The Emperor has No Clothes

Those living in glass houses, etc. is well known. Yet, the hubris of the Bush administration is such that they actually tried to blame 9-11 on the Clinton Administration. As is well known, Clinton finally hit back (too little, too late, and too much in self-defense after being quiet and cozying up to the Bushies all these years as the country was going to hell) but nonetheless...

A mini- Ed Murrow for our times. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC broke the silence finally, in the mainstream media, and made this brilliant peroration. View it here.

300 Billion and Counting

Torturing the Obvious
Why this too shall pass

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

According to the New York Times, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from April 2006 concludes the Iraq War has actually increased Islamic radicalism.

You don't say! Americans are shocked, shocked that our bombing, devastating and occupying a country that did us no harm would inflame its inhabitants and swell the ranks of those arrayed against America.

"Common Sense", wrote Einstein, "is prejudice acquired before the age of 18". In science, the obvious is often contrary to the truth, which is why scientists are sticklers for 'proof'. As Isaac Asimov said, anyone could 'see' that the sun revolved around the earth. Mistrusting the obvious is thus the first attribute of a scientist.

In human affairs, on the other hand, the obvious may be the most important thing. Not for nothing does the Declaration of Independence say, "We hold these truths to be self-evident". If instead, Thomas Jefferson were to have set out to prove why Life, Liberty and Happiness are essential commodities for human existence, the English might still be here. As it is, the document calls out to us across the centuries. The great leaps in politics are made by appeals to the heart, not the head.

The great truths (eternal verities, my dad called them) have no proof, nor are they pious. They are merely based on emprical, societal, experience. In the old saying "Honesty is the best Policy", the use of the word, "Policy" is worth noting. It appeals not to ideology or ethics, but to simple everyday practicality. It says that any temporary gains of dishonesty are bound to evaporate over the long run.

Devotion to such obvious truths was America's salvation. Its common sense was a uniter. It was obvious that rules were to be obeyed, that the law was majestic. Even more, it was obvious that the law acquired teeth not by adding provisions, but by first enforcing the few that existed. Scrapping or changing laws was difficult by design, but the laws on the books were respected. Even the 'American Street' seemed to have a working understanding of the Constitution and ordinary people were aware of things like the first or fourth amendments, no mean achievement for a large society.

What is one to say when, in a few short decades, the same people whose native pragmatism and instinctive linkage of societal and personal self-interest made their country unique, suddenly seem to have reached a stage where the obvious requires a dissertation? We have arrived in a milieu where coffee shops need to put up signs warning patrons that spilling hot coffee on your crotch can be painful.

How do we suddenly find ourslves here? Not so suddenly, in fact, for the signs have been there all along. As Michael Neumann wrote, the onset of Dementia Americana has its origins all the way back in the election of Ronald Reagan. Whether or not Neumann is correct, take a look at the list below; blunders that would have been immediately obvious to a previous generation, but which barely trouble the current one:

• The proposition that budget deficits and lowered taxes would together usher in the millenium, an obvious crock, gives the Gipper a 49 state reelection win,
  
  
• The notion that shutting down American factories and getting things manufactured abroad, touted and accepted as the way to enduring prosperity,
  
  
• NAFTA, whose obvious consequence was described best by Ross Perot's "Giant Sucking Sound" (a prediction realized in greater measure than even Perot might have imagined)
  
  
• The Environment, an American ideal dating back to Teddy Roosevelt, steadily under attack begining with James Watt, with state after state voting for the notion that land conservation was inimical to individual prosperity,
  
  
• The obvious advantage of having a common language for the country, undermined by a tawdry appeal to multiculturalism and multilingualism (signs in every language, so long as we can sell in one of 'em!),
  
  
• The country actually entertains a serious debate on whether illegal immigration is wrong,
  
  
• President ignores warnings of 'bin Laden determined to strike inside the US', vacations, reads My Pet Goat, and refuses to order an inquiry into 9-11 until over a year later, when forced,
  
  
• Responding to 15 hijackers coming from a country which financed madraasas and recognized Osama's hosts, by going to war against a country which had no connection to 9-11,
  
  
• Responding to the attack by training our guns on the American Constitution, a la the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping, detentions without trial...,
  
  
• Reelecting a President who had not only flubbed 9-11, but was so obviously clueless three years later that he had to declare in the first presidential debate, "Of course I know Osama Bin Laden Attacked Us. I know that!".

Comedy happens when the fool pays inordinate attention to some trifling problem while disaster looms in the background, unnoticed by him but obvious to the audience. Tragedy too. While America gets riled up over gay rights (for or against) and engrossed in who won Survivor last night, state and country totter under a quarter century of determined movement (see James Kurth's excellent essay, The Rich Got Richer) toward a split society.

Now, three hundred billion dollars (and countless dead and maimed) have bought, we are told, the spread of Islamic radicalism.

The obvious solution? Go after those who leaked the story, of course. And thank God for that brand new torture agreement. Now at least the President is bound (unless he decides otherwise) to permit the Times and the leakers to see the evidence.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Three 9-11's

P. Sainath writes of three 9-11's. This appeared in the Hindu on 9-11-2006.

Three 9/11s — choose your own

P. Sainath

There were three 9/11s in history. The New York one of 2001. The neo-liberal one of Chile 1973, and the non-violent one of 1906 — Gandhiji's satyagraha in South Africa. The authors of all three tried to change the world. Two brought bloodshed, destruction, misery, and chaos. But the Mahatma's WMD — Weapon of Mass Disobedience — helped change the world for the better.

FIVE YEARS on, the world is a more dangerous place than it was prior to September 11, 2001. Acts of terror, real and presumed, cause panic each month across the globe. Hundreds of people have been killed in terror attacks in many countries. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. Both nations have been ravaged and devastated. Millions of lives have been disrupted forever. Lebanon lies shattered. And more and more flashpoints — even nuclear ones — emerge. In a divided planet, there is one zone of agreement: the worst is yet to come.

The appalling crime committed in New York on 9/11 — when close to 3,000 people were murdered in the WTC bombing — is still fresh in memory. One claim of the time was that it had "changed the world forever." Did it? And in what ways? The West's search for security against a global threat continues. It was there in the 1960s too, when the satirical song writer Tom Lehrer sang an ode to it in his "MLF Lullaby." The `multilateral force' set up to `deter' the Russian threat was its subject. "MLF, will scare Brezhnev," crooned Lehrer, "I hope he is half as scared as I."

Changing the world in terms of `exporting democracy' has come a cropper. The bloodied streets of Iraq show us just how insane that notion was and is. As for Afghanistan, it gets more bizarre each month. Take the recent claim by British Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells. "Across the country progress is being made. Afghanistan had economic growth of 14% last year." Well, in 2003, the same country had the fastest rate of growth in the world — 21 per cent. More than half of that coming, as the United Nations noted, from opium. In any case, Afghanistan's figures improve if you just stop the bombing for a few hours. It's not hard when your base is zero. Or worse.

Both the crazies who brought down the WTC and those later responding to them, stay firmly convinced they are changing the world. The world itself remains somewhat stubbornly resistant to these notions. In every society, the Muslim-non-Muslin divide has deepened as neighbour suspects and lives in fear of neighbour. The war on terror translates too, into a war of suspicions and nerves. Meanwhile the basic pretexts for the assault on Iraq have collapsed. A U.S. Senate panel finds that Saddam had no link with Al-Qaeda whatsoever. And the weapons of mass destruction story has ceased to be even a joke.

Neo-Liberal 9/11

September 11, 1973. Then it was the export not of democracy but of terror. This was the day the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile was brought down. By the Chilean armed forces led by General Augusto Pinochet. And fully supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Allende was pushing measures that favoured his nation's poor. But even the most modest re-distribution of wealth was intolerable to the Chilean elite. As also to the U.S. corporations controlling so much of the economy.

"Make the economy scream," President Nixon ordered CIA boss Richard Helms in 1970. His order was duly carried out. A vast array of overt and covert actions were launched to wreck that nation's economy. "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves," declared Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The 9/11 of 1973 saw what analyst and author William I. Robinson called "the bloodiest coup in Latin American history." Over 3,000 people were murdered after the armed forces bombed and stormed the Presidential Palace. Allende himself went down in the battle. Estimates of people killed in the years that followed range from 3,000 to 20,000. Well over 100,000 people were arrested in the first three years. Many simply "disappeared." The film Missing starring Jack Lemon was inspired by this period.

Chile's National Stadium was used as a concentration camp. Thousands suffered gruesome tortures. And many of them were slaughtered. Among those tortured and put to death here was the legendary Victor Jara, one of Latin America's greatest musicians.

Chile's 9/11 also marked the start of the imposition by force of a neo-liberal economic model on an unwilling nation. U.S. economist Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" ran riot in Chile. While the putschists raped, tortured and murdered pregnant mothers and children, neo-liberal policies had the same impact on the economy of the poor.

Some 25 years later, the U.S. and the Britain were still holding Gen. Pinochet's hand. The leader of Chile's bloody putsch was arrested in London while there on a visit. This followed an Interpol Red Notice. A warrant had been issued against him in Spain for crimes his junta had committed against Spanish citizens in Chile during his 17-year dictatorship. But his old friends in the West did not desert him. (The same powers are driving trials of war criminals in Iraq and elsewhere.) Pinochet is back in Chile — facing murder charges there too.

Latin America, though, is seeing a wave of anti-neo-liberal globalism protests. And a trashing of pro-U.S. regimes. Whether in Venezuela or Ecuador or Bolivia. Last year, tiny Uruguay became the first nation in the world to ban water privatisation. Others too, are reclaiming their natural resources from foreign corporations. The world is changing, but not in the way the authors of 9/11, 1973, hoped for. Moral authority in Latin America belongs to a Castro or a Chavez. No pro-U.S. leader comes anywhere close.

Non-violent 9/11

The first of the 9/11s did help change the world. That was the day Gandhiji's Satyagraha in South Africa first began — September 11, 1906. Today is the 100th anniversary of that launch of his non-violent resistance movement. Gandhiji was quite clear it was a war he was fighting against racism and colonial oppression in South Africa. A war he saw as touching anti-colonial sentiment in India as well. A war he felt he had a strategy for. "Only the general who conducts a campaign can know the objective of each particular move," he later wrote. "And as this was the first attempt to apply the principle of satyagraha to politics on a large scale, it is necessary any day that the public should have an idea of its development."

For decades, the weapon of mass disobedience he had developed rattled the British in India. Gandhiji always referred to 9/11, 1906, as the day it all began. "The term satyagraha was invented and employed in connection therewith," he wrote. And listed the times where he used it again — in India. It was to be used yet again in South Africa much later. It was also used by Martin Luther King in the civil rights struggle in the United States.

On that day in Johannesburg, the Indians Gandhiji spoke to were more than a little mystified by his notion that the might of the Empire could be engaged differently. It's a debate that lasts to this day. With no easy answers. Gandhiji himself acknowledged there were no "miraculous qualities as such in satyagraha..." And that a movement which lost sight of the truth would find the technique of little use.

Yet, the struggle put the South African government in the dock. It saw the repeal or suspension of some of the more obnoxious laws the Indians there were opposed to. Very importantly, it brought about a vital measure of Hindu-Muslim unity amongst Indians in South Africa for the first time. New factors were to make things a whole lot worse later. But at the time, it set off a process that caught on in many other parts of the British Empire. Not the least within India, led by Gandhiji himself.

The British had to contend with the rising of millions of ordinary people. His weapon and its allied tools helped forge great changes in Indian history. But this General was not for war. "War with all its glorification of brute force is essentially degrading," he wrote. "It demoralises those trained for it. It brutalises men of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful canon of morality."

That was in an era when another global figure, then bigger than Gandhiji, had declared "War is the most natural, the most commonplace thing... War is life. ... all struggle is war." Hitler too, changed the world.

Three 9/11s. One that helped change the world for the better. Two that had much in common. The bloody slaughter of innocents, the brutalisation of millions. And the imposition of regimes hated and despised. Juntas with no legitimacy at all. Think of a Pinochet now hiding behind pleas of age, ill-health, and senility to escape justice Think of an Iraqi regime whose leaders almost no one can name. Or of a Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan whose writ barely runs across the presidential palace in Kabul. Who has to at all times be protected from his own people by American soldiers. Think also of a Henry Kissinger who has curbed his travel in recent years for fear of facing war crimes charges in more than one country in Europe. Think, too, of an old man who warned: "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind."

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Krauthammer on the Pope's Remarks

Tolerance: A Two-Way Street

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, September 22, 2006; Page A17

Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It's hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.

Today's Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:

In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.

· In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.

· In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to "hunt down" the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children's hospital.

"How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I'll kill you for it" is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.

The fact is that all three monotheistic religions have in their long histories wielded the sword. The Book of Joshua is knee-deep in blood. The real Hanukkah story, so absurdly twinned (by calendric accident) with the Christian festival of peace, is about a savage insurgency and civil war.

Christianity more than matched that lurid history with the Crusades, an ecumenical blood bath that began with the slaughter of Jews in the Rhineland, a kind of preseason warm-up to the featured massacres to come against the Muslims, with the sacking of the capital of Byzantium (the Fourth Crusade) thrown in for good measure.

And Islam, of course, spread with great speed from Arabia across the Mediterranean and into Europe. It was not all benign persuasion. After all, what were Islamic armies doing at Poitiers in 732 and the gates of Vienna in 1683? Tourism?

However, the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of monotheistic religion today are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who shout "God is great" as they slit the throats of infidels -- such as those of the flight crews on Sept. 11, 2001 -- and are then celebrated as heroes and martyrs.

Just one month ago, two journalists were kidnapped in Gaza and were released only after their forced conversion to Islam. Where were the protests in the Islamic world at that act -- rather than the charge -- of forced conversion?

Where is the protest over the constant stream of vilification of Christianity and Judaism issuing from the official newspapers, mosques and religious authorities of Arab nations? When Sheik 'Atiyyah Saqr issues a fatwa declaring Jews "apes and pigs"? When Sheik Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, professor of Islamic law, says on Saudi TV that "someone who denies Allah, worships Christ, son of Mary, and claims that God is one-third of a trinity. . . . Don't you hate the faith of such a polytheist?"

Where are the demonstrations, where are the parliamentary resolutions, where are the demands for retraction when the Mufti Sheik Ali Gum'a incites readers of al-Ahram, the Egyptian government daily, against "the true and hideous face of the blood-suckers . . . who prepare [Passover] matzos from human blood"?

The pope gives offense and the Mujaheddin al-Shura Council in Iraq declares that it "will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the 'jizya' [head] tax; then the only thing acceptable is conversion or the sword." This to protest the accusation that Islam might be spread by the sword.

As I said. No sense of irony.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Five Years after 9-11

What Happened?

When Anecdote Beat Principle

Niranjan Ramakrishnan

What's become of 'merica

Soothly, Who can say?

Bush and Cheney only grin

In a nasty way.

Justices are reticent

Senators are mute

But the belts of all their friends

Simply bulge with Loot.

--with apologies to Rudyard Kipling

However compelling the immediate drama, history's milestones are laid out in retrospective, not as things unfold. They are at best convenient markers for processes which are more significant by far. If events are the hares of history, flashy and flamboyant, processes are its tortoises, obstinate, relentless -- and conclusive.

We live in the Age of the Picture, where almost everything has to be made for TV, where reality itself is not exempt from adaptation. Because events lend themselves to graphic portrayal so much better than processes, which are tedious, it is natural, given our predeliction, that our dominant means of understanding be shaped around events. More people get their grasp of the world from watching 20 minutes of the evening news, than by reading the newspaper. This enforces its own reality.

Chances are that this glacial truth will determine our destiny more than 9-11 or the Iraq war. If the Battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton, the twin towers clattered to the ground with the sound of phony debates in a hundred 'episodes' of Meet the Press, Larry King Live or Face the Nation, playing in the background on our TV sets. You cannot spend fifty years replacing the paradigm of reading and discussing issues with a culture of entertainement and sound-bite politicking (while your government is playing with fire all across the globe) without reaching a point where so much failure on so many fronts becomes possible.

Alexander Cockburn in his latest piece has loosed some withering scattershot in the direction of all those conspiracy buffs who claim that there is more to 9-11 than meets the eye. Don't these nuts know that even the best planned operations can go wrong, he asks. One is tempted to echo the Reverend Al Shapton, "I hope Bush is lying. The alternative is too scary to contemplate". If the notion of hundreds of people having to be involved in a conspiracy is troublesome, how about a conspiracy of millions? The cloak and dagger stealth of 9-11 is nothing as compared to the open machinations which brought forth the Iraq War, launching it with a huge majority of public support. That was a conspiracy of 290 million people, secure in the knowledge that the bombs would be falling elsewhere, even if a goodly number of them couldn't find Iraq on a map. Agatha Christie, in her bestselling Murder on the Orient Express, was far more modest.

And with public support for the war now headed south, is it fair to ask why such a huge majority has cratered? The 'principles' that launched the war have not changed. Please don't say it is because no WMD's were found. That was settled long ago, and well before the 2004 elections, when we elected the same gang which carried out all this, our eyes wide open. The cause of the current angst and unease is that things have not gone swimmingly. What if they had? I'm reminded of something I read in the wake of 9-11. When some middle eastern spokesman went on television and expounded at great length how 9-11 was immoral because Islam condemns violence, a writer asked, "and what if Islam did not condemn violence, would that make killing all these people right?". The sad irony is that the politics and the population of a country founded on principles are both bereft of any allusion to same when considering their affairs. The implications of this truth underly all our follies -- and our fates.

As the brilliant Joe Bageant wrote in Counterpunch recently (I paraphrase), we are now so far along a haze induced by our decades-long sniffings of consumerism that even the capacity to grasp and discuss matters of principle has deserted us. All we can do is talk personalities, and whom we can 'trust' (the fellow who at least seems to believe the lies he tells). With apologies to Kipling again,

And that was like arranging chairs

Upon a sinking boat,

Though he that told the better lie

Might get the larger vote.

Even when discussing 9-11, isn't it astounding that not single politician has asked, five years on, why so many checks and balances failed that day and after? All we can think of is how Giuliani did this or that while Bush did not. What happens when personalities trump principles? The quick answer, 9-11 -- and its aftermath.

For a quarter century at least we have steeped ourselves in what Mahatma Gandhi termed a deadly social sin, Politics without Principle. I don't even mean this in the conventional sense, a la Tom Delay's gerrymandering or the Abramoff junkets. I mean the pursuit of politics without articulation of principle.

A whole generation has thus been raised in a political atmosphere that brooks no politics! A respectable philosophy has taken hold that everything will be resolved by the market, and politics is despicable. The myopic view that all politics is local, attributed to Tip O'Neill, obscures the fact that without grasp of principles, it is impossible for anyone to transcend boundaries. Having imbibed this lesson too well, all that the local politician does upon ascending to higher realms is to apply the same understanding to his new environs, that is to say, up-shifting from petty theft to grand larceny. This is a bigger tragedy than mere corruption. It is impossible to have a national conversation when the population has lost the ability to discuss principles. It is the same mindset which leads serious politicians to argue that trade is a substitute for politics.

Is there a principle involved in 9-11? Is there a principle which says that when a huge failure like 9-11 happens, someone should be held responsible? Is there a principle that when one accepts responsibility, it means paying a political price (a resignation, a demotion). Is there a principle that no matter what, freedoms are sacrosanct? Are not politics arguments over principle? Isn't this the sort of discussion that should dominate the political debate, and animate the presidential race? When was the last time you recall a Democratic candidate raise an issue of principle? Even in the last general election, which ought to have been ideal for a discussion of principles, Kerry, for all his wealth and education, turned out a true man of the masses , a politician who could not argue principle. He sought to run an entire race without asking if it was right to invade Iraq.

Without principle, the national debate reduces to little more than a series of sitcom episodes. For showcasing his welfare reform package, one president would make some lady in the audience stand up during the state of the union, relaying her vignette. To show that Katrina victims are being helped, another president has some individual appear in a press conference with him, telling his story. This is the level of politics in America, bereft of principle, replete with anecdotes. News coverage is the same way. If there is at all a principle somewhere in all this, it has been that the market will take care of everything, including politics. And in a perverse sense, it is.

It is why our leaders (why blame Bush alone, any Democract could have given voice to these) call for shopping and traveling as a way to combat Al Qaeda, instead of asking the nation to sacrifice, share in the challenge of protecting and preserving the nation. As with the Sherlock Holmes story of the dog in the night, what was not done after 9-11 is as significant as 9-11 itself. There has been no effort to rein in energy consumption, no call to sacrifice. There has been no action on border or port security worth the name. We are morphing into a third world kleptocracy where the leader thinks all is well so long as his family, tribe or unit is profiting from his reign. There is no challenge in principle, from the political class, to the notion of spying on citizens or detention without trial. The author of the magic bullet theory, Arlen Specter (there's one more anecdote!), now wants to turn the law retroactively so that Bush will be exonerated for his warrantless wiretapping.

The entire text of the Federalist Papers is about principles. The entire political debate on TV is anecdotal. For the political process and for the country, from 'anecdotage' to dotage is a but a short step.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@#yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Thoughts in the Traffic Jam

Joe Bageant is one of America's best essayists. Read his latest.

Inside the Iron Theater

By JOE BAGEANT

Nobody talks about it out loud, but a few million Americans are seriously doubting their sanity these days. Or having their sanity doubted. Or both. They seldom speak their minds because what is going on in there is a vision of society that conjures grave doubt, if not outright horror. It is the kind of stuff that will get your ass kicked off the island in a heartbeat. Nobody wants to hear it.

Yesterday I was gridlocked with my wife in traffic near the new mall, surrounded by cars full of monsters. Every redneck face and bloated or coifed middle class head in every vehicle was a grotesque, awful thing. In them you could see the meanest kind of white man ignorance, or smug middle class obliviousness, the kind that could care less if all the babies in Iraq were fried on spits in the Green Zone of Baghdad, so long as their nails get done on Saturdays. (Ah, you’ve seen the monsters too, haven’t you!) There was that fleshy, overweight killer ugliness America seems to produce these day, the faces of a happy motoring people whose armies hold the world at gunpoint so they can stuff down pizza and check out this town’s newest mall. Underneath the ugliness, there's a festering mean streak caused by frustration of knowing deep-down that government and commerce are corrupt -- everybody knows this, but tolerates it for fear of losing their bling. The choice was ever thus (DeToqueville noted its beginnings) but now has become a waking nightmare. One that brings up rage for some if us, rage that, if expressed in the wrong places and too often will get me thrown into the psyche ward if I tarry too much longer here in the land of the free.

“Lookie there,” I told my wife, who was driving, “A fucking car wash right over the spot where Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s mother was born! I remember when it was in a cornfield. And all these zombies who don’t give a crap about the bloody sand and sweatshops they create, just so they can buy a cheap skirt and drive cars worth 10 years of wages in most of the world through a goddamned car wash! If every American died tomorrow, it is unarguable that the planet would be way more sustainable for not having to feed their greed!” On the inside I was bawling and screaming at the same time. I go off on on these tirades increasingly these days. It is not good.

I could see by my wife’s face she was wondering if “getting Joe some help” was in order. Oh yes, getting some help---which in America means calling the authorities, in this case the psychiatric medical ones. Advanced technology and the skills of the medical cadre of the super-state offer its citizens wondrous ways to reach out to those in need of help. But it always comes down to prescribing drugs or possibly of even being locked up “for your own good,” until your ideations are more “normal.”

And so it is that many of us keep the rage inside as best we can, unwilling to destroy a job, or a marriage. And there are many of us, judging from the emails I receive (see www.joebageant.com), men and women alike, mostly over 40 with lots at stake, who fear being judged unstable by the well intentioned folks around us who never in their wildest thoughts would consider themselves good Germans. At any rate, who wants to be seen as unbalanced at the very moment in our lives when we unexpectedly find ourselves seeing Americans and America as they really are (and may have always been) for the first time. Not that it required insight. The sheer scale and pervasiveness of our national condition, plus decades of exposure, made it so damned obvious we could no longer escape it.

Regardless, inside me it gives rise to an alter ego I call THE SCREAMING MAN, who luckily for me, only screams inside my head. I’ve come to learn lately that plenty of other Americans have their own SCREAMING MAN and even see the same monsters I see in the traffic. (A big thank you to the L.A. Times reporter who was the first to tell me he saw the same creatures). The thought that so much of my readership is comprised of such folks is worrisome at times.

Once the monsters in the traffic reveal themselves, life can never be the same. We are left to go about doing all the ordinary things we always did, but with the building inexpressible moral outrage, living out our lives as rote actors in a theater of iron. Inside the iron theatre---a place surrounded by high walls of normalcy, where to discover a window to the outside is considered madness---the majority have apparently learned their scripts too well. So we are left in sitting in traffic jams to fester on our evil situation.

The great evils both past and present---the American genocide against the red Indian, My Lai and the uncounted others like it, Chairman Mao’s purges, the Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians, the Muslim slaughter in Darfur, Bosnia, and most notably the Holocaust---were not carried out by sociopaths, but by ordinary people who believed in their states their leaders and their gods. The machinist who made instruments for Nazi Germany felt no guilt. Nor does the anonymous mailroom employee in the Department of Homeland Security. I make a living editing military history magazines, thereby providing “pompous reaffirmations of a great past amid present mediocrity and immediate disorder,” as Marguerite Yourcenar put it. And right next door to my workplace Pakistani and Croatian programmers design death dealing aircraft circuitry for Curtis Wright, yet inside our florescent lit, air conditioned reality, there is not an ounce of guilt, much less a sense of accountability. Our work feels unquestionably ordinary, just as does the work of the traffic monsters, most of who work in Washington DC or the beltway around it.

(Vertigo, a taste of vomit in the throat, then…)
SCREAMING MAN HERE! AND I SAY FRY ALL THE PORK-FACED PUD-PUMPERS WITHIN A HUNDRED MILE RADIUS OF DC! BULLDOZE THEIR WINE-SOAKED CONDOS. RAZE THE BELTWAY AND SOW IT WITH DEPLETED URANIUM! WE NEED A REAL KILLER ON THE JOB. WHERE THE HELL IS THAT MURDERING GODDAM NAZI JEW SHARON WHEN YOU NEED HIM? GET ME MOKTADA AL-SADR ON THE PHONE!

Sheesh!

Oprah, LSD and the Lycra Micro Jukebox

How did we become so numb to the greatest moral issues of our time? Our time? Probably in human history, considering the irrevocable destruction of our ecosystem. Especially considering that 40 years ago they seemed to dominate the national arena…The Vietnam War, civil rights… A hell of a lot of wrong choices built the 200-year long road to where we now find ourselves, and I must admit that my generation did its share of the paving, laying down much of the roadbed during the Sixties. Despite much talk since then about the Sixties fight for moral justice, talk still easily launched by the pop of a chardonnay cork or the appearance of The Grateful Dead at the local arena, nearly to a man or woman, my generation, regardless of affluence, has traded principles for simple materialism. Assuming of course, they had any identifiable principles, which most didn’t.

Perhaps it was only part of this country’s ongoing struggle to accept successive waves of immigration, but the Sixties saw a push toward openness toward diverse viewpoints and values. There has always been great pressure on our social and public institutions to be capable of accepting the diversity thronging at its doors, a pressure yielded to only when it looks like things are about to blow sky high: “OK niggers, you can ride in the front of the bus. Pssst! Jeeter, get out the fire hoses and turn the dogs loose.” No institution is more pressed than the educational system. “Aw now the Mexicans want bilingual education!”, which has been handed the responsibility of building character by parents, and charged by the state with creating obedient, functional citizens who can multiply at least to the sixth power, are willing to file income tax forms, and at least pretend they don’t smoke pot. We are talking bare minimum standards here, although lately the multiplication standard has been dropped in favor of a willingness to be subjected to surveillance and mass body cavity searches at football games. In a nation where real education remains under suspicion by both the devoutly religious right, and the all-but-antireligious left, it was natural that school administrators and 10 million or so state teachers college graduates---themselves products of the mediocrity characterizing our common denominator approach to democracy and education---would arrive the “morality-is-all-a-matter of opinion” solution. It was the only way out. And, besides, from their standpoint, it looked true.

(Hissss…crackle…can this truly be a signal through my fillings?)

AW, SHUT THE FUCK UP BAGEANT! NO MORAL ISSUE EVER GOT "EXPLORED" IN THIS COUNTRY. NEVER! THEY JUST GET EXPRESSED IN LOATHESOME SHORTHAND AT DISGUSTING LENGTH BETWEEN G.O.P. CRETINS WHO, IN THEIR HALF-WITTED SELF-DELUSIONS BELIEVE THAT RONALD REAGAN SHOOK HIS FIST AT THE BERLIN WALL AND ENDED THE COLD WAR…AND FAGGOT DEMOCRATS, A MISERABLE LOT NOW FORCED TO PRETEND THEIR VOTES WILL EVER GOING TO BE COUNTED AGAIN!

Godammit, I was trying to establish rational discourse here. Now where was I? Oh yes. The erosion of moral principles…

So we now we find principles treated as mere opinion by most young people and their parents, call it diversity tolerance overshoot, and any answers posed to the great questions of our age neatly written off. Global warming? Just some scientists’ opinion. The unjustness of our wars? More opinion. Inequity in society? In whose opinion? Wastefulness of our lifestyle? A matter of opinion.

Over the course of two generations of this, a predictable thing happened. Because the first generation avoided the questions, the second one never learned that they could be asked. The atmosphere could not be riper for pure triumphant consumer capitalism and its inherent militarism (Somebody has to clear the way for Wal-Mart democracy.) If there are no overarching public moral or intellectual questions, then the only remaining questions are material ones: Which is best? The iPod or the RCA Lycra Micro Jukebox? Headphones, cell phones and polyphonic ringtones, everyone is plugged into the white noise of pure commerce. It’s the new “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” I liked then old version better. Used appropriately, LSD posed the great questions. And sometimes highlighted a few answers, too.

But it doesn’t take a psychedelic experience to pursue the kind of truth inherent to fleshly human existence, the kind that seeks justice from within our bones. In fact, it takes effort to avoid it. I’ve never seen a culture or human being that did not have an inherent sense of justice, an innate desire for balance. Most consider this to be the spiritual side of man, if they consider it at all. Most do not. A huge portion of the world is commodity addicted, while another portion is simply looking for a warm dry spot in which to shit or lay down and die. There is not much room for contemplation of the finer points of existence in either instance. Whatever the case, the American lack of even minimal spiritual observance inducted us into the Empire’s cast of featureless players inside the iron theater. Nobody needs answers to meaningful questions that are never asked, or dare not be asked.

Some days however, change does seem to be afoot, as it certainly must be, given that change is the world’s only constant. A majority of Americas now disapprove of the war in Iraq. Just three years ago when I started writing from this town’s taverns and churches, working people therein absolutely loved George Bush. Now they have returned to their normal state of political apathy, seldom speaking of Bush, but with one difference---they no longer approve of his war, and express disapproval generally in the form of grumbling. They grumble because television has given them permission to do so, through its constant touting of polling results expressing “dissatisfaction” with the war. Being “dissatisfied” with something, a war in this case, is more in accordance with their programming as consumers, not citizens. They will never get permission to be really pissed off, much less pissed off enough to burn anything down.
Television polls never specifically count the outraged and the heartbroken, thus reducing our deepest emotions, once more, to mere opinion in another opinion poll. Outrage is impermissible, except for the pretend outrage of Crossfire, etc, which has entertainment value, thus profitability. Which is why the majority of Americans know little about Cindy Sheehan. Sorry to say that here in lefty blogdom, but it’s true. Cindy Sheehan has never been on Oprah.
When and if Sheehan ever is on Oprah, we will know we have won regarding the war in Iraq. We will have won if your standard for victory is acknowledgment by the high priestess of emotional vapidity and Barnes and Noble sales, talked to by a woman who uses her child rape as a credential. In her particular celebrity delusion, she considers herself the emotional caretaker of the nation, the Martha Stewart of the soul. Lusting for proximity of your cause to celebrity may be a gratifying short term antidote, but lusting for universal justice is the ultimate cure.

But even assuming getting within four feet of Oprah Winfrey constitutes victory, we will have won far too late for the already dead on both sides. Vietnam proved that the Empire’s wars are easier to stop than the overall trajectory of national hubris and folly. Winning is stopping wars before they start, or creating a society wherein war is the last resort, not a casual preemptive option. As for the growing rejection of the war, copping to the obvious in the face of defeat, then claiming moral high ground after we have scorched it and everyone on it, well, that’s no victory at all.

Which leaves me here to fester on celebrity and moral victory under the looming possibility of forced medication by the state. Hmmmm….

Where the hell are you Aldous Huxley?

So are they gonna medicate me and you or what? Surely I must have some time left before that happens. And if they don’t, then I’ll have to do it myself anyway. You cannot win in the Iron Theater. What its producers and directors want to happen is destined to happen. They are always in control. And when it comes to control, you can’t beat the good ole US pharmaceutical industry, which has clearly met the challenge of adult rage and despair, and is now doping down the kids before they even hit puberty. Over the past six years mental health drugs prescribed to children have jumped 550%.

Recently the NFC (New Freedom Commission on Mental Health) recommended the mandatory mental health screening for 100% of America’s school children and drug treatment for all children “judged to in need of drugs.” Hell, every kid in the whole damned country needs drugs, if only to face their future in the global gulag being constructed for them.

Godammit, Huxley, you saw it coming, didn’t you? But I don’t think it will be nearly as much fun as your grim vision. You held out the possibility of science perfecting bread and circuses—Soma. Now THAT was an idea, bud! Three brands of pharmacological reality: Technicolor Soma a pleasant hallucinogen; Soma medium, a Valium-like tranquilizer; and El Crusho black gold, the heavy sleeping pill. And for the rugged freedom loving individualist, you offered those tropical islands offshore. There was really nothing coercive about it all. If the corpocracy had listened to you Hux, about how to do oppression the right way, I’d be curled up in the lap of Halliburton right now, gurgling happily. I have nothing against state-controlled euphoria if they don’t skimp on the euphies. By the way Hux, can I do the Technicolor on the Island? Or will I be kicked off that one too?

Anyway, we seem to be truly dicked now. Man the machine making monkey is so proud of the machines he has created he now pushes toward the machining of human nature itself. Why not? It was always so damned unpredictable. So yes, by dammit, let’s do’er! Let the scientific and economic machinery we have created remake us in its own likeness. Let there be technology without wisdom and efficiency without human benefit. Let there be one blissful nation of highly medicated sleepwalkers in a scientific hell that, if you get doped up enough, feels like paradise.

A visitation from Diogenes and Stonewall Jackson

So what about that rage, huh? My own personal experiences tell me that, being part of human nature, it’s also unpredictable stuff. Tonight I went to a dinner party given by a freedom-hearted couple, the female half of which is probably the most intellectually courageous woman in town. I can’t know that with certainty because even the most liberal people in this Southern burgh would never dare to invite me to dinner. Word has gotten around.

Two hours into the dinner party, I did a bad thing. I called a nice-enough but gutless, apolitical guest, “one more ignorant motherfucking American wanting respect for his self-imposed blindness,” adding that “Everything is not just an opinion, you know.” My good wife stood horrified. (Yes, there was alcohol involved.) Now, I know I am not the judge of that man’s days, and that he has the right to his opinion or non-opinion. But some days I cannot find even the dinner party pretense of respect for American denial, and this was one of those days.

By way of rationalization, I tell myself that if Diogenes of Sinope could live under a tub and take shots at the entire Greek world, then I am entitled to a snootful and an occasional outburst, despite the disparity between my talents and the long dead old Greek’s. It’s either that, or the deer rifle and water tower solution. Or the cheap online polemics you are now suffering. All of which is more bullshit, but it is the best I can do at the moment to rationalize bad behavior.

It is 11 pm, after the dinner party, and I sit in this muggy summer darkness on a bench in front of the Stonewall Jackson Headquarters Museum, located right behind my house.

Stonewall Jackson sat on his horse and sucked on lemons while he calmly managed the slaughter of thousands. I should probably take up lemons instead of gin. But at least I am guilty of mere stupidity, not slaughter. Tomorrow I will repent. Maybe. Depends upon whether anyone with legal authority finally decides I need help. Meanwhile, any kind of resistance, even the stupidest sort waged against fools, gives relief on a hot night inside the iron theater.

This anger will all come out in the morning as prose. Most likely, bad prose. (It did and you are reading it now.) But at least it will be out. Hell, there is only the world at stake.

*For Al Aronowitz, “The Blacklisted Journalist,” (1928-2005). A friend and mentor in art.

Joe Bageant is the author of a forthcoming book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, from Random House Crown about working class America, scheduled for spring 2007 release. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found at: http://www.joebageant.com. Feel free to contact him at: joebageant@joebageant.com. Copyright © 2006 by Joe Bageant.

Jews in Hezbollah

Got your attention, didn't I. No, I don't know if there are any reports of Jews fighting for Hezbollah. But this was an equally silly or man-bites-dog piece of news I ran across, of a Hindu commander of a Kashmiri Islamic militant outfit, the Hizb Mujahideen. Read the article here.

The New Emergency by Patrick J. Buchanan

Patrick J. Buchanan has written an important new book (State of Emergency). I haven't read it yet, but saw a brief set of highlights from it on the web, reproduced later. The book deals with the unfettered illegal and legal immigration fast turning America into a third world country, a theme Buchanan has stressed repeatedly over the years. The immigration debates and rallies of this year make this book timely, though it may be too late as a wake up call.

This from the Drudge Report:

**Exclusive**

“As Rome passed away, so, the West is passing away, from the same causes and in much the same way. What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilization no longer defended.”

So begins a new work of warning from Pat Buchanan.

And this time Buchanan goes all the way.

STATE OF EMERGENCY: THIRD WORLD INVASION AND CONQUEST OF AMERICA streets this week and is designed to jolt readers with stats/analysis of illegal immigration gone dangerously wild.

Buchanan warns: “The children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West."

One in every twelve people breaking into America has a criminal record.

By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics concentrated in the U.S. Southwest.

Between 10 and 20 percent of all Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbean people have already moved to the United States.

Every month, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehends more illegal aliens breaking into our country, 150,000, than the number of troops we have in Iraq.

[The book was ranked #571 on AMAZON's sales chart Sunday evening.]

Buchanan slams the president: “Concerned about his legacy, George W. Bush may yet live to see his name entered into the history of his country as the president who lost the American Southwest that James K. Polk won for the United States."

In EMERGENCY, Pat Buchanan charges the Mexican regime with an Aztlan Plot, a conscious campaign to use America as a dumping ground for its poor and unemployed, both to relieve social pressure and effect a cultural re-annexation of the American Southwest. La Reconquista, the reconquest of the lands lost by Mexico in the Mexican-American War, Buchanan charges, is underway.

The Republican Party, a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is in the grip of a cult called “Economism.” It is all about money now. The GOP worships at the “Church of GDP”

• Both parties are paralyzed by guilt over American past racial sins.

• Powerful Mexican and U.S. elites seek to erase America’s borders and merge the United States and Mexico into a “North American Union.”

In his controversial final chapter, “Last Chance,” Buchanan lays out a national plan to deal with the State of Emergency, before it makes an end of America:

• An Eisenhower-type deportation program, beginning with all illegal aliens convicted of felonies and every gang member not a U.S. citizen.

• A ten-year moratorium on all legal immigration, at the level JFK favored in 1958 -- 150,000 to 250,000 a year.

• A $10-billion, 2000-mile double-line security fence between the United States and Mexico, built with no apologies to Mexico City.

Developing...

Tony Blankley, Buchanan's fellow member of the McLaughlin Group, has this to say in his review of the book:

Most people will be familiar with Mr. Buchanan's view on immigration. But even those who have read his earlier books and read his columns, as I have, will not be prepared for the remorseless presentation of unimpeachable facts with which he makes his convincing case for the reality of his book's subtitle: "the third world invasion and conquest of America." Here he deepens his case against illegal immigration (and his case for a moratorium on even legal immigration) with statistic after statistic concerning, among many topics, the shockingly disproportionate degree of disease and crime that illegal Mexican and other immigrants are transmitting into the country.

For example, in Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide, which total 1,200-1,500, are for illegal aliens. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, California now has almost 40,000 cases of tuberculosis (a disease only recently thought to be virtually extinct in America). He presents compelling evidence that the "Reconquista" of southwestern United States is not merely the silly conceit of a few extremists, but is widely desired by Mexicans (he cites a 2002 Zogby poll showing that by 58 percent to 28 percent, Mexicans believe the American Southwest belongs to Mexico).

New to me was his citation to the fact that all 47 Mexican consulates in the United States are mandated to provide textbooks to U.S. schools with significant Hispanic populations, which textbooks teach history from the point of view of General Santa Ana -- in which America stole the Southwest. The Los Angeles consulate, alone, has distributed 100,000 such textbooks just this year to the L.A. Unified School District.

This weekend, I turned on the PBS TV channel and discovered a Sesame Street program in Spanish. Since when did the regular PBS channel become bi-lingual? The notice from the utility company comes in seven or eight languages. High up in the Lick Observatory in San Jose this summer, I saw signs in English, Spanish-- and Vietnamese (I think). The recent response to a wholly unjustified destruction of Lebanon's civil life, strong armed by an Israeli lobby, and the equally intense lobbying by Indian groups to twist (wholly willing, for a price, one should add) congressional opinion on the nuclear agreement, are evidences of where immigrant loyalties are influencing important policy decisions.

Notwithstanding his unforgivable support to Bush in the 2004 election, despite all his opposition to Bush on the Iraq War, Buchanan has been been astute in his diagnosis of many of the major trends of our times. He is right on immigration, he is right on foreign wars, he is right on outsourcing, he is right on globalization, he is right in his opposition to US foreign policy being made an adjunct of Israel's. That's a lot of rights. A big picture guy who can also quote minute details to bolster his points, Patrick J. Buchanan is worth listening to.

The Politics of Terror - Cui Bono?

Cui Bono?

Who benefits from the terror of terror?

A few months back, Werther wrote a brilliant piece in Counterpunch, called "A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don't Want You to Ask". Now, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC has a remarkable presentation of the close proximity of terror warnings of the past four years to politically inconvenient times for the Bush administration. This is an incredibly painstaking work of journalism. See for yourself: Nexus of Terror and Politics. A must watch. Olbermann presents facts without making allegations. Far more powerful that way.

John Kerry was Right?

Here's an astonishing article by George Will, who was an ardent supporter of George W. Bush, and (I think) was a supporter of the Iraq War.

Yes, that George Will.

The Triumph of Unrealism

By George F. Will

Tuesday, August 15, 2006; Page A13

Five weeks have passed since the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers provoked Israel to launch its most unsatisfactory military operation in 58 years. What problem has been solved, or even ameliorated?

Hezbollah, often using World War II-vintage rockets, has demonstrated the inadequacy of Israel's policy of unilateral disengagement -- from Lebanon, Gaza, much of the West Bank -- behind a fence. Hezbollah has willingly suffered (temporary) military diminution in exchange for enormous political enlargement. Hitherto Hezbollah in Lebanon was a "state within a state." Henceforth, the Lebanese state may be an appendage of Hezbollah, as the collapsing Palestinian Authority is an appendage of the terrorist organization Hamas. Hezbollah is an army that, having frustrated the regional superpower, suddenly embodies, as no Arab state ever has, Arab valor vindicated in combat with Israel.

Only twice in the United Nations' six decades has it authorized the use of substantial force -- in 1950 regarding Korea and in 1990 regarding Kuwait. It still has not authorized force in Lebanon. What is being called a "cease-fire" resolution calls for Israel to stop all "offensive" operations. Israel, however, reasonably says that its entire effort is defensive. The resolution calls for Hezbollah to stop "all attacks." The United Nations, however, has twice resolved that Hezbollah should be disarmed, yet has not willed the means to that end. Regarding force now, the U.N. merely "expresses its intention to consider in a later resolution further enhancements" of the U.N. force that for 28 years has been loitering without serious intent in south Lebanon.

The "new Middle East," the "birth pangs" of which we supposedly are witnessing, reflects the region's oldest tradition, the tribalism that preceded nations. The faux and disintegrating nation of Iraq, from which the middle class, the hope of stability, is fleeing, has experienced in these five weeks many more violent deaths than have occurred in Lebanon and Israel. U.S. Gen. George Casey says 60 percent of Iraqis recently killed are victims of Shiite death squads. Some are associated with the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry, which resembles a terrorist organization.

The London plot against civil aviation confirmed a theme of an illuminating new book, Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." The theme is that better law enforcement, which probably could have prevented Sept. 11, is central to combating terrorism. F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England.

Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry's belief (as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, 2004) that "many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror." In a candidates' debate in South Carolina (Jan. 29, 2004), Kerry said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world."

Immediately after the London plot was disrupted, a "senior administration official," insisting on anonymity for his or her splenetic words, denied the obvious, that Kerry had a point. The official told The Weekly Standard:

"The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren't for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It's like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn't work."

This farrago of caricature and non sequitur makes the administration seem eager to repel all but the delusional. But perhaps such rhetoric reflects the intellectual contortions required to sustain the illusion that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terrorism, and that the war, unlike "the law enforcement approach," does "work."

The official is correct that it is wrong "to think that somehow we are responsible -- that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies." But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that. It is more dismaying that someone at the center of government considers it clever to talk like that. It is the language of foreign policy -- and domestic politics -- unrealism.

Foreign policy "realists" considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists' critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.

georgewill@washpost.com

A Connecticut Donkey...

A Connecticut Donkey in King George's Court

(with apologies to Mark Twain)

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

The first three letters just happen to be,

L-I-E., L-I-E.

(with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, The Sound of Music)

But what's in a name? It is the actions that count. And here, perhaps the biggest greatest contribution to legitimizing the actions of the Bush administration has come from what can be euphamistically called, an 'enabling' legislator.

I first noticed the strange behavior of Joseph I. Lieberman shortly after the 2000 election. Those were difficult days (you have to remember, we had higher standards then). It was bad enough that Gore and Lieberman went quietly into the night after so blatant a travesty as the Rehnquist court judgement. While Gore may not have had Obrador's gumption, it was clear that he was at least capable of inner outrage.

Lieberman, on the other hand, clearly appeared relieved that he could now go back to full-time faux bipartisanship. Instead of being a stringent opposition politician watching every false move of the ruling party, he was happy to promote a phony 'let us all get along'. Such an attitude, always dubious in an opposition, turned disastrous for the country when a criminal and inept administration was at the helm.

The stentorious statesman who pilloried Ralph Nader in 2000 for bolting the party and standing as an independent, announced during the primary campaign he would consider precisely such a move himself. He kept this pledge, announcing after his loss last evening, using a concession speech to Lamont into a launching pad for his campaign as independent, although he kept saying that he would be a Democrat. How? By opposing the Democratic nominee? While Lamont in his victory speech praised Lieberman, the Senator spewed bile on the upstart who had beaten him. Talk of the politics of division!

But doublespeak comes naturally to this self-professed moralist. Michael Kinsley wrote long ago that when he was hosting his TV show, the two politicians who were always available to appear, day or night, weekday or weekend, were Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, the very same enablers who gave so many of Bush's egregious initiatives the stamp of moral authenticity, or at least, temporary cover. I cannot erase from my memory how assiduously Lieberman helped McCain pilot the Iraq War resolution through the Senate, and how Lieberman went after Howard Dean when Dean said Saddam Hussain's capture had not made America any safer (see Duryodhana Dies). No wonder the Bush administration made full use of Lieberman's crucial votes, portraying him as a reasonable and bipartisan politician who cared for the country in this time of war. Rather ironic, coming from a crew that itself didn't care about the country, and saw the war only as an opportunity to curtail rights and help its friends.

Bill Clinton, knowing Lieberman's intentions, still came out to campaign for him. How glorious that it helped not at all, exploding the myth that people will be fooled into excusing enablers, and their enablers. So did Chris Dodd and Barbara Boxer, both of whom had voted against the war. The Senate protects its own.

A week before the primary, facing a 13 point gap in the polls, the man of principle attempted to shed his record with a vigor that surprised even his admirers, all the while claiming to stand firm on principle. "I not only respect your right to disagree or question the president or anyone else -- including me -- I value your right to disagree".

How magnanimous! One wishes Lieberman had valued as much his right to disagree with Bush. We are not talking about any old administration here, but the most brazen and incompetent one in memory. But Lieberman had no problem voting with the Bush team for Gonzales, Rice, CAFTA, the Patriot Act, Roberts, Alito, on the recent resolution (the original and the watered down versions) on withdrawing troops...

Lamont may have any number of flaws, but his courage in taking on this so-called icon of the Democratic party (a true representative for a party under whose Senate leadership the war resolution was passed), challenged him on the War and laid him low, assures him a place in the history of our times.

Congrats and thanks, Ned Lamont, for your wake up call to the Democratic Party, and for causing more sleepless nights for all those other minor and major Liebermans among the political elite.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

The Fig Leaf(let) of Warning

Looking for the Bright Side

By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN

Banta Singh has been hit by a car, and his colleague Santa Singh is visiting him in the hospital. Seeing Banta swathed in bandages, Santa racks his brain for something cheerful to say.

Finally, he observes, "Ohe Banta, look at it this way, at least it is only your left hand that's broken, not the right."

Banta Singh brightens up immediately. "Aha! At last, a person who appreciates my presence of mind! You know, actually it was my right hand that was under the car at first. I thought to myself how terrible that would be, so I quickly withdrew my right hand, and put in my left instead!"

--From my late friend, philosopher, and guide, D. Subbarao.

If Banta Singh's logic appeals to you, then you should have no difficulty applauding the wisdom of the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman.

Speaking of the deaths of ordinary men, women and children in Qana and other places in Lebanon, Mr. Gillerman told the Security Council that Israel regretted every casualty, and was indeed so concerned to avoid them that each time, before bombing, it dropped leaflets beseeching people to leave the area. His nodders, assistant nodders, and sundry yes-men on the US side, including John Bolton, Condoleezza Rice, Tony Snow, Hillary Clinton and why, even Bill Maher, have been echoing Mr. Gillerman's words in their own remarks.

The Israeli statements exceed even the old Billy Bunter double-defense, "I never touched that cake. Besides, it tasted terrible". First they said they were ultra-careful to hit the correct building. Then they said they were sure Hezbollah was holed up near, if not inside the building itself. Then they said they had used precision missiles. Then they said they were sorry, but this was war, and errors do happen. This is why they dropped leaflets in the first place.

Once you have given a warning, you are absolved. What next, complaints that Israel only dropped printed leaflets, of omitting to put up warnings on the web and send out an email message to everyone in Lebanon? (A Jewish state sending out spam?). Some people are never satisfied.

By this fresh piece of Israeli-American logic, however, Hitler's atrocities are mitigated, if not absolved, because he had given umpteen warnings to the Jews, all the way from Mein Kampf on, of their impending fate if he came to power. If people didn't believe him, stuck around and suffered the consequences, it was because they did not follow their many smart cohorts who left Germany when they were warned. Hezbollah and Hamas, too, are similarly exculpated, because they have never left any Israeli in doubt of their intentions towards Israel. As is Osama bin Laden because, long before Khobar Towers, Cole and 9-11, he repeatedly warned American to leave the Muslim lands.

Welcome to the 21st century version of "Let them eat Cake".

Going along with this argument for a moment, assume that I, as a resident of Lebanon at whose feet a floating Israeli leaflet has just landed, decide that prudence is in order, and taking the warning seriously, depart town with my family. I return two days later to find my roof lying on my living room floor, my town devastated, my water and power supply busted. One million Lebanese are, like imaginary me, estimated to be refugees within their own country, having left their residences in heed of Israeli warnings or fear of being buried alive by a bomb. Surely they are beside themselves in gratitude for Israel's pre-bomb warning leaflets.

The natural tendency of the human mind is to equate the protagonists in a fight. In the subconscious of world opinion, then, the Hezbollah is acquiring coequal status with Israel. Current reality too has added to the perception. Once upon a time, Israel finished off three whole countries and doubled the territory under its control, all in less time than God took to create the universe. Today it cannot advance more than two miles along a narrow front, against an entity that is not even a regular army (maybe for that very reason).

By its tactics, which have killed ten times the number of people as has Hezbollah, Israel has also obliterated any distinction between itself and its enemy which, as it says, does not care about the human toll. Along with its leaflets, myths of Israeli military invincibility and moral superiority too have dropped out of the sky, making their way to the ground where Hezbollah stands.

The Banta Singh analogy does not end with Israel, however. Those who rejoice in the damage to Israeli myths should be equally mindful of falling victim to the mystique of Hezbollah. The tragedy remains that it has taken a religious and sectarian militia to accomplish what broad-based nationalist and secular movements could not. To take heart in Israel's discomfiture, ignoring this reality, is to emulate Banta Singh's smug satisfaction in salvaging the right hand by sacrificing the left. No pun intended.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Campaigns in the new Century

Michael Neumann is an extraordinarily original and perceptive thinker. His article, How Time Flies, is among the most insightful writings on the Iraq and Afghan wars, though it analyzes the actual fighting almost not at all. Here, once again, is a piece by him in yesterday's online edition of Counterpunch examining the nature of communication and organization in the era of emails.

Like other writings by Neumann, it does not seek to provide an answer, but leads one to a better starting point for thinking about the problem.

August 1, 2006

War in the Blathersphere

What is to be Said?

By MICHAEL NEUMANN

Every day the emails swarm, like earnest flies around some goo on the sidewalk. You get more of them when there is more human misery, more filth or gore. They are useless in various ways. Sometimes they moralize about the obvious. Often they tell you what you already know. They at once proclaim that the press does not report the story, and get the story from the press. Many emailers both get their items from, say, The Guardian, and pretend that The Guardian doesn't exist, or that you don't read it. But if you get these sorts of emails, you do read it. If you don't read it, you don't get these sorts of emails.

Even then, you may well learn what the emailers insist, ad nauseam, you will never learn. "Watch as Palestinians struggle without basic necessities", says CNN.

Sometimes the emails do contain information you can't get elsewhere, but don't want from anywhere. You receive them because you have been identified, correctly, as someone concerned about the horrors unfolding in some particular part of the world. If the idea is to arouse further concern, one wonders why: your greater concern probably won't mean that you help the sufferers, or even that you try to help them. Most likely you will simply send more emails, which is why the concerned types often get the same story from four or five sources.

Sometimes the emails call for 'action'. Petitions are signed. There are 'boycotts', which really are a sort of *in*action: for a while, a few concerned boycotters half-heartedly try to do the work of billions. Here, in full, is what one very decent person sent out a few months ago: "To express solidarity with the Palestinian people and their democratically elected government, all citizens of the world should join in a global non-violent boycott of US and European products until the governments of these countries change all such policies which condone, help and support the occupation of the Palestinian people and their effective genocide by the Israeli Apartheid regime." If there were enough people to mount these boycotts, the problems they address would not exist in the first place. But boycott efforts do bear fruit in the form of many more emails, for and against the boycott.

The emails (and I've sent them myself) are symptomatic of a big, bad, debilitating problem. They exhibit profound faith in a doctrine contradicted by all recent history. Apparently, most kind-hearted people with keyboards feel that humanity, or the people, or the nation, or some skillful vanguard, is driven by a powerful conscience which, once aroused, will like a lion descend on injustice and rip it to shreds. How quickly this is to happen isn't clear, but the emailers at once proclaim the dire urgency of 'the situation' and signal that really, there is no urgency at all. We know and they know and the whole world knows that outraged consciences are not going to change anything much anytime soon. People are dying right now, we are told - yet not one person on the planet can expect these messages to drive back the killers or suppress the terrible ambitions of their handlers. If the emails produce any effect, it will be far, far down the road, when today's urgency has become last year's memory.

Some emailers simply pretend otherwise. For others, the answer is: "one has to do something." No one doesn't, when this is all one does. For yet others, their messages are simply a bearing of witness to evil, which essentially means watching people suffer and die. Why this should be some moral obligation or personal accomplishment is a mystery.

If these emails are action, what we need is better talk. It is emphatically not time to organize - organize whom? how many? with what money? to what end? to do what? have a march? How exactly will 'organizing' stop the next army crashing through the next far-off slum, much less the armies already on the move? No one can really believe that because marches and lugubrious meetings have failed in the past, they will succeed in the future. Indeed the very same critics who insist on the impotence of individuals in the face of a thoroughly debased electoral process, the emasculation of the trade unions and the repression of genuine dissent - these same critics act as if none of this made any difference, and we could, politically, do pretty much as we'd like.

Lenin asked, and answered, the question of what is to be done. Today the question is adolescent and the answers are lame. "We must build a movement" now belongs to the same category as "we must make the revolution" or "we must radicalize the underclass" or "make love not war". Leftists need to take their own pessimism about American politics seriously. If anything is ever to be done, some illusions need to go.
First among them is the supposed power of goodness. Many morally good movements have indeed succeeded. The usual suspects are the struggles of black Americans (Martin Luther King or Malcom X, take your pick), feminism, trade unions, the anti-apartheid movements and, implausibly, Gandhi's pacifist yet blood-soaked liberation of India. Others might add the Cuban, Algerian, Chinese, or Russian revolutions, and the Vietnamese expulsion of their enemies. But none of these movements succeeded *because* they were morally good. The bulk of those who fought these fights - as opposed to the well-wishers on the sidelines - were acting out of self-interest. The rank and file often fought for themselves or their families. The political types fought for some group to which they belonged, and with which they identified. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Malcom X had fine words but little else for the Vietnamese. Ho Chi Minh had fine words and little else for American or South African blacks. No one expected, or should have expected, otherwise.

Today, these heroes might have sent some emails, and those emails might have been appreciated. People like getting messages of support. Maybe these messages even help a little - but not much. Usually a movement succeeds because it has enlisted huge numbers of self-interested followers, usually against a numerically inferior opposition. Departures from this pattern say nothing for the power of The Good. The Vietnamese had important Soviet support; this had to little to do with love of justice and much to do with countering American ambitions. The civil rights movement had the armed backing of the US federal government, and the anti-apartheid movement had (much-exaggerated) international backing. In both cases morality was not the driver of this support; it was rather a recognition that, without racial equality, there would be an ongoing bloodbath that would serve no one's political or economic interests. In both cases, many local whites eventually came to the same conclusion.

A look at some of the world's more conspicuous failures provides a better gauge of the power of moral concern. One sometimes hears that the world just didn't care about the pogroms against Jews in Russia and the Ukraine, the Armenian massacres, the horrors of Biafra, Ethiopia, Rwanda. This is nonsense: there was a huge outpouring of concern about these events, as there was about many forms of poverty and exploitation the world over, as there was when America was poised to attack Iraq. Lack of power, not lack of concern, was the problem. Then, of course, there are the painful failures we live with this very day, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Congo. We give our emails and articles and speeches no credit for any improvement in these areas, because there is none. Hand-wringing is not new; that's why we ought to know it doesn't work.

This is no somber reflection on 'human nature'. Concern is not enough, that's all, and for three reasons.

First, we take sides. Once you are for the USA, you will not be overwhelmed by concern for dead Afghan kiddies. People don't actually proclaim the one-sidedness of their compassion, but why should they need to? Isn't it an obvious fact of life? If there are people who cried as many tears for both wounded Vietnamese and wounded American GIs, for both innocent Jews and innocent Germans, for both Palestinian and Israeli children, there are very few, and fewer still whose tears helped any substantial proportion of these victims.

Second, our concern, however admirable, is almost never sufficiently focused. There are so many things to be concerned about. One person is particularly touched the condition of the Palestinians, another by cancerous children, another by famine in the Sudan, another by sweatshops, another by animal extinctions, another by landmines, another by the destruction of native cultures, another by sweatshops. Often the same person flits from one concern to another.

Third, and decisively, We lack any real power to change what we are concerned about. Our votes count for nothing; nonviolent protest is ignored; violent protest, these days, is inconceivable. This could all change, but not soon. For now, many people - and who can prove them wrong? - judge there is nothing they can do about the world's ills, and look to their own business.
These are the reasons not to preach. Now it would be silly to argue against concern for others, or to claim that moral argument has absolutely no place in politics. Sometimes it is useful for deflating propaganda. Often it is useful for creating propaganda, once a cause has powerful support. But it almost never creates such support, and the left has gone astray by inflating its very modest political importance.
It is time we stop bringing one another news and views we've already heard, time we stopped wallowing in others' crimes, time we stopped invoking wimpy principles of law and morals as if these invocations really mattered, time we stopped crying on one another's soggy shoulders. Preaching does spawn longer and more varied email lists, but it is time we realized that this electronic chatter will never help the people we claim to want to help. It is not, for example, that no one will care about the plight of the Palestinians. On the contrary, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have cared, do and will care, very much. But that's just why we should realize that mere caring, and the actions it produced, are resoundingly ineffectual. The Palestinians are worse off than ever, and Israel couldn't care less about our caring.

The short of it is that you cannot build an effective movement on altruism, which means that, for many of the causes that most concern us, you cannot build an effective movement at all. There is an alternative, unromantic and unsatisfying, but much more promising, and therefore morally obligatory. It is to appeal to the interests of those with power. Depending on your point of view, this could mean the rich and corporate, or the mainstream majority, or either, or both.

These appeals need to be practical. Sermonizing results at best in empty gestures. Nor is it any good basing such appeals on what some pet theory proclaims as the deeper interests of humanity. If people were responsive to leftists revealing deeper, unrecognized human interests, the world's problems would have been solved a long time ago. Instead, effective appeals address the ignoble, short-term, possibly 'unreal' interests of those with power. These interests are mainly to have wealth and/or a good job, security and the comforts of life - yes, that includes gas for SUVs.

If effective appeals deviated from leftist orthodoxy, that would hardly speak against them. But they don't. Appealing to unsavory groups or interests doesn't endorse those interests or say anything about the legitimacy of policies or power structures. It is no renunciation of the desire to change those structures, even by the most radical means.
It is simply recognition of contemporary political realities. If that isn't impeccably orthodox, so much the worse for orthodoxy.

For anyone who actually gives a damn whether people starve or are beaten or burned to death, the whiny moralizing of the left is no longer a mere annoyance. It is also immoral. Lacking any remotely reasonable prospect of success, it is an exercise in self-gratification. The forms of this gratification may vary: for some it is simply a relief from great distress about the ways of the world, an outlet for painful frustration. For others it is an exercise in snobbery. For others it is a trip to fantasyland, glowing with visions of revolutionary triumph. Whatever its form, leftist moralizing places the moralizer's own satisfaction over the needs of those in desperate straits. That's not good; it's selfish. It is unpleasant to admit powerlessness and to act within the political framework of an abhorrent system. But it's the only game in town.
To pretend otherwise is hypocrisy - not the worst sin, perhaps, but one the left most loves to condemn. It is to act as if one really cares about others while pursuing a strategy that clearly will help only oneself.

The irony of it all is that it is only once leftists give up on their obsession with concern that they can make progress on those same concerns, on what induced them to become leftists in the first place.
The ignorance and stupidity of America's leaders and their supporters present great opportunities. Many think American policies, though they do run counter to the interests of 'ordinary Americans', serve the interests of big business, or the ruling class. This is false. Most American foreign policies run counter to the interest of big business as well.

Big business, on the whole, has no interest in supporting Israel, or invading Iraq, or confronting Iran, or tying aid to 'abstinence' birth control.* Major oil companies, who value stability, have no interest in risky, expensive, outrage-provoking schemes to siphon off oil from Central Asia. Even in Venezuela or Bolivia, American businessmen don't think lame coup attempts are an intelligent response to oil nationalizations. No corporate type wants high-ranking dweebs admonishing Russia or China about human rights, or provoking these nations with attempts to encircle them. All of these policies, because of the chaos and hostility they create, are worse for America's security, its energy supplies. and therefore its economy. American foreign policy is, often as not, an appeal to special voting blocks like anti-Castro Cubans or born-again Christians, not the implementation of corporate agendas.

The idiocies of US policy are an opportunity, not for effective action, but for its prerequisite, effective talk. In half the world, the US undercuts its security and economic prospects by supporting Israel, thereby alienating oil producers and key allies. Iran was once in the US camp; support for Israel is part of the reason it is now on the other side. In the first Gulf War, most of the world, including Syria, sided with the US and even fought alongside it. Now only a coalition of poodles skitters at America's heels. In Turkey, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in every country important to US objectives, anti-American sentiment explodes; this endangers America's grip on its energy suppliers. On the other side of the ocean, America's boycott of Cuba has done much to alienate first Venezuela, then Bolivia; Brazil and Mexico may not be far behind. This policy benefits no one and pleases only bitter first-generation Cuban refugees in Florida.

None of this does middle America or the big corporations any good. It's not hard to promote change on the only viable basis for promoting it, the self-interest of those who can make the changes. But most leftists, instead of addressing the obvious needs of virtually all Americans, apparently think they can infect a whole population with passionate altruism and high ideals. People are going hungry! Children are dying! International law is defied! There are violations of the Geneva Convention! Democracy is not being spread! Corporations are profitable! US policymakers are hypocrites!

When unions organize, when Toyota wants to sell a car, they don't say: "this will be great for someone else." Until the left stops thinking that's a smart way to sell change, the question of what is to be done can't even arise. Civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement, feminism, environmentalism - the only progressive postwar movements that can claim some success - were successful precisely because they got past leftist idealism and made powerful appeals to the interests of those involved.(**)

Real compassion requires placing results over political puritanism. No one heeds connoisseurs of purity and agony. Nobody is interested in what we do or don't 'support' - the emptiest term in the whole vapid lexicon of leftism. You can 'support' violent revolution all you like, just as you can 'support' socialism in the United States or fair wages around the world or a secular state in Israel/Palestine. "Supporting' these things - or even more comically, 'demanding' them - has absolutely no tendency to bring them within a parsec of reality. At such a distance from high ideals, it is idle to fuss about whether they've been abandoned. Again, and until then: we are powerless. This could change dramatically tomorrow, but there is no sign of it changing, and if the signs come they will overshadow our 'radicalism' completely.
For now, we are - to harp on it - powerless. It is only by accepting this that we can set about persuading those who do have power to do less harm. If we succeed, and our chances are good, the American left will have more power than it has had for many years.

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(*) Inevitably Halliburton will come to mind. Halliburton, despite years of government patronage, hasn't made it to the top 100 of the Fortune 500. Its 2005 revenues are a bit over 20 billion and its 'profit' is a loss of 979 million; it lost similar amounts in the previous three years. Exxon Mobil had revenues of $270 billion and profits of $25 billion. ChevronTexaco had revenues of almost 148 billion and profits of over 13 billion. ConocoPhillips had revenues of over 121 billion and profits of 8 billion. None of these truly big companies made anything noticeable out of Iraq or Afghanistan, much less Israel.

(**) Even churchmen are often less other-wordly than lefists in recognizing the importance of appeals to self-interest. The leader of Greece's Orthodox church, condemning Israel's attack on Lebanon, provides an example:

"[Israel is] sacrificing innocent civilians by the hundreds, and creating refugees by the thousands," he added, telling the Israeli authorities, "Do not provoke our consciences. Do not feed the world condemnation against you. It is not in your interest...Fear God's wrath."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/741764.html

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those of his university. His book What's Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just been republished by Broadview Press. He contributed the essay, "What is Anti-Semitism", to CounterPunch's book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. His latest book is The Case Against Israel. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.