Shocking Revelations as Bush "Secret Prisons" Empty

With the Obama administration planning to restore habeas corpus and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, while Bush factotums scramble for pardons, new photographs have been released of some of the "prisoners without a name, in cells without a number" rounded up by the Bush administration.

A Brief History of Collateral Damage

A lot of civilians are being killed in this crazy little thing that Bush calls a war. The U.S. military is measuring out other people's lives with coffee spoons. If an American soldier risks killing civilians, up to thirty deaths are acceptable, so long as the strike was against military targets. In the Iraqui war, which even its most ardent lovers admit cannot be "won" by military means, thirty civiian deaths would be counterproductive, if those thirty corpses leave one or two very angry survivors; certainly if my own loved ones were killed by a well-groomed aviator listening to headphones, I'd be dead or in Guantanamo before i'd stop hunting. Why do we expect better behavior from the fellaheen than we do from outrselves?

Time was, with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, you could see the face of the poor bastard you shot, and be sure of your mark. War sure has gone downhill since Napoleon's brother added state terror to his conquest of Spain, and the outgunned Spanish responded with tactics that were given the name guerilla, "little war". The French hussars thought a little shock and awe would cow the Spanish into submission, and of course it did-- only for so long as they kept the eye on weeping fathers and screaming women. The moment the big guy's back was turned, survivors started thinking up homespun ways to make a technologically superior force die very slowly, and very old.

This is a fundamental problem in the use of air force and massive strikes that has never been publically debated in a society that claims to have civilian control of its military. its origins lie in the biplane-era theories of an Italian aviator, Giulio Douhet, who thought you could bomb an enemy into submission by destroying his infrastructure and taking civilian lives. They thought he was a crank during the First World War, even court-martialed and threw him in jail, but starting in the 1920s, when The Command of the Air was published, he found an audience, with Guernica the first experiment.

The first part of Douhet's theory-- that you could destroy an enemy's war-making infrastructure from the air, and force him to surrender-- proved to be true as far as Germany was concerned. In Japan, the atomic bomb forced Japanese civilians to force the emperor to force the military to surrender-- but a close examination, as in the Pacific War Research Society's Japan's Longest Day, proves, beyond the wishful thinking of my gentle pacifist brethren, that the Japanese military was still not going to surrender even after Nagasaki. It was our good luck and a civilian revolt against the samurai generals in charge that forced the emperor to concede. The second half of Douhet's premise has never been openly debated, except in our war colleges. It may be that American civilians, seeing their military adventures as fundamentally altruistic, cannot imagine there would be any organized revenge for an accidental killing.

The 14 Japanese researchers that make up the Pacific War Research Society must be lonely men, since so much of their work puts the lie to dearly held cliches on both sides of the Pacific. You might even find out that the Japanese were working on their ownatomic bomb project at Hungnam, Korea, under Yoshio Nishina at the Imperial Japanese Army's Riken Institute.

In the case of Vietnam, the infrastructure was bombed "back to the Stone Age" many times over, with neutral Cambodia and Laos bombed for good measure, but it did not yield the results described by the Douhet: the Vietnamese simply hunkered down and toughened their resolve. The Luftwaffe could have told them that; Hitler's bombing of Britain did nothing to "weaken the resolve" of the civilian population, but only pissed everyone off and made Arthurian legends out of the teenagers who went up in Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, the firemen memorialized near St. James Cathedral, and Winston Churchill's sad guilty poking through the ashes of Canterbury.

And what is the emotional effect of modern American air power, for those unlucky enough to be standing under it? Are their first thoughts, "Gosh, we'd better surrender", or "Come close enough, you bastard, and I'll put a Stone-Age cap in your high-tech ass"? American audiences, who gasp at the atrocities inflicted on downed Americans in Somalia, apparently lack the imagination to see a Blackhawk helicopter from the Somali's point of view. Americans want always to be loved, and always perceive themselves as acting out of good will, like the Abominable Snowman hugging Bugs Bunny, and are always astonished, hurt, and then angry when they face rejection by the other.

If we are willing to as the Romans did, "make a desert and call it peace", then bombing and collateral damage will suffice; but there are no guarantees about what happens later, when the few survivors grow to manhood.

Blowback: Here Comes Another Piece of the Sixth Avenue El

100,000 brand new AK-47s and 80,000 pistols are AWOL in Iraq. Can't find 'em. Can't imagine who would want them. Wups, there they--*

New York used to have an elevated train like Chicago's, until it was scrapped in the 1930s and sold for steel to the Japanese. New Yorkers in the Pacific during World War Two would complain, "here comes another piece of the old Sixth Avenue El" as another Japanese barrage started. E. E. Cummings used the phrase as the punchline for his poem "plato told him":

plato told
him:he couldn’t
believe it (jesus
told him;he
wouldn’t believe
it) lao
tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes
mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or
not) you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn’t believe it,no
sir) it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth
avenue
el; in the top of his head:to tell
him
(e.e. cummings, 1944)

Now the GAO can't find 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols that were sent to Iraq between 2004 and 2006, with helmets and body armor to match. Just gone, stolen, lost to the black market and the People Who Are Trying to Kill Us.

Who the hell was in charge? Wait, this just gets better. The officer responsible for training Iraqi troops-- and signing off on their weapons-- in that period was General David Petraeus, now overall commander of American forces in Iraq. Poor bastard can't catch a break.

My father-in-law was musing as to why Petreus took this job after others demurred. If it was sheer careerism, then he deserves every piece of blowback that comes his way, and God help the people standing next to him. If he accepted out of honor, when you're the only one willing to clean up someone else's mess, then I embrace him as a brother and a friend.

I like to think that the other generals tricked him, like the Stooges used to stick Curly with the blame. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must have asked, "Who wants to cleanup this disaster Bush left behind?", and General Moe and General Larry kept pointing to each other and switching places until poor Petreus was stuck at the end of the line.

GET READY FOR "WHO LOST IRAQ?" AND THE NEXT ATTACK ON U.S. SOIL

Who lost Iraq? Why, you did, you cowardly terrorist-loving liberal traitor. We would have won if you'd supported the invasion from the beginning. It's your fault, you and that quisling appeasement Congress, undermining our Commander-in-Chief and deserting our brave men and women in harm's way.

I am expecting another attack on the continental US-- I refuse to use that Nazi phrase, "the Homeland"-- but not for any of the administration's fearmongering reasons. I think it's going to happen because Bush has INCREASED al-Qaeda membership faster than the Marines can kill 'em. As far as I can tell, the only candidates to say these honest but forbidden words are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Every politician who accuses war opponents of supporting al-Qaeda should be immediately confronted with the unpleasant facts about just who has been strengthening al-Qaeda for the past five years.

I wish the the neocons and the terrorists were better shots, and would only kill each other, leaving the world a better place, but a lot of innocent people are going to die again, both here and in the poorly aimed retaliation overseas.

Most infuriating of all, Bush and company won't take the blame for enabling the next attack-- they'll blame you and me, the opponents of the war, for emboldening the terrorists. It's Michael Moore's fault that we lost in Iraq, for not supporting the invasion from the get go; it's Cindy Sheehan's fault for undermining our troops. It's Congress' fault for not spending another 3,000 lives.

Al-Qaeda, in the meantime, are as happy as pigs in shit with the war in Iraq. An attack on U.S. soil will inspire more repression, which will provoke resentment, which will incite rebellion, which will lead to more repression, which will... It's working for them in Pakistan, it works in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, they've opened new training facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan-- five bucks says somewhere in Osama's secret lair, there's a sign posted over the desk that says LET GEORGE DO IT.

Killer Apes and Mental Illness: the Sons of Abel Versus the Sons of Cain

There are millions of people kept in prison because their behavior is seen as threatening to social order and safety-- and yet the primates that threaten the most lives, even show blatant disregard for innnocent bystanders, are not only free to roam the streets, but lionized by their peers. Because Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ayman al-Zawahiri are seen as enacting the wishes of a group, they surround themselves with armed guards and issue orders that will murder or maim thousands of people who never voted for them, never met them, and wouldn't like them if they did.

Like it or not, we have to share a planet with these gangsters and have to find a way to remove them from power without turning into one of them. If human's outer appearance matched their internal demons, the problem would take care of itself in a few generations: no sane person would want to have sex with them, and the species would die out. But the killer chimps among us are breeding as rapidly as the peaceful bonobos, and the chimps don't mind cooking the books by killing a few thousand bonobos to make the world safer for their bloodthirsty kind. It may be time to talk about the genetic elephant in the room: why are some of us Abel, happy in our own garden, and too many of us worshippers of Cain?

If we can agree that the brain and the nervous system are electro-chemical, that our perception of reality-- and our response to it-- depends on a certain balance of dopamine, serotonin and all their building blocks... And within a given population, there are bound to be variations of that chemical balance in individuals, making (to borrow the ancient personality types) this one choleric, that one sanguine, this one melancholic and occasionally choleric. And just as variations in the pancreas or the thyroid gland can cause life-threatening illness, imbalance outside the normal range in brain chemistry can bring on mania, depression, delusions and hallucinations of the five senses. We've known since at least World War One that not just physical trauma, but repeated emotional trauma can carve channels in the mind that induce post traumatic stress disorder, multiple personalities, and many other illnesses. It may be that the tragedies of schizophrenia and autism might be traced back to a virus.

If all this is so, might there be an unpleasant secret hidden in plain sight: that within a given population, there will be highly organized indiduals who seek power over others and then use that power to wage war on neighboring tribes? That just as humanity wars tribe against tribe, there is an undeclared war in every community between the sons of Cain and the children of Abel?

There are horrible ironies in this relationship. A peace-loving but curious primate named Einstein followed a line of inquiry that made it possible for a desperate, threatened group of his peers to deliver a terrible weapon into the hands of the killer apes. Archimedes of Syracus was killed by a Roman soldier while lost in thought over a problem he had drawn in the sand. Marcellus, the Roman general in charge of the expedition, had given direct orders that Archimedes was not to be harmed-- but as many a commander has learned since then, you can't turn a thousand soldiers loose in a foreign country without a few bad apples and some collateral damage.

The peaceful ape can be provoked to violence, just as any animal can. Many a Cincinnatus has been called from his plow to fight savagely for hearth and home, but then-- the reason the name Cinncinatus is immortal-- when the threat is over, the peace-lover returns to his plow and turns his back on any temptation to power. But the goodwill of a thousand citizen soldiers can be undone in a second by a few rapists, torturers and murderers and the commanders who enable them.

How does a peace-loving soul contain-- or, terribly, eradicate-- his violent brother and his friends? If we were still a small band living in the trees, it would be evident that the violent mobs are scratching each other to death, and endangering our peace-loving children. The political question of the 20th century will look to Mandela and Havel and other martyrs who survived to wield power themselves. We must rescue hostages to fortune, take the dangerous toys away from the violent boys, and discourage our daughters from joining in and breeding with them.

Lessons the Pirates Taught Me

After hundreds of years, piracy was eradicated in the Caribbean when the big powers of the time (Britain, Spain and France) finally agreed to stop harboring them, stop sponsoring pirates against other countries, and stop taking a percentage of pirated loot. There were still "letters of marque" but the practice faded except for a few pockets, I'm told, in Southeast Asia.

Americans who ought to know better, from Eisenhower to Kissinger to Carter, have engaged in state sponsored terrorism, in looking the other way so long as terrorists attacked our enemies, and in taking profit from "outlaw" operations like the Contra "rebel" cocaine profiteers. Wasn't it the CIA in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iran in the 1950s that led us to this pass? And aren't we even now spending billlions to build a terrorist Disneyland in Iraq?

The United States has itself used terrorists as catspaws for decades. So have the Saudis, and the French, and the Russians, and the Iranians, and Chile, and Argentina, and...

Private interest groups sponsor terrorism as well, offer shelter and wink at their excesses; consider the Miami Cubans who hate Castro so much they don't much care who gets hurt, or anti-abortionists that incite home-grown terrorists to use health care workers as target practice.

This is an ancient practice. Professional criminals often hire "bugs", sociopathic outcasts, as tools to do their dirtiest jobs. Sometimes you can point an assasin in the right direction without ever leaving a fingerprint.

When the nations start to come clean about this history and negotiate OPENLY about taking away the safe harbors, we might start to see terrorism lose its popularity as a tactic, except for the bughouse rogues like McVeigh or Andrew Kehoe, who blew up Bath, Michigan in the Twenties.

The only thing Bush and Cheney have been correct about is that stopping terrorism will take decades-- and they, bless their crippled hearts, have a talent for pouring gasoline onto a fire instead of water.

A MODEST AGENDA FOR THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

1. Raise the federal minimum wage, which now has the same spending power it had in 1955. Override the inevitable presidential veto.
3. Implement the security recommendations of the 9/11 commission. Override the inevitable presidential veto.
4. Reinstate the ancient right of habeas corpus as won by the barons at Runnymeade, seized from the tyrannical hands of King John. Override the inevitable presidential veto.
5. Rewrite the so-called "Patrot Act" to restore privacy protection. Override the inevitable presidential veto.
6. Investigate and shine a light on a) why we invaded Iraq, ignoring the best available intelligence; b) gross negligence by person or persons unknown in the conduct of the war in Iraq.
7. Investigate and shine a light on Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq and damage done to national security by privatizing "security" militias in Iraq.
8. Investigate and shine a light on how and why the Taliban was alllowed to make a come back in Afghanistan.
9. Appoint Grand Juries to investigate, indict and persecute those responsible for torture committed in the name of the people of the United States.
10. a) Supoena EVERYBODY. b) Indict everybody that doesn't turn state's evidence. c) IMPEACH THE MOTHERFUCKER ALREADY.

If the Democrats take the Senate too (12 Midnight here, too close to call), there will be no end-zone dances. But Carl Levin is quietly and judiciously going to start looking for the Truth-- last seen bloody, beaten and left lying in the ditch by George W. Bush.

Lazy Plotting at Marvel's "Civil War", Good Stuff at "Front Line", "Cap" and "Planet Hulk"

Terrorist explosions kill thousands of innocents while the country watches on television. The incident turns the country against anyone who "might be" or "looks like" a terrorist. Their friends and legal defenders are branded as fellow travelers. Congress panics and rushes through a series of laws to suspend due process and habeas corpus. The president tells the dissidents "you're either with us or against us".
The head of US intelligence tries to recruit prominent Americans to the government cause. When they refuse, the government and the conservative press defame them as traitors who hate America. Former heros, even combat veterans loyal to the Constitution, find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Prisoners are transported thousands of miles away to an improvised prison camp and kept without trial, with no contact with the outside world. Defendants are abused by over-eager guards and interrogators. Intimidated by the government, bullied by their peers, eager to please, old friends sell each other out. Both sides regroup as the violence increases Several former conservatives change sides and join the anti-government dissidents. The law-abiding, pro-government forces become more and more righteous and defensive, desperate enough to enlist sadists and crimnals to attack their former friends. The American government persecutes "enemies within", while a dangerous foreign power activates a sleeper cell...
But hey, it's just a comic book.
For me, "Front Line" is the best (and least publicized) of Marvel's "Civil War" titles. The multiple storylines-- Ben Urich's simple motivation to get to the truth, Speedball as an unpopular defendent being tossed into the prison population-- gets closer to the "messier" aspects than the mainstream titles.
What I object to is Marvel's bad habit under Quesada of trashing well-established characters we've been taught to respect and care about. We're supposed to believe that characters who have (literally, sometimes) gone through Hell to do the right thing will suddenly buckle for anyone waving a flag or a badge? I think this is lazy writing and a failure of imagination; instead of creating new and interesting characters to embody the pro-registration side, we're supposed to believe that Reed? Jan? SPIDEY?!? would sign on for this? And the goofier characters from the '70s and '80s used as cannon fodder?
Heck, even Stan, whose sixties "political" stories might have been naive pleas for tolerance, wasn't afraid to try a new character to embody ideas. Some were Star Trek Silly-- remember Hitler as the Hate-Monger?-- but some, like Bolivar Trask and his heirs, had real staying power. "Front Line" is doing a pretty good job of playing with the archetypes; the two-panel suicide in issue 6 had real pathos.
It's not as if it's a lost skill--Brian K. Vaughn, Alan Moore, the nuts over at "Planet Hulk", all these guys can make us care about a new character in just a few panels. Grant Morrison broke my heart in just three issues with brave little Pirate in "We Three" (and yes, house rabbits really ARE that aggressive and stubborn when they don't want to go where you want them to go.)
The uncharacteristic, un-heroic, "you're either with us or against us" behavior of suddenly right-wing characters at Marvel is unconvincing. It may be that Marvel has brought in too many Hollywood writers trained by Hollywood. The manufactured "conflict between old friends" is reminiscent of an ensemble television show that's running out of steam.
In tawdry reality, the politicians so quick to abandon habeas corpus and their constitutional oath were never our friends, and never our heros; they have been waiting their entire lives to sell out to any bully with a twang. Nine-eleven didn't change a damn thing, it only brought out the smallness and meaness that was always there. Torturers, let your hearts be glad. Let a thousand sadists bloom. If Marvel really wanted to appear even-handed in "Civil War", the pro-registration team would be led by nasty little opportunists giving orders to conflicted characters who do the wrong things for the right reasons, instead of heros selling out heros and trashing their reader's good will.

(Inspired by a review of "Civil War" at Filing Cabinet of the Damned)

COMMONPLACE BOOK of QUOTATIONS for September, 2006

“It makes me wonder what happens when the language of argument and the language of ridicule become the same, when the address of a potentate is voiced no more soberly than the goofings of some rube.” (Wyatt Mason

***


***

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. ...moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used.”
(Lt. General John Jeff Kimmons)

***
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine

***
“The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe. (Mark Mazzeti in the NYT

***

“George W. Bush's Sept. 15 outburst - threatening to stop interrogating terror suspects if Congress doesn't let him revise the Geneva Conventions to permit coercive techniques - is part of a pattern of petulance that dates back to even before the 9/11 attacks but has resurfaced as Bush faces new challenges to his authority.
“In summer 2001, less than six months into his presidency while confronting congressional obstacles to his domestic program, Bush told followers that he was ready to "go back to Crawford" if he didn't get his way on legislation....Back then, Republicans framed Bush's "back to Crawford" threats as a sign of his principled leadership as well as a new self-confidence in asserting his authority.” (Andrew Bard Schmookler, author of “Parable of the Tribes”)

***
“Britain's leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change. In an unprecedented step [first time in 364 years], the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence". The scientists also strongly criticize the company's public statements on global warming, which they describe as "inaccurate and misleading".”
(reported in The Guardian UK

***

The Royal Society—the world’s oldest learned society—has publicly taken on Exxon. Just so you know: this is the first time in the Royal Society’s 364 years that they’ve done something like this.

Britain’s leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”.

The scientists also strongly criticise the company’s public statements on global warming, which they describe as “inaccurate and misleading

***
"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
Robert A. Heinlein
***

“In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically....
“Paper ballots will not completely eliminate the threat of tampering, of course - after all, election fraud and miscounts have occurred throughout our history. As long as there has been a paper trail, however, our elections have been conducted with some measure of public scrutiny. But electronic voting machines are a hacker's dream. And today, for-profit companies are being given unprecedented and frightening power not only to provide these machines but to store and count our votes in secret, without any real oversight. You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system...” (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)

***
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) -- A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers....
“Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican. Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan....Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.... Democrats want to keep us poor while voting only Democrat...Democrats want us to accept same-sex marriages, teen abortions without a parent's consent and suing the Boy Scouts for saying 'God' in their pledge.... Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution."

***

***

"Cap is about freedom more than anything else. He's about altruism and not being in anyone's pocket. He'd be repulsed by the idea of doing this as a job. He's all about civic duty. He's no lapdog and is bigger than any government, whether it's Republican or Democrat. He represents the ideal.... That said, I live miles away and am quite safe and it all makes great comics. Remember how dull books were under Clinton? Like the 80s, we need a Republican in the White House to react against to make good comics. Well done, Bush. May you reign forever." (Mark Millar)

***

“On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’
“The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen... But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name... As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists....the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.”

(Tony Judt in The London Review of Books)

***
“Avoiding prosecution under the War Crimes Act has been an obsession of this administration since shortly after 9/11. In a January 2002 memorandum to the president, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales pointed out the problem of prosecution for detainee mistreatment under the War Crimes Act....Gonzales also understood that the specter of prosecution could hang over top administration officials involved in detainee mistreatment throughout their lives...
“....To "reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales recommended that Bush not apply the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaida and the Taliban....The administration has apparently decided to secure immunity from prosecution through legislation. Under cover of the controversy involving the military tribunals and whether they could use hearsay or coerced evidence, the administration is trying to pardon itself, hoping that no one will notice.... Creating immunity retroactively for violating the law sets a terrible precedent....A president who knowingly and deliberately violates U.S. criminal laws should not be able to use stealth tactics to immunize himself from liability, and Congress should not go along.” Elizabeth Holtzman, “Bush seeks retroactive immunity for violating War Crimes Act”

***
“One central characteristic of the [9/11 conspiracy] nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous, belief in American efficiency, and hence many of them start with the racist premise that "Arabs in caves" weren't capable of the mission. They believe that military systems work the way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work.”
(Alexander Cockburn in The Nation 9/25/2006)

***
As we are liberated from our own fear, our prescence automatically liberates others.
(Nelson Mandela)

***
"[Marvel Comics’] Civil War" provides problems in spades. The story opens with a reckless fight between a novice group of heroes (filming a reality television show) and a cadre of villains. The battle becomes quite literally explosive, killing some of the superheroes and many innocent bystanders. That crystallizes a government movement to register all super-powered beings as living weapons of mass destruction. The subsequent Registration Act will divide the heroes into two camps, one led by Captain America {against registration, thus criminalized by the Act], the other [pro-government] by Iron Man. Along the way, Marvel will unveil its version of Guantánamo Bay, enemy combatants, embedded reporters and more. The question at the heart of the series is a fundamental one: "Would you give up your civil liberties to feel safer in the world?" ( The Battle Outside Raging, Superheroes Dive In by GEORGE GENE GUSTINES in The New York Times)

***

“So, why did they hate us after all? We sure blew off that question nicely. As with everything else in this country, our response to 9/11 was a heroic compendium of idiocy, cowardice, callow flag-waving, weepy sentimentality (coupled with an apparently bottomless capacity for self-pity), sloth, laziness and partisan ignorance.... We did just about everything except honestly ask ourselves what the hell really happened, and why.”
(Matt Taibbi

***

***
"The first thing a principle does, if it really is a principle, is to kill someone."
Dorothy Sayers

***

"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place."
Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz

***

“What fears and desires does Civil War reveal? The fear is that we are coming apart; the secret desire is not for social and political unity, but instead for open conflict. The 20th Century hero fought for all of us and for an American Way that everyone supposedly shared. In the 21st Century, superheroes will fight over the very meaning of the American Way. The winners will decide who is an American ... and who is a criminal.” ( Jeremy Adam Smith)

An Appeal for Sanity

"In handling a stinging insect, move very slowly." (Robert A. Heinlein)

The Arab "street" evidentally can't handle a Danish cartoon or a statement from the Pope without going batshit. In their defense, it must be said that Muslim clerics and governments are distorting what is said in Europe and America for their own reasons. The fairly innocuous Danish cartoons were distributed by Arab clerics in a pamphlet containing cartoons that definitely WERE inflammatory. As long as they can keep the masses whipped into a frenzy against the Western infidels, the masses won't start asking questions about their own conditions at home.

And our president-- can we impeach him YET?-- can't open his mouth without making things worse. I am personally in favor of parachuting the administration and their "advisors" into Iraq and letting them clean up the mess they made-- but that mealy-mouthed sonofabitch is going to get us into so many wars, we're going to wind up having to protect his sorry ass even though we hate his guts.

Pope Benedict ought to have known better. Quoting a Byzantine emperor--"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached"-- is probably not the best approach to bridge building. We used to call this guy Cardinal Ratfuck-- I mean, Ratzinger-- back when he was in charge of the Inquisition; now he commits this public relations disaster and Machiavelli won't take his calls.

Not to worry-- we have the noted Islamicist Karen P. Hughes leading the defense of Western civilization.

I offer this, an appeal for sanity, one of my favorite short essays from Monty Python's Flying Circus:

Voice Over: And now, an appeal for sanity, from the Reverend Arthur Belling.

[Cut to studio. Close shot of a vicar sitting facing camera.]

Reverend Belling [played by Graham Chapman]: You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives.

[The camera pulls back and we can see that the vicar has an axe in his head.]

Reverend Belling [continues]: It is up to people like you and me, who are out of our tiny little minds, to try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice and then you can paint half of your body red and the other half green and then you can jump up and down in a bowl of treacle going 'squawk, squawk, squawk...' And then you can go 'Neurhhh! Neurhh!' and then you can roll around on the floor going 'pting pting pting' ... [he rolls around on the floor]

Voice Over: The Reverend Arthur Belling is Vicar of St Loony Up The Cream Bun and Jam.

Halfway Through September: Commonplace Book of Current Readings

“.... there are things that prose can do that visual media require both far more effort and vastly more artistic acuity to put across. What they are good at is transmitting extremely simple ideas; the villain kicks a dog, the hero grumbles at the outrage and shoots him. This is great if your goal is to sell a million movie tickets. It ain’t particularly good for the development of complex thought. Or, indeed, any thought at all.”
(John M. Ford, on the blog Making Light)

***
“It would be impossible to be taken seriously as a reporter or expert on Russia, France, Germany, Latin America, or perhaps even China or Japan without knowing the requisite languages but for "Islam" no linguistic knowledge seems to be necessary since what one is dealing with is considered to be a psychological deformation, not a "real" culture or religion.“
(Edward Said)

***
"In the aftermath of 9/11, the world was united with America. Even in Arab and Muslim countries, the sense of shock and feelings of solidarity with America far outweighed any sympathies with the terrorists. ...Immediately after 9/11, Al Qaeda seemed to be losing its battle with America and the West. Unfortunately, that changed when America invaded Iraq. The fight against the jihadists will not be decided simply on the battlefield; it will also be decided in the sphere of international legitimacy. ... Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the situation in Iraq could hardly be called successes.”
( Joschka Fischer)

***

“All the same, I suspect that we will miss Tony Blair when he is gone. The boyish charm is fraying but still intact. The exhaustion, the desperate need to convince everyone of the truth of his own delusions, the raw emotions worn as a kind of exoskeleton, all show one of the great actor-managers in heroic decline. Blair may be the last British prime minister able to trade openly on his emotions. He knows that we are secretly rather drawn to bad acting and are happy to collude in his exposure of his weaknesses.

“He is the beaten husband, still in charge of the car keys and the TV remote, but aware that the rest of the household despises him and is impatient for him to bring down the curtain. He jokes and winces, and makes fun of his own despair. The longer he hangs on, the more he can steer us towards the steamy, emotional bath we were happy to help him prepare. Would he like to drown us? After all, we like being lied to, we like promises that will never be kept, we like being locked into his smiling neediness.”
(J.G. Ballard)

***
“For me SNAKES ON A PLANE is like an ex-girlfriend: my feelings toward it are complicated. There is a lot to say about my relationship with this movie, and I'm gonna try to say it all. But it all boils down to this: I used to think I loved SNAKES ON A PLANE, but now I just want to be friends.”
(Outlaw Vern for 8/21/06)

***

“Unfettered power... cannot go berserk like this and expect to hold it all together.” (S. Roy)

***

“Is there anything about the current [9/11 commission] hearings that does interest the administration? From the evidence so far, they're interested in controlling what you and I find out about what happened, and what the administration did and didn't do about it. But they're only concerned about that because we vote, and because Dubya's perennially sensitive about the lustre of his reputation. Our actual safety doesn't enter into the calculation.”
(Teresa Neil Hayden on her blog Making Light)

***
“Fending off the chaos that would almost certainly come with civil war would be a reason to stay the course, although it does not inspire the full-throated rhetoric about freedom that Mr. Bush offered last night. But the nation needs to hear a workable plan to stabilize a fractured, disintegrating country and end the violence. If such a strategy exists, it seems unlikely that Mr. Bush could see it through the filter of his fantasies.” (NYT editorial)

***

“Another attempt on the scale of the 2001 attacks hasn’t been necessary. The last one is still doing the trick, and the terrorists’ resources are limited.”
(William Gibson)

***
“In cultural evolution, [Susan] Blackmore claims, the replicators are hypothetical entities called memes, a term coined by Dawkins as a cultural analogue for genes. Dawkins intended it as a metaphor, but Blackmore (and others) argue that memes are real physical entities, like genes (DNA). Moreover, memes have a mind of their own; they compete among themselves "for their own sake" [Blackmore's emphasis]. ... Memes have taken control of our cultural evolution, she says.....
“The trouble is, memes don't really exist as a distinct causal agency in evolution, and saying they do won't make it so; I predict that they will prove to be more elusive than the Higgs boson. As a metaphor for various forms of learned cultural "information", the term might be quite useful. It has the advantage of being more generic than such familiar terms as "ideas", "inventions", "behaviors", "artifacts", etc., and it is certainly preferable to such clumsy neologisms as Edward Wilson's "culturgens". But as a shaper of cultural evolution independently of the motivations, goals, purposes, compulsions and judgments -- in short the minds -- of human actors, memes rank right up there with the fiery phogiston and the heavenly aether.”
(Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.: “The Invasion of the Memes: Is It Science Fiction?”)

***

“Earlier this month Banksy surreptitiously placed a blow-up doll dressed as a Guantánamo detainee inside the fence of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland, where it apparently remained for more than an hour before park officials shut down the ride and removed it. Recently he also smuggled 500 altered versions of Paris Hilton’s new CD into record stores around Britain and placed them in the racks.... [a] panel van with the notice on the back, “How’s My Bombing?” and an 800 number that links to a Navy recruiting office in Phoenix.... “1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?”...Many comment on war, like the stark image of a television camera crew filming a child amid ruins as the producer holds back aid workers to allow for just one more shot.”

***

"ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush." (Frank Rich)

They Would Rather Lose the War on Terror Than Admit That They Were Wrong

84% of the readers polled at Foreign Policy magazine think we're losing the war on terror. If you'da ast me, I coulda tole ya.

It's not likely that the corridors of power will start consulting Noam Chomsky, the late Edward Said, or my current crush Arundhati Roy.

And I am certainly not advocating that politicians follow the advice of intuitives/amateur story-tellers who've read a little history like yrs. truly.

But in the name of all that's holy, the establishment is going to keep losing this war until they at least incorporate the warnings from Chomsky, Roy, Said, et alia into their calculations. America refuses to know its enemy because they don't WANT to know their enemy. They'd rather lose the war on terror than challenge capitalism's assumptions about the Middle East and Third World.

A reading of Al Qaeda strategy only underlines how the Bush administration has played into their hands by shooting from the hip. Evidence suggests that the invasion of Iraq was planned before the 9/11 attack. George W. Bush is the greatest recruiter al-Qaeda ever had. Can we impeach him NOW? Can we do any worse?

See also:
Lessons Pancho Villa Taught Me When They Finally Shot His Ass

Dead Children of a Lesser God: Why the Terrorists are Winning, #247 in a Series

Blue Eyed Body Count: Bush/Zarqawi

Why We're Losing the War on Terror: #370,001 In a Series

Why They Voted for Hamas

COMMONPLACE QUOTATIONS for AUGUST, 2006

"Public interest is clear in this matter. It is the upholding of the Constitution. . . . It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control. (U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Michigan)

***
“One judge in Michigan has done what 535 members of Congress have so abysmally failed to do.” (NYT editorial)

***

“Socrates asked: what do a beautiful woman, a beautiful vase and a beautiful bed have in common? His answer: the idea of beauty. My question is: what do extremist ideologies like the communism or Nazism of yesteryear and the Islamism of today have in common? After all, they support ostensibly very different ideals – the superior race, mankind united in socialism, the community of Muslim believers, the Umma. Tomorrow, it could be altogether different ideals: some theological, some scientific, others racist. But the common characteristic is nihilism.
“The root element is the attitude that anything goes, particularly when with regard to ordinary people: I can do whatever I want, without scruples. Goehring put it like this: my consciousness is Adolf Hitler. Bolsheviks said: man is made of iron. And the Islamists whom I visited in Algeria said that you have the right to kill little Muslim children, in order to save them.
“....Religion is only the cloth, the excuse and the justification. What is essential is the practice. For there is a direct connection between the Islamic suicide bomber and the general serving under Franco who shouted out in front of the University of Salamanca: “Long live death!” This is the connection that I was trying to grasp.”
(André Glucksmann, in a terrific interview considering Bin Laden in the light of Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed”)

***
“Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep doing it. ... You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focused on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.” (John Arquilla, defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, quoted by Seymour Hersch in The New Yorker August 21, 2006)

***
The Geek Heirarchy

***
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” (Charles Bukowski in “Factotum)

***
“[During the Cuban Missile Crisis] Kennedy was deeply influenced by Barbara Tuchman's classic, "The Guns of August," which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarajevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: "The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."
Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. Unfortunately, there is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognize how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions. (Richard Holbrooke, The Washington Post

***
“Ralph Giordano, a German writer and, by the way, a Jew, has noted that Mr. Grass was only 6 when Adolf Hitler was invited to become Germany’s chancellor. (The overused phrase “seizure of power” badly distorts what happened around Jan. 30, 1933, the date of the Führer’s accession. A coup d’ état would have been bad enough; that Hitler’s appointment was perfectly legal only makes it worse for German history.) And Mr. Giordano has asked, reasonably enough, “What else could he have done during that time in the face of the Nazis’ all-powerful propaganda apparatus?” And answers his own question: “Nothing.”.... It is not that a public personality should get a free ride simply for being famous, let alone popular. Herbert von Karajan may have been an outstanding conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, but this would not erase the fact that he joined the Nazi party twice — these were the acts of an adult, after all. The uncomfortable question that remains for Mr. Grass is this: Why did he keep this interlude as a servant of the regime so tight a secret? .... I am not Mr. Grass’s analyst, nor have I ever met him. But it seems to me that he failed to come forward all these years simply because he was too ashamed.” (op-ed by Peter Gay in the New York Times

***
(Ward Sutton in The Village Voice)
***

"All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.
“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
“....Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
(George Washington)

***

".... The snakes will reveal themselves to be not a counter-Phallus, but rather an expression of the rage of the Medusa, the radical queer postcolonial feminine. What is at stake here is not a battle between "snakes" and the "plane," but rather the contest between transgressive Oedipalized subjectivity (memorably described by Jackson's line, "there's motherf---- snakes on the motherf---- plane") and the anti-Oedipal, serpentine, body-machine complex...."
(A Pre-Reading of "Snakes on a Plane" by Amardeep Singh)

***

“... And I’ve been killing my way to the truth ever since.”
(Marv, in Frank Miller’s “Sin City”)

Lessons Pancho Villa Taught Me: A Small Footprint Instead of "Shock and Awe"

“Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep doing it. ... You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focused on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.” (John Arquilla, defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, quoted by Seymour Hersch in The New Yorker August 21, 2006)


The death this summer of al-Zarqawi taught practical lessons about how to win this fight, if we have wit enough to see it. The terrorist’s end was not accomplished by massive invasion, but by combining law enforcement skills, good intelligence and a Gideon’s band of commandoes, saving technology-- the F-16s, the lasers and two 500-pound bombs— for the last judicious blow.
The men stepping to the microphone to take credit for the kill had almost nothing to do with it. They show no signs of learning from this small success. The administration still insists we are in a “War on Terror”? that must be engaged with apocalyptic force: but Justice has always carried a sword, a symbol of precision, not a blunderbuss.
American commandoes led the hunt, a careful and precise force that would leave a small footprint in a foreign land. This echoes Stephen Decatur and the first contingent of US Marines, who stole into Tripoli, killed with as much precision as possible, and took away the sanctuary of the Barbary pirates.
Results were less gratifying when Woodrow Wilson sent 10,000 soldiers, Black Jack Pershing, and a shavetail George Patton into Mexico to catch Pancho Villa. They gave up and declared victory after a year of chasing back and forth across the desert; Wilson succeeded only in making Villa a folk hero. Villa laughed for another seven years later, until a more modest,
seven-man Mexican team poured 150 bullets in his car.
Our president does not believe in the judicious use of the sword against murderers who hide themselves in
crowds. He likes his “Shock and Awe”, with the result that 80,000 pounds of bombs fell on Iraq. This was not a small footprint or a precision strike. We held the tearful smile of the world, on the day after September 11, and in a video flash became the best recruiters al-Qaeda ever had.
Our stalwarts then dropped 130,000 green Americans into the Middle East without a shred of Arabic or common sense. A small fierce band can discipline itself, but a sprawling invasion force cannot. Regardless of intentions or nobility, every large army since time began has given employment along its edges to what Wellington called “the scum of the earth”, profiteers and sadists and half-wits. For the next ten years, every diplomatic effort, every proclamation of American virtue will be hag-ridden by the smirk of Lindsey Englund.
The Thrones and Powers of this administration met in conclave last week to discuss their Great War. Secretary Rumsfeld persists in his imitation of a French aristocrat: you can’t tell him anything, he already knows, and damn your impertinence, Sir!
By all reports our affable president is, in private life, every bit as mean as his courtiers. Proud enemies of George Bush must be humiliated, the insubordinate punished, flatterers elevated: thus we see the remarkable elevation of Karen Hughes from Texas publicist to the highest-ranking Arabist in the world.
Two days after the al-Zarqawi hit, Hughes told the BBC, “Europe still, I think, does not see quote ‘a war against terror’ [sic]. I think the perception here [in Europe] tends to be a little more that it’s a law enforcement or perhaps criminal matter.” She claimed “the majority view of people of both parties in America” is that a law enforcement approach to terrorism “hadn’t proved effective.” Hence the model of American efficacy that we see in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The American military can only follow whatever bad strategy they’ve been given. The president’s attempt to bring democracy to the Middle East by bombing the hell out of it resembles nothing so much as John Steinbeck’s Lenny crushing a rabbit that he means to embrace. Here in Michigan, at least, we will be paying with dead children and lost treasure long after
President Bush has skipped on the 300 billion dollar check. Let us not squander the operational lessons we ought
to have learned in finding and killing al-Zarqawi, and spare a grudging prayer for the repose of Ahmed Fadeel al-Khalayleh. He was an indiscriminate killer of both Muslims and infidels. Until George Bush learns the
difference between the sword of justice and a cluster bomb, so are we.

Dead Children of a Lesser God: Why the Terrorists are Winning, #247 in a Series

"What future other than one of fear, frustration, financial ruin and fanaticism can stem from the rubble? Is the value of human life less in Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere? Are we children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood? Can the international community continue to stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted upon us? Is this what is called legitimate self-defence?"
-- Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora seen here next to Condoleeza Rice, who-- I hope for the sake of her soul-- is covering her face in shame.

She just got out of a meeting in which she tried to explain to the gentleman Why He Can't Have a Cease Fire Right Now, in the name of Another Grand Strategy of the Bush Administration. I wonder how many more of those this country can survive?


The news is awful, with more children, blameless old people and animals being killed and suffering in Lebanon for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, while men (and some women) who have never suffered such horrors pontificate about other people's suffering and do nothing to stop it.

It should be stated here for the record that the politics of Ormondroyd's Encyclopedia Esoterica have long been encapsulated in this credo by Brendan Behan: "I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer." Everything else is contingent on that goal for better government.

In both Iraq and Lebanon, we see the United States and Israel falling like passenger pigeons into a basket. This continues to baffle me, as I've always assumed this was a truism of terrorist planning:
Step one: attack civilians or soft military targets.
Step two: this provokes a response by the targeted state that's out of proportion to the original offense.
Step three: the logic of violence and the state's inability to surgically control a mass of soldiers and policemen guarantees that there will be atrocities, oppression, "collateral damage" against innocent bystanders.
Step four: this repression will provoke an uprising against the state, cycling into greater and greater violence until--
Step five, the original terrorists appear more sympathetic to the people than the now out-of-control state.

This apparently is too subtle for the saps in power in the US and Israel to understand. Thus Israel and the United States continue to lose the war on terror by doing exactly what Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda want. I don't see anyone explaining this dynamic to a broad audience; perhaps it's so "obvious" that it's invisible.

See Also:
Blue Eyed Body Count
Why We're Losing the War on Terror #3701 in a series
Why They Voted for Hamas

BLUE-EYED BODY COUNT: sponsored by Ormondroyd's Encyclopedia Esoterica: call on our friendly team of demonologists for all YOUR unpleasant details!

Hm, Zarqawi killed...
Laurence Foley
Nicholas Berg
plus 700 killings in Iraq during the invasion, and the attack on that NATO summit 2004 in Istanbul..
about 70 more people in three hotels in Amman, Jordan... 22 UN people killed by the bomb in the Canal Hotel...
So, rough numbers, that's almost 800 people that somebody loved, dead because of an abstract idea. He killed those people like they were things, objects unlucky enough to be included in whatver crazy personal drama al-Zarqawi was playing out in his head.
Second battle of Falujah--? FUCK, Jamie was in that... what would we have done if this pinwheel eyed motherfucker had gotten off a lucky shot and killed James? And would have felt no worse about that you would feel taking the arms and legs off a Barbie doll.

Funny thing is, there are still people in the Middle East who think al-Zarqawi's a hero, because he was "fightin' for Palestine" you see, and that forgives a lot of sins in the Arab world. Makes him a resistance fighter not a terrorist. They BELIEVE that crazy shit over there. That's it's okay if someone you don't know gets killed for someone else's reasons.

Ken Bigley, the Zarqawi beheaded him, poor fella. Sergio Vieira de Mello, perfectly nice guy, much loved apparently in UN circles. You and I, we're just obstacles in the great struggle. What kind of monstrous self-importance would someone have to have to do this to other people? The son of a bitch had a 14 and a 16 year old "wife" with him when the bomb hit. And he wore New Balance shoes.

Hm, Samarra, Iraq. Five American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier were killed. "Appointment in Samarra", eh? With John O'Hara dead, I wonder if anyone else remembers that story besides me and Idries Shah? Okay, I'm coming up with one thousand people, tops, killed by this fantasist who saw himself as a hero.

Okay, now, MR. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH'S TURN TO STAND UP AND BE COUNTED, the face our society wears on television:
hm 38,475 minimum civilian deaths, maximum 42,889 reported civilian deaths, add in 2,500 American soldiers...

Oog, as Pogo used to say.

“We don’t do body counts” General Tommy Franks, US Central Command, and I can see why. It's insulting; at this level, comparisons are odious. WE burn down the motherfucking BARN to get those rats! And Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops? “Change the channel.” Fucking amateur night, Abu Musab the Zarqawi the fuck indeed.

Why We're Losing the War on Terror: #370,001 In a Series

For those of you who missed early episodes in the series, here is a recap:

Reason # 1: Calling it a "war". If we had taken a law enforcement approach to hunting down Osama bin Laden, with military backup as needed, we would still have the support of civil societies around the world.

Reason #2: Caribbean piracy was virtually eliminated in the late 1600s when the competing countries of France, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands finally got sick of pestering each other and agreed to take away the pirates' safe harbors. Instead, the Bush administration has expanded the territories where terrorists might find eager recruits. The administration's short attention span in Afghanistan has given the Taliban time to catch its breath, instead of crushing the dictatorship with our heel.

Reasons # 4-560: the current White House Office staff (support personnel excluded).

Reasons # 561-569 Why We're Losing the War: The eight people on the White House Office staff who know what they're doing, but who are constantly undermined by the other 458.

Reasons # 570- 668: Everyone who works in the Office of the Vice President. It is the policy of the office of the Vice President to refuse employment to anyone who might tell the current Vice President something he doesn't like to hear.

Reasons # 669-857: At least 188 members of the current National Security Council staff.

Reasons # 858-860: The two members of the National Security Council staff who were kicked out of meetings because of their fancy talk about reading maps, learning a foreign language, studying local history and "trying to understand how the enemy thinks." Weirdoes.

Reasons # 861-350,000: Kerry voters in Ohio whose ballots were stolen after being forced to wait in line 12 hours or more by Ohio's Secretary of State.

Reason # 350,001: Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State and co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee. Not to be confused with Mr. Blackwell the fashion maven, but we'll take humor where we can get it.

(Personal note to Mr. Blackwell: As the country doctor said to the patient with gonorrhea, I hope that piece of ass was worth it-- because you're certainly going to regret it when someone you love comes home in a box, as a direct result of your diddling with the vote in Ohio. Sleep well tonight.)

Reasons # 350,002-370,000: The 2004 count in Florida that showed 20,000 more votes for Bush than there are registered Republicans in the state. Can it be, as Bart Simpson warned, that "the dead have risen from the grave and are voting Republican"?

Ormondroyd's Encyclopedia Esoterica, fearless in matters of the occult, interviewed all 20,000 of these zombies and determined that they had, in fact, voted for Harold Stassen.

Finally tonight, we offer Reason # 370,001 Why We Are Losing the War on Terror: the inability of the global culture to examine itself with any sustained effort. What is it about this international culture, that it produces dissidents of such vileness, they feel real joy in blowing up themselves and hundreds of innocent victims?

Instead of asking that question, the dominant culture demands that we spend all our time and money "hunting down the terrorists"-- a hopeless effort, if we never address conditions that encourage the terrorist to not just imagine, but act out his rage. You tell me that Islamic countries encourage extremism, and I agree absolutely. Why, then, do we help them exterminate their moderates, until we have a climate where only fanatics can grow? More pie, Bandir?

Should anyone wilfully misinterpret these questions as sympathy for the devil, ask them this: if you have rats in your backyard, and the rats carry disease, would you spend all your effort in shooting the rats-- or should you clean up the garbage that's attracting the rats?

If you're George W. Bush or the irascible Donald Rumsfeld, you blow up your neighbors' houses, then shoot at the rats as they run out, inadvertantly killing the neighbor's dogs and small children. When the neighbors complain, accuse them of ingratitude. Like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, "careless people, who smash things up and retreat into their wealth and let other people clean up their messes", leave the garbage for someone else. Pose for photos with the Saudi prince of rats. And act surprised when the older children want revenge for their dog and baby sister.

***
THAT'S ALL for today; be sure to tune in for Episodes #370,002 to #99,005,385-- as we lay the dead at the doorstep of the 98,635,383 Americans who think two more years of the Bush administration couldn't possibly do any more harm.

(Figure obtained by calculating 33% out of a population of 298,895,101. There ain't no flies on me.)

SEE ALSO:
A Little Touch of Hotspur in the Night
A Thankless Task for Diogenes
Why They Voted for Hamas
The Mummers' Play

SOME DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS BEHIND THE CARTOON WAR

So far, only the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio and some French smartasses have gotten the Danish cartoon story right: It seems that the cleric who first protested the cartoons in Denmark then reprinted them in a flyer that was distributed throughout the Muslim world... and he sort of, um, added a few even MORE offensive cartoons to juice up his case against the Danish newspaper.



The Americans, from Bill Clinton to Bush, have gone all mealy-mouthed and scold the newspapers to be more responsible. Coming from those two, "responsibility" is like Messalina calling for chastity. Apparently it's okay to order an air strike that kills hundreds of innocents in order to miss one terrorist target, but if your little ink spills piss somebody off, we never heard of you. Thanks for your strong defense of the Four Freedoms, guys. Vladimir Putin, known affectionately to the Russian mobsters as "KGB Lite", a man whose soul President Bush has gazed into, is first and always a true friend of censorship: "Any provocation in this area is absolutely unacceptable. One should think 100 times before publishing anything, doing anything or drawing anything." Shit, I'd never get ANYTHING done.

But Lor' bless 'em, the French satiric weekly 'Charlie Hebdo' reprinted all 12, along with a new cartoon on the cover entitled "Mohammed stressed out by the fundamentalists" showing the prophet holding his head in his hands uttering the words "It's hard to be loved by fools."

Phillipe Val, the editor of 'Charlie Hebdo', told the BBC: "Of course there has to be tolerance, there has to be respect to any community and any religious believers. But it is very much important for our whole society to show that we have firm principles on which democracy stands. This is an inviolable question of principle here in the land of Voltaire and Zola. We are willing to appear before the courts if some think the drawings go too far, but we are certainly not willing to give way to the desires of religious extremists."

Push comes to shove, these little cartoons are drawing fire in a just cause. Muslim mobs are using violence and intimidation against anyone who criticizes Islam, especially those who suggest that Islam embraces violence and intimidation. It took a couple hundred years for Christians to stop burning anyone who suggested that the Pope wasn't perfect. This may take a while longer; so long as Muslims view themselves as victims, they will feel justified in whatever atrocities they commit.

Something else is going unreported: someone is profiting from these riots. Can you say 'agent provocateur'? So long as the mobs are busy burning down Danish embassies, they're not thinking about what shitty governments they have in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran... If you don't like that scenario, then consider how much juice the imams are getting out of this: play ball with us, or we'll start a riot. Lastly, these hysterical screams for the blood of cartoonists will make the Americans and Israelis look reasonable by comparison. Thus the rioters and the politicians wash each others' hands. Everyone's a winner.

Except free thought, free speech, Danish tolerance, and a few mostly harmless ink-stained wretches.

UPDATE from the AP: Charlie-Hebdo sold out all 160,000 copies with the cartoons, 60,000 more than usual. France Soir, a daily, ran the drawings and sold 40 percent more-- "leading a battle for freedom of the press", their spokeswoman says, perhaps not cynically. Wouldn't it be funny if this insanity makes some hair sprout on the chest of the media? Wouldn't it be something if cartoonists rediscover their power to afflict the comfortable and ridicule villainy in the spirit of Hogarth and Goya, Daumier, Ben Shawn, George Grosz and Lautrec? Who are these monsters, that would turn cartoonists' ink into blood?

WHY THEY VOTED FOR HAMAS

[Preliminary from AP: "Hamas leaders are claiming Hamas had won about 70 seats, enough for a majority in the 132-seat parliament. ... Officials with Fatah also said that Hamas had won about 70 seats, which would give the Islamists a majority in the 132-seat parliament."]

I'm surprised that anyone is surprised. After years of corruption and killing every moderate in the hemisphere, there's no one left alive but radicals.

We've seen this again and again in history, from Revolutionary France to Batista's Cuba to Somoza's Nicaragua to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and still entrenched power reacts to this news like Aunt Pittypat at the ball, clutching their chests and swooning.

"Your explanation depresses me," I said.
"Your nonsense depresses me," said Simple.
(Langston Hughes, "Bop")

Kipling on Blowback, or the Law of Unintended Consequences

No surprise at the latest bombings (more people were killed in Egypt and Iraq than in London). Colin Powell told Bush, "If you break it, you bought it", but no one seems to understand what that means until the bombs start coming home. I love London, and I love the Tube, and resent her being put in the crossfire.

If there is any reason to smile, it's that when we heard there was a failed attack at Shepherd's Bush, we were quick to exclaim "Holland Park! Holland Park!" (Friends of "Absolutely Fabulous" will know that Edina, who lives on the border of Shepherd's Bush, always protests that she REALLY lives in the MUCH more fashionable Holland Park.)

If piracy and slavery were suppressed by taking away their refuges, (South China Sea and the Sudan still exceptions), why did we think we would contain terrorism by giving them a vast new playground?

If there is a reason to frown, it is our obtuse insistence that we can fuck around, and fuck around, and fuck around with a hornet's nest and never get stung ourselves. Pardon me for feeling disgust at the sancimony of official mourning from Bush and Blair (Bush, by the way, was back to

yukking it up

the next day-- while sitting next to Blair). With all the tons of ordinance left laying around (some of it brought by Donald Rumsfeld himself), why are we shocked! --shocked!-- that it was used to blow up blue eyed babies instead of brown eyed ones?

"Why do Americans think it is heroic and honorable for our troops to massacre Iraqis with bombs, missiles, gunships, tanks, and heavy machine guns, but cowardly and barbaric when our victims fight back in the only way they can?
.... The war is breeding terrorism and cannot be won.... As long as Bush continues to operate with Mao's belief that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, terrorism will prosper and people will die for no reason except their refusal to hold corrupt leaders accountable."
-- Paul Craig Roberts at

Counterpunch

America, the Naive. I pray you and yours stay safe.

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

-- Rudyard Kipling