Easy reads and think-pieces

Here’s a couple of articles, pleasant weekend reading and bits to ponder — my weekly offering contains a link to a short op/ed that fits that category, so don’t miss it.

We’ve spent so much time in these last years working against what was happening — it’s time to get a grip on what we want to work for … and that will take some internal assessment.

Jude

Swimming the Slipstream
Judith Gayle, Political Waves Weekly

See You Can’t Please Everyone So You Got To Please Yourself
Christopher Cooper, CommonDreams
Friday, July 27, 2007

I make some effort to give you people what you want. Some. Nothing heroic, but some.

I wouldn’t pander, and I won’t sell out. Not for what they pay me now. But I’ll consider at least the possibility that I may direct too few or too many of my works toward particular subjects, and although it may not be immediately apparent in any week’s product, I do regulate, temper, control, edit, simplify and humanize the wild thoughts and savage surges that erupt when first I seize my keyboard long past midnight.

But you are little help to me in sorting out where I should root and what sorts of moral and intellectual truffles I ought turn into the light of our consideration. Some say No More War! That is, “Enough on the war! We already know what you think about that.” But others (many more others) tell me “Thanks for trying to shake people awake. Keep the faith.”

A man shuffled up to me after the close of a town meeting a few weeks ago, gripped my arm as if to prevent my escape, and muttered darkly, “I don’t like the way you’ve been treating our commander-in chief lately.” But then, in a nicely timed and executed turnaround, he revealed, “I don’t think you’ve been nearly hard enough on him.”

And the road commissioner called me one morning last week. He wanted something. He always does. Don’t ask what your road commissioner can do for you, wait for him to tell you what you can do for him. “Cooper, your columns are crap.” And “That paper you write for is crap, too.”

And how might we strive to be less crappy? “Get off that political stuff. Nobody cares about that crap. Leave Dick Cheney alone.” And, incidentally, I understood I should not anticipate any road improvements. Then he gave me a list of local persons whose actions or opinions or lifestyles aggrieved him and suggested I might more productively and to the point investigate whatever much I could find about their dooryards or places of business while I gave poor old Dick and sad, dumb, brain-damaged G.W. a break.

So that’s two who are fed up to here with my lack of support for The Long War in its various glorious and bloody manifestations, several sordid sidebars, surges, extensions to surges, midnight renditions, domestic spying, exacerbated lying, crimes and misdemeanors of the highest and most base sorts, press cheerleading, public apathy and ignorance and Congressional complicity. So, “How about something on illegal immigration?”

So, OK, fine. What’ll we have? Build a higher, longer wall? Fill the tunnels with water and drown the damned wetback rats? Round ‘em up and shoot ‘em? Make English the National Language? Ban the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner” in foreign tongues? (Except for the obvious free speech consideration, I’d ban the lame, insipid, pointless, painful ditty altogether.)

You can understand why a Mexican man, woman or child might want to sneak across the border for a chance to gut chickens for minimum wage in Arkansas, of course. Who wouldn’t brave dehydration and death in the desert or rough handling and deportation at the hands of la Migra for such an opportunity? And, putting aside my customary sarcasms, I do understand that in some agricultural or industrial communities subject to large numbers of migrant workers there are collateral problems of homelessness, crime, and large burdens upon hospital emergency rooms.

But my sympathy for hospitals is minuscule, and in any event, Maine is not Texas or California. I have seen Mexicans in Maine, of course. More than thirty years ago I worked with a young Mexican-American man named Carlos as we built a recreation facility for yuppies in Brunswick. But Carlos was entirely legal. And he and I were more likely of similar opinion about the self-satisfied tennis players and exercise bike riders for whom we labored than I was of a like mind with them against my humble brown brother.

I know that some Maine farmers import seasonal help because they say they cannot interest Mainers in hoeing row crops or harvesting fruit or vegetables for the wages they are able or perhaps inclined to offer. Probably most of these willing workers have the requisite documents. If a few don’t, they nevertheless seem to do no damage to our quiet rural culture or by their presence scare the Massachusetts people away from Vacationland during the months the sun shines, the surf slaps against the sand, and sails snap satisfyingly in the salt breeze.

I did discover a startling invasion of one cherished part of the Maine experience when I took my grandson to Bath Heritage Days Fourth of July weekend. We bought exorbitantly priced tickets so that he could enjoy being spun and elevated on some of the less dangerous contraptions maintained by Smokey’s Greater Shows. He liked the Carousel. I was disgusted by its shabbiness. We both enjoyed our two rides down the high slide. (No motors-one is pretty safe here unless it collapses from rust or just tips over.)

The “balloon ride” baskets that turned us in a moderately fast circle perhaps eight feet above the ground he did not like, and he told me so from the floor where he huddled for the duration. I thought it was just about dangerous enough. We avoided the tilt-a-whirl, the scrambler, the dive-bomber, and all other manifestations of the scream-’til-you-puke variety.

But here’s the shocking thing, my friends: the alcoholics are gone! Yes, I’m here to tell you that the scrawny, wasted, tattooed, needle-marked, do-rag-bedecked bums, young and old, who have operated carnival rides for as long as I have lived and attended fairs and festivals are no more. What a terrible loss this is to anyone who has grown to love the nuances of the carnie tradition in America. I do not, of course, worry for the surly alkies themselves; they are survivors if nothing else. So long as a man might beg borrow or steal the price of a bottle of Mad Dog, as surely as pigeons die every day and lie to be discovered, lifted from the sidewalk and roasted over a scrapwood fire in a patch of broken-stemmed boxelder, the American street drunk shall endure.

But what of our youth? We have entrusted our toddlers to the care of these gentle outlaws for generations. They have turned the switches and heaved the levers and greased the gearboxes (or not) of the great machines that send our laughing, happy youngsters, the beloved fruit of our loins and the desperate hope of our future civilization, arcing skyward in delight. They have stared into our wives’ and mothers’ and daughters’ cleavages. These mostly toothless gentlemen, stubble partially concealing their heart and dagger neck tattoos, have held to the bargain of trust and service, have extended their warmth and love to us and our families, and we have (or Smokey has) told them they are no longer necessary to us. We have told them they must hasten down the wind.

Oh, the City of Bath prepared the lot as it always has, a rough gravel base padded quickly an inch deep in cigarette butts and damp litter. The air still stunk of fried dough and vile sausage made entirely of snout and penis meat and hot spices. There were enough three hundred pound women in halter tops and short shorts (and some with pink crew cuts and multiple piercings, too!) to satisfy any normal man’s desire for ambulatory erotic fantasy on a warm Independence Day evening.

I thought the Elvis Impersonator was quite good. I say this and I mean it. He had the moves and he had the blood. Or at least the spirit. He sang rockabilly Elvis and Vegas Elvis and maudlin, gotta-love-yer-momma Elvis and insipid Sinatra Elvis and inspired go-to-Heaven-with-Jesus Elvis, and it was, as they say, All Good. And he was black. He looked like a young Smokey Robinson, but he sang like The King. Don’t the moon look good, momma, shinin’ through those trees? Don’t that black man sound wonderful, laying open his heart in his white suit, down on his knees.

But every damned ride was manned by a Mexican. Legal, illegal-who cares? The carnival is ruined. Because what can I tell you about these Mexican men? They were clean. They were sober. They were polite, neat, well-mannered. What a contrast with their predecessors, with, truth to tell, a good number of the public they served.

So there it is. My Mexican story. Apparently several dozen (maybe hundreds) of Mexicans (possibly some Guatemalans or Hondurans) have accepted positions as amusement ride operators in New England (and I doubt not other Northeast states and possibly the whole Atlantic seaboard and even into Eastern Canada). The bums are gone. They will not likely be back in our lifetimes. They are replaced by foreigners who are not in any degree frightening or dangerous or, in the traditional carnival way, interesting.

Because we know what they want. They want what most of us want: to live their lives and feed their families, and to do this they will work long hours at low wages in jobs that you and I will not do. They will do this above the law or, if necessary, outside the law.

And if I lived in Brownsville, Texas, I might complain about groups of men hanging out on street corners or in the Home Depot parking lot hoping to be selected for a day’s cash work at five a.m. Small complaint. But I don’t live there and I won’t live there. Brownsville is too hot for human habitation and it’s too close to W’s. ranch for my taste. My good feelings about Brownsville are entirely vested in the words and music of Bob Dylan’s glorious long song, “Brownsville Girl”, which, additional to the title character, with her “teeth like pearls, shining like the moon above”, also features the great Gregory Peck, a busted down Ford, the sun coming up over the Rockies, a gunfight, a trial, perjury on the witness stand, and the author’s admission that he didn’t know who he was or where he was bound.

“Sometimes,” says Bob, “you just find yourself over the line,” and that’s true for certain, and you know it and feel it as well as he does or I do. And “people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” And if you haven’t suffered, alone or together, then possibly you can’t understand why a man would leave his home and family in some Mexican village and risk death and break the law (repeatedly if required) for the chance to go over the line to pour concrete or shovel shit or pick blueberries or prune shrubbery or stand at his station in a filthy parking lot and help loud, spoiled, rich (by his experience) American kids waste their parents’ money on a soft July evening.

“You know, I can’t believe we’ve lived so long and are still so far apart.” That’s a part of the message one takes from “Brownsville Girl” after some decades of listening to its manifest marvels. And it’s a big part of the lesson of this country. That some do hate the Mexicans so, and others fear them. Or the blacks. Or the queers. Or the Iraqis. Or the bugs and the beasts that make the noises in the night woods beyond the campsite as July erodes into August in Maine in this new uncertain century.

The fairs will be starting soon, from Pittston next weekend through Fryeburg in October. I’ve promised my grandson one fair this year. I’ll be happy to do business there with any hardworking Mexican, even one who might be less than legal, he no more a threat to me or my country or my way of life than I am to him or his.

Now, Dick Cheney-there’s a scary alien for ya, friends! ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Add comment July 28th, 2007

What tangled webs …

Wes Clark was on Charlie Rose the other night [it was another of those episodes when Charlie appears to either be a ham–handed devils advocate or incredibly dense, they’re rare but disturbing] and spoke to the problems with Bush’s war. He said Petraeus was a fine man and soldier, he knew him, but that solutions in Iraq were NOT military, and even Petraeus would agree. [He has not ruled out running again, by the way, and has a fine grasp of what is necessary to get us out and attempt conciliation in the region; I hope he’s grabbed up by whichever Dem wins in ‘08 — he’s got the chops and the heart to make a stellar cabinet member.]

General Petraeus may be a military leader of the First Water, but … soldier still, and therein lies the limit of his effectiveness. He will be blamed [is already being blamed by the administration, which prefers to pretend they don’t GIVE the marching orders] for the failure of the “surge,” as the Generals before him were pilloried and dismissed for their failures. Many of them have come forward to tell us that they were bullied, threatened and manipulated by the NeoCon arm of the Bush regime.

Still, you can BET that Maliki will be replaced before Petraeus is. And it still … always … begs the question: whose country is it?

The Iraqi’s, meanwhile, have taken a month off, strong-armed to give up their original plan for two — which really isn’t a problem, as I see it, because they’re reluctant to do much of anything, anyhow; Sadr’s in, Sadr’s out, the Kurds don’t want any part of it, and nobody likes the Bushie oil deal. The third article here is an example of their stonewall [and the complexity of our presence in a country happier with the 12th century than the 21st] and they’re better at stonewall, apparently, than anything else. That article should be passed around to the Happy Face conservatives that constantly howl that the press doesn’t show us all the “good things” that are happening in Iraq.

Ultimately, the Iraqi’s themselves will take the blame for all this … they already are in many minds. But I’m not falling for that one — this belongs squarely on Bush’s shoulders; this is what happens when you have a man of limited intelligence and vision in the White House … so un-curious about life that he bypassed the lessons of history in this region, so personally confused that he can’t separate his theocratic need to proselytize from his empirical desire to profit — and apparently didn’t even read [or see] Lawrence of Arabia, which should have, if nothing else, given him a heads up on the immense culture gap that has never been breached … and may never be until the Middle East solves its own internal problems.

First article is about the Maliki/Petraeus feud — second points us back to the actual “deciders” — third makes you wish all those billions spent in reconstruction had gone to New Orleans instead.

Jude

Iraqi leader tells Bush: Get Gen Petraeus out
Stormy relationship: Nouri al-Maliki and Gen David Petraeus
Damien McElroy, Telegraph UK
28/07/2007

Relations between the top United States general in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, the country’s prime minister, are so bad that the Iraqi leader made a direct appeal for his removal to President George W Bush.

Although the call was rejected, aides to both men admit that Mr Maliki and Gen David Petraeus engage in frequent stand-up shouting matches, differing particularly over the US general’s moves to arm Sunni tribesmen to fight al-Qa’eda.

One Iraqi source said Mr Maliki used a video conference with Mr Bush to call for the general’s signature strategy to be scrapped. “He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias,” said the official. “Bush told Maliki to calm down.”

At another meeting with Gen Petraeus, Mr Maliki said: “I can’t deal with you any more. I will ask for someone else to replace you.”

Gen Petraeus admitted that the relationship was stormy, saying: “We have not pulled punches with each other.”

President Bush’s support for Mr Maliki is deeply controversial within the US government because of the Iraqi’s ties to Shia militias responsible for some of the worst sectarian violence.

The New York Times claimed yesterday that Saudi Arabia was refusing to work with Mr Maliki and has presented “evidence” that he was an Iranian intelligence agent to US officials. “Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the war,” it reported.

Alongside the firm support of Mr Bush, Mr Maliki also enjoys the backing of Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador and his predecessor, Zalmay Khalilzad, now America’s representative at the United Nations.

Mr Khalilzad took a swipe at Saudi Arabia in an editorial published earlier this month that was widely seen as an appeal for a larger UN role in stabilising Iraq.

Mr Crocker, who attends Mr Maliki’s stormy weekly meetings with Gen Petraeus, said the Iraqi leader was a strong partner of America.

“There is no leader in the world that is under more pressure than Nouri al-Maliki, without question,” he said. “Sometimes he reflects that frustration. I don’t blame him. I probably would too.”

The Neocon Armchair Generals
Scott Horton, Harpers
July 27

To hear President Bush tell it, all he does is sit back and patiently take the advice of his generals in the field and in the Pentagon. But every field commander to return from Iraq and put on his civvies has told a different tale: the White House hammers ridiculous strategies down their throats, doesn’t listen to a word they say, and instead takes direction from a group of juveniles in their fifties over at Neocon Central Command, the American Enterprise Institute.

This is another point on which White House lies are wearing thin and the truth is beginning to shine through. And Rowan Scarborough over at the D.C. Examiner has offered up an extremely revealing vignette. He looks at where the current strategy for the surge got cooked up. He notes that in the final analysis, there were three plans sent to the White House. One was prepared by General Petraeus and his team out in Baghdad. The second was crafted by the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon. And the third plan was put together by a bunch of overgrown teenagers who play with lead soldiers at the American Enterprise Institute.

And guess which one the White House picked? That’s right, the AEI plan.

And guess who put on his duck hunting fatigues to come over and run the show? That’s right, it’s Dead-Eye Dick himself, Vice President Cheney.

Even Vice President Dick Cheney came. “We took the results of our planning session immediately to people in the administration,” said AEI analyst Thomas Donnelly, a surge planner. “It became sort of a magnet for movers and shakers in the White House.”

Donnelly said the AEI approach won out over plans from the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command. The two Army generals then in charge of Iraq had opposed a troop increase . . .

The emergence of AEI as a power player on Iraq belies the notion that neo-conservatives are on the decline in Washington. AEI brags an impressive roster of neo-con thinkers.

Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq war architect, arrived at AIE this summer, joining such prominent conservatives as John Bolton, David Frum and Michael Ledeen.

With its plan in place, the AEI Iraq team is not sitting still. Keane is an adviser to Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. He has inspected war conditions on two visits. Kagan left for Iraq this week. “It was kind of the 11th hour, 59th minute,” Donnelly said of AEI’s surge plan. “It’s the function that think tanks are supposed to perform to provide independent advice and analysis.”

When all this fails–and now it looks very far from any sort of success–let’s please keep a sharp focus on who called the shots and who bears the blame. Not the generals in the field. Not the Pentagon. It’s the armchair generals from the Neocon Battalion. We’d all be a lot safer if they’d keep to playing paintball on the weekends. And even at that sort of game I wouldn’t want to be on their team.

As U.S. Rebuilds, Iraq Won’t Act on Finished Work
JAMES GLANZ, NYT
July 28, 2007

Iraq’s national government is refusing to take possession of thousands of American-financed reconstruction projects, forcing the United States either to hand them over to local Iraqis, who often lack the proper training and resources to keep the projects running, or commit new money to an effort that has already consumed billions of taxpayer dollars.

The conclusions, detailed in a report released Friday by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a federal oversight agency, include the finding that of 2,797 completed projects costing $5.8 billion, Iraq’s national government had, by the spring of this year, accepted only 435 projects valued at $501 million. Few transfers to Iraqi national government control have taken place since the current Iraqi government, which is frequently criticized for inaction on matters relating to the American intervention, took office in 2006.

The United States often promotes the number of rebuilding projects, like power plants and hospitals, that have been completed in Iraq, citing them as signs of progress in a nation otherwise fraught with violence and political stalemate. But closer examination by the inspector general’s office, headed by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., has found that a number of individual projects are crumbling, abandoned or otherwise inoperative only months after the United States declared that they had been successfully completed. The United States always intended to hand over projects to the Iraqi government when they were completed.

Although Mr. Bowen’s latest report is primarily a financial overview, he said in an interview that it raised serious questions on whether the problems his inspectors had found were much more widespread in the reconstruction program.

The process of transferring projects to Iraq “worked for a while,” Mr. Bowen said. But then the new government took over and installed its finance minister, Bayan Jabr, who has been a continuing center of controversy in his various government posts and is formally in charge of the transfers.

“After Mr. Jabr took over, that process ceased to function,” Mr. Bowen said.

In fact, in the first two quarters of 2007, Mr. Bowen said, his inspectors found significant problems in all but 2 of the 12 projects they examined after the United States declared those projects completed.

In one of the most recent cases, a $90 million project to overhaul two giant turbines at the Dora power plant in Baghdad failed after completion because employees at the plant did not know how to operate the turbines properly and the wrong fuel was used. The additional power is critically needed in Baghdad, where residents often have only a few hours of electricity a day.

Because the Iraqi government will not formally accept projects like the refurbished turbines, the United States is “finding someone at the local level to handle the project, handing them the keys and saying, ‘Operate and maintain it,’ ” another official in the inspector general’s office said.

If the pace of the American rebuilding program is a guide, those problems could quickly accelerate: So far, the United States has declared that $5.8 billion in American taxpayer-financed projects have been completed, but most of the rest of the projects within a $21 billion rebuilding program that Mr. Bowen examined in the report are expected to be finished by the end of this year. Some of that money is also being used to train and equip Iraqi security forces rather than finance construction projects.

The report was released too late in the day to contact Mr. Jabr, who is part of a Shiite alliance in charge of the government. In his previous position as interior minister, he was accused of running Shiite death squads out of the ministry. In his current position he has developed a reputation as being slow to release budget money to Iraqi government entities, which would have to run the new projects at substantial expense.

He is sometimes suspected of seeking to use his position to undermine the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who is also a Shiite but answers to a different faction within the alliance. In interviews, Mr. Jabr has rejected those accusations and says he strongly supports the government.

American researchers who have followed the reconstruction said Mr. Bowen’s report raised serious new doubts about the program. Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institute in Washington, said the lack of interest on the part of the Iraqis was the latest demonstration that they were not involved enough in its planning stages. “It sort of confirms that you really need pre-agreement on the projects you are attempting,” Mr. Barton said, “or you end up with these kinds of problems at the tail end, where people don’t know much about the program and they haven’t bought into it.”

Mr. Barton said that the episode was probably inevitable given that the elected Iraqi government operated mainly within the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad and had little capability of managing thousands of new projects around the country. He said that this was the most likely explanation — rather than any ill will on Mr. Jabr’s part. But Mr. Barton said the findings indicated that the United States should put some of the remaining money in the program into “sustainment,” the term for running the projects, rather than continuing to build when there might be no one to run the projects.

“To build something and not have these issues resolved from top to bottom is unfathomable,” said William L. Nash, a retired general who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on Middle East reconstruction. “The management of the reconstruction program for Iraq has been a near-total disaster from the beginning.”

The report says that of the 2,797 projects declared completed, besides the 435 projects formally accepted by Iraq’s central government, 1,141 have been transferred to local Iraqi authorities. American government entities in charge of those projects include the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the American-led multinational forces in Iraq, the United States Embassy and the United States Agency for International Development. In letters attached to Mr. Bowen’s report, several of those entities largely concurred with many of Mr. Bowen’s findings and said that new agreements were being hammered out with the Iraqi government to smooth the transfers.

A spokesman for the development agency, David Snider, said in a statement that work now being undertaken by the agency “helps address the concerns” raised in the report. Mr. Snider said that the agency was seeking to formalize an agreement with the Iraqi government that would protect the American investment there.

The agency “usually secures these commitments from recipient governments before the initiation of a project,” Mr. Snider said. But in the case of Iraq, he said, the American rebuilding effort “began before the current Iraqi government was established.”

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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1 comment July 28th, 2007