Thursday January 1, 2003
Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic.
Jean Sibelius
I hope that starting off the new year with a cold isn't a bad omen... I am still sick, this is getting old. I took Calie, "B", Monica and Autumn to the park, Christy took Christian and Cindy shopping. The plan was to take the kids that wanted to go to the movies. In order to that I had to meet up with Christy and give her Autumn... Autumn doesn't do movies, I don't know if it's the volume, the darkness or just a short attention span... but Autumn does not do movies.
The kids saw Haunted Mansion (They liked it) and "B" and I saw Paycheck...I have listened to
critics bashing every move that poor Ben Affleck made in 2003, critics love to kick people when they are down, especially when they can't fight back. Paycheck wasn't a film classic by any stretch of the imagination but it was fun to watch. My son and I enjoyed it. He's 14 and he liked it a lot. I think ole Ben held his own. He'll be a good actor if they give him a chance to grow.
What is the point of critics anyway. Talk about a weasel job. What sort of person gets kicks out of throwing mud at folks who not only can't fight back they have actually gone and put their professional lives on the line, a critic can say anything it wants to and is completely immune to any sort of repercussion for the bile they regurgitate, they just slither back under their rocks. Actors put it on the line every time they get before the cameras... if they blow it... so what... nobody dies, it really doesn't have any affect on anything in the universe, but when an actor gets it right, it is an awesome thing to behold.
Pardon a quote:
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier. -Gustave Flaubert
Friday January 2, 2003
I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe-I believe what I believe is right.
The Wit and elusive Wisdom of George W. Bush
Today was another laid back day... I watched Eli Manning and the rest of the boys from Mississippi beat Oklahoma... He really is as good as they say... it will be interesting to see how he holds up in the Pros
Flip Wilson, I just heard an audio biography of his life with some clips of his standup act...he died in 1998 at the age of 64 of Liver Cancer... I think he was one of the funniest men who ever lived... He dropped out of showbiz... no one seems to know why.
Saturday January 3, 2003
Being in politics is like being in a football game. You have to be smart enough to know the game and stupid enough to think it important.
Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN)
Playoffs, Panthers and Ravens advance, tomorrow we see if Favre's magic is still there...
Sunday January 4, 2003
If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language.
Andrew Cohen, professor of linguistics (1944- )
Sadly, I only know one language, I have tried twice, once mightily, to master Spanish, I have no talent for it. I think for me to have learned a second language I would have had to start about three years of age. My mind is totally one track... I can't, as they say, walk and chew gum at the same time. My brain
is overloaded if I try and read with the radio on.
Watched some more football, today, Colts paid back the Bronco's for humiliating them 2 weeks ago, The Panthers showed the Cowboys who's boss... Favre still has it, he was excellent, the running game really helped the Packers, they have to play the Eagles in Philly... that will be a tough game.
This is from a travelogue at "Thismodernworld.com" I am adding it because his observations and sentiments about America resonate with mine to the point where it is really eerie.
Sydney: like a Prisoner episode, but better
First, an aside:
Apologies for the delay in posting this, but I was down for a few days with a case of "Bali Belly," a common malady for tourists to that fair island, caused by the unfortunate circumstance that the public water and public waste streams are often one and the same.
It's a lot like Montezuma's Revenge for Mexican tourists, although speaking as one with both experiences, I can now vouch for the notion (once said to me by a misty-eyed ex-girlfriend with a taste for flowery skirts) that "Bali never really leaves your system."
This might be the truest thing she ever said to me.
But that's not a criticism of Bali per se; much of the third world faces similar circumstances, and a birthplace-fortunate first-worlder inconvenienced for a few days really has little business complaining. Hell, truth is, I've really just sampled the native cuisine in full glory, and gotten a teensy reminder of just what hell the world really is like for at least (and this is really the number) two billion people.
So I spent a few days trying to keep an enlightened worldview about my own intestines attempting to secede from my union.
Thus, no posts.
Second aside: I realize the formatting on a few of these posts is a little rough. Not Tom's fault; I'm posting these on the run from Internet cafes, which poses some minor obstacles I won't belabor here. Thanks for bearing with the odd random italics and strange punctuation substitutions that have sometimes occured. I'll clean it all up when I get home. Meanwhile, mistakes in spellinj are mine aloone.
But now, back to the travel-o-rama, specifically, Sydney:
I didn't realize it when arranging the trip, but in a way it always really ended here in Sydney, at least the high-adventure part. After the exotica of South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, how alien can Sydney possibly be to an American? I realized even in Africa that the tarmac in Australia was going to feel much like coming home, even though I'd never been there before.
(Those of you over 40: insert your "Rocky Mountain High" jokes here.)
(Those under 40: John Denver was a singer. I'd compare him to a current pop star, but, um... all I can think of is John Mayer, but de-sexed, twangier, and half-blind, or, um, early Jewel with a sex change. But we liked him. He really was pretty good. Honest. Oh, never mind. You kids these days.)
What I didn't realize was just how much Sydney would feel like home -- in some ways, more than I've ever felt inside the United States.
That's not quite as nice a feeling as it sounds.
How's this for a first impression? Taking a cab from the airport, right away I noticed something missing: the inch-thick bulletproof glass.
There wasn't any. Nothing.
How strange. Why, I could have whipped out a machete and gutted the driver, or possibly dropped a grenade in his lap, or garroted him and dumped the body in a swamp if I wanted. And that's just off the top of my American-cab-trained head. There's still gassing, stabbing, and immolation to consider.
I didn't, actually. But still. How odd. How... trusting.
How nice.
Matter of fact, you're actually expected to sit up front, right next to the driver, since, gosh, it's just more polite, and a happy little chat is a friendly way to pass the time. And tipping is minimal -- rounding up to the nearest dollar is common -- because cabbies are actually paid a decent wage.
I learned this from my friend (and former Jeopardy Masters opponent) Leslie, who lives in Sydney and met me at the airport, sharing the cab ride back. Leslie's as bright and fun as you'd expect a Jeopardy Master to be, and about to leave Sydney (with mixed feelings) for a better job in Helsinki, and thus eager to say goodbye to her adopted home just as I was saying hello. So I got the nickel tour and a chance to hug somebody, which is like oxygen after a good while on the road.
(Leslie's was the first familiar face I'd seen in a while, and I attribute some of my gosh-this-feels-like-home-y-ness to that simple fact. You should, too. But only some. Read on.)
Sydney waitstaff are also paid like actual human beings. In restuarants, I was stunned to discover charge-card forms with no place even to enter a tip. If you want, you can put a couple of bucks in change down (easy when the country has dollar and two-dollar coins instead of bills), but the service people are gonna eat OK one way or another.:
It's hard to explain just how strange and different -- how much more, um, liveable -- stuff like this feels. Which is heightened, not lessened, by the California-like climate, English language, and ubiquitous familiar American brand names. Part of you thinks you're home -- and then, when something is actually easier than you're used to, you have to realize sadly that home isn't always quite this nice.
This is probably a lot harder for Americans, given our national state of self-persuaded perpetual universal bestness, than it is for folks from other countries.
But damn. Here it is.
(What are you feeling right this minute, as you read this? It's worth thinking about. I'll get back to some thoughts on that, below.)
It's more than just clean air, clean water, and the best public transit system I've ever seen (including buses, a light rail and tram system, ferries, a subway, an extensive suburban rail system, and even -- yes! -- a monorail. Which is about as useless, actually, as the monorail on The Simpsons. But still.)
These things seem to be just aspects of a fundamental difference in culture from the U.S. which manifests in a hundred tiny ways. If I'm reading things right (and keep in mind: I do not know shit; this is just a guy from Ohio telling you what he sees): the social contract in Australia has yet to be denounced as a communist plot quite the way that it has in America.
How naive.
Moreover, the idea of a collective good is still considered, yes, a collective good.
Imagine.
So massive amounts of prime waterfront real estate -- land that in the U.S. or many European countries would long ago have been sold off to a high-rise hotel chain after some politician got his wallet sexed -- remains public and green and gorgeous and open to all.
So you have a culture that measures itself not on the wealth of its richest, but of its middle class. "Tall poppies" -- people who are "up themselves" a bit too much -- aren't objects of admiration here, but scorn. The cars are modest. The houses are modest. The people don't walk around quite so often wearing corporate logos like a bunch of assimilated human billboards.
So the streets are remarkably clean -- not because you'll get your ass paddled and wallet lightened otherwise (as in Singapore), but because people usually actually pick up after themselves, and sometimes even after total strangers. And large street signs ask Sydneysiders to do even better -- not with threats or fines, and not with empty slogans, but with (get this!) actual hard data concerning how much waste is being produced and what better targets might be achieved.
So recreation areas actually have barbecues powered by coin-operated propane tanks, which in the United States would be converted by teenagers into handy high explosives in a matter of minutes, but which sit open and unguarded here for years at a time.
I kid you not.
Speaking of recreation, the work-vs.-life priorities here seem relatively sane. As an American traveling abroad, I'm constantly asked how long I'll be staying somewhere, along with a pitying look. The two weeks we get pales next to the four or six that are customary in most of the developed world. (Is our way better? Maybe, if a four-percent increase in work is worth a fifty-percent reduction in vacation time, and the extra output isn't just lost in exhaustion...)
In any case, back in Hollywood, it's impossible to go anywhere without seeing people working on laptops. Work isn't just for work anymore -- it's for eating, relaxing, and possibly sleeping time, too, if anyone figures out the appropriate WiFi/HumanSpine interface. But here in Sydney, I promise you this is true: I haven't seen a single person working on a laptop. Not one. Free time, by all appearances, is actually free time. Maybe I'm missing the backroom sweatshops where Aussie drones are finger-bashing their Toshibas in near-sexual frenzy. But somehow I don't think so.
It's also incredibly easy to talk to people here. Just say, "where are you from?" Chances are, you'll hear about a part of the world you've never been. I don't remember the exact numbers -- you can Google if you're interested -- but a hell of a lot of people here are either immigrants themselves or their parents were. Which also means you see every variety of skin, everywhere you look. I've read of some racial incidents, and a few locals have uttered resentments (mostly toward the Chinese, it seems), but the large majority of those I've spoken with seem sincerely to take great pride in the city's multiculturalism.
And freedom of speech means something here in a way it simply doesn't back in the States. Case in point: John Howard, the prime minister, is by most accounts (and like many prominent politicians, anywhere) a lying asshole. The difference: unlike America's lying asshole, Howard has already by censured by the legislature, and has been roundly booed several times in public appearances, including the opening ceremony of the Rugby World Cup, where 60,000 nigh-orgasmic rugger fans wheeled from cheering to jeering when said asshole dared to rear his head, forcing him to stand silently for several moments.
Can you imagine something similar in the United States, land of the Best Free Speechiest Freedom There Is? Fuck, no. Try for yourself. Boo Bush in public, you're hauled away by security at a minimum, if you're lucky. At major appearances and political conventions, protesters are shunted off to "Free Speech Zones" out of the asshole's eyesight and earshot (and thus that of the press, which is to Bush as Jenna Jameson is to any actor at eye-level), defeating the entire purpose of the first amendment.
Which country, pray tell, is freer?
If this place was one speck nicer, I'd half-expect my hotel room to include the disembodied voice greeting Number Six in The Prisoner.
It actually started while passing through customs -- possibly within the very minute I stepped off of the plane -- believe it or not. Instead of the standard frowny-faced inkpad-banging passport-slamming suspicious-glaremeisters I'm used to in most countries, the Aussies greeted me with glad smiles and pleasantries. I know that sounds like nothing, but you climb through customs on four continents and see if you're not shocked when people call you by your first name while checking your visa status.
I've been wondering if maybe I'm just happy to be back in the developed world, and thus fabulizing the ordinary. But no. It really is different here.
A few nights ago, Leslie and I went to an outdoor movie screening in one of Sydney's enormous beautiful public parks. I was carrying a plastic bag with some food and books in it. So naturally, when we got to the entry, I started fumbling between the bag and my ticket, trying to open the bag to show the ticket-taker that I didn't have, I dunno, a bomb or an Uzi or perhaps a Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle hidden beneath my corn chips.
Both Leslie and the ticket-taker looked at me, puzzled, not understanding my "see the inside of my bag?" gesture. Oh. Um. They, uh, don't do that here. Right.
There's sort of this constant assumption in America -- never spoken, but omnipresent, visible in almost every public space, if you pay attention -- that somebody, somewhere, is about to commit a crime, right this minute, and it might even be you.
From this assumption flow a thousand things; make your own list. But it runs directly opposite to the spirit of the constitution, not to mention freedom itself. Maybe America was always like that, and I just didn't notice when I was a kid while they were teaching me a vast set of comfortable lies in school. (And unless you learned that Columbus was genocidal, the pilgrims wore multicolored garb, Lincoln was shot as part of a fairly large conspiracy for which several people were hanged, etc., you were getting the lies, just like everyone else.) Or maybe things changed. If so, I can't pinpoint when this happened. It wasn't the aftermath of 9-11, certainly; we've all had bags searched at public events for so long that I'm not even sure when it started.
But it's an amazing thing to suddenly sit in open air, free of the assumption of guilt.
And so then Leslie were suddenly surrounded by hundreds of other people whose bags might well have contained Sidewinder missiles for all we knew.
And then we sat down on the grass, ate our Predators and chips, and watched as enormous flying fox bats circled lazily overhead.
And we watched an excellent movie -- "Japanese Story" -- in which the male hero dies pointlessly, the heroine grieves, and nobody is redeemed in the end. In other words: a movie that Hollywood would never consider (for nearly every American movie includes the protagonist's redemption, usually through single-combat in the third act), and which American audiences have been trained never to embrace.
The next morning, the TV in my hotel showed Tom Ridge clenching his face into a smile and reassuring all of America that a) they were about to blow up, and b) they should go about their business.
And -- forgive me, any reader whose sense of American Bestness is offended; I'm just being honest with you, my only true obligation -- the United States didn't look quite like home anymore. Not the one I remember and have tried to believe in my whole life.
So gee -- suddenly I'm in an actual nation of immigrants, one which values equality, freedom, and the environment -- instead of a pretend one, where civic leaders routinely utter soothing virtuous bullshit, and the people go along because it feels a lot better than actually confronting the serious, urgent, even deadly problems facing them.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the air in Sydney is filled with magic flying wallabies dropping pixie dust from their kiesters.
I haven't seen them, anyway...
And in a few weeks I'll be back in Los Angeles.
There are friends and family I wouldn't trade for anything. There are also things America does supremely well. (Retelling the exact same story of redemption, for example.)
But I will miss the night Leslie and I watched a movie in the park, and what was in my bag was my own business, not a threat to be assessed and managed.
One last thing.
Finally, now that I've written this, I also realize that in praising a place as preferable in some respects to America, I will incite wounded anger in American readers. My inbox is about to go apeshit.
I know this the way I know my name, since I've been writing for years. I've been trying to sort out why. And this is my best guess:
Being honest about ongoing racial troubles in South Africa or the pollution in Bangkok gives readers the chance to feel superior, even as they also get to feel concern.
But being honest about the incredible beauty of Sydney Harbour, for example, doesn't let readers feel superior. It doesn't reinforce our sense of collective national bestness, as virtually every public utterance in America is expected to.
(Not that we realize that, or might admit it once pointed out. Since we have free speech and all, why, that's completely impossible.)
This blind spot about ourselves is precisely the sort of problem America ought to be discussing with itself right now.
But instead, I'm just gonna get angry e-mail from fellow Americans whose outrage should be much better directed to improving the nation.
I don't hate America; I have loved it all my life. And it saddens me beyond expression to see it not reach its potential, and to feel my own ability to change its course dwarfed into near-impotence by an onslaught of near-criminal mindlessness.
Sitting here, watching the grand show... like I said. Home doesn't feel like home right now.
And the response to those words I'm surely about to get isn't exactly gonna help...
Merry Christmas from Dick Cheney
VP holiday greetings make frightening reference to God and empire.
By Molly Ivans
AUSTIN -- Vice President Cheney's Christmas card this year not only offers best wishes in this holiday season but also bears the following quotation from Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" Food for thought there: a heavy meal, in fact. Interpreting what the Lord intended by one thing or another has always been a dicey pastime. Ten years ago, we had one of those outbreaks where lots of people do ridiculous things and then claim it was because the Lord told them to. That was the summer a family of 20 people from Floydada, Texas, got naked, piled into a GTO (five kids in the trunk) and drove to Vinton, La., where they ran into a tree. Surprised hell out of the Vinton cops to see 20 nekkid people get out of one car. The family said the Lord told them to do it. There
was so much of that kind of thing going around, I developed a theory about a dangerous Lord impersonator being on the loose.
I'm not saying that either Cheney or Franklin has heard from a Lord Impersonator, but just for starters on this empire biz, it was the Roman Empire that crucified Jesus. Then your Turkish Empire, not too tasty. Your Moghuls, ditto. Aztec Empire, fairly liberal on human sacrifice. Of the colonial empires -- French, Dutch, British, Portuguese
-- all were contenders for the title of Worst Ever at different times and in different places -- but I think the crown probably goes to the Belgian Empire under King Leopold, believed to be responsible for the deaths of 10 million Africans when the entire Congo was Leopold's private plantation.
Of course, in the United States, we like to believe in American exceptionalism, to see ourselves as the Shining City on the Hill, a light and beacon unto all the world, and -- as it says on that statue given us by our friends, the French -- opening our arms to the world's tired, hungry and poor. We would naturally prefer to forget that the country was founded on genocide and slavery, but we have amongst us many nags and scolds who keep bringing it up, especially when we're having one of our snits of American triumphalism.
All I am saying is I wouldn't be all too sure about the Lord's intentions regarding empire. Just a cheery Christmas thought brought to you by the vice-president and me.
My favorite Christmas card this year says: "We wish you a Merry Christmas" three times on the front. On the inside it says, "AND a Happy New Year ... or not ... Depending on what the elves get for Christmas. After all, we wished you a Merry Christmas three times! Only Santa does this for grins."
I have not heard of one good creche fight this year. We can normally count on a peppy creche controversy to add to the seasonal joy and festive cheer. This occurs when some citizen or public official suffering from an excess of Goodwill Toward Men puts up a religious symbol, often a creche, on public property. Then the ACLU or somebody files a lawsuit, and everybody gets mad at everybody else, leading to slightly less Peace On Earth. As Ann Richards once observed of a controversial star on top of the Texas state capitol: "Oh, I hate to see them take that down. This could be the only chance we'll ever get to find three wise men in that building."
My favorite Christmas visitor (so far) was the chief of the Pojoaque, N.M., Volunteer Fire Department. I love to hear true tales from the Pojoaque fire department (the time the food warehouse burned down and all the popcorn popped is a special favorite). The chief observes that they're getting more and more calls from people who don't have a fire, or even a raccoon in the house, but from people who are sick. The fire trucks come with EMTs (emergency medical technicians), who can handle any number of routine medical emergencies (if you can have a routine emergency) like a person in a diabetic coma or in need of a regular shot. The sick person then refuses to let the firefighters call an ambulance because the ambulance and the emergency room cost money, whereas the fire department does not charge. As a consequence, fire departments across the country are now becoming the frontline for a medical
system in increasing disrepair.
So if some homeless woman by any chance had a child in a stable in Pojoaque last night, most likely neither shepherds nor wise men were summoned, but instead volunteer firefighters. Which makes me very happy because I think volunteer firefighters are, by and large, a perfectly wonderful set of people. Merry Christmas to all.
'Morons in the news: Top 10 most moronic stories of 2003'
By Nick Johnson, Morons.org
2003 is gone. Good riddance. Here's a look back at some of the greatest moments in stupidity as chosen by Morons.org readers through votes and comments...
As we've done each year, it's time again to look back at glorious moments of stupidity over the last year.
10 Ann Coulter unilaterally decided that Joseph McCarthy, whose name is synonymous with malicious prosecution and persecution of political enemies and the innocent, who at long last had no shame, was a Great American Hero who should be revered. It's pretty clear that she was rewriting history since McCarthy was a great embarrassment to all Americans and the principles and values of fair trials and due process upon which the nation was founded and because he was a Republican. Unable to reconcile in her mind the infallibility of Republicans and the treachery of McCarthy, she simply decided that McCarthy wasn't treacherous at all, despite that fact being well-documented, in spite of the Venona papers that she foolishly asserts exonerated him of wrongdoing. I don't know how many times I have to say this, but even if every single person McCarthy accused were patently guilty, it still doesn't excuse his
behaviour.
9 Bush told us all a big lie: that Iraq tried to purchase yellow-cake in Africa. It wasn't just an error; it was a lie. He knew it was a lie because he'd been told it wasn't correct almost a year before he included it in his state of the union address. Yet the CIA took the fall for Bush deciding that it "wrongfully allowed" the quote about the uranium to remain in the address. Mind you, this wouldn't be the first time a president has lied to the nation. We just wish Bush would have owned up to in when he got caught. Maybe he can practice saying "I was wrong" a few hundred times until he's comfortable saying it.
8 Senator Rick Santorum spewed forth nonsense worthy of the American "Family" Association or the "Family Research" Council in an Associated Press interview, likening gay sex to incest, polygamy, adultery and abortion and accusing gays of undermining society and blah blah blah. In the light of Trent Lott's relatively benign comments about Strom Thurmond earlier, a lot of folks thought that it would at least be apropos for Santorum to apologize, but he insisted he had nothing to apologize for and later tripped over a chair fleeing from parents of gay kids.
7 US Representative Jim Moran (D-VA) came under fire for blaming the war with Iraq on Jews. He claimed that it was strong support from the Jewish community that was bolstering the war, and implied that because the Jewish community leaders weren't opposing the Iraq war, they were somehow responsible for it. He later issued a weak apology saying he has to be "more careful not to say things I don't believe."
6 While you were sleeping, a power-mad John Ashcroft and his buddies in the Justice Department were drafting the Patriot Act II. A copy of it was leaked to the press and all hell broke loose when its contents became public. Patriot II include provisions for kicking people out of the country if they're thought by Ashcroft to be aiding terrorists, which you might recall means opposing any of his policies.
5 Like french fries' French dressing' French toast' French dip' French bread' French onion soup' French roast' French vanilla' French mustard' You won't be finding them in the House cafeteria anymore. Republican lawmakers control the cafeteria menu, you see, and France became our rhetorical enemy because they failed to fall lockstep behind Bush over the war on Iraq. The whole fiasco inspired me to head to the grocery store to secure my own freedom french fries.
4 Lawyer Stephen Downs was arrested for wearing a T-shirt with a peace symbol because a shopping mall decided that peace symbols were offensive and un-American. The shirt also bore the slogan, "give peace a chance" and Downs had purchased it in that same mall. So offended at the idea of peace was the mall that it demanded Downs remove the shirt. When he refused, he was arrested.
3 The decision to overturn Bowers v Hardwick and to throw out the country's "sodomy" laws, kicking the government out of the bedroom was a great step forward for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. Unsurprisingly the greatest enemies of freedom-- the radical religious right-- had no shortage of sky-falling predictions and their usual batch of aspersions to cast to demean homosexuals, prognosticate doom and disaster, and blame gays for everything short of the bubonic plague.
2 Orrin Hatch determined that the solution to gun violence in Washington DC was for there to be more guns. It's possible that there could be some credibility to the theory that guns in the hands of responsible persons may help to avert gun crime and violence, but only if such an assertion were backed by credible research and not ideological rhetoric. Unfortunately, ideological rhetoric seems to be the only thing that exists on either side of the gun-control debate in this country.
1 The Dixie Chicks dared to oppose Bush's war on Iraq, and in an even more daring move actually said something about it. As a consequence, they drew the ire of "patriotic" citizens who demanded boycotts, stoning outside the city gates and that sort of thing. Cumulus Broadcasting banned their music on any of their stations. Two Colorado DJs were suspended for playing Dixie Chicks songs. It's distressing how, although blacklisting and similar McCarthyistic tactics are still fresh in the minds of many, people are so willing to immediately revert to that behaviour without a second thought.
So there you have it. The top ten most moronic stories of 2003. Maybe 2004 will be better, but I'm not betting on it. It is, after all, an election year.
Reprinted from Morons.org: http://web.morons.org/article.jsp' sectionid=1&id=4393
'Why Bush must be captured and tried alongside Saddam Hussein'
By Bob Fitrakis, Columbus Free Press
As the new year unfolds, one unmistakable fact remains unreported in America's submissive mainstream media: our President George W. Bush is a war criminal. Any attempt to state this obvious fact is ignored and any Democratic Presidential hopeful who suggests we repudiate the new Bush doctrine of American imperialism and instead, work for world peace, is dismissed as a 'vanity' candidate and told to drop out of the race.
The case against President Bush is overwhelming. The nonprofit American Society of International Law, consisting mainly of scholars, has laid out the case against the President in article after article in a dispassionate fashion. Following the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, both the United States and Britain attempted to comply with international law. When Operation Enduring Freedom, the massive military assault on Afghanistan, began on October 7, 2001, both countries adhered to the United Nations Charter Article 51 by notifying the Security Council that they were attacking Afghanistan under the doctrine of individual and collective self-defense. Most international law scholars accepted the United States' right to self-defense against terrorist bases in Afghanistan.
From legitimate self-defense, the Bush administration suddenly resurrected the discredited Nazi doctrine of 'preventive war' with Bush and his collaborators arguing that in the battle of 'good' versus 'evil' the United States had the right to attack any country that might pose a future threat to our nation.
The Bush administration is using the recent capture of Saddam Hussein for propaganda purposes to justify its illegal and criminal war against Iraq. Some newspapers have gone so far to question the practicality of the 'Bush doctrine' without pointing out its illegal and criminal nature. For example, Matthew Hay Brown of the Orlando Sentinel wrote in a news analysis piece the day Saddam was captured, that: 'By striking at a country that was not threatening to attack the United States and without hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction or links to al-Qaeda officials hope to show the length to which the United States would go to protect itself.'
The Columbus Dispatch ran Brown's analysis on its front page. Still there was no mention of the universal repudiation of the Bush doctrine.
Let's start with the obvious. Any law scholar will tell you that pre-emptive self-defense is unlawful under international law ' from Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter to the UN Charter. In fact, the United States was the guiding force behind both the Nuremberg trials and the establishment of the United Nations. At the end of the second world war, with the Nazis defeated and discredited, the United Nations Charter, a treaty binding on the U.S., prohibited nations using preventive force in Article II, Section 4. Only the Security Council has the authority to take measures against 'threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression.'
The only exception to this is the right of individual and collective self-defense that the U.S. and Britain invoked under Article 51. The key, of course, is that you has to be attacked or that an enemy must be in the process of attacking you. Under the UN Charter, you cannot simply say here's a list of 'rogue nations' who may at some undefined time in the near future pose a threat to you because they may harbor weapons of mass destruction, which we have in abundance, and they are not allowed to have. Nor is there anything under international law that says simply developing a weapons program amounts to an armed threat or attack. If this were true, every country on Earth would be justified in attacking the U.S., the country with the greatest number of WMD's, at any time.
A few voices in the Democratic Presidential primary have attempted to raise substantial issues concerning U.S. foreign policy but the mainstream media is obsessed with its 'politics as horse race' mentality focusing mostly on who is in the lead. So, while the talking heads analyze the post-Saddam capture 'Bush bounce' and predict that no President with a favorable rating over 60% going into a presidential election year has ever lost, they miss the point that if they actually reported that world consensus holds their president to be a war criminal, then maybe his rating wouldn't be so high.
Perhaps the most egregious example of a journalist trying to silence debate on the Bush doctrine was ABC debate moderator Ted Koppel who suggested that peace candidates Dennis Kucinich, Ambassador Carol Mosley-Braun and Rev. Al Sharpton should drop out of the debate. When Kucinich directly challenged Koppel suggesting that it wasn't the media's role to define who should be in or out of a presidential race prior to the people casting votes, ABC retaliated by pulling the fulltime reporter covering the Kucinich campaign.
Recently the Pope reminded the world that the war against Iraq is illegal. Perhaps ABC could take the fulltime reporter they pulled from Kucinich and put him on fulltime research on the illegality of the Bush doctrine and its eerie parallels to Nazi Germany and its attack on Poland.
And they might want to look into the story Popular Mechanics broke in its December 2003 issue showing a satellite photo of a pipeline through Kuwait looting Iraqi oil from the Ramalah oil field.
Dr. Bob Fitrakis is Senior Editor of The Free Press (http://freepress.org), a political science professor, and author of numerous articles and books.
' 2004 The Columbus Free Press
Reprinted from The Columbus Free Press: http://www.freepress.org/columns.php' strFunc=display&strID=804&strYear=2003&strAuthor=3
Let Them Eat War
By Arlie Hochschild, tomdispatch.com October 2, 2003
George W. Bush is sinking in the polls, but a few beats on the war drum could reverse that trend and re-elect him in 2004. Ironically, the sector of American society now poised to keep him in the White House is the one which stands to lose the most from virtually all of his policies – blue-collar men. A full 49 percent of them and 38 percent percent of blue-collar women told a January 2003 Roper poll they would vote for Bush in 2004.
In fact, blue-collar workers were more pro-Bush than professionals and managers among whom only 40 percent of men and 32 percent of women, when polled, favor him; that is, people who reported to Roper such occupations as painter, furniture mover, waitress, and sewer repairman were more likely to be for our pro-big business president than people with occupations like doctor, attorney, CPA or property manager. High-school graduates and dropouts were more pro-Bush (41 percent) than people with graduate degrees (36 percent). And people with family incomes of $30,000 or less were no more opposed to Bush than those with incomes of $75,000 or more.
We should think about this. The blue-collar vote is huge. Skilled and semi-skilled manual jobs are on the decline, of course, but if we count as blue-collar those workers without a college degree, as Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers do in their book Why the White Working Class Still Matters, then blue-collar voters represent 55 percent of all voters. They are, the authors note, the real swing vote in America. "Their loyalties shift the most from election to election and in so doing determine the winners in American politics."
This fact has not been lost on Republican strategists, who are now targeting right-leaning blue-collar men, or as they call them, "Nascar Dads." These are, reporter Liz Clarke of the Washington Post tells us, "lower or middle-class men who once voted Democratic but who now favor Republicans." Nascar Dads, commentator Bill Decker adds, are likely to be racing-car fans, live in rural areas, and have voted for Bush in 2000. Bush is giving special attention to steelworkers, autoworkers, carpenters and other building-trades workers, according to Richard Dunham and Aaron Bernstein of Business Week, and finding common cause on such issues as placing tariffs on imported steel and offering tax breaks on pensions.
We can certainly understand why Bush wants blue-collar voters. But why would a near majority of blue-collar voters still want Bush? Millionaires, billionaires for Bush, well, sure; he's their man. But why pipe fitters and cafeteria workers? Some are drawn to his pro-marriage, pro-church, pro-gun stands, but could those issues override a voter's economic self-interest?
Let's consider the situation. Since Bush took office in 2000, the U.S. has lost 4.9 million jobs, (2.5 million net), the vast majority of them in manufacturing. While this cannot be blamed entirely on Bush, his bleed-'em-dry approach to the non-Pentagon parts of the government has led him to do nothing to help blue-collar workers learn new trades, find affordable housing, or help their children go to college. The loosening of Occupational Health and Safety Administration regulations has made plants less safe. Bush's agricultural policies favor agribusiness and have put many small and medium-sized farms into bankruptcy. His tax cuts are creating state budget shortfalls, which will hit the public schools blue-collar children go to, and erode what services they now get. He has put industrialists in his environmental posts, so that the air and water will grow dirtier. His administration's disregard
for the severe understaffing of America's nursing homes means worse care for the elderly parents of the Nascar Dad as they live out their last days. His invasion of Iraq has sent blue-collar children and relatives to the front. Indeed, his entire tap-the-hornets'-nest foreign policy has made the U.S. arguably less secure than it was before he took office. Indeed, a recent series of polls revealed that most people around the world believe him to be a greater danger than Osama Bin Laden. Many blue-collar voters know at least some of this already. So why are so many of them pro-Bush anyway?
Wondering about the Nascar Dad
Among blue-collar voters, more men than women favor Bush, so we can ask what's going on with the men. It might seem that their pocketbooks say one thing, their votes another, but could it be that, by some good fortune, blue-collar men are actually better off than we imagine? No, that can't be it. About a fifth of them had household incomes of $30,000 or less; 4 in 10 between $30,000 and $75, 000; and 4 in 10 $75,000 or more. Among the poorest blue-collar families (with household incomes of $30,000 or less) a full 44 percent were pro-Bush. Perhaps even more strikingly, $75,000-plus Nascar Dads are more likely to favor Bush than their income-counterparts who hold professional and managerial jobs.
Even if poor blue-collar men were pro-Bush in general, we might at least assume that they would oppose Bush's massive program of tax cuts if they thought it favored the rich? If we did, then we'd be wrong again. "Do you think this tax plan benefits mainly the rich or benefits everyone?" Roper interviewers asked. Among blue-collar men who answered, "Yes, it benefits mainly the rich," 56 percent percent nonetheless favored the plan. Among blue-collar men with $30,000 or less who answered "yes" and who believed that yes, this tax cut "benefits mainly the rich," a full 53 percent favored it. This far exceeds the 35 percent of people who make $75,000 or more, knew the tax cut favored the rich, and still supported it.
So, what's going on? Should we throw out the classic Clinton-era explanation for how we all vote: "It's the economy, stupid"? Not right away. Maybe the blue-collar man who favors that tax cut is thinking "the economy stupid" but only in the short term. He badly needs even the small amounts of money he'll get from a tax cut to repair his car or contribute to the rent. But then many working-class men labor decade after decade at difficult jobs to secure a future for their children. So if they think long term as a way of life, why are they thinking short-term when it comes to their vote?
One possibility is that the Nascar Dad is not well informed; that indeed, like the rest of us, he's been duped. For example, he may have fallen for the Karl Rove-inspired bandwagon effect. "Bush is unbeatable," he hears, or "Bush has a $200,000,000 re-election fund. Get with the winner." It makes you a winner too, he feels. This might account for some blue-collar Bush support, but it doesn't explain why the Nascar Dad would be more likely to be taken in by the bandwagon effect than the professional or managerial dad. Anyway, most blue-collar men would seem to be no less likely than anyone else to vote their conscience, regardless of whom they think will win, and that's not even counting those who root for the underdog as a matter of principle.
But another kind of manipulation could be going on. A certain amount of crucial information has gone missing in the Bush years. As has recently become clear, information that would be of great interest to the Nascar Dad has been withheld. With jobs disappearing at a staggering rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ended its Mass Layoff Tracking Study on Christmas Eve of 2002, thanks to this administration. And although Congressional Democrats managed to get funding for the study restored in February of 2003, the loss of 614,167 jobs in those two months was unannounced.
Conveying the truth in a misleading manner is, of course, another way of manipulating people. As the linguist George Lakoff astutely observes, the term "tax relief" slyly invites us to imagine taxes as an affliction and those who propose them as villains. If we add in such distortions to the suppression of vital information, the Nascar Dad who listens to Rush Limbaugh on the commute home, turns on Fox News at dinner, and is too tired after working overtime to catch more than the headlines is perhaps a man being exposed to only one side of the political story.
But then Nascar Dad could always turn the radio dial. He could do a google search on job loss on his kid's computer. He could talk to his union buddies – if he's one of the 12 percent who are still unionized – or to his slightly more liberal wife. It could be he knows perfectly well that he's being lied to, but believes people are usually being lied to, and that Bush is, in this respect, still the better of two evils. But how could that be?
Maybe it's because Bush fits an underlying recipe for the kind of confident, authoritative father figure such dads believe should run the ship of state as they believe a man should run a family. Republican rhetoric may appeal to the blue-collar man, Lakoff suggests, because we tend to match our view of good politics with our image of a good family. The appeal of any political leader, he believes, lies in the way he matches our images of the father in the ideal family. There are two main pictures of such an ideal American family, Lakoff argues. According to a "strict father family" model, dad should provide for the family, control mom, and use discipline to teach his children how to survive in a competitive and hostile world. Those who advocate the strict father model, Lakoff reasons, favor a "strict father" kind of government. If an administration fits this model, it supports the family (by
maximizing overall wealth). It protects the family from harm (by building up the military). It raises the children to be self-reliant and obedient (by fostering citizens who ask for little and speak when spoken to). The match-up here is, of course, to Bush Republicans.
Then there is the "nurturing parent family" model in which parents don't simply control their children but encourage their development. The government equivalent would be offering services to the citizenry, funding education, health, and welfare, and emphasizing diplomacy on a global stage. The core values here are empathy and responsibility, not control and discipline, and the match up is to the pro-public sector Dean/Kucinich Democrats. Studies have shown that blue-collar ideals are closer to the strict father than to the nurturing parent model. But that's been true for a very long time, while the blue-collar vote sometimes goes left as in the l930s, and sometimes goes right as it's doing now. So we can't simply pin the pro-Bush Nascar Dad vote on a sudden change in blue-collar family ideals.
Appealing to the "forgotten American"
Maybe, however, something deeper is going on, which has so far permitted Bush's flag-waving and cowboy-boot-strutting to trump issues of job security, wages, safety, and health – and even, in the case of Bush's threats of further war – life itself. In an essay, "The White Man Unburdened," in a recent New York Review of Books, Norman Mailer recently argued that the war in Iraq returned to white males a lost sense of mastery, offering them a feeling of revenge for imagined wrongs, and a sense of psychic rejuvenation. In the last thirty years, white men have taken a drubbing, he notes, especially the three quarters of them who lack college degrees. Between l979 and l999, for example, real wages for male high-school graduates dropped 24 percent. In addition, Mailer notes, white working class men have lost white champs in football, basketball and boxing. (A lot of white men cheer black athletes, of
course, whomever they vote for.) But the war in Iraq, Mailer notes, gave white men white heroes. By climbing into his jumpsuit, stepping out of an S-3B Viking jet onto the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln , Bush posed as – one could say impersonated – such a hero.
Mailer is talking here about white men and support for the war in Iraq. But we're talking about something that cuts deeper into emotional life, and stretches farther back into the twin histories of American labor and Republican presidencies. For Republicans have been capturing blue-collar hearts for some time now. In the summer of l971, Jefferson Cowie tells us in a recent essay, Richard Nixon worked out a semi-clandestine "blue-collar strategy." Nixon instructed Jerome Rosow of the Department of Labor to draw up a confidential report, only 25 copies of which were circulated. One of them got into the hands of a Wall Street Journal reporter who exposed it under the banner, "Secret Report Tells Nixon How to Help White Workingmen and Win Their Votes."
As the article noted, "President Nixon has before him a confidential blueprint designed to help him capture the hearts and votes of the nation's white working men – the traditionally Democratic 'forgotten Americans' that the Administration believes are ripe for political plucking." According to close advisor, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's plan was to maintain an image as "a tough, courageous, masculine leader." The never-ending Nixon tapes actually catch Nixon talking with aides Haldeman and Ehlichman about an episode in the popular television show "All in the Family" in which the working-class Archie Bunker confronts an old buddy, a former football player who has just come out of the closet as gay. Nixon then recounts on tape how civilizations decline when homosexuality rises, and concludes, "We have to stand up to this." Nixon sought to appeal to the blue-collar man's straightness (at least he still
had that), his superiority over women (that, too), and his native-born whiteness (and that.). As Cowie sums it up, "It was neither the entire working class nor its material grievances on which the administration would focus; rather it was the 'feeling of being forgotten' among white male workers that Nixon and his advisors would seek to tap."
Until Nixon, Republicans had for a century written off the blue-collar voter. But turning Marx on his head, Nixon appealed not to a desire for real economic change but to the distress caused by the absence of it. And it worked as it's doing again now. In the l972 contest between Nixon and McGovern, 57 percent of the manual worker vote and 54 percent of the union vote went to Nixon. (This meant 22 and 25-point gains for Nixon over his l968 presidential run.) After Nixon, other Republican presidents – Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. – followed in the same footsteps, although not always so cleverly.
Now George Bush Jr. is pursuing a sequel strategy by again appealing to the emotions of male blue-collar voters. Only he's adding a new element to the mix. Instead of appealing, as Nixon did, to anger at economic decline, Bush is appealing to fear of economic displacement, and offering the Nascar Dad a set of villains to blame, and a hero to thank – George W. Bush.
Let's begin by re-imagining the blue-collar man, for we do not normally think of him as a fearful man. The very term "Nascar Dad" like the earlier term "Joe Six Pack" suggests, somewhat dismissively, an "I'm-alright-Jack" kind of guy. We imagine him with his son, some money in his pocket, in the stands with the other guys rooting for his favorite driver and car. The term doesn't call to mind a restless house-husband or a despondent divorcee living back in his parents' house and seeing his kids every other weekend. In other words, the very image we start with may lead us away from clues to his worldview, his feelings, his politics and the links between these.
Since the l970s, the blue-collar man has taken a lot of economic hits. The buying power of his paycheck, the size of his benefits, the security of his job – all these have diminished. As Ed Landry, a 62 year-old-machinist interviewed by Paul Solman on the Lehrer News Hour said, "We went to lunch and our jobs went to China." He searched for another job and couldn't find one. He was even turned down for a job as a grocery bagger. "I was told that we'd get back to you." "Did they?" Solman asked. "No. I couldn't believe it myself. I couldn't get the job." In today's jobless recovery, the average jobless stint for a man like Landry is now 19 weeks, the longest since l983. Jobs that don't even exist at present may eventually open up, experts reassure us, but they aren't opening up yet. In the meantime, three out of every four available jobs are low-level service jobs. A lot of workers like Ed Landry,
cast out of one economic sector, have been unable to land a job even at the bottom of another.
For anyone who stakes his pride on earning an honest day's pay, this economic fall is, unsurprisingly enough, hard to bear. How, then, do these blue-collar men feel about it? Ed Landry said he felt "numb." Others are anxious, humiliated and, as who wouldn't be, fearful. But in cultural terms, Nascar Dad isn't supposed to feel afraid. What he can feel though is angry. As Susan Faludi has described so well in her book Stiffed, that is what many such men feel. As a friend who works in a Maine lumber mill among blue-collar Republicans explained about his co-workers, "They felt that everyone else – women, kids, minorities – were all moving up, and they felt like they were moving down. Even the spotted owl seemed like it was on its way up, while he and his job, were on the way down. And he's angry."
Strutting the political flight deck
But is that anger directed downward – at "welfare cheats," women, gays, blacks, and immigrants – or is it aimed up at job exporters and rich tax dodgers? Or out at alien enemies? The answer is likely to depend on the political turn of the screw. The Republicans are clearly doing all they can to aim that anger down or out, but in any case away from the rich beneficiaries of Bush's tax cut. Unhinging the personal from the political, playing on identity politics, Republican strategists have offered the blue-collar voter a Faustian bargain: We'll lift your self-respect by putting down women, minorities, immigrants, even those spotted owls. We'll honor the manly fortitude you've shown in taking bad news. But (and this is implicit) don't ask us to do anything to change that bad news. Instead of Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake," we have – and this is Bush's twist on the old Nixonian strategy – "let
them eat war."
Paired with this is an aggressive right-wing attempt to mobilize blue-collar fear, resentment and a sense of being lost – and attach it to the fear of American vulnerability, American loss. By doing so, Bush aims to win the blue-collar man's identification with big business, empire, and himself. The resentment anyone might feel at the personnel officer who didn't have the courtesy to call him back and tell him he didn't have the job, Bush now redirects toward the target of Osama bin Laden, and when we can't find him, Saddam Hussein and when we can't find him... And these enemies are now so intimate that we see them close up on the small screen in our bedrooms and call them by their first names.
Whether strutting across a flight deck or mocking the enemy, Bush with his seemingly fearless bravado – ironically born of class entitlement – offers an aura of confidence. And this confidence dampens, even if temporarily, the feelings of insecurity and fear exacerbated by virtually every major domestic and foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration. Maybe it comes down to this: George W. Bush is deregulating American global capitalism with one hand while regulating the feelings it produces with the other. Or, to put it another way, he is doing nothing to change the causes of fear and everything to channel the feeling and expression of it. He speaks to a working man's lost pride and his fear of the future by offering an image of fearlessness. He poses here in his union jacket, there in his pilot's jumpsuit, taunting the Iraqis to "bring ‘em on" – all of it meant to feed something in the
heart of a frightened man. In this light, even Bush's "bad boy" past is a plus. He steals a wreath off a Macy's door for his Yale fraternity and careens around drunk in Daddy's car. But in the politics of anger and fear, the Republican politics of feelings, this is a plus.
There is a paradox here. While Nixon was born into a lower-middle-class family, his distrustful personality ensured that his embrace of the blue-collar voter would prove to be wary and distrustful. Paradoxically, Bush, who was born to wealth, seems really to like being the top gun talking to "regular guys." In this way, Bush adds to Nixon's strategy his lone-ranger machismo.
More important, Nixon came into power already saddled with an unpopular war. Bush has taken a single horrific set of attacks on September 11, 2001 and mobilized his supporters and their feelings around them. Unlike Nixon, Bush created his own war, declared it ongoing but triumphant, and fed it to his potential supporters. His policy – and this his political advisor Karl Rove has carefully calibrated – is something like the old bait-and-switch. He continues to take the steaks out of the blue-collar refrigerator and to declare instead, "let them eat war." He has been, in effect, strip-mining the emotional responses of blue-collar men to the problems his own administration is so intent on causing.
But there is a chance this won't work. For one thing, the war may turn out to have been a bad idea, Bush's equivalent of a runaway plant. For another thing, working men may smell a skunk. Many of them may resent those they think have emerged from the pack behind them and are now getting ahead, and they may fear for their future. But they may also come to question whether they've been offered Osama bin Laden as a stand-in for the many unfixed problems they face. They may wonder whether their own emotions aren't just one more natural resource the Republicans are exploiting for their profit. What we urgently need now, of course, is a presidential candidate who addresses the root causes of blue-collar anger and fear and who actually tackles the problems before us all, instead of pandering to the emotions bad times evoke.
Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of "The Second Shift," "The Time Bind," and a collection of essays, "The Commercialization of Intimate Life."
