Tuesday, June 28, 2005
So thankful for email...I emailed S as soon as I read about the helicopter crash an hour ago. I
can't believe it -- he emailed me back just now. I'm so thankful.
Unfortunately, many other families will not be as lucky as I am
tonight. They will have that dreaded house call tomorrow. It's all so
sad and heartbreaking. 11:11:54 PM | I'm going to think about this hour-long roller coaster ride and write about it tomorrow. The up and down, the well of emotions, how irrational it all was. Not good. And the darkness it made me feel! Toward others! It didn't last past writing the post (honest -- the writing itself was cathartic and my mom's email woke me up to what I needed to do), but it did come up in me. I've got a lot of zen training to do. Yeah, there were two shot down actually. The situation is still developing, so I have no news, but my group really hasn't been a part of it. No worries. I love you too S Quoting Kate: Hey baby Please email me asap so I know you're okay. I heard about a helicopter crash outside Asadabad. I'm worried!! I love you Kate 
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Thank you, mom. I needed that reminder.Subject: Meditate! 10:35:34 PM | Date: June 28, 2005 10:18:55 PM CDT Hi Sweetie, I know you are worried about S but you will hear from him tomorrow I'm sure. I hate it so much that you are going through this. I mostly HATE this administration for putting him over there. What to do about that?! I'll call you in the morning. I love you very much. Mom
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Too much worryI'm not sure if I can handle this. S is in Asadabad right now. He can't call me because there's no cell phone service in the mountains. 10:08:36 PM | I'm so selfish. I hope he wasn't on that helicopter, that if anyone was lost it was someone else's husband who died today. I don't know what I would do without him! I feel lost as it is. (This is what fear does to you -- it makes you selfish and concerned with your own family and no one else. No wonder it's so easy to control people with fear.) It's too much stress. This is so unfair. I hope every neocon asshole who ever pushed for these wars rots in hell. They believe in hell, so they can end up there. Even hell would be too kind for them. I know I'm supposed to care about all sentient beings, but tonight I don't. Tonight I wish ill on a whole segment of my own country. I wish they felt the fear I feel right now, that every family of every soldier serving in these wars feels nearly every day. But no, the neocons get to sit in their posh living rooms, at their mahogany desks, and write bullsh*t lies, lies, lies. Free of fear! It's times like these that I wish I was still into kickboxing. I want to beat the crap out of Elizabeth and Michael Ignatieff and every other neocon who's supported this administration. I know it's wrong! I know there's no point to revenge! Trust me, though, beating the crap out of someone is visceral and rewarding at the time. I learned this fighting back in the day. I learned, too, that I'd feel like crap the next day, but does that stop me from feeling this right now? No! I hate what this is making me feel, what it is turning me into, even temporarily. And we wonder why there's so much violence in the world. Afghanistan is still a mess after four long years and men like my husband are in danger over there. Why? Because our power-crazed, wacko leaders had to invade Iraq, draining all of our resources so their friends could get rich, leaving Afghanistan abandoned. What bastards. I don't think I'll get much sleep tonight.
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Paul Rieckoff on Bush's Ft. Bragg SpeechPissed off after Bush's speech tonight? 10:04:20 PM | Read Paul Rieckoff's statement in response. He's the founder and executive director of Operation Truth, the nation's largest OIF/OEF veterans' advocacy organization. Here's an excerpt: "We agree there is no choice but to succeed in
"What is success? Tonight you will tell us
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"Amid the Turmoil, Iraqis...Turn to Books"I think this piece from yesterday's New York Times is related to my previous two posts. 11:53:34 AM | Intellectuals and writers seem particularly disoriented in the new
Iraq. Many were alive in the decades before 1968, when the Baath Party
took control, which was a time of cultural renaissance in Iraq. But in
1979, when Mr. Hussein became president, he began banning books,
singling out writers and intellectuals, jailing them and blocking
publication of their work.
The employees of the Dar al-Bayan bookstore used a small crawl space in an attic area to hide favorite books that were banned. Some writers left the country, but many stayed, surviving by meeting secretly and circulating photocopies of banned books. Faiza Mulla, a lawyer who was educated in Cairo and lived in London for two years in the 1950's, recalled such meetings. "To many people, it was like oxygen," she said. "This was how we survived." When Mr. Hussein fell in 2003, Ms. Mulla was elated. She told her
daughter that life would return to the way it was, when Baghdad
sparkled with a lively cultural scene. Her husband, Mahmoud Uthman,
kept a diary, taking down the hopes of neighbors and relatives.
Now,
two years later, the entries seem naïve, Mr. Uthman said. Several of
the couple's friends have been kidnapped. Some have left the country.
Many who stayed have withdrawn from life outside their homes. Ms. Mulla
and Mr. Uthman's daughter, who just graduated from college in Iraq with
a computer science degree, spends most of her days at home, her future
uncertain. [...] Mr. Jazaery [the former cultural minister] said he worried about the power of religion among young Iraqis. Anyone who was born after 1980 grew up during Iraq's decline into war and economic sanctions. Corruption and poverty have eroded the once-strong educational system, leaving young people vulnerable to populist leaders like Mr. Sadr. "They can read, they can write,
but they can't understand," Mr. Jazaery said. "That's good for
dictatorship and dangerous for democracy. It's a spare army for all
hard-line elements."
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China's cyber wallGlutter shows us how easy it is for a government to combine totalitarianism and capitalism. 11:21:31 AM | She's fighting for freedom every day, our courageous girl from Hong Kong: The word FREEDOM has meaning. It really does. I only wish more people knew.
I'm thinking about you, Glutter.
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Sam Hamill on Poetry, War, and ProtestLast Wednesday Joy Harjo, whose poetry saved my life a decade ago, gave space in her blog to another great poet, Sam Hamill, founder of Poets Against the War. She posted an essay of his from The Virginia Quarterly Review about poetry and war and protest. Please read it. Here are a few horribly disjointed excerpts: 11:03:02 AM | Had
we behaved as Whitman's democracy after the September 11 attack, we
would have expressed strong convictions about our faith in our
Constitution rather than subverting it; we would have asked where such
virulent antiAmerican sentiment was born and what fostered it-as if we
did not know. The United States has bombed more than forty countries
since the end of WW II. We have empowered tyrants (including Saddam
Hussein) and dictators when we could profit from it. Pinochet was
brought to power by Henry Kissinger (with aid from Bush Sr.); Noriega
is a product of the CIA. How many years did the people of the
Philippines suffer under a U.S.-backed Ferdinand Marcos? It's a long,
ignoble list, about which most of my compatriots know far too little.
Our Constitution was not written for application only in easy times, to
be subverted every time a bunch of people are overcome with fear. Fear
brought the Nazis to power. We should have stood firmly and strictly by
our Constitution and hunted down the people responsible. And we should
have addressed the disease that lies at the heart of religious
fanaticism as well as the rage that is the result of our own imperial
behavior.
[...] Time and time again I was asked by media people, "Why can't you poets just leave the politics out of your poetry?" The answer: Because "politics" isn't thrown into a poem like a spoonful of curry into the pot. Poetry is a large house and has plenty of room for the overtly political, the covertly political, the personally political, even attempts to be apolitical, which is almost impossible. Hamill presents a poem by Iraqi exile poet Salah al Hamdani (translated by Molly Deschenes), "From Baghdad, Mon Amour." Here is an excerpt: I wished so much today that man had never discovered fire
And cursed it to advance so much in its own din. This soil that gave birth to me, today put to death. Oh mother! I want to return inside your flesh To hear the beating of your heart, To quench my thirst in the murmur of your breath. And Hamill goes on... I thought of my old
friend Shirley Kaufman, who translated the poetry of Abba Kovner, a
Jewish poet who grew up in Vilnius and led the United Partisan
Organization against the extermination of the Vilna ghetto before
settling in Israel in 1946. He called poetry "a way of asking
forgiveness for the evil in human existence."
[...] And if some poet feels obliged to speak for those whose voices have been silenced, we might benefit by listening, even as that means listening to the dead. And numbering and naming the dead. If we're going to annihilate masses of people "for the good of the world," we might take the time and trouble to learn their language and cultural values and even their poetry. [...] True peace is achieved from within, one person at a time. Poetry clarifies the vision. If war were an effective means to peace, the last century would not have been the bloodiest in all of history. Poets are good at helping people look more closely at words and all of their implications. The poem is a little body of language and music and enlightenment. A poem can embody or ennoble or inspire a moment of peace. A poem can change a life. If you are inspired, write a poem and submit it to Poets Against the War. They have been collecting poems since January 2003, the run-up to our invasion of Iraq. You can search for poems by author and title, too, from their database of over 22,000 poems submitted.
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Afghanistan, still brokenThis story from Newsday is positively heartbreaking. 9:56:49 AM | Afghanistan is riddled with thievery, so it's no surprise that our fuel is ending up on the black market and then in people's lamps in their homes, left there to explode and kill and maim children. Why can't our leadership take some responsibility for it? Unbelievable poverty, a lack of an national education system (or even ID system to help track who's getting what care), and on top of it this:
And there is the war, and the unhappy similarity of lamp kerosene to jet fuel. The U.S. military prefers to fly its aircraft on an American grade of kerosene called JP-8. For safety, it's formulated so its flashpoint -- the temperature at which the fuel's vapors can be ignited -- is at least 100 degrees. That is the same standard for kerosene sold for domestic use in the United States. With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces here can't find enough JP-8. So they are buying huge amounts of a Russian grade of kerosene, TS-1, that ignites at temperatures as low as 83 degrees. On the rutted track from Pakistan to Kabul on a recent day, tanker trucks loaded with the Russian fuel rumbled by every few minutes to keep the U.S. military machine fueled. When the trucks arrive at a U.S. base, the load is tested. "If the base rejects the fuel because it is contaminated or something, instead of driving back to Pakistan, the driver will sell the fuel cheaply" in Afghanistan, said Moghul, the commerce ministry official. He and other Afghans say fuel also gets smuggled off U.S. bases, just like the military food stocks, uniforms and cots for sale in local bazaars. The U.S. logistics commander in Afghanistan, Col. Walter Sawyer, said American forces found "no known instances where fuel ... from coalition fuel carriers" is diverted for local sale."
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Thank you, Washington Post, for keeping on the DSMsThe Washington Post is keeping the spotlight on the Downing Street memos. And on page A1 no less! 12:12:10 AM | Go get 'em, Post.
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Last update: 8/24/05; 8:18:29 PM .
