A short history

Neddie from American Street points to this great art-essay, Robert R. Crumb's "Short history of America", which was reprinted in the Guardian recently.
Neddie asks: If you could wave a wand at one of those frames and magically make the destruction stop at that moment in time, which frame would it be?


Yes -- what IS next?

"If you could see her through my eyes . . .

. . . she wouldn't look Jewish at all" -- Joel Grey in Cabaret.
I just wanted to remind everybody else that once upon a time, anti-semitism was pretty common. I myself was reminded of it when I read the gratuitously bigoted language in this Canadian Press story.
So here is a test.
See if you can figure out which word I have replaced in this news story:

Cotler might amend Jewish bill
. . . [Justice Minister Cotler said] it's beyond his legal reach to protect provincial marriage commissioners or religious organizations who turn away Jewish couples . . . "That's right," Cotler said, when asked if his hands are tied by jurisdictional limits. Ottawa has the authority to define marriage, but provinces have the power to solemnize weddings. A range of conflicts has already emerged. Human rights challenges are underway in cases where religious groups refused to rent halls for Jewish celebrations. Marriage commissioners in several provinces, including Manitoba and B.C., have stepped down after receiving provincial orders to perform Jewish weddings against their beliefs. A couple in Prince Edward Island shut down their bed-breakfast rather than rent a room to a Jewish couple. "These are very significant issues," says Conservative justice critic Vic Toews, a vocal opponent of the bill. "We are opening up a Pandora's box, and this minister has steadfastly refused (to concede) that there are any problems." . . . The bill is expected to pass the Commons in a vote as early as next week . . . If it becomes law, Canada would be just the third country in the world after the Netherlands and Belgium to legalize Jewish marriage. Toews and other critics say crucial details must be worked out before the bill is enshrined in law. He says Cotler must "deal with each of the provinces in terms of enacting corresponding legislation that will protect religious organizations and those who object to Jewish marriage for reasons of conscience." Derek Rogusky, spokesman for Focus on the Family Canada, says those who oppose Jewish weddings are uneasy. "Faith-based groups are not all that confident if their rights are going to be left up to the courts," said the senior vice-president of the conservative family values group. Equality protections tend to trump religious freedoms in legal fights over Jewish rights, he said. The divisive debate continues to expose deep rifts among political parties and Canadians in general. Nearly three dozen Liberals are against changing the definition of marriage to allow Jewish weddings. Former Liberal Pat O'Brien's decision this week to bolt the party because of his concerns about the bill pushed the minority government to consider amendments. Cotler says any changes must be consistent with the need to balance equality rights and religious freedom. Still, he supports the bill as it is and suggested there will be little more than tinkering with language to calm fears over its impact.

Sorta jumps out at you, doesn't it?

Words CAN hurt them

The Poor Man writes about the basic brilliance of Amnesty International calling the American ghost prison system a gulag:

. . . a lot of techniques have been tried to make Republicans care that they, and their party, are supporting torture. Reporting facts has been tried, unsuccessfully. Releasing graphic photographs was also tried, to no avail. Asking nicely didn't work, begging didn't work, and guilt-tripping didn't work either. But there was one thing that hadn't been tried yet, not really, not until Amnesty tried it the other day: name-calling.

Childish? Can be. But effective. Report, photograph, explain, analyze, moralize - all useless. But it the post-modern world of the modern right wing, where objective facts are social constructs and the endlessly mutable text is all that really is, there is still one thing that has the power to inspire a reaction: words. Pick your word carefully, like, say, the word “gulag”, and watch the fun begin .

. . the moral degenerates who are the postmodern Republican party [are] fundamentally only concerned with words, appearances, and the power both can wield . . . Amnesty’s use of the word “gulag” in reference to Republican policies weakens the Republican party, a group that cares nothing for human rights, only power, and has substantially strengthened Amnesty, a group that cares only about exposing powerful violators of human rights, and has no fear of making enemies, with a decades-long record to back it up.

This is a very significant post -- the realization that words can actually hurt the American right wing is an insight I have not seen before.
On the whole, progressives try to deal with "reality". We pride ourselves on making a conscious effort not to be tricked by orwellian language. As a result, perhaps, we have not understood the crucial importance of this same orwellian language to the right wing. We attack what we think is their "reality" problem, but the right wing isn't listening because we're not dealing directly with the pseudonyms and talking points through which they can quell any vestige of uneasiness about what they are actually doing.
Offensive, unjustified and unprovoked war becomes "the Bush doctrine".
Protests against American agression becomes "they hate our freedom"
Bugging the security council becomes "reforming the UN"
Intolerant creationist bible worship becomes "intelligent design"
Threatening judges and picketing hospitals becomes "culture of life".
Demonizing gay people becomes "protecting the sancity of marriage"
The wrongfully imprisoned and possibly innocent people in Gitmo are "enemy combatants"
Locking people up without charge or trial or legal process becomes "protecting the American people"
As long as they continue to frame the world with poorly-defined but comforting pseudonyms, the right wing (and I include the Canadian right wing too) can continue to think of themsevles as morally upright, Christian people.
One thing I remember reading about Watergate was this -- that the worst thing about it was realizing "the nut at the end of the bar was right" -- you know, that blowhard guy who was ranting about conspiracies and bribery and crooks and liars and cover-ups.
Well, now we progressives may well be the 2005 version of the "nut at the end of the bar" -- and maybe people will listen if we use the language they understand.

Book tag

Thanks for the tag, Timmy G at Voice in the Wilderness I have added you to the blogroll.
I googled "book tag" and got 15,000 hits, so I couldn't track down where this started, but its growing exponentially all over the blogosphere.
Here are my answers:
1. Number of books I own: probably about 400 at this time. I try to keep mainly the books I will likely want to reread someday, but the others do pile up, too. Last summer we did a major book clearout and at least we got some of the bookshelves opened up.
2. What was the last book you bought? Well, I buy a lot of mysteries -- John Grisham's The Last Juror was probably the most recent one I bought. Grisham is one of those big-name, prolific authors who gets trashed by the hoity toity -- until you read some of his books and you understand why he is a big-name author. The quality varies a bit too much with Grisham, but I liked the pacing of The Last Juror -- its a bit of a mystery, but only at the end. Most of it is just a gently paced story about a small-town Mississippi newspaper editor and the stories he writes and the people he meets and what it is like to work at that kind of journalism and live in a small southern town in the 1970s.
3. What was the last book you read? Interspersed with other reading, I am rereading my way through Michael Connelly, so I am in the middle of Trunk Music right now. I often prefer to have a book I have already read for my pre-sleep reading, just so that I don't get so interested in the book that I never get to sleep.
I have liked the Harry Bosch series since the beginning. The series character can be both a writer's greatest strength and greatest weakness -- the strength of a series character is that the author can build the character's personality and experience from book to book; the weakness is, when the author gets bored then the series can get pretty boring too. As a general rule, the very best series character book is book two or book three; the slow decline can set in as early as book four, though with Connelly, his Bosch books have stayed pretty interesting all the way.
4. Five books that mean a lot to me.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I read these for the first time about 35 years ago, and I have been rereading them every two years or so, ever since. When I broke my leg a few years ago, and went through multiple surgeries and a two year recovery, it was Frodo's journey that helped me keep going.
Smiley's People. Fascinating characters, complex plot, subtle writing, not as dark as some of LeCarre's other books because Smiley finally wins in the end.
The Day the Universe Changed. James Burke's 1985 book gave me a unique perspective on history and on human progress, making me realize that human societies did not necessarily progress onward and upward, but sometimes could go sideways and backwards (as, I think, American society is going now under Bush.)
Chaos: The Making of a New Science. When I read James Gleick's book in 1989 it was just about the first "science" book this humanities major had ever read. It was the first time I saw that science has as many fascinating stories as English literature does, and that science theories, like chaos theory, could be useful and applicable in other disciplines.
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maude Montgomery. When I was a lonely teenager, this book gave me hope that I could have happiness one day. And I have.
Now I tag a whole bunch of people whose book stories I want to read about:
Sean Incognito
Canadian Cynic
RossK from Gazetteer
Edward T Bear in Blankout Times
Mike at Rational Reasons
Trucker Bob from Over the Road
People's Republic of Seabrook
And just to spread this across the pond, UK's Albion's Alchemist

Spring cleaning time

Get Organized! I've never been much of a house cleaner, but we do often enjoy watching HGTV and every now and then I check out their site.
After tonight's blog cleanup -- Pine and Embarassed to be Canadian, buh-bye -- I guess I am thinking about everything else that needs to be scrubbed around the house.
Some random observations:
What I have always disliked about house cleaning is this -- it never really gets you anywhere. All that work and the only thing you have to show for it is that the house briefly looks the way it should look all the time. But at least now we have all the Swifer stuff to make it quicker, which works great as long as your standards aren't too high.
Luckily, that has never been a problem for me.
I have tried hard never to be one of those annoying Poppins-wannabe little-red-hen sort of people who feel that only their own housework is good enough -- except that I do find myself bitching to my family that if they would only FOLD the damn laundry when it comes out of the dryer, instead of throwing it pellmell into the basket every which way, then it wouldn't get all WRINKLED and need IRONING . . . is anyone listening to me? Anybody? Oh, well . . .

Well, when you live by the sword . . .

. . . you die by the sword.
Sidelining the CIA "After nearly 60 years at the pinnacle of American intelligence- and at the elbow of Presidents - the CIA director is no longer automatically welcome at the President's National Security Council meetings. John Negroponte, the new director of National Intelligence, has taken his chair."
Well, I think this is sort of funny -- after spending last fall toeing the party line by firing a bunch of CIA leaders for their 'disloyalty' to the Bush administration, the man who had said at one time that he wasn't qualified to be a CIA agent is now being taken at this word. Here is what Goss is doing these days: ". . . he is spending more time focusing on needed reforms at the agency, visiting far-flung CIA spooks in the field and looking for ways to fill in gaps in the CIA's human intelligence and analysis." In orher words, he's a personnel manager -- and I'll bet those spooks in the field don't want to blow their cover by going anywhere near him.
Thanks to Buzzflash for the link.

Shut up

Why can't Harry Schmidt just shut the fuck up? Pilot who killed four Cdns. in friendly fire says he's a scapegoat
Everytime this yahoo opens his mouth, he just changes feet. Whine, whine, whine, blubber, sniff, oh poor little me, me, me.
He was the one who disobeyed orders -- "Despite orders to the contrary from air controllers, Schmidt dropped the 225-kilogram bomb that killed the four Canadians and injured six others" -- and he still refuses to accept responsibility for what he did. "I am truly sorry that the accident happened" he says -- yeah, like the bomb bay doors opened by accident, like the drop lever flipped all by itself. He still acts like it was an act of God, rather than an act of Harry.

Good, better, best

Good.

Brian Gable, Toronto, ON -- The Globe & Mail

Better.

Cameron (Cam) Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Best.

Kevin Siers, North Carolina, The Charlotte Observer

Now, here's how to frame an issue!

Canadian Cynic writes "The same-sex marriage controversy, in a nutshell
Dear same-sex marriage opponents:
We're right. You're wrong. Fuck off."
That says it all, really . . .

Make a new plan, Stan

Here are the facts, Jack -- the US lost in Vietnam YEARS before Watergate even began; Nixon was elected in 1972 mainly BECAUSE he promised to end the war.
So why are the 101st Fighting Keyboardrs now blaming Watergate for the US military failure and retreat in Vietnam?
I agree with TBlogg -- they're setting up for a blamefest after the coming US military failure and retreat in Iraq:

Like Viet Nam, we are losing in Iraq. That's a fact. You cannot beat an insurgency that seems to have an unlimited amount of 'martyrs' willing to walk into the public square and blow themselves up taking twenty or so citizens with them. The American military is bunkered into the Green Zone behind blast-proof walls and razor wire because; if they walk out into the streets...they're going to die. It's Fort Apache the Bronx. Those who are supposed to be in control of the streets are the Iraqi policemen, but if they are in control, then why do they have to wear masks? Because, if they don't the insurgents will come to their houses and kill them. Iraq is probably the only country in the world whose entire police force is in the Witness Protection Program. With every American death, with every request for more billions for Iraq, the American public that initially supported the war starts to edge away from it as if it smells like last weeks garbage. Military recruiters are currently doing everything short of shanghaiing high school kids and they still can't meet their recruitment goals. Soldiers are being kept in Iraq for too long. We are running out of money, soldiers, patience, and more importantly, the will to fight in Iraq.
Which is exactly what happened in Viet Nam.
So when we finally bow down to public opinion and admit defeat . . . who do you think the rightwing echo chamber is going to blame? Not the neo-cons who sent us on this fools errand. Not the generals who were whistling past the graveyard when they should have been telling Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to fuck off. Not the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who waved their little flags and their well-thumbed copies of Sun Tzu and pointed out that it looked a hell of a lot easier on the Risk board. No. They're going to blame us because we didn't wear little flag lapel pins and slap yellow ribbon magnetic stickers on our SUV's and we subverted the cause of democracy in the Middle East and that's why 1600 and counting American soldiers are dead, and the blood of every Iraqi killed in the wake of our leaving will be on our hands. And it's all because we didn't stop them before they killed again. Shame on us.

I love this show

Here they are:

He's my fave.


I read something recently about a college graduating class being asked whether they would throw over the professions they had just finished training forif they could go and write for Family Guy for a year, and most of them said sure. The tone of the article was shocked!- shocked! - at how shallow these young people were. But hey, you can go and be an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor anytime, but how many opportunities does someone have to write dialogue like this:
PETER:(riding a circus elephant) "Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a big fat white guy who is threatened by change."
STEWIE: (talking to teddy bear Rupert) "Rupert did you know that the word 'gullible' isn’t in the dictionary? ...(passes dictionary to Rupert)... What's that, it ISN’T? ...(takes dictionary)... Oh, Rupert, hoisted by my own petard! Haha! Haha!......I am so alone..."
LOIS: "My days in college were so exciting. This one time, the national guard came and shot some of my friends."
CHRIS: "I never knew anyone who went crazy before, except for my invisible friend, Col. Schwartz."
BRIAN: "Hey, barkeep, whose leg do you have to hump to get a dry martini around here?"

How surprising!

Released after five on Friday, just in time for the Saturday riots in the Middle East -- Pentagon details mishandling of Quran which describes " . . . a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book . . . an interrogator stepped on a Quran . . . water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran."
Well, well -- how could this be?
Wasn't Newsweek the absolute lowest of the absolute low for daring to print that Guantanamo guards dissed the Quran? Oh, of course, really, you know, Newsweek WAS wrong -- THEY said a guard flushed a Quran down the toilet, when ACTUALLY guards pissed on it, kicked it, stepped on it, and defaced it.
And don't you just love the Act of God passive voice sentence construction here -- " . . . a guard's urine came through an air vent . . . " -- like the guard himself wasn't actually on the other end of that urine stream.

The some sayers

Who except James Wolcott could write this and get away with it:
"Donald Rumsfeld, whose Steely Resolve more and more resembles aluminum siding, is a man unafraid of confronting the full spectrum of America's enemies from Al Qaeda to Amnesty International. Some say he is too zealous in defending our freedom. Too candid. Too cocksure. Too unwilling to accept counsel and criticism. Too wedded to his overriding vision of military transformation. Those some sayers are right."
Wolcott goes on to quote Antiwar.com's William Lind "under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. armed forces have . . . been taken over by "wreck it and run" management. When Rumsfeld leaves office, what will his successor inherit? A volunteer military without volunteers . . . The world's largest pile of wrecked and worn-out military equipment . . . A military tied down in a strategically meaningless backwater, Iraq, to the point where it can't do much else . . . Commitments to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of future weapons programs that are militarily as useful as Zeppelins but less fun to watch . . . [and] a lost war."

Nixon was the snake

Deep Throat takes fire -- a hero or a snake?
Watching Pat Buchanan on Hardball last night, the spin direction emerged quickly -- first, that Nixon didn't do anything worse than Kennedy or Clinton, and second, that Felt was a traitor to the White House.
Both are completely ridiculous.
Yes, Kennedy had affairs -- and so what? This didn't affect his presidency or his decision-making as president. And yes, Clinton had affairs -- and again, so what? Three or four episodes of oral sex with a 22-year-old woman had no effect whatsoever on his responsibility as president. With all the high indignation and harrumphing from Republicans now about both these presidents, they cannot identify a single presidential decision made by either man which was tainted by their affairs. In the Starr investigation the only wrongdoing charge Starr could come up with after years of investigation was that Clinton lied about having an affair. In both cases, the American public didn't care. Clinton's approval rating remained above 60 per cent even during the impeachment attempt.
In contrast, here is what the Nixon and his administration did (from Wikipedia):

"President Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman were tape-recorded . . . on June 23 discussing use of the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct the FBI's investigation of the Watergate break-ins. Nixon followed through by asking the CIA to slow the FBI's investigation of the crime—claiming, speciously, that national security would be put at risk. In fact, the crime and numerous other "dirty tricks" had been undertaken on behalf of CRP, mainly under the direction of Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. They had also previously worked in the White House in the Special Investigations Unit, nicknamed the "Plumbers". This group investigated leaks of information the administration did not want publicly known, and ran various operations against the Democrats and anti-war protesters. Most famously, they broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg, a former employee of The Pentagon and State Department, had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NewYork Times and as a result was prosecuted for espionage, theft, and conspiracy. Hunt and Liddy found nothing useful, however, and trashed the office to cover their tracks. The break-in was only linked to the White House much later, but at the time it caused the collapse of Ellsberg's trial due to evident government misconduct. There is still much dispute about the level of involvement of leading figures in the White House, such as Attorney General John Mitchell, chief of staff Haldeman, leading aides Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman, and Nixon himself. Mitchell, as the head of CRP, along with campaign manager Jeb Stuart Magruder and Fred LaRue, approved Hunt and Liddy's espionage plans, including the break-in, but whether it went above them is unclear. Magruder, for instance, provided a number of different accounts, including having overheard Nixon order Mitchell to conduct the break-in in order to gather intelligence about the activities of Larry O'Brien, the director of the Democratic Campaign Committee.

There is simply no comparison -- Nixon conspired with his staff and with government officials to obstruct criminal investigations, and he directed a White House staff who authorized or participated in criminal activities and criminal conspiracies, all with the goal of subverting the US electoral system and making sure Nixon won the 1972 election.
Now THAT was criminal. Felt was the patriot. Nixon was the snake.

No fops allowed

The Daily Howler is getting set to explore the question of why conservatives outshine liberals in the US spin wars. Howler writes "Why do liberals fail in our nation's spin wars? Over the weekend, we thought about that problem as we watched Woody Allen's Interiors . . . As we watched, we were mainly struck by the self-involved foppishness of all the central characters . . . right to this day, liberal interests have often been fronted by these very same foppish folk, by the deracinated Manhattan types who thought Interiors showcased great tragedy—the tragedy of a “mediocre novelist” who is furious because his wife, “an embittered poet,” gets better reviews than he does. Why do conservatives often do better in the nation’s endless spin wars? In part, it’s because liberal interests are often promoted by a wide array of self-involved fops."
Reading this, it struck me that we simply do not have this problem in Canada -- here, everybody speaks up.
We frequently see Chantal Hebert and Alan Gregg and Andrew Coyne and Rex Murphy on The National, articulating leftish and rightish views; we watch Harper and Martin and Layton in Question Period. We read Rick Salutin and Jeffrey Simpson and Margaret Wente in the Globe. There is nary a shrinking violet in sight.
Maybe its because so many of our left wingers came out of the union movement while our right wingers came out of the oil patch, but here both sides are tough, and ready to give as good as they get.