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August 31, 2004
12 Nepalis, "believing in Buddha as their God", Summarily Slaughtered in Iraq
by Jeremy"We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalis who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians ... believing in Buddha as their God," said the statement by the military committee of the Army of Ansar al-Sunna.[...]
The group posted a series of photographs showing the killing as well as a video. The recording showed two masked men, one in camouflage, holding down a hostage. One of the men then used a knife to behead the hostage and then hold his head aloft.
The video then showed a group of hostages lying face down and being shot by a man using an automatic rifle. It then showed bodies splattered with blood and bullet wounds.
Posted by Jeremy at 08:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Brutality at Protest
by JeremyThose who have been predicting brutality during the RNC protests may not have been far wrong. This brutal head-cracking is like something out of Chicago, 1968:
A march from the United Nations to Madison Square Garden ended in violence Monday after a protester attacked a plainclothes detective on a scooter, knocking him unconscious. Hundreds of police in riot gear swarmed the area, pushing protesters away from the Garden and into nearby side streets.[...]
The plainclothes detective who was attacked, William Sample, was in serious condition Tuesday with serious facial trauma, but his injuries were not life threatening, police said. His assailant was being sought. Four other officers suffered minor injuries during the scuffle.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly called it ``a blatant, vicious attack.''
I hope this is not indicative of what's to come these next few days. Thus far I've gotten the impression that most of the protestors are peaceful, but it only takes a handful of idiots to endanger thousands of people. But, according to a vague reference in this New York Times story, the handful-of-idiots-endangering-thousands portion of the week's events is planned mostly for today:
In the months leading up to the convention, activists designated Tuesday an official day of civil disobedience, planning sit-ins, street theater and even vandalism aimed at the offices of corporations with links to the Bush family or the Republican Party.They planned to start early in the day by harassing Republicans at a breakfast at the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park.
We'll just have to hope it doesn't get out of control.
Another piece in the Times today underscores what the real problem may turn out to be, namely individual assholes scattered throughout the city:
Outside a hotel in Times Square, delegates to the Republican National Convention were swarmed by protesters dressed in black and swearing at them. Blocks away, delegates engaged in shoving matches with protesters seeking to spoil their night at the theater. And outside "The Lion King" on 42nd Street, a delegate was punched by a protester who ran by.Although the organized protests yesterday and Sunday have been largely peaceful, there has been a starkly different tone to smaller incidents in Midtown and elsewhere: angry encounters and planned harassment of convention delegates as they go out on the town.
[...]
The police are bracing for another round of unsanctioned demonstrations today, which protesters have designated a day of "nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action." Among the parties expected to be a target is the Tennessee delegation's gathering at Sotheby's. A group calling itself the Man in Black Bloc plans to protest it, saying it is angered that the convention intends to honor the late country singer Johnny Cash.
[...]
Mindful that delegates are targets, police officers guard their hotels and ride aboard their chartered buses around town, and several receive police escorts to various events.
And how is threatening and harassing electoral delegates supposed to translate as social justice? I have a huge problem with that. And I'd like to think that the majority of protestors do too.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Seminar for British Columnists
by JeremySome hilariously clever stuff from Pootergeek:
Advanced Level Broadsheet Columnism: Section 1Choose any one question. You have 45 minutes to complete and file your answer for sub-editing.
1. How arrogant exactly is George W. Bush? Support your answer with half-remembered things you heard at a dinner party earlier in the week, stereotypes of American people, and two of the following cliches:
o "neo-conservative cabal"
o "cowboy bully"
o any phrase combing the words "Blair" and "poodle" or "lapdog"
o "crushing of dissent"
o "stole the election"
o "disaffected Arab youth"
o "fundamentalist Christian lobby"Extra marks will be awarded for quoting Bush Jnr.'s malapropisms and for making pseudo-Freudian references to Bush Snr. Illustrate your essay with a cartoon depicting the President of the United States as a monkey.
2. Men are shit. Discuss.
Read the whole thing.
It's a shame that a guy capable of such brilliant satire is going to have his bald pate bashed in by a 95% Secular Humanist Rhodesian Dylanite for having uttered some contemptible nonsense about Zimmy (watch out for that other 5 percent: that's the 5 percent that will snap you in half like a dry twig).
(All of this via Marcus at Harry's Place)
Posted by Jeremy at 06:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Conflict France Can't Avoid
by JeremyTwo French journalists kidnapped in Iraq have pleaded for Paris to meet their captors' demands and reverse a ban on Muslim headscarves for girls in public schools.
It shouldn't be necessary to point out that this is not about the headscarf ban, whatever one thinks of that. This is about France's inescapable choice -- the policies of Chirac and company notwithstanding -- to protect its culture of Enlightenment values, democracy, liberalism from the assault of theocratic fascism. This confrontation is inevitable. Let's hope these two journalists, somehow, will avoid becoming the latest victims of this gruesome Jihad.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 30, 2004
Why was I prepared to vote for Edwards?
by JeremyIs this why the Kerry team generally shuns specifics on foreign policy? I find this deeply frightening:
If elected U.S. president, Sen. John Kerry would offer Iran a deal allowing it to keep its nuclear power plants if it gave up the right to retain bomb-making nuclear fuel, said Kerry's vice presidential running mate in an interview published on Monday. Sen. John Edwards told The Washington Post if Iran did not accept this "great bargain," this would confirm the Islamic state was building nuclear weapons under cover of a nuclear power initiative.If Iran rejected this proposal, Kerry would ensure European allies were prepared to join the United States in imposing strict sanctions against Iran, said Edwards.
"If we are engaging with Iranians in an effort to reach this great bargain and if in fact this is a bluff that they are trying to develop nuclear weapons capability, then we know that our European friends will stand with us," said the North Carolina Democrat.
Trusting the Mullahs and banking on the unblinking support of France, Russia and Germany is not a water-tight plan for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of theocratic fascists. While Bush's plan for Iran is unclear, it at least will come within a context of a credible willingness to act. This worked in Libya. We can't build relationships of trust with the Iranian Mullahs or, similarly, with the government of Sudan, at the expense of the lives and freedom of the millions of people in those countries whose lives are made cheap by that kind of trust. If this is not what Edwards means then he needs to clarify immediately.
(hat tip: Roger)
Posted by Jeremy at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
But You Said, You Said, I Heard You! And no Backsies!
by Jeremy"John Kerry and I know we can win the war on terror and we know how to do it."
I just heard John Edwards say that on TV in response to Bush having said to that annoying morning show guy, Matt Lauer, that you can't really win the war on terror, clearly meaning that there won't be a single decisive moment of victory. This is a non-issue. Bush is certainly capable of saying stupid things, but this was not one of them. I find it strange, even depressing, that there is so little room for nuance in political discourse specifically when nuance would be helpful.
Why couldn't John Edwards, or Kerry, have said that yes, it's true there won't be a single day of victory when terrorism will have been vanquished once and for all (but that therefore it's all the more important that Kerry/Edwards lead the way. blah, bah, blah...). You know, you've got to make up your mind -- do you want big, dumb, easy rhetoric (such as what Edwards said above) or do you want the truth? Bush has been supplying both. The Kerry people are sure as hell not champions of either truth or nuance when it comes to foreign policy (this century's or any other's). And they're not talking about much else at the moment.
Posted by Jeremy at 05:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Not much RNC blogging from me
by JeremyWhy? Not only have I got a deadline I'm also feeling extremely nauseous. I'm going without a cigar today, if that gives you an idea. I almost popped into CVS to score a tin of Macanudos, but I was too queasy to get out of the car. I'd psyched myself up to rest for five minutes in the parking lot but, you know, if you're too nauseous to purchase your cigars, you really, probably, don't want to be smoking them.
And anyway, Roger Simon is there and I'd sooner read what he has to say, though who knows what sorts of strange moments might provoke or inspire me to grab the old laptop. We'll see.
Posted by Jeremy at 04:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Thin Blue Line
by JeremyI was watching CSPAN's coverage of the anti-Bush march today. I don't have anything much to say just yet other than to comment on the NYPD, the police. They looked amazingly laid back. Weren't they supposed to be beating kids with billy clubs, I asked Cara sarcastically, or shooting and teargassing people for no reason? Then I derived the following formula:
LRD = low risk of death
HSP = harmlessly silly protestors
LS = long shift
OT = time and a half
LRD + SP + LS + OT = Chillin2
The accuracy of this formula has just been confirmed in a post by Roger Simon:
Happiest faces on the streets of New York tonight -- the police. One word explanation for this -- overtime.
Though the harmlessness of the silly protestors, in the bigger picture, is debatable:
Cops were everywhere. It was fun talking to them. One of them said to me, "It's like fuggin' 9/11 never happened." His buddies seemed to agree.
When the next attack happens, the police and the fire department, it must be remembered, will be running toward the scene, while everyone else runs away.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 29, 2004
Norm on the Liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto
by JeremyWhen I become angry to the point of unpleasantness over comparisons between Bush and Hitler and even more angry when people take that as a sign that I've gone Republican, it's not because I love Bush but because I see it as part of a process of downplaying the reality of the Nazi holocaust. The fact that these comparisons are drawn so as to negate the importance of the U.S. having brought down the Saddam Hussein regime only reinforces this.
That's why I think many intelligent people should be ashamed of saying or writing things that are beneath them. And that's why you should read a series of posts that Norm Geras has been writing today on the Lodz Ghetto:
Today marks 60 years since the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto in Poland, with the sending of the last transport of Jews to the death camps. The Lodz ghetto - with the Warsaw ghetto one of the two largest in Nazi-occupied Poland - was established in February 1940. According to one estimate, the death rate in those two ghettos, just from overcrowding, starvation and disease was one percent of the population per month.[...]
'In all, more than 200,000 Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and what was then Czechoslovakia were imprisoned in the ghetto, with only 5,000?12,000 of them surviving the Holocaust. '
[...]
The head of the Jewish council in the Lodz ghetto was Chaim Rumkowski. Believing in salvation through obedience and work - through being useful to the Germans - his policy eventually was to sacrifice some Jews in the hope of saving others.
There really is much to be learned in reading this stuff, and much to think about. It's more important than ever that we study the lessons of history before making comfortable pronouncements about current crises in the world.
Posted by Jeremy at 06:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 28, 2004
A Small Piece of Justice for Vonnegut
by JeremyKurt Vonnegut's recent idiotic remarks left me unable to formulate a response for a while. I admire him greatly as a writer. And I can add him to the list of people whose ideas have influenced me, though they themselves seem to disregard their own past wisdom. I guess that's how I cope with this sort of thing. It's similar to something I realized while learning to work with people suffering from mental illness, namely that sometimes you can best honor a person's better nature by refusing to reward or apologize for their uglier instincts. And you can, if you want, learn a thing like that from reading some of Vonnegut's work. A ready example of this fact, that Vonnegut refutes and ridicules himself better than I ever could, can be seen in the way he signs his name as shown in the graphic below:
If you aren't familiar with the iconography of that asterisk, it represents something each person has and out of which some people, on occasion and in spite of themselves, talk or write.
Here's what Vonnegut has said (via Norm):
In case you haven't noticed... we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.In case you haven't noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.
With good reason.
[...]
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
Reading this is a bit like walking into the kitchen of one of your favorite restaurants to find the master chef preparing uncooked Spaghettios into which he has drooled liberally. Except, really, it's worse.
But the graphic above isn't the small piece of justice to which the title refers. The justice I refer to is the treatment he received, at least for a while, from the head of maintenance in the building Vonnegut lived while he spent a year teaching at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I worked for a mental health day program in an adjoining building that also fell within the fiefdom of that maintenance chief -- let's call him Hank. Hank was a surly old guy, and a veteran of the Korean war who seemed a little weary of the left wing youth culture that surrounded him. His most common greeting for me and my two co-workers each morning was, "you better move that goddamn blue van of yours or it's getting towed. No more Mr. nice guy. That's it!" Good morning to you too, Hank. I once asked my supervisor why she thought Hank disliked us so much and she said, "Are you kidding? He loves us. We're the only people in the building he respects." After that I noticed the way he spoke to other people (i.e. not at all unless it was unavoidable) vs. the way he spoke to us, and I realized she was right. And I realized we really did tend to park our transport van in stupid places and he probably wouldn't have let anyone else get away with that.
When Kurt Vonnegut moved into the other building, Hank asked me about him: "my niece told me he's some kind of big science fiction writer or some goddamn thing." I said that was more or less right. "He's a strange one," Hank said. "He's carrying a load of his shit into the building, a box of crap, a bag on his shoulder, and he's got all kinds of junk balanced on top of the box. Anyway, a lamp shade falls off and what does he do? Does he stop and pick it up? No. He just keeps kicking it all along the floor from the elevator, all the way to the apartment. Strange guy."
At this point I figure I can do a little diplomacy by pointing out that Vonnegut is a war veteran too, and that he had survived some bad stuff during World War II. I thought this might encourage a little respect and camaraderie from Hank and that they might even hit it off. Hank's reply was, "World War Two, huh? Was he on our side?"
After a heavy snowstorm that Winter -- we'd gotten a foot and a half of snow -- I didn't wait for Hank to bitch at me. I spent a good hour clearing and digging out our fifteen passenger van so I could move it to the designated side of the parking lot. The next morning, as I was walking in from the lot, I noticed that there was only one car that had still not been cleared and moved. It looked a bit like Vonnegut's car. It was still covered by over a foot of snow, though the driver's side door and window were more or less clear. Then I saw the window roll down and Vonnegut's head crane out of it as the car started to roll forward. He was moving his "goddamn car" without having even bothered to clear the windshield.
What's my point in telling that story? I have two of them. The first is that we can take some pleasure in knowing that Hank the building manager put Vonnegut in his place, same as the rest of us. The second point is that Vonnegut seems to be driving with a blocked windshield in more ways than one these days.
Posted by Jeremy at 07:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Sistani: let's hope this analysis is correct
by JeremyJeff Weintraub, guest-posting at Normblog, analyzes what appears to have been a brilliant maneuver by Sistani in calling for a march on Najaf. The result so far is that Al Sadr is no longer holding the Imam Ali shrine hostage, the U.S. has been able to avoid storming an important holy site and capturing or killing a powerful cleric (a fate Al Sadr deserves but which could trigger a dangerous backlash), and Sistani's authority over Sadr seems to have been reinforced.
My immediate reaction to Sistani's call for a march on Najaf was that it felt like a significantly positive thing, but this was based on a gut feeling (an uncharacteristically pleasant one) and not much else. Weintraub has a much more substantive analysis:
The Ayatollah Sistani may be a frail, elderly, and reclusive cleric. But he clearly has an exquisite sense of political timing, as well as remarkable skill in using his moral and religious authority to achieve precise political effects.The solution to the crisis in Najaf that Sistani has just brokered may or may not fall apart, and its long-term effects are still uncertain. But what he's just accomplished, as well as the way he accomplished it, are pretty impressive.
[...]
...Sistani returned dramatically to Iraq and to Najaf, accompanied by thousands of peaceful marchers, and brokered a solution that gave all the major actors a less-than-catastrophic way out - while, at least on paper, giving Sistani all the crucial things that he wanted, and enhancing his own prestige and authority in the process.
[...]
All this strikes me as a good and promising outcome, since overall (given the available alternatives) a win for Sistani is a win for Iraq.
Read the whole thing...
Posted by Jeremy at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 26, 2004
The one thing that grabs me about this swift boat insanity
by JeremyI have to admit I'm sick of hearing about Kerry and swift boats and Kerry's self-described glowing record as a war criminal and hero.
This, as I see it, is a train crash Kerry created for himself, first by telling romantic tales of having personally committed and witnessed war atrocities, then by being too proud to apologize to his fellow swift boat veterans (which need not have meant recanting on his forceful opposition to the Viet Nam war) and finally by idiotically pushing his war record as the thematic focal point of his candidacy.
But there's something that has been striking me as genuinely relevant hiding within all of this, and that is the question of Kerry's diplomatic skills. Kerry, as Cara has put it, is supposed to be "Mr. Nuance. Mr. Diplomacy." One of the key reasons Kerry feels he should be president is that he would be far better at building partnerships during times of conflict than Bush has been. Where are those skills now? Wouldn't this be a good time to put them to use? Making peace with angry swifties, coming to some kind of detente with the Bush administration over 527 ads, acknowledging some impassioned overstatements and misstatements over the years...
Are we to conclude that Kerry is a champion diplomat, provided he is never expected to engage in diplomacy with actors as wicked and immovable as the president of his own country and a group of his fellow war veterans? If Kerry is planning to show us how he would put arrogance aside in favor of building partnerships, wouldn't you think he ought to start, like, nowish?
Posted by Jeremy at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 25, 2004
Technology, Humanity, Community, Practitioners, Perpetrators...all that stuff
by JeremyLast night I voluntarily took some work home and, after a while, wondered why. The answer came today when I realized I could make up the time by taking a two hour lunch in the park on this beautiful Wednesday in Holyoke. I am writing this now on my Palm Pilot ($20 on Ebay, with folding keyboard, also $20 on Ebay).
The trouble is I forgot to bring a light for my cigar, so I walked a few blocks over to the 99 cent store for a Bic lighter. This was OK because I could listen to some first rate jazz on the mp3 player/radio that Cara bought me for my last birthday. Often, Jazz on the radio is not the best, even when it's acoustic, straight ahead, non-commercial. I can't put my finger on it, but I guess I often just don't like the taste of the DJ's on Jazz stations.
As if reading my mind, here's what this DJ said during a station identification pause:
"When it comes to American Classical Music, which some of you will know as 'Jazz,' the thing that separates the serious practitioners from the perpetrators has always been the ability to swing."
Well there you go then.
I was listening to a combo (is that term passe now?) led by an alto saxophonist who sounded a bit like Cannonball Adderly, though I soon realized it wasn't him because the playing, though superb, was not superhumanly perfect. I was walking through Holyoke at the time, a fairly down-and-out city here in Western Massachusetts, and crossing through an alley (probably not the best idea, but I thought it was a street at first) and there were huge, low flying military cargo planes passing overhead either to or from Westover Air Reserve Base. These planes, called C-5's, make 767's look like cessnas (I looked it up and they?re about 40% bigger in both length and wingspan, and they have four engines instead of two).
It was a strange combination of influences.
I could also hear the strains of calliope music coming from the carousel in the park. (there goes another C-5. I instinctively ducked my head that time, though I suppose they must be a thousand feet up there anyway).
Here's what freaked me out: I was really getting into the music I was listening to (it turned out to have been Frank Morgan, who seems to be playing better than ever since his comeback in the 80's. It was a track from this brand new live album, which I'm going to get soon. Go to that page and listen to the sample of "Impressions" and you'll hear what I was hearing when I though it was Cannonball. I also heard him do a really nice version of "Equinox") when the music was interrupted by that gut-churning (and my gut doesn't need the help) alarm for the Emergency Alert System. I guess it's those plane crashes in Russia yesterday, but this alert scared me more than it normally would. I actually took out my cell phone expecting to have to call Cara at work or to see if I could reach my family in NYC. But it turned out to be an Amber Alert, the system that has been helping the police to foil child abductions by quickly soliciting help from the public. Some poor girl was kidnapped in Fitchburg by two guys in a white Ford 150 pickup with a brown stripe on the side. One of the guys has tattoos on his neck. One of them is called "spider."
These cases often seem so futile, but with this system it almost seems impossible for these bastards to not get caught
To some, the Amber Alert might seem a bit like the long arm of Big Brother (there's another C-5) but to me it feels like the protective part of what we used to call 'community' struggling to adapt to this widening-techno-world we now live in. And it's a reminder that the police, when things are working the way they should, are servants of the community, and that the real power (dormant though it often is) is in the hands of the community. "We need your help" the Massachusetts State Police official said.
After the alert, the DJ on the Springfield Technical Community College station I was listening to apologized for the interruption of Frank Morgan's solo by the alert but, he pointed out, it was in service of a worthy cause.
"That guy Spider and his buddy better drop that poor girl off somewhere because they're gonna have the whole state of Massachusetts out lookin' for em, I can tell you that."
Amen. [As I copy this over into my blog just a few hours later I am able to report that the girl has been found, though the abductors have not been apprehended].
(There goes another C-5. And another. More than usual. I have to wonder what's going on. It might just be some routine movement of equipment or something.)
(There goes another C-5...and another...and a C-130...and another C-130).
The transport planes aren't as bad a sign, since I would assume they indicate some sort of planful activity. It's when we hear a lot of fighters (F-15's or F-16's, I'm not sure which) that we begin to worry. It was the sound of fighters circling directly over our house that got Cara out of bed wondering what was going on back on September 11, 2001. They fly over us often enough but they never just circle like that. We later found out that flight 11, one of the two planes that hit the World Trade Center, had flown over us after leaving Boston and before taking a sharp turn Southward toward New York City. I guess those fighter jets had been ordered into the air and were awaiting further instructions as to whether or where to pursue any other planes, or were just there to defend the Air Base. Ever since then we react to the sound of figher jets with both fear and a sense, fairly recent for us, that those guys are actually up there to help people, not just to hurt them.
Posted by Jeremy at 09:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Sistani: "March to Najaf...rescue the city"
by JeremyMaybe this will mark a turning point for the better (though I don't claim to know):
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani arrived Wednesday in Basra, Iraq, from England, where he had been receiving medical treatment, according to a spokesman for al-Sistani in Baghdad.Before he arrived, al-Sistani -- one of Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim leaders -- asked all Iraqis to "march to Najaf in order to rescue the city," according to his spokesman in his Damascus, Syria, office.
Posted by Jeremy at 08:24 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 24, 2004
A True Leader
by CaraA good boss, a true leader, is a definite rarity.
I once heard someone say that real leaders, as opposed to power hungry opportunists, are the people you instinctively run to for help in a crisis and often they're not necessarily the people who make the most money or hold the most authority. When all hell breaks loose you rush to the folks who can help out the most. For me, Donald was that kind of true leader.
I consider myself lucky and privileged that I once worked for one of the most inclusive, compassionate, and astute people I've ever met.
I worked as a mental health counselor in a psychiatric hospital for several years and he was seriously one of the most skilled human service/mental health professionals I've ever met in my 13 years in various human service jobs. Donald's an RN with an MBA who, despite his sky-high blood pressure, is still plugging away at making sure every single patient's humanity, dignity, and soul is validated in very simple, grounded, and humor filled ways. He had an amazing instinct about people because he truly wanted to know people. He was curious about what made folks tick and was always ready to get his hands dirty doing the real work most "management" types wouldn't be caught dead doing. He was never above helping out his overwhelmed staff change and bathe patients on the geriatric unit. In action, he was funny, relevant, always smiling, smart...he was the kind of person who literally brought out the best in everyone around him with all the sincerity of one wanting to connect with what is great in people, for real. He could look at a person, psychosis or not, and not only instantly find that person's strengths but also employ the most entertaining way to dignify those strengths with humor and honesty. I saw him do this in the most precarious, if not downright dangerous, of situations and I saw him do it in everyday banter with CEO, schizophrenic, janitor, and psychiatrist alike. Everything he said, he meant. And if he thought you were full of it, he'd find a funny way to tell you that too and have you laughing at yourself for it. I saw him do this with one of the most volatile patients we treated. She had a history of causing physical damage to both property and people (herself included) and, once again, she was about to blow. On a dime, Donald completely turned the situation around and actually had her laughing at herself. I've never witnessed a more skillful defusing maneuver.
But he certainly was no push over. He always knew when to set limits and maintain boundaries, a must in this command hallucination mine field of a profession where a misstep can mean literal injury to all involved. He knew just when to laugh and open up or when to shield to protect everyone's safety. He was, simply put, the most accurate judge of human character and human behavior I've ever witnessed in my life. I learned volumes just by watching him work. You can't put a price on that kind of leadership.
I had many memorable and interesting conversations with him through the years. I remember the story he told once about being a golf partner, purely by chance one day, with George Shultz, and having the green surrounded by armed secret service agents while nervously trying to putt. George didn't talk about his old job much and Donald didn't push it, but he did eventually come around to asking him a general sort of question regarding his old job. He said he looked off in the distance and said something like, "It was the dirtiest job in the world." He knew he meant it.
The other story I always remember Donald telling was about the time he was in the hospital years ago. He said that he awoke in his hospital bed, still groggy, to see a young politician forcefully make his presence and intentions known to one and all, shaking hands and loudly proclaiming his run for office, the senate in fact. Donald said he was never as annoyed at anyone as he was then. From that clearly staged and scripted campaign scene of a hospital room photo-op backdrop he said that it was obvious this guy was a totally ambitious, self aggrandizing phony. And if I'm remembering the story right, he told him so too. He really hated the guy. At the time I remember being really surprised, naively, because Donald, after all, found the good in everyone. I realized later that he'd spotlight good whenever he found it but he just didn't happen to find it in this guy who thought waking up sick patients in a hospital for a campaign photo-op was a good idea. And I don?t think you need Donald's genius for bullshit detection to smell it here.
Oh yeah, that candidate, well he won that bid for office back then and went on to hold the same senate seat ever since. Come voting time, I chose to ignore Donald's story, and a lot of other facts too, and voted for the guy myself rationalizing all this away for the 'good of liberal ideals', ideals that Donald held as well.
And now, well, he's running for president. This time, though, I'm paying close attention to that story and I'm not ignoring the facts (hat tip:Instapundit) :
"This is all about Mr. Kerry and what the veterans believe was his blood libel against their service when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the spring of 1971 that all American soldiers had committed war crimes as a matter of official policy. "Crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command" were among his incendiary words.Mr. Kerry has never offered proof of those charges, yet he has never retracted them either. At his recent coronation in Boston he managed the oxymoronic feat of celebrating both his own war-fighting valor and his antiwar activities when he returned home."
So the question for me now is this: is this candidate someone I'd instinctively trust enough to run to in a crisis? Years ago, Donald was quite literally woken up by liberal hypocrisy; I regret it took me until 9/11 to do the same.
That candidate will never again get my vote for either office.
Donald, how could I have ever doubted you?
Posted by Cara at 02:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Zeyad On Al Sadr
by JeremyZeyad gives us a glimpse of what Muqtada Al Sadr's "freedom fighters" have been up to lately (emphasis mine):
In the south, Al-Mahdi and Sadr followers are wreaking havoc and seriously threatening to cripple Iraqi economy. After setting the Al-Halfaya oil field south of Ammara ablaze, they broke into SOC (South Oil Company) headquarters at Al-Asma'i in downtown Basrah. The whole second floor was set to fire after the building was looted. This is deeply troubling, especially when the SOC police station is less than 200 metres from the building and the British base is about 5 kilometres away. Al-Mahdi have threatened to kill SOC employees if they show up at work. The same in Ammara, where governmental employees have been prevented from going to work for days.A group of militiamen broke into the Ammara prison setting hundreds of prisoners free under the eyes and noses of Iraqi and British forces. A convoy of 70 trucks loaded with rice and flour sacks belonging to the Ministry of Trade heading to Baghdad from southern ports in Basrah have been held by Al-Mahdi in the city since Saturday. The minister pathetically called Sadr followers in an interview published in Azzaman to return the trucks. Makes you wonder who controls this country, Sadr or the Iraqi government. This country is in deep shit if somebody doesn't put an end to this farce.
Something else has been bothering me for a while. How come there are NEVER any suicide bombings whenever there is trouble in the south with Sadr? And why do the Sunni areas seem so peaceful?
Posted by Jeremy at 01:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Is that our Anne? Why yes it is!
by JeremyAnne Cunningham is the victim of an anecdote in today's New York Times. This has been verified beyond speculation. I even asked her if it was cleared for blogging and she gave me to go ahead to reveal her "bratty teenage self" to the blogosphere. Not too, too bratty, but a typical Hunter student if you ask me. Typical.
It's the first item on this page. Read it now.
Did I know where the Khyber pass was when I was in high school? Well, I knew who Joe Pass was. And I'd at least heard of the Khyber Pass, so I think that's pretty good.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 23, 2004
A Growing Problem for France
by JeremyIs it safe to say that no one could mistake this as an act of free speech in criticism of Israeli policy?
Arsonists set fire to a Jewish soup kitchen in central Paris early on Sunday morning and daubed Nazi symbols on the building, police said, in the latest anti-Semitic act in France.[...]
It was the second anti-Semitic act in the French capital in about a week after vandals last Saturday drew a swastika and wrote ``death to the Jews'' on a low wall in front of Paris's Notre Dame cathedral early on Saturday.
Let this randomly chosen example serve as a reminder of why some of us still tend to "cry anti-semitism" and "whine about the holocaust"
This is an attack on French liberalism as much as anything else. If all French Jews were to leave the country there would still be the homeless to kill, French art and architecture to vandalize, and countless other flotsam and jetsam of the Enlightenment to dispose of. This is a crisis for France not just for French Jews. That's one of the things that is meant by the phrase "never forget."
Posted by Jeremy at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 22, 2004
Blair in 2004
by JeremyIn a state (Massachusetts) that Kerry is guaranteed to win -- the closest thing to defeat for him here would be something like only drawing fifty percent more votes than Bush, rather than the eighty four percent advantage Gore had over Bush in 2000 -- I have the luxury of being able to seriously consider a write-in vote. I don't know whether anyone pays any attention to such feeble efforts at making a political statement, though, and I'm not sure willfully throwing away my vote will do anybody any good.
But Johann Hari describes a policy of the Blair government that exemplifies the sort of thing I'd like to see here in the States. Blair is apparently responsible for a policy toward helping homeless people that makes a mockery of the vaguely similar but feeble by comparison, efforts toward caring for homeless and mentally ill people even here in Massachusetts, a state that does a better job than most.
In 1999 - the year Blair and Gordon Brown finally abandoned Tory spending plans - the Government began to plough ?200m into lifting the poorest people in Britain off the streets. This whopping sum - more than some homeless charities were demanding - has made it possible to introduce a whole new approach to lifting people off the streets. The new Rough Sleepers Unit is in charge of Contact and Assessment Teams (CATs) for homeless people. It sounds jargon-heavy, but the reality is life-changing. Each individual is assigned a CATs worker who develops a detailed action plan for getting them into accommodation, dealing with their drug habit, and ultimately into work. They ring the hostels, they liaise with the GPs, they find them job training. Homeless people aren't on their own any more.[...]
For many people on the streets, it is the first time in their lives that anybody has lavished this amount of care and attention on them. You remember all those figures about the "extra bureaucrats" employed by New Labour? This is what they do. Workers in CATs count as "pen pushers". Some pen. Some pushers.
And the extra cash for the homeless (raised by, yes, increased taxation, particularly on the middle class) buys even more than this. Once they are housed, the ex-homeless are given a Tenancy Sustainment Officer who helps to make sure they don't lose their new home. These officers have been so successful that the rate of tenancy breakdowns has fallen to just 3 per cent. And there's more: spending on social housing stock has increased by 250 per cent under New Labour. But how many of us know about these successes? In some cities, such as Birmingham, the number of people on the streets has been cut by 96 per cent.
And this while simultaneously and staunchly opposing theocratic fascism. I don't know why or when this pairing of ideals took on the status of an amazing ideological balancing act for the left, since both strike me as arising from fundamental progressive values. But that's the 21st century for you.
And yes it's true, Bush is certainly not going to be instituting this sort of social reform (though helping to wean people off of their dependencies and get them off the streets are goals that would strike me as fitting well with the values of honorable conservatives). But, I'm sorry to have to tell you, neither is Kerry.
One last thought relating to the parenthetical in the previous paragraph (while I sprawl in the comfort of an editor-free environment): the journey toward a better society will be led by honorable people from all points in the political spectrum. Change for the better can be sparked by exciting ideological whip-cracks, but I think that the movement toward real progress is mainstream, non-partisan, and hence boring as hell to idealists and demagogues (though I think idealism is part of the fuel admixture that drives this process. Demagoguery is probably the hole in the muffler).
Expanding on the parenthetical in that paragraph...OK, now I'm kidding.
Posted by Jeremy at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 21, 2004
More Matter with Less Art
by JeremyThough I disagree with his opinions regarding Bush's decision to invade Iraq, I might have voted for someone who viewed the world this way. But guys like this never run for president. And it's too bad. Though by coincidence, someone with the same name, born in the same town, who also is a doctor and former governor of Vermont did run for president, he'd never have said this (via Norm):
...the U.N. bears a portion of the blame for the Iraq war. The U.N. did not understand that sometimes action is necessary and talk is not enough. There is often too much dithering in the European Union and at the U.N. when action is needed. The shameful reluctance of the European Union to intervene forcefully in Bosnia in order to stop genocide is one such instance. The ultimate failure of the entire world community, including the United States, to stop the massacres in Rwanda is another example.The U.N. does not seem to learn very fast.
In Sudan, Africa's largest nation geographically, a terrible ethnic cleansing has been going on for more than a year in the western Darfur region where government sponsored Arabic speaking Sudanese militias have been systematically moving black Muslim Sudanese off their traditional lands. Over one million people have been displaced. Systematic rapes, burning women and children alive, and other forms of murder and intimidation are the preferred methods of the roving gangs called the Janjaweed. These gangs, supported sometimes directly by Sudanese government forces, are burning villages and sending their populations either to mass graves or, for the lucky ones, to foul refugee camps along the border with Chad.
This spring, the U.S. pushed a resolution through the U.N. Security Council threatening sanctions on Sudan for their disgraceful conduct. The already weak resolution was watered down at the request of a number of countries, including the Europeans.
Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness.
This guy sounds too left wing on foreign policy to get any support from today's left wing. He'd have to Chomsky it up a bit to get anywhere in the politics of the left. He'd have to appeal to the plastic turkey block to build any grassroots support. And he'd have to keep this kind of responsible talk under his hat. Maybe this is why he didn't want to be president.
Every once in a while I wonder what Kerry might actually be thinking about all this genocide stuff, how he defines the limits of sovereignty, etc. But he's running for president now so I wouldn't want to put that kind of head trip on him. His most important task now is to prove that his valor in Viet Nam was up to the high standards of the anti-war baby boomers. Actually, that last sentence doesn't seem to make much sense does it. Mightn't it make more sense for Kerry to acknowledge that Viet Nam was hell, that it was a moral vacuum and that his service was neither venal nor saintly but that he's both proud of his service during war and of his efforts to end the war, but that he regrets some of the hurtful things he said about his comrades in the heat of that era, etc. It wouldn't be hard to come up with the right words to dismiss this thing. But he'd have to actually mean them, I suppose.
It would then be helpful if Kerry could focus on serious issues without simply using them as levers against his opponent. The way to beat Bush (at least in the world I'd like to live in) is to lay out a domestic and foreign policy that embraces the gains made in Iraq and Afghanistan but that makes Bush's role seem now irrelevant or even ill suited. These are claims I could believe if there seemed to be any serious alternative. But the Democrats have got to get serious about the world situation and then have the courage to act on their convictions even, as may be the case with Bush, if it means sacrificing their chances for reelection. That kind of steadfastness of conviction is what the world needs now (the Democratic party needs, in other words, Tony Blair). Clinton was good at pretending to have that kind of convinction, though he had not an ounce. And this legacy haunts and worries me as someone who has previously voted only Democratic (and Nadercratic once or twice).
Posted by Jeremy at 10:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 20, 2004
Shakespeare poll results
by JeremyNorm's shakespeare poll (not a poll) results are in, and we learn of the Borda method (I, at least, had never heard of it. Interesting).
I'm pleased to see Lear take first place. Here was my entry:
King Lear
Hamlet
Othello
Macbeth
My trouble (yes, I'll accept that it may be me, not you) is that I don't understand the whole Macbeth thing. It's true that there are some excellent moments in that play, and there's that deservedly famous passage about frets and struts (where Macbeth's luthier and his auto mechanic argue over who is the finer craftsman. It's Shakespeare at his wittiest. No, I'm just kidding. That really is some of the Bard's best writing).
When I first read Macbeth back in college I couldn't believe how thin it seemed to me. Subsequent reading failed to change my mind. But I guess I was a bit spellbound by King Lear back in those days and I may have been disproportianately unkind to any less worthy rivals. I guess I'm a Macbeth-basher. I'll give it another shot.
Incidentally, I tried to find support for my bad attitude toward Macbeth via google but found only bad reviews of productions of the play, except for one intelligent woman in a bulletin board thread who referred to Macbeth as "Shakespeare's most overrated play." That was all I needed. I have learned (through many years of sour grapes) that I don't need to be part of an in-crowd. But neither do I want to be one of those guys walking down the street muttering to himself loudly while other people cross to the other side (I know an intelligent and very sane person who found this happening to him during his first visit to Amsterdam. It seems the brownies served in some of the coffee shops will have you raving).
I have to confess also that I wondered whether there wasn't some kind of trick being played on us, like some ranking of Shakespeare's tragedies to see how they match up with theories as to their authorship by people other than W.S., just for yuks, or that maybe it was another one of those "find out which shakespeare tragedy you are" things, in reverse. But it turned out to be just what it seemed.
I think those theories about Shakespeare's plays being written by the Earl of Sandwich (or whatever it is) are silly, by the way. I had a professor as an undergraduate who had his own theory that Shakespeare indeed had not written any of his plays, that they had all been penned by an unknown Stratford actor, a man born in the same year, gwho looked exactly like W.S. and also, by coincidence, was named William Shakespeare. It would explain all the confusion. It was all just a crazy coincidence.
Posted by Jeremy at 07:45 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
August 19, 2004
I Love You, Man!
by JeremyOk, here are the rules: every time some human screams "bear!" you've got to claw open another one and take a drink. The first one to pass out under a tree loses.
SEATTLE, Washington (Reuters) -- A black bear was found passed out at a campground in Washington state recently after guzzling down three dozen cans of a local beer, a campground worker said on Wednesday."We noticed a bear sleeping on the common lawn and wondered what was going on until we discovered that there were a lot of beer cans lying around,"
Posted by Jeremy at 12:09 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Mr. Fadhil Goes to Baghdad
by JeremyAli and Mohammed of Iraq the Model are running for the Iraqi National Assembly. It makes one feel a renewed sense of the potential importance of blogging and the importance, whether or not the word is fashionable among your friends, of democracy.
Through our writings in our weblog and communication with different opinions and view points we find ourselves committed to reconsider the way in which we can serve our nation.We also saw that our somewhat daring opinions were accepted by many people whether westerners or Iraqis and we see that we have the capability to clarify our vision about Iraq's future through talking to Iraqis directly.
Our work on the weblog opened our minds more, made us bolder and encouraged us to communicate with our fellow citizens as they're the ones who can make the change and they're the ones we started to write for their sake.
[...]
The bloggers are running under the banner of the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party. Elections will be held after December 2004. For the complete list of party candidates and more information on the party's history and its platform, please visit our website www.iraqdemparty.org [and in English: http://english.iraqdemparty.org/.
Click over to find out how you can lend your support.
Posted by Jeremy at 08:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I've been anthologized canonized!
by Jeremy
This is a real honor. Barbara O'Brien of The Mahablog has written a book on blogs: "Blogging America." There probably aren't many people in the blogosphere with whom I disagree more on just about everything, but here's the section of her new book where you will find a post by me:
Chapter 4 - Best of the Blogs
Look, it would be silly to argue with everything a person decides to do or say, so maybe I can let that one slide. Though, strictly speaking, none of my top five favorite bloggers are even in the book (UPDATE: though Vodkapundit and Andrew Sullivan are certainly in my top ten), so I guess I don't actually agree.
Other bloggers of note in this book: Stephen Green, Kevin Drum, Andrew Sullivan, Poliblog, Daily Kos, Kim du Toit, Crooked Timber...
I'm curious about the content of this section:
Chapter 2 - Charting the Blogosphere
Part 1: The Right Blogosphere
Part 2: The Left Blogosphere
I have not read the book yet. But You've gotta figure it's on the required reading list for any blogger (I'm not just saying that because...well, maybe I am...no, I'm not).
Posted by Jeremy at 01:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
A question about cilantro
by JeremyI'm feeling a bit under the weather and I lack the energy to think seriously about anything. But then there's this. We were watching a cooking show and the guy was making something that looked pretty tasty until he covered it with a ton of fresh cilantro (for an international audience I should point out that I'm referring to what you might better know as the leaves of coriander).
cilantro, to me, is the evil weed. I would rather garnish a dish with poison ivy. Oh, but I'm serious about that. I'd take my chances. I've never reacted to poison ivy before and don't know whether it's a simply matter of luck, or if I'm not genetically susceptible.
The concept of genetics comes to the point. I've read that there are some people who dislike cilantro because they think it tastes soapy and that there is evidence that these people have some genetic difference that alters the sensitivity of their tastebuds. That's fine. I certainly have sympathy for those people.
But there is a third category of cilantro people, and that's the category I belong to. To us, cilantro has an odor so foul it defies any single adjective I can think of. To me, cilantro smells like a rotting corpse. That's not hyperbole, nor is it a metaphor for intense dislike; it's an effort at clinical accuracy. If cilantro smelled to most people the way it smells to me, it would never be sold as a food item, any more than skunk oil would be sold as a lip balm.
Cara, by the way, likes the stuff, though she acknowledges it has a strong and complex flavor and a smell that has a certain dark mystery, almost a muskiness.
This is how I know there's something genetic going on. She senses something powerful, something unique and affecting about the smell, but it just doesn't trigger the same olfactory receptor, or whatever, so she doesn't scream and run out of the room.
There are only two things in the world that smell exactly the same to me as cilantro, so if you are something like a biochemist, this may be an important clue. The first, on occasion, is the artificial peach flavoring in certain junk foods (it happened with peach flavored instant oat meal; once in a while it happens with peach flavored hard candies).
The second occurence of this "smell" (I think pheromones may be involved. The word "smell" does not carry enough weight) happened to me was when I got a whiff of a very large flowering plant on display at the Smith College Arboretum. I don't remember the name of this exotic plant, but I will -- carefully -- go find out.
What I'm interested in is two-fold:
1) Does anyone out there know what I'm talking about? Have you experienced this? Should we start a club?
2) Are you knowledgeable about this sort of thing? Are you studying the human genome and, maybe, attending a culinary school? Will you look into this? And I don't want to hear any more about that "soapy taste" crap. That's cilantro-hating for light weights. The people you want to study are those for whom this terrible weed is like kryptonite to Superman, or holy water to that poor little girl in The Exorcist.
Oh, another clue: heat seems to destroy cilantro's neuro-toxic power. I wonder if this is similar to the way you can cook nettles and they lose their sting.
If your research into this leads to a cure for cancer, please just mention me in the footnotes somewhere.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:17 AM | Comments (24) | TrackBack
August 18, 2004
Our First Blog Anniversary!
by Jeremy
It's hard to believe it has only been a year! Thanks for making this an extremely rewarding obsession. And thanks for making us feel as though we finally have friends who do not think we spend our days worshipping Satan and heaping contumely upon small children.
I keep saying "we" because one of these days I'll get Cara to post some stuff again (like the piece on Kerry, and other lost episodes of "Who Knew?"). But even if she never posts again, this blog -- much like the Monkees without Nesmith -- will soldier on in spite of itself. I promise never to put good sense before stubborn persistence. I have no plans, that is, to end this project. I will keep the cabal rolling.
Did I thank you for reading? Well thanks again!
Posted by Jeremy at 12:20 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
August 17, 2004
Quiz Time, Kids!
by JeremyMichael Totten links to this little play-time exercise that appeared in a Washington Post editorial a few months days ago:
The days when the chief Israeli puppeteer comes to the United States and meets with the puppet in the White House and then proceeds to Capitol Hill, where he meets with hundreds of other puppets, should be replaced.""Bush also repeated the catch-phrase . . . 'committed to the security of Israel as a Jewish state,' which is repeated almost word-for-word again and again by Israel's sycophants and Capitol Hill puppets."
QUICK QUIZ: Which of the above quotations is lifted from the Web site of the white supremacist National Alliance and which was uttered this summer by independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader? It's a tough one. After all, both play on the age-old anti-Semitic stereotype of powerful Jews dominating politics and manipulating hapless non-Jewish puppets for their own ends. Yet if Mr. Nader is at all disquieted by the company he is keeping by using such metaphors, he sure isn't showing it. In a letter this week to the Anti-Defamation League, which had complained to him about his rhetoric, he responded with breezy indifference and more rhetoric that only compounds concerns.
Does this mean Nader is an anti-Semite? I would need further convincing. Let's just say, pending further evidence, that he's an arrogant meat-head.
To see the answer, just turn your placemat upside down!
Posted by Jeremy at 08:24 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 16, 2004
The People's Limo Service
by JeremyTo some it might seem strange that Norm dreams of struggling for a more just society from the back of a stretch limo. Not only can I envision this, but I believe myself to have played some small part in the vanguard of the luxury transport revolution myself. I have to be careful not to disclose too much detail, but here's the story...
I used to be a mental health outreach worker. One of my "clients" was a woman who did not consent to any treatment but whose monthly government check had to be, by court order, managed by an agency (the job was assigned to me) so that the government could be sure her rent was paid and that she bought enough food to live on. The balance was hers to do with what she wanted. I didn't feel especially proud of this kind of work, but I think the woman appreciated the fact that I performed this role with genuine respect for her dignity. I never lectured her or acted as though she were a child, though I always asked how she was doing and offered to help. She was always "OK" and resented any additional questions.
At one point I got word that she had been doing things that were going to get her evicted (any sane landlord would have evicted her for these things). I warned her that eviction was pending and that there was probably no way to avoid it and I offered to help her find another place while we appealed the eviction (though it was inevitable). She refused to let me help her. This went on for a couple of months. Both of us were getting angry about it. I told her I wasn't trying to tell her how to live her life but that I didn't want to see her sleeping on the street. But I think that she didn't want to dignify the system by doing anything to acknowledge that this was happening. I believe that a certain brand of pop psychology has referred to this as "I'll show you: I'll get me."
A few weeks later I was working an evening shift on-call and, of course, she came in saying she'd been locked out of her apartment and had nowhere to sleep. She was in a panic and embarrassed to have to ask me for help after telling me to go to hell all those weeks. I made calls for a couple of hours and finally found a homeless shelter 30 miles away. I was annoyed enough that I didn't want to drive her there myself at 8pm, so I called around for a cab to bring her there. This wasn't easy either. I finally found a cab company willing to do this for a reasonable sum.
The two of us stood outside for an hour waiting for the cab to arrive. My anger was slowly ebbing away as I realized how hurtful and frightening this all was to her. I think some of the reality of her life was beginning to dawn on her. She looked miserable. I was feeling guilty for refusing to drive her to the shelter.
Then the cab arrived. We knew it was hers because we recognized the name of the company printed on the door. The surprise was that this cab, rather than the beat up yellow sedan we were looking for, was a white stretch limo! Then the tinted window rolled down and we saw that the driver was a middle aged Harley Davidson sort of guy with long hair and a beard. "D'you call for a cab?" he said.
My client looked at me and we both erupted into laughter. "You really set me up in style" she said. "This ought to get them talking up at the homeless shelter." She started laughing again and thanked me. It was completely absurd, of no actual value to her and, if anything, a mockery of the seriousness of the situation she was in. But it was an absurdity precisely tuned to her sense of humor, and it broke, for good, the barrier of mutual resentment that had formed between us.
Now, you might say that this wasn't much in the way of a triumph for the underclass, that it is really just an example of perpetuating a crummy status quo by adding a bit of pointless window dressing.
But you would be missing the point.
I'll spell it out: take your life, add a stretch limo, enjoy. Live a little.
Posted by Jeremy at 02:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 14, 2004
Another Cape Post
by JeremyLast night we turned on the TV to see if the Olympics were happening, and who did we see? Mr. Jeff Jarvis. Some sort of blog panel being aired on CSPAN. That was a nice surprise.
And here's this picture of my niece, Hannah. I don't know who the boy is. Just some fellow she met on the boat.
Posted by Jeremy at 05:27 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
August 13, 2004
(UPDATED) Pavlov's Political Humor (for children?)
by JeremyWe were dragged along to a godawful children's play; an adaptation of what I guess is an English folk tale: "The Three Sillies."
It had one or two moments, but it was bad. I wouldn't have been so vindictive as to disrespect someone's work before our vast readership, except that this particular opus included a facile and offensive "put your fear and anger into loathing Bush" indoctrination of children portion.
The 9/11 attacks (and/or the threat of more such attacks, or at the very least, the crimes of the Iraqi Baath regime) were directly equated with a snowball attack on a municipal sign by two children. Boys will, as we know, be boys. Yes, I understand the concept of satire, hyperbole to make a point, etc. But you wouldn't use, to take a random and seldom chosen example, the Aremenian genocide as a allegorical referent for getting some easy laughs in a performance for children. This invitation to negate the realities of Islamo-fascism and Baath oppression would have been merely stupid and contemptible were it a play for adults. Given that the target audience (pun intended) were children, this was truly foul and irresponsible.
I don't think Cara and I were the only people who were pissed off either. A couple of people walked out and one guy got in his car and tore out of the parking lot, a gesture, I took it, of anger. But, of course, those who had children to drive home were placed in an extremely awkward position. How do you explain to your child why it is you are yanking them out of the silly play they're enjoying before it has reached the end? It's not something a loving parent would have wanted to subject their kids to. But of course the fact that you are offended means that you are a mean and selfish person who doesn't care about freedom or peace, doesn't it? So it serves you right.
This sort of thing makes it a lot easier for me to own up to the fact that I am seriously considering voting for Bush. It really frightens me that Kerry has a mandate to appease the sort of self-righteous avoidance in the face of Islamo-fascism that was displayed for us this evening. I think John Edwards would have been offended by this play, or at least would have understood why we were. I think Kerry would have applauded and guffawed in that Alex Trebek tone of voice.
But anyway.............I also tasted scallops this evening. Interesting. A subtle, complex, almost smoky flavor, with a slightly creepy texture, whereas the fish part of my fish-n-chips was bland (though light and flaky and all that).
Vegetarians: you're not really missing much. I like some of the fish I've been eating these past few weeks (after a 20 year, self-imposed embargo) but, overall, I've been underwhelmed.
UPDATE: There's been some controversy in the comments on Michael Totten's blog about what exactly I was trying to say in this post (uh...about the play, not the scallops). I was going to post this there, but it got too long, so here's the comment:
Sorry to throw that post out there in a kind of rough hewn form and then split the scene, but I was on vacation and had a very tenuous, very slow dial-up connection in the motel room (3 minutes just for the Google search page to load!). Add to this the fact that I was worked up to a froth, etc.
But the deal is that the phrase "put your fear and anger into loathing Bush" should not be in quotes as I look at it now. My fault. I should have used hyphens or something. More importantly, perhaps, I should have explained what the hell I was talking about. The actual details are these:
The play was not at a school. It was a community theater on Cape Cod. But it was a play advertised as being for children and indeed there were many children there and it was indeed clearly a children's play.
The first political content was during a brief set change. A boy of 14 or so was removing parts of the set for the next scene and he began to address the audience in an obviously scripted patter about how they're going to replace various old, worn out props in the Fall: chairs, rugs, etc. And then he pointed to a wooden board that was cut out and painted to look like a shrub. He said that he was especially looking forward to getting rid of "that bush" in the Fall. He then picked it up and, as he carried it off stage you could see the "Kerry/Edwards in 2004" bumper sticker on the back. This struck me as inappropriate but I figured that would be as far as they'd dare to go. I was wrong.
The plot involved a guy in England unwilling to marry his girlfriend because her family is so silly. He agrees to marriage only if he can find 3 sillier people anywhere in the world. He decides there's no better place to search than America. OK, I thought, I've certainly got a sense of humor about my own country. Not a problem.
He finds two silly Americans. Kids are loving all the silliness. OK.
The third silly person is in a town that is run by four corrupt power brokers (my term): a police chief, some vaguely mobsterish character, and another pair of cigar puffing deal-maker types. At the beginning of the scene we see two rowdy kids in battle fatigues throw two snowballs at the brand new "welcome to Sillydale" sign that had just been painted. We then learn that the power brokers are looking for a new mayor, but they want someone who's just like them, who'll do exactly what they say, etc. One of them realizes that his 12 year old son would be perfect. The 12 year old enters the stage looking generically presidential, uttering inane quasi-presidential platitudes about nothing. It was the most amusing performance in the play. The character could have been JFK, Bush, Kerry, anybody, really. I thought it was a fine performance (by the 14 year old boy mentioned earlier).
Later in the scene, however, while explaining how he'd deal with some sort of problem in the town without creating a backlash (I'm afraid I don't remember the exact plot point here. I had gotten pretty bored with the plot) he switches into a southern accent, stands behind a podium that has just been placed on the stage, and becomes, quite obviously, George W. Bush. He delivers a speech about how the town has been visciously attacked by snowballs (they use the term "slushballs") and that the town must stand together and get behind their government, etc, etc. The trouble here is that I can't remember the exact words, but no one in their right mind would either fail to see or deny that this was a Bush impression. He goes on to choke on a pretzel, if you needed another clue.
What wasn't clear to me was whether the snowball attacks were meant to be evocative of the 9/11 attacks. If so, that's Pretty outrageous, even as satire. The speech, however, seems to be lampooning Bush's warning's of the threat of WMDs in Iraq as necessitating a course of action that must not be questioned, etc. The play was sloppily written and so it wasn't clear. Also, I was shocked and fuming mad, so I'd probably have to see it again to be sure whether there were specific referents, or just sloppily general ones. But clearly what was being referred to was either the 9/11 attacks, the threat of WMDs in Iraq, and/or the past crimes and current threat of the Saddam Hussein regime.
So, while the confusion is my fault, I think you'll see that there cannot be any doubt as to this having been an anti-Bush message including some light humor regarding either 9/11 or the Iraqi Baath regmime, in a play advertised for children. There was nothing in the ad that even hinted at the possibility of sharp political satire, left leaning or otherwise, or ironic references to Iraq or Al Qaeda.
I hope this clarifies things a bit.
UPDATE #2: One thing I forgot is that, upon leaving Sillydale, our protagonist declares that the people there were not so much silly as simply "mean."
Posted by Jeremy at 12:00 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
August 12, 2004
First Vacation Events
by JeremyLate night pizza dinner (a gastroparesis no-no. I will try to avoid whining about tomorrow morning's aftermath, since I will have brought it on myself).
During the above, a fairly respectful debate with my parents about socialism (yes, it's a family vacation. My brother and his 'nuclear' family are here too). Summary of the argument Cara and I put forward: socialism as a tool a la FDR's New Deal...yes. Socialism as template for constructing an entirely new society...no. The strange thing is we and my parents both seem to be saying that the most important thing is simply to play some small role in improving the lot of people in the present tense. So the difference seems to be on the level of abstract ideals, or something like that. But we didn't get into the problem of there being different perceptions as to which sets of people are in the most jeopardy, or whether we should limit our primary concern to our own national borders, etc.
We did not mention the war even once. This is something we've all learned from past experience must be avoided unless shouting is the goal.
Posted by Jeremy at 02:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 11, 2004
Vacation Picture Number One
by Jeremy
UPDATE: Cara points out that this is not a black & white picture. My witty retort: "Uh................................oh yeah."
Posted by Jeremy at 04:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Zeyad on Sistani's Health
by JeremyAfter declaring the recent heart problem and consequent whisking away of Sistani for treatment to be, in his (Zeyad's) view legitimate, Zeyad has this to say about what would happen were Sistani to die in the near future:
Also, the sensational media's talk of a power vacuum, or a struggle in Najaf among the clerics on the event of Sistani's death betrays their ignorance of the traditional Shia leadership hierarchy. Sistani would be succeeded by either Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Ishaq Al-Fayyadh or Grand Ayatollah Bashir Al-Najafi, with the former being the most likely candidate even though they are equals in terms of scholarship and Islamic jurisprudence. Al-Fayyadh is of Afghani origin, while Al-Najafi is Pakistani. Al-Fayyadh was also, together with Sistani, one of Al-Khoei's most favourite students and esteemed aides. Grand Ayatollah Abu Al-Qasim Al-Khoei (who is Sistani's predecessor) even allowed Sistani, Al-Fayyadh, and Mohammed Baqir Al-Sadr to issue fatwas on his behalf at many occasions. His followers are all over the Shi'ite world from Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.Furthermore, Grand Ayatollah Al-Fayyadh is known to be the most moderate of Shi'ite marji'iya, even more so than Sistani. He belongs to the traditional old school of the Hawza (that of Abu Al-Hassan Al-Asfahani, Sadiq Al-Shirazi, Al-Barujardi, Hussein Kashif Al-Ghatta', Muhsin Al-Hakim, and Al-Khoei) that calls for a distinct seperation of state and religion and an utter contempt for the notion of Wilayet Al-Faqih (the rule of the jurisprudent) that was preached by Khomeini and taken up by the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
So I wish to comfort the sensational media that there will be no power struggles in the Hawza after Sistani's death. There will always be a peaceful consensus on who would be the supreme marji' in Najaf, as it has always been that way for centuries
If true, this will be vexing to Noam Chomsky who will have to find some other putative Imperialist pants-pissing to kvetch to us about in that "this crime will result in the deaths of millions, if indeed one is keeping score" tone of his.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 10, 2004
A Little Vacation
by JeremyWe are going away for several days to Cape Cod. Oh, I expect I'll be posting something every day, but I'm not going to be too worried about what. Why, even today I was so wrapped up in an audit at work coinciding with a network meltdown, that I didn't read any news or blogs and didn't even think of posting until just now.
[some kind of witty or merely pertinent transition]
I plan to take only black & white pictures with my 3 megapixel Olympus digital camera. It's all about light and shade, friends; tones and hilights, lines and textures, thumbs and droplets, blurs and scratches, lotion and sand. That's what it's all about with me, this vacation, as I sport my camera through the majestic dunes and the salty byways of the sticky-outy part of Massachusetts.
Uh...that's all. Gotta pack.
Thanks for reading. I'll try, during our trip, to post some images worth looking at.
Note to burglars: our housesitter is not a person to be messed with. Nor are the dogs next door (we refer to them affectionately as "the monsters." They really are a couple of sweethearts, but they both do Tai Chi. They are, I believe, the only dogs in the state who practice the soft forms of the martial arts. They can push you down real slow, in other words, so don't test them.)
Posted by Jeremy at 08:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 09, 2004
A Bleak Future for Harry Belafonte's Cranium
by JeremyRemember that slightly crazy proposal to bring UN observers to monitor the 2004 presidential election? Well it seems something like it has actually been approved by the Bush Administration:
A team of international observers will monitor the presidential election in November, according to the U.S. State Department.The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was invited to monitor the election by the State Department. The observers will come from the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
Barbara Lee and Eddie Bernice Johnson are praising the move but focusing on the fact that it is coming out of the State Department:
"I am pleased that Secretary Powell is as committed as I am to a fair and democratic process," said Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, who spearheaded the effort to get U.N. observers."The presence of monitors will assure Americans that America cares about their votes and it cares about its standing in the world," she said in a news release.
Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California agreed.
"This represents a step in the right direction toward ensuring that this year's elections are fair and transparent," she said.
"I am pleased that the State Department responded by acting on this need for international monitors. We sincerely hope that the presence of the monitors will make certain that every person's voice is heard, every person's vote is counted."
That's OK; that's politics. No need to praise or thank Bush. But -- and this gets to the meaning of the title of this post -- this will very likely cause Harry Belafonte's head to explode, since he has indicated that Powell is a "house slave" who merely does his master's bidding.
Seriously, I do tend to think this is a smart move. If nothing else (because if Bush wins there will certainly still be a cottage industry thriving on the "Bush Stole the Election" line of activewear, Volvo adornments, coffee mugs, women's undergarments...) this will at least make it easier for the U.S. to insist on international monitoring of elections in other countries without having to evade the accusation that the U.S. itself would never allow such an indignity.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 08, 2004
I Possess a Magic Key
by JeremyI am slow. Cara is faster. When she gets into the driver's seat of our car she is always there before I am (we rotate driving duty). I take out my key to unlock the passengers' side door but she, being as considerate as she is quick, always has it unlocked from the inside before I can get to if from the outside. I have often wondered why I should bother to enter this competition that I always lose.
I've thought, to put it another way, of abandoning what has now become an empty gesture. But standing there in selfish passivity, like some pathetic zombie, is not an option. Still, taking my key out just to point it at the car door has served as a mild existential rebuke, a reminder that so many of the things we humans spend our time doing are done just for appearances. We are kidding ourselves. "Who do you think you're fooling with your little daily procedures, your empty rituals?" the car door seems to be asking me. (Actually, though, who is mocking me here: Is it the door? the Key?)
But I have finally slain this beast through a trick of conceptual re-framing. As much as I hate that New Age -- or, as Penn Gillette calls it: "Newage" (to rhyme with sewage) -- tripe about simply re-framing your situation rather than wallowing in self pity, it does occasionally work.
Here's how I look at it now: I have a key that opens my car door by magic. All I have to do is point it at the lock and -- "PLUNK" -- the lock opens. While to Cara this may simply be an occasion for an eye-roll, to me it is something quite special. I possess a strange and wonderful power.
As the elders of my tribe might put it: "that's some key you got there."
Indeed. It is a magic key.
I haven't tried the trick with any other key so I don't know if it would work that way. I don't want to offend to Gods by toying with this too much. If you experiment with this spell on your own please share your results, though you do so at your own risk.
Posted by Jeremy at 01:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Rod Serling on commercialism at its most pernicious
by JeremyIf you admire the work of Rod Serling, you'll want to visit this site, as noted earlier.
He was a great story teller, a fine writer, and an interesting guy. I think what makes his work so special is that rare balance he was able to achieve between a dark awareness of what humanity can be and a childlike belief in the miraculous.
While he valued the unique power of television, he evidently had a healthy cynicism about the way it functioned as an industry. This sound clip, from a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, is a chilling illustration of why. It also suggests a thematic thread running through much of his work that may be easier to recognize than to put into words. But I'd say it has something to do with things being not exactly the way they appear on the surface.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 07, 2004
Ghost Story
by JeremyReading Zeyad's tales of spooky Mesopotamia, and reading some of the commenters' own accounts of brushes with the occult, I was reminded of a little tale of my own. I don't exactly believe in ghosts, but I have something of a ghost story nonetheless.
Several years ago Cara and I were walking through the streets of Amherst, Massachusetts (that's not the scary part yet) and we decided to visit the grave of Emily Dickinson (pictured below, if I was able to find the photo). We paid our respects to the strange departed poet in the accustomed manner of the townsfolk, by setting a small stone upon the fence behind which her remains, still swathed, they say, in the housedress in which she departed this Earth, lay entombed under God's hallowed soil. The sky was blood red...ok, sorry. I'll tone it down a bit.
It was simply a nice visit on a lovely day. Nothing unusual about it.
As we were walking down the stone path toward the wrought iron gate that girded the perimeter, our conversation turned, I know not why, toward horticulture. Specifically, my lovely bride entertained me with a charming, impromptu treatise concerning the mysterious and treacherous plants of the deadly Nightshade family (I'm getting carried away again, I know. But that really was the topic of our conversation).
The exit was blocked to automobile traffic by the use of a low hung chain spanning the gap between two rough hewn stone pillars. The chain, at its lowest point, was no higher than about six inches from the ground. Cara and I were walking side by side, so it was necessary for each of us to step over the higher parts of the chain's arc on our respective sides. Still, these were only ten or twelve inches in height. I led with my right foot, bending my knee and raising my leg to clear the modest height. One wanted to be careful that one's lagging foot did not snag the chain, but the front was never in danger.
Except that something was wrong.
My leading foot had indeed not snagged the chain, for I had cleared it easily. But something strange had happened: I was unable to move my foot forward, as if it were impeded by some invisible thread. But by this point my body was already moving ahead, even as both my feet were now behind my center of balance. I saw the ground racing up toward my face. Time seemed to slow to an otherwordly pace as I visualized my head striking hard upon the broken paving stones below. Fortunately I had instinctively braced for my fall by placing my hands out in front of me. A sickening thud brought the motion of the Earth back to its normal rate of speed. My hands and knees hurt and were slightly bloodied. I turned to look up toward Cara to reassure her that I did not suppose myself to be seriously injured, when I saw that she was in fact kneeling on the ground beside me, and that she too was rubbing gravel from her slightly bloodied palms.
I was afflicted with a burden of guilt for what pains I had caused my dear wife. I did not know what had happened to me -- some kind of spasm? -- but I must clearly, I thought, have brought Cara down with me. I began to apologize and to explain that some strange thing had barred my leg from stepping and that, though I had not been conscious of it, I must have drawn her down with me.
Cara looked confused and a bit frightened. The same strange thing had happened to her, she hastened to explain, and she had been about to apologize to me. Something had blocked her leg as well.
It had happened to both of us.
I would hasten to point out to the more skeptical of my readers that we had not been holding hands and that neither of us had disturbed the chain in any manner.
The moral of the story is simply this: whilst visiting the tomb of the Belle of Amherst, discourse not upon the topic of the deadly Nightshade.
Posted by Jeremy at 07:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Vast Gulf Between Cultures
by JeremyZeyad tells some stories of the Mesopotamian supernatural. One of them sounded a tad familiar:
There was a famous story during the nineties that took place in Najaf which is home to the largest graveyard in the world (This is because most Shia from all over the Middle East desire to be buried in holy Najaf close to the shrine of Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, to this day corpses are brought from Iran, Pakistan, even India to be buried there, this was also how several plagues spread to Iraq centuries ago). Two friends challenged a third to enter the graveyard in the middle of the night and to hammer a large nail into a well known grave which belonged to a Sayyed. The man entered the graveyard, his friends waited for hours but there was no sign of their friend returning. They headed to the mentioned grave the next morning, and they found him at the grave babbling and acting as if he had lost his mind. On closer look, they found that he had driven the nail through the sleeve of his dishdasha and into the tomb. Since it was pitch dark the previous night, the man had apparently hammered the nail through his shirt unknowingly and on trying to leave imagined it as something or someone had snatched his hand and he went crazy on the spot.
This was actually the plot of a 1961 Twilight Zone episode set in the old West. The episode was called "The Grave" and starred Lee Marvin. The story is basically the same, though in this version the protagonist dies of fright (and there is a cheesy twist tagged onto the end where it is suggested that the event may have been a supernatural occurrence after all). Rather than include a synopsis, since you basically have one above, here's a bit of audio.
I got that audio from this amazing site -- an absolute treasure for Twilight Zone/Rod Serling fans.
Truly we are two cultures who will never see the world the same way.
Posted by Jeremy at 01:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Zeyad on Al-Sadr
by JeremyZeyad has some compelling thoughts and observations on the current clash with Muqtada Al Sadr's militia:
The US move looks as if it was a planned one. The latest news from Najaf is that American tanks are closing in on the old city centre where the shrine of Imam Ali, Sadr's office and residence are located, as well as those of several senior Hawza clerics. Clashes are also reported from the Wadi Al-Salam graveyard in the north where Mahdi militiamen have taken refuge in the many basements there.Over 300 militiamen are reported dead and a 1000 have been arrested according to the governor of Najaf. Overall, the situation looks bleak for Sadr, and one has to surmise if this would end in either his arrest or his death. I doubt that the Sadrist movement would be over with Muqtada's death, they would just have a third martyr from the Sadr family to add to their list.
One also can't help but wonder about the timing of Sistani's departure from Najaf to London for treatment. The man is known for his subtle messages, could this be a sign for his tacit approval to finish Sadr and his militia once and for all? The remaining Hawza clerics are highly unlikely to issue a collective statement in the absense of Sistani, even more so when they have been threatened and attacked by Sadr's supporters on many occasions. An aide of Sadr mentioned today on Al-Jazeera that Sistani was forced to leave Najaf and that the medical report of his ischemic heart condition was forged.
I suppose it's dangerous for the U.S. to take out Al-Sadr precipitously. Though wearing him down gradually has been looking like a bloody option, I guess it's not hard to imagine how something far worse could be sparked by handling this in a ham-fisted way.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 06, 2004
I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream...
by JeremyAlmost came up empty today, but then I found the thing below. This is a Friday kind of post. The monologue below was apparently recorded among audience chatter at a punk concert of some variety (feel free to Google it. I don't want to endorse a particular version of its origin, since much depends on accuracy in these kinds of situations):
"You know, I saw you two guys earlier at the Good Humor truck, and you were eating your ice cream like little boys, and I thought "Those guys aren't so tough! They're eating ice cream! What a bunch of swell guys!" I saw you eating ice cream, pal. Don't you deny it, you were eating an ice cream cone. You were eating an ice cream cone. Oh you're bad now. You're bad now. But you were eating an ice cream cone! And I saw you! That's the shit you can't hide, you know? You got your fuckin shit, but you eat ice cream and everybody knows it. The whole fuckin' place knows it. Ice cream eating motherfucker, that's what you are."
When I first saw this I assumed it came out of a Quentin Tarrantino movie. Turns out not to have been the case. I have to confess that I can't watch his movies (which, as we know, are "not violent in a gratuitous way") because movie blood makes me ill (when I was a kid my mother would remind me that "it's just ketchup." But frankly, ketchup occasionally makes me queasy when I think about it too much.)
UPDATE: This seems to be a likely (or at least verifiable) account of the above quote as having been uttered by one Guy Picciotto of the band Fugazi during one of their concerts. It was evidently captured on audio and video:
Oh yeah, the best part of the movie is when Guy makes fun of this guy in the audience for bullying people around by calling him an "ice cream-eating motherfucker"
There is something satisfying about the thing when you read it with this context in mind.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 05, 2004
Radio, TV, Terror Suspects Down the Street...
by JeremyI was listening this morning to a call-in show on one of the public radio stations we get here, WAMC, when the hosts announced that there had just been a federal raid on a mosque just down the street from their studio (they broadcast from Albany, NY). Here is the New York Times' account:
Law enforcement authorities raided a mosque here today and arrested two men after an investigation of more than a year, officials said.The Associated Press reported that the men were arrested on charges stemming from an alleged plot to help a man they thought was a terrorist purchase a shoulder-fired missile, and that they had ties to a group called Ansar al-Islam, according to two federal law enforcement authorities speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Interestingly, the WAMC hosts had little first-hand information, though one of the staff was able to grab a soundbite from a apokesman for the mosque who said that the government didn't find any more WMDs there than they found in iraq (meaning none, one can assume, rather than a handful of shells loaded with nerve gas and a couple of metric tons of moderately enriched urnanium).
The hosts did confess that their first instinct was to switch on the TV for any news of what undoubtedly must be a national, if not international, story. This made a nice seque into the topic of the day which was how listeners feel about having television sets in their homes, or something along those lines.
Posted by Jeremy at 04:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Is This the Real Fallujah?
by JeremyIt may be too early to tell exactly what happened here, but there is something very exciting about this report (via Michael Totten)
In an extraordinary assault, gunmen in the city of Fallujah stormed a kidnappers' lair and forced the overmatched militants inside to flee, freeing four Jordanian truck drivers held captive, local officials said Wednesday.
As has been demonstrated, it is, in the long run, impossible to win a war against the people of a nation and expect to triumph. And I should not have to remind anyone reading this that the terrorists who have been taking hostages in Iraq have been engaged in just that: a war against the people of Iraq.
Let's hope this event is one of a series of signs that the people of Iraq will not let anyone stand in their way as they reclaim their own country.
In any event, this is certainly great news for the four Jordanian hostages who are now free, and for their families.
Posted by Jeremy at 01:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 04, 2004
Fahrenheit Something-or-Other
by JeremyBook browsing in Iraq, then and now:
One man browsing the stalls was Sami al-Mutairy, a one-eyed poet and playwright who wrote The Tribes of Fear, a thinly-veiled attack on Saddam's attempts to sow ethnic disunity. He was imprisoned and tortured by the Ba'ath party's secret police."They used a ring to grind out my eye," he said. "They said I was a communist. Well, that was true enough - I am a Trotskyite. But I don't think the punishment fitted the crime."
Many of those around him, vendors and customers alike, were also jailed.
Abdul Rasool Ali, a member of the once-persecuted Shia religious majority, was arrested three times, accused of selling texts espousing his creed. After a confession obtained under torture, he was jailed for eight years.
But he considers that he escaped lightly in comparison with his brothers. One was executed, the other disappeared.
"Before we had to be very careful what we sold," Mr Ali said. "But now, look, I have everything in open view."
And now there are Michael Moore's 'Minutemen,' his "REVOLUTION':
Iraq's intellectuals are starting to write again. But they now face a new threat from extremists fighting American troops and Iraq's interim government. These insurgents are also targeting academics and, according to the Iraqi Union of University Lecturers, have killed more than 250 since Saddam's fall.
There are other subtleites, complexities and ambiguities in the rest of the short article. But I like the bit about books not being banned under penalty of death and all that. I thought that bit was nice.
(Via Norm)
Posted by Jeremy at 07:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 03, 2004
The Village
by JeremyCara and I just saw "The Village" by M. Night Shyamalan. Interesting, powerful, beautifully shot, visualized and photographed. Flawed, yes, but in the end that didn't matter to us (could have used a punch up by someone like, say, Roger L. Simon, but there you go).
There has been some talk on the street about the "obvious" political intent, as if the movie were some Left wing "culture of fear" allegory. Cara and I both strongly came away feeling something like the opposite, that this movie suggested the culture of retreat into comfortable fiction by those who are traumatized by the violent realities of the post 9/11 world.
I'm being oblique so as not to spoil the film for those who intend to see it. And I should say that I'm not sure that looking for political subtexts in this film is necessary or even advisable. What I like about Shyamalan's work is that he tells deceptively simple stories with, at times, awkwardly heavy-handed symbolism, except that upon reflection the meanings are ambiguous and, as I've suggested, can reasonably inspire contradictory interpretations.
As regards whether Shyamalan had any political intentions, this review in the National Review Online seems to get it right:
Shyamalan poses questions about the human response to evil and loss then allows the audience to come its own conclusions. His themes are incredibly relevant to the dilemmas we face today: Should we confront the things that threaten us and try to defeat them, or should we retreat, sacrificing even truth if it is necessary to enjoy a precious, if tenuous, peace? Should we ignore real menaces we can't control in favor of imagined ones we can?Shyamalan doesn't paint his villagers motivations as right or wrong, and his reticence to make an allegory of his tale may leave some viewers frustrated. But it will also leave them thinking more deeply about the issues than if they were force-fed a lesson. Already, critics are reviewing The Village through their own political lenses, and it is to Shyamalan's credit that both the left and right could make credible arguments that the film falls in their favor.
Just to prove I couldn't have said it better myself, I didn't.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 02, 2004
The Crap I Have to Deal With
by JeremyA friend of mine, with whom I bitterly disagree on matters of current events, has started a blog. His blog is in support of his music. I wish him the best success in his music career (he's quite talented).
But he's also been blogging about the Imperial MenaceTM lately and he recently referenced me and this blog as exemplifying a point made by Tom Tomorrow (I am the "Sensible Liberal" who is too ass-backward to question any of the bad stuff that Bush has been putting into the world. Why, even if he were to "suspend the constitution" or declare himself "dictator for life," I would caution liberals that we must assess his proposals on their merits, etc).
I ask that you do not do or say anything nasty (not that I think you would) to my friend (who for musical purposes calls himself "dexter methorhpan") but I can't let a thing like this go without comment. And he gets more visits than I do so it's not as if he's manipulating me for the traffic.
One problem is that he has comments turned off for the post I mention above. However, comments for this post are not turned off. While I wouldn't wish trolls upon him, some dissent is sorely needed.
If you'll excuse me, I must now return to concocting inane rationalizations for Bush policy (because I simply don't care about the future of the world the way some of my friends do).
Posted by Jeremy at 07:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 01, 2004
One Reason to Pay Attention to the Iraqi Church Bombings
by JeremyFor those here in the U.S. who feel this "culture of fear" type of "story" is better left ingored in this election year, it may be worth noting that this day, if nothing else, is valuable as a template for what is being planned stateside:
"This afternoon we do have new and unusually specific information about where Al Qaeda would like to attack," Mr. Ridge said at a news conference in Washington.[...]
On Saturday night, the New York Police Department, responding to new information that terrorists may be planning to attack corporations or large public institutions in the city, advised building managers and corporate security personnel to step up their procedures to guard against vehicles rigged with explosives and against chemical agents placed in ventilation systems.
And this from the Washington Post (emphasis mine):
Ridge said intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security officials had amassed "extraordinary detail" about the possible attacks in the last 24 to 36 hours."This is not the usual chatter," Ridge told a group of reporters and editors during a 1 p.m. conference call prior to the televised news conference. "We have in this case a most unusual set of circumstances, a convergence of information that compels us to talk publicly about specific potential targets."
[...]
This is a hallmark of al Qaeda's planning. They are meticulous," he said. "There has been extensive reconnaissance . . . over an extensive period of time."
In the course of their communications, the officials said, the terrorists note possible sewer system escape routes, the locations of nearby fire departments and police precincts, and whether individual security guards carry guns.
"Getting up to the higher floors is not very difficult if you go there midweek, as I did," one suspected terrorist was quoted as saying. In a separate communication, a potential attacker warned, "You must provide an adequate cover story."
There is indeed a culture of fear being created, but not by those whose job it is to report it, or to anticipate and defend us against its assaults. And I'm sorry to have to report that this culture of fear cannot simply be voted, sneered, or bumper-stickered into oblivion.
Posted by Jeremy at 03:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Anniversary of Warsaw Uprising
by JeremyToday is the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising (as distinct from its earlier incarnation as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising). Norm has several links. Today seems a disturbingly appropriate day to contemplate this.
Posted by Jeremy at 02:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Church Bombings in Baghdad
by JeremyThere aren't a lot of details at the moment, but there were two bombings in Baghdad by the fascist insurgency (Michael Moore's "Minutemen") this morning. Fox News (television) is reporting that two Christian churches, one Assyrian, the other Armenian, were targeted. The second bomb exploded as rescue workers began to arrive (UPDATE: they are now reporting that five churches have been hit)(UPDATE #2: sadly, the number of attacks seems to be growing, per TV reports. And it appears that early reports that services were not in progress in any of the churches were false. It seems we will be hearing of a significant death toll).
Fox News apparently was the only American News team who happened to be in the area and thus were exclusively able to cover the story as it happened, complete with disturbing video [as noted in updates above, it is now evident that this was only one of a number of attack locations]. The studio, at present, is reporting that they have lost contact with the reporter and cameraman.
Yes, I realize that Fox has a conservative bias. But this is hard reporting (of the most frightening kind). It's a reminder to my comrades in Western Massachusetts that a thing may occasionally be a fact, even if it is reported by someone with whom you disagree (and perhaps especially when the contemplation of a certain type of fact doesn't create as much congnitive dissonance with respect to their political assumptions as it does with respect to yours).
I can't help thinking of a similar event more than forty years ago, one that horrified and instructed people -- across party lines. But the Left -- then -- did not need to be reminded what this sort of thing means. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
UPDATE #3: Here is an AP account carried by the New York Times today.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
