy out of the antiwar movement. My recent visit to Iraq only strengthened my belief that this war is wrong. And only renewed passionate dissent by the American people can end it.
And in an article in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, the author Mark Danner suggests that the euphoria over the apparent success of the January elections in Iraq was seriously misplaced. Indeed, Danner states, the elections brought to a head the ugly problematics of the Iraqi democracy-building project. The elections occurred only because U.S. forces effectively locked down the country; the Sunnis hardly participated at all; the real victors were the Kurds, who have the power to stop anything from happening, and who are extremely skeptical about the prospect of a unitary state. Thus it is not surprising that the insurgency continues unabated and that a government is still not in place. But the American people (whatever that means in this day and age), seem blissfully unaware of what is happening in Iraq, only too willing to buy into the administration’s eagerness to have us believe that developments in Iraq represent steps toward something they call “democracy.” The populace at large seem to be quite incapable of anything like “passionate dissent” about anything in the public domain. Or consider the failure of significant numbers of people to rise up in indignation over the actions of Congress and the president in the Terri Schiavo affair. The ruling neocons profess to believe that the government should have very few functions—except to wage war, subsidize the oil industry, and now to mess around in the private lives of American families. The polls show that most people didn’t approve of the actions of the Republican leadership in using the power of the federal government to intervene in what was a family dispute, but what are the consequences for the congresspersons who went along with this outrageous and cynical strategy, including our own Congresswoman Heather Wilson , or for the president himself? There have been no consequences so far as the headlines are dominated by the weekly trivial cause celebre. Mr. Bush, you may recall, rushed home from Texas in the middle of the night to sign the bill that removed the Schiavo affair from the jurisdiction of the Florida State courts. He did this, he said, because he wanted to “err on the side of life,” something he had consistently failed to do in signing 127 death penalty warrants, some of them highly questionable, as governor of Texas, even mocking Carla Faye Tucker’s plaintive plea to be allowed to live so that she could do good in the world with her new found born-again Christianity (which is exactly George Bush’s life pattern, incidentally.) Moreover, it turns out that when he was governor of Texas, Bush promoted and signed into law a bill that authorizes physicians to remove life support from hopeless cases even over family objections. In other words, our president is a nasty little hypocrite, about this and a lot of other things. Our next chance to make our voices heard will be the congressional elections next year. Are there any issues that would sweep the perpetrators of the war and the Terri Schiavo fiasco out of office? We shall see; but the prospects are not good. Now a few favorable signs should be acknowledged. It is true that Mr. Bush’s approval ratings have dropped into the high forties; and that he is having no success whatever in convincing the American people that the Social Security System should be modified, if not destroyed, by the institution of so-called “personal accounts”. Moreover, the infamous Tom Delay, one of Heather Wilson’s mentors, seems to be covering up on the ropes while awaiting a knockout punch, and it appears increasingly unlikely that the Senate will approve the appointment of sworn enemy of the United Nations as U.S. Ambassador to that body. Maybe the people out there are beginning to catch on. Or maybe they’re getting older and wiser. Or maybe the only thing that really matters is the price of Fritos.—Richard Hopkins SUPERSYCOPHANT The appointment of John Negroponte as the country’s first “intelligence czar” is at least as shocking as any of George Bush’s appalling appointments to major cabinet positions. Far from being the spokesman of truth to power that is needed in this office, Negroponte is and has been a supersycophant, serving the foreign policy interests of right-wing America throughout his entire career. As the following review of Negroponte’s public career reveals, he has demonstrated none of the independence of judgment that this critical position requires. [This material is adapted from the entry on Negroponte in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.] In other words, like Secretary of state Condoleeza Rice, he can be counted on the feed to the president intelligence that confirms his prejudices. Negroponte was born in London. His father was a Greek shipping magnate. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1956 and Yale University in 1960. He later served at eight different Foreign Service posts in Asia, Europe and Latin America; and he also held important positions at the State Department and the White House. Negroponte speaks five languages. From 1981 to 1985 Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras. During his tenure, he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. At the time, Honduras was ruled by an elected but heavily militarily-influenced government. According to The New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic. Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the US, and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site. Records also show that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred to as a "death squad") of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress. In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Óscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with The Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive. In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two together with a contact in the Honduran armed forces. The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any US involvement, despite Negroponte's participation in the scheme. Other documents uncovered a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government. During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military and he claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post. When the Reagan administration came to power, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Later, the Honduras Commission on Human Rights accused Negroponte himself of human rights violations. Speaking of Negroponte and other senior US officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told The Baltimore Sun, which in 1995 published an extensive investigation of US activities in Honduras: “Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.” The Sun's investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of numerous abuses but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensured that the embassy's annual human rights report did not contain the full story. The question of what John Negroponte knew about human rights abuses in Honduras will probably never be answered definitively, but there is a large body of circumstantial evidence supporting the view that Negroponte was aware that serious violations of human rights were carried out by the Honduran government with the support of the CIA. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, on 14 September 2001, as reported in the Congressional Record (http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2001_cr/s091401.html), aired his suspicions on the occasion of Negroponte's nomination to the position of UN ambassador: Based upon the Committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government perpetuated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports. Among other evidence, Dodd cited a cable sent by Negroponte in 1985 that made it clear that Negroponte was aware of the threat of "future human rights abuses" by "secret operating cells" left over by General Alvarez after his deposition in 1984. When President Bush announced Negroponte's appointment to the UN shortly after coming to office, it was met with widespread protest. However, the Bush administration did not back down and even went so far as to try to silence potential witnesses. On March 25 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden deportation from the United States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his Senate confirmation hearings. One of the deportees was General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of Battalion 3-16. In the preceding month, Washington had revoked the visa of Discua who was Honduras' Deputy Ambassador to the UN. Nonetheless, Discua went public with details of US support of Battalion 3-16. On April 19, 2004, Negroponte was nominated by US President George W. Bush to be US ambassador to Iraq after the June 30 handover. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 6, 2004, by a vote of 95 to 3, and was officially sworn in on June 23, 2004, replacing L. Paul Bremer as the country's head American civilian official. One can only hope that the Senate, in confirmation hearings, will subject this truly terrible appointment to the critical scrutiny it deserves. —Richard Hopkins The Truth About Social Security Two years ago, Secretary of State, Colin Powell, stood before the United Nations, and the world, and proclaimed, the US knows Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and WE know where they are hidden. Condoleezza Rice, Powell's successor, warned the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud! And throughout it all, President Bush reminded us at every opportunity, Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and we have to go to war to prevent him from using those weapons on our soil. Last week, amid little fanfare, the White House called off the search for the WMDs saying it had found none. Meanwhile, over 1,300 American soldiers have died and over 10,000 have been wounded. The country is in total chaos and the end of this war is nowhere in sight. Today, the President has a new mantra, "The Social Security system is in crisis and unless we act now, it will go bankrupt! Don't you believe it. If you do your homework, you'll discover that the system is doing quite well. And if we do nothing at all, Social Security will be just fine until 2040. 2050 if you listen to the GAO (Government Accounting Office). And with a few minor tweaks, you'll discover, Social Security will be fine after 2050 and for a long time to come. (If the current administration had not squandered the budget surplus left behind by the Clinton administration, Social Security would have been in good shape until the end of the century). But don't take my word for it. And whatever you do, don't take the White House's word for it. Find out for yourself what the real motivation is for the mass destruction of Social Security. Search out the answers and get all the facts. —GWP Terrorizing America It has become increasingly clear that George W. Bush got himself re-elected by systematically, deliberately (and cynically) frightening voters with talk of terrorism, and by convincing a bare majority of voters that they would be safer in a country governed by his administration than by his opponent. This was done with impressive skill and with transparent political intent The president, acting in a drama orchestrated by political impresario Karl Rove, set out to rescue his floundering administration with a torrent of “terrortalk.” With the assistance of a compliant press, it worked. Have you noticed the almost complete absence of “terrortalk” since the election? No pending election; no need to scare people with “Orange Alerts.” Behind it all was the horrific event of September 11, 2001, an incident of stunning frightfulness that occurred in our greatest city like a stroke of lightning on a clear day, and that was replayed time and again by our omnipresent media to a public most of whom had no idea what was behind it or what its purpose might have been. The President might have taken an approach to this event quite different from the one he actually adopted, an approach designed to quieting our fears, exploring how this could have been allowed to happen, educating the citizenry to its complex meaning, moving to tighten the country’s defenses against a repetition , and taking decisive action to seeking out and dealing with the perpetrators of this dramatic act. Of these alternatives, the President undertook to do only the latter, and this in a kind of slipshod, indecisive, and ultimately only partially-successful way. He sent troops to Afghanistan to search out Osama Bin Laden and destroy the infrastructure of al Qaida. This, of course, was only a limited success. Osama escaped, and the Taliban was removed from power, but has now come back in much of the country outside of the capital, Kabul. So far as we know (and hard information about the progress, or lack of it, of the vaunted War on Terror is very hard to come by) Al Qaida remains alive and well in small cells throughout the world. A few of its leaders have apparently been captured, but anti-Western Muslim radicalism remains. Just how this will manifest itself in the decades ahead remains as mysterious as the exact whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Then there was (and remains) the Iraq war, which is increasingly presented as par of an anti-terrorist strategy, although it seems clear to all but committed neocon ideologues that it has served to provoke more terrorism, not less. So where does that leave us? Well, terrorism is real and it does represent a threat to someone, somewhere, sometime, and it is not a phenomenon associated only with religious fanatics from the Middle East. Remember that the second most devastating terrorism event in our history occurred only 600 miles from here, in Oklahoma City. Yet for most us, the threat of terrorism is certainly no greater than the threat of a hurricane, a flood or an earthquake—possible, but certainly not likely, indeed only remotely so, far less probable than an automobile accident or any one of a number of categories of domestic mishap. A rational conclusion might be that those terrorism “experts” who tell us that a domestic terrorist act is certain are full of it, as are those who say it will never occur. It is certainly not worth the widespread fear and apprehension that the Bush administration has worked so assiduously to instill in the American people. But then they don’t need to do that anymore, do they? At least not for the time being. So relax...and drive safely. —Richard Hopkins Whistling in the Dark As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.—H.L. Mencken
I wake up in the morning whistling a happy tune when it hits me, about half way to the bathroom: the American people, 60 million of them, in their wisdom, have re-elected George W. Bush President of the United States. The day is ruined, at least until about ten o’clock. Then I start living with it, as we all must. There have been two, perhaps three, major American catastrophes in the first five years of the 21st Century. The first was the destruction of the World Trade Center and of 2,700 American lives on September 11, 2001. The second was the reelection of George W. Bush on November 2, 2004. There may be a third on the way—the disastrous war in Iraq, which has not yet played itself out but which seems headed toward a tragic and ugly denouement. These events were, of course, closely related. Bush could not have been reelected without 9/11. Using the leverage of the World Trade Center disaster, the president and his neocon entourage have successfully convinced a plurality of the American people that the attack on Iraq was a necessary and fitting response. “The president got re-elected,” writes Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, “by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule.” Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian of London wrote in a post-election column that what had appeared to be a four-year accident of history [Bush’s “election” in 2000], instead of being an “aberration,” has now become, with his re-election, an “era”. So be it. The breathtaking cynicism of the entire operation surrounding Bush’s re-election, the odious disregard for truth, and the shocking vulnerability of the populace to such flagrant manipulation have combined to cloud the future of democratic government in this country. For with the reshaping of the Supreme Court that is certain to occur over the next four years, what (or who) is to protect our political system from irreparable damage? It’s got to be us, folks, and it won’t be easy. For one thing, a critical portion of the millions who voted for Bush are living in a fantasyland of misinformation and (perhaps willful) ignorance. What can be done when 72% of those who cast their votes for Bush’s reelection believe that Iraq was behind the World Trade Center attack and over half also believe that “weapons of mass destruction” have been discovered in Iraq. It is evident from various polls that millions of voters chose Bush even though they believe that the war in Iraq was and is a horrible mistake and even though they are hurting economically and support the federal programs that Bush and his people have worked so assiduously to destroy. So what, if anything, can we blue state folks do to turn this thing around? All we have to do, remember is change the mind of a couple of million voters in the right places. So who’s available to have their minds changed? First among those who seem to be unreachable are the notorious supermoralists, although the “moral values” explanation for what happened on November 2 seems to me to be highly problematic. Maybe there’s something to it and maybe not. It seems unquestionable that the so-called evangelical churches turned out right-wing voters, more or less obsessed with abortion, guns and gays, in unprecedented numbers, but the question about moral values that was asked of voters after they voted is, if nothing else, ambiguous. Those of us who oppose the Iraq war, who were sickened and depressed by the torture at Abu Ghraib, and who is appalled by the efforts to remove the social and economic safety net, are also driven by moral values. Thus, it is unclear what reality lies behind the moral values catchphrase The evidence is clear, it seems to me, that this was a faith-based election in more ways than one; that is, that millions of American voters—not a majority but a pivotal number nonetheless-- don’t care what the facts are. They are anti-rationalists for whom evidence is anathema. They reject scientific explanations for natural and social phenomena, such as the age of the earth and the evolution of the human species. They believe because they must, because it is their way of dealing with an often confusing and frightening world. They have the same kind of faith in George Bush that they do that Jesus of Nazareth literally was born of a virgin mother and that he came back to life after having been executed by the Romans. They believe that the president will protect us from evil (and so does Bush, apparently). This is not to deny that there are profound differences between the moral positions of polarized, mutually distrustful, groups of Americans. Moral stances are by their very nature almost impossible to compromise, however, and it is difficult to see how rationalistic, liberal Americans can heal this breach without sacrificing their base beliefs. This is not to suggest that there are not “rational” Republicans, persons of moderately conservative temperament, comfortably carrying out a family tradition, who believe that the “right people” should be in charge. It’s just that they reason from a different set of principles than the people across town. If things get really bad, if the economy should collapse, for example, this group might be changeable. There are other more or less intractable groups, however, that seem to reside permanently on the right: The Greedniks (or Taxophobes); The Hummerheads, who drive large, threatening automobiles and sleep their fitful sleep in huge minimansions, for whom conspicuous consumption is a way of life and who seem to feel no responsibility to a larger collective at all. There’s the Guns ‘R Us Crowd, who put their faith in untrammeled firepower; as well as those who demand simplistic explanations for all complex phenomena. There seems to be nothing that can be done about these folks, either, except to try to keep them in check. What these groups, most of them, anyway, have in common is a pervasive sense of victimhood. Just what it is the feel the victims of has never been quite clear. It is very difficult to ease the sense of victimhood of people who are not really victims. It is difficult to salve the fear of people who feel vulnerable to contingencies they don’t understand and, indeed, don’t know how to understand and who are persistently and systematically misled by those in whom they have placed their faith. Perhaps our best hope is that George W. and his minions will go too far, when the extreme cognitive dissonance required denying reality, and the blindness of ideological fervor, pushing the Bushies over the edge. (One of my good friends is convinced that Bush will crack under the strain and fall sick from acute internal conflict.) The evidence is becoming clear that Bush did not win anything like a mandate. A New York Times/CBS News poll, reported in Thanksgiving week, showed clearly how confused the electorate really is and how fragile Bush’s victory really was. The poll found that “Americans are at best ambivalent about Mr. Bush’s plans to reshape Social Security, rewrite the tax code, cut taxes and appoint conservative judges to the bench. There is continuing disapproval of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, with a plurality now saying it was a mistake to invade in the first place.” Moreover, nearly two-thirds of the persons polled said that it was more important to reduce deficits than to cut taxes. Other results suggest just how tenuous Bush’s capacity to bring about massive changes really is. For example, “by 48 to 40 per cent, respondents said they believed four more years of a Bush presidency would divide the nation more than it would unite it.” In a startling bit of data, 54 per cent of the respondents say they have a favorable view of Democrats, while only 49 per cent think well of Republicans. Of course, the administration probably has the votes in Congress to push through any proposals it chooses. But if it goes too far, there will be repercussions, probably in the 2006 congressional elections. So the evidence is clear that Bush won, not because of his policies, but because the voters bought the line that the country would be safer with Bush in office from a vague something called “terrorism” and because a slim majority of the voters simply liked him better than John Kerry. This may be puzzling to some of us, for whom Bush’s phony folksiness makes our skin crawl, but it’s not loony. As the indispensable Robert Scheer commented in a recent column: “The GOP has met its old bugaboo, incompetent Big government, and it is them. No doubt Rush Limbaugh and friends will continue to blame us liberals for everything that goes wrong, but that old scapegoating game won’t fly with the American people forever.” Perhaps the good news is that John Kerry and the Democrats will not have to face the mess that the Bushies have created. We can leave that to the perpetrators.—Richard Hopkins —TOP OF PAGE— The One Real Issue There is only one real, fundamental issue in American politics, regardless of the election year, the candidates, or any of the cultural ephemera that candidates use to stir up the voters. The Iraq war was (and still is) most certainly an illegal and atrocious mistake, and it may appear to be the Big Issue of the Day. But it will pass. Issues such as abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, and our chronic trade deficit stir certain people up, but in the long sweep of things they are as ephemeral as a lone raindrop on a hot sidewalk. The One Big Issue that (more or less explicitly) has dominated our politics for over seventy years, and that distinguishes the two parties is, simply put, how much of the national treasure is to be dedicated to public, as opposed, to private purposes. This is a bigger long term issue than war and peace, or stem cell research, or abortion. It has to do with how much we are willing to be taxed to control the excesses of capitalism and to soften the blows of its cruelties on those who are left behind in the zero sum game that is American life--the aged, the infirm, and the unfortunate. In our highly competitive economy (and in our educational and other social systems), there are winners and losers. Through no fault of their own—bad luck, genetic and temperamental predisposition, geographic, educational and demographic differences, racial and gender prejudice--some people struggle to make a living, in the midst of affluence and the seductions of a flamboyant consumerist society. Some live in abject poverty, others (we call them the working poor) on the edge of financial disaster. Over the last twenty years or so, the gap between rich and poor has widened substantially. The political issue that emerges from this chronic condition has to do with how much government should do to soften these conditions. Republicans tend not to believe in the government programs that make up what is commonly called the social safety net. They are uncomfortable with social security, with Medicare, with government housing programs, with welfare for poor people in its various forms, with public health activities. They prefer to leave such matters to the marketplace, or, in cases where a problem is perceived, to such mechanisms as tax credits (which help only those who pay taxes). They tend not to be averse to paying (sometimes massive) government subsidies to corporations to support various policy initiatives, nor are they averse to using government to enforce their ideas of moral rectitude or to the use of government power to suppress labor unions or civil liberties. But helping poor people makes them uncomfortable. Democrats, by and large, believe that government should take action when clearly-defined social and economic problems emerge. Even today, seventy-odd years later, Democrats subscribe to the broad principles of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In a radio speech delivered in 1944, FDR set out what he called a “second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.” These were the rights he enunciated: - “The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
- “The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
- “The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living ;
- “The right of every businessman…to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination from monopolies here and abroad;
- “The right of every family to a decent home;
- “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
- “The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;
- · “The right to a good education.”
At the time of FDR’s address in 1944, Congress had already passed legislation implementing many, if not all, of these “rights,” and some legislation (anti-trust laws, for example) pre-dated the New Deal by a generation. Many of the federal programs that we take for granted today—social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage legislation, agricultural subsidies, Medicare and Medicaid and mortgage loan guarantees are just a few—were enacted over the bitter and consistent opposition of what at that time was a Republican minority. When that minority became a majority, and especially since the Reagan Revolution of the nineteen eighties, and the Republicans’ largely successful effort to paint government as the problem, not the solution, this comprehensive system of social and economic legislation has been under attack and has been whittled down to virtually nothing in some areas. People who think this has been a good thing will vote Republican this November, because Republicans do not believe that government should help people in trouble, only corporations. Democrats believe the opposite. So those who persist in saying that the two parties are the same, or that their votes don’t really matter, are just plain wrong. Democrats may have been intimidated by the vigor and passion of the Republican party’s ideological assaults on the welfare state, but deep down there’s a lot of difference between the two parties, and it matters.—Richard Hopkins —TOP OF PAGE— Hating George Bush This is a kind of confession: I know I’m not supposed to; I know that it’s not nice and that we should accept our political differences; but I do “hate” George W. Bush. That is, I find his demeanor, his voice, his ideas (such as they are), his policy pronouncements—I find them all more than distasteful; I find them disgusting. They affect me deep down, in a particularly visceral way. Why should I deny this? It’s true for me, and probably for millions of other Americans. We do find George Bush hateful. To deny this is a type of dissembling that weakens our opposition to him and to the effects of his governance. It’s not enough to say, “I hate his policies, but not the man himself.” I want to be clear about this: I hate the man himself. Let me be clear about something else: I do not hate conservatives as such. Some are hateful; some are lovable; some are merely ill-informed and naïve, people who lack the time, the inclination or the energy to think things through, people who dedicate most of their energies to looking out for what they consider their own interests. While it would not be accurate to say that “some of my best friends are conservatives,” it would be accurate to say that many people whom I like and even admire (for some of their qualities) are conservatives. For example, I admired Dwight Eisenhower and I respect John McCain. And some people (including even me and certainly including the two aforementioned) are conservative about some things and liberal or even radical about others. I puzzle over the blindness and lack of perceptive acuity of right-wingers (especially about George W. Bush). But I don’t believe they are necessarily bad people. I’m willing to engage in quiet dialogue with them about what is best for our country and its people. To the extent that I think George Bush is a “bad person,” it is not because he is a conservative per se, but because of his behavior as president. First, there is his almost incredible rigidity, his implacable division of the world into good and evil persons, countries, ideas (us and them). This rigidity is manifest most dramatically in his refusal, one might almost say his inability, to moderate his position when it becomes untenable. Anyone, even a president of the United States, has a right to be wrong, to make mistakes. But to deny mistakes after they have been exposed is a character flaw. Take two issues: the president’s claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and his repeated assertion that Iraq and al Qaeda had a working relationship prior to the events of September 11. Both of these claims have turned out to be manifestly not true. What does the president do when the facts come out? According to Jonathan Schell, writing in The Nation, Bush engages in monotonous repetition of the falsehood in the face of manifest evidence to the contrary and then a redefinition of words (…confounding actual weapons of mass destruction with mere “programs” for building them), and throughout a tireless insistence that they [the president and his associates] were right, detached alike from information and the meaning of words. [The president] seems to believe that truth consists not of correspondence of word with fact but of an implacable consistency armed with self-righteousness.
Self righteous people are not easy to deal with in private life. They become downright dangerous when associated with the power and inherent prestige of the presidency. It is truly depressing that so many people seem to see Bush’s rigidity as strength and toughness. Then there is the president’s smarmy, unctuous, religiosity, his suggestion that he speaks directly with god and that god speaks through him. Any president who drags god into politics is asking for trouble for himself, for the country and for god herself. We need to keep the two separate. George Bush has been responsible for some pretty unChristlike actions since he took office. There is no reason to doubt him when he says that religion helped him get his alcoholism under control. But beyond that, it is more important to see how he walks the walk rather than how he talks the talk. “Drag God into politics, the irrepressible Molly Ivins wrote recently, and you “ruin his reputation in no time. ..I have seen too many Psalm-singing, Bible-quoting Holy Joe hypocrites to think these frauds improve the tone of our public life. Getting snookered by some canting humbug is even more depressing than getting snookered by a plain old crook.” Then there are his policies, which reward the rich and punish the poor. (You know that George W. really meant it when he told a group of wealthy supporters that they were (and are) his “base.”) Of course they are. That’s why he was selected for the presidency by his “base” and provided with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign support, despite his manifest deficiencies in intelligence and judgment. After his massive tax cuts to wealthy taxpayers, and his innumerable favors to his corporate sponsors, his administration has slashed support for vulnerable groups in our society—programs such as housing assistance, child care, veteran’s assistance, Head Start, vocational education, temporary assistance for needy families –even as he purports to be a “compassionate conservative.” The thing that makes all this so offensive, is not the policies themselves so much but the deep lack of empathy for ordinary, struggling Americans that his policies represent. His refusal to acknowledge the high cost in human lives and physical destruction of his war policies, his attempts to distance himself from the human costs of the Iraq war and of his social and economic policies, suggest that this is an empty, callous man, interested in power but not in people. Remember that Bush is an American aristocrat, despite his efforts to paint himself as a Texas cowboy. Yet something seems to be missing from his moral makeup that is often present among such people, and that is a sense of commitment to the well being of the larger society and of weaker, less fortunate people, some quality of empathy that was present in Franklin D. Roosevelt and even in the entire Rockefeller clan (As Kevin Phillips’s study of the Bushes entitled American Dynasty reveals, the Bushes as a family have seemed much more interesting in grasping than in giving.) Perhaps hate is not quite the right word; perhaps its not good to hate anyone or anything. Perhaps we Bush-haters, too, should be tolerant of human frailty, and assume that Bush is not a bad person but merely mistaken. But there comes a time when dislike, disgust, disfavor, detestation, etc., are inadequate. Perhaps hatred is all that’s left. —Richard Hopkins —TOP OF PAGE— As American As… We make a huge mistake if we see the Abu Ghraib disgrace as an anomaly. It is as American as…as... the Iraq War. It emanates from a decision made by our national government and approved by congress and by a majority of the American people, a decision to move into a sovereign country, however benighted its leadership may have been, and subjugate its people, presumably for their own good. Like any other occupying colonial power in history, we ended up objectifying and dehumanizing the people we have overcome. The results have been photographed for posterity. We could not have done to the Iraqi people what we have done, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, without the moral numbing that allows us to ignore their humanity. War does that to people; it always has and always will. We have systematically wrecked the infrastructure of the country [to be profitably reconstructed by American companies, of course]. We have killed ten thousand or more Iraqi civilians, some thousands in the early, “military” stages of the war, the remainder on an almost-daily basis as we attempt to control the nationalistic insurgency that has grown, little by little but inexorably, over the past months. (True, Saddam Hussein has been removed, but at the cost of the conditions and the horrors that we’re now experiencing, which include, of course, the deaths of hundreds of our own troops.) And we have done so in an atmosphere of steadfast denial or avoidance of the truth—that war is ugly, brutalizing, victimizes both sides, and rarely achieves its stated aims. Our troops are fighting an ugly, irregular war against the people of Iraq. They have had no choice, given the circumstances. They are faced daily with repeated and deadly random attacks, originating from mysterious sources—the President himself persists in calling them “terrorist” sources—and they respond, understandably, with a kind of reckless and fear-induced flailing about that only further alienates the people. No wonder the troops, whether in Fallujah or in the prison at Al Ghraib, behave in such self-defeating and barbarous ways. They are scared, jumpy, and uncomprehending. So when the prison guards were instructed by their superiors to “soften up” prisoners for interrogation, they did as they were told, and did so in a kind of mad, sadistic, carnival—they softened them up by engaging in various sexually perverse and deeply humiliating actions, even going so far as to record these actions with digital cameras. These were only modest departures from existing protocol. There is every reason to believe that abusive interrogation tactics had become a regular and approved part of the government’s so-called “war on terrorism.” There have been repeated reports from organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Red Cross, from Afghanistan, Iraq and from the notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, of human rights abuses and violations of international law. Of course, this administration has shown nothing but contempt for international law since the day it took office. The fact that the new officer in charge of the Iraqi military prisons is the former commander at Guantanamo is further evidence of the low regard this administration holds for basic decency and human rights. “That’s not the way we do things,” George Bush told the world. But it was and is the way we do things, and still would be if a courageous soldier had not squealed and made some of the pictures public. Day by day the evidence piles up that conditions in Abu Ghraib have been known about for months—and ignored for months. The International Red Cross informed the United States government no later than January, and has done so repeatedly since, about severe prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons in Iraq. These warnings were ignored. It was not until the notorious pictures of sadistic and humiliating abuses were made public that the administration responded at all. It was the photographs that caused the problem from the administration’s perspective, not the practices they depicted. These practices are being banned now that the word is out. There is no evidence that they would have been otherwise. The Bush administration and most of the press have worked hard to make all of this appear to be an aberration. It won’t work because it isn’t true. The British commentator Martin Jacques wrote in the Guardian just last week: President Bush claimed...: “People seeing those pictures don’t understand the true nature and heart of America.” On the contrary, they are an integral part of its “true nature and heart:” a society that was built on the destruction of the indigenous peoples; that practiced racial segregation until forty years ago; that still incarcerates many of its young black people; that killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese; that has a messianic belief in the applicability of its own values to the rest of the world; that is willing to impose its model by force; that believes itself to be above international law. These too are American values. In this light, the behavior of the U.S. forces, nurturing a deep sense of racial superiority, combined with a disdain for international law, is entirely predictable.
These are painful truths. The situation calls not so much for self-flagellation as for a fundamental change of perspective. Perhaps these awful events will turn out to have been a good thing for everyone except those who suffered from them. Perhaps it will help us to see, and come to terms with, what we have been doing in Iraq and elsewhere in the world abroad. Perhaps it will lead to regime change here at home and for a careful but definitive withdrawal from our arrogant colonial adventure. Perhaps. —RH —TOP OF PAGE— A Deadly Failure The war in Iraq, which began a year ago this week, has been a massive, deadly failure, a bloody disaster. The sole positive outcome of the ongoing war has been the capture and imprisonment of Saddam Hussein, although he is, after all, a mere mortal whose regime was far shakier than we were initially led to believe and who might well have been brought down internally without the bloodshed and destruction that the war has entailed. The price paid for that “success” has been horrendous: the profound destabilization of the country’s political and social life; the destruction of the country’s infrastructure (and its profitable reconstruction by patrons of the Republican party); the slaughter of ten thousand or so Iraqi civilians and uncounted numbers (literally) of Iraqi military personnel; and the chaotic aftermath, which has more than doubled the number of American troops killed and wounded; and finally, the expenditure of scores of billions of dollars that could have been used for other domestic and international purposes. It has been, at best, a nasty business, from its dishonest onset to the present. To suggest that the people of Iraq now live in freedom is a travesty of this term. They may someday be free to vote on the members of their government, protected erratically by the so-called coalition forces. That this will bring peace and quiet and freedom to Iraq, in the absence of supporting democratic institutions, seems quite unlikely. They Iraqis are a divided people who have always relied on a strong, and sometimes brutal, central governing authority to keep the warring forces in check. It will take a long, long time for this war to pay off in a free Iraq. In the indolence and safety of our consumerist lives, we forget (and only a few of us have ever known) the horrors of war, its brutality, inhumanity and cruelty, its objectification of human life. In these times, we hire professional soldiers to do our war making for us, thus relieving most of us from any personal connection to its consequences. War becomes a bloodless abstraction. We are not allowed to witness the arrival home of the caskets of the dead, and most of us will never encounter a crippled veteran of this senseless war. We’re not even asked to make sacrifices, but instead to go our mindless way, getting and spending and wasting our energies on diversions such as exposed breasts, gay marriage, and the march to the final four. And now our president has concluded that calling himself a “War President” will get himself re-elected, even in the face of the Iraqi adventure’s manifest failure, the weakness and clear unfairness of his domestic program, and his embarrassing machinations to stay away from actual combat as a young man.. And his strategy just may work. For war is a powerful force. In his stunning book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, the war correspondent Chris Hedges writes: War dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it…War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.
Whether this strategy will work in George W. Bush’s case, however, is still an unknown, possible but not certain. Increasing numbers of potential voters seem to be coming to understand that the American people were manipulated into supporting this war, manipulated through lies and distortions. Apparently there are no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and it has become increasingly clear that Saddam’s Iraq was not in league with Al Qaeda. Instead, the chaos of the war itself has been like a magnet attracting terrorists from the Arab world into Iraq. It is fitting that the war has become a political issue. That is the only way we can sort it out and hold its perpetrators accountable. As the British commentator Gary Younge has written in The Guardian: Sadly the inquiries to be launched in Britain and the US have been limited to intelligence. The premise for this war was not security but politics—it’s the politicians who should be in the dock. The fact that they will not be reflects badly, not just on the governments concerned but on all of us. If a country can be led to war on false pretexts and there are no substantive consequences as a result, there is something seriously wrong with both politicians and the political culture that produces them. In a democracy worthy of the name, if the machinery of government cannot call those responsible to account, civil society and the ballot box must. This war is not just killing Iraqi civilians, resistance fighters and coalition soldiers. It’s murdering any pretense that we live in countries that value, let alone practice, the principle of democratic accountability. It calls into question our ability to rein in political excess and to root out state-sponsored incompetence.
So that’s what it comes down to in this anniversary week of the Iraq War: It’s up to us to hold our leaders accountable. If we don’t, they’ll lie to us again and again with impunity. And why shouldn’t they? It seems to work with an unengaged and largely clueless population. —RH —TOP OF PAGE— Heather Again We have written previously about the voting record of Congresswoman Heather Wilson of New Mexico’s First Congressional District and of her efforts to present herself as a moderate Republican. [See “Heather’s Stealthy Performance” below.] These efforts are exemplified by a recent mailing , presumably directed to seniors, that arrived in local mailboxes recently. This slick piece of election-year literature purports to explain the benefits of the Medicare drug benefit bill passed recently by Congress (and written to drug industry specifications by a congressional subcommittee on which Heather Wilson serves.) Beginning in 2006, the bill will provide modest relief to Medicare recipients. Persons who spend $1,500 per year or so for drugs (the average expenditure of Medicare recipients) will save about $600. But what is not revealed in the brochure is that the $600 in annual savings may well be eaten up by price increases, since the bill forbids the government to negotiate bulk prices for medicines, and provides massive subsidies to private health care organizations to undercut the Medicare program. In other words, the law is, and was intended to be, a direct assault on the Medicare program. [See the article above for a fuller discussion of this bill.] Furthermore, it turns out now that the bill will cost $550 billion in its first decade, rather than $400 billion, as first advertised by the administration. And this will all be borrowed money. Now we learn that Heather has voted with the Republican majority in the House for the so-called “reform” of federal bankruptcy laws. This reform would make it almost impossible for ordinary citizens to file for bankruptcy, while retaining the rights of corporate interests, such as Enron or Worldcom, to use the bankruptcy laws to manage, if not to write off entirely, their often-massive debt. The bill in question was written by credit card interests to protect them from the consequences of their relentless promotion of unsolicited high-interest credit cards to persons of limited financial capacity. (The industry distributes about 900 million credit card solicitations annually.) When such persons build up unmanageable debt they can, and often do, file for bankruptcy. Bankruptcy filings have soared in recent years as millions of lower-income Americans find it impossible to meet payments on large credit card balances or on usurious loans from credit companies. (There were almost 400, 000 bankruptcy filings in the last quarter of 2003, the highest in several years.) The financial institutions would like to put a stop to this, but they are not willing, in return, to put limits on their relentless promotion of credit cards to persons who have neither the resources, the sophistication, or the long-range security to manage credit card debt. Wilson voted against proposed amendments to this bill that would have discriminated between obvious malingerers and persons who are caught in circumstances beyond their control, that would have required credit-card companies to moderate their promotions to marginal populations, as well as several other amendments that would have softened the impact of the law. One interesting factor in Heather’s career has been the support afforded her in the news columns of New Mexico’s largest newspaper, The Albuquerque Journal. The Journal does publish a once-weekly, un-annotated report on the votes of the state’s congressional delegation on major bills, but it provides almost no coverage of Heather’s activities in shaping legislation, such as her votes on amendments. The Journal’s Washington correspondent seems to restrict his coverage to social events, while ignoring the substantive political aspects, such as committee work, of the congresswoman’s performance. Moreover, The Journal misses no opportunity to publish cute pictures of Wilson or her banal statements on insignificant public issues. The apogee of such coverage was the recent cut-out color photo of Wilson at the very top of the front page accompanying a story on her bold statement castigating the TV networks for vulgar programming, which she even suggested might have a commercial motive! Talk about political risk-taking! Heather, as she likes to be called, is among the more conservative persons in the congress. She consistently votes the party line as defined by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, and as a result is handsomely rewarded, not only with re-election financing from the party, but also with substantial campaign contributions by special interests, such as drug companies, financial institutions, health care organizations, and energy firms. The evidence shows that she is not a moderate, but a toe-the-line right-wing ideologue. So Heather Wilson has a lot going for her: the support of the rich and powerful; a huge campaign fund supported by the interests she serves in Washington, which enables her to distribute expensive, if misleading, mailings such as the one discussed here; an attractive (if skillfully manipulated) political image; but most important of all, a carefully concealed right-wing voting record. This may be what the voters of the First Congressional District want in their representative. We’ll never know, unless some way is found to get the word out about the real Heather Wilson. —RH —TOP OF PAGE— The Terrorism Hustle Perhaps there are indeed dark-eyed, satanic, persons out there somewhere preparing, with dedicated ferocity, to rain death on us all in one cataclysmic gesture after another, annihilating, one at a time, the structures that support our economy and our way of life: our bridges, power plants, major buildings, our ports, stadiums filled with sports fans, historical monuments, crowded shopping centers, nuclear installations, water supplies. “It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country, to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known,” warned President Bush in his State of the Union address. Perhaps we—meaning “we” Americans collectively—do have something to fear from what has come to be called, with breathless and ominous imprecision, international terrorism. Perhaps the threat is so great and so imminent that dozens of international flights should be terminated, our freedoms curtailed, our politics suspended. Perhaps we must keep an eye on each other, report our suspicions to the authorities, watch what we say, withhold our criticism of public officials, behave as though we’re at war with an invisible enemy, and hunker down. Perhaps. Or perhaps the holiday season furor over terrorism is a gigantic political hustle, cooked up more or less formally in Karl Rove’s White House office, designed to keep us on edge, to divert our attention from the continuing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan and, most important, to make us fearful of making a major political change next November. Now the chances are that neither one of these scenarios fully explains what is going on today, but that neither is completely implausible. The cataclysm of September 11, 2001, and a number of more remote events since then—in Turkey, Saudi Arabia , and of course in Iraq—certainly have illustrated a startling and discomfiting degree of rage against the United States and its allies in the Arab world and thus the chance, if not the probability, of further terrorist action against the U.S., although none has occurred in the two years since 9/11 and all of the “orange alerts” since then have proved to be false alarms. Beyond that, there have been the provocations to terrorism that have occurred since 9/11—the war in Iraq; George W. Bush’s division of the world into forces of good and evil; his announcement of the preemptive war principle; the administration’s unwillingness to explore or to address the types of grievances that might fuel the terrorists’ impulse to destroy or damage our way of life; the repetitious harping on the threat of terrorism, epitomized by Bush’s bombastic “bring ‘em on” challenge of a few months past. All this blends seamlessly into the Bush administration’s unembarrassed political exploitation of the “War on Terrorism,” its overt effort to suppress domestic criticism and questioning of its policies, and its use of the “war” as cover for promoting and in some cases enacting an extreme right-wing domestic program. One way to think about it is that “terrorism” has been the making of the Bush presidency. Thus, there is reason to suspect that there may be further terrorist events in the indeterminate future, and that suggests the need for appropriate preventive measures. But what kind? And at what cost to our traditional freedoms? And should we allow it to affect our politics? A certain amount of quiet diligence is clearly called for. That’s why we have a new Department of Homeland Security, to assemble data, to search out the points of vulnerability and take steps to make them more secure. There is a fine line, however, between necessary diligence and stimulating and exploiting fear in the populace. There is very little that an ordinary citizen can do to prevent terrorist acts. To keep us constantly fearful and apprehensive serves political ends, perhaps, but does not make us more secure. As the columnist Peter Preston writes in The Guardian: There’s a real problem with terrorism , to be sure. Never put that out of your mind. Always give it due weight. But never forget what becomes of those [such as the Department of Homeland Security] “who come to protect and help us.” If you’re running a department of homeland security and you always need more funds (because brother it’s a big, big department), then you have a problem. Success is preventing any more attacks—success also means nothing happening, which means you’ve got a lower profile that makes more budget-busting increases more difficult to come by. Thus there’s every reason to go about your business with manifest display. One thing, uncynically, goes with another. The more flights cancelled, the more you’re obviously doing your job.
So perhaps the most appropriate way to approach the problem of terrorism is to think of it as a kind of natural phenomenon, like earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, and floods, against which you take intelligent precautions, but don’t let it take over your life—or your politics. And expect of your politicians that they will pay some attention to where all this rage comes from, and avoid actions that provoke more of it. And be properly cynical about the motives of those who would use the threat of terrorism to justify limitations on our individual rights as citizens or to conceal a broader ideological agenda. And watch out for anti-terrorist tricks. Don’t be surprised, for example, if Osama Bin Laden should be captured or assassinated sometime this fall, just in time for the election. Remember, you read it here first. —RH —TOP OF PAGE— |
