alias Bruce.

Gunter Grass, Dave Eggers, Germany, Israel, Iran, and "What Must Be Said."

So Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Here is a link to the Grass poem, titled "What Must Be Said."

And here is what must be said about this whole conflagration:

1.) Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the contemporary Israeli regime has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand.

2.) It is horribly ironic but not shocking that the Israeli regime, over its lifetime, has plunged into such a long moral fall. Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.

3.) Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obedient or self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in some Israeli trends. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

4.) Grass's poem is lousy as a poem. It's barely a poem, actually; it's more like a proclamation with lots of line breaks. But that's not the point anyway. Nobody cares about it as a poem. We care about what it says. Presenting it as a poem in a publication, actually, was a good move on Grass's part: it assured that his message would be disseminated intact, in its entirety. Had Grass simply called a press conference and issued the message as a statement, it would have been sound-bited and paraphrased beyond recognition.

5.) Eggers's refusing the personal tribute while accepting the money stinks to high heaven. His excuse in published reports that the controversy had become too much about Germany and Israel and Iran just doesn't hold water. A response of integrity would be to either be okay with the moral context of the award and to accept the prize and the money, or to not be okay with it and to reject the prize and the money. You can't have both. Good luck washing those dirty little hands of yours, Dave.

Amid today's Fourth of July rockets and porch flags,

I was part of a Facebook exchange with a man who said he feels deep guilt about not having served in the military, and a sense of loss at not having shared in the sacrifice and intense sense of belonging that military service can entail. Among the responses from folks on Facebook were cautions against romanticizing the horrors of war. What I wrote there, and what I'll paraphrase here, is:

I think that part of what is going on with "service envy" and other male feelings of social inadequacy is that American men, in particular, don't have the profound bonding experiences that we need. The culture's not built for it. It glorifies male childishness: a me-first corporate "work" ethic, selfishness, dominance, consumerism. So we seek male initiation in fake ways: fraternity rituals, gangs, "extreme" sports and other scary challenges, a ruthless model of male "leadership" in business and politics. I saw the Vietnam War destroy someone I knew, and I know that WWII destroyed one of my relatives. Glorifying war is bullshit. But I think the need for a sense of shared risk and commitment is real. That is why I think we American men need to relearn things like true passion and a sense of brotherhood, neither of which is rewarded by the current culture.

Happy Fourth.

Quote of the Day

Gary Younge in a Nation piece about the debate over the U.S. going to war in Libya (and yes, it is war):

"The innocence of the liberal hawk is one of the few truly renewable resources America seems to have in abundance. Liberal hawks treasure their innocence but are also very careless with it, for they keep on losing it. And each time they misplace it, they manage to find it again just in time for the next bad idea."

What was most interesting about President Obama's Libya speech last night

was what he did not say. But I'll get to that in a minute.

Overall, it was his usual dynamic oratory, a stream of ear candy that might have had the power to inspire were it imbued with substance and some demonstrated history of conviction. Even lacking those, it sounded beautiful. I listened to it on the radio and enjoyed the succession of boomy little thumps through the microphone when Obama brought his hand down on the podium for emphasis. His gift of gab and presence nearly conjures up a centrist version of Ronald Reagan, except that Obama is smarter, has an actual vocabulary, and doesn't understand (as The Gipper did) that if you won't fight for the things you say, others won't respect you or follow your lead. Strongest lines in the speech: Obama's pointing to the eight-year gazillion-dollar Iraq debacle as a warning against American occupation and nation-building in Libya. Here, his underlying indictment of George W. Bush's legacy cut like a razor in butter. Weakest lines: Obama's boilerplate run-ons about ruthless dictatorships being anathema to American "values" and our just role in the world. A laugh track would not have been out of place here.

Which leads to the interesting thing that Obama did not say. In countering critics, he made at least two references in the speech to the fact that American "interests" were a critical element in forcing our intervention in Libya, while we have chosen to ignore or abet monstrous regimes elsewhere. He went on to define these compelling "interests" as being 1.) the unacceptability of having a Gaddafi dictatorship smack dab between fledgling democratic revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and 2.) the destruction of the credibility of the Western alliance if their threats against Gaddafi were not backed up with firm action. Leaving aside the shaky nature of NATO's Libya action and its unpredictable outcome, both of these claims of Obama's are pure cow pie. Realpolitik America tolerates enemies in proximity to non-enemies all the time for the sake of expediency. And if NATO's and the West's empty threats over the decades were terminally discrediting, we would have lost all international clout long ago.

But here is what is interesting. The unstated but clear admission behind Obama's statement is: Having three brutal dictatorships next to one another – Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt – was okay, but having one remaining dictatorship next to two newly overthrown ones is not okay. In other words, stability for American corporate and strategic interests is what matters. According to this unspoken worldview, if three adjacent bloody dictatorships maintain stability – as they have for decades with America's tolerance – then we're cool. And if three new less repressive governments mean stability, then that's cool, too. But if democratic upheavals (with no American help) in two of those nations stir up things so that our third dictator partner is now the odd man out – well, we can't have that. So here comes our convenient awakening of conscience. Hail democracy! Down with (our formerly approved) tyranny!

Pretty despicable, really. But Obama sure did make it sound pretty.

Jon Stewart's breakup with President Obama over Libya

 

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

 
Thanks to Laurie.

 

Here's a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy

worthy of the holiday, as opposed to the gelded tributes that trot out a clip of King's "I Have a Dream" speech like a Hallmark card every year. Skip the corporate-sponsored King Moments and watch this video:

 

Thanks to The Agonist for the tip.

Happy New Year. I didn't mean to take this long

to blog again, but somehow I just haven't been into opinionizing. I've been writing poems and playing drums and taking care of my sick (but now healthy) cat and otherwise keeping myself occupied with the sorts of elemental things that are not subject to debate.

Of course, in the (welcome) exit from 2010 there are plenty of things that are subject to question and worth a quick look back:

President Obama and his party took a "shellacking" in November not, as house-trained pundits have been fond of saying, because they overreached, but because they underreached. On health care (e.g., public option), on jobs, and on oversight of the banking sector, the Dems and Obama repeatedly came to the table predisposed to fold on issues on which they enjoyed a solid majority in the polls. Rather than use public opinion as a negotiating weapon against hard-nosed Republicans, Hopey and Company foolishly telegraphed their concessions before bare-knuckle bargaining could even begin. Result: a lousy health care compromise that forces citizens to buy crappy coverage from a ruling private sector; a stimulus package big enough to be expensive but too small and timid to jump-start jobs and increase economic security; and banking policies that flush billions of taxpayer dollars down Wall Street toilets while making "too big to fail" institutions even bigger and more vulnerable to future hubris and ruin. So the political right is angry and emboldened, the center is despondent, and the left is furious and defiant. Nice going, Prez.

The Obama tax deal was an obscenity, reflecting, again, the conciliator-in-chief's inability to fight for what the nation needs. The deal's endorsement by Bill Clinton -- the president who brought us triangulation, NAFTA, welfare reform, and continued deregulation -- was thoroughly unconvincing.

The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a genuine victory, and one worth celebrating. It is nice to be able to say, in the year 2011, that one more version of Jim Crow has lost some of its legitimacy. I believe Obama sincerely wanted this, and what made it doable for a politician of his pliancy was the repeal's practical appeal. As was the case with racial segregation during and after World War Two, the easiest (and therefore first) breach in gay segregation is the practical matter of making all possible bodies available to a strapped American military. Only the most hardened bigots (and craven sycophants to hard-right mobs) in the House and Senate were willing to stand against the clear-eyed declarations of top generals that barring gays is militarily stupid and humanly unjustifiable. The necessity of repeal exploited a huge Republican weak spot -- Repubs were caught between fire-breathing conservatives and the military brass -- and it played into Obama's preference to let problems work themselves out rather than fight battles.

The ratification of the START Treaty is a joke, putting the phony stamp of mutual restraint on a U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy mankind many times over.

The case of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is where criminal prosecution and opportunistic politics meet. The timing of the Interpol warrant and the Swedish charges stinks to high heaven. If you think this sudden fervency for Assange's prosecution is purely about justice for women, I have a bridge I want to sell to you. At the same time, the case highlights the need for sexual assault to be taken seriously, as neither a tool to "get" a political dissenter nor fodder to preemptively make him a martyr. As I've said before, Assange is an object lesson in the danger of building an activist organization around a cult of personality. Successors -- and there will be successors -- will learn from this. I am beginning to think that the next truly potent movement against corrupt American political authority -- in the wake of the last one, which happened in the 1960s and 70s -- may be the cyberleak offensive, which exploits a quiet but profound vulnerability of modern capitalism: the ruling elite's dependence upon information technologies in which skilled outlaws have cultivated a decided advantage. Wouldn't that be something: the Halliburtons and Goldman Sachs and their government minions meeting their downfall not in street riots but in guerrilla cyberwarfare.

More soon.

Petraeus says “The president didn’t send me over here to seek a graceful exit”

from Afghanistan.

Uh, actually, General, that is exactly why Obama sent you there.

Obama the Pleaser hoped for enough war progress by 2011 that he could then begin a pullout, thereby placating both the hawkish U.S. military leadership and the increasingly dovish American voting public. It's not working out that way, as long predicted by those who remember the tar pit of the Vietnam War situation: A small nation sick to death of successive Western invaders; a corrupt government that would collapse in days if not propped up by the West and that offers zero possibility of viable nation-building; an American military that, driven by the hopeless mandate of its impossible mission, does more harm than good as it exposes civilians to peril and sometimes kills them outright; and all of this taking place in a nation whose physical landscape is perfectly suited for guerrilla warfare by anti-U.S. fighters who know the territory.

Obama feels a desperate need to emerge from Afghanistan with something that can be dressed up as success, but not at too great a cost. Petraeus, to his credit, is at least willing to call his boss's bluff: If these are the results you want, boss, this is the price you're going to have to pay. I think Petraeus has his own soldierly delusions about what his sword and his purported guardianship of innocents can accomplish in Afghanistan; he is in denial in his own way. But let's at least give him credit for being honest enough to tell Obama and the American public that this war is going to be long and it's going to be ugly.

And let's not forget the civility thing: Petraeus had the class to avoid voicing his dissent through mockery in a Rolling Stone article.

When Ted Koppel said today that Americans are failing to sacrifice for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars,

he had a point. Koppel was right to say, in his NPR Talk of the Nation interview, that putting the war bill essentially on a credit card held by the Chinese, and placing the sacrifices on the backs of a small pool of reservists and recruits who are recycled again and again into combat, is the wrong way for a nation to fight its battles. He was right, too, to hint that a draft would help to equalize things, and to criticize private mercenary operations such as Blackwater that prosper while military servicemen and women fight and die for a pittance.

But Koppel was wrong on two important scores.

First, Koppel misses the fact that most Americans' distance from personal sacrifice is the main reason why they have tolerated these wars at all. The Iraq War, for its part, was deceptive and uncalled-for from the beginning. An Afghanistan military action, although perhaps worth arguing for eight or nine years ago, is now a case of the horses having long ago bolted the barn. It is plain to American voters that neither of these wars has been worth fighting: the first was concocted for cynical corporate and geopolitical gain, and the second is a flailing attempt by Obama to salvage a disaster and to appear war-worthy as a president. The very fact that a draft is politically unthinkable for these wars says a lot. Bringing the nation together to sacrifice for a war requires, to start with, a supportable war.

Second, Koppel fails to see that even if the casualties of these wars are borne by a few, and much of the wars' fiscal cost is in deficit spending, there is still a brutal and widespread cost to Americans in the form of missing government support that would otherwise be covered by deficit spending. A time of national economic crisis -- which is to say, right now -- is exactly when deficit spending is sensible and justifiable. If you refuse to borrow to keep your ship from sinking, what good are your hoarded pennies at the bottom of the ocean? Borrowing billions upon billions for Iraq and Afghanistan means that those borrowed billions are therefore not available to shore up unemployment benefits, to do something about our health care disaster, and to create a national corps of jobs (e.g., repairing crumbling infrastructure, expanding mass transit, providing day care for working families). We can't sufficiently borrow to repair our busted country because we're too much in debt for bad wars? Sounds like a national sacrifice to me, Ted.

Koppel kept stressing that he did not want to get into the issue of whether or not we ought to fight these two wars. But he's ducking. Whether these wars are worth supporting IS the issue. If our nation truly bought into them, we could get the fairness of sacrifice that Koppel seeks. And if our leadership acknowledged that we haven't bought into them, we could stop killing people and instead put the money where it would do some good.

"If you enjoy your freedom, thank a vet,"

read a bumper sticker I saw yesterday on the highway.

Talk about a whoring out of the role of veterans.

The last war in which the American military arguably protected our freedom was World War Two.

The Korean War did not protect our freedom. Neither did the Vietnam War. Neither did the Gulf War. Neither did the Iraq War. Neither does the Afghanistan war, although one could make the argument that had Bush not blown off Afghanistan in favor of oil, it might have at one point. But certainly not now.

Want to know what really threatens my freedom? Out-of-control corporations. Out-of-control health insurers. Gelded federal regulatory agencies. Politicians who auction themselves off to the bidding of companies (e.g., Verizon) that would invade my privacy and violate my constitutional rights. A "security" state that trades its foreign policy for oil revenues and cynically strategic military alliances. A for-profit prison industry that hawks incarceration as a solution to rage and drug addiction. Police departments for whom the War On Drugs has become a money-making enterprise.

Want to thank veterans? Then let's stop using them, with all they have sacrificed, as pawns in a long-running ruse of false enemies. Vets deserve far better.