All Politics is Local: Spitzer's Fall from Grace

I have decided this morning to come down from my usual Olympian heights and comment on a local political event. It seems that here in New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi has been caught spending $80,000 of the taxpayers' funds on limousine service for his ailing wife. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer decided that the appropriate response to the criminal behavior of his political crony is forgiveness. With a fifty percent lead in the polls in his "race" for Governor of our fair state, Spitzer must be feeling a bit Olympian himself. Hevesi's behavior should have generated a speech from Spitzer along the lines of, "Much as I had come to respect Comptroller Hevesi and his acknowledged efforts on the part of the people of New York, his theft of city services requires me to ask for a criminal indictment." So far, this has not occurred, and given Spitzer's lack of an immediate response along these lines, an indictment will come too late to change the fact that he has revealed his clay feet even before taking office as governor. (Even if not too late to apprehend a corrupt politician.) That fifty percent lead in the polls, Eliot, is not an index of how much people love you or how charming they find you. It is not about love and you don't give off much charm. It is a vote for a style of governance that many citizens feel they see all too rarely in an era of deepening corruption by fat corporate types. It is, in other words, a self-congratulatory vote for having the perspicacity to find in your persona as Attorney General an honest man who will go after the bad guys. The people are so desperate for such governance that they even chose to turn a blind eye to the unbridled ambition that you manifest from the very first day you appeared on the political scene, yet another rich guy buying himself a political office. Try to get this straight, Eliot, the people who are voting for you are not voting for you as an individual but as an agent of their desire for decency. Do not make the mistake others before you have of misreading the true nature of your "popularity" and giving yourself carte blanche to pardon the wrongdoing of your political allies.

Wu, Kucinich and the Bomb

C-Span is a wonderful thing. I have always refused to subscribe to (read pay for) cable television, but when the roofers told me I had to remove my roof antenna, I was forced to look around for an unused cable and hook up. Now I see why so many people are addicted to C-Span. It is a news and politics junky's ultimate stash. What truly amazed me about it is that it actually allows, (or to be kinder? fairer?), one might say even promotes diversity of opinion. Since one of my themes of late is that we presently have only one political party in this country, the Repubricrats, C-Span's programming forced me to take a closer look at that notion. C-Span's coverage of debates on the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate would seem to put the lie to the notion of a single, tweedle-dee-tweedle dum party. There is definitely finger waving, dais thumping and exhortation going on a lot of the time. And, it is obvious that if there were literally one party, there would be no need to take votes on resolutions. Voting takes place a lot on C-Span. Of course, 99.9% of all voting is along party lines, and since there is a comfortable Republican majority, and there are only two parties, this creates an interesting opportunity for the opposition party: it can rant and rave all it wants, showboat, grandstand, flip-flop and do handstands in full confidence that all these pyrotechnics will have no impact whatsoever. Sometimes, of course, an aura of sincerity emerges, a call to delve into one's sense of what is right, moral, just, fair, or just sensible. The discomfort that such expressions cause is fortunately short-lived, since they occur only rarely, and usually at one o'clock in the morning (at least here on the East coast) when anyone who might make a difference has probably gone to bed three hours earlier. One such outburst took place this morning. The words expressed were rather startling words, particularly given the fact that they would be among the last words recorded in the House of Representatives until early November, as the Congress recesses to take part in elections. In a colloquy between himself and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, Oregon Representative David Wu stated that if a mushroom cloud ever rose over the American heartland, he would like to be on the record as having pointed out that the responsibility for such an outcome could be laid at the steps of our own Capitol as it threw all reason and caution to the winds and fed the appetite of India and Pakistan for fissile material. Pretty heady stuff. The temptation is to say, "Yeah, but he and Kucinich were the only two guys on the floor of the House, it was one A.M., and no one was watching." But, you know, someone was watching. Maybe there is some hope. We still have C-Span, and we still have a few honest citizens.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

While I contemplate the implications of the congressional votes taken over the last twenty-four hours, I invite everyone to contemplate this the most recent of my messages from the fortune cookie printing presses:

Better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.

On the Internment of American Prisoners: VII

The suspension of the right of habeus corpus, a legal right that every school child can trace back to the year 1215 when the English forced bad King John to sign the Magna Carta is about to occur in the land that claims to be the world's most exemplary democracy. When, recently, I opined to a friend that this country desperately needs a third party, he came back with, "Don't you mean a second party?" In that quip lies the tragic crossroads at which this nation now finds itself. With very, very few exceptions, the haircuts and coifs that now adorn the two houses of the U.S. congress are essentially indistinguishable from one another. They may disagree on some of the details of the current economic arrangement that slowly impoverishes the majority of our citizens, and they may disagree on certain less than pressing moral issues like gay marriage but whether it is the Clinton variety of corporate take-over or the Bush variety makes very little fundamental difference. When the U.S. allowed Israel to fight its proxy war in Lebanon, where even after a cease-fire was agreed upon a million anti-personnel weapons descended upon the south of that tragic land, not a single voice could be heard in opposition to that war. At least we had Senator Wayne Morse during the Tonkin Gulf resolution, at least then, there was one voice raised in opposition. Now there is no opposition. The suits with the free haircuts have gotten fatter and fatter and have overseen the nation through to the dissolution of the system. The U.S. system of government simply no longer works. The checks are not checking and the balances are not balancing. An imperial presidency, essentially a serial monarchy with a unicameral house cannot claim to be a true democracy. Our so-called two party system has long had inherent within it the flaw that it allows the clearly absurd notion that all acceptable political opinion is contained within its self-proclaimed two-fold limits. What the recent mishandling of American governance has revealed is that democracy only has a prayer of succeeding in a parliamentary system with multiple parties, the need for coalitions to form, the right to recall a leader in whom the nation no longer has confidence or trust. The story of the U.S. presidency since Dwight Eisenhower left office warning of the military-industrial complex is one of unrelenting violence and scandal. Kennedy is assassinated. Johnson is forced, by virtue of his stubbornly pursuing a murderous war, to decline a second term. Nixon, threatened with impeachment, is forced to resign. Ford is a mere caretaker replaced by Carter, yet another interim caretaker. Reagan clearly should have been impeached for his abrogation of the constitution in the Iran-Contra scandal, as should his former CIA chief and successor, Bush, who was also clearly complicit. Clinton is impeached, only to be replaced by Bush, a man clearly unqualified for the office who was thrust into power-with a majority of the American people having voted for his opponent--by an antiquated electoral system, ballot box rigging, and an ultra-conservative Supreme Court. With the possible exception of President Carter, whose role it was to make us forget the nightmare of the preceding years by introducing a dose of old time religion into the oval office, a role that sent the nation into deep psychological depression, no U.S president since 1963 could have survived a parliamentary vote of confidence. Rather than bring us stability, our stubborn adherence to a constitutional framework that no longer works has brought us full circle to the bad old days. Yes, it is now 1214 and there are just a few voices crying in the wilderness. Not enough right now, it seems, to institute a true democracy.

Pope Bendict Speaks: A Caution

Those of us outside of the inner circle of power, particularly as power manifests itself in the current regime, need to take care on one very important point. To rebut the attack on Islam in all of its varieties--from Islamo-fascist to Islamic terrorists to Islamic fundamentalists--is not to take sides with Islam, any more than it is to condemn all of the glorious by-products of European civilization. One can respect Islamic culture and art and give it full credit for the role it played in helping to create Western civilization in the same agnostic fashion that one gives similar credit to European culture. What the argument against Muslim bashing does is merely point out the colossal hypocrisy in attacking Islam for precisely the same crimes that Christian churches and political regimes have committed on an even larger scale. Had most reasonable people had a choice, the tendency toward secularism that emerged after WWII would have been encouraged. The opposite was encouraged. Since secular movements in the Arab and other Islamic former colonies tended to be suspect, seen as inevitably gravitating toward the soviet camp, it is the U.S. and the Europeans who stimulated the growth of a brand of Islamic fanatics who would take on the soviet machine with U.S.-provided weapons, but also blow up Buddhas and initiate extremist regimes of their own. In short, the U.S. played the religion card. Atheistic regimes are bad. We support religion. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Machiavelli gone haywire.

Pope Benedict Speaks

Now that the pope has gone on the record as being wary of a tendency to violence in the Islamic religion, (this is too wearisome an argument to refute particularly from the leader of a church that has conquered with the sword throughout its history), the floodgates are open to all those heretofore closet Muslim haters to fully express themselves. Everyone from Oriana Fallaci to Spain's Jose Maria Aznar is going into print to profess their long held (and up until now apparently politely repressed) opinion about the evils inherent in Islam. It is more and more looking like we had the existence of the Soviet Union to thank for keeping historical discourse even a little bit rational and not descending into the kind of primitive tribalism we are now seeing. If this is how the anti-communist white European bourgeoisie behaves when it feels it is free from the excoriation of historical materialists, I say bring back the good old days. I will always recall R.W. Apple, writing (on the front page of the Times no less) that the events of 1989 were the most significant in world history since the revolutions of 1848. Of course, the Times would revisit the attempt at historical perspective when it allowed its front page to be used as a forum for the unique perspective of Alexander Solzhenitsyn who observed that, no, we had to go back even earlier, to the French Revolution of 1789. (It is now clear that liberte, fraternite and egalite are mutually exclusive argued the Russian seer.) Well, it now seems clear that both men were too conservative in their analyses. Based on the behavior of the Europeans and their evil spawn in the "new" world, it appears we need to go way back, maybe pre-enlightenment, maybe even pre-Islamic influence. Oh, yes, have we forgotten that old standby of college history courses, the Pierenne thesis, which argues that there would be no Western civilization without the influence of Islam? Yes, it seems now that the post-modernists and the neo-conservatives (born again as neo-liberals) have taken over the printing presses of the power structure, we are free to paint ourselves blue and really have at one another.

On the Internment of American Prisoners: V

Give them a little and they'll take a lot. Once you allow the construct "terror/terrorists/terrorism," the floodgates open. And we live in a period when certain linguistic distortions seem conveniently to serve the ends of nation states across a wide spectrum. There is no counterbalancing force to keep a given big power honest when all of the existing big powers are implicated to one degree or another. China has Tibet and its Uighur population to fret over, Russia has Chechnya, India has Pakistan, many of the larger European powers their Muslim minorities. Since with the exception of Tibetan Buddhists, the fact that most of the recalcitrant groups mentioned happen to be Muslim only makes it easier for the truth to be obscured. In order to truly understand what is happening, one has to have a sense of history rare among the citizenry of powers large and small. A glancing dip into the pages of twentieth century history will reveal a certain level of truth. To this end, the breakup of Yugoslavia will serve as exemplary. The world looked on in horror at what happened to Yugoslavia, first, after the death of Tito, and then following the breakup of the USSR. Ethnic cleansing, mass graves, neighbors killing neighbors with whom they had managed to coexist for over fifty year. Croat Catholics, Kosovan Muslims, Serbian Orthodox had lived together after the end of WWII without so much as a ripple on the political waters. What happened? The usual answer, of course, is that so long as police state repression could be maintained, old blood feuds had to be postponed. Once the police apparatus loosened its hold, the merriment could begin. Although Tito's regime provides a good example of one way of dealing with diverse populations that can't stand one another and that can not forgive or forget the violence done them in the past, Stalin may offer us an even better example. Great leaders are often provided with academic credentials. When certain political elements in the U.S. were grooming General Eisenhower for the presidency, they slipped him into the role of university president for a while, giving him the prestigious post at Columbian University in New York. Stalin's claim to intellectual status was "the nationalities question." Now, even casual students of left wing history know that socialism and communism claim to recognize no borders. (The theme song is the Internationale, right?) Ties to a nation are seen as a petit-bourgeois aberration akin to religious affiliations. The end result of Stalin's ratiocinations on the question of nationality was that he decided that they just didn't matter to all the good communists across the eleven time zones and countless nationalities and cultures that lay therein. Hundreds of diverse peoples living in perfect harmony. This fabrication is still to be seen in China, with its 57 ethnic minorities, again, supposedly all equal, all living in blissful harmony and equality. That this is clearly not the case is indirectly acknowledged by the Chinese government itself in many ways. Uighurs, for example, a Turkic, non-Han race living in the largest (though least populous) Xinjiang Province are allowed to have more than one child, a waiver on the one birth policy still in effect for most Chinese. In the year 2000, it is said that 1,000 Uighurs were killed during anti-government demonstrations, and, in the aftermath of 9/11 travel to Xinjiang was restricted. Some may be thinking, well, what about us? Only the youngest U.S. citizens may fail to see the parallels to our own history when in the living memory of many of us there still lingers the scent of smoke from the burning of our inner cities during the civil rights movement. We fought a civil war at least in part over the enslavement of a racial minority within our own borders. We took a large part of Mexico and absorbed it without truly absorbing its population, as any Chicano can tell you, and the story of the treatment of the western hemisphere's original peoples will bear comparison for its tragedy with the mistreatment of any group on the planet.

On the Internment of American Prisoners: IV

Before one can really discuss the internment issue, viz., Gitmo, terror, the Geneva Convention, in any meaningful way, we need to literally go through a glossary of newspeak, so multifaceted and already so deep in its penetration of the U.S. consciousness, that I am sure it would have impressed even Goebbels. The first word in the right wing glossary that requires our attention is "terrorism." Just to get the glib stuff out of the way, the historical use of the word is that terrorrism consists of anything that terrifies the power structure. Think of the long list of terrorists from Western history and you will come up with names like Robespierre, Thomas Munzer, John Brown. One can be certain that the prospect of noble heads rolling will get the attention of the propertied classes. As should be obvious even to a neophyte student of history, the total number of individuals killed by all of history's terrorists would be virtually insignificant next to those who have died at the hands of (we like to think) perfectly rational heads of various states. And the statutary status of the killers is important, since the right has conveniently defined terror as violence perpetrated by non-state operators. You may recall that I asked the question in an earlier blog, "Why weren't kamikaes known as Shinto terrorists?" Robert Pape, whose Dying to Win I praised in that same blog puts it this way: "The Japanese kamikazes in World War II are not normally considered terrorists because they targeted solely soldiers and sailors, not civilians, and because their actions were authorized and directed by a recognized national government." On the other hand, it is hard to see how kamikazes could be called anything other than suicide bombers. Yet, in films like Empire of the Sun, made by Steven Spielberg of all people, we see the depiction of young kamikaze pilots, wearing white silk scarves, clad in glamorous leather jackets and helmets, their handsome young profiles silhouetted by the setting of the sun in a lovely amber sky. They are clearly depicted as national heros. What gives Speilberg license to do this? They didn't, we are told, kill civilians and they had the imprimatur of their emperor. The killing of civilians during WWII was the exclusive right of those "recognized national governments."

On the Internment of American Prisoners: III

By the time an apparatus called Der Heimat--no, sorry, Homeland Security, was being put in place, it was clear that there would be a homegrown reign of terror overseen by Bush, but more particularly by the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perlman cabal. By the way, that word "cabal." Perhaps the one sign of life in the loyal opposition is that they have allowed that word to have currency in discussing the nature of the Bush government. It is a word formerly out of dark conspiracy theories, illuminati stuff. And, of course, given the Bush family's predilection for nonsense like Yale's Skull and Bones, there has been a deluge of internet web sites that will educate you on Prescott (Bush the Father's Father) Bush's Nazi ties, the key role of Bush the Father in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Kennedy assassination. Some of it is actually quite amusing. For example, Bush the Father named his fighter plane "Barbara" when he was a pilot during WWII, then when it was shot down, called his new plane--you guessed--"Barbara II." In a similar fashion, he ran an offshore oil company called Zapata, which lent its name to the insider's name for covert operations in Cuba, "Operation Zapata," and one of the boats used in the mission was--of course--called "Barbara." Ahh...the cosmic lattice of coincidence. Again, we really don't need to devote our full waking hours to tracking down conspiracy theories, (something the right wing would love the left to do--sit on its collective derriere as I am doing at this very moment, rather than acting to change the political fabric of this country), it is what the current political administration does as a matter of public record that should be enough to get them all indicted as war criminals.

On the Internment of American Prisoners: II

It was clear from the very beginning that Bush was a figurehead for the forces that had previously been arrayed during his father's tenure. There was clearly going to be a war since what the Bush forces had put together was a war cabinet consisting of essentially the same cast of characters that had been assembled for the Moral/Military Rearmament Campaign known as Desert Storm. More than likely the dunes of Southern Iraq would once again be trod by U.S. boots. Daddy, (the old CIA preppie-avenger with the pose of a Methodist minister wed to a white-haired matron out of central casting), or probably more accurately, the forces behind Daddy were now back in the catbird seat. You just knew all kinds of hell was about to break loose, but we never imagined... And then, on that beautiful autumnal morning, out of the crystal clear skies blessing the American landscape, all hell did break loose. Now, almost as soon as the attacks occurred, there were conspiracy theories coming out of the woodwork. Did the government plan this? Did they know about it in advance and let it happen? Was this just another Tonkin Gulf? Maine? Lusitania? Pearl Harbor? Just another way to get us involved in a war whose real agenda would not and could not be admitted to? Now, you know, in a sense this whole conspiracy business is just silly. Putting all the minor tactical details of the attack aside, just a review of what is public record on the 9/11 tragedy should be enough to turn the scoundrels out of power. To begin with, let's say it was "bungling" on the part of the intelligence apparatus that allowed the attack to occur. No one has ever been fired for what is clearly criminal negligence. And then the whole nation heard a name few had ever heard before and his picture was posted on dart board all across the nation. Bin Laden. The Bin Ladens, some of the richest of the Saudi oligararchs, were old buddies of the Bush family. As for Sadaam Hussein, (and it was clear his prime position on the administration hit list had just been enhanced), some U.S. citizens could still remember photos taken when he was one of our allies in which he is cordially accepting a bible from none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Usama Bin Laden, of course, had also been a U.S. ally, recruited for his highly religious scruples in the war against atheistic communism. It's really a very old story. Western capitalists blithely allowed a psychotic like Hitler to take power in the highest of mittel European cultures so that he could eliminate the red menace. The plan is, after the hatchet man has done his work, he will meet the fate of all hatchet men and get hatcheted himself. That plan did not work out quite as planned in the 1930s and 40s. Frankenstein's monster has a habit of turning on Frankenstein. We see this now occurring all over the former colonies of both the U.S. and Soviet empires. The author Chalmers Johnson spelled out this process in a book written shortly before 9/11 titled Blowback--which I am pleased to say I read before it became the best seller it would after 9/11. As Johnson makes clear, "blowback" is the name given to the phenomenon of attacks that only appear to have no cause because the causes have been largely covert. Nevertheless, within months of the Bush cabal's putsch into the White House, my country was being referred to as "the Homeland." At least it wasn't "the Fatherland." The last time I had gotten a shock like this was when I looked at front page photographs of our troops fighting their heroic battle in Grenada wearing new helmets that had a frightening resemblance to those worn by the troops of the Third Reich.

On the Internment of American Prisoners: I

I can recall Bush the father pacing up and down the halls of the White House wondering what to make of the imminent end of the Soviet Union, his advisors fretting at his side. The Red Menace had decided to close up shop and not a shot would be fired. No missile ever landed on U.S. soil during the whole of the Cold War, from 1945 to 1991, a period of forty-six years. Unfortunately, the Republicans barely had time to celebrate, since the "read my lips" kid took it on the chin in the next presidential election, and for eight years, a Democrat would occupy the White House. In spite of the rather dismaying behavior of his first months in office, (a health plan the poor strategy of which is best summarized in the fact that it was delegated to the First Lady and an equally mystifying lapse of political strategy in the Gays in the Military campaign), before long Clinton found his real groove...and that was basically to become a Republican in Democrat's clothing. To the right wing, however, this made Clinton even more despicable. He had co-opted chunks of their economic platform, but in the holy wars the U.S. right likes to fight, viz., the jihad against secular humanism and remnants of commie thought wherever they may exist, he was clearly the enemy. Thus, the neo-conservative celebration had to wait eight long years for its mayhem to begin. Its agenda is a long one. It could not allow yet another Democrat to occupy the White House, particularly one so embedded with Clinton. Now, the Democrats had done their best to sabotage the prospect of having another president in the White House by nominating Al Gore and then saddling him with a Jewish vice-presidential candidate, (the plan being, ironically, to carry Florida--at the expense of losing every Southern state including the Gore's own), but U.S. voters found the prospect of an ex-alcoholic, born again Yalie President so astounding that the majority of them voted for Gore anyway. A few hanging chads later, the man who really wanted to be baseball commissioner was doing his presidential strut. The Supreme Court of the Land had chosen The Greater Good.

The Triumph of Doublespeak: Better Red than Dead?

'Building Red America,' by Thomas B. Edsall No. This is not a book written by a hopelessly delusional member of the American Communist Party. It is about those "red" states, i.e., Republican states, and their prospects for the future. How very smug. Readers of this blog may recall that in my posting on September 11th, I wrote of the Republicans having "grabbed the red flag." The brand of conservative "intellectual" whose hatred of communism was--to put it mildly it appears--visceral, just cannot find enough ways to celebrate its humiliating collapse. What a triumph to have rescued a color from their nefarious hands! The trillions of dollars spent on armaments, propaganda and covert operations might have made of the U.S. the Athens on the hill it pretends to be, rather than a land in which, by the government's own estimates, 30 million of its citizens live in abject poverty. President Eisenhower's warning about these guys fell essentially on deaf ears. Those ears have remained deaf to the ongoing social cost of right wing social engineering. Perhaps a little bit of the world we have created got through during the Katrina debacle ("We're Americans, too!") but by the time New Orleans is covered with theme parks, Americans will have resumed their typical amnesia. In spite of all the reasons one could cite for not celebrating the end of soviet style bureaucracy too loudly, these guys see this as one of those rare historical moments when one must seize the day and take every possible inch of territory while they can. This is a counter-revolution suffused with the kind of fevered zeal that led to the burning of monasteries, the melting down of holy artifacts--and three hundred years of the kind of sectarian violence that these same guys now disingenuously ascribe to Islamic fundamentalists. So, conservative America, enjoy your freshly reacquired color. A lot of Amercians would now truly rather be dead than red.

"The Greater Good" Contest 1

A. The Problem. B. The Dilemma. C. Implementation of the Lesser Evil Option in the name of The Greater Good. D. Evaluation Question: Was The Greater Good Served? Okay. Let's try one. A. The Problem: Young anti-war protesters are out of control. We hold the conviction that this represents a real threat to our national security. B. The Dilemma: No legal method we have so far implemented has succeeded in subduing them. Thus, we are forced to consider illegal methods. Much as we hate doing this, it seems we have no choice but to kill a few students in the hope that this will dissuade most students from protesting. Of course, we cannot publicly acknowledge our decision. Therefore, our action must be covert and appear to be coincidental . C. Implementation of the Lesser Evil Option in the name of The Greater Good: Students are shot and killed, others are wounded on two college campuses by police or National Guard Troops. D. Was The Greater Good Served? Send your answer in the form of a comment to this posting. Winning respondents will receive a prize. Isn't this fun?

When the Mundane Intervenes

To all of my loyal following, my apologies for not getting back to my blog, but I had my own miniature version of the WTC dust cloud in my dining room this morning when a good section of my ceiling came crashing down. Such events put life in perspective, I guess. Rather than musing over my new blog site, I spent the day in the company of my building's young superintendent clearing the room for the contractor to come in and restore the integrity of my ceiling. As Brecht once said, "First comes the ceiling repair, and then comes philosopy." (Well, perhaps it was not exactly those words.)

Coming Attractions

0 More on "The Greater Good" including a contest with prizes! 0 Where I was on 9/11. 0 Where I was during the 1993 attack on the WTC. 0 When the loyal, the trusting, the obedient get ugly.

A Poetic Interlude

This is the Chinese poet Du Fu's cottage located in the city of Chengde in Sichuan Province. The park in which it is located is quite beautiful and full of lovely bonsai among other plants. It is this cottage that gives my site its name.

Here is one of Du Fu's shorter poems:


On Route from the Capital to Fengxian...

Behind the gates of the wealthy
food lies rotting from waste.
Outside it's the poor who lie frozen to death.

"The Greater Good": Part IV

Let's deconstruct this picture. To let the horse out of the barn early, I will confess that the first time I saw this picture on the front page of the Daily News, my immediate reaction was--cannon fodder. The face of cannon fodder. "Where do I go to enlist?" I say this with all due respect for the man standing next to the president. I really don't have any idea what kind of man he is. This isn't about reality; it's about symbols. There's the president, just a regular guy wearing a plain old gray wind-breaker, and he has positioned himself next to one of the guys in the trenches, and, man, that guy is just beaming. He looks like he would go to the wall for his commander-in-chief. And he doesn't look like a green kid. In fact, he looks like he's a bit on in years. Loyalty, obedience, trust. Semper fi(delis) is the Marine motto, and it might as well serve for all the uniformed services. Knowing what we know now, the health of that fire fighter might have better served if that respirator hanging around his neck was still over his nose and mouth. The president would spend a few minutes at the site; the fire fighter and his fellow rescue workers would spend hours, weeks and months. They were told the air was safe. It was recommended that they wear their respirators, but unlike the workers at the Pentagon site for whom the use of the respirators was mandatory, it was more or less up to them. Loyalty. Trust. Obedience. Hey, c'mon. People had died here. This was war. We know now that many rescue workers have died and that many, many more are sick and will never get better. What about Christine Todd Whitman? What about the EPA? What about OSHA? The city? The state?

"The Greater Good": Part III

When all of the arguments made by the Bush administration ultimately proved to be baseless, viz., there were no weapons of mass destruction found, there was no direct link to Al Qaeda, there was no rose petal parade into the "liberated" cities of Iraq, there really was only one argument of last resort: the greater good. How justify the death of 3,000 Americans and the injuring of countless more, how justify the invasion of a sovereign nation thousands of miles from our borders, how justify the devastation to that nation's infrastructure and cultural heritage, how justify killing thousands of its innocent civilians and the spawning of sectarian violence and near civil war? The greater good. Again, it is not my purpose here to argue the merits of the argument, it is to look at the nature of the argument being made. "The world is a better place without Sadaam Hussein in power" has become the mantra of the war cabal in Washington. Rarely, if ever, are the policymakers asked to prove this or to provide hard evidence that this is the case. "Better place" is merely a corollary of "greater good," and is, at the end of the day (as they like to say) a conversation closer. Those beyond the pale, beyond the inner circles of decision making, are merely asked to believe, to trust, to obey, to be loyal. Belief, trust, obedience and loyalty are the hallmarks of men and women in uniform. The over 300 firefighters lost at the World Trade Center and the numerous other police and security workers who died took an oath to protect the citizenry, and few, if any, paused to question the wisdom of their actions. We see such men and women as heros, just as much as we see military men and women who risk their lives in the course of fulfilling their roles as heros. But can this ethos go too far, can it expand beyond its necessary sphere and come to represent a danger to the very society it promises to protect?

"The Greater Good": Part II

How do you convince a soldier to fire on a village in which there is a real possibility women and children are living? How do you convince a police officer, and FBI or CIA agent to commit an act that--under ordinary circumstances--would be clearly both illegal and immoral? How do you convince a fighter or a bomber pilot to use his guns, missiles or bombs on territory that may house hundreds, even thousands of civilians? The greater good. The outstanding example of this moral equation, of course, is the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Nagasaki during the war with Japan. From President Truman down the chain of command to the airman who would ultimately push the button releasing the bomb, some moral justification for using a weapon whose devastating power to kill had already been dramatically illustrated only days before must have been present. The greater good. It is not my purpose here to debate whether in fact a greater good was served by using the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, rather it is to demonstrate the power of this rationale, and to ask this question: What happens when this rationale is used so often that we effectively lose sight of our morality?

"For the Greater Good": Part I

I watched "Law and Order: Criminal Intent" last night, and was struck by one of the detectives on the show using the phrase, "the greater good." In the context of the episode, the detective is haranguing a veteran of the war in Iraq to turn in his guilty father with, "The greater good. That's the oath you took. It's the same as the oath I took. The greater good." The phrase struck a chord in me. It helped me to put my finger on an attitude, one might even say an ethos that has been growing in its aura ever since 9/11. I decided that before I wrote down my thoughts on this phrase, however, I would "google it." Nowhere could I find any reference to the phrase as a part of an oath taken by either the military or the police. I had no better luck tracking down the origin of the phrase. I got hits that related to the Hippocratic Oath and to the related phrase, "lesser of two evils," but even a dip into Bartlett's quotations revealed nothing. Perhaps I should write to the creators of "Criminal Intent" to determine what the basis for Chris Nolte's line is. In spite of my failure to find, shall we say, a scholarly reference, I feel I don't want to let escape the opportunity to set down my feelings about what the phrase conjures up in me at this historical moment. Any leads on its origins would be appreciated.

The End of American Exceptionalism

After watching the endless coverage of the events surrounding the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attack including a movie made for television, (shown without commercial interruption!), I was torn by a number of uncomfortable emotions. All those who lost family members and friends certainly deserve our sympathy; the victims were, after all, innocent victims and victims, moreover, of an attack they had no way to prepare for. Thus, to call much of the coverage pious, even overly mawkish, would seem close to sacrilegious. Yet, it was disturbing to also harbor thoughts about how much the day fed into the agenda of the current administration. The film broadcast by ABC seemed a strange melange of expose on the one hand and whitewash on the other. It did nothing to combat our stereotypical view of the Islamic world. The overall message, sadly, seemed to be that we just value American lives far more highly than any others. I could not keep myself from thinking about what a similar day of commemoration would look like in Lebanon five years from now, where nearly a thousand innocents were killed, many of them children. Or, for that matter, what would such a day of remembrance one day mean in Baghdad where some estimate that as many as 100,000 Iraqis have died? And, on an even larger scale, taking a longer historical perspective, who are we to wring our hands over the death of innocents? It was not Islamic fundamentalists who participated in an almost world-wide nightmare in which 60 to 70 million died. It was not Islamic fundamentalists who found a rationale for the death of thousands in two nuclear holocausts. The two world wars were conflicts in which good Christian gentlemen went at one another with demonic abandon and didn't seem to mind dropping hellfire from the skies on not just combatants but the elderly, the women and the children. Yet we are exposed almost daily to endless pontification about the horrors of Islamic terrorists. In one sense, however, 9/11 clearly marked a significant historical change. No longer would the U.S. feel immune to the consequences of its involvements. The luxury of two world wars and a host of foreign adventures (only the most outstanding of which were Korea and Vietnam) fought with impunity, separated by the Atlantic and the Pacific was over. Ultimately, perhaps, the meaning of the loss of the 3,000 lives in the 9/11 attacks will be to serve as a check on American policies drafted with no regard for their possible impact on our own people. Perhaps, as a result of their sacrifice, we have truly become globalized.

Cato's Tim Lynch on Doublespeak

DOUBLESPEAK. I just read Tim Lynch's paper, published by the Cato Institute, in which he takes on the doublespeak of the current administration. Anything at all that is designed to unsnarl official language is welcome, of course, but Lynch's paper seems rather superficial given the dimensions of the assault on language initiated by the conservative movement in the U.S. Perhaps it would be more accurate to talk about the arch-conservative movement. No one would accuse a president like Nixon of being anything other than a conservative, and there are certainly members of the Democratic Party who deserve the label, but the real abuse of language seems to have begun in the Reagan administration. It was during the Reagan years that the then still forming neo-conservative cabal began to take control of the language. My favorite at the time was the use of "right wing" and "conservative" to describe those in the still extant Soviet Union who were on the side of maintaining the Soviet system. Thus, it was bad to be a conservative or a right-winger if you lived in the USSR but a very good thing here. This particular example is a good one, I believe, because it has all the trappings of the genre that now threatens to debase political discourse entirely. What is at work is a kind of psychological warfare designed not merely to confuse the unitiated, but to annoy one's intellectual counterparts on the other side. It is a phenomenon familiar in sports where part of the game is "psyching" your opponent, "throwing him off his game." The visual counterpart that best expresses this in political terms is probably Nixon throwing his arms in the air and throwing off two "Vs" or victory signs with his fingers. "They hate it when I do this..." he was once heard to say. The whole purpose of co-optation, of course, is to neutralize an opponent. The latter day use of "red" and "blue" states provides an example of how the right in the U.S. uses every opportunity to co-opt. There was a time not so long ago when labelling a state a red state would have implied that it was left wing, even pro-communist or pro-socialist. The Republicans have now grabbed the red flag.

Why didn't we call Japanese kamikazes "Shinto Terrorists"? Finally the lie to the doublespeak of the Bush administration and its supporters has been definitively put by the work of Robert Pape in his Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. In his work, he makes a compelling argument against the notion that suicide bombers are "Islamic Fundamentalists." Rather than having anything at all to do with religion or Islam, suicide bombing is a military tactic of last resort (as we saw in the Japanese example during WWI) and it is, moreover, focused and rational. It should be somewhat reassuring to those of us who feel that freedom of expression is at risk in our nation that C-Span broadcast Pape's talk based on his book and followed that talk by a distinguished panel discussion in which the consensus that clearly emerged was in keeping with the real gist of Pape's work, viz., that suicide attacks are a response to the occupation of the Arabian peninsula by the military forces of the U.S. and its allies. It is my hope that each time a know-nothing politician--or anyone else for that matter--uses the term "Islamic fundamentalist" he or she will be confronted by a large number of people waving Pape's book in their faces. In addition to making it clear that suicide bombing is not religion based and not the work of irrational fanatics, the third most striking argument Pape makes (actually more a sharp observation than an argument) is that not a single suicide bomber has come out of Iran. Let's try to remember, ladies and gentleman, the users and coiners of doublespeak don't need to own the language--if we make a real effort to challenge big lies, little lies, rainstorms of lies, disingenuous speech and double talk each and every time we are in their presence.

Can our president possibly be sincere? Is this man so surrounded by handlers and manipulators that we have some bizarre version of a Manchurian Candidate in the White House? Bush's speech yesterday in which he admitted to the use of interrogation chambers beyond our borders was suffused with a breathless exasperation, particularly at the point when he stated, "Why some people would actually have us tried for war crimes!" That may be a shocking notion to the president, his "think tank" and whatever loyal following they still have, but it is a reality waiting to happen. None of the neoconservative cabal's Orwellian and malicious playfulness with language, none of their M.C. Escher logical pathways will ultimately serve to keep them from being tried in the courts of justice. Who in his right mind could argue that the world and the people of Iraq themselves are the better off for our illegal invasion? Sadamm stands trial for the death of a hundred or so of his victims while tens of thousands of Iraqi innocents have been killed in the name of our bald-faced empire building in the Middle East. The Israeli army, fighting as our proxies, uses state-sponsored terror with mad abandon. The Anglo/American/Israeli axis threatens and baits Iran for its nuclear policy, while Israel illegally caches its 225 nuclear warheads and the U.S. encourages India (a nation which is a real threat to kill millions of innocents with its arsenal) to arm itself to the teeth. Always lurking barely beneath the surface is the threat of another attack on the American people engineered by its own government. When the going gets really tough for this administration, an administration which has shown little restraint and a dangerous, mega-adolescent, Ian Fleming-like fondness for covert activities, there will be a real risk for another Reichstag fire. A lot of Americans are afraid of another attack.