Sunday, July 20, 2003

oooh I’ve been aggravated. I live in a state of political aggravation. The causes seem only to multiply. Here’s a pledge I recently read by our former V.P. Dan Quayle, this a “Reclaiming America” conference in 1994:   “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands. One Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.”   A few weeks ago Ha’aretz (a liberal Israeli paper) obtained and excerpted the minutes of the meetings of the new Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas with militant groups. Abbas told the militant leaders that Bush said God ordered Bush to attack Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, then God told him to attack Iraq, and lately God has told him to bring peace to the Middle-East.   I have been living in a bubble world of secularists. I grew up in that bubble world and I believed in it. But now the Christians have risen again and the horrible truth is you have to believe that they’re serious.   The Bible Belt has grabbed its razor strap and is coming for us.   I recommend a book by Michael Lind, a fifth generation Texan, “Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.” It lays out the background for what is going on. The South has never been in my country, despite the fact that some of my ancestors came from there. This book reveals how deeply different the Southern political system has been, not only before the Civil War, but ever since.   According to Lind, although the South lost the Civil War, in their territory they established a de facto Confederacy, “with the economy of a non-industrial resource colony, the social order of a racial caste society, and the politics of a one-party dictatorship.” This party was the Dixiecrats, and after the Civil Rights revolution, its white constituents migrated politically to become the core base of the modern Republican party. The Republican takeover in the South has shown the consequences of the way the American system is rigged in favor of rural states. It has given the Confeds the power even if they don’t have the majority — witness, of course, the Presidential debacle (oops, election).   Today’s Southern right combines the political economy of plantation owners with the fundamentalist religion of hillbillies. When George W. Bush captured the White House that backwater rose up like the return of the repressed. We have become captives of the legacy of the South and the consequences are beginning to look devastating.   I’ve been in despair lately over the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. How do you have an anti-war movement when the war is supposedly over? Perhaps killing the anti-war movement is the real reason Bush did his pimp walk across the deck of that aircraft carrier, strutting against a military backdrop to hype his declaration of American victory. Now the guerilla war has begun and there’s no end in sight. I suspect the most passionate opponents of this new stage of American involvement are the grunts in uniform, worried about their exposed backs. They signed up to defend this country from real threats. Now they are stuck over there indefinately, eyeing a hostile and restive population any one of whom may or may not try to kill them. The only thing that is clear in this situation is that Iraq was never a threat to begin with. (Guess that faith-based intelligence isn’t always accurate!)   After the first Gulf War, Saddam ordered his people to get the country up and running fast and his terrified minions scurried and toiled and it was done --- in forty one days. The Palestinian grocer down the street confirms this. He worked for a water purification company in Baghdad after the first Gulf War, and when he arrived, 3 months after that war ended, the whole country was patched up and running smoothly except for one smallish piece of the telecommunications infrastructure. No wonder many Iraqis think the Americans have contempt for them and don’t care whether or not their country rots. How could the Americans, so stunningly efficient in winning the war, turn out to be stunningly incompetent afterwards? It’s a shock. But it really only confirms what was obvious to begin with about this Administration. They are driven by faith and ideology and the complexities of real human societies are beyond their capacities.   Such complexities are so overwhelming to this Administration that they have already enacted policies of censorship: in the CIA, the State Department, the Armed Forces, and the EPA. What’s next?   Bush is a Southern conservative. We’ve had many national politicians who were Southern moderates or even progressives. Bush is the first Southern conservative, and he is the chosen son of what I am calling the oligarchy — the ones who were Dixiecrats before they were Republicans, and who were slave-holding, plantation owning Confederates before they were Dixiecrats. This oligarchy is not the same thing as the managerial and technocratic business class. The latter certainly has its problems from a progressive point of view, but it is interested in the well-being and stability of the Federal Government (good for business).  It would not and did not use Whitewater and adultery to launch an attempted coup. That came from the Southern oligarchy, one of whose most influential elected representatives recently said that their aim was to starve the Federal Government until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub.   If we want to understand the imperatives of the current Administration’s economic policies, it is instructive to look at the economic history of the Deep South. I quote Michael Lind: The Southern oligarchy—in its various historic incarnations, ranging from enlightened slaveowners of Virginia like Jefferson and Madison to reactionary West Texas oil men born to family wealth—is a genuine aristocracy. The members of the Anglo-Southern “chivalry” who, in the 19th Century, compared one another to Bayard, the chevalier peur et sans reproche, were not pretentious frauds who had read too many books by Sir Walter Scott. They were the real thing: a hereditary ruling class with a premodern mentality whose power rested in ownership of land and domination of politics and the military. They were the first cousins of the British aristocracy and distant cousins of the Prussian Junkers, the Spanish creole elite, and the Russian service nobility. For centuries in their English-speaking section of tropical America they rode horses, fought duels, and were waited on by hordes of slaves or servants from birth until death. There were usually better at spending money than at making it. They were not bourgeois.   So many Americans today do not have ancestral connections to the Civil War that the notion that the history of the South is exerting powerful influences on our political present is often counter-intuitive.  But consider that Enron and Worldcom, the biggest bankruptcies in American history, were headquartered, respectively, in Houston and Clinton, Mississippi. These were companies whose growth strategy was based on good-ole-boy politicking, bluffing, and swindling. Need I even mention the scam known as the “California energy crisis”, visited on California by Texas energy firms. Consider the business career of George W. Bush, the “MBA president”, who cashed in on his insider status as a Bush son and ended up with a fortune of $14 million. (In only one chapter to this saga, Bush invested $800,000 in the Texas Rangers and walked away with $14 million, because his business partners “voluntarily” gave up a share of their profits to him.) This version of capitalism is the way business is done in the Deep South. Over and over again the elite of the South have chosen to maintain their region as a resource colony, exploiting rather than developing resources and labor, because it served the interests of their cronies. For generations they have passed the buck—to each other.   These crony capitalists will be picking at the bones of the Federal Government after they’ve bankrupted it, but it will be bad times for the rest of us.   It was interesting for me to read Lind’s history of the South because it explained why my ancestors left Virginia for Chicago. Southern society, with its indolent elite, produced very few inventors. One of the few who came from the South was Cyrus McCormick. He is some kind of great great great uncle or whatnot of mine (distaff side, not in the family business).  His invention, the reaper, couldn’t make it in the South because slaves were cheaper than machines. And that’s what brought my ancestors to Chicago! The reaper ended up freeing so many Northern men from work in the fields that it swelled the ranks of the Union Army and contributed to the defeat of the South in the Civil War.   It’s important to have a grasp of history in order to understand the times we are living in. The interests of business and the interests of cronies are not necessarily the same. The oligarchs can wreck our economy and enrich themselves, and historical precedent suggests that this is what they will do.   What to do? California has the temptation of the initiative process — it’s possible to force a discussion of secession from the new Confederacy, by getting it on the ballot. I’m sure we pay the Feds more than our fair share, and for what: policies of environmental degradation, energy hijinx, and imperialist war.   Then there’s the example of the progressive movement that started in the late 19th Century. I recently read the inaugural platform of the People’s Party, issued with deliberate intent on July 4, 1892.   ...We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin...Corruption dominates the ballot box, the [state] legislatures and the Congress and touches even the bench...The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced...The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.”   A kick ass document! The progressives’ electoral impact peaked at 22 electoral votes in 1892 and a handful of Congressional seats, but their policy influence was huge. Everything from public education, wilderness preservation....They put the ‘progressive’ in income tax. Now that so many of us have, as one wag put it, “a bright future in the growing field of unemployment,” why not give it a go: organize fiercely. The progressives rose up when the country was being strangled by its ruling class — and it’s happening again. There’s just not much left to lose.     Now if you’ve read this far, you get a poem. It’s a prize, or a tease (if you’re that kind of person!). I’m starting a new project, The Blackboard Project, where fresh poems and other writing will be posted (then taken down & archived) every few days. It is a place for experimental writing to investigate interrogate and explicate the NOW. You can read this work — and also contribute your own. This is not a publication venue. It is a blackboard!  Check it out.       Arabian Stud     War party. I brought my knife. We drank to anger, skill set collapse, to the end of liberalism. I felt fleshy & full of intelligence, ready for a long ride on an Arabian stud. ..the aroma of horse is a backdrop of our culture...   Her thudded leg split open twice, over rain... it was a shame. “What is shame, but the suddenly realized weight of the visible?” Tissues torn off  that Coarsened stub   as Word after word slid down the throats of the Confederates.   Error of terror, that eye swallowing-- All stand, scared but ready, in case the dirt bunnies expectorate.   The past is eaten by the future and becomes futuristic cannonball. The present, intolerable melting, while pimping the country to his rich friends.   War, I mean. menace. me mean. men.   When I purchased my knife, I bought the idea. Now I hide it in my name. “Zone of entry into eroded life, she’s stuck on the tip of culture, as it dries up & blows away.” Blow. All the needles in the forest dipped in cocaine.   My wooden moods, with clogs: start there, the terrific saturation of the hitch point.   But I wonder what a poem is, floating off like this, into its own idleness, while I stroll around and look, tourist in my own poetics.   BAM BAM BAM.   If I lay down my resemblance, would it flow from me into all these objects?   Past tense pushes out into my language like the ghost. Past: that girlish brainiac childhood. The plump world holds me up, its shine elsewhere.       camille roy the blackboard project   5:46:35 PM

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

I’ve wanted to write something more personal lately. I need to register a point of view, to disagree --- with what? Everything! It’s all wrong, on so many levels. One that stuck in my craw was an infantryman quoted by CNN, calling Iraq ‘the ugliest desert I’ve ever seen.’   As in, “I’ve just hauled ass in my Humvee through the ugliest desert I’ve ever seen.”   The quote startled me into remembering that desert. Its lyricism was at each moment contradicted by the powdery gritty flatness under my feet. At the horizon, dunes, their limber gentle curves oddly like nudes. On a hot day, in the distance, dunes hovered over a silvery shimmer in the earth:  Mirage. I always missed the moment of lift off. As the Landrover bounced and jerked forward, that watery sheen kept retreating. Whereas the actual ground beneath my two feet had the harsh detail of magnification, a disappointment. But it was strewn with stuff: shards, beads, assorted trash of thousands of years. Picking up a small roughly cut carnelian bead in what seemed like nowhere, no habitation of any kind visible anywhere on the horizon, a mystery. Had it fallen from a girls neck 5000 years ago, or fifty? Was she walking, riding a donkey, a camel? As I examined the bead in my palm a depth of time opened up & took me in. Perhaps I was standing at an ancient riverbank. Over the last few thousand years the rivers had meandered hundred of miles across that plain, at one time or another slipping under my feet.   The Iraqi writer Betool Khedairi has said, “You cannot imagine the internal dialogue I have with my eight-thousand-year-old civilization every time I sit down at my desk.”   Depth of time. I read an amazing quote in a recent New Yorker from a nameless Iraqi doctor. “The sandstorm is coming back… You can smell it. It smells like earth. Whenever I smell this, it reminds me of dead people. Think about it. Think of Iraq’s history. What is that history but thousands of years of wars and killing… right back to Sumerian and Babylonian times. Millions of people have died on this earth and become part of it. Their bodies are part of the land, the earth we are breathing.”   I remember bones in a burial pot in the corner of the archeological lab. After a fierce rainstorm the mound that covered the ancient city bloomed with pots, their burial incantations revealed by the flash floods that followed the rain.   When I read that looters had ransacked the Baghdad museum I was grief stricken. I was just a girl when I went there & my memory is sketchy, really just impressions: cool spacious halls that sheltered the past and a quality of ambient delight which I think came from the director. I remember him as cordial and relaxed, known to my father, hospitable.   When I read about the looters, I was overcome by dread: how soon we are at the end of the beginning. The first moments of liberation were raped by American arrogance and carelessness. The despoliation of this museum is a cultural catastrophe of the first magnitude.    For America, this has been a fantastical war: against an enemy and culture wholly misunderstood, whose premises were deeply concealed in the murky waters of unverifiable suspicion. It’s curious that Bush, known for his Texas style straight talk, stakes the biggest wager of his presidency on the intellectually rotten ground of paranoia. Straight talk has rarely been shown to be so clearly divorced from good judgment. There are no reasoned arguments in his mind, and so far, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.    My father comments that the extreme rightwing ideology infecting our government can’t be separated from its sidekick, Christian fundamentalism. These people don’t believe in evolution; why should they care what economists think about their economic policy? The value of reasoned argument and experienced judgment has withered across the nation as a result of the influence of these ideologues. More to the point, if Rumsfeld has contempt for the advice of his own advisors, why would anyone else’s suggestions carry any weight?   During the first Gulf War, American archeologists were in close contact with the U.S. military on protecting the priceless cultural heritage of Iraq from the effects of war. In Gulf War II, the American forces, responsible under the Geneva Convention for order and government in Iraq, made the choice to guard the oil ministry from looters and leave all other doors open to the mobs. If efforts to recover the collections fail, the result of the looting will be infamy for the United States. Artifacts forming a record of thousands of years of human civilization have been lost. It is a rip into the fabric of human culture. What has been lost is beyond valuing. Of course, any knowledgeable person could have predicted this, and many did. No doubt religious bias played a role in this unspeakable carelessness, even though the objects were pre-Islamic.   Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban demonstrated the insufficiency of Islamic fundamentalism as a basis for social and political life. Bush and his minions show that the defect is fundamentalism, not Islam.   The United States has refused to allow itself to be judged in the World Court, whose charter includes trying government representatives for war crimes. How quickly that refusal has become convenient! The reckoning may not arrive soon, but someday this tragedy in Baghdad will be understood as an American war crime.   URL for more info on Iraqi antiquities, including photos URL for humanitarian assistance to Iraq URL for Humanities and Social Sciences Online website with info on the situation URL for the threat to world heritage in Iraq           5:20:44 PM

Monday, March 31, 2003

It’s been a difficult week. Lying in the dark before I go to sleep, scenes from the news appear in my mind. Images come to me in a procession, in order to become tender, intimate, like ghosts clothed in living bruised flesh. It’s repeatedly horrifying, not just the scenes, but how  I’m forced to recognize that I cannot screen them out. The war has become a parallel dream life. Perhaps this is because I was in Iraq as a child and I revert under this pressure to that girl, for whom the violence of the war is unbearable. An adult is a set of boundaries (afloat in an ocean of denial). The first night of bombing I found myself trying to hide by curling up under the warm body of my lover...  I taste the dust of Baghdad in my mouth...   Yesterday the wires carried a picture of a girl with a wounded eye, her little face smudged with droplets of blood. Her mother had just been killed. In the background her father was crying out to the soldiers to release him from their handcuffs, so he could comfort her. I quickly put this image out of my mind, but it returned to me last night, with a ragged sawing sound ... I think that was the father’s cry.   Young American soldiers have been thrust into this vise of tragedy, hatred, and revenge. Because the American people have chosen to put them there, the force of rationalization distorts American views. One of those insta-polls I saw just moments ago on CNN showed that 82% of the respondents felt American troops were justified in firing into a van that didn’t stop at a checkpoint, killing 7 women and children. The British paper The Guardian reports that British soldiers at the scene are critical of American troops for excessive use of force . Perhaps the Brits will be expelled from the ‘alliance’ on the grounds of insufficient admiration for the American way of war.    I find the heated blah-blah recently generated among pundits accusing Iraq of terrorism in its military tactics to be extraordinary. (William Saletan comes to mind.)  One question: who launched this invasion? If you swipe a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat, you get to deal with the consequences.   I stopped doing this blog for several months. It was hard for me to argue for peace, given that Saddam is so vicious, a thug. But my gut told me this whole enterprise was corrupt, rotten from top to bottom. How you do things IS what you do. There is no distinction.   Ambrose Bierce said war is how Americans learn geography. This war may teach Americans the shape of Iraq, the rough location of its rivers, the names of its largest cities. Perhaps we will also learn that American ideals are a form of self-delusion. An anonymous woman was quoted the other day in the New York Times that while Iraqis may conceal their guns in civilian clothes, and stage ambushes, and behave in the generally dastardly manner of guerrilla fighters everywhere, American can’t and won’t, because “we play fair. That’s just who we are.”   Who launched this invasion? What makes unprovoked invasion an example of "playing fair"? Is this what American now means?   Camille Roy         8:29:55 PM

Sunday, March 23, 2003

I felt so anxious when the bombs started dropping that I stayed home. I didn’t riot in the San Francisco streets like some friends of mine, who had a great time, not because they broke windows or anything like that, but because when the police came for them, the crowd moved, scattering to other intersections, where they would come together again, and scatter again, and so on. A tactic of liberation that felt festive. The impulse to resist could not be tied down. On the other hand... people trying to get to work were very aggravated, even when they sympathized with the protestors. Our city, already broke, is spending some millions that would otherwise go for health care or what not, on police overtime.   Here’s an idea: resistance to the war needs to be tied to concern for people struggling here, as well as abroad. The left needs to be trustworthy. Attacking businesses and interfering with people’s livelihoods should be a last resort. The enemy of American democracy right now is the feds. In California they have looked on and smiled as we’ve been fleeced to the tune of billions of dollars by their energy company buddies. They are scalping our forests, planning oil rigs along the Santa Barbara coast, attacking our fuel efficiency standards... The list goes on and on. Our sin is to have not voted for their regime. Meanwhile they bankrupt a government that belongs to all of us, while exposing us to increased risk of terrorism because of their aggressive and imperialist foreign policy.   At a party last night someone commented to me that the Feds going after Iraq and not North Korea is one more expression of their contempt and lack of concern for California. For which state is in range of North Korean nuclear missiles?   I think the anti-war movement in California should exclusively target the Federal Government, it’s buildings, military installations, and other centers of power. We can broaden the war resistance to include resisting the attacks of the feds on our state and our democracy.   Finally: a blog entry from Baghdad. Salam Pax. Could someone be blogging from Iraq? Well, the material feels authentic to me. I haven’t been able to get access to it for a few days, so I’ve posted this excerpt on my site. It clarified for me the confusing mix of the necessity to criticize Saddam (note to Colin Powell: the name is not pronounced Sodom) with the necessity to resist this war. Saddam is a fascist dictator, no doubt. One of many. How does this justify destroying the country, killing and starving its people?   Camille Roy   6:06:55 PM

Monday, March 17, 2003

Welcome back. This blog has been out of commission for months but now that we’re at the cusp of a huge mistake, I find it necessary to pause and consider what is coming. This is what I said about the situation last October:   Americans have no appetite for the complexities of this region. The current Administration says they’ll replace Saddam with a democracy. Well, wishing doesn’t make it so. It may be impossible to impose civil society on Iraq. Certainly this Administration, which lacks diplomacy, tact, judgement, respect, and patience, is incapable. Our military is highly skilled and America will win eventually, perhaps quickly (perhaps not, given that so many Iraqis blame the United States for sanctions). But what comes after? People hold up the Gulf War as an example of a successful war --- relatively quick, not too much upsetting teevee footage (Al Jazeera will change that this time around), and hey, the ‘Arab street’ didn’t revolt, they way they were expected too. But what was September 11, if not blow back? Bin Laden targeted the United States because he was enraged at the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, who came and stayed after the Gulf War. If we invade Iraq, there will be more terror, not less.     I felt I was going a bit out on a limb with such a harsh critique of the administration. Who could have predicted that they would turn out to be this inept? The last few weeks have been a mind-boggling display of diplomatic bungling and alliance destruction. World public opinion is united --- against the United States.  It’s astounding how impervious the rest of the world is to the tactics that have demolished the Democrats! Their press doesn’t kowtow like our press, at least to our government. It our situation weren’t so terrifying I would be relishing the spectacle.   I’ll go out on a limb again. Here are my thoughts on how this invasion will go, as well as some comments on our current political climate. In a few months we’ll see if I have any sense at all.   (1)               There will be a house-to-house, street-by-street struggle for Baghdad. Saddam Hussein will concentrate his Republican Guard in Baghdad where they will be integrated into civilian neighborhoods. Iraqi troop deployment will be designed to expose Iraqi civilians to the invading American forces. In the American media this will play out as a dishonorable and cowardly attempt by Saddam to use the Iraqi people as human shields, but in the international and Arab press, civilian casualties will be seen as blood on American hands. Administration spin won’t control the cameras of Al Jazeera. The moral standing of the United States has already been heavily damaged, but the struggle in Baghdad will seal the case that America has become an ammoral and imperialist power.   (2)               The oil wells at Kirkuk will be blown up as soon as the invasion starts. (Kurds fleeing that city report that the traps are now being set.) The Iraqi oil industry, already in bad shape, will be devastated.   (3)               The war won’t last long. The competence of the American military will be obvious to all. This will not create a pax Americana, or even give much of a public relations bounce, because world opinion is already anxious and resentful about American power.   (4)               There will be a humanitarian disaster following the war, focused on malnutrition and even starvation. It is not well understood in the United States how dependent the Iraqi people are on rations and how efficiently the Iraqi government distributes them. United Nations experts on food relief consider Iraqi food distribution to be the best in the world. The American military will have things to worry about other than taking over Iraqi social services. Hunger in Iraq may not be covered in the American media, but it will be an issue for world opinion.   (5)               The possibility of civil war in Iraq is high, perhaps not in the short term, but in the medium to long term. I think the Iraqi Kurds will resist with force any attempt to take away the foothold to statehood which they now possess in the no-fly zone. There is no party to this conflict who is looking out for the Kurds, but they are armed and they possess a degree of independence and political and military organization which they will fiercely defend. At this point, subjugating the Iraqi Kurds could be as difficult as subjugating the Afghans was for the Soviet Union. Yet Turkey is prepared to go into northern Iraq with tens of thousands of troops (they are massing at the border). Iranian proxy forces are already there. There is a weird little fundamentalist sect that also has some territory and forces as well. All this is in addition to the two Kurdish parties and their armed forces. It could be that the best case for northern Iraq is that it would be chronically unstable and chaotic, like Afghanistan. The worst case is an open regional war involving Turkey and Iran. If that were to happen, the likelihood of civil war breaking out in the south becomes much greater. Why would the Americans allow this? Well, the pacification of Iraq is such a long-term, complex, and expensive proposition that it is hard to believe that the American people will have the stomach for it. The military and economic costs will be huge. Exploitation of Iraqi oil reserves by American companies will be viewed with great suspicion in the Middle East, making it hard for American interests in Iraq to operate with impunity. There will be other hot spots in the world, particularly North Korea, which even now poses a serious threat and will need to be dealt with sooner rather than later.   (6)               Will Iraq become a democracy? First, I think the brouhaha about a democratic Iraq has been administration war propaganda. I don’t think they are interested in such a democracy, really, because it will inevitably counter American political and economic interests. A recent story in Newsweek described what big oil was looking for in postwar Iraq: rolling back the clock to oil contracts typical of the pre-OPEC era, which gave oil companies an ownership interest and relieved them of any social or environmental responsibilities. This is going to be legitimate in a democratic Iraq? (Hello, is anyone home?) Of course not. Forcing the contradictions of an imperial United States down the throats of subject countries is going to be a very expensive task, devastating our reputation (if it could be more damaged) and making for difficulties even with the bottom line. I think within a few years we will abandon Iraq as a chaotic state, not a democratic one, hoping against hope that the dictator who emerges will be one we can manipulate or buy off. (Recall that for a long time we thought Saddam Hussein was such a dictator. Recall the Shah. Recall funding Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. Recall… You get the idea.) This will be tragic for the Iraqi people, but this war is being fought for American hegemony, not to liberate the Iraqi people.   (7)               Will we find weapons of mass destruction? Just as the reports of the weapons inspectors have been subject to conflicting interpretations, there will be discoveries that the Americans will claim show the necessity of war, while others will claim it could more easily have been dealt with through further inspections. The discoveries could include stores of anthrax or technical files but will not include a nuclear program (or some evidence of such would have been found by the inspectors). I don’t think a network of secret underground labs, roaming trucks, or the like will be revealed. It’s possible that very little in the way of active programs will be discovered. It’s unlikely that the United States will uncover enough to convince world opinion that invasion and overthrow was necessary for world security. It’s also possible that some of these materials will be dispersed to terrorists in the last hours of the regime.   (8)               Will chemical agents be used on American troops? Yes. This will be a shock to American public (and may be used by the Administration to drum up support for more imperial adventures abroad) but the numbers won’t be terribly high. The infrastructure of Iraqi society at all levels has greatly deteriorated, reducing the effectiveness of every aspect of the military, even this most terrible one.   (9)               Will the resolution of the Iraqi standoff be good for the American economy? The economy has been so bad for so long that people cling to our current climate of uncertainty and the expectation of war as the reason. I’m skeptical. Consider two statistics. First, in the Bay Area, venture capital funding over the last three years is down 95%. Second, foreign capital flows into the United States over the same period is down 85%. I think these figures are connected, and I think that our economic growth will suffer as a result of our imperial policies. We can’t extract all the capital, resources, and people that we need for our growth by military means. We have taken our economic primacy for granted, forgetting that we have received huge infusions of investment and human capital (engineers from the third world, for example) from other countries because we were growing, dynamic, innovative. We have had their confidence, but we are rapidly losing it. Their capital is free to go elsewhere (and at present most investment capital is going to China). The American idea has been the most valuable franchise in the world, but it is being trashed by the current administration. The damage will probably be lasting.   (10)           When I view this wretched situation, I can only ask, how did it come to this? Much of what others have said I agree with, but I’ll add a few points which I think have been underappreciated. First of all, a comment on the relation of ideology to insanity. I have heard insanity defined as repeating the same behavior over and over while expecting different results. The ideological ferocity of this administration fits this definition of insanity. If tax cuts fail to produce the desired results, have more tax cuts. If offending allies fails to produce the desired results, offend more allies. If bellicose policies fail to achieve political goals, go to war. What is missing here is the ability to reason about effective policy. There is no feedback loop that adjusts policy to reality, given experience, context, and history. That’s why the administration seems so tone-deaf. In fact they can’t listen, being out of the reality loop. No matter what reaction they get, no matter the consequences, they repeat what they know, which is their ideology. What is this ideology? It is the marriage of market and Christian fundamentalisms (with an ample helping of Confederate values; see below). The market is always right, no matter how much corruption is exposed after regulations are lifted, no matter how many people suffer from market gaming. Lifting the ‘burden’ of taxes on the wealthy is always right, etc. The Christian fundamentalism that permeates the administration appears to be so intrinsic that it’s unconscious. Bush’s slip about a ‘Crusade’ against Islamic fundamentalists is an example of that. He reportedly believes that his presidency is God’s will. That means his decisions are God’s will too. No wonder he sleeps well at night! (Even if no one else can.)  I wonder whether he is also influenced by apolcalyptic Christianity, the fervor of the saved to be risen in a holocaust in the Middle East. His appetite for war, whatever its consequences, seems to point in that direction.   (11)           Finally, how did these guys take over all branches of government? They’ve replaced the Trinity (the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court) with the Republican Party. (What else will they take over? The military?) I have only one comment here. It seems to me the seeds of this takeover lie in Nixon’s Southern Strategy of 40 years ago, when Nixon pushed his party to go after the white Southern Democrats who were disaffected from the Democratic party due to its support of civil rights. Nixon in effect sold the soul of his party to the devil in order to go after the the remnants of the Confederacy. The core of the modern Republican party is built upon these remnants. They’ve integrated the public face of the party, which gives them deniability with regards to racism. It is worth looking at the Confederacy, in particular the economic and political values other than racism for which it stood, to understand what has taken over America today.  These values include exploitation of land and natural resources, exploitation of labor, fierce and unrelenting class inequality (oligarchy, in effect), violent patriotism, rigid and often violent conceptions of personal honor and manhood, fundamentalist Christianity, economic backwardness, slow growth and lack of innovation, constriction of opportunity at all levels of society except the most elite. The South has in fact risen again. Policies to enact these values are being shoved at the rest of the country at every level where the Feds have leverage. I predict the divisions in the country will increase as this continues. Can you say ‘outbreaks of civil unrest’? But the question still remains, why did people fall for it? What failure in the American character accounts for this abdication of self-interest? Actually the real issue concerns middle and working class whites, particularly males, who have abdicated their class interests vis a vis the elite. Trully their behavior is a mystery. Perhaps in that mysterious defect in the American character lies sufficient reason for the decline of the Republic.   I’ll close with a war poem, Tom Sleigh's version of an ancient Babylonian text. (This appeared recently in slate.) The city of Ur is in modern Iraq.   LAMENTATION ON UR 2000 B.C. Like molten bronze and iron shed blood pools. Our country's dead melt into the earth as grease melts in the sun, men whose helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond help, they lie still as a gazelle exhausted in a trap, muzzle in the dust. In home after home, empty doorways frame the absence of mothers and fathers who vanished in the flames remorselessly spreading claiming even frightened children who lay quiet in their mothers' arms, now borne into oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea by the surging current. May the great barred gate of blackest night again swing shut on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn, may this disaster too be torn out of mind   Have a nice day.    Camille Roy 3:07:12 PM

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

For those wanting the real deal (with photos) on Iraq, see below, because I'm off that gig – just for today.   I saw a documentary Sunday night on the Weather Underground (event). The huge Castro Theatre was packed. Young director, young crowd, standing ovation at the end. I think the standing ovation was the most intense I've ever experienced at a film. The loud enthusiasm was not just about the film (which was enthralling and stylish) but our political moment. We had just spent several hours watching a set of passionate, hot-headed, and incredibly cool looking young people willing to go to the barricades, to bomb, again and again, to live in hiding and go to prison in order to protest the war in Vietnam and American racism. We also had watched the measured and mostly rueful reflections by those same people well into middle-age. But the heart of the audience was with the young radicals. Their resistance is what spoke to our moment.   The left has been running away from the excesses of the 60's ever since they occurred. The movie was a startling resurrection of those excesses. It claimed the S.D.S. Weatherman as a living legacy that belonged not to any political establishment, but to the youth. (I couldn't believe this film had gotten funding. The producer has hopes of getting it on public tv. Well, good luck. Probably the Repubs would sooner pull the plug on PBS.)   I was with several friends who had been members of Weather (making me subject to running commentary of the 'Did ya know I slept with him?' variety). My friends were shocked to see Weather emerge after all this time with so much sexy cachet. 'The Days of Rage were a dud.' 'I left the day my collective went underground. I wasn't going to do that!' And so on. But inside I think they were thrilled, as I was. The evening seemed like an early vibe of a new level of left activism.   Which brings me to the topic of the moment. The blather on what the Democrats should do, now that they've been solidly whupped, has begun to die down. As usual no one has even mentioned anything that corresponds to the precious perspective of moi.  So I will charge ahead and spew the trouff as I see it...   The Repubs have pretty much dropped any interest in moderate domestic government with their slide to the radical right. They love huge deficits because they hate government and putting the government deep into debt forces cutbacks. The rich love them for it. It's a party! Since the Repubs have become wildly irresponsible, the Dems have been forced to occupy the role of the responsible adult: balance your budget, dearie. Reform those welfare mothers. And so on. That leaves no party to advocate for people. For unions. For women, children, and men. For racial minorities. Etc.   Who cares if the Dems go to the left, or stay in the center? Perhaps the Dems are incapable of speaking directly to the people, because in truth they are bought off by corporate interests just like the Repubs are. It's only a matter of degree. Perhaps nothing can break through the media bubble which keeps us doped, as our standard of living slowly drops, as people work more and more jobs to have more debt and less time for their kids. Or perhaps attitudes changed in the sixties only because the radicals were willing to take their conflicts to the streets. Civic unrest: think about it. This is the Weather slogan from the movie that will stay with me: Bring the war home. Camille Roy 4:44:45 PM

Friday, November 15, 2002

Fifteen years or so ago I had to write about my childhood in Iraq. The incongruity of that past was making me feel detached from my surroundings. So I wrote this series of poems, and dumped my past in it, then went on with my business. This was before the first Gulf war. The Iraqi material felt so personal I never even tried to get them published. What American poet would be interested in a blurring of Iraqi memoir and West Coast poetics? Context is everything, at least when it comes to determining what is politically relevant. I read these poems at a hybrid politico-poetry event put on by the Poetry Center recently. It was clear at that moment at the podium that right now this series is the most political work I've done. I feel that to be true because of the quasi-religious war with Iraq we are stumbling into. Of course Iraq is one of the most secular states of the Middle-east, but that doesn't invalidate my point, it only gives the drama a farcical as well as tragic aspect. The special horror of this kind of war is religion-fueled desire and demonization, and those influences are among us. There is the peculiar and sinister sympathy that the far Christian right has for Israel, based in a wish for the Second Coming, the Rapture that will destroy the world. President Bush is a fundamentalist, and a deeply secretive bureaucrat. We have no way of knowing what influence his religious ideas have on American policies. There is also the longstanding blind spot which afflicts the media and our political establishment with regards to Israel and the Palestinians. Remember when Bush gave his speech to the United Nations, in which he castigated the U.N. for not taking Iraq to task for violating U.N. resolutions? The press praised him to the skies for re-framing the debate, for switching the focus from American threats to Iraqi intransigence. It went virtually unmentioned that Israel has also been violating U.N. resolutions directing Israel to withdraw from the territories they occupied in the 1967 war. Why is this not also an affront to the United Nations? Why this double standard?  In the current highly inflamed context I fear this can be interpreted as a lesser regard for the human rights and suffering of Muslim Palestinians. What's worse, this interpretation may be correct.  That political and human disconnect can only lead to more violence. Camille Roy 4:29:49 PM