terrette

Halloween Scare

2009-10-30T06:36:00.006-04:00

For the third time in a couple of weeks, someone asked me if, when I participated in Halloween in the States, I used to damage others' property. The first two times, I didn't get the connection. I simply said "no," described a typical walk through the neighborhood in search of sweets, and set the question up along side the many weird things people here ask me about "my home country." But then a student asked me the question yesterday and I knew that I had to get to the bottom of it.

It turns out, many Japanese are taught the historical meaning of the phrase "trick or treat" and imagine that it is spoken as a threat. They see in their minds images of children staring down homeowners with a presumption well beyond their years. They see kids spray-painting cars and TP-ing homes where candy was not had. (The examples are not mine.)

I did not understand the historical meaning of the phrase until well after my trick-or-treating days were done. I used to imagine that it meant, "give me a treat or, failing which, do a trick for me." I wondered if some wise guy might appear at his door and pull a rabbit out of a hat. I saw myself doing the same thing when I'd become adult, assuming no one else had seized on the idea.

I imagine that this sort of perception among Japanese satisfies their rather pronounced need to think of Americans as violent people. Americans are indeed violent, on the whole; but it's always a question of who and where and when. You have to know the streets, know the people and the places, if you want to cut down your risk of being exposed to violence at the hands of an American.

This explanation does not seem to satisfy those I give it to. I guess it is easier simply to imagine the whole country as a bizarrely violent place where children are taught how to exact vicious revenge on their stingy or absent neighbors through specially crafted acts of vandalism.

Halloween scare, American style (made in Japan).

A la poursuite du blaireau anglais

2009-10-27T07:11:00.002-04:00

Pardon the French title; it's the only way I could manage the necessary word play on Blair's name. Blaireau: i) badger ii) fool.

Enough for the title.

Have you ever felt like making a citizens' arrest of Tony Blair for his unpunished crime of aggression against the people of Iraq, of whom anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 were murdered -- yes, that's the correct word here -- as a direct result of Blair's and Bush's commands? (Let's forget Bush for the time being. There's simply too much material when it comes to this homegrown criminal.)

Maybe you have felt it more than once. Maybe you simply dreamed of seeing others making the arrest and sighed in deep nocturnal relief at the sight. Well, if so, consider that Guardian journalist George Monbiot has neatly spelled out not only the case against Blair but also a somewhat plausible means for having him arrested. The only problem with the scheme is that it involves first putting Blair back into a position of great authority: the presidency of the European Union. Such a risk would in no way be worth taking if it were Bush we were talking about. Few Americans wake up these days without feeling profound relief that that murderous buffoon no longer disturbs the public peace at home or abroad. Oblivion does him and the rest of us little justice; but at least it gives us a workable peace of mind.

Embarrassing Face of the Nation

2009-10-20T09:04:00.005-04:00

The public TV station I receive shows a series of news reports from around the world with a doubled voice-over (so that you hear both the original and the Japanese interpretation), each 15 or 30 minutes in length. Consistently, the ABC broadcast comes off looking, in comparison, like Teen Magazine presented by a bunch of serious looking men and pin-up girls. It is truly the most embarrassing awareness of being an American that I ever experience. This last week was so bad, I felt ashamed to leave my apartment for a few hours after the program came to an end. There was the boy-in-the-balloon hoax, pursued as if it were a matter of national security, then a drawn-out investigation into John McCain's daughter having shared a picture revealing her cleavage on some social networking site. This was preceded and followed by other nations reporting on climate change, terrorist attacks, international summits and the like: the sort of stuff traditionally associated with the word "news." The American programming included a few other pieces of fluff that were so insubstantial that I cannot even recall what they were about. And of course there was the chitchat to top it all off and make everyone feel good.

No wonder why Jon Stewart is so funny. His writers have an embarrassment of material. And corporate news in the US is now a parody of itself to the point where I'd be pressed to distinguish much of it from the Onion's intended parody.

Tenez!

2009-07-07T11:15:00.003-04:00

I stayed up till just after 2 AM watching the Wimbeldon Final between the American Andy Roddick and Roger Federer, and I've been a little bleary-eyed since then, since my schedule on Monday and Tuesday allowed for little catch-up rest.

I had never liked Roddick much because he seemed hot-headed and impetuous; but he dug deep and found a good sportsman somewhere in his heart. What's more, he played a tremendous match against the Swiss. The thing that strikes me about Roger Federer is that he plays tennis with such composure. You almost never see him looking strained or falling to the ground in a desperate reach for the ball. He seems to cultivate the gentlemanly approach to the sport in both dress and manner of play. He is the anti-John McEnroe. And it's easy to imagine that his composed manner takes some of the nastiness out of his opponents generally. Dignity is disarming.

I have never blogged much about sports, but I thought the photo I took this afternoon deserved some kind of caption.

Happy Birthday, Not

2009-07-06T10:31:00.007-04:00

12 shot at birthday party

There's always more gun violence going on in the US on any given day than a person could possibly keep up with, but in a report of one of today's colorful episodes, the following statements caught my attention:

Police around the country are increasingly seeing shootings with high-powered assault rifles.

"This is a sign of the times. It's no longer a .32-caliber," Timoney said. "We're finding dozens upon dozens of rounds, innocent people getting hit. It's just an awful situation."

I wonder if there's a connection between this "sign of the times" and the federal government allowing the ban on civilian ownership of assault weapons to expire in 2004. The journalist who wrote this report didn't think to mention it, but it's not as if such nationwide trends materialize spontaneously out of the ether.

The Best and Brightest Now Dimmed

2009-07-05T09:58:00.001-04:00

photo by terrette

Vietnam War Engineer Has Died

The early comments at the Times suggest that the deceased Robert McNamara is getting little love from the public, to wit:

Hell welcomes a new 'platinum tier' member. Robert, may you burn there slowly for eternity for the evil you so willingly brought to this world.

McNamara is dead, but according to the Wiki, 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects.

Judging from the tenor of the earliest posted comments, "de mortuis nil nisi bonum" has apparently been set aside for a special occasion.

At least McNamara, the Rumsfeld of the previous generation, found it in himself to do some soul searching. I, for one, can never see Rumsfeld mustering even the slightest blink of self-criticism. And McNamara went as far as to say that he was a war criminal and would have been prosecuted as such had the US not been victorious in WWII.

Public forgiveness, puh-lease

2009-06-25T05:24:00.013-04:00

This is delicious. Mark Sandford, Governor of South Carolina, gives a rambling, groveling discourse rich with flattery, self-adoration, requests for forgiveness, flamboyant adverbs, and, at times, it's-just-hard-to-make-out-exactly-what. (Maureen Dowd gets her claws into this one with gusto.) Two women can be seen smiling and, it seems, giggling at times in the background. I was totally with them. It's not out of Schadenfreude, it's just that the performance is brilliant in a self-pitying but steadfastly delusional way. It's impressive, however you cut it. My favorite line of all:

"The biggest self of self is, indeed, self."

I am tempted to turn the best parts of this into a 7-minute Dylanesque ballad, a comic tribute to that distinctly American art wherein politicians fess up to their extramarital affairs. Can't you just hear Dylan croon?: "The biggaaaast... self of se-huh-elfuh... is-a selfuh."

Uh, no, I can't either.

Washington doublespeak

2009-06-24T07:56:00.010-04:00

1. 'Dozens dead' in US drone strike

2. Obama condemns 'unjust' violence

No, those titles do not both refer to the same incident, one that has repeated itself time and again since Obama took office. I reconstituted these two BBC titles just as I had first found them on the BBC news feed. I thought they were highly eloquent when placed next to one another. And I wondered whether in being reshuffled, the titles' embarrassing proximity had been noted by someone at the BBC. I don't think I need to translate, but seeing "US president kills scores of innocent people" and "US president bemoans deaths and brutality against scores of innocent people" next to one another like that gave me pause. Obama's quote was equally eloquent in its lack of self-criticism: "We deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere it takes place." Did he merely forget to say, except for when it takes place in Pakistan and/or Afghanistan under my command? One wonders, because it's hard to put much sense to his words without postulating such an omission.

While my courageous Yellow Sth Sth friend seems at the end of his patience with the corporate control of the political process in the US, which seems incapable of delivering the health care that the people want and need, Obama keeps pursuing his vain attempt to crush resistance to foreign intervention in Afghanistan. And it doesn't seem to disturb the president one bit to take words from the mouth of Martin Luther King Jr., a man who would have been the most influential and strident critic of the campaign of violence in Afghanistan if he were still alive today. The arc of the moral universe might be long, but it doesn't bend toward the indiscriminate and unjustified bombing of civilians.

According to the Pakistani government, there have been 60-something drone attacks, which have resulted in 14 "bad guys" killed and over 700 civilians. When your "precision weaponry" is proven to be that bad, isn't it time to shelve it? And when its only significant consequence is that the flames of hatred against the US have been fanned far and wide, can you find a better example of the meaning of "counterproductive"? That's the most generous word that can be used to describe this campaign.

Let's see Obama quote MLK Jr. meaningfully and not spit on all that he stood for. Let's have the president make the same connection that MLK Jr. made between the unjust and costly military adventures abroad and the denial of services that are a public right to citizens at home.

Armagideon Times

2009-04-22T02:29:00.005-04:00

The ice age is comin'
The sun's zoomin' in
Meltown expected
The wheat is growin' thin
A nuclear error
But I have no fear
'Cause London is drowning and I
Live by river

Well, latest reports put to rest even that one sliver of comfort. Joe Strummer of the Clash did sing that last line tongue in cheek, but were he still alive, he could add that the rivers are drying up, too. Such are the findings of certain "US researchers" who have studied the world's major rivers over the past 50 or so years.

The thing about this sort of report is that it is becoming as habitual as the endless number of health studies that are carried out every year around the world and that, whatever their initial pretext, all lead to the conclusion that consumption of fruits and vegetables, accompanied by regular exercise, is good for one's health. The growing sense is that, whether we are getting sufficient vitamins and exercise or not, as a species, we are on an inevitable path to self-destruction for which none other than the Four Horseman seem bound to serve as our guides.

Kind of makes you want to start a big family, doesn't it?

Chuckling at the mainstream

2009-04-05T00:51:00.021-04:00

I've just read a series of articles in so-called mainstream online press that all made me laugh because of their ridiculous use of English. Consider these samples, from the two tabs that remain open on my screen at this moment.

First, in the New York Times article on a Korean missile launch, I encountered this surprising assessment of a certain international mindset:

Nonetheless, the series of tests in recent years — in 2006 and 1998 — is prompting fears of North Korean proliferation among Japanese, Chinese and Western leaders.

Indeed, it would be at the very least odd to have "North Korean proliferation" among the leaders of other nations, especially if this means the language spoken in that country. Unless, of course, the infected leaders were from South Korea, where the Korean language has already proliferated to an astonishing degree. However, since "North Korean" does not refer to a distinct language, perhaps what is feared is that a proliferation that is somehow related to the habits and customs of North Korea will spread throughout the leaders of the world. (If it refers to the habits of North Korean leadership, I tremble at the thought that leaders around the world might also wear dark sunglasses at all hours and consume pornographic movies daily.) Or perhaps the writer just meant to say this:

Nonetheless, the series of tests in recent years — in 2006 and 1998 — is prompting fears among Japanese, Chinese and Western leaders of weapons proliferation in North Korea.

The other one comes from an unnamed BBC journalist who was dispatched to Binghamton, NY, to report on the conditions surrounding the shooting spree that took place there a few days ago.

Sheltering from the rain in a doorway, smoking a cigarette, I found Darlene Trunkowski, who speculated that economic pressures could have been a factor.

It's a mystery to me why the reporter felt it was necessary to report that he or she was smoking a cigarette while out reporting. I also wondered, how do you "discover" someone in a doorway while you are sheltering there from the rain, smoking? Just how big is that doorway? And how long were you there before you made your discovery? And what was Darlene Trunkowski doing in the doorway, if not also sheltering from the rain? (I doubt she was also smoking, for that would have given her away at once; never mind any discovery.)

Let's see if we can repair the sentence while our BBC friend likely remains ensconced somewhere in a doorway, smoking, awaiting new discoveries.

I found Darlene Trunkowski sheltering from the rain in a doorway, smoking a cigarette, and she speculated that economic pressures could have been a factor.

Has copy editing also fallen victim to the economic downturn? Sheesh.

In Tokyo

2009-01-23T10:05:00.000-05:00

Climate debate (or something like it)

2009-01-16T20:19:00.014-05:00

Have a look at this debate over climate change, hosted and posted by Channel 4 in the UK. (You have to click on "watch the report" within the first lines of the write-up.) This shows what any such debate should really look like, as long as it's not manipulated from the get-go by corporate news handlers. In short, the side without evidence should be exposed as such and summarily trounced.

I am not an expert on US media by any means, and in recent years my exposure to it has been minimal; but I do not recall ever having seen such a debate as this one. Partly this is due to the preparedness and sharpness of George Monbiot, the Guardian journalist who faces off against David Bellamy, the botanist, prolific author and, more recently, freewheeling denier of anthropogenic global warming. Monbiot makes the easy task look easy. I have seen other such debates in US media where global warming deniers are given equal credence -- such stand-offs seem to be the rule, not the exception -- but none in which they were trounced by competent spokespersons for the scientific community, as they should be in every case. In the States, one is exposed to much louder and more arrogant versions of Bellamy's line, notably from that great source of intellectual darkness, Rush Limbaugh; but Limbaugh and his ilk are never seriously challenged on air.

What this debate really shows is that people like Bellamy have had their little moment of noise-making and that such false debates -- false because based on the moronic assumption that whether global warming exists and is caused by fossil fuel consumption is still in doubt -- need to be replaced with the truly pressing question: what to do to reverse course and slow the destruction of the biosphere even as it may already be too late.

The only recourse the denier, Bellamy, has, is to repeat: "show me the evidence." It is not enough for him that thousands of peer-reviewed articles present that evidence. (Does he dislike reading to that degree?) Apparently, for Bellamy to take notice, one would have to raise a glacier above him and have it commence melting into his lap in voluminous waves of bone-chilling water, with a convoy of SUVs rolling noisily by.

This was a debate that concluded as it should have, with the humiliation of the professional denier, but it should also be the last of its kind. It's time to stop asking the brain-dead question of whether glaciers are melting and whether global climate change is real. It's time for radical policy shifts across the globe and especially in the United States.

Harold Pinter, a writer of conscience

2008-12-25T23:12:00.006-05:00

On the occasion of the death of the British author Harold Pinter, I invite visitors to this site to take a moment to watch a true writer of conscience give his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature. Such writers are increasingly rare, and one of the few remaining has just left us.

In his speech, Pinter reminds Americans that, with its 702 military installations in 134 countries, the U.S., which is now on a permanent military footing, maintains as its core policy the threat of nuclear annihilation. Moreover, it does this while selling its countless crimes in the post-war period as democracy promotion and effectively--that is, successfully--brainwashing its population on a massive scale.

In light of this, to have confidence in a Clinton-Obama foreign policy today would require one to forget or actively not to care that, since W.W. II, the U.S. has supported and in some cases engendered right-wing military dictatorships that have provoked the violent deaths of millions of innocent people in Indonesia, Greece, Brazil, Vietnam, Paraguay, Uruguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Haiti, Turkey, Iran, and Chile, among other places, and to imagine, like the completely useless idiots that most Americans are when it comes to assessing the state of the world, that the administration heading to Washington D.C. repudiates this long history of deception and violence and in no way intends to extend its tyranny into the future.

Hiatus

2008-11-08T21:38:00.008-05:00

I am taking a hiatus from blogging and may return early next year. Thanks, Steve Bates, the Yellow Doggerel Democrat, Charles2 of The Fulcrum, and others for stopping by through a tumultuous but victorious election season. For the time being, I am going to focus on my non-virtual existence--teaching, writing, living a life.

Frank Rich has penned a masterful summation of the Obama election that I'd rather tip my hat to than try to rival ("It Still Felt Good the Morning After," November 9, 2008). And should anyone care to see a good movie, I recommend The Visitor. This modern Bildungsroman takes place within a very Bushy post-9-11 New York City, a once-vibrant community now splintered by paranoid security overreaches and strangled with xenophobic immigration nets, and we can only hope that the film will begin to appear dated in some respects by early next year. The human element of the film, buoyed by superb acting, will surely not fade, but it's hard to watch this film and not feel bitter about the cruel turn given to American society under Bush and Cheney.

Who won?

2008-11-06T07:01:00.015-05:00

Despite the convincing victory of Barack Obama, the question, "who won?," remains.

This victory was not only of President-Elect Obama, nor of the Democratic Party, nor of African-Americans, nor even of dark-skinned people the world over -- and I say that knowing that in each of those cases, the victory was immense and, for each, uniquely so. The victory was also one of all Americans, whose credibility in the world had been severely damaged by 8 years of poisonous leadership. For, at the end of the day, it was the American people who had failed twice to prevent Bush from reaching the White House. It was the American people who had failed to give Bush and Cheney the sound beating in the polls that they deserved. This fact hits hard those like myself who live abroad and who have to brave the opinion of "America" and of "Americans" before it is ever a question of winning anyone's opinion over with one's own personal merits. This, and many other things, account for the fact that I busted a tear not only when the news of Obama's victory was announced, nor only when Obama made his acceptance speech, but again and again: when I watched the videos of many spontaneous celebrations in the cities of America (gathered at www.michaelmoore.com on Nov. 5), when I read celebratory opinion pieces from different points of view, when I viewed photos of others crying in joy, when I scanned a series of political cartoons relating to the event, and, at times, when I sat back and pondered what had happened. There was something in that election victory that surpassed not only expectations but that could not be fully anticipated. The elation could be somewhat imagined, abstractly, but the joy was too great for foretasting or prediction. The fact that so many people, for so many different reasons, could rightly feel victorious in this one man's victory created a global vibration of hope and optimism. I know from my own experience of seeing spontaneous joy on the faces of normally reserved Japanese as soon as the victory of Obama was mentioned.

So, to the question, "who won?," I do not pretend to know the answer. It is clear, however, that many did, and that the reasons for which they see themselves as having triumphed are themselves many in nature.

Of course, this is a post of celebration; and in celebrations of victors there is something forgetful and cruel. However, as celebrations come and go, somewhere, the eye of conscience remains fixed. It's my sincere hope that President Obama greatly reduces the numbers of those who for so long have been on the losing end of blind American military power. Some of his policy statements have given hope in that respect; others have done the opposite. May he be something other than a dark-skinned version of the military belligerent and slayer of innocents that other US presidents have been before him.

The grand democratic hand

2008-11-05T22:06:00.006-05:00

Tonight's victory of Barack Obama and Joe Biden signals a defeat for many very bad things. I have no political enthusiasts around me; so, to celebrate, I am going list a few of the horrible people and things that have been smacked upside the head tonight by the grand democratic hand of American voters.

The Republican Party, Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, John McCain, George Bush Jr., Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, racism, hate, ignorance, corporate fundamentalism, election theft, dirty politics, the Religious Right, and that woman with a big mouth in the video posted below.

These pestiferous people and things will surely not go away any time soon, but it is very comforting to know that, tonight, they have been solidly rejected by a majority of Americans. Do you know how long I have waited for this day? It feels like a lifetime. And it is exactly what I have been asking for ever since I started blogging.

Palin is beyond help

2008-11-04T03:51:00.008-05:00

If the thought of Sarah Palin wielding executive power has not yet stunned you, you should listen to her take a completely wacko prank call completely seriously for nearly 6 minutes. After provoking her repeatedly with nonsense claims and irreverent comments, the prankster has to come out and tell her "you have been pranked" before she realizes what she has been rolling in giddily. This comes after the prankster, for instance, refers to Johnny Holliday as his "special American advisor" (in fact, he's a miserable French pop star) and praises "Nailin' Palin," a porno flick that derides Palin which the prankster calls "a documentary they made on your life." Palin, ever the shrewd one, thanks him joyfully for complimenting her on the "documentary." Throughout the entire conversation, Palin keeps pushing out the memorized "good energy" phrases, flatters "Nicolas" (who sounds nothing like Sarkozy), and generally acts like she's about 9 years old and in the midst of her first sleep-over with friends.

Executive material, you think?

It is no wonder that many prominent conservative commentators have abandoned the Republican ticket for the first time in modern history.

A plea for Barack Obama

2008-11-01T09:40:00.012-04:00

I do not have the time before November 4th to present a fully reasoned endorsement for Barack Obama. This is partly because I have many other responsibilities before me and partly because the reasons for the choice are too numerous to be explained in a few words. However, it seems to me that the vicious tenor of the McCain-Palin campaign -- both its strategy to bury its main opponent with tireless mud-slinging (an example?) and the concomitant rage and ignorance that flared up among McCain-Palin supporters -- is a very pregnant sign about not only what sort of leadership those two would provide, but also of what sort of country the United States would become with them in power. In short, McCain-Palin promise more years of divisiveness, hate, aggression, government-fed falsifications and bald-faced denials of substantiated wrongdoing, increased social stratification and increased wealth distribution to those few at the top who least need it.

There are those toward whom I would be silent if they gave their votes to McCain and Palin: for instance, the super wealthy, who clearly have it in their interests to see Bush's tax cuts for the super wealthy become "permanent" in accordance with McCain's will. Or, again, those for whom anti-abortion rights legislation is the only issue that matters. I do not fathom that such people will ever be persuaded to see the world differently; they shall forever be led by the rigors of their single ideological pursuit: making all abortions illegal. However, there is apparently a stunningly large number of people who are ready to vote, or who have already voted for, McCain-Palin simply out of a spirit of partisanship or on the basis of an erroneous and misguided sense of what that ticket may offer them. For these masses -- many of them fans of Fox News, the Drudge Report, or Rush Limbaugh -- I think the best response might be something like the full-page advertisements taken out over the past few years by the religious right in an attempt to persuade homosexuals to "convert" to heterosexuality. That advertisement campaign was offensive for its erroneous assumption about the nature of homosexuality; but the strategy might well fit if applied to those who apparently cannot learn from the eight-year example of failure upon failure that the Republicans have put on display for them in virtually every domain of government. After all, no one is born Republican. And certainly no one without special issues is born incorrigibly stupid.

Of course, time is tight, and the resources for such an advertisement campaign are lacking. Nonetheless, should any Republican supporter read these words and feel moved, by courage or other human sentiment, to testify that they are determined not to be duped any longer, and not to be brought once again to vote against their own economic and political interests on the basis of bogus fears, kindly leave a few comments below and join the more perfect Union that Barack Obama and Joe Biden have the dignity and resolve to lead us towards.

Oh, here are some of you now!

Is it just me, or are 95 percent of the reasons given for opposing or fearing Obama truly just cooked up somewhere?

I close this post with lines sent to me from a friend who works in Cleveland, Ohio. A sign of the times, for sure:

I volunteered one afternoon for the Obama campaign to knock on doors to encourage voters to vote early. One registered voter told me he wouldn't vote for Obama because he said Obama was a Muslim and would use weapons of mass destruction against America. I started chuckling because I thought he was joking and tried to continue my conversation with him. When he continued to stare at me without saying anything, I realized he was serious. These people are out there.

I've always hated college football coaches who run up the score against weak opponents. That being said, I have a lust for running up the score in this election.

Fish, Milton, Lennon

2008-10-28T10:50:00.009-04:00

I never imagined I would discuss the literary critic and sometimes New York Times editorial writer Stanley Fish favorably, but his recent opinion piece is a stinger, especially if you read it with the religious Right in mind. Fish has a penchant for casting tame arguments in scandalous terms or, at other times, for making truly scandalous claims in an off-hand manner. The upshot of his most recent piece is that, in one important respect, Obama is like Jesus while McCain is like Satan. Forget for the moment whatever Fish might mean by that, because the comparison is bound to create a storm. This may well be the objective for Fish, a veritable storm chaser of essay writing.

Fish's piece reminds me of the famously twisted words of John Lennon, who at the height of Beatlemania in the United States quipped that the Beatles seemed to be more famous than God. The religious Right went bazookey, running wild with the assumption that Lennon meant something like, "I think that I should be more famous than God" or some such blasphemy, and destroying Beatles paraphernalia, getting the group banned from radio, etc. Could a similarly mindless little storm be kicked up in the wake of this oddly couched argument from a literary critic? Fish's piece is really nothing more than an appreciation of the Obama campaign articulated on the basis of Fish's reading of Milton's "Paradise Regained." It is reasonable enough and somewhat colorful, but I can just imagine its getting twisted into something truly execrable -- for instance, final proof that Obama IS the anti-Christ. Let's see. I'll give it 48 hours. Check back.

How to win a crime

2008-10-23T06:11:00.008-04:00

Senator McCain keeps bellowing forth that, as president, he is going to "win" the greatest crime of the Bush administration -- the violent invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq. (Of course he doesn't call the crime a crime. He prefers the inaccurate, righteous-sounding word "war." But let's be serious.) McCain's claim is that, by contrast, Obama can only lose the crime by seeking an end to it. Well, not only is there very little possibility that Obama will end the crime or prosecute those who are responsible for it, the idea that McCain can in any way "win" it is simply inconceivable -- that is, unless by "win" McCain means perpetuate the greatest international crime of the last 60-some years and crush any idea of justice and democracy in Iraq. What a win that would be, huh? And what a whopper of a campaign promise. If this is what is meant, McCain's achieving "victory" would require us to invent a new expression in English -- "to win a crime." But, if that is not the sense intended, it remains unclear how McCain intends to achieve "victory" in any honest use of the word. How, precisely, would McCain appease the vast majority of citizens in Iraq, those who have always rejected U.S. presence there, let alone bring real security and a functional infrastructure back to what remains the most dangerous nation on the planet? And does he intend to do this without withdrawing all US troops, in accordance with the wishes of the Iraqi people?

I don't know if Senator McCain pays much attention to events in Iraq, or to the criminal nature of Bush's designs on that nation and its resources, but it is worth underscoring that the

US president has just signed, or issued a signing statement, showing the intention of the US government to take control over Iraq’s oil.

So notes Raed Jarrar, an architect in Washington, D.C. who translated the relevant documents. Here are his comments:

I think this is an amazingly frustrating and shocking thing to do at the same week that the Bush administration is trying to sign a long-term agreement legitimizing a long-term occupation of Iraq. So, it gives, I think, the wrong—or maybe the right—message to the Iraqi people, that the US will continue occupying their country to secure oil, to control their country’s oil...

Jarrar's blog, Raed in the Middle, presents the translated document in full (also pdf'd here) and also shows photos from anti-occupation demonstrations that just took place in Baghdad. According to Jarrar,

the city witnessed another demonstration with more than one million Iraqi, Arabs and Kurds and others, Muslims and Christians and others, Sunnis and Shiites and others demonstrated together against the occupation and the long term agreement, asking for a complete withdrawal the leaves no permanent bases, no troops, and no mercenaries.

Put the pieces of this puzzle together. On the one hand, you have massive public rejection among Iraqis of all forms of U.S. occupation and intrusion into their nation -- a fact that is left without comment in the U.S. other than in a few independent news sources such as Democracy Now! (see, in particular, show of October 21, 2008); on the other, you have a U.S. president who, never having been even censured for his massive crimes there, continues to pursue, via the ruse of a signing statement, his ultimate goal of controlling Iraq's natural resources, thereby sitting on and butt-smearing any notion of justice or democracy for the foreseeable future.

In the midst of this conundrum peeps up little soldier boy: "I will never concede defeat, my friends. I will never surrender in Iraq!"

Sounds impressive, Johnny.

Now, what the hell does it mean?

terrette photo: Etretat, France 34173

Choose your elites with care; it matters

2008-10-22T01:50:00.024-04:00

Noam Chomsky speaks on voting without illusions and on why it is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama articulated health care initiatives that, while still falling short of the needs and stated desires of most Americans, nonetheless promised improvement to the currently dysfunctional and brutally expensive health care system:

THE VIDEO WAS MADE UNAVAILABLE WEEKS AFTER THIS POSTING

After years of mulling this question over and at times drawing different conclusions, I can say solidly that I concur with Chomsky's view on the value of a disabused approach to voting, and my vote for Obama in the State of Ohio reflected that.

Our dysfunctional way of life

2008-10-19T10:11:00.004-04:00

Andrew J. Bacevich makes a number of insightful comments about the state of the nation in his two-part interview with Bill Moyers. A sample from the online transcript:

I think that the Bush Administration's response to 9/11 in constructing this paradigm of a global war on terror, in promulgating the so-called Bush Doctrine of Preventive War, in plunging into Iraq - (an) utterly unnecessary war - will go down in our history as a record of recklessness that will be probably unmatched by any other administration.

But (that) doesn't really mean that Bill Clinton before him, or George Herbert Walker Bush before him, or Ronald Reagan before him, were all that much better. Because they all have seen military power as our strong suit. They all have worked under the assumption that through the projection of power, or the threat to employ power, that we can fix the world. Fix the world in order to sustain this dysfunctional way of life that we have back here.

The implication here is that equating "freedom" with consumer choice, as so many Americans do, is going, eventually, to lead to a perilous financial and political state for the nation as a whole.

I think the nation would be served well if Bacevich were asked to be the next president's speech writer. His are hard truths that need to be told repeatedly and heard far and wide.

Holy fraud!

2008-10-18T03:04:00.026-04:00

The Washington Post reports that Sarah Palin, noting some "movement" in the polls (of the statistically irrelevant sort), attributes the apparent pause in her ticket's weeks-long trouncing to the influence of none other than God.

Giving credit to a higher power for the day's poll ratings, the Alaska governor told the roughly 500-person audience that things might be changing. "We even saw today, thank the Lord," she said, looking upwards and raising her fist, "We saw some movement."(source)

I understand that Palin has been shielded from news -- both voluntarily, over a long period, and, of late, by advisement from her handlers. That is unfortunate, for had she been paying attention, she would have noticed that a recent case brought against selfsame God, seeking a permanent injunction to prevent "death, destruction, and terrorisation (sic)," was dismissed on account of the fact that the defendant has no address and that therefore no legal papers can be served. (BBC report)

This fact should give pause to those like Palin in the GOP who like to imagine that God is on their side in a political campaign. Imagining that God would take a partisan stake in such a matter comes dangerously close to imagining that God would, in essence, cast a vote in favor of the GOP. And, as we have seen, lacking any address, God cannot in fact be registered legally to vote. And since the Holy One has no dog in this fight and no legal means of intervening, any advice or influence God might exercise upon the proceedings would surely be unwarranted.

To stop appearing absurd, Palin and those like her who hype charges of voter fraud need to stop evoking the Godhead as an active member of their team. Is it reasonable to whine publicly that Mickey Mouse has been registered to vote while at the same time boasting that the Creator of the Universe is pushing one's campaign forward by tinkering with poll results? The most Mickey could ever do is toss a single vote in for Obama and Biden; whereas God, if we are to believe Palin, could actually alter the votes of millions of legally registered citizens. Try to tell me that such unwarranted intrusion would not be voter fraud on a massive scale and the end of democracy as we know it.

It is only fitting that I end this post with a retouched quote from John McCain's debate-delivered tirade:

"We need to know the full extent of Governor Palin's relationship with God, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

terrette photo: Carpathian Mountains, Poland.

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Ohio voter?

2008-10-17T03:10:00.006-04:00

If you vote in Ohio, know that this page, from the League of Women Voters, gives you a heads-up on all state issues that you will be asked to make a choice on. I just sent my ballot in. For Americans living in Japan, the postage costs the equivalent of about three dollars and ninety cents this year, which is a little better than in years past on account of the weak dollar.
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Chalmers Johnson on a national blind spot

2008-10-13T08:24:00.005-04:00

If you have a moment, watch this video of historian Chalmers Johnson explain how US military spending cannot go on at its maddening pace without threatening the prospects of our presumably democratic nation (via the Real News Network).

Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw. Photo: terrette

This is a point that right wing sympathizers, political conservatives, Limbaugh fans, Republicans, and so on, would do well to consider. It is also a point that sorely needs to be raised in the October 15 debate. Of course, for structural reasons relating to party power and owing to the industrial complex stranglehold on political discourse in the United States, there's not a chance in hell that it will.