Read Bob Herbert

"most of us are, indeed, hard-pressed to give a damn."

--T.A. Franks, "Why is Bob Herbert Boring?: The Perils of Punditry for the Powerless," Washington Monthly, October 2007

I had read T.A. Franks' column some time ago but was reminded of it this morning in one of Matthew Yglesias's posts. Franks writes about how right New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been on many issues over the years--yet Herbert is not an influential columnist such as David Brooks or Maureen Dowd. I quit reading Maureen Dowd a while ago; her columns are smarmy, and her nasty descriptions of public people can go viral so quickly in mainstream media that her characterizations stick to those people like tar, absorbing all light and directing attention away from the real issues. I only occasionally read Brooks' column, but see him every Friday evening on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer voicing support of Republican ideas and actions in his soft and reasonable way (ideas which he is finding kind of difficult to defend these days; he has actually criticized recent Republican shenanigans). But I don't read Bob Herbert much, either, only when a blogger links to his column. Well, I'm going to make a real effort to read Bob's column and encourage others to do so, too. These days, with people screaming at town halls so that no civil discussion to take place, we need calm, reasonable voices that clearly identify the problems in this country and in the world and that encourage us to work to fix those problems.

Another reason I'm going to read Herbert's column is that his column of August 7th clearly articulates thoughts I have rolled over and over in my mind about George Sodini and his attack on those women in that aerobics class--but I hadn't gotten around to putting those thoughts into any coherent order. In "Women at Risk,", Herbert writes that

[w]e have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

I, too, had been thinking of how so many of these public mass killings have been perpetuated by men who direct their disappointments in themselves and in their society toward women. As Herbert points out, if the victims of these men had been chosen because of their ethnicity, there would be a huge uproar; but because they are women, there is an immediate shocked response, and then a return to life as usual. No one seems to be trying to get to the root of misogyny in this country in order to weed it out of us. (Of course, there is disturbing evidence of racism and an unhinged attitude toward Barak Obama in Sodini's online journal, as well.)

Oh, and Herbert received 310 comments on that column, so someone is reading him.

"Weaponized Christianity"--THIS is What Jesus Would Do?

In Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, the homicidal Assef, childhood bully of the main character and his friend, has joined the Taliban. Afghanistan is under an extreme-fringe interpretation of Sharia law. The law is really whatever the Taliban rule. Mobs of young Taliban men massacre people in the streets and destroy centuries-old artifacts. In a climactic chapter of the novel, the first-person narrator, Amir, is confronted by his childhood enemy, Assef, who describes to Amir the massacre of members of an Afghani minority group:

"You don't know the meaning of the word 'liberating' until you've done that, stood in a roomful of targets, let the bullets fly, free of guilt and remorse, knowing you are virtuous, good, and decent. Knowing you're doing God's work. It's breathtaking." He kissed the prayer beads, tilted his head.

It's a horrifying scene and a horrifying philosophy, that rampant murder of innocent people is blessed by God. As the writer of the novel wants to convey, that philosophy does not reflect the true philosophy of Islam, that it is the philosophy of fringe elements, bullies, thugs.

As I read the novel, I realized that we have our own religious fringe elements, people who say they are "Christians" and yet who tout a philosophy not unlike that of Assef. They might not be massacring people on Mainstreet, U.S.A., but they are communicating that philosophy politically through other means, and even, yes, with weapons.

Here are a few examples of how this idea of a "weaponized Christianity" is spreading, intentionally in some ways, unintentionally in other ways, yet no less creepy and insidious.

The war in Iraq has particularly brought out the militant in the Christianity fringe. We see evidence of this in stories about Blackwater, the military contractor that sent many people to Iraq to guard government personnel. The owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, and his company have been under investigation for some time for illegally smuggling arms into Iraq and for killing Iraqi civilians. Now Prince is getting a closer look: A former employee of Blackwater and an ex-Marine who worked in security for the company have filed sworn statements in court against Prince and his company:

The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." (from "Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder," by Jeremy Scahill, in The Nation, posted August 4, 2009.)

According to one of these former Blackwater employees, Erik Prince deliberately hired men who

shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."

Despite these allegations and previous investigations, Blackwater, which has been renamed Xe, continues to be hired by the Obama administration to provide security overseas. (See "U.S. Still Paying Blackwater Millions," Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, 7 August 2009.)

As Jeremy Scahill relates in an interview with Keith Olberman, one of these former employees of Blackwater was also in management in Blackwater, someone who would be intimately familiar with the culture of the company. He and the second Blackwater employee provided this startling information in "sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia." Jeremy Scahill has been researching the use of privatized armies for some time and has written a book based on his research.

These are not frivolous allegations, and their content unnervingly reflects an apocalyptic viewpoint expressed by other people in our government, including, evidently, former president George W. Bush. Jacques Chirac, president of France when the Bush administration was pushing invading Iraq, has revealed the language President Bush used to try to convince France to join the coalition:

"Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. ... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. ... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins." (from "Agog over Bush's Comments on Gog and Magog," Saturday Gazette-Mail, posted 22 July 2009, by James Haught--h/t to David Crisp; See also, Mitch Potter, "Did He Feel the Hand of God?: Apocalyptic fervor may have held sway in White House," Toronto Star, 29 May 2009, posted on TheSpec.com--h/t to Kevin Drum)

Evidently puzzled by this language President Jacques Chirac asked a theologian at the University of Lausanne to explain the strange references. Thomas Romer, the theologian, later "recounted Bush's strange behavior in Lausanne University's review, Allez Savoir." He explained to Chirac that the arcane references were to Biblical scripture from the books of Ezekial and Revelation. It's troubling to me, as it should be to all Americans, that our president may have been making decisions of war based on an interpretation of Biblical scripture that remains in great dispute among Christians.

Also evident in these stories is the racist attitudes expressed toward Muslims and citizens of Middle Eastern countries. People who incline toward racism in the first place are emboldened when their attitudes are supported, tacitly or explicitly, by their leaders. In his article for Harper's, "Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military," Jeff Sharlet describes how a Special Forces unit in Samarra carried out their military mission: by openly denigrating the religion of the people they were there to "liberate." Sergeant Jeffery Humphrey and his squad of nine men were assigned to guard the 10th Special Forces Unit, who called themselves "the Faith Element." He recalls how the men that Easter Sunday were shown Mel Gibson's bloody re-telling of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Then the 109th National Guard Infantry rolled out to confront insurgents; they returned under fire from a furious crowd, and the compound remained underseige for the rest of the day.

Sergeant Jeffery Humphrey describes how the men in the compound prepared four Bradley Fighting Vehicles to run from the compound in order to draw enemy fire and how "his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio," and a couple of sergeants were snickering because they had convinced their interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint in Farsi on the side of the vehicle: "Jesus Killed Mohammad." At dusk, this tank, along with the others, rolled into the streets of Samarra, a holy city of Iraq, with its militarized Christian message on its side and the Iraqi interpreter shouting from a bullhorn, "Jesus kill Mohammad, Jesus kill Mohammad," while local Iraqis were being called to evening prayers. Of course, the tank came under increasing fire, and its superior firepower exploded house after Iraqi house. Who was firing from those houses? Just insurgents? Or perhaps, also, Iraqi civilians angered by the lack of respect shown their religion?

"Humphrey heard Lieutenant DeGiulio reporting in from the Bradley’s cabin, opening up on all doorways that popped off a round, responding to rifle fire—each Iraqi household is allowed one gun—with 25mm shells powerful enough to smash straight through the front of a house and out the back wall."

According to Jeff Sharlet, a militarized version of Christianity permeates American armed forces. He cites example after example of highly-placed military leaders who view the United States' intervention in Iraq through apocalyptic lenses; they are holy warriors. How, then, do they--and we, if we do not work diligently to maintain our Constitutional ideal of separation of church and state--differ from the Assefs of the world?

Sources and Further Reading:

• James Haught, "Agog over Bush's Comments on Gog and Magog," Gazette-Mail, 22 July 2009.
  
  
• Mitch Potter, "Did He Feel the Hand of God?," Toronto Star, 29 May 2009, posted at TheSpec.com.
  
  
• Jeremy Scahill, "Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder," The Nation, 4th August 2009.
  
  
• Jeremy Scahill, "US Still Paying Blackwater Millions," The Nation, 7 August 2009.
  
  
• Jeff Sharlet, "Jesus Killed Mohammad: The Crusade for a Christian Military," Harper's, May 2009.
  
  
• Scott Horton, "Blackwater's Dark Secrets," No Comment, Harper's, posted 6 August 2009.
  
  
• Bill Moyers interviews Jeremy Scahill on PBS's Bill Moyer's Journal about the use of Blackwater mercenaries on U.S. Soil, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. See, also, Bill Moyers' website on PBS: Information about Blackwater and extended interview with Jeremy Scahill.
  
  
• David Antoon, "The Cancer from Within," Truthdig, posted 7 November 2007. (one man's experience and opinion)
  
  
• Eric Mandonnet, "Chirac, Bush et l'Apocalypse," L'Expresse.fr, published 26 February 2009. (h/t truthout.org).

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 & 9, 1945)

Updated

"I can't describe what I witnessed. I don't have the words. It's like when you burn a fish on the grill. That's what they looked like," a survivor recalls. One of the burned fish, a woman now reconstructed by plastic surgery, describes her father peeling her charred face away from her head with scissors. Another recalls looking at a woman whose body had been burned beyond recognition and realizing from the gold tooth that it was her mother. As she and her sister reached out, their mother crumbled to ashes before their eyes. "This happened 60 years ago, but I'll never forget it," she says quietly.

(from "Still Surviving Hiroshima," Hugh Gusterson, 1 August 2007, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Update: Read Greg Mitchell's article on how the press reported the story: "The Day After Hiroshima: How the Press Reported the News -- And the 'Half-Truths' That Emerged," in Editor and Publisher, 7 August, 2009.

Blame all our woes on one region?

Well, it seems that our experience with the nice lady in northern California (see this post) was just a precursor to what Southerners could expect from more prominent voices. Kathleen Parker, a conservative writer whose column I read yesterday, blames the GOP's problems on Southern Republicans who have a lot of wing-nut ideas. I don't disagree with this. "Southern Republicans," she writes, "have seceded from sanity." Okay, I'm up with that. Sure seems that way to me, too. But now we have progressive columnists taking up the flag and condemning Southern whites and Southern culture. Well, again, I see plenty to criticize about the South, but I don't think the South is monolithic; nor does the region today deserve the scathing scorn that commenters to Kevin Drum's post heap upon it. The South today is not just a remnant of Scots-Irish culture, as many seem to believe. It has been influenced by many cultures. I, myself, am descended from Acadians who left Nova Scotia in the 1700s when the British kicked out the French; pockets of the South are vitally influenced by Acadian culture. I am also descended from Germans who immigrated to Texas in the 1800s. German culture influenced Texas. We knew people born in Texas whose first language was German; they didn't learn English until they began school. Many immigrants from old Czechoslovakia clustered in towns in Texas, giving us one of my favorite desserts, kolaches, as well as polka (not my favorite music). African slaves influenced the South, too, even the white South.

So when Kevin Drum--whom I keep hoping is parodying prejudice--impugns Southern white culture, I'm not sure just what he means. There are plenty of Southern ideas left over from the old-slave South that need criticizing. But Southern white culture? That's an imprecise term, and inflammatory in its impreciseness.

Wing-nut ideas are not confined to the South and to "Southern white culture," whatever that means.

Oh, and how could I have left out the Hispanic influence?

What's Up with This?

Watching the clips of the screaming middle-aged and old white people (people my age) at town hall meetings, I am just astonished at these folks who are being encouraged to act so stupidly and disrespectfully. Howls from mobs never convinced me of the rightness of something: in fact, just the opposite. Will there be lynch mobs next?

I went to the website of one of those organizations that is encouraging people to disrupt town hall meetings. A link on that website led to this picture of old white dudes showing some attitude: (Old white dudes wanting to "kick some liberal ass"). Well, one can find idiocy in any group or movement. But the more I see of those heckling people on television, the less I want to have to do with anyone associated with the movement, even folks who might have legitimate gripes.

At Slate, Timothy Noah lists links for keeping up with the health care debate.

Crazy "Birthers"

Update below

After publishing my previous post this morning, in which I ended on some comments about crazy "birthers," I received an e-mail from an anonymous person "arguing" (I use the term loosely here) that the vote on Sotomayor should be postponed because Barack Obama's presidency is illegitimate. The "argument"? That Obama couldn't be president because he holds "dual citizenship" with the U.S. and with Kenya. I won't publish the comment because the writer does not identify himself/herself and because it seems to have been some kind of robo-response. It might have been copied from some mass e-mail, for it bears the characteristics of those blightful communications (illogical sentences, confused content, inflated language). But I've summarized the gist of the comment here.

As Steve Benen notes, these people never quit, no matter how many times they have been confronted with the facts. The non-partisan Factcheck.org also is fed up with responding to these folks, as indicated in the post "The Last Word? We Wish."

We at FactCheck.org are grateful to the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists for hundreds of thousands of page views to our "Born in the U.S.A." article from last November, and to our other items debunking some of their more outrageously false claims. We’re less grateful for their thousands of sometimes abusive e-mails claiming that we’re perpetuating a dangerous falsehood, among the more printable comments. Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, is also fed up. She has now released her second statement (the first was made last November) saying that state records show Obama was indeed born in the U.S.A. This one states unequivocally that he is "a natural-born American citizen," and will everyone please just leave it alone now? (We confess we are paraphrasing that second part.)

And in case my readership (which is small!) actually includes crazy birthers, here is the link to Factcheck.org's 2008 post on Barack Obama's citizenship: "Born in the USA: The Truth about Obama's Birth Certificate," posted August 21, 2008 and updated November 1, 2008. And in March, FactCheck.org fielded another silly claim by birthers: "More Citizenship Quibbles."As far as dual citizenship, Factcheck. org addressed that bit of silliness back in 2008, too: "Does Barack Obama Have Kenyan Citizenship,". As the factchecker on that issue noted, after a good discussion of that issue:

"the Kenyan Constitution prohibits dual citizenship for adults. Kenya recognizes dual citizenship for children, but Kenya's Constitution specifies that at age 21, Kenyan citizens who possesses citizenship in more than one country automatically lose their Kenyan citizenship unless they formally renounce any non-Kenyan citizenship and swear an oath of allegiance to Kenya.

Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on Aug. 4,1982.

But, then, as my husband has often reminded me, crazy people are not rational, and, thus, facts mean nothing to them.

Update: More on those birther statistics in the South can be found here: "Early Poll Data: Half Of All Virginia Voters Are Birthers," Eric Kleefield, posted on Talking Points Memo, 3 August 2009.

Regional Bias

Most people feel at least a little faithful to the region in which they were born and in which they grew up. We want to defend our "home," even when that defense might seem wrong-headed. If we are thoughtful people, we recognize the shortcomings of our birth home, and, when we do, wish for improvement. And, of course, we get defensive when people from other regions spout ill-founded judgments about the region with which we most closely identify. Southerners, particularly, seem to have to work hard to overcome negative images some people have of the region and its people. I was reminded of this bias on our trip to the northern California Pacific Coast to visit very dear friends who had moved from the South (Louisiana) to Crescent City, California.

We had been in the area for about a day when one of my friend's new local friends dropped by to meet us. This well-spoken, lovely woman in her sixties had grown up in Oregon. Within only a few minutes, she expressed her ambivalence about the South. "I think I would like to visit the South," she said, "but I'm a little afraid of the South. It's prone to violence, isn't it? Several years ago at a conference [she was a counselor until she retired], we discussed a study that concluded that Southerners tended more to violence because the South was settled by Scots-Irish."

Oh, yes--the study that proves Southerners are more violent than other Americans because the majority of them are descended from Scots who settled in northern Ireland where bloody war continued between the Protestant Scots and the Catholic Irish--these "Scots-Irish" later immigrated to the United States in great numbers, many of them moving to the Appalachians and further south. That study continues to be used by otherwise thoughtful folks to bolster their bias toward the South. My husband encountered the study when we lived in Minnesota; folks at a Minnesotan university brought it up in an interview with him. Behind the reference to that study is the suggestion that the Southerner in the room is therefore suspect: he can't be trusted because he might have heretofore unexpressed violent tendencies. It's used as an excuse to condescend to and to judge an individual based on his or her place of birth. And it encourages the undiscerning to judge a whole region of individuals, many of whom have very mixed genetic heritage.

Of course, some information coming out of the South makes even me wonder what's up with us. Take the "birther" movement. Although it's not just Southerners who question Barack Obama's birth--despite hard evidence, including a birth certificate (!) that proves the man was born in the U.S.--an astonishingly high percentage of Southerners question Obama's right to the presidency based on this "birther" conspiracy. As Steve Benen discusses in this post, a recent poll indicates that some 20% or so of Southerners think Barack Obama was not born in the United States and 30% are unsure. How can that be? Is that 20% of ALL Southerners or 20% of Southern REPUBLICANS? Can it be true that about 50% of Southerners either believe Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. or that perhaps he wasn't? Statistics like that make me want to enroll in a voice class to eliminate my Southern drawl.

The bottom line is, however, that we shouldn't judge individuals based on statistical studies. We should judge them by their own character.

Update: Steve Benen addresses more birther nonsense today: "They'll never stop," Washington Monthly, 3 August 2009.

What I Missed While I was on a Three-Week Road Trip

My family and I traveled across the country, from one coast to another, in three weeks, leaving behind my blog and often cell phone access as well as internet access. When we camped in National and State Parks, we focused on local phenomena--wild life, fauna and floral: a gray fox quietly passing our tent site, a herd of javelinas, a dusk visit from a pole cat in the Davis Mountains of West Texas; millenia-worth of natural wonders--Carlsbad Caverns, Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley; examples of eons of erosion in the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest; the biggest, tallest, and oldest trees in Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks, Redwood National Parks, and the Great Basin National Park of Nevada; the Milky Way which the lights of cities dim to nothingness in much of the United States. When we stayed overnight in a hotel, we would catch glimpses of what was going on in the outside world. One of us would read a bit of news on the internet; another would turn on the television for weather reports.

I don't think we missed much, actually. The flare-up over Barack Obama's really rather honest response to the arrest of Henry Gates, Jr., in his own house seemed strident, hysterical. (And so, I agree mostly with Frank Rich's assessment of the entire brou-ha-ha: "Small Beer, Big Hangover," in The New York Times, 1 August 2009.) The political fight over health care just reminded us that the political world goes on as usual: the American citizen about to lose his or her job and the health care associated with it gets screwed again by the insurance companies and by our wonderful representatives who are beholden to them and to an ideology that sounds more and more like "I've got what I want: screw you!"

In our own personal lives, we are dealing with jobs that pay poorly or that introduced problems we didn't foresee; with opportunities that seemed to have slipped away as we aged; with paying for our childrens' college expenses; with health issues that make us anxious; with insurance companies that don't want to cover our doctors' bills; with dwindling paychecks and the escalating costs of everything. In short, we are ordinary Americans--well-educated but from humble roots--dealing with the modern world. And on this trip, far from those everyday anxieties, we were free for a while from our usual fears. It felt so good that if our kids were out of college, I think we would pack up everything and move to some place where we could see the Milky Way on moonless nights.

And I agree with Bob Herbert, too: "Anger Has Its Place," The New York Times, 31 July 2009.

Oh, for Pete's Sake!

Sometimes the short-sightedness, weirdness, and stupidity of people and organizations leave one sputtering, speechless:

• First up, a story of the Bureau of Prisons, which had at first refused to let a prison inmate read Barack Obama's books, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The bureau's reasoning? "The books contained material 'potentially detrimental to national security,' prison officials said in two separate rejections from August and September." However, in November, the Bureau allowed the man to read the books.
  
  
• Next, another fight is brewing in Texas over curriculum standards for public schools, this time in social studies. Three men appointed by Republicans to a panel to "help guide" the teachers, community representatives, and academics who are charged with writing the standards have complained about the credit given to some civil rights leaders. One of them has "questioned whether Thurgood Marshall, who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first black U.S. supreme Court justice, should be presented to Texas students as an important historical figure." Another thinks Cesar Chavez "'lacks the stature, impact, and overall contributions of so many others'"--and thus is not as worthy of discussion.
  
  The condescension of these men is captured very well in the tone evangelical minister Peter Marshall adopts toward the inclusion of Anne Hutchinson in the social studies text. (Hutchinson was "a New England pioneer and early advocate of women's rights and religious freedom." She was later invited by Roger Williams to "help establish a colony in what became Rhode Island.") According to Marshall, Hutchinson "does not belong in the company of these eminent gentlemen" [William Penn, Roger Williams and other early leaders]. Can this short-sidedness and stupidity be topped? Oh, yes, for David Barton, a former vice-president of the Texas Republican Party, "said that because the U.S. is a republic rather than a democracy, the proper adjective for identifying U.S. values and processes should be 'republican' rather than 'democratic.' That means social studies books should discuss 'republican' values in the U.S." (from "Conservatives say Texas Social Studies Classes Give Too Much Credit to Civil Rights Leaders," published in The Dallas Morning News, 9 July 2009, and written by Terrence Stutz)
  
  
• Oh, and, finally, Sarah Palin. I know that she is the darling of certain conservatives, but, please, give me a break. She speaks of responsibility and leadership, yet she resigns her governorship before her term is up--and blames her shortcomings on others: just another person falling back on the politics of victimhood. While I certainly disagree with Peggy Noonan on many issues, I think her criticism of Sarah Palin in The Wall Street Journal is pretty accurate: "In television interviews she [Palin] was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. 'I'm not wired that way,' 'I'm not a quitter,' 'I'm standing up for our values.' I'm, I'm, I'm."
  
  Noonan ends her editorial with a call to arms for the Republican party: "Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think." I may lean liberal, but I'm behind you on this one, Peggy.

Torture Probes in the UK

Scott Horton links to an article in The Guardian about a torture suspect whom British intelligence allowed to fly to Pakistan and then tipped off Pakistani intelligence to arrest the man. In Pakistan, the suspect was tortured, including having three of his fingernails removed, and British intelligence worked with the Pakistanis, knowing that torture was used, to question the man. Cozy. David Davis, former shadow home secretary, brought these details to light and had this to say about Britain's and the United States' examination and prosecution of those who used, or who were complicit in the use of, torture:

The Americans have made a clean breast of their complicity, whilst explicitly not prosecuting the junior officers who were acting under instruction. We have done the opposite. As it stands, we are awaiting a police investigation which will presumably end in the prosecution of frontline officers. At the same time the government is fighting tooth and nail to use state secrecy to cover up both crimes and political embarrassments, to protect those who are the real villains of the piece, those who approved the policies in the first place. (quoted in "Revealed – the secret torture evidence MI5 tried to suppress," Ian Cobain, The Guardian, Wednesday, 8 July 2009).

David Davis ended his speech to the the British Commons with these words:

The battle against terrorism is not just a fight for life; it is a battle of ideas and ideals. It is a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarism. In that fight, we should never allow our standards to drop to those of our enemies. We cannot defend our civilisation by giving up the values of that civilisation. I hope the minister will today help me in ensuring that we find out what has gone wrong so we can return to defending those values once again.

The entire speech can be read here: "David Davis on Torture: Statement in Full, The Guardian, 8 July 2009.

Chance Encounters

This weekend I've been reading my old letters and journals in order to bring to light for my son and daughter some stories from their childhood, the funny things they said and did. Just a few minutes ago, I came across this entry (which has little to do with the kind of journal entries for which I was searching), in which I recorded a chance encounter at an art museum in Columbus, Georgia, February 28, 1997:

The Photographs of Dorothea Lange
Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley, California (1938)

A dark-haired woman, probably in her forties, excitedly walks up to me as the kids and I are viewing the Dorothea Lange Photo Exhibit at the Columbus Museum. "Those men," she says, "don't they look like they come straight out of the pages of GQ? Those faces, that bone structure. No fat bellies there. Like hundreds of Gary Coopers. Where can one find men like that today?"

"Yeah," I reply, "they're hungry--It's the Depression."

A few minutes later the same woman comes up to me again in a different section of the exhibit. She wants me to look at a particular photograph, that of a woman looking out of the oval window of a black hearse-like car, from the title of the photograph, one in a funeral procession. The woman in the photograph looks pensive; her left hand partially obscures her nose and the bottom of her face. The middle-aged wrinkles around her eyes add to the pensive and sad air of the woman.

"Look at the clouds reflected in the window," points out my momentary friend. "They give the impression of eternity--all those clouds going on & on behind her. Look at how her eyes follow you. She's a spirit--in reality because she's dead by now but that moment captured forever in this photograph. She reminds us that we too will be like her."

"Even the oval frame of the car window suggests a family photograph hung on a wall," I add. "She reminds us of our own mortality."

As the woman walks out of the exhibit, she says, "I'm glad you were here for me to share my thoughts with. You've got to talk with someone when you're affected so by art."

"And I appreciate your sharing them with me," I told her. "I know the feeling."

The older we get, the more we rely on the kindness of strangers.

Driving in Georgia

A mother in Kennesaw, Georgia, has come up with an idea to identify new teen drivers on the road. She has created large magnets to be placed on cars of teens, Caution: Newly Licensed, which she sells nationwide. Now she has the support of a Georgia state senator to get a bill passed to require all newly-licensed teens to have this magnet and a window decal displayed on their cars: "Should Georgia Teen Drivers Sport Warning Magnets?", posted on the website of The Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 5, 2009.

Anyone who has driven in Georgia, especially around Atlanta, would sympathize with this mother's campaign, I think. I have lived in several states, and the drivers here are among the worst I have ever encountered. Unfortunately, LOTS of people drive as if they've just been newly licensed. Just last night, on our return from Lithonia, where we dropped our daughter off at a party, we were turning right at a green light when four drivers turned left right in front of us: one, two, three, four, without slowing down, as if they had absolutely no knowledge of right-of-way rules. Then, later, on our way home after picking up our daughter, someone ran a red light as ours was green, and at least two people absolutely RACED through caution lights. These experiences and observations are typical. AutoAdvantage Road Rage Survey reveals that Atlanta is among the top five cities as the worst for road rage.

I think part of the problem here is that Georgia does not have a good driver's education program. To get her learner's permit, our daughter attended several classes and then had to complete only a few hours of in-car instruction with a licensed instructor, hours that she completed in one weekend. And I wasn't impressed with the driving instruction, at all. To get her unrestricted license, our daughter is expected to complete 40 hours of driving under parental instruction. But I wonder how many teens actually complete those 40 hours. Susie Kessler, the mother who is marketing the magnets for new drivers says:

I talk to the state licensing people that actually give these kids the test … and I’ve asked them how many of these kids have really had 40 hours with parents. And they’ll tell you [some of the kids] don’t know how to turn the lights on in the car. It’s scary. Even if they do the minimum of 40 hours, that’s nothing.

According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, car crashes are the leading cause of teenage deaths, "accounting for more than one in three deaths in this age group.1 In 2005, twelve teens ages 16 to 19 died every day from motor vehicle injuries." Those are awful statistics.

Fourth of July

Yesterday evening, our daughter attended a Fourth of July party with friends, and Tom and I headed to the local downtown center, within walking distance, to watch the Fourth of July parade. The parade consisted of local folks walking with their kids in strollers or wagons and on bikes. Some strollers were decorated with small flags or banners. Two years ago I drove my art car in the parade, the strangest element in the parade, I'm sure, and while I received an invitation to do so again this year, I declined. The car has been exposed to inclement weather and needs some work before I put her on the road again--or attempt to sell her.

Before the parade was over, Tom and I headed to a local restaurant near the town square and settled on a table outside where we could watch all the folks gathering for the evening's festivities. We could hear the faint strains of martial music from the bandstand while we feasted. In honor of our president, I ordered an arugula salad with feta cheese (very good) and a crisp cold glass of hard cider. When I ordered the fish and chips--a dish we associate with England--Tom commented that the choice seemed appropriate since Georgia was loyalist in the Revolution.

I, however, am a patriotic American, despite what the far-right says about liberals.

Below are views of the parade from our table and of the crowd gathering for the evening's events.

Going West

In a few days, my family and I will begin what may be our last long trip together, a car-camping journey to the west coast of the United States and back to Georgia. The kids are adults or nearly adults: our son will be a senior at the University of Texas this fall, and our daughter will be a senior in high school. Maybe we will take more long trips together, but as the children grow, one realizes that the time one can expect to spend with them is increasingly limited. Living only an hour's drive from Austin at the time, we then left our son in Texas to move to Georgia. He has proven to be very self-motivated, getting involved in clubs and activities that suit his science and engineering-tuned mind, but I miss the time we would have spent together had we stayed nearby. Having grown up in a family that remained in the same area for six generations, I realize too clearly what one loses in our very mobile society. I am the only one of my siblings to live out of the state of Texas (from Louisiana to Minnesota to Georgia), and, frankly, I am ready to move on now, having lived only two years in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Some people, I think, have a tendency to wander. Perhaps I am one of those.

This tendency may explain why I hold on so fiercely to tangible connections to the past. I have kept over the years all the letters my friends have sent me; every year I send Christmas cards to friends and family from whom I haven't heard in years and from whom I really never expect to hear. And my husband's family: Lord have mercy--we have letters going back to the mid-1800s. Those people kept everything, from letters to photographs to advertisements from magazines to recipe clippings.

As we prepare for this journey West--or, rather, as I prepare, for I'm the organizer in our family, the one who plans the route, the places to camp, the attractions from which the rest can choose to experience--I think of all those ancestors who traveled west before us: the original Abraham Dugast who headed across an ocean from France to the New World; the descendants who traveled south and west to Louisiana when the British were so unfriendly; the Scotts and Coles and Deweeses and Bentons who migrated across the country from Virginia and Alabama and Delaware and North Carolina. Something propelled them west, a similar something that produces this restless spirit in myself. Oh, I know what it's like to be a part of a community for generations; for twenty years I stayed in the same place where generations of my family had lived. Even today, years after leaving my home, I long for that kind of connection, but it's never occurred again. Instead, I drag my restless body from state to state, and behind it? journals and letters of all I have ever loved.

I am tempted, sometimes, to burn it all. But I can't let go. Maybe someday I'll meet my Death Valley and leave all I've loved beside the wagon-rutted roadway. Until then, well, it's westward ho and a stagger as I drag my past behind.

Fruits of Our Labor

I don't know what I would do without work. When I write "work," I don't necessarily mean tasks associated with a paycheck or some other kind of exchange for services rendered--though I do include that sort of work, too. My everyday work, the twenty-five years of teaching college writing and literature and the hours that I now spend tutoring students in writing at a community college, has been necessary for me, too. Teaching was frustrating in many ways: the dynamics of university politics, the demands on one's time, the apathy of many students. Yet it also had its rewards: friendships that, while many didn't stand the test of time and distance, helped me grow intellectually and emotionally and now provide me with vivid memories; encounters with people from all over the world; opportunities to travel; the respect and gratitude of many students; the fun of being creatively engaged with my work (I loved organizing my classes and coming up with new ways to communicate ideas).....

But by work, I mean also the extent of one's labor beyond the workaday world, the world of paychecks and time clocks. Gardening is work, hard work, yet it also gives me great satisfaction. I am rewarded not only with the fruit of that labor (as the picture at the top of this post illustrates) but with a consciousness of the seasons that my gardening provides. Here I am in the middle of a large metropolitan area, yet gardening helps me connect with nature, with the earth, and with all the creatures I notice when I'm outside in my little urban garden.

Other kinds of labor sustain me, too. For the past few months, I've been working on two unusual quilts that I've designed for my son and daughter--quilts that I'm making out of recycled and felted wool sweaters. I've cut the sweaters into squares and embellished half of them with needlework. This week, I will complete the squares and then crochet them together to make the quilt. Here are photos of the squares of one as-yet-unassembled quilt, laid out on my queen-sized bed. I am enjoying the fruits of my labor. The joy is doubled when the fruit is shared!

Public and News Media All Agog over an Adulterous Affair.....

Okay, while I didn't watch South Carolina governor Mark Sanford at his news conference where he confessed to his affair with a woman in Argentina, just a few minutes ago I did read a little of those e-mails released by some unknown person to a South Carolina newspaper. I was titillated enough to scan the e-mails but not enough to read them entirely. And as I clicked around the Internet for news today, I thought about how the news media has followed the Mark Sanford story so closely the last few days. Everyone was all agog.

What a wonderful news media we have, so ready to reveal the most salacious details of any secrets of our leaders and stars, so reluctant to ask really serious questions about those same leaders and stars. Oh, yeah, there are reporters who pursue the truths our government would like to bury in an unknown, mass grave somewhere. There are newspapers that will publish the stories. But our popular media--the cable news and major networks--well, they are are all about ratings and viewers. Who wants to hear about the recent report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody? Golly, the executive summary alone runs to 19 pages. (The report itself is 263 pages long.)

Who is interested in listening to boring reports on health care reform? So what if our Congressmen and Senators are owned by insurance companies and health care companies? According to those same Congressmen and Senators, we have the best health care industry and insurance in the world. Ha. ha. Let us return, instead, to this story about the dalliance of ole Mark Sanford. Now that's a story that rocks our world.

Update: Rush Limbaugh blames President Obama for Republican governor Mark Sanford's affair with a woman in Argentina. According to Rush, Sanford was just so dispirited by Obama's presidency that he sought relief from that despondency in the arms of another woman. P-L-E-A-S-E! This is a stupid argument on so many levels, least of which is that it disregards the fact that Sanford began his affair before Obama won the presidency.

Finally, of all the comments I've read about Mark Sanford's affair and the public interest, these struck me as most worthy: John Dickerson's article, "Heartless," at Slate and Gary Kamiya's "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford", at Salon. Move along, people, nothing to see here but the sad complexities of the human heart. Get a life of your own.

The Corruption of Power

I've been dropping in on Nico Pitney's blog on Huffington Post for updates on what's happening in Iran. CNN is another news source. Pitney reports news sent him from individuals in Iran as well as from traditional news sources. A couple of items caught by attention as I scanned the blog this morning. The first one was about a letter reported to have been signed by some 40 members of the Assembly of Experts. In this letter, the clerics call for an annulment of the presidential election results and also accuse Supreme Leader Ali Khamenai of working to have his son succeed him as Supreme Leader. According to the letter, Khamenai has lung cancer. Ah, how those in power want to hold onto that power, even in death. The second item that caught my attention was the news from the Wall Street Journal that European technology companies Nokia and Siemens provided the Iranian government "one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale." Ah, how those in power want even more power. The seduction of power is not limited to Iran and other authoritarian governments.

Can You Watch and Not Weep?

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats

What do They Want?

Update Below

I am by no means as knowledgeable as I would like to be about the Middle East, Iran in particular. However, William Pfaff, author and political commentator on international relations, makes sense to me in his article "The Islamic Republic is Not in Danger, posted on Truthdig. Pfaff writes that

Iran’s cosmopolitan and liberal middle classes and its students are making a revolutionary bid without intending a revolution. The Islamic Republic is not in danger. At least not now.

Few think that the demonstrations in Tehran, and now in other Iranian cities, can produce a change in regime. The government’s police power, and that of the Revolutionary Guards, with the support of the farming and working-class population that believes it has a defender in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, makes that convincing.

What is being challenged is the reactionary social and political form the Iranian system has assumed under Ahmadinejad and the most conservative clerics. The Islamic state itself is not, or at least not yet, in real danger.

The mass rallies and marches in Iran have been compelling, even inspirational, but from what I've read and observed, it seems that those rallying and marching are not advocating overthrow of the government, with American-style freedom as an object. They seem, rather, to be speaking out against the government's repressing their votes. The leader they would want to rule their country would still be an advocate of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I don't think most of those protesters want separation of their religion and the state; they would prefer, however, a relaxation of religious restrictions and a more modern outlook.

Granted, I draw these conclusions from my reading and my small number of Iranian contacts, three or four people whom I know. One is a woman my age (or a little older) and the others are young women in their twenties. The older woman left Iran years ago, has lived in the United States for many years, and is an American citizen. She openly expresses her desire for a secular Iranian government. She returns to Iran, however, to visit family.

The younger women are more closely tied to Iran and less dismissive of the religious rule in Iran. They moved to the United States as children but have many contemporary friends and extended family members living in Iran. They are experts with Twitter, the Internet, and texting; they are in as constant contact with their Iranian friends and family as they can possibly be in this technological age. Over the past few months, I have listened to these younger women describe their visits to Iran, their anxiety over dressing correctly so as not to get arrested or to get their male companions arrested. (One of these young women has been arrested before.) One must pay attention to the neckline of one's outfit--the morality police might deem it too low and revealing. Tunics buttoned up the middle rather than slit on the sides are suspect because they may reveal the crotch of one's pants. Such restrictions on dress seem arbitrary at times. Women are often harassed or arrested for wearing bright colors; one year, pink seemed to be a particularly egregious color choice.

This week, an exchange between one of the younger women and the older woman illustrated to me the difference I see between these two generations. The two women were talking about the rallies in Iran. The older woman said that she didn't think the rallies would produce a real change in government, and, of course, she would like to see Islamic removed from the name of the government. She has little sympathy for religious leaders telling people what to do. The younger woman demurred. "That's not the point [of the protests]," she said. "We want our vote counted." She has followed the news from Iran as closely as possible, getting little sleep and frequently checking the internet and her cell phone throughout the day.

My impression was that the younger woman, who is representative of many of the young people like her in Iran, is not interested in an overthrow of the government. It's Ahmadinejad she doesn't like, as well as the overly restrictive religious requirements in public space. Young Iranians want a more modern Iran but not necessarily secular democracy.

As William Pfaff suggests, however, one might not really understand the true nature of one's desires or the consequences:

One wonders to what extent the young people on the streets of Tehran this week are conscious of just what they do want from a new government. They would undoubtedly be happy with a vote recount that gave them Mir Hossein Mousavi as president, and an end to the morality police who patrol in search of symptoms of modernity to stamp out. But if they got this, they would find that it was not enough. That there are far more difficult problems ahead.

Update: The tough response of the Iranian regime (in the form of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei) has resulted in violence. Not wanting to show weakness, Khamenei refused to back down from his support of Ahmadinejad. So now more than the election is being challenged; the legitimacy of the Iranian regime is challenged. It remains to be seen what will come of the reformists' protests and the Iranian government's fierce response. Too bad the reformists don't have a character such as Christian Bale played in Equilibrium, which we watched on the SciFi channel last night. Only in the movies is one person, with guns blazing, capable of toppling an entire regime.

Small World....the Iranian Election

One of my young co-workers is from Iran and has many friends and family there. Today she told me that she hadn't slept in three days because she was so concerned about what was happening in Iran after the re-election of Ahmadinejad. One of her friends there, she said, has been arrested, and no one has heard from her since. It's difficult to get information from Iran; the Iranian government is limiting communication access. Foreign reporters are confined to their hotels and are forbidden to report events. My young friend is trying to keep in touch with her friends through Facebook.

Another of our young co-workers is in Iran now; she and her brother left the U.S. in May to visit family in Iran for several weeks.

Garden Structures

Tom has once again proven his talents in constructing bamboo cages for our cucumber plants. To make each cage, he took a large bamboo pole and split it six ways. Then he split narrow pieces of bamboo which he fashioned into hoops. He wound wire at the top of each bamboo pole to prevent further splitting, then spread the legs of the cage apart and placed the bamboo hoops over the cage and affixed those hoops to the cage. The hoops hold the shape of the cage. Our cucumbers are now clambering up these garden structures.

Later today Tom and I took a walk, and I took photos of other garden structures, at ways we manipulate the landscape for garden beauty. Here are a few examples.

When Religion Rules

The earlier words of my colleague from Iran have proven true. When I had asked her if she were avidly following the election in Iran, where young people were taking to the streets in large numbers to support Mir Hossein Mousavi against Ahmadinejad, she shrugged. "In Iran, you know," she said, "votes can be stolen." She dejectedly reminded us that the name of the country reflects the true power in the government: the Islamic Republic of Iran. And indeed, the election results indicate that votes were not merely stolen but that the goods are being brazenly flaunted. Ahmadinejad has been announced the winner by a wide margin, even from areas where opposition support was strong, that no one believes. The supreme religious rulers of the country have made a mockery of the will of the people. And that's what happens when religion rules: whoever speaks for the religious group always claims to have God on his side, the ultimate power. Laura Secor has an interesting article at The New Yorker: "Laura Secor: Iran's Stolen Election," News Desk, New Yorker, June 13, 2009.

And Steven Benen at The Washington Monthly points out that not only our major news networks (which are poor purveyors of news in the world, anyway) but also cable news channels have done a poor job covering the results of Iran's elections and the violent aftermath. Newspapers, evidently, have done a much better job. He also points to Nico Pitney's post on Huffington Post, which is a compilation of a number of news sources, from Twitterers, e-mailers, news columnists in Iran, etc.: "Iran Violence: Protests Erupt, Riot Police Launch Crackdown," posted June 14, 2009.

Here's Middle Eastern expert Juan Cole's take on the elections in Iran: "Stealing the Iranian Election," posted June 13, 2009, on Cole's blog Informed Comment. Cole hedges his analysis with uncertainties, but he theorizes that Mousavi was perhaps bringing in enough votes to be declared the victor in the election but when that news reached Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, "who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years," the religious leaders "sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts."

Developing Self-Awareness

In her review of Eve Pell's memoir, We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante, Megan Hustad describes how Pell, descendant of a rich and privileged family, traveled west and embraced radicalism in the 70s, hoping to escape the aristocratic failings of her flawed family back East. However, in her memoir, Pell comes to see that her turn to radicalism wasn't really a shift in perspective. Here's how Hustad describes Pell's reflection on her life:

The last part of the book offers a glancing overview of Pell’s immersion in early ’70s radical chic. She starts working with assorted anti-capitalists, joins the Prison Law Project and shares a brief kiss with Black Panther Field Marshal George Jackson in the visiting room at San Quentin. This account of Pell’s radicalism is made more compelling in that it didn’t require a fundamental shift of perspective—her world was not reimagined so much as flipped around. Pell at the revolution retained the strident elitism she was born to, only now black, brown and other oppressed peoples occupied the moral superior slots.

Pell eventually realizes that she’s in over her head when a brick thrown through her window lands on her son’s bed. Satisfaction would have to be found elsewhere, and likely after dispensing with self-righteousness and resentment. To her lasting credit, “We Used to Own the Bronx” is a graceful object lesson in how perspective is gained not all at once but by accretion, the reward of years of methodical observation.(from "Megan Hustad on Class in America," posted on Truthdig, Arts and Culture section, June 12, 2009--my emphasis)

I've underlined the phrases that jumped out at me when I read this review because they reflect some recent ponderings of my own. I have observed over the years the various ways that people--including me--attempt to transcend their past by seeking redemption in work or a new religion or travel or education or by getting the hell as far away from family as one can. Unfortunately, the attitudes that we've inherited or nourished go with us. Those attitudes just get placed on the new life we've adopted. In her case, Eve Pell transferred her family's sense of moral superiority to the new "family" she adopted: radicals of the 70s. These were the new "superior" groups to her.

I didn't grow up in a rich, privileged family--far from it--but I grew up in a very religious family and one with a fierce pride in family history. We were members of a country Southern Baptist church that my father and his mother helped found. The pastors of this church were often the yelling, hell-fire-and-damnation pastors one encounters in film and literature. Sin stuck like flypaper and contaminated everything we touched. In addition, I lived in a culture that practiced corporal punishment. Whippings with leather belts or even leather-braided bull whips accompanied the shame of our short-comings. A less sensitive child would have listened to those sermons, accepted her punishments, and would have been perhaps only superficially affected. I was too sensitive and took everything to heart. Self-righteousness and self-doubt doubled up in the seat of my saddle. Over the years, of course, my religious views changed. Eventually (over a long period of time), I abandoned most of them except the ethical ideals, espoused by many religions, which seem very true to me. I consider myself to be an agnostic Christian, if such a philosophical combination can actually make sense. But I don't think I quite abandoned the self-righteousness; that attitude was just transferred to other things: my political views, my views of personal responsibility, my views of parenting.

In the last few years, however, I've been working on un-saddling that sense of self-righteousness. It's hard--but a work in progress. And feeling resentment about the past just clouds the present. I can relate to Pell's conclusions about her own life:

In a wistful prologue, Pell admits to lingering mixed feelings about her background. “My relatives include bigots, humanitarians, eccentrics, athletes, and ordinary people, most of them infused with a strong sense that they are aristocrats. Like them, I love it that our family used to own a manor in colonial America.” But “while the family forms a sort of bulwark against time, a base of permanence in a world of flux, it exacts a terrible price.” (from "Megan Hustad on Class in America," Truthdig, June 12, 2009)

Donald Rumsfeld and Taos, NM

When I read of Taos, New Mexico, I think of artists who visited and were inspired by the landscape of New Mexico, such as Georgia O'Keefe, and of writers such as D. H. Lawrence who once owned a ranch near Taos. Taos has a reputation of being an artist's community. So I was surprised--stupidly so, perhaps--that Donald Rumsfeld owns a ranch near Taos, New Mexico; he divides much of his time these days between a home in Maryland and his ranch in Taos. It's easy to view public figures as caricatures, particularly when one disagrees with decisions those people have made. Bradley Graham's article "Decline and Fall: Donald Rumsfeld's Dramatic End," reveals some interesting details about the man who receives a lot of blame (and rightly so) for misjudgments in the early days of the Iraq war. The farm in Taos is just one of those minor details.

Just a New Saddle?

The director of the tutoring center where I work part-time is from Iran but is an American citizen. She has many relatives in Iran and usually visits once a year or so. When I asked her today if she had been keeping up with all the news covering the election in Iran, where people are taking to the streets in mass numbers to criticize President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, she stuck her hands in her sweater pockets, leaned against a desk, and shrugged her shoulders. "We have a saying in my country," she said,"that goes something like this: It's the same old donkey with a new saddle ."

A less succinct and less colorful quote from a White House official reveals a similar conclusion:

"We take what we get," a White House official said of the forthcoming Iranian elections. "Whether with Ahmadinejad or Khatami in power, it's clear the Iranian president has limited influence, either for better or for worse. So even were Ahmadinejad to lose, there will not suddenly be flowers blooming" in Washington's efforts to engage Iran. (from Laura Rozen's blog The Cable, at Foreign Policy: "Lebanese election results relieve Washington," June 8, 2009; and quoted in Schmuel Rosner's essay, "Who cares who's president of Iran," in Slate, July 11, 2009)

Consequences of the Economic Crisis

I've never really understood the intricacies of the stock market or Wall Street, but the economic crisis of the Bush administration and the continuation of that crisis in the Obama administration have prompted me to become a lot more informed. This week I followed a link to an article published in Vanity Fair by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor at Columbia University. I had read other articles and interviews with Stiglitz, and what he said made sense, so I was interested in reading "Wall Street's Toxic Message." In this article, Stiglitz discusses what he sees as consequences of a world-wide economic crisis for which America (Wall Street, bankers, mortgage lenders, the American government, the American people who lived beyond their means) is greatly responsible.

With the ideals of democracy, America has also proselytized the ideals of an unfettered market to developing countries (as well as to the rest of the world and ourselves). Now, however, this recent economic crisis has revealed to developing nations the magnitude of America's displaced faith in unfettered markets. "Today," Stiglitz writes, "only the deluded would argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the self-regulated behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly." Even in the past, unfettered markets did not work to the advantage of developing countries; the cards were stacked in favor of western powers:

Europe and America didn't open up their own markets to the agricultural produce of the Third World, which was often all these poor countries had to offer. They forced developing countries to eliminate subsidies aimed at creating new industries, even as they provided massive subsidies to their own farmers.

These countries have noted that the United States and the International Monetary Fund responded much differently to the East Asia crisis of ten years ago than to the current economic crisis. Then, the United States and the I.M.F. insisted that Third World countries be tough: to "cut their deficits by cutting back on expenditures," "to raise interest rates, in some cases more than 50 percent," and not to bail out their banks. These restrictions created great hardships in the countries most affected. Now, however, in the current crisis, the U.S. has not expected from itself what it expected from poorer, developing countries in that crisis ten years ago. The U.S. government has bailed out its banks, has raised the deficit, and has lowered interest rates. This hypocrisy does not improve our standing in the world. Stiglitz notes, "Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?"

There are consequences to these actions, Stiglitz argues:

• The role of the Unites States has diminished and may continue to diminish: "We are no longer the chief source of capital. The world's top three banks are now Chinese. America's largest bank is down at the No. 5 spot." Developing countries have used the American dollar as their "reserve money" to maintain confidence in their solvency. However, the American dollar does not engender the confidence it once did. The world may choose other currency to serve as reserve currency, and the Chinese are out front in suggesting such a possibility.
  
  
• In the current economic crisis, America has provided less monetary support to developing countries. Stiglitz points out that we were never terribly generous anyway. However, China is stepping into the breach, and more and more developing countries are turning to China for assistance. I can think of how countries such as Sudan have received much infrastructure support from China. China is a lot less interested in human rights than the U.S. is, so China's increasing influence will have a different effect than that of the U.S.
  
  
• There is the possiblity that this increasingly lack of confidence in America will blossom into a rejection of capitalism altogether, at least by governing powers of developing countries, which can lead to regimes that will not be good for the poor.
  
  
• The loss of confidence in American-style free markets may also result in a rejection of other American ideals, such as democracy. Stiglitz writes that "democracy and market forces are essential to a just and prosperous world," but concludes that "[t]he economic crisis, created largely by America's behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have."

More of Joseph Stiglitz's analysis can be found here: Articles by Joseph Stiglitz about the Current Economic Crisis. Other economists may have different views that merit our attention. This is just the most recent article about the economic crisis that sparked my interest.

By the way, the photo at the beginning of this post has little to do with the economic crisis. This is Tom stir-frying beet greens and chopped beats to serve over pasta for our evening meal. My contributions were a green salad with leafy green stuff from a local farm and our own garden--and a fruit salad that included fruit not-so-locally grown. Living with two vegetarians has meant that I eat many vegetarian meals these days, though I did have a turkey-ham sandwich yesterday!

Poetry and Luck

When I was a child in Texas, my family lived in an old wooden house on land my ancestors had owned and that my father had cleared of brush and trees. In our yard were patches of clover in which I and my sisters and brother would often find four-leaf clovers. We would press the clovers between pages of books and then glue them to cardstock to make bookmarks or tape them to letters we sent to cousins. I'll bet we've never felt so lucky since. Today while walking from the compost bin where I had deposited potato peelings, I glanced down and saw a four-leaf clover at my feet. Of course, I plucked it, and it's now pressed flat inside the back cover of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. Looking at this picture I took of my four-leaf clover, I remembered a poem that I wrote years ago. I never have been satisfied with any version, but I've done a bit of tinkering with it this evening, and it captures some of my feeling about that




Early Luck

At the concrete steps of our childhood home
each spring through summer we would find
clover of the most unusual kind,
four-leaved, even five or six-leaved.
We soon grew confident of our treasure,
just minutes needed to bring to hand
a lucky token grown on demand,
it seemed, to our then more trusting minds.
We could hardly pass a leafy patch
without stopping to search, to count
the leaves whose numbers seemed to surmount
all odds, all natural probabilities.
We plucked our luck, then pressed it flat,
its green life turning brittle, dull as a dollar bill.
With steady fingers and cut-and-paste skill
of children, we fastened our fortune to paper.
Like prayers to St. Jude our letters were mailed,
those splayed-out specimens of luck bestowing grace
on all correspondents who touched that holy space
where we had glued the simple optimism
we never quite lost, though pressed hard by sorrows
and dulled by time. I learned luck rarely follows
one's wish, one's desire. But I still pause when I pass
a patch of dark clover in a lawn of grass.

Anita D-G

At about the same time I put away what I thought would be the final, disappointing version of that poem, I took up writing haiku. Oh, like most people, I had written haiku as literary exercises in high school. But now, years later, I had discovered the works of Matsuo Basho, a Japanese master of haiku, and I sought to capture in three lines suspended moments of daily experience. At first I tried to write one haiku every day; that goal diminished to one haiku a week. Finally, I thought I would write enough haiku in a year to fill a favorite pottery jar. I wrote each haiku on a small square of post-it paper, rolled up the paper, tied it with ribbon, and dropped it in the jar. At the end of the year, I planned to host a party, invite friends, drink some wine, smoke some cigars, and read the haiku by candlelight. The party never transpired, the pottery jar never quite filled, but this evening, I've one more haiku to add. If only there were a few cigar-smoking friends still around.....

Hydrangeas, old jar,
the years are long between us--
your face blooms fresh here.

Follow-up on Catmo

I'm not one to crow about success because I've had too many experiences in life where success comes with a thick codicil. However, it seems that at least for now, my husband's amendments to Catmo (described here and here, here, and here) seem to be working. Pluto has been confined to our backyard for two weeks now. For a few days after his last return (when he received an electrical shock as he escaped from the yard), I kept him inside at night, with a kitty litter box at the ready. The other two cats were allowed in and out. At first, Pluto responded to this nightly house arrest by running through the house with his tail held high. Finally, he settled down, finding a restful place to spend the night on our daughter's rattan clothes hamper. When I let him out after the sun rose (I was off from work between semesters, so I had the leisure to cat-sit), I would check on him periodically during the day. He saw me checking, though I don't really know a cat's mind, so I can't conclude that he knew what I was up to. Then, while we were in Texas, we left the cat door open so all the cats could go in and out. There has been no indication that Pluto has escaped. So--success.

That very loud knocking noise you hear? That's me knocking on wood.

Early June Garden Update

In the week I was in Texas, the garden in Georgia blossomed. Here are some signs of that growth. I took the photo of the scarlet Monarda didyma at left on May 29th, the day before my daughter and I left for Texas. I took the photos below today. The monarda (bee balm) is in full flower near the grape arbor. The scarlet bee balm is "Jacob Cline," which is powdery mildew resistant. The pink bee balm that I've planted by the mail box is pretty, but the center of the clump succumbed to powdery mildew (or something like it), and the sprouts around it aren't as tall and healthy-looking as the scarlet bee balm. Click on each photo for a larger view.