Remora
I was going to post a long bit about the politics of tears tonight -- but alas, I have to finish this article for the Statesman early tomorrow, so I have swallowed a sleeping pill and written to Miruna and now I intend to sleep. Tomorrow, for sure, the tears piece - from Jesus to Edmund Burk and beyond. I promise.
Friday, September 21, 2001
Thursday, September 20, 2001
According to the WP this morning, some of the hijackers may have been using fake names.
"FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said Friday that the bureau had "a fairly high level of confidence" that the hijacker names released by the FBI were not aliases. But one senior official said that "there may be some question with regard to the identity of at least some of them."
The uncertainty highlights how difficult it may be to ever identify some of the hijackers who participated in the deadliest act of violence on American soil. Most of the hijackers' bodies were obliterated in the fiery crashes."
I am amazed at two things: one is the ability of an apparently widely dispersed, cover group to actually carry through on its mission; this is still the puzzle at the center of the atrocity; two is the the relative incuriosity of the media about the disparity between the FBI's manifest incapacity to uncover the conspiracy before it hit its targets, and the speed with which the FBI is apparently rolling up the conspiracy in the aftermath. I don't get this asymmetry. Some of what is being reported seems to be simply bigotry turned into a police raid -- if you have an arabic name and you work in an airport, be prepared to talk to the Man, because he is going to be at your door. But some of it seems, in hindsight, so obvious. There is a Federal program named CIPRIS - Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students. Does this program, which is run by the Immigration department and the FBI (supposedly -- that's what the Coordination is about) extend to airplane pilot schools?
On another note: We never read about 'liberal' schools of Islam. In fact, I have a very poor picture of Islam in my head. I have skimmed bits of the Qu'ran, and I have read some groovy Sufi stuff, but I don't know much about the mechanics of the religion. Anyway, for those of you out there who are curious about the breadth of disagreement in Islam, here's an article about Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish religious leader who does not believe that shari'a should be the law of the state. This article comes from an interesting journal, the Middle Eastern Review of International Affairs.
"FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said Friday that the bureau had "a fairly high level of confidence" that the hijacker names released by the FBI were not aliases. But one senior official said that "there may be some question with regard to the identity of at least some of them."
The uncertainty highlights how difficult it may be to ever identify some of the hijackers who participated in the deadliest act of violence on American soil. Most of the hijackers' bodies were obliterated in the fiery crashes."
I am amazed at two things: one is the ability of an apparently widely dispersed, cover group to actually carry through on its mission; this is still the puzzle at the center of the atrocity; two is the the relative incuriosity of the media about the disparity between the FBI's manifest incapacity to uncover the conspiracy before it hit its targets, and the speed with which the FBI is apparently rolling up the conspiracy in the aftermath. I don't get this asymmetry. Some of what is being reported seems to be simply bigotry turned into a police raid -- if you have an arabic name and you work in an airport, be prepared to talk to the Man, because he is going to be at your door. But some of it seems, in hindsight, so obvious. There is a Federal program named CIPRIS - Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students. Does this program, which is run by the Immigration department and the FBI (supposedly -- that's what the Coordination is about) extend to airplane pilot schools?
On another note: We never read about 'liberal' schools of Islam. In fact, I have a very poor picture of Islam in my head. I have skimmed bits of the Qu'ran, and I have read some groovy Sufi stuff, but I don't know much about the mechanics of the religion. Anyway, for those of you out there who are curious about the breadth of disagreement in Islam, here's an article about Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish religious leader who does not believe that shari'a should be the law of the state. This article comes from an interesting journal, the Middle Eastern Review of International Affairs.
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
Dope.
One result of the present Crisis is that I've had to read books I never wanted to read. Just thinking about the Middle East gets me depressed. But manfully I assumed the weblogger's burden, and last night read John Cooley's book, Payback, about the US vs Iran vs Israel vs Syria conflicts of the 80s. Today I've been reading Out of the Ashes, Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's book about the ressurection of Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
Let's talk about the Cockburn book a bit, since Cooley's book, although a swift bit of reporting, is really history.
The American view of the endurance of Saddam Hussein is a curious case of the public swallowing anything in order to preserve its inertia. The story is, the Gulf war was stopped because of the immemorial respect that the US bears for UN resolutions -- and since the UN resolution said that we were intent on freeing Kuwait, we simply freed Kuwait. If the Republican guard, Hussein's finest troops, escaped, and during the weeks in which our troops were on the ground literally cut the rebellion against Hussein into bloody bits, well, mark it down to America's respect for the law.
Since, however, America was, at the same time, making up the rules as it went along regarding economic sanctions, and since the fine hand of American power has never been noticeably stayed by the palsied body of UN resolutions before, even American apologists shove the law abiding excuse aside after a sheepish wink, and readily come up with the real excuse: that we have to consider the feelings of our allies.
For a condensed, classic version of this theme, see this article by Wallace Thies from three years ago - in the midst of Clinton's sudden attention to S. Hussein' s weapons of mass destruction (attention that curiously coincided with the deliberations of the House on the question of impeaching him). There are two grafs that I spied with my little eye. Let's bore in upon them:
"... the United States labors under two constraints that limit the steps that it can take against Iraq. On one hand, if Saddam is ousted and/or killed, how well would Iraq hold together in the aftermath? The United States' goal is to oust Saddam, but not to cause Iraq to break up. The latter could trigger a new round of warfare as Iraq's neighbors fought over the pieces.
"On the other hand, even if the U.S. intelligence community knew precisely the location of Iraq's weapons stockpile, would it be prudent to target the weapons themselves, at the risk of releasing their contents into the atmosphere? Saddam Hussein may not care much about the lives of his fellow Iraqis, but democracies must adhere to a higher standard. "
Anybody who reads Cockburn's book will discern a high degree of hilarity in the last paragraph. From the poison gas used indiscriminately by Hussein against Kurds (which we never protested) to the use of gas and bio agents against the Iranian armies (which we covertly condoned) to the double whammy of placing economic sanctions around Iraq until Saddam Hussein was deposed, while at the same time refusing to aid any movement to depose him, and even warning allies against aiding said movements, the US has adhered to the same tender standards regarding Iraqui lives as King Leopold once displayed for his Congolese subjects.
But let's disregard history and just try to make those two paragraphs consistent, shall we? For they represent the Officialspeak of American foreign policy re Iraq. The tender concern for Iraq's nationhood, you will notice, trumps concern for, well, democracy. Since if Iraq fell apart without a dictatorship, hmm, perhaps it is being imposed, even shall we say imposed bloodily, on an unwilling population? And so perhaps we can translate the higher US standard as something like this: although we do want to strip you of your basic human rights and keep you in an unresisting position, land's sakes, we don't want you to die of anthrax! How do you think that would look on tv!
As I said before, I didn't want to delve into these topics, since they make me so violently ill.
One result of the present Crisis is that I've had to read books I never wanted to read. Just thinking about the Middle East gets me depressed. But manfully I assumed the weblogger's burden, and last night read John Cooley's book, Payback, about the US vs Iran vs Israel vs Syria conflicts of the 80s. Today I've been reading Out of the Ashes, Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's book about the ressurection of Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
Let's talk about the Cockburn book a bit, since Cooley's book, although a swift bit of reporting, is really history.
The American view of the endurance of Saddam Hussein is a curious case of the public swallowing anything in order to preserve its inertia. The story is, the Gulf war was stopped because of the immemorial respect that the US bears for UN resolutions -- and since the UN resolution said that we were intent on freeing Kuwait, we simply freed Kuwait. If the Republican guard, Hussein's finest troops, escaped, and during the weeks in which our troops were on the ground literally cut the rebellion against Hussein into bloody bits, well, mark it down to America's respect for the law.
Since, however, America was, at the same time, making up the rules as it went along regarding economic sanctions, and since the fine hand of American power has never been noticeably stayed by the palsied body of UN resolutions before, even American apologists shove the law abiding excuse aside after a sheepish wink, and readily come up with the real excuse: that we have to consider the feelings of our allies.
For a condensed, classic version of this theme, see this article by Wallace Thies from three years ago - in the midst of Clinton's sudden attention to S. Hussein' s weapons of mass destruction (attention that curiously coincided with the deliberations of the House on the question of impeaching him). There are two grafs that I spied with my little eye. Let's bore in upon them:
"... the United States labors under two constraints that limit the steps that it can take against Iraq. On one hand, if Saddam is ousted and/or killed, how well would Iraq hold together in the aftermath? The United States' goal is to oust Saddam, but not to cause Iraq to break up. The latter could trigger a new round of warfare as Iraq's neighbors fought over the pieces.
"On the other hand, even if the U.S. intelligence community knew precisely the location of Iraq's weapons stockpile, would it be prudent to target the weapons themselves, at the risk of releasing their contents into the atmosphere? Saddam Hussein may not care much about the lives of his fellow Iraqis, but democracies must adhere to a higher standard. "
Anybody who reads Cockburn's book will discern a high degree of hilarity in the last paragraph. From the poison gas used indiscriminately by Hussein against Kurds (which we never protested) to the use of gas and bio agents against the Iranian armies (which we covertly condoned) to the double whammy of placing economic sanctions around Iraq until Saddam Hussein was deposed, while at the same time refusing to aid any movement to depose him, and even warning allies against aiding said movements, the US has adhered to the same tender standards regarding Iraqui lives as King Leopold once displayed for his Congolese subjects.
But let's disregard history and just try to make those two paragraphs consistent, shall we? For they represent the Officialspeak of American foreign policy re Iraq. The tender concern for Iraq's nationhood, you will notice, trumps concern for, well, democracy. Since if Iraq fell apart without a dictatorship, hmm, perhaps it is being imposed, even shall we say imposed bloodily, on an unwilling population? And so perhaps we can translate the higher US standard as something like this: although we do want to strip you of your basic human rights and keep you in an unresisting position, land's sakes, we don't want you to die of anthrax! How do you think that would look on tv!
As I said before, I didn't want to delve into these topics, since they make me so violently ill.
Remora
Further pogram notes: Victims of Mistaken Identity, Sikhs Pay a Price for Turbans. For some reason, this article is sublined, The Anger. Instead of, say, the Bigotry.
Further pogram notes: Victims of Mistaken Identity, Sikhs Pay a Price for Turbans. For some reason, this article is sublined, The Anger. Instead of, say, the Bigotry.
Dope.
I try to run this place like a Punch and Judy show. Usually, I play Punch, and I get some conservative retread to play Judy. And of course I'm enthralled by my own theatrics.
Well... reluctantly, I want to play this game with an idea that is going around the lefty pole of the media spectrum. As Seumus Milne put it in the Guardian:
" Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
"...any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent."
There's a number of things to say about that.
1. The assumption that the hijackers were representative is nonsense. They were merely successful.
The Seumus Milne line starts out with an assumption that I certainly agree with - the real opinions of the masses in the poor countries, from Pakistan to Rwanda, are simply ignored in the West. Unfortunately, the gesture of ignorance is then repeated. Who says that the hijackers of the airplanes are in any way representative of Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon - their nationalities, as reported at least in the American press? To pretend that hating the US is a progressive act in Egypt is to ignore what I thought we all learned in Iran - there are many ideological variants of hate. The people associated with the hijacking belong to a rather rebarbative, and certainly fascist, variant. The inference that hate has a cause must be true -- but that it is a cause we should sympathize with isn't. The Jews were well hated in Nazi Germany - does Milne really think that was the fault of the Jews?
2. The US has blood on its hand. This is certainly more than true. The US has pursued a barbaric policy in Iraq, and it has provided Israel with support even when Israel has used its American sponsorship to create an apartheid state that systematically discriminates against Palestinians and favors Jews. But to see this as the only US policy in the Middle East is incredibly shortsighted. The US also has close ties, via its oil empire, with the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other Arabic states and factions. The US routinely creates ties with the ruling class in many poor countries, has sponsored death squads all over South America, tilted towards Pakistan when Pakistan was committing genocide in Bangla Desh... hey, I could go on.
But there is a rule of relevance, here. When the US attacked Nicauragua in the 80s, it was often pointed out that the Sandinistas were persecuting the Misquito Indians - in fact, Daniel Ortega himself admitted this. Did this justify US intervention? No. For a number of reasons, I felt, back then, that nothing in International Law, or my own conscience (which countenances a certain amount of violence for progressive ends - which is why I felt the Viet Minh and their successors were legitimate) could justify what Reagan was doing in Central America. In the same way, the groups that have been associated with the WTC atrocity have no justification for spilling American blood. So far, we don't even know what they stand for - which is condemnation enough. To kill five thousand people without bothering to even write a note about it shows a contempt for human life not even equalled by your average suicide. So Milne engages in a little psychological projection, which, to my mind, is as patronizing as anything I have read on the right.
3. The word hate. Hmm. Milne uses that as the keynote - the US is hated bitterly -- without considering it as a more complex emotion. US pop culture, the US as a destination, the US as both overbearing, politically stupid tyrant and as the 'petit chose x' -- Lacan's obscure object of desire - are the intertwining forces in the Third World. This isn't to defend the New World Order - the preponderance of wealth, which is in Europe, Japan and the US, has a direct and terrible relationship with the preponderance of poverty, which is in the Global South -- but to ask a question about the psychological coordinates of that situation. Much as the shorthand of hate seems relevant to the WTC assault, I don't think the hijackers would have done it if they were doing it for hate. Hate was balanced by affection -- affection for another order. This order is one Milne doesn't really want to look at. It is certainly not the order of socialism -- the Afghans were kicking Russian butt precisely because they didnt want that socialist feeling. It is the order of sharia. If Milne thinks that this is going to be satisfied with a more just distribution of the world's goods, I think he is wrong. This is about theocracy, about what the worship of God requires, about the relationship between the sexes, about corruption. It is about a mix of changes in the Middle East, and I even have some sympathy with the corruption issue. In the end, though, it is about mandating a lifestyle I find abhorrant - and more, that I don't have to live in. Seeing someone oozing with the luxury of sympathy for these Holy Warriors while never having to face the consequence of living in the order they dream of brings out the militant Orwell in me. Milne, who thinks that Americans 'simply don't get it," doesn't seem to get it himself. Instead he immediately broadens this incident, as if we were still in the Nassar era, where we were all going to adjust to secular norms and dam the Nile and we could talk about the solidarity of the Third World masses.
That epoch is long gone.
I try to run this place like a Punch and Judy show. Usually, I play Punch, and I get some conservative retread to play Judy. And of course I'm enthralled by my own theatrics.
Well... reluctantly, I want to play this game with an idea that is going around the lefty pole of the media spectrum. As Seumus Milne put it in the Guardian:
" Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
"...any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent."
There's a number of things to say about that.
1. The assumption that the hijackers were representative is nonsense. They were merely successful.
The Seumus Milne line starts out with an assumption that I certainly agree with - the real opinions of the masses in the poor countries, from Pakistan to Rwanda, are simply ignored in the West. Unfortunately, the gesture of ignorance is then repeated. Who says that the hijackers of the airplanes are in any way representative of Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon - their nationalities, as reported at least in the American press? To pretend that hating the US is a progressive act in Egypt is to ignore what I thought we all learned in Iran - there are many ideological variants of hate. The people associated with the hijacking belong to a rather rebarbative, and certainly fascist, variant. The inference that hate has a cause must be true -- but that it is a cause we should sympathize with isn't. The Jews were well hated in Nazi Germany - does Milne really think that was the fault of the Jews?
2. The US has blood on its hand. This is certainly more than true. The US has pursued a barbaric policy in Iraq, and it has provided Israel with support even when Israel has used its American sponsorship to create an apartheid state that systematically discriminates against Palestinians and favors Jews. But to see this as the only US policy in the Middle East is incredibly shortsighted. The US also has close ties, via its oil empire, with the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other Arabic states and factions. The US routinely creates ties with the ruling class in many poor countries, has sponsored death squads all over South America, tilted towards Pakistan when Pakistan was committing genocide in Bangla Desh... hey, I could go on.
But there is a rule of relevance, here. When the US attacked Nicauragua in the 80s, it was often pointed out that the Sandinistas were persecuting the Misquito Indians - in fact, Daniel Ortega himself admitted this. Did this justify US intervention? No. For a number of reasons, I felt, back then, that nothing in International Law, or my own conscience (which countenances a certain amount of violence for progressive ends - which is why I felt the Viet Minh and their successors were legitimate) could justify what Reagan was doing in Central America. In the same way, the groups that have been associated with the WTC atrocity have no justification for spilling American blood. So far, we don't even know what they stand for - which is condemnation enough. To kill five thousand people without bothering to even write a note about it shows a contempt for human life not even equalled by your average suicide. So Milne engages in a little psychological projection, which, to my mind, is as patronizing as anything I have read on the right.
3. The word hate. Hmm. Milne uses that as the keynote - the US is hated bitterly -- without considering it as a more complex emotion. US pop culture, the US as a destination, the US as both overbearing, politically stupid tyrant and as the 'petit chose x' -- Lacan's obscure object of desire - are the intertwining forces in the Third World. This isn't to defend the New World Order - the preponderance of wealth, which is in Europe, Japan and the US, has a direct and terrible relationship with the preponderance of poverty, which is in the Global South -- but to ask a question about the psychological coordinates of that situation. Much as the shorthand of hate seems relevant to the WTC assault, I don't think the hijackers would have done it if they were doing it for hate. Hate was balanced by affection -- affection for another order. This order is one Milne doesn't really want to look at. It is certainly not the order of socialism -- the Afghans were kicking Russian butt precisely because they didnt want that socialist feeling. It is the order of sharia. If Milne thinks that this is going to be satisfied with a more just distribution of the world's goods, I think he is wrong. This is about theocracy, about what the worship of God requires, about the relationship between the sexes, about corruption. It is about a mix of changes in the Middle East, and I even have some sympathy with the corruption issue. In the end, though, it is about mandating a lifestyle I find abhorrant - and more, that I don't have to live in. Seeing someone oozing with the luxury of sympathy for these Holy Warriors while never having to face the consequence of living in the order they dream of brings out the militant Orwell in me. Milne, who thinks that Americans 'simply don't get it," doesn't seem to get it himself. Instead he immediately broadens this incident, as if we were still in the Nassar era, where we were all going to adjust to secular norms and dam the Nile and we could talk about the solidarity of the Third World masses.
That epoch is long gone.
I have a problem with my reblogging comment tool - it doesn't work. I have received some comments, though, so I thought it wouldn't be indiscrete to put these up.
Comments
From my friend Bernat in Barcelona, I received this:
I have been checking your website everyday and I have
found it illuminating (except the first day, when you
were probably still not believing what had happened!).
Bush is reaping the fruits his father sowed in the Middle East.
Every one here is shocked and horrified, pundits talk about the beginning of the XXI century and the new paradigm, bla, bla, bla. It is true that a
lot of things might change, but how is another
question. After the fall of the Berlin wall, everyone
thought we were beyond history, in this new liberal
society... Now even those Europeans who might have
been antiamerican and against USA foreign policy are
shocked because their frame of reference has been
shaken.I imagine the new scenario will be determined
by whether Bush decides to act unilaterally or with
the UE or even with Russia and China.
From Allen, I recieved this:
If Senem thinks you're unAmerican, what would she say about the author of this piece? (Although actually I don't know her nationality). The site this comes from, Common Dreams, is a good source of "lefty" commentary & analysis, most of it far more perceptive than this little exercise in the jerking of the knee. See ya.
Comments
From my friend Bernat in Barcelona, I received this:
I have been checking your website everyday and I have
found it illuminating (except the first day, when you
were probably still not believing what had happened!).
Bush is reaping the fruits his father sowed in the Middle East.
Every one here is shocked and horrified, pundits talk about the beginning of the XXI century and the new paradigm, bla, bla, bla. It is true that a
lot of things might change, but how is another
question. After the fall of the Berlin wall, everyone
thought we were beyond history, in this new liberal
society... Now even those Europeans who might have
been antiamerican and against USA foreign policy are
shocked because their frame of reference has been
shaken.I imagine the new scenario will be determined
by whether Bush decides to act unilaterally or with
the UE or even with Russia and China.
From Allen, I recieved this:
If Senem thinks you're unAmerican, what would she say about the author of this piece? (Although actually I don't know her nationality). The site this comes from, Common Dreams, is a good source of "lefty" commentary & analysis, most of it far more perceptive than this little exercise in the jerking of the knee. See ya.
Tuesday, September 18, 2001
Dope
I was thinking of writing about gout today... because I have surely written enough about the bombing. I was talking with some friends a couple of days ago about gout, and one of them said, well, what is gout? And I thought, what a perfect topic...
Well, who am I fooling? We live in a time when the margins will not hold, and are drawn magnetically to the center, to the images, topics, imbecilities, commonplaces, pans, and cant of the Network news.
So okay. Last week, when the WTC slaughter was 8 hours old, I was watching the shot of the towers fall, in rotation, on the tv, over at Don and Senem's house. Senem is from Istanbul, and she said something I thought perspicacious - she said, the Turk in me says, blood for blood. The Turk in me utters the same cry. But certainly that shouldn't be the last word on the subject. Since last Tuesday, I've seen Senem a few times, and each time, after I've said various things that aren't in the American pep rally spirit, she has implied that I am an anti-American snot, at least compared with the people she works with, who are practically coming out rashes of Stars and Bars, I mean it is almost medical. It is certainly pathological.
I've tried to explain that, far from being anti-American, I'm very consciously in the American tradition of bitching, cussedness, black humor, anti-establishmentarianism, and pissing on public monuments -- all marks of our great inebriated whoremongering pioneer ancestors as they settled ever westward, and gave up the expensive and useless pretences of the Old World for rustling, drinking, and saying "like" in, like, every context.
Well, this is one of those periods when we have to cherish the ragged 10 percent -- the ones who don't give high marks to the Prez in the polls, the ones who ask, plaintively why do they hate us (yes, that's a little irritating -- I'm going to do a post on that inanity) instead of why can't we kill em all now and let God sort em out afterwards; the ones who gather, in small groups, before state capitals and in parks to sing John Lennon songs of peace and chant the people//united//will never be defeated -- or whatever. This is our inner brake, our fabled, fabulous diversity in action, and tough titty if you think these are anti-Americans -- they have a hot cousinship to your blood and bearings, mon frere, so quit with the McCarthyite blather.
At times like this, the liberal thing to do is to go popular front, and talk about how us embattled lefties are part of a grand tradition stretching back to Tom Paine. That's true. But, like Tom Paine, I see no need for that, uh, defensiveness. We have an intellectual model in Randolph Bourne, the little crooked pamphleteer who wrote against the American entry into World War I. His The War and the Intellectuals is a classic statement of dissent and a public pissing on public monuments with style and joie de vivre. Here's a link to that essay. And here's a random, beautiful passage from it:
"The American intellectual, therefore has been rational neither in his hindsight, nor his foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they thought as how they felt that explains our intellectual class. Allowing for colonial sympathy, there was still the personal shock in a world-war which outraged all our preconceived notions of the way the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish most of the humanitarian internationalism and democratic nationalism which had been the emotional thread of our intellectuals' life. We had suddenly to make a new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove with our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first lofty and remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual isolation from the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in the great experience which the rest of the world was having. Numbers of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only the ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for freedom abroad. "
I was thinking of writing about gout today... because I have surely written enough about the bombing. I was talking with some friends a couple of days ago about gout, and one of them said, well, what is gout? And I thought, what a perfect topic...
Well, who am I fooling? We live in a time when the margins will not hold, and are drawn magnetically to the center, to the images, topics, imbecilities, commonplaces, pans, and cant of the Network news.
So okay. Last week, when the WTC slaughter was 8 hours old, I was watching the shot of the towers fall, in rotation, on the tv, over at Don and Senem's house. Senem is from Istanbul, and she said something I thought perspicacious - she said, the Turk in me says, blood for blood. The Turk in me utters the same cry. But certainly that shouldn't be the last word on the subject. Since last Tuesday, I've seen Senem a few times, and each time, after I've said various things that aren't in the American pep rally spirit, she has implied that I am an anti-American snot, at least compared with the people she works with, who are practically coming out rashes of Stars and Bars, I mean it is almost medical. It is certainly pathological.
I've tried to explain that, far from being anti-American, I'm very consciously in the American tradition of bitching, cussedness, black humor, anti-establishmentarianism, and pissing on public monuments -- all marks of our great inebriated whoremongering pioneer ancestors as they settled ever westward, and gave up the expensive and useless pretences of the Old World for rustling, drinking, and saying "like" in, like, every context.
Well, this is one of those periods when we have to cherish the ragged 10 percent -- the ones who don't give high marks to the Prez in the polls, the ones who ask, plaintively why do they hate us (yes, that's a little irritating -- I'm going to do a post on that inanity) instead of why can't we kill em all now and let God sort em out afterwards; the ones who gather, in small groups, before state capitals and in parks to sing John Lennon songs of peace and chant the people//united//will never be defeated -- or whatever. This is our inner brake, our fabled, fabulous diversity in action, and tough titty if you think these are anti-Americans -- they have a hot cousinship to your blood and bearings, mon frere, so quit with the McCarthyite blather.
At times like this, the liberal thing to do is to go popular front, and talk about how us embattled lefties are part of a grand tradition stretching back to Tom Paine. That's true. But, like Tom Paine, I see no need for that, uh, defensiveness. We have an intellectual model in Randolph Bourne, the little crooked pamphleteer who wrote against the American entry into World War I. His The War and the Intellectuals is a classic statement of dissent and a public pissing on public monuments with style and joie de vivre. Here's a link to that essay. And here's a random, beautiful passage from it:
"The American intellectual, therefore has been rational neither in his hindsight, nor his foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they thought as how they felt that explains our intellectual class. Allowing for colonial sympathy, there was still the personal shock in a world-war which outraged all our preconceived notions of the way the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish most of the humanitarian internationalism and democratic nationalism which had been the emotional thread of our intellectuals' life. We had suddenly to make a new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove with our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first lofty and remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual isolation from the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in the great experience which the rest of the world was having. Numbers of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only the ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for freedom abroad. "
Monday, September 17, 2001
Remora
Pogram watch. In Dallas, someone has already tried to torch a mosque. And in today's paper there are stories of three killings, one of which is certainly because the victim was a Sikh - which shows that pograms in America are conducted with maximum stupidity as well as hate, since Sikh's are not, you know, Moslems.
Sikh Owner of Gas Station Is Fatally Shot in Rampage
Important graf:
"The police in Mesa, Ariz., arrested Frank Roque, 42, on two counts of attempted murder, in the shootings. The killing of the gas station owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was under investigation.
The East Valley Tribune reported that Mr. Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way," as he was handcuffed. And while the police have not declared that the shootings were motivated by the victims' ethnicity, they have notified Federal Bureau of Investigation officials who investigate hate crimes."
So, Mr. Roque stands for America all the way -- God help us all.
Pogram watch. In Dallas, someone has already tried to torch a mosque. And in today's paper there are stories of three killings, one of which is certainly because the victim was a Sikh - which shows that pograms in America are conducted with maximum stupidity as well as hate, since Sikh's are not, you know, Moslems.
Sikh Owner of Gas Station Is Fatally Shot in Rampage
Important graf:
"The police in Mesa, Ariz., arrested Frank Roque, 42, on two counts of attempted murder, in the shootings. The killing of the gas station owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was under investigation.
The East Valley Tribune reported that Mr. Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way," as he was handcuffed. And while the police have not declared that the shootings were motivated by the victims' ethnicity, they have notified Federal Bureau of Investigation officials who investigate hate crimes."
So, Mr. Roque stands for America all the way -- God help us all.
Sunday, September 16, 2001
Remora
It is always a pleasure to find one's views shared by some more expert person. This is particularly true with my views, which sometimes feel, even to me, so eccentric as to be irrelevant. I'm a raver.
In any case, for those looking for some clues to the Taliban's history, check out this interview with a Pakistani journalist:
Interview - 2000.08.10
key graf (especially given what I have written in earlier posts):
"I think the U.S. and Iran have a lot of common ground on Afghanistan, and this issue could prove a catalyst to improve their relations. They are both threatened by the Taliban and want to see peace in the country and a diminishing of the Taliban's power. Officials from both countries have told me they are working together quietly on Afghanistan at such forums as the U.N. in New York and in neutral capitals such as Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan."
It is always a pleasure to find one's views shared by some more expert person. This is particularly true with my views, which sometimes feel, even to me, so eccentric as to be irrelevant. I'm a raver.
In any case, for those looking for some clues to the Taliban's history, check out this interview with a Pakistani journalist:
Interview - 2000.08.10
key graf (especially given what I have written in earlier posts):
"I think the U.S. and Iran have a lot of common ground on Afghanistan, and this issue could prove a catalyst to improve their relations. They are both threatened by the Taliban and want to see peace in the country and a diminishing of the Taliban's power. Officials from both countries have told me they are working together quietly on Afghanistan at such forums as the U.N. in New York and in neutral capitals such as Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan."
Remora
Has the New York Times ever been this bad before?
I usually read the Times first. I depend on it, in spite of its weakness for simpleminded neo-liberal mantras, its lack of interest in the juicier stories in the city it is based in, and its arrogance. It is the best paper in America.
But this week, my faith in that last claim has been shaken.
Example:
For the last eight months, the NYT has published some rather snipey articles about Bush. This week, as if in repentence, they have taken to publishing toadying article about our child Commander in Chief. Topping them all is R.W. Apple's analysis of Bushiepoo today, which (under a snippy title - Bush Presidency Seems to Gain Legitimacy) discerns, in the zigzags and radically distributed power of the current regime (the first presidency, in my lifetime, in which the vice president's words are routinely given more consideration than the president's), growth. Of course! -- That magic American quality, which takes a temporary biological characteristic located in our hormones and makes of it a virtue of character.
Well, it is hard to find the most ridiculous paragraph in Apple's piece -- every graf sparkles with its own special bad faith. But here's my fave passage:
"At Camp David this morning, the president reached for a down-home metaphor reminiscent of Lyndon B. Johnson's promise of "coonskins on the wall" during the Vietnam war. Declaring bluntly that "we're at war, there's been a war declared," he added, "We will find those who did it. We'll smoke them out of their holes, we'll get them running and we'll bring them to justice."
Perhaps most important, he was visible: in a Washington hospital ward, in a couple of brief exchanges with reporters, amid the awful devastation in New York's financial district, clad in a beige windbreaker, with his arm draped around a retired firefighter. Shyer than most politicians, he sometimes seems to shun the limelight. This weekend, he stepped smartly into it."
Invoking the wildly successful rhetoric of LBJ to move us into war might not be, well, tactful. Didn't we, uh, lose that one? And the photo op catch-up game hasn't, I think, erased the original bad impression of a prez who let his secret servicemen and vice president determine his first responses to a national crisis. Bad news for the rest of us, no matter that polls show people giving Bush their approval. At the moment, you would expect such an outpouring of support for anything that smells remotely American. Hell, right now, my fave song is This Land is Your Land (God Bless America just doesn't have the poetry). It will, no doubt, fade from my top ten list in the next couple months, and Lithium will re-assume its rightful place in my affections.
But the NYT hasn't just been ideologically weak kneed - as a newsgathering organization, they've been behind the curve. The Post has been much quicker in getting pieces of this story and putting them together. The human details of the attack have been gathered everywhere - I have a piece about that in the Austin Statesman, today - but the larger details have been amazingly neglected. For instance, I haven't seen a major piece yet that concentrates not on the terrorists ethnicity, but on their nationalities. Why Lebanese, Saudis and Egyptians? Since we are getting reports that mysteriously speak of a long war - on whom? -- one would think that the subgroups which exist in these places would call for some focus, and especially focus on what it means, if anything, that we are going to war with bits and pieces of populations with whose governments we aren't going to war. This sounds sickeningly like the war on drugs - not a good precedent, campers. So lets have some news stories about what has been happening in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our allies. And a big lacuna out there is why the US allowed the Cole investigation to be, basically, rolled up by the Saudis without protest, which is a key incident, in the series of events that led up to the wtc mass murder. But try arousing the torpid interest of the major newsgathering organizations in a question which lies at the heart of the entangled interests of the US and the Saudis: namely, how the American interest came to be so incorporated into maintaining a highly volatile and corrupt regime in the Arabian peninsula. Don't look for this story any time soon, since the big news organizations mainly (mis) represent the Mideast as a stomping ground for Israelis and Palestinians.
Has the New York Times ever been this bad before?
I usually read the Times first. I depend on it, in spite of its weakness for simpleminded neo-liberal mantras, its lack of interest in the juicier stories in the city it is based in, and its arrogance. It is the best paper in America.
But this week, my faith in that last claim has been shaken.
Example:
For the last eight months, the NYT has published some rather snipey articles about Bush. This week, as if in repentence, they have taken to publishing toadying article about our child Commander in Chief. Topping them all is R.W. Apple's analysis of Bushiepoo today, which (under a snippy title - Bush Presidency Seems to Gain Legitimacy) discerns, in the zigzags and radically distributed power of the current regime (the first presidency, in my lifetime, in which the vice president's words are routinely given more consideration than the president's), growth. Of course! -- That magic American quality, which takes a temporary biological characteristic located in our hormones and makes of it a virtue of character.
Well, it is hard to find the most ridiculous paragraph in Apple's piece -- every graf sparkles with its own special bad faith. But here's my fave passage:
"At Camp David this morning, the president reached for a down-home metaphor reminiscent of Lyndon B. Johnson's promise of "coonskins on the wall" during the Vietnam war. Declaring bluntly that "we're at war, there's been a war declared," he added, "We will find those who did it. We'll smoke them out of their holes, we'll get them running and we'll bring them to justice."
Perhaps most important, he was visible: in a Washington hospital ward, in a couple of brief exchanges with reporters, amid the awful devastation in New York's financial district, clad in a beige windbreaker, with his arm draped around a retired firefighter. Shyer than most politicians, he sometimes seems to shun the limelight. This weekend, he stepped smartly into it."
Invoking the wildly successful rhetoric of LBJ to move us into war might not be, well, tactful. Didn't we, uh, lose that one? And the photo op catch-up game hasn't, I think, erased the original bad impression of a prez who let his secret servicemen and vice president determine his first responses to a national crisis. Bad news for the rest of us, no matter that polls show people giving Bush their approval. At the moment, you would expect such an outpouring of support for anything that smells remotely American. Hell, right now, my fave song is This Land is Your Land (God Bless America just doesn't have the poetry). It will, no doubt, fade from my top ten list in the next couple months, and Lithium will re-assume its rightful place in my affections.
But the NYT hasn't just been ideologically weak kneed - as a newsgathering organization, they've been behind the curve. The Post has been much quicker in getting pieces of this story and putting them together. The human details of the attack have been gathered everywhere - I have a piece about that in the Austin Statesman, today - but the larger details have been amazingly neglected. For instance, I haven't seen a major piece yet that concentrates not on the terrorists ethnicity, but on their nationalities. Why Lebanese, Saudis and Egyptians? Since we are getting reports that mysteriously speak of a long war - on whom? -- one would think that the subgroups which exist in these places would call for some focus, and especially focus on what it means, if anything, that we are going to war with bits and pieces of populations with whose governments we aren't going to war. This sounds sickeningly like the war on drugs - not a good precedent, campers. So lets have some news stories about what has been happening in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our allies. And a big lacuna out there is why the US allowed the Cole investigation to be, basically, rolled up by the Saudis without protest, which is a key incident, in the series of events that led up to the wtc mass murder. But try arousing the torpid interest of the major newsgathering organizations in a question which lies at the heart of the entangled interests of the US and the Saudis: namely, how the American interest came to be so incorporated into maintaining a highly volatile and corrupt regime in the Arabian peninsula. Don't look for this story any time soon, since the big news organizations mainly (mis) represent the Mideast as a stomping ground for Israelis and Palestinians.
Saturday, September 15, 2001
Remora
When I first started logging, I made a private resolution to try to do something every day.
What I would like to do, today, is write a long commentary on Voltaire's response to the Lisbon Earthquake, with invidious references to yesterday's day of prayer.
But I have to work my ass off this weekend, in order to catch up with my committments: three reviews, and then a piece I am supposedly doing, due wednesday, on terrorism.
So I am going to have to suspend the Voltaire thing.
Also, I have received a few comments on my posts about the WTC bombing (or holocaust, or mass murder - one thing it wasn't was a tragedy. Unless building a skyscraper is considered an act of hubris. But even then, the hijacking and jet fuel explosion doesn't compute as a tragedy. Sorry.). The comments surprised me - my friend David said that my posts were cold. He said he didn't mean this as an insult, just that is what they were.
I guess I have responded, so far, in these posts, on a highly intellectual plane. The reason is, my emotional response, my grief, my obsessive replaying of the planes hitting the towers within my mind - all of these things aren't, yet, things I can write about in a direct way. Maybe I won't ever be able to do that. I wasn't there - my experience is of being by, being a bystander. Karl Kraus once remarked that the ontological effect of newspapers was to shift our Dasein into Dabeisein - a sort of untranslateable German pun, but you get my point. Or do you? Lately I wonder if my points are similar to private jokes, which I think are funny and everybody else thinks are incomprehensible. Spelling it out - the movement from being there to being by there is the dialectical moment of inauthenticity, its historically specific structure.
But don't get me started, me with my big Heideggerian mouth!
In any case - I am not at all cold about this thing. I am frozen, I am at dead zero, I am an emotional evacuee. That's what I am.
As for todays link - this is the best I could do. I'm not, repeat, not trying to be cold, but we need information about what is going on, and what the puzzle American forces, apparently, are going to enter is all about.
When I first started logging, I made a private resolution to try to do something every day.
What I would like to do, today, is write a long commentary on Voltaire's response to the Lisbon Earthquake, with invidious references to yesterday's day of prayer.
But I have to work my ass off this weekend, in order to catch up with my committments: three reviews, and then a piece I am supposedly doing, due wednesday, on terrorism.
So I am going to have to suspend the Voltaire thing.
Also, I have received a few comments on my posts about the WTC bombing (or holocaust, or mass murder - one thing it wasn't was a tragedy. Unless building a skyscraper is considered an act of hubris. But even then, the hijacking and jet fuel explosion doesn't compute as a tragedy. Sorry.). The comments surprised me - my friend David said that my posts were cold. He said he didn't mean this as an insult, just that is what they were.
I guess I have responded, so far, in these posts, on a highly intellectual plane. The reason is, my emotional response, my grief, my obsessive replaying of the planes hitting the towers within my mind - all of these things aren't, yet, things I can write about in a direct way. Maybe I won't ever be able to do that. I wasn't there - my experience is of being by, being a bystander. Karl Kraus once remarked that the ontological effect of newspapers was to shift our Dasein into Dabeisein - a sort of untranslateable German pun, but you get my point. Or do you? Lately I wonder if my points are similar to private jokes, which I think are funny and everybody else thinks are incomprehensible. Spelling it out - the movement from being there to being by there is the dialectical moment of inauthenticity, its historically specific structure.
But don't get me started, me with my big Heideggerian mouth!
In any case - I am not at all cold about this thing. I am frozen, I am at dead zero, I am an emotional evacuee. That's what I am.
As for todays link - this is the best I could do. I'm not, repeat, not trying to be cold, but we need information about what is going on, and what the puzzle American forces, apparently, are going to enter is all about.
Friday, September 14, 2001
Remora
Invading Afghanistan. I talked to my brother a couple of days ago, and he told me he thought we should try to invade and hold Afghanistan, like we did Germany in 1945.
I think that is a crazy idea, although it seems to be floating around in the American psyche right now. There's a nice site on the Soviet Afghanistan war as a possible "harbinger of future war."by a General Mohammed Nawroz. Facts to know and tell:
a. "Yet, their [the Soviet] force commitment, initially assessed as requiring several months, lasted ten years and required increasing numbers of Soviet forces. It proved a bloody experience in which the Soviet Union reportedly killed 1.3 million people and forced five and a half million Afghans (a third of the prewar population) to leave the country as refugees. Another two million Afghans were forced to migrate within the country. Today, the countryside is ravaged and littered with mines. On a percentage basis, the Soviet Union inflicted more suffering on Afghanistan than Germany inflicted on the Soviet Union during World War.
b. "One needs only review the recently released casualty figures to underscore the pervasiveness of the problem [of the military situation in Afghanistan]. Soviet dead and missing in Afghanistan amounted to almost 15,000 troops, a modest percent of the 642,000 Soviets who served during the ten-year war. Far more telling were the 469,685 other casualties, fully 73 percent of the overall force, who were wounded or incapacitated by serious illness. Some 415,932 troops fell victim to disease, of which 115,308 suffered from infectious hepatitis and 31,080 from typhoid fever. Beyond the sheer magnitude of these numbers is what these figures say about Soviet military hygiene and the conditions surrounding troop life. These numbers are unheard of in modern armies and modern medicine and their social impact among the returnees and the Soviet population was staggering. The Armed Forces of the Soviet Union were structured, equipped and trained for nuclear and high-intensity war on the great northern European plain. However, their political leadership thrust them into the middle of the Afghanistan civil war to reconstitute and to support a nominally Marxist-Leninist government. The terrain, the climate and the enemy were entirely different from what they had prepared for." Of course, it wouldn't be a Marxist-Leninist government that the US would try, hypothetically, to install. What type, then? Big problem is that the governments before the Taliban fell apart, as warlords ruled over various areas, with very very unappetizing results for the people. We begin, then, with a situation politically similar to South Vietnam's.
c. "General Nawroz once watched the return of a Soviet motorized column from a day's combat. It's mission was to open a highway for traffic and destroy the enemy blocking it. The Soviets acted like conquerors as they passed by General Nawroz's hiding place. Officers stood inside the turrets of the tanks, firing machineguns in the air and to the sides. One would have thought they had vanquished their enemies for ever. Disabled tanks and trucks were towed, carefully camouflaged, inside the column. When General Nawroz reached the site of the highway battle, he saw swarms of very young, cheerful freedom fighters running to the highway from all directions, armed only with rifles, a few AK47s and a couple of rocket launchers. They were collecting the meager spoils of the combat that had just taken place. The vain-glorious return of the Soviet column was in fact a rout."
This could easily happen again. If the US is smart, it won't - it will limit its operation, it will ally with those resistance forces on the ground and (unlike during the Gulf war) not betray them, and it will not attempt to impose its own political solution on this country.
Invading Afghanistan. I talked to my brother a couple of days ago, and he told me he thought we should try to invade and hold Afghanistan, like we did Germany in 1945.
I think that is a crazy idea, although it seems to be floating around in the American psyche right now. There's a nice site on the Soviet Afghanistan war as a possible "harbinger of future war."by a General Mohammed Nawroz. Facts to know and tell:
a. "Yet, their [the Soviet] force commitment, initially assessed as requiring several months, lasted ten years and required increasing numbers of Soviet forces. It proved a bloody experience in which the Soviet Union reportedly killed 1.3 million people and forced five and a half million Afghans (a third of the prewar population) to leave the country as refugees. Another two million Afghans were forced to migrate within the country. Today, the countryside is ravaged and littered with mines. On a percentage basis, the Soviet Union inflicted more suffering on Afghanistan than Germany inflicted on the Soviet Union during World War.
b. "One needs only review the recently released casualty figures to underscore the pervasiveness of the problem [of the military situation in Afghanistan]. Soviet dead and missing in Afghanistan amounted to almost 15,000 troops, a modest percent of the 642,000 Soviets who served during the ten-year war. Far more telling were the 469,685 other casualties, fully 73 percent of the overall force, who were wounded or incapacitated by serious illness. Some 415,932 troops fell victim to disease, of which 115,308 suffered from infectious hepatitis and 31,080 from typhoid fever. Beyond the sheer magnitude of these numbers is what these figures say about Soviet military hygiene and the conditions surrounding troop life. These numbers are unheard of in modern armies and modern medicine and their social impact among the returnees and the Soviet population was staggering. The Armed Forces of the Soviet Union were structured, equipped and trained for nuclear and high-intensity war on the great northern European plain. However, their political leadership thrust them into the middle of the Afghanistan civil war to reconstitute and to support a nominally Marxist-Leninist government. The terrain, the climate and the enemy were entirely different from what they had prepared for." Of course, it wouldn't be a Marxist-Leninist government that the US would try, hypothetically, to install. What type, then? Big problem is that the governments before the Taliban fell apart, as warlords ruled over various areas, with very very unappetizing results for the people. We begin, then, with a situation politically similar to South Vietnam's.
c. "General Nawroz once watched the return of a Soviet motorized column from a day's combat. It's mission was to open a highway for traffic and destroy the enemy blocking it. The Soviets acted like conquerors as they passed by General Nawroz's hiding place. Officers stood inside the turrets of the tanks, firing machineguns in the air and to the sides. One would have thought they had vanquished their enemies for ever. Disabled tanks and trucks were towed, carefully camouflaged, inside the column. When General Nawroz reached the site of the highway battle, he saw swarms of very young, cheerful freedom fighters running to the highway from all directions, armed only with rifles, a few AK47s and a couple of rocket launchers. They were collecting the meager spoils of the combat that had just taken place. The vain-glorious return of the Soviet column was in fact a rout."
This could easily happen again. If the US is smart, it won't - it will limit its operation, it will ally with those resistance forces on the ground and (unlike during the Gulf war) not betray them, and it will not attempt to impose its own political solution on this country.
Dope
The article that you must go to today is on the New Yorker site. It is a profile of Osama bin Laden by a Mary Weaver, originally published last year.
Here's a key graf:
"He is part puritanical Wahhabi, the dominant school of Islam in Saudi Arabia, yet at one time he may have led a very liberated social life. He is part feudal Saudi, an aristocrat who, from time to time, would retreat with his father to the desert and live in a tent. And he is of a Saudi generation that came of age during the rise of OPEC, with the extraordinary wealth that accompanied it: a generation whose religious fervor or political zeal, complemented by government airline tickets, led thousands to fight a war in a distant Muslim land. That Pan-Islamic effort, whose fighters were funded, armed, and trained by the C.I.A., eventually brought some twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from more than fifty countries, to combat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States, intentionally or not, had launched Pan-Islam's first jihad, or holy war, in eight centuries."
The article is pretty good, but it does ignore a few important facts - most notably, the high price we have paid for tying the US interest to the Saudi interest. There's a popular phrase - client state - that is often used by the left and right to characterize an unambiguous and unilateral flow of command from some superpower to some state fingerpuppet. In reality, however, such top down models ignore the pull of various interests that get into the channel with client states. And if the client state, like Saudi Arabia, has its own imperial circle to worry about, the relationship between sponsor and client is much more a dance, with the sponsor hopefully leading, than an imperative.
As the smoke clears, it becomes clear that the world trade center bombing is an act of war that has emerged from a frozen war - the Gulf war. When the US chose not to depose Hussein, and to, in effect, cave to Saudi and Kuwaiti interests (both of those states feared and fear Iranian influence), we made a fundamentally irrational decision. We allowed wishful thinking, instead of strategy, to dictate the terms of our co-existence with Iraq.
In the same way, we went along with the Saudi plan for Afghanistan. I've read an interesting book, Fundamentalism Reborn? edited by William Maley. Well, no, it isn't interesting, except insofar as this week's situation makes it so - it is dusty and strewn with factional names cluttered with hard to pronounce sounds that are, in addition, hard to remember. To cut to the chase, when the Taliban came out of Pakistan in the early 90s, they came out basically as the pawns of Saudi interest, which was worried that the Iranians supporting Rabbani and Massoud, the previous most powerful clique in the country, were gaining a strategic advantage. Iran, India and Russia made up an informal support group for this faction. Riyadh reacted by throwing its support to the Taliban.
When Weaver, in her article, writes of the Pakistani irritation over the US effort to punish bin Laden, she ignores this history. But as in one of those great Persian miniatures, the calligraphy of state interest in this part of the Middle East is intricate, esoteric, and not easily decyphered on first glance.
What is obvious is that al-Qaeda, bin Laden's group, has an on and off relationship with all the governments in the region. And that the phrase that Bush used, and that comes from the mandarin speak of US Foreign Policy people - sponsor states - is a bit of a misnomer. Aftter all, the USA was the first sponsor state for the prototype of this group. And our "allies" - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - have learned one thing from the disasterous relationship between the Shah's Iran and the US - the US is blind to the internal dynamics of its client states. So that the rulers play a more sophisticated game then the hapless shah did, bowing to US pressure on the one hand, but molding it on the other hand.
Conclusions:
1. the war on terrorism is not going to be won. That's because the structure of war - its institutions, its goals, its necessary wagers - are absent in the case of 'terrorism' tout court, which has become a covert addendum to every state's policy - including the US, with its widespread support of death squads in Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatamala and other places. In Egypt or Pakistan, individual terrorists can be captured, organizations can be taken down, but given the international context in which these people travel, and given the rivalries between countries, these will all be provisional police solutions.
2. bin Laden's organization can be taken down. I hope it will be. To really insure the extinction of support for anti-American groups in the region, the US is going to have to come to terms with Iran. If the people around Bush have any brains, they recognize this. Question is, how they are going to explain it to the Saudis.
3. Iraq is still a problem without a solution. The Bush regime certainly doesn't have the courage to risk splitting up Iraq - which means we will witness a continuation of the current stupid, stupid policy.
The article that you must go to today is on the New Yorker site. It is a profile of Osama bin Laden by a Mary Weaver, originally published last year.
Here's a key graf:
"He is part puritanical Wahhabi, the dominant school of Islam in Saudi Arabia, yet at one time he may have led a very liberated social life. He is part feudal Saudi, an aristocrat who, from time to time, would retreat with his father to the desert and live in a tent. And he is of a Saudi generation that came of age during the rise of OPEC, with the extraordinary wealth that accompanied it: a generation whose religious fervor or political zeal, complemented by government airline tickets, led thousands to fight a war in a distant Muslim land. That Pan-Islamic effort, whose fighters were funded, armed, and trained by the C.I.A., eventually brought some twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from more than fifty countries, to combat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States, intentionally or not, had launched Pan-Islam's first jihad, or holy war, in eight centuries."
The article is pretty good, but it does ignore a few important facts - most notably, the high price we have paid for tying the US interest to the Saudi interest. There's a popular phrase - client state - that is often used by the left and right to characterize an unambiguous and unilateral flow of command from some superpower to some state fingerpuppet. In reality, however, such top down models ignore the pull of various interests that get into the channel with client states. And if the client state, like Saudi Arabia, has its own imperial circle to worry about, the relationship between sponsor and client is much more a dance, with the sponsor hopefully leading, than an imperative.
As the smoke clears, it becomes clear that the world trade center bombing is an act of war that has emerged from a frozen war - the Gulf war. When the US chose not to depose Hussein, and to, in effect, cave to Saudi and Kuwaiti interests (both of those states feared and fear Iranian influence), we made a fundamentally irrational decision. We allowed wishful thinking, instead of strategy, to dictate the terms of our co-existence with Iraq.
In the same way, we went along with the Saudi plan for Afghanistan. I've read an interesting book, Fundamentalism Reborn? edited by William Maley. Well, no, it isn't interesting, except insofar as this week's situation makes it so - it is dusty and strewn with factional names cluttered with hard to pronounce sounds that are, in addition, hard to remember. To cut to the chase, when the Taliban came out of Pakistan in the early 90s, they came out basically as the pawns of Saudi interest, which was worried that the Iranians supporting Rabbani and Massoud, the previous most powerful clique in the country, were gaining a strategic advantage. Iran, India and Russia made up an informal support group for this faction. Riyadh reacted by throwing its support to the Taliban.
When Weaver, in her article, writes of the Pakistani irritation over the US effort to punish bin Laden, she ignores this history. But as in one of those great Persian miniatures, the calligraphy of state interest in this part of the Middle East is intricate, esoteric, and not easily decyphered on first glance.
What is obvious is that al-Qaeda, bin Laden's group, has an on and off relationship with all the governments in the region. And that the phrase that Bush used, and that comes from the mandarin speak of US Foreign Policy people - sponsor states - is a bit of a misnomer. Aftter all, the USA was the first sponsor state for the prototype of this group. And our "allies" - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - have learned one thing from the disasterous relationship between the Shah's Iran and the US - the US is blind to the internal dynamics of its client states. So that the rulers play a more sophisticated game then the hapless shah did, bowing to US pressure on the one hand, but molding it on the other hand.
Conclusions:
1. the war on terrorism is not going to be won. That's because the structure of war - its institutions, its goals, its necessary wagers - are absent in the case of 'terrorism' tout court, which has become a covert addendum to every state's policy - including the US, with its widespread support of death squads in Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatamala and other places. In Egypt or Pakistan, individual terrorists can be captured, organizations can be taken down, but given the international context in which these people travel, and given the rivalries between countries, these will all be provisional police solutions.
2. bin Laden's organization can be taken down. I hope it will be. To really insure the extinction of support for anti-American groups in the region, the US is going to have to come to terms with Iran. If the people around Bush have any brains, they recognize this. Question is, how they are going to explain it to the Saudis.
3. Iraq is still a problem without a solution. The Bush regime certainly doesn't have the courage to risk splitting up Iraq - which means we will witness a continuation of the current stupid, stupid policy.
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
"The less any thing is, the less we know it: how invisible, how unintelligible a thing then, is this Nothing! We say in the School, Deus cognoscibilior Angelis, We have better means to know the nature of God, than of Angels, because God hath appeared and manifested himself more in actions, than Angels have done: we know what they are, by knowing what they have done; and it is very little that is related to us what Angels have done: what then is there that can bring this Nothing to our understanding? what hath that done? A Leviathan, a Whale, from a grain of Spawn; an Oke from a buried Akehorn, is a great; but a great world from nothing, is a strange improvement. We wonder to see a man rise from nothing to a great Estate; but that Nothing is but nothing in comparison; but absolutely nothing, meerly nothing, is more incomprehensible than any thing, than all things together. It is a state (if a man may call it a state) that the Devil himself in the midst of his torments, cannot wish." - John Donne
That puzzle of Nothing, today, is the puzzle of the hijackers. So far what we know is that, from an incredible effect, the reduction to powder of the World Trade Center Towers, we go backwards towards a few pitiful clues - cell phone calls from airplanes in the midst of being turned into missiles, a possible black box in a field in Pennsylvania, the statement of Barbara Olsen, before she was slammed into the Pentagon along with all her other fellow passengers, that the hijackers used knives. And we, like Donne's Devil, are in the midst of contending with a disproportion so great that the mind keeps blinking.
In Salon today, among a group of pundits and airport security experts interviewed for their responses, one of the common statements was that this was a terribly sophisticated operation. A Sam Skinner, an investigator of the Lockerbie attack, was quoted as saying:
"...the fact that four domestic flights were hijacked is entirely shocking. I don't know of any scenario that allowed for this. This is not an amateur performance. It must have had support from strong organizations or governments."
This was echoed by a Charlie Leblanc, billed as the manager for an Airline Security company, who said:
"I can't tell you how this happened. We don't know exactly what was done, or in the order it was done to accomplish what they did accomplish. But what we know is that this was a well-planned attack. This took months if not years to figure out. We can also guarantee that at least 30 to 50 people were involved."
If this is true, it is hard not to endorse Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, who was quoted by the Washington Post labeling this as an intelligence failure of "catastrophic proportions."
"How nothing could have been picked up is beyond me � way beyond me," Katzman told The Post. "There's a major, major intelligence failure, specially since the [previous] Trade Center bombing produced such an investigation of the networks and so much monitoring."
So on the one hand, we have four coordinated hijackings, we have a devastatingly well synchronized attack schedule, and we have the assurance that the backup for these terrorists had to be extensive and deep. And, on the other hand, we have the startling lack of guns, and the confusing testimony of a few voices who are dead and gone now. It is as if we had received cell phone calls from the cattle cars rolling to Auschwitz.
When you beat your head against a Blank this huge and black, against a will to the void this determined, it is easy to fall for any hint. Orrin Hatch callously demagoged on ABC last night (and is quoted in the Times this morning) with the assertion that the FBI (or the CIA or some "High Intelligence Official", whatever that means) had certain knowledge linking the hijacking to bin Ladin.
"They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit," Hatch said in an interview with The Associated Press. He declined to be more specific."
So we are to conclude that while the conspiracy was building, the intercept people just let it go - but now they have certain information that "the target was hit", whatever that means? This sounds more than suspicious - it sounds like serious tail covering and disinformation of the worst kind.
This isn't surprising, since men like Orrin Hatch are always the willing dupes of Nothing - they gamble with wild inferences, playing their own ideological games, and we suffer the consequences longterm if we let them get away with it.
I'm not getting to the obvious point that we don't know if bin Ladin did it. Because if there is a man with a motive and a habit of shouting that he wants to knock down American skyscrapers and kill Americans en masse, it is Ladin. An obvious point by the way: the U.S. has been terribly lax not only in letting Ladin receive aid and comfort from the Taliban and from Pakistan, but in refusing to support anti-Taliban forces. There's a strong Iran-o-phobia keeping us from exercizing a rational policy in this part of the Middle East. It is the same fear of Iran that prevented the US from destroying Saddam Hussein when that was a real option. The Kuwait war was a huge oddity: it shouldn't have been waged in the first place, and it shouldn't have been stopped once it was waged before Hussein was taken down. It was, on both ends, a complete botch.
Yet we don't have to backtrack over American policy to make a simple point about a criminal investigation. That point is: we can't start with suspects that we want to be suspects. We have to start with what we know.
I think we are in for some surprises as we find out more about the men who planned and carried out this crime.
That puzzle of Nothing, today, is the puzzle of the hijackers. So far what we know is that, from an incredible effect, the reduction to powder of the World Trade Center Towers, we go backwards towards a few pitiful clues - cell phone calls from airplanes in the midst of being turned into missiles, a possible black box in a field in Pennsylvania, the statement of Barbara Olsen, before she was slammed into the Pentagon along with all her other fellow passengers, that the hijackers used knives. And we, like Donne's Devil, are in the midst of contending with a disproportion so great that the mind keeps blinking.
In Salon today, among a group of pundits and airport security experts interviewed for their responses, one of the common statements was that this was a terribly sophisticated operation. A Sam Skinner, an investigator of the Lockerbie attack, was quoted as saying:
"...the fact that four domestic flights were hijacked is entirely shocking. I don't know of any scenario that allowed for this. This is not an amateur performance. It must have had support from strong organizations or governments."
This was echoed by a Charlie Leblanc, billed as the manager for an Airline Security company, who said:
"I can't tell you how this happened. We don't know exactly what was done, or in the order it was done to accomplish what they did accomplish. But what we know is that this was a well-planned attack. This took months if not years to figure out. We can also guarantee that at least 30 to 50 people were involved."
If this is true, it is hard not to endorse Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, who was quoted by the Washington Post labeling this as an intelligence failure of "catastrophic proportions."
"How nothing could have been picked up is beyond me � way beyond me," Katzman told The Post. "There's a major, major intelligence failure, specially since the [previous] Trade Center bombing produced such an investigation of the networks and so much monitoring."
So on the one hand, we have four coordinated hijackings, we have a devastatingly well synchronized attack schedule, and we have the assurance that the backup for these terrorists had to be extensive and deep. And, on the other hand, we have the startling lack of guns, and the confusing testimony of a few voices who are dead and gone now. It is as if we had received cell phone calls from the cattle cars rolling to Auschwitz.
When you beat your head against a Blank this huge and black, against a will to the void this determined, it is easy to fall for any hint. Orrin Hatch callously demagoged on ABC last night (and is quoted in the Times this morning) with the assertion that the FBI (or the CIA or some "High Intelligence Official", whatever that means) had certain knowledge linking the hijacking to bin Ladin.
"They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit," Hatch said in an interview with The Associated Press. He declined to be more specific."
So we are to conclude that while the conspiracy was building, the intercept people just let it go - but now they have certain information that "the target was hit", whatever that means? This sounds more than suspicious - it sounds like serious tail covering and disinformation of the worst kind.
This isn't surprising, since men like Orrin Hatch are always the willing dupes of Nothing - they gamble with wild inferences, playing their own ideological games, and we suffer the consequences longterm if we let them get away with it.
I'm not getting to the obvious point that we don't know if bin Ladin did it. Because if there is a man with a motive and a habit of shouting that he wants to knock down American skyscrapers and kill Americans en masse, it is Ladin. An obvious point by the way: the U.S. has been terribly lax not only in letting Ladin receive aid and comfort from the Taliban and from Pakistan, but in refusing to support anti-Taliban forces. There's a strong Iran-o-phobia keeping us from exercizing a rational policy in this part of the Middle East. It is the same fear of Iran that prevented the US from destroying Saddam Hussein when that was a real option. The Kuwait war was a huge oddity: it shouldn't have been waged in the first place, and it shouldn't have been stopped once it was waged before Hussein was taken down. It was, on both ends, a complete botch.
Yet we don't have to backtrack over American policy to make a simple point about a criminal investigation. That point is: we can't start with suspects that we want to be suspects. We have to start with what we know.
I think we are in for some surprises as we find out more about the men who planned and carried out this crime.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Dope
My post today was going to address the reparations issue, following on the heels of the Durban, South Africa conference on racism. But I'm sick today - I have a sore throat, and I've just finished watching, for the 100th time, the World Trade Tower collapse, and I'm so sick of that.
When a disaster like this strikes - although, actually, there hasn't been a disaster like this in the US - the public personalities who float ectoplasmically across our tv screens suddenly come into relief, some for good, some for ill. I'd have to say that Peter Jennings is the most palatable of tv anchors. Dan Rather was at least more subdued than his usually ebullient, dyslexic self. Brokaw was pretty bad - he kept remarking that prominent people were probably killed in the planes that went down. Well, death is a nasty equalizer.
Fox TV went psychotic, so that I couldn't really watch it. The immediate question was where had they rounded up so many multi-fold fat white guys with barbecue on their chins to shout, in unison, let's bomb the bejesus out of em. Unfortunately, there is nobody yet to bomb. This is a punch in the dark.
There's an article in Slate -
Who Done It? by Timothy Noah - which (despite the title's inappropriate Yoga Berra grammar) is a reminder that we have no idea that Osman Ladin was responsible for this. Noah's point is that it could be home grown fascists. Nobody yet has fingered the Columbians, yet Ochoa was just extradited to the US - and the last time a Columbian coco billionaire was threatened with extradition, a terrific bombing campaign broke out in Bogota. The oddity is that there was no warning. It does make you think - what is the FBI doing? We have a huge national police force that chases stolen cars, has the dopiest psychological profiling bureau ever, catches bank robbers, and seems to have no clue that an organization is about to coordinate the hijacking of four separate planes and coordinate crashes of those planes into populated areas.
There isn't really anybody to retaliate against, yet, which gave the tv talking heads, and their endless analyses of Osmana bin Ladin, a rather odd cast. I have tried to imagine what it means that apparently four planes were hijacked with knives, if what the networks report is true. Knives. I am suprised that knives were the weapon of choice, especially if these were men trained by or associated with Ladin. Another thing I find funny is the reports of the telephone calls. There were numerous telephone callers among the passengers, and yet none of them described the men hijacking the plane the way your average white american - like me - would. None, that is, said these arab guys, or these foreign guys - they simply refered to men.
Another impression - and these impressions seem particularly unworthy when I think that as many as ten thousand people might have died in the World Trade Center today - is that Giuliani, a man I have, otherwise, no tolerance for, is a great mayor in an emergency. The contrast between his tv persona and Bush's was quite striking.
I've gone through a lot of weblogs. I recommend this one:
There are some others too, which I will put up later.
My post today was going to address the reparations issue, following on the heels of the Durban, South Africa conference on racism. But I'm sick today - I have a sore throat, and I've just finished watching, for the 100th time, the World Trade Tower collapse, and I'm so sick of that.
When a disaster like this strikes - although, actually, there hasn't been a disaster like this in the US - the public personalities who float ectoplasmically across our tv screens suddenly come into relief, some for good, some for ill. I'd have to say that Peter Jennings is the most palatable of tv anchors. Dan Rather was at least more subdued than his usually ebullient, dyslexic self. Brokaw was pretty bad - he kept remarking that prominent people were probably killed in the planes that went down. Well, death is a nasty equalizer.
Fox TV went psychotic, so that I couldn't really watch it. The immediate question was where had they rounded up so many multi-fold fat white guys with barbecue on their chins to shout, in unison, let's bomb the bejesus out of em. Unfortunately, there is nobody yet to bomb. This is a punch in the dark.
There's an article in Slate -
Who Done It? by Timothy Noah - which (despite the title's inappropriate Yoga Berra grammar) is a reminder that we have no idea that Osman Ladin was responsible for this. Noah's point is that it could be home grown fascists. Nobody yet has fingered the Columbians, yet Ochoa was just extradited to the US - and the last time a Columbian coco billionaire was threatened with extradition, a terrific bombing campaign broke out in Bogota. The oddity is that there was no warning. It does make you think - what is the FBI doing? We have a huge national police force that chases stolen cars, has the dopiest psychological profiling bureau ever, catches bank robbers, and seems to have no clue that an organization is about to coordinate the hijacking of four separate planes and coordinate crashes of those planes into populated areas.
There isn't really anybody to retaliate against, yet, which gave the tv talking heads, and their endless analyses of Osmana bin Ladin, a rather odd cast. I have tried to imagine what it means that apparently four planes were hijacked with knives, if what the networks report is true. Knives. I am suprised that knives were the weapon of choice, especially if these were men trained by or associated with Ladin. Another thing I find funny is the reports of the telephone calls. There were numerous telephone callers among the passengers, and yet none of them described the men hijacking the plane the way your average white american - like me - would. None, that is, said these arab guys, or these foreign guys - they simply refered to men.
Another impression - and these impressions seem particularly unworthy when I think that as many as ten thousand people might have died in the World Trade Center today - is that Giuliani, a man I have, otherwise, no tolerance for, is a great mayor in an emergency. The contrast between his tv persona and Bush's was quite striking.
I've gone through a lot of weblogs. I recommend this one:
There are some others too, which I will put up later.
Monday, September 10, 2001
Remora.
Interesting article by David Bradley
in this month's Elemental Discoveries, a sci-zine. He scrolls through recent Pharma discoveries, and finds a high percentage of recycled drugs, now touted for other uses. The graf that interested me, however, was this one:
"The metabolites of common antipsychotic drugs, such as clozapine, have been found to inhibit replication of HIV in human cell cultures, which could lead to yet another multipurpose drug. Antipsychotics have for several years been suspected of having antiviral activity, for instance lithium inhibits Herpes simplex replication. Such activity is consistent with the theory that certain forms of mental illness are thought to have a viral component."
Elemental Discoveries - August 2001
As some of you might know, I've written about this subject myself, in an Austin Chronicle article reviewing various books on Cancer, viruses, and medical discoveries. A couple of months ago there was a brief flurry about the disputed finding that schizophrenia was linked to a cat disease that was viral in nature. I find all this rather fascinating.
Interesting article by David Bradley
in this month's Elemental Discoveries, a sci-zine. He scrolls through recent Pharma discoveries, and finds a high percentage of recycled drugs, now touted for other uses. The graf that interested me, however, was this one:
"The metabolites of common antipsychotic drugs, such as clozapine, have been found to inhibit replication of HIV in human cell cultures, which could lead to yet another multipurpose drug. Antipsychotics have for several years been suspected of having antiviral activity, for instance lithium inhibits Herpes simplex replication. Such activity is consistent with the theory that certain forms of mental illness are thought to have a viral component."
Elemental Discoveries - August 2001
As some of you might know, I've written about this subject myself, in an Austin Chronicle article reviewing various books on Cancer, viruses, and medical discoveries. A couple of months ago there was a brief flurry about the disputed finding that schizophrenia was linked to a cat disease that was viral in nature. I find all this rather fascinating.
Remora
More stuff about Fujimori - who now ranks up there with Craxi in the "former leaders who flee criminal prosecution" department. American papers hadn't reported on this sterilization campaign. My big grievances with population control people is that the focus seems suspiciously eugenic - get brown and black people to have less kids.
The Times
Lede graf:
"A PARLIAMENTARY commission in Peru is investigating reports that hundreds of poor indigenous women died after 300,000 were forcibly sterilised in a scheme backed by the disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori."
More stuff about Fujimori - who now ranks up there with Craxi in the "former leaders who flee criminal prosecution" department. American papers hadn't reported on this sterilization campaign. My big grievances with population control people is that the focus seems suspiciously eugenic - get brown and black people to have less kids.
The Times
Lede graf:
"A PARLIAMENTARY commission in Peru is investigating reports that hundreds of poor indigenous women died after 300,000 were forcibly sterilised in a scheme backed by the disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori."
Remora
The Post beats the Times for pungency, today, with its story about the Bush tax cut - about as fraudulent a piece of economic policy as a systems player's plan to beat the odds at blackjack at Trump Casino. Interesting, given the parallel between what Bush did on a national level and what he did in Texas. The same publicity driven tax cut, the same post budget repair work. The Times references further tax cuts to jumpstart the economy being mooted by both parties. It's beginning to feel a lot like a recession, so politicos are naturally getting antsy. The Post, however, revisits the budget which was passed this spring by the live wire Repugs and the cadaverous Dems, and guess what, my happy readers? Now that the budget is yesterday's papers, there's a lot of grinning and shuffling about how, shucks, the whole thing was sorta built out of fraudulent spending projections, taxes cut which will be supplanted by obscurer taxes revived, and the promise of consensual restraint on the part of Congress. Yeah, right. The last is like teaching abstinence in sex ed to teenagers - there's the gonad on the one side, and the rhetoric on the other. Which do you think is going to win?
Key Graf
Tax Cut Plan Filled With Dubious Spending Predictions (washingtonpost.com)
Discipline may indeed be needed. The tax package assumes that discretionary federal spending (about one-third of all spending) will grow annually by only 2.5 percent or less in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Such spending, however, has grown by an average of 6 percent annually for the past three years, and it hit 9.9 percent in 2001
The Post beats the Times for pungency, today, with its story about the Bush tax cut - about as fraudulent a piece of economic policy as a systems player's plan to beat the odds at blackjack at Trump Casino. Interesting, given the parallel between what Bush did on a national level and what he did in Texas. The same publicity driven tax cut, the same post budget repair work. The Times references further tax cuts to jumpstart the economy being mooted by both parties. It's beginning to feel a lot like a recession, so politicos are naturally getting antsy. The Post, however, revisits the budget which was passed this spring by the live wire Repugs and the cadaverous Dems, and guess what, my happy readers? Now that the budget is yesterday's papers, there's a lot of grinning and shuffling about how, shucks, the whole thing was sorta built out of fraudulent spending projections, taxes cut which will be supplanted by obscurer taxes revived, and the promise of consensual restraint on the part of Congress. Yeah, right. The last is like teaching abstinence in sex ed to teenagers - there's the gonad on the one side, and the rhetoric on the other. Which do you think is going to win?
Key Graf
Tax Cut Plan Filled With Dubious Spending Predictions (washingtonpost.com)
Discipline may indeed be needed. The tax package assumes that discretionary federal spending (about one-third of all spending) will grow annually by only 2.5 percent or less in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Such spending, however, has grown by an average of 6 percent annually for the past three years, and it hit 9.9 percent in 2001
Sunday, September 09, 2001
Dope.
This is a story of orange peels.
One of the most famous facts about Mexico City is probably not known to a vast majority of the inhabitants of Mexico City.
In the 80s, William Rathje, the archeologist who started the famous Garbage project at the University of Arizona, conducted a comparative study of waste disposal between households in Mexico City and the average American urban household. With his associate, Michael Reilly, he published an article, "Household Garbage and the Role of Packaging." The article isn't on the Net, but there is an excellent article by Frank Ackerman of Tufts University at the Society for Philosophy and Technology, ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF PACKAGING IN THE U.S. AND MEXICO, which summarizes it:
"The tradeoff between food waste and packaging waste explains one of the most remarkable empirical results in the field of "garbage research." Detailed surveys in the early 1980s found that households in Mexico City discard more waste than urban and suburban U.S. households, even after correcting for family size (Restrepo et al., 1991; for a summary in English see Rathje and Murphy, 1992, pp. 216-219). The Mexican households threw out twice as much food waste, while the Americans threw out more packaging and other materials; on balance the Mexicans discarded more per capita. Most other studies have found that the United States is the world leader in per capita waste disposal, and that developing countries generate much less waste. However, the defense of packaging presented here only shows that some packaging is desirable, including some of the exotic new plastic and composite packages"
There are a lot of examples of food waste in Mexico City, but the one that caught the eye of conservative commentators was the humble orange. Take David Koppel, who writes, in an article entitled Envirohogwash,
"For example, in Mexico � where packaging and refrigeration are rarer than in the U.S. � the average household throws away 40% more total refuse than the average U.S. household. It's not that the Mexican household has a higher standard of living; it's just that high-tech packaging and other advances make U.S. consumption more efficient. In Mexico City, households that drink orange juice usually buy fresh oranges, squeeze them, and throw away the peels � about ten and a half ounces of peels per week. Most American households make their orange juice from frozen concentrate, which comes in a package. The American household, making the same amount of orange juice, throws out a two-ounce cardboard or aluminum container. Thus, the American household creates more than 80% less solid waste."
The idea of all those orange peels flooding Mexico City, as though some bizarre sci-fi flick was running loose South of the Border, seems to have a dreamlike appeal to the defenders of the American Way of Packaging. This is Virginia Postrel , the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason:
"For instance, in Mexico City, most consumers squeeze fresh oranges to make
orange juice. The peels are then thrown away. Americans, by contrast,
tend to buy packaged frozen concentrate. As a result, the typical Mexican
household tosses out 10.5 ounces of orange peel each week; the typical
American household throws out 2 ounces of cardboard or aluminum ."
She adds a little flavor to this stat by commenting: "If all the orange juice
drinkers in New York Cidy individually tossed away their orange peels, one
day's haul would weigh as much as two ocean liners."
What an image! and a puzzle, too, since Mexico City has twice as many people as New York City. Is it true, then, that Mexico city is disposing of a fleet of orange peels every week?
Another, separate question is - why are Kopel and Postrel emphasizing the buying of concentrate? Their example has an oddly outdated feeling. The simple answer is provided in the quote from Anderson's paper - Kopel and Postrel is relying on a study made in the 80s. We'll see in a minute that the time frame of Rathje's study is important. But first, one more example of the by now famous inclination of Mexicans to incautiously make their juices from natural products. In a famous article, Recycling is Garbage, in the New York Times magazine by John Tierney, another libertarian type recycles Rathje to say:
"The typical household in Mexico City buys fewer packaged goods than an American household, but it produces one-third more garbage, chiefly because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused, spoiled or stale."
Okay, okay. The orange peel menace is beginning to seem truly threatening. The cold war is over, so we need a new enemy, but who knew that it would be a fruit? Still, one thing that seems to have gotten lost here. If orange peels are so bad, why haven't orange trees long ago flooded the world with orange peels? The answer is - orange peels decay. If they didn't, in fact, there wouldn't be orange trees - the fruit, you might have noticed, contains orange seeds.
Well, how about other orange juice containers? Here's what Tropicana has to say about its juice cartons at its faq site:
"IS THE PLASTIC BOTTLE RECYCLABLE?
The bottle is recyclable with plastics coded #2. It is predominantly high density polyethylene (HDPE), and contains a very thin layer of nylon which prevents oxygen penetration and deterioration of the juice. Therefore, we must label it as #7 for "layered" packages. But since the nylon does not interfere with its recyclability, we highlight its #2 compatibility.
ARE YOUR CARTONS RECYCLABLE?
Yes, for the most part. The carton's paper fiber has a high market value and can be recycled. Because the fitment and cap come in direct contact with the juice, they cannot be made of recycled material. These parts are removed during the recycling process."
Interestingly, according to the Plastics Council, an advocacy group for Plastics manufacturers, there was zero recycling of HDPE in the eighties - in other words, when Rathje made his study, the choice between throwing out an orange peel and throwing out a plastic jug full of juice was that the orange peel would decay, and the plastic jug would be left to chemically disassociate on a garbage dump. So in spite of the invidious comparison of the scale of disposal, the orange peel was still the preferred option for the environmentally conscious consumer. This is the kind of moderating fact that Tierney and Postrel seem unaware of.
Tierney, who is a reporter, is more to blame for his lack of curiosity about packaging. Since he was writing in 1996, he should have been aware that there were packaging developments that year, chief among which was the design of the "aseptic package." It won the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development that year. And, even more importantly, it introduced a wild card into Mexico City's orange peel crisis.
Juice in a carton had arrived.
Mexican juices are being packaged, now, in bulk, just like they are in the US. However, the packaging reflects, pace the John Tierney's of the world, the pressure from consumers and environmental groups to find stable, low energy, greener containers.
Having just come back from Mexico City, I can guarantee you that there are no ocean liners made out of orange peels blocking Reforma. If you are looking for juice in Mexico City, you will probably be buying some product of Jugos del Valle, which uses an aseptic carton supplied by SIG Combibloc Inc. Aseptic cartons drive container designers into heights of hyperbole. Here's a quote from the food product design people:
"Aseptic cartons are a lightweight, multi-layer, energy-efficient example of minimal packaging. They combine high-performance materials with high-performance construction and high-performance features. The package is 70% paper (to provide stiffness and strength), 25% low-density polyethylene (to seal the carton liquid-tight), and 5% aluminum (to keep out light and oxygen). Together, these materials produce a carton that safeguards the aseptically processed product inside. "
There isn't a simple moral to the story of the orange peel. On the one hand, you have claims about bulk solid waste which ignore the context of waste decay and use. On the other hand, you have claims made from a study that is ten to fifteen years old that ignore technological developments that are partly driven by environmental regulation. In other words, this is a classic picture of the Keynsian system at work - the state represents the interest of third parties, here, to force private industry to either carry the unadulterated costs of waste disposal or find ways to minimize waste.
The moral of this story, as of almost all the stories I tell, sadly enough, comes from Lafontaine:
Toujours par quelque endroit fourbes se laissent prendre
Quiconque est loup agisse en loup:
C'est le plus certain de beaucoup
This is a story of orange peels.
One of the most famous facts about Mexico City is probably not known to a vast majority of the inhabitants of Mexico City.
In the 80s, William Rathje, the archeologist who started the famous Garbage project at the University of Arizona, conducted a comparative study of waste disposal between households in Mexico City and the average American urban household. With his associate, Michael Reilly, he published an article, "Household Garbage and the Role of Packaging." The article isn't on the Net, but there is an excellent article by Frank Ackerman of Tufts University at the Society for Philosophy and Technology, ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF PACKAGING IN THE U.S. AND MEXICO, which summarizes it:
"The tradeoff between food waste and packaging waste explains one of the most remarkable empirical results in the field of "garbage research." Detailed surveys in the early 1980s found that households in Mexico City discard more waste than urban and suburban U.S. households, even after correcting for family size (Restrepo et al., 1991; for a summary in English see Rathje and Murphy, 1992, pp. 216-219). The Mexican households threw out twice as much food waste, while the Americans threw out more packaging and other materials; on balance the Mexicans discarded more per capita. Most other studies have found that the United States is the world leader in per capita waste disposal, and that developing countries generate much less waste. However, the defense of packaging presented here only shows that some packaging is desirable, including some of the exotic new plastic and composite packages"
There are a lot of examples of food waste in Mexico City, but the one that caught the eye of conservative commentators was the humble orange. Take David Koppel, who writes, in an article entitled Envirohogwash,
"For example, in Mexico � where packaging and refrigeration are rarer than in the U.S. � the average household throws away 40% more total refuse than the average U.S. household. It's not that the Mexican household has a higher standard of living; it's just that high-tech packaging and other advances make U.S. consumption more efficient. In Mexico City, households that drink orange juice usually buy fresh oranges, squeeze them, and throw away the peels � about ten and a half ounces of peels per week. Most American households make their orange juice from frozen concentrate, which comes in a package. The American household, making the same amount of orange juice, throws out a two-ounce cardboard or aluminum container. Thus, the American household creates more than 80% less solid waste."
The idea of all those orange peels flooding Mexico City, as though some bizarre sci-fi flick was running loose South of the Border, seems to have a dreamlike appeal to the defenders of the American Way of Packaging. This is Virginia Postrel , the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason:
"For instance, in Mexico City, most consumers squeeze fresh oranges to make
orange juice. The peels are then thrown away. Americans, by contrast,
tend to buy packaged frozen concentrate. As a result, the typical Mexican
household tosses out 10.5 ounces of orange peel each week; the typical
American household throws out 2 ounces of cardboard or aluminum ."
She adds a little flavor to this stat by commenting: "If all the orange juice
drinkers in New York Cidy individually tossed away their orange peels, one
day's haul would weigh as much as two ocean liners."
What an image! and a puzzle, too, since Mexico City has twice as many people as New York City. Is it true, then, that Mexico city is disposing of a fleet of orange peels every week?
Another, separate question is - why are Kopel and Postrel emphasizing the buying of concentrate? Their example has an oddly outdated feeling. The simple answer is provided in the quote from Anderson's paper - Kopel and Postrel is relying on a study made in the 80s. We'll see in a minute that the time frame of Rathje's study is important. But first, one more example of the by now famous inclination of Mexicans to incautiously make their juices from natural products. In a famous article, Recycling is Garbage, in the New York Times magazine by John Tierney, another libertarian type recycles Rathje to say:
"The typical household in Mexico City buys fewer packaged goods than an American household, but it produces one-third more garbage, chiefly because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused, spoiled or stale."
Okay, okay. The orange peel menace is beginning to seem truly threatening. The cold war is over, so we need a new enemy, but who knew that it would be a fruit? Still, one thing that seems to have gotten lost here. If orange peels are so bad, why haven't orange trees long ago flooded the world with orange peels? The answer is - orange peels decay. If they didn't, in fact, there wouldn't be orange trees - the fruit, you might have noticed, contains orange seeds.
Well, how about other orange juice containers? Here's what Tropicana has to say about its juice cartons at its faq site:
"IS THE PLASTIC BOTTLE RECYCLABLE?
The bottle is recyclable with plastics coded #2. It is predominantly high density polyethylene (HDPE), and contains a very thin layer of nylon which prevents oxygen penetration and deterioration of the juice. Therefore, we must label it as #7 for "layered" packages. But since the nylon does not interfere with its recyclability, we highlight its #2 compatibility.
ARE YOUR CARTONS RECYCLABLE?
Yes, for the most part. The carton's paper fiber has a high market value and can be recycled. Because the fitment and cap come in direct contact with the juice, they cannot be made of recycled material. These parts are removed during the recycling process."
Interestingly, according to the Plastics Council, an advocacy group for Plastics manufacturers, there was zero recycling of HDPE in the eighties - in other words, when Rathje made his study, the choice between throwing out an orange peel and throwing out a plastic jug full of juice was that the orange peel would decay, and the plastic jug would be left to chemically disassociate on a garbage dump. So in spite of the invidious comparison of the scale of disposal, the orange peel was still the preferred option for the environmentally conscious consumer. This is the kind of moderating fact that Tierney and Postrel seem unaware of.
Tierney, who is a reporter, is more to blame for his lack of curiosity about packaging. Since he was writing in 1996, he should have been aware that there were packaging developments that year, chief among which was the design of the "aseptic package." It won the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development that year. And, even more importantly, it introduced a wild card into Mexico City's orange peel crisis.
Juice in a carton had arrived.
Mexican juices are being packaged, now, in bulk, just like they are in the US. However, the packaging reflects, pace the John Tierney's of the world, the pressure from consumers and environmental groups to find stable, low energy, greener containers.
Having just come back from Mexico City, I can guarantee you that there are no ocean liners made out of orange peels blocking Reforma. If you are looking for juice in Mexico City, you will probably be buying some product of Jugos del Valle, which uses an aseptic carton supplied by SIG Combibloc Inc. Aseptic cartons drive container designers into heights of hyperbole. Here's a quote from the food product design people:
"Aseptic cartons are a lightweight, multi-layer, energy-efficient example of minimal packaging. They combine high-performance materials with high-performance construction and high-performance features. The package is 70% paper (to provide stiffness and strength), 25% low-density polyethylene (to seal the carton liquid-tight), and 5% aluminum (to keep out light and oxygen). Together, these materials produce a carton that safeguards the aseptically processed product inside. "
There isn't a simple moral to the story of the orange peel. On the one hand, you have claims about bulk solid waste which ignore the context of waste decay and use. On the other hand, you have claims made from a study that is ten to fifteen years old that ignore technological developments that are partly driven by environmental regulation. In other words, this is a classic picture of the Keynsian system at work - the state represents the interest of third parties, here, to force private industry to either carry the unadulterated costs of waste disposal or find ways to minimize waste.
The moral of this story, as of almost all the stories I tell, sadly enough, comes from Lafontaine:
Toujours par quelque endroit fourbes se laissent prendre
Quiconque est loup agisse en loup:
C'est le plus certain de beaucoup
Remora
There's a couple of stories in the NYT Biz section today on the interplay between the profit motive and the environment. One touts the savings and even profit to be made from redesigning the flow of wastes from production plants, both in terms of its composition (fining safer chemical products, for instance) and its re-use. Unfortunately, its smily business message is rather contradicted in the article on low emission autos. If you follow the auto company juggernaut and their fight against CAFE standards (an obsession with yours truly, as my readers know), the profit to be made from more environmentally sensitive autos is balanced, in Detroit's mindmeld, by the panic that Green cars might, after all, compete successfully with the Behemoth guzzlers that are the most profitable sector of the auto industry. So Detroit follows a two-fold strategy. It poormouths the technology needed to produce cleaner cars, with the big claim being that they are more dangerous - an ironic claim, given that the danger comes from the size of the Behemoth guzzlers. It also claims that Green cars are not good handlers. And there is a subtle sexual claim here as well - cars haven't been advertised for fifty years as an accessory to essential malehood to no effect. Green cars are, in the subconscious of an industry that hires women to design cars about as often as Bush utters five consecutive grammatical sentences, a surrender of privilege. The other leg of the policy is to comply, with great fanfare, to the mandate to research Green vehicles, but to hike prices and make the vehicle as scarce as possible. Ford did that with their EV SUVs in the 90s.
Here, however, we can say something good about globalisation. Or at least about international competition in the car market. Hybrid's and, eventually, fuel cell powered cars are a more rational vehicle for the Japanese and Europeans than the gut burgerliche Detroit mobiles, and so they have developed there. Now they are coming to the American market.
Key grafs in the Times piece:
Cleaner Cars Are Here, if You Can Find Them
Unlike electric cars, hybrid gas-electric cars need no special equipment, like battery-charging stations.
"A lot of people are surprised that you don't have to plug them in," said Ernest Bastien, corporate marketing manager at Toyota Motor Sales USA, who is in charge of American sales for the Prius. The car became available in Japan in 1997 and in the United States last year.
But first, you have to find one. Both the Prius and the Insight are in short supply � the Prius is sold out until April, while the Insight can be extremely scarce in markets like California, where they are most popular. (The City of New York just bought 231 of them, while New York State and New Jersey bought several dozen to be used by municipal and state agencies.)
There's a couple of stories in the NYT Biz section today on the interplay between the profit motive and the environment. One touts the savings and even profit to be made from redesigning the flow of wastes from production plants, both in terms of its composition (fining safer chemical products, for instance) and its re-use. Unfortunately, its smily business message is rather contradicted in the article on low emission autos. If you follow the auto company juggernaut and their fight against CAFE standards (an obsession with yours truly, as my readers know), the profit to be made from more environmentally sensitive autos is balanced, in Detroit's mindmeld, by the panic that Green cars might, after all, compete successfully with the Behemoth guzzlers that are the most profitable sector of the auto industry. So Detroit follows a two-fold strategy. It poormouths the technology needed to produce cleaner cars, with the big claim being that they are more dangerous - an ironic claim, given that the danger comes from the size of the Behemoth guzzlers. It also claims that Green cars are not good handlers. And there is a subtle sexual claim here as well - cars haven't been advertised for fifty years as an accessory to essential malehood to no effect. Green cars are, in the subconscious of an industry that hires women to design cars about as often as Bush utters five consecutive grammatical sentences, a surrender of privilege. The other leg of the policy is to comply, with great fanfare, to the mandate to research Green vehicles, but to hike prices and make the vehicle as scarce as possible. Ford did that with their EV SUVs in the 90s.
Here, however, we can say something good about globalisation. Or at least about international competition in the car market. Hybrid's and, eventually, fuel cell powered cars are a more rational vehicle for the Japanese and Europeans than the gut burgerliche Detroit mobiles, and so they have developed there. Now they are coming to the American market.
Key grafs in the Times piece:
Cleaner Cars Are Here, if You Can Find Them
Unlike electric cars, hybrid gas-electric cars need no special equipment, like battery-charging stations.
"A lot of people are surprised that you don't have to plug them in," said Ernest Bastien, corporate marketing manager at Toyota Motor Sales USA, who is in charge of American sales for the Prius. The car became available in Japan in 1997 and in the United States last year.
But first, you have to find one. Both the Prius and the Insight are in short supply � the Prius is sold out until April, while the Insight can be extremely scarce in markets like California, where they are most popular. (The City of New York just bought 231 of them, while New York State and New Jersey bought several dozen to be used by municipal and state agencies.)
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