Personal Possum

Up there in heaven there is a possum, or opossum, who will never forgive me. I'll be rattling the pearly gates and he'll be whispering in Saint Peter's ear about my dastardly vaccuum-cleaner attack.

I discovered him one evening on my return home from work. There he was, fussing and scratching around my little converted garage on Inman Street. At first I thought he was a rat, so I quickly opened the french doors to the brick patio to give him an escape hatch, then I went on the offense, charging right at him. But he didn't behave as expected. He didn't run away or defend himself like a standard rat. He didn't do anything, he just froze right there in the corner looking pretty much like a dead rat, or so it seemed to me.

My first thought was that I'd given the rat a heart attack and he'd expired on the spot. In hindsight it's easy to say that I should have recognized his behavior as playing possum, the characteristic evasive strategy of these harmless little... errr... marsupials? But I'd never knowingly met a real possum or opossum and didn't know that they closely resemble giant rats. (The tail of your common American opossum is particularly rat-like.)



The death act was disconcerting, but I wasn't persuaded and looked around frantically for some sort of missile or bludgeon to ratchet my program for this intruder to the next level. Finding nothing more appropriate than my shiny new vaccuum cleaner, I grabbed it and hurled it at the rat, a violent transgression for which I was instantly punished by the complete destruction of the expensive plastic gadget. Fortunately, I had missed. The rat/possum just continued lying there with no apparent damage apart from the fact that he wasn't moving. (The ability of the possum/opossum to play possum is really impressive.)

At this point, I paused for a moment to reconnoiter the situation, and after some deep thought, the truth finally dawned. I understood that I was dealing with a possum and not a rat. After that important realization, I managed to coax the poor traumatized animal into a cardboard box and carry him out to the patio and release him, where he sniffed momentarily at my habachi to show he wasn't afraid, then trundled off into the bushes, never to return.

I was just completely unfamiliar with possums—or—that is, possums other than Pogo, who is a towering giant among your more literate class of cartoon possums, and is also an old acquaintance with whom I am on intimate terms, having read him since before I knew how to decipher the scribbled characters in those little speech balloons. Pogo and I go way back, but this real-world interloper looked nothing at all like Walt Kelly's creation.

Pogo, Churchy Lafemme, Albert, Miz Beaver and those pesky CIA weasels, etc., are as familiar to me as the members of my own family and probably more so. If I'd known that my real-life visitor was of the order of Didelphimorphia I would have invited him for coffee and popovers and generally treated him like a lost brother. But when I mention Pogo to people around here, nobody knows what I'm talking about.



Walt Kelly was possibly the greatest american artist of the latter twentieth century. It's not an exaggeration to say that Pogo's satirical books and newspaper funnies helped in a substantial way to defeat McCarthyism in the mid nineteen-fifties. My eagerness to decode Pogo's conversations with his fellow Okefenokeeans motivated me to learn to read, and probably helped prepare me for the contradictions and follies of adult life in this swampy world and for the absurdity of our attempts at governance. From my obsessive reading of Pogo I acquired an appreciation for divine nonsense, and those books (of which there are many) might even be the reason I'm not helpless with Asperger's syndrome, or something. Yet the name of Pogo's creator is now already forgotten and his grave obscured with the dust of ages, despite which regrettable fact there might be some people around who can still recall the following immortal phrase:



I certainly hope so, since it's the big lesson of our epoch.

 

Election Results

Muz be election time, Miz Beaver

People are startin' to kinda wonder what happened to that towel-head we were spozed to be chasin' down in hot pursuit last year, or when was it, five years ago? Whoops, better snip the leader on that dead fish so it doesn't stink up the joint any further. It's time to float a story that el supremo boogey-man has succumbed to some disgustin' disease like, say, typhoid?

Ok good, now back to Iraq.

Whoops, hold your whiskers there, Gin-Rummy, you rascal you, and refocus your peepers on that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad evil-doer, the scourge of the United National Doggy Biscuit Festival. Oh you are such a good boy today! Yes you are! Go fetch me a few of those missile cruisers 'n' submarines, and make it look like, you know, we're serious about this nuclear whatever-whatever, ok? But don't alarm the electorate, and here's a nice doggy biscuit. Wolf! Wolf!

Joking aside, I don't believe the report that Bin Laden is dead of typhoid in a remote area of Pakistan. We've heard it all before. But as to the question of whether the nuclear armada steaming toward Iran is a bluff or preparation for an actual attack, it's anybody's guess. We've actually been promised another October surprise this year. (They're not even trying to hide it any more, as if it was football.) Is that it? A nuclear bombardment of the nuclear R&D facilities of Iran plus conventional bombardment of that country's infrastructure as a last minute booster for republicans in the midterm? God, I dunno, it seems awfully far-fetched, but hey, whatever it takes! I wonder what's really in those missiles? Brioche? Phylo dough? (Reagan sent a cake.)

My big left toe

One day in early August, my big left toe started swelling up and became a red balloon that I couldn't fit a shoe over.  It wasn't painful, just big and very red.  A friend diagnosed it as Gout, a disease I'd read about in nineteenth century novels but was otherwise unfamiliar with.  Gout is known as the "disease of kings" since it results from overindulgence in rich, fatty foods.  My friend, a wonderful French cook, knew perfectly well that the only royal meals I consume are at his table, but he couldn't resist the opportunity to suggest that my health problems were the result of my diet.  A quick Google search told me that Gout is an extremely painful condition, so he was wrong and it wasn't the cause of my problem.  But—what was it?

Another friend, Dimitry, a physician's assistant at Maimonides Hospital, urged me to get my big left toe checked out, but I'm one of the people who thinks it's better to avoid the medical profession whenever possible, so I did nothing, and just hoped the inflammation would subside on its own.  For me there are two major problems with doctors:

1. Medicine is Ivan Illich's prime example of a disabling profession.  In his view, our reliance on doctors as experts tends to reduce our ability to look after our own health, so the more healthcare we consume, the less healthy we become, an important point with which I fundamentally agree.


2. Doctors always find more problems and tend to suggest drastic solutions.  They're like hammers in search of nails.  The joke is that if you tell a surgeon you have a headache, he'll recommend a brain transplant.

Unfortunately, the inflammation of my big left toe persisted, and then I discovered a large red and blue mark on the left side of my torso, an angry lesion that seemed to grow and diminish in sync with the swelling of my big left toe.  Sometimes it appeared as an amorphous red area, like one of those red-state/ blue-state maps of Alaska or South Carolina.  Other times it shape-shifted into perfectly concentric oval rings, which should have clued me to suspect a deer-tick bite, but there are no deer anywhere in Brooklyn, so Lyme disease just didn't occur to me as the culprit.  Nor did I remember that I'd recently spent several days working on the exterior of my mother's house, which is located in a leafy zone up north where deer are common enough to be regarded as pests.  Looking back, I don't know how I could have been so clueless.

But I was clueless, though I did finally gave in to Dimitry's insistent prompting and presented myself to the Bellevue ER, where the doctors were amused to discover Lyme disease in their midst, an oddity in the city that none of them had seen before.  Bellevue is a large city teaching hospital, and the main Emergency Room teaching doctor kept bringing groups of young acolytes over to stare at the prominent target-shaped lesion on the leeward surface of my body, so much so that the old Cuban stevedore in the bed nextdoor to mine suggested I start charging admission.  I was given a three-week course of amoxicyllin and sent home, but I had to return to the ambulatory clinic for several more tests to make sure the Lyme spirochettes were eliminated.

Meanwhile, my big left toe gradually normalized, but my General Practitioner had trouble figuring out whether it had been caused by the Lyme infestation, so he ordered other tests that included an EKG, and that's when they discovered I had a significant heart murmur—or rather confirmed it since the GP had heard it through his deathoscope.  He told me the EKG didn't look good, and ordered another round of tests, including an echocardiogram, CAT scan and catheterization.  The echo machines are in great demand at Bellevue so it took several weeks to get in there.  Now those weeks are behind me, the echo-gram is done, and the cardiologist has informed me that my aortal valve, the valve that meters blood from the left ventricle into the arterial tree, needs to be replaced with stainless steel or pig tissue, so I'm on the launching pad for open heart surgery.  (Like... whoop--dee--shit.)

If I decide to get the surgery, I will probably survive, since the statistics for this particular procedure are pretty good and they do it at Bellevue all the time, though there could be complications, but after it's done I won't actually feel better.  They tell me that I will notice no perceptible change in my overall health.  Of course I also have to find a way to pay for it, and since I am now completely asymptomatic, it is pretty difficult to wax enthusiastic about heart surgery.

Let's review, shall we?  Starting with a stupid little inflamed toe, I moved on to being diagnosed with Lyme disease, which is somewhat serious, but fortunately the doctors cured me of that.  Unfortunately, they found a potentially fatal problem I hadn't been aware of that, had they not found it, might not actually be harmful and I might be perfectly fine and would not now be facing major surgery.  If I don't do the surgery, chances are pretty good that I'll continue living for a long while, though there's also a chance I might not.  (The cardio-guy I went to for a second opinion said that I could have it done next year, "but why wait?"  He also told me I could drop dead at any moment.)

Am I fortunate that they found this problem, or not?  And is it really so important to live a little longer than I would if I don't get my aortal root and heart valve replaced with tissue from a pig?  (What kind of pig?  A nice friendly pig with a curly tail that has to die for this?)  I'm really not sure, but what bugs me even more than imagining what they have to do to temporarily disconnect my aorta without killing me is that I still have no idea what caused the inflammation of my big left toe.

 

* WARNING *

Space aliens have landed and are somehow sucking the cortex layers from the brains of randomly selected human earthlings.  Theay are replacing our high-level thinking materials with a substance that looks like green jello and appears to contain no neurons but can be remotely accessed by means of undetectable signals from advanced communications equipment located on the dark side of the moon.

 

Reasonable people & conspiracy

Reasonable people steer clear of conspiracy theories and the characters who espouse them, since they exist in a twilight zone of unprovable conjectures and impassioned beliefs that range from sincere and seemingly rational to batshit insane.

Reasonable people don't frequent the websites that go into the anomalies of 9/11, although such anomalies no doubt exist—the puffs of dust that emanated from the collapsing towers, the too-small hole at the Pentagon crash site, the "ghost plane" that was seen by witnesses in Pennsylvania—all of these things seem suspicious at first but one suspects they can be explained without much difficulty—the wave of downward pressure in the structure of the towers caused the dust puffs, the wings sheared off the plane that hit the Pentagon, etc.  In the end, one is left with competing narratives and no authoritative method to distill truth from conjecture, so one simply moves on since the cat needs to be fed anyway and it's laundry day and, etc.

I don't know if the Bush administration was just asleep at the switch on 9/11 or whether they knew something was about to happen and declined to prevent it for political reasons.  I strongly suspect the latter, but since I am a reasonable person and lack conclusive evidence, I keep silent.

But then, what about the possibility that the reasonable disinclination to get lost in the conspiracy labyrinth is an obstacle that prevents reasonable people from perceiving the truth?  There is always the danger of throwing out the good apples with the rotten ones.  After admitting this possibility, the next step along the trail of madness is to understand that the reasonable disinclination to go in for half-baked theories might itself be the cloak that shields the perpetrators from discovery.  Maybe they even planned on it from the start.  It's simple psychology—do something so outrageous that nobody would ever believe it, then blame a more likely suspect.  (This is, in fact, the sort of pernicious policy I tend to associate with the Likud.) The Bush crew is the most mendacious and cynically manipulative administration in US history and it would be naive to put such outrageous chicanery beyond them.

Reasonable people understand that we don't yet know the whole truth about the events of 9/11, but because other major mysteries that engendered conspiracy theories have never been resolved (the Kennedy assassination being the supreme example), there is a tendency to accept the lack of resolution as inevitable, thereby adding another layer to the impermeable cloak of mystery.

Having laid out my credentials as a reasonable person who doesn't go in for wild theories but who remains uncomfortable about official narratives, let me tell you about my own conspiracy theory.  I'm not interested in questionable points of evidence.  Rather, I look at the major events that have taken place since 9/11 and I notice the overall and continuous de-emphasis of Bin Laden as the evil perpetrator and enemy mastermind, culminating in the following headline in today's New York Times (online version):

U.S. Strategy Shifts Focus From Al Qaeda

On the one hand, for the US to shift focus at this point seems not unreasonable, since many copycat terror organizations have sprung up to follow in Bin Laden's footsteps.  Such small and loosely connected organizations represent a new force in the world, one that is irresistibly attractive to dis-empowered people who join them in order to reinvigorate their own dormant sense of imminence and hit back against the dominant forces that have long been oppressing them, especially the US.  But these groups have multiplied so enormously primarily as a consequence of the US war in Iraq.  If that war had not occurred and the focus had remained on Bin Laden and if Bin Laden had been brought to justice, then these small terror groups would not now have such drawing power on the "Arab street" and all over the Islamic world.

At some point, the following questions need to be asked:

• Why did the focus shift so early from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein?
• Was Bin Laden allowed to escape Tora Bora? (See here, here, and here.)
• Was it necessary to identify a different enemy (Iraq) so that Bin Laden and all his associations could escape public scrutiny?

I must admit that I find these questions much more compelling than the minutiae of the 9/11 attacks, the more so since Bin Laden had such a strong association with both the CIA and the Bush family.  I mean, ... Gawd...

UPDATE (6/2/2016):  It's a few months shy of ten years since I wrote the above post, and I'm blogging again.  Over the intervening years I've changed my tune on this question of conspiracy because the physical, photographic, anecdotal and recorded bureaucratic evidence in support of conspiracy is now overwhelming and impossible to refute.   I believe, along with many thousands (if not millions) of other sane and rational (reasonable) people that it's imperative to reopen the case and to follow all available leads with journalistic thoroughness in full public view,  just as it is more vital than ever for the Kennedy assassination to be similarly exposed, but this thankless (not to say hopeless) and arduous work is not going to be done by me.  I, the Luminous Pachyderm, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bury my head in the sand.

Accordingly, I am considering changing the name of this blog to "Fluorescent Ostrich."

The failure of "non-existential" war

John Robb at Global Guerillas makes an interesting case for his contention that our conventional methods of warfare are obsolete and that now the western countries are learning that they can't attain their objectives through war because they don't have the will or resources to fight "non-existential" conflicts (wars of choice, not neccesity).  He leaves out any discussion of nuclear weapons, maybe because he understands the nuclear option to be self defeating and therefore unthinkable.  (I'd like to introduce him to Richard Bruce Cheney, but never mind.)  He enumerates the reasons why warfare is not turning out to be the tool of policy that the neocon fantasists imagined, including the fact that conventional military strategy and weapons are futile in the new asymmetric "4GW" conflicts against dispersed non-state organizations like Al Qaeda.

I wonder if any of this new thinking has made it through the endoplasmic filters that have insulated the executive branch for so long.  Former President Khatami has been invited to Washington, which is a surprising diplomatic turn.  Of course the know-nothing tabloids are already screaming that it represents appeasement, and maybe it's just a short period of (Condoleeza-style) theatrical diplomacy before Cheney gives Rumsfeld the go-ahead to unleash the Weimaraners, but let's be optimistic for a change.  I'd be happy to be wrong about the nuclear paranoia, anyway, though I feel quasi-idiotic.  Am I crazy or do I have a death wish, or what?  And what is all this criticism of Israel?  Am I anti-Semitic too?  I better watch my step or I might alienate my non-existent readership, and then where would I be?

Hell, that's where, just like that Jehovah's Witness preacher told me the other day on the subway.  He was yelling at the top of his voice, warning me that I was in danger of going there, and I probably should have listened to him instead of yelling back:

"I'm in hell already!"

---

Labor day update:  I keep returning to the notion that the apparent outbreak of diplomacy we're seeing now is nothing more than a kabuki dance intended to show that no stone is being left unturned in the effort to avoid war.  If congress flips to the Democrats in November, there will surely be a movement to impeach for the high treason of falsifying evidence to mislead the country into the Iraq quagmire.  It could be that the Bushites want to embroil the country in another war so they can wrap themselves in the kevlar cloak of wartime emergency and avoid that bullet of accountability.

 

Cooler heads

Considering all the jaw-wagging that's been going on lately about this war and that war and the latest episode of the JonBenet series, it seems appropriate to raise one's voice to the highest possible volume, particularly on those topics about which one has little knowledge.  I am, for example, clueless about Iran, so I consider it my duty to make uninformed assumptions about that country and to post them here as an exercise of my constitutional right to make a fool of myself in public.

Iran is a timely topic, since the lovely folks who brought us the Iraq war are now banging the same drum about that country and, just as with Iraq, the case they present for starting up another war is founded on deliberate misrepresentations of intelligence (i.e., lies).  Their familiarity with Iran is not greater than mine, but that's ok because any real knowledge about the godless Persian evil-doers could only slow the rush to obliterate them with cleansing nuclear fire, a fully contingency-planned project that is ready to be pulled off the shelf and carried out at a moment's notice.  I've read that the nuclear bombs and cruise missiles are already positioned with targeting coordinates punched in, the field commanders briefed and ready to launch... ?

Once again I find myself asking whether we are on the brink of using nuclear weapons.  Has the world gone crazy or am I just subject to the intimidating propaganda of the Bush/Cheney bullies?  I don't put anything past these frigging assholes after what they've done to Iraq, especially with all this loose talk about readiness to go nuclear.

War may be "a continuation of politics by other means," but militarism is actually a way of life, a modus vivendi that does not so much extend politics as replace it.  A reliance on military solutions carries with it a narrow manichaean mindset that is intolerant of any "means" other than itself, any competing methodology that might be used to similar ends, such as diplomacy or negotiation (both synonymous with politics).  The most grievous difficulty associated with having at our disposal the world's most powerful military force seems to be that the pressure to use that power for something increases to the point where war becomes just a logical step in the process.  During the final stages of that machine-like sequence, an enemy-object is required upon which to release the pressure.  If no credible threat exists at that point, then one must be invented, a principle that helps to explain some fundamental motivations for the war with Iraq.  Everyone whose salary doesn't depend on parroting the administration line can now agree that there was no compelling reason for that catastrophic war.  A false set of reasons therefore had to be first imagined, then prototyped and planted in various hollow trees, and finally mass produced and distributed via compliant media outlets, a process that has come full circle with Iraq and is now being repeated to bolster the next cycle with Iran, albeit with less enthusiasm.

A prominent aspect of our militarized society is that it is teeming with useful idiots who can be counted on to continuously cry wolf about the horrific intentions of various real or imagined enemies.  In a different political culture, one that is dominated more by civil society than militarism, such loud-mouthed war mongers would be sidelined or defanged before acquiring influence in the media or attaining powerful positions in government.  In our mainstream media and in the hallowed corridors of Washington, these are the people who pull the strings of the marionettes that are driving the rogue elephant around Southwest Asia.



So, the deranged wingnuts are embedded in Washington and are obliged to create credibly dangerous external enemies in order to legitimize their stranglehold on power.  There's nothing really new or mysterious about that, though the sheer magnitude of the deception is impressive.  What I fail to comprehend is why, after everything we've been through in the five years since 9/11, it continues to be an effective political strategem to scream bloody murder about the horrific intentions of fabricated enemies.  Are my fellow citizens really so profoundly dumb and suggestible as to fall for this transparent bullshit again and again, endlessly?  Maybe the current election season will answer that question once and for all.

But wait, is the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not the dangerous lunatic we've been told repeatedly that he is?  Is he not a fascist who wants to acquire nuclear bombs so he can toast us infidels like marshmallows?  Who knows?  He looks the part, certainly, but it's important to understand that he's also a product of failed diplomacy in the form of the Bush adminstration's refusal to break bread with the Iranians when they made reasonable overtures in hopes of finding common cause with the US against Al Qaeda (among other objectives that probably included the desire to be considered an entity distinct from the Al Qaeda nexus).

For the sake of clarity, it is the Bush administration and not the mullahs in Teheran that has consistently declined to engage in peaceful negotiations, as is more fully explained here, and in answer to the war party's continuous repetition of the wondrously effective trope comparing Democrats to Neville Chamberlain at Munich, it needs to be pointed out that Hitler's rise to power was similarly the product of an avoidable diplomatic failure in the form of the allies' rigid enforcement of the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty.

(Now there's a question for the What if...? theorizers and Philip Roth-style speculative novelists:  If WWII had been avoided by more farsighted policies on the part of the allies, what would the present world look like?)

As historical analysis, maybe all that seems overly breezy, though it's no more so than the shouted accusations of appeasement, but such historical comparisons tend to be thinly-veiled agitprop in any case.  Times change, the point being that this embroglio with Iran is the kind of squabble that is probably amenable to garden variety diplomacy of the kind the French just pulled off so brilliantly in defusing the Israeli/Hezbollah war.  Their achievement was built up from the simple recognition that both sides needed a dignfied way to step down from lethal hostilities.  The same method should work with Iran, but of course the US is as disinterested in negotiating with Iran as it was with Iraq.

Furthermore, though I'm no expert on Iranian intentions, based on the reputation of detente for stability, I seriously question whether an Iranian bomb is so dangerous that it must be prevented at any cost, but even if it were, there is no need to rush to a military solution while Iran is still far from weapons capability and outsiders are uncertain about the details of Iran's program to achieve it.  The startup of a heavy water plant yesterday might bring the decision closer but it comes nowhere near to equivalency with Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland.  Plenty of time remains in which to engage with the Iranians diplomatically before resorting to extremities.

BUT... any suggestion of diplomacy appears to be moot at this point because Bush has a strong domestic political motivation for going to war, or at least he believes that he has, in addition to whatever triple-bankshot geostrategic designs the neocons have cooked up on Iran.  All Bush & Co. needs is the merest excuse to scramble the bombers, and Iran's reaffirmed refusal to discontinue uranium enrichment might prove to be that trigger.

Jimmy the Greek hasn't been answering his phone lately, so we're on our own, percentage-wise.  In my estimation, the odds on whether Bush will go for it seem about even (assuming Ahmadinejad doesn't change his position before the Security Council deadline on Friday of this week).  A big factor in that probability calculation is Bush's psychological predilection for war, which might tip the scales in favor of attacking Iran as soon as — next Saturday?  Is this really a distinct possibility?  I certainly hope that cooler heads will prevail at least until Labor Day, since I haven't been to the beach all summer and would like to spend some idle hours floating in my inner tube before the Autumn jellyfish bloom hits Coney Island or the world blows up.

 

Nuclear Tuesday

August 22nd (Tuesday) is the day on which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that he will deliver a formal statement defining Iran's nuclear intentions to the UN Security Council.  Considering the insane character of both his administration and the current crowd of deciders in Washington, playing the devil's advocate seems about as reasonable as any other method of divination, so here below are some of the exciting possibilities I come up with as I consider what might happen on that day:

1. Nothing
2. Iran launches a missile attack on Israel and surges across the Iraqi border to attack American forces
3. US attacks Iran's nuclear facilities with tactical nuke "bunker-busters"
4. Israel's airforce attacks Iran

(Other attractive options include the detonation of NK-provided nuclear devices in American cities.)

With all of the glaring policy failures, the Bush (Cheney) administration is deep in a hole and needs to pull off a turnaround before the congressional elections, some Rovian August to October surprise that will realign the electorate behind his war policy.  The recent scare over binary liquids on commercial planes didn't go over well, so something more spectacular is required.

Judging from what we know of Bush (Cheney) and the past behavior of his administration, including the recent collusion with Israel in the destruction of Lebanon (which Bush (Cheney) regards as Iran's western border), there isn't much justification for optimism.  In contrast to recent predecessors, Dubya is not a president who "grows into his job" and learns to govern more wisely in his second term or after the failure of favored projects.  To the contrary, he tends to repeat and even amplify his mistakes.  The inability to change, to correct his wayward policies and adapt to real circumstances, is the proof of his limitations.  Bush is overmatched by the great challenges of office and is dragging the country and the entire world deeper and deeper into chaos and darkness.

Before committing hari-kari, imagine for a moment that you are George Bush.  On the whole, you'd rather be out on your mountain bike or ripping apart small trees with your chainsaw, but there you are in that dreary office with the walls curving in on you, considering your narrowing policy options for dealing with those pesky towel heads in—damn, what's the name of that evil 'n' godless country?  Where the hell is Condi?  She's supposed to keep track of these details, goddammit, and which one of these bastards stole your daily executive briefing book—oh never mind, you found it, and it says that the name of the country is "Iran."  Now, sharpen your pencil and answer a very important question:

Which of the following would be the worst outcome?

1. A failed presidency
2. Nuclear war

(Ok, you can stop now.)

Is this the binary choice Bush (Cheney) believes he is facing?  One insistent fear is that this adminisration is not beyond going nuclear as a desperate move to save its own political hide.

Even so, the nuclear threshold is extremely high, even for Bush (Cheney), and therefore my instinctive first estimation of the relative likelihood of the four possiblities above is 1 first, followed by 3, 2, and then 4—though 3 and 4 might be the same—but then maybe Teheran is more realistic than Washington currently.  Even though Ahmadinejad is not less apocalyptic and may be Bush's equivalent in the nutball arena, he would have to be pretty crazy to launch a missile attack considering the risk of annihilation, so I'll climb out on a limb and change my estimation to 1 first, then 3 & 4 together, with 2 as least likely.

In my view of the world, a nuclear-armed Iran is not all that dangerous, since Iran would essentially be targeting itself with American ICBMs that would erase Persian civilization from the planet if Teheran launched nuclear-tipped missiles bound for Tel Aviv.  The terror logic of nuclear detente was proven effective in the cold war, but with Bush's (Cheney's) trigger-happy finger hovering over the red button, the absence of a nuclear deterrent is less stable and more dangerous.  That is why I think we are more likely to see nukes used by the US in the current situation, assuming some rationality on the part of the Iranians.

Ahh, but I was forgetting the holier-than-thou religious nature of the Ahmadinejad group.  It turns out that Tuesday is an Islamic holy date, commemorated as the day on which Mohammed rose to heaven from the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and reappeared in Mecca.  Ahmadinejad is a millenarian who believes in the coming of the 12th imam, the mahdi (messiah) of Shia theology, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.  For all I know, President Ahmadinejad might even imagine himself to be the earthly embodiment of this perfect mahdi character, considering which mumbo jumbo, I must admit that I really have no idea what will happen on Tuesday.

Nothing unusual, I hope.

The prevailing view around here is that Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons, but maybe it has somehow acquired North Korean warheads small enough to be fitted onto its medium-range missiles and will launch them westward into Israel.  If so, well then, we are about to witness a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East and possibly elsewhere (the container yards of Elizabeth NJ, for example?).  No reference to this possibility appears in the media that I've seen apart from this warning by Bernard Lewis—a very influential Arabist whose counsel Bush (Cheney) is known to closely heed—on the demented editorial page of the WSJ for August 8th.  Lewis warns that traditional deterrence will not work with Iran, and theorizes that Iran might be preparing an attack on Israel, but I search in vain for any corroborating or disputatious commentary about his article.  The mighty Juan Cole himself doesn't mention it, so I'm surely wandering in speculative territory, but even just the remote possiblity of such an event might explain some things I've found unfathomabale recently.  (As often happens in periods of world crisis, events are proceeding in advance of my ability to grasp their significance.)  It seems likely that Bush (Cheney) takes Bernard Lewis's warning more seriously than others do, which means that Tuesday will at least be a day of tense alertness for the US military command.

As if there weren't enough ongoing and potential cataclysms to deal with, Israel may have taken the Strangelovian insanity of nuclear strategy to new heights.  As an Israeli acquaintance recently informed me, in the event of an Iranian nuclear missile strike on Tel Aviv, Israeli ballistic missiles will be launched against targets in Europe, not Iran.  At first I didn't take this strange notion seriously, but now I'm not so sure.  It's insane, no question, but the strangeness and outrageous character of such a strategy is not inconsistent with Israel's overall posture.

Not to make light of all this apocalyptic psychosis, but I'm reminded of Tom Lehrer's old song from the early sixties:

We will all go together when we go,
every Hotten-tot and every Eskimo...

So, are you getting nervous yet?  Relax, you probably won't feel a thing.  Go about your normal business and have a nice day!  Eat, drink and use up the remaining minutes on your cel phone, for tomorrow it might be fused with your ear.

 

Don't fart, it's antisemitic

...and as you sink down into your plush seat at the frigid cineplex with your eyes welling up unexpectedly at the sight of the heroic cops being slowly crushed under tons of broken concrete in Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, don't think about the hundreds of people who have been and continue to be crushed in exactly the same way and buried alive under concrete apartment buildings collapsed onto their heads by the ongoing Israeli bombardment.  They're just a bunch of tewowists anyway, even though a third of the people killed in this way have been children under the age of thirteen.  Better to just let them die, since if they lived through the bombing attacks they'd be left to grow up parentless and to join the seething multitudes who want to see blood flowing on the pavement of American cities, for a change.  The bombs and cluster shells that killed their families were made right here in the USA and rushed over to them as a special gift from you and me.

Letter from Beirut.

 

Creating enemies

Probably due to the divide in American liberal opinion about anything related to Israel, a lot of bloggers have been avoiding the topic of the Lebanon-Israel-Gaza war.  Josh Marshall is an example of this reticence, and accordingly he wrote an entry yesterday attempting to explore his feelings about the issue.  In the US context, he's a vociferous partisan, a liberal Democrat who writes mostly about the corruption in the Republican-controlled congress.  I sometimes find his style youthfully self-indulgent, but there is a valuable depth to his journalism and his blog Talking Points Memo is quite effective and important in the domestic arena.  Josh makes a real difference, and yet, though it's clear that he's deeply troubled by the war, he cannot bring himself to publicly criticize Israel since, as he says, he is personally dedicated to the "Zionist project," defined as setting up a Jewish state in Palestine within the Green Line.  Apparently, he has received a lot of heat from the lunatic fringe, and this may be what he is reacting to, but I'm reminded of Elie Weisel's refusal to comment during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.  Both Weisel and Marshall make a veiled accusation of anti-semitism when they repeat that Israel's critics hold that country to a double standard.  I see no double standard in the basic human refusal to countenance mass murder, and what of their own double standard?  Is Israel to be endlessly indulged and forgiven for its policy of extreme violence and the Arabs eternally condemned for theirs?

I appreciate Josh's willingness to examine the "dissonance" of his position and look forward to further elucidation, but there you have it—this subject divides the liberal/left opposition, a split that is easy for Rove/Bush to exploit, and after all these years we still don't know how to talk about it.  That makes it dangerous.  We have to learn how to talk more clearly and honestly about Israel/Palestine and Israel's relations with its Arab neighbors because it's the biggest fluorescent elephant in the room.

In Israel there is currently a lot of war fever, something that tends to preclude rational debate.  Peaceniks are receiving death threats over there, yet I also notice less reticence and greater willingness to criticize the government's decision to go to war and the manner in which the war is being prosecuted.  Today in Haaretz, for example, Nehemia Shtrasler asks in an editorial whether the war planners are aware that they're creating an enemy state out of a country that could have been Israel's partner in peace if Israel's diplomatic policies were other than maximally belligerent.  It's very eloquent and worth reading, more so than anything I've been able to contribute on this important topic, though I've done my best.  Note:  this weblog is not intended to be a link aggregator, which is mostly what I've been doing lately even though it's totally useless for that since it is the ten millionth of ten million blogs that nobody ever reads (thank god!).

So nobody cares what I think and I'm really only writing about this as part of my own struggle to come to terms with what's going on in the world, but I will add anyway that—in my opinion—it is always the weakest governments that busy themselves with the creation of external enemies because they need to cover for their own poverty of vision and lack of competence and accomplishment.  The USA is the prime current example of this phenomenon.  The end of the cold war left America without a worthy national enemy, but then Osama came along and volunteered for the role.  Ever since 9/11, the previously listless and failing Bush administration has been intently focused on legitimizing itself by using that catastrophe to create new enemies all over the Arab and Islamic world, and in this they have succeeded beyond measure.  The real enemy of the American people is not terrorism or Islamic militancy or any of the usual suspects, it is the Bush administration that works so dilligently and so effectively to create hatred of the US everywhere throughout the world.  Israel, by creating an enemy state out of Lebanon, is following the same disastrous program.  Both Israel and the US will pay dearly for their short-sightedness and total lack of diplomatic aplomb in the months and years to come.

 

War crimes and Lebanon

Thursday August 3, 2006
The Guardian

The US-backed Israeli assault on Lebanon has left the country numb, smouldering and angry. The massacre in Qana and the loss of life is not simply "disproportionate". It is, according to existing international laws, a war crime.

The deliberate and systematic destruction of Lebanon's social infrastructure by the Israeli air force was also a war crime, designed to reduce that country to the status of an Israeli-US protectorate. The attempt has backfired. In Lebanon itself, 87% of the population now support Hizbullah's resistance, including 80% of Christian and Druze and 89% of Sunni Muslims, while 8% believe the US supports Lebanon. But these actions will not be tried by any court set up by the "international community" since the US and its allies that commit or are complicit in these appalling crimes will not permit it.

It has now become clear that the assault on Lebanon to wipe out Hizbullah had been prepared long before. Israel's crimes had been given a green light by the US and its loyal British ally, despite the opposition to Blair in his own country.

In short, the peace that Lebanon enjoyed has come to an end, and a paralysed country is forced to remember a past it had hoped to forget. The state terror inflicted on Lebanon is being repeated in the Gaza ghetto, while the "international community" stands by and watches in silence. Meanwhile, the rest of Palestine is annexed and dismantled with the direct participation of the US and the tacit approval of its allies.

We offer our solidarity and support to the victims of this brutality and to those who mount a resistance against it. For our part, we will use all the means at our disposal to expose the complicity of our governments in these crimes. There will be no peace in the Middle East while the occupations of Palestine and Iraq and the temporarily "paused" bombings of Lebanon continue.

Tariq Ali
Noam Chomsky
Eduardo Galeano
Howard Zinn
Ken Loach
John Berger
Arundhati Roy
London

// From a letter to the editor of the Guardian //

Haaretz:  Human Rights Watch slams Israel for apparently targeting Lebanese civilians

Haaretz:  Between two friends

News reports tell us that the incursion into Lebanon started when two Israeli soldiers were "kidnapped" by Hezbollah, but what really happened is that the two Israeli soldiers had infiltrated into Lebanon and were captured.

 

A nice little war

I am tired of rich countries bombing poor countries, and angry that I'm implicated without my consent.

I don't have anything more to say, but these guys do:

• Uri Avnery —  In the Gunsight: Syria!
  
• Gideon Levy —  Days of Darkness
  
• Nathan Gardels —  Beginning of the End for Israel?
  
• Kenneth Brown —  Suez a Half Century On:  The Continuation of War by War
  
• Alex Cockburn —   The Triumph of Crackpot Realism
  

 

From Buckley to Hezbollah

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign."

Gollum in his cave

When no less a Republican deity than William F. Buckley, the Grand Poobah of the conservative movement, proclaims that the Republican president should step down, it is long past time for everyone else—across the entire political spectrum—to see the Bush crew for the bumbling clowns they are and, at the very least, stop taking them seriously.

But no, the sycophantocracy is still mesmerized and enamored of its favored role at ringside.  The band plays obliviously on, the conglomerized news outlets continue gushing out pabulum by the truckload.  You want celebrity gossip and sex advice?  No problem.  But if you're trying to understand what's really going on in the world, look elsewhere.

This emperor is naked and it's time to publicly acknowledge it.  Two and a half years remain before this catastrophically ignorant/insane administration is replaced, assuming the United States still holds elections for national office by then.  This country and the world cannot tolerate two and a half more years of mounting disasters, each instigated as a desperate ploy to distract attention from the last.  There must be a strong and genuine opposition perspective in the mainstream media, something that's been AWOL far, far too long.

Sure, there are reasons.  Screw the reasons.  The mess in Iraq is the fault of the President, as is the mess in Louisiana.  Now we have Israel attacking Gaza and Lebanon, a mess in which the United States is implicated as a full participant.  What's next?  Syria?  There are indications that Bush is pressuring Israel to extend the war there.  Syria could become another Iraq.

But then maybe you disagree.  Maybe you feel that, when it comes to holy support for the state of Israel in her hour of need against the terrorist threat from Palestinian Gaza and Hezbollah in the north, it would be heretical, possibly even anti-semitic, to suggest that support be other than total.  If that is what you think, you are in good company.

Consider that the slaughter of innocents, whether by Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, Americans in Iraq or the Israelis, is always wrong and should never be tolerated.  As the number of civilian dead in Lebanon surges past 500 (600 according to the Lebanese government), nobody can in good conscience stand by and remain silent as thousands more are threatened by Israel's actions.

Israel is presented to the American audience as a victim of terror, but its own longstanding policy vis-a-vis its neighbors is one of unrelenting intransigence and state terror, and its policy regarding the Palestinians has always been designed to destroy their national aspirations.  Everyone knows that the Palestinians abducted an Israeli soldier (we even know his name: Shalit), and this act is commonly regarded as the precipitating event of the ongoing incursion into Gaza, which has so far killed over 100 people, but most people are unaware that Israel abducted two Palestinian civilians only the day before—a small but typical example of how our understanding is manipulated.

The state of Israel has been in existence for nearly sixty years, and in all that time it has not been able to resolve the Palestine problem, the festering wound that is the actual root cause of the current conflict.  The reason for this failure has nothing to do with a historical enmity between the Arabs and the Jews.  It has everything to do with the calculation by Israel's government that truly resolving the Palestine issue is not in Israel's interest.

During the 1982 invasion, Israel killed 18,000 people in Lebanon.  Eighteen thousand.  How many must die this time?  An answer to that question was provided by the Israeli chief of staff, Dan Halutz, who ordered his pilots to destroy ten apartment buildings for every Katyusha rocket that lands in the environs of Haifa.  (Or is it every rocket that lands in Israel?  I forget.)  This is apparently what is meant by Israel's "measured response," and it fits the longstanding pattern.

The massive destruction from aerial bombardment and resulting human suffering and loss of life also guarantee that there will be another round of violence in the next generation cycle, and in our extremely dangerous era of nuclear proliferation, that leads straight to a holocaust.  It's simple, inexorable logic.

Ergo, anyone who does not support Israel in its hard-line reliance on a military solution cares more about the fate of the Israeli Jews than, for example, the Democrats in congress, who are unanimous in their support—a cynical political calculation based on their perceived need to win votes in the upcoming election.  They don't present a genuuine opposition and therefore don't deserve to win, but then anyone in congress who is targeted by the Israel lobby (AIPAC) has a major problem on his or her hands.  As an example of AIPAC's influence, the resolution unanimously approved in congress "condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel's exercise of its right to self-defense" was written by AIPAC, not by members of congress. (Read John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's paper on the influence of the Israel lobby, which has aroused considerable controversy, including a rebuttal by Alan Dershowitz.)

QUESTION:  Who is responsible for educating the electorate about such a crucially important issue?

ANSWER:  The press.

Frank Rich is a lonely voice at the NYT along with Krugman and Herbert, but their editorial influence is severely limited by the TimesSelect subscription wall.  The New Republic has been unreliable for decades and should not be forgiven for favoring the war.  TNR's Gates-sired offspring in the electronic realm, Kinsley's Slate, defines a liberalish center, but is mostly just clever snottery served up with cool iconoclastic attitude.  (Though I admire Michael and seek out his own essays, elsewhere.)  In disdainful silence we shall pass over the rancid buffoonery of Christopher Hitchens to skip directly to the MSNBC Mama-ship, which is, with the single exception of the brilliant and forthright Eric Alterman, a barren wasteland along with the other big portal sites.

Warning:  To avoid toxic contamination, the Surgeon General advises total abstinence from the entertainment spectacle of television news.

PBS's News Hour is engaging but compromised by its peculiar brand of competitive advocacy journalism, wherein Subject Matter Experts confound us with in-depth squawkery on both sides of every issue until there's no longer any such thing as The Truth.

In the absence of a single source for reliable and objective news analysis, there is no choice but to hunt around and look at everything.  The editorials in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, are particularly valuable, as are those in the Lebanense newspaper The Daily Star.  Both of these are available online.  Also important is Alex Cockburn's site, Counterpunch.org, though I've noticed that my links for articles there are (surprise!) being blocked somewhere.  Due to that censorship, I emphasize the importance of that site, and recommend particularly the entries by Uri Avnery, the Israeli peace advocate who took the initiative to talk to the PLO long before the government did and whose articles are also available here, and also the articles by Alex himself, who is controversial in some quarters but whose writing is cogent and worth reading.  (I haven't mentioned the mighty Juan Cole only because I've done so before, but he has become the go-to source for this topic as he has been for Iraq for the last three years.)

If you belong to a public libary, you might be able, as I am, to get around the TimesSelect subscription wall by accessing the online archives for the New York Times, which contain everything up until the prior day (yesterday).  The Middle East Research and Information Project is another source, available here.  Then there is the BBC and the other British outlets (The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times).  Other sources are listed on Juan Cole's site.  Among these are often found links to the writing of Helena Cobban, whose current article in the Boston Review about Hezbollah is here and whose website is here.

 

War crimes

The news from Lebanon is horrible.  The country is being rapidly and systematically destroyed, and the killing of civilian lebanese, especially in Shiite areas, is not merely indiscriminate, it's intentional.  Several hundred people have died in one week, yet what do we see in the NYT?  Wrenching stories about a couple of people killed by the highly inaccurate katyusha rockets that Hezbollah has been lobbing into northern Israel, and other stories about Israeli Palestinians being sympathetic to Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is perpetrating a war crime by randomly targeting civilian areas, but Israel's response is disproportionately massive and is not directed at the rocket launchers but largely at a civilian population not involved in the conflict.  That too is a war crime, and the breadth and scale of the operation belies its retaliatory nature, including the destruction of much of Lebanon's infrastructure and the wholesale demolition of entire villages and "block after block" of apartment buildings in south Beirut.  The overall picture of what Israel is doing there starts to look like the economic murder of the country and ethnic cleansing of a large segment of its population.

If you want to know what is really going on now in Lebanon, you have to do some digging because the actual details are not being featured on the front pages of the news outlets.  Juan Cole's website, Informed Comment, is one place to start, but if you follow some of the links he has put up, you're going to need a strong stomach.  (Several updated links added below.)



It is terrible to once again see piles of rubble in the streets of Beirut.  After the twenty years it took to rebuild that city, it is again being demolished by bombs.  Why?  Hezbollah controls the south, and there is nothing the Lebanese citizenry can do about that, yet they are being targeted by Israeli air power.

The response of former American administrations to such hostile outbreaks between Israel and its neighbors was invariably to send the Secretary of State to meet individually with the leaders of the belligerent countries in what was called "shuttle diplomacy" in an effort to bring about a ceasefire, but Condoleeza Rice will not engage in any attempt to arrange a ceasefire until after Hezbollah has been thoroughly vanquished.  The wholesale destruction and slaughter of Shiites and the effect this will have in Iraq seems not to worry her, but this new explosion of violence is not occuring in isolation.  There are now too many problems in the region, all of them headed in the wrong direction.  Does Condi even consider the strong possiblity that the Shiite militias in Iraq are likely to turn on American forces with newly motivated ferocity?

I shudder to think what is going on in the south.  Israel has leafleted villages and towns, making it known that everyone must get out, but where can they go?  The clear implication is that all human beings in that region are considered targets, with the result that the terrified population is fleeing northward and a humantiarian crisis is now inevitable.

It gets worse.  It appears that the Israelis may be using chemical weapons to dispose of the Shiite population in certain areas, or as a weapon of terror, or both.  I would not have believed it, but I don't know what else to make of the pictures.  Juan Cole warns you not to look at them, so of course I had to, and what I saw was a lot of dead children, their skin burned to a ghastly shade of gray but their hair intact and unburned, something that can only be the result of exposure to abhorrent chemicals.  There are three possibilities:

1. The Israelis are using chemical weapons
   
2. Bombs hit an arms dump containing chemical munitions provided to Hezbollah by Syria or Iran
   
3. Bombs hit a chemical plant of some kind
   

From prior experience with accusations of such outrages, I suspect we'll never get the definitive truth, even though there is actual evidence.

All wars are obscene, and terrible pictures of dead children are an aspect of the obscenity.  Leaving aside the question of whether or not Israel is guilty of war crimes in the current conflict, one needs to consider the power of propaganda.  Just as pictures from Abu Ghraib and of American brutality in Iraq served as recruitment vehicles for Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency, the enormous suffering of the Lebanese people will make heroes of Hezbollah fighters all over the Arab world.  America lost the propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Iraqis long ago, after which we lost the country, though Bush won't acknowledge it.  The lesson is simple: If your actions serve to strengthen and swell the ranks of your enemies, you will lose, but Israel is following the failed template.

A more fundamental lesson is embedded in old Judeo-Christian (or Abrahamic?) doctrine that makes a civilized world possible.  I'm referring to the one about living and dying by the sword.  A child who loses his parents to a bomb dropped on a village is a bitter enemy for life, and in the large historical view, Israel's longstanding policy of the Iron Wall leads ultimately to disaster.

It's partly the bottomless US support that has made genuine Israeli adherence to peace accords unneccesary and enabled people like Ariel Sharon to pursue the irredentist fantasy of a Greater Israel.  The US bears major responsiblity for the fact that Israel has consistently chosen the sword, and now the logical, predictable consequence of this policy and this dangerous alliance might be unfolding.

I'm reminded of Al Gore's observation— "We are living in a time of consequences" —from his recent documentary about global warming.  As a New Yorker, I also remember something David Levy, a Knesset member and one of Menachem Begin's deputies, said during the last invasion of Lebanon:

"We will not budge an inch for the Arabs even if it means nuclear flames in New York."

Hardly the warm sentiments of an ally.

So is it WWIII?  I don't know, but I don't think we've ever witnessed a more dangerous lineup of circumstances in that region, with hot fires burning from the Levant to Afghanistan.  What happens when they connect?

---

The pictures mentioned above of people apparently killed by chemical exposure have been removed from this site where I found them early yesterday morning.  Allegations of chemical weapons being used in Lebanon can be found elsehwere on the web.

New links as of Sunday July 23rd:

Robert Fisk's Elegy for Beirut
Juan Cole's entry for Saturday (yesterday) provides good analysis at Informed Comment
Stop that Shit! by Uri Avnery
Operation Peace for the IDF by Gideon Levy
Willful Fantasies and Reality in Today's Mideast Conflict by James Zogby.
The rut becomes a grave by Larry Johnson
Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know by Alex Cockburn
British Split with Bush as Israeli Tanks Roll in by Ned Temko, Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv and Peter Beaumont in Beirut
Do People Know How Much We Hurt? by Najla Said.
Why is Israel Destroying Lebanon by Patrick Seale.
Is Hizbullah here? Only children here by Clancy Chassay
Western media has dropped the ball by failing to tell the real story in Lebanon by Marc J Sirois
Stop now, immediately by Gideon Levy
Purity of Arms in Lebanon by Mark Whitney
Letting Lebanon Burn, MERIP Online

 

Israel's barbarism

Our taxes help pay for it.

The last time I felt a twinge of pride for being American was twenty-four years ago.   A young American soldier was holding back a Merkava tank with only his pistol.  I am looking for the reference, but it was a minor story in the overall blitzkreig of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and I doubt I'll find it.  I can still see the pleasant face of the young soldier, and also that of the Israeli tank commander, a brutal bastard who appeared capable of firing phosphorous shells into schoolyards with no problem.

Israel's use of white phosphorous as a terror weapon is well documented.  When a shell explodes, hundreds of burning clumps are scattered throughout a wide area.  If one lands on you, it burns inside your body for days and cannot be extinguished.  Guess what?  The Americans used white phosphorous in Fallujah.

Israel is a nasty little state and I want no part in supporting what it's doing in Lebanon and Gaza.  The USA is a nasty big state and I want no part in supporting the things we're doing either, the more so since it's the result of illegitimate power, but in fact I'm supporting all of this with my taxes.

It looks as though Israel is preparing another ground invasion into Lebanon, just as in 1982, this time to demolish Hezbollah.  But is this also an opening salvo in a showdown with Iran?  Will Israel attack Iran directly?  If they do that, all hell will break loose in that region and we will be in immediate danger of losing our entire army in Iraq.  Of course, before that actually happens, Bush would go nuclear.  My sense is that—in the dark recesses of his heart, that vague and repellant object he's always yapping about—it's what he really wants to do.

 

Outing

Their gray heads bob up and down as they talk in subdued voices on the way back from the stores. I can see them in the rear-view, their puffed-up hairdos all identically elegant because they’re done by the same Polish woman in the parlor next to the cafeteria. I can hear the bags rustling over the tape of Christmas carols and the hum of the motor as they show off their purchases. The nice fabrics and gee-gaws pass back and forth among the seats.

Anna is not taking part. She’s sitting in banished isolation in the row behind me, staring ahead through the windshield and occasionally catching my eye in the mirror. She’s regretful, and I appreciate that, but if she has any idea of my responsibilities, she may also be troubled about what happens next. She’s in hot water and I’m sorry but I have to do my job. We’re running late and the superintendent will have questions that must be answered. I really have no choice. I don’t want to be fired again.

I’ve known Anna as an older woman for a few years, and have been flirting with her and driving her around all that time to various destinations and gatherings, sometimes alone but often in the company of this same group of companions. I drive all these old characters around. Mornings we go to radiation and dialysis centers, afternoons there are outings and social visits. The faces change but the hairdos remain the same as each of these old ladies rides around with me for a few months or a few years and is then replaced by another. My wife Karla says I drive them all to the cemetery. It’s not literally the case, but that's sort of how it is.

Anna is special in that she’s the only one I knew from before. Thirty years ago, she used to direct plays in the old town hall building in the Ponkapoag village, and I took part in some of them. I was in a Pirandello and a Thronton Wilder and a few others I forget. My best role was Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. Anna said I had good timing, and for a while there was talk of sending me to some fancy place in Connecticut, but then I did a stretch in Billerica and things took a different turn.

At the mall this afternoon, I had to wait an extra half hour for Anna to show up. She knew she was late and was urgently pushing her classy walker forward with the bag almost tumbling out of the basket. As I was helping her into the van, she made a halting excuse in a barely audible voice about how important it was to get the right style of shirts for her nieces and nephews, but the helicopter view, as my dispatcher Esmerelda would say, is that she’s getting pretty far along the route. Her condition has advanced to where she’s becoming irresponsible and we can’t handle it any more.

After making the turn into the long driveway that goes up to the Briarwood Assisted Living Facility, I loop through the entryway to the nursing home building at the bottom of the hill, slowing down in front of the door as if to let someone off. Just before rolling to a dead stop, I slam the wheel hard and gun the motor to take the van the rest of the way up the hill.

 

Zidane and Materazzi

The international organization that oversees futbol is going to investigate the Zidane incident that occurred in the 110th minute of the final playoff on Sunday.  If it is determined that Materazzi racially insulted Zidane, Italy could be disqualified and lose the world cup, making France the winner this year.  There has been a lot of speculation about what passed between the players, but Zidane is going to go public with what was actually said "in a few days."  It's amazing to think that the FIFA might actually revoke the trophy, but to me it appears not unlikely, and I'd be glad to see it happen. Zenedine Zidane is a graceful and elegant player, one of the greatest in history, and his removal from the final for that head-butting incident probably lost the game for France.


As a young guy I played a lot of pond hockey and mob soccer, but now I don't follow any sports at all, including futbol, though a professional match is a lovely sight, much more so than American football with its grotesque uniforms, continuous stops and emphasis on individual stardom.  The only professional futbol match I've seen in person was in Mexico City, and I was very impressed with the beauty of the game, but this is not the case with the Italians, who rely heavily on a dirty style of play that results in many injuries and bodies lying all over the field.  The azzullis (the Italian team wears blue) have plenty of the requisite skills, especially in defense, but their violent style appears to give them an edge that, in my highly inexpert opinion, should be denied them by the FIFA.  I thought there were many uncalled fouls in the final game, including the one in which Zidane appeared to be injured, which is why Italy's sudden-death victory on penalty kicks seemed unfair.  I assume they are encouraged to provoke the better players of the opposing team in any way possible and do whatever it takes to put them out of action.

Cheaters and bullies often win outside the sports arena, so it would be heartening to see the victory revoked for symbolic reasons, but the actual deciding factor is racism.  France's team covers the spectrum from French-bread white through Algerian 'beurre' to deep Senegal ebony, but the azzullis are all tanned white guys and probably do indulge in a culture of racism, and that's not ok, no matter how cute they look in their blue uniforms.

Update:  The remarks were not racist.  Suspension and community service for Zidane, shorter suspension for Materazzi.  C'est tout.

 

Xwtpoieca

This word is a counter-alphabetic anagram of Wax Poetic, the name of the Nublu Sessions jazz (or whatever) group.  If you superimpose these letters over the backwards alphabet, so that the X is over X and W over W, etc, the letters appearing between them in the alphabet are:

vusrqnmlkjhgfdb

These are the green letters in the table below.  (xwtpoieca is red.)

z

y

x

w

v

u

t

s

r

q

p

o

n

m

l

k

j

i

h

g

f

e

d

c

b

a

This group then divides evenly into three subgroups,

vusrq
nmlkj
hgfdb

each containing five letters, for a total of fifteen.  This is not a bad result, so maybe I'll like the music of Wax Poetic, though fourteen would have been preferable, since everybody knows that multiples of seven are more satisfying than multiples of five, but you can't always get what you want.


(In fact, Ilhan Ersahin's Nublu collaborative society over in Alphabet City is certainly an exciting musical development.  Here in Brooklyn something similar might be occuring at Barbès, a scruffy French joint at Sixth and Ninth where the wonderful Las Rubias del Norte appear often, but maybe it's not really comparable.  I don't hang out there much and don't know the music scene.  There's a lot of stuff going on in NYC.)

 

Bird music

The gods might be laughing in the gray-
light twittering of the flock that lives in
the courtyard, mostly your basic starlings
with some itinerant blackbirds mixed in.

But before the chirping cacophony there's
a different sound, an urgent rustling of
hundreds of folded wings, heard through
a window and mistaken for the quick steps

of bustling Japanese maidservants as they
flutter about the palace in pastel kimonos,
or the muffled clatter of infantry coming to
attention in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas.

In another season, alert at that hour, the
synchronous flapping comes clear through
the air, the sign of spontaneous assembly
of the consolidated mind of the flock.

Then the laughter begins, the euphonious
delight of the collective at finding itself
whole after a night of separation, when
each disparate element was isolated,

alone.

 

Zionism in the evening

We had a farewell dinner for a young French friend named Emmanuel who is going back home after seven years here.  He happens to be a Jewish guy who also chose to spend a significant part of his life in Israel and did a stint in the IDF, which disqualifies him for association with my politically-correct acquaintances.  I disagree with many of his views on Israel/Palestine, but he's fundamentally a good guy, a mensch, the kind of person you want to have standing next to you when trouble is brewing.  While it is true that no trouble of that particular kind is brewing around here, I always have to remind myself that as an outsider I don't have the complete picture of the situtation over there in the Middle East.

My critical views are very well considered and not easily shaken in argument, but normally I avoid political discussion with people like Emmanuel since I don't know how to break out of the sort of circular arguments and repetitive tautologies that always occur.  But on that evening another very intelligent and articulate Israeli named Haggai was present, as was my Jewish friend Bill who's an ardent liberal/left activist and as anti-Zionist as they come.  A political discussion about Israel was inevitable, so I got it rolling by asking Haggai what he thought about the wall.  What followed was a two-hour back-and-forth during which the entire array of standard bullet-proof apologetics was enumerated and repeated over and over, though calmly and without hysteria of voice or expression.  Bill and I did our best, but it was just as useless as always.  At one point Haggai even trotted out the old business about "blood libel" against Israel and Sharon for Sabra and Shatila in 1982, a topic I happen to know something about and was able to dispatch fairly easily.  I told him that I was afraid of going to Israel because if I went there I might begin to identify with his position.  I hope that would not be the case, but it happened to someone I know who went there in a naive condition and was subjected to unceasing propaganda, finding himself among friendly Israelis who denigrated the Palestinians as dangerous and dirty and full of hate, and he came back here with his head twisted all the way around.

I'm a non-denominational American mutt and the Israel/Palestine issue is not my fight, so the final refuge of zionist polemics is to accuse me of anti-semitism because I don't subject other countries to the same moral standard, and why do I care about the poor little Palestinians when there is an ongoing massacre in Darfur and on and on, etc.  There are many perfectly reasonable ways to respond to this accusation, but when the discussion reaches this point, I head for the door.  I react with some anger to the accusation of anti-semitism because it is the cloak and bludgeon of the Likud.  Holocaust-related guilt is by far the most powerful weapon in their arsenal, and they use it to great effect.  Since 9/11 we have witnessed the Likudization of our own government, and the accusation of anti-Semitism effectively silences all rational argument.  Especially on college campuses, where discussion is supposed to be unfettered and open, openly anti-zionist professors fail to get tenure and are attacked and villified and often fired for their views.  The question of Israel/Palestine has long been and continues to be radioactive here, glowing poisonously underneath the surface of acceptable discourse.  It is the third rail of American politics, and on the very day it rises above that dangerous subliminal level, the entire Middle East will be reduced to charred ash.  There will be no survivors, and with all due respect to Haggai and Emmanuel, both of whom I hold in high esteem, none of us will be excluded from that holocaust.

 

Boulevard Jourdan

I was often awakened late at night by the yowling of stray cats.  In the mornings I made my way over to the cheap student restaurant for coffee and a roll, and as I left the Fondation building by the back door I passed alongside a huge pile of sleeping cats.  There must have been over a hundred cats in that pile, which was located several floors directly below the window of my room.  I understood that the midnight yowling was probably the sound of the cats arranging themselves in the pile and deciding by some mysterious process who gets to sleep at what position in the pile.  I supposed the top cats to be the strongest, but in any case, never before or since have I witnessed such a phenomenon of stray cats sleeping in a massive pile.  It was striking also that nobody seemed to notice them, as if such a huge living pile of cats was just another aspect of daily life there, a fuzzy kind of outdoor furniture, something to be ignored the way people ignored so many other things that I—as a newly arrived American—couldn't help noticing, so after a while I too no longer paused on my way to breakfast to regard the pile of cats with naiveté and amazement.

At the student restaurant there was usually a line consisting of a United-Nations variety of other students, many of whom came from countries where the concept of waiting one's turn in a queue was a foreign notion.  This meant that the line resembled something more like a funnel than a single-file line waiting to pass through to the dining room, so you had to be agressive and push your way along or you wouldn't get any breakfast.  Such a funnel-like queue is a normal social phenomenon in many places around the world, and it indicates for me the absence of a fundamental aspect of the consensual arrangement we refer to as civilization.  Ultimately, human society is probably just another cat pile, but without some surface-level niceties like the ingrained habit to faire le queue (form a line), life loses a certain measure of its charm.

Cité Universitaire

There was a lot of activity in that hallway and something very jarring about the harsh voices jabbering incessantly in several strange languages and echoing off the hard surfaces of the walls and floor.  I used to have a recurring dream that I think originated from repetitive exposure to that sound.  In the dream I'm out in a large exterior area filled with people, all of whom are grunting and making guttural noises while slabs of meat and live chickens are thrown into the crowd from the open backs of trucks—a vision that's not far from the reality of daily life in some miserable areas of the world.


Without exception the weather was always gray—always.  After my arrival I did not see the sun for more than eight months, which was very hard to bear at first, but after a few months I started to discern subtle differences between one cloudy day and the next, and realized that it's actually possible to adjust to such conditions, though it lent a grim dullness to the daily experience of living there.  I went off to my dull classes in the Clignancourt direction, ate a dull lunch in another dull student restaurant, and in the afternoons took the same dull metro back towards Port d'Orleans to my dull workplace near Denfert Rochereau, which was a working section of the city then.

In fact the work was not really dull.  I learned to be very good at multi-color viscosity printing using large rollers on deeply etched intaglio plates, and the printing shop contained another United-Nations variety of people who made an interesting crowd, a diverse and stimulating community that was comfortable to be part of in the huge foreign city, the first major city I'd lived in.  Since then I've felt the need to live in a large international city where people mind their own business and are tolerant of differences.  In that way and in others, my experience of living in Paris in the mid-seventies was formative.  It's part of who I am, but as far as community goes, sauve qui peut la vie.

The Nagual

 

French Lessons

I took six or seven years of French classes in grade school, and in all that time I learned almost nothing, so when I arrived in Paris in August 1975 I could say only the most basic phrases.  Even before landing in my first hotel room in the latin quarter, I realized that I was going to have to start over again from the beginning.  Better informed Americans who go to Paris with the intention of learning the language discover the Cours de Langue et Civilization Francaise at the Sorbonne.  I didn't know about that program and probably couldn't have afforded it anyway, so I just went along with the crowds of Middle-Easterners, Africans and orientals to the Alliance Francaise on the Boulevard Raspail.

I had made a connection through a teacher and was in Paris to work in a print shop, where I had to start immediately, even before finding a living arrangement.  At first I worked in the afternoons, and after I found a dormitory room in the Cite Universitaire, I started attending morning classes at the Alliance.  My progress was excrutiatingly slow because the classes were large and taught by rote, with every one of about thirty students required to repeat the same phrases one after the other, around and around in an endless cycle of dumb repetitions.  I had never particularly liked the French language and the routine boredom of the Alliance classes felt like punishment and only estranged me further, yet in a curious way the difficulty drew me on and kept me going as a kind of masochistic challenge.  I was determined not to let this French thing beat me, but now all these years later, it's still an even race.  Of course I speak much better than I did then, but somehow I'm still essentially neck-and-neck with that sadistic language.  (The aspiration to learn a foreign language is a terrible thing to waste on French.)

My continuing distaste for French is odd considering the enormous time and effort I've spent trying to learn it.  It is harder than Spanish or Italian and other Latin languages.  In three months of intensive Spanish in Mexico I picked up the basic structure of that language and learned a lot of things I never expect to master in French even now.  More than twenty-five years after that first visit to Paris, I'm still working at it, albeit reluctantly, and frequently decide the time has come to just give up and admit that I'll never master the language with all its impossible idioms, silent suffixes and endlessly confusing homonyms.  Damn the French anyway for speaking such a complex and difficult language that seems intentionally designed to be opaque to outsiders.

Some big famous person (Thomas Jefferson?) once said that Americans go to France only to discover how American they really are, and I agree with this sentiment.  My last trip home from Paris serves as an illustrative example.  There I was near the Luxembourg gardens with my travel bags, descending down into the bowels of the city to the RER, the extraordinary deep-level subway system that enables very rapid access across the city and out into the surrounding suburbs.  Every time I ride the RER I curse our American religion of private transportation.  The Europeans in general and the French especially are lightyears ahead of us in modern rapid transit.

The RER is fantastic and impressive, but for some reason the people who ride it don't seem appreciative of their great good fortune in having such a wonderful system, and appear to simply expect it as their due.  Everyone on those trains looks severely bored and utterly disinterested in their surroundings.  Maybe it is the famous sang froid, the European sophistication and formality, but whatever the explanation, the face that French people put on to meet the faces they encounter on those trains is repellant.

The train arrived at the Charles De Gaulle airport, a magnificent sprawling temple of modern airport design.  The fact that the beautiful winding reinforced concrete sructures occasionally collapse to crush a few hapless travelers only indicates for me the daring nature of architecture across the puddle, and as I strolled through the glorious interior volumes of the various pavillions I felt uplifted by the sheer beauty of the place.  I boarded the plane finally and—

after the long miraculous flight

—the arrival at Kennedy airport in New York was a violent shock by contrast to the departure from Charles De Gaulle.  One is herded like a pig to be slaughtered in customs and the baggage area, then unceremoniously dumped out onto the ring road with no indication of what to do or where to go.  Eventually, after standing in the rain and wondering what to do, a Manhattan bus arrives, but turns out to cost $35.  Many people board it anyway, seeing no alternative and grumbling about the rip-off, but you can stick it out for the jitney bus that circles through long-term parking and finally stops at the A-Train, which is what I did.

The little bus was jammed with people I recognized from the flight.  The ventilator was not working properly so it was uncomfortably humid and stuffy, and the driver had to stop to wipe down the windshield every couple of minutes so he wouldn't smash into other vehicles.  There was something distinctly ominous in the experience of riding that little bus, and I noticed an attractive young French couple looking terrified at what they'd gotten themselves into.  I joked with them to put them at their ease, but I understood their consternation at finding themselves in the great city of New York—Numero un dans le monde—and feeling as though they might be in for some good old-fashioned American violence, something they obviously had not expected.

After a twenty minute ride, the jitney finally arrives at the A-train station and everyone gets off to stand once again in the rain, there being no protective roof at that station.  Almost unbelievably, there were hardly any lights either, so in addition to the indignity of being exposed to the pouring rain we had to stand waiting in near total darkness, which multiplied the general feeling of distress and even danger.  Considering such conditions on arrival, one is forced to conclude that the great and powerful United States of America has descended to the status of third-world backwater.

Eventually the train arrives, and of course it's a cattle car compared to the magnificent Parisian RER.  During the long rattle toward Jay Street I find myself surrounded by a bunch of crazy kids who are yacking away excitedly about all sorts of things, projects they are working on, their future plans and some gritty stuff about serious problems caused by unemployment, drugs, poverty, racism, etc. and suddenly I am content to be back in squalid America, where transportation is problematic, public education is a disgrace and all sorts of terrible social issues are glaringly obvious all around me, but where people are happy to talk on the subway.