The road goes ever on and on…
Last month over at Electrolite, there were some observations about how suddenly the premise of Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel, The Wild Shore, seemed much more likely than it had previously. From Messr. Nielsen Hayden’s colleague, Beth Meacham:
...I had a big problem with the basic premise—that the United States had been devastated, forced into economic and technological primitivity by a sudden, overwhelming, tactical nuclear attack, and was now interdicted by the rest of the world. It seemed to me to be an unbelievable premise, the kind of thing where you just had to hold your breath and jump in for the sake of the story and the writing. How could we possibly get from here (20 years ago) to there?
This weekend I read a story in the Los Angeles Times, and was overwhelmed with the sudden knowledge that I now knew the answer to my question so long ago.
I had something of a similar reaction when I read Pacific Edge, the utopian third of Robinson’s Orange County books. Don’t get me wrong, it’s on my rather promiscuous list of favorites, with one of the most heart-breakingly funny suckerpunches of a last line ever; along with Red Mars, it helps define the point on my conceptual map to which I want somehow to muddle through, some day—the lighthouse towards which I’m sailing, to borrow Woody’s father’s metaphor; the hypothetical home at the end of my personal road to utopia. —But the mechanism by which Pacific Edge’s utopia came to be was obscured—rather appropriately, perhaps (the underlying hows of it being more important to Robinson’s point than the superficial who-did-whats-to-whom), but still frustratingly; apparently, We the People finally just got fed up one day and told Them the Corporations to stop with the bullshit, already. It all seemed (not unlike Green Mars’s constitutional carnival: realpolitik as science fiction convention) to spring fully grown from the forehead of some Zeus ex machina.
Until this weekend, when I started to see the numbers come in, and was myself suddenly overwhelmed with an unexpected surge of something that’s been in rather short supply, these days. —War may seem inevitable (in a very real sense, of course it is: we’ve been at war with the Iraqis for 12 years running), but it is already providing a focal point for something unprecedented, rich and strange, something altogether larger: an object lesson for more and more people around the world of something we’ve all found too easy to forget of late—how we can get things done together that we can’t get done alone.
So just, you know. Stop with the bullshit, already. We the People are getting testy.
Obsolescence.
So we just got a DVD player.
And I’m hooking it up to our ancient television set which means I’m actually hooking it up to the VCR which is at least able to hook up to our ancient television set through a whaddayacallit, a coaxial cable, as well as being able to handle those little RCA pulg thingamabobs or VCA or whatever the hell that’s all that comes with the DVD player. (The set’s a Zenith, since, if you get your hands on an old one, it’ll last forever. The VCR is a Sharp, since it was cheap. The DVD player is a Phillips, ditto, and it sits on top of a Kenwood 5-disc CD player which does fine enough, and the whole thing’s run through a Technics amplifier/tuner whateverthefuck, except for the VCR and the DVD player, which just pump sound out of the TV set, because the amp is so old it only has one set of auxilliary jacks, and who wants to get up and unplug this and plug that in every time? Huh? —Anyway, point being: we are a promiscuous couple of people when it comes to audiovisual equipment. We do not stand on brand names.) So in setting things up I have to turn the VCR to the AU channel (and why is there no AU button on my goddamn remote? Why do I have to turn the TV to channel 02 or channel 99 and then click up or down to hit AU? I tell you, the crap we have to put up with these days) and get the blue screen of death, you know? Except all the plugs worked and everything hummed along fine when I turned the DVD player on; that dead blue screen was replaced with the happy DVD logo and all was right with the world. (Or at least this tiny little corner of it. You know. Focus.)
After that, though, it was time to eat dinner and watch another set of Sopranos episodes. It was finally our turn to get the tapes from the library, so we’ve been watching an episode or two a night. (Not as good as the first two seasons, no. And there was definitely a feeling of maybe setting up the cards to deal out at the end—Chase had talked about bailing at the end of the third season, until they gave him a year off to go and come up with seasons four and five—only to take them back and deal out a new set and get it all a little bobbled and then flub the ending. —Keeping in mind that this is The Sopranos and as such is held to a standard that’s altogether rarified.)
So we put in the tape and press play (and everything worked fine, this isn’t that kind of story) and the Macrovision Copy Protection logo comes up and the FBI warning (which we fast-forwarded through; which we won’t be able to do with our DVD player, I don’t think), and then the “Feature Presentation” animation, which seems strange, since, you know, no previews, and then the HBO Original Programming blip, which uses a screen full of television snow to make its logo—
You remember snow, right? Static? Used to fill up the screen on a dead channel back when there were dead channels, before 250 undead channels of cable and TVs all started doing the blue screen of death?
Anyway. It occurred to me that one of the more famous opening lines in science fiction—
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
—looks one fuck of a lot different these days, doesn’t it.
That pleasure taken in watching a bladesmith at work,
or, (Snicker-snack).
“And this is the only woman whom I ever loved,” Jurgen remembered, upon a sudden. For people cannot always be thinking of these matters.
That’s from Jurgen, the book currently living in the pocket of whichever coat I happen to be wearing, to be pulled out and dipped into whenever there’s a spare moment, its pages littered with bus transfers marking this passage or that, or the one following:
“Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith in the importance of what use they made of half-hours and months and years; and because a jill-flirt had opened my eyes so that they saw too much, I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere. Now tell me, Heart’s Desire, but was not that a foolish dream? For these things never happened. Why, it would not be fair if these things ever happened!”
(If you happen to note that I’m quoting rather extensively from the early bits, specifically Chapter 4, “The Dorothy Who Did Not Understand,” it’s because the other book in my pocket is The King of Elfland’s Daughter, which I’d been reading til yesterday, when a surfeit of “the fields we know” prompted me to set it aside and cast about for a more bracing tonic. —Not to knock Dunsany, mind; Pegana’s one of my all-time faves. But enough every now and again is enough.)
I’m not sure where I first picked up the name Cabell as one to watch; it may well be that I merely saw the slim, well-used, gorgeously stringent 1940s Penguin paperbacks on the shelf at Powell’s and said, huh. Jurgen and The Silver Stallion have been in my to-read-one-of-these-days pile for a while; and now that I’ve dipped my toe, I can tell I’ve got a new obsession to occupy my spare book-hunting moments. (I’m rather amused if mildly taken aback to discover Cabell’s apparent influence on one my bêtes noires, Robert Anson Heinlein. [We can argue it later and elsewhere if you’re so inclined, and I’ll concede his importance and wouldn’t dream of denying his influence which, after all, is the reason this bête is so very noire. And I’ll even allow as how “The Menace from Earth” has a fond place in my heart and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great book. But but but. Let’s just say for now that much as comic booksters have Papa Jack Kirby, speculative fictioneers have Papa Robert Heinlein, and the comics folks got the better deal by far.] —Not that I’ve much of a leg to stand on at the moment, but based on my familiarity with Heinlein, having skimmed a couple of biographical and critical essays on Cabell, and oohed and aahed over a couple-dozen pages of Jurgen, I’m going out on a limb and saying I think the Grand Master rather tragicomically Missed the Point. Or a Point. And even if one can argue successfully that Heinlein’s ends were largely sympathetic to Cabell’s, his means were quite different—and as the world seems hell-bent on proving beyond the shadow of any faith to the contrary these days, there are no ends. There’s never an end. Only means. But I’m legless and on a thin branch here; keep your salt handy. I will.)
Don’t mind me too much; I’m in the first mad throes of an infatuation. The bloom will fade, I’ve no doubt; it always does. (Nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly.) But until then—I mean, Jesus wept, would you look at this? Is it not a splendid rose?
Before each tarradiddle,
Uncowed by sciolists,
Robuster persons twiddle
Tremendously big fists.
“Our gods are good,” they tell us;
“Nor will our gods defer
Remission of rude fellows’
Ability to err.”
So this, your Jurgen, travels
Content to compromise
Ordainments none unravels
Explicitly . . . and sighs.
Given the source
of the quote in question, I’ll put my money on option C.
Speechful.
In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years.
One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.
But to turn one’s frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.
Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq—a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15—this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare—this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.
We are truly “sleepwalking through history.” In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.
—Senator Robert Byrd (D-W. Va), via Medley.
Speechless.
One mantra from the Bush administration since it launched its military campaign in Afghanistan 16 months ago has been that the United States will not walk away from the Afghan people.
President Bush has even suggested a Marshall plan for the country, and the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, will visit Washington later this month.
But in its budget proposals for FY 2003, the White House did not explicitly ask for any money to aid humanitarian and reconstruction costs in the impoverished country.
The chairman of the committee that distributes foreign aid, Jim Kolbe, says that when he asked administration officials why they had not requested any funds, he was given no satisfactory explanation, but did get a pledge that it would not happen again.
—“Afghanistan omitted from US aid budget,” the BBC, via Atrios.
A footstone.
Maybe 10 minutes ago I got hit by my ten-thousandth unique visit since I began counting back in December. (It was yet another search for Eisenhower’s rice.)
Transparency.
The Daily Howler on what Brit Hume said on Monday (and repeated here in this Tuesday Grapevine column):
A top strategist for Al Gore’s 2000 president campaign says the Gore camp deliberately caused a traffic jam on a major artery in southern New Hampshire on primary day that year to keep Bill Bradley voters away from the polls. The disclosure came from Gore strategist Michael Whouley, who said the Gore team had seen exit polls indicating a large number of independents, many who live in the up scale suburbs, were turning out to vote for Bradley.
So, they organized a caravan to clog traffic on Interstate 23 late in the day to keep potential Bradley voters away from voting places. The disclosure was made at a Harvard symposium and picked up first by the Boston Phoenix.
A little rubber is meeting the road on this one in the blogosphere, despite Whouley’s adamant denial of the Phoenix’s account. What you should really stop and think about, for a moment, is why, exactly, the éminence grise of Fox News would go about hyping an easily discredited story that links Al Gore with three-year-old political dirty tricks in New Hampshire.
How very… interesting.
(The new question becomes: why on earth would l’éminence grise strive so mightily to discredit Colin “For this I blew my creditability” Powell? Anyone see anything interesting in those tea leaves?)
Politically?
Politically, the most damaging criticism is that a consumption tax could obliterate the idea of a progressive tax system and shift much of the tax burden from the rich to middle-income people and the poor.
—White House Floats Idea of Dropping Income Tax Overhaul, New York Times, 8 February 2003.
Politically? How about morally? Ethically? Hello?
Oh. Right.
(Yes, old news. It’s being a week, okay? More later, if and when.)
Ashcroft + tar + feathers.
You want to know why I passed a leisure hour with Eisenhower’s apocryphal bags of rice?
Because I’ve been trying not to think about this for the past six hours, that’s why. —Bill Moyers has been, though.
“In Georgia, New Jersey, and Connecticut,” notes this history of tarring and feathering in revolutionary America, “villagers were quick to feather any perceived ‘enemy to the rights of America.’”
Ladies and gentlemen Georgian, Jerseyite, Connecticutian, or otherwise, start your pots a-bubblin’. There’s a number of people in the Justice Department deserve the brush.
Eisenhower + bags + rice.
For those of you breezing through from a Google search which contains one or more of the words Eisenhower, bags, rice, Quemoy, Matsu, Joint Chiefs, nuclear, David Albert, People Power, or nonviolence: another source purporting to verify what might or might not be the urban legend about Eisenhower deciding not to use nuclear weapons in a stand-off with China over the Taiwan Strait. (Not up to speed? Here, follow the links, don’t skip the comments. Catch up with us when you’re ready.) —The folks behind the current Rice for Peace—No War on Iraq campaign point us to a couple of interviews with Alfred Hassler, a conscientious objector during World War II who helped found the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who organized the original grain—not rice—campaign in 1954 – 55. In a 1974 interview, Hassler told this story:
There was a famine in China, extremely grave. We urged people to send President Eisenhower small sacks of grain with the message, “If thine enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.” The surplus food, in fact, was never sent. On the surface, the project was an utter failure.
But then—quite by accident—we learned from someone on Eisenhower’s press staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate cabinet meetings. Also discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China in response to the Quemoy-Matsu crisis.
At the third meeting the president turned to a cabinet member responsible for the Food for Peace program and asked, “How many of those grain bags have come in?” The answer was 45,000, plus tens of thousands of letters.
Eisenhower’s response was that if that many Americans were trying to find a conciliatory solution with China, it wasn’t the time to bomb China. The proposal was vetoed.
In a 1975 interview, he repeated the story in a different context:
No food was offered to China, of course, although a year later Eisenhower did give surplus grain to some East European countries. Except for one of the accidents of history, the Food-for-China campaign would have appeared to be an imaginative, colorful failure, like many another. But the “accident” was in the information, provided confidentially years later by a former colleague of Eisenhower’s, that the campaign had been discussed in cabinet meetings simultaneously with proposals from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the bombing of mainland China. The President, said our informant, asked how many of the grain bags had been received. When he heard that there had been over 45,000 plus thousands of additional letters, he ruled against bombing—on the grounds that if so many Americans wanted reconciliation with China, it was hardly the time to start bombing it!
On the one hand, of course, we have that figure pervasive in what passes for modern journalism, the unnamed source. And in one account, he’s on Eisenhower’s press staff; in the other, he’s a former colleague. —Not necessarily a contradiction, mind, but it doesn’t fill one with confidence.
On the other hand, this is a much more creditable scenario than the sketchier (if more urgent, gripping, colorful) anecdote as written up by David Albert. No General Jack D. Rippers snarl and slaver at the situation room table in this one, determined to drop the A-bomb on those slant-eyed Chinks, while that steely-eyed un-Wolfowitz, Eisenhower, sagely gauges the American Zeitgeist by half-cup bags of grain, narrowly averting nuclear crisis twice in the Taiwan Strait. —Instead, we have a political weighing of options at one cabinet meeting; we have a course of action recommended by the Joint Chiefs perhaps contemplated (“In any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes,” said Eisenhower, “I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else”) but ultimately set aside—much as one might a bullet—due to the political ramifications. —Judged by the half-cup, yes, but.
Does this increased creditability make the story true?
Snopes doesn’t think so (vastly updated, so if you haven’t read it in the past couple of days, go, do so).
But! Snopes is hung up a little too much, methinks, on the idea that the original Food for China campaign was never intended by its participants to protest the possibility of war (no one ever said it did; as Jeanne d’Arc points out, the humanitarian concern is rather easily inferred and transferrable); that the original campaign was grain, not rice (which Hassler’s accounts make quite clear [despite Snopes’s protestations of their being “garbled”]—as they should, Hassler helped launch the campaign, after all; it’s only later, as the details of this progressive corner of the past have been forgotten, that the switch was rather tellingly made by those who too-enthusiastically rushed in: China, rice, get it?); and that Eisenhower was never forced to the crisis point of deciding whether or not to use the bomb, so bags of grain he’d never have seen could not have affected said decision (Hassler’s second-hand accounts are muddled, yes, but again they’re clearly about political ramifications discussed at a cabinet meeting. One can argue the nitty and the gritty of what was and was not discussed at cabinet meetings as regards the possibility of bombing mainland China in 1955, but what we manifestly have in Hassler’s accounts is not a crisis point defused, but a policy option publicly removed from play [if privately left in the chamber, under the hammer, just in case]).
In other words: because the statement “Bags of rice sent to President Eisenhower helped dissuade him from launching an attack against China” has been found false does not mean that what Hassler said isn’t true. —It’s also a somewhat less compelling and uplifting example of the discourses of the mighty shaken by the likes of thee and me, but there you are.
And whether you believe it or not—and honestly, I’m still on the side of not, albeit much more reluctantly—it has no bearing at all on your taking a half cup of rice, pouring it into a ziploc bag, squeezing all the air out of it and sealing it shut, writing “If your enemies are hungry, feed them. —Romans 12:20” on a slip of paper, putting the paper and the bag into a padded envelope and sealing it up, addressing it to President George Bush, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20500, pasting $1.29 in postage on the upper right corner, dropping the package into the mail, and emailing the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center to tell them you’ve done so.
—Heck, you might even make it into the papers.
Projection.
Yeah, I know. Cheap indeed to begin a piece with a definition; it’s usually a sign of desperately padding one’s word count. Just humor me, okay, as I crib this précis of various definitions of Freudian projection culled from, I am assured, orthodox psychology texts:
- A defense mechanism in which the individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that he himself has but cannot accept. It is especially likely to occur when the person lacks insight into his own impulses and traits.
- The externalisation of internal unconscious wishes, desires or emotions on to other people. So, for example, someone who feels subconsciously that they have a powerful latent homosexual drive may not acknowledge this consciously, but it may show in their readiness to suspect others of being homosexual.
- Attributing one’s own undesirable traits to other people or agencies, e.g., an aggressive man accuses other people of being hostile.
- The individual perceives in others the motive he denies having himself. Thus the cheat is sure that everyone else is dishonest. The would-be adulterer accuses his wife of infidelity.
- People attribute their own undesirable traits onto others. An individual who unconsciously recognises his or her aggressive tendencies may then see other people acting in an excessively aggressive way.
- Projection is the opposite defence mechanism to identification. We project our own unpleasant feelings onto someone else and blame them for having thoughts that we really have.
Clear enough, right?
David Brock, of course, is famous enough for asserting that the peculiar vituperation of the current incarnation of the American right (and even, perhaps, their insistence on a vast, left-wing media conspiracy?) is due to projection:
But then there was something deeper that went beyond just partisanship. It went beyond disagreement on the issues. You could only find it in the emotional life of the actual Clinton haters, their own frustration, their own projection of their own flaws onto the Clintons. There’s hardly anyone in the book who wasn’t living in a glass house while they were making all these accusations against the Clintons. I’m not a psychologist, but you have some kind of psychological phenomenon going on where that deep level of emotion and hatred has to do with themselves more than it has to do with anything the Clintons said or did.
Of course, we don’t need to rely on what might or might not be rank psychobabble from a man who admits he isn’t a psychologist to explain what’s going on. There’s a far more prosaic form of projection demonstrably at work, as Nicholas Confessore explains:
When right-wing journalists don’t fall into line, they’re considered traitors, not professionals. In the late 1990s, The Weekly Standard’s Tucker Carlson was nearly banished from the conservative movement for being too critical of strategist Grover Norquist. Meanwhile, The New Yorker’s Sid Blumenthal was banished from journalism for being too close to Bill Clinton. To generalize, conservative pundits assume that establishment media such as the Times are partisan because that’s how their own journalists are expected to operate. They believe Howell Raines runs The New York Times the way they know Wes Pruden runs The Washington Times.
Now, Ann Coulter—
I’ll wait till you stop laughing.
Okay?
Good.
Ann Coulter—stop it!—is, of course, the classic example whenever one brings up the American right wing and projection. Whether it’s the starkly simple example of her assertion that Jesse Jackson presided over riots in Florida streets in 2000, when the only riots in Florida streets were engineered by the genteel, decorous GOP, or multipage analyses of her factually challenged bestseller, Slander, that litter the internet, she is the nonpareil, ne plus ultra; she is the sine qua non for anyone making this argument. Cheekily or not. —Heck, don’t listen to me, open her book to find any of a number of petards:
In the rush to provide the public with yet more liberal bilge, editors apparently dispense with fact-checking…Books that become publishing scandals by virtue of phony research, invented facts, or apocryphal stories invariably grind political axes for the left. There may be publishing frauds that are apolitical, but it’s hard to think of a single hoax book written by a conservative.
But let’s leave behind for a moment the question of what some on the American right are saying and what it might say about them. Instead, consider these points culled from recent news:
- It is easier to demonstrate a link between the Bush administration and Al Qaeda than it is to demonstrate a link between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda.
- The Bush administration continues to persecute by any means necessary a war that’s been planned since 1997, instead of acting against the very real and present threat. (Extra credit: John O’Neill and Marion Bowman.)
- And, because I like a trifecta as much as the next guy, there’s the baffling drive to cripple the very government whose stewardship was gifted to the Bush administration by the Supreme Court.
Given that. Given that projection is the attribution of one’s own undesirable traits onto others. Given that a marked propensity for projection can be demonstrated on the part of the right-wing punditocracy in general and Ann Coulter in specific. Give me all of this just for a moment so that I in turn can ask you, an impish smile on my face:
What can we then infer from the title of Coulter’s summer release?
Intellectually superior psychology always trumps defensive emotionality.
Couldn’t have quoted it out of context any better myself, dearie.
Be thou an honest pro-war cartoon?
Dirk “Diogenes” Deppey over at ¡Journalista! is combing the marketplace, raising his lantern high: he’s looking for a single recent pro-war editorial cartoon, and can’t think of a one. —Myself, I figured this was a gimme: I cunningly expanded the definition of “editorial cartoon” to include that bulwark of the underdog conservative, Mallard Fillmore, held my nose, and went trawling through the past month or so of strips. Figuring, you know, what with a January full of aluminum tubes and material breaches and troops standing tall to defend the American Way and Dr. Blix’ report to the UN chastising Saddam, surely the duck would have something to say.
Well, I found a lot of Trent Lott jokes. (Apparently, Mr. Tinsley is still bitter over the whole affair.)
I did find two strips that could be construed as pro-war, in that one asserts Saddam is merrily working away at nuclear weaponry (even as it tags Bush for pronouncing “nuclear” as “newkewlar,” and can I just stop a moment and roll my eyes at this, whether it comes from the left or the right? I mean, say “comfortable,” so I can more likely than not razz you for saying “comfterbul”), while the other is anti- those who are anti-war, which, I suppose, makes it pro-war. Objectively speaking.
But this is weak fodder, especially since arguing that Mallard Fillmore is an editorial cartoon is strictly speaking a bit of a stretch. —Anyway. Rack your brains and comb your papers and email whatever you find to Dirk. There must be some out there. Right?
Filibuster baby.
Ampersand, quoting Ruminate This, tells you how to stiffen your Senator’s spine:
- Pick up the phone—right now—and dial the toll-free congressional switchboard at 800.839.5276. Urge your Senator to filibuster the Estrada nomination. That’s it. You’ll be asked your name, address and phone. Simple and to the point.
- Follow up that call with a visit to True Majority and send off their fax which calls for an Estrada filibuster. The fax is already written. If you agree with the verbage, just sign your name and move on. If you’d like to craft your own personal message, take the opportunity to do so.
Sam Heldman tells you why. In no uncertain terms.
Do True Majority tonight. Call bright and early tomorrow morning. Keep the pressure on.
Romans 12:20.
(I’ve returned from APE. More on which later.)
Prentiss Riddle has found the original text of Ullman and Wade’s Shock and Awe on—where else?—line. From the introduction, the bit dealing with OOTW:
Given this reality that our military dominance can and will extend for some considerable time to come, provided we are prepared to use it, why then is a re-examination of American defense posture and doctrine important? The answers to this question involve
- the changing nature of the domestic and international environments;
- the complex nature of resolving inter and intra-state conflict that falls outside conventional war, including peacekeeping, and countering terrorism, crime, and the use of weapons of mass destruction;
- resource constraints;
- defense infrastructure and technical industrial bases raised on a large, continuous infusion of funding now facing a future of austerity; and
- the vast uncertainties of the so-called social, economic, and information revolutions that could check or counter many of the nation’s assumptions as well as public support currently underwriting defense.
Let’s give ’em a taste of the ol’ Number 5, eh? From Body and Soul:
- Find a bag of rice.
- Measure out 1/2 cup.
- Pour it into a ziploc bag.
- Squeeze all the air out and seal it.
- Write the following on a piece of paper:
“If your enemies are hungry, feed them.” —Romans 12:20
Please send this rice to the people of Iraq; do not attack them.
- Put the note and the bag of rice in a padded envelope or a small box and write on the outside of the package:
Rice for Peace—No War on Iraq
- Address it to:
President George Bush
White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington DC 20500
- Put $1.29 in postage on the outside.
- Drop it in the mail.
- Write about it and link it on your blog or journal or email list and spread the word.
“So-called” revolutions my ass.
Oh, and if, like Jeanne, you tend to suspect that our President’s compassionate, Christian conservatism is little more than a cynical vote-dredging scam, you might want to quote the entirety of Romans 12:20. He might like the bit about the coals.
Though I don’t mention the Eisenhower connection in this post, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center does. Patrick Nielsen Hayden notes rather pungently in the comments section that said Eisenhower connection is “all nonsense”; Jeanne d’Arc has a rather interesting take on why it isn’t. —In the interests of strict factuality, it should probably be noted that the original source of the anecdote (which I should probably summarize, for those who don’t follow links: supposedly, when the Joint Chiefs twice recommended the use of nukes against China in conflicts over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu [the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises], President Eisenhower turned to an aide both times and asked, “How many little bags of rice came in?” referring to little bags of rice sent to the White House to urge the Eisenhower administration to act to alleviate famine on mainland China), David H. Albert’s People Power: Applying Non-violence Theory, includes no indication of how, exactly, he or anyone else learned that Eisenhower’s thinking was in any way influenced by that earlier “Feed thy Enemy” campaign.
That said.
The Instapundits of the world may try to belittle the movement because it’s been inspired by an urban legend. Let ’em—the war in question, after all, is itself based on distortions, dissemblings, and outright lies. Their Fiskings and self-satisfied chortlings amount to nothing more than a hill of hot air (much as do ours, to deflate my ugly moment of us-and-them), and will look rather foolish when you and me and everyone else sends a hill of rice like hot coals to the White House, one half-cup at a time.
There but for the grace of God.
Thirty to forty days out—
The conversations turn quickly, from the health of friends, to the state of Jordanian politics to the impending war against Iraq. It is a race to catch up for lost time. A race everyone runs because no one know when the bombs will start falling and people won’t have time to talk. Mr. Mozen believes it will be soon, right after the New Year. Nassim agrees but thinks it will be thirty to forty days after the New Year. He doesn’t give a reason. Everyone has predictions, which I confuse with premonitions.
Celine and Jackie—
After a visit to an Iraqi family’s home, which usually lasts four to five hours, with the obligatory meal made from the food rations given out by the government and several rounds of sweet tea, they no longer look like the wretched of the earth. They are the eleven-year-old twins, He’be and Du’a, who loves Jackie Chan (Baghdad television broadcasts a movie every night at 11:30PM). And Shouruk, the twenty-two-year-old student who believes sadness is the primary value in music, and thinks Celine Dion is the pinnacle of this value.
My tax dollars at work—
The US government doesn’t help either. They have fined Voices in the Wilderness over $163,000 and have threatened members with twelve years of prison and fines of up to one million dollars for bringing toys and medicines into the country.
Here on the ground, Wolf—
I remember now the party last night at Farouk’s house. Members of the Iraq Peace Team were invited to a private party of musicians, journalists, and poets. Farouk dressed in casual black. He had sleepy eyes. He was gracious and demanding, ordering drinks to be constantly filled, especially for the women. The Socialist Baath Party banned public drinking in 1995. Ever since, Iraqis have taken their drink underground and at each other’s homes. Farouk’s second daughter is named Reem, which means one who is as graceful as a deer running. She doesn’t have her father’s eyes.
A droll pianist and a veteran of the Iran/Iraq war in the early ’80s played Bach and a jazzy funeral march. Earlier in the evening the pianist told me he killed six men in the war and that the men and women of Iraq are all trained in combat, and will take to arms and stones if need be to stop the Americans from entering Baghdad. I ask him if his experience in killing shaped in any way his piano playing. No response.
Upstairs, downstairs—
Most of the upper echelons of Iraqi society think that Baghdad will be ablaze with street fighters beating back the Americans. The middle class (if you can call it that) have largely left it to the fates, having had little to no history of political self-determination. The poor of Iraq wants to see the invasion over with. The sanctions have made their life already impossible, why not a war to shake things up a bit: what’s there to lose? A young poor Iraqi teenage girl summed it up nicely when she said that she can’t wait for the invasion so she can marry an American soldier.
There but for the grace of God—
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
There is more; there is so much more. And yet—
Perhaps we ought not invade; perhaps we ought to. But to badmouth America and imply that Saddam and his cronies are just plain nice folks and innocent is at best silly.
—MetaFilter comments on National Philistine
You’re sitting in Baghdad and, all of a sudden, you’re the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power and water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.
—Harlan Ullman, architect of Shock and Awe
There but for the grace of God.
Despite the differences on how one will survive a war and how a war will be waged in the country, they all agree that if there is a war, it won’t begin until after the invasion. It is incandescently clear that Iraq does not have the capabilities to fight the American military juggernaut. The real story of Iraq’s survival will begin after the Americans come (if they come, yes there is still time and the means to stop the war, there is always time because tomorrow is today) and set up their puppet regime. A media escort and veteran of the Iran/Iraq war said, “They will have an occupation in hell.”
