You Can Never Be Ordinary Again

“We did what we could but it was not enough because I found you here. All of you are not just names on the wall, you are alive. Your blood’s on my hands, your screams in my ears, your eyes in my soul. I told you you’d be alright but I lied. Please forgive me. I see your face in my son. I can’t bear the thought. You told me about your wife, your kids, your girl, your mother. Then you died. I should have done more. Your pain is ours. Please, God. I’ll never forget your faces. I can’t, you’re still alive.”

President Obama is right: of Major Hasan we should not “jump to conclusions.” But there is one thing we can know for certain: the horrors of war are not cabined to those who fight in them.

The centrality of war is the intentional killing of human beings: the healer is charged with preserving life, to “abstain from doing harm.” When these worlds collide, when a healer is tasked with applying the healing arts to those deliberately damaged by war, then, as one nurse learned, “you can never be ordinary again.”

The note quoted above, left by another nurse at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, speaks to that. Beyond the “furthur” are more such voices. Many more.

Squirters

Jane Mayer, our correspondent from The Dark Side, has filed a valuable piece with the New Yorker on the increased use of predator drones in the War on Terra. Mayer’s piece makes four important points:

—Drones are a weapon of targeted assassination. Though traditionally disfavored or actually prohibited in this country, targeted assassination has become, with little or no public debate, the primary means by which the US wages the War on Terra.

—Drones are ineffective. Sixteen separate drone strikes targeting one individual killed more than 300 other people before the targeted man was himself killed.

—Drones create enemies. “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”

—Drones corrupt and debase our people. From 8000 miles away, Americans observe on video screens “little people scurrying”; they then push a button, and end those people’s lives. People now smugly derided, among those who kill them, as “squirters.”

A Long Way From Semper Fi

US Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North is emerging now as the Charles Manson figure in this hideous scandal that crawls like a plague of maggots on the White House.

Oliver North apparently moved into the White House basement about five years ago and turned himself into something worse than the mad Dr. Frankenstein . . . He was given control of everything he could reach, from the president of Israel and secret US Army bank accounts in Switzerland to the CIA and George Bush and the home phone number of the Chinese defense minister.

Gordon Liddy was the Bad Boy in the Watergate crowd—the meanest of the mean—but all he did was commit a few burglaries, shred some papers and shoot out a street light in front of McGovern for President headquarters on Capitol Hill.

That was in the good old days, when real men were still running the White House and the president roamed the hallways at night with a beaker of gin in his fist, raving and jabbering at huge oil portraits of Abe Lincoln and John Philip Sousa while Henry Kissinger followed him around and made notes.

Gordon Liddy was cruel, but he never did anything even remotely like running a neo-Nazi shadow government out of the White House basement, skimming millions of dollars off the top of illegal arms sales to hostile foreign governments or selling weapons to a hate-crazed international terrorist like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, who was paying North millions of dollars for TOW missiles with one hand while admittedly using the other to finance the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed nearly 300 of North’s people.

Not even Tex Colson sold bombs and rockets to crazed Persian maniacs who used them to kill his own kind—and not even Kissinger would have put his arm around him and said, “Well done.”

This is a long way from “Semper Fi,” and there is a steel bed with D-rings already reserved at Bethesda for the eventual presence of Ollie North.

—Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

All Hail Atlantis

A 5000-year-old sunken city off the southern Peloponnese is the latest candidate for the fabled city of Atlantis. Known as Pavlopetri, and straddling some 30,000 square meters of the ocean floor, it is the first submerged Greek city found that actually predates Plato’s 360 BCE-era references to Atlantis in Critias and Timaeus.

Meanwhile, in their continuing refusal to address climate change, the planet’s industrialized nations are proceeding to slip beneath the waves new cultures, new peoples, new civilizations, new Atlanti. The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, for instance, is expected to disappear into the Pacific Ocean in less than 50 years.

In Dubai recently opened the $1.5 billion, 113-acre Atlantis Hotel, located on the world’s largest artificial island, offering rooms for $26,000 per night. This when roughly 1 billion people on this planet go to bed hungry every night.

Welcome to our world.

The Moon Is Blue

All that is created comes of water.

—Mohammed

NASA is bombing the moon. Last Friday the Houston doubledomes smashed a two-ton rocket hull the size of a bus into the lunar surface. Four minutes later, a second probe, also hurtling through space at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kamikazed into the moon.

The bombing commenced after science-types in September announced they had determined that the lunar polar regions contain water molecules. The bombing was intended to suss out just how much water might be lurking beneath the lunar surface.

The bus-bomb attack, on a two-miles-deep crater at the moon’s south pole, was supposed to send a plume of debris into space that could be analyzed for the presence of sub-surface ice. Although party-poopers at the MMT Observatory in Arizona, which closely observed the shelling, claim not to have detected any debris plume, NASA spokespeaks pooh-poohed this naysaying. “We have the data we needed to address the question of water,” said NASA’s Anthony Colaprete.

The twin bombing, intoned a second spokespeak, is “NASA’s first step in a lasting return to the moon.”

The Return Of Frank James

Having been pronounced dead by Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik and various assorted Western intelligence agents, diplomats, and spokespeaks, Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud convened a press conference Sunday to reveal his resurrection and promise a new campaign of mayhem.

Mehsud’s brother, Baitullah, was killed by cowardly back-shooters on August 4, blown in half by a missile directed from the United States, as he lay abed on a rooftop in Pakistan, receiving a drip infusion for a kidney ailment. Pakistani and US officials immediately, jubilantly announced that “fierce infighting” had commenced among Baitullah’s mates over who should succeed him. Hakimullah was several times declared dead in this alleged fighting.

Sunday Hakimullah appeared with his chief deputy, also several times described as dead, numerous top Taliban commanders, the head of the Taliban’s suicide-bomb cell, a prominent Taliban press agent, and an Al Qaeda figure with a $5 million US bounty on his head.

So much for “infighting.”

A Dieu

Yesterday it was crisp all day. Never really warmed up. Mr. Sun, just not pumping it out the way he used to. Yesterday, well, “he tried to do his best,” as Neil Young once put it, “but he could not.”

The kitten, an April child who has lived all his young life in the lambent blush of sultry California summer, huddled yesterday, befuddled and bewildered. “Not likely to get any better, not any time soon,” I told him. “This is called ‘cold.’” Attempting to burrow into my feet, he makes it clear that he doesn’t like it. “And ‘cold’ is why,” say I, squatting before the wood stove, “we have this thing called ‘fire.’” And lit the match.

Yep, Mr. Sun is in trouble, up here in the Northern Hemisphere. He’s on the long slide, heading down towards the Solstice, at which time he’ll flicker out . . . to fire up anew. Northern peoples for millennia honored the passing of the sun, and his rebirth, each year at the Winter Solstice—which is why the children of Saul, when they elected to make of Jesus a Christ, decided he had been born on Christmas Day. Even though, best evidence suggests, he was really born a Pisces.

Anyway. That’s all a couple months down the road still. I wanted to post today Van Morrison’s “Country Fair,” from Veedon Fleece, the song that most says to me: undeniable arrival of autumn. But Morrison is a crusty poopstain about allowing his stuff on the tubes: as soon as somebody puts something up, his people descend to growl that it be taken down. Morrison is an ornery cuss by nature; his view of people frolicking with his songs across the tubes is also no doubt colored by the fact that, after 50 years in the music business, he’s a near-pauper, gleefully fleeced by slimeballing “managers” who serially “managed” to pocket all of his money.

So I’m left instead with “Requiem Again,” from The Durutti Column. Pretty autumn-like. Candles a good idea, too. Burning for Mr. Sun, to help him make it through.

It Is Happening Again

Not knowing the language, they did not know the people. They did not know what the people loved or respected or feared or hated. They did not recognize hostility unless it was patent, unless it came in a form other than language; the complexities of tone and language were beyond them. Not knowing the language, the men did not know whom to trust. Trust was lethal. They did not know false smiles from true smiles, or if a smile here had the same meaning it had in the States. Not knowing the people, they did not know friends from enemies. They did not know if it was a popular war, or, if popular, in what sense. They did not know if the people viewed the war stoically, as it sometimes seemed, or with grief, as it seemed other times, or with bewilderment or greed or partisan fury. It was impossible to know.

They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were, or how being there might influence larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing the dead, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the myths about the place—tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer—but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.

—Going After Cacciato, Tim O’Brien

Come, Little Donkey, Come

The paper rustled under his swishing priest’s robes, and I told him we were crossing a field of promises. I told him the eschatologies seemed to me like a bunch of hay dangled in front of a donkey to induce him to go on pulling a cart. “But mankind needs to set its sights on something lofty and distant,” said Adolf. “Think of the strength that the attraction of heaven gave to people in the Middle Ages.”

“Yes,” I said. “The donkey pulled the cart. It thought it was pulling the cart heavenwards, and soon it would reach paradise, where there were no loads to carry, evergreen pastures, and the beasts of prey were friendly companions. But gradually the donkey realized that heaven was drawing no nearer, it grew tired, and the hay of religion no longer induced it to step out bravely. So lest the cart come to a halt, the donkey’s hunger was switched to an earthly paradise, a socialist park where all donkeys will be equal, the whip will be abolished, where there will be lighter loads and improved fodder, but then the road to this Eden turns out to be just as long, the end is just as far off, and the donkey becomes stubborn again. But in fact, he was wearing blinkers the whole time, so that he never realized that he was just going round and round, and that he wasn’t pulling a cart but a carousel, and perhaps all we are is a sideshow on a fairground of the gods, and at the end of their day out, the gods have forgotten to tidy the carousel away, and the donkey is still pulling it, only the gods have forgotten all about us.”
                                                                      —Death in Rome, Wolfgang Koeppen

Among The Christians

ABC News is reporting that Lithuania supplied the CIA with facilities for a secret prison in which eight War on Terra prisoners were interned, interrogated, and tortured.

The black site was located on the outskirts of Vilnius, the nation’s capital. Lithuanian officials are said to have agreed to host the facility as part of a campaign to improve relations with the United States. CIA black—or secret—prisons have previously been identified in Thailand, Poland, Afghanistan, Romania, and Morocco. Like the black sites in Romania and Poland, the Lithuanian facility was shut down in 2005, after the Washington Post reported that War on Terra prisoners were suffering in secret confinement in Eastern European prisons.

The Lithuanian government denies the report, while the CIA has blasted it as “irresponsible.”

“The CIA does not publicly discuss where facilities associated with its past detention program may or may not have been located,” said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. “The dangers of airing such allegations are plain. These kinds of assertions could, at least potentially, expose millions of people to direct threat. That is irresponsible.”

The CIA apparently still doesn’t get that it is the serial abuses of George II’s War on Terra, and not the public airing of those abuses, that “expose millions of people to direct threat.”

What Is To Be Done

Vladimir Lenin was not fond of alcohol. He agreed with Friedrich Engels that intoxication followed from capitalist degradation; presumably, once workers were free of their bonds, they would no longer feel the need to marinate their minds, to stumble, slouch, and slur. Lenin himself eschewed alcohol; once installed in the Kremlin, he pronounced a nationwide prohibition on the possession and consumption of alcohol.

Lenin didn’t last very long; neither did the USSR’s prohibition experiment. Soviet citizens were allowed to return to the bottle in 1925, a year after Lenin’s death. In 1928, Joseph Stalin succeeded in maneuvering himself into Lenin’s place.

Now Stalin was a man who liked to take a drink or 19, and he was not averse to determining the fate of the nation while immersed in alcohol. Hunter S. Thompson has a version of one pickled-premier story:

He had gone into one of his rages, according to the story as I heard it, and this one had something to do with a notion that seized him, after five days and nights in a brutal vodka orgy, that every Catholic in Moscow should be nailed up on a telephone pole by dawn on Easter Sunday. This announcement caused genuine fear in the Kremlin, because Stalin was known by his staff to be “capable of almost anything.” When he calmed down a bit, one of his advisers suggested that a mass crucifixion of Russian Catholics—for no reason at all—would almost certainly raise hackles in the Vatican and no doubt anger the pope.

“Fuck the pope,” Stalin mumbled. “How many divisions does he have?”

Anyway. Seems from the news today that Lenin, even from the grave, continues to frown upon alcohol. In Uvarovichi, a town in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, an intoxicated 21-year-old man took it into his bibulated brain to clamber upon a 70-year-old, 16-foot tall plaster statue of Lenin. As the man hung from Lenin’s arm, the statute crumbled and collapsed, killing him.

“The monument’s heavy head tumbled on him,” said Nataliya Bolbas, a witness.

In my trade—criminal-defense law—we call this sort of thing an SDT: Stupid Drunk Trick. Crimes occasioned or encouraged by alcohol probably account for something like 80 percent of our business.

Somewhere in Uvarovichi today, family and friends are calling it something different: senseless tragedy.

As A City Upon A Hill

Builders of states, architects of revolution: these are usually idealists, who believe that what they create shall be different, better, other, more, than all that came before.

If wishes were horses . . . .

John Winthrop, Puritan prelate of the Massachusetts Bay Company, promised to plant on the shores of North America a beacon for all the world: “the eyes of all people are upon us,” he said, and “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Yet before his people could even properly feed themselves, they were busy hanging one another for adultery.

Nearly 400 years later, the animatronic Ronald Reagan proclaimed that Winthrop’s fabled American city had taken on a glow—we were now “a shining city on a hill.” To which William Burroughs was heard to grumble: ”America may well be the hope of the world. It is also the source of such emotional plagues as drug hysteria, racism, Bible belt morality, Protestant capitalistic ethic, muscular Christianity, that have spread everywhere, transforming this planet into an annex of Hell.” My own observation, expressed at the time, was that the only American city I could see with much of a shine, there during Reagan’s time, was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, then all aglow from the near-meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility.

In a 1972 interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir confessed her deep disappointment with the reality of the Jewish state.

You’ll think me foolish, naive, but I thought that in a Jewish state there wouldn’t be the evils that afflict other societies. Theft, murder, prostitution. I thought so because we had started out so well. Fifteen years ago in Israel there were almost no thefts, and there were no murders, there was no prostitution. Now instead we have everything, everything. And it’s something that breaks your heart[.]

So too, Iran. 

I Summoned Am To Tourney

It has been said that no one can understand the mind of the medieval knight, and the implication is that his blend of arrogance, quick temper, risk-taking and irrationality is a thing of the past.

Curiously enough, the automobile has created its own species of knights. Lulled into a false sense of security by the armour around him, flattered by the speed which he controls with the touch of the foot, arrogant towards those with inferior mounts or with no mounts at all, the modern motorist will display chivalry towards an attractive woman, pay grudging deference to the owner of a vehicle which is clearly superior, but otherwise behave with stupid over-competitive hostility to every other road-user. The clearest conviction of the modern motorist is that every other driver is in the wrong; he is driving too fast, too slowly, too timidly or too aggressively. Even the carnage of the multiple accident leaves him relatively unmoved; the massacre of a few peasants had much the same effect on a feudal baron’s emotions.

Like the medieval predecessor, the knight of the road goes into the lists and challenges all comers. This is the melee where he can work off his repressions and the ill-temper which everyday life engenders. Some drivers are worse than others but few of us have a completely unblotted escutcheon. Perhaps we are not so remote in thought from our distant ancestors as we like to believe.
                                                                       —Philip Warner, The Medieval Castle

Cambridge Goddam

(This piece was originally posted to Daily Kos. All iterations of “this blog,” “this site,” and the like, thus reference that place, not this one.)

When they slapped the cuffs on Henry Louis Gates Jr., they took it all away from him. In his 58 years he’d done everything he was supposed to, played all the games, made all the moves, but now none of it mattered: when it came right down to it, he was just another uppity Negro, and he was going to jail.

“This was the supreme humiliation for Henry Louis Gates, because he has achieved a rarefied status and the considerations that are usually afforded to him went right out the window when the officer arrested him. In a minute, that cop erased all that Gates has had to work through to get where he is. That officer tripped every racial humiliation that Gates and his family have experienced since slavery.”

Brought it all back home. And today Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is sitting there on the piano bench, right next to Nina Simone, and he’s singing “Cambridge Goddam.”

That’s Just The Way It Is

I try to maintain a sunny outlook. I reject original sin. I believe human beings are born innocent, and that they are perfectible. I see things, in the main, trending towards the good. I am not a Pollyanna; I know the world is a mass of suffering; yet I believe, with Martin Luther King, with our president, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

And then something happens that laughs at me. Mocks me as a fool, lost in illusion. Whispers in an ugly way that some things will never change. That the world will always be awash in ignorance, hatred, fear.

This week, this one really hurt my heart.

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.

“I heard this lady, she was like, ‘Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?’ She’s like, ‘I’m scared they might do something to my child,’” said camper Dymire Baylor.

The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers’ first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.

“When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool,” Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. “The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately.”

“They just kicked us out,” said camper Simer Burwell.

“There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion and the atmosphere of the club,” John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.

We already went through this. It was the 1950 injunction by United States District Court Judge Rubey M. Hulen of the Eastern District of Missouri requiring the city of St Louis to open its Fairground Park swimming pool to people of color that sparked the United States Supreme Court’s decision four years later, in Brown v. Board of Education, that mandated racial integration and supposedly wrote the notion of “separate but equal” out of this nation’s laws

Judge Hulen died in July of 1956, about a month before I was born. It’s as if all those years never passed. We’re still back in Judge Hulen’s time. “All the years combine; they melt into a dream.”

Our president may today occupy a duskier shade of the color bar, but in their hearts, too many of our people still believe, with Strom Thurmond, that it is wrong to “admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” They just don’t have guts enough to say it. Until children come for their water.

History Lesson

“Can you remember the name of any one of the soldiers who were killed in the Hundred Years’ War? Have you ever tried to find out one single name among them all? No, you can’t; you’ve never tried, have you? To you they’re all anonymous, unknown and less important than the least atom in this paperweight on the table in front of you, less important than the food your bowels digested yesterday. You can see that they died for nothing. For nothing at all. I swear that’s true; you can see that it is. Only life itself is of any importance. Ten thousand years hence I’ll bet youthat this war, all-important as it seems to us now, will be completely forgotten. Possibly a dozen or so learned men may wrangle about it occasionally, and about the dates of the chief hecatombs for which it was famous. Up to the present time that is all that Humanity has ever succeeded in finding memorable about itself . . .” 

—Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey To The End Of The Night 

Wanna Be Stealin’ Somethin’

In the heyday of rocknroll, white musicians were occasionally apprehended in the act of brazenly stealing the work of black artists. Perhaps the most notorious offenders were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who once had the effrontery to rip off Robert Johnson, of all people, and for “Love In Vain.” They were promptly slapped down by Rolling Stone, which growled that they “should know better”; subsequent pressings of Let It Bleed properly credited Johnson. The Stones had already, and more successfully, filched songwriting credit for “The Last Time” from the Blind Boys of Alabama.

To be fair, Jagger’s sticky fingers were not confined solely to picking the pockets of black artists. He also wrested credit for “Wild Horses” from country boy Gram Parsons (who conveniently died during the struggle), and later floated as his own a boatload of tunes from bandmate Mick Taylor. Perhaps his most base act of thievery came when he placed his name on inamorata Marianne Faithfull’s “Sister Morphine”; only in recent years, and at the urging of Keith Richards, has Faithfull’s song been returned to her (Faithfull also had a hand in “Wild Horses”; that credit does not appear to be forthcoming, at least not any time soon).

Now, as they enter their twilight years, the Stones find themselves querulously pursuing people they perceive to be pirating their work, as in a 2008 action against Lil Wayne, for allegedly appropriating, without permission, pieces of the Stones’ “Play With Fire.” Amusingly, for a band that for so long marketed itself as “the bad boys of rocknroll” (“the Beatles want to hold your hand; the Stones want to pillage your town”), the suit against Lil Wayne additionally sniffed that Wayne’s riff on “Play With Fire” contained “explicit, sexist and offensive language” that, if associated with the Stones, might cause the aging rockers Harm.

One would think that, particularly given such history, black artists might be more sensitive to laying hands on one another’s work. But one would be wrong. For, as Kelefa Sanneh relates in the July 6 New Yorker, Michael Jackson built “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the first track off Thriller, on “Soul Makossa,” a song by Cameroon musician Manu Dibango. Jackson was eventually forced to come to a financial arrangement with Dibango, but apparently did not learn his lesson. For, even as he collapsed last week into death, he was facing another suit, in France, alleging that he had passed sampling rights to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to Rihanna for her hit “Don’t Stop The Music.” Problem is, he wasn’t empowered to pass on said rights without Dibango’s say-so, which he had failed to ask for or obtain.

Bling Dynasty

Even when reading a cookbook, you can get a sense of why the Chinese had their revolution. You’ll learn that during the Qing Dynasty, for the rich folk a “light” meal consisted of over 40 courses, while dinner ran well over 100. This during a period when most of the citizenry subsisted on rice and a little soya. Rulers then were fond of dishes such as Jade Chicken, which required cooks to patiently peel mountains of grapes, or Bird’s Nest Soup, which necessitated employment of a stable of young girls “with perfect vision,” tasked with but one job: removing feathers and fluff from the nests of sea swallows.

But of course nowhere on the planet today are things quite so decadent and outre. Right?

Wrong. As Lance says in Apocalypse Now: “Jim, it’s here. It really is here.”

Here in the June 22 edition of the New Yorker, in a dotty little review of a Park Avenue tapas joint, La Fonda Del Sol:

Among the tapas . . . lamb dressed with hot peppers and roasted on a bed of grass from the field in which the lamb once grazed. The dinner version of this dish is stewed in yogurt made with the milk of the lamb’s mother.

I don’t think any more needs to be said.

Out Of Africa

Barack Obama has been quite the globe-trotter in his first few short months in office. He has journeyed several times to Europe, once to the Caribbean, touched down in Asia, and recently tip-toed through the minefield of the Middle East.

In July, Obama will make his first visit as president to sub-Saharan Africa. Over two days in Ghana, says press secretary Robert Gibbs, Obama will “highlight[] the critical role that sound governance and civil society play in promoting lasting development.”

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with Gibbs’ choice of words. To these ears they echo eerily an address on Africa delivered by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, in February of 2008, wherein The Decider outlined his vision of an Africa captive to the interests of international capital. Which itself echoed words inscribed by the exiled Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his 2006 novel Wizard Of The Crow.

Ce Pauvre Mort

While the governments and the ruling classes of Europe and the United States were ignoring, enabling, or supporting fascists, George Orwell was fighting them in Spain. There he took a fascist bullet in the throat. Later, back in England, and on the continent of Europe, Orwell lost family, friends, and property to fascist bombs and fascist bullets.

Yet after the war, Orwell wanted no part of the war-crimes tribunals convened to try and punish now-vanquished fascists. In a remarkable essay published November 9, 1945, Orwell concluded: “Revenge Is Sour.”

As people on the left continue to press for war-crimes tribunals to try and punish members of the now-vanquished Bush administration, Orwell’s essay, I think, deserves some attention.

Take Two

There are grumblings this morning that the United States should not accept the results of Friday’s presidential election in Iran, where incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared the victor.

Appearing on Meet the Press, Vice President Joe Biden opined:

“It sure looks like the way they’re suppressing speech, the way they’re suppressing crowds, the way in which people are being treated, that there’s some real doubt.”

Maybe so, maybe so. Problem is that here, as in so many areas of human conduct, the US is precluded from objecting too loudly without prompting much of the world to snicker about American hypocrisy.

For in December of 2000, George W. Bush was selected as President of the United States, despite the fact that Albert Gore had won the election, if “winning” is defined, as it traditionally is, by receiving the most votes—which Gore did, in the disputed state of Florida, had every legitimate ballot cast actually been counted.

Those votes were not counted, however, because Bush operatives first forcibly shut down the counting of ballots, and then obtained a 5-4 ruling from the United States Supreme Court that permanently halted ballot-counting, effectively proclaiming Bush president.

Three of the five justices who installed Bush as president possessed conflicts that should have compelled them to recuse themselves from the case. Antonin Scalia’s son was a partner in the legal firm representing Bush before the high court. Clarence Thomas’ wife was busily processing applications for those seeking appointment to the yet-to-be Bush administration. Sandra Day O’Connor on election night had publicly exclaimed “this is terrible” upon learning that Gore had apparently won; she wished to retire from the bench, but would only do so under a Republican president.

Nonetheless, these folks, the supreme law of the land, declared Bush the victor, and so he was.

Now, in Iran, the supreme law of that land, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, has declared Ahmadinejad the victor. And so he is.

Both the United States Supreme Court and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini may boast of the word “supreme” in their titles. Both wear robes. Neither were elected by the people they govern to the positions they hold.

Meanwhile, from the safety of the tubes, voluble keyboard commandos are urging the Iranian people to resist recognizing Ahmadinejad’s re-election, decreeing: “If it comes down to a violent revolution, so be it.”

Maybe these people should reflect that it was a violent revolution, in 1979-80, that brought the current Iranian regime to power.

The Graveyard Of Empires

General David Petraeus, the dude John McCain said during the 2008 presidential campaign we should all regard as a sure-as-shootin’ infallible oracle on all things military, has, according to the Washington Post, pronounced Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires,” and more or less counseled the Obama administration that it cannot hope to “win” in that region.

In addition to more combat troops, Petraeus called for “a surge in civilian capacity” to help rebuild villages, train local police forces, tackle corruption in the Afghan government and reduce the country’s thriving opium trade. He also suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires,” he said. “We cannot take that history lightly.”

French, Germans Balk At Increasing Afghan Commitment; McGovern Warns “Military Power No Solution”

Vice President Joe Biden traveled this weekend to Munich to cajole Europeans into committing more troops to Afghanistan, while NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer Saturday complained: “I’m frankly concerned when I hear the United States is planning a major commitment for Afghanistan but other allies are already ruling out doing more.”

France and Germany, however, which, pace Russia, sacrificed in the 20th Century more of their citizens’ lives to military madness than any other Western countries, do not seem much inclined to dispatch more bodies to be shot and blown to shreds in a region that challenged even Genghis Khan, and in recent decades saw the British and Russians beaten like gongs.

Dirt

Early last Monday morning, KGO-San Francisco’s Ray Taliaferro, dean of the Left Coast lefty AM-radio talk-show hosts, signed on with an impassioned sermon both poxing, and pleading with, all parties in Israel’s current assault on Gaza. A brief account of that jeremiad can be found here.

This Monday morning, the violence in Gaza having not at all abated, Taliaferro returned to sermonizing, this time taking as his text the primacy in this Mideast conflict, of dirt.

What is liberating to me about Taliaferro’s lamentations is that they transcend all the tired old themes that are so incessantly and obsessively worked and reworked whenever people feel the need to on this issue opine, ruminate, bloviate, screech. This night, Taliaferro graphically exposed and addressed the bald fact that in this Mideast conflict combatants on all sides, through their actions, demonstrate that to them dirt is more important than their own children.

“There Is No Other Reward”

And what a terrible morning it is. Where?—over in the Middle East. Oh no—you mean the Middle East is at it again? Yeah, they’re at it again. They don’t have enough intelligent people in the population over there on both sides of the border to get together? No, no, no-no. Well then how many of them have to die? Well, they don’t care if all of them die.

So how long is it going to take all you guys to kill each other? Somebody will fire on Israel, kill some people; Israel will fire back, and kill some people; back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth—here comes 2015—and forth—here comes 2020—and forth—here comes 2050—and forth–here comes—oh lord.

I have come to the conclusion—and nobody can talk me out of this one—that there is no answer. And that the killing will take place until there’s no . . . one . . . left.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’ll tell you this: I feel sick to my stomach, when I see what is happening today.

It’s so sad. It is so sad. It is so sad. It . . .is . . . so . . . sad. Say it again, Mr. Taliaferro: it is so sad.

Operation Enduring Fiefdom “Doomed”; “We Have Assumed The Place Of The Soviets”

French officials mortified by President Nikolas Sarkozy’s suicidal embrace of Operation Enduring Fiefdom—George II’s adventure in Afghanistan—have leaked to the uppity French weekly Le Canard Enchaine a classified cable relating that the British envoy to Afghanistan has concluded that “American strategy is doomed to fail.”

Meanwhile, the former deputy chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center has admitted that a trio of Afghani “warlords,” formerly supported and supplied by the Reagan administration in the 1980s proxy war against the Soviet Union, today—again—control much of Afghanistan, and that we here in the US “have assumed the place of the Soviets.”

Elks Club

The factotums of Bomb McCain sound exceedingly silly in vowing that their man could not possibly have seized the opportunity to listen in on the questions that would be asked of him at Saturday’s Saddleback “faith forum.”

According to the New York Times, faith-forum ringmaster Rick Warren “seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building” when Warren posed the same questions to Barack Obama that he would later pose to McCain. Warren intended that during Obama’s oratorio McCain would be sequestered in some Saddleback cell, there shrouded in “a cone of silence.”

But McCain—no doubt “running late”—was not yet in the building: instead, he was en route, ensconced in his motorcade. Though the vehicle bearing the Bomb was certainly equipped with radio, television, computer, and all manner of texting devices, McCain spokesmouth Nicolle Wallace told the Times he “had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.”

Of course not. Monomaniacally pursuing the presidency, nursing an eight-year losing streak, desperate to reverse his luck, why would McCain take advantage of an opportunity to furtively peek at the cards . . . especially when no one but his own people would ever know?

If we know anything about the people who have recently attained the presidency, we know that, in all the important ways, they are at one with Chinatown’s Noah Cross. Who, when speaking of the child he sired upon his own daughter, observed: “I don’t blame myself.

“You see,” Cross explained, “most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time, the right place, they’re capable of anything.”

Reruns

The arguments of ignorance tend to recur. It will always be so: ignorance is by nature a limited beast. Originality and creativity are not required, to persist in seeing through a glass darkly.

If you live long enough, you will witness the marshaling of the same arguments at different instances of space and time. If the arguments prove ignorant on the first go-round, you can generally expect that they will likewise wobble wrongly in succeeding revolutions. This is part of what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he wrote:

Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished.

The cohorts of George II at present instruct that we must pursue all over the planet a War On Terra because “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them over here.” If you slip in a disc of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, you can watch one of the first known invocations of this same mantra, as a band of ur-men brandishing bones crushes the skulls of a rival band at a strategically important watering hole. Fast-forward the planet some several million years, and you may observe hundreds of thousands of Americans and Australians, awash in the same shibboleth, floating over to Europe for WWI, there to ensure Germans do not occupy Topeka, and Turks do not site a mosque on Ayers Rock.

In my youth, the United States transformed Southeast Asia into a charnel house in order to “there” put a stop to Communism, so that “here” we would not be forced to burn all our money and construct refrigerators out of cement. The US lost that war, but there don’t now seem to be any more Communists here where I live than there were before the defeat. Just the same one guy, an economics professor at the university, ready soon to retire. The US will lose the War on Terra, too, but I don’t expect that as a result my daughter will be immured in a burka, or that I will be impressed into service as a dervish.