Today marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. These are extended passages from his April 4, 1967, speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” (see the entire address here)

…In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.… Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

…[W]e increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese — the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs….

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

…What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

…Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

…The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy—and laymen—concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

…I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

…War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

…This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept — so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force — has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

…If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

[Rest in peace.]

So I saw a very interesting bumper sticker today, which is the fifth anniversary of the ground invasion of Iraq, that speaks volumes about the silence in the mainstream discussion about the impeachment option (it may not be too late). But it attacked the burning issue of our constitutional order from a different angle, reading: “Support the Troops – Impeach Bush Now.” And, if you think about it, don’t our fighting men and women deserve a more competent and able commander-in-chief? Everyone talks about the “antiwar” case for removing Bush from office, but what about the “pro-war” case? Where’s Anthony Cordesman, our respected military affairs think-tanker, talking about the insult to our soldiers that they be victim to a chief policy-maker (and commander, needless to say) of such ineptitude? Why should our troops continue to sacrifice their lives for a man who was never fit for the job, and for a strategy that will ensure they die in vain? Does anyone really care about them?

SIDEBAR NOTE: Five years, half a decade of war. 4,000 Americans dead. (Nearly one million Iraqis dead.) $3 trillion down the hole. Iraqi society devastated, basic services still unavailable to many. Internal displacement and refugees in the millions. Terrorism a bigger threat to the United States than ever. Al Qaeda and Taliban resurgent, the Hydra that endures our fire, enriched by the conflagration we initiated by invading Iraq. It’s time to leave Mesopotamia like the British have before us so long ago. The question now is how to exit without ensuring imminent genocide and a deepening of the ethnic cleansing and humanitarian crisis that already exists. It’s also time to put out to pasture the war criminals in our capital seat who have killed thousands of our sons, daughters, mothers and fathers, and maimed, scarred and crippled many thousands more.

I believe it was John Kenneth Galbraith, the respected economist, who once said that “the only respectable form of socialism in America is socialism for the rich.” And it is obvious that that’s happening right before our eyes, shattering whatever illusion left about the “free market” in the United States. We do not have one. Instead, we have, as E.J. Dionne was good to note in today’s Washington Post, a system of corporate welfare that—instead of enduring the rigors and sacrifices of real risk and self-discipline that the “market” instills in everyday people, like the people who have really suffered but, really, to hell with them because they’re not rugged individuals like us right?—expects a government hand-out when they start to feel the pain.

Condemning the Hamas rocketing against Sderot and Ashkelon is a no-brainer, let’s make that clear. But the Israeli retaliatory responses are, in my judgment, excessively heavy-handed and counter-productive. Taking my cue from news reports from several sources, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead on this front is about 100 to one (over the past several months of fighting since the Hamas victory in January 2006). It is now almost beyond dispute that Israeli policy is, in effect, a collective punishment of the Gazan population, and that’s despicable as a general principle.

Although I have no military background, I think it’s fair to observe that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) strategy seems to be that by exercising intermittent displays of force instead of a full-out invasion, terrible enough in terms of the human impact but more cost-effective, Hamas will be incrementally weakened but not destroyed. In other words, destroying Hamas — and to be real, I’d like to see the organization eradicated — would probably totally destroy Gaza and its 1.5 million people. Not a pretty public relations picture. So now we also have this lovely statement by Matan Vilnai, the Deputy Minister of Defense:

“Palestinians will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”*

Anyone who honestly cares about the future of Israeli society and its wonderful people would surely see at once the obscenity of those words, and join me in calling for his immediate shit-canning and dismissal. (Hamas “spokesmen” predictably dubbed their foe “new Nazis,” according to a report in Yediot Aharonot.) So what to do, when uncontested sovereign territory undergoes near-constant attack? I wish I had an easy answer because I do not; but I hope it’s not naïve or unreasonable of me to declare that threatening annihilation is not the best choice — nor is it anything other than an insult to the Jewish people and a defamation of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Period.

*Min. Vilnai used the word ‘shoah,’ connotative of disaster or calamity — but unmistakably a direct reference to, and unconscionable exploitation of, the Nazi Holocaust.

Creatures from the Gaza Zoo spotted escaping their pen (above), venturing out for a totally unnecessary shopping spree. Get back to your cages, wild beasts!

Dept. of Homeland Security: Preggers are to be shot on sight.

Full report here.

In December, the State of New Jersey put a heralded moratorium on the death penalty. Just yesterday, Nebraska ended the use of the electric chair, giving this reason (courtesy Andrew Sullivan, a sharp conservative writer, who cited the decision):

We recognize the temptation to make the prisoner suffer, just as the prisoner made an innocent victim suffer. But it is the hallmark of a civilized society that we punish cruelty without practicing it. Condemend [sic] prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes. And the evidence clearly proves that unconsciousness and death are not instantaneous for many condemned prisoners. These prisoners will, when electrocuted, consciously suffer the torture that high voltage electric current inflicts on the human body. The evidence shows that electrocution inflicts intense pain and agonizing suffering. Therefore, electrocution as a method of execution is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Nebraska Constitution.”

There’s a lot to remain proud of in these United States. We are a humane people, and nearly a decade of arch-reactionary, authoritarian (mis)rule cannot, could not, and will not change that. I would also add that it is a hallmark of a civilized society that we punish terrorism without practicing terror.

Call for the abolition of the “superdelegate” system, which is hideously antidemocratic; in the next several months, also call for the abolition of the electoral college. As it stands now, the popular voice may become subverted by entrenched systems of power and privilege that many of us do not entirely understand—all of which are woefully underreported if not ignored by our media. That said, my earnest wish is that Obama can pull through and defeat Clinton, the California returns notwithstanding.

“It was painful. It’s painful now. … There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn’t speak up. That devastated me.”

— Colin Powell, 8 September 2005

And so it was: a used, duped man helped sell a war that is now facing its sixth year.

Democracy in America Revisited

We face the radicalization of the obvious. The zeitgeist demands that we deny what is right before us and give reality all manner of euphemistic descriptions and evasions. And so we want simple answers for everything. But, on the other hand, the social reality is not so complicated that we cannot speak of it. We stand on the self-destroyed scaffolds of the New Right and the ashes of the New Left, generations removed from the promises of social democracy and looking toward an uncertain, chaotic future, mindful of the need to rise above the tired categories of “left” and “right” and demonizations of the Other. My generation has enslaved itself to trendy, escapist and cynical patterns of thought, as we, to borrow the language of Port Huron, look uncomfortably to the world we inherit from our vantage in college dormitories.

We have so many opportunities ahead of us and are so privileged. Social change on an institutional, systemic level is a moral imperative that rests on our shoulders. This should not be of academic interest, or the province of “change agent” elites, but the work of ordinary citizens. We are a republic only if we can keep it, to borrow Benjamin Franklin’s words. I have no doubt that my words will be given some or other ideological sign or tag. We can ask what were the tags appended to the proponents of the American Enlightenment and revolutionaries who resisted colonialism? It is surely recognizable.

So we must proceed from elementary facts. One of these is that we have betrayed the Founders in word and spirit, for which we ought to be deeply ashamed and embarrassed. The second is that even acknowledging that fact is illegitimately tarred radical. Orwell, at one point in his life an anarcho-syndicalist fighting fascism in Spain, wrote that to “see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” What faces us is a bald-faced betrayal, a usurpation of American liberty and the Constitutional order that has thrown us, atomized, confused and self-deluded, into a denial of the reality before us. To speak honestly, the litany of high crimes perpetrated by our government need not be reviewed here. Have we been awake?

It should suffice to say that we cannot afford to approach the world as liberals or conservatives, terms now more worthless than international peacekeeping missions. “Liberal,” for example, when not a pejorative term of abuse and derision, means in an operative sense accommodating of neocolonial foreign policy and “centrist” management of the domestic polity in an arch-regressive, statist direction for the sake of political expediency (Clinton). It can at times take on a charismatic form (Obama) or fashion itself as populist (Edwards), but all are a far cry from traditional Enlightenment notions of freedom and equality. “Conservative” has been deformed beyond recognition.

Tocqueville wrote admiringly of the impressive “equality of conditions” that gave meaning to freedom in the United States. No big government enforced such conditions of life; the society was structured along the contours of small townships and direct participatory democracy was realizable. Much has obviously changed, like industrialization—not altogether a bad thing—but some things, thank God, do not. The preamble to our Constitution still speaks of a strange concept called the “general welfare.” What of it now? Does it even remain coherent or sensible to talk of American society, when the dominant culture encourages us all to think only of ourselves so we can “get ahead” by climbing over everyone else’s backs as we all ascend the same pyramid?

I believe in the power of individuals, and think of myself as an individual with the rights of an individual and, hopefully, a free mind. So, for example, my attraction to democratic socialist theory, a school of thought obvious enough at several points (i.e., the insane idea that people, as human beings, ought to own themselves and not submit to state or corporate power), is tempered by several caveats. Yet politics has discredited itself. But we avoid any and all things “political” at our own expense, and at the peril of generations unborn, in these times.

Charlie Wilson’s War?

Your application was intriguing … What you didn’t have was the strong news reporting background of many of the other candidates. [I actually submitted a dozen or so pieces from my college paper] … You clearly have many of the instincts that a very good journalist should have. In particular, we applaud your curiosity and your commitment to search out your own truths, rather than to swallow a party line.”

Excerpted from my rejection letter from the Washington, D.C. bureau of The New York Times for this summer’s Rosenbaum editorial internship. If it’s a good thing to not be a partisan...?

Here’s my problem with much of the post-N.H. commentary with regard to the Clinton “victory.” Particularly, with third-wave “feminists” like Gloria Steinem, who wrote in the New York Times the day before the primary a gushing, grotesque article about HRC that made me briefly consider the wisdom of throwing up. (I did not.) Lemme pull it out of the trash bin, just a sec… here we go. January 8: “Women Are Never Front-Runners.”

Right out of the gate Steinem is playing the ‘gender card’ at full tempo, without any shame at all. The biggest illogic of the whole thing is the insinuation that opposing Hillary Clinton means I am opposing the advancement of women in politics. And that’s flat-out absurd. Yes, there is no question that women have it tougher, that they have a higher hurdle in the political arena, and that there are popular stereotypes they have to overcome. But that’s not the point: HRC is not as polarizing, unpopular and shrill and power-mad and self-congratulatory as she is because she’s a woman, but because she’s Hillary Clinton. It is actually, in a way, sexist of Steinem to suggest, ever so implicitly, that Clinton represents all women. No, not all women, but a subset of career-oriented women who are not really that interested in equality but more intent on shaming men into thinking they are automatically “sexist” or “misogynistic” because they oppose individuals like Hillary Clinton. In other words, it is sexist to argue that opposing her candidacy is perforce sexist.

Here’s Steinem: “I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate [not if you count Obama’s service as a state senator], an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training…” Wait, stop, stop right there. On-the-job training? Are you kidding me? She is not getting hired; this is an election, not a job selection process. Steinem concludes that “[w]e”—i.e. women—“have to be able to say: ‘I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.’” (her emphasis) The first part is dubious at best, and the second is completely patronizing. It’s like saying that I support Joe Lieberman—and I certainly do not, for several reasons—because he’s Jewish. Just ridiculous.

NOTE: It is interesting to take a look at the letters published in Thursday’s Times. The best came from two men and two women writers (because, unlike the Steinem-type feminists I am interested in equality; there was a feminazi forum at my college some time ago, whose breakdown was three women speakers and the token guy).

Daniel Grossman of Clifton, NJ writes, “It is unfortunate that the Clintons continue to resort to this type of manipulation [Hillary had gotten a tad choked up the day before NH]. … Victimhood is not a sufficient criterion for being president.”

Karin Kimbrough adds: “As a black woman and a feminist, I find it depressing to see Gloria Steinem set up this tired, false debate as to whether a black man or a white woman is more disadvantaged in national politics. … My parents (who are Ms. Steinem’s age) vividly recall racism in the Deep South, including barriers to voting as well as the barriers to many other supposedly granted rights like eating in restaurants, staying in hotels and using public facilities. These were all rights white women actively enjoyed.” I’m reminded of the Carlin rant about how feminists like Steinem “don’t give a shit about black women’s problems, they don’t give a shit about Latino women, all they care about is their own reproductive freedom and their pocketbooks.” Then he goes on to agree about their characterization of men as moral monsters and how it’s terrible that women “put on a man-tailored suit with shoulder pads” and “imitate the worst habits of men”—like, tada! Hillary Clinton!

But I digress. Phillip Ruland from Laguna Beach (CA) chips in with the fair-minded sentiment that “such a self-regarding emotional display”—I believe a good paraphrase can be something like “oh, look I’m about to cry, can’t you see how you should agree that I’m entitled to be your leader?”—“is hardly the type of character trait one desires to see in a presidential candidate—man or woman.” And Marilyn Kiss of Staten Island writes that she has been “firmly in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp” until she cast a vote in favor of authorization of use of force against Iraq in 2002. “For me,” Ms. Kiss—couldn’t help it, sorry—“international peace trumps national feminism, since it also takes into consideration the lives of women and girls in Baghdad and beyond.” Need I repeat what Carlin said?

Alas, we cannot expect everyone to be levelheaded, male or female. This is Carolyn Kirkland of Fort Worth, Texas, who makes this asinine statement: “Gloria Steinem ... may have ... helped turn an election. I am amazed at how many of my women friends e-mailed her Op-Ed article to their friends because she put into words what so many of us feel in our bones.” Oh, how long, oh Lord, how long?

[Addendum, Jan. 11: in her 1983 book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions Gloria Steinem made the ominous foreshadowing, “One day, an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the earth” (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 218), er, the Democratic nomination.]

(Photo credit Zombie/AP)

...and CNN calls it for Hillary. Damn.

The goddamned Associated Press and NBC just called New Hampshire for Clinton; CNN still thinks it is too close to call. Which it is. Looks like a dead-heat. Have the college-town votes been counted yet? They cannot just ignore 30% of the precincts can they?

STOP HILLARY NOW. Come on, college kids!

Our voting machines still do not have paper; and there are -- still -- questions about their reliability. This is some ridiculous shit.

“I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there’s at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world. But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven’t known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war. Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I’m facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn’t have a sense of humor?

“But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it’s a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision. Because it is pretty clear that the average American would not have supported the Iraq War had they known the costs going in. I am far too cynical to believe that any future debate over war will be any less vitriolic or emotional, but perhaps a few more people will realize just what those costs can be the next time.”

— Andrew Olmsted, a soldier and a blogger, who was killed on-duty in Iraq on January 3 (courtesy Obsidian Wings)

God rest him in peace.

It’s time to seriously consider doing this, as a sensible and prudent measure to end the Iraq war. If our Congress can’t de-fund it, the American people can. I’m not sure how this can be legally, or if it will be successful in crippling the war machine and its efforts to suck more and more of our sons and daughters to their assured slaughter for no intelligible reason or end in sight, but it may be worth a try to check it out. I’m not a pacifist, but this is not a just war and our soldiers need to come home. Make it a New Years’ resolution.

These are heavy times, and it’s easy (and understandable) to want to just tune out and wait it out, hoping for the “opposition” to roll in and fix everything. But we need to make sure that future generations know that we didn’t all just sit around and wait; that we cared about our country; and that we knew that the times were too serious for frivolous campaign games and electoral chicanery to not stand up and defend our Constitution, and indeed our way of life. Privacy International just released a massive study that troublingly points to the conclusion that the United States has joined the ranks of the “endemic surveillance societies” of the world; our status over the past year has been “deteriorating.” Russia and China are also listed as endemic surveillance societies, obviously.

It ought to inspire shame that we’ve managed to join them — and they’re totalitarian societies, no less. We did it in a democracy. But there is still much to celebrate, and I hope everyone had a wonderful New Years’ Day. I will never be afraid to say I love my country.

Happy New Year.

So I’ve been home for the second full day since my ten-day trip to Israel ended, a wonderful, amazing, incredible time. I hope to return someday, and make aliyah. And I also hope to see the people I met once again somewhere across these United States. I got bused with mostly Univ. of Florida people, great people, very cool people. And I hope to meet the wonderful Israelis we met once again, someday, somehow. Thank God for Facebook; I’ve been able to get my pictures developed (woot, Motofoto!) and posted. I usually don’t do personal stuff on this blog but I feel it is appropriate, more than appropriate here. We did, and saw, and experienced so much. Unfortunately I have to spend the next few days I am home until I return to college to draft my undergrad paper, something about media critiques and propaganda.

So I’m sababa (cool) and wondering about haMatzav (the situation) and everything, hoping I can stay connected with my new hevre (friends). The biblical Hebrew I’ve taken, one semester’s worth, has not prepared me. Nor should it have. I’ll continue with it, and throw in the new conversationals I’ve picked up. And here’s to the children we spent time with at the daycare center, a government-financed home for them to go to as respite from their “at-risk” or otherwise dysfunctional family lives. Atsuv (sad), I know, but at least they’re happy there, and here’s hoping they turn out as great as they are now.

Israeli music and food and sights and sounds, it’s still unfolding. I observed some interesting parallels between the culture and what I saw in Spain some three years ago. On one point they’re both Mediterranean countries. So now I’ve seen both ends of it. Balkan Beat Box; these guys are incredible. Bought a copy of their record, “Nu Med,” on the way home at the Ben-Gurion airport. Ben Gurion, son of a lion cub. My Hebrew name is Ari, simply meaning lion; well the Kabbalists won’t settle for simple meanings. Ari. I knew someone named Ari once. He was the brother of a girl I once knew, Yelena, a very rambunctious kid. I’m rambling, and digressing.

Probably going to sleep soon, been quite sick all day. Estoy enferma. It’s a winter thing.

Thank God for conservative writers like Andrew Sullivan. I’ve been a long-time reader of his, and it appears that the impeachment option is not only common-sensical but, by now, practically mandatory if we are to remain a constitutional republic, and a free society. I’ve taken the liberty to post (above) a delightful memo he clipped on his blog, simply because it’s so fucking chilling. The writing is on the wall, I fear.

Some words on the Ron Paul phenomenon: how has it come to pass that anti-war, anti-empire and pro-Constitution positions are nearly universally labeled radical and fringe?

(Disclosure: Some weeks ago I contributed $25 to the campaign, my first and hopefully last political donation. Therefore supporters of his candidacy are hopelessly biased.)

“You see, my mom, she saw Kristallnacht; and my dad, he saw worse/the land called Lithuania was the country of his birth/and before the Auschwitz ovens fired, the Nazis went there first/

“So I heard their stories and, well, I guess I keep ‘em someplace in my mind/Though I go about my business pretty carefree most of the time, when I see the mark of Nuremberg I have to speak my mind/

“Excess nationalism; religious intolerance; corporate worship; unchecked military growth, with a global reach/Sounds like fascism to me.

“… I remember a boat full of dreams carryin’ my mom and my dad/And I can’t be silent about the only country I’ve ever had.”

— Dan Bern, October 2004
Nelsonville, Ohio

There is democracy in Venezuela. Take that, Chavistas.

THE GOOD WORD
“If only holiness were measured by the volume of our incessant chatter, we would be universally praised as the most holy nation on earth. But in our fretful, theatrical piety, we have come to mistake noisiness for holiness, and we have presumed to know, with a clarity and certitude that not even the angels dared claim, the divine will for the world. We have organized our needs with the confidence that God is on our side, now and always, whether we feed the poor or corral them into ghettos.”

— Charles Marsh, “God and Country,” The Boston Globe, July 8, 2007

Marsh prefaces his article by quoting a line from the old Dylan song: “If God is on our side, He’ll stop the next war…” Studs Terkel interviewed Dylan (Zimmerman) in 1963. He was asked about another song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and in response he explained that he wasn’t “talking about that hard rain meaning atomic rain,” but instead that “it seems to me like the bomb is a god in some sort of way,… and people will worship it actually. You have to be nice to it, you know. You have to be careful what you say about it. People work on it, they go six days a week and work on it, you have people designing it, you know, it’s a whole new show. … I don’t believe they’re bad people.

“…What’s gonna happen, there’s got to be an explosion of some kind. The hard rain that’s gonna fall. In the last verse when I say, ‘When the pellets of poison are flooding the waters,’ that means all the lies, you know, all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers. All you have to do is think for a minute. They’re trying to take people’s brains away. Which maybe has been done already. I have to think it’s been done. All the lies I consider poison.” (Quoted in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott [New York: Wenner, 2006], pp. 7, 8)

Poisonous pieties and self-righteous platitudes, to boot.

Sir, I beg your pardon,” said the sandy-haired young man. “There is nothing here. You don’t seem to understand. The Middle East, all of this, this is nothing.” He gestured around the new living room and toward the window, where we could see a half-finished house, obscured in the fading winter light by a haze of blowing sand.

“The Middle East,” he said, firmly taking another crescent, “is just a corridor, a pass-through for great powers. Always has been. Throughout history. Even more now.”

“But the Golden Age,” I protested. “The Arabian Nights.”

“That was centuries ago.” The young man laughed disdainfully. “Do you see any magnificent palaces in Baghdad today?” …

Mr. Kirtikar set down his biscuit-filled plate. “Ah, Sami,” he said to the sandy-haired young man. “You’re not being fair to our guests. We are all here, my dear Sami, most probably, is that you do not see a long-range future for yourself here in Baghdad.”

“Why?” asked Bob. “Is it politics? Religious discrimination against Christians? East-West tensions? The Arab-Israeli conflict?” Bob came out with it. The company looked slightly embarrassed. Mrs. Kirtikar offered more tea. There were more cardamom crescents and also large round thick cookies with whole almonds pressed into their centers.

Sami nodded. He had apparently decided to take this strange American seriously. “All of those things,” he replied. “Yes. I would like to go to America. Maybe you could give me a list of places where there are scholarships available? Because,” he rushed on, “well, in addition to all of those things you mentioned you must remember that this is a poor area, a poor country. Without resources such as you are accustomed to taking for granted.” He laughed, bitterly, I thought. “Nomads. The desert. Living off of goats’ milk. You have surely heard of all that, even in rich America.”

“But what about oil?” Bob asked. “You have plenty of that.”

Mr. Kirtikar sniffed. “The British take most of it. Iraq gets only a small share. But you see the British made a great investment and they are the ones who brought the technology that made it possible for Iraq to exploit their oil. So they deserve the largest share.”

Was he serious? I stared at him. He was, and he was not finished talking. “And the Arab-Israeli conflict, that is not such a problem. It will pass with time.”

— Elizabeth and Robert Fernea, The Arab World: Personal Encounters, ch. 14, “Baghdad and Al-Nahra, Iraq” (1956) [New York: Anchor Books, 1985], pp. 334, 335

An Onion editorial cartoon (29 October 2007).

As the popular saying goes, “In times of universal deceit, truth-telling becomes a revolutionary act.”* Indeed, I discovered a bit of this myself when for this week’s issue of my campus paper, The Wooster Voice, in an editorial I made the following off-hand observations: (1) the president — our president and leader of the free world — likely has several of the defining characteristics of sociopathy, (2) has presided over a murderous and criminal reign, (3) impeachment is a moderate, in fact conservative and, most importantly, the right constitutional remedy, and (4) given the above facts it is shocking enough that the firing squad (or gallows) option goes unmentioned.

I wrote this in full recognition that many will take these statements to be extreme, even awful and deplorable. So I will be completely clear in what I am saying; a fault of the article, in retrospect a glaring one, is its lack of clarity which may make people jump to the wrong conclusions. First, another colorless and uncontroversial fact: our leaders have committed, repeatedly and remorselessly, crimes against peace and war crimes (though not crimes against humanity, in my opinion, although others may disagree) for which the defendants at Nuremberg were hanged — including waterboarding, a political science professor and study advisor at my college, was quick to add. Expecting an outcome, based upon the logic of crime and punishment, is not the same as desiring it. The aggressive war against Iraq hatched in Washington is obviously far from the scale of Nazi criminality — not suggesting that. But let’s have some honesty and consistency in our moral judgments. Otherwise, ethical standards have no meaning and ought to be discarded.

Here I am going to quote from the record of the Trial of the Century. As Norman Birkett, alternate judge for the United Kingdom, declared on September 30, 1946: “To initiate a war of aggression, … is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (proceedings of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, vol. 22, p. 426, via the Avalon Project of the Yale Law School). Or as United States prosecutor Robert Jackson said on November 21, 1945, “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well” (quoted in “Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression,” Office of the United States Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality [Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946], vol. 1, ch. 5, “Opening Statement for the United States,” via Avalon Project).

Anyway, earlier today I watched Robert Redford’s excellent and stunning film Lions for Lambs. “Rome is burning.” Reminded me of a song that went, “How do we sleep when our beds are burning?” Or “Room on Fire,” by The Strokes, in which Julian Casablancas wails, “The room is on fire/and she’s fixing her hair!” But I digress.

*Of course, this is attributed to Orwell, although it is not precisely sourced and actually comes up in many different variations.

NOTE (Nov. 11): Common-sensical commentator Frank Rich hit the nail on the head today.

“So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. ... Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad. ... In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

“This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

“... Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

“Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that ‘there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.’

“To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.”

As Garret Keizer wrote in a recent issue of Harper’s magazine: “It is one thing to endure abuses and to carry on in spite of them. It is quite another thing to carry on to the point of abetting the abuse. We need to move the discussion of our nation’s health to the emergency room. We need to tell the doctors of the body politic that the treatment isn’t working—and that until it changes radically for the better, neither are we.”

CYNICAL THOUGHT OF THE DAY: If Musharraf had our electoral system, he wouldn’t have to worry about an independent judiciary — or mass, popular demonstrations in city streets. (Ouch.)

I’ve got only enough time these days for short posts, like the preceding one (and a random though hilarious photo to boot). As a matter of fact, I used to have a series of “rumble jumbles,” but those have fallen by the wayside. That and my computer (a 2005 iMac from the PowerPC era) has been acting screwy; almost makes me miss my old Dell laptop. Maybe needs more memory. Should be studying for that Hebrew midterm tomorrow, but first…

We’re now right in the middle of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Stone a pundit! Declare a fatwa on your university, O Westerners! See, David Horowitz is a funny man. Not comedically; I mean there is something that is quite clearly imbalanced about him. I’ve read his autobiography (in 2006), and have read his writings as much as I can keep up, trying to keep appraised of where he’s at intellectually. And to be honest? Lunacy, sheer lunacy. The picture of his mind that he presents in that autobio is completely opposed to the character he parades as on TV and in his speeches, and diatribe-based performances. It’s day and night: one is a reasonable man trying to overcome and repudiate and have second thoughts from the shady notions he used to have, and the other is an unthinking, hysterical party-liner who sees criticism as an act of treason.

That said I agreed with every point on the Islamo-Fascism petition, which stated thoughtfully enough the following: “[W]e affirm four key principles denied by the jihadists and threatened by them: the right of all people to live in freedom and dignity; the freedom of the individual conscience: to change religions or have no religion at all; the equality of [sic] dignity of women and men; the right of all people to live free from violence, intimidation, and coercion… opposing all forms of religious supremacism, violence and intimidation.” Perfectly fine. No quarrel. And for the most part, I think “Islamofascism” is a valid and non-hateful term. I wouldn’t hestitate to designate hateful and intolerant species of Christianity as Christofascism and the same in Judaism (I believe Meir Kahane’s movement came closest to this) as Judeofascism.* Nor should Horowitz, and if he were consistent I don’t expect he would. An important caveat is that Islamist extremism is much more prevalent and, crucially, more violent: let us not forget that we are in deed at war with the Islamofascists. The Christofascists and Judeofascists have not yet embraced suicide terror, nor do they seek the destruction of Western civilization; conversely, the Christofascists seek the end of the American Enlightenment and constitutionalism and the Judeofascists seek the prevention of a viable, sensible Palestinian state. Alright, enough with this piece.

The Pew Research Center reported last Thursday that the news media, once again, is totally at odds with people’s “news interest.” It’s almost inverted. Twenty percent of Americans “listed” the “situation in Iraq… as their most closely followed story” and the media responded by giving it six percent of the coverage. Only eight percent are most closely keeping tabs on the 2008 presidential (ugh) campaign; fifteen percent of coverage is devoted to it, which admittedly is not quite as dramatic as the Iraq Slaughterhouse (er, war).

Jeff Bercovici’s Mixed Media blog at Portfolio raises an interesting question: if Fox has an alternative to CNBC (and the self-described “unabashed capitalists” who run it, quoted in the New York Times) with its Fox Business Network, who’s the enemy? The “news” division’s “bread and butter is the culture war, and it’s forever inventing new campaigns to boil viewers’ blood in the dead space between celebrity scandals.” Generally, the forgotten man versus a shadowy big government that overtaxes him and is prone to take away his land (the eminent domain demon). What’s the equivalent? “Where’s the us-versus-them?” Would it be “the forgotten little guy against the sinister corporate interests”? Likely not, since Bercovici quotes Fox president Roger Ailes as saying that he simply doesn’t see them “as the enemy.” Wouldn’t be politically correct.

“Alternatively,” Bercovici adds, “Fox Business could adopt a libertarian stance: embattled entrepreneurs versus heavy-handed, tax-and-regulate government.” Seems like it would jibe very well; in the news, the little guy gets fucked over by dastardly bureaucrats who think they’re doing it for the common good, and in business hard-working Joes trying to set up shop keep getting hassled. Their entire enterprise would be admirable if it weren’t soaked with nationalist ideology and tabloid-chic sensibilities, upon which blowhard “experts” and “analysts” get to pounce, snipe and self-aggrandize.

*In an article for Slate (Oct. 22), Christopher Hitchens goes farther, pointing out that Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers [Gush Enumim, Bloc of the Faithful] who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967.” Hitchens adds that “there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being ‘singled out’ on this point.”

Strange days have found us: first there was that Israeli neo-Nazi cell (you read that correctly), and now this? Oh, and once again the Indians got massacred. Strange days indeed.

First time seeing this in any major U.S. paper. Yeah, it’s definitely a first (not counting the N-bomb in Slate some time ago):

“Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those ‘good Germans’ who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.”

— Frank Rich, 14 October 2007

Radiohead’s latest work, In Rainbows, their last since 2003’s Hail to the Thief (my pithy comments last time), is a Web-only deal at any price you choose. I decided to pay a fair share, considering my respect for their sound and the hypnotizing effect their music has always had on me: $8.50, which is what the baseline music album price probably ought to be I think. In only ten much-too-short tracks it’s clear it’s going to take time to grow on you like the others have; toward the middle it becomes almost symphonic, beautifully. Then it cuts off. Next year’s full-release should promise more, but with what exists now quality, at the outset, seems to have triumphed over its ne’er-do-well sibling quantity.

The royal treatment.

I’m with Hitchens on this one: enabling of genocide in Darfur, tyranny in Burma — not to mention the antifreeze and lead. Enough is enough. BOYCOTT THE 2008 BEIJING OLYMPIC GAMES

“We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate. … 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again. … We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy.”

— Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 30 September 2007 (his emphasis)

At least he acknowledges his own contribution to the off-balance discourse. Here’s where he’d been all this time:

“… let’s stay the course in Iraq, but stay extra-vigilant at home” (13 April 2005)

“Sept. 11 amounts to World War III — the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years” (8 January 2004)

“The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.’s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it’s the wrong issue now. … The ‘real reason’ for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn’t enough. Because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. … The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world” (4 June 2003)

“Lord knows, 9/11 has been a trauma for us, and our response has been to strike back and install better security” (8 January 2003)

“Thank you, may the Imam Mahdi’s return be hastened, for your silver grail. And here is your gold star…”

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the veritable dean of realist international relations figures, has just said that “the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq.” This comes about one week after French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said that the world should “prepare” for a US-Iran war should negotiations fail. Redux indeed.

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit.
Blood on the trees, blood at the root.
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck.
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.”

— “Strange Fruit” (1939), courtesy Michael Louis-Ingram

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” (Alan Greenspan, in his memoir The Age of Turbulence, as quoted by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post, 15 September)

You meant what you said, Alan. Grow a pair and quit dissembling.

(Courtesy Martin Klimas, and a personal hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan, who drew my attention to this really cool gallery; I think this is the best one.)

An air-attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would likely lead to a Shiite uprising in the South of Iraq — that’s why the Brits are trying to get out of there as quickly as possible — and mass casualties across the country. It would align the new Shiite ‘government’ in Baghdad much more closely with Iran, and force the US into a hideous alliance with Sunni dictators and Sunni tribes. We would have no other global allies. We would still have insufficient troops to win. And we would not just have created a regional civil war in the Middle East; we would have taken sides in it. Such a development could unleash a wave of Islamist terror across the West far more lethal than anything we have yet seen — and even bring the Sunni-Shiite conflict to the streets of Western cities. Such warfare would likely lead to an intensification of the imperial presidency at home, with all the consequences for the Constitution that would entail. There is a disconnect right now, I fear, between the enormous stakes we are deciding and the awareness of most Americans of what may be about to engulf them.”

— Andrew Sullivan, 12 September 2007

Writing in The Nation, Alexander Cockburn is skeptical: “Despite the unending stream of stories across the months announcing that an attack on Iran is on the way, I’ve had my doubts. … China has a big stake in Iran. It’s also Uncle Sam’s banker. The Chinese don’t have to destroy the dollar, merely squeeze its windpipe or revalue their currency enough to double retail prices at Wal-Mart. The Republicans and the presidential candidates wouldn’t want that.

“The Joint Chiefs of Staff know the Iraq War has almost broken the US Army,” he adds; it is worth noting that it has been reported that several military commanders have vowed to resign should war with Iran commence. “Wouldn’t they adamantly oppose the notion of an attack on Iran, which would see Shiite resistance groups in Iraq cut US supply convoys from Kuwait…? [Sullivan’s point, I believe] Wouldn’t Shiite forces as a whole finally commence a campaign of eviction of the American occupier?” These are reasonable critiques, although I disagree that “the Israel lobby calls the shots in US foreign policy,” as Cockburn believes. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

NOTE (Sept. 15): Debat vigorously denied the allegations brought against him yesterday, and the examination has been extended to his reporting of the Jundullah affair in Pakistan, the reported US arming of the militant organization in an effort to spur regime change in Iran. The New York Times reports that ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross, “the correspondent who worked most closely with Mr. Debat, said the Jundullah story had many sources. ‘We’re only worried about the things Debat supplied, not about the substance of that story,’ he said. … So far, ABC has found nothing that would undermine the stories Mr. Debat worked on, Mr. Ross said last night. But he acknowledged that as the stories of fabrications continue to roll in, the network ‘at some point has to question whether anything he said can be believed.’”

CORRECTION: One of the more sensational claims in the preceding post was attributed to one Alexis Debat of the Nixon Center who, according to the New York Times, “has been revealed to be the author of faked interviews” and ABC News is launching what is going to be “a second investigation” into Debat, on whom ABC had used as “a consultant.” This obviously brings into question the credibility of his claims about our war plans for Iran. The Times notes that Debat “was quoted as a knowledgeable source in an article in The Times of London … saying that American military forces were planning attacks that would demolish ‘the entire Iranian military.’” Regardless, I think, of the validity of the source saying this, that would be the way to do it. It doesn’t make much sense to take out the nuclear plants and wait for a response, which would of course be balls-out ballistic. So, in a word, mea culpa.

“Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout [for war against Iran] will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way [my italics]:

They [the source’s institution] have ‘instructions’ (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this — they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is ‘plenty.’

Of course I cannot verify this report. But besides all the other pieces of information about this circulating, I heard last week from a former U.S. government contractor. According to this friend, someone in the Department of Defense called, asking for cost estimates for a model for reconstruction in Asia. The former contractor finally concluded that the model was intended for Iran. This anecdote is also inconclusive, but it is consistent with the depth of planning that went into the reconstruction effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I hesitated before posting this. I don’t want to spread alarmist rumors.”

— Barnett Rubin, a specialist on Afghanistan at New York University (according to George Packer of the New Yorker), 29 August 2007

What about the alarmism — and dehumanization — in that cartoon (above) in the Columbus Dispatch, published on 4 September, the day after Labor Day?

In related news: “The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to ... well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament.”

(The report adds that “Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a ‘full-spectrum approach,’ designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of ‘a weak or failed state.’ Although they acknowledge potential risks and impediments that might deter the Bush administration from carrying out such a massive attack, they also emphasize that the administration’s National Security Strategy includes as a major goal the elimination of Iran as a regional power.”)

Oh, and the London Times reported on 2 September that “the Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to ... Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, [who] said last week that US military planners were not preparing for ‘pinprick strikes’ against Iran’s nuclear facilities ... at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: ‘Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.’ It was, he added, a ‘very legitimate strategic calculus’.”

Stop the cockroaches before it is too late!

ADDENDUM (Sept. 11): I’m not alone in my crazed assertions. One commentator at Asia Times (some kook named Alan Jamieson) also thinks war against Iran looms, writing specifically that it’s most likely to go down sometime over the next twelve months, possibly just as the 2008 election heats up. Speaking of today, though, it’s not one for politics — albeit that politics but for a brief lull swept it into an exploited memory that less and less of my generation remembers, judging by an increasingly younger freshman class that was all of twelve(!) when it happened. My God. To paraphrase Hot Tuna, death don’t have no mercy in this world.

Think twice. (Courtesy Vero Testa, McSweeney’s)

“We are poorly developed primates, these people, my friends, the Jews and the Palestinians of the Holy Land. We beat our fists against our chests a lot to assure our enemies, and no less, ourselves, that we haven’t lost an ounce of macho. But we’re not man enough to be human beings.… Like little boys delighting their family with precocious displays of bonehead locker-room masculinity, every act of war that we the Jews or they the Palestinians perform, is met with a chorus of cheers, blessings, learned explanations and justifications from supporters across the world. Every half-hearted tic we take in the general direction peace is hooted at from home, condemned to death by the self-styled keepers of the faith at home, who will shout it down the initiative if they can, or literally shoot it down if they must.

The choice is simple, and we are persuaded to make it early. If we make war, we are loved by our own side as the little boy who has done as his family or his rabbi or sheikh, would have him do. There will be compliments on his devotion, his guts, his savvy, his clarity of thinking, his willingness to act. Try to make peace, however, and your own side will be the first to emasculate you. How could you know so little, they will ask. How could you risk so much?…

Holy men of this place teach chapter and verse that war is right and proper, that peace is worse than surrender, it is contrary to the will of the one God of these two peoples. The Mideast conflicts, in particular the 1967 war, have warped religious Judaism and fundamentalist Islam beyond recognition. … We have been taught, both in the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, that uprising and warfare are the path to freedom. But we are, both of our peoples, now slaves to the consequences of our uprisings and our wars. It is time for a redefinition of courage here, a new conception of heroism, one that recognizes that the risks of compromise are fully as necessary as the readiness to fight. It is time to fight the idea that manliness and moral authority grow out of the barrel of a gun.…”

— Bradley Burston, writing in Tuesday’s Ha’aretz

Marc Perelman in the Forward reports that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith’s (ADL) “description of the Ottoman massacre of Armenians during World War I as ‘tantamount to genocide’” has set off a conflagration as “Turkish, Israeli and American Jewish officials held frantic consultations … in an effort to defuse a diplomatic crisis” — one that doesn’t need to exist because, aside from the ADL’s understatement (not simply tantamount), there are more important things besides diplomatic relations and public relations “crises.”

But what brings this matter to the level of moral depravity is what the ADL has done, “issuing a statement opposing a congressional resolution recognizing that a genocide took place and by sending a letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressing ‘deep regret’ and the desire to ‘deepen our friendship.’” This is a straightforward betrayal of Jewish ethics and human rights in the name of propagandizing for the Israeli Government and its ties with the Turkish Government, mostly military (“diplomatic”). Shmuel Rosner ruefully adds that this is “the always controversial Israeli position … choos[ing] Realpolitik over moral purity.” The Forward editors inquire as to “the point of fighting for a Jewish state if it will not act in a Jewish manner,” a painful question indeed. As a short-term remedy, Abraham Foxman must step down now. He’s for defamation.

It’s not at all surprising to see anti-Bush attitudes from someone using one of the New York Times computers, as the now-essential WikiScanner has shown (“jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk”) but, to be honest, one would expect Al Jazeera to descend to a similar level of juvenile pranksterism, i.e. “America: blah blah blah” or some stupid shit like that on the “United States” page. Oh no, it’s worse. Here’re some enlightened comments about Israel from… well, someone using one of the Jazeera computers:

Israel is only created in 1948 after the Jews fled from the hands of Hitler. The Jews did to the indigenous people of Palestine what Hitler had done to them. Jews were the first people to start the terrorist attacks in the region. They have stolen the land of the Palestinians. Jews believe that they are chosen by God and that they are better than other people.”

Some real hateful ignorance coming from somewhere at that station. (Imagine if someone at, say, CBS or CNN or Fox mused about whether the Wiki is “a Jewish propaganda site”!) Thanks a bunch, Virgil Griffith. (Added to Wired’s list.)

John From Cincinnati. Canceled. Dammit. Only a million other viewers will agree.

At least it won’t hit New Orleans.

Been away for awhile, and will continue to be until it feels right to talk about something at all important. Thought to let you know.

Let us count the ways, in rough chronological order: 1) Fraudulent and deceptive casus belli; 2) criminal manipulation of (international and domestic) intelligence services; 3) commission of aggressive war and invasion without justifiable cause or pretext; 4) failure to stabilize or establish peace upon cessation of hostilities, and 5) further criminal embezzlement, favoritism and fraud; 6) routine violations on a systemic scale of international humanitarian law and 7) widespread, unclear rules of engagement backed by an unaccountable, byzantine chain of command; 8) wanton employment of torture and abuse toward prisoners, wrong-headed alone in the name of actionable military intelligence to rationalize it; 9) radical de-Ba’athification decrees in the early occupation period that inexorably have led to the wholesale exemption of the Sunni bloc from political representation, much less the encouragement of the Sunni resistance; 10) the ever-present lack of any meaningful exit strategy; and 11) the establishment of permanent bases* closely mapped to petroleum refineries (notably Kirkuk and the northeastern fields) and transport routes… etc etc.

Meanwhile, a soldier (one Jesse Spielman, private first-class) receives a 110-year sentence for the rape-murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl: compounding the crimes of the above, committed not by the discretion of soldiers but under their orders, missions and operations through the systemic, executive decision to invade and the subsequent, over-arching events and failures done by the military command under the direction and orchestration of civilian planners and ideologues who wear no uniform. How thus many sentences should belong saddled unto the backs of Mssrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Bremer and Franks? For the sake of argument, each of the above is of equal deleterious and destructive value; and each receives a relatively light punishment, say, one-fifth the imprisonment given to this one soldier. At the very least two hundred years, then, in total: for each of the five named right there, perhaps in descending order (Bremer and Franks getting the least share, Cheney-Rumsfeld the most). To be clear, this is a very modest, bare-bones fair sentence; emaciated justice, you could say, since there is no weighing of the crimes, many are omitted, and the punishment is meted out to five actors at the very top, three of whom are ex-officio.

*The Chicago Tribune first broke the story in 2004, quoting Robert Pollman, an Army brigadier general, as saying that the project “makes a lot of logical sense.” Further, in corroborating the story the Christian Science Monitor adds, “Polls find that 80 percent of Iraqis … want US armed forces to leave their nation,” on top of which our permanent occupation encampments of freedom “could stir up more opposition” (i.e. more names in the small boxes of the back pages, not to speak of the suffering and misery our policies are doing to them). Chalmers Johnson, an international relations specialist and a former Navy officer, would likely see this as of a piece with what he called “the military-petroleum complex” (USF Center for the Pacific Rim, Pacific Rim Report No. 33, March 2004) of bases ringing and radiating outward from the Caspian region and the Central Asian sphere of the former Soviet satellites — including our Mideast protectorate in the Saudi kingdom, for which the “enduring bases” in key Iraqi cities may serve as a useful (colonial) replacement.

This writer (i.e. blogger) does not demand any guarantee to either provide punditry or make sense, nor is any type of certifiable lunatic. Warning: some of my thoughts on turning twenty (posted below) in the approaching days may sound like it; just a dent in the eternal wall of inquiry, one could say. At least this blog lives true for a strange singular moment to its own name. [Enjoy, if that proves possible.]

impossible to describe after all so many things are beyond description
lives are so short and yet there are so many of them it is up to question whether everyone’s experiences are unique as all world history will yet repeat
obsessive ramblings are so easy to reproduce though it often feels fleeting
what are these psychotic people pretending they try and pose the right way and will not even realize ever what they do or why but it’s good for now we have no ideas
fit to print wall of paint lines in love like sieves you filter the good and bad and then weigh the final balance in time it all sorts itself out nothing ever changes
everything is changing all too fast it oftentimes seems that change is everything
all there is and all that there will ever be what should never be somehow persists
timeless and time-stamped so much structure to the free-form idiosyncratic dispositions of never mind never think never say never
cracking up or falling down it is hard to articulate the tearing away at the seams of reality panic turns to short flash picture start full stop
patterns emerge especially where none exist it does not seem to look like how it really is until too late too soon not the right time when will it be coming into focus captures the moment living in that frame shift the register
self-consciously piercing through windows opened when the door is closed
minds are not at peace they talk among themselves sometimes violently but not me
streams of consciousness get rerouted past the horizon
you don’t even know the faces of tomorrow or that which you can never see
sheer oceanic enormity rolls back across the rock of ages the surface eroded but invisibly warping the hallows of persistence of memory all the world memory staged fabricated invented the necessity when do you get it all set and sorted out
no use filling up with fact they get mangled and thrown into the mix of templates
ancient dreams will not broadcast crushing ignorance past histories the totality of lived ideas can’t even describe the pained metamorphic humanity
these years have a failing to return every misstep walks its way backward
better pack your things leaving home how many mis-connected souls go back
universes condemned not to know down to the small things beyond reach
morning light clarity of day not fast enough things that think too much what do you have to say about that
unable to withstand the flak useless to attempt futility of resistance in spirit of free expression individual right universally achieved going unaware no we’re not happy
the whole world crumbles spinning in madness and confusion so much good left little drops of comment infinity of sublimity and misery share the road obey all posted signs keep back five-hundred feet observe caution and all holy days
overwhelming and ineffable in pursuing truths and irrefutable comprehension
lying eyes belie the truth solidity to pure air you’re not actually breathing sheer oceanic enormity of time thinking things six billion existing living within every two set eyes seeing through itself as atoms
right and fact namely to name but what content contained there its truth and justice not respective hard to tell
it is ultimately contestable people tend to disagree and time has a tendency to slip falls fast and gone complexity need not breed confusion but some make life harder than it is so obviously surreal
minded toward a convolution of thesis in dominant ideological narratives moral clarity and socio-political enlightenment no ideas worth repeating yet all histories will repeat in time
that multitudes of mystery repeating myself already had to stop felt compelled repellent signal
flicks to green spark and blue funnel things no one will ever know frustrates everyone but somehow people make their own peace even if they never see it at hand

(Good night.)

“…a student at Pace University in New York City has been arrested for a hate crime in consequence of an alleged dumping of the Quran. Nothing repels me more than the burning or desecration of books, and if, for example, this was a volume from a public or university library, I would hope that its mistreatment would constitute a misdemeanor at the very least. But if I choose to spit on a copy of the writings of Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or James Joyce, that is entirely my business. When I check into a hotel room and send my free and unsolicited copy of the Gideon Bible or the Book of Mormon spinning out of the window, I infringe no law, except perhaps the one concerning litter. Why do we not make this distinction in the case of the Quran?”

— Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate (July 30); would it unduly piss him off to say Amen to his words?