Posts

Posted on

Our Torture Problem

Andrew Sullivan, of Andrew Sullivan fame, has a huge and absorbing piece in The New York Times Sunday Book Review on Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Bush administration (along with the rest of us) and torture. He’s reviewing a couple of newly published books that document the administration’s policy on and practice of torture (“Torture and Truth,” by Mark Danner, and “The Abu Ghraib Investigations,” edited by Steven Strasser),

Sullivan’s take is thoughtful. He supported going to war in Iraq, still supports it, but has become a forceful critic of the Bush administration’s handling of it. His critique of the administration’s rationalization of torture and abusive tactics is pretty devastating. Although I’ll never agree with him on going to war in Iraq, I respect his willingness to look at his own, and other citizens’, complicity in what has taken place:

“Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ”evil” might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes. …

“I’m not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible are as guilty as those who inflicted it. I am saying that when the results are this horrifying, it’s worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ”heroic” protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.”

Posted on

Revolutions

Finally got around to watching the History Channel’s “French Revolution” documentary. As a general outline of the events, it’s an OK hour and 28 minutes of programming. Yes, it’s history that’s been tarted up with lame live-action voice-over sequences, hundreds of scenes of the guillotine falling (most accompanied by a shot of a blood-like substance spreading on the pavement beneath) and a sometimes ponderous and breathless script (“And then, the sans culottes really got their croissants in an uproar and treated the royal family very rudely” or, “If there was one thing Robespierre couldn’t stand, it was moderates — especially moderates who had bad table manners”).

There was one little detail when the documentary is dealing with the years leading to the revolution (usually with scenes of peasants scrabbling in the snow for branches to gnaw on) that I wonder about. The script says that Louis No. 16 wanted to support the American Revolution largely to settle scores with the British. And to do so, he approved spending 2 billion livres (the scripts says two thousand million, which is the same thing), enough to feed about 7 million of his subjects for a year. The claim is made that the deficit incurred in supporting the Americans eventually bankrupted the French government and threw the national economy into a state of collapse. On one level, what an irony. On another — and I know before I say it the parallel is superficial — what an interesting analogy for our leaders’ apparent willingness to spend whatever it takes in Iraq. You wonder what the ruinous consequences for us could be,

Posted on

Friday Reading

Supporting the troops: Getting an education is one reason people enlist in the military, whether as active duty or in the National Guard. The Mountain Times of Boone, North Carolina, has an inspiring story about what happened when a young woman named Jordan Byrd finished her commitment to the Guard — her originally agreed-upon six years plus a full year in Afghanistan plus a full year in Iraq. Sounds like she did her part and then some. When she got out of the service with an honorable discharge, she went to her local college to sign up for classes. Long story short, the Army’s reneging on its commitment. The apparent reason: Byrd didn’t enroll in school soon enough to collect her educational benefits. The reason she didn’t was that the Army sent her to Afghanistan and Iraq. Thanks, soldier!

From the home of Björk: Sometimes a New York Times subscription pays for itself just in the issues ads that show up in the paper. Today, for instance, there’s a full-page ad bannered, “War Ends Today,” pushing a new book by Deepak Chopra, “Peace Is the Way.” There’s another full-pager from a San Francisco group called ForestEthics that blasts Victoria’s Secret for cutting down swaths of Canada’s boreal forests for paper for its catalogs (which have been declared “a world cultural resource” by the U.N. High Commission on Reading Matter for Men). On the next page (in my edition) Christians for Middle East Peace asks our president to do something meaningful about peace between Israel and the Palestinians (specifically: a solution with two viable states and Jerusalem as the shared capital).

But the ad that caught my eye was a statement from The Movement for Active Democracy in Iceland. It denounces the government’s support for the war in Iraq, noting in passing 1) that parliamentary approval for support was never sought, 2) that Iceland refused to declare war on Japan and Germany in 1945 as a condition of joining the United Nations as a charter member, 3) that even when it joined NATO in 1949, it was with the understanding that Iceland would never declare war on another nation, and 4) that the most recent polls show that 84 percent of Icelanders oppose the government’s support for the war.

Posted on

Hawking Freedom

Inauguration Day (1,461 days until Bush II is scheduled to leave office).

All Bush’s liberty and freedom talk (here’s the link, if you have the stomach) is swell. But the kind of liberty and freedom he and his people are pushing is more a matter of public relations on one hand and pure faith on the other.

The public relations part needs no explanation. It’s manifest every time he or Cheney or Wolfowitz or Rice or any of the other hucksters of liberty talk about how we’ve liberated Iraq. Yes, we’ve invaded. We routed the army. We rooted out the old power structure, right down to ground level, whether it was wise or not. We’re capable of outmuscling the insurgents, when push comes to shove. We put the smackdown on Saddam Hussein, who has been forever reduced to a bedraggled old man cowering in a hole. And yes, we’ve handed out lots of soccer balls to kids and fixed some sewers and built some roads. The power grid still sucks, though.

For all that, we’ve let loose something we cannot control in the insurgency. For all that, we’ve created oceans of resentment and even hatred in Iraq and throughout the Arab and Muslim world that won’t just evaporate under our sunny intentions. And despite all the money we’ve spent and our willingness to shed our own and others’ blood to do it, what we’re creating in Iraq is unlikely to resemble anything like freedom and liberty as we would recognize it.

The marketing campaign for the march of freedom brushes aside incidents like U.S. troops opening fire on a family at a checkpoint, killing the parents; or troops treating a minister of the U.S,.-appointed Iraqi government like a terrorist suspect; or the fact our handpicked Iraqi leader, Iyad Allawi, is the subject of persistent rumors suggesting he has personally executed terrorist suspects.

Those realities are messy, so this is where faith comes in. Faith that Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else exposed to our light will see their way to the truth. If people are killed and countries devastated in the process, well, we’re helping them make the necessary sacrifices to have just what we have.

Posted on

“Extravagant … Excitable … Lazy”

Clare_island1For several years, anyway, I’ve had an alert on file at a site called Abebooks, formerly the Advanced Book Exchange. The alert (or want, in book-searching parlance) is for anything having to do with Clare Island, off the coast of County Mayo in the west of Ireland. It’s significant because my mother’s mother’s family were Clare Islanders who emigrated to Chicago in the 1890s.

So, not to go into all the details, recently a Clare Island item popped up through Abebooks. It’s the first volume of a sweeping scientific and cultural study of the island started in the 1990s, titled plainly "New Survey of Clare Island." I’ve known it was out there, and also have read a little bit about the history of the project. It was undertaken partly because of modern residents who are working to uncover and preserve the island’s heritage and partly because Clare Island was the site of one of the first exhaustive multidisciplinary scientific studies of a single locale anywhere in the world, back at the beginning of the last century. The results of that first Clare Island survey were published by the Royal Irish Academy from 1911 through 1915; the first summer I was in Berkeley, in 1976, I found the survey volumes at the Doe Library on campus and wasted many afternoons poring over them (and not understanding a lot of what I read, because much of the matter was rather serious biology and geology and such).

I ordered the first volume from an East Coast bookseller a couple weeks ago, and it came in the mail today. It deals with the island’s "history and cultural landscape," subjects that I might have a chance of understanding. I leafed through the book this evening, and happened across a couple of passages written within a few years of when first Martin O’Malley (in about 1895) and then his wife, Anne Moran, and children (in 1897) left their home for the city in the middle of America.

The first was written in 1892 by a kind of government inspector sent to look into conditions on the island — conditions had been deteriorating for decades, since even before famine struck in 1845 — and what might be done to improve them. Number 30 in a list of points of information sought was this: "Character of the people for industry, etc., etc." The inspector was brief and to the point:

"The inhabitants … have lost almost all habits of industry and self-reliance. They have good holdings of land as a rule, and the mountains adjacent, on which their stock graze, are celebrated for their feeding qualities; but they live very extravagantly, and in good years make no effort to lay by anything to meet adverse circumstances."

As for improvements, the inspector suggested better livestock husbandry, encouragement of fishing, abolishing traditional landholding customs, and "perhaps most important of all: Discouraging gratuitous relief being given under any circumstances. …"

The second brief account comes from an ethnographer who visited the island in 1896. As quoted in the survey:

"To the casual visitor the people are decidedly attractive. Like all dwellers in out-of-the-way places, they are somewhat shy of and suspicious of strangers at first; but after the crust is broken they are kind, obliging, and communicative. With each other they are rather social, and given to joking and laughing, and they seem to have a rather keen sense of the ludicrous. They are very excitable, and said to be somewhat quarrelsome at times. The island used formerly [to] have rather a name for outrages, but none of these seem to have been very serious, and they were most likely largely the outcome of this excitable disposition, and to the nature of the social surroundings of the time. They are decidedly talkative, especially among themselves. Drunkenness may be said to be unknown. They are very kindly to one another in times of trouble or distress. The charge of laziness has been brought against them, and with some degree of justification; but the manner in which they worked when organised by the Congested Districts Board, and when they had some real inducement to do so, leads one to think that they did not work on account of having no real interest in doing so."

It all sounds so familiar: Excitable, extravagant, lazy. Keen sense of the ludicrous. Quarrelsome. Shy and suspicious. Kind and obliging. Decidedly talkative.

Posted on

More Tsunami Aid Statistics

After fiddling around for a week or so assembling, then updating and updating again, lists summarizing some governments’ tsunami aid commitments (here and here), I moved on. I liked watching the relative surge in traffic and seeing visitors hit the site from all over the world, due in large part to the fact a Google search for “per capita tsunami aid” (and close permutations) returned this site at the very top of the list. But I didn’t see making the collection of aid statistics a full-time job.

Now the traffic surge is over. One reason is that per capita tsunami aid is cooling off as a topic (yes, those Norwegians and Australians shelled out a ton of cash. Boy, those Americans sure are reluctant to take the plunge). Another is that other sites have risen to the top of the list:

—Tsunami Aid is a post on another blog that approaches the relative aid that governments have committed from the standpoint of gross domestic product. It’s just another variable for quickly analyzing what governments are offering.

–A site called NationMaster, which apparently is in the business of mining the CIA World Factbook for data and presenting it in new and interesting ways, has put together a richly detailed section that includes not only government commitments, but also statistics on the amount donated to the cause by private sources in each country, how aid stacks up per capita and by GDP, and how many nationals of each donor country were killed or are missing. Each category is ranked (and, according to this list, as of today, the United States ranks second (after Germany) in the world in the total of public and private aid committed to date with $1.003 billion; but judged in terms of dollars of aid per capita and per dollar of GDP, the U.S. ranks 23rd and 27th, respectively).

–One resource that doesn’t show up on Google and appears only in fine print on NationMaster’s site is a Wikipedia compilation of government and private donations from around the world. What makes this list great is how well it’s sourced — you can see directly where the numbers are coming from, which is a big aid in assessing how reliable and current they are. The article also includes a detailed listing of just what aid has been offered in terms of cash, loans, services, and materiel; and it concludes with a list of contributions by U.S. corporations. Pretty impressive, and a great demonstration (I think) of Wikipedia’s power to build authoritative information through an open group effort.

Posted on

Death of an Army Blogger

One of the latest U.S. casualties in Iraq: Army Specialist Michael J. Smith of Media, Pennsylvania, was killed in action last Tuesday. He was 24. (And he was not the first Michael J. Smith to die in Iraq.)

The Defense Department issued the usual antiseptic press release. The news has created a little more buzz online, because Specialist Smith maintained an infrequently updated blog that hinted at how he felt about some of his experiences (“so i think i might have made a mistake,” a November post started; it concluded “this place sucks”) without elaborating). The blog itself is simple to the point of poignancy. Smith’s last post, titled “regrets, i’ve had a few,” is dated eight days before his death:

“so i’ve been thinking a lot lately.

that time at the college… nope…

those countless times in the car… nope…

the party? you guessed it… NOPE

i know i’ve always said i don’t regret anything i’ve done in my life, but i think i found one.

——————————————–

it’s time to call my dad. it’s his birthday today

——————————————–

beauty and the beast is such a great movie

——————————————–

i need a day off

that is all…

missing you

and all of you too

-Mike”

Some of Smith’s fellow LiveJournal bloggers have posted about his death (here and here, for instance). Several papers in eastern Pennsylvania and his hometown paper, the Daily Times in Delaware County, ran a feature on him last week:

“James Smith, who lives in Coatesville, Chester County, learned of his son’s death Tuesday night. Smith said the officers who delivered the news were professional and supportive.

” ‘I don’t know that I could do that job,’ he said.

“Smith said his son did not show any interest in the military as a child.

” ‘It was a couple of years ago he came to me and said, ‘Dad, I’m going to join the Army.’

“Smith said the terrorist attacks of 9/11 probably influenced his son’s decision to join the Army in November 2002. Whatever the reason, it was supported by the family.

” ‘He believed in the liberation of Iraq, and so do I,’ Smith said. ‘He died doing what he believed.’ ”

Stories along the same lines appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.

Posted on

Revolutionary Advertising

The national edition of The New York Times, the one that lands on the doorstep here in the post-revolutionary community of Berkeley, had an interesting advertising insert Monday morning. It consisted of four broadsheet pages, the first of which appears thus: Big bold type: “For Two Hours It Won’t Kill You To Love The French.” Then there’s a big bold simple picture of a blood-red guillotine against a blue background. Then the type again: “The French Revolution.” It’s a come-on for a History Channel documentary on the subject stated above that showed tonight. That’s striking, or strange, in its own right. But the ad itself is more striking, or stranger, still.

The following three pages outline, in slightly smaller but still bold type an outline of the revolution, starting with the declaration, “You’ll love the French Revolution. It speaks freedom fluently.” The copy, in trying to convey the revolutionary spectacle, achieves outright oddness: “When the prison governor, de Launey, gave the order to fire on them, their rage achieved its full ignition in what is known as the storming of the Bastille.”

The ad copy ends, after explaining that 17.000 French men and women were guillotined in the Terror, by saying: “Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité. They’re the 3 most expensive words in French history. And, in any mans [sic] language, you’ll love that the French stood up and, without complaint, paid the price.”

Huh? Paid the price … without complaint? Not to be overly persnickety, this starts to read like something from the George W. Bush press operation, except as well all know that’s not possible because in the Bush universe the French are just one small step above true evildoers. More significant, that little declaration at the end leaves out the little matter of what followed the revolution: Napoleon running amok across sundry exotic destinations in Europe and elsewhere for the nearly two decades. Maybe the show will try to explain how the revolution’s energy was channeled in that direction.

Posted on

A World Gone Mad

Marinara_1

The picture (me, with a camera phone, at Andronico’s) says it all. A dollar-off special on marinara sauce — $9.99 a jar.. The sign is not a mistake. An online search confirms that someone is intentionally selling pasta sauce for 10 bucks (and up) a quart. Our dilemma here at the Infospigot household is that we do not have pasta fine enough to exalt with this product.

Posted on

Nice Meeting You, Too

I went out for a ride yesterday in the Berkeley Hills. A short, slow ride due to the fact I haven’t really ridden for weeks. Near the top of Spruce Street, one of the main routes into the hills from the north side of town, a guy passed me and said, “Nice bike.” I looked over and he, like me, was riding a Bridgestone RB-1, which is kind of a cult classic steel production bike. “You, too,” I said. I’m given to talking to other cyclists when I’m out riding, so I sped up just enough to keep up with him. In just a few minutes, after we had hit the top of Spruce and turned on to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, I had learned that his wife had given him a dirty look when he left the house (“full of screaming kids,” he said) for his short ride and that “many moons ago” he had ridden for Harvard’s cycling team.

“It was a club sport, and we were part of something called the Eastern Collegiate Cycling Association. Twelve schools. As far south as Virginia and as far north as New Hampshire. In the winter we did lots of indoor workouts. Our coach would put on rollers. New Hampshire was tough — the mountains up there, and I think they all did cross-country skiing, too. One time we had a three-way meet — New Hampshire, us, and Columbia. All the New Hampshire guys finished together in front. Five minutes later, we all finished together. Then we went in and got something to eat and took showers, then wandered back out to see the wreckage of the Columbia team coming in. They just didn’t have any chance to train outdoors before the race.”

And so on. The whole time I had been conscious of riding fast enough to keep up with him. I was just trying to keep up a nice quick spin on the very gradual incline of Grizzly Peak. After about five or six minutes of this pleasant cycling talk, another cyclist, a non-Bridgestone rider, passed us. My companion’s response was dramatic: Without a word, he accelerated from our conversational pace to not just catch up with the new rider, but pass him, too. Not that he was in great shape to do it — he’d been complaining about his conditioning. But apparently, he found something a little intolerable about getting passed, even on a pretty Sunday afternoon on which there was nothing to do but enjoy the ride and sunshine. The funny thing was, he continued leading the second rider for all of about a quarter mile, then turned off onto a side street, apparently to head downhill and home.

I thought, see ya, bud; nice talking to you, too.