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Crooked Timber 14 November 2004:
Anyone who gets a glimpse of the inner workings of local politics when they're young enough to not have an investment in the status quo ante gets radicalized, or at least thoroughly disillusioned, unless they had no illusions to lose. It's hard to insist on moral behavior once you realize how fragile it is, how thin and human, but that's the task. The best argument for the invasion and occupation is the hideous tyranny of Saddam, that's the only basis for the use of the word "liberation" to describe the presence of the US military and the things they've done; but Saddam was a virtual employee of the US for years, as were the Taliban in Afghanistan. They wouldn't have been what they were without American encouragement. That isn't conjecture, it's history, and complicity. Geras, like John Wayne, wants to get rid of the bad guys, but simply getting rid of bad people is easy, it's preserving the good that's hard, protecting the innocent, things like that. Allawi would not appear to be a particularly devoted champion of the innocent. And the presence of John Negroponte in Iraq now should put paid to any nonsense about humanitarian motives, though it won't of course. Because no one who says there are humanitarian motives involved really believes it. What they mean is they'd like it be like that, it would be nice if it were. Geras can only repeat the p.r. mantra about Saddam, mewling about "the torture chambers" over and over - and ignoring the overwhelming stench of Abu Ghraib completely. He has no other point than that Saddam was terribly bad and therefore anything that gets rid of Saddam is automatically good. Bad cops use that same inversion to justify themseves no matter what they do. Pilger's logic is of a substantially higher order, as this piece shows. Though if it really is simply a matter of getting rid of the bad people, rest assured the extinction of the human race will remove every last villain from the planet, permanently. Like I said, the hard part is keeping the good, preserving it, encouraging it. Where's the moral encouragement in Iraq? What's being preserved? The polite Left kowtows to the gloating Right by talking about "foreign fighters" in Iraq, as though coming to the aid of your brothers in arms is against the rules. What nonsense. The only historical figure it's acceptable to point to for an example of appropriate resistance is Ghandi. But Ghandi would have been assassinated already if he was in this. Geras says "Stop The Denial" and I think that's excellent advice for everyone. Quit pretending there's anything decent about this nightmare, and while you're at it quit pretending it was about oil too. It's about empire, and the subjugation of Iraq is intentional. Lies to the credulous and bullets to the rebels. Mission Accomplished. - Crooked Timber 17 November 2004: To solve these difficulties of evidence and Geneva Convention-based rules of engagement we need officials - just as we have in professional sports - paid professionals themselves, wearing easily identifiable uniforms, unbiased toward either team, and fully cognizant of all appropriate laws and regulations. Then armchair combatants can concentrate more readily on the thrills and excitement of what is, after all, the thing out of which the metaphor of sport was born. - feral 19 November 2004: Another way to say that bit about the moon, it doesn't go around us, it goes around the sun, in and out, and we go through the middle of that. The illusion is it rises and sets, but the sun also presents that illusion, and we see through that with the help of astronomical science. Interesting that the moon's path should be so obscured still. The queen of clubs stands in for the muse and the thing within us that seeks the muse, both. Your will is the more-than-energy that moves between them. Once momentum's achieved redirection is simpler, and easier than the herculean task of getting up and moving in the first place was. It's a deception that we're puny in the vast and infinite universe. A lie really. We're in-between two infinite realms, one bigger than us, one we contain. We're taught to trivialize anything smaller than we are, and the corollary - that anything bigger makes us trivial, works to the advantage of what's in the way of understanding. There are things, creatures, which benefit from our confusion. Between us and the muse the queen of clubs stands in for. It isn't easy, and it isn't a matter of understanding alone, and the closer you get the more on fire everything seems, but there isn't anything else. - Open Brackets 18 November 2004: As a Brazilian. - As an American, or more specifically as a birth-entitled citizen of the US I'll fight to see the day when this country is no longer a vehicle driven by a scabby clot of clever madmen, with the majority of its citizenry strapped into the back like toddling children, going wherever they're taken, in wonder and unconcern. As an American I'd like some recognition from the international community that whatever process of appropriation and theft has taken their lands and resources has been operating here as well - and that the closer to the fire you find yourself, the more you will be likely get burned. The resistance here has vaporized. Atomized. No leaders, and only a few confused veterans; the rest are the young coming into their radicalization like pioneers, with nothing before them but a kind of greyed-out questionmark, as though no one had ever moved against the still nameless thing that the world calls America, but is in fact not American at all, and only hidden behind that name. - John Quiggin 18 November 2004: As long as you start somewhere in the middle of the chain of circumstance, it's relatively simple to make the case that reconstruction depends on political stability, because it does. The assumption being that instability proceeds from something other than the American presence, and once the resistance is subdued or removed entirely Iraq can commence its rebuilding, with American assistance playing the part of benevolent guide and patron. Which is true as far as it goes. Just as it would be true that I could assist in the rebuilding of your home, and the equitable reassigning of your possessions, possibly even the care of your children, once my invasion and occupation of your home was complete. Depending on how vehemently you resisted that invasion and occupation, of course. We would have to wait until you stopped fighting back, in other words, before we began to improve conditions, once I entered the premises. And let's not talk about what business I had invading your home to begin with - it's much too complex an issue and it's now fait accompli anyway. As far as 'silliness' pertaining to accusations of immorality about the invasion and occupation, or to accusations of Halliburton's obscene and corrupt profits as condemnatory of the entire operation, it's only distance, moral and emotional, from the carnage that makes that word possible. Halliburton's corruption, Saddam's iniquity, even Bush's deceit and incompetence are all side issues. Iraq is being metabolized. Working out the details of reconstruction, even as an academic exercise in that light would be silly in the extreme if it weren't happening as a result of something so appalling. The presence of the American military in Iraq is an ongoing criminal act under international law, and even if it weren't statutory it would be, and is, immoral by any accurate definition, and repugnant. letter to friend 12 November 2004: Have you learned to recognize compulsion? Can you tell the difference between obsession and fascination? These aren't academic questions. It's not that money is the god of small-hearted people, that's not it at all. They are. Themselves. It's not the money. They're the gods of themselves; the money is just a way for a third party to profit from that self-obsession. The selfishness would be there if there was no money in the world at all. Money's an opportunistic infection, secondary to the disease, which is selfishness. It's an important distinction, because making it strips the black-and-white mask off things, replacing it with the subtlety and wholeness of color. Balance is more complicated when there's more than two forces at work. Like standing still and staying upright requires a bunch of muscular coordination; but running through broken terrain takes all that and more. To live you have to take care of the self, your-self, so the second level of the scam is to throw your desire for transcendence into a denial of the self which is all too often a denial of life. Money isn't the god there. Money's like a tax on selfishness. Look around. See how selfishness has been encouraged so long and so well that for most now lightweight greed is a fact of life, the way things are. Desire is the incense of worship. The self is covered in gold at the heart of the church. Compulsion - I mean you can get the definition from books and therapists and online, but seeing it is mostly breakthrough, like gathering the information along with a lot you won't need or use and it just sits there, and then one day it clicks. Whether you hear that click or not isn't that crucial. Compulsion at its simplest means things you have to do, things you find yourself having done, then shamed after, scared after, or just confused about, but after. During there's a thrill sometimes, sometimes a sense of duty or something like duty, an obligation to some unseen authority, or you're just carried along like a bug on a leaf on a river, it's something you do because...because you do, because it needed doing. Mechanisms in the brain and soul, little parts of the machine that control the rest from hidden corners of what we are. It gets messy when there's pain involved, and for some of us there's always pain involved. Then avoiding the mess can become the only task. Short circuiting the mechanical triggers. Blocking the flow of command. In the sense that when you, personally, T.S., say God, you mean some extra-earthly power that makes things happen, it helps to see that if that God wanted you to avoid being here you wouldn't be - you know - getting through doesn't mean the same as getting out no matter what. Creating a smokescreen of healing out of a self-induced wound. It masks the wound beneath that one. It's all work. Still, we go on with what we can hold, what we remember to grab on the way out the door, what we find next to us when we wake up... - Crooked Timber 09 November: One is under the impression that by "indoor plumbing" is meant an indoor commode, or toilet. This distinction is paramount, there being no question that cooking facilities virtually necessitate quantities of water that plumbed-in access provides simply and on demand. The commode being indoors, however, is primarily a convenience and of benefit to the infirm, the elderly, and the busy - as opposed to piped-in water's beneficial necessity to the vital heart of any home, the cook. However, any meal's end result will eventually be a trip to the necessary, and anyone who's lived for any time with an outdoor facility, what rural Americans still call an "outhouse", can tell you there is a substantial olfactory difference between the two locations, a lingering one in the modern setting. In addition, doing one's business in an outdoor setting can be most conducive to contemplation, and the sight and scent of trees and natural flora can be metabolically facilitating and therapeutic. This is countered by the urban and suburban with the relatively minor inconvenience of it's requiring a longer walk to achieve the relief station - but what is that? A matter of a mere few yards. The benefits far outweigh the inconvenience unless one is ill or otherwise handicapped, or the weather being so inclement as to be adverse. The cumulative effect on local water tables of a responsible community's use of outhouse technologies can be minimized far past that of community use of great volumes of fresh water in sewage "sanitation". Depending on the sizes of the communities of course. But then that's also kind of the point about the bearing of arms by the average citizen. The way we live now it's probably not a good thing for most people to do; the overwhelming mass of humanity in ever-concentrated numbers precludes an armed civilian populace, by virtue of the necessity for enforced passivity amidst the pressures and constraints of such concentrated living; as also the outhouse is inappropriate and impossible in the heart of Manhattan or Chicago. The way we live now we can't all dig holes out back - many of us don't even have an "out back". Yet the same gesture that dispatches the outhouse without a moment's thought as primitive and unbearably inconvenient welcomes the unbreathable air of summertime Los Angeles as modern, and necessary to "progress". There may be more to this than simple knee-jerk ridiculing of so-called primitive facilities. Considering the elimination of solid waste is something the regular among us accomplish daily, it may behoove the thoughtful person to consider the disappearance of outdoor plumbing as somewhat of a loss, inasmuch as the experience al fresco (or nearly) is far more satisfying generally than that accomplished in any cramped water closet will ever be. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 9:53 PM  
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