addition to movies of 2007

interview (doesn't make sense ultimately)
artists and models (martin and lewis, great colors, but it's what's wrong with the world, isn't it?)

Movies of 2007

missing: movies watched in january and february.

titles in ALL CAPS the most notable of the year

list of movies watched between march 15 and december 31:

ZODIAC (obsessive in every way)
seduced and abandoned (still holds up)
crimen perfecto (funny)
desperate living (still outlandish)
a canturbury tale (historically interesting)
300 (not compelling)
shortbus (graphic and either sad or liberating)
lady vengeance (more korean sadism)
aliens (acceptable)
zerophilia (ridiculous)
rich and strange (fascinating Hitchcock relic)
mr. moto in danger island (another fascinating racial glimpse)
bridge to terabithia (i cried)
color me kubrick (i laughed)
come early morning (earnest)
searching for the wrong-eyed jesus (too typical of american citizenry)
virgin spring (excellent)
apartment zero (perverse)
beyond the valley of the dolls (time capsule)
death of a president (wishful thinking)
blades of glory (predictable)
man of flowers (nice art)
stroszek (overrated Herzog)
sadie thompson (silent)
following sean (made me depressed)
3 needles (pretentious, but worthy)
a year without love (quite good)
the conformist (awesomely good)
grindhouse (liked the fake trailers)
el bola (just ok)
bobby (inaccurate details, sentimental)
tia alexandra (not bad)
jonestown (made me depressed)
the aura (strange spanish taxidermy tale)
stand up and cheer (amazing historical document)
the notebook (watched for sentimentalist reasons)
notes on a scandal (well made)
wild camp (trashy french fun)
murder by numbers (forgot it)
fracture (figured it out, but was engrossed anyway)
port of call (early Bergman)
criminal lovers (good mexican trash)
the history boys (word rich)
gattaca (visually more rich than i had remembered)
amsterdam global village (excellent documentary)
the queen (quite good)
united states of leland (part of ryan gosling film fest)
last king of scotland (very good)
machuco (ok)
stay (too weird, ryan gosling film festival)
WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (Hong Sang-soo mind boggler)
happy feet (cute)
dreamgirls (still not my favorite musical by a long shot)
THE HOST (korean multi-genre monster movie with a heart)
little children (excellent)
OLD JOY (the soul of friendship)
the war tapes (shot by soldiers)
manderlay (take a break, Von Trier)
deliver us from evil (devastating)
diggers (passable indie)
smokin' aces (yawn)
alpha dog (yawn)
deja vu (underrated, subtext of a republican's wish for a do-over in iraq)
the passenger (one of the best movies of all time)
before the fall (german boxer movie, poor)
judy berlin (ok)
the spook who sat by the door (historical interest)
the painted veil (hollywood travelogue)
fixed bayonets (sam fuller can do no wrong)
muriel (Renais can do no chronology)
ten items or less (passable indie)
rocky balboa (you have to ask?)
black book (return to form for Verhoeven)
sir no sir (another war doc)
my country my country (another war doc)
disturbia (creepier than it first would seem)
28 weeks later (too hyper)
LOST: SEASON FINALE
SOPRANOS: SEASON FINALE
JOHN FROM CINCINNATI
THE WIRE
TELL ME YOU LOVE ME (television was way better than the movies this year)
nosotros los pobres (Mexican cinema historical interest)
the good german (less than it should have been)
faye grim (hal hartley slips)
letters from iwo jima (fine)
the fountain (visually and thematically arresting)
13 tzameti (one of those things you want to stop watching but can't)
vive l'amour (by tsai ming-liang, my favorite new director)
bride stripped bare by the bridegrooms (catching up on more Hong Sang-soo)
sansho the bailiff (awaiting even more Mizoguchi on dvd)
flanders (Bruno Dumont typical, humanity is pigs)
THE LIVES OF OTHERS (life under surveillance)
CHELSEA GIRLS (life under surveillance)
bug (capable adaptation of Tracy Letts' play)
the river (tsai ming-liang can do no wrong)
knocked up (way overrated)
us vs. john lennon (life under surveillance)
latter days (gay)
hannibal rising (sick)
the hired hand (Peter Fonda and Warren Oates)
fired (too true)
mr. brooks (creepy in the wrong way)
the fever (play is half-off the mark somehow)
state legislature (Frederick Wiseman typical slice, am i the only one still watching?)
ghost rider (better than it had any right to be)
rebels of the neon god (tsai ming-liang etc. etc.)
indigenes (overrated)
the messengers (forgot it)
sicko (excellent and entertaining)
battle of algiers (still powerful)
psychopathia sexualis (ridiculous)
fantastic four: rise of the silver surfer (strangely watchable)
reno 911: miami (tv show is better)
acid eaters (not good)
weed (bad)
romantico (forgot it)
the italian (sweet Russian movie about orphans)
epic movie (awful)
damnation (can't dismiss Bela Tarr, as much as one might want to)
becket (still classy)
the bridge (suicide doc, hard to watch)
stay (ryan gosling)
pirates of the caribbean: part two (blurred together)
regular lovers (68 in paris, deserves another look)
pirates of the caribbean 3: at world's end (surrealism on a hollywood budget)
shooter (just what you would expect)
pirates of the caribbean 1 (why did i watch this?)
sicko (second viewing)
pride (nice swimmers's bodies)
land of the pharoahs (they don't make camp they way they used to inadvertently)
romantico (hmmm don't recall)
queen of outer space (too bad they can't make 'em like this any more; all innocence is lost)
satyricon (doesn't seem so bizarre any more)
ratatouille (overrated, i'm afraid)
driving lessons (indie with harry potter's ron weasley)
attack of the 50 foot woman (good thing they can't make 'em like they used to)
you're gonna miss me (rock stars go mad)
i like killing flies (not a great subject, but nice new york eatery stuff)
pulp (not really very good at all)
harry potter and the order of the phoenix (fine)
wild tigers i have known (gay)
venus (too creepy, really)
frankenstein conquers the world (i wish)
the president's analyst (what was once paranoid fantasy is now common fact)
funny girl (doesn't hold up for me)
AFTER THE WEDDING (not a great movie, but I still preferred it to most other movies)
hamlet (russian; b/w)
climates (intriguing in a global sense)
if... (quite good still)
woman in the dunes (even better than when i saw it in the sixties)
little dieter needs to fly (ok for Herzog)
the big cube (no)
perfume (not as good as the book, but almost)
heart of glass (hypnotized Herzog)
the number 23 (ridiculous and bad)
aalira (funny belgian trek)
falling angels (gay)
wanda (classic bleak)
steal me (forgettable)
avenue montaigne (not bad)
wooden crosses (french anti-war silent; the world never changes)
persona (still excellent)
hot fuzz (funny the first time)
iraq in fragments (the world never changes)
everything's gone green (no)
one third (really, no)
les enfants terribles (can't even give Melville a pass on this one; miscast)
i now pronounce you chuck and larry (worst movie of the year; sets back sexuality two decades)
ivan's childhood (early Tarkovsky, fascinating)
the darwin awards (didn't make it to the end)
the bourne ultimatum (most exciting movie of the year)
hairspray (a real toe-tapper)
double life of veronique (early kieslowski)
unconscious (extremely strange Freudian historical comedy drama)
private fears in public places (i preferred it when Renais was oblique)
power of kangwon province (Hong Sang-soo; it's one of his best, I think; it's ten years old; can I call it the best of the year?)
hot rods to hell (even when we were trying to be wild and bad, we were innocent)
i think i love my wife (misfire for Chris Rock)
INLAND EMPIRE (i can't help it; movies are dreams and dreams are reality)
vacancy (disappointing)
the young one (early Bunuel, worth watching)
bathing beauty (esther williams, not worth watching)
gene autry (i even forgot the name of this one)
breaking and entering (i love movies of redemption and forgiveness)
kwik stop (a little too much not enough here)
sans soleil (chris marker classic)
broken english (yet another Parker Posey misfire this year)
house of games (doesn't hold up as well as i'd hoped)
superbad (better than it had any right to be)
boy culture (best gay movie of the year)
the castle (quality Kafka adaptation)
woman in the window (Lang and Robinson, Jr., what's not to like?)
blossoming of maximo oliveros (pretty good for a manila film)
when a woman ascends the stairs (classic japanese movie, rich)
end of summer (late Ozu)
les miserables (french silent, four hours long, brilliant)
o fantomas (my annual viewing of the most perverse movie ever and one of my favorites)
en la hoya (excellent mexican documentary about highway)
the wind that shakes the barley (i'm tired of the irish conflict)
because i said so (horrible)
PITFALL (excellent 1962 Hiroshi Teshigahara movie; watched it twice, along with other Teshigahara movies)
buenos aires 100km (passable)
robinson crusoe (Bunuel version)
AWAY FROM HER (excellent, especially Julie Christie)
the baron of arizona (well, maybe Sam Fuller can do wrong after all)
skin for sale (didn't buy it)
year of the dog (too quirky by half)
the secret life of words (more Sarah Polley and maybe should have been one of the year's best)
human beings (from Spain, where it should have stayed)
naked kiss (Sam Fuller can do no wrong again)
the camden 28 (superior pbs documentary)
le samouri (putting Melville back in my good graces)
bob le flambeur (on a Melville kick)
moolade (ok for african movie)
le circle rouge (more Melville)
small town gay bar (dull)
steel helmet (Fuller)
the face of another (more Teshigahara, fascinating)
fist in the pocket (worthwhile)
a woman without love (old Bunuel)
la collectioneuse (catching up with old Rohmer)
cafe lumiere (homage to Ozu by Hou Hsiao-hsien; watched it twice)
case of the grinning cat (Chris Marker political iconography)
millennium actress (haven't finished watching it yet)
the lookout (predictable)
the valet (french and predictable)
KENNETH ANGER VOLUME II (excellent)
miller's crossing (worn with time)
zodiac (again)
mysterious skin (very good)
eastern promises (disappointing)
cruising (in its own way, as wrongheaded about gayness as chuck and larry)
mala noche (good)
the ex (bad)
1408 (creepy enough)
across the universe (loved it)
the best friend (really liked it)
the hoax (unnecessary)
innocent voices (the pain of latin america)
chopper (unnecessary)
lonely hearts (yet another version of this story; has its moments)
into the wild (wildly romantic)
transformers (guilty pleasure)
gone baby gone (may be best hollywood movie of the year)
the tv set (made me glad to be unemployed)
the taste of tea (superb)
the ferryman (crap)
the burmese harp (classic, but...)
darjeeling limited (my favorite wes anderson movie)
ratcatcher (bleak britishness yet again)
o lucky man! (classic, better than if...)
spiderman III (as surreal and complex as pirates III)
rushmore (i love it less than most people)
into great silence (wonderful)
no end in sight (endlessly depressing)
lights in the dusk (bizarre finland noir)
the river (Tsai Ming-liang, so, of course, great)
p2 (not bad for a thriller)
goodbye dragon inn (Tsai Ming-liang, one of my favorites)
such is life (mexico's Ripstein, one of his very best)
unseen beatles (revealed nothing)
this is england (bleak brit again, don't understand why some loved so much)
ashes and diamonds (Wajda catching up, especially liked with the commentary)
paris je t'aime (dizzying)
kanal (more wajda)
i am cuba (king of the tracking shots)
I DON'T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE (Tsai Ming-Liang's newest available and excellent)
royal tenenbaums (ok)
negativland: my favorite things (glad to have available)
beowulf 3-d (much better than expected)
the life aquatic (completing the wes anderson film festival, strangely sour)
KILLER OF SHEEP (bleak black portrait, real, finally available)
helvetica (one of year's best documentaries)
help (as good as ever)
sawdust and tinsel (early Bergman, not bad)
adios moma (argentina, magical but not elevating)
waitress (way overrated)
thieves like us (sort of pointless Altman, but watchable)
first snow (not worth it)
rescue dawn (Herzog goes hollywood, completely amoral view of war)
bud's recruit (1918 silent, part of american treasures collection)
mr. bean's holiday (matter of taste, loved the cannes setting, i laughed, i admit it)
antibodies (serial killer stuff, half seven and half silence of the lambs, better than it should have been)
the namesake (made me cry)
live free or die hard (ridiculous)
oceans 13 (ridiculous)
our hitler (better on big screen)
no country for old men (perfect metaphor for society, airless, without music, hopeless)
prospero's books (found a bootleg dvd)
simpson's movie (not thrilling)
talk to me (compelling)
kubrick: a life in pictures (fascinating, great clips)
once (nice, nice music)
sweeney todd (beautiful music, buckets of blood)
in a glass cage (from spain, in contention now for the most perverse movie ever)
innocence (french sans subtitles, i think it was ok)
horrors of malformed men (japanese 1960s psychedelic sick horror)

end of the year

so maybe benazir bhutto died of a gunshot wound after all

now that the doctors say they were pressured to give a false official cause of death: "she bumped her head" they said

just the other day, i had explained to my sister-in-law how the head bump occurred.

i was well informed.

turns out, it was a lie.

before the war, any general who estimated it would cost more than 95 billion dollars got fired.

don't capitalists calculate success in profit and cost?

by that standard, "success" in iraq is a joke. (unless we steal the resources)

i am tired of reading lies.

i could give up reading the newspaper, i suppose.

become ignorant as a happy lily pad.

but that's what they're banking on.

and i do mean banking.

for anyone with a conscience and a brain,

life in America

is excruciating and banal

one can't even write a poem about it

new year's eve

i'm going to bed at 8 p.m.

Anger

You're Damn Right I'm Angry. Why Isn't Everybody?

by David Michael Green

I write articles each week with titles like "Everything I Need to Know About the Regressive Right I Learned In Junior High", or " Conservatism Is Politics For Kindergartners", or "Schadenfreude Is My Middle Name".

I regret doing so very much. Believe it or not, I really don't like spewing venom, sarcasm and rage all over my computer keyboard.

I particularly don't like it because I have friends who are conservative, and it's not my nature to trash-talk anybody, let alone friends.

Indeed, none of this is in my nature. I don't start fights and I don't go looking for them. I'm not an angry, bitter or mean-spirited person. But I can understand how I might be seen as such in the absence of the appropriate context, and it truly chagrins me that I might be so misperceived, and so negatively.

But I don't intend to change, and I don't intend to stop making the arguments contained in my rants. I'm angry for a very good set of reasons, and I'm angry because I care about my country just the way conservatives claim to. I'm angry, in short, because I'm a patriot and defender of the ideas that America is supposed to stand for. And what I really want to know is why those on the right aren't equally outraged?

I was a teenager when Nixon was being Nixon, destroying democracy at home, napalming civilians in Vietnam, conducting secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, employing racism to win elections. At that age I knew enough to dislike what I saw (and what I learned of what Nixon and McCarthy had done to innocent Americans even earlier, before I was born, in order to serve their political ambitions), but I didn't know enough yet to feel genuine rage at what regressives were doing to my country and to the world.

I began to experience those feelings in my twenties, first as truly sociopathically insane gun laws in this country helped to claim the life of John Lennon, and then as Ronald Reagan began to systematically turn his back on the poor and the middle-class in order to further enrich the country's already wealthy economic elites. I also felt deep shame and outrage that America - the country that had supported if not literally created every two-bit dictator in Latin America, 'our backyard', (and well beyond) for a century - began to murder Nicaraguan peasants in order to halt their struggle to free themselves from the economic and political tyranny of one of those Washington-run caudillo clients, the sickening Somoza regime.

Then I watched in disgust as Newt Gingrich and his merry band of infantile hypocrites impeached a president for lying about a consensual sexual affair, while they were themselves all doing worse, like dumping a wife while she was lying in her hospital bed recovering from cancer surgery, or fathering children with a mistress, or carrying on many years-long affairs.

All of this was truly noxious. Nothing to that point had prepared me, however, for the regressive politics of our time. And they have turned me very angry indeed.

Regressives like to call people like me Bush-haters, and so it is important to address that claim before proceeding, because the entire intent of hurling that label at the president's critics is to undermine their credibility. If you simply hate the man, they imply, you're not rational, and your critiques can be dismissed. But it isn't that simple - not by a long shot. First, it should be noted that the regressive right is far wider a phenomenon than just one person. It currently includes an entire executive branch administration, almost (and, just a year ago, more than) half of Congress, a majority of the Supreme Court and probably a majority of the lower federal courts, a biased-to-the-point-of-being-a-joke mainstream media, and tons of lobbyists, think tanks and profitable industries.

But as to George W. Bush, himself, I suspect it's quite fair to say that most Americans and even most progressives did not originally despise or loathe him. I didn't. I certainly didn't admire the guy, nor did I think he was remotely prepared to be president of the United States. (Nor, by the way, was I particularly impressed with Al Gore in 2000.) Bush campaigned as a center-right pragmatist (a "compassionate conservative", in his words), much as his father had been, and I expected that's how he would govern if elected. You know, more embarrassing most of the time than truly destructive.

I mention all this because it is important to note what has - and what has not - been responsible for my/our anger, and to make clear that attempts to dismiss that anger as some Bush-hating bias or predisposition are false, a ploy to destroy the messenger when one doesn't care for the message he's carrying. If Bush had governed like he campaigned I'm sure I would have disliked him, but neither hated him nor his policies, nor experienced the rage that I feel about what he's done to the country and the world. Frankly, my feelings toward another center-right Bush presidency would have likely been largely the same as my feelings toward the center-right Clinton presidency which preceded it.

But he hasn't governed anywhere near to how he campaigned, and he wasn't even elected properly, and I do in fact feel huge anger at the damage done. Moreover, I cannot for the life of me imagine how anyone - even conservatives - could feel differently. Even the wealthy, to whose interests this presidency is so wholly devoted, have to sleep at night. Even they have children who will inherit a broken country existing in an environmentally and politically hostile world, though no doubt they figure that big enough fences, mean enough private armies, and loads of central air conditioning will insulate them from the damage.

I don't mind that the Bush campaign fought hard to win the 2000 election. That was certainly a legitimate goal for them to pursue. But it nauseates me beyond belief that their agents in the Florida government disenfranchised tens of thousands of African Americans in order to keep them from voting Democratic. And it sickens me that they gathered up a bunch of congressional staffers pretending to be an angry local mob and stormed election canvassers, using pure Gestapo techniques to shut down the most fundamental act of democracy, counting the votes.

I don't mind that the Bush campaign took the election to the Supreme Court, even though they were simultaneously accusing the Gore folks of being litigious. What disgusts me beyond words is that a regressive majority of the Court anointed Bush president in a sheer act of partisan politics. And that they were so anxious to achieve that end that they repudiated all their own judicial politics previously espoused in case after case - from states' rights, to equal protection, to judicial restraint. And that they were so conscious of what they were actually doing that they took the unprecedented step of stating that no lasting principles were involved in the matter, that their decision would forever apply to this case and this case only.

Once in office, there was still the possibility that the administration would govern as it had campaigned, as a rather centrist, status quo-style government, perhaps especially tempered from arrogance and overstretch by the knowledge that the country was deeply divided and that Bush had in fact actually lost the popular vote. In fact, though, they did precisely the opposite.

The first order of business, certainly the top priority for the administration, and arguably the only thing they were ever completely seriously about, was their tax restructuring program. It was grim enough that the tax cuts, as under Reagan, where dramatically tilted in favor of the wealthy. But what made them especially disgusting was that - again, as under Reagan - these wholesale revenue reductions were not only not accompanied by expenditure cuts, but in fact were coupled with increased spending. Can you say "voodoo economics"? Bush's father once had, before he treasonously changed his tune to win the vice presidency (leading to the presidency) for himself. But he was right the first time, before he put personal ambition and transparent insecurity ahead of the national interest. And thus we've witnessed the only possible result of the combination of massive revenue cuts and continuing spending increases: astronomical debt, now well over nine trillion dollars in total, and rapidly growing. What I want to know is how can we - especially so-called family-oriented, so-called fiscal conservatives - not be outraged, not be scandalized, not be boiling with anger at the debt we have transferred to our own children, all so that we could avoid paying our own way, like every generation before us has?

I am outraged as well at how the administration polarized the country in the wake of one of the greatest traumas it had ever experienced. Let us leave aside the ample evidence demonstrating that the Bush team was asleep at the wheel before 9/11 - or perhaps far, far worse - a set of facts which is noteworthy in part because progressives did not use them to attack the president and score cheap but easy political points. But the administration did precisely that. It is disgusting - and it fills me with anger - how they used a national security crisis to win partisan political contests. How they scheduled a vote on the Iraq war resolution right before the midterm elections of 2002, thus politicizing the gravest decision a country can make by forcing Democrats to choose between voting their conscience and campaign accusations of being soft on national security.

It boils my blood that these chickenhawks - almost none of whom showed up for duty in Vietnam when it was their turn - could dare to accuse Max Cleland of being weak on national security, a guy who gave three of his four limbs to that very cause on the battlefields of Southeast Asia. How could they run ads morphing his face into Saddam's or bin Laden's, when his opponent - of course - took Vietnam deferments, just like Cheney and Ashcroft and the rest? And how could they accuse him of being weak on national defense because he opposed the bureaucratic reshuffling to create the Homeland Security Department, when Bush himself had also opposed it? That is, before Rove politicized it by inserting union-busting language applying to tens of thousands of civil servants covered by the act.

It nauseates me beyond words that this president could use the tragedy of 9/11 to justify invading a country which had nothing to do with that attack whatsoever. It enrages me that those who had the courage to oppose this policy so transparently deceitful (and it truly was - from the proof of the Downing Street Memos, to Colin Powell's charade at the UN, to the assurances that the US knew where the WMD were, to the rejection of the weapons inspectors' request to have two more months to finish the job) were labeled as traitors and worse for telling the truth. And that 4,000 Americans and over a million Iraqis have died for these lies.

And speaking of treason, what sort of looking glass have we all fallen through when the government of the United States exposes its own CIA undercover agent in order to punish her spouse for revealing administration lies about the war? When did that cease to be a cause of outrage, especially among our super-patriotic friends on the right?

How is it possible not to be angry looking at the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, and the bungled response of the government before, during and after that tragedy? Indeed, even journalists who had spent so many years licking government boots that their tongues had long ago turned black were moved to outrage at the magnitude of that failure, with the president meanwhile on a stage in San Diego pretending to play guitar at a Republican fundraiser.

I am outraged, as well, by one of the most insane and avoidable tragedies of all human history, the slow-motion holocaust of global warming. How can anyone not be angry at a political movement and a government that puts the short-term profits of one or two industries ahead of the viability of the entire planet? How can anyone not be mortified as we one-twentieth of the world's population, who generate one-fourth of the greenhouse gases causing the problem, not only do nothing about the problem, but actively block the rest of the world from saving all of us from this folly?

I'm furious because the Bush administration and its ideological allies have shredded the Constitution at every turn, destroying the institutional gift of those they pretend to revere (but only when it's convenient to upholding their own depredations). This president, who has gotten virtually everything he has ever wanted throughout his life and his presidency, once privately exclaimed in frustration at not getting something he wanted when he wanted it, "It's just a goddam piece of paper!", and that is precisely how he has treated America's founding document. His signing statements - probably over a thousand in count now - completely obliterate the checks and balances principle of the Constitution, its most central idea. His admitted spying on Americans without warrant smashes the Fourth Amendment. His fiasco in Guantánamo and beyond mocks due process and habeas corpus guarantees. His invasion of Iraq against the international law codified in the UN Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, violates the Constitutional requirement to hold such treaties as the highest law of the land. Altogether, Americans have never seen a presidency with such imperial ambitions, and anyone who cares about the Constitution should be furious. A year from now, it is quite possible that Hillary Clinton will be president of the United States (ugh). Would our conservative friends silently countenance, let alone viciously support, such a monarchy in the White House if it belonged to Queen Hillary rather than King George? I think not.

We could go on and on from here. This administration and the movement it fronts at least gets high marks for consistency. Everything they touch turns to stone. There's Pat Tillman and Terri Schiavo. There's the politicization of the US Attorneys and the corruption of DeLay and Abramoff. There's North Korea, Pakistan and the Middle East. There's the shame of torture and rendition. There's the wrecking of the American military and of the country's reputation abroad. There's Afghanistan and the failure to capture bin Laden. And much, much more. But above all, and driving all, there's the kleptocracy - the doing of everything in every way to facilitate the looting of the national fisc.

What an unbelievable record of deceit, destruction, hypocrisy, incompetence, treason and greed. What a tragic tale of debt, lost wars, stolen elections, environmental crises, Constitution shredding, national shame and diminished security.

All done by the very most pious amongst us, of course. Merry Christmas, eh? I guess those are our presents, all carefully wrapped in spin, contempt, and preemptive attacks on any of us impertinent enough to say "No thanks, Santa".

So, yeah, you're goddam right I'm angry about what's been done to my country, and what's been done by my country in my name.

How could anyone who claims to care about America not be?

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net

--
"What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle." -- Cormac McCarthy

On Becoming Aware (Again!) of One's Nothingness

This allergy to cinnamon comes on,
From flavored Mini-Wheats (from Kellogg's! New!).
I stare outside the window as I chew,
Repressing burps to watch the snow beyond.
This allergy will pass; it is not fact,
A chemical reaction for one day,
A day when I have nothing hard to say,
And nothing on my plate, no tasks to stack.
In truth, this day, like those I knew before,
Is matched by every day that did precede.
There is no work to do, no field to seed,
No effort to endure, no need, no chore.
Perhaps I'll plumb the sink that doesn't drain,
Or write these words as they emerge in light.
Perhaps I'll watch the snow into the night,
Or change my name, or craft a dance for rain.
I've eaten every pillow.  Here's the cat.
I'll walk his path today, and that is that.

The Death of God

Zorio speaks.

War

I couldn't understand why Werner Herzog made Rescue Dawn. A fictionalized remake of his documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, it seemed the kind of war movie that Herzog once would have rejected for not being bizarre enough. As I watched the DVD recently, there were some obvious Herzog touches... the outrageously beautiful and harsh landscape, the quirky details in the POW camp, the acts of lunacy performed more for the camera than for art (eating grubs, deliberate starving of the actors, etc.). But didn't it glorify war? Unlike any other war movie I've seen, Rescue Dawn seemed completely without moral convictions one way or the other. The celebration at the end came across without glory, without much true feeling, a perfunctory act that just went with the territory. Dieter, as played by Christian Bale, gets it and knows he's not fighting any kind of ideological battle, not anti-Communist. No, he just wants -- no, he needs -- to fly, at any cost. Fly he does. The war is just one of the necessary costs of his spiritual quest to be airborne. It's a strange movie, right from the beautiful bombing sequences that open the film, sequences that should appall us, but fascinate instead. Herzog is still fascinated with the world and all its cruelties.

But society's relationship to war -- clearly more a love than a hate relationship -- continues in Rescue Dawn, and how little things have changed since this Vietnam era picture. In fact, another movie I watched this past week, King Vidor's 1918 silent 26-minute short, Bud's Recruit, is remarkable in the way that war was sold even then, the way consent was manufactured, and the way peace workers were shown to be cowardly, misguided, feminine. Of course, WWI was a very bad war ideologically and horrible in its devastation and death. But here again, young boys play soldier, carry sticks, pretend to be older in order to join the army, and the entire process is glorified. It is a fascinating film. The glasses-wearing young man who objects to war -- and is the only male to sit in on the Peace Group meetings -- is eventually shamed into joining the army and marching off to war. It was a propaganda film of the day, but it could have been commissioned by Karl Rove. Le plus ca change... (The film is available on the recent American Treasures film series, Series III, disk 4).

Footnote to the previous post

Another aspect of the use of the word "gay" is the perception that, apart from the minor affection that now is attached to the word, there is also a sense of envy. There has always been a bit of envy buried under the hatred -- envy for the freedom, the sexual liberation, the separation from the oppression of conformity -- but it was usually manifested as disgust. That's not so much the case today. People who profess disgust at homosexuality are seen as ignorant and bigoted. Some non-gay people feel freer to admit their envy of gay people (while acknowledging, still partially as a boast or a declaration of their own sexuality, that they could never themselves be gay). Witness the "metrosexual" phenomenon, wherein straight men take on the taste and perspective and style and speech patterns of gayness.

Neither does any label boil down easily to behavior, although that's how the Kinsey scale is based. I've been married for 28 years now, with an active and imaginative physical relationship (although, I must admit, lately... not so much), and there is no way I'd either fit or be able to reject this or that label, one way or the other. Call me Ishmael. Nothing makes me flinch.

And thus ends my decades long crusade against the label! At last! Free at last from the burden of being shoved into a pigeonhole, uncomfortable and invalid!

Holy the lack of labels on Ginsberg! Holy Lincoln and holy Melville and holy the grandfathers of New Jersey and Brooklyn! Holy footnote to Howl and Holy Footnote to the Previous Post!

Feud with The Crockhead

He would probably disagree with me on this, but... Wait, of course he would disagree with me, that's the nature of the erstwhile relationship... But, I believe the schism in the friendship between me and the Crockhead boils down to differences of taste and judgment. He played judge (perhaps a frustrated career turn?) and called it criticism. Whatever. The gap was too wide to bridge between what he considers good art, "masterpieces" even, and what I see as uninspired product, between what he sees as profane nonsense and what I see as rich craft and inspiration.

So, we don't speak.

But I did post something on his website this morning, since I am stuck in a high school classroom for the next four hours, subbing in a physics class where the students are self-contained and I have the Internet at my disposal.

He had posted his musings on Larry Craig and using public toilets. I commented the following.

The reason I'm reading A Crockhead Abroad today is because I'm subbing in a high school classroom for the next four hours with no students and nothing to do except use this computer.

Plus, I've been wanting for some time to comment about the use of the word "gay" and how it has mutated in the last so many years. The Larry Craig incident inspired much reflection.

Craig said famously, "I am not gay. I have never been gay," as though "gay" was something one could take on and off, like a dress.

Much, if not all, of that restroom flirtation etiquette and language probably came as a surprise to non-gay people following the Craig incident. That's probably why so many gay people think of non-gay people as oblivious in general. They can't read the codes of nonverbal communication all that well.

There's a graffito inscribed on a UI dorm wall, "Homophobia is so gay."

I observed a group of middle school black boys talking during a study hall. One walked past the other and gave a little punch. The other said, "You're gay," and it was just the common discourse. One hears similar talk in popular movies, straight guys joking with their friends by calling them gay -- 40 Year Old Virgin famously has the "I know you're gay because..." scene, also in Superbad, and many other movies.

To be called gay no longer carries the stigmatic weight it once did. Of course, if the taunt is actually true, maybe it has a little more sting. But even so, there is some affection in the word used in the popular discourse.

Homophobia is so gay.

Actually, one can't define what calling someone gay means any more. Just like Larry Craig saying "I am not gay. I have never been gay." It is nonsense.

He has had and clearly sought to have more sex with other men. But he's not gay.

Because gay doesn't mean anything anymore. Or, rather, nobody knows what it means.

Merry Christmas from Gregoire and Lee

Fwd: report

I apologize for not having posted more personal information in the
last couple of weeks.

Let me catch up a little.

TOM WAITS: Somehow, I was invited to his aftershow birthday party in
Chicago at a bar. Family and friends were there. We talked and drank
for a while. Later, I wrote an article for the News-Gazette about the
evening and the newspaper received a scathing postcard from Waits'
wife and collaborator, Kathleen Something (I would look it up, but I'm
working on an old iMac at the middle school in Urbana, where I am
subbing in advanced math class), who excoriated me for breaching their
privacy. Well, gee, I only said nice things. But anyway, it kind of
soured me on Waits after that.

CURT MCDOWELL: Filmmaker. Died with AIDS in the early years. I
stayed at his San Francisco apartment for a while and collaborated
with him on a movie that I've never seen. I read the narration. Curt
will never be famous and I doubt that his films will ever be put on
DVD. But some of us remember him fondly.

SAM FULLER: Filmmaker. Interviewed and spent time with him at Athens
Film Festival one year when I was a judge. Nice old coot, always
smoking his big cigars. His B movies are still striking in their
fierce bluntness and independence.

Christians in Iraq today

Vicar: Dire Times For Iraq's Christians

Dec. 2, 2007

---

(CBS) From the time of Jesus, there have been Christians in what is now Iraq. The Christian community took root there after the Apostle Thomas headed east.

But now, after nearly 2,000 years, Iraqi Christians are being hunted, murdered and forced to flee -- persecuted on a biblical scale in Iraq's religious civil war. You'd have to be mad to hold a Christian service in Iraq today, but if you must, then the vicar of Baghdad is your man. He's the Reverend Canon Andrew White, an Anglican chaplain who suffers from multiple sclerosis and from a fanatical determination to save the last Iraqi Christians from the purge.

White invited 60 Minutes cameras and correspondent Scott Pelley to an underground Baghdad church service for what's left of his congregation. White's parishioners are risking their lives to celebrate their faith.

---

"The room is full of children, it's full of women, but I don't see the men. Where are they?" Pelley remarked.

"They are mainly killed. Some are kidnapped. Some are killed. In the last six months things have got particularly bad for the Christians. Here in this church, all of my leadership were originally taken and killed," White explained. "All dead. But we never got their bodies back. This is one of the problems. I regularly do funerals here but it's not easy to get the bodies."

Many Iraqi Christians' churches are destroyed or abandoned. The congregation is smuggled in and out of this secret sanctuary. Even letting 60 Minutes come to the service was a terrible risk. White is among the last Christian ministers here, a savior with crosses to bear. Larger than life, stricken with MS, and by his own reckoning, driven a little bit mad.

He was first sent to Baghdad by the Archbishop of Canterbury nine years ago, well before the Christian persecution.

"You were here during Saddam's reign. And now after. Which was better? Which was worse?" Pelley asked.

"The situation now is clearly worse" than under Saddam, White replied.

"There's no comparison between Iraq now and then," he told Pelley. "Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians. Probably ever in history. They've never known it like now."

"Wait a minute, Christians have been here for 2,000 years," Pelley remarked.

"Yes," White said.

"And it's now the worst it has ever been," Pelley replied.

To understand the history of Iraqi Christianity, start with the Last Supper. One saint to the right of Jesus is the Apostle Thomas, who took the gospel and headed east after the death of Christ.

In modern times, under Saddam, Christians were treated much the same as Muslims; Saddam's right hand man, Tariq Aziz, was Christian.

Before the war, it's estimated there were about a million Christians in Iraq. They were a small minority, but free to worship, free to build churches, and free to speak the ancient language of Jesus, Aramaic. But, after the invasion, Muslim militants launched a war on each other and the cross.

On Sunday, Aug. 1, 2004, five churches were bombed. The Iraqi Christian community, which had survived invasions by Mongols and Turks, was driven out under American occupation. No one can be sure, but Canon White estimates most of Iraq's Christians have fled or been killed. Those still here are too old, too ill or too poor to run.

"Why are you feeding them all?" Pelley asked.

"Because, this is the only decent meal they'll have in the week," White explained. "They can't afford food. So we're just moving from every other week to every week because they've got nothing."

Nothing for many, not even their families. The 60 Minutes team was confronted with one of many stories of depravity as the congregation left.

"Outside the church service this gentleman put these pictures in my hand. I can't show you the pictures. They're just too much. They're pictures of his children. His daughter who was 15 years old. And his son who was about four years old. They've both been shot in the head," Pelley said.

His children were killed, the father said, because he ran a liquor store. Liquor stores are typically Christian businesses here, legal, except under the Islamic street justice that rules since the invasion.

"So I hear stories of shootings, death, torturing, kidnapping, mutilation. I hear it all," White told Pelley.

The people with those stories once lived in a neighborhood called Dora, where Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites had lived together. 60 Minutes wanted to see what happened there so, we took a ride with U.S. Army Colonel Rick Gibbs. His men picked Pelley and the team up under a rusting relic of Saddam's tyranny, a parade archway made of two enormous swords, and from there they headed to ethnic cleansing's "ground zero."

"We have 13 churches. None of them are operational," Col. Gibbs said.

Asked if this was the worst neighborhood in town, Gibbs said, "It's the toughest neighborhood in town."

Gibbs commands the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, Kan. In Dora, he set up a combat outpost in an abandoned Catholic seminary.

"I was at a secret church service yesterday. A man came up to me and handed me some photographs of his children. They'd been shot to death. Somebody had come by their house and murdered his children because they were Christians. What are you seeing?" Pelley asked Gibbs.

"I don't see a lot of that anymore. But when we first arrived we saw lots of that. We have 500 a month. That's what we were tracking," the colonel replied. "It would not surprise my soldiers to walk down a street on a patrol and see three or four bodies laying in the street with a bullet behind their head."

U.S. forces do not protect the churches. There's a hands-off policy for all religious sites and Gibbs says there's another reason.

"The Christians do not what us to guard the churches openly," he said.

Why wouldn't the Christians want Gibbs and his soldiers to protect the churches?

"They feel that if we are overtly protecting the churches that someone underground covertly will come in and murder the Christians because they're collaborating with the U.S. forces," Gibbs explained.

There seems to be less violence now in part because of the surge of U.S. forces but also because the purge of Christians from Dora is largely complete. Gibbs says Islamic militants are on the run now.

"We hear that through our intelligence sources on the ground people telling us they're running that's how we knew to come down here with our next big fight to keep getting after them," Gibbs said, as shots could be heard in the background. "And that's what you hear over there is us in that fight trying to go get them."

60 Minutes wanted to see one church that had been destroyed but Gibbs couldn't take us there -- roadside bombs blocked the way. So he walked us over to a church next to his combat outpost. Because of the proximity, it hadn't been looted. In fact, it hadn't been touched by anyone for a very long time.

"This is one of the abandoned churches of Dora," Pelley remarked inside the church. "It looks like it was left suddenly and completely. There's a fine coat of dust over everything in the church. It was all left just as it was. One of the reasons these churches have been abandoned is in this letter, a letter that went out to the neighborhoods of Dora about a year ago. It reads like this: 'To the Christian, we would like to inform you of the decision of the legal court of the Secret Islamic Army to notify you that this is the last and final threat. If you do not leave your home, your blood will be spilled.' And in case there was any chance that anyone would not get the message, the letter ends like this: 'You and your family will be killed.'"

Pelley talked to a young man, a Baghdad Christian, whose name we cannot use. He told Pelley that after the invasion, posters appeared near his home.

"They were like telling us that Christians were against Islam, that we're infidels, that women shouldn't drive and a woman that doesn't wear a scarf would get her head cut off," the man told Pelley. "And I thought, 'What, are we going back to the Middle Ages?'"

He told us his family began going to Mass in shifts. Asked why, he told Pelley, "If like the church gets bombed on like one of the Masses, so like half of the family will be there and half will be safe."

Ultimately, the church was bombed.

Asked what has become of the people he used to worship with in that church, the young man told Pelley, "I simply don't know. A lot them are in Syria. I don't know any of 'em that stayed in Baghdad."

His family, unharmed, fled to neighboring Jordan. But most Christians ran north to Syria where they've filled a Damascus neighborhood. Knock on any door and you'll find a story.

"They threatened this young girl," one woman told 60 Minutes. "They want her to become a Muslim. The boy is in danger of being kidnapped. My other boy is in danger of being kidnapped because we're Christians."

Another woman was on a bus outside Baghdad, when gunmen boarded and demanded to know her husband's faith. "They told him, 'How come you have not embraced Islam yet?' He said, 'To each his own religion,'" she recalled.

"He told him 'I am a Christian.' He told him to get off the bus," a child added.

And they never saw him again. Christian refugees are now swept up in an exodus of historic proportions. The U.N. estimates more than four million Iraqis of all faiths are running from the war. The United States has promised to help, but so far about 2,000 Iraqis have been allowed into the U.S., less than one tenth of one percent of all the refugees.

Those who remain in Iraq are bound together by a particular kind of faith known only to those under siege.

Why is this happening?

"It's happening because religion has gone wrong," Canon White told Pelley. "And when religion goes wrong, it kills others."

"Some of your parishioners must ask you, 'Why is God allowing this to happen to us?'" Pelley asked.

"To them I say, 'God is with you and he is with me and I am with you and I'm not going away,'" White replied.

everybody hates us

Follow the Leaders

by Hendrik Hertzberg 

 December 10, 2007

Regime change was one of the stated goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Unlike cleansing the place of weapons of mass destruction and breaking up the alleged Baghdad-Al Qaeda nexus, it was a reality-based goal; and, unlike the other two (which were as unattainable and unnecessary as ridding the moon of green cheese), it was actually accomplished. Saddam Hussein's regime has indeed been changed—though what it has been changed into, of course, is not quite what was intended.

And regime change, it turns out, is infectious—a militarily transmittable disease, almost invariably fatal, so far, to any political party or head of government so careless of hygiene as to have had intimate relations with the Bush Administration's Mesopotamian misadventure. The contagion set in less than a year into the war, when, three days after the Madrid terrorist bombings of March 11, 2004, Spain's conservative government, which had sent thirteen hundred soldiers to Iraq, was defeated at the polls. The soldiers were out within three months. In May of 2005, it was the turn of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, of Italy, President Bush's loudest West European supporter, who had sent three thousand troops; his successor, Romano Prodi, brought them home. In June of this year, Tony Blair was finally obliged to relinquish his grip on Britain's Labour government, largely because of Iraq; the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has signalled that he intends to withdraw Britain's troops—some five thousand of the original commitment of forty-five thousand remain—by the end of 2008. Six weeks ago, Poland's premier, the twin brother of the country's President, lost to an opponent whose platform included bringing back the nine hundred Polish troops that are still in Iraq. Other countries whose voters have dispensed with the services of leaders who enrolled them in Bush's "coalition of the willing" include Hungary, Ukraine, Norway, and Slovakia.

A week ago last Saturday, John Howard, the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia, became the newest casualty of this political epidemic. Howard's case is unusual, both for the slavishness with which he has followed Bush's lead and for the comprehensiveness of his defeat. After a decade in office, and at a time of widespread economic contentment, his center-right coalition was decisively ousted at every level of government. He even lost his parliamentary seat. His fealty to Bush, not only on Iraq but also, and at least as important, on climate change, was, of course, not the only factor. But it colored everything.

Two episodes helped solidify the public's fed-upness. As close observers of our own election campaign may recall, the Australian Prime Minister greeted Barack Obama's entry into the Presidential race—and his proposal, at about the same time, for an American withdrawal from Iraq by next March—with a sneer. "If I was running Al Qaeda in Iraq," Howard said, "I would put a circle around March, 2008, and pray as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats." Kevin Rudd, then the leader of Australia's opposition, now Prime Minister-elect, gave him hell for this. But the crispest rebuke came from Obama himself, who, after calling the attack flattering, said, "I would also note that we have close to a hundred and forty thousand troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr. Howard has deployed fourteen hundred. So if he's ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he call up another twenty thousand Australians and send them to Iraq. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric." This point, which an Australian politician might find it awkward to make, exposed the gap between Howard's talk of the civilizational imperative of victory in Iraq and the relative paltriness of his commitment to that victory. Australian troops have suffered zero combat deaths in Iraq to date. Rudd plans to get them out before any occur. He also plans to sign the Kyoto climate-change protocol in Bali this week, leaving the United States isolated as the only major Western country to reject it.

Then, in early September, Bush decided to drop in on the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group to give his old mate an electoral boost. The event, which officially described itself as "the most significant international gathering of an economic kind that Australia has hosted," was supposed to be the zenith of Howard's premiership. It turned out to be the nadir. He was humiliated when Kevin Rudd chatted with the President of China in perfect Mandarin. He was humiliated when a popular TV satire troupe called the Chaser mounted a fake motorcade, flying a Canadian flag and featuring a rented limo with an actor dressed as Osama bin Laden in the back seat, and got within ten yards of Bush's hotel, making a mockery of an elaborate, war-on-terror-inspired security lockdown that had encased downtown Sydney in a "ring of steel." Bush, for his part, made a fool of himself (and, by extension, of his host) by calling APEC "OPEC" and Australian troops "Austrian troops." The Bush boost was a Bush bust.

They don't much like our President in the land Down Under. In the most recent poll by Australia's Lowy Institute, huge majorities disapproved of American foreign policy in general (sixty-three per cent) and of George W. Bush in particular (sixty-nine per cent). But similar majorities take a positive view of America (sixty per cent) and Americans (seventy-six per cent). The rest of the world, alas, is not so discriminating. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes's "America Against the World" (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners "found it easy to say their problem with America was really President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable." An avalanche of new international polls—from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others—show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. "Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us," Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about "world opinion," wrote recently in the Washington Post. "Count that—along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment—as another cost of the war."

Last week's gathering of Israeli and (Sunni) Arab leaders at Annapolis was a sign that it has finally dawned on the Bush Administration that its six-year policy of ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian morass has aggravated America's troubles in the Middle East. The President may at last have realized that while the issue is not the sole cause of Islamist extremism, it cannot continue to fester––for the sake not only of Israeli survival and justice for the Palestinians but also of beginning to restore some of the global influence and esteem this Administration has squandered. But in suddenly capping six years of obtuse neglect with a one-year timeline, President Bush has probably dithered too long to have any hope of solving the world's most complicated and persistent rebus. His late awakening is yet another cost of the Iraq war. Those costs keep mounting, and they're not likely to abate until there's regime change a little closer to home. ♦

The Founders Wanted Separation of Church and State

December 7, 2007

New York Times Editorial

The Crisis of Faith

Mitt Romney obviously felt he had no choice but to give a speech yesterday on his Mormon faith. Even by the low standards of this campaign, it was a distressing moment and just what the nation's founders wanted to head off with the immortal words of the First Amendment: A presidential candidate cowed into defending his way of worshiping God by a powerful minority determined to impose its religious tenets as a test for holding public office.

Mr. Romney spoke with an evident passion about the hunger for religious freedom that defined the birth of the nation. He said several times that his faith informs his life, but he would not impose it on the Oval Office.

Still, there was no escaping the reality of the moment. Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.

Mr. Romney tried to cloak himself in the memory of John F. Kennedy, who had to defend his Catholicism in the 1960 campaign. But Mr. Kennedy had the moral courage to do so in front of an audience of Southern Baptist leaders and to declare: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."

Mr. Romney did not even come close to that in his speech, at the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, before a carefully selected crowd. And in his speech, he courted the most religiously intolerant sector of American political life by buying into the myths at the heart of the "cultural war," so eagerly embraced by the extreme right.

Mr. Romney filled his speech with the first myth — that the nation's founders, rather than seeking to protect all faiths, sought to imbue the United States with Christian orthodoxy. He cited the Declaration of Independence's reference to "the creator" endowing all men with unalienable rights and the founders' proclaiming not just their belief in God, but their belief that God's hand guided the American revolutionaries.

Mr. Romney dragged out the old chestnuts about "In God We Trust" on the nation's currency, and the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance — conveniently omitting that those weren't the founders' handiwork, but were adopted in the 1950s at the height of McCarthyism. He managed to find a few quotes from John Adams to support his argument about America's Christian foundation, but overlooked George Washington's letter of reassurance to the Jews in Newport, R.I., that they would be full members of the new nation.

He didn't mention Thomas Jefferson, who said he wanted to be remembered for writing the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia and drafting the first American law — a Virginia statute — guaranteeing religious freedom. In his book, "American Gospel," Jon Meacham quotes James Madison as saying that law was "meant to comprehend, with the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."

The founders were indeed religious men, as Mr. Romney said. But they understood the difference between celebrating religious faith as a virtue, and imposing a particular doctrine, or even religion in general, on everyone. As Mr. Meacham put it, they knew that "many if not most believed, yet none must."

The other myth permeating the debate over religion is that it is a dispute between those who believe religion has a place in public life and those who advocate, as Mr. Romney put it, "the elimination of religion from the public square." That same nonsense is trotted out every time a court rules that the Ten Commandments may not be displayed in a government building.

We believe democracy cannot exist without separation of church and state, not that public displays of faith are anathema. We believe, as did the founding fathers, that no specific religion should be elevated above all others by the government.

The authors of the Constitution knew that requiring specific declarations of religious belief (like Mr. Romney saying he believes Jesus was the son of God) is a step toward imposing that belief on all Americans. That is why they wrote in Article VI that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

And yet, religious testing has gained strength in the last few elections. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, has made it the cornerstone of his campaign. John McCain, another Republican who struggles to win over the religious right, calls America "a Christian nation."

CNN, shockingly, required the candidates at the recent Republican debate to answer a videotaped question from a voter holding a Christian edition of the Bible, who said: "How you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you believe this book?"

The nation's founders knew the answer to that question says nothing about a candidate's fitness for office. It's tragic to see it being asked at a time when Americans need a president who will tell the truth, lead with conviction and restore the nation's moral standing, not one who happens to attend a particular church.

Democracy of Chavez trumps the democrazy of Bush

Published on Wednesday, December 5, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Venezuela Is Not Florida

by Mark Weisbrot

Last Monday, with less than 90 percent of the vote counted and the opposition leading by just 50.7 percent to 49.3 percent, President Chavez congratulated his opponents on their victory. They had defeated his proposed constitutional reforms, including the abolition of term limits for the presidency.

No one should have been surprised by Chavez's immediate concession: Venezuela is a constitutional democracy, and its government has stuck to the democratic rules of the game since he was first elected in 1998. Despite the non-renewal of the broadcast license for a major TV station in May - one that wouldn't have gotten a license in any democratic country - Venezuela still has the most oppositional media in the hemisphere.

But the U.S. media has managed to convey the impression to most Americans that Venezuela is some sort of dictatorship or near-dictatorship.

Some of this disinformation takes place through mere repetition and association (e.g. "communist Cuba" appearing in thousands of news reports) — just as 70 percent of Americans were convinced, prior to the Iraq war, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the massacres of September 11. In that case, the major media didn't even believe the message, but somehow it got across and provided justification for the war.

In the case of Venezuela, the media is more pro-active, with lots of grossly exaggerated editorials and op-eds, news articles that sometimes read like editorials, and a general lack of balance in sources and subject matter.

But Venezuela is not Pakistan. In fact, it's not Florida or Ohio either. One reason that Chavez could be confident of the vote count is that Venezuela has a very secure voting system. This is very different from the United States, where millions of citizens cast electronic votes with no paper record. Venezuelan voters mark their choice on a touch-screen machine, which then records the vote and prints out a paper receipt for the voter. The voter then deposits the vote in a ballot box. An extremely large random sample - about 54 percent - of the paper ballots are counted and compared with the electronic tally.

If the two counts match, then that is a pretty solid guarantee against electronic fraud. Any such fraud would have to rig the machines and stuff the ballot boxes to match them - a trick that strains the imagination.

In 2007, Venezuelans once again came in second for all of Latin America in the percentage of citizens who are satisfied or very satisfied with their democracy, according to the prestigious Chilean polling firm Latinobarometro - 59 percent, far above the Latin American average of 37 percent.

It is not only the secure elections that are responsible for this result - it is also that the government has delivered on its promises to share the nation's oil wealth with the poor and the majority. For most people - unlike the pundits here - voting for something and actually getting what you voted for are also an important part of democracy.

The Bush Administration has consistently sought regime change in Venezuela, even before Chavez began regularly denouncing "the Empire." According to the U.S. State Department, Washington funded leaders and organizations involved in the coup which briefly overthrew Chavez's democratically elected government in April 2002. The Washington Post reported this week that the Bush Administration has been funding unnamed student groups, presumably opposition, up to and including this year.

Venezuela must be seen as undemocratic, and Chavez as the aggressor against the United States, in order to justify the Bush Administration's objective of regime change. As in the run-up to the Iraq war, most of the major media are advancing the Administration's goals, regardless of the intentions of individual journalists.

It Turns Out Ahmadinejad Was the Truthful One

Published on Wednesday, December 5, 2007 by TruthDig.com

It Turns Out Ahmadinejad Was the Truthful One

by Robert Scheer

Bush is such a liar. Or is he just out to lunch on the most important issue that he faces? In October, he charged that Iran's nuclear weapons program was bringing the world to the precipice of World War III, even though the White House had been informed at least a month earlier that Iran had no such program and had stopped efforts to develop one back in 2003.

Is it conceivable that Bush was telling the truth at his press conference Tuesday when he stated that he learned of the National Intelligence Estimate report, which contained that inconvenient fact, only last week? Even if Bush read the NIE report, he clearly doesn't respect it, for at his press conference he said "the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world-quite the contrary." Not that he has anything against the NIE, whose directors he handpicked. "I want to compliment the intelligence community for their good work. Right after the failure of intelligence in Iraq, we reformed the intelligence community."

But whether or not the intelligence agencies are reformed, the president still ignores them. He didn't listen when they told him he was wrong in claiming that Iraq had purchased yellow cake uranium from Niger and he doesn't listen now when they tell him his alarms about Iran are without factual foundation. The difference this time around is that because Bush is a discredited lame duck the intelligence chiefs were a bit more forthcoming with their findings in a report that has, in part, been made available to the public.

The whole episode shows that our democratic system retains at least some essential checks and balances, but it also is depressing to see that, in this instance at least, the fanatical leader of a theocracy seems to have a higher regard for truth than does the president of the world's greatest experiment in representative democracy.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took office as Iran's president in August of 2005, two years after Iran's nuclear weapons program ended, has now been vindicated in his claims that Iran has abandoned the weaponization program. Not so Bush, who has summarily dismissed the intelligence community's findings and, using his favorite tactic in dealing with debacles, is sticking to his original story. A story, as in the case of the earlier Iraq threat inflation, that too many in the mass media and Congress, including some leading Democrats, have bought.

Take Hillary Clinton, who said that "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is in the forefront of that" by way of defending her vote for a resolution that, like the one she voted for before the Iraq war, blindly supports rather than seriously questions the president's case for war. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was absolutely correct in calling candidate Clinton out on that vote and challenging her lame excuse that she had not read the full intelligence report before her Iraq war vote. "Members of Congress," Obama cautioned, "must carefully read the intelligence before giving the president any justification to use military force."

Not a bad idea. In the case of Iraq's non-nukes, the intelligence evidence supporting Bush was flimsy at best when it did not directly contradict his key assertions. In the case of Iran, it is now publicly understood that there is no such evidence, flimsy or otherwise. But don't count on that to stop the bipartisan coalition of invasion hawks from pushing on.

Once again, they will attack the United Nations' experts, who have been proved right in Iran as they were in Iraq. A spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency pointed out that the NIE report supports the agency's view that there is "no evidence" of an undeclared nuclear weapons program in Iran and "validates the assessments of [IAEA Director General] Mohamed ElBaradei, who continuously said in his public statements that he saw no clear and public danger, and that therefore that there was plenty of time for negotiations."

Can we get ElBaradei to run in the Iowa caucus? Why are our leading presidential candidates so easily fooled?

It's humiliating to all of us who believe in a free press, separation of powers and individual liberty that a system of government designed by its founders to hold leaders accountable can be so easily manipulated by an unremarkable loser who has been rewarded throughout his life for screwing up. It is hoped that this time around the truth will catch up with him before he gets us in yet another bloody war, just to show he can.

practice practice

Tengo pensado pasar un par de semanas en cada sitio que visite.*

Practicando el subjuntivo.

Preparando para America del Sur en dieciocho meses.

dia muy fuerte

it was a strange and potent day.  the first grade teacher didn't show up, so I was put in charge of 15 hispanic kids, without the ability to demonstrate much command of the classroom. no sooner was the first activity underway than flor threw up... on the floor, of course.  while janitors managed the room, i tromped off with the others and -- with the help of the substitute principal -- found a space on the stage in the gym to read them where the wild things are.  they learned the new word "rumpus." then they all wrote their own stories and proceeded to make the entire morning a rumpus of wild proportions.

anyway, tengo que preparar la cena ahora.  las cosas son tremendos y mas grande que podemos imaginar.  aqui viene mi esposa.  i need a drink

from senor espringer-melville

i have your hat, tu gorro.  if you want to come to poker thursday, please do.  we'll be having a farewell to filippo/rocky, since it's his last time.

this morning, one of the old computers in my office just wouldn't output anything to the monitor.  it is the computer i was using to compose my east bend mess.  i don't think i lost much (but even if i did, i didn't lose much, if you know what i mean).  maybe this will be the kickstart i need to actually write the thing.

i meant to ask you sunday what you were working on.

my problem with writing these book projects, is that all my enthusiasm is invested in the planning and outlining and once this brilliant strategy is laid out, then i have no oomph left to go through the writing, unless i take painstaking time to enjoy writing and rewriting every line.  kind of like the way it used to be when i was composing query letters to publications.  i took so much time writing a brilliant query, i had great success selling projects and then was stuck with the pain of actually writing the thing.

i'm sitting at the computer in the first grade classroom, waiting for the kids to come. 

anyway,

later

pg

Cheap food

Penny Foolish, by Eric Schlosser

THE migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation's most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.

Florida's tomato growers have long faced pressure to reduce operating costs; one way to do that is to keep migrant wages as low as possible. Although some of the pressure has come from increased competition with Mexican growers, most of it has been forcefully applied by the largest purchaser of Florida tomatoes: American fast food chains that want millions of pounds of cheap tomatoes as a garnish for their hamburgers, tacos and salads.

In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald's agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald's.

This month the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state's growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers. Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, described the surcharge for poor migrants as "pretty much near un-American."

Migrant farm laborers have long been among America's most impoverished workers. Perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants and thus especially vulnerable to abuse. During the past decade, the United States Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. Migrants have been driven into debt, forced to work for nothing and kept in chained trailers at night. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers — a farm worker alliance based in Immokalee, Fla. — has done a heroic job improving the lives of migrants in the state, investigating slavery cases and negotiating the penny-per-pound surcharge with fast food chains.

Now the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange has threatened a fine of $100,000 for any grower who accepts an extra penny per pound for migrant wages. The organization claims that such a surcharge would violate "federal and state laws related to antitrust, labor and racketeering." It has not explained how that extra penny would break those laws; nor has it explained why other surcharges routinely imposed by the growers (for things like higher fuel costs) are perfectly legal.

The prominent role that Burger King has played in rescinding the pay raise offers a spectacle of yuletide greed worthy of Charles Dickens. Burger King has justified its behavior by claiming that it has no control over the labor practices of its suppliers. "Florida growers have a right to run their businesses how they see fit," a Burger King spokesman told The St. Petersburg Times.

Yet the company has adopted a far more activist approach when the issue is the well-being of livestock. In March, Burger King announced strict new rules on how its meatpacking suppliers should treat chickens and hogs. As for human rights abuses, Burger King has suggested that if the poor farm workers of southern Florida need more money, they should apply for jobs at its restaurants.

Three private equity firms — Bain Capital, the Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners — control most of Burger King's stock. Last year, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd C. Blankfein, earned the largest annual bonus in Wall Street history, and this year he stands to receive an even larger one. Goldman Sachs has served its investors well lately, avoiding the subprime mortgage meltdown and, according to Business Week, doubling the value of its Burger King investment within three years.

Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn't be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year. Now Mr. Blankfein should find a way to share some of his company's good fortune with the workers at the bottom of the food chain.

Eric Schlosser is the author of "Fast Food Nation."

second grade

teaching second grade today
the tom waits story must wait

science and faith

To the Editor:

Paul Davies asserts that, at present, science's "claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus." But neither the viability nor the dignity of science depends upon any such whole-cloth repudiation of faith. Rather, what science rejects is any kind of faith that demands the sacrifice of intellect, rational judgment or consciousness.

If it turns out to be impossible to find an explanation for physical law from within our universe, which Mr. Davies rightly advocates seeking, if nature in effect declares, this far and no farther, as in particular the multiverse hypothesis implies, this will not have made a "mockery of science": science will simply have reached its rational limit. The correct response to this is awe, not shame.

The very greatest scientists, such as Newton and Einstein, have always been individuals in whom science and faith have coexisted amicably and synergistically, individuals who have valued conscious understanding of creation, and the human drive to pursue it, as bounty and blessing.

Michael L. Brown
Boston, Nov. 25, 2007
The writer is a professor of mathematics at Simmons College.

Asking the Hard Questions on Iraq

Re NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE "Increased Role Sought for G.I.'s in Iraq Training" (front page, Nov. 23):

After four long, costly and deadly years, why do American troops still need to be in Iraq, in harm's way, to train more Iraqi troops? After four long years, why are still more American troops and still more American tax dollars still needed to train more Iraqi troops? Why haven't we, at the very least, trained enough Iraqi troops to train other Iraqi troops?

After four long years, why are American tax dollars still needed to equip and supply Iraqi forces? Why, after four long years, aren't Iraqi oil revenues and Iraqi treasury funds paying for Iraqi equipment and Iraqi supplies?

Why have America's leaders allowed so many American lives, limbs and dollars to be continuously sacrificed for the same endless mission? Why have America's veterans organizations so willingly supported such endless stupidity? What a sham! What a shame!

Thomas Austin

Bratenahl, Ohio, Nov. 23, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Does anyone but me find it odd that the Bush administration came into office in 2001 planning an unprovoked war in Iraq; spent the next two years building a fraudulent case for launching that war; spent the next four years prolonging that war by making every mistake it could in Iraq while the war cost escalated, billions disappeared and its private contractor supporters grew filthy rich; and only now, when its five-year privatization of the war is suddenly being reined in, has magically developed its very first actual Iraq strategy, which it will finally reveal to us in March, or just in time to influence the November 2008 election?

Since most G.O.P. presidential candidates endorse all this, one would have to note that today's Republicans lend new meaning to the phrase "war profiteering." Judith Balaban Quine

Beverly Hills, Calif., Nov. 23, 2007

•

To the Editor:

The information provided in "Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S." (front page, Nov. 22) strengthens and adds credibility to the argument that the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq is a failed one. A significant percentage of the insurgent fighters battling American and Iraqi forces has now been identified as Saudi or Libyan.

For at least three years or since the war bogged down and became a quagmire, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their minions have repeatedly insisted that we are in Iraq to defeat homegrown terrorism. It has now been clearly documented that by invading Iraq and occupying the country, the actions taken by the United States have attracted foreign fighters to join the insurgency in an effort to drive the Americans out of Iraq.

The current stronghold of terrorism in Iraq has developed as a direct result of the Bush administration's actions and decisions, not in spite of them as Mr. Bush would have us believe.

The incredible irony here is that two countries that the president and the vice president have lauded as staunch allies in the global war against terrorism have been significant sources of the people who are killing and wounding American troops on a daily basis.

The only strategic course of action that makes political and military sense is to plan and carry out a phased withdrawal of American forces from a country that has become a cauldron of terrorist and insurgent activity and where there is no victory at the end of the road. Alan Safron

Woodcliff Lake, N.J., Nov. 22, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Re "Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves" (front page, Nov. 20):

Now that it appears that progress is being made in Iraq, let's stanch the notion that Democrats and progressives are going to be unhappy and disappointed. Nothing could be further from the truth from what will amount to a cheap shot that will go out through the conservative echo chamber.

Liberals more than anyone have been sickened by the continuing loss of life and disruption in the lives of everyday Iraqis along with our soldiers and their families, not to mention the damage being done to our economy through this costly and endless occupation. If this success has been brought about by the surge, then the question is, Why wasn't it done sooner? Keith Schmitz

Shorewood, Wis., Nov. 20, 2007

if the world could vote

Op-Ed Columnist

Obama in Orbit

By ROGER COHEN

Published: November 15, 2007

NEW YORK

Little that is certain can be said about the U.S. election a year from now, but one certainty is this: about 6.3 billion people will not be voting even if they will be affected by the outcome.

That's the approximate world population outside the United States. If nothing else, President Bush has reminded them that it's hard to get out of the way of U.S. power. The wielding of it, as in Iraq, has whirlwind effects. The withholding of it, as on the environment, has a huge impact.

No wonder the view is increasingly heard that everyone merits a ballot on Nov. 4, 2008.

That won't happen, of course. Even the most open-armed multilateralist is not ready for hanging chads in Chad. But the broader point of the give-us-a-vote itch must be taken: the global community is ever more linked. American exceptionalism, as practiced by Bush, has created a longing for new American engagement.

Renewal is about policy; it's also about symbolism. Which brings us to Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic candidate with a Kenyan father, a Kansan mother, an Indonesian stepfather, a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and impressionable experience of the Muslim world.

If the globe can't vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world.

Michael Ignatieff, the deputy leader of Canada's opposition Liberal Party, said: "Outsiders know it's your choice. Still, they are following this election with passionate interest. And it's clear Barack Obama would be the first globalized American leader, the first leader in whom internationalism would not be a credo, it would be in his veins."

To the south, in Mexico, resentment of the Bush administration has less to do with American unilateralism and more with stalled immigration policy and the building of a border fence. But the thirst for change is the same.

"Mexicans want evidence that things are shifting, which means the Democrats, and of course a woman like Hillary Clinton, or a black like Obama, would signal a huge cultural change," said Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister.

"My sense is the symbolism in Mexico of a dark-skinned American president would be enormous. We've got female leaders now in Latin America — in Chile, in Argentina. But the idea of a U.S. leader who looks the way the world looks as seen from Mexico is revolutionary."

Of course, Mexicans aren't electing the president. Nor are Canadians, even if Michael Moore thinks they should. The America of the global imagination is not that of red-state reality, a disconnect that has spawned a million misunderstandings.

Still, the transformational symbolism of an Obama presidency is compelling, especially as the actual content of the foreign policy proposals of leading Democratic candidates looks similar. Among Republicans, only John McCain — admired in Europe — seems to offer real bridge-building capacity.

Clinton, Obama and John Edwards all favor closing Guantánamo Bay. They all want to end the Iraq war, although they differ on how fast and on what residual force to leave in the country or area. They all favor undoing unilateralism. They all back engagement with Iran, although Clinton supported the designation of the Revolutionary Guard Corps as terrorists.

Most of this would please an expectant world. But Obama, while saying he might attack "high value terrorist targets" in Pakistan, has been most forthright in sketching a globalized community — "the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people" — and pushing hope over fear.

I see nobody else who would represent such a Kennedy-like restorative charge at a time when America often seems out of sync with the world.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former British ambassador to the United Nations, told me that the United States remained the most important nation, but "the American label feels tied to something anachronistic. America has not been working out where the world is going, nor creating the appropriate relationships for that world."

Obama, in many ways, is where the world is going. He embodies interconnectedness where the Bush administration has projected separateness.

Andrew Sullivan, in a fine piece in The Atlantic, imagines a Pakistani Muslim seeing on television a man "who attended a majority-Muslim school" and is "now the alleged enemy."

He notes: "If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close."

The world isn't voting. America is. But the candidate who most mirrors the 21st-century world seems clear enough.

Tsai Ming-Liang Goodbye Dragon Inn

Winter Comes

I couldn't be coherent today. My third son left home yesterday. He's 17. And he's not ready. But he doesn't know that, as if anyone could tell him, because, remember, he's 17.

I haven't had any Prozac in the house for two years now. But winter's coming.

The trees are shedding, stripping down outside this window.

I need coffee. I need mountains. I need the ocean. I need a world where English is not the primary language.

It is dawn, but it doesn't seem rosy. I should drink coffee and watch a movie by Tsai Ming-Liang. Something impossible to figure out.

I know people without children. They think they know what it is like to have children. They do not, but they cannot be told this. They do not like to be told this. Having children is beyond one's ability to imagine, like the afterlife I suppose, but what it feels like, what it does to your body and brain, cannot be conveyed or passed on.

By the time most people have raised children, they forget how they originally imagined it would be.

However I imagined it would be, how I thought I could continue to be the same person, was wrong. It is hard to remember.

I could take the cold coffee from the other room and put it in the microwave. I am not yet wearing socks and don't want to move. The cats were here to sniff my toes, but they left.

Eduardo and I had a drink last night after the movie. I ordered Maker's Mark. We were at Outback Steakhouse. The bartender had a huge tattoo on his arm, the name of his daughter, Hailey Somethingorother. The whisky was delicious. I nursed my wounds.

I will go back to working on the crossword puzzle I am constructing. Will Shortz finally wrote back about three of the four crosswords I submitted. He actually read them, closely, and commented on clues and themes, before rejecting them. It was the best rejection letter I ever received. I am still hopeful about the fourth puzzle.

I couldn't bear to read the letters in yesterday's News-Gazette. It seems praising the defunct Chief Illiniwek has come back into fashion. It was that damn homecoming parade. Then, there was also praise for Rush Limbaugh. I just get tired of all the ignorance. It wears me down more than children.

Bare feet or not, it is time for coffee. I hope no one reads this. If I included the names of people who troll the Internet for comments about themselves -- people like David Eisenman or John Otto or Mark Roberts -- at least I'd have those three readers, I suppose.

But I continue to aspire to go unnoticed, something else people may think they understand but do not.

Maybe I'll read Ed Sanders' book today, Tales of Beatnik Glory.