Kate Ingold: Politics

Go, Rude Pundit, Go!

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 18:53:20 GMT

Ann Coulter is not only an ignorant, slimy, cruel and bitter liar, she's also a bona fide plagiarist.

May she go down in flames. Please.

Katrina Dollar

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 20:13:20 GMT

Our last trip down to New Orleans, I recieved this dollar as change at the Walgreen's on Tchoupitoulas. The corners and edges have been eaten up by water rot; along the back and on the bottom right are smudges of hardened, muddy sludge.

Pretty much sums up our state of affairs, don't you think?

We needed a hero, and now we have one

Tue, 02 May 2006 00:27:46 GMT

From that now-legendary White House Correspondents' Dinner Saturday night, at which Stephen Colbert proved once and for all he really does have the grandest cajones in the entire fucking world:

On our fine president:

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

[...]

The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.

On the press:

Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

[...]

And, of course, we can't forget the man of the hour, new press secretary, Tony Snow. Secret Service name, "Snow Job." Toughest job. What a hero! Took the second toughest job in government, next to, of course, the ambassador to Iraq. Got some big shoes to fill, Tony. Big shoes to fill. Scott McClellan could say nothing like nobody else.

And then there was Scalia, and McCain, and the Generals, and the President again and again and again...I haven't laughed so hard EVER.

Monsieur Colbert, you are my hero.

(Watch the video at C&L, Video Dog, or C-Span. Or read the transcript at Daily Kos.)

A Saturday morning must read

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 15:08:39 GMT

If you read nothing else today, read Patrick McDonnell's piece in the LA Times magazine. Be warned, though. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

We've already lost the war because it's not winnable. When will Bush notice? And how many more will have to die before he does?

Saturday morning

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 15:58:27 GMT

The spectacle on capitol hill yesterday was another pathetic, dark mark on our so-called democracy. This made me incredibly pissed:

At one point in the emotional debate, Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel.

"He asked me to send Congress a message - stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message - that cowards cut and run, Marines never do," Schmidt said. Murtha is a 37-year Marine veteran and ranking Democrat on the defense appropriations subcommittee.

So it will never end, this smearing of vets who disagree with the hawkish chickens in power. Is it any wonder at all that most want to get out of the military and stay out?

I wasn't surprised that the Iraq vet who Schmidt quoted was an officer, but I was surprised that he'd said anything at all. I had this image of marines being loyal to each other. S was a marine right out of high school. He has always had this dual loyalty to the marines and the rangers, which is quite unusual -- most stick to one and badmouth the other. But then, now everything is different. Everything is tinged with political opinion. Facts no longer exist. Slobs like Dennis Hastert can call decorated war veterans like Murtha cowards and the only consequence is young veterans agree with Hastert instead of defending Murtha. We're swimming in a poisoned pie and it's made us sick. We see everything through a fever-induced haze and therefore we see only hallucinations, if we see anything at all.

Early this morning, before the sun had risen all the way up in the sky, S called me from deep in the mountains via satellite phone. We talked briefly. He wanted me to know he was okay and that he would be out on this same mission until after Thanksgiving at least. It was great to talk to him, even if I was in a middle-of-the-night daze. I dreamt vividly last night, probably because I'd spent the evening watching stupid movies on television. I ought to have just read instead of wasting hours on nothing.

In that daze, I forgot to tell him about the All Things Considered essay. How silly was that?

Dinosaurs wearing saddles

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 04:49:41 GMT

For an excellent discussion of Idiot America, those who are bringing us "ID" as an alternative to evolution, the Iraq quagmire, and the deadly, flacid response to Katrina, read this from Esquire.

Dinosaurs wearing saddles. That pretty much sums it up.

(hat tip to Mike)

The View from Inside

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:26:25 GMT

When S left for Afghanistan eight months ago I asked him to buy me a burkha. A bluebird-blue burkha like those worn by the amorphous shadow-women I thought of when I thought of our sisters in Afghanistan. In March he obliged me. I wore it around the house for a few moments -- I honestly couldn't stand it for more than that -- then stuffed it up on one of our closet's top shelves to sit next to the other cultural relics he's sent me, like the water-logged-sand-wool hat the men wear and a blood red velvet coat with frilly gold trim from what S calls "used to be Russia" Kyrzykstan. The burkha's symbolic power is undeniable: to those of us in the non- fundamentalist- Muslim "west", it represents all the pain and suffering some Afghan women live with every day, suffering that is imposed on them by the men in their lives. This may not be an accurate view (hopefully the women of Afghanistan will one day write their own burkha stories), but it is the one most of us have when we see photographs of those women-turned-feather-blue ghosts.

During our feverish fifteen days together a month ago when S filled my mind with stories about Afghanistan, he told me over and over how he had no real idea what it was like for women in Afghanistan because he so rarely saw any of them. When he did they were in their burkhas, usually in groups of two or more. One time he saw a group of women being herded through the streets of a village near Asadabad by an old man and his switch, his whipping stick, in a manner you might see a herder herding a group of belligerent cows. Another time he saw a woman in a burkha kick the crap out of a young boy. He said she was like one of those kung-fu heroes who transforms from a crotchety monk to a killer in seconds. S didn't see what happened the moments before the beating, so he had no idea what brought it about though it seemed to him like a reasonable response from a woman forced to wear a mummy shroud whenever she left the house.

To buy the burkha, S had to go into town and explore some of the markets. He'd been studying Dari since he purchased tapes after we'd been woken up by that early morning phone call that changed our lives in an instant. Not that it was easy to find Dari language instruction tapes or books. Farsi? Easy to find. Arabic? Everywhere. But the languages of Afghanistan, Dari, Pashto, were nowhere to be found in bookstores or the web. It took a serious search to find an academic series put out by the University of Nebraska that included pronunciation tapes. I don't remember exactly how much it cost, but I know it was around a hundred dollars and that didn't include the rushed shipping we required since it took us so long to find them. The same was true for books about our war. The "Current Affairs," "US Military History," and "World History" sections of every bookstore we visited were filled shelf by shelf with books about Iraq but there was very little to find about Afghanistan, and what there was tended to be about the Russian occupation and the Taliban terror that followed. Since he wasn't able to get the tapes until just days before he left for Ft. Hood, he wasn't able to study as much as he would have liked, but he still landed in Afghanistan with enough basic Dari to be cordial and count numbers. As it turns out most of the ANA troops he's worked with speak more Pashto than Dari, but his studies have helped him. He reads some Arabic now (the alphabet is the same) and he can ask enough questions not to get lost. And enough to buy a burkha.

The man who sold it to him was ecstatic to hear S was buying it for his wife. That is, until S told him that I had no intention of wearing it around town. The burkha he sent me is the standard issue pleated burkha. No fancy adornments, shiny polyester fabric. I suspect some are more beautiful than others, with the differentiations of class expressed in their stitching (hand- rather than machine-stitching) and the quality of the fabric. It is the only outward expression a woman's allowed, and though Afghanistan is the world's poorest country, surely their women are as interested in appearances as their men are, who hang tin dangles from their garden-tinted jingle trucks, and decorate their rifles with hand-painted flowers and swirly cues. When S came home for his visit, he brought back a couple of presents from the troops he trained, including a large box of green tea and a handmade sling shot, its handle adorned by colorful Czech-style beads.

Ambrose Bierce said "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography," but then he died in Mexico during the run up to the First World War and therefore didn't get to see how little geography we learn today even when we're waging two wars at once. When S went to Ft. Hood for his "train-up" in December, he was "briefed" after a month of non-training (he and his Ranger buddies worked out on their own; the national guard leadership had no interest in anything other than eating chicken at Popeye's) by a soldier who had just returned from Iraq. When S and his friend questioned this, asking why they weren't being briefed by a soldier who had served in Afghanistan, the briefer said "What's the difference? They're all in the Middle East." S pointed out that no, Afghanistan isn't in the Middle East, it's in Asia, and then the briefer said incredulously, "Well they're all Arabs, aren't they?!" No surprise, then, that S was the only soldier in his entire group who had studied any Dari at all. In fact, he was the only one who knew Afghans spoke Dari, not Farsi, not Arabic. He was stuck in Ft. Hood for nearly two agonizing months.

I took out the burkha today and took a few pictures from the view inside. I was thinking about how quickly the change came in Afghanistan, how in an historical instant the women became shrouded. The Taliban took over with their medieval politics and 21st century hyper-fast violence, and then, then. Imagine: women had been teaching in universities, performing surgeries in hospitals, running restaurants and shops and negotiating deals, and then suddenly nothing. Not allowed to take a breath outside unless hidden from view, and even then running the risk of being beaten, or worse, executed. It's the image of those women in the center of the soccer stadium, their beautiful bodies turned into sky-blue mountains then reduced to blue rubble when the shots were fired, that I see when I look at my burkha.

I wonder if the women of Afghanistan were stunned into submission, if it all happened so swiftly it gave them no chance to save themselves, to change the course of events. We weren't engaged in our war, hadn't learned any geography yet let alone the words for "sorrow" and "outrage" and "injustice" in Dari, so though we knew they had been transformed from women into shadows we didn't truly notice them and therefore we did nothing. Most of the women of Afghanistan are still hidden from view behind mud-brick walls and blue polyester shrouds. Laura Bush lauds the "freedom" of Afghan women now that "democracy" has come to their country. She offers up empty rhetoric to fill the dead space around her husband's morally bankrupt presidency. I wonder, will we be just as stunned when our rights are taken away from us? I ask because it seems we're at one of those moments now, a moment when things could change drastically if we don't prevent it. And once the change happens, it takes more than translated abstract nouns to change it back.

Looking at my back door from inside the burkha.

The Falluja Nightmare and Our Unknown Numbers

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 03:10:45 GMT

S called me this morning, a relief. I assumed he had been out on missions and I was right. Hopefully he'll be able to call again in the next couple of days, but so much is uncertain that he could call again tomorrow or not again until next week. We talked about the absence of news from Afghanistan (and Iraq, for that matter) and how this makes me worry more because I'm never sure if the violence has occurred in his province or not. He hadn't heard about the UK soldier killed in Masar-e-Sharif yesterday, a town he'd heard was completely safe. We are living in this time of nanopods and laptop computers, yet there is still such a basic lack of information when it comes to this war.

And then there is Iraq. On Tuesday the nation mourned the 2,000th American soldier killed. Since then another eighteen have died. Eighty-five this month. We have become numb to it, clearly, and remain disinterested. I can't help but think this is a product of our abstraction of the war and the men and women who are fighting it. But then, perhaps it's even more banal, a simple reflection of our preference for meaningless, shiny fictions and their matching accessories available at our local Target stores. Libby may go down but it won't matter if we're still waging this war with no plan. He'll be just another crony caught for a moment only to be released back into the world with his own Fox TV show or Clear Channel radio program. I imagine he'll meet our other infamous traitors, Ollie North and Liddy, to compare show notes on Monday mornings at the corner deli, or perhaps via conference call while they're served their heart healthy oatmeal and black coffee by their loyal trophy wives.

It is all the more offensive after seeing Operation: Dreamland last night, a more pointed and direct film than Gunner Palace. The film follows one squad from the 82nd Airborne based in Falluja in the spring of 2004 before the Marines retreated then invaded again and flattened the city. The plan is nowhere, not on the ground with the squad, not in the officers' planning room. At one point we see the squad's leaders sitting around reviewing the past missions and the captain giving the presentation asks the group what exactly the squad is securing on these missions. Someone suggests the government, and the captain asks if they really are securing the mosques and the local leaders, and if so why since they aren't in any danger anyway. Then he asks if they are merely keeping themselves secure, and if that's not it, then what was the purpose of these missions. No one could answer him, and finally he answers it himself: "I don't know."

No one knows what the hell is going on. That sums up the agonizing truth in the film. The raids seem pointless, the missions without end. When we saw the planning room captain say he didn't know what the purpose of the missions his men were risking their lives to perform was, the entire theater let out a "humph" sigh, a resignation tinged with anger over the futility of it all. This futility wasn't lost on the men, of course, though most were steady in their assertion that they were "doing the job" and would continue to until they were out of the army. Getting out is no easy matter, as S and I can attest to. They coerce like crazy and then lay on the guilt. In one scene we see a room full of exhausted, fed-up soldiers while an officer stands in front of them making the pitch for reenlistment. He begins by asking who had already told their commanders they wouldn't sign back up and nearly the entire room raised their hands. Then he asked them if they had jobs lined up when they got home, whether they had paid off all their loans and car payments, whether they had a place to live or if they had to move back into their mama's house, and whether the same bad kids were still in their neighborhood, the neighborhood they escaped when they joined the military. Nearly everyone raised there hands again, a cue for a second officer to step up and continue the pitch. Afterwards Sgt. Pacheco, a medic from Chicago (who was at the earlier screening last night for Q&A -- unfortunately we missed him), said he was sick of the officers hounding them every day, making them go to meeting after meeting (with the ubiquitous, amateurish PowerPoint presentations S has told me about), when they'd already made up their minds to get the hell out. Yes, it is a "voluntary army" (except those stop-lossed soldiers who are included in the reenlistment numbers), but the amount of coercion is as prodigious as the number of lies told to soldiers to get them to reenlist, let alone to enlist the first time.

The film is unbelievably depressing. We see the escalating violence and distrust of the Iraqis during the film and aren't surprised when the ending credits tell us the city burst open in the months afterwards, the insurgency taking hold of the community and erupting in unbelievable violence. (The story of how we took the city back will be told one day, I suspect, and it may be another story that is impossible to find pride in even if its outcome was inevitable.) The men the film follows are outspoken politically and about as divided on the war as the nation is overall. Most of them came to the army because they didn't know what else to do with themselves and were worried that they'd end up in jail or worse. And all of the men in the squad were under thirty.

This is Chicago's national public radio station's fall fund drive so yesterday they had a "three hour marathon" of This American Life. One of the stories was about the Johns Hopkins study published in Lancet and released days before the election last year that estimated the number of civilian deaths since the invasion in 2003. The researchers, led by Les Roberts, estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died during the first year of the war and that the vast majority of violent deaths were caused by coalition bombs and bullets. Because of the timing of the study's release, and the fact that Roberts was outspoken against the war, the study was discredited in the press and given little coverage. The study was said to be deeply flawed because the methodology was corrupt and the samples weren't random, but as the This American Life story demonstrates, the study's methodology was sound and the samples were completely random. In fact, Roberts is the world's leading researcher on war-caused civilian deaths and his studies of Congo and Kosovo are widely cited across the political spectrum (and by the government). It is only his Iraq study, which used identical techniques as his others, that is flawed, a curious coincidence given how "we don't do body counts."

To be as fair as possible, Roberts didn't include numbers from Falluja, though they had surveyed that city. The numbers of civilians killed during the seige were so high Roberts feared they would have inaccurately skewed the other results, so they only averaged the deaths in the thirty-one other communities they surveyed. Watching Operation:Dreamland I thought about those high numbers. I thought about how so many Iraqi families were torn apart, and how so many soldiers came home with their minds impossibly heavy with nightmares of the civilians they had killed. Of the 100,000 dead, more than 50% were women and children.

It's not that the Pentagon intends to kill civilians. They just don't much care when they do. Marc Galasco, one of the people in the This American Life story, had helped the Defense Department come up with its "high-value targeting" in Iraq before the start of the war, their attempt to lower the number of civilian deaths and increase the disruption to military infrastructure. Galasco was amazed that the Pentagon had no interest in counting the number of civilian deaths seeing that it was the surest way to test whether their "high-value targeting" had worked. Now Galasco works for Human Rights Watch in Iraq tracking down how many civilians have died there, which just shows that fiction has nothing on real life.

We're still in the foggy days of these wars, when we're desperate to document what is going on as it happens, unable to process it all because it's just too soon. Some day the stories, the truths, shuffling beneath these documentations will be told. I wonder, what will our children say about these wars? Or will we still be fighting them twenty years from now?

And now that number is 2006

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 13:52:26 GMT

Because, Mr. President, there has to be a better way to bring our troops home.

Watch the ad here.

Then give to Operation Truth what you can spare to get this ad on the air.

A Milestone to Regret

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:55:29 GMT

2,000

2,000 men and women, sons and daughters, some brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, cousins and nephews and neices, some teachers and coworkers and lovers and exes, some neighbors and roommates and former neighbors and former roommates, some students, some joggers, some Doom players, some movie buffs, some poets, some boxers, some pilots, some knitters, some painters, some cooks, some bakers, some chocolate lovers, some anchovy haters, some fishermen and women, some swimmers, some afraid of the water, some who were afraid of love and some who fed off of it, some who told stories and some who listened, some who drank single malt whiskey and some who drank beer, some who had never lived away from their parents until they joined the military and some who had left many years earlier, some who lived in cramped city apartments and some who lived in suburban palaces, some who read the paper and some who did not, some who wanted revenge, some who dreamed about wide open spaces and some who dreamed of friendship, some who held hands in public and some who shied away from affection, some who shook out of anger and some who held it inside, some who whispered in their sleep and some who screamed loudly, some who believed in God and some who didn't, some who had never been outside of the US until their plane landed in Shannon then Kuwait then Iraq and some who swam across rivers to get to the US, some who were hated and some who were loved deeply, some who smoked and some who chewed, some who carried their stories in their back pockets and some who sent them through email or phone calls or the internet, some who loved hip-hop and some who loved classic rock and some who loved 'alternative' and some who loved salsa and some who loved opera and some who loved polka, some who bit their nails, some who flossed, some who loved the summer heat and some who loved the autumn chill, some who took pictures and some whose pictures were taken, some who were afraid, some who smiled easily and some who had to force it once in a while, some who believed in the power of lovemaking and some who believed in the power of sex, some who had spaniels or siamese or koi or iguanas or boas or toads or turantulas or turtles or hamsters or rabbits or canaries, some who were allergic to pets and some who were allergic to dustmites, some who were bastards and some who were bitches, some who were loyal and some who were backstabbers, some who were crazy with bravery, some who felt heavy with regret, some who did what they had to do, some who saved for tomorrow, some who bought their friends drinks even when they protested, some who knew how to install cabinets and software, some who had read the same books more than twice, some who could recite whole scenes from their favorite movies, some who could tell jokes, some who knew when it was time to leave, some who could dance, some who slept better during the day, some who thought heroically, some who believed in justice, some whose nights were riddled with nightmares, some who had only a few days left in Iraq and some who had just arrived, some who had voted, some who loved the color blue, some who loved gadgets, some who played guitar, some who sang beautifully and some who thought they sang beautifully, some who wrote thank you notes, some who had lost something dear to them, some who believed it was all good...

Operation Truth has begun an "Honor the Fallen" campaign to encourage newspapers to run stories of soldiers' deaths on the front page. You can join the campaign and send letters to your town's paper on Op Truth's website.

Remember after 9/11 when the New York Times ran detailed obituaries of everyone who had died that day? I remember them and I remember how much they affected me. They were meant to bring the human side to the tragedy to all of us and they did. Stories about foiled birthday surprises. Stories of falling in love. Stories of divorce and remarriage. Stories of hope and promise and disappointment.

It's time the stories of these 2,000 men and women, three-dimensional human beings, are told too. Imagine if the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune or the small town gazette ran detailed obituaries about these people who happened to be soldiers. Would we be okay with their deaths even though we know they could have been prevented? Would we be angry enough to stop the war?

Las Lloronas, The Crying Women

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 01:00:22 GMT

Coyolxauhqui, daughter of Coatlicue, as a broken woman at the base of Templo Mayor.

Las Lloronas/The Crying Women

As she cried,
she drowned her children,
wrung them breath-
dry in the river
after he left.

He left with cudgels, rifles, and short knives,
perhaps with another woman's
                                                wet
on his lips, she tells me.

I know about crying.
I tell her my words left
under river stones and broken-
down bridges failed
to come up that day.
I found only an inadequate list:
weep, wail, bawl, keen,
a collection of girl-words
soaked in absurdity.

Yes, I killed them, she tells me,
like a man, then I wept
like a woman.

We part at the end of the river
where the water turns
                                  brackish.

Her laments follow me
home, entangle in my damp
hair, sway me to sleep.

I wake when the night
                                   dawns
with a splatter of stars across the ink-blood sky.
Outside, the mourning
                                   doves speak little cries,
feed the young and feather-
cover their eyes. Tear-
stripped naked, I swim
in the river next to her, run
my fingers in the hair
of her first-born son
as he descends.

c Kate Ingold, November 2004, New Orleans

S and I spent the summer of 2003 in Oaxaca City, a colonial town of 75% indigenous population in the thick of the largest state in Mexico, the state Cortes described to the Spanish crown by crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it on a table. To walk through the mountains of Oaxaca, he said, was to walk through that crumpled parchment.

That summer I studied Spanish and S worked at an archaeological site on the road to Mitla about 35 miles outside of the city. The site was an ordinary household in a Zapotec suburb of 1,000 years ago, a collection of patios surrounded by rectangular structures each with the family's dead entombed beneath the patio and in front of an altar. Many of the men S worked with were from a nearby Zapotec village, Maquilxochitl, which means "Five Flower" in Nahuatl. Some day in the future, after he's done with this war, S will do his doctoral research in Maquilxochitl, where families live in the same patio-structure compounds their relatives did those years ago and where the tlyudas are made on adobe stoves fired by craggled mesquite.

I was flooded with the stories of the women I met there, particularly the women of Maquilxochitl who fed us stewed squash with onions, chile, and Oaxacan string cheese, and those miraculous tlyudas made from corn they'd ground themselves on volcanic metates. So many of the stories were about goodbyes. Women had said goodbye to their children years ago before the children went north to cross the border, and some hadn't seen them since. Others had said goodbye to their chidren before they had left to cross the border themselves, returning years later when their children were no longer children. One woman had four daughters and only one was still in Oaxaca. The other daughters were scattered from San Jose, California down to Baja and Mexico City, where one daughter worked in a plastics factory. This woman had crossed the border herself several times, outwitted coyotes and was beaten by one, but ended up coming back to Oaxaca for good and married one of S's good friends, Procopio. Her cousin crossed fifteen years ago and she never heard from him again. He was presumed to be dead.

How many have died in the river of two names, Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, or in the dusty, waterless desert? Can you imagine how many?

I had been reading about Mexico for a few years before that summer we spent in Oaxaca, including books about Mexico's rich religious and cultural heritage. The country is crawling with stories. legends, myths. When I got home, I started a series of poems about women facing what we face at this beginning of the third millennium, and how these stories relate to the histories of our anscestors and my own life. Las Lloronas is one of these poems.

I wrote this poem the day after S was "called up," one week and two days before Thanksgiving last year. They really did call. Early, before 7. We were both still in bed in our leaky New Orleans apartment because it was a Tuesday and neither of us had class. They called on the cell phone we shared and they told him he was to report to his base in Indiana the following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. We were supposed to leave that day for New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with S's family, but suddenly everything was uncertain, unknown. S was in his final semester of classes in his PhD program. In just a few months he was to take his comprehensive exams then his orals, and then the following autumn (right now in fact) we were to go back to Oaxaca where S was to begin a dig at the temples ringing the small chapel on top of Cerro Danush, the symmetrical mountain that sits prominently inside the village of Maquilxochitl, a mountain that the entire village ascends on May 3rd to celebrate the Festival of the Cross. Now we weren't even sure he'd be able to finish his semester. I was a full-time instructor at University of New Orleans and I knew I had to make some decisions too. Should I stay in New Orleans or go back to Chicago to be near my mother? This all happened in an instant, and as a stark reminder that nothing is constant, all is change, our lives were changed instantly.

Yes, you'd think that there would have been a little more consideration for national guard soldiers, an understanding that they would have to "tie up loose ends" and make arrangements at work, school, home. But no. There was none of that until S and the other four men who were called (the unit had been split up and splintered the previous August, with some of the group sent to Afghanistan and others ordered to stay home to help train new members) complained so bitterly they were given a reprieve. But this happened a few days later, just before we were to leave for New Jersey, and just after we called the airline to see if we could change our tickets (the answer was no, by the way). It was the first of several mid-play changes, some good, some not, that would define our next several months and demonstrate how absolutely incompetent and confused the military brass were.

After that call I yelled at S, told him he clearly didn't love me since he had put our relationship and our future in jeopardy for the army (why he was still in is for another day). I cried and yelled, then cried again. He said that of course he loved me and that he regretted this as much as I did. I had to get away from him. I was too angry, too upset. I went into our roommate Rebecca's room. She was awake and had her coffee, which was curious. Usually she woke much later, but she was studying for her comps too and at the side of her bed was a mountain of books she was studying from. Her days were beginning early and ending late as she filled out note cards and typed out synopses of anthropology and archaeology texts. I went into her room and she took me in her arms and said "What's wrong, honey?" and I told her and she cried with me.

That day S and I talked a lot. We talked about what would happen. We talked about how much we loved each other and how surprised S was because he was certain, dead certain, that Kerry would win and he wouldn't get called up. He apologized and apologized again, and then I forgave him.

The call had come after weeks of disappointment. The three of us were still in mourning over Kerry's loss, still stunned and stressed and dreading another four years with Bush in office. Election night we had sat together in the living room batting away brown june bugs and the occasional flying cockroach that had moved in through the open windows, and watched the results come in. When it started to look bad, Rebecca and I ran around the house and found things that represented the contested states: a Pretenders disc for Ohio; a chunk of cheese for Wisconsin; a book of poems by Florida poet David Kirby. Rebecca had spent eight years in West Africa working with Doctors Without Borders, so she gathered up her super-fine African juju sculptures like the two figures with nails and shanks sticking out of their bodies, and I gathered my Zuni fetishes (buffalo, toad, bear, Corn Mother). We placed it all on the table in the living room then rang the booty with La Virgen candles, curios, small bowls of our just-finished dinner, and several shots of tequila. Rebecca got sage out of the refrigerator and burned it, blew the smoke across the table and at the windows, and we both begged the spirits to help John Kerry win, to help all of us escape the Bush-born madness. As the night wore on and things got even more dire, we knocked on the door of our neighbor George, a voodoo practitioner who had helped Rebecca rid the apartment of evil spirits when she'd first moved in two years before. George wasn't home, which we should have taken as an omen, I guess. When we knew it was over, Rebecca went to her room and we crawled into our bed for a sleep deep enough, we'd hoped, to erase the night and start us over again.

Well, obviously it didn't work. S knew it wouldn't, but then he's much more practical than me. It was that morning after when I started to worry. I knew it would take more good juju than we had in our leaky apartment to prevent S from being called up. Three weeks later I was proven right.

The story of the La Llorona, the Crying Woman, comes from Mexico and it varies from the scorned harlot who kills her children out of revenge, to a scorned woman who kills her children to protect them from poverty, to a woman whose children are murdered by their father, to a woman who has a vision of her children being wisked away by floodwaters, only to wake up and find her nightmare had come true. In every version La Llorona dies, usually from her own hand, on the banks of the river that also took her children. For her crime she is condemned to die and to walk the banks as a ghost. In most versions of the story she feels regret and remorse for her rashness, and cries in longing for the children she will never see again. In the version of the story told around fires and at bedside by malicious babysitters, she roams the banks looking for children to snatch and take as her own.

When S was called up, I became a crying woman myself. The original version of the poem had allusions to the fact that we hadn't gotten pregnant yet (and that I therefore had no children to drown), but the wise ladies in my poetry workshop urged me to take that stuff out, and as usual they were right. But when I let loose the river inside of me and mourned for the forced separation that was to come, I felt an affecton for las lloronas who had come before me, and the thousands who are struggling with difficult goodbyes right now.

(I wonder, even, if Cindy Sheehan feels like la llorona too. She is trying to 'right' the wrong of her son's death, a death she feels all of us, including herself, are responsible for because we allowed Bush to be elected. She is wailing for her dead son on the banks of concrete rivers across the country.)

The photograph above is of Coyolxauhqui, the daughter and murderer of Coatlicue. She is part of the web of legends and myths that La Llorona is a part of. In this picture of the stone at the base of Templo Mayor in Mexico City, she is a broken woman, beheaded and shattered to pieces, the work of her just-born brother. Wikipedia has decent versions of the stories of Coyolxauhqui, Coatlicue, and La llorona.

I decided to post this poem and this story today after reading two excellent posts yesterday about Lashaun Harris, a severely mentally ill woman who drowned her children and who faces execution for her crime. Dr. Omed's wife Elsbeth has a powerful personal essay about living with a manic-depressive, knowing a man who'd "sacrificed his arms to a train," and the possibility for mercy. And Phila at Bouphonia talks about Harris and the question of hearing voices. Of course Lashaun is a version of la llorona and Coyolxauhqui (she is certainly a broken woman), and sadly, her fate may be the same as the women of those legends. She may not die by her own hand, but rather by the groping hands of the state.

S the Soldier, Still a Three-Dimensional Man

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 13:52:37 GMT

Here is S, a Soldier, seated behind a big gun. He's got a scruffy beard because the Special Forces don't demand a clean-shave; in fact, they prefer a "Talibeard" as a mercenary we know calls it. S sent this picture to me while I was in Houston volunteering at the Astrodome after Katrina. The thought of putting up a picture of a giant instrument of death was too much for me after seeing so much death live on CNN during those grainy days after the city flooded. But now here it is.

Yes, S is a Soldier, and I capitalize that on purpose. For a Soldier -- honorable, strong, patriotic -- is something to be admired and worshipped. Their Sacrifice is without end. They are valiantly defending Our Rights abroad, keeping Our Country safe from terror and oppression. They are willing to make the Ultimate Sacrifice so that we may live in Freedom here at home.

But is that all he is? To some, yes. In fact, to many. Soldiers are abstract notions that fulfill dark or light fantasies of what "Soldier" means to people who don't know any. They are inhuman things, not red-blooded, three-dimensional human beings, human beings who happen to be soldiers.

S is a man. He is a husband and a lover, an intellectual, a lacrosse player, a former chemist and a current archaeologist, a kickboxing champion, a fabulous cook and baker, a fair athlete who believes in playing for the game's sake, not just winning, a backyard mechanic (remember that water pump we replaced in Baja?) and an amateur plumber. He is a son and nephew and someday he'll be a father. He is a generous friend who will do whatever needs to be done, whenever you need it. If you're sick, he'll make soup. If you need to move, he'll help you pack. He is an expert, soon-to-be published writer and a teacher. He's even lectured in Spanish. He is loyal and he can fix anything, whether it be a mechanical problem around the house or a fracture inside my delicate heart. He is not afraid of a challenge, which is why he is a jump master with dozens of jumps behind him though as a kid he was afraid of heights. He is a wit and a serious debater. He knows how to be gracious to those he disagrees with, though if you challenge him to a fight, he'll give it everything he's got, which is a lot. He is tenacious. Tough. And he is the kindest man I've ever known.

S is all this. And he happens to be a soldier too.

Why was I so upset that the demise of Daniel's blog became a cause celebre on the internet yesterday? Because while I don't know Daniel nearly as well as I know S, he is still more than an abstract noun to me. He is an awesome writer and a fiance to Holly. He is a three-dimensional man who happens to be a soldier, and reluctantly these days.

I know it was all well-intentioned. And I know that it will help Daniel get a book deal, if he wants one. I know too that the internet is like a wild animal that becomes fixated on one thing until the next shiny object distracts the attention away once again. Sometimes that attention is good. Sometimes it's malicious. But always it abstracts and dehumanizes. It can create paper cut-outs where people once were, even when that was not the intention.

S is S because it's too dangerous for him to be fully identified on my blog. We have different last names, so though I'm open about who I am, he is still protected. I share his stories when he says I can. This is the first picture of him in uniform that he was comfortable with me posting, so here it is. S the Soldier with a scruffy "Talibeard," seated behind a big gun.

Okay, It's good

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 03:56:57 GMT

Matt at Tattered Coat emailed me to point out how wonderful all of this coverage of Daniel's blog is for any future book deals and how I clearly have a "protective urge." He's right. I've got that crazy loyalty thing. I get feisty and ready to fight (really) when I think one of my homies has been "wronged." I really ought to lay off because it's actually good. Especially since a lot of people really are reading Daniel's posts.

I have no idea how Daniel feels about this coverage, but Holly is ecstatic, and that's cool. Daily Kos! Democratic Underground!! It's fantastic that the story of his blog's demise has been so widely publicized. It's just too bad all of these folks weren't reading his blog regularly when he was still able to post.

If you haven't yet, go read his blog. Honest. You won't regret it.

All Shut Down (Completely Revised)

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:19:40 GMT

Please go read all of Daniel's blog, All the King's Horses, and then come back to read this.

Daniel's blog has been shut down by the military.

I've read Daniel's blog for months now and I consider him a friend. It saddens me to see a few in the liberal blogosphere decry the demise of his blog without actually reading his essays. Please do not make Daniel into a censorship martyr. Read his work!

The fact that Daniel's blog has been censored is not just sad because censorship is always sad. It's sad because Daniel is a damn fine writer and his blog was one of the best out there, soldier-written or not. I have a handful of actual blogs on my blogroll. I only visit a handful out of that handful every day and Daniel's is one of them. His stories are often hilarious and dark, just the way I like them. His satires are comparable to those of Lewis Lapham, in my opinion, and often even better. His writing is clear and concise. His rants are well thought out, honest, and most of all, heartfelt.

He's known about the risk this whole time and yet he's still blogged, which shows how brave a writer he is. Most bloggers blog anonymously, some without even revealing their real first names, though they do not write under the risk of being criminally charged, being ostracized, demoted, or given life-threatening orders. Not so with Daniel. Daniel has said what he thinks and said it well, and said it all as himself, Daniel Goetz.

That's why I will miss Daniel's blog.

We have all heard right-wing pundits (and right-wing soldiers) say countless times that soldiers are "defending our freedom of speech." It is horribly ironic that the free speech of the soldier, especially when he says anything critical of the military, the administration, or our policies, does not exist.

I understand the need to keep "sensitive" information off the web. And perhaps these commanders have read "critical" wrong, thinking it applies to writing that criticizes the administration rather than information essential to military operations. (It wouldn't suprise me given the misuse of words and the bleeding of meaning that have been trademarks of the past five years.) But having read everything Daniel has written this year, including Club Fed and Remember Petey, two highly amusing works of expert satire, I can say (and swear on the Bible, y'all!) that he did not once, not ever, give away any information about where he was, what his unit was up to, or how they did what they did. Nothing at all.

I can only guess that his blog has been shut down because he dared to be the "Vet of the Week" on Operation Truth two weeks ago. In his profile, he talked about how this is his second tour in Iraq and how his contract expired months and months ago, and how this breach of contract, and the behavior of the military, has left him feeling betrayed. He's not alone. That profile could have been written by S.

The sad truth is that the military can't recruit enough soldiers for a war the vast majority of Americans don't support being fought in a country where the vast majority want us to leave. The war was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. This administration doesn't believe in admitting mistakes, let alone correcting them. They would rather silence those who dare to point them out.

Bush Co. wants to believe it can control everything, including the criticisms thrown at it. But it can't. Sooner or later the stories will be told. I hope Daniel continues to chronicle his stop-lossed time in Iraq and that he comes home and puts it all together as a book. His stories are important. And he's just the writer to tell them.

I'll miss your blog, Daniel. Stay safe.

Making sense out of senselessness

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 19:39:41 GMT

I think I'm finally getting a handle on my house situation, this place that has left me tired and obsessed for weeks. Today a contractor who worked for my mom and her neighbor came by and he can do both of my projects, hopefully for a reasonable price. What a relief. I can't wait. Meanwhile, I talked to my neighbor last night and she made an effort this morning to shuffle instead of stomp, to turn the television down to a low murmur instead of the usual carry-through-the-house volume. I still woke up when she did, but I was able to fall asleep for stretches which helped a lot. I'm really tired of being tired. It's hard to write when my mind is soggy with sleep.

Since it is Thursday, there are outrages and outrages though they could have come yesterday and more could come tomorrow since that is the state of things right now. Crooks and Liars has video from Keith Olbermann/NBC about a FEMA whistleblower who was inside the Superdome during the Katrina debacle. He blackberried our despot Mike Brown about the growing desperation of the situation only to receive a brief email from Brown's press secretary saying how important it was for Brown to get a good dinner and how the restaurants in Baton Rouge were packed with all the New Orleanians swirling about. So why exactly hasn't he been criminally charged and why hasn't Chertoff been fired? And why oh why hasn't Bush been impeached? I know. Stupid, living-in-a-dreamworld questions.

On Bill Maher's show last night Larry Miller (who was hilarious) wondered why anyone has been surprised by the corruption in New Orleans that Katrina exposed because "the concept of corruption is part of the fabric of the city." He said visitors weren't offered keys to the city because "it's always open," and so it is. Now we know it's not just New Orleans that is open to thieves and plunderers, but the federal government as well. Even open to horse and pony show operators aching for a pot of gumbo and a whiskey-sauced bread pudding for dessert on a steamy August evening in Baton Rouge.

Last night I watched Voices in Wartime, a documentary about poetry of war and the Poets Against the War movement prompted by an invitation Sam Hamill received from Laura Bush. I wonder if Laura knows how much she's helped the world of poetry in the United States by being such a dolt. She asked poets to join her for a symposium about Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. What the hell did she expect? Apparently she hadn't actually read any of their work. If she had, she'd have noticed that they were rather progressively political poets, even Emily, and that if they were alive today they would have refused her invitation too.

The documentary isn't the best, but it is something. Later this month Occupation: Dreamland is playing at Facets Media Center. It sounds similar to Gunner Palace, though perhaps with more insight. The New York Times said it is"a compelling study of composure and decency in the midst of overwhelming pointlessness," which could describe so much of the absurdity this administration has produced as good-hearted, everyday Americans try to make sense out of senselessness in our wars abroad and here at home. Clif Hicks, Op Truth's newest Vet of the Week, tells his story of absurdity, and is it ever absurd:

My squadron lost three soldiers, one killed by an EID, the other two in a vehicle accident. They were riding in a humvee and a tank was coming down the road. Each vehicle had a headlight out and in the darkness they couldn't tell where the edge of the tank was. The two vehicles went right into each other and the tank killed them both...One of the duties my platoon was tasked with was to go around collective all sorts of information from local officials. We went to schools, water plants, gas stations, local police, etc. and had them fill out surveys and tell us what was going on and how we could help.

Well, during this time we were supposed to go around interviewing imams at all the local mosques. An 'imam' being the muslim equivalent of a christian preacher. The first imam we spoke to was murdered the next day. There had been a large crowd watching the whole thing as we did not enter the mosque for the interview. Well we went out the next day and interviewed two more imams in the same manner. They too were murdered the next day. I realized what was happening and told everyone what I thought. These men were being murdered by the insurgents for collaborating. I couldn't realize why, none of them were particularly cooperative, they were blatantly not happy about us being around their mosques, but they were killed just for speaking to us. We went out again several times that week with same results. Finally my lieutenant (a fresh fish butter bar just out of OBC) decided to tell our CO about this and these missions were put to a stop. The fifth imam was murdered that night.

Occasionally we would knock down a gate with a Bradley and raid a house, usually the wrong house, and when it was the right house the bad guys would already have caught wind of us and be long gone most of the time.

His story is a litany of pointless actions and an indictment of incompetence and foolish military hierarchy. He and his unit weren't allowed to eat in the KBR compound and were threatened with article 15s if they did, among other insanities. It is a really, really long list.

On a completely random note, Paula Zahn and CNN have just now discovered "cage fighting," the promoters' newest name for Mixed Martial Arts. When I first started kickboxing in the early 90s, an even younger kid at my gym who rode his skateboard everywhere and listened to Pink Floyd before every fight built an octagon in his mom's basement to grapple with friends. They used to compete in these "cage" matches held in bars and Catholic school gymnasiums. So Paula, "cage fighting" is nothing new.

Passion is enough

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 06:36:17 GMT

Last night I went to see Carmen at the Lyric Opera with my mom, Howard, and Howard's friend Chuck. Oh Carmen. The most passionate character in opera, and that says something given that opera, at least late 19th century opera, is all about passion. Carmen is a seductress, a tease, a talent beyond measure, and also a woman whose driving ambition is true, honest emancipation. I've seen this opera twice and I've had the pleasure of seeing Denyce Graves sing it both times, though it seems her voice has improved the past five years so much so that now it cascades into the auditorium and tumbles right into you.

Graves's Carmen is luscious and irresistable, and so in the end when she's left one broken heart and the cards have read death, death, death, condemning her and her broken lover to die, we root for her, the one who wronged, when he comes for her with a dagger strapped to his boot. Even as she taunts him and denies him in her falling lace mantilla, as she shifts across the bullring gallery gesturing to her new lover, the star-studded toreador, we want her to live even if it means Don Jose will die. She was cruel until the end, and yet we still love her.

There were half a dozen Carmens at the opera house, women in blood red flamenco skirts and laced-up corsets, their hair pulled back in buns with silk roses and just enough locks of hair loose from their moorings. This expression of passion unleashed, uncontrolled, and completely free of constraint, makes sense right now when it seems it's the 'passion of the christ' that more Americans care about.

Before the opera we met for dinner at Cyrano's, a charming French bistro on Wells in River North that has the best pommes frites this side of the Atlantic and homemade ketsup that once tasted makes eating Heinz impossible. Over dinner Chuck told us about his main passion, nanotechnology, which coincidentally is featured in Salon this month. Chuck is burning with hope for this technology, in part because he sees it as the actual fountain of youth, a way to make disease, and perhaps even death, obsolete. I questioned whether if we made old age and death things of the past we'd have to make birth also, since quickly we'd find our little planet even more serried. He answered that with nanotechnology we'd be able to populate the moon and other celestial bodies, making the issue of overpopulation obsolete as well.

With the example of Deep Blue and its slapping about of Kasparov in the late 90s, Chuck said that by 2045 nanotechnology will be to a point where there will be no separation between man and machine, but rather a melding of the two, not unlike the nightmares of Philip K. Dick. It is no nightmare to Chuck, though, who sees a future made brighter when we're all, regardless of race or class, implanted with miniscule chips holding all the knowledge of the universe, leading to breathtaking advances in knowledge and technology, advances so fast that we reach "singularity" when the changes happen at the same pace as time itself. The potentials for good are incredible, of course, but there are also potentials for bad, as the articles in Salon discuss. I pointed out how impossible it seemed that everyone in the world would have this nanotechnology within my lifetime given that most people live in mud-brick homes with packed dirt floors and no running water let alone electricity. I wondered, too, how we'd manage all this when we can't even get a handle on chronic hunger or AIDS or genocide or corporate-driven wars, and Chuck said that with nanotechnology there would be enough food for everyone and disease would be something of history. There is enough food for everyone right now, at this very moment, I told him. We're just lacking the political will and cooperation to get it to the people. The desire, the passion, for power is extreme enough that politicians across the world leave millions to suffer if it means fatter pockets for them.

I can see how intoxicating the hope of this technology could be, and how much more comfortable it would be to deny how this same technology could take us down an even darker road than the one we're already on. The lessening of human suffering has always been the promise of technology. The Salon piece points out, though, that right now most of the money being funneled into nanotechnology research is for the military (surprise!), including the creation of uber soldiers with artificial muscles and uniforms that could mend wounds on the battlefield. Sad, isn't it, that we can imagine a suit that performs surgeries but we can't imagine a future without war.

One of my hopes about this cyber-future is the role of the arts. I said that perhaps, finally, the arts would be valued as they should be because they would be the one area of human experience and intelligence that computers couldn't compete with. Chuck said that they could, and that in fact one day computers would create better art than humans are capable of, including poetry. I can only think this is because Chuck doesn't know much about poetry. How can a computer replicate passion when it is passion that is the most unpredictable, most irrational side of us? I'm not sure I want to live in a future without decay and death (we could alleviate suffering without turning ourselves into meaningless machines, couldn't we?), and I'm completely certain I don't want to live in a future without passion, especially a future peppered with "perfect" wars.

Chuck is an optimist, sees only the good and not the bad that can come of our out-of-control technology, and perhaps it's a reflection of my state of mind these days that I see possibilities in all of their dark and somber shades. But his optimism is also pragmatic and admirable. Besides the nano-obsession, Chuck is a real estate developer and all of his upcoming projects are "green," buildings that will sell electricity back to Com Ed's grid and will be built with eco-friendly materials. It sounds so exciting that my mom may buy one and move. She's been thinking about moving for years, and here is this, a green condo in the middle of the city. His other project is to do large-scale affordable housing, again all green, that will be targeted to low-income families and former public housing residents. There are vacant lots scattered across the city -- some neighborhoods have more vacant lots than full ones -- and the thought of them being green, sustainable (no utilities!) houses for our most vulnerable neighbors is truly exciting.

So then it is passion that drives all of us, even the nano-developers who see passion expressed in deathless soldiers and encyclopedic minds.

I've had such a culture-rich week: an opera, two plays (including Tennesse Williams' "Orpheus Descending" -- miraculous!!), and a couple of books. I'm working through a stack of new memoirs. I read Persepolis Vols. 1 and 2 by Marjane Satrapi, and also Satrapi's Embroideries, three memoirs in the graphic novel form about Satrapi's life as a progressive Iranian woman during the height of the Islamic Revolution. The books chronicle her life and give insights into the paperclip-curved shifts from dictator to intellectual revolution to religious overthrow that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The books are matter-of-fact and quick, but also funny and heartwrenching. And just yesterday I finished Jason Christopher Hartley's Just Another Soldier, a blog-turned-book by a former national guard soldier who spent a year in Iraq as an infantry soldier. I'd read Hartley's blog a little before it was taken down by his commander (which led to his demotion) and so I expected the book to be more than just a recantation of events, but rather a true memoir with insights into his heart. Instead, it is a recantation with only hints at that heart, more a blueprint for a future book than a book itself. I kept thinking about Tobias Wolff's In Pharoah's Army and how he needed more than a dozen years to process his war experience and turn it into a book. I don't think everyone needs that much time, but in this case I'd have appreciated a little more time and a little more depth. I think he's got it in him so perhaps the next book will be better.

In sharp contrast, I've just begun reading The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir of the death of her husband in December, 2003. I've only read the first few chapters and already it's full of insight, superfine prose. She finds the meaning in every last detail and the passion along with it. I think I will zip through this book because it's so easy to read, even if what she's writing about is so painful.

S is back at his tiny fire base, the special forces outfit that is fully equipped with wireless internet even though it's in the middle of nowhere. I talked to S tonight briefly via Skype and he thinks I should write a novel about this year, and perhaps he's right. After tonight's JOT writing group at the library in Uptown, I'm in the mood to write poetry again, inspired by the writers I met whose lives are complicated beyond measure. One writer is in hospice, dying of leukemia, and still he writes. He submits work each week to be critiqued by the group and returned to him by the workshop leader.

Perhaps passion is enough. At least for the Carmens of the world.

Our Waterlogged Carousel, Spinning into Oblivion

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 17:03:00 GMT

How about war with Syria? Anyone? Anyone?

It seems we're already "engaged" on the Iraq/Syrian border:

A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials.

[...]

Some other current and former officials suggest that there already have been initial intelligence gathering operations by small clandestine Special Operations units inside Syria. Several senior administration officials said such special operations had not yet been conducted, although they did not dispute the notion that they were under consideration.

Whether they have already occurred or are still being planned, the goal of such operations is limited to singling out insurgents passing through Syria and do not appear to amount to an organized effort to punish or topple the Syrian government.

And you thought I was joking.

I know, I know. You're saying to yourself that we already have a shortage of troops in the overstretched military, that we're already spending billions that we don't have (and that we're borrowing from China) to sustain our ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the corporate pillaging in the Gulf Coast, and you're wondering how we can afford, in the fullest sense of that word, yet another war. And I say to you, have faith! Faith in our president and his leadership!! With God telling him what to do he will not lead us astray.

Is it just me or is it becoming increasingly difficult to write about politics? I feel like I write the same argument over and over again in response to the same outrageous actions by the administration, and nothing ever changes. It's as if we are on a carousel in the middle of the drowned Ninth Ward, fighting the waters slapping all around us just as the mad carnival operator operates the machine with a remote control high up in his Blackhawk enjoying every minute of our suffering. I read a comment today on another blog about how evil homosexuality is but how it's okay if the army turns their blind eyes from gay soldiers who have been activated for Iraq, even if those soldiers have been open about their homosexuality and therefore have violated the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Several commenters even said that gay soldiers fighting in a war zone are "patriotic" but that when they get back from their war service they should be "prosecuted" and given a dishonorable discharge because "their lifestyle is evil." There are still neanderthals out there that think this way.

And then there was the comment on Op Truth from a soldier who participated in Bush's Q&A the other day that was "outed" by the AP as being staged. The soldier said that he and the others weren't prodded at all, that they are firm supporters of the war in Iraq, and that they are "preserving YOUR freedom of speech." I have no doubt that this soldier, and probably the other nine who were handpicked by the military to talk to the president, is behind the war. And I have no doubt, too, that the vast majority of soldiers who are serving in Iraq are "for the war" when their superiors are standing next to them or behind the cameraman facing them, and that many remain supportive even when they get home and get the hell out of the military. This doesn't mean that tens of thousands of soldiers aren't against the war, but who can deny that many are for it? When they are trained to fight in wars and, especially the younger ones, are eager to 'test' their training in the field, it's not exactly a surprise. I also have no doubt that not a single soldier fighting in Iraq, not a single soldier who has died in Iraq or lost a limb in Iraq or lost his or her mind in Iraq, is or was "preserving" my freedom of speech.

The carousel spins and spins, waterlogged and rotten.

And speaking of the Ninth Ward and Lakeview and New Orleans East, apparently animal rescue workers are finding more dead than alive, except for the feral dogs roaming the streets and no doubt feasting on the corpses of their dead cousins and neighbors. I wonder how many of these wild dogs became wild the past month and a half and how many were already wild, members of the roving bands we'd encounter walking our dog down Carondelet and driving down Louisiana Avenue or even Napoleon. Sometimes the dogs still had their leashes attached. Many had remnants of collars, but many more had no leash, no collar. They were pure-bread dogs and mongrels, the females with fat nipples hanging down toward the ground, the males free to piss on every patch of "who" grass along the crackled sidewalks. They were sometimes intimidating, their free-spirit struts and power in numbers, and our dog Casey would breathe heavy until they passed or we made it home. The first pack of wild dogs we saw on our trip to New Orleans before deciding to move there, the same trip we heard from the real estate agent (who was, in theory, trying to sell us a house) that any house would "get flooded and get termites," and probably have to be shorred up, and the same trip where we saw then-mayor Marc Morial on our B+B room television set standing before a green-screened animated computer graphic of the city filling with water like a baby's bath tub under the spout, and telling us that the levees along the lake were certain to be breached and overflowed from even a category 4 hurricane. I remember S turned to me when we saw the dogs and said, "I feel like I'm in Mexico," and after Mayor Morial's half hour plea to get the hell out of the city if he tells you to, "We are definitely not buying a house down here."

One Saturday when we lived on Magazine Street near the "dog park" levee at the turn of the river, we encountered a yellow/brown dog hanging out at the gravel parking lot next to an abandoned, condemned shop. The dog was clearly abandoned too, and was making a home for himself in the upturned insides of the building that just a few days before had been torn apart by a drunk driving a pick-up (the driver had plowed into the building, scraping two cars parked there and barely missing ours, and then abandoned his car and fled. Since it was New Orleans, it took about two weeks for the truck to be removed and the wall to be patched up with plywood.) The dog wasn't quite feral yet when we first saw him. He accepted food and water from us and didn't growl. We called the humane society (the police didn't have a K-9 or animal control unit. At least that's what they said when I called.) and were told that it would take at least two weeks for someone to come for the dog because there were so many reports, always, of near-feral dogs and they were horribly understaffed. The man on the phone told me we had two options: feed the dog and hope for the best, that the dog could survive the two plus weeks it would take for a professional to collect him, or take the dog in. We couldn't do the latter -- our leaky apartment was already too small for my husband and I and our dog -- so we kept feeding the animal, but within a week he was gone, and I'm quite certain he wasn't picked up by SPCA. He just joined the others, leashed or not, to hunt for rats in the bushes and undergrowth of New Orleans, or take a spin on that waterlogged carousel.

So my cousin Bobby couldn't come up this weekend after all. He was offered a job he couldn't refuse. I'm completey excited for him and I don't mind waiting until S comes home to install our new kitchen. Bobby and his wife have started their own housebuilding business and they break ground on their first spec-house in just two weeks. They both have to keep their regular jobs -- with four kids between them they really have no choice -- and any extra income from overtime weekend jobs helps a lot. Oh well! I know "we can do that," and I don't much mind waiting. I've lived with this kitchen for six years, so what's a few more months?

This means that I can enjoy this beautiful fall day, though I'm not sure how I'll do that. S is stuck in Kabul for another couple of days, away from his cold-weather clothes and he's already sick. I'm sure the depression he's dealt with ever since landing back at Bagram doesn't help. He knows it's only a handful of months, but every day feels long and those months seem impossibly so. Hopefully he'll be able to call again today. For that reason I selfishly wish he could stay in Kabul, even if he was stuck for the next few months with the "mofrakies" he's dealing with there (or the "PX soldiers" as my cousin Bobby, a former Blackhawk pilot, calls them). It's so wonderful to hear his voice, even if it is crackled with static and delayed from its long travel up to space and back down again.

Warning: a stolen post coming up

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 14:25:34 GMT

Agit, formerly of Agitprop, has a new blog, Pime Forest Collective. And yesterday he posted this:

Word of the Day: Kakistocracy

kak·is·toc·ra·cy

NOUN: Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.

ETYMOLOGY: Greek kakistos, worst, superlative of kakos, bad; see caco-+ -cracy.

EXAMPLE:

For all of your wordsmiths out there, Wikipedia reminds us not to confuse "kakistocracy" with "kleptocracy," but they note the two aren't mutually exclusive since incompetent rulers can also be greedy thieves.

Sounds like a few we know, doesn't it?

Thank you, Agit. Your post was just too funny. I had to post it here.

(Eew. It just occurred to me that now I have to look at these three mugs for the next fifteen posts. I'm not sure I can handle that. If it's too much, I'll take it down. They give me the willies!!)

The Horrific Face of One-Party Rule

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 14:19:09 GMT

Bob Herbert, whose column is only available on-line through Time Select, nails it today by taking to task the "liberals" who are "no longer hopeful" that Bush will address poverty and race when dealing with the Katrina disaster. He questions how anyone could have believed a word Bush said in front of the cathedral at Jackson Square those weeks ago:

As the president spoke, it never occurred to me that anyone would buy into the notion that Mr. Bush and his supporters would actually do something about poverty and racism. Someone who believed that could probably be persuaded to make a bid on eBay to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

Mr. Bush is the standard-bearer par excellence of his party's efforts to redistribute the bounty of the U.S. from the bottom up, not the other way around. This is no longer a matter of dispute. Mr. Bush may not be the greatest commander in chief. And he may not be adept at sidestepping the land mines of language. ("I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here.") But if there's one thing the president has been good at, it has been funneling money to the rich. The suffering wrought by Katrina hasn't changed that at all.

As usual, Bob Herbert is right.

As I've said before, I think of the Bush administration's privatization schemes as a gangster-style money laundering system: take money from the people, filter it through government, then hand it out to corporations, all the time wearing the pastor's cloak to lend "legitimacy" to your actions. They are pillaging our country in the same fashion the PRI pillaged Mexico (and as it continues to today). Last week I heard on Chicago NPR's WorldView (an outstanding show, btw) that the US now ranks third in economic disparity and corruption, under Mexico (#1) and Russia. We are going through a dramatic "Mexicanization," which certainly doesn't bode well for our future seeing that Mexico is going through a transformation too, what Margarita calls "Colombiazacion," as the government is being taken over by drug cartels. Frankly, I don't see us too far away from that, it's just that our drug cartels don't peddle in heroin and cocaine but oil and other natural resources, including human beings.

The Chicago Tribune ran a series last week, "Pipeline to Peril," about KBR's subcontracting for third world labor in Iraq. The series focused on twelve Nepalese workers who were kidnapped and executed by insurgents on the road to Baghdad from Jordan. Most had been promised high-paying jobs in luxury Jordanian hotels by labor brokers who took $3,000+ brokerage fees from each of the men in exchange for the "opportunity." The average annual salary in Nepal is about $270, so the families of these men had to borrow a decade's worth of salaries (some at 36% interest) to pay the fee, only to have the men end up in Jordan and told there was no work there after all. It's a horrendous story and not so different from what is happening now in New Orleans, except the Ecuadorian men my friend Lisa met are still alive. Apparently, though, slavery (or at least indentured survitude) is making a come back wherever we're "rebuilding".

Like Herbert, I am shocked when anyone trusts anything Bush says. And frankly I'm insulted when a liberal claims to. When have Bush's words jived with his actions? Not once! Instead, it is nationalistic rhetoric laced with religiosity delivered on a patriotic, well-lit set, bleeding the language of all meaning through his repetitive use of a handful of words and phrases. Herbert calls the Bush cabal a "regime," which is more appropriate than "administration." Our one-party rule is becoming increasingly similar to those of other totalitarian regimes, which seems to suit the ruling party just fine. They see no disconnect between "democracy" and one-party rule. If Stalin had "state-capitalism," what do we have when the state funnels money from the people to well-connected corporations? Has such a monster been named yet?

I lost hope years ago that Bush et al would suddenly reform and see the light on any issue, let alone the important ones. He "took responsibility" for the government's negligent response to Katrina by acccepting Brownie's resignation then quickly turning a blind eye to Chertoff's hiring of Brownie as a consultant. Apparently Bush knows we are fools. A few mentions in a column or two, and then we're on to the next photo-op. He can do this without worry of ramifications because we are living in a state not so different from other totalitarian regimes where there are no real checks and balances. Last night MSNBC was back on Aruba. You'd have thought we'd left Iraq months ago and all was peaceful around the world, not that there had been more killed in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday, or that tens of thousands had been killed in an earthquake in Pakistan.

I'll say I was suckered the past couple of weeks into thinking our national attention had changed, that maybe, just maybe, enough people had woken up to the truth to force our news agencies and politicians to start talking about what's important. But perhaps optimism is an American trait, something given to me simply by this accident of birth. Clearly it is irrational in the face of this one-party rule.

I'm in the middle of kitchen redo preparations, which has left me with less time to write. I''ve posted an ad for the cabinets and I've cleaned out half of them. Today I clean out the rest. My cousin Bobby and his wife are coming up tomorrow evening and we get to work on Saturday. I'll post before and after pictures. We don't have all of the wall cabinets in yet (two are missing -- good for me, one of them wasn't in our plan, and since it was the designer's oversight, we don't have to pay for it!), but we have all of the floor cabinets, so I ought to have a working kitchen within a week or so. What an adventure.

I've already got another home improvement project in my sights. I have a new neighbor upstairs and she has no carpets. She gets up about 6 every morning, so now I do too. The sound is unbelievable. I hear the clickety-clack of her heels, of course, but also the opening and closing of drawers, the hyper patter of her yellow lab, the low murmur of her morning television fix. This place has very thin ceilings. I don't know how I'm going to fix it (or how we're going to afford it), but I'm going to start asking around seriously and see if I can get some material prices. Perhaps S and I can do it together next year when he's home. Right now he's at Camp Julien in Kabul which is being torn down now that the Canadians are moving out. He's living in a deconstructed base just as I'm living with a deconstructed kitchen! Soon he'll be returning to his fire base near the border and then it will be time to worry again...

Violence Erupts

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 02:44:43 GMT

The earth opened up in Pakistan and 20,000 or more are dead. First we offered $100,000 in aid, then we were shamed into giving $50 million, a substantial sum though only one-third of the $148 million we gave in military aid this year. (There is always money for guns and bullets, only less for bottled water and medical supplies). Right now hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping without shelter in a mountainous place that nurtures chilly winds this time of year. Doctors Without Borders has sent teams and supplies and they need our help.

Across the border in Afghanistan, five suicide bombers have blown themselves up in two weeks, a chinook has crashed, and another US soldier has been killed along the eastern border. Iraq is, perennially, Iraq, where every day brings more despair, more tragedy. Most Americans are against that war, but does it matter? The violence continues, more and more people die, more families are torn apart by the deaths of those they love and our president continues to offer empty platitudes, desperate calls for patriotism. He is trying to convince himself, no doubt, just as he is trying to convince us. Doesn't he know we already know the truth?

In Guatemala, the clouds erupted in a flood of tears, leaving hundreds buried in rivers of mud. This time last year the story was drought, showing that April does not own the market on cruelty.

Many of our water-soaked neighbors in Louisiana and Mississippi are still suffering on this Columbus Day, or Indigenous Peoples Day, including the United Houma Nation. Katrina and Rita left nearly 5,000 of their tribal members homeless and many others unable to inhabit their homes. Organizations like Veterans for Peace have been helping them, but not the Red Cross or FEMA, who has only worked with a handful of families so far. You can help them directly here.

On Democracy Now today, the United Houma Nation's Principal Chief, Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, talked about the troubles her tribe has faced these past five weeks and why Christopher Columbus, the Italian adventurer working for the Spanish crown who never set foot on the land that would become the US, should not be honored with a national holiday. "Let's face it," she said, "Columbus was a slave trader and an Indian killer...This shouldn't be a day of celebration, this should be a day of mourning."

And so it is.

Temper That Heart (the links are fixed!)

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:55:41 GMT

I've realized that I'm becoming angry again. I'm not surprised; I'm missing S badly and it seems when I do I lash out at those around me, even those I don't actually know. I've gotten snippy in comments on other blogs (not here, because my snippy comment to one wingnut was appropriate, thank you very much!), and that's not good. I need to find myself again. This afternoon I'm meeting with my former co-workers at the Neighborhood Writing Alliance. We're hoping to find a new location for a workshop that I'll facilitate. Their workshops are brilliant, really. They are free and open to all adults in the city. They're held in neighborhood locations that don't require much travel for the writers. They're based on the idea that "every person is a philosopher" and all work is valid. As a facilitator, I won't "teach" but rather make a safe place for everyone to share their poetry, prose, rants, snippets without fear of ridicule. Later, work by every writer who participates will be published in NWA's quarterly magazine, the Journal of Ordinary Thought, should they want to be published. This little magazine has won two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards (one when I was ED), going against well-known journals like Another Chicago Magazine and Rhino. And in support of this magazine and the workshop, our group will host readings that are free and open to the public, where writers can meet one another, exchange ideas, and share their work with family, friends, and strangers. Cool, huh?

As usual, there's some fine writing floating through cyberspace:

Sam at Feral on loss and laundry (beautiful);

Clayton at Operation Eden on Charity Hospital, New Orleans, and the "Third World version" of America;

Rob at Realtique on cleaning house, rescuing pets, and being harassed by NOPD;

Harry Connick, Jr. at Habitat for Humanity on humanely rebuilding New Orleans;

Yan at Glutter on dissent and censorship, American-style;

Joe the Heretik on the "Tragedy of the Real" in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan;

and a shout-out to Daniel at All the Kings Horses, whose name and writing I came across at n+1.

Last night I saw Bill Maher's Real Time and Salman Rushdie asked what the difference was between yellow and orange fear, the daily alerts put out by what Rushdie calls Bush's "Ministry of False Alarms." I was shocked to find myself agreeing with nearly everything Andrew "Sully" Sullivan said. Ann Coulter was on too, but really, is there anything to say about her that hasn't already been said? The fact that she's still invited to be on television shows all that's wrong with our country.

I need to erase her face from my memory if I'm ever to get past this angry phase. Temper that heart, girl!

The Uncertainty of It All

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 16:12:38 GMT

Last night I saw Copenhagen at the TimeLine Theatre on Wellington Avenue on the border of Lakeview in northern Lincoln Park. The play, by Mark Frayn, attempts to reconstruct a meeting between two physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in German-occupied Copenhagen in 1941. Bohr, the "father of atomic phsyics," was a mentor to Heisenberg, who authored the "Uncertainty Principle" which according to the notes (I'm no physicist, so please bear with me!), says that we can't know both the position of a particle and it's velocity simultaneously. Heisenberg stayed in Germany during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, working for the German government at the university in Leipzig, while Bohr was forced to flee from Denmark by the Germans because of his Jewish ancestry. In the course of a short visit between these two old friends, a conversation ensued that may have changed the course of World War II, though the details of the conversation are to this day unknown.

It is the question of this uncertainty, the uncertainty of what the two men talked about that afternoon, that is the crux of the play. Heisenberg stayed in Germany and worked for the Nazi regime, developing a nuclear reactor but no weapons. Bohr fled to the US in 1943 and ended up working at Los Alamos and ultimately on the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago this year, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In the play, Bohr and his wife challenge Heisenberg (in the reconstructions of the visit and perhaps in the afterlife -- the opening scene has Margrethe, Bohr's wife, talking about how they are dead now and finally safe to tell all) and accuse him of trying to develop the bomb for the Germans. Heisenberg, who never developed the bomb and claimed to have stayed in Germany to maintain control over Germany's program as to ensure they never did develop nuclear weapons, challenged Bohr to defend his role in developing the bomb and unleashing it on the world. During that afternoon in 1941, Heisenberg supposedly asked Bohr what moral responsibility scientists had during times of war (basically if their loyalties should lie with humanity as a whole or with their country) and the question alone made Bohr think Heisenberg was trying to find out if the Allies were developing the atom bomb and admitting that the Germans were. In the end, Heisenberg was villified for working with the Germans and Bohr and the other Allied scientists were seen as heroes for developing and dropping the atomic bomb. The play challenges us to review this logic by showing both men as they question their own roles and the consequences of their actions. Heisenberg, who by living in Germany throughout the war saw the destructive power of conventional bombs, said he would never have developed the bomb because its victims "could have been my widowed mother...my wife, my son." The two wonder if there will one day be a quantitative physics, one that decides how many are too many and when horrors are justified.

During intermission, my mother and her friend and I talked about the state of uncertainty in our country right now, and our seemingly limitless tolerance for chaos. Her friend said that he thought the neocons, through privatization and wars of choice, are trying to "starve the beast" of government and make it completely ineffective and bankrupt, as Grover Norquist has proposed. I argued that though their rhetoric talks about this it isn't what they actually want, and that instead of dreaming of some sort of libertarian/anarchic hollow government, the neocons actually want our government to be a capitalist/conservative version of the Mexican PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled the country for nearly a century until Vincente Fox was elected in 2000. The PRI is still very much in control and are poised to take back the presidency next year. Unlike the dream of teeny tiny government, the PRI believe in gangster government, one that is about laundering money, filtering it from the people to the corporations and their elite directors. Our government is doing the same thing. We have the largest deficit in our nation's history, yet we have an atrocious lack of services and support. Our government is growing monetarily in ways few "conservatives" could have fathomed five years ago, and most of the money is going to private corporations, subcontractors, who do the jobs goverment used to do less efficiently and clearly at a higher cost. It is a brilliant money-laundering scheme: tax the people, putting a higher burden on the middle class and working poor, and spend that money on corporate contracts and handouts. Say that it is through privatization that a more "lean" government will be produced, and convince legions of "conservatives" that it will lead to "smaller" government while growing government spending exponentially. The money changes hands seamlessly from the people to the government to the corporation, therefore "cleaning" it no differently than Al Capone did in the 1930s or Salinas in the 1990s when he sold Mexico's resources for a handful of campaign contributions. My mom's friend said that this made no sense because it wasn't sustainable -- eventually the system would collapse and the elites would suffer too -- but I pointed out that it seemed it was sustainable, since Mexico, though it is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, goes on and on with its elites gaining more power and more money even as the average person continues to suffer.

If we are going through a "Mexicanization," then our future is even more bleak than we can imagine, seeing that Mexico is going through its own transformation, its "Colombiazacion" as the drug cartels take over law enforcement and other governmental positions. Imagine a future like Colombia's present. My only hope is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to politics and economics too, and that because we're in the middle of this thing we can't know how fast we're going, so maybe we're not careening off the cliff as we seem to be but rather taking a slow enough sail we can turn ourselves around before it's too late. I'm becoming more of a cynic, but I have to have some sort of hope.

Yes, the uncertainty of it all. I talked to S yesterday morning and he's back in Kabul where he'll be for about ten days before heading back to his FOB near the Pakistan border. He told me that he went to take out $200 from his account and was told that he had to have a "permission slip" from an officer E-7 or higher. A permission slip to take out his own money that he's earned!!! It's so completely outrageous and it's new. Before he left for his two week R+R, no one needed "permission" to access their own bank accounts. Also new are soldiers wearing electronic monitoring anklets. He saw two on base yesterday. Apparently they are under house arrest at home, but that doesn't preclude them from being called up for duty in Afghanistan. What the hell is going on?!

We're both rather down these days and our conversation was pretty brief. "I'm feeling pretty bad," he told me, "so I'll have to call you tomorrow. I just want to go to sleep." The initial rebound was easier this time, but I think we're both feeling our loneliness more acutely because we had so much fun together. Two weeks out of an entire year is not enough. We're holding onto the certainty (false, perhaps) that he will be home by mid-February or maybe sooner if by some miracle Afghanistan settles down between now and then. He's ready to come home. And I'm ready to have him home again for good.

A few good reads and links

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 02:35:29 GMT

As usual, a few good reads out there in the blogosphere these days:

Phila at Bouphonia lays out a pandemic flu scenario that is the stuff of nightmare. Sadly, he's probably not far off from what will happen should the avian flu spread and evolve to grotesque proportions. As if there weren't enough to worry about these days! Yikes.

If you missed poet Sharon Olds' letter to Laura Bush, read it here. She was invited to come to the White House and she refused.

Diane at DED Space points to another Katrina-related loss, the death of chef Austin Leslie. I shook his hand a few years ago at Jacques-Imo's. His fried chicken really was the very best. I bought his cookbook and S attempted the gumbo. First time he burned the roux, the second time didn't cook it enough. It's just a matter of time, though, before S masters it. I wonder how many were lost in the days after Katrina, killed indirectly by the stress and horrors of the storm. Leslie was rescued from his roof, taken to the Superdome, and finally evacuated out of Louisiana. It was clearly, sadly, too much.

Doc, marooned on the broken blog isle Sam has on her site, takes a cue from my master's thesis and improves on it: The Spiro site is now a State Park and closes before sunset, but I'd like to lie on my back on top of a mound on a clear night, to see their stars, and the spaces between their stars, the stars the long dead people mapped their myths on. Surely, some of our stars are the same, and some of our dark spaces, too. I feel honored to be honored by him.

Our president is now counting plots we've supposedly stopped, trying to distract us, again, from the reality all around us, as another soldier died in Iraq, making the total now 1945. I'm becoming so pessimistic these days, as the number goes up and our country continues to be governed by one incompetent party.

Daedalus at Washington Rox talks about surrealism and corporatism in an excellent post about the abstraction of war. S and I talked a bit about abstraction last week, though not in the political sense. He bought a copy of Claude Levi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning, a collection of addresses the structural anthropologist gave in the 1970s. I read it one afternoon and was struck by his dualist approach to myth and culture, and how he made no mention of the abstract nature of myth. I started thinking about myth as abstraction and how abstraction can be closer to "truth" than strict representations of "reality." Writers often talk about the truth of fiction, how it is through story that the heart is revealed. The same is true of abstract art, I think. A realistic painting of a bridge over the River Seine, say at twilight, shows the bridge and river as they appeared, but may not show the truth of the bridge and the river: the lovers who have crossed it; the blood that has spilled into it during the revolution, during everyday crimes; the salty tears that have added to its flowing waters; the joys and conversations and awkward silences that have happened in houseboats along the river's edges or on cruising boats as they passed under the changing light; all that has happened under the bridge, the scrapping up of foodstuffs by those who are sleeping there, the sharing of half-burned cigarette butts, or a stack of newspapers held down by a chipped-edged coffee cup. Through abstraction of color and shape, some of these truths can be revealed to us, even as they aren't shown representationally. To me, myth is no different than this. The most moving myths touch us in ways straightforward recantations cannot. Myths often have only a loose basis in "reality" but they often demonstrate more clearly the contradictions in life, the emotional renderings that are harder to show in strict historical accounts.

I'm not sure how this relates to the wars and the hurricane and our crooked leadership, but perhaps that is because right now we are in the documentation phase of history, too busy trying to record what is happening around us as it comes at us at this flushed, information-age pace. In the coming years we'll be translating it all through abstraction, revealing the truth hidden beneath the facts.

Katrina and the War on the Poor

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 23:55:49 GMT

First LBJ and then Reagan had the "War on Poverty," but we all saw it for what it was, a war on the poor. Twenty-five years later, and here we are with an ever-rising percentage of us living below the poverty line, tens of millions without health care, and all making a wage nowhere close to life-sustaining. It took a disaster of epic proportions, and the disturbing images that it produced, for us to start talking about poverty again. All over the place are little hints and discussions about the role of class and race in the mess left from Katrina, and what role both should play in the rebuilding of New Orleans. Seeing that NOLA is one of the most corrupt cities in the country, making even the corruption of Chicago pale in comparison (well, maybe not pale), and that it has long been run by and for elites (first white, now mixed with the "talented tenth" of the black creole population), it will be a miracle if the city included any of its tens of thousands of poor citizens in the decisions being hatched out over martini lunches right now.

Salon ran a two-part roundtable discussion on how to rebuild, and I thought this from Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, was a highlight:

The television coverage of Katrina's impact on New Orleans, for the first time, showed the American people the reality of black poverty in this country. The American people were shocked and embarrassed. The last time the country had a sustained glimpse into the conditions in black America was during the civil rights movement -- then, however, the cameras captured the determination of black leaders and the courage of the young civil rights workers. This time it was the face of black poverty directly. Despite some early attempts on the part of some media to turn the victims of the hurricane into lawless vandals, what the American people saw was individuals and families and community members, just like themselves, trying to do the best they could for their friends, relatives and neighbors. They saw children and the elderly suffering because of decades of neglect, not just days of neglect. For the first time they saw their fellow U.S. citizens and they were ashamed that such neglect could exist in the land of abundance.

The people of the United States responded with their dollars, but where is the vehicle to allow the American people to send their political will to Washington to demand that the country do something about persistent poverty? This is the big opportunity: to have a sustained conversation about the continuing causes of poverty, why it is still disproportionately concentrated among African-Americans, and what strategies can effectively reverse this trend and open up more opportunties for all.

This is the time to help the American people understand the unsustainability of current development patterns that promote vast investments in suburban communities while concentrating poor people in areas that are isolated from job opportunity, not well served by public transit, and defined by failing public schools and the absence of essential amenities like supermarkets.

The Nation this week ran a number of essays about New Orleans and the role of class as well, including a gem by Adolph Reed, Jr., one of our country's most eloquent writers on class and race. I'm reading his book Class Notes right now on recommendation from one of his friends who I know here in Chicago. Reed was born and raised in New Orleans:

I don't have space or words to catalogue the horrors and outrages associated with the plight of New Orleans and its people. In any event, the basic story is now well-known, and we're entering the stage at which further details mainly feed the voyeuristic sentimentalism that will help the momentarily startled corporate news media retreat gracefully to their more familiar role as court heralds. The bigger picture will disappear in the minutiae of timelines and discrete actions.

What will be lost is the central point that the destruction was not an "act of God." Nor was it simply the product of incompetence, lack of empathy or cronyism. Those exist in abundance, to be sure, but they are symptoms, not ultimate causes. What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility; of a concerted effort--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government's functions to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else, undermining any notion of social solidarity.

[snip]

Natural disasters can magnify existing patterns of inequality. The people who were swept aside or simply overlooked in this catastrophe were the same ones who were already swept aside in a model of urban revitalization that, in New Orleans as everywhere else, is predicated on their removal. Their presence is treated as an eyesore, a retardant of property values, proof by definition that the spaces they occupy are underutilized. And it's not simply because they're black. They embody another, more specific category, the equivalent of what used to be known, in the heyday of racial taxonomy, as a "sub-race." They are a population against which others--blacks as well as whites--measure their own civic worth. Those who were the greatest victims of the disaster were invisible in preparation and response, just as they were the largely invisible, low-wage props supporting the tourism industry's mythos of New Orleans as the city of constant carnival. They enter public discussion only as a problem to be rectified or contained, never as subjects of political action with their own voices and needs. White elites fret about how best to move them out of the way; black elites ventriloquize them and smooth their removal.

Also in this week's Nation, Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenat ask 25 questions about the "murder" of New Orleans, and Naomi Klein calls for a "people's reconstruction." I don't have much hope at this point that the reconstruction will be mindful of class given how rents have already skyrocketed in the city, landlords are evicting tenants before they even return, and soaked-through houses are being gobbled up by hungry developers. It's sad, truly sad, that so many who were left behind when Katrina first stormed in are being left behind again, and will most likely continue to be. When I read Clayton Cubett's blog about his mother's loss, I thought of how many tens of thousands of others like her there are down in the Gulf Coast, and how most of them don't have a child or relative who is financially capable of helping them out.

I was struck by the lack of philanthropy in New Orleans when I first moved there three years ago. It was so different than Chicago, where though there is poverty and shameful segregation, there are also a lot of individuals and organizations commited to social change and working hard in neighborhoods across the city to make life better for the city's residents. When I first moved to New Orleans a close friend introduced me to two of her cousins, local socialites, because she thought they might be able to help me get a job in the non-profit sector. Before moving to New Orleans I was Executive Director of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, a small community arts program in Chicago, and I wanted to stay in the same sort of job. They told me in very frank terms that New Orleans was about church and family and Mardi Gras, and that it was to those three areas that money went. Over the next three years I found out how true this was. There was money in New Orleans, no doubt. Dick Cheney came to town for a lunch before the election and raised $500,000 in an hour for David Vitter's successful senate campaign. But the money wasn't going into the communities that needed it the most, unless you count the aluminum doubloons made in China that were thrown out to the masses during the many days and nights of Mardi Gras.

The poverty was obvious in that city to anyone who lived there. I wrote about it the day the hurricane struck, thinking like so many others that New Orleans had once again been spared the worst. Reading over the note I sent to that prominent Sir back in the fifth grade, I thought how my grammar and spelling were better when I was "9 1/2 going on 10" than many of my college freshman students in New Orleans. It was heartwrenching and frustrating to see how low their level of skill was. They had so many interesting ideas, so many stories they wanted to tell, but they were crippled by their failed educations. (And it wasn't just the public school students, by the way.) Many had to take remedial English for several semesters (with no financial assistance) before they could take my freshman comp class. And many others failed my class, then failed again, trying to get to a basic level of competence. That level was far below what was expected of me when I was a freshman in high school (the students had to write a four-paragraph argumentative essay at the community college and a five-paragraph essay at the university). The class ended with a pass/fail exit exam that was neither administered nor graded by the instructors that determined whether the student passed out of freshman comp or had to take it again. Some of us instructors talked about how much cash the public university system was making off of this freshman comp business and how, perhaps, the elementary and high school system was kept at a lower level on purpose to create legions of low-wage workers unable to critically think (and therefore question their lot in the city) while simultaneously being sold the idea that they needed college educations to earn anything more than minimum wage, only to go to college and pay to take the same class over and over again because they were so lacking in skills. It seemed like a racket, and perhaps it was.

Part of me thinks that the evacuees I met in Houston are better off there -- their kids will get better educations, the parents higher-paying jobs. But the other part of me thinks this is a monumental failure of the city of New Orleans and its elites and they owe it to these residents to include them in the city this time around. I've never understood how some people can be so blindly selfish as to think that if they protect their own little corner of the world that's enough. Don't they realize that everyone benefits when everyone is taken care of?

In the Garden District, signs are posted on telephone poles declaring that the neighborhood is "Patrolled by Off-Duty NOPD." We lived on the northernmost edge of the Garden District Private Patrol route, which was fine with us since we heard gun shots nearly every night. (Not that the private patrol made any difference -- after all, we heard gun shots every night even with them rolling around in their Ford SUVs). The first time I saw that sign I thought how absurd it was -- why wouldn't the neighborhood be patrolled by on-duty NOPD? -- and how completely opposite it was to my hometown Chicago where you can't go a night or day without hearing sirens (this is a fortified city with 14,000 sworn officers) and where even in my working-class and immigrant neighborhood cops respond to calls within minutes. I got rear-ended on St. Charles one fall and called 911 to have a cop come by and write up a report. Several cops drove by and told us we had to wait for a "traffic cop" who, they promised, was "on the way." After a full five hours of waiting for the mythical "traffic cop" we drove ourselves to the police station on Magazine and Napoleon and got harangued by the lieutenant in his office lined with Rex posters about how we were supposed "to wait at the scene of the accident and not move the vehicles." It was infuriating, and we were two white women with out-of-state plates and on the main tourist drag outside of the Quarter. Imagine the lack of service in the 9th Ward.

Will New Orleans change for the better? I don't know. But if I still lived there I'd stock up on supplies and pretend I lived in the middle of nowhere with no prospect of governmental support. Because that's probably the way it will continue to be.

It's always been a struggle...

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 16:54:32 GMT

Monday night I went to see Lhasa at the HotHouse with my mom, Luis, his wife Diana, and two of their friends. Lhasa clutched her left hand in a fist, held it tight to her stomach while she sang, her face contorted as if each word was a struggle to get out. Opening for her was DeVotchKa, an odd Denver trio that uses a theramin in their show. Nifty!

Before the show I had dinner with my mom at her house, and she gave me this draft of a letter I sent to "Sir," a nameless man-in-charge (government-type, no doubt) when I was "9 1/2, going on 10":

Dear Sir,

My name is Katy Ingold and I have a terrific idea. If fuel ever runs out and nobody knows what's happening around the world because they can't watch television 'cause it is runned [sic] by electricity then why don't we make big batteries and put them in the televisions and lights and other things so we can still have these things.

Your Friend,
Katy Ingold

P.S. Please send me a letter saying if it is a good idea or a bad idea.

Surprisingly, I never got a letter back from Sir about this idea.

When I wrote this I was in the fifth grade, and my mom and I lived in a railroad apartment on Pleasant Street in Oak Park, Illinois, a self-described progressive suburb just west of Chicago where Ernest Hemingway grew up (and so famously said it was a city "of wide streets and narrow minds"). We had a rickety black-and-white RCA TV and it was in my mom's room. I remember my favorite shows were re-runs of The Cisco Kid, Hawaii Five-O and Emergency!. Apparently I was quite concerned with keeping up with my "information" and worried about what an energy crisis might do to my quality of life.

I don't remember too much about my teacher, Mr. Morelli, except that he always had a five o'clock shadow and it looked green from his black hair and pale skin. I remember, too, that we had to memorize one poem that year and recite it and I chose "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost (which I still remember, by the way). I guess he had us write letters to powerful Sirs too, which I'm sure suited me just fine since I already saw myself as a political person.

I wonder, do fifth graders still send letters to powerful Sirs in their classrooms? And if they do, what do they write about? Their desire to learn "intelligent design" in science class? How prayer should be a part of school? The inequities of our economic system? Or are they still sending letters about our on-going energy crisis and the wars we're waging in relation to it?

S has not received any letters from kids, but he has received a couple from adult strangers, including an elderly woman from New Orleans who knows one of the men on his old lacrosse team down there. She sent a kind letter to him wishing him well and hoping he stays safe. He wasn't sure if he should send a response back now that her city has no mail service and is struggling to emerge from the flood. I'm not certain, but I think he sent her a card anyway, thinking one day it would reach her, even if it came a little soiled around the edges.