17th and Irving

Friday, July 28, 2006

spin: after spending some time at the New York Times

A brief note before I get to what I want to think about right now: Peter Doran, a professor in earth sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago writes in today's New York Times that his research on Antarctica has been taken out of context by the conservitive moron crew that includes the likes of Ann Coulter and the Hannity guy in regards to global warming, while this is about as surprising as the fact that Russia and China are both big, it does once again show how the Plutocracy assumes, so you don't have to, what the truth should be.

It's quite a popular story, the only story emailed more from the New York Times at the moment is about how your yoga mat might have germs. Be careful.

Germs, everywhere these days - little liberal nabobs of negativity.

Another brief note on the piece process in Lebanon and the attempt to figure out what must happen there: the idea that a cease fire is meaningless, which the U.S. appears to hold, undoes their own logic, oddly enough, that a ceasefire is only a desired end if it leads to peaceful solutions rather than simply a brief cessation of violence.

Without a cease fire a peaceful solution becomes more and more impossible, because who is going to want to bargain with Israel now? Who is going to say, "hey, we got some fair concessions here" now? Regardless of the deal brokered. What Arab can support patience when the Israelis are reportedly using phospherous weapons and who knows what in Lebanon (any weapson really)? Rice's arguments seem semi-logical and responsible on first blush or if you're not paying any attention, but not when you read about individual Egyptians buying 20 posters of Hizbullah's Nasrallah and when you see cartoons of Israeli tanks sitting on the Arab map in the "new Middle East" (Rice quoting from the Oslo accords), then quickly it becomes horribly clear how the U.S. stance makes absolutely no sense. It's really Orwellian, not to lean on an over-used adjective, but they seem to suggest that the one thing that might make their stance possible later is impossible now because it's not their stance. If any European or Arab nation secretly supports the U.S. position, as the New York Times strongly suggests, then what they are supporting is civilian lives now for the POSSIBILITY of a peace settlement later, one that will be made in defiance of the people and which will only do even more to create this groundswell against Israel and for Hizbullah and perhaps other Arab groups that support active violence against Israel. I think the U.S. might be thinking, "well, it's too late now for any real sustainable long term peace, so we might as well let Israel take care of as much of Hizbullah as they can." That seems to be the impetus behind Bush's remarks that seem to indicate he's willing to give the Israelis as much time as they need, not just another week like Time supposed earlier this week.

The New York Times argued in their news analysis that the administration is undoing a year's work of diplomatic re-positioning, but I don't see it. Yes, they have managed not to completely alienate the Europeans over Iran, but I think that has more to do with what Iran is than with how we've handled the situation. I believe the same thing about our "handling" of North Korea. When the New York Times is praising how the Bush Administration has dealt diplomatically with North Korea mere weeks after North Korea tested some missiles in the Sea of Japan, then you have to wonder what the hell they're thinking.

It's odd how the failures of an entire world end up being the deaths in the end of a collection of people who are, after all, simply this person who lives on this street, and that person who grew up here and liked this or liked that.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

dupelomacy

Manichaean ideas of good and evil lose their clarity when confronted with the world of screams that is Southern Lebanon but there is Condoleezza Rice assuring everybody that it IS terrorists who are completely responsible for the carnage in Lebanon and Israel and the terrorists are called Hizbullah, therefore efforts to immediately halt the deaths of Lebanese citizens who are innocent of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time aren't necessary.

What she was doing in Beirut is not exactly clear but I can guess a few things based on the previous acts of this administration. First, nothing is as important as to create the appearance of confronting the problem. Second, don't confront the problem, use the problem as an opportunity to assert a matter of policy that will allow the problem you appear to confront to become a larger problem left unconfronted. Third, thumb your nose at everybody that says your wrong, and when you're wrong, talk about how you're dealing with terrorists while everybody else is ignoring the problem you are so bravely confronting by not confronting the problem but instead, actually encouraging the spread of that problem so that you can claim to confront it even more. It sounds like the Marx Brothers but it lacks the panache.

She thanked the Lebanese Government for being brave, which is actually surreal, and then headed down to Israel where she stood by and looked resolute while Prime Minister Olmert pledged to continue on the attacks, Rice added that before the violence can stop there has to be a groundwork for lasting peace.

This is the kind of absurdity that Brendan Behan wrote about, this is the kind of absurdity that buries the child before the parent.

There are millions of Arabs who do not want an Israel, every bomb made in the U.S.A., dropped by an Israeli fighter jet and exploded in a Lebanese neighborhood makes them more fervant. It doesn't matter what the cause is and it doesn't matter if Hizbullah is disbanded, once upon a time Hizbullah was Fatah. Making "lasting" peace a condition for peace talks only further jeopardizes them, for the Arabs who don't want an Israel it makes it easy to figure out what to do next.

In the New York Times Sunday Book Section a book was reviewed detailing the pogroms against Polish Jews returning home after the Holocaust, those pogroms were as bad as the pogroms that consumed the Russian Pale in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Jews who had survived the trains to Dachau and Auschwitz were thrown off the trains that promised to take them home, and now, for many Jews, the spectre of pogrom once again finds expression in the random rockets of Hizbullah and the random suicide bombers who walk into the light of a Sbarro or a shopping mall and rearrange the worlds of the victims.

For the people of Lebanon is this something else? Do they perceive it as something else?

One thing they do perceive, one Lebanese government official categorized Rice's visit as "not encouraging". Is it ever encouraging to talk to the chronically obtuse?

Saturday, July 22, 2006

go home!

Condi Rice is not going to eat any humble pie, she is not going to acknowledge that American diplomacy in the Middle East under the Bush Administration has been an oxymoran and she is not going to actually listen to anything said to her by any of the Arab countries in the region. This administration dictates its reality, but it has never taken notes and it has never reacted to anything that fell outside of its narrow view of the world.

So Condi is out there right now trying to convince a bunch of Egyptians, Saudis and Jordanians to go to Syria and tell Syria that we're ok. Meanwhile we're sending precision bombs to Israel that will, in the next week, be dropped on Lebanon where they will undoubtedly mingle the blood of the guilty with the blood of the innocent in a rubble and dust stew. The Egyptians haven't bothered to send anybody of significance to listen to Condi pull her Colin and what amazes me is she's doing it like she's the angry third grade teacher in a classroom of misfits but we're the ones trying to get a note passed around in the class.

How do so many Americans feel safer with this group of morons representing them?

How can an Arabic country even want to speak for us to Syria with any degree of belief when we've clearly signalled that we're ok with a what? Couple hundred, couple thousand, how many thousand dead Lebanese civilians? Imagine you got a little leaflet that floated from heaven that said, "yeah, you should probably leave, your house is going to be gone sometime in the next week? Take your valuables and wander in the desert." Those are the lucky ones of Tyre, the unlucky ones dawdled a little too close to a truck or lived on the same block as a targeted building - their lives, whatever they were, are no more, and for what? Now imagine you lead an Arabic country where the feelings against Israel and America tower to a furious rage as those bird wings of lives are broken over the rocks of Lebanon on the televisions of your country, how can you afford to side with America?

We are creating incubators for Islamic Radicalism and we have made it the most important movement in the world. If you are marginalized, how important it is to be taken seriously! That alone...

When we eat the humble pie, how much of it will be made with our own blood?

It's the scariest thought, but not for Condi or the Dicks, undoubtedly, it will be somebody else's blood: the bad have always slept well.

Friday, July 21, 2006

various pitfalls

Well, the neocons at the Weekly Standard think we've got to prove we're man enough to Iran and that the suffering that results will be good for us. After all, once again, it's permanently 1938. For a long time this constant resort to the failure of Appeasement confused me, I sympathized with the worry, after all, who wants Hitler?

Still I couldn't agree with it, and would put to the dangers of historical analogy, after all, Hitler was able to rise so qucikly (after years of near irrelevance) because those who were in a position to stop him compared him to various things, people and movements that he was not and therefore, helped him. People are always talking about history repeating itself but this is nonsense. Events are distinct and made up of millions of pieces. Patterns emerge in places but then are subsumed by subsequently occuring events so that only when we look at a part do we see seeming similarities of the whole. Having said that...at some point I was teaching World War One again, a subject I love to teach, at some point and I thought, 1938 hell, this is all shaking out much more like 1898, 1900, when the forces of various programs led by the plutocratic idealists also held sway over much of the world. How else to explain the delusional fantasies of Cecil Rhodes's deepest Africa or other European actions in Africa, Asia and just about everywhere else and how compatible those various beliefs are with the beliefs of the plutocratic administration led by Bush and Vice?

Also, this makes sense because imperialism unleashed a vision of the world that has become pervasive and hard to shake, because to shake it is to confront the darkness of our own cultures. To anybody that's examined Conrad, this should come as no surprise. This vision suggested that as we exploited those weaker than us, we would elevate them in spirit and show them that our way led to the light of salvation if they would just cooperate and let us dictate to them what actually was.

The idea that we are instruments of salvation is beguiling and gives us the confidence to look beyond injustice or to interpret it as something allowable because it is part of a larger movement that is God's Plan. Other people's suffering or unbelief, regardless of the cause, after all, allows us to become missionaries of God's Love and God's Will. This argument is used everywhere seemingly, at the moment.

Imperialism, likewise, suggests that we can invasively make changes, and as long as they are done in the spirit of our beliefs, these changes we make to others will benefit them. These beliefs can be religious, and they can also be brought about by ideas of what our culture stands for, what our country means and other nonsense that allows us to justify our violences as the spreading of peace, economy and community. As in the late 1800s and early 1900s, actions create reactions, and reactions create reprisals, and reprisals create revenge and revenge creates fury and fury creates the the law of the jungle as practiced by man. Wherever we look, there it is: the massings of anger.

In the early 1900s, as now, there were plenty of skirmishes, even some pretty big wars (Russo-Japanese and Boer Wars for instance - the American incursion into the Philippines), and tensions rose over the competitions of national feeling, the desire to control how the world's prizes were divvied, as the world armed itself to the teeth, and as nations counted their friends and their enemies, war came because the dialectic of war had been entered into.

And if we are to talk about appeasement and its dangers, should we not talk about the failures of historical analogy that preceded and drove that appeasement and take a long, hard look at how much Iran has profited from the American actions of the last few years and should we not look at the brushfire of radical religion everywhere in this world, including Washington D.C.

And yet, there is another precedent that would be interesting to explore, cheaper and perhaps more useful. In the late 1940s George Marshall and company devised the Marshall Plan, a massive aid program to rebuild Europe and contain the spread of communist sympathies in the countries we counted as our friends and satellites. I believe that to exit from the dialectic of war, it would be helpful if the schools that most Lebanese and Palestinian children went to weren't run by Hamas and Hizbullah. I believe that increased cultural exchange and interaction would also be necessary, the United States should be included in this increased cultural exchange and attempt to play a central role in the development of peaceful enterprises. We should believe that peace is stronger than the acts undoubtedly arrayed against it by the many forces of hate. Down the path we are on the fires will only grow more fierce.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

storms

The Cubs lost again last night, 4-2. They continue to sit 20 games under .500 and all year speculation about whether and at what point they should fire Dusty Baker has swirled, yet Baker continues to manage and the Cubs continue to lose and make goofball mistakes that bring an immediate sense of nostalgia to anybody that grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s when players like Ken Reitz and Mike Lum paraded the grounds of the dingy and aging Wrigley Field to mostly empty stands while Dick Tidrow and Ken Kravitz glumly threw up offerings to other, more competent teams.

There was no team less competent than the Cubs and I worshipped Dave Kingman and thought Ivan de Jesus was underrated.

De Jesus slugged .233 in 1981 and was second in plate appearances and at bats for the Cubs that year. Now we have another de Jesus and his name is Neifi Perez.

The other day the Cubs pulled off something not even the 1981 Cubs were able to do, they gave up two grand slams in an inning. That inning they gave up 11 runs and a game they had once been winning 5-0 was lost 13-7. In true Cubs fashion, the grand slams by Cliff Floyd and Carlos Beltran were divided by a David Wright two run shot. Todd Walker tried to take the blame, but once again you couldn't help but notice the hand of Baker placing his pawns in the path of the rooks and bishops the Mets lined up. Why would anybody, in a game that, at that moment it occurred, you were winning 5-3 with one out in the sixth inning, would you bring in your worst reliever with runners on base and your four best relievers, that you paid untold millions to just sitting there? Is that Todd Walker's fault?

And the constant grousing about what Todd Walker can't do when he's been one of the best hitters on the club and has been willing to go wherever the Cubs put him has been nearly criminal. Meanwhile Neifi Perez, until very recently when his awfulness has reached atomic brightness that can be seen even from outer space, received at bat after at bat. For Neifi they shouldn't be called at bats, they should be called weak grounders. The Cubs off the record complaining about Walker is kind of like the slob complaining about the messy couch but it's consistent with a regime that has no idea at all how to construct talent in any meaningful way. Witnessing their attempts to build any kind of team following a coherent philosophy is like watching a dog with Legos.

When the Cubs make some kind of move, occasionally it has some utility and you think, wow, these guys are figuring it out, but then they do something so asinine you know that it was kind of like a monkey making a sentence, the next line will more than likely be nonsense. Such was the case this off-season, they had suffered through a couple seasons of Nomar Garciaparra being injured and decided he wasn't worth a risk anymore. Better not to give an incentive-laden contract because hey, fool me once right? Some Cubs fans here might protest, "well, remember we had to see if Ronny Cedeno was the real deal," please remember then that the Cubs wanted to give Rafael Furcal tens of millions of dollars. The Dodgers were lucky enough to get Nomar but as penance, they ended up with the fruits of Furcal. Nomar is batting .345.

Furcal, who the Cubs wanted, has seen his performance falter, though he's had a decent last month, kind of.

If you have a Cedeno and you want to see what he can do, but you want to try and win, why not sign Garciaparra, who will probably miss at least some time with injury, and he has, and then have Cedeno there to spell him. Cedeno will still get enough playing time not to regress and might actually develop better in such a situation. WIth the Cubs it's sink or swim, with predictable results.

And what is clear from all that is that the last thing the Cubs should have been wasting their off-season on was trying to sign Rafael Furcal. It took luck to keep the Cubs from throwing even more money into this pit of listlessly played baseball.

And then there was the Juan Pierre deal which the Cubs made because they never figured out how to work with Corey Patterson, who has had an excellent year in Baltimore after the Cubs fussed, fidgeted and complained, again, about what he couldn't do, for the last few years. They gave him chances to succeed, then they kicked at him while he was out there and failed, yet again, to help develop him as a player. In the end they punted him for basically nothing and then gave up two excellent pitching prospects and a serviceable pitcher in Sergio Mitre for Pierre who replaced Patterson. It was bad on both sides and in the end they went backward and backward.

I think this is one reason the Cubs end up with amazing players surrounded by useless ones. They have no idea how to develop a player, but if a player comes who's so good it doesn't matter, even they can see that once in awhile. How do you fuck up a Zambrano? You don't - although the Cubs at one point seemed to think his future was probably as a reliever.

The team is run by apologists who fail to maximize what player talent they do have because they don't want to risk being put up for criticism by a media that appears to think baseball is still being played in the dead-ball era.

The morons that cover this team glory in little things like hitting behind the runner, bunting and the stolen base. Manufactured runs gleam like fools' gold to them, while the three run homer, unless hit by the elegant and wonderful Derrick Lee (and I mean that), are eschewed, as if they had been hit by some fat man with a beer in his hand at a 16" tourney. They spent so much time talking about Todd Walker's errors in the Mets game that you would have thought he hit the Mets homeruns, and at least one of those errors, the one Beltran reached on before later hitting his grand slam, would probably have been an infield hit anyway. The ball was hit slow and Beltran was flying, after all, unlike the Cubs, he had a game to win.

It's painful to watch the Cubs wallow so miserably, there's Zambrano out there, seemingly oblivious to the negative nabobs who surround him, when he pitches there's some transcendence, it is the assertion of poetry and exhuberance that this game continues to give to the soul.

And then there's Maddux, the greatest pitcher of his, or any, time. How does one even begin to explain him? That's for another time. Sometimes he has seemed to me the lone man, surrounded and beset on all sides (after all, he is a Cub), but as a pitcher he is pitiless.

They deserve better. This team is embarrassing.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

heat

Well, the shit's really hitting the fan in Lebanon but let's talk about really important things: House Republicans want to make sure the Pledge of Allegiance will be free of pesky Consitutional challenges by making it impossible for Federal Courts to rule on the Pledge's legality.

That doesn't create a dangerous precedent.

Why on this green earth would anybody create a bill of such nonsense? There is no attack on God greater in this country than the blanket oppression of the poor and working class and the unelected president's war in Iraq. Meanwhile, House Republicans want to make sure that Evangelicals know that old God is going to be protected, by them.

Does God need protecting? Does perhaps the child of a single mother growing up in East New York need maybe just a little bit more protecting? How about that 19 year old kid from West Virginia just going back to Iraq for his third tour of duty? Might he need a little bit more of God's help, our help and anybody's help, than the Pledge of Allegiance does?

260 morons in the House ruled that one branch of government should be allowed to put restraints on the Constitutional duties of another branch, it's another proof that this society has passed on from democracy into a nether state of something else. This something else is mostly plutocracy and some weird pseudo-philosophical idea that the free market as it exists in America should be the blueprint for government to follow.

Meanwhile, Lebanon shudders.

Tyre, one of the larger towns in Lebanon, has been hit harshly and that has been particularly painful for me because Tyre has always been one of those magical places for me, a kind of touchstone for my historical imagination. Heroditus visited Tyre and wrote that it had been founded somewhere around 2750 B.C., it's conquerors include Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Marmeluks and finally the Ottomans. Like Palermo, Tyre's beauty, its importance and its perseverence have been proved by the numbers of its conquerors. Alexander transformed the city in his seige of it, after seven months he could not conquer the island that was much of Tyre so he built a causeway to it and finally was able to topple its walls; Tyre's most famous voice perhaps belongs to William of Tyre, who chronicled the Crusades and wrote much on Peter the Hermit. He was also responsible for discovering of Baldwin IV, the boy who would shortly be king of Christendom's Kingdom of Jerusalem, that Baldwin was leperous. William's rises and falls in political and religious fortune hint at the labyrinths of conspiricies and fates that seem to define the city.

The city is now crooked teeth of fallen buildings and burning trucks.

There is a lot of talk of assigning blame and of what to do with the militant Hizbullah, but what is scariest is the steadily eroding support for peace in the populations of Arab states more willing to practice some measure of diplomacy with Israel.

Regardless of what happens, what seems certain is that moderate Arab states like Jordan and Egypt will have lost some needed prestige and Iran will be the happy recipient of the gain. It's hard not to see Iran's hand in all that's happening, and in their actions, they've put pretty much everybody besides Russia in an uncomfortable place.

Bush chews on a buttered roll and talks about Assad and Syria putting pressure on Hisbullah, but as usual he's talking around the real problem. While some have argued that Iran has played a muted role n this crisis, it's not difficult to imagine that Hizbullah needed at least tacit support before kidnapping those two Israeli soldiers, and while the other countries in the Arab world have called to rein in the spectre of violence, Iran has extolled the virtues of fighting against the "Zionists".

So there's the possibility of another intifada as well.

Here the rain has just started, it had been threatning to for hours, even half-starting. The air felt alive with occasional rumblings of thunder and half-hearted flickers of lightning; all afternoon it was dark and the wind would come to sudden life and then a stillness and the sounds of cicadas would be brought to a height and fade, everything rising and falling, the afternoon stretching out like a spilled drink. Now suddenly, the storm has broken from the leash, just before the dawn.

I haven't been able to sleep tonight, a dissatisfaction in my soul of some kind, a restlessness like one of those unassuming Poe characters occasionally got.

I'm off to look at the storm.

Monday, July 17, 2006

the new map

They were like this with Nixon too. One of the odd things I have always wondered about was why people believe the Republicans are for limited government. If you ask self-defined Republicans what they believe in one of the first phrases to jump from their mouths is "small government". After all, the Nixon, Reagan and Bush Junior administrations have all been about completely unlimited and very large government.

Wire-tapping, price fixing, enemies list, illegal courts and extraordinary rendition, secret arms sales, break-ins, throwing journalists in jail and intimidation of journalists, corporate welfare both in terms of huge tax cuts and in terms of massive defense spending, attempts, mostly successful at court-packing with idealogues rather than serious jurists, this has been anything but small government.

But you throw a few phrases around, project an image and it's amazing what people will think.

I think there are two really big reasons that people tend to identify the Republicans as defenders of limited government even though they are the very opposite of that definition.

First, the Republicans, running on this ticket have had more success in national elections than, until recently, in congressional elections, therefore, they have pressed their advantage in the electoral branch to maximize what political power they have. Having now had not a small success in these congressional elections they have failed to change their mindset and instead have adapted and adopted to this "the president is always right and it's patriotic to support the president" nonsense because it's what they've been developing since Eisenhour. That's why the Monica Lewinsky scandel was exactly what they needed and why it resonated so loudly in Republican corridors during the Clinton presidency. They now had reason not to support the president (who is always right) because he had disgraced the office and was "unfit for command" and thus they could avoid looking too obviously like hypocrites; having in essence developed a cult of personality approach (and Bush the Elder was always only lukewarmly supported because he failed to cultivate this approach to leadership the way Nixon, Reagan and afterwards The Younger did), it was more important to tarnish character than policy in trying to recover and solidify their base (especially for fund-raising).

This is not to say that no reasons existed to oppose Clinton's policies, from either side of the aisle. The 1996 Federal Communications Act that he so championed is one of the worst pieces of crap ever to come from this government and his failure to enact new healthcare legislation was a failure born of amazing arrogance by those he allowed to take the helm on that issue. Only on the second issue were the Republicans in any opposition, citing cost, philosophy and mostly resorting to labeling and name-calling in their opposition. Sadly, their actions during the health care debates, dumbing down the debate, avoiding real issues and defending the rights of the richest four or five percent of the country in the name of the middle class only set the blueprint that they used so successfully in 1994 and again in 2000, 2002 and 2004. On the other hand, it's safe to say that on policy, Clinton was more successful, more knowledgeable and more prescient than the current president, but that has nothing to do with Republican perception of leadership.

I have already touched on the second reason that the Republicans have managed to define themselves as exactly what they are not. Neither party is for small government, but the Republicans have been quite successful at defining where big government exists. It doesn't exist in the defense industry, doesn't exist in writing legislation that restricts competition and maximizes competitive advantage for the huge corporations who usually have a hand in writing the legislation, doesn't exist in creating a war without justifiable reason, no it exists in student loans and grants, it exists in WIC and estate taxes, it exists in the activist judges continued support of constitutional protections for flag-burners, abortionists and the gays. The Republicans have managed to make voting for them a kind of referendum on cultural issues rather than actually about any policy.

Vote for us, they say, and the gays won't make a mockery of marriage having orgies at discoes in New York and LA, the immigrants and the various coloreds won't be sitting around smoking crack, having babies and collecting your money and loose girls won't be having abortions every five minutes because they couldn't keep their legs crossed. Vote for us and you will have the America you grew up with. Meanwhile, they have advocated torture and the breach of fair trial.

But now, in the wake of 9/11 that idea of the America you grew up with, whatever it actually was, has amazing resonance. Nobody wants this world of potential falling beams and now two very large beams have crumpled back to earth, sending souls leaping from their sides. In terms of images, no image has helped the Republican cause more than that image of those two towers sinking into the hard rock of Manhattan's Financial District, any image of Guantanimo Bay pales in effect for most Americans. That a Republican president failed to acknowledge the coming crisis of 9/11 at any point until the afternoon after the morning of 9/11, that his response has completely failed to make accountable those people who were responsible for 9/11 and that his policies have only had the effect of making it more likely that more 9/11s will occur and that those same policies have taken us farther away from that previous America does not matter in the referendums held since then. What matters is that people feel safer with Republicans because Republicans appear to support more strongly the world that existed before 9/11. Many people who supported Bush cited the idea that they felt they felt safer with him, an absurdity, but that's the point. They felt safer with him because he represented not safer actions, the opposite in fact, but more importantly, he represented an America that would hold onto values that seemingly had no relation to this new and uncertain future. And he also was the president, and you support the president in a crisis, that's being a good American; there are no Monica Lewinskys to drag foolish words from his lips and make him look "unfit for command". The image he has projected, a man clumsy with words, working with his hands on his ranch, those have been carefully orchestrated traits and actions (along with many others) to send a message to those voters who pick up on images more forcefully than they do matters of policy, that this is a man who will fight for their idea of what America is. When it comes to matters of policy, his message has been much more muddled than it has been on projecting what kind of personality he is. This image was amazingly successful up through the 2004 election and even into 2005. Unlike Reagan, the confluence of world events has undone him, unlike Reagan, he is largely responsible for these events.

Many strategists have argued that values actually did not tip the scales to the Republicans in the presidential race and up until now the Congressional races held since 9/11. I believe this is wrong. The pollsters who have come to the conclusion that they initially misidentified a key component in the Bush victory in 2004, as well as the continued Republican hold on Congress, actually were right, but they failed to identify the marriage of values to image, allowing people who have been adversely affected by Republican policies to more easily able to latch onto one issue, one value, or one image to justify their voting choice. How else to explain West Virginia or Southern Ohio? How else to explain Florida?

Many Americans are increasingly finding solace in what they are not, rather in what they are. And this has impacted how they vote and what they choose to identify as key reasons to vote a certain way. It may be less flattering to say of these voters that they are also slightly turned on, in terms of interest of course, by issues like homosexuality, abortion and deviance and law. Though the attempts at authoritarianism have failed miserably to protect Americans or their rights, a bunch of thugs who look like dads and grandpas have had tremendous success on projecting these images. But as Wallace Stevens wrote, "not ideas of the thing, but the thing itself". Anyway, there was a man for you, old Wallace.


a young philosopher in Hartford - and an amazing poet - Wallace Stevens

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

getting ready to perambulate

So why do I suddenly feel that the CIA will be taking over the interrogation of all dangerous prisoners?

Well, just at first blush, they don't get any mention in that little White House Directive that said the military would, after all, be following that Geneva Convention, and I don't doubt it. As a matter of fact, I imagine sometime in September or October that Guantanimo will be thrown open to the press and damn if the prisoners won't have their own little mosque and some decent grub.

Not too good, don't want to desert the base by offering dessert or even fruit cups, but hell, nobody ever got too upset by seeing a prisoner eat an apple.

"The Base", that phrase, ironically enough, is thrown around when discussing Republican attempts to hold onto their iron-fisted grip on power and it refers to the "values" voters who apparently believe posting the ten commandments in courts and keeping the gays from marriage is more proof of values than say, not torturing people and making sure that all populations in this country are served by decent health care and protected from the catostrophic economic effects of sudden sickness or injury (just to start...). Joe Lieberman is finding out the hard way that there's a new base, and like all dinosaurs he's big and ugly from the perspective of power to bear, but slow to react or act in any way that acknowledges that things have changed.

And the new base forming on the Left, half-in and half-out of the Democratic Party is willing to stake control of the Senate on this race because their support for the Democratic Party is so tepid that they're not too worried one way or the other who owns the power between the two parties.

I don't know if this is the wisest idea, perhaps letting the dinosaur huff and puff a few more years is equal trade to make sure that the Democrats can stamp out a good many of the Decider's decisions for the judiciary. Perhaps force some investigations and etc. Maybe they could spend a little less time voting against flag burners.

On the other hand, it's not like Hilary Clinton, that bastian of the Left Dinosaurs did anything but support that and Joe Lieberman is such a moron, and so distasteful, that sending a message of accountability to the politicos who have offices on the Hill might be nice; a hard slap to at least one of the hands held out for a hand-out from the deep chests of antithetical interests might be instructive.

And getting a politician on the Hill who rose in such a way might encourage more of a revolt elsewhere. Anywhere at this point. Here, in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, where I'm spending the month of July, things are just fine as far as most people are concerned. Water the lawn, mow the lawn, fertalize the lawn, that's pretty much the rhythm. Meanwhile, a child born 20 miles from here, in Chicago, is three times as likely not to see her first birthday and if she survives she is around eight times more likely to suffer from lead poisoning.

Monday, July 10, 2006

the Italians are no champions

"How could he let his team down like that and not be focused on the win?"
"Would Michael Jordan do that with a championship on the line?"

Two good questions asked by friends while watching the World Cup, but I don't give a fuck, Zidane is brilliant, the Italians are weasels. Zidane has been provoked before, earned many a yellow and a few red cards in his career, including during important games, this was something worse for him and for those of us who have gloried in his brilliance. This was a setting of a sun obscured by smoke, clatter and disquiet.

Flip Bondy, that moron of the sportsdesk, suggested that Zidane is a thug, a genius who, "as we all know" has the "problem genius has, which is that it lies too close to madness". Or some nonsense like that. Reductive and idiotic, as most such pronouncements will be.

Zidane is no freak. No hot-head. Never been arrested for hitting his girl or getting in a fight at a diner, or any of the other sad et ceteras that mar football and baseball. Never cut off his ear. Unlike the Italians, he has never been accused of being in the fix. No, he is the rarest of things, a poet. Look at his play, so precise, so sound, so exact and so beautiful, with an unerring sense of tempo - never have I seen such balance in sport. A thug? No, that's somebody who looks to provoke, to shift the balance from competition to aggression - an instigator. If you win not on your strengths but on another's vulnerability that lies outside the zone of competiton, then many will refuse to call you champion. Instead, I can only call the Italians opportunists.

Many, if they bother to read this, will disagree with me for saying this, but I don't care. If Zidane was provoked, and he most certainly was, you can talk all you want about the mental part of the game and the keeping focus or et cetera all you want - it's bullshit. If the game is all that matters then it is also all that matters in the measuring - on that then, Italy would have no prize. You cannot say the same for Jordan or the Bulls. Can you imagine asking of Michael Jordan what ethnic slur he used to get a player out of his groove? Or ask him if the constant elbowing and nipple tweaking was what put the Bulls over the top? Nipple tweaking. Sure, Zidane should be above being taunted about his Algerian heritage, should be above the constant elbows the Italians rained upon him and the nipple tweaking as well. After all, his game has nothing to do with that drivel, his game is the poet's verse, the composer's tempo. Why resort to more vulger tones and shades? Why abondon the beautiful for the prosaic? The game is not all for Zidane, it's that simple. Perhaps the game was all for Jordan, who knows? But this much is true, it took the Italians insults, wheedling, and harassment to "win" the World Cup. To degrade yourself for victory is to lose the victory its meaning. Nipple tweaking. If you need to resort to a constant stream of hate and nipple tweaking to achieve victory, just take it, set fires in celebration and leave.

A friend of mine asked me if Jordan would ever give up a championship to defend his own honor? No, I replied in a text message, but so what? Without honor, victory is meaningless. As much as I love Jordan, and I do, Zidane to me represented something deeper, if both of them with the distillation of process into art, then Zidan's distillation was more complex, less about the black and white of victory and defeat that drove Jordan so and more about the music that makes the whole thing.

The saddest thing about this World Cup is that a poet of the beautiful game resorted to the mundanity of violent response too often inspired by hate, insult and tawdry ambition. WIthout his poetry Zidane is simply one of us, another guy getting angry at somebody on the highway who's cut him off. Zidane is better than that, the Italian "Champions" are not. Any libation from that tarnished cup will be bitter, and if drunken to the lees, fatal. For Zidane, the bitter aftertaste will be the knowledge that when it was most necessary, he ignored what was through him, the music of the spheres.

Friday, July 07, 2006

annoyed, catty

Drove back to Chicago today. It was a pleasant drive, save the last fifty or so miles of Pennsylvania, which are always a slog.

So, I get home and check the baseball and news, and what's there? some shit-head writing about how it would be terrible and send the wrong message to her fragile daughters (and by proxy others, I suppose/she supposes) if J.K. Rowling kills off ol' Harry...meanwhile little things like North Korea playing erector set and Iraq devolving into My Lai (aka Pinkville) along with another explosion in oil prices and inflation are becoming a real concern for some outside Dreamworld. For the first time in a few weeks, I wrote a letter doomed to be unpublished save here - I'm sure you can find the article I'm responding to reprinted in full somewhere, or email me for a copy of it...how I hated it! I stereotyped a little, the Park Slope brigade of parents...but they don't care, they're rich and I'm not:

To Whom It May Concern,

Your new columnist, Judith Warner, is terrible. I will not read her column again. Ever. Not even for money. Why do you publish this when there are plenty of intelligent people out there who could write something off the cuff better than this "oh what a complex and frightening world for my daughters...and ME, a gamely battling mother!" spew.

The last thing I want to see when I open the opinion page of the New York Times is some puff peice about what a crazy world it is since 9/11. Really?

I hadn't noticed.

Then, to top it off, in this column which stinks of privilege, Warner goes on some inane rant about what J.K. Rowling should do in the final Harry Potter book, or so I deciphered, it was kind of sketchy. Was she demanding, pleading or just being a typical overbearing Park Sloper who knows best? Why doesn't she write her own books for her daughters then? They could be about super-heroes who always win in the end and everything is better than it was ever before! Really, there should be little lobbying in art (especially if it comes unpaid or unasked), if Michelangelo wants to carve in ice, let him, if J.K. Rowling wants to make a martyr of Harry, well, Harry (like Little Dombey for Dickens), is from her heart, her imagination and owes his flesh and blood to her labors; if Ms. Warner wants to bring Pollyanna back from the deep-freeze, I'm all for her rolling up her sleeves, she could enlist the help of Mr. Snow, the current administration's spokesmen. Or she could just rip out the pages in her copy of the book, if the feared event that can't be named comes to pass. Regardless, what world is she in to say that a work of fiction must necessarily be something or threaten the worlds imagined by children?

Warner's rules of fiction for her daughter, who was terrified of narrative fiction (!), were dispiriting. Most of the great books for children are not so simplistic as she dreams, sadly, some owies are bigger than any band-aid and sometimes rising against will have to suffice, because rising above is not in the cards (Louis Lowry's Number the Stars, for example, or if she venture into the terrifying world of non-fiction, a particular diary). Witness even in the Great Brain series, bad things sometimes happen and there's no going back.

Just like the Election of 2000 and 9/11.

Other not-so-simplistic narratives for the young reader that Ms. Warner will want to shield her daughters from include the powerful StarGirl by Jerry Spinelli, A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck and, of course, Charlotte's Web by the amazing E.B. White. Children have the ability and the right to know that the world is more complicated than winning and losing, and also of being exposed to new ideas, not always positive, about the world. Innocence is not spoiled by knowledge, it is spoiled by lies.

Anyway, please try something else on the editorial page, anything! Take a page from Dave Eggers and interview people in odd places, like his Voices of Katrina. Have something written by a disaffected school teacher. Draw pictures. Anything is better than this Newsweek-worthy schlock. And tell Ms. Warner about this hero out there who faces bad people and always wins, her name is Nancy Drew.

Whatever it takes.

best and warmest wishes,

Andrew Decker

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

billy wilder

The air conditioner broke at Time Warner Cable and everybody was grumpy. Everywhere I looked on the third of July I saw girls crying on boys' shoulders and in the Time Warner Cable office this old guy held onto a box and over and over again, wiped the sweat off his bald head. It was moist in there. Took an hour and fifteen minutes to give them the cable box, the remote and the internet router, tools of the modern apartment, and then out the door and up to the Apple Store on 5th Avenue.

That thing is underground, it has kind of a Louvre thing going, people could take the stairs but they were waiting for the elevator and blocking the stairs. A flow problem. New York City is one big flow problem.

The trains have been working relatively painlessly on the plus side, it would be almost boring but everytime I seem to get on a train there's a crying couple, everybody's self-conscious at those moments. Why is she crying? Is he a jerk? Has something terrible happened? What? The whole drama and there's no program.

Today the United States celebrated its independence from England, I stress the last because in terms of independence, most of our elected officials seem about as independent as the fingers from the hand taking the pay-out. The latest sham anger at the press is only the latest in a disturbing and disgusting effort to make dissent the scapegoat for the sins of this administration.

I've skipped fireworks, which I love for any reason, for the last few years because it's hard to celebrate our country's existence when we're killing tens of thousands of innocent people for no reason really, except that our president and his vice have certain ideas about the world leading them to the conclusion that it's not murder if you can call the victim a terrorist. That fifteen year old girl who was raped, had her body lit on fire and was killed with the rest of her family certainly might have been a terrorist, she's from the right neighborhood and she makes the right amount of money to fit in our conception of terrorist. They also suffer from the delusion that this is a democracy because they held a vote...you can see the logic.

Or you can see its absence anyway.

I didn't suffer or declare a hunger strike though, I watched a couple Billy Wilder films at Film Forum. One directed, one just written with Howard Hawks directing - Howard Hawks is no slouch. The first, directed by Hawks, was Ball of Fire, which was a lot of fun, it was also, besides the convivial nature of the collegues, a perfectly accurate depiction of the academic world as far as I could tell. Barbara Stanwyk was perfect, as she always is, always the suggestion that she's the smartest one there...

The Major and the Minor was also a lot of fun, a kind of accidental Lolita made out of a grown woman put in a military school - a fish out of water like Kool Aid Man at a wine tasting. It really was fun, the spectre of World War II about to be played out gave it an odd feeling of poignance.

Billy Wilder is so wonderful because there is no pretension in his work at all, he really focuses on the story to almost an insane degree, the best example is his handling of Double Indemnity. One of the problems I have with James Cain as a writer is he tends toward moralization, but in Wilder's hands the story, retaining all the sense of nemesis that is everywhere in Cain, veers from condemnation (you can point to Barbara Stanwyk's character, but even in her last scene there's no sense of justice being done, only a certain path followed to one of its natural conclusions) toward curiosity, and this allows the last scene between Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson (who is always amazing) to be one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. Wow, what a scene!

There are no scenes like that in the movies I saw today, but there are some amazing moments - any moment Barbara Stanwyk turns on the seduction is a moment to really sink into and watching Dana Andrews turn on the ham is always fun as well. Movies can be so wonderful, why are movies like Superman Returns made? That tired old movie without suspense and barely a reason for being beyond the profit motive depresses me so much when the medium has so much potential to fill the soul with life. Going through the motions is bad enough in a three minute pop song, but in a two and half hour bloated beached whale of a movie, it's simply agony. Perfunctionary humor, perfunctionary action, perfunctionary plot, it's as safe as an office park and tastes like aspirin.

Some moron critics talked about how the director wanted to make an icon out of Superman. Gee, that's some kind of goal, seeing as you're starting with the iconic figure of Superman. Thanks for making a movie pal. That's deep an all, but little things in a popcorn movie count, like suspense and plot, for instance. Never, and this is saying something because I don't think I've ever even thought of her, have I cared LESS about Lois Lane than I did while I was watching her. Really. I thought, why doesn't Superman just find somebody else? ANYBODY else. Other women would date him and not win Pulitizers for articles about how the world doesn't need him. Never have I imagined the ungratefulness shown by Lois Lane after Superman saved her life by stopping her plane from crashing.

It was like he never flew down from space, avoided chunks of plane and single-handedly stopped her plane from crashing into a baseball diamond at about Mach 2. Her son owes his mother to this Man of Steel and she can't get over the fact that he left to go back to Krypton a few years back. Could care less, luckily for everybody, though fat good it does old Sup, she cares more about the power outage. Why? It's never explained how she seems to think it's something more than a plain old power outage. What does she think it is? Why does she think it's so important? Because nobody can give her a straight answer? Because the story needs her to be interested? And I hate to say this, but the kid actor was one of those terrible kid actors like Sam in Diff'rent Strokes...the fine line between obnoxious and cute is explored in microscopic detail and at some point obnoxious wins and then starts bragging.

The story was apparently written by a committee after doing a study entitled "Successful Components of High Grossing Movies" and really, the piano scene has to be seen to be believed in its awful patness. I was in an agony of suspense to find out if it was going to be as predictable as I imagined it would be and in the end it was somehow more predictable, to the point where it felt somehow defeated by the weight of its own celluloid. The film itself seemed to ask, "do we have to go through these motions? Or can we simply assume them?"

In Ball of Fire I knew the boy would somehow win the girl, but the journey itself was full of all kinds of delights, sometimes it was a delight of the script, or the cinematographer, of the actor or actress, of a director's decision. Every scene was infused with the joy of telling a story that felt fun, absurd and optimistic. In contrast, Superman Returns was an exercise, something pasted together to insure profit. Of course the studio behind Ball of Fire wanted to make a profit, as much profit as it could, yet it succeeded artistically whereas Superman Returns was about as artistic a Celine Dion concert. Instead of relying on special effects and the idea that the audience will be impressed because it's supposed to be impressed, Ball of Fire offered character, story and action driven by the consequences of the story, rather than a story dependent on the needs of the CGI and accounting departments of a major studio, there was little, if any, self-satisfaction in it.

It also didn't appear to hold its audience in disdain.

I also saw The Devil Wears Prada. I bought the tickets for these movies on Fandango. Today I received a questionaire from Fandango. The questionaire was all about how much I had noticed the S-Class Mercedes in The Devil Wears Prada? What else is there to say?

Finally I saw The Road to Guantanamo, an odd film directed by the always compelling Michael Winterbottom. His Code 46 deserved to be seen by more people and his Tristam Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story was wonderful and life-affirming. This film, mixing the voices of men who were falsely imprisoned at Guantanimo Bay with acted recreations of their experiences allowed Winterbottom to accentuate what he felt were keys into the characters of these men who endured hell because of the political monstrousity of the current U.S. government. It was a difficult film to watch because it worked so well as propaganda against the United States, and that was shameful. Also, however, the recreations allowed one to avoid the questions raised by the movie by leading one to wonder about the legitimacy of the scenes just witnessed. How real was this? Was it just like that? More important questions were left behind at the disbelief of seeing this inhumanity in action. To what degree is this what Winterbottom wants us to imagine Guantanamo is like and to what degree is it an accurate portrayal of Guantanamo. Strangely enough, one doesn't have these questions rise up as to the nature of Solieri while watching Amadeus.

Anyway, the sentimentality of patriotism is so sham as to make me want to puke. It really comes out on July 4th and Memorial Day, these morons who have no trouble with a president who sends soldiers into harm's way without a defensible reason, oh right, weapons of mass destruction and torture, anyway, they get so sentimental about these same boys they've happily supported marching off into a madness of violence. Instead of getting sentimental, it would be great if they got real. This war is so sad, so misguided, I keep coming back to it like a stutter.

I should sleep. Tomorrow is all about preperations for the summer.

Di05

Stanwyck26


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