Friday, September 18, 2009

The Twitterings of War

Once again the wretched hordes of war are circling around the people of Iran. Like schoolchildren who must prove their rectitude, some American observers are taking gleeful note of how the people of Iran are willing to step into harm’s way to overthrow the current regime. There are no certainties of the outcome, except one: when the rulers of Iran tire of the disruptions, they will send the protesters into oblivion. What else can these safe-in-their-homes commentators say, then, except, we the righteous western champions of goodness must uphold what we think are unchallengeable moral certainties. These electronic picadors do not get near the bull they taunt.

Even if a new set of rulers rise from deadly chaos, and they are given the task of cleaning the flesh and blood from the streets in Teheran, what do U.S. commentators know about how the new regime will change Iran? Nothing. The waste of lives may very well continue under a new regime; like many revolutions, they only provide a new set of fingerprints on the guns. The commentators will have moved on, by then, seeking a new field for their games of empire, unchastised, unbloodied and well-paid for their efforts.



We are forcing the hand of the current leaders in Iran. It is only one day after President Obama said our missile defenses will be turned against Iran. What would you do if you where in charge of Iran, under these circumstances? History’s largest empire, most certainly the nation with the greatest military might in history, the country that overthrew your government a little less than 60 years ago and that has never recognized the legitimacy of your rule, is egging on your people (this is from their point of view) to topple your rule.

Soon, we will find out if President Obama can stand up to the dogs of war and further America’s interests in peaceful ways or if he has to make another “compromise” and start a new, unwinnable conflict. We can only hope he is more John F. Kennedy than Dwight D. Eisenhower (the latter authorized Project Ajax, the operation that overthrew Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the man elected prime minister of Iran in 1953). Even though Kennedy was as cold a warrior as they came, he refused to be dragged past the point of no return during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He also nixed an all-out attack on Cuba when the Soviets put nuclear missiles there. I hope President Obama has read The Guns of August.

From one of the tweets coming out of Iran: Not Gaza, not Lebanon, I’ll die for Iran. If that is your wish, yes you will. And you will only succeed in adding your corpse to the piles.

I do not credit the Iranian regime with pure motives. They are as wicked and dangerous as any set of rulers. The continued incarceration of Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal, the hikers who, it seems, accidentally walked into Iran in August, appears to be indefensible. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has linked their release to Iranian diplomats he says Americans have arrested. The U.S. did arrest five Iranian diplomats in Iraq, allegedly for arming Shi’ite militias, but they were released in July. The backpackers have become pawns in a wretched, global war game. How they may be sacrificed or returned has nothing to do with their own actions. This is senseless cruelty and may still escalate, wasting three more lives.

It looks like the hot, violent repression has been cooled, for today. We will probably see a spate of show trials, forced confessions and executions. The Iranian officials will be using enhanced interrogation techniques to force confessions. Maybe they can outsource that nasty chore and hire Blackwater USA (pardon me, Xe Services LLC) or our own CIA; we can offset the cost of health care insurance if we are shrewd in negotiating a good fee.

Remember, America, Iran and Israel were backroom buddies, once (maybe still, ala Margaret Thatcher). In 1986, under the auspices of President Reagan, Israel supplied Iran with weapons and the U.S. resupplied Israel with new weapons, for which we got cash. Some of that loot went to supply anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, the Contras, in Nicaragua. Also part of the deal was that Iran would do what it could to help in the release of six U.S. hostages who were being held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is what we know. My guess is that there exist unknown unknowns in the tangle that we call American foreign policy.

Nothing the U.S. government says about Iran should be believed. It wastes time trying to intuit the real story. We should not be twittering away the lives of Iranians on such flimsy evidence. They have their own ways of needlessly dying.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Wrought Iron

You think no human being can be completely concealed and still walk among his equals? The wretched can and do. Everyday. Read on, if you want to waste your time.

Lambert is the last, regular human contact I have. Since he allowed me to sublet his basement apartment, we no longer see each other. I have never seen another tenant in the building. No one in the building, except Lambert, has ever seen me. I put Lambert’s payment into a wrought iron mailbox.

I suspect Lambert comes into my apartment occasionally. There is no proof of this. If the casement window is opened, or closed, and I remember it being closed, or open, I do not trust my memory. It is the same when I leave a legal pad on the table. Was it turned up or turned down? My memory must be turning wretched, too.

Nothing was unmistakably disturbed, ever, until today.

The lives of the wretched are concealed. Your ability to disappear increases as your wretchedness grows. The truly wretched completely disappear. Street beggars are not wretched. They are not hidden; thousands of people can pass a supplicant each day. People ignore beggars. People cannot see the wretched; you cannot ignore what you cannot see. Wretches do not want to be seen. I am not asking for anything except to be left alone. That is what I have gotten: only what I had asked for. Only, I have gotten more of it than I expected.

“Noble,” Lambert said when he handed me the apartment keys, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Haugh, haugh.”



I first saw Lambert when he came up to me outside the supermarket. The supermarket manager allows people to take away food that is just overripe enough not to sell, but is still safe to eat. You know how that goes. Urban gleaners can slice away the soft quarter of a head of lettuce or soak stale bread in a cup of coffee to get a meal.

I was just looking at some withered broccoli when a big man, a tall and wide big man, looked down on me. His left eye was slightly, almost unnoticeably, independent of his right. The expected bass voice that asked do you need a bag was instead just over the baritone edge of tenor. I mean you’re just stuffin’ the food in your pockets.

He was the blackest man I had ever seen. His close-cropped natural hair had begun to turn grey. Nothing else distinguished him from the other people on the street: blue jeans, tan polo shirt and white sneakers. There were no scars, tattoos or jewelry, not even a watch. The smoothness of his dark, black skin belonged to someone in his twenties, not to the man in his late forties or early fifties who was handing me a cloth, Whole Foods shopping bag.

I put the gleaned broccoli into the bag and nodded a thank you. He moved on without another word. Within a week I had taken up residence in his basement apartment and Lambert had taken up with a woman who lived on the third floor. The romance has lasted three years. I do not know what will happen if her passion for him cools off, or the other way around.

The wrought iron mailbox hangs on the inside of the basement door. Every person in the building passes the door. The door is locked and only Lambert has a key.

Lambert maintains the mailbox. He is the building’s super. Tenants pass notes into this box through a slot in the door, if they need his services, or drop in their rent checks. It is where I pass my payment to Lambert, through the top of the mailbox. The box is locked and only Lambert had a key, once. Now, I have one, too.

We never see each other. No one in the building knows I live in the basement. There is a separate entrance to the basement from an alley. I am the only one who uses this entrance. Both Lambert and I have this door’s keys (there are two, dead-bolt locks and a police lock).

Unless I do not give Lambert his money for the sublet, no one will notice if I am dead.

This arrangement has allowed me to disappear. Not such a difficult trick. All it takes is enough desire. I got lucky finding someone willing to abet my wretchedness.

It was already dark when I made my way back to the building, opened the locks and scurried into the basement last night. I usually take my shopping bag with me, in case I pass the supermarket on my way in.

The bag hung where I left it. Inside was a large cluster of grapes.

Lambert!

Friday, July 17, 2009

Precious Freedom

Sometimes our better selves guide the pen, even if our real thoughts are opposed to the written words.

If the white, property-owning men who founded this country did not actually believe blacks, women and working people should be equal to them, at least the words they wrote belied their presumed assumptions. You cannot print words about the universal rights of man and hope readers will forever understand man was really meant to be limited to a racial subset of men or one economic class. It is also hard to read those words and think the entitlements to life, liberty and happiness stop at national borders. Maybe they wanted freedom to become more common than even they themselves could support in their own time.

It wastes time arguing what people may have thought, then. Now, we believe freedom is universal no matter what was in our founders’ hearts.

“America will remain strong and united, but its strength will remain dedicated to the safety and sanity of the entire family of man, as well as to our own precious freedom,” said President Gerald Ford upon taking the oath of office (more famous for its “long national nightmare” sentence).

The language used in our political discourse matters. We may not live up to our words at any given moment. Few among us are so constant. Yet it is wise and practical to include the soaring rhetoric of freedom into our laws and official documents. If our fidelity to freedom slips today, at least the language will exist to give subsequent generations a chance to put into practice our self-evident ideals. Weakening freedom’s words puts us at risk of becoming political atheists, or those who do not believe in the people’s right to govern. Political atheists do not believe in universal rights. They frequently use the practical concerns of the moment to undermine our system of government.

These are the stakes in the current debate on what torture means. A few crazies believe we should allow all forms of torture. Most of us do not. It is un-American.

Torture has been used by every military force and national power since the beginning of civilization. Of course America has practiced torture and is using it now. The only people who seem not to know this are those who have been lucky enough to stay out of war or out of prison. Anti-torture language or laws have never stopped the practice. That is not the point.

It is still wrong to torture people and our laws must make all forms of illegal, no matter what we currently believe is practical. We will fall short of our ideals, who does not? The worse alternative is if we fail to embody those ideals in the language of our law. Then, we risk a greater danger of losing those ideals forever in the dilution of the moment.

Sometimes, we catch up in practice to the words we publish, but I would not waste time waiting for that with torture. Still, I am not wretched enough to believe it impossible that America can, in its deeds, move closer to its ideals. Ask women and blacks, who fought to be included in the universal language of our constitution, if you think there is no chance that America can correct its practice of freedom. We cannot control what subsequent generations will do. The best we can hope for is they will take our words at face value.

Wretchedness knows no boundaries. We now call it torture when our enemies do it. If torture is practiced by Americans, it becomes enhanced interrogation techniques. It is a despicable complication of clear language this weaving of torture into the fabric of patriotism.

If you are being interrogated with enhanced techniques and it feels like torture to you, it is torture.

When the rest of the world sees that America openly supports a splitting of enhanced interrogation technique hairs, they naturally understand our precious freedoms apply only to us and us alone. American exceptionalism might become to mean our laws and freedoms apply to everyone except non-Americans. We must make it clear by our actions that our ideas of governing apply universally.

Ford went on to say in his acceptance speech: “truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.”

Break the bond we have with the rest of the world and we give the terrorists who would attack us the tool of truth.

That strained bond might break at home, too. Many Americans also find the language subtleties of enhanced interrogation techniques torturous.

As the spinach-hating little girl created by Carl Rose and E.B. White might conclude today: “I say it’s torture, and I say the hell with it.”

Rock Salt, at Least

If you thought my last post too wretched, or that Rolling Stone too far out for serious discussion about economic issues, check out Paul Krugman's column in today's TNYT.

Maybe rock salt is too gentle a method to punish these monsters.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Load the Rock Salt

I thought I was at the wretched nadir when I began this blog. I should have realized that the world is far more base than even I could imagine.

See Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone: The Great American Bubble Machine.

When I was a kid, I once played near a junkyard (now known as an automotive recycling center). The owner was, well, meaner than a junkyard dog. He kept a shotgun with rock salt loaded shells handy to guard his precious junk. While not hit directly with the sodium pellets, a couple of pieces that scraped my leg managed to teach me about the sanctity of territory.

It is time to get out the rock salt. My guess is that more Americans own guns than pitchforks, the latter being a rather clumsy teaching instrument. The blast and instant creation of salt-rubbed wounds of the former instrument make it a far better tool for deterrence than any garden implement.

A couple of shells per Goldman employee would cure all the ills Taibbi wrote about in his screed of greed.

It is a waste of time to think our government would do anything to help us. No one, and I really mean not one, single person in the executive, legislative or judicial branch of government--or any real contender for any elected or appointed position of power in our government--would do anything else but wait for the calm after the protest storm to resume business as usual. There are long lines to get a chance to wear the public feedbag. So maybe it is time to take the protest directly to the thieves.

There is a cliche about fixing the economic mess that involves letting the people who buried the bodies fix the economy since they know where the bodies are buried. I have not heard anyone point out that the more important point is that these financial ghouls are the ones who know how to bury the bodies and are absolutely uninterested in unearthing their crimes. These ghouls only want to enlarge the economic cemetery.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Headed for the Showers

As wretched as Richard Nixon was, his facility with language sharply contrasts with soon to be ex-Governor Sarah Palin’s “you won’t have me to kick around, anymore” resignation. She has committed political suicide. To use a sport analogy, why would you give a pitcher who walks off the field during a minor league game the ball to pitch in the major leagues?

She looked unsteady and unsure during her resignation. It did not look like someone with national ambitions. Palin is scared. The confidence we saw when she gave her vice presidential candidate’s acceptance speech is gone.

I think it would be a waste of time for Tina Fey to reprise her Palin role, or for others to continue using her for satiric material. Palin is down and out and it would be a loathsome to ridicule someone with such obvious emotional problems. Had she continued in her job, stayed and fought the ethical or other charges pending, if any, then I would say, unleash the dogs of laughter.

Palin might resurface if she her time on the speech circuit becomes politically productive. I doubt it. The Republican wing of the Republocrats was already assembling more suitable politicians for 2010.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Madoff the Piker

Federal District Judge Denny Chin noted Bernard L. Madoff had no one, friends, family or other supporters, attesting to Madoff’s character or any good deeds he may have done. There were no immediate family members present at the sentencing. Madoff is learning about wretchedness.

Salem burned witches and blacks were lynched all over America and they had the same amount of friends: none. Madoff is certainly no victim, but his new 150-year lease with the American prison system is a waste of time. Chin opted to take the least amount of criticism by supersizing the sentence. He acted irrationally and rationality is the least we should expect of federal judges appointed to life terms.

Many people left Madoff to dangle alone in the courtroom. The myriad of useless regulators who job it was to notice if Madoff was actually investing his clients’ money, need to be burned to maximum prison sentences.

Madoff is being used as a lightening rod. He helps deflect anger from the real crooks: the people who brought down the international financial system. They were sentenced to accept trillions in handouts from all of us. Still these crooks have many friends.

Madoff is a piker compared to those scum.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Kick 'em Out

TNYT has done a lot of reporting about the useless legislature in Albany. This morning, it went over the same ground again and it will be wasted time, again. It did not mention what it editorially has not supported: term limits. Two terms and you're out. Just like NYC has for mayor, ah, had for mayor.

At least with term limits the amount of damage they can do is limited. What we have now is wretched and nothing the current crop of politicians will do, which is probably nothing, will help. Kicking them out every once is a while at least keeps them from getting too much experience stealing from us.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Circling Idlewild

She was flying above the Atlantic, pregnant, traveling alone to a place she had never seen to meet strangers, as the propeller droned. He would soon be on a beach in France, but she didn’t know that, then. She saw clear blue sky and seemingly unending water. There were men in uniform. She saw most had bandages or slings. Some were on crutches. There were also the dead men in the cargo hold she could not see. She got used to the drone of the propeller.

It had been a struggle to get her on the plane. Her husband said it would be impossible to get out of England just then. She continued to insist. He was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, certainly you could find a way. She wanted time for her baby. It took a lot of negotiation and cash. And it took a promise that she carried with her to America in her purse.

She was afraid. Her fear was constant like the drone of the propellers. As the flight went on, her fear subsided and merged into the background. She got used to the fear. The fear never left her; it continued long after she left the plane, long after the boy was born. It stayed through the decades until she was very old.

She told the boy years later about war and time. War’s greatest disgrace is not murder, she said, it is theft. War first steals youth, its vitality and vigor. It steals the time one would normally spend on family and friends. War also steals the time one uses finding out what one aught to know and replaces it with learning things that never should have been revealed.

There was one more thing she told the boy about war: its larceny of time never ends. War slices so expertly a layer of time from your life that a piece from every part of your life is lost. You feel misplaced throughout your life, from the time war performs its crafty surgery until you can no longer feel anything at all. That wretchedness drones on and may recede into the background, but it is unceasingly present until you die.

Halfway across the ocean, she realized there was no more time. She knew that before the plane landed she would no longer be pregnant. That is what happened. The boy began life wrapped in parachute cloth. His experience of time started while circling through the light clouds above Idlewild Airport.

She had married him in England, she a graduate student, and he a U.S. Army Lieutenant. They met, courted and married in four weeks. It was August 1943 and they knew that war could intercede to take away their time. The boy heard their story in short pieces from American relatives; her parents and sisters died in The Blitz.

When they knew they would be married, he said she should go to live with his parents in New York. She could have the baby there. They would be safe in America, she and the baby, and he would join them as soon as he could. Though her parents and sisters were dead, she had two uncles and an aunt. She lived with the aunt. They were family and she was, at first, reluctant to leave them. Quickly, as her baby developed, she became more concerned about its safety. The baby needed to get out of the war. She wanted to be out of the war, too.

They delayed. It became spring and they were losing time. He became more reluctant and she more determined. An Air Force pilot he knew from university arrived and said he could arrange it all. It took another month, but she would leave in early May. The pilot had to pay for the paperwork and he asked a favor. She carried the letter for the pilot. It was addressed to her husband’s parents.

She boarded the military plane under a stunningly blue sky. It was warm and sweat dripped down the sides of his face from under his cap. I will be seeing you soon he said. She cried. He would probably die and she was big and fat and going to a strange country to live with strangers and there was somebody she did not know growing inside of her. They kissed, and she climbed a couple of steps and turned. He held her not too hard; her round belly pushed gently against the side of his face. Then she climbed into the plane and soon she was gone.

There was a window seat open and a big, burley sergeant with curly hair and a broad smile, stood up to let her in. His talking calmed her. I’ve taken care of plenty of babies, he said. His five sisters had at least one a piece. He himself had even delivered one of his nephews in the back of a bread truck. The boy would be the second baby he helped into the world.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

The Salesmen of Death

My wretched mood continues, though there is a break in the rain now.

It is around two hours past the time, 17:00 Tehran, that Sunday’s protests were supposed to begin. Calm prevails, so far. According to TNYT, protest leaders are talking about off-street demonstrations. Good. Street protests only will end in corpses. I hope this day’s peace continues and offers a respite from death.

There is no respite from the commentators who are paid to promote the interests of the ruling class from their deskchairs. Their bodies are not in the line of fire.

“There’s a very basic lesson here: For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option,” wrote Mark Steyn in The National Review.

This is the basic lesson of a sixth-grade school child. For great powers, often the best choice is to do nothing; let events on the street play out, and then work with the results. This is the difference between great powers and brutal thugs. Steyn and his cadre were brought up on the Rambo school of diplomacy: kill them before they kill us. They are employed to be the salesmen of death. For the gains in the end will be too small for the many priceless lives spent.

These salesmen of death are the most wretched of men.


“… faux elections because while the regime may have counted the votes accurately, it tightly controlled who could run. The choices were dark black and light black,” wrote TNYT Thomas Freidman in this morning’s paper.

For this you support a revolution? Do these people not understand how many worms will compost the protestors’ corpses?

Nearly anything an American President is politically allowed to say will push Ayatollah Ali Khamenei deeper into a corner. When you corner rulers who are perfectly capable of great brutality (that means most rulers in the history of civilization), they will react predictably. The first responsibility of anyone who rules any country is to keep in power. That is an unavoidable fact. The salesmen of death know this and want to use this fact to force Iran into a downward spiral of chaos. They would then feel justified calling, in their constant chorus, for the hard line tactics they believe can force Iran back under the control of the American Empire.

“I’ve also argued that, although repressive, the Islamic Republic offers significant margins of freedom by regional standards. I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness,” wrote Roger Cohen in TNYT on June 14. (He is bravely reporting from Tehran.)

Cohen did not make an error. Both are true. In 1979, when American hostages were held in Iran, protestors were heard shouting death to the great satan at the television cameras. Then, they would turn away, and, with equal fervor, express friendship for Americans. Nations and people are complex, especially a nation and a people as old as Iran.

All rulers are capable of great banality and cynicism. All rulers understand ruthlessness, else they would not be in power. Al Gore did not become president because George W. Bush understood these lessons and Gore either did not, or he chose a gentler path. I cannot tell which. The outcome was the same, in any case.

Remember that our elections are faux, too. Americans are only more sophisticated in our methods than clumsy rulers elsewhere. Election districts are drawn to maintain elected officials in power. Only a great deal of money elects rulers here. Power does not come from the barrel of a gun in America as from the pocket of a billfold. (Do not be fooled. Rulers here are perfectly capable of ruling by the gun when circumstances allow.) Even the simplest checks on the new, computerized voting machines, those hackers’ delights, are voraciously fought against by those whose interests are in controlling vote counting. There is no limit to the ruthlessness of any nation’s ruling class.

Khamenei has no choice but to support the election. If he annuls the election he admits the process is a farce. If there is a recount and Hussein Moussavi wins, the election will be revealed as a farce. If there is a recount and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still the winner, the recount will be called a farce. America should be wise enough to recognize this. Any rhetorical behests from American officials only serve to harden Khamenei’s resolve to use brutal means to keep power.

It is the apex of wretchedness to push Iran into such chaos.

“Shouts of outrage are fine by folks like me on the web, but the U.S. government should never forget that its primary task is to do no harm,” wrote Gary Sick on Gary’s Choices. “It may be hard to hold your tongue, but then nobody ever said foreign policy was easy.”

Saturday, June 20, 2009

A Vain Cry for Breath

This is a most wretched day. New York is in the midst of a monsoon; everybody is depressed. New York State still has no working government. Cookie dough is being recalled for E coli contamination. President Obama seemed to be practicing last night, at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner, for his next career: on Comedy Central.

Oh, yes. A massacre is underway in Tehran.

I would weep if I had any tears left. In the six and a half decades that I have been breathing millions have involuntarily stopped breathing, and I have shed tears for them. It is a wonder my weeping has not turned me into a desiccated corpse. So no more tears from me; I would rather breathe than not breathe.

“The World cries seeing your last breath, you didn't die in vain. We remember you,” one poster is reported to have Twittered.

All dying is in vain. The only thing more persistent than violence among human beings is death. And death could be seen as unusually persistent except there is nothing abnormal about dying. Iran seems poised for a killing season, a monsoon of violence. It is time for retreat. We need to forget our national and international policies and ask all sides to withdraw. America’s interest, everyone’s interest, pales before the finality of oblivion. There will be time enough to talk to Iran’s rulers about keeping civilization’s worst killing devices from spreading. Time for talk ends only when breathing ends.

All the protest over the election results are in vain. For when the killing ends the same rulers will prevail and the same national interests will remain.

Evidently, there are a lot of people in Iran who are at a point of voluntarily giving up respiration for their cause. As always, whenever people prefer not to breath, there are plenty of others who will be glad to hold a pillow over their willing faces.

Are there any good guys in Iran? Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is threatening protestors. Shut up or be killed! Mir Hussein Moussavi is reported to have said he will accept martyrdom. Is he hoping to lead his followers to certain death by example? A suicide bomber attacked a shrine to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Was the bomber a Moussavi martyr or working for the government to blemish the protest movement? The protestors themselves know the government is ready to kill as much as necessary to restore order, but continue anyway. It is always a lovely day to die.

None in Iran are as wretched as our own government. President Obama takes the side of the protestors; he spurs them on by only admonishing the rulers of Iran. “If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion,” BHO said in a statement released by the White House. Blast dignity to hell. All governments, everywhere, must ask all sides to cease tempting the death instinct. Tell protestors to go home and stay home. Ask Iran’s rulers to send its Basij troops back to the barracks. It is time to assure Iran’s ruling class America will recognize its authority after the crisis ends and that we will no longer interfere with Iran’s internal affairs.

America asking a country to respect the dignity of its own people is like O.J. Simpson engaging in marriage counseling. Our history is littered with the undermining of democratically elected governments. Iran is the prime example of America’s wretched behavior. If you were in charge in Iran would you have anything but contempt for American rulers who have not only overthrown your government, but have done nearly everything short of invasion to undermine your country?

First, America isolates that ancient nation from normal international discourse for the sake of our own domestic political ends, then we, one of the youngest of nations, make demands. All such demands are in vain unless America is ready to stop enough Iranian people from breathing so they acquiesce. That is the vainest of hopes.

Night fell on Iran; inevitable darkness seems to ebb the tide of death. I have this wretched fear that once the sun rises, unless morning brings sobriety to all sides, the protest and killing will continue. For while there has been plenty of killing in the shade, mass death, perversely, happens more efficiently under the sun.

One protestor was quoted in a news report to have said they, the rulers, are out of their minds if they think bloodshed can crush their movement. A wretchedly reckless thing to believe. Governments are known to be willing to shed as much blood as it takes to quench any threat to their rule.

Enough people have stopped breathing for the privilege of fronting for Iran’s rulers.

Maybe they don't like the beards



Damn. Now, I will have to update the Wasting Time list because WashPo fired Dan Froomkin. I always thought is was wasting time(squared) to put a standard newspaperland source on this list.

Sydney Schanberg, who was a NYT's Op-ed columnist (focused on Metro issues) was fired for being a pain in the ass, too. That was at a time when it was almost unheard of for TNYT to fire a columnist. There ain't nothing new.

The circumstances for such firings are always different with each case. At the same time, it seems that standard newspaperland management leans toward the ruling powers when it makes its decisions.

At the time of this posting, Wikipedia does not even mention TNYT fired Schanberg.

So it goes.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Springtime for Amherst

“Lenders didn’t hold on to their loans, but instead sold them off to be repackaged into securities, which in turn were sold to investors who didn’t understand what they were buying.”

When I saw this quote from President Obama, I thought it was a wretched analysis of the state of affairs regarding credit-default swaps and subprime mortgage-backed securities. Does BHO really believe the people buying CDS are that stupid? Then I remembered Max Bialystock.

Bialystock was the fictional Broadway producer who oversold shares in his new play, betting it would flop and he would not have to return his investors’ money. Max would have made money for himself and his partner, but it was illegal. Plus, it was small potatoes. Bialystock needed to think on a larger scale, like the financial firms America has bailed out.

Amherst Holdings, the Texas brokerage house, built on the Bialystock method by buying subprime mortgages and overselling CDS on those mortgages. It then arranged to pay down those toxic loans and profited on the difference: they purchased $29 million of subprime mortgages and sold $130 million of CDS. Now the buyers of the CDS are crying foul. Boohoo.

All this was splendidly reported in The Wall Street Journal.

Those people are that stupid. Even I wasn’t wretch enough to think that.

Choosing Sides

I know I am wasting time. Here it is anyway.

In his post at TruthDig, "The War Between Civilizations That Never Was," William Pfaff noted:

"(The Chinese are now on the side of the United States, where much of their fortune is tied up.)"

I won't comment on Pfaff's main topic involving Professor Samuel Huntington's odd notions about the clash of civilizations. That's time to waste another day.

As to Pfaff's aside, we must constantly keep in mind that every country in the history of the human race has only been on one side, its own. Any ruling class in any country would be rightfully subject to violent revolt if they made any decision against the country’s interest, allies be damned.

If China were on “our side” it would put more pressure on North Korea, with which it trades profitably in armaments. China also wants to be dominant in its region and not increase America’s influence there.

No country does anything that is not in its interest unless it is forced by a stronger country. We constantly forget this primary rule of international affairs.

The bonds that tie nations are among the most ephemeral alliances.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Perpetual War

Maybe if wars were studied like English departments study literature, we could have a theory of postmodern war. Traditional wars had beginnings and ends, like the world wars of the last century. Then the Cold War came, a postmodern conflict. It was war about war.

While its main combatants did not fight directly, a long string of proxy conflicts brought the level of war’s absurdity to new heights. Many regional conflicts, at that time, were more about the US and the USSR than the aims of the warring parties.

That postmodern conflict was not a joke. Both sides had atomic weapons enough to end human life on this planet. Those of us who lived through that time believed the world’s collective weapons could destroy everything at any time. We had air raid drills and bomb shelters. Metaphoric clocks read only minutes to the midnight doom of nuclear apocalypse.

Then the USSR collapsed and the warning clocks were reset to give us a little more time between life and the end of the world. War planners did not sit idle; they did not waste time. When 9/11 came, they were ready with a new kind of war, a most wretched kind of conflict.



I call it Neopostmodern War. There is no set battleground or territory where this new kind of war can take place; it can happen anywhere and nowhere. No real enemies exist. There are just vague notions of western values versus whatever anti-western values can be concocted. Neopostmodern combatants owe no particular allegiance to any country or place. Any religious basis for fighting is self-defining on all sides. The most exploited part of Neopostmodern War is that it has no end. The narrative of this new kind of war only reveals new enemies for as far into the future as we can reasonably hope to see.

The war on terrorism is perpetual war. With existing technologies and arms markets, there will always be enough people willing to attack American interests with enough force to make an endless manifestation of danger credible. So, there is no longer a need to reduce military budgets to “peacetime levels” as there no longer exists times of peace. This war has no end because the supply of hate and violence are the only things in greater supply than our collection of armaments. We are not entertaining ourselves to death, as some people say; we are defending ourselves into oblivion.

You will waste your time arguing that the basis for perpetual war is wrong because the ones who argue that there are enemies out there ready to attack us at anytime are right. Military and political leaders must conduct perpetual war. They have taken oaths to defend America and defend us they must.

At the same time it is also true that defense spending at current levels is unsustainable. We are on the verge of seeing how it will destroy us economically. Putting the world under America’s armed guards is also unsustainable. We are fast approaching a time when the other national powers will not accept America’s military dominance. Neopostmodern Warfare is about enemies without borders. There are no neopostmodern nations, however. Nations are very much about borders.

America is trapped in an endless loop. We cannot let our guard down on terrorism. A lowered level of preparedness will lead to disaster. So we employ the maximum, politically viable defense. That greater show of force by Empire America means more people around the world willing to join the struggle against us. America, then, expands its defenses. So it goes.

Capture a territory thought to aid and abet a terrorist group and the terrorist group just moves elsewhere. Iraq was not a center of military resistance to America, until we invaded. Fighters from all over then joined native forces fighting to make America’s stay in Iraq costly. They mostly succeeded.

Our enemy can be anywhere. Enough hate exists everywhere to make that true.

I doubt if anyone knows how wars without geography, wars that are not about winning territory, can end. Even wars that are mostly about territory, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, can go on for decades. Yet conventional wars do end when the territorial dispute is settled, or if a massacre makes the geographical question moot. Perpetual war changes this.

Defense at any cost will also lead to a suicidal end of our American values. Domestic spying finally has the technological means to reach truly Orwellian ends. That may not mean much to our current politicians, who are mainly political atheists, after all. Most believe in nothing but reelection. I am not going to waste my time trying to convince anyone how un-American our current rulers are.

The most wretched “enemy” are anti-Empire American citizens, and the government is preparing for that eventuality, too.

This One's for You

“Tomorrow it is going to be you.” (From a letter by Iran’s former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sent to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei before the election, according to Neil Macfarquhar of The New York Times.)

Rafsanjani was warning Khamenei about ignoring the public. Nothing scares a revolutionary government more than its own revolutionaries.

Iran’s religious rulers are hemmed in by centuries of tradition. They have not reached the wretched level of the politicians who rule America’s faux republic. Khamenei and his cadre of clerics will learn quickly. He may be a weak ruler, but Khamenei cannot be too scared. The Guardian Council’s ploy to recount some of the ballots allows time to pass, hot heads to cool. The trick is to keep the people returning to the polls, to keep believing that elections are fair.



Iran’s rulers will quickly lose their clumsy ways of governing and provide their people a smoother, more skilled tailoring of the wardrobe of democracy. Underneath their clerical robes, they will remain as autocratic as any ruling class.

Iran’s government is not for its people; no government is. Today and tomorrow, Mr. Khamenei, as a wretch in Iran would say, the government, it is going to be you.

Monday, June 15, 2009

More wretchedness to come

Chris Hedges in his latest column gives us a preview of the wretched times ahead.

"It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose."

The countries that are attacking the dollar do not waste time. An American Empire financed by the debt of the very nations it surrounds is unsustainable. Most of America's discretionary spending is on the military or goes to support the military indirectly. If you think the economic crises is wretched now, just fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy flight.

I did not believe my wretchedness could increase. Now I think it can.

Not really news from Iran

The only thing really surprising about the wretched election in Iran is how far behind that ancient Persian regime is to America in stealing elections. Next time, Ali Khamenei should hire ex-Bush election workers to consult on more sophisticated election manipulation, if he cares at all about appearances.

Looks like we will soon see how they feel about appearances and how far behind Iran is to China and Tiananmen Square.

How far behind Iranian reformers are behind in realizing that they are wasting time is obvious.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Echos of War

The anniversary of D-Day brought reminds me of a story I thought lost to my wretchedness.

The story is about a father who took his family on a road trip when his boy was 10. The family drove from New York through Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Kentucky on the small highways and county roads. It was the first time the boy saw the Appalachian tarpaper shacks he had heard about. The father drove maybe 2,000 miles in ten days. The family sat in the car a lot. The father loved to drive. He was most mobile when driving, less so then when walking, since he had lost a leg on D-Day.

No book, no movie, no personal account could relate the real horrors of war. Those of us lucky to have passed our time through this life without experiencing war do not even suspect how tragic it is. To use a rumsfeldian construct, it is one of the unknown, unknowns. We civilians can only shiver in our suspicions, and sometimes that shivering is literal.

The family stopped one night in Kentucky. in a small roadside motel that sat atop a hill about 200 yards from the road. It was a hot July night and there was no air conditioning. A breeze blew through the thin white curtains that were drawn across the window; darker, heavier curtains lay unmoved at each side. Cars sounded as if they were passing far away, as far away as the graves of Arlington.

The boy and his six-year-old sister shared one double bed, the parents the other bed. Not long after the siblings fell asleep, the screams started. They were familiar shrieks. They had heard these screams before. Yet in that far away place, in that quiet and unfamiliar room, it was as if they heard them for the first time. The father’s missing leg echoed the pain from the beaches of northern France to the hillsides of rural Kentucky.

Many years later, the father told the boy about the bullets that ripped through his left leg at mid thigh. The machine gun rounds split his femur. The two severed ends of that bone painfully rubbed against each other as he was carried away from the battlefield, hours later, and brought to the field hospital. He screamed for morphine as he was unable to pass out. The medics took off his leg as the tent flapped in the wind.

His phantom limb pain recurred with frequency. The boy would lie awake in his bed at night and hear his father’s screams. His transistor radio’s earplug helped muffle the father’s cries. Late-night clear channels allowed the boy to hear broadcasts as far away as Florida and Chicago on a device not much larger than today’s portable media players. He sometimes imagined he could hear the screams of wounded men from all the battlefields of all time.

That was romantic nonsense. Hearing a father’s pain was not much more than watching a crappy war movie, or even a good war movie, if there is such a thing. You lie in your own bedroom, lie in your own bed and are trapped in your own body, within your own soul, and only imagine you know. You cannot really understand how it is to be in the line of fire or, or be the target of a bullet or a bomb, unless you are on the battlefield when the ammunition is exploding around you.

The boy was only feeling is own fears. His father was mortal, more so than most fathers, he thought. Everyone learns about the mortal weakness of parents; the boy just learned it sooner than most.

The boy of the past is gone, lost to the wretchedness of today. Today there are new battlefields constructed by men who pointedly stayed away from the fields of war when they were called to fight. They did not hesitate to send men and women to their new, useless wars. Only those who fought in wars hesitate to start wars; the ones who never fought, especially the ones who made certain they would never fight, can fearlessly put other people in the sights of guns.

Do not think I feel superior to the makers of war. These thoughts are only posted to pass the time. I am wretched and unable to feel that I can soar above anyone. It wastes time to think empires will bend to the will of their people and stop war or that empires will never begin a war because its people forbid it. The person who campaigned on the strength of his opposition to America’s War on Iraq, now that he has the authority to end it, hesitates.

From D-Day to today, we have passed the time. Its lessons are wasted.

The 62 Thieves

I am especially wretched today. I get no pleasure pointing out how much wasted time goes on in the state capital of New York.

It does not matter what label the 62 thieves in Albany give themselves. They are now and always will be Republocrats and their actions in the state senate yesterday reduced the deplorable ability of the state to govern itself to a new low.

At least Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania had the decency to tell the truth when he explained why he made his recent switch to the Democrats.

Do not worry. It will get worse.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Avoiding Icebergs

Time passes. Another ostensibly progressive American President fills the air with words of hope and progress. More time gets wasted.

I will pass the time by speaking as clearly and plainly as I can, in later postings, about some specific issues raised by our audacious leader. Here are two important issues you can waste your time on, now.

The first issue is the contradictory nature the speech’s geography, Egypt. Americans are notorious for not being well-schooled in geography. Be assured that Arab listeners to the speech fully understand the resonance of the country that surrounds the Suez Canal.

Hosni Mubarak has been its elected President since his appointment in 1981, after the murder of Anwar el-Sadat. Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for 24 years with the imprimatur of elections. Mubarak has ruled for 28 years under similar election rules. Gamal Mubarak, Hosni’s second son, may succeed his father under the well-known rules of hereditary democracy.

The second issue is the contradictory nature of this president. We once had another president like BHO: JFK. The latter’s confident call to young Americans resonated, then too, and we hoped for change from the first president born in the 20th Century. The trail of ruins JFK left included assassinations, assassination attempts, secret operations designed to subvert other countries, the expansion of an unnecessary war in Vietnam, and other recklessness Empires promote. JFK was the first American president we deified. His was the first Imperial Presidency. He lied about a missile gap with the Soviets to get elected. Only a few extreme right-wingers surpassed his Cold War rhetoric.

The country was ruled competently under JFK and he began to soften on civil rights issues, even though as a Democrat he was as committed as FDR to retaining the solid south. We can give him credit, though, for keeping us from a shooting war with the Soviets over the Berlin Wall and Cuba missiles crises.

I cried like the schoolboy I was at his death and shuddered in horror through the bloody decade that ensued. My participation in marches and demonstrations, the time spent in jail for peaceful protest, was wasted. All the people who, like myself, dissented against the American Empire were just passing time.

BHO is not changing course, as a careful reading of his speech can confirm. His ship of state is just more adept than the last at clearing the rhetorical icebergs.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The Identity Element

I am a wretch. I have no friends. All the members of my family are dead. What I call home you would call a hovel. I can wear all the clothes that I own at one time though it takes several layers. My meals come mainly from soup kitchens and garbage dumpsters. At least I can bathe daily and keep myself clean (not all the wretches I come across can do so). I have a New York City library card and travel from branch to branch reading books and newspapers and logging onto the Internet through their computers. The musty smell of books sooths me. The flickering of computer monitors passes time.

I once lived in more prosperous times that included a wife and children. They have been obliterated. Every physical trace of them was destroyed in fires. Of course I had a father, a mother, siblings. They existed too many years ago. My wretchedness has removed them from memory. Except that I recall having a family, I remember nothing about them at all.

I once worked. Now, I collect Social Security. The pension fund I contributed to for 40 years was stolen. No one was prosecuted, no one was held responsible. I read all the civil court and corporate documents, the SEC filings, every newspaper and magazine story and every scrap of information on the Internet. I wanted to murder someone, anyone. I wasted time. I found many people who should have known, but no one who was accountable. And there still was no money left. Nothing cannot be undone.

I am just passing time. Keep your sympathies for the other wretches, or soon to be wretches. And I don't care if your sympathies are thrown back at you by them. To hell with them and to hell with you. If I live another 20 years it will only be by amazing luck. I would rather breath than not breath, and that is all. To hell with me.

OK, you say to me, you are a wretch. A self-indulgent man who pretends to being horrible to shock us. As if we can be shocked. You overestimate my concern. I have nothing shocking to tell you. What I have to say will probably not concern even the most sympathetic, or bored, among you. Nor would I indulge in shocking you even if I had something scandalous to say. What I have to say, you already know. I have the time to tell you what you know. You have the time to ignore what you know. There is no great mystery here. We live under the equal shadows of fear and hatred and they mix to create contempt. No one understands better what it is like to live in the focus of contempt as the wretched.

Like an element that leaves unchanged a number it combines with, I am an identity element. Add zero to any number in a set of real numbers and you have no change. One plus zero is one. Multiplication with an identity element does not change anything, nor will anything change under division. Subtract zero from one and it still leaves you with one. I have not changed anything during the nearly 65 years I have trod this earth. Not one member of the human system has been changed by contact with me. Need you wonder why I am so wretched?

Even the librarians I see every week barely recognize me. They remember my clothes, at best. Do you have a library card, they ask even though they have asked me that same question scores of times. It is not their fault. I never borrow materials. Once inside, unless I have to reserve a computer, I never speak to the librarians or to anyone else. I find the furthest spot from their counter to sit. I am especially unnoticed as the library fills with people. When I go to the main branch, I sit as far back of whichever side of the great hall I choose that day and read books just a few steps from my seat. I once fell asleep there and lay undisturbed until morning and the opening of the doors. I let an hour pass before I got up and left. No one noticed.

My whole being is concentrated on keeping to myself, staying alone. I stay so far apart from anyone else, I readily pass unnoticed. Sometimes a neighborhood regular recognizes me and gives me a nod. I then change my route. It is easy to find alternate ways to the same place.

You might think I am exaggerating. You think no one could so completely disappear. Yes, we can so disappear and, yes, I have thus dissolved. Anyone can hide in plain sight in a world so overfilled with people.