Grim Reading

My favorite bookstore in Austin, Texas, is BookPeople. When I'm in Austin visiting my son, I usually take time to drop by BookPeople and pore over the store's sales tables and shelves. By doing this, I've discovered some winners, including Caroline Elkins' book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2005), an examination of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the fifties and the British response to that uprising. This book won a Pulitzer for General Non-fiction in 2006. It's very grim reading.

The book interested me because I know so little about colonialism in Africa outside of what I learned in general history classes, what I've read over the years in book reviews and the passing article or two, and what I've caught in news stories on current events in Africa. And Africa is much in the news today, with genocide in Darfur, Sudan, the disputed elections and violence in Kenya and in Zimbabwe, and post-election violence in Nigeria.

Elkins' book is an eye-opener, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand more fully the consequences of imperial powers' exporting their world view, their sense of superiority, and their military might. The Mau Mau conflict in Kenya arose out of years of native subjugation to British rule. The most advantageous land was wrested from tribes and given to white British settlers. The Kikuyu were relegated to reserves, as were other tribes, to land that was less fertile and to areas that were too small to provide for their growing populations. According to Caroline Elkins, the Kikuyu "was the ethnic group most affected by the colonial government's policies of land alienation, or expropriation, and European settlement" (12). Agriculturalists, the Kikuyu "lost over sixty thousand acres to the settlers, mostly in southern Kiambu, a highly fertile region just outside of Nairobi that would become some of the most productive European farmland in the colony."

Over the years, tribes brought their grievances to the British government, but the government favored white settlers and British needs over that of the natives. And, of course, racism was rampant. The British ruling class lived leisured lives supported by native servants. In the fifties, thousands of Kikuyu--and some from other tribes--took oaths of allegiance to fighting British colonialism and to evicting Europeans from Kenya. Thus began a bloody guerrilla war. The colonial government's response was to create "transit" camps in which tens of thousands of Kikuyus (and some other tribal members) were incarcerated--and creating a detainee population of over 52,000, scattered in various camps and militarily-confined villages.

As I read the descriptions of these camps and of the treatment of men, women, and children in these camps, I could not help comparing what happened here, at the hands of the British, to what happened in Nazi concentration camps. The numbers might have been smaller, the eventual dead less numerous, but the torture as horrendous. And this was governmentally-approved torture, official torture.

The goal of the British colonial government was to get Kikuyus to confess their Mau-Mau affiliations and to provide intelligence of any Mau Mau movements and plans. In addition to using British settlers and soldiers, the colonial government used loyalist Kikuyus and members of other tribes to subjugate those resisting--thus ensuring hatred between these groups for generations to come.

In Operation Anvil, the Kikuyu living in Nairobi were rounded up, Gestapo-like, by British soldiers. Many of these detainees were strip-searched, relieved of their valuables, packed in enclosed rail cars for the trip to one of the camps, forced through a cattle dip of disinfectant, forced to strip and were provided with little clothing in exchange (for men--a pair of shorts and a couple of blankets). And they were given identity bracelets with a number on them. These people were "screened" to get them to confess their Mau Mau sympathies, screenings which included being whipped, beaten, sodomized, burned, and forced to eat feces and drink urine. Life in the camps was horrific, where diseases such as typhoid spread. Women were raped. Men were castrated. Others were summarily executed. Thousands of children died. Truly brutal people were put in charge of many of the camps.

One Labour MP, Barbara Castle, became a public critic of British policies in Kenya, but Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd maintained these camps by outright lying to the British people--all in the name of national security. High-level British officials knew that they were violating international human rights treaties but used "national security" (as well as lying) to side-step those legal issues. Detainees were held without the right to a fair trial or legal help. The government often fabricated charges, but the detainees could not even find out what those charges were in order to address them. Charges were unspecified for "security reasons." Detainees who smuggled out letters describing their horrific circumstances were punished if caught. Sometimes the entire camp was punished. And, of course, people who had only slightly supported the land and freedom movement became radicalized by their treatment in the camps.

Many British records of this time have disappeared, been purged. But people who suffered in these camps still live. As I read this book, I couldn't help draw parallels with the atrocities associated with the war in Iraq, with the mind-set of people who think they are above international and even national law.

For more information:
"British Brutality in Mau Mau Conflict", by John McGhie, in The Guardian
"10 Downing Street's Gulag", in Harvard Magazine
"What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing," by Caroline Elkins, in The Washington Post
"Who are the Kikuyu?" by Michela Wrong, in Slate
a book review by R. W. Johnson, in the Times Online
another book review, by Richard Dowden, in The Guardian

Techie Fun: Wordle

My son sent me and other family members a link to Wordle, a program created by Jonathan Feinberg, that turns text into "word clouds." I took the text for my postings in June and created a Wordle. Here is the link: A Wordle of June's postings

Update:
And here is the link to Benton's Wordle of Samuel Butler's translation of The Iliad of Homer.

Today's Quotation

from John LeCarre's The Constant Gardner:

She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to--even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites--but, above all, an inherited belief. . . that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist. . . And the fact that she was working for the system did not oblige her to accept the system's lies. . . On the contrary, it obliged her to reject them, and put the system back where it belonged, which was on the side of truth.

Promote Torture? Don't Travel!

Scott Horton has two pieces online this morning ["Travel Advisory" and "Torture from the Top Down"] that address the subject of war crimes, of whether or not our leaders will be held accountable for condoning and even actively promoting torture of prisoners in pursuit of information after the attacks of 9/11. Not only did our leaders discuss and direct particular torture techniques, but they also attempted to ensure that those directives would not be traced to them but would seem to appear to be instituted because of requests from Guantanamo.

In his article for The New Republic, Horton refers to a recently-released report by Physicians for Human Rights which details the abuse. That report is led by a quote from Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who was assigned to investigate the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and who authored the consequent report on that investigation, known as the Taguba Report: "

After years of disclosures by government investigators, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held into account.

Horton writes that only in very unusual circumstances will a country prosecute its own leaders for war crimes; to do so requires a political will that Americans just don't have. [We're distracted now by high gas prices, the increasing costs of food, flooding in the Midwest, and drought in the Southeast. Will the presidential campaign just add to the distraction or focus our attention on the previous administration's disastrous leadership?] But foreign countries have no such restrictions. Investigating magistrates for at least two European countries ("pro-Iraq war NATO allies," according to Horton) are assembling a case for war crimes, focusing on American policymakers. Horton suggests that certain of these policymakers should be mighty careful about traveling outside the United States.

Gardening and Conservation

The drought continues in Atlanta, where the watershed doesn't meet the needs of a metropolis that continues to grow with little restrictions. Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, claims that "Georgians use more water and more energy per person than the national average" and that "you can never 'drought-proof a metro area that grows by a million people every decade while repeatedly failing to plan for sustainable growth and invest in measures to use water more efficiently."

Yet, despite the continuing drought, water restrictions have been eased in some counties in metro Atlanta. Here in Dekalb County, we are under a level four drought declaration which allows citizens to irrigate personal food gardens and to water plants with a hand-held hose for 25 minutes on designated days. In fact, I just read the updated restrictions and realized how conservative I have been with my water use the past few months.

I have gardened all my life, beginning with the vegetable garden in which I was required to hoe weeds when I was a kid. I love gardening. My favorite memories of both of my grandmothers are connected with gardens: my short and fat grandmother Ruby Benton, flat on her back like a June bug, having fallen over when trying to straddle a row of crowder peas, holding up her hands and laughing as I reach to pull her up from the ground; my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat hiring me as a teenager one summer to help her re-shape all her flower beds and all the years thereafter sharing seeds and plants with me as I moved around the country, far from Tarkington Prairie and Old River, where Coles and Dugats first settled in Texas.

Here in metro Atlanta, in our little urban yard, my husband and I have ripped out traditional plants such as boxwoods and have planted blueberry bushes, strawberries, herbs and vegetables (lemon grass from a friend in Louisiana, a chilipiquin--also known as chiltecpin, chiltepin, bird eye pepper--from my father, basil, dill, cilantro, rosemary, lemon balm, serranos, Sungold tomatoes, etc.), flowers and native plants from Georgia Perimeter College Botanical Garden.

To care for these plants, we've connected a rain barrel to a downspout behind our house, we've mulched the plants, and we have become more careful conservators of the water we use in our house.

I first started paying attention to the length of my showers, limiting shower time to 3-5 minutes, and I never take real baths anymore. How I miss those long, hot soaks in water perfumed with bath salts. I don't let the water run while I brush my teeth or wash my hands. For a while, we kept a bucket in the shower to catch gray water. More recently, I've begun to conserve the cold water that usually runs down the drain while the shower water is warming. Unlike my daughter, who claims she immediately jumps into her shower, no matter how cold it is at the beginning, I have always let the water run until the water turns tepid. Now I keep an enamel bowl in the bathroom, in which I catch the cold water. I put the bowl of water aside when the water just begins to warm. After my shower, I pour the cold water into two-liter soda bottles that we now keep at-the-ready in the bathroom.

The first time I did this, I was shocked to discover that almost 2 liters of water go down the drain while my shower is warming up. That water now goes on my garden, on whatever plants seem to need it the most at the moment.

I am trying to see how I can sustain my vegetables, herbs, and flowers with these measures: collecting rain water and conserving household water that would otherwise go down the drain. By the time I give in to the more liberal level-four restrictions, irrigating food gardens with no restrictions and watering other plants with a hand-held hose, even those watering techniques may be banned. By that time, then, my garden will be dead. As will all our gardens if we do not become better stewards of our diminishing resources.

Predators: An Essay, a Moral Story, a Poem

We live in a leafy neighborhood in a fairly enlightened city in the metro Atlanta area. By "enlightened" I mean that the city, with the support of most of its citizens, has instituted practices that indicate a care for the environment and a desire for a quality of life that promotes community: a recycling program that includes composting leaves, clippings and tree limbs for free distribution to anyone who wants to fill up her truck-bed with compost; and community activities such as art festivals, downtown music, Community Supported Agriculture, a community garden, etc.

And the city has a leash law that includes not only dogs, but cats, too. Any pet must be collared and restricted to one's own property or on a leash if off the property. This law caused us the most problems when we moved to our leafy neighborhood, for while our dog stayed behind in Texas, we brought with us three cats, cats that were used to going in and out of our house and over fences in more lawless Belton, Texas.

The two female cats seemed fairly content to stay in our fenced-in back yard here in metro Atlanta. But Pluto, the male cat, was not so sanguine about his diminished domain. First, he lost the collar we put on him when he had his shots updated. Then he started going right over the privacy fence.

Some of our neighbors are more militant than others about encountering wandering cats. One neighbor keeps a trap in her yard, a humane trap, but a trap that has caught other neighborhood cats that ended up in the pound until their owners showed up to pay the hefty fine. We know this because neighbors whose cats disappeared told us as soon as we moved in to beware the cat trap across the street. I know this because the first community forum I attended, the cat trap was the topic of discussion. A local policeman was brought in to remind us of the law: Pets must be restricted to one's property or leashed.

Now, I'm a woman of peace, so I did what I could to keep the cats contained. I failed. Spring came. Birds were singing and nesting. A couple of neighbors began worrying about the black cat eyeing their bird baths or casing the bushes in their yards in the early morning hours. E-mails were sent on the neighborhood listserv describing the nurturing antics of the parent birds and the criminal cats that threatened the lives of baby birds.

How was I to keep the peace and keep Pluto out of neighbors' yards? Tom and I finally came up with a workable plan for our own little cat Alcatraz. It was a simple plan, really: chicken wire. We stapled chicken wire all along the top of the privacy fence in our back yard, about two feet of chicken wire that flops over and prevents the cats climbing to the top of the fence. At a distance, the chicken wire is barely visible. Up close, well. . . . it works. Or rather, it worked after Tom plugged up all the other holes Pluto found to escape the back yard.

Now the neighborhood birds are safe from our cats (except for, of course, the birds that seem determined to nest in the trees in our back yard--but they seem a scrappy lot).

But this morning, as Tom, Mary-Margaret, and I sat in our back yard, I wondered if our neighbors realize that--with hardly a cat on the streets--their bushes and bird baths are still not predator-free. Ten to fifteen squirrels played chase in the sweet gums and water oaks above us. A rattled robin came fiercely down a limb of a sweet gum toward the squirrels. All around us this morning we could hear birds defending their nests. Oh, yes, squirrels eat birds. We've seen a video that proves it. An ornithologist Tom knows focused a camera on the nest of an endangered bird in Texas (a golden-cheeked warbler or black-capped vireo--we can't remember which one) and caught quite a murderous sequence on tape. The video of a squirrel eating the baby birds in their nest is really compelling; local school children who were shown the video in a nature workshop were very impressed.

Or what about the red-shouldered hawk that haunts these trees? Or the crows that also will eat baby birds of other species, given the chance? Do our neighbors think mockingbirds chase crows because the mockingbirds are ill-tempered?

Cats, I know, are hell on songbirds, but, really, feral cats in the countryside do the most damage. Removing one predator in an urban setting will not much impact the songbird population. Or so says Dr. Kevin J. McGowan, in defense of crows.

And now, our daughter's story:
One afternoon in late winter, our daughter was walking home from school. When she was less than a block from the house, she noticed a little striped ground squirrel being chased by a cat. The ground squirrel had obviously been trying to evade the cat for a while and was losing energy. It would be captured any moment. So our daughter scared off the cat with a loud "shushing" sound and some swift hand movements. The cat ran off. The little ground squirrel took a thankful breath. And then, from a limb in a large tree in one of our neighbors' front yards where this life-saving mission was taking place, a hawk swooped down and picked up the ground squirrel. Open-mouthed and speechless, daughter watched the hawk fly away with its prey in its claws.

And Anita's poem:

The Darkness that Haunts their Dreams

Flat on its back, beak bitter
and still, feathers lank and close,
a sparrow lies under the ironing board
like a drunk in a stupor--
But even a drunk has breath,
heavy, malodorous, humid
exchange of air for air.
Not this bird
placed with such poignant domesticity,
a gift from Pluto,
cat of the underbrush,
pre-dawn shadow among shadows,
connoisseur of bird baths and dodgy bird dives,
cartographer of neighborhoods.
Scofflaw, he stalks where city laws
forbid the unleashed.
Neighbors mourn the feathers they find,
curse the cat and plot revenge.
What do they know?
The darkness that haunts their dreams
has other forms.
It sits with watchful eyes,
it glides with silent wings.
It preens in the sycamore at the edge of their lawns,
perfectly at home,
perfectly at ease,
perfectly prepared for darkness or dawn.

Bolstering the Constitution

One of my sisters recently checked this blog and asked "what was up" with my not having any recent postings. There are a number of reasons: travel to Texas to help my son finish moving into an apartment and to visit with some friends and relatives there; general malaise due to some health issues; time spent doing other activities, such as gardening and reading; and such a disappointment in our country's leadership that I just don't have the heart to post!

However, I've been cheered by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Boumediene vs. Bush, rejecting the Bush administration's assertion that enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay do not have the right of habeas corpus. Of course, the reaction to this judgment seems to fall along political lines. Here are links to editorial responses on the Real Clear Politics (conservative-leaning) website: "Editorial Roundup".

I particularly recommend reading Scott Horton's clear and interesting discussion of the ruling on his [recently retired but occasionally updated] blog at Harper's Magazine: "A Setback for the State of Exception."

Update
I'm with Juan Cole on John McCain's response to the Supreme Court's decision on habeas corpus. And why can't those on the far right not see that people who have been abused by power can be radicalized by that abuse?

Thirty Years

30 YEARS: May 19, 1978 to May 19, 2008

Stupid, Venal, or Illegal Stuff Government Officials Do In the Post 9/11 "Keeping You Safe" Era

And these links are just from a few minutes of today's Internet news browsing. . .

"Italian's Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face" This article from The New York Times recounts the experience of an Italian man who had traveled to the United States to visit his American girlfriend. No threat to us United States citizens, this man ended up in jail for ten days.

"Official Urged Fewer Diagnoses of PTSD" The Washington Post reports on psychologist for Veterans Affairs Norma Perez, who sent an e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Olin E. Teague Veterans' Center in Temple, Texas, urging these medical professionals who treat our returning soldiers to avoid giving an "outright" diagnosis of PTSD. She suggested that the specialists diagnose "Adjustment Disorder" instead of PTSD, claiming that VA staff did not have time to do the extensive testing to determine PTSD with the increased diagnoses. Unlike soldiers who are diagnosed with PTSD, those diagnosed with the lesser disease, Adjustment Disorder, do not receive monetary disability compensation.

"Famed War Reporter Calls Pentagon /Media Propoganda Program Illegal" Joe Galloway, war reporter and author of We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, speaks out against Donald Rumsfeld's secret program to use "friendly to the administration" military analysts to spread government propaganda about the Iraq war.

Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers' Guild and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, testifies before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee. She calls for an "an immediate and thorough investigation of the circumstances under which torture was authorized and rationalized" by our top leaders. You can hear Scott Bateman's recording of some of her testimony here: Bateman's video

The Agribusiness Empire and Iraq

I've been reading about a subject that seems far removed from the U. S. presence in the Middle East: the philosophy of unlimited and rapid economic growth, the effects of that philosophy on the environment and on communities, the limitations of that philosophy. In his book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Bill McKibben argues against America's secular religion of "More Means Better." He describes how a growth economy will ultimately meet its end in ecological disaster. Steady and rapid growth, as has occurred in the West since the discovery of fossil fuels, has led to increased consumption of natural resources. There are limits to those resources. McKibben suggests ways to ward off that disaster and to address the issues of decreased resources.

Americans have exported to the rest of the world the philosophy of "More Means Better," of the efficiency of the marketplace. The consequences, according to McKibben, will be astronomical. Every American, he writes, "uses 6 times as much as the average Mexican, 38 times as much as the average Indian, 531 times as much as the man in the Ethiopian street. That gives you," he continues, "some rough idea of what it would mean if most of the rest of the world even approached our level of consumption" (184).

The American dream these days seems not to be "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," so much as "buying stuff in all those malls and outlets." Go shopping, our president tells us in times of crisis. We're exporting the religion of consumption and corporate hegemony.

So I get to the last chapter in the book and see how even this subject connects to the war in Iraq. Here's the draw-dropping quote:

In Iraq, one of the first laws adopted by the U.S.-led transition government of 2003 protected the patenting of plants and seeds, even though 97 percent of Iraqi farmers used seeds saved from their own crops or from local markets to grow their food. "The new law is presented as being necessary to ensure the supply of good quality seeds in Iraq, and to facilitate Iraq's membership in the World Trade Organization," reported the GRAIN, an international organization promoting sustainable agriculture. "What it will actually do is facilitate the penetration of Iraqi agriculture by the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow Chemical." Does this sound overly suspicious? Daniel Amstutz, the man named by the U.S. government to oversee agriculture reconstruction in Iraq, was a former Cargill executive. "It's like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission," one observer said. "This guy is uniquely well-placed to...bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill-equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country." (193)

I'm no leftist, and I don't want to think that the war in Iraq was an excuse for American corporate hegemony. But when I read stuff such as this, I get mighty suspicious. My Republican father is an avid gardener and an heirloom seed saver. He is always railing against those huge agri-businesses that patent seeds and plants. Would he be surprised, I wonder, to see this connection between the war in Iraq and seed-patenting? I sure was.

Here's the link to the article McKibben quotes, on the website of GRAIN: "Iraq's new patent law: A declaration of war against farmers"

UPDATE:

In re-reading this post, I realize that I come across as more naive than I really am. Of course, the Iraq war is connected to the philosophy of unlimited growth and our dependence upon resources that are diminishing. There are plenty of dictators in the world who abuse their citizens and a few who pose a threat to our country, yet we have not invaded their country. Iraqi oil and Iraq's proximity to other Middle Eastern countries with oil resources factored into our invasion of that country. I'm not saying it's the only reason; I'm saying it's one important reason. But what surprises me is that as soon as the CPA is in place, the first laws that organization passes include seed-patenting laws, laws that benefit American agribusiness. When everything is going to hell in Iraq, when the Iraqis are being slaughtered and there's looting in the streets, our government has time to pass seed-patenting laws. That's what I find jaw-droppingly unbelievable. And so it goes.

When all else fails...

This Life

Now I sip this wine as red as the sky this morning
maroon, almost, just above the pines on these last
ridges of the Appalachians, where Georgia clay
soon gives way to the sand of ancient seas.
It's fall, and the maple trees are yellow,
so brilliant in the early sun against the longleaf green.
I wanted to take you out in that bright day,
along some ridge where I would park and point
to you the green horizon, the possibilities from which
I choose to fashion this calm life.

Did I say calm? Appearances are deceiving.
The steady way in which I learn the landscape,
the history of each place I've lived, the flora--
see the wild ginger there? tear that heart-
shaped leaf and sniff its clove-like scent--
is but a palliative for the vertigo of change.
But what I cannot place in some still center of earth or sky
is now subsumed by will into this smaller canvas.

poem by Anita D-G

Propeller trillium

Bird's Foot Violet

Photos by Tom G at Fort Mountain State Park, Georgia (April 2008)

"A Tempting Prize"

"In the 1830s almost the entire Cherokee Nation was forced west by state and federal troops on the infamous Trail of Tears. The Vann family lost their elegant home, rebuilding in the Cherokee Territory of Oklahoma."And so it goes.

"Message Force Multipliers"

I haven't written a post lately because I've been busy reading, gardening, and working, and national news is just so dispiriting to me. Right-wing pundits are fond of claiming that liberals have no "moral values," but I seem to have a surfeit. As my previous entries indicate, I'm disgusted by our leaders' willingness to scuttle the Geneva Conventions and to stretch and distort the definition of torture. Too many such decisions of the present administration have led to immoral, illiberal, and anti-democratic consequences. Having lowered the bar in governing behavior, will a new administration be capable of raising the bar sufficiently to restore America's standing in the world and to restore trust to the American public?

Yesterday, The New York Times published an investigative report on how the Pentagon successfully countered any negative criticism with well-orchestrated responses from military analysts who were courted by the Pentagon, many of whom also traded on their contacts with Pentagon officials to line their own pockets through military contracts. The link is here: "Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand."

And here are a few discouraging quotes from the article:

• "Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' who could be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions.'"
• "Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary....The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda."
• "In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself."
• " Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads [retired
  Army lieutenant colonel, Fox analyst, vice-president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies] said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV."
• "Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air."

And so it goes.

Quotations, Part II: Incompetency and ineptitude

From Patrick Cockburn's editorial, "Iraq is a Country No More," The Independent, 16 March 2008:

In those first months after the fall of Baghdad it was extraordinary, and at times amusing, to watch the American victors behave exactly like the British at the height of their power in 19th-century India. The ways of the Raj were reborn. A friend who had a brokerage in the Baghdad stock market told me how a 24-year-old American, whose family were donors to the Republican Party, had been put in charge of the market and had lectured the highly irritated brokers, most of whom spoke several languages and had PhDs, about the virtues of democracy.

In Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon (2008), A. J. Rossmiller (former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst) writes:

In my office [Office of Iraq Analysis] where we constantly read reports straight from the ground, the general consensus--despite being overwhelmingly populated by conservatives--was that the Iraq project was a debacle, mainly due to incompetent leadership in the Pentagon and the White House. We joked that President Bush had finally set up the conservative religious government he dreamed of. . . only it was an Islamist one in Iraq rather than a Christian one at home. (215)

From The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (2005), by George Packer, on the looting that occurred in Iraq immediately after the U. S. forces won Baghdad:

"We're incompetent, as far as [the Iraqis] are concerned," said Noah Feldman, the New York University law professor who went to Baghdad as a constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. "The key to it all was the looting. That was when it was clear that there was no order. There's an Arab proverb: Better forty years of dictatorship than one day of anarchy." He added, "That also told them they could fight against us and we were not a serious force." (138)

"Our people don't understand what's going on, so they think the Americans are deliberately creating this chaos," Dr. Butti told me. The conspiracy theories were an attempt to make sense of the absurd. . . The notion that bad planning, halfhearted commitment, ignorance, and incompetence accounted for the anarchy simply wasn't believable. How were Iraqis to grasp that the same Washington think tank where Bush offered Iraq as a model for the region had contributed to the postwar collapse by shooting down any talk of nation building? Deliberate sabotage made more sense. (166)

From A. J. Rossmiller's Still Broken:

To be viewed as legitimate by its people, a government must generally be competent in two areas: security and basic services. Iraqis view the United States as the government as much as they view their own elected officials as the government (after all, they reason, an occupying military must control the state, right?), and failure to meet those basic requirements offers insurgents an opportunity to present themselves as able to govern effectively, or at least better. Further, because Iraqis see the U.S. as overwhelmingly powerful and advanced, they think we must be able to provide security and economic opportunity--so if these things do not exist, many believe, it must be because we purposefully fail to provide them. A frequent reference among Iraqis is that the U.S. put people on the moon; how could a nation that can land on the moon not provide electricity? (52-53)

From Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), by Thomas E. Ricks, on the Coalitional Provision Authority (CPA)--or, less honorably known as Can't Do Anything:

The U.S. civilian occupation organization was a house built on sand and inhabited by the wrong sort of people, according to many who worked there. "No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes," concluded retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked at the CPA as a civilian contractor dealing with the Iraqi communications infrastructure. Personnel was an especially nettlesome issue. Hallenbeck said that in addition to being young and inexperienced, most of the young CPA people he met during his work as a contractor were ideologically minded Republicans whose only professional experience was working on election campaigns back in the United States. It was, as Zinni later commented, "a pickup team." Scott Erwin, a former intern for Vice President Cheney who worked on the budget for security forces, reported that his favorite job before that was "my time as an ice cream truck driver." (203)

From Packer's The Assassin's Gate, on the young members of the CPA:

Most of them [young members of the Coalition Provisional Authority] seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad, few knew anything about the Middle East, and that first summer only three or four of the Americans spoke Arabic. Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application.(184)

Almost all of [head of the CPA, Paul Bremer] Bremer's confidants were Americans. The Arabic-speaking ambassadors with years of experience in the Middle East had less access to the administrator and less work to do than his small coterie of trusted aides from Washington. An Iraqi who was close to the CPA told me that, in general, the less one knew about Iraq, the more influence one had. (198)

Why should we still care about the incompetent leadership of the Bush administration in the Iraq war? Because those leaders are still in power and because the Republican Party's nominee for president, John McCain, shows no indication of making any changes in leadership. The same people who advised George Bush are advising John McCain.

A Few Quotations: No Justice

Some of my reading recently has rather serendipitously connected with current events, particularly the war in Iraq. I've been thinking of how to write about what I've read. Until then, here are some quotations from that reading.

From Greg Mortenson's and David Oliver Resin's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time (2006), in a conversation with Pakistani Brigadier General Bashir Baz, who was reacting to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan:

As he studied the [television] screen, Bashir's bullish shoulders slumped. "People like me are America's best friends in the region," Bashir said at last, shaking his head ruefully. "I'm a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?" Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of his desk. "Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years."

From Andrew Eames's The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie (2004), in a conversation with Alp Aslan, a Turkish man in Konya, Turkey, who answers the author's question about regional responses to the war in Iraq, which at that point hadn't yet started:

"Iraq will probably be a better place without Saddam Hussein, but the war must not go on for too long. Might is only right for a limited time, look at Genghis Khan. Justice, that is the important thing. If the US treats Iraq with justice, then I don't think there'll be any backlash from here...."

From A. J. Rossmiller's Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, From Baghdad to the Pentagon (2008):

In America's Iraq, the burden of proof is on the suspect. Guilty until proven innocent. The action units place the responsibility on the intel crew to sort out the guys they grab, and the intel guys figure that the action units will bring in only legitimate targets. In that space an innocent individual becomes a prisoner."

From Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks:

[Nir] Rosen, an Arabic speaker who had spent time in Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan, was stunned at how little the American soldiers understood of their environment. On another raid he witnessed, soldiers burst into a house, shot a man named Ayoub in the hand with nonlethal pellets, and arrested him. They seized two compact discs with images of Saddam Hussein on them--not knowing that the titles on the discs, in Arabic, were The Crimes of Saddam Hussein. "The soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt," Rosen wrote. Several hours later intelligence operatives intercepted a telephone call by another man. "Oh, shit," said Army Capt. Bill Ray, an intelligence officer; the man they had detained "was the wrong Ayoub." (275)

Americans Against Torture

This month's Washington Monthly is devoted to the subject of torture, with a series of essays and short statements by United States citizens--most of them prominent citizens. The list includes people who identify themselves as members of the Republican or Democratic party, former military leaders, former military interrogators, one former president, Senators (both Republican and Democratic), religious leaders. You can read the essays here: No Torture, No Exceptions.

Back from Texas

We have the Bible of my husband's great-great grandmother, on the flyleaf of which that lady recorded the journeys of her children:

Robert left for B--Aug 30, 1882; Baker left for Roanoke, 20 Aug 1882; Baker came home sick Oct 5, 1882 & left for Baltimore Jan 2nd, 1883; Baker & Robert left Sept 18th, 1884; Baker left for Texas October 28th, 1884; Robert left for Roanoke Mar 13, 1885; Robert left for Texas Aug 31, 1886; Baker reached home from Texas July 7, 1886--left for Texas again July 26, 1886

I thought of these lovingly recorded events while wandering through the Texas History Museum in Austin this past week. "Gone to Texas" was the title of one of the exhibits on the movement of people from the east to the west, from the United States to the Mexican territory of Texas and later to the state of Texas. My ancestors have their own "gone to Texas" stories: the Dugats, Cajuns who moved into Southeast Texas from Louisiana around 1832, with a Spanish land grant; Simmonses and Coles who moved into East Texas in the mid-to-late-1800s from west Louisiana; German immigrants--the Schlobaums--who landed in Galveston, Texas, in the mid-1800s; the Bentons, who traveled west from Alabama, leaving behind a history that they never talked about in Texas.

On the Dugat side of my family, I am a sixth-generation Texan. (The Dugat patriarch who immigrated to the New World in the 1600s, to what is now Nova Scotia, was born in France, in 1616.) I am a daughter of Texas, proud of the toughness of my ancestors who left familiar landscapes for the unknown. But when I drove across the Texas state line, from Merryville, Louisiana, on a lone drive that took me from Georgia, to Louisiana, through Alabama and Mississippi, I had very mixed feelings. The marquee at the Texas line on Hwy 190 says "Welcome to Texas, Proud to be the Home of President George W. Bush." I could feel my heart sink into the pit of my stomach.

As an antidote to the Father of American Torture and the Quaintness of the Geneva Conventions, I was listening at the time to the music of another transplanted Texan, Eliza Gilkyson. Heading toward Jasper, I sang along with Gilkyson's song "Man of God," which really is much too positive, I think. The narrator of Gilkyson's song is looking forward to the day when the whole world is going to rise up and say "that ain't the teachings of a man of god," when everyone is going to know what a bill of goods George W. Bush sold this country.

Based on my few days in Texas, that hope may be mightily misplaced. George W. Bush would still be welcomed as a man of god by many people.

Torture? "I don't have any pity for terrorists," said one person I know. He hadn't heard the story of Dilawar, the Afghan detainee tortured to death at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. But, no matter: "Those things always happen in war," he replied, excusing our government's official use of torture.

Everything comes down to the fact that too many people just want to be safe. "There have been no terrorist attacks since 9/11," I've heard some people say, conveniently forgetting the anthrax attacks which, as far as the public knows, have never been solved. And, of course, the attacks in Spain and London don't count--because those attacks aren't on American soil.

Just as George Bush looks into the eyes of leaders and decides that he can "see into the soul" of them and base his judgment on that alone, so do people I know. Their gut feelings, as far as I can tell, are fed mainly by a steady diet of Fox News and no other news sources.

I was glad to leave Texas. It makes me too sad to visit these days. Not that Georgia is much better--but my heart isn't in Georgia.

What is Patriotism?

The Response

Barack Obama
“My attitude is that I’m less concerned about what you’re wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart. And you show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who served. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and our ideals and that’s what we have to lead with is our values and our ideals.”

from Zeleny, Jeff. "Obama's Labels." The Caucus: The New York Times Politics Blog. 4 October 2007.

What Others Are Saying:

David Crisp, editor of The Billings Outpost, explores the meaning of Michelle Obama's statement about being really proud of her country for the first time in her adult life

Mary Mitchell, in the Chicago Sun Times, discusses African-American pride and patriotism

More Beef

Twenty-four hours of much-needed rain has relegated me to my study (my original plan for the day was early-spring gardening) where I've been reading articles online, covering subjects from recently-released biographies of Edna St. Vincent Millay; to John McCain's murky relationship with a female lobbyist; to who won the Democratic debate in Austin, Texas; to problems in the meat industry. In this casual browsing of information, I clicked on my bookmark for Atlantic.com and discovered that the online magazine has conveniently prepared for its readers links to previous articles written on "the decline of the meat industry" in America.

The opening article led me to a 2005 article by B. R. Myers, "If Pigs Could Swim." Myers describes how Europeans take much better care of their meat animals than Americans do. And why do they? He answers:

Livestock are treated better in Europe because Europeans want them treated better. They are treated worse here because we hardly think of them at all. It's as simple as that. . . [O]ur concern usually lasts only as long as it takes for an industry hack to express his.

Got Beef?

The recent recall of millions of pounds of beef reminded me of an experience I had the first week of my marriage. I was twenty years old and had always eaten beef from grass-fed cattle raised by my family--my father, grandfather, uncles, and friends of the family. In the sixties and seventies, my family and some of their friends ran a couple hundred head of cattle on government land in the marshes of Old and Lost Rivers, located about midway between Beaumont, Texas, and Houston, along the I-10 corridor. And we usually had a few head of cattle on our small plot of country land, maybe a mama cow or two and three or four calves whose future was our freezer.

Flush with money we had received as wedding gifts, my husband and I went shopping for the ingredients of our first home-cooked meal as newly-weds. We purchased some packaged ground beef. I don't remember what particular dish I was preparing, but I do remember my shocked response to the meat as I began to brown it in a skillet. It smelled funny. It looked funny. It looked nothing like the meat I had eaten up to this time.

I called my husband into the kitchen. "I think this meat is spoiled," I said. "It smells awful."

Tom looked at the meat, leaned forward to sniff it, and then started laughing. "Anita," he said, "there's nothing wrong with this meat. It's just not your daddy's grass-fed beef. This is what store-bought beef looks like. The cattle are kept in pens and fed grain to fatten them. So the meat's got a lot of fat in it."

I've had my share of hamburgers and restaurant-prepared beef dishes since then, but over the years my father continued to supply us with meat. One of my favorite dishes for years was fried steak served with rice, homemade gravy, and shallots fresh from my father's garden. However, in the mid-90s, Tom stopped eating red meat, stunned by his father's early death from heart disease. Now he is a vegetarian, and I only eat red meat when I'm visiting my parents, whose small, seventy-five acre farm can support the twenty or so head of cattle they raise, mostly Brahman cattle. My parents' freezer is always full of meat from grass-fed cattle, fish my sister and her husband catch in the Sam Rayburn reservoir, and shrimp caught by a distant cousin who shrimps in the Gulf of Mexico. And my father maintains a huge garden of vegetables, fruit trees, and sugar cane.

Most Americans, however, not only do not know the source of their food; they don't even think of where their food originates until some big news item such as the beef recall catches their attention--briefly. And that's a shame. We should be concerned with more than the safety of our food supply. We should be concerned with the ethics of our food supply. If we are going to eat meat, we should think about how the animals are raised and treated, what the animals are fed, how the animals are slaughtered.

If only Americans would remain outraged long enough to initiate serious changes in how that hamburger meat gets from the cow penned up and pumped up with antibiotics, to the slaughter house, to the supermarket, to the family's meal of Hamburger Helper. Of course, when people begin to think about the ethics of their food supply (just type the phrase "the ethics of eating meat" into Google and note the results), the responses and discussion can be very wide ranging. But at least the participants are thinking.

Other Voices:

A veterinarian's view of the use of antibiotics in beef cattle, in Cattle Today

"The Ethics of Eating Meat: A Radical View", by Charles Eisenstein (the Yoga of eating)

Grass-fed cattle, on Atlantic.com: "Back to Grass," by Corby Kummer

"Chew the Right Thing," a Mother Jones interview with Peter Singer, bioethicist and author of Animal Liberation

Michael Pollan, "An Animal's Place," on Peter Singer, vegetarianism, and "conscious" meat-eating

What Others Say

I've not been posting much this year mainly because the new year began with my being ill, and it took a while for me to recover. A visit to the otolaryngologist today brought welcome relief. Now I won't have to lean in quite so closely to my friends and colleagues to hear conversation, and I might feel well enough to begin my garden planting and landscaping.

Offline, I've been reading a lot of poetry lately--Margaret Gibson, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Elizabeth Bishop (the new Library of America collection of her poems, prose, and letters)--some nonfiction (began Derrick Jensen's A Language Older than Words, a Christmas gift from a friend; have almost finished reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time, a Christmas gift from Mary-Margaret) and some fiction (reread Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac and am a chapter and a half from finishing A Friend from England; am about 100 pages into Marcel Proust's Swann's Way).

Meanwhile, here are some links to what others are saying online:

James Fallows on the charges of plagiarism against Barrack Obama

Jack Shafer on charges of plagiarism against Obama

Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo's military commissions, on trials at Guantanamo (in an interview with The Nation--and hat tip to Kevin Drum)

Nicholas Kristof on torture and Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held for more than six years at Guantanamo Bay

Paul Kramer on earlier American use of the "water cure"--and an earlier Atlantic article on torture and rendition by Jane Mayer

The BBC on learning English

Happy Valentine's Day

In Season

An Occasional Poem for Valentine's Day, 2008

Signs of love are everywhere,
symbols that beckon, more
than what they are—
shiny foil on chocolate hearts
like treasure long sought,
the glitter that attracts,
the sweetness that rewards.
Red and pink entwined, such
a fashion no-no,
become a yes of hearts,
lips, kisses, candy favors
that shorthand I LUV U.
And so you say you do,
if at no other time than this—
the season of valentines.

Anita

When We're Afraid We Won't Have Enough

Updates below blog

Why is aggression always the Republican answer to problems these days? The drought in Georgia has heated up the rhetoric over state boundaries. First, Governor Perdue disputed Alabama's and Florida's rights to the water of the Chattahoochee River; now state Republicans are trying to get a piece of Tennessee.

In the late 1700s, the Tennessee-Georgia border was set at the 35th parallel. However, in the early 1800s, a surveying team placed the border at a little over a mile south of that parallel, and thus the Tennessee River has been within the Tennessee state line since that time. No one complained until this year, when Georgia Republican state senators introduced a bill to change the border back to the 35th parallel.

This is how Republicans want to solve Atlanta's thirst: not by conserving what we have, not by regulating growth and thus the out-sized demands on our resources; not by changing people's attitudes toward water use--but by stealing from our neighbors!

According to some news sources, changing the state line would also give Georgia a slice of Chattanooga and Mississippi a slice of Memphis.

1818 Map Error Raises New Water War Front," Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Drought-Thirsty Georgia Wants Slice of Tennessee," The Ledger

"Dehydrated Georgia Wants Slice of Tennessee," The St. Augustine Record

Updates: What Others Are Saying

"Bordering on Ludicrous," says the Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff, on Feb. 24, 2008

It's not just about water, says Sen. John Bulloch (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, say no more)

Secret water talks affect more than those within I-284, says Dusty Nix , for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer editorial board

Border Bill a diversionary stunt by leaders who lack courage, says Bill Shipp, of the The Athens Banner-Herald, Feb. 24, 2008

Back to Blackwater: Consequences of Privatization

Peter Singer has an interesting article in Salon on the tragic and dangerous consequences of our military outsourcing. I posted a couple of months back on the problems with the military contractor, Blackwater. Singer revisits and explains those problems in his essay, which can be found here.

Here are some excerpts that struck me:

• "In 2007, an internal Department of Defense census on the industry found almost 160,000 private contractors were employed in Iraq (roughly equal to the total U.S. troops at the time, even after the troop "surge"). Yet even this figure was a conservative estimate...."

• Singer points out that contractor deaths aren't counted in the military death toll (though many of those contractors are performing duties once the work of official military personnel), thus skewing the reported numbers of actual American lives lost in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan: "If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. By one count, as of July 2007, more than 1,000 contractors have been killed in Iraq, and another 13,000 wounded. . . .Since the troop "surge" started in January 2007, these numbers have accelerated -- contractors have been killed at a rate of nine per week."

• "According to testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Defense Contract Audit Agency has identified more than a staggering $10 billion in unsupported or questionable costs from battlefield contractors -- and investigators have barely scratched the surface."

• "Halliburton's contract has garnered the firm $20.1 billion in Iraq-related revenue and helped the firm report a $2.7 billion profit last year. To put this into context, the amount paid to Halliburton-KBR is roughly three times what the U.S. government paid to fight the entire 1991 Persian Gulf War.

• "[C]ontractors are one of the most visible and hated aspects of the American presence in Iraq."

  These contractors are not held responsible for criminal acts, hurt the goals of the military, and even detrimentally affect the decisions of our leaders. Will any of these issues be truly addressed in the hearings by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee?

I'm Disappointed, Too

When accusations of using the race card in the campaign began to be lobbied against the Clintons, I was skeptical, but I listened closely to an exchange on PBS's Lehrer News Hour between Rep. John Lewis of Georgia (who led the 1965 voting rights march in Selma, Alabama) and Rev. Joseph Lowery (co-founder, with Dr. Martin Luther King, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) on this topic. Congressman Lewis has openly supported the Clinton campaign, and Rev. Lowery is a supporter of Barack Obama. As each man argued, I thought how this was a defining moment in some ways: two well-known and respected African-American men were openly discussing their differences of opinion, not bound by the politics of race which requires those of the same race to "present a united front." Each put the best spin on his candidate's actions. I came away thinking that the press was perhaps being too hard on the Clintons.

Recent statements of Bill Clinton's, however, have changed my mind. President Clinton has every right to strongly support his wife's campaign, but some of his recent comments have the whiff of the nasty personal attacks associated with the right-wing "noise machine." I was horrified and disgusted with the Republican tactics in many recent political campaigns: the Saxby Chambliss attacks on the patriotism of Max Cleland and the Swift-boating of John Kerry. The Clintons do not do Democrats any favors with Bill Clinton's recent comments comparing Barack Obama's win in South Carolina with Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign in the same state, dismissing Obama's victory as merely the result of the "black candidate" getting the "black vote."

Glenn Glenwald excellently describes the situation and the Clintons' missteps in his blog. I, like many Democratic women my age, want to see a strong woman president, and I think Hillary Clinton is our best hope and could make a good president. However, I believe Barack Obama is a good candidate, too, and my vote could easily go to Barack Obama if the Clintons don't change their campaign tactics. The Republican smearing is going to be bad enough after Democrats nominate a candidate; Democrats should not take a page out of the Republican smear-tactics game book to smear one another.

Other Comments:
From Barbara Ehrenreich's blog
James Fallows' blog

Let the Drug Addicts Die?????

I just read of an amazing drug that, if administered timely and correctly, can prevent drug addicts from overdosing on heroin. The drug is called Narcan, and it comes in the form of an easy-to-use nasal spray. According to a report on National Public Radio, naxolone, or Narcan, "blocks the brain receptors that heroin activates, instantly reversing an overdose." Drug programs include this drug in kits that cost $9.50 and make those kits, as well as education on how to use them, available for drug addicts. Doctors and emergency medical technicians have been using naxolone for years. Now it's available in a kit for the people who are on the scene at the moment of a drug overdose.

However, a Bush administration official, Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, doesn't think that these kits should be available to the public or drug overdose rescue operations. Why? Because, she says, "Narcan kits may actually encourage drug abusers to keep using heroin because they know overdosing isn't as likely."

What's up with people who think like this? These are the same people who think teenagers shouldn't have access to birth control because the teens will be more encouraged to have sex or that girls shouldn't receive the vaccine for human papillomavirus because more girls might then be encouraged to be sexually active with the fear of this disease (and its consequences, such as cervical cancer) removed.

People who engage in risky behavior aren't calculating those risks. They're caught up in the demands of the drug addiction or the forceful tug of their hormones or the siren song of love and desire.

There's a nasty undercurrent of sadism in these puritanical types who obviously think people should not escape punishment for poor decisions. It's really scary, however, when these types of folks are in positions of authority and run our government programs. Who do they think they are? God?

Other posts on this topic:
Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly

Mark Kleiman, at The Reality-Based Commuity

The Art of Craft: Hats, Hats, Hats

Years ago, more than I care to admit, my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat handed me a crochet needle and yarn and taught me to single-stitch a chain. Once I could single-stitch with fairly regular precision, she taught me how to double-stitch in each of those single-stitches--and thus I learned to crochet. I completed my first crocheted afghan when I was in high school, one with red roses and green leaves on white background squares. This afghan was to become part of my art car years and years later, attached to the back seat of the car and plumped around with Virgin of Guadalupe pillows.

Over the years I met many people who denigrated such craft. Some thought crocheting an activity for old women or intellectually inferior women or women with too much time on their hands. Depending upon the circumstances, I kept my craft a secret.

But now I am an old woman--or at least a woman inching past middle age--and I'm going public with my craft. In memory of my grandmother, who died in 2006, I've picked up the crochet hook once again with a vengeance. First, I crocheted scarfs and hats, following no directions but my own inclinations. I bought wool from a local craft shop and learned to felt the crocheted pieces. Then I created what I call "Christmas gnomes," inspired by--but not much like--some handmade felted gnomes sold in a local store. Here are a few of the hats:

Snow in Metro-Atlanta

The temperature is 27 degrees this afternoon, following yesterday's snow fall. Icy snow still remains on the lawns of the neighborhood though the streets are clear. Yesterday Tom, Mary-Margaret and I walked downtown, taking photos of the snow and of snowmen created by neighborhood children. Grass and other leafy debris added texture to the snow sculptures. We had maybe an inch of snow, with the brown remainders of summer's lawn grass sticking up through the white stuff. With no usable garage here at our new home in Georgia, my art car is exposed to the elements. The Barbies on the roof of the car seemed to be flailing rather desperately in the snow.

Falling into 2008

Two days ago I fell through the ceiling with a black cat under one arm, screaming and shouting "shit, shit, shit!" as my left leg shot through pink insulation and chalky sheetrock.

The Old Year had not ended well nor the New Year begun well.

Just as last year, I celebrated the Christmas season feeling very unwell. Last year, it was ear problems, this year a very nasty cold that led to fever, chills, and weird dreams of Mama cows and baby calves trying to escape a flood in Papa and Grandma Benton's East Gate prairie farmyard . Both the Mama cows and calves sank beneath the muddy waters of that dream, just as I was sinking in a depression of illness.

But perhaps like March, a year that begins ill and blustering will transform to zephyr breezes and happy health.

Two days ago, for the first time in over a week, I felt as if I might actually get well. Then Pluto followed me up into the attic, where I was storing Christmas decorations, and instead of closing the cat in the attic until he was ready to come down of his own accord, I determined to catch him. Fortunately, the hole I knocked in the ceiling is where we might put in an attic fan, and also, fortunately, I suffered only from the first initial fright and later a little tenderness in bruising.

Every New Year brings lessons in life, some of which I have to learn over and over again:

• Allow a cat his way, for he knows it and he's determined to follow it.
• Don't travel at Christmas or Thanksgiving. Enjoy the seasons in one's own small circle, in one's own local community. Traveling is for business, leisure(!) vacations, and emergencies.
• Don't read melancholy biographies of people who suffer from depression and illness when one is depressed and ill.

When Tom and I were looking at used books at The Eagle's Nest in North Decatur just before Christmas, I found a pocket-sized, Oxford University Press World Classics, 1919-reprint of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte, for $33, and I asked Tom to purchase it for me as a Christmas present--which he did, glad to have his shopping decisions so easily made. Elizabeth Gaskell is one of my favorite nineteenth-century writers, and I had been wanting to read this biography for quite some time. Also, I had just purchased for a gift for Mary-Margaret a book which contained novels by the three Bronte sisters: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.

But a book on the lives of the Brontes--no matter how wonderfully written--does not make for cheerful reading, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the literary merit of the biography and the voyeurism of reading extracts from Charlotte Bronte's letters, the sad details of the lives of these promising young women who died so young deepened the melancholia I was feeling already from my own illness. Unfortunately, fairy tales don't interest me at this age, anyway, so there was no hope for the melancholia until the fever lifted and the cough dissipated. ("Is this how a consumptive feels?" I thought as I hacked and coughed and heaped covers over my shivering body, night after night.)

But now I've arisen from the invalid's bed, I've fallen from the ceiling, and I've captured the black cat who sometimes does indeed come when his name is called. I've spent a few leisurely minutes today reading poems and essays from Mary Oliver's Blue Iris: Poems and Essays and have recorded from an essay my first quotation for the year:

"For flowers, like people and birds, are travelers, and will leave a garden if they can."

Ten-Year-Old "Consents" to Rape?!

I haven't posted lately because I've been busy with projects and because I've been rather dispirited over the news. Nothing seems to change. The Democrats are in the majority in the House and Senate, yet they seem to be only weakly challenging the administration. There are a few lone voices--voices we've heard all along--but the Democratic leadership capitulates too easily to the fear of being negatively branded by Republican propagandists sometime in the future: fear of being called unpatriotic or weak on terror or [fill in the blank]. . . .

But more on that in the future.

Having earlier posted on the horror of Saudi Arabian attitudes toward women who are raped, I would be remiss if I didn't bring to your attention two recent news items that I found through Broadsheet, stories that remind me all too vividly that sexual oppression and hateful, violent attitudes toward women are not limited to one culture. I hate to sound like a throw-back to the 70s, but, by god, are we progressing at all in our attitudes toward women? The first article is about a rape case in Australia: a ten-year-old girl was gang-raped, and the judge in the case did not send the perpetrators to jail because the girl "probably consented" to the rape. What ten-year-old consents to rape?

The second story is of a young woman from Houston, Texas, who was gang-raped by her colleagues in Baghdad, all of whom worked for Halliburton/KBR. After complaining about the rapes, she was kept under guard in a shipping container. After a sympathetic guard loaned her a cell phone, the woman called her father, who contacted the State Department. People were then sent to release her from the shipping container. Since then Halliburton/KBR and the State Department have worked to cover up the case, evidently. According to what the young woman told ABC News, Army doctors examined her and found evidence of rape--anally and vaginally--but--surprise!--the rape kit disappeared after being turned over to KBR security.

Ah, the vanishing rape kit act! In the 1980s, one of my aunts was raped in Dayton, Texas, and Liberty County officials lost her rape kit, too--very conveniently as they were accusing her of making up her story of her attack. When her experience became locally public, several women called her to describe similar experiences they had had with Dayton and Liberty County police.

Just as I was counting my blessings as a woman that I didn't live in an oppressive culture that holds women guilty for being raped, I am reminded that not too far beneath the surface, similar attitudes lurk in my own culture. When are we going to win this war?