bookofdays

barbara hall and the secret of the zeitgeist

So I’ve been wondering for some time about me and Barbara Hall. Do we sleep in the same muddy swim, grasping at half-glimpsed figures from not-shared childhoods, and wake up to read the same newspapers? Is she the girl who left Hunter after 7th grade, and brought a bushel of my obsessions away with her? Or did I leave smudges of my DNA on her page proofs, to merge with hers?

What the hell am I talking about?

Let’s start- as I did – with  “Joan of Arcadia.”   Given my own, albeit slow-steeping, creative interest in Jehanne Darc, my ears pricked when I heard about this series, with equal parts curiosity and dread.  Joan of Arc in high school? Then a friend who works in Hollywood told me it was better than I’d expect, and when I finally checked it out, I was struck (like a lot of people, including the New Yorker) by its glum wit, sharp dialogue, and  fine acting. It became one of the only series I follow regularly (joining the odd fellows of “The West Wing” and the aforementioned “Full Metal Alchemist”). It’s also on the same earnest-borderline-sentimental scale as both what I read and write.

Over that first season, however, I began to notice queerly similar subject matter, beyond the sideways Joan of Arc motif.

In fairly quick sequence, episodes dealt with suicide (in terms that echo my book fairly closely), sexual assault (with a fairly sophisticated understanding of trauma and memory), and psychiatric hospitalization (that last implied by the conceit, of course, but still). With the conspicuous exception of the military – conspicuous considering the amount of violence, including a Columbine-cipher and several serial killers, embedded in the series’ police plots – there’s hardly a writing subject I’ve taken on that doesn’t find its way into this series somehow.  As I said to a friend, “Interests like these --- trauma, types of suicide, magic realism, Joan of Arc -- don't usually converge this closely in one person.” I know TV shows are written by teams – and that the Joan team in particular includes David Grae, one of the founders of Gotham Writers Workshop, where I teach – but the unifying vision is still Hall’s, and I thought for some time about sending her a postcard.

Then I was trying to  buy, for a friend, a copy of a young adult for which I was a copyeditor once, almost 20 years ago (during my brief unhappy stint in publishing). Skeeball and the Secret of the Universe had stayed with me for its humor and heartfelt, somewhat caffeinated narration: I was sorry it was out of print. The author, whose name I’d forgotten, turned out to be  someone named, yes....... Barbara Hall. Even before I established that the link was real, I felt it: the teen narrator of that book, in his confusion and passionate engagement, was Joan’s ancestor. “How weird is that!”  I told a friend or two. “I wrote the flap copy for Barbara Hall’s first novel, and now she’s channeling my obsessions!”

But I was finally driven to write this tonight, after, Rachel and I watched episode 9 of this season, called "Friday Night."

It was pretty devastating, enough to make us curse admiringly at the screen. And it pushed me to write this.

I’d been too busy to remark, even internally, on Joan’s new, wisecracking friend Judith, whose name is the same as my suicidal protagonist and who, in retrospect could have been lifted, fairly whole cloth, from the excerpt "Greyhound Jack and Other Slow Suicides"  (my story, published in 1998; I’ve linked to it before). Including addressing her mother by her first name and smoking/fucking as a conscious route to oblivion. It took one of the adolescent characters on the show, tonight, to lay it out for me. Some people do it all at once�and some people do it a little bit every day.

I’m not accusing Ms. Hall of plagiarism. I am finding it beyond uncanny: similar themes, yes, but characters? I tell my students that there are just a few plots (someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town): but it’s mostly funny, how she and I pulled bits from the nation we both live in and pulled out faces that mirror one another.

A glass of wine to you, and to your wry earnestness. To all of us, making up realities as we go on, trying to be true to what we feel matters most – and to not lose our sense of humor in the process.

After all, if God's a trickster (when will Joan study Voltaire?) and all we can do is juggle, no wonder our stories, no matter how earnest, come out postmodern -- like the cars in the Julian Reid story "Probability Storm." which enter virtual parking meters Cadillacs and emerge battered Buicks.

i have been to hell and it is called bhopal

I've been deeply interested in the Bhopal disaster since it happened, and have watched with interest the movement that has sprung up  in the 20 years since the disaster, to demand justice.  Now, this week, Amnesty International has a report that higlights how little has been done for the survivors - and how little Union Carbide has paid.

And I wanted to share my visit there, a few years back.

“Chai chai chai . . .. Chai chai chai chai.” These were the first words I heard on the morning of my thirty-fourth birthday, a low gentle call down the aisles of a half-darkened overnight train. “Chai chai chai chai!” the voice reedy, patient, indifferent.
I was glad enough for the offer of tea, and dug in my fanny pack for the few spare rupees I kept there. Even at five a.m. he didn’t wake me; I hadn’t slept much, even though the  overnight Malwi Express, from Allahabad to Bhopal, was hardly  my first Indian train. Something about plunging this far off the beaten track; something about the chilly air conditioning and the thin blankets usefully provided by the railway company, my own sleeping bag sliding off the hard plastic-and-steel bunk o Varanasi, it was not full of families, sleepy children, young men out to test my patience.  No this train was sprinkled with a handful of anxious businessmen, fathers, farmers. 
Who else would choose, in the beginning of India’s  of the hot season, to take a train to Bhopal, former home of Union Carbide and now best known for its cousins?
Why was I here, on my limited one-month journey to India?
I had come because of the accident that had made Bhopal famous, if briefly, around the world: the 1984 chemical release at the Union Carbide plant. I was writing a novel about suicide, much of which took place in India; I had had to choose, having only three weeks, whether to go to Rajasthan, where a Fort held the handprints of women who committed mass suicide in the face of invasion, or Bhopal. By coming to Bhopal I had chosen to look at what one could construe a different kind of mass suicide — a sort of species-suicide, if you will.  I wanted to know what sort of effect it still had — and if the place itself offered a key to how it might have happened. But I wasn’t thinking of myself as a journalist  then: I was there to assess the human landscape.
And as with the rest of my journey,  I was the Blanche du Bois of India: I learned what I needed to learn because of the kindness and passionate commitment of strangers. In this case I have to thank the Internet, and a string of strangers that led to a name, a contact, that led me to the edge of the plant. Even if they led me to the conclusion: I have been to hell and it is called Bhopal. 
My first clues to this hell were on that birthday morning; at 6 a.m. I was far too tired to over-negotiate with taxi drivers, and I fell for the classic Indian ruse when the driver told me the hotel I wanted was “closed! I take you somewhere better.” If I’d been awake I would have insisted he take me there anyway, which would likely have saved me about half of what I ended up spending: but when the sunrise already has your skin blistered and your heart is just a touch maudlin from birthdays you know when to cut your losses. In any event, the hotel was dark and underpopulated, despite the alliance of the cabdriver. Certainly, I was still the only Westerner (as I had been, actually, since I left Varanasi) and the only woman traveling alone.
By this time I’d learned to expect Indian men to look at me like a tramp; I’d learned to ignore stares, propositions, even men following me down the street. I’d rationalized it after the only time I ever watched Baywatch, in a hotel in Faizabad: “they think they’ve seen me without my clothes on!” I’d even shouted, from a cycle-rickshaw from Allahabad, when I knew the driver had minimal English and couldn’t hear me for the traffic, “You f**ing pricks, you don’t have a right to do that!” But this was the first time I ever felt one of them make a grab for me, as if to see if I were real. Young men would pull on my clothes, laugh when I pulled away.
I wasn’t going to let them stop me from doing what I had come here for: I hailed an auto-rickshaw and said “TT Nagar,” Bhopal’s business district.
I expected something of a younger city than the places I had just been, Calcutta and the Ganges towns: Bhopal, the industrial heart of Madyha Pradesh state, prides itself on being far more 20th-century than they. What I found in TT Nagar was industrialization gone haywire and just a bit berserk, in its white cellblock glory.
The central streets were LA-style thoroughfares, fences of yellow tubing down the center — belching cars masses of people on either side, medium-tall bank buildings,  billboards about as large as I’d seen in Asia. One billboard said ABORTION and in slightly smaller letters advertised other gynecological services, including sex selection (the female birthrate in India is considerably lower than the male, the mixed blessing of ultrasound). Sex selection seemed already successful, as very few women were visible, even fewer than in Calcutta.
Every few yards, it seemed, another computer school to be advertised: as I walked  I watched the progression, as I was no doubt meant to, of people and signs old and new, intermingled, interwoven.  A woman in a dark blue sari and stolid expression crossed the street with a baby on her hip, right in front of the sign that says LEARN DTP ONE MILE; an old man clad in only a lunghi (a swath of cloth tied aroung the waist to make a sort of skirt) with streaks of paint between his forehead passed before the next sign,  LEARN WINDOWS ONE MILE.  The effect not even subliminal, if you want to catch up you’d better do this.
How could anyone do any of it in this heat? I knew it had been 38 degrees (around 100F) when I left my hotel, and it was noon now. In April India’s sun begins to burn through your clothes; it sneers at sunscreen. Mosquitos laugh at whatever ointment you’ve slathered on and bite merrily, sometimes leaving bloodstains behind. The heat lubricates your joints but only at the expense of most of your good sense.
Perhaps that was why I got up the nerve to ask the woman in the bank, where I was cashing a traveler’s check, how I might be able to reach this fellow T.R. Chouhan — and expected her to be able to help.
What she did was simple and effective: she wrote down his address in Hindi for me, and told me to show it to the auto-rickshaw driver. Auto-rickshaws are these three-wheeled vehicles, kind of like  tuk-tuks in Bangkok but far sturdier; Bhopal has far too many cars to be safe for cycle-rickshaws. I already missed the mad traffic mix of northern India, with cows bicycles cycle-rickshaws motorcycles mopeds very few cars. This was 20th-century insanity, all right.
The driver nodded at the address and took off like a shot, challenging my motion sickness; he had little enough English that he didn’t ask me what I was doing in Bhopal, wearing my samir kalweez and Rockports. He sped me toward the neighborhood whose name I  knew from the Internet referral, Durga Chouk, past Bhopal’s famous man-made lakes: big silver discs set calmly in the space between new and old Bhopal, ringed by trees.
Durga Chouk was then more like Calcutta, some consistency now with the India I knew: homes cut into narrow alleyways, low houses of brick, mud shops selling life’s necessities (including three bottles of mineral water for my thirsty self). There was even a long skinny cow led by an even skinnier man down the alleyway: what did he use it for?
As the driver slowed, stopping several times to ask directions, they craned to see me, did the curious men in tunics and loose pants, adolescent boys smoking cigarettes shouting “Hallo!”, women looking out the windows of clay and brick tiny houses.  Finally we were there, and the door was answered by a sincere, frail thirteen-year-old boy with huge glasses. “Yes?”
“Kim sent me.” I used the name of the woman who’d stayed with them, when she was working on her dissertation years before: at which point I was welcomed by his mother, sisters, and ultimately hugely by T.R. Chouhan, who had been a middle manager at the Union Carbide plant before it blew.
For those too young to remember, or those of us who want mostly to forget:
Bhopal is a capital city, with nearly one million inhabitants.  For such a city to be ringed with potentially toxic industries is madness, yet it happens and not only in India.
Until December 3, 1984, Union Carbide (maker of pesticides, batteries and car parts, other products of industrial civilization/decay) had a thriving plant just north of Hamidia Road, not far from here, from other chowks, the hotels, the lakes.
On that day, just after midnight, a tank ruptured containing methyl isocyanate (MIC), a chemical used for making pesticides,  get the word “cyanate” cousin of cyanide.
A cloud of poison gas was released, dispersing right over the urban area; 3000 people died immediately, others beginning a slow decline as the gas poisoned their lungs, their blood cells, their eyesight and ability to swallow. Scleroses scars remained in the cells of people whose only crime was to live near where so many worked.
Including T.R. Chouhan,a man with large sad eyes and a mustache that seemed to droop further when he talked about the disaster.
By the time Chouhan actually arrived home, his wife and children had celebrated my birthday with me, with cups of orange soda and big smiles. He got me back to my hotel, where we sat in the deserted restaurant and talked about the bad old days. He saw, as I did, a direct connection between the T.T. Nagar towers and the disaster that had scarred his life.
“It’s revenge from nature,” said this engineer who had warned repeatedly that the gas was building up to dangerous levels, long before the plant finally blew. “What the West has done with this colonialism.” He pointed out that Bhopal had grown from 40,000 in 1955 to its current 400,000 and growing; that with migrations to the cities “our villages are empty, just old people.”  Chouhan, who had been active in the 1990 People’s Tribunal on Bhopal, was now disheartened at the paltry 25,000 rupees (a little over $750) per person awarded those made ill by the gas, and the lack of full accounting of what had happened nearly 15 years before.
“You want to see the plant?” he asked me. “I take you – you are okay with a motorbike?”
I nodded, laughing inwardly at a still-evolving fact: I seem to ride motorcycles only in Asia. (My bike-virginity had been  broken a month earlier, in a wild, exhilarating  2 a.m. ride through Bangkok; later, in Vietnam and Cambodia, it was the only way I traveled if I could help it.)
The next morning, Chouhan came to my hotel with his motorcycle; I gasped as we moved forward through the blistering heat, the the noise of the auto-rickshaws and the thundering traffic that blinked to us from all sides, over a bridge overpass into an even more congested part of the city.
“Where are we?” I shouted into his ear, very self-conscious about touching him as I leaned forward.
“Old City,” he shouted back and of course that was it, as the old mosque I’d seen in the distance reared over us, a via dolorosa on the way to the toxic plant, facades equally Jerusalem and Calcutta.  But no, these were far emptier, as much as anywhere in urban India can be called empty.  Old Bhopal was a shell, a ghost town of sacred spaces.
We were released onto something resembling a highway just as the sun pierced the smog, cleared the way for full-dress morning heat.
From miles away the plant was pale, ominous, swathed in barbed wire. As we got closer we were entering a slum, not as Americans understand the word but a series of tiny shacks with corrugated aluminum roofs, children with rags around their bottoms and diseased old men with tin cups, Calcutta ghosts wrapped around the edges of the plant.  The slum clung its way up a gentle hill, at the top of which was the vent that had released the cyanotic gases. Chouhan stopped at the foot of the hill, where we were greeted by a statue in white cement, depicting a mother in a heavy cloak.
I got off the motorcycle to greet her. She wore either a sari or a shawl, impossible to tell in the rough white stone, her mouth wide open her arms outstretched a small child clinging to her skirt. The inscription at the bottom read:
NO HIROSHIMA
NO BHOPAL
WE WANT TO LIVE
The sculptor was Hiroshima survivor  Ruth Waterman, its date five years after the accident: her  we want to live  challenged my suicide novel, could this be a place where to mention suicide is blasphemy?  it’s all very well to say that but Hiroshima and Bhopal did happen and maybe that teaches us something about suicide.   I got back on Chouhan’s motorcycle.
My teeth loosened and my muscles jumped as we finally left the road and began to climb, the motorcycle jolted by the pitted un-paved earth and maneuvering very slowly between the cramped rows of shanty huts. I watched a group of kids play in a large mud-puddle, one of them stopping to drink from it.
“Is that water poisoned?” I asked an intentionally stupid question of my host, shouting it at his ear over the sounds of the motorcycle and the people.
He just nodded and kept going. A telltale puffiness in the tips of my fingers told me I was pushing my limits by staying outside in this heat, but I felt no choice—the children were still drinking the water, the women looking at me with incomprehension, what was I doing here? I wanted to ask them the same question and did, of Chouhan, when we finally stopped.
“Why are they here?”  I gestured to the vicinity of the plant, which right up to the barbed wire was crammed with the detritus of human habitation—huts, clothes, pits for toilets. “Don’t they know it’s dangerous?”
Chouhan shrugged.  “Is empty space.”
“Why doesn’t the government try to keep them out of here?”
The first flash of anger, finally, as he helped me off the motorcycle and we walked closer to the barbed wire. “Why don’t government find out exactly what is in that water. We call this plant Dead Body.”
It lives and breathes its poisons still, I wanted to answer, but my tongue was loose in my mouth. I just kept staring at the tall tower and the barbed wire, Auschwitz echo in the Indian sunshine, the sweat gleaming from my face and shoulders, I wanted to pass out I wanted to write to all my friends, _I have been to hell and it is called Bhopal._

Chouhan and his family themselves had to flee the gas, fifteen years ago. The son with the adorable huge glasses, who recited his social studies exam to me quite proudly, was an infant at the time. “We picked him up and ran, got into a friend’s car and away.” None of them had immediate health effects — but Chouhan’s rage is fed by the lack of monitoring, to assess the long-term impact.
Over the next few days, courtesy of Chouhan’s motorcycle,  I saw the rest of New Bhopal — LA-style highways to match T.T. Nagar’s thoroughfares, slicing through wide expanses of greenery, former farmland now colonized every few miles by chemical companies, Carbide’s heedless younger cousins.  Chouhan told me none of these companies have installed the safety features recommended by his commission.  “We have learned nothing,” he said, “nothing.”
New Bhopal sprawls and sprawls and sprawls, with huge cinder-block apartment buildings competing with industrial parks and more suburban housing developments, the Silicon Valley feel nearly complete  — except for  the relentless, irresistible, thriving chowk, stalls of corrugated iron and cloth, selling everything from toilet paper to prescription drugs. I was heartened to see this particular form of Indian commerce slap this near-suburbia, even with Chouhan’s grumble, “everything is imported. Where are the cottage industries?”
We were travelling these highways enroute to more traditional tourist destinations, the ancient city of Bhojpur, a series of cave paintings in Bhimbetka. It was in the latter that I finally saw other Westerners, including the only woman traveller I’d seen since Varanasi. We shrugged at each other and smiled.
“How long are you here?”I asked and she shrugged again; like many Westerners in India, she was there as long as her money lasted.
“I’m a bit disappointed,” she said, gesturing to the caves. “The book made these sound quite grand.”
My turn to shrug; as much as I was glad to see the caves, and be reminded of a time before Bhopal, they were not after all why I had come here.
She was from New Zealand, and rode on the bike with me and Chouhan awhile. I was struck by how little she asked, how little she seemed to care to know who he was. Perhaps she had been in India longer than I, and could no longer feel safe with Indian men. (Though in fact even when they were grabbing at me, I never felt truly unsafe in India, truly felt I was about to be attacked: the boldest backed off pretty fast.) But I think she was more on the kind of Indian journey I had heard more about back home: from fabulous temple to cave to beach, contacts with locals extra. She hadn’t been to the city of Bhopal, and didn’t care to go.
Of course mid-size industrial hellholes like Bhopal are not the sort of  places I visit in my own country; I’ve not been to Detroit, or even Fresno. But I’m not sorry I chose Bhopal over Rajasthan, and not only because of my novel. I learned something about the India the West helped create, something not evident from New Delhi’s monkey-shadowed skyscrapers or Bangalore’s cell phones. I saw up close and personal some of the collateral damage created by the global economy, the sort of thing you skim in the  New York Times  with a sigh and a heavy heart.
Most I am grateful to Chouhan and his wife — for the orange soda on my birthday, for the fabulous Rajput meals, for the escort to the lip of hell. And if I ever have the opportunity to meet Ruth Waterman, the hikabusha sculptor, I will thank her for the strongest voice of survival I repeated over and over in my novel, which is really about a journey away from suicide: NO HIROSHIMA. NO BHOPAL. I WANT TO LIVE.

two prophets after Tiresias

I didn't even know about American Reporter   till I read this interview. Seymour Hersh is turning into our  Tiresias, working tirelessly to get out the truth, even as the still-crazed  veteran (U.S. as Odysseus) continues lumbering toward victory through atrocity, and thus ever-further disaster. And Chris Hedges, who's been at this about half the time Hersh has, adds a layer of clarity that must be even harder to bear.

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Hersh pointed out that Fallujah was once famous for resisting British imperialism; it is also the ancient center of Sunni Wahaabism - the state religion of Saudi Arabia. "Now Bush has guaranteed that the Saudi princes, no matter what they say, will be giving money to the insurgents," Hersh said. "We've basically committed ourselves to Saudi opposition." We cannot win in Iraq, Hersh said. "We have no intel. We can't find the insurgents. When they bomb something, we only know about it afterward. We can't figure them out. Someone said, 'We play chess, they play Go.' All we can do is lose. All we can do is bomb."

The United States cannot afford this endless war, Hersh said. The dollar is already falling against the Euro, and the Chinese and Japanese hold trillions of dollars of U.S. debt. "Soon China and Russia will start buying oil in Euros," Hersh said. "They'll stop buying American in Europe because they hate us so much - Disney in Paris is already going down. Large American corporations doing business abroad are going down. We could see more anti-American violence abroad. The dollar will fall. Billionaires are now telling other billionaires to get out of the stock market and buy foreign currency and stocks."

Then what could the good news be? "The good side - and I promise you I'm not selling uppers - is that there will be direct attacks on the Supreme Court, a change in the filibuster rules, it's going to be down and dirty, a complete hoe-down, but there won't be anything subtle," Hersh said. "It's all going to be out in the open."

We must let events take over, Hersh said. "We have put ourselves in an enormous hole," he said. "There's no magic story to get us out. The market will crash. Maybe people will come to their senses. Maybe some Democrat will step forward to do the right thing. And maybe the Easter bunny will turn out to be real."
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I'm not sure how the reporter glossed Hersh's final words into "We must let events take over," though it seems that the chain of consequences he predicts would tend to do so, smashing all our most earnest efforts.

I come to this piece after a sober mo(u)rning with another Tiresias, Chris Hedges, whose War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning   should be required reading in all universities (right after
Zinn if they haven't read that already).  Hedges both honors two recent books on Iraq and points out their built-in limitations as embedded reporters, both for Jon Lee Anderson as a reporter embedded alternately with Saddam and the US forcs in Iraq, and for  Evan Wright embedded with Marines for the aptly titled Generation Kill. If those Marines allowed themselves to see the war's full consequences, he writes, "they could not continue." (Both pieces are in the not-yet-online New York Review of Books: go forth and buy, or wait.)

from brave T-shirts to Bosch

I'm in Philadelphia visiting Rachel's family, and therefore offer just a few links -- from the Times, which I'm reading online rather than wrap around me in customary fashion. Both are, however, appropriate to my free-speech week.

There's the brave gay student in a Missouri high school where free speech normally, it seems, consists of  pseudo-Christian, anti-gay slogans on student T-shirts. Brave because he'd refused twice to be intimidated by school officials claiming "Gay and Proud" an offensive slogan.   (One of the T-shirts was from a Gay-Straight Alliance in his previous school in Arkansas.</i>. Bill Clinton aside, I confess to being startled that Arkansas was the model for tolerance.)

Then there's the always lucid Frank Rich's deconstruction of the brouhaha over the Nicolette Sheridan TV ad on Monday Night Football. I recommend the piece, "The Great Indecency Hoax," in its entirety, especially for its revealing the manipulative hand of the American Family Association in the "controversy." But I was particularly struck by this:

Again as in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls "the family entertainment, the family sports show" rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, "wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other" on the field.

what I'm thankful for

I've noticed and appreciated the reasons noted by other bloggers; one of my favorites was "I'm thankful I'm not eating MREs in Fallujah," though there are people in Fallujah - indeed,all of Iraq - not eating enough to live, and unaided by their US occupiers, and I can't summon any gratitude for that.

I am of course grateful for the health of my family, and for my own: four years ago today I wasn't walking, and was preparing for a bout of steroids to allay the MS exacerbation. But I wanted to keep writing about the First Amendment, to be what Rachel used to call a "free speech tourist" (misquoting Mark Knopfler).

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

Today, we're on the very first clause.

The news keeps giving me, and us, many reasons to refocus on the genius of what that crowd of deists and freethinkers and liberal Christians who founded this country had in mind. Especially when bogus lawsuits filed by fundamentalist whackjobs with organizational clout are out there spinning the media, claiming that feeding Christian propaganda to fifth-graders is just "teaching the Declaration of Independence."

Digby has provided, today, a wonderful set of excerpts from our founding documents that illustrate that, at the very least, the Founders were tolerant of tthe populace's Christianity, while warning against any government obeisance to same. James Madison:

What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not."

I'm deeply thankful for a government founded on his principles. And for those working to keep them alive.

ukraine a role model?

I've been silent for nearly a week due to some maddening brower issues -- all my fault, actually, and too boring to talk about. What was ironic: I had this whole concept about the First Amendment, and accomplishing a thorough gloss on the Bush Administration's assault on all three prongs. If the stupidity weren't so obvious, I'd suspect foul play in these erasures.

What's also obvious:  some people take free speech seriously.  Thanks to Roxanne for the fabulous photo of people in Uruguay, who brought to my mind the amazing example of the Ukrainian people. Both face governments (in Ukraine's case including Russia, who just incineraed a school) far more repressive than ours has been.

Until now.  I was on 16th Street, the week of the Convention, and watched as passersby and peaceful activists were wrapped in yellow netting and herded into buses. I know people who got sick in that toxic pit, the Guantanamo on the Hudson, without access to lawyers or doctors or even the ability to notify their loved ones. Kafka with a smile. All this just metonymy for the erosion of our democracy.

mr president (2)

Watch the video.  Sign the petition. I think I wasn't this impressed seeing John Kerry speak the whole campaign. Is it possible that we'll have a real leader of the opposition?

it feels like the future

Before I turn it over to Carolyn Forché, I wanted to note  a discussion on the always invaluable Obsidian Wings  about the Marine shooting: Edward, a veteran himself, sums up well the agony of bad choices in a bad war.

I was having my fiction students read the piece below for its economy of plot and buried themes. I wonder now if it's also our future.

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THE COLONEL

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

Carolyn Forche, 1978

not a way to start the morning, but.

Crying again.  But seeing these pictures is something we all need to do: it's our tax money and our children being spent on this. And I will repeat the other caveat the page author offers:

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i believe the american people are decent and not without humanity. they have not seen what is being done in their name. maybe we don't live in a world that can do without war. i do know that people need to know what war means before they decide.

a lot of people have sent me pictures of september 11th. please stop. i lived in lower manhattan on 9/11. i've seen it in real life.

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I have been proposing lately a moratorium on references to September 11 by all those who didn't either witness it or lose someone. (Especially politicians and yahoos who send photos of towers and kitschy poems.)

Meanwhile, I'm too old for constant wearing of slogans on T-shirts -- and I'm still thinking of buying a gross of First Amendment-wear, given that all three components - church/state sep, freedom of speech, and freedom to seek redress -- are now officially "quaint" to this Administration.

Colin Powell

There they go, the bloggers, refusing to mourn the departure of Colin Powell, even though there also a sense that the adult supervision has left the room.  Many, if not most, cite perhaps the high/low point of his career: his piece of performance art at the United Nations in late 2002, using shadow puppets to claim imminent threats. Given this, the result, it's completely justified for people to feel this way.

But I need to join the chorus in reminding those of us who care about human rights that Powell has never been the treasure his charisma and formidable intellect might suggest.

It was Powell, using his famous "Doctrine," who ran the first Iraqi slaughter in 1991, the one whose veterans came home with depleted uranium sapping their bones and which was followed by a sanctions regime that starved ten times as many people as died on that famous 11 September. Previous to that, as someone reminded me this afternoon, he was Ronald Reagan's bagman in Nicaragua and ran the invasion of Panama in 1989. And prior to that, as he admits in his own autobiography, he witnessed war crimes in Vietnam from aloft and never investigated further., (Richard Stutsman offers an invaluable chronology here. ) And we won't even get into "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" , a policy which is currently in its usual wartime lull).

I first became aware of most of this about 9 years ago, when Powell was pushing his autobiography and normally sensible people were talking about him as presidential caliber. At CCCO, we mentioned Powell every day: in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. he'd convinced George I to put in motion an expansion of the Junior ROTC program, which charges schools to hire retired military folks to lead drills and teach a surreal version of American history ( in the process, ensuring a steady stream of leads for military recruiters). We went to confront him, at a bookstore in downtown San Francisco, and in the process reminded ourselves of all the griefs caused by this "hero."

That day's still crisp in my mind: Labor Day weekend, big crowd on a summer-sunny day, and I a scrappy activist trying to get our flyer in front of the TV cameras. All to no avail until Ron Kovic showed up, demanding to get into the press room: an immovable force, that one, in his sunglasses and roughly used voice: "I want to tell him some things!"  We slid in right behind him, working the room until Powell himself came to take questions.

I was pretty thorough in handing out our informational flyer, which was entitled"Not a Hero!"  Not that we influenced the coverage of the event a whit: but nearly a year later  I realized that the tall, striking woman in the dashiki was not a reporter but Alma Powell. When it was announced, around 1996, that Powell wouldn''t run for "family reasons," I was inspired to do that old commercial for Shake and Bake: "An' I helped!"

Not that I'm looking forward to the Age of Rice. Especially because it also seems ro mean an Age of Purge.  Tamar , what's that about Canada again? But then I remember - there's work to be done, (I've just agreed to begin doing some work with the Military Law Task Force  of the National Lawyers Guild: putting what I know to more immediate use than this blog or any of the books not yet complete.)  Having maniacs in office doesn't make our responsibility any lighter.

Besides, I'm not ready to leave New  York yet. It feels like I just got here.

(And for any of you in New York, I'll be part of a reading at the 11th Street Bar, between A and B. Yes, there's only one bar on that block: I'll be reading a  piece called "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?")

Excuse the shameless self promotion: I won't do it often, I promise.