A nice segue on one of Charles Osgood’s CBS Radio spots this morning: He did a news item on the strange drama surrounding Yasser Arafat’s decline, and ran a soundbite from one of Arafat’s aides that went something like this: “He will live or die based on his body’s strength and the will of God.” Then Osgood comes on and says, “More after this, from the American Jewish Committee.” The message turned out to be an ad for Israel. A lovely unplanned moment of irony.
Notes on the New Iraq
A reading: The New Yorker (Nov. 15 edition) has a harrowing piece from Jon Lee Anderson, its principal Iraq correspondent, on the consequences of the U.S. decision to try to break up the Baath Party and the Iraqi Army. I think a lot of this stuff has been said before — that abolishing the party and disbanding the army simply through Iraq’s best and brightest, on one hand, and most desperate and well-armed on the other — into the street with little to do but oppose or fight the occupation. But he presents a couple of tragic examples of what happened to individual Baathists in the wake of "de-Baathification," suggests how poorly the purge program was run, and collects some interesting opinions on the ground from U.S. military and civilian officials who questioned the purge when it was ordered.
"The order had an immediate effect. … ‘We had a lot of directors general of hospitals who were very good, and, with de-Baathification, we lost them and their expertise overnight,’ [Stephen Browning, the U.S. official in charge of Iraq’s Ministry of Health] told me. At the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which was another of his responsibilities, ‘we were left dealing with what seemed like the fifth string. . . . Nobody who was left knew anything.’
"An American special-forces officer stationed in Baghdad at the time told me that he was stunned by Bremer’s twin decrees. After the dissolution of the Army, he said, ‘I had my guys coming up to me and saying, "Does Bremer realize that there are four hundred thousand of these guys out there and they all have guns?" They all have to feed their families.’ He went on, ‘The problem with the blanket ban is that you get rid of the infrastructure; I mean, after all, these guys ran the country, and you polarize them. So did these decisions contribute to the insurgency? Unequivocally, yes. And we have to ask ourselves: How well did we really know how to run Iraq? Zero.’ "
Even if you’ve been paying attention, Anderson’s article is helpful in explaining how our whole Iraq show has fallen apart.
‘Birthday, Lydell
Happy birthday to Lydell Fisk, a one-time fellow inmate at the state institution in Normal, who like my brother John (yet another former Normalite) is entering the final year of his first half-century of excellence.
Nocturnal Perambulation
If you want to cut down on the syllable count, just say “night walk.” A storm has been headed our way all day long. And after all the family business of the evening had been transacted, by which I mean dinner (I’ll admit it: frozen pizza), 1.0 episodes of regular old-school (i.e. Michael Moriarty era) “Law and Order” and .5 units of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” on cable, “The Daily Show,” which did a nice bit on Falluja’s impact on the future of Iraqi democracy, and the beginning of the KTVU’s “10 O’Clock News,” which had thrilling local jet-fuel-pipeline-rupture video to show, I headed out for a short walk before the rain. Stopped at the open-till-midnight drug store and bought some unneeded “athletic energy” (or ‘fancy candy”) bars for future consumption. Headed north on the streets that cut across the lower part of the ridge that marks the beginning of the hills here in North Berkeley (our house is about 120 feet above sea level, and the high point on the walk, as I know from my new mapping software, was 400 feet). All was quiet, except for the airline flights climbing as they headed east on all-night trips (if the wind shifts to the south or southwest as the storm moves in, the air traffic pattern will reverse and we’ll have incoming flights descending to the west over the hills). Got home just as the rain really started to come down.
Mission Accomplished! Again!
My dad suggests that there’s a little irony in U.S. troops going into Fallujah, in sort of latter-day "Sands of Iwo Jima" style, 18 months after the president and friends declared "mission accomplished." But maybe the new battle is an excellent public-relations opportunity. We could stage a "Mission Accomplished! Again!" event. Maybe George "Two-Term" Bush could land a chopper in the middle of town, or whatever is left of it after all our precision-munitions work. Maybe someone could drape a big "Mission Accomplished! Again!" banner on the bridge from which those four American security contractors were hung after insurgents killed and burned them earlier this year. And maybe we can get out of Iraq before we need to accomplish the same mission again, in Fallujah or Najaf or some other town we have to blow to hell to liberate.
X Prize News: $10 Million Check
Just for the record: Yesterday in St. Louis, the X Prize Foundation awarded Paul Allen and Burt Rutan the $10 million check they won for their SpaceShipOne launches of Sept. 29 and Oct. 4. (Other significant X Prize booty: a 200-pound, 5-foot-tall trophy.) I thought about going, but what with the election and other little things nagging at me (plus the reluctance of what I’ll call my freelance sponsors to pick up expenses for out-of-town trips, meaning I would have gone on my own dime) I didn’t make it.
The stories I see (I’ve only read a couple of them) don’t answer my biggest point of curiosity about the award: How the cash is going to be split up. Rutan has been very upfront that all the investment for SpaceShipOne came from Allen (no one but the principals knows exactly how much money went into the project; but after the second successful X Prize flight in October, Rutan remarked that winning the $10 million prize recouped 40 percent of Allen’s outlay, which would put the investment figure at $25 million. Anyway, Allen said he’d be sharing the jackpot with Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites; and Rutan said, in turn, that everyone at Scaled would share in the cash. I just wonder how much everyone got.
Up, Around and About
I’ve been spending too much time inside lately. So I went out early this afternoon on a long, long walk. Up into the hills to the north of campus, then skirted the campus to the east, but below the top of the ridge. Then walked back down south of campus, near the Claremont Hotel, then walked back across town home. About 10 miles, in all, and I was back just as it was getting dark. There was a football game at Memorial Stadium. Cal continued its great season by coming back to win against Oregon. Wherever I was along the hike, I could hear at least the muffled roar of the crowd. I found one spot as I came down from the hills — must have been the fourth quarter by then — where I could hear so clearly that I could pick out individual voices. Also, wherever I went, a big red blimp with a Saturn logo was orbiting overhead. I think if I’d gone to the very top of the hills I might have gotten to a spot where I was higher than it was; didn’t quite make it that far, though. The blimp became my frequent photographic subject.
Also saw a natural phenomenon I’d never seen before: I happened to look up at a big pine tree that had the sun directly behind it. At the tips of several boughs, there was a very light veil of something — spider webs, maybe even a vapor of some kind — waving in the air. Another hiker came by and I asked whether she could see it to and whether she knew what it was. She said she hadn’t seen anything like it before, and wondered if the streamers were actually little clouds of insects (also, while we were standing there, a big red-tailed hawk came directly overhead, very low, and landed in a tree behind us; immediately, a little kestrel appeared and chased the hawk away, dive bombing the bigger bird as it sailed out over a canyon). I continued walking, and came to another line of trees silhouetted by the sun. Sure enough: the same little misty wisps of nearly nothing were dancing above some of the boughs. Looking closely, it did look like they were insects. I got a couple of bad pictures of what it looked like. The best I could do with my little camera, I think. Strange that in all my years walking around here I’ve never seen this before.
My Votes
The night before the election, I was feeling optimistic about a Kerry victory, but aware that because so much was unknown about what was really going on with voters in what the French call les états d’oscillation (Florida, Ohio, Michigan et al.), that I was talking myself into my optimism. That brought to mind my first presidential vote, in 1972; I had just turned 18, my participation was a gift of the 26th Amendment. The race, insofar as it was a race, was McGovern versus Nixon, an ultraliberal antiwar candidate who chose, then dropped, a mentally fragile running mate versus a paranoid lush who was not only making a historic diplomatic opening to China but also, it turned out, working overtime to entangle himself in Watergate.
I voted for McGovern, of course. I was in the midst of my first newspaper job, working as a copy boy for Chicago Today, and worked a double shift on election night. Despite what all the polls said — and though I haven’t gone back and read them, I’m sure they were saying McGovern was going to get his ass kicked — I was hopeful. I wore a McGovern button into the office. Despite that breach of unspoken newsroom etiquette, no one told me to take it off; the reporters and editors probably looked on with a mixture of amusement and pity at my delusion, long hair, and odd, sometimes bad-tempered idealism. Nixon, who had just squeaked through in 1968, won in a landslide. McGovern won Massashusetts, probably still in the thrall of the Kennedys, and the District of Columbia, whose electorate is charmingly immune from the world outside. He didn’t even win his home state. I only remember that it was a painfully long shift, with the outcome known pretty much as soon as the polls closed.
Somewhere back there in my asthmatic and thick-lensed boyhood, I had gotten the idea that the Democrats owned the White House. My mom was a precinct captain in 1960, and we had a huge Kennedy poster in our front window. His victory was a big bright spot in a bleak year, and I remember watching his inauguration on our black-and-white TV. In 1964, Johnson won. A fifth-grade classmate, Ron Crouch, wrote me recently to remind me that we had made up LBJ signs to put up in our classroom; it seemed natural to me (though I remember I thought the Goldwater bumperstickers that used the chemical abbreviations for gold and water — AuH20 — were really clever), but Ron’s Republican parents were horrified. When I got old enough, I saw some history in the notion that Democrats won the White House: in the 10 elections before I first voted, the Democrats won seven (FDR in 1932, ’36, ’40, ’44; Truman in ’48; Kennedy; and Johnson). To me, Nixon’s victory in 1968 seemed an anomaly that could be explained by the tragic death of the most inspiring candidate in the race, Bobby Kennedy.
In 1972, I was appalled by the idea that Nixon would get four more years, but, boy, did the people speak. Then, of course, the Watergate conspiracy and Nixon’s role in it was laid bare, and he was out. So in 1976, the Democrats were up again and I got to vote (absentee, because I was in Japan) for a winner (though, despite having been crippled by the Nixon scandal and having a candidate who insisted on national television that the Iron Curtain didn’t exist where Poland was concerned, the Republicans nearly won; in retrospect, that narrow victory should have been a sign of what was to come for the Democrats).
So, my votes since then:
1980: Carter
1984: Mondale
1988: Dukakis
1992: Clinton
1996: Clinton
2000: Gore
2004: Kerry
I note that I have been nothing if not a faithful Democrat. And also that there’s only one winning candidate on that list. So after nine presidential elections, my record is three wins and six losses. Not exactly what my teen-age self expected when I cast my first vote. I know history isn’t this simple, or maybe it is but we’re in love with the notion it’s far more complex, but: I noted that in the 10 elections from 1932 through 1968, the Democrats won seven times. However, in the nine elections from 1896 through 1932, the Republicans won seven (McKinley in 1896 and 1900; Roosevelt in ’04; Taft in ’08; Harding in ’20; Coolidge in ’24, and Hoover in ’28). So maybe there’s a cycle at work here. The earlier Republican cycle was ended by a national calamity, the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression; the ensuing Democratic cycle ended with another national crisis, highlighted by the Vietnam War; and now we’re deep into a Republican cycle, with all the elements of a crisis on hand.
As I said, I believe history is more complex than this, and that the cycles I’m talking about might be only as meaningful and useful as a horoscope. Still, I think it’s apparent that the easy assumptions after a smashing electoral victory — for instance, that the Republicans and their values are supreme — can unravel with amazing speed.
Us and Them
Just a little post-election reading today:
Not a big fan of Thomas Friedman’s — I think he abdicated his duty as a skeptical and credible observer when Bush was pushing us toward war in favor of a rather thin hope that the Iraq adventure would turn out well. But letting bygones be for today, his column in Thursday’s Times (free registration required) asks some compelling questions, especially about the role of religion in the Bush party:
“… What troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don’t just favor different policies than I do – they favor a whole different kind of America. We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.
“Is it a country that does not intrude into people’s sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn’t trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us – instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?”
Another good read I happened across was a long entry on the blog Philocrates by a Unitarian Universalist minister (and Kerry supporter)) in Tennessee. It’s an interesting take on a subject a lot of liberals and progressives are talking about now, which is how to communicate across the divide to conservatives. The thrust is that liberals must reimagine how they frame their basic appeal:
So, we need to do two things. First, rather than heaping scorn upon conservatives who “just don’t understand,” as liberals, we need to understand that they mean it when they say they are voting their values. Understanding them, and taking them at their word, means living out our own value of empathy. It also means getting to know our neighbors, not holing up in some liberals-only enclave.
“Secondly, we need to learn how to articulate our own values in metaphors, and then learn how to reframe the debate. Using conservative terminology and frames—”tax relief,” “partial-birth abortion,” etc—we’ve already lost it.
“I don’t yet know the compelling metaphors that will give voice to our values the best. But the work is before us. This is where I find hope in the election. If it is true that people are thinking and acting morally—all of us, not just those who voted like us—then there is hope for persuasion, and change.”
I’m not saying I buy the guy’s whole argument. For one thing, I don’t thing the handwringing that’s going on now about how liberals look down on religious conservatives takes account of the raw contempt many conservatives and right-wing religious activists voice for liberals at the same time they’re talking about how important their Christian values are. But there’s a lot of interesting food for thought there.
And last, by way of my bro-han John, there’s a nice little piece on Boing Boing about a nice future arrangement for Blue America and Red America:
“… The new USAR (United States of America Red) can ban books, repeal civil rights, persecute gays and have all the wars they like. They want prayer in schools? More power to them. They can ban abortion and post the Ten Commandments in every federal building in their country. Bring back slavery, if they want. We’ll be free to live with our like-minded countrymen who believe in science, modernism, tolerance, religion as a personal choice, and truly want limited government intrusion in our personal lives. Why should each side be driven mad by the other any more, decade after decade? Call the Culture War a tie and everyone go home.”
“Ecotopia,” anyone?
Miles O’Brien, TV Dolt
A small moment of CNN anchor idiocy today: While Miles O’Brien, TV dolt extraordinaire, was filling time while the network waited for Kerry to show up for his concession speech at Faneuil Hall, he started jabbering about the hall’s history with fellow anchor-dolt Kyra Phillips:
O’Brien: Our affiliate, WCVB, giving us a live feed from inside Faneuil Hall where, really, the revolution was born. Patrick Henry, all the…
Phillips: I was waiting for the Bostonian history, because you lived there…
O’Brien: All the great orations of — the cradle of the revolution right there. And at this point, at that location, in that historic spot, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, of Beacon Hill, just a few minutes away, will offer up his concession speech. That is coming to us, we think within about 30 minutes time. They’re still plugging in all the cables and getting everything ready.”
Yes, dolt. They are still getting everything ready. And while they do, let’s remind you that Patrick Henry certainly did not — not — make one of those great orations there, since he was busy stirring up the Virginia legislature at the time.
Do you get the feeling I don’t like Miles? I don’t. He’s just a jot above the archetypal dumb TV news guy who’s on the air for his looks ‘n’ charm. Dolt. Miles O’Dolt.