Till the last drop

The bombings of Gaza have occupied the news for the past 24 hours or so. Some 225 people killed, most of them innocents of course, the number of wounded is pegged at around 600. Always retaliation. Retaliation, retaliation. Against whom?


Israel has a difficult position, anyone will agree. The country is regularly bombarded by extremists who do not have a hope in the world of changing the situation. In fact, that is not their aim, and Israel's political leaders should know this by now. The idea is to force the hand of the other Arab nations to take a stance against Israel by inflaming the so-called "Street." Retaliation under the circumstances seems ill-advised, especially such wild bombing raids that will do just that, namely polarize the situation. It is also unfair towards the rest of the Palestinian nation and will merely perpetuate this apparently unending conflict.

One can ask, though, what has the USA done in the past 10 years? Nothing. The one nation that really has some clout in the region has been suffering a neo-conservative-evangelical fever that mixes bits of Adam Smith with Armaggedon Theory. To all his other sins, George Bush has added the one of not doing anything to rein in Israel and try to alleviate some of the legitimate Palestinian grievances. Instead, Bush Junior has been gallivanting around the planet like Monty Python's King Arthur. The fact that the Palestinian conflict is a vicious neural spot on the political map only seemed to occur to him in 2008 while he was on a quest for some success in an otherwise devastatingly poor presidency.

People have laughed at Carter for his cutesiness with Sadat and Begin at Camp David. (People have laughed at Carter for many things, but after nearly three decades of the kind of neoconservative bosh, I think some of that a lot of the hyar-hyar has stuck in people's throats ...).

It's the cause, not the symptom
Americans should remember that 9/11 did not happen in a vacuum. The cycle of revenge will continue as Hamas leaders say "until the last drop", meaning until more women, children, innocents are killed. By whom, makes no difference anymore. None. Killing the innocent benefit both sides. The Israelis can continue their terror raids, and the other side, whoever they are, may continue theirs. Everyone benefits, even the arms dealers and manufacturers. But by throwing in its lot with Israel rather than act as a genuine moderator, the USA is putting itself at risk as well, and that is something the American people do not seem to realize.

Meanwhile, it would also behoove Europe to use some of its clout to get the peace process moving again. The best solution is probably money. When people are busy earning a good living, they are less inclined toward violence. And that is where the Arab world could help. If a country can build an artificial island, as some can, it can also solve the Palestinian conflict... Of course, that would imply that the Arab world also had a stake in regional peace, which, apparently they don't. A cynical note: oftentimes, when Israel bombs the Palestinians, the price of oil goes up a little.

Pillar number two

Harold Pinter's death was announced today. Dark plays that focused attention on one of the most destructive human forces: power. Reality or the boards were all one, of course. What else is the stage but a microcosm of the world at large. Where are the clear boundaries? Let us recall the beginning of his most articulate attack on the whole fraud of our political systems that he launched with his grand speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

...And so on.

For the rest of the speech.

Helen Thomas gold medalist for honesty

Press secretaries have to have noses that are guaranteed not to grow whenever they have to play fast and loose with the truth. The three memorables under the Bush admin were Ari Fleischer, Scott McLellan and the current one Dana Perino. I suspect Ari, who attended a liberal arts college (he was a class below me at Middlebury), just couldn't look at himself in the mirror anymore, so the option was either to grow a very long beard or get out. He did the latter, but kept quiet... after all, much of the money to be earned as a groveling bootlicker for America's powers that be is to be found on the right. Trumpet patent idiocies loud and clear over the airwaves or in print, and as long as they support the far right agenda, you will be well endowed. (Bill Kristol is a perfect example). Scotty boy also had pangs of conscience... he kissed and told. Perino... Well, after the exchange above, I think she has earned a long spell in purgatory.

But let us remember... press secretary is a function of the press... Helen Thomas has been the most fearless reporter covering the Whithe House, most of the others have kissed the hand that feeds them repeatedly. Probably for fear of losing their accreditation. On light of the White House Press Corps, the conservative ravings about a liberal media appear as vast and paranoid hallucinations. Which they are, of course.

But it hardly matters. The dead in Iraq are not complaining, George Bush doesn't care either way, and the American public is busy trying to figure out what happened to all that money after a decade of arcane, razzamatazz financial bondage...

Musical breather

The irksome, impersonal virtual world has its advantages... Finding music by contemporary composers is not always easy. The big record companies, with their focus on profit margins are, of course, reluctant to get into the business of composers who might, say, introduce the sledge hammer, grandma's china and a bingo basket filled with Ben Wa balls to the recording studio. But the world of contemporary music is most often a bold experiment in sound and impression and a way to extend the range of instruments... Like the piano... Or is it the dowel's range that has been extended in this version of John Cage's Sonata V?



.... Difficult to perform on an electronic piano...

Shame-storming

Muntader al-Zaidi, unknown a week ago, today, an honorable name in a profession that is only a hazy shadow of its former self.... al Zaidi is the journalist who threw the shoe at George W. Bush, calling him a dog and adding:

"This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

He could have thrown it at all those timorous scratchers for such glorified rags as the Washington Post, the NYT, even the LA Times, who never used the words widows and orphans when writing about Iraq. Especially not in conjunction with US action there. They did not even dare use the word "civil war." No sooner do struggling reporters make the grade, than they drop their ideals like a very heavy bale of hay while the nose sniffs the stratospheres.

Oh, today the editorial boards are opposed to the war, but where were these clowns when the war was being sold? How come so many people the world round knew that the facts were being fabricated? But those wise journalists did not? Those boobs disguising as savvy editors? They were hemming and hawing, afraid that maybe someone would blame the media and just maybe there were WMD. Are they surprised that sales figures are dropping? Who are the real shameless ones....?

George W. Bush, yes. But the fourth pillar of democracy in the USA, the press, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Middle Mind (see Curtis White), they have been asleep at the wheel.

And in fact they always have been. Watergate? That was a fluke and nothing more, believe me. It's like a surgeon performing a successful appendicitis and running around for the next 35 years saying what a great surgeon he is and amputating legs to cure ear aches. During the whole time, the 70s, the 80s, even the 90s and certainly since the neocon coup d'état, these great journalists like Woodward and Bernstein, have been whooping up the status quo, reporting the obvious and never touching the genuinely controversial.

Well, al-Zaidi put them to shame with one swift and decisive piece of action. They are all worrying about whether he has been beaten or not -- again, what could be more obvious -- perhaps they should be wondering at the pain felt by the Iraqi mothers, fathers and sisters and brothers who have lost relatives to American hubris. Voting for Obama has not cleaned that record. Just like voting for Reagan and his Happy Days message did not cleanse the monstrosity that was Vietnam. But don't wait for introspection to suddenly take hold of the American press and the American public. Don't expect GW Bush to suddenly take on human and humane traits. The man enjoys his killing the way some enjoy reading a good book. It's the evangelical in him.

Cheers, al-Zaidi. And thanks.

Lame President Ducks

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2008/12/15/bush_defends_war_in_trip_to_iraq



The headline on the first page of the Boston Globe's URL was perhaps inadvertently hilarious


Bush Defends War, Ducks


We might add, especially lame ducks. It is indeed difficult to imagine a worse presidency. Bush and his cohorts have, from day one, been a venal and lazy bunch, permanently behind the events rather than ahead of them. Entirely forgotten by the press, apparently, except somewhere on the left, is the plain fact that his administration was told that something big was going down in 2001, and they did nothing. The reaction to 9/11 was disaster number two. Lots of Clinton blaming, lots of activism, lots of aggression. Not enough careful examination of the facts on the ground, of the lead-up, of the grievances, many quite legitimate, in the Arab world... hence lots of wasted opportunity. There were those who saw the trap laid by Bin Laden, notably Robert Fisk, who wrote in The Independent:

Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated – it becomes ever clearer – to provoke the United States into just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military is preparing.

The conspiracy theories abound. But they give far too much credit to an administration that has simply been fettered by its extremely narrow ideology. And ideology, like musty old religious beliefs, is all too often a substitute for imagination and plain human intelligence. The ability to look at situations holistically, i.e., from every possible angle is willfully set aside in favor of same ole, same ole, which for most is plain stupidity, for Einstein it was insanity.

And that Iraqi journalist is going to feel the sheer, vindictive response of neo-conservative parochialism.

Lubricious interlude

Today, a mass was held for the late dictator and monster man of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, who died in his bed two years ago after evading justice more or less successfully for years by pretending to be demented or something. Of course, to preside over the killing and torturing of so many thousands, you have to be more than just a little dotty. But Cardinal Jorge Medina held a homily for the General, who, as a good Catholic, made sure that the rich in Chile became richer and that the rest of the economy hit a brick wall. (If this sounds familiar, then remember that Pinochet was the darling of such freedom fighters as Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher and the entire horror chamber of neocons). Under Augusto, anyone raising objections was dumped alive in the Pacific from a flying helicopter after being used as a filament... or shot, or mutilated by some more pious people in uniform in a 20th-century dungeon.



Anyway: Excellency's eye apparently strayed onto some image of Madonna, who was in town, because Santiago is on her somewhat pruriently-named Sticky and Sweet Tour itinerary. Now that the dictatorship has been lifted and some joy has returned to the city, this kind of phenomenon is perfectly legal. Finally liberated from the moroseness of Catholic dictators, young Chileans apparently find her music attractive -- and I suspect her half-century old wiles are somehow energizing. A win-win situation, since Madonna obviously needs to sell more of her "Hard Candy" album (oh, what a subtle title!)

It's all rather innocent. But not for the Cardinal: "The atmosphere in our city is pretty agitated because this woman is visiting and with incredibly shameful behavior provokes a wild and lustful enthusiasm," he told his flock. Medina is entitled to his opinion, of course, but there are two points here that must be taken up with this Man of God.

First, his way of interpreting án eyeful of the American singer suggests that he finds her sexy. If he is turned on by Madonna and given to lubricious thoughts, I believe he should deal with it himself, whichever way suits him as long as he does not break the law. And if other people, male or female, feel some hormonal surge at the sight of the pop star, then so be it.... Maybe they will run home and stirred by the vision of Madonna's fishnets, will make babies. And that is very much the doctrine of the Church, right? The Church loves children, but must we remind the Cardinal, that for the most part children are made in a "wild and lustful" moment of enthusiasm. If nature -- or God for the believers -- had made sex something to be carried out tp the sound of a metronome ticking, the chances are there would not be 6 billion of us on the planet. Why do you have amuses-gueules, or appetisers, please.

(To be honest, Madonna does not interest me musically in the least. I think I can whistle one tune of hers, and the rest all sound pretty much the same. I'll take the Golberg Variations when I go to the desert island. And her version of "in-your-face" sexuality I find about as erotic as being hit with a sock full of wet sand.)


The second point is more dramatic: As mentioned above, it's a free world. So if the Cardinal feels like whooping up Pinochet and dissing Madonna, I guess he, too, is free. The photo on the left, then, is what his world might look like. It's his world, Chile, 1970s... Whoever that man was, let Cardinal Medina be reminded, he was somebody's son, and probably guilty of nothing more than reading a book or listening to the Bee Gees. And by the looks of it, he did not die from hearing Madonna or making lustful love to his girlfriend. Pinochet's secret police, the DINA, left bodies lying around not because they were sloppy, I suspect, but to make sure the people saw them. It's terror in its crudest form. And the head of the DINA, Manuela Contreras, even got an extra dose of prison time this year. Was Medina praying for the black soul of Mr. Pinochet?

And there were thousands more like this unknown fellow; many were shot in the infamous stadium at the time of the coup against Allende, many were tortured and/or killed later on. And each victim had a mother and a father and maybe syblings. And each one had a life, had learning, had love and even nautiness in his or her heart.

All that so the rich, the very rich, the owners of the latifundia, the oligarchs who went shopping in Geneva, New York, Paris, embalmed in wealth drawn from the country, could sleep peacefully, knowing their overflowing coffers were safe. And so the world could get some more cheap copper or some other commodity wrested from the earth by cheap labor. This is the true war and the only war. It is waged against people by men mad with power and money. And that power attracts others, like citizen Medina, because they feel it will rub off. And that is a plague.

What ignorant, self-deluded little men they are. And alas, still very virulent.

Let me give the short version first: I am for the bailout of the automobile industry using tax dollars. And I am for an auto czar and a lot of oversight. We (all countries) should be producing highly efficient vehicles and at the same time pumping sums into innovative transportation, including shipping on rivers, modular trains, electric buses and bicycle paths. And the taxpayer should be invited to contribute for a simple reason: taxpayers bought the cars, encouraging the industry to build more and more of those gas-guzzlers. Had the user said no, the industry would have had to change its ways. And unless we feel something in our pocket, we are not going to react. That is the way most people seem to tick, alas. So the free market neo-liberal approach doesn’t work in the long run, because the various industries ultimately bump into each other like whales in a small pond... You need government pressure, and that pressure must be put on the auto industry and the consumer equally. And incentives are needed for scientists, researchers, inventors…

Men at work. Really.

As the world turns, the financial crisis grinds on. The figures bandied about in particular in the USA – everything in the USA has to be bigger and more spectacular than elsewhere, the country will not stand for less – are especially attractive to the media and to the couch potato, or whatever the news-gobbler is called today. It's dramatic stuff, the thought of a trillion dollars being thrown at investment bankers without oversight is really astounding. We watch it as we would an entertaining show, it affects us only tangentially, like the reports of the global climate changing anthropogenically or of a few more species biting the dust because of our ridiculous profit-driven system. “We.” That is, the killer gene for much of life on this planet. Anyway, the latest objects of our collective loathing are the CEOs of the “Big 3” from the auto industry. They are down in Washington lobbying for funding to pay their way out of their own mess. And they are feeling some heat, but nowhere near the heat of the people losing their jobs and retirements funds.

Take no prisoners
Let us stick to the car problem. The air is thick with pointed fingers. And yes, the car manufacturers are genuinely responsible for simply ignoring the oil shocks of the 1970s and producing automobiles with very little consideration for the environment or for Realpolitik for that matter. Any request to improve automobiles in some way that would make these tools less dangerous to the drivers or the pedestrians, consume less of a highly poisonous substance has met with prima-donna-like drama, threats of redundancies, of shutting down factories, drastic scenarios indeed, if Wagner had been alive, he would have had material. In the early 70s, Jacques Chaban-Delmas tried to get the French industry to make seatbelts compulsory, you would have thought he had asked them to grind up their CEOs and turn them into pâté. Seatbelts came, the auto industry survived... etc., etc...

CEOs of CO2
In July this year, Daimler and the UN held an environmental forum in Magdeburg where numerous wheels spoke, pun intended, including Mr. Ashok Khosla of the Club of Rome, who was perhaps the only one there who took a long-term and social view of the energy crisis. There were several vocal critics of the auto industry, like Jos Dings, director of the European Foundation for Traffic and Environment, who rightly pointed out that the industry has been merely paying lip service to innovation… Then there was the usual pack of dittoheads and industry yesmen, like Ulrich Karl Becker from the ADAC, Germany’s powerful automobile club. This organization has opposed reforms, speed limits, higher taxation on automobiles, in short anything that would in some way get the Germans to rethink their imbecilic love affair with gasoline. The propaganda arm of the industry is the ADAC’s monthly magazine, which is sent to all purchasers of towing insurance. It continuously rants against any effort to cut back driving. When oil stood at around $145/barrel, it was promoting three-day driving trips and big station wagons with far too powerful engines. And the editor, Michael Ramstetter, was coming out with imbecilities suggesting that the high price of oil was not causing people to switch to public transport or carpool. We can wonder out loud what planet these people live on: I read this bilge on the same days that Reuters was reporting on how Americans were switching to other modes of transportation. And a few weeks earlier, I picked up a report on the radio stating that in 2007, already, the use of cars had dropped 7 percent owing to high prices.
In the latest edition, Mr. Ramstetter writes (using the vague German form “Nun heisst es” “Now the idea is to get customers back to the dealerships.” That was an unwitting confession. And alas, the price of oil is way down again, so the automobile fetichism may proceed as usual.


It’s the addiction
But let us not kid ourselves, the automobile industry, with the Big 3 in the lead, are not the only ones at fault: People bought those cars with eyes wide open. And while oil was cheap and jobs apparently plentiful, no one was complaining. I have had several friends who drove inappropriate vehicles for their daily commute (in a city with excellent public transportation), and both explained in detail how a vermillion Alpha Romeo or one of those GI-Joe make-believe heaps was “necessary” to cross town. “Cheaper” was the explanation given by the AR driver, forgetting the huge price tag to buy the thing and repair it. (His transmission froze up one night well after the end of the warrantee).

Exhaust-pipe fetichism
In fact anyone who did suggest that SUVs and trucks were perhaps not the car of choice on a planet with dwindling resources was checked off as either a tree-hugger or a spoil-joy, a parade-pisser. Gas is cheap, burn it. And it’s ours (meaning Western)… Or is it? That is where America has really slacked off. Here is a conversation I had at a nursing facility in Western Massachusetts in January 2003, when the Busharatchiks were beating the drum for the illegal war in Iraq. The setting was as follows: I was having a smoke in the parking lot, and there was a Buick sedan with its engine running. The weather was relatively warm. 10 minutes later, the car is still running and no one was around. I could have taken it for a joy ride, easily. I went in and asked around if someone had left their car running in the lot. A young nurse came over and said, yes, it was hers:
“You might want to switch it off, idling is bad for the engine,” I said.
“I don’t care, I like to get into a warm car.”
“Ok, I understand, but it’s really bad for the environment.”
“I don’t care,” she answered. (And I knew she just wanted to tell me to mind my own business).
“Well, it’s a waste of oil, and that is after all what we are soon going to be killing thousands of people for.”
“…”
Fill in the blanks. Yes, it was nosey of me, but it really shows the attitude well.

Western supremacy
Our Western society never thought that those funny communists over in China or those cute Indians would ever amount to much on the economic scale, and if they did, they would just continue to use bicycles or mangy old buffalo to move around. They wouldn’t dare claim some oil. Not to speak of all those other people on the planet… The narcissism and the related selfishness won out over any logic. Hence, one can speak of a kind of international pathology here. Driving has become like smoking a cigarette or taking drugs. It has become pathological.

Step one
I am not against the automobile. Very useful tool to get around with kids and luggage, etc… But do they have to go 230 km/h? Do they have to have 300 hp under the bonnet? Do they have to be sold as a penis extension? No.

But it behooves individuals to make better choices, to be reasonable, to keep in mind what automobiles really cost. If that were the case, the industry would have never continued building the huge gas-guzzlers that it can’t sell anymore. In fact, within two or three years, automakers would have probably come up with some very nice designs for high-economy, low carbon-footprint vehicles. Being conscious is crucial. It’s crucial to the environment, social and physical. It’s crucial to democracy.

The first step towards totalitarianism is not a concentration camp. It’s hampering critical thought. And if that is not possible, a diet of dumber-than-rocks television programs will do the trick after a while.

---- More about the addiction and the consequences coming up soon----

Happy Thanksgiving:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAOQtp-3b48

Cheers

Step one...

Gradually, this e-Life is becoming extremely drab, the spiritual equivalent of living in some horrid 1960s tenement with low ceilings and scratched formica kitchen surfaces. I wonder what I am doing in it after about 15 minutes. Sure, I adore what you can find on U-Tube -- provided you don't read the mostly arrogant comments by people who would otherwise be doing time at a state institution to protect them from themselves. But there is so much that is perfectly bogus, especially relationships. The sheer narcissism of the Web... I even wonder, who would be interested in this crap that I am writing. Has it received a single visit since I started? Who knows, who cares? I say this quite frankly. It's the posterity thing, a private little time capsule you hope might survive your own demise.

I have had a number of thoughts on the subject since I began inspecting the Web and adding comments here and there. It is a depressing place. I would wish that people would be more social in their immediate suroundings, but there is so much opportunism, somehow the greed-generation is really revealing itself to be a disaster.

I am slowly going to pull out from all those networking sites that serve no real purpose other than fulfill some voyeuristic vision. I'll be cancelling accounts here and there, once I get a URL going. It may take some time.

Two interesting things: This weekend, I found a few exciting recordings of music by Frederic Rzewski, an American composer from, if I recall correctly, Westfield, Massachusetts. I lived in nearby Amherst for 5 years and probably should have used the opportunity to meet him and maybe interview him. I knew the "People United Will Never Be Defeated" variations for piano and was always flabbergasted by their breadth. Perhaps the best way to learn the history of music is to listen to this almost endless work. So this weekend, I found some clips of his Winsboro Cotton Mill Blues: It's modern music used for an incredibly pictorial purpose. And it is in the minimalist tradition, I guess. Of the four recordings (by Arciuli, Ferguson, Wright and van Raat), it is the van Raat I think I prefer. There is something icy in his performance, the dehumanising quality of a cotton mill roaring away is also all the more potent for the camera's poking around inside the Steinway. Best without the image... And kudos to the other three, the Arciuli is the most elegant, Ferguson and Wright are passionate in their approach, Ferguson has the millworkers really hammering out the cotton.... Arciuli: Perhaps a cotton mill in Italy somewhere, with some nice olives and cheese during the break and a little siesta... No, it's not that elegant, it is robust and dark, too... but listen to Arciuli's Beethoven Sonata # 32... it is a very perky interpretation of one of my favorite pieces of piano music.

Here's the Rewski.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJbROXEiwjY

The second little item that caught my eye is an event in Georgia (Caucasus) ... apparently someone took a potshot at Saakashvili.... I am posting (for posterity, before I shut down the MySpace site), my comment on the events of August there... I have made a few corrections, spelling and such...

Monday, August 11, 2008

The war in South Ossetia is confusing. Somehow for the
past 10 years it seems no one even mentioned the place, so it comes off really
sounding like something out of Pushkin, with brave hussars involved in duels of the favors of some genteel damsels. But there it is in the news, large as
life. I've been going through the pics and the reports. As usual, it's a case of
a few men throwing their useless and paranoid weight around, while most people
have to suffer, especially the average families. Children, moms, old people,
farmers eking out a living, the poor...

Sound familiar?

It is the story of wars the world round and through time. I can't quite figure out why the Georgian prez, Saakashvili, wants that dumpy little town so badly that he has to destroy it. Maybe if he should do some bulldozing on a construction site on weekends, that would satisfy his visceral need to rearrange the landscape. Does he believe, or does any Georgian or Russian or American for that matter, believe they are any better than, say, a South Ossetian, an Abkhaz, a Mingrelian, a Gagauz, an Uzbekh, an
Iraqi? If so, they are laboring under a severe delusion.

When we rot by the side of the road with half a face missing and legs turned into pink mist, it makes no effing difference. The worms and wasps don't care. So it would be really nice if people, chiefly men, could stop making life miserable for everyone else.

A constructive thought for Saakashvili: Dump S. Ossetia ASAP, you don't want a
budding democracy burdened down by some cantankerous people who want
independence. If they want to be beholden to Russia, then Go In Peace... That
was the great lesson from Vaclav Havel.... I remember traveling to Slovakia, in 1991:
whenever you spoke to people, they blamed the country's economic troubles on
everyone, from the Czechs and Hungarian, to the Roma (Gypsies), the Jews, the
Poles, the Russians, etc.... Only Slovaks were holy and pure. I think the Czechs are far better off on their own and they should thank Havel loudly and every day for having let the Slovak side of what was once Czechoslovakia sail into the sunset to do its own thing. "

Off my perch

Something is wrong.... I listened to to the following speech by Pres-Elect Obama.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd8f9Zqap6U

and realized that I, like many Americans and other English-speakers, know what PTSD is even without having endured Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam or other traumatic incidents....

Here is what happened... My inner eye kept seeing shoulders pivoting ever so slightly in an anti-clockwise movement. I saw the right arm resting on the lectern the way guys do when they are squeezing in between other guys at crowded bars. I felt slight nausea as I saw Obama's face morph into the Bush smirk -- the one he uses when he is about to shaft that planet... again.... I saw his eyes shifting to the right, questioning his Mysterious Creator (Rove, perhaps?) qwhether his lying was coming across credibly....

And I was about to throw my expensive acer screen somewhere in the general direction of the window screaming "Nooooooooooo!" But I caught myself in time as I realized this was Barack Obama, he was sitting in his chair looking confidently at the camera and .... and what?

He was speaking in coherent sentences. He wasn't smiling while announcing some disaster... He was just giving the skinny on what was happening, the G20 getting together for a nice meal and some hopefully productive chatter (though I personally suspect a public colonoscopy).

Good start.

Relax, folks, we can actually listen to this man without cringing. It's been a long time.

The continuing trashiness....

Truthiness, trashiness, bold and brummagem pronunciamentoes from South Carolina priests...

Anyone who thinks that the election of Barack Obama has taken care of racism and bigotry in the USA -- and in the world, non e vero, Sr. Berlusconi? -- is doing him/herself a colonoscopy.

Let us not confuse being there at the start and reaching the finish line.

I am thankful not to have TV. Having to see the female gasbag from Alaska around dinner time would surely make me anorexic. I found this in the New York Times, probably others have as well...

"What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”" It's a commentary by Dick Cavett

http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/the-wild-wordsmith-of-wasilla/?em

Enjoy...

World War One was hailed as the War to end all Wars, and it should have been thus. Instead, we are still somehow crying over the dead and being mildly romantic about "heroes" and such. The truth is still hardly being told, because we like it that way, we like to be lied to, since we do it to ourselves on a permanent basis. On this day, we should be pulling out our Lyn McDonald books, switching off the telephone and curling up in a corner for some difficult reading... McDonald wrote about the war from the soldier's standpoint, and from the vantage point of close observers of the tragedy unfolding, the nurses who cared for the wounded and dying, for example. Read The Roses of No Man's Land on an empty stomach.

World War One was the epitome of war: The rich and powerful fighting among themselves. On the battlefields, the soldiers and lower officers were not "led" anywhere, they were ordered into the meat grinder to be killed as sure as the sun comes up. The generals and the pols, all of them, should have been tried for crimes against humanity. That applies to those who start wars nowadays as well, our planet is too tight, too close-knit, to afford conflict.

I look at the Congo and wonder where do these imbeciles get their weapons from. And what is their aim, aside from raping, looting, killing, exerting power. Men against the defenseless. Bravo, slow clap. For the profit of armsmongers. Because whoever says arms are built for defense, has his or her head stuck in a place where the sun never shines. Ultimately, they are there for aggression and they will be used for that purpose.

Anyway.... World War One:
There was no heroism, none, the idea was: you got shot up or turned into pink mist for no real reason. Did any of those who profit from the war give a hoot? As a kid, in France, I still saw the old veterans. They had some benefits, a sign in the metro in Paris that reserved them a seat, and they had a few days earmarked for a dismal parade down the Champs-Elysées. Like most men, they just shut up all the time. Actually, there should have been parades of mourning by the mothers of all those kids shot up for nothing but the pleasure of three cousins and warlords. And of course the fellows who earned millions manufacturing phosphorus bombs (ooo, how chic!), phosgene gas, barbed wire, "liquid fire" as flamethrowers used to be called... Take all that useless hardware and multiply its potenty by about 1 million, and you have today. Lesson Learned? Killing makes money.

War is a disgusting spectacle (unpleasant shot, but real), a complete failure of human enterprise, and it should be treated as such rather than be whooped up as some sort of opportunity for heroism. The gloating when it is over is also a dismal spectacle. The damage wars do is not only in the immediate. It runs down the generations, the trauma spreading like some horrible DNA-driven canker. I can track it down in my own family, 90 years on.

As for "just" wars, they don't exist. In my books, there was no WW2, it was just the continuation of WW1. And one more thought before this 90th anniversary sinks into oblivion:

There are no civil wars but ultimately all wars are uncivil civil wars.

The crazy world

I lost my blog. I forgot the password, I even forgot its name. And then, somehow I found it again, quite by magic. And here we are in the midst of an earthshaking presidential election in the USA.

I have written hundreds of comments in fora. But here are some of the main themes, I believe.

First and foremost, the details are far too complex, and anyway, by the time any candidate reaches the Big Office, things will have changed. It makes no sense to discuss the trees, the forest and its quality suffice at the beginning. And in broad strokes, Obama is miles ahead of McCain.

Experience is also, in part, irrelevant. Judgment is not.