Saddam Dies. We Lose.
Documentary filmmaker and scholar of terrorism Kevin Toole had an interesting piece in the Times of London in November. in which, anticipating the execution of Saddam Hussein, he did the math and pronounced the American occupation both the loser
and the greater evil of the two.
Now that Saddam is hanged and Bush 2 is touting this
(conveniently timed) "milestone" at a time when that country's
implosion into civil war is killing dozens of Iraqis and Americans
daily, it is fair to ask the question: Who was worse for Iraq: Saddam
or W?
Toole's computation -- and I think it is a sound one -- is that George
W. Bush wins the nightmarish distinction of having done more to
decimate Iraq than the blood-soaked dictator from whom Bush claimed to
liberate the country.
The physical and moral arithmetic in comparing the destruction wrought
by Saddam and W, respectively, is cruelly straightforward. As Toole
posits it, it comes down to two essential measurements:
1.) How many Iraqis died under each? It is safe to say that Saddam and
Bush 2 are each responsible for the deaths of anywhere from tens to
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, depending on which estimates you
believe. Whatever the exact numbers, it appears likely that the two men
have generated comparable carnage.
2.) How has the nation of Iraq survived under each? In the case of
Saddam, his brutal regime of ruthlessly paranoid operatives, paid-off
officials and well-oiled networks of imprisonment and torture managed,
through a precisely-calibrated mixture of fear and patronage, to keep
the country running. The power grid worked. People went to work and
came home. The wheels of secular government -- fascist and dictatorial
as they were -- turned. (And let us not forget the key role played by
the United States -- wasn't that Reagan envoy Donald Rumsfeld we saw shaking Saddam's hand in that goodwill photo
in 1983? -- in propping up Hussein's efficient dictatorship.) Contrast
this with Bush's Iraq, in which virtually nothing works, national
government is functionally nonexistent, unemployment is stratospheric,
and order has almost entirely dissolved.
So on the one hand, you have a dictator who killed tens or hundreds of
thousands and kept the country running. And on the other, you have an
invader who has, to date, killed tens or hundreds of thousands and also
destroyed the country.
As I said, the math isn't complicated.
The way that Toole sums it up is that the only act crueler than
gripping a nation in an iron dictatorship is plunging it into utter
chaos: unmitigated slaughter, a total absence of security, and a
breakdown of any semblance of order.
So those formerly ruled by Saddam have now met the enemy. And he is us.
I suspect that this tortuous question -- of our intervention having
made Iraq worse than it was before we ostensibly tried to "save" it --
is as often quietly pondered by Americans of conscience as it is
avoided by our leaders and our journalists.
Meanwhile, amid the flaming wreckage, our own presidential megalomaniac
flaunts the corpse of Saddam and raises a champagne glass to propose a
toast to triumph.
Happy New Year.
(Posted 12/31/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Scrub Yourself Clean with a Good Poem.
It's the
holidays. Not even an inveterate liar like our president (Maureen Dowd recently quipped that the Bush 2 cabal is so brainwashed
that Bush 1 has had to send in Baker and Gates to deprogram them), or a
fetid presence like fired O.J. If I Did It editor Judith Regan (her first job was as
cub reporter for the National Enquirer; classic tomes during her
tenure at HarperCollins included porn queen Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star and finger-wagging troglo-moralist Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah) can rob a winter breeze of its cleansing bite, or alter the
small and sweet world beneath a hanging sprig of mistletoe.
So in celebration of the indestructible, and in shameless imitation of the folks at The Agonist, who had the great idea to post a poem thread in honor of the Winter Solstice, here is a poem that may help you to forget
about charlatans of all kinds. Happy holidays!
THE BANDWAGON
-Alfred Corn, Beloit Poetry Journal, Fall 1999
A tiny speck on the horizon.
Which doesn’t move or doesn’t seem to yet
Must be on the move; has enlarged, is now
The size of a thumb, and now still larger, look,
A newly gilded vehicle rocking and racketing
Down the pike. Besides the band—uniformed,
Gold-braided, their brasses aglitter—
A few grand figureheads clutch a post,
They wave and fire off grins at onlookers, who,
The boldest, respond by grabbing and climbing
A ladder dangling from the wagon, dragged
Onto the flatbed by earlier troops and welcomed
As opportune endorsements of their clan,
Another, another and another! And some
Impressive knot of adherents they are,
Arms on shoulders, the victor’s strut,
A promo for dazzled joiners farther on,
Who scuttle and jump to swell their ranks.
Each wheel turns faster, revving up
For the straightaway, hickory spokes
A blur like an electric fan at top speed,
Scribbles of gleam smeared across it.
Faster, closer, numbers snowballing
According to an exponent that also mounts.
Yet, nothing daunted, they swing aboard, dying
To be part of it, the A-list, the blue-chips.
Hup! It’s party-time, tap this keg and chug
Your suds, we won-won-won, and we’re one
High roller of a club, hotshots all, bigger, louder,
United stumpers we stand, sterling but humble.
Of course we commiserate with you hangdogs
Out there who fumbled the ball, who didn’t latch on
Quick enough. But rest easy, we’ll help you out
When we get a chance, why, sure. Meantime, ha ha,
Eat our dust! And then—then, like a flashbulb, it’s gone.
Sudden stillness. Still here. In open space, morning sun.
Which toplights the trees and their strange, shining leaves.
(Posted 12/20/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)Barack's Shade of Black.
Marveling
at Barack Obama's current gusher of national celebrity, and at his
apparent ability to sidestep venerable mainstream hesitancies about
charismatic black politicos, has become a cottage industry of pundits
lately.
Everybody, it seems, wants to know how "Obamamania" came to be, and
whether it will last. And everybody's got a theory as to why the new
junior senator from Illinois seems to be going where no black political
figure has gone before -- perhaps, some breathlessly suggest, to the
presidency.
To me, the most interesting theory for Obama's meteoric blast through
the presumed "black" ceiling -- one I've run across in The Nation, on
NPR, and in other places -- is that he is not "black" in the ways that
have traditionally scared the pants off the white mainstream. Although
he is African American, he is not a descendant of slaves; his father
was a "black as pitch" Kenyan, in Obama's words, and his mother a
"white as milk" native of Kansas. This alone -- or so the theory goes
-- frees Obama from the millstone hung round the neck of most black
candidates who court the white mainstream, namely the baggage of being
viewed as a presumed angry seeker of retribution for slavery and an
apologist for the misdeeds of the impoverished progeny of ex-slaves.
Nothing, after all, sends white voters fleeing faster than the prospect
of being stalked -- for their votes or for their wallets -- by a
pissed-off black man with payback on his mind.
Obama, born in Hawaii to an East African and an American Midwesterner
who he says is a distant relative of Jefferson Davis, assuredly had no
part in the bitter business of being an ex-slave. Further, having spent
early years in Indonesia, having attended both Muslim and Catholic
Schools, and having a half-Indonesian half-sister married to a
Chinese-Canadian (Obama's wife, Michelle, has reportedly called their
family a "mini-United Nations"), he is as global a figure as any
campaign manager could ask for. From this standpoint, Obama is a
blessedly non-threatening prospect to many whites who are tired and frightened of our own nation's ongoing baggage from
slavery. Like a black American with a thick British accent, he is, to
many whites, not really one of "those blacks" -- you know, the
troublesome natives.
Or, as I said, so the theory goes. Personally, I do think this goes a
long way toward explaining Obama's open-armed welcome among white
audiences who might shun Jesse Jackson or Cornel West and run screaming
from Al Sharpton. His largely populist politics aside, Obama is more
the Colin Powell type in his public persona. He speaks rigorously
proper English with no "black" accent. He is conservative in dress,
bearing and tone. He is light-skinned (please, let us not pretend this
does not matter when it comes to many whites' (and blacks') high regard
for certain black males). He is studiously mainstream in his rhetoric,
with none of that preachy blackified singsong stuff that gives some
white voters the jitters. He is, actually, the perfect African-American
political candidate for mass white appeal: a populist who, while black,
is not "one of them."
But Obama is also more than that.
If his safe-black-man persona has given him an easier path into the
heart of the mainstream, his character has also given him the singular
and admirable nerve to do what few Democrats of any ethnicity have
dared: to stand up and act like a progressive. American voters have
hungered for years now for candidates who are willing to wade in and
take it on the chin for what they truly believe. The Obama who won an
Illinois senate seat with 70 percent of the vote was one such bold
contender. Not to say I told you so, but I told you so: I, and many
long before me, have been saying in print for quite some time that
Americans want to vote for candidates who are not afraid to lose.
Voters want leaders who actually believe in something. One of the
reasons George W. Bush nearly won the popular vote in 2000 and did win
it in 2004 was that he projected the (deceptive but effective) image of
a straight-shooting believer. His victory was a tribute to the utter
desperation of voters for something that looks and feels like principle
in their leaders.
Obama had that for real. And it's a winning quality in a politician of any color.
Whether he still has that quality, however, after a short time in the
moneychangers' club known as the U.S. Senate, seems to be an open
question. While he still sounds populist themes with power and flourish
before cheering crowds, I'm now hearing some suspiciously mealy-mouthed
Obama positions on campaign contributions, immigration policy, and
other issues. In a recent NPR interview, he sounded as glib and
obfuscatory as any corporate-underwritten Senator Silverhair. Fact is
(and please excuse the comparison), as was the case with a newcomer
named Bush who exploded onto the national scene six years ago in a
flash of media fascination, we still don't know a lot about this guy.
So let's stay tuned and see what subsequent episodes reveal about the
man named Obama: who voters think he is, who he actually turns out to
be, and what role, if any, the theater of race plays in the outcome.
(Posted by Bruce A. Jacobs 12/14/06)
The Best Headline of the Year.
Out of the blue, at year's end, here it is: hands down, the best headline of 2006, right in today's New York Times:
YES, YOU CAN SURF IN CLEVELAND, BEFORE THE BROWN WATER FREEZES
Now that's a headline.
The accompanying story is about people who surf on Lake Erie in the
winter. That's the lake known, among other things, for having
spontaneously caught fire (I think in the 1970s) at the height of its
industrial toxicity. It's cleaner now, so I guess it's able to freeze.
Have you ever been to Cleveland?
It's cold. Very cold. I have dear relatives there. My cousin was
married there earlier this year. We all went. It was a beautiful
wedding. In January. When she announced the date, we all had one
question: "Why?"
But Cleveland gets a bad rap. Sure, maybe it's not top-of-mind as a
destination for fine weather or eye-popping discovery. Maybe the word
"Wow!" isn't often uttered by visitors to Cleveland (except in winter).
But the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is there, and it's well worth the
trip (in the warm season). The Browns play football there. The Indians
(I'm going to start naming sports teams and SUVs after white people and
see how they like it in Kansas) play baseball there. Cedar Point, the
big amusement park that was our thrill of thrills when we were kids, is
nearby. And of course there's the infamous chemically-altered lake
itself, where once while fishing at Port Clinton I saw my Uncle John
catch a bionic catfish that was so huge it made my father, the
consummate fisherman, jealous to the point of ugliness. (We'll just
leave that story right there.)
I still can't say that I know Cleveland well. But it reminds me of
towns like Buffalo and Baltimore (where I live): sprawling
ex-industrial burgs sporting hard histories and surreal casts of
characters and sovereign-state neighborhoods and doggedly sunny civic
optimism and (in the case of Baltimore anyway) quietly high cancer
rates.
And I mean no disrespect. I've had fun in Cleveland, and I love my
relatives there, who in addition to being wonderful people also wrote
the book on being gracious and caring hosts.
But I have to say that the all-time best line on Cleveland, as far as I
know, comes from the novelist and journalist D. Keith Mano, who once
wrote in his review of a novel (and I think my memory comes
close to his exact words):
But, hey. You can surf there. In December. At least until the brown water freezes.
(Posted 12/10/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)The "Colored Only" Books Section.
Many of
my older relatives, who remember growing up in all-black communities
where all of the grocers, doctors, carpenters and tailors they
patronized were black, talk with a sense of irony about the demise of
legal racial segregation, which for decades had closed off most of the
mainstream retail and service sectors to African American customers.
On the one hand, the end of the official "white only"/"colored only"
Jim Crow dichotomy legally freed black citizens -- in theory, anyway --
to spend their money wherever they wanted. But on the other hand, it
spelled the beginning of the end of an entire economy serving
exclusively black customers: black vacation resorts, black sports
leagues, and an abundance of black service providers. Racial
integration, although it brought certain freedoms to black Americans as
citizens and consumers, also brought the beginning of the "minority"
business mentality, whereby formerly dominant black economic figures
were either obliterated or absorbed into the white-owned mainstream as
bit players. It's a dynamic that remains true today, as black coaches,
would-be team owners, college administrators, business owners and
others find themselves at the mercy of industries and enterprises
controlled almost entirely by whites.
Sure, it was progress. But at a cost.
What brings this to mind is an article in the December 6, 2006 Wall
Street Journal about the controversy over segregating books by black
authors, particularly fiction, into special "African American" sections
in bookstores. Browse through most chain bookstores (except Barnes
& Noble, which as a rule does not segregate) and many indie book
shops as well, and you'll find contemporary novels by black writers
about black protagonists shelved in their own "black" section, while
novels by whites about whites are treated as simply "fiction." This is
often true of nonfiction as well. (I usually find my book, Race
Manners, a guide for blacks and whites, stashed on the "African
American" shelf.) It's a distinction that limits my exposure and my
sales as an author, and I don't like it. Neither does bestselling
novelist Terry McMillan, whose Waiting to Exhale helped black pop
fiction writers to break down the doors of the publishing industry. She
told the Journal she considers the book-segregation practice to be
"racist" and a "disservice."
But hold on. The Journal story also quotes other black fiction authors,
such as suspense writer Tananarive Due. She says that being set apart
for recognition by black readers and black bookstores is a mainstay of
her career. The story also quotes black writer Brandon Massey as saying
he has mixed feelings about his horror novels being sold as "black
fiction" because it has nourished a loyal audience for his work but it
also limits his sales. And it quotes the publisher of the romance novel
industry's leading trade journal (which ignores its usual 10-genre
breakdown in order to treat black-written books of all genres as simply
"African American") as saying, "We know we're walking a fine line, but
the reader wants to know if a book has African-American characters."
All of this starts to sound an awful lot like what black team owners
and shopkeepers might have said 60 years ago about the way in which Jim
Crow fed their businesses, and about the necessity for someone to serve
black customers when the mainstream ignored or mistreated them.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. What is driving the economic
logic of today's segregation in publishing is the same fact that drove
it in society as a whole decades ago: the American mainstream treats
blacks differently than it treats whites. White fiction readers as a
whole are, out of habit, more interested in novels about white
characters than novels about black characters. White-run publishers, as
a whole, have only recently accepted black-written pop fiction as being
viable at all, and still ghettoize it as a product they see as saleable
only to blacks. White-owned bookstores, as a whole, view black-written
fiction as an "ethnic" literary satellite to be shelved away from the
central and presumably non-ethnic (read: white) category of plain old
"fiction."
Yes, the political sea changes of the 1960s and 1970s created an
intellectual demand, and a powerful function, for African American
sections in bookstores and African American Studies departments at
universities. And a book like W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk or
Haki Madhubuti's Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? arguably
belongs in a section dedicated to the analysis of black culture and
history. But a "black fiction" section exists for one reason and one
reason only: for the most part, white audiences and white publishers think stories about
black characters are not universally interesting.
And so black writers of such stories have a hard time garnering wide
attention. And under this duress, these black writers come to depend
upon segregation as a way of gaining what attention they can muster --
that is, the attention of grateful black audiences starved for stories
about themselves in a society that considers the white narrative to be
the central one.
In the Journal piece, I thought Terry McMillan offered a decent
stop-gap solution: put black-written novels about black characters in
both the general "fiction" and "African American" sections, enabling
fans to easily find them and non-fans to discover them. Fair enough.
For now, at least.
But wouldn't it be far more fair if the mainstream's idea of
popularly-sought fiction were not a "white only" zone?
(Posted 12/9/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Re: "Racially Motivated."
So we have yet another New York City Police atrocity to contemplate: the firing of more than 50 shots into the car of an unarmed
black man in Queens, killing him hours before he was to be married.
Twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell is dead. His fianceé and family are
devastated. Black leaders in New York are infuriated and demanding a
rapid investigation and indictments. The Queens district attorney is
calling for patience while he seeks facts to build a case. Mayor
Michael Bloomberg, apparently both smarter and more compassionate than
his predecessor, Rudolph "Tough Enough for '08" Giuliani, has met with
black leaders and with Bell's family and has already called the
shooting "inexplicable" and "unacceptable," according to the New York
Times.
Some of you will know that spectacularly excessive police behavior
toward black targets has become kind of a New York City tradition:
unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo was killed by 41 police bullets
in 1999; unarmed black security guard Patrick Dorismond was fatally
shot by an undercover police officer in 2000; handcuffed Haitian
immigrant Abner Louima was brutally sodomized with a broken broomstick
by police officers in a station house in 1997.
Beyond the unspeakable tragedy of the Bell case, I find something else
striking: the claim of city officials, including Mayor Bloomberg, that
the shooting was not racially motivated because, according to the
Times, of the five officers who fired into Bell's car, two were black,
one was black and Hispanic, and two were white.
We need to talk about this.
Conventional knowledge would have us believe that in order for an act
to be "racially motivated," it must be committed by a member of one
race against a member of another. On the face of it, this makes sense.
There's only one problem: it's not true.
There are any number of middle-class suburban black Americans, for
example, who embrace the same stereotypes as the white mainstream about
low-income urban black males: that they are criminal, amoral and
dangerous. I know some black people who feel this way. They will lock
the doors of their SUVs or cross the street against a black male in a
heartbeat.
In the same way, in the rarified and militarized culture of urban
policing -- within which many cops commute from the suburbs to don guns
and bulletproof vests in waging daily battle in poor black communities
-- there are plenty of black police officers who buy into, and enforce,
the prevailing assumptions of racial profiling: that young black men on
the street are threats for whom the best policy is to shoot (or arrest)
first and ask questions later.
The fact that the shooters (or arrestors) are black does not prevent
them from carrying out actions that are racially biased in nature.
There is nothing to prevent, say, a black officer who lives in the
'burbs from acting out, on patrol in Harlem, the same preconceptions
and prejudices as his or her white counterparts about blacks who live
above 125th Street, or about black suspects in general. In fact, there
is tremendous pressure within police culture on cops of all races to
yield to such biases, both for the sake of being accepted by their
peers and protecting their own perceived safety on the street. It's a
kind of racialized class struggle, whereby "underclass" blacks
(especially young black males) in the nation's ghettos are viewed with
equal suspicion and contempt by black, white and brown working stiffs
alike who live outside the 'hood. Some of these working stiffs are
cops. And the results are as clear as they are bloody and unjust.
The dirty little secret about "racially motivated" police abuse is that
it involves cops of all colors, not just bigoted whites. Reporters,
politicians and pundits need to stop pretending that racial abuse only
happens when whites mistreat people of color (or vice versa). It's
worse than that. We need to admit it and start doing something about
it. One place to start is to require that police officers live in, or
near, the communities they serve.
Another is to acknowledge that blackness, particularly within the
occupying-army mentality of many of today's urban police departments,
provides no immunity against racial bigotry.
(Posted 11/29/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Death Wishes.
Here's the story, repeating itself again and again:
Child is horribly damaged by a grownup. Child grows up to be an adult
psychopath. Adult psychopath commits heinous and gruesome murder.
Anguished loved ones of murder victim call for murderer to pay with his
life. Murderer is sentenced to death and is executed. Hours after the
execution, a reporter asks loved ones of victim if they feel relief or
closure. Loved ones declare, Yes, the killer deserved a worse death
than he got, but his death was justice and they can now start to feel
some closure and vindication and move on with their lives. Reporter
runs the quotes in a dramatic story, immediately after the execution,
about the clash between the pro-execution vigil by loved ones of the
victim and the anti-execution vigil by death penalty opponents.
Reporter never again contacts or speaks with the loved ones of the
victim, who disappear from public view.
Months or years pass. The loved ones find that their suffering has not
eased as much as they hoped. They discover that in fact the killing of
the murderer has brought them little lasting peace. They learn, often
in therapy, that the closure they seek has more to do with their own
relation to the world than with any revenge they gain against others.
They eventually come to feel that the killing of the murderer never
lived up to its billing as the powerful healing act they had hoped for,
and that their long-term healing was in fact enabled by other things
entirely. If a reporter were to call them now and ask, they would tell
the reporter all of this.
But the reporters do not call. They are now busy interviewing loved
ones of more recent murder victims who proclaim, with fresh and
dramatically quotable grief, how they can feel the beginnings of
closure, they really can, after yesterday's or last week's execution of
the murderer.
The latest version of this doubly tragic repeating episode appeared in
this week's newspapers as the story of Wednesday's Florida execution of
Danny H. Rolling, who carried out a series of grisly rapes and murders
of Gainesville college students, including one in which he severed the
victim's head and placed it on a shelf. In his confession, Rolling
spoke of being sexually abused by his father and spending much of his
life adrift. Reporters quoted loved ones of the victims as saying they
have long awaited the justice of Rolling's death and now look forward
to closure and peace following his execution.
How long will this cruel charade go on?
How long will lazy reporters continue to report spectacular murders and
executions chiefly in the present tense, as breaking news events and
quotations of the moment, instead of as the true unfolding events they
are, in which damage begets damage and in which the false healing of
revenge yields to deeper healing over time? How long will journalists
keep feeding us the same banal "sicko commits atrocity, grieving family
applauds grim justice" story, a narrative bereft of the wisdom that
countless clinicians and long-term grief survivors can offer: that the
temporary gratification of lethal payback does little to address the
true wounds inflicted by a murder? How long will most
headline-motivated newspaper and TV accounts ignore the real stories of
psychopathic murders -- stories of psyches laid to waste by childhood
trauma or by physiology -- and the real stories of grieving families --
people whose grief often evolves as they learn what revenge can and
cannot bring?
How long will this thought-free reporting, and the public ignorance it
nurtures about the true nature of psychopathic murder and of healing,
continue to incubate the self-defeating rage of successive new crops of
revenge-hungry families whose venomous grief can be harvested for a few
days' or weeks' worth of news drama? Not that reporters are the only
guilty parties here. How about the politicians who milk the "death
penalty is a deterrent to murder" myth, in the face of long-standing
clinical evidence to the contrary, for the sake of political capital?
How about the pastors who preach the wickedly destructive gospel of
retributive murder from the pulpit?
And how about those grieving families themselves who channel their
immense grief into a desire to repeat the fundamental abomination that
caused their pain: murder? After all, not all agonized families of
murder victims choose to follow this bitter and vengeful course. Many
make much deeper, and universal, expressions of grief. To be sure, it
is hard to blame some grief-crazed loved ones for morally sagging under
the pressure. And yet, are they not responsible, too, for the manner in
which they hold their hearts at such times? Is it not in our deepest
crises -- the times when we are most vulnerable to acting out wickedly
-- that who we choose to be matters most? And if we, as more or less
intact adults who have the good fortune to have not been horribly
damaged early in life, choose reciprocal murder as our moral answer to
such crimes, what does that say about us?
I remember a newspaper photograph of a relative of a murder victim who
held a vigil outside the prison during the murderer's execution. At the
moment of the murderer's death, the relative pumped his fist in the air
in satisfaction. For me, that photo said it all: One monster -- a
self-made one -- celebrating the death of another.
(Posted 10/27/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
He Should Know.
Here is
more confirmation of why the country needs independent local media: a
jaw-dropping interview with retired Army Major General John Batiste in
the September 27, 2006 issue of Rochester, New York's weekly City
Newspaper
[http://www.rochester-citynews.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A4845].
Batiste, who commanded the First Infantry Division in Iraq, has made
international news by repeatedly calling for Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld to resign, most recently when Batiste testified before
Congress on September 25.
How did a small Rochester weekly score a full-length interview with a
figure of Batiste's stature? Easy. He happens to live in Rochester.
Moreover, the local corporate daily, the Gannett-owned Democrat and
Chronicle, will barely give Batiste the time of day.
This is when alternative media shine. The City Newspaper interview
provides a rare glimpse of how a trained warrior views the dishonest
and incompetent public figures from whom he is expected to take orders.
In the interview, Batiste discusses, in blunt detail:
- How Batiste, who was once assistant to Paul Wolfowitz and had a
Pentagon office adjacent to those of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, observed
first-hand how the two cherry-picked intelligence to justify their
predetermined intention to invade Iraq.
- How Batiste, as Commander of the First Infantry in Iraq, refused to
follow Rumsfeld's relaxed guidelines on abuse of prisoners, and
considers the nation's current disregard for the Geneva Conventions to
be a moral failure and a military mistake that endangers American
troops.
- Batiste's long-standing assessment that America needs three times the
current number of U.S. troops in Iraq to have a fighting chance of
securing stability, and that this is far beyond the troop strength that
U.S. armed forces can now muster.
- His bleak observation that Americans still have no idea what a
long-term commitment this war will require. In Batiste's words. "We are
fat, dumb, and happy. Our country really doesn't understand what it has
gotten itself into."
And there's more. I suggest you read the entire interview. You simply
won't get this kind of reporting in your local McPaper. Long live the
truly local press.
(Posted 10/5/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
"Survivor" Wimps Out.
So the new season of "Survivor" will base its four "tribes" on race: black, Hispanic, white and Asian.
The fallout is pinning the Geiger counters, and the CBS show's slinky producers are cringing all the way to the bank.
Political
leaders have called for the show to be canceled. A protest rally was
held in Manhattan. Bloggers are losing their minds with outrage or
delight. Rush Limbaugh is race-baiting his butt off with quips
about how this will be a tough one to handicap because of the
athleticism of the blacks versus the oppressor skills of the whites
versus the brainy Asians... you get the idea. "Survivor" producer Mark
Burnett, in his best imitation of a guy taken aback by all the furor,
is making Multiculturalism 101 statements to the press about how the
race angle is no big deal, how the show has previously done gender and
age, how this season's version will reveal that race matters less than
we think.
It's
an absolute marketing stroke for a show with sagging ratings, that's
for sure. Burnett and his network cohorts are not as dumb as they act.
The brilliance of the "Survivor" idea has always been the way it seizes
the predator-prey paranoia of contemporary America -- you know, the
whole fashionably selfish pre-fascistic thing -- and makes it personal.
In the jungle. On an island of no escape. Unless you're voted off, that
is.
No question, Burnett and his team of me-sellers at "Survivor" headquarters are smart folks with a keen eye for
how to play the public mood for the sake of attention and ad revenues.
But I have to say, they made one whopper of a strategic mistake with this battle-of-the-races thing.
They left out the racists.
I
know, it's hard to believe. I mean, how can you base an entire season
of a fear-and-abuse-themed show on race and not include the most
fearful and abusive of the would-be candidates: the racists? But,
appallingly, that is what Burnett and company did. They have admitted
it publicly. The show's producers have said, right out loud, without a
trace of shame, that they deliberately filtered the racists and the
bigots and the name-callers out of this season's "Survivor" selection
process. So what we have left, as the season begins, is four
racially-motivated gangs stripped unceremoniously of the one thing that
racially-motivated gangs do: stoke their sore egos with racial heat and
then turn the blowtorch on other people.
Can you believe what a bunch of wimps Burnett and his producers are? What a gaggle of panty-waists. What a craven crew
of lily-livered little wusses.
Here
we could have had a greasy-haired white guy in combat boots and an Iron
Maiden T-shirt yell to his juiced-up tribemates on prime-time
international television, "Let's show those fucking niggers what we
ought to be doing to the sand niggers over in I-Rock!"
We
could have had an Angry African-American and a Seething Latino spitting
venom within mere inches of each other's faces, with the Hispanic
screaming, "Why don't you black people want to work? Huh? Why won't you
work?!" and the black person yelling, "Why don't you wetbacks learn the
damn language and play by the rules? How come my goddamn taxes are
supposed to pay for you?!"
We could have had an Asian contestant sneering at a Caucasian, "What, you want me to do the math for you? Huh? Be
your handy little computer? Work it out for yourself, white girl."
We
could have had straight-up racial profiling along the nightly-traveled
island trails. We could have had drive-by (so to speak) epithets by
torchlight. White women pulling nervously downward on the tattered hems
of their jungle skirts in the presence of black men. White males
yelling out, "Whoo, Conchita! Arriba, arriba!" at female Hispanic
contestants on the beach. Black women bitching out blond white women
for thinking they're so irresistible. Hispanic men bitching out black
women for being so strong. Asian contestants bitching out everybody for
feeling so sorry for themselves.
We
could have had, in other words, real-life racism on TV. We could have
seen the kinds of racial behavior that people usually fling at one
another through car windows or across rows of seats at a football game
-- but this time on an island where no one can drive away or hide. We
could have heard the kinds of racial remarks that angry whites and
Hispanics and blacks and Asians often mutter confidentially to one
another within the safety of their own groups -- but this time on
network television where the entire world can eavesdrop.
But instead we get -- well, what DO we get? A televised diversity class
where participants don't say what they wish they could? A four-sided
summit whose members all try to make a good impression in front of a
prime-time TV audience as the perceived representatives of "their"
people? Or, as the show's producers seem to be assuring us, do we get
something much more like the typical "Survivor" ordeal, in which
behavior devolves quickly into a primordial ooze somewhere far
beneath race or gender or any other realm worth thinking about?
What
a waste. Here is a chance to train the cameras on one of the things our
nation does best -- an extended, intimately personal riot over race --
and on an island, no less, with no gated communities allowed. But it's
preempted before it can happen because the show's producers are a bunch
of trembling weenies who are afraid of the things that prejudiced
people might actually say. (And speaking of CBS' fraidy-cat quotient,
have you noticed that Arab Americans are not one of the represented
groups?)
But
before you get too glum about the lost opportunity, consider the good
news: Burnett and his crack staff are not as smart as they think. They
may believe they have successfully filtered out any prejudiced
contestants. But you and I know that's impossible. If you're an
American, you've got bigotry in you. Somewhere.
Okay, people: Places, everyone! And... ACTION!
(Posted 8/28/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Net Gain.
A funny thing seems to be happening with corporate journalists as they come up against something closer to a free press: some
of them are getting downright pissy.
I'm talking about the snide, snippy and sarcastic language used by many major-media reporters when they do stories about
the blogosphere and its opinionated cousins, multimedia parody websites.
I
probably wouldn't notice this as much if it didn't stand in such stark
contrast to the straight-faced, credulous treatment such reporters
grant to even the most gratuitously wackazoid media excesses of the far
right. I mean, we have certifiable brain-trauma cases like Ann Coulter
being gently called "provocative," and scorched-earth Administration
bulldozers such as Bill O'Reilly being tenderly (and wrongly) referred
to as "conservative," but we then get the entire universe of Internet
commentary shrilly dismissed, schoolmarm-style, as "unruly,"
"fact-challenged" and "half-cocked." The only wackos and liars who
deserve to be called out as such, apparently, are those who do their
deeds online.
Consider this language, typical of the syndrome, in an August 2, 2006 Washington Post story by reporter Sara Kehaulani
Goo:
Goo
goes on to cite other crude online caricatures of Gibson, and then
delves into the story she really set out to write, which is an analysis
of the practice of "mashing," whereby clever online multimedia
satirists mash together photos, movie clips, and any other material
they can find to get a laugh, often at the expense of a person or a
cause they dislike. Goo writes an interesting and amusing little story,
as far as it goes. The problem is that she, like many of her corporate
journalistic peers, starts and stops at the proposition that Internet
commentary is basically entertainment. And she can't resist leading her
story, like so many of her peers, with a condescending cheap shot
mocking the quality and substance of online commentary.
We
need to talk about this. When a press corps that nodded obediently at a
President's pre-war lies, and that gave more play to Bill Clinton's
blow job than to George W. Bush's unconstitutional acts, gets up on its
high horse about "the kind of thoughtful commentary users have come to
expect" from the Internet, you know there is something very strange
going on.
The
Post is the same newspaper, after all, that has apologized in print for
its supine behavior during the run-up to the Iraq War, when it, like
most corporate media, failed utterly to pursue what is arguably the
most important story since Watergate: the Bush Administration's
dishonest march to war in the face of facts that were being cited even
then by knowledgeable and legitimate dissenters.
So
let's re-frame Goo's sassy lede to her story this way: "When President
George W. Bush went on an anti-Iraq tirade to justify a pre-planned
invasion, the mainstream media weighed in with the kind of thoughtful
commentary users have come to expect: breathless repetitions of the
Administration's claims, with nary a mention of the many credible
sources who offered contrary evidence."
Or
how about saying it like this: "When presidential candidate Howard Dean
ignited a fast-spreading brush fire in the Democratic base by
aggressively espousing progressive values, mainstream reporters weighed
in with the kind of thoughtful commentary users have come to expect:
constant harping on his lack of 'professional' political cachet and on
his personal style, culminating in the blanket coverage of 'The Scream'
that killed his candidacy."
You get the idea. A mainstream reporter sarcastically dissing the "thoughtful commentary" of the Internet is
like a giant sloth making fun of a tortoise's lack of verve.
Except
for this: More of today's important and substantial commentary is to be
found -- alongside the vanity blogs and the psycho-liar websites -- on
the Internet than in the traditional corporate press. Yes, folks, it's
true. When it chooses to, the traditional press still has the edge with
breaking news (e.g., important revelations in recent investigative
stories in the Post, The New Yorker, the New York Times, the L.A. Times
and others), although Web magazines such as Salon and a number of
influential blogs wield increasing power as breaking news sources. But,
without question, today's best-informed commentary and most courageous
muckraking is happening online. Success-hungry reporters for corporate
news organs may not have the patience or the, er, cerebral fortitude to
make their way through the likes of sites such as Pandagon, Majikthise,
The Daily Howler and The Memory Hole. But the fact is that some of the
smartest and nerviest writers in America right now are plying their
commentary online for an audience that craves variety and potent
political criticism instead of the corporate-approved clichéism and
gnashing of teeth we get on the nation's most prestigious op-ed pages.
True,
to get to the quality stuff on the Web one must wade, relentlessly and
thoughtfully, through a sea of bombast, self-promotion, and outright
lies. There is a name for this: a free press. To the extent that a free
press still exists in Fortress America, it is to be found much more in
the still largely untamed realm of the Internet than in well-appointed
newsrooms where reporters are rewarded for re-typing press releases.
Mind
you, the private sector is working on quashing this little problem of
unrestricted Internet access to information. Corporations have
sponsored, for instance, the recently-stalled federal legislation that
would allow companies to buy higher rankings on search engines, pushing
public-spirited information far down on the lists of search results.
They will undoubtedly be back, campaign donations in hand, to revisit
the issue with your elected representatives.
But
for now, if you're looking for Tom Paine instead of Tom Friedman, the
Internet is the place to be. And I have a sneaking suspicion that many
mainstream journalists, reporting for duty daily in their gilded cages,
know this.
Can you blame them for having an attitude?
(Posted 8/18/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Facts on the Ground.
As the
lopsidedness of the body count in Israel's war of opportunity in
Lebanon becomes a more grotesque irony daily -- with the August 6
killing of 12 Israeli soldiers by a ball-bearing-packed Hezbollah
rocket being related in horrifying detail in much of the Western press
while the deaths of scores of Lebanese civilians from equally gruesome
Israeli shrapnel-spewing antipersonnel bombs are reported with far less
fervor and few damning particulars -- it's hard to know what Israel
hopes to accomplish with such an wildly wanton violation of
international standards for human rights and common sense in warfare.
If
the Israeli intent is, as some have guessed, to overrun as much
Hezbollah-defended territory as possible before an internationally
mediated settlement stops the clock on the war, its success in the
short run will only assure future Israeli vulnerability -- and solidify
the cynical immorality of the contemporary Israeli approach to settling
international disputes. Witness the "success" of the Sharon and Olmert
regimes' "facts on the ground" approach to the Palestinian conflict --
a strategy otherwise known as "grab all the land we can and then
negotiate to give back the parcels we want least." The net gain in
Israeli-controlled territory has been more than offset by a deepened
Palestinian rage for revenge, the election of Hamas, and the fueling of
an unceasing and escalating war for land. Similarly, any current
Israeli "gains" in Lebanon legitimized by a clock-freezing mediated
deal will only serve, in the long run, to underpin the very grievances
that strengthen Hezbollah's popular appeal in the first place. It's a
tactic that only a bully can be blind enough to believe in: kick ass
today and don't worry about having to coexist tomorrow.
If,
on the other hand, the intent of the Olmert regime is to simply blow
Hezbollah off the map, Israel's hopes are even more self-delusory. One
cannot wipe out a guerrilla movement with conventional overpowering
force any more than one can stop a swarm of hornets with a shotgun. The
true power behind the forces waging war against Israel, including
Hezbollah and Hamas, is not sheer fighting muscle (as Israeli hawks and
their backers would like to believe) but the popular legitimacy of the
grievances these resistance groups represent. It's the occupation,
stupid. When the viciously unfair "facts on the ground" carved out by
the Israeli occupation finally dissipate in the face of good sense, so
will the popularity of the murderous agendas of those who lead the
opposing charge.
The
practical problem in Lebanon -- as in Palestine, as in Iraq, as in
Vietnam -- is that Israel, like its heavy-footed sponsor the United
States, still has no idea whatsoever how to win a guerrilla war. The
self-immolating hubris of the Bush ethic has already made itself
useless in the Middle East. What now remains to be seen is whether
Israel has learned from the blunders of its benefactor. Will it cut its
losses in Lebanon and Palestine, or extend them?
(Posted 8/8/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
There You Go Again.
Here's the scenario:
A
well-armed western power, citing past and likely future attacks by far
weaker but diabolically clever opponents, launches a massive offensive
within another sovereign nation for the stated purpose of rooting out
these enemies. The western nation's leaders, fiery with righteous rage
and flush with their overwhelming military superiority, promise their
citizens back home a quick and inspiring victory in which awesome air
power will crush the enemy and make cleanup on the ground easy. But
things prove far less easy than planned. Civilian deaths mount
dramatically and erode what little international support existed for
the attack. The enemy proves to be elusive, organized and popular with
the citizenry, who view the western attackers with growing rage. The
promised quick victory fails to materialize. Back at home, as the
western nation's leaders offer excuses and calls for perseverance, its
citizens begin to get a sinking feeling about the bill of goods they
have been sold.
Sound familiar? It should. I'm talking about Israel, and its present folly in Lebanon.
To
be sure, the parallel to the Bush Iraq fiasco is far from exact.
Israel's position as a state with hostile neighbors differs greatly
from that of the United States and its neocon-led wild goose chase in
Iraq. Israel's issues of security are several levels of magnitude
higher than the Bush Administration's devious hyping of America's "War
On Terror." The Israelis understand that war is war, as opposed to the
giddy political warmongering of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other
draft-evaders who now use the American military as their own private
board game.
But
the parallel that remains is damning enough: An armed-to-the-teeth
state hyping its own vulnerability as rationale for a brutal and
bullying militarism that savages civilian populations and helps to
assure a condition of perpetual war.
The
similarities, in both attitude and approach, between the Bush and
Sharon (now Olmert) regimes are both abhorrent and self-defeating. Both
have staked their political capital on a sort of
defensiveness-on-steroids wherein wielding anything short of absurdly
disproportionate military advantage equals weakness. Both are milking
blind patriotism in their constituencies for everything it's worth.
Both allow the real losses and suffering on their side -- including, in
the case of Israel, the Jews' historic displacement and the horrific
cataclysm of the Holocaust and its aftermath -- to propel them into a
frenzy of perceived self-defense that rationalizes their own acts of
massive atrocity and ignores their own position of vast military
superiority. And both will, ultimately, fail in a world in which sheer
forceful dominance of other masses of human beings can never
permanently prevail.
It
is high time that more of we progressives -- folks who call ourselves
committed to principles rather than to governments -- stood up in
public and proclaimed the crucial distinction between Israel's current
ruling regime on the one hand and the actual long-term identity and
interests of the nation of Israel on the other. The two are not the
same, and lefties need to take a chain saw to the tottering premise
that condemnation of Israel's contemporary ruling regime equals
anti-Semitism. If I hear one more fervent defender of the Israeli
occupation slandering Noam Chomsky or the late Edward Said as
anti-Semitic for objecting to Israeli expansionism and appropriation,
I'm going to start handing out Joe McCarthy For President buttons. This
scarlet-lettering of honest and upright dissent, in an attempt to
silence legitimate critics of Israel's recent behavior, is a shameful
perversion of the meaning of prejudice, and we on the left ought not
put up with it. There is too large a political opposition within the
Israeli body politic, and there are too many Israeli citizens morally
outraged by their government's wholesale killing, abuse and
displacement of Palestinian civilians (remember that Palestinian
civilian casualties dwarf those of Israelis) for we on the western side
of the Atlantic to let ourselves be cowed into tolerant silence.
Every
argument that I have yet heard in support of Israel's
disproportionately ruthless and preemptive stance toward its neighbors
-- and I have heard several, some in heated conversations with
well-informed friends and colleagues -- falls into tatters when
measured against basic standards of logic and decency.
The
argument that Israel's very existence is threatened by its hostile
neighbors, for instance, is a flat-out falsehood. The fact that Hamas
says it wants to see the end of Israel does not make this an even
remotely feasible outcome. My cat wants a footbridge from the living
room window to the bird feeder, but he won't get it. In truth, no
hostile power in the region, not even Iran or Syria, has anywhere near
the military or munitions might possessed by Israel, and none of the
other players has nuclear weapons. With Israel's buildup of its
spectacular arsenal, and with the backing of the United States as added
insurance -- a strategic symbiosis that will not change anytime soon --
Israel is in danger of being eliminated by any of its rivals in the
same way that a Hummer is in danger of being totaled in a collision
with a bicycle. To misuse "Never Again" as a rationale for Palestinian
bantustans and lopsided casualties is the worst, and most tragic, of
historical hypocrisies.
Moreover,
the notion that Israel's survival depends on its having such
exponential superiority over all other military rivals -- an argument I
often hear -- ignores the basic facts of nationhood. Arms alone will
never suffice to maintain borders, to weaken enemies, or to assure a
country's future. At some point in a nation's life, if it is to
survive, it learns -- as do you and I in our everyday doings -- to
sustain equilibrium through relationships of proximity. In the Middle
East, some of this regional equilibrium, no doubt, will emanate from
the threatening barrels of strategically-aimed guns. But any assured
future for Israel will have to involve negotiations (instead of
appropriations) regarding land, and agreements for workable political
and economic interchange that all of the affected states can live with.
Israel's brute force advantage cannot alter the fact that at least one,
and perhaps more, of its neighbors will eventually develop nuclear
weapons; it is as unstoppable as the wind. If anything, Israel's
stockpiling of armaments is an incentive for proliferation. An Israel
that lives only by the superiority of force is an Israel that will
ultimately die by it.
And
as for resolving the quarrels of ownership of the disputed territories
-- who lived there first, who has put down the deepest roots, who
deserves compensation for what -- the Bush and Sharon doctrines offer
exactly nothing. If there is one truth that well-armed heads of state
seem to perpetually forget through the ages, it is this: overwhelming
military superiority on the part of an invading or controlling power
will never, ever, stamp out a grass-roots resistance whose members are
willing to die for goals they perceive as just. Call them what you
like: terrorists, guerrillas, militias. Crush them, and they will
reappear. You cannot wipe out such resistance movements solely with
guns; it is imbalanced relations of power and land and resources that
create such movements, and only new and more balanced relations will
cause them to disappear. Ask Winston Churchill (if you can reach him)
about India. Ask Robert McNamara about Vietnam. Ask the career military
planners who, behind the scenes, are now resisting the Bush
Administration's push to invade Iran.
In
practical and moral terms, the Bush/Sharon approach to international
conflict is a disaster and a disgrace. Many of us who genuinely wish
for a secure Israel to take its place alongside a strong Palestinian
state in a stable Middle East are, and should be, frightened and
revolted by what now passes for Israeli foreign policy. And we need to
say so, loudly and insistently. This isn't about the Israeli nation
being bad. This is about a bad Israeli government. To condemn the
Sharon-era Israeli regime for its brutality and its hypocritical,
self-justifying rationalizations for occupation is no more anti-Israeli
than condemning the Bush regime is anti-American.
For my money, the true patriots are those who try to stop their leaders from hurting their country.
So maybe we need to start asking the pro-Sharon folks why they hate Israel.
(Posted 7/30/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Read It and Veep.
Here's
another mainstream journalist to whom we owe thanks for going where
most of her peers fear to report: Jane Mayer, whose "The Hidden Power"
story in the July 3, 2006 issue of The New Yorker takes the lid off the
secrecy surrounding the power of David Addington.
If you're asking, "David who?", so much more the reason to read this story.
David
Addington is Dick Cheney's in-house lawyer. So what? you might ask.
After all, in a normal administration teeming with attorneys familiar
with checks and balances, the Vice President's lawyer has about as much
power as the White House groundskeeper. But in the George W. Bush
Administration, where Cheney largely handles the deeper policy issues
and where there is nary an attorney (and no one conversant in
constitutional law) at the very top, Addington's credentials and his
dictatorial style have given his radical legal agenda virtually
unlimited sway in the White House.
This is the man to whom Colin Powell attributed the Bush Administration's extreme positions on presidential power, according
to reporter Mayer, thusly: "It's Addington. He doesn't care about the Constitution."
Addington is the man, Mayer tells us, who a former Pentagon deputy general counsel for intelligence called "an unopposable
force."
This is the man whose overriding influence prompted a former top Administration lawyer to tell Mayer that the Bush White
House's legal positions were "all Addington."
Want
to know who is the legal brain behind the seemingly surreal imperial
stance of this Administration on the President's right to authorize
domestic and international spying, to sanction torture, to ignore the
Geneva Conventions, and to wage war? Forget the figurehead Attorney
General and Bush pal Alberto Gonzales, who Mayer tells us has little
constitutional knowledge and even less authority over policy. As a
mind-boggling procession of named and unnamed high-ranking sources
reveals in her article, in the top-level strategy meetings where legal
rationales are decided, it's all Addington, all the time.
Mayer
unearths the history of how this came to be. Addington, as she reports,
is a crusading reactionary who, ever since Watergate and the subsequent
legal constraints on the presidency, has made it his personal quest to
try to reinvest the Oval Office with what he sees as its lost power and
glory. He reportedly carries a copy of the Constitution in his pocket,
and he believes that it grants the President virtually unchecked powers
to do as he wishes. During the mid-1980s Addington joined forces with
Dick Cheney, who was of like mind (Cheney ultimately brought Addington
into the Bush I Administration in 1989). The two have been a dynamic
despotic duo ever since. In their current partnership, Vice President
Cheney outlines the objectives, and attorney/enforcer Addington
suitably bulldozes the legal and procedural terrain. He is
ideologically fanatical and bureaucratically ruthless. He undercuts or
drives out those who oppose him. Peers and underlings speak of him, in
Mayer's article, with a mixture of awe and fear.
Through
it all, Addington has maintained an aura of invisibility. He gives no
interviews (he refused to speak to Mayer) and he forbids the press to
photograph him. He avoids public appearances, and the Administration
never outwardly mentions his name. Most Americans have no idea who he
is.
The implications of this are frightening. In effect, we have an unseen, unelected behind-the-scenes Washington operative
who is laying the groundwork for something very much like a fascist regime.
If all of this sounds hard to believe, read Mayer's story in The New Yorker and decide for yourself. Then tell others
to do the same.
_________________________
While we're on the subject of must-reads, three other articles come to mind.
Historian
Edwin G. Burrows' op-ed piece in the July 3, 2006 New York Times tells
the astonishingly forgotten story of the horrific treatment and
tortuous deaths, during the Revolutionary War, of thousands of American
Colonists held as prisoners in subhuman conditions for months or years
without trial at the hands of King George III (note the irony).
Seymour
Hersh's investigative story, "Last Stand"
(http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060710fa_fact), in the
July 7, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, chronicles what he calls the
"war" now being waged in Washington between career military officers
and the hawkish Bush White House over the prospect of war with Iran.
(Guess which side the military is on?)
And
"Project Corpus Callosum," the winning essay in The Nation's 2006
Student Writing Contest, written by Yale senior Sarah Stillman, will
shore up your faith in the commitment of young activists. It appears in
the magazine's July 17, 2006 issue. Read it and cheer.
(Posted 7/7/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
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