bookofdays

lose your watchfulness and your bitterness

As National Poetry Month draws to a close, I can't leave behind those closer to home.

Though any poem from this poet feels like an arm extended in a half- empty hug: Barry Wallenstein, who I  met in 2000 but feel I've known all my life, is a secret rock star, and all his poems go best with musical accompaniment (often from the estimable John Hicks). More recently his work's turned more elliptical, fabulously dense, like C.D. Wright, below; this is from an earlier series featuring a character, like Berryman's Henry, who finds some rare solace in unexpected spaces.

Tony Visits Hotel Splendide

After a week with my arms
around very little--
nothing really to talk about,
after my pet spider quit being a spider,
I had a will to splurge--
moved into the Hotel Splendide.

The drinks at the lounge bar
need neither mixer nor chaser;
tipping back and getting the glad-eye.
Conversation too goes down like rain
with faces moving in, personal
in the middle of time off at the Hotel Splendide.

Speaking with a person named Randy,
I remembered how ill I'd felt one time
running to meet another Randy,
falling down on my way.
The current Randy is my mate
lately met and smiling at the Hotel Splendide.

Another character, call him Joe,
told me about his wife of some 30 years
and how his travels divided him,
sometimes quartered him--but he
never lost his memory,
stopping off at the Hotel Splendide.

They say if you stay a week
(and no one dies at the Hotel Splendide
and the topic itself never comes up)
then, chances are, you'll extend the visit
and lose your watchfulness,
your bitterness.

But, myself, I scan the daily papers now,
study first the box scores
then the obituaries.
There's the need to know
who's won and lost
off the grounds of Hotel Splendide.

Who wouldn't give up love
or such a dream as being loved,
for needed facts--the ones that can't be fudged?
Hotel Splendide, come to on a whim,
has provided armfuls and respite--
-- not cold truths; I'm on my way home.

 

where are we going, and where have we been?

First, a quickie: I wrote about the Abu Ghraib anniversary last week; rather than go critique the punditry on it, such as the Wall Street Journal's "so nu?" editorial, I want to re-link to the wonderful chart I found in January, a visual representation of the complex web of accountability up the chain of command.

Click here to see the web of shame.

Meanwhile, in case you wondered how the war was going:

I don't look at the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com nearly often enough. But today's comprehensive  post, even before it gets to Michael Schwartz's piece on the draft, is so rich with info about this FUBAR war that I'm breathless. A sampling:

An overstretched military?  You bet.  Things going terribly in Iraq?  No kidding.  Why only yesterday, Jill Carroll and Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reminded us that, with 140,000 troops (and untold numbers of mercenaries) in Iraq, the Americans can't defend a crucial six-mile stretch of highway between the two lodestars of the American occupation -- Baghdad International Airport, a vast, fortified military encampment, and the Green Zone in the heart of the capital, another vast, fortified encampment. Carroll and Murphy write:

 

"The danger of the airport road also speaks to the wider problem of securing a country in the face of a dispersed and committed insurgency blended within the civilian population. Millions of cars traverse Baghdad's roads every day, and just a handful of them are carrying suicide bombers. For the Iraqi government and US forces, it's a needle-in-the-haystack problem with few practical solutions. There is limited US military manpower for adding checkpoints, but even if it was logistically possible, stopping every car on Baghdad's roads would bring the city to a grinding halt and make the airport journey even longer than it is now… The airport road is a direct link to the US headquarters in the secured Green Zone. But rather than risk the road, US diplomats fly by helicopter from the airport to the Green Zone."

As Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent commented last week, the inability to stop attacks along this stretch of highway has "become a symbol of the failure of the US in Iraq. Heavily armoured US patrols, prone to open fire unpredictably, are regarded as being as dangerous as the insurgents." On this highway, in the last week, five foreign "contractors" and the young aid worker Marla Ruzicka all died and others were wounded. The Americans undoubtedly dream of bringing in Iraqi troops, sooner rather than later, to help with the security task. Unfortunately, these highly touted, newly trained troops have evidently been deserting their posts in significant numbers in embattled parts of the country. "On the Syrian border, US troops in the Sunni city of Husaybah report mass desertions," writes Oliver Poole of the British Telegraph. 

 

"An Iraqi unit that had once grown to 400 troops now numbers a few dozen who are 'holed up' inside a local phosphate plant. Major John Reed, of the 2nd Marine Regiment, said: 'They will claim that they are ready to come back and fight but there are no more than 30 of them on duty on any given day and they are completely ineffective.'"

 

In the last months, the Americans (as happened in the latter part of the Vietnam War) have also hunkered down in their bases, attempting to reduce casualties, among other things. In response, the insurgents have recently been launching more sophisticated operations, including, for the first time, serious attacks on isolated bases. 

In the meantime, Baghdad continues to be an occupied city -- even at the level of symbolism.  A report, translated from the Arabic and appearing at Watching America, an interesting new site featuring pieces about the U.S. from around the world, states:

 

"Iraq's new president has said he will not reside in the Presidential Palace, which for many Iraqis is a symbol of the country's sovereignty. Jalal Talabani said that the interim government has agreed to rent the palace to the Americans for two years. The presidential complex on the banks of the Tigris River is a maze of palaces, green lawns and orchards… President Talabani said that the Americans 'might' evacuate the palace when the lease expires."

 

Sovereignty anyone? In order to gain legitimacy, the Iraqis who were elected on January 30th would need to put some real distance between themselves and the American occupiers. However, as Middle Eastern expert Robert Dreyfuss comments in a canny piece at Tompaine.com, "doing so… is impossible, since the newly elected regime wouldn't last a week without the protection of U.S. forces." In any case, the new government, such as it is, will be a familiar one. "[V]irtually all of its leading actors," Dreyfuss comments, "are retreads from the IGC, which was appointed by L. Paul Bremer, and from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, the exile-dominated coalition that included Chalabi, Talabani, Abdel Aziz Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and other officials and members of the just-elected National Assembly."

To the frustration of the Bush administration, the Iraqis have proved incapable for almost two months of forming a government, in part because of the nature of Article 38 of the "interim constitution" that Bush officials so cleverly imposed upon them, as Justin Raimondo, columnist for Antiwar.com pointed out recently.  And, of course, they too must meet inside the Green Zone where, Rory Carroll of the Guardian observes, "the 10,000 Iraqis who also live in the zone need passes to enter and must negotiate several checkpoints, as if they are in quarantine." Even the legislators are not immune from the indignities of occupation. As Carroll reports:

 

"Last week an assembly member named Fattah al-Sheikh said he was roughed up and humiliated by US troops on his way in. One allegedly grabbed him by the throat, another handcuffed him, and a third kicked his car. 'I was dragged to the ground,' he told parliament, weeping. 'What happened to me represents an insult to the whole national assembly that was elected by the Iraqi people. This shows that the democracy we are enjoying is fake.'"

Juan Cole offered the following on this incident: "[It] will seem minor to most Americans and few will see this Reuters photograph [of the legislator wiping away his tears] reprinted from al-Hayat… But such an incident is a serious affront to national honor, and Iraqi male politicians don't often weep." Naturally, Brigadier General Karl Horst of the 3rd infantry division "expressed regret" and promised "a thorough investigation"; but we've just seen, in the case of kidnapped Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena and Nicola Calipari, the agent who died on the Baghdad Airport road after rescuing her, how such investigations generally turn out -- even when those who have suffered at American hands are citizens of the administration's second closest ally, Italy, with its government in desperate shape and its deployment in Iraq at stake.

Schwartz himself mostly offers familiar territory to readers of this page, and a little too shot through with Marxist rhetoric to be as useful as it could be. Still, he eloquently draws the administration's central dilemma in regards to a new draft:

Pro-war partisans rest much of their support of administration foreign policy on the expectation that the January 30 election was a turning point, that the battle of Falluja disabled the resistance, that Iraqi troops will be ready to handle the guerrillas in the not-too-distant future -- and that American troops will soon be brought home at least reasonably victorious. The reinstitution of a draft would constitute an admission that these beliefs are so many illusions. In all likelihood, therefore, any relaxation of the unequivocal opposition to the draft in the administration would indeed precipitate a sharp erosion of the war's already eroding base. Opposition might then reach the critical mass needed to make withdrawal "thinkable."

Is that why Rangel keeps introducing his bill? I'm terrified to call and ask.

Apologies to Joyce Carol Oates and Bob Dylan for the double steal of the title.

talking to saints in north england

Quick post: I saw this sweet movie last night.  Millions  brings all of us back to that moment, at nine or ten years old, when we  mused intensely, with an intensity others called weird, on BIG questions.  The small protagonist of this film, Damian, talks to saints as if they were his drunk old uncles. With their hints, he spends most of the film trying hard "to be good," to do what he thinks is right. I'm suddenly curious if this is what  Danny Boyle, the director, was once like, long before the Trainspotting years.

Though the trailer might make it seem a little saccharine, it's worth the glimpse, and the film  feels not sentimental but honestly emotional. Also funny, whimsical and entirely new: a distant cousin, of course,  to  Joan of Arcadia (consoling me a little about the latter, which has betrayed me these last weeks by opting to become a faux Buffy.) 

I'll leave it to more cinematically-minded people, like Rachel, whose  review and meditation on the film is well worth reading.  and to critics like Manohla Dargis to identify all the elements that make it work.  I also want to shout out to Dargis, who like me almost didn't graduate Hunter High School in 1979 because of the math Regents: her writing here, and often in her work for the Times, is lyrical , as when  she outlines the movie's premise:

Damian has moved into new digs, mostly, it seems, because their old home is where once upon a time they lived with a loving wife and mother. Recently deceased, the missing woman hangs over this woeful threesome like a sigh. Her absence shapes their days and nights, driving Ronnie to cuddle the pillows in his big empty bed and sending his children deep into worlds of their own making, one shaped by pre-adolescent tremors, the other by ecstatic faith.

Alex Etel, who plays Damian,  makes Haley Joel Osment look like a cereal box image. (Not for nothing does Salon call Etel "unreasonably appealing." )   The wild poet locked in this small pre-monk is just waiting for the next movie. Or rather, the wild young activist, as the film's fantastic ending suggests. As Jehanne Darc knew, all that truck with saints can drive you into the future.

backward-looking statements

So CACI International, one of two private contractors named as co-conspirators in the Abu Ghraib lawsuit I cited this weekend, has been awarded a new Navy contract, to the tune of $9.4 million for command and control systems. They're thrilled, of course:  their cheery press release announcing the fact has their stock symbol in the first line. But at the end,  they whisper something else (bold mine, italics theirs):

CACI International Inc provides the IT and network solutions needed to prevail in today's new era of defense, intelligence, and e-government. From systems integration and managed network solutions to knowledge management, engineering, simulation, and information assurance, we deliver the IT applications and infrastructures our federal customers use to improve communications and collaboration, secure the integrity of information systems and networks, enhance data collection and analysis, and increase efficiency and mission effectiveness. Our solutions lead the transformation of defense and intelligence, assure homeland security, enhance decision-making, and help government to work smarter, faster, and more responsively. CACI, a member of the Russell 2000 and S&P SmallCap 600 indices, provides dynamic careers for approximately 9,500 employees working in over 100 offices in the U.S. and Europe. CACI is the IT provider for a networked world. Visit CACI on the web at www.caci.com.

There are statements made herein which do not address historical facts and, therefore could be interpreted to be forward-looking statements as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are subject to factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results. The factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated include, but are not limited to, the following: regional and national economic conditions in the United States and the United Kingdom, including conditions that result from terrorist activities or war; failure to achieve contract awards in connection with recompetes for present business and/or competition for new business; the risks and uncertainties associated with client interest in and purchases of new products and/or services; continued funding of U.S. government or other public sector projects in the event of a priority need for funds, such as homeland security, the war on terrorism or rebuilding Iraq; government contract procurement (such as bid protest, small business set asides, etc.) and termination risks; the results of government investigations into allegations of improper actions related to the provision of services in support of U.S. military operations in Iraq; the results of the appeal of CACI International Inc ASBCA No. 53058; individual business decisions of our clients; paradigm shifts in technology; competitive factors such as pricing pressures and/or competition to hire and retain employees; material changes in laws or regulations applicable to our businesses, particularly in connection with (i) government contracts for services, (ii) outsourcing of activities that have been performed by the government, and (iii) competition for task orders under Government Wide Acquisition Contracts ("GWACs") and/or schedule contracts with the General Services Administration; our own ability to achieve the objectives of near term or long range business plans; and other risks described in the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Did the SEC mandate that when you're sued on suspicion of abetting war crimes, you have to inform your investors and the public about its possible effect on stock prices? Update, 4/28: Titan Inc., the other defendant in the suit, also got an AG-anniversary present, and their announcement bears similar language, referencing "litigation against us." (In case you hadn't guessed, I'm poking around in preparation for another article on the topic.)

This pair of contracts, coming almost exactly a year since 60 Minutes II showed us some of CACI and Titan's alleged work , is certainly evidence that giving military intelligence what they were asking for certainly isn't bad for business. I won't say anything about the lawsuit's charge that the offenses fell under the racketeering laws - not now, at least.

we see a little further now and further still

I still remember seeing C.D. Wright read  at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in 1998. One of the poems she read included the excerpt below; my head is, I think, still spinning from it.

   Everyone in their car needs love. Car love. Meat love. Money
   love. Pass with care.

   Deepstep, Baby. Deepstep.

   The boneman said he would take the blinded driver to the river. With
   a mirror. And then what.

   The boneman said he would take the blinded into a darkened
   room. And put a hot-herb poultice on their sightless face.

   Mellein for this mullein for that. We called it flannel.

   Then leave them there.

   The baby sister of the color photographer had a baby girl in the
   hills. Born with scooped-out sockets in the head. Born near the
   tracks they sprayed with Agent Orange. The railroad's denials,
   ditto the army's.

   They would have been blue. The eyes. She did not have. Blue
   as the chicory in yonder ditch.

            We see a little further now and a little further still

            She said her lights would be on and they were

            Groping around the sleeping house in our gowns

            Peeping into the unseen

            Beautiful things fill every vacancy

                                            -- C.D. Wright.

National Poetry Month, which  ends this week, is a silly concept. All year long, we should start our days with poems.

abu ghraib: an anniversary whitewash

I wish I could say that I was surprised.

Almost exactly  a year since 60 Minutes II first splashed those minicam photos of Lynndie England, Charles Graner, and Sabrina Harman in classic lynching snaps, the generals who ignored or encouraged the abusive practices there have been cleared of any wrongdoing by the Army. (Janis Karpinski, on the other hand, is getting a reprimand: Truthout headlined the story "Karpinsku is Scapegoat," which is true if a bit beside the point.)

After all the inquiries,  after a bookshelf full of cases for the prosecution presented by Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command, Mark Danner's Torture and Truth and the damning paper trail ensconced in The Torture Papers, the military court has cleared General Sanchez and three others of all responsibility for what happened at Abu Ghraib.

An independent panel led by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger concluded last August that General Sanchez had failed to make sure that his staff was dealing with Abu Ghraib's problems. A separate Army investigation, called the Kern-Fay-Jones report, found that at one point General Sanchez approved the use of severe interrogation practices that led indirectly to some of the abuses.

The Schlesinger inquiry last summer also determined that General Sanchez's deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, failed to act quickly enough to make urgent requests to higher levels for more troops at the understaffed prison.

But those inquiries were not empowered to impose any punishments; that was left up to the Army.

The new review, by the Army inspector general, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Green, exonerated General Sanchez and General Wojdakowski of the allegations that were included in one or more of the 10 major investigations over the past year into detainee abuse.

It also found to be "unsubstantiated" allegations against Maj. Gen. Barbara G. Fast, the former chief intelligence officer in Iraq who oversaw the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib, and Col. Marc Warren, the command's top legal officer. The Schlesinger panel said Colonel Warren had failed to report prisoner abuses witnessed by the Red Cross to his boss for more than a month, and that General Fast had failed to advise General Sanchez properly about the management of interrogations at the prison.

While General Sanchez and the other top officers may not have done everything right, the inquiry said, their failures came as they struggled to combat a fast-growing insurgency and a booming prison population, all with an understaffed headquarters.

Wait a minute. You let them off because they were working so hard? An "understaffed headquarters" turns off your moral compass? Sanchez wrote that memo , those director's guidelines for a creative gulag, some late night under pressure when then IED explosions had gotten to  be too much? Fast and Warren were just under too much stress, and just forgot to mention what the Red Cross had seen? I've had undegraduates with late or missing term papers come up with better rationales than that.

(As for the "booming prison population," I spoke with a Reserve MP a few months back who said he had spent hours trying to help a grieving family figure out why their husband/father had been taken there; after that, he occasionally turned his back to let an ordinary Iraqi leave the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than bring him to that black hole. The conversation comfirmed the impression, left by other sources, that the boom was caused equally by panicked GIs arresting every male with a pulse.)

By now, the fiction that Abu Ghraib was an anomaly, that similar practices weren't common in U.S. detention facilities from Bagram to Guantanamo or that no official sanction had been provided, has long since melted away.  But what has happened to public outrage? When politicos talk of "values," of "moral politics," they mean prying into your sex life.  (Tomorrow, on the anti-constitutional orgy known as 'Justice Sunday," a bunch of neo-Calvinists will pound away in obeisance to the Republican Party without mentioning the most amoral behavior exhibited tbis year.)

Update: And even before John Bolton's possible arrival, the U.S. has managed to bully the U.N. into firing its human rights monitor for Afghanistan. and even eliminating the post, to prevent more alarms like this one.

How can we honor this anniversary -- while also reminding people that the highest-level perpetrators have been promoted? 

Well, with Schiavo and JP2 safely dead,  the cable death cults have a need for ghoulist images. They can do an Anniversary Torture Special, hosted by Maher Arar, with dramatic readings of the testimony of torture survivors across eras.

Perhaps someone can read from the legal case  on behalf of one Abu Ghraib survivor represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights in Saleh v. Titan (full complaint in PDF here) .The phrase "Torture Conspirators" is used to identify the alliance of MPs and private contractors, who were, he says --

(a) During interrogation, hitting him with electric cables and kicking him with
boots if he did not answer or did not answer in the manner desired by the Torture Conspirators;
(b) Tying his hands behind his backs and terrorizing him by shooting electric
guns at him;
(c) Stripping him, tying his hands behind his back and releasing dogs to attack
his private parts;
(d) Using demeaning and dehumanizing language;
(e) Depriving him of sleep by use of loud music or loose dogs roaming around the tent;
(f) Stripping his clothes off and forcing him to stand on one leg for as long as five hours, during which they would hit him with a rifle if he showed any sign of fatigue or moved in any manner;
(g) Hitting his private parts repeatedly.
116. During a particular interrogation, the Torture Conspirators asked Plaintiff Ismael a
question that he refused to answer. As a result, they stripped off his clothes and covered his face with a bag. Hours later they removed the bag and showed him two photographs of sexual torture committed on detainees known to Plaintiff Ismael. The first photograph showed a young boy (age 12-15) being sexually molested by a person in a United States uniform. The Torture Conspirators told Plaintiff Ismael that he would be treated in the same fashion if he did not answer their question.
The Torture Conspirators then showed him another photograph of a different detainee, also known to Plaintiff Ismael, who was being forced to perform oral sex on a person in a United States uniform. The Torture Conspirators again threatened Plaintiff Ismael with similar treatment if he refused to answer questions.

The italics and bolds indicate acts also confirmed by photographs that only Congress has so far seen.:

The images, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress, depict "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman." After Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) viewed some of them in a classified briefing, he testified that his "stomach gave out."  NBC News reported that they show "American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys." Everyone who saw the photographs and videos seemed to shudder openly when contemplating what the reaction would be when they eventually were made public.

But they never were. After the first batch of Abu Ghraib images shocked the world on April 28, 2004, becoming instantly iconic—a hooded prisoner standing atop a box with electrodes attatched to his   hands, Pfc. Lynndie England dragging a naked prisoner by a leash, England and   Spc. Charles Graner giving a grinning thumbs-up behind a stack of human meat—no   substantial second round ever came, either from Abu Ghraib or any of the other   locations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay where abuses have been   alleged. ABC News  broadcast two new photos from the notorious Iraq prison on May 19, The   Washington Post printed a half-dozen on May 20 and three more on June 10,   and that was it.

That's how to mark this anniversary. That's the equivalent to the Schiavo show. Blur the faces and the genitals and let the public know what they voted for in December, what the baby-faced Attorney General and his minions at Justice claim they can paper over and brush off with a smile.

Call this my modest proposal.

 

 

and there is blood on the wire

I don't know when I first started acknowledging, and paying attention to, the international ruling class -- or when I first came across the work of William Domhoff. I think it was the marvelously readable The Bohemian Grove: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness,, before  I went straight to the hard stuff in The Higher Circles. The former had me, after a performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, standing up and calling out that we should all go north, and  confront  in their summer retreat the ruling class being parodied. And long after I stopped being a Jackson Browne fan, I was still singing his lyric in the shower:

There's a shadow on the faces/of the men who send the gun
To the wars that are fought in places/where their business interests run

Still, when I talk sbout the influence of the moneyed class on military decisions, and vice versa, I feel someone cutting  a tinfoil hat for me. Despite (because of?) Michael Moore.

That's why this is so powerful: the program for the funeral of  Thomas Enders (who they must have had  trouble stuffing into his coffin because all of the blood that wouldn't wash off his hands). Thanks to tiny revolution for explaining why, and offering an elegant illustration of those elites holding hands.

And now that I'm reminded of it, let JB give us the true funeral song.

They sell us the president the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
...
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

as we fall apart, will you let me hear?

Yes, I know it's National Poetry Month, not National Berryman month, but ....

I don't know one damned butterfly from another
my ignorance of the stars is formidable,
also of dogs & ferns
except that around my house one destroys the other
When I reckon up my real ignorance, pal,
I mumble "many returns"—

next time it will be nature & Thoreau
this time is Baudelaire if one had the skill
and even those problems O
At the mysterious urging of the body or Poe
reeled I with chance, insubordinate & a killer
O formal & elaborate I choose you

but I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss,
the mad, I sometimes can't    always tell them apart
As we fall apart, will you let me hear?
That would be good, that would be halfway to bliss
You said will you answer back? I cross my heart
& hope to die but not this year.        

John Berryman

you'd think Karl Rove was at the conclave

Like Jeanne, I was momentarily stunned when I heard the Latinate pronouncement that the new pope would be the virulent Joseph Ratzinger -- and then enraged,  like my girl and  John Aravosis, who's spent the last few hours compiling much of the damning evidence on Benedict 16. Starting with  this:

----------------
He sends shivers down the spines of liberal Catholics and Catholic thinkers. He's bee been the head of the inquisition in the church, literally. He's called dozens upon hundreds of theologians and priests to the carpet, put a chill through free speech and debate in the church. John Paul's legacy was of spreading democracy in eastern Europe but he quashed it inside the church. Ratzinger was the main instrument for killing free speech in the church. Ratzinger helped quash democracy inside the church, intellectual thought. He believes the church always knows what right, is never wrong.

He's UBER-conservative, he was a bit of a liberal, a moderate, as a young man. But the 1968 student uprisings turned him into an arch uber-conservative, he's like a convert, the worst kind of conservative.
------------------

Over the years,  the fierce anti-clericalism of my teen years has been moderated by the knowledge that much, if not most, of the heavy lifting in social justice movements has been done by people with some kind of religious community -- whether it's the Erie Benedictines and their vibrant feminist community up north, who stood up to John Paul II -- and Ratzinger - when he ordered Sister Joan Chittister to be silenced in her support of women''s ordination; Catholic Relief Services, doing in Darfur what no government will;  the Mennonites that staff the Military Counseling Network in Germany; or my uncle Joe, about to retire from 35 years of teaching in the South Bronx, but not from his ministry as a deacon. I was at his ordination in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and was stirred by the music and the odd reckoning that I was, by doctrine, watching two (three) miracles in one.

I've also felt that if age made me more in need of  a spiritual community, I would have to dance with the one that brung me -- rather than convert to Judaism, as I'd thought about,  let alone some more homegrown California Taoist thing. Not any more. I will stop feeling embarrassed when I go to a wedding and decline communion.

For when a man  variously called, according to the Times of London, by  "a variety of sobriquets — including “the enforcer”, “the panzer cardinal” and “God’s rottweiler,”  who defends violence against gays and doesn't think much of women, is chosen with such dispatch, it can only mean  two things, neither of them appetizing.

One is that a group of celibate old men had a chance to express their rage at  the sexual revolution, feminism, and the tendency of literate clergy  and parishioners to think and write for themselves. The other is their fear of that "enforcer," like Tom De Lay on steroids. The  result was a repeat of the Cheney effect: the dark power behind the throne easing himself into the seat of power without a hitch. (Update, Friday: Maureen Dowd saw the same connection, and of course her take is funnier..)

Many have observed how JP II, with his purge of diverse thought, centralization of power on the one hand, and oversimplified. wildly charismatic approach on the other, has brought Catholicism into much closer alignment with the fundamentalists who once abhorred it. No wonder George Bush was the first American president at a papal  funeral.

My condolences to the brave Catholics who are weeping tonight. I'm deeply curious about your thoughts.

humans live out of curiosity

From  an unbelievably good book of short stories called Sarajevo Marlboro, by  Miljenko Jergovic (translated by Stela Tomasevic):

-------------------------.
I flick through books, and wait for the carrots, parsnips and the lettuce to grow. Humans live out of curiosity. That's the best way, and the most honest way. Anything else is just a false way of  courting other people's tears. Camus demanded and gave melodramatic explanations. For those whose death isn't accidental, the situation is as follows: women and homosexuals slit their wrists, soldiers and boors shoot themselves in the head, actors and romantics swallow pills, the clumsy and neurotic shoot themselves in the heart, the ignorant and the perverse hang themselves, the ambitious and the weak jump off bridges, sad cases and intellectuals jump from roofs or top floors.

The parsnips are the first to sprout, followed by lettuce and finally the carrots. The tiny leaves are as soft as a newborn baby's hair.

-----------------------

As Voltaire suggests, sometimes the garden is all we have .

The rest of the book -- which I hope to review for ABR, and will blog my notes as usual -- features stuff like this:

------------
Elena was happy and successful. Zlaja was happy and unrealistic, Often she accompanied him on his drinking bouts but only when there was a gap in her busy schedule.....As a couple, they hadn't reckoned on the non-stop shellings:  it couldn't be ignored or avoided; it destroyed real as well as imaginary worlds.

-------------------------
No wonder some characters revert to parsnips. The only other choices are on the menu at the suicide cafe.   (Link is to another TSP excerpt, which a few of you may have heard me read in public.)

Writing about it, even to work it out, is an option only if you're not an illegal immigrant some bored FBI agent wants to nab.  From Detainment, the blog set up to support the girls in Queens:

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In fact, an FBI official told The New York Daily News, "Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers." Another official at the Department of Homeland Security commented, "We're not spun up about this case." So why, then, are these young women in jail, cut off from their families? Why are their lives being ruined? This is an insane injustice.

Please open your hearts to both families. The family of A., the young Guinean woman, is in urgent need, and owes money to their lawyer. They have also lost their income, as the father has also been detained on immigration violations. As we learn more details about her situation, we may find they have other needs as well.

The young Bangladeshi woman, T., and her loved ones also face an enormous challenge. Her family needs to raise approximately $10,000 in the next three months just to get by. There are three children. The vast majority of the money would go towards housing, because the family has had to give up their apartment out of fear of surveillance or other threats to their safety.

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Ed, my little brother, commented rather poetically on this case: "I would rather we recieve comment for being wrong than cry later for doing nothing. "  I won't argue here that those FBI agents could have been doing something more productive than reading teenn girls' high school essays; I'd just love for him, and the silent hordes who agree, to concede that there's no there there. It's  time for someone bright at HSA to hear the comments, and to decide this is getting to be more of a pain than it's worth.  And it's our job, I guess, to keep telling the story till something actually happens.

It's been on NPR as well as continuing Times coverage (though the latter will insist on mentioning a suicide bomb fear). but the girls are still detained. I feel proud of having been the first to throw this up in the commentish blogosphere (Body and Soul , The Heretik, and Bitch Ph.D. since made sure it got proper notice)  and now wonder what else is possible. The power of the press, even the Times,  is severely limited, at least against these monsters. (Click that NPR link and hear Nina Bernstein's frustration.)

I hope the girl who wrote the sincere essay about suicide and Islam is taking good notes in detention. Send her Dostoevsky and Malcolm X. Send her Jergovic as well (who some have compared favorably to Calvino), though he may be a little scatological for her current level of Islamic devotion. But voices from hell deserve such clear notes, and wide distribution.

I'm, certainly going to read more Jergovic if I can (he has two novels also). Knowing a little about translation, I looked up Tomasevic as well -- only to find that she has mostly done nonfiction before, and now works for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. I hope she realized from this book that she's a poet, and years from now writes her own fiction or narrative nonfiction. She could certainly draw it  from the ICTY commedia: Milosevic's clowning self-defense, rich NGO buzzards in their expensive jackets .