questions and definitions

I read the little shaded box listing “US deaths” every day, as regularly as the weather report.  This rather morbid preoccupation dates back to the Vietnam War, when, on a hot humid summer’s day in about 1967, I chanced upon a similar shaded box of “kill ratios” en route to the sports section.  The eerie similarity of these ratios of human life to the baseball scores I was originally interested in profoundly disturbed me.

These days the government doesn’t even bother with kill ratios. Apparently Iraqi lives aren’t even worth mentioning.  But the past two Sundays I have noticed something odd. Along with the listings of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been over fifty people killed each week in “Operation Enduring Freedom”.  I googled “Operation Enduring Freedom”, a creepy name if there ever was one, and discovered that this is the military’s term for all actions taken in reaction to 9/11.  the military lists these other locations as Guantamamo Bay Naval Base,Cuba, Dijibouti, Eritrea,Jordan, Kenya,Kyrgzstan, Phillipines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Yemen.

What the hell is going on here? What kind of war is our country conducting under the radar?  And why doesn’t anybody care?

On to definitions.  I am amazed that no one questions Bush’s little ideological creation, “Islamofascism”.

The American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of “fascism” is as follows:  “A system of government market by the centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belliigerent nationalism and racism.”

The American Heritage definition of terrorism is “The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments.”

Fascism and terrorism are anithetical.  Fascism by defintion relies on a central authority while terrorism is an anarchic,attack on that authority.  If the US had been attacked by an Islamic theocracy  comparable to Hitler’s Christian theocracy then the term “Islamofascism” might be accurate.  But when applied to isolated, stateless bands of terrorists, it’s patently ridiculous.

If George Bush is concerned about centralized executive power and beliigerent nationalism he might try looking in the mirror.

One of the major ways dictatorships exert control is through the manipulation of language.  It’s hard to imagine language being manipulated by someone barely capable of speaking it, but Bush gives his goldarn, homespun, adamant best.

world travels

I keep thinking I should skip the political rants for a couple weeks and share yummy tomato recipes or music recommendations.  But there’s plenty of recipes and music out there and not enough outrage over the truly atrocious crimes being committed by the Bush administration.  PLEASE check out this month’s Harper’s, in particular the article “American Gulag”.  There you will find in well documented detail stories of all the prisoners we are holding without evidence or a fair trial and torturing (in foreign prisons, beyond the reach of American law and in blatant disregard of the Geneva Conventions).  There’s also an interesting article on how a DC based organization called the Lincoln Group is fabricating articles for the IRaqi press.

Just for the record, tomatoes taste best fresh from the garden, and a little bit warm, on a piece of whole grain bread with olive oil or mayonnaise, maybe some baco bits.  And Mark Knopler and Emmylou Harris have a great new album out.

My 21 year old son just returned from a summer tour of Europe, where he spent a considerable time in places my grandparents and many of my parent’s friends and parents struggled mightily hard to get out of:  Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland.

He still didn’t find being Jewish was a real popular calling card in most of these places.  But that didn’t stop him from reporting that Germany was a “great country”.

A “great country”?

To me, Germany is inseperable from Nazis and concentration camps.  While I’ve met many Germans (of a post World War II generation) and found them almost to a one to be warm, friendly, and adventurous, I still couldn’t bring myself to actually walk the streets of a German town, passing Germans of a certain age and exchanging friendly greetings, knowing that they once were Nazis or silently complicit with the Nazis.

Maybe now.  Maybe now that  most of these World War II generation Germans are pretty doddering and old I could visit Germany?  But to enthusiastically refer to it as a ”great country”, with attractive architecture and good beer?  I don’t think so.

Similarly, a friend of mine in her early thirties “went to Vietnam”, a phrase I associate with coming back injured and traumatized, if not in a box.  ONly for my friend Vietnam was a place to take cooking classes and sun on tropical beaches.

Makes you wonder doesn’t it?  I’m unsure what kind of lessons to take out of all this, but I’ve come up with a few:

1)  Nations are just clumps of land where we happen to be born.  People are the same the world over.  What happened in Germany could just as easily happen here (see the reference to American Gulag, above)

2) The world events we get all worked up about are just a blip in the grand sweep of history.

3)  The Vietnam war was utterly pointless.  In thirty years will there be Arabic cooking classes in Baghdad?  Maybe the Basra Resort and Spa, complete with herbal wraps and golf courses.

4) Whatever you sincerely and fervently believe, someone else in the world is bound to fervently and sincerely believe the opposite.  Avoid making value judgements about “clashes of civilizations”.  Who are you to judge which civilization is better?

5)  Does that type of thinking represent “relativistic values”?  Maybe so.  I believe Einstein proved that relativity is a basic condition of the universe.

Anyway, world travel sure is a way to get out of mental and physical ruts and see the world in perspective.  Next time, I’d like to be the one sending the emails home.                  

terror toothpaste

Well as Natalie Portman says in V for Vendetta, “fiction writers use lies to tell the truth.  POliticians use lies to cover up the truth.”  No sooner do I write about fiction than in becomes, in its own twisted way, reality.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think the threat of terrorism is real.  If there were terrorists honestly involved in a plot in Britain I hope they are all now in jail where they belong.

That doesn’t justify the Department of Homeland Security and our Decider-in-Chief exploiting this threat to manipulate the American public through fear.  NOr does it explain why airline officials are now confiscating hair gel and toothpaste from carry on baggage.  This is more of a nuisance than a huge imposition, but, please, how on earth does this make flying any safer?  HOw on earth do you get explosives in a Bausch and Lomb vial?

Well, I guess it insures our safety about as much as removing sandals at security checkpoints.

so pack that terror toothpaste, take a deep breath and relax.  Big Brother is protecting you?

V for Vendetta

This movie totally surprised me.  From the trailers and the DVD cover I expected a run of the mill action movie.  After speaking with a couple of people who’d actually seen the film, i expected a dsystopian vision of the future, an update on 1984. What I wasn’t expecting was what it turned out to be:  a powerful allegory of our own times.

I don’t want to give away the plot but try these elements on for size:  a horrible slaughter blamed on “terrorists” but actually perpetrated by the government;government officials with powerful business interests that benefit from the terrorist acts; a populace manipulated by fear and a government-controlled press; religious fundamentalism that punishes gays and Muslims; accused terrorists that mysteriously “disappear”; an overwhelming emphasis on “strength through unity; unity through faith”.

V for Vendetta veers into the mystical, offering a powerful and uplifting message on how we can transform ourselves through fearlessness.  AS the movie states, “People should not be afraid of the government.  The government should be afraid of its people.”

Where V for Vendetta breaks from contemporary reality is that it takes place in a totalitarian society where violent revolution has become the only option.  Here our democracy is weak but still kicking (witness Lamont’s defeat of Lieberman yesterday–yay!).  The American people just need to break loose from their apathy and their fear.

At least people could start by watching this movie. 

recompressing

First of all, an apology:  this post has been floating around in my mind for the past three weeks. Either its been too stiflingly hot to do any work at my computer beyond the necessary, or I’ve been lost in a summer mist of entertaining my six year old, taking him to swim lessons, and harvesting veggies in the garden.  But fall is already closing in.

I look forward all year to the Oregon Country Fair (held the second weekend of July) and after three days of bliss at the fair I always feel let down, like I did as a child after my birthday party was over–gotta wait another whole year.

At the fair I store up positive energy to draw on during the upcoming year–that country fair space in my mind, but I also experience the inevitable recompression re-entering the outside world.  This summer it felt more like a thud, and I’m not sure why.  Maybe because the contrast between the senseless violence and narrow-minded fanaticism of the world at large seems ever more in contrast with the ideal world of the fair. General societal trends are in opposition, too–the constantly ringing cell phone, the honking horns, all the frenzied people rushing about like hamsters spinning around on a wheel.

If you’re not familiar with the fair, the best way i can describe it ia as alternative Disneyland:  a safe fantasy world where everyone smiles. The first time I walked in the gates (1993) I almost broke down in tears of overwhelming happiness.  It was like reuniting with relatives you believed were dead.  The sixties lived!  In this corner of Oregon, they’d been living all along.  As a person who spent the real sixties (well, to be accurate, the early seventies) half the time at an observer’s remove, thinking “this is really bizarre, I’ll write about it someday” , I’m amazed how at the fair, where the sixties still live, I can now melt into the scene and words fail me.  I don’t even want to hear the spoken word presentations or look at the exhibits in energy park.  I just wan to dance to the music and watch the parade going by.

Of course, just like Disneyland, at the fair there’s an underground where all the work gets done.  As the fair has matured, a whole mini-society has emerged, with the same range of personality types and management struggles as anywhere, the same struggles between freedom and order.

I don’t want to know about that.  I’m happy just to attend the party.

The fair is a bubble, but the bubble endures.  Maybe that’s all one can reasonably expect.  What began as a youth festival can no longer be classified that way.  Over the thirteen years I’ve attended. Ive seen an increase in the number of genuinely old people–all these gray haired, hobbling hippies–and three generational families.  Some people we used to see, like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, have died.  Faith Petric, who sings her folk songs every summer, celebrated her ninetiesh birthday.

The fair started in 1969, the same year as Woodstock.  Woodstock was a one time event, but the fair is in its thirty-seventh year.

Long live the bubble!