Deep Blade Journal

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling impression

Jonathan Schwarz digs up an evidently-forgotten mea culpa in the Washington Post.

Dead at 73

My favorite quote from the eminently quotable Ann Richards concerned then-president George H. W. Bush at a joyous moment after a presidential debate in October 1992:

He’s done, stick a fork in him.

It looked like we would be able to get rid of a Bush, and we did. So long ago…

Please see winding road for a very interesting perspective on Ann Richards.

Because I read the Eschaton blog in a feed reader, I did not notice until now that one of my recent readers & commenters was a guest blogger over there for a few days. Good work, Avedon!

Now Avedon’s post I referred to has become a sort of weird controversy. I have little to say about this, except that I will mention that on 9/11/2001, I was fast asleep in Westbrook, Maine at the moment Atta checked in at the Portland Jetport about two miles away. Still gives me the creeps.

Anyone catch this Chris Matthews thing on what Atta was doing in Portland on 9/10/2001?

Update: Make sure to visit Avedon Carol’s blog, The Sideshow. This post addresses the “idiot” Brendan Nyhan. More important, we are implored to write our reps. so that Arlen Spector’s bill granting Bush dictatorial powers be stopped.

“Why?” question still not examined, looks in the mirror not on the agenda

This is an extreme example, but I think it shows us something about the far-too-common jingoism branch of the American intellectual class and how they understand 9/11:

Remember 9-11 without denial
By Jon Reisman

I watched the attacks on the World Trade Center on a perfect blue September morning five years ago. As I watched the world change with my two young sons I thought that I didn’t want to be at war. I really wanted to deny the reality of that awful day and its consequences. Apparently many of my fellow citizens feel the same way. Denial may ultimately bring peace through appeasement and defeat, but I can’t recommend it….

Riesman, identified as a faculty member at the University of Maine at Machias, goes on to paint essentially the Rums-Chen-Bushian image of an epic global struggle against the mad, ruthless force of “Islamo-fascist” killers from a “pool of 12,000 homicide bombers”.

Why? They do it for glory–“certain cultures are apparently glorifying such actions” and that is “disturbing.”

For how long will the war continue? Until there is “peace”:

Peace will come when we either win or lose the war. At the moment we’re losing, but we’d be in greater peril if we had accepted the 2001 status quo in the Middle East. If we want peace either the three large Persian Gulf regimes must change, or Israel must cease to exist. One Persian Gulf regime has been replaced, and another is developing nuclear weapons and flouting the United Nations. Either that regime will succeed, eradicate Israel and win the war, or they will not.

And Israel is the linchpin of Middle East righteousness. When Israel disappears under (I guess) Iran’s mushroom cloud, it’ll be the end of “America, capitalism and freedom.”

Never mind Israel’s advanced nuclear armaments pointed all over the Arab & Persian world? No threat there?

Over the last week or so, a media drumbeat of 9/11 5-yr anniversary programs sought answers to the question, “Are we more secure?” Every answer came from a point of view similar to Mr. Reisman’s.

I went to a forum yesterday where my friend Doug, a philosophy professor and academic with a more serious analysis, made an observation I have found quite compelling: “Only a very small percentage of our insecurity has anything to do with terrorists flying planes into buildings. We need to deepen and expand our notions of security….People flying planes into the World Trade Center, or suicide bombers, those are real concerns. But what I’d like to suggest is these are less than one percent of the real concerns about insecurity in the world that are not being addressed.”

The list of unaddressed security issues are very familiar to those of us not fortunate enough to belong to the upper classes: lack of jobs, the health care crisis, school decay, soaring energy prices.

Meanwhile, the United State continues to lead a Terror War steeped in false premises and manipulation of intelligence. The consequences of the US invasion of Iraq has visited the equivalent of one 9/11 per month on the Iraqis, as the Iraqi people have suffered untold detention, torture, and death at the hands of the Americans.

Yes, the post 9/11 Terror war started up whole new programs of attempted US domination around the world. But it is funny to listen to administration officials make the ridiculous argument that 9/11 could not be about US policy because Iraq had not yet been invaded at that time. These arguments presume that history itself started on 9/11/2001. Here is a quote from Vice President Cheney from a couple of weeks ago,

I know some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, we simply stirred up a hornet’s nest. They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway. As President Bush has said, the hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

In fact there was history before 9/11. Rarely were US actions purely beneficent. The savagery of American policy over the last few decades hardly can be underestimated.

Here is how Guardian writer Seamus Milne put it in a September 13, 2001 comment:

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But 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. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world….

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush’s father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel’s 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

Now President Bush wants us to believe his utterly failed war that has destroyed Iraq is some kind of global line in the “struggle between tyranny and freedom” where “the worst mistake” would be to “pull out” because the terrorists we have attracted to Iraq “will follow us” home.

Mr. Bush then says, “The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.” He may be right, but he has it backwards. Then only victory possible at this point is a Pyrrhic victory where possibly decades of struggle against American domination by Iraqi resistance and their supporters will be the only thing that follows.

It’s turned out just like I wrote the week before the invasion:

US taking of Iraq will increase, not lessen, the chance of terrorism against Americans….Bush is in the process of whipping up such strong anti-American sentiment throughout the world that pathetically weak Iraq is near the back of the line of potential attackers who will remain angry for a long, long time. In the run-up to the attack, the terrorism threat is being played like an accordion with the flood of alerts and news of bin Laden tapes and al-Qa’ida connections to Hussein. Listen to the din carefully and you will hear the dissonance: Powell tells the U.N about al-Qa’ida in Iraq, but there are disclaimers on the terror alerts that want to direct us away from thinking there is a link to the coming war….Unfortunately, the anger generated by this approach will leave America the target of terror for years to come.

…An extended, dangerous period of escalation of application of U.S. power in an attempt to hold and control its expanding spoils of war can be expected. Despite their arrogance and hubris, Bush and his team should not have much confidence that the chaos of the post-invasion period can be kept benign. There is great uncertainty about the controllability of forces that could be unleashed as America commits to new global management requirements far beyond its present substantial deployments. Current U.S. planning envisions a three-phase transition of Iraq from American military administration to some form of American-style government led by current Iraqi exiles. This process will be highly problematic and will probably require considerable force to pacify the disparate populations within Iraq. Beyond Iraq, the U.S. intends to insure that the behavior of Saudi Arabia and other countries with strategic resources align with its hegemonic goals, thus inviting a radical anti-american response.

It really didn’t take a genius to see this then, nor does it take one to see where all this is still heading right now.

I suppose this has been the genius of the Bush regime. They have taken an extreme demonstration of vulnerability in the technological age–“Nineteen men attacked us with a barbarity unequaled in our history”–and turned that into an “offensive in a war unlike any we have fought before.”

But the Terror War is a failure. The “offensive” sweeps up mostly the innocent. Americans still don’t get it. Provoking people around the world against by killing their kin while we wallow in our victimhood is hardly going to protect us. Our attention to the real question of why someone would want to hurt us is lost.

Five years ago this week I wrote this about justice for 9/11:

Naturally, our first reaction is that we want those responsible punished. And they should be punished. But I have a great deal of fear that the U.S. will retaliate, blindly, with actions that would put us on the same disgusting moral level of terrorism of the hijackers. If we as a generous, free, peace-loving people, want justice, there should be justice, not just vengeance. This is no time for blind patriotism that could become the justification for the killing of innocents in the manner of the hijackers. Justice must be calm and measured in a fair Court of Law. Justice must involve not only punishment of perpetrators, but also an examination of the conditions giving those perpetrators the passions they possess lest such attacks will happen again. We must ask and answer fully—Why?

What President Bush and his administration have done, the multiple 9/11s they have inflicted upon others, unfortunately has come to pass with far too little resistance at home. We won’t be safe until we can take a good hard look in the mirror and act on to correct the moral failings that we would see.

Doc-u-drama and elections

Airdate: January 5, 2003; Executive Producer: Robert Greenwald; Co-Executive Producer: Alys Shanti; Supervising Producer: Philip Kleinbart; Writer: Steven Mazur; Director: Penelope Spheeris; Cast: Brian Dennehy, Mike Farrell, Shannon Elizabeth, Cameron Bancroft, Christian Kane

MR. BLUE (Brian Dennehy): This is America–life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness–you see something you want, you just take it.

Curious thing about the airdate of this 2-hr made-for-TV depiction of the Enron collapse, it was pulled from it’s original airdate just before the 2002 mid-term election.

Here’s how the Washington Post reported the story at the time it did finally air, safely into January 2003:

CBS originally scheduled its movie about the Enron corporate scandal for broadcast two days before the November elections, and the movie’s director is questioning whether politics was behind a last-minute decision to move the air date to this Sunday …

“The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron” had been on CBS’s schedule for Sunday, Nov. 3, just ahead of the Nov. 5 midterm elections.

Director Penelope Spheeris said today that she was surprised and unhappy when she received a call two weeks ahead of the broadcast informing her that the movie had been postponed.

“I didn’t ever get a reason why,” she said. “We were under such pressure to get the thing done. We were supposed to have it done in the last part of October when it was suddenly canceled. . . . We just dropped it.”

A spokeswoman for CBS said the election played no part in the decision to move the air date. “I don’t think politics had anything to do with the scheduling decision,” she said, adding that she was unsure of the reason for originally scheduling the Enron movie just before the election.

But other people close to the project said they learned that CBS President Leslie Moonves and Entertainment President Nancy Tellem got cold feet as the November air date neared, growing uncomfortable at the prospect of appearing to criticize the Republican administration. Moonves is an active contributor to the Democratic Party but has also forged relationships in the Bush White House.

Darn media liberals, always out to get Bush and the Republicans, can’t have that.

Meanwhile ABC’s right-wing-friendly fictionalized doc-u-drama “The Path to 9/11” is, according to the rightist website NRO, “locked and ready to air” in its prime-time slots this Sunday and Monday. Media Matters is following the details of the story, with everything they have so far accessible here.

I think the reasons for the observed behavior of corporate media in these circumstances is clear. The orientation of executives is to curry favor with the government in power. As soon as it looked like media-consolidation-friendly Republicans might be threatened in the close 2002 Congressional election, no CBS exec felt like embarrassing them by waving their biggest scandal in front of them just prior to the voting.

On the other hand, “The Path to 9/11” reinforces Republican 9/11 mythology. The Terror War response to the attacks has always been the Republican strong suit with a voting public seeking power over an uncertain world. Slyly portraying Democratic weakness through scenes of not-enough-blood-and-guts moments prior to 9/11 in the previous administration serves this right-wing narrative well.

The lets-bomb-them-just-to-be-safe approach to the Terror War cuts across all political lines. It is the most powerful thing the Republicans have over the public, as is demonstrated by the way the Democrats whimper in the corner as Terror War measures are forcefully promoted by the Administration. “The Path to 9/11” seems to be out there to bash down “September 10” political notions that seem to be making a comeback following the Iraq debacle.

Glimpses of fall

Broccoli is late, only the third plant to mature

Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina)

While the broccoli plants are developing nice, thick stems, the heads are hardly full. And it’s been so slow to mature.

Meanwhile, sumac turning that incredible red-orange lines the road down to the Salmon Club Park.

Stirring the wingnuts

Richly deserved

Newt is on a marketing tour, promoting the Bush agenda of war and destruction of our social fabric for the benefit of right-wing Republican elites, like those at the despicable Maine Heritage Policy Center.

The headline for Newt’s Wednesday appearance in South Portland, Maine was picked up by AP and sent far and wide around the world:

Gingrich Urges US: Get Tough with Iran

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine (AP) - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says it’s time for the United States to get tough with Iran’s Islamic theocracy.

Speaking before a conservative public policy group Wednesday, Gingrich said Americans should take Iranian leaders’ threats seriously, before they acquire nuclear weapons.

“We have real enemies and they would like to kill us,” said Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who engineered a GOP congressional takeover in 1994.

Gingrich, attending the Maine Heritage Center Policy Center’s annual luncheon, said it’s time for Americans to “profoundly rethink” their position on Iran and be prepared to take all necessary steps to safeguard the United States.

He said the United States is paying for former President Clinton’s foreign policies, which he said gave Americans “eight years of appeasing the world and provided an opportunity for Osama bin Laden to bomb two U.S. embassies and the USS Cole.”

“You don’t appease your enemies - you defeat them,” Gingrich said. “We have to take this seriously because the next time we won’t just lose a building or an airplane - we will potentially lose a city.”

Does he mean that just to be safe, we ought to nuke Iran to oblivion? Where do you draw the line below which the form of aggression chosen against your perceived enemy amounts to appeasement?

How about the recent “truce with the Taliban” declared in the Waziristan region of Pakistan? Are the spate of briefings we used to get on Pakistani government “hot pursuit” of terrorists in this region over? Now what’s happening there is called an “integrated civilian military-political approach” in order “to try to work with them”. I don’t know, after Newt’s speech, sure does sound like appeasement to me.

While in Maine, Gingrich couldn’t resist taking a shot at my state-supported health care plan that I pay a lot of money to purchase. He called it “a car with three flat tires,” and “a failed program”.

Obviously, all the years of federal health care Gingrich received at taxpayer expense did not improve his ability to care or be sympathetic to people under fire from out-of-control private insurance companies.

MSNBC host Keith Olberman yesterday gave Gingrich the perfect award for his muddy manner and inconsistent logic–Worst Person of the World.

OLBERMANN:…our winner, Newt Gingrich. The disgraced former speaker of the House, not only lying about finding 700 new weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but telling a TV audience that it’s, quote, “not an insult[]” to compare those who criticize the war in Iraq or even the president to the appeasers who enabled Hitler. I don’t want to be an alarmist or anything, but I’m beginning to think the radical right has issued a new set of talking points. Newt Gingrich, today’s “Worst Person in the World.”

School days

Heavenly blue morning glory

School days mean early mornings for me this fall, an 8am class to teach three days per week. Thank goodness our best crop of morning glories ever will be there to greet me as I leave the house. (This is just the first FGB entry on them.)

Seven pints of tomatoes went into jars this week too. School days are harvest days.