Month: November 2006

Cortez The Killer

by poputonian

This summer I saw the Dave Matthews Band, along with Warren Haynes (of Gov’t Mule) perform a sensational, twenty-minute cover of Neil Young’s, Cortez The Killer. Cortez is that guy who slipped into Mexico and conquered the indigenous people. I wonder what the place was like when he got there?

The book 1491 lists the following inside the cover:

-In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.

-Certain cities — such as Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital — were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlan, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.

-The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.

-Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as “man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.”

-Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it — a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.

-Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings.

DMB and Warren Haynes also played Cortez the Killer (a shorter, ten minute version) before 100,000 people in 2003 in New York’s Central Park. The video of that performance [link below] juxtaposes beautiful shots of the fruits of one civilization, the NYC sky-scrape, while the band plays on about the conqueror of another. Several other songs on the DVD had similar images, so I don’t think any message was intended. But it is paradoxical, methinks, that you have this going on, and all the while everyone in the crowd and in the band is smiling.

Maybe Kurt Vonnegut knows a reason why. He had a comment or two about music in his book, A Man Without a Country:

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
…
It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even Military bands, although I am a pacifist, cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today — jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on — is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful songwriter Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country — an atrocity from which we can never fully recover — the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it’s played. So please remember that.

Here’s the link to Cortez the Killer. Enjoy the incredible guitar riffs by Haynes, and watch after the second one when Dave turns to Carter, shakes his head in amazement, and says smiling: “That’s bad!”A nice slice of Americana.
You can get the Central Park DVD at any music retailer.

The Root Of All Evil

by poputonian

There were many interesting comments in tristero’s last post, but two separate ones in particular caught my eye:

“This world is ruled by the purse, and violence, diplomacy, war, deception, and the long knives all serve the purse.”

And then this one, which argued against economic causes:

“It is irrational tribalism, nationalism, religion (and also the pride, fears, and stupidities of leaders) that are the root cause of most conflicts.”

I agree with both of these points but think the first one, material standing, causes a distortion of the ‘rightness’ of the second, the cultural ways that make up the tribe. In other words, those with the material means control the politics, and with control of the politics comes the opportunity to push your tribe’s belief system onto society. My favorite history professor writes:

[Culture] is communicated from one generation to the next by many interlocking mechanisms — child-rearing processes, institutional structures, cultural ethics, and codes of law — which in advanced societies as well as primitive cultures create ethical imperatives of great power. Indeed, the more advanced a society becomes in material terms, the stronger is the determinant power of its folkways, for modern technologies act as amplifiers, and modern institutions as stabilizers, and modern elites as organizers of these complex cultural processes.

I would posit that America’s path to war was caused by the political power of the Republican culture along with its southern and religious cultural roots. Modern institutions, such as the free press, failed to act as a stabilizer against what that culture saw as its ethical imperatives. The Republican connection to the business class amplified the power behind those perceived imperatives.

In a footnote, Fischer tempers the notion that materialism is the lone determinant in what shapes a culture’s norms and expectations:

Scholars regularly rediscover the persistent power of ethnicity and regional culture in modern societies without being able to explain it except in material terms. See, for example, Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (London 1975), which argues that survival of “ethnic solidarity” in Britain was caused by a division of labor in which some ethnic groups were kept in inferior positions by a process “internal colonialism.” The argument of the present work is different — that cultural systems have their own imperatives, and are not mere reflexes of material relationships. This is not to argue against the power of material forces, but for a more balanced conception of the problem in which material structures are seen as part of a cultural whole.

Maybe this is a chicken and the egg sort of thing: is it the pursuit of material things that causes war, or is it the perceived cultural imperatives — or both? There is strong evidence that the Bush-Cheney plutocrats were already planning regime change for Iraq, but 9/11 surely was a trigger event (bad pun intended) for all the moralistic and ideological responses that made war essential to their tribal cause.

Buy Nothing Day

by poputonian

This email came in from Hello Cool World, where I purchased the enlightening (or should I say harrowing) DVD The Corporation:

As we toil to make the Blackspot venture bear fruit, we think it’s a good strategy to occasionally pause and take stock of all of the ideals that motivated all of this effort in the first place. That’s why we hope you’ll join us this Friday or Saturday (November 24th and 25th) in celebrating the 14th annual Buy Nothing Day.

This year’s Buy Nothing Day has a special poignancy. Never before have our emerging environmental crises been planted so firmly on the lips of the policymakers and the general public. Rather than screaming from the fringes, high-profile economists and scientists are sounding the warnings in respected journals and the halls of parliament — warnings that our oceans are dying, that the ice shelves are melting, and that we are setting ourselves up for the most massive and widest-ranging market failure the world has ever seen.

All of this points to a profound need for a shift in the way we see things. Recycling, protecting our waterways, driving hybrid cars — all the old environmental imperatives — are great, but it’s becoming obvious that they don’t address the core problem: we have to change our lifestyles, we have to change our culture, and we have to consume smarter and consume less.

This is the message of this year’s Buy Nothing Day, and there are only a few days left to get that message out onto the streets. From the quietly sublime to the crazily anarchic, the ways in which you can mark BND are only limited by the imperative not to spend. Strut your stuff as if the fate of whole planet is resting in your hands, because even if each of us only does one small thing to contribute, tens of thousands of small things sure add up!

At the BND campaign headquarters – that’s http://www.adbusters.org/bnd – we’ve already featured upcoming actions in Japan, the UK, Canada, and the USA, with more to come from all over the world, including Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Hungary, Spain and Sweden. You can also download posters and other resources, as well as connect with activists in your own little corner of the globe.

Remember: Make a scene. Make people laugh. Make them think. If you have to, make them angry. Just get out there.

I won’t be harrassing anyone who wants to shop, but I am happy to buy nothing.

Actually, I think I’m going to give 1491 a try. It’s been sitting on the shelf for a while waiting its turn. A couple of people mentioned it in my prior post, which caused me to take a closer look.

Fire in the fireplace (it’s 35 degrees here), couch, coffee, book, iPod, human.

Mark Danner

by tristero

This article by Mark Danner is a superb summary of the spectacular series of mis-assumptions and downright idiocies that created the unmitigated disaster that is Iraq today. As Danner says several times in the article, some of the mistakes are simply unbelievably basic as, for example, invading and conquering a country without any idea about what to do afterwards.

Where I differ, perhaps, with Danner, is in ascribing any positive value to the original neo-con vision that the region would be transformed. It is difficult to say exactly where Danner stands on this. I think he comes down on the side of “very unlikely, but it would be nice if it worked and with the right people, maybe, just maybe, it would.” Others have gone further, asserting that an aggressively evangelical foreign policy to bring democracy to the Middle East and elsewhere is a noble idea.

I think it is a deeply immoral idea. It is an indication of how dangerously stupid our discourse has become that opposition to democracy evangelization is almost instantly labelled as a form of Kissingerism. It is not, by a long shot.

In the interest of keeping this post short and sweet, here are two reasons I’m opposed to such a policy. First of all, it is ignorant. Evangelization rests upon the same “black box” assumptions as realism, that what goes on inside the country to be transformed is far less important than the supposed benefits that will accrue once the people in that country experience American-style democracy.

Second of all, it is racist, in a white man’s burden sort of a way.

The combination of willful ignorance and unquestioned superiority, even if the intentions were wholly disinterested and good (which they never are), make the evangelizing model propagated by neo-cons and other so-called idealists utterly immoral. That doesn’t mean that abetting tyrants and atrocities is moral. Nor does it mean that the United States, acting in concert with other nations, shouldn’t encourage efforts to build democracies and to improve already existing democracies (including its own). It does mean acting with great prudence, defined as acting cautiously and with deep knowledge of a country’s culture, politics, and concerns. Prudence is one value (among many) that is conspicuosly lacking in Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush.

Prudence also means acting rationally. I’m sure all of you were as disgusted as I was by Richard Cohen’s remarks on America’s so-called “need for therapeutic violence after 9/11” which Digby mentioned below. The corollary to rejecting such an ridiculous idea is that whatever actions the US takes, especially military ones, should never be predicated on emotion but only on cold, rational calculation. Gut instinct has no place in American foreign policy. Ever. That doesn’t mean that self-interest and only interest is the only concern (although I believe it must be the principle one). Compassion certainly has an important role, for example in an American response to the atrocities in Darfur, but it must be a rational, knowledgeable compassion, not the kind of do-good impulse that led Bush the Elder to send troops to Somalia.

Read Danner’s article, which makes it very clear how an imprudent foreign policy unfolded.

A Very Special Turkey

by digby

For those of you who, like me, are spending Thanksgiving in the company of rightwingers, here’s Rush Limbaugh’s version of the pilgrim story to remind you that that your dinner table conversation could actually be worse than it is:

On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.

“But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness,” destined to become the home of the Kennedy family. “There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims – including Bradford’s own wife – died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.

“When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.” Yes, it was Indians that taught the white man how to skin beasts. “Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. “Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments. Here is the part [of Thanksgiving] that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share.

“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well. They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well. Nobody owned anything. They just had a share in it. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California – and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way. Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.

“That’s right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn’t work! Surprise, surprise, huh? What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years – trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it – the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild’s history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.

“‘The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years…that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God,’ Bradford wrote. ‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense…that was thought injustice.’ Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? What’s the point?

“Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’ Bradford doesn’t sound like much of a…” I wrote “Clintonite” then. He doesn’t sound much like a liberal Democrat, “does he? Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes.

“Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph’s suggestion (Gen 41:34), Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the ‘seven years of plenty’ and the ‘Earth brought forth in heaps.’ (Gen. 41:47) In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves…. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.'” Now, other than on this program every year, have you heard this story before? Is this lesson being taught to your kids today — and if it isn’t, why not?

Can you think of a more important lesson one could derive from the pilgrim experience? So in essence there was, thanks to the Indians, because they taught us how to skin beavers and how to plant corn when we arrived, but the real Thanksgiving was thanking the Lord for guidance and plenty — and once they reformed their system and got rid of the communal bottle and started what was essentially free market capitalism, they produced more than they could possibly consume, and they invited the Indians to dinner, and voila, we got Thanksgiving, and that’s what it was: inviting the Indians to dinner and giving thanks for all the plenty is the true story of Thanksgiving. The last two-thirds of this story simply are not told.

Now, I was just talking about the plenty of this country and how I’m awed by it. You can go to places where there are famines, and we usually get the story, “Well, look it, there are deserts, well, look it, Africa, I mean there’s no water and nothing but sand and so forth.” It’s not the answer, folks. Those people don’t have a prayer because they have no incentive. They live under tyrannical dictatorships and governments. The problem with the world is not too few resources. The problem with the world is an insufficient distribution of capitalism.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Remember to be thankful that you don’t have to spend the day with Rush Limbaugh.

But also remember that the reason people are hungry in the world is because they just don’t have enough incentive to eat.

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A Win For Moderation

by digby

This is what it’s come to:

Despite his work for a Christian pregnancy counseling group that opposes contraception, the physician who yesterday began overseeing federal family-planning programs has prescribed birth control for his patients, a Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman said.

Out of all the doctors in the country they had to pick one for whom it was necessary to issue a statement like that one. I never thought I’d live to see the day when birth control would once again be a subject of controversy. It’s quite stunning. After all, I’m old. This one, at least, seemed settled.

This is a classic Overton Window deal where it sounds completely out to lunch at the moment but soon will have made its way into mainstream dialog. But it also serves the dual purpose of putting abortion on the negotiating table at a time when all the “reasonable” people are getting together to talk about the need to drastically “reduce” abortion.

There are moral and practical reasons for members of both parties, and combatants on both sides of the abortion question, to embrace this approach.

Liberal supporters of abortion rights should be eager to promote a measure that does not make abortion illegal but does embrace goals, including help for the poor, that liberals have long advocated.

In the meantime, the victories that opponents of abortion rights have won do little to reduce the number of abortions. As Rachel Laser, director of the Third Way Culture Project, points out, even those who would ban late-term or “partial-birth” abortions need to acknowledge that very few are performed, meaning that these laws do little to reduce the overall abortion rate. According to one study cited by Laser, only 0.08 percent of abortions are performed in the third trimester.

The problem is that the forced pregnancy forces are dedicated to a long term process whereby they whittle away at abortion rights. They move the goal posts, little by little with outrageous stunts at the far fringe which allow the “reasonable” people to negotiate away things like parental notice and “partial-birth” abortion. This is where the birth control issue comes in:

Anti-choicers: “Birth control is just like baby killing”

Reasonable Dupes: “Not true! It’s nothing like baby killing. We are against baby killing!”

Anti-choicers: “We don’t believe you. You just want the freedom to put little girls on the pill and when that doesn’t work, you want to yank unborn babies from their wombs against God’s will!”

Dupes: (rolling eyes) “Ok, ok. We’ll prove it. We are willing to outlaw abortion, but you will pry our birth control from our cold dead fingers.

Anti-choicers: “heh”

Moderates and centrists of good will often try to split the difference and find ways to appease all sides when it comes to civil rights and liberties. And they almost always screw things up because fundamental rights are called fundamental for a reason. Once you let go of them all sorts of other things become possible.

I’m reminded of Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail. He was, of course, talking about the necessity of activism to gain civil rights for African Americans, but I think the sentiment applies equally well to those who allow the rights and freedoms women already have to be whittled away over time in political negotiations.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Like those white moderates of yesterday, the social moderates of today think they can finesse the issue with appeals to change around the edges. But they can’t. I’m sorry the culture war is unpleasant. But it’s happening whether we like it or not. Resolving the issue is not a matter of finding some middle ground or splitting the difference. This is not finesseable with neat slogans or nice little agreements to try to “reduce” the ickiness. Women either own their own bodies or they don’t.

The new, fiercely anti-choice, head of HHS family planning programs has agitated against birth control for years. But it turns out that he “has” prescribed it for some of his patients, so he’s not really outside the mainstream after all. Another win for the voices of moderation.

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Becoming Goldstein

by digby

Perhaps some of you already came across this amazing essay in the American Conservative, but I had missed it. It is written by a lawyer and writer named Austin Bramwell, who was, until recently, a director and trustee for the National Review. It’s an impressive analysis of the failure of the conservative movement and one that I guarantee you will find very interesting.

Here’s a little excerpt:

The movement’s leaders may be better informed, but they have no clearer idea of what they actually think. What they need is analysis: the skeptical tradition extending from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Hamilton, and Burnham that seeks to understand the world as it is rather than as we might like it to be. Analysis, however, requires intellect, but the movement’s mainstream, perhaps to avoid embarrassment (some mainstream figures favorably compared Bush not just to Ronald Reagan but to Abraham Lincoln), has increasingly ostracized its brightest minds.

Sadly, analysis is also often lacking outside the mainstream movement. Every movement throws off disgruntled outsiders (conservatives sometimes call them “paleoconservatives”) who feel bitterly their loss of power. They write obsessively, sometimes quite fancifully, on the alleged perfidies of the mainstream. Often, however, their critiques want credibility.

Some, for example, carry on the Cold War obsession with the so-called “crisis of the West.” Convinced that history at some point took a wrong turn, they pore over ancient texts in search of some Hermetic insight into the fatal error. (Not surprisingly, this approach has little popular appeal, although it still commands respect among professional conservatives.) The notion of a crisis of the West, however, grossly overestimates the importance of ideas; indeed, it requires an unphilosophical and almost paranoid ability to treat ideologies (most conspicuously, liberalism) as living, breathing omnipresences to which intentions, tactics, strategies, feelings, disappointments, and conflicts can all be attributed. Believers in the crisis of the West rest almost their entire worldview on an elusive notion—modernity—borrowed from a half-formed science—sociology. Crisis-of-the-West conservatism, at one time a fruitful response to the calamities of the 20th century, has become more a posture than a genuine school of thought.

Another group pleads for the conservative movement to return to its alleged first principles. “If only people would still read Russell Kirk,” one hears. But the movement never had any first principles to begin with. Although it boasts a carefully husbanded canon of supposedly foundational texts, the men who wrote them—Kirk, Strauss, Voegelin, Weaver, Chambers, Meyer—were notorious eccentrics given to extravagant claims whose policy implications remain largely obscure. Russell Kirk, for example, even as he shrewdly positioned himself as the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement, had almost no political opinions whatsoever.

What is most refreshing about this piece, and perhaps unprecedented, is that Bramwell does not just fault flawed execution or creeping liberalism. He considers the movement empty in all its forms, even as his temperament and view of human psychology shows him to be what everyone used to think of as a conservative. (After living with “movement conservatism” for so long it’s actually a bit disorienting to see a conservative under the age of 70 or so with intellectual integrity.) And to his credit he doesn’t erect a liberal straw man or hedge his bets by explicitly saying that liberalism is “even worse,” which, considering his history must have been a temptation.

We have all discussed the bizarre parallels to 1984 over these last freakish years, but Bramwell’s observations are among the most entertaining and insightful I’ve read:

First, like Ingsoc, conservatism has a hierarchical structure. Like Orwell’s “Inner Party,” those at the top of the movement have almost perfect freedom to decide what opinions count as official conservatism. The Iraq War furnishes a telling example. In the run-up to the invasion, leading conservatives announced that conservatism now meant spreading global democratic revolution. This forthright radicalism—this embrace of the sanative powers of violence—became quickly accepted as the ineluctable meaning of conservatism in foreign policy. Those who dissented risked ostracism and harsh rebuke. Had conservative leaders instead argued that global democratic revolution would not cure our woes but increase them, the rest of the movement would have accepted this position no less quickly. Millions of conservative epigones believe nothing less than what the movement’s established organs tell them to believe. Rarely does a man recognize, like Winston Smith, his own ideology as such.

Read on. You won’t regret it.

It sounds like Bramwell has been having some very unpleasant conversations with conservatives recently. I feel for him. Lord knows I’ve been there. In the intro to the essay he says that he was asked to resign from the National Review by Buckley himself. That certainly sounds intriguing and well worth another article or two, I would think.

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OK – But Let’s Not Shit Ourselves

by poputonian

As best I can tell, the following is the approximate order in which homo-sapiens came to the land now called America (or parts of Canada.) Some stayed and made themselves at home, some didn’t:

2. The population that came over the land bridge, the ancestry of the people we now call Native Americans.

3. The Vikings, about 1,000 years ago (they apparently didn’t stay.)Next were a couple more European attempts:

[4.] In 1559, Tristan de Luna y Arellano led an attempt by Europeans to colonize Florida. He established a settlement at Pensacola Bay, but a series of misfortunes caused his efforts to be abandoned after two years. [Link below]

[5.] In 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived in 1565 at a place he called San Augustín (St. Augustine, Florida) and established the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States. [Link below]

6. Then, in 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition foundered at Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. The survivors were most likely absorbed into the indigenous population. Those who doubt this should read the remarkable book by author, anthropologist, and ethno-historian, Lee Miller. In her research, Miller dealt first with English political history to determine why these people were abandoned, and then followed with the stunning evidence of what became of them.

7. In 1598, there was the The Second Thanksgiving:

On April 30th four centuries ago, our ancestors, led by Don Juan de Oñate, reached the banks of El Rio Bravo (Rio Grande). The first recorded act of thanksgiving by colonizing Europeans on this continent occurred on that April day in 1598 in Nuevo Mexico, about 25 miles south of what is now El Paso, Texas. After having begun their northward trek in March of that same year, the entire caravan was gathered at this point. The 400 person expedition included soldiers, families, servants, personal belongings, and livestock . . . virtually a living village. Two thirds of the colonizers were from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and the Canary Islands). There was even one Greek and a man from Flanders! The rest were Mexican Indians and mestizos (mixed bloods).

The starting point for the colonists had been in Zacatecas, Nueva España (now Mexico) and by being part of the colonizing expedition they had been promised the title of Hidalgo, men with rights and privileges equal to Spain’s nobility. Juan de Oñate was a man of wealth and prominence, the son of Cristobal Oñate, silver mine owner whose family had come to the New World from the Basque region of Spain. Titles granted to him by Viceroy Luis de Velasco were Governor and Adelantado of New Mexico. The colonists suffered hardships and deprivations as they headed north, but they were also headed toward posterity: they would participate in the first recorded act of Thanksgiving by colonizing Europeans on this continent—22 years before the English colonists similarly gave thanks on the Atlantic coast. The expedition is well recorded by Gaspar Perez de Villagrá, the Spanish poet who traveled with the group. He wrote, “We were sadly lacking in all knowledge of the stars, the winds, and other knowledge by which to guide our steps.”

On April 30, 1598, the scouts made camp along the Rio Grande and prepared to drink and eat their fill, for there they found fishes and waterfowl. Villagrá wrote,

“We built a great bonfire and roasted meat and fish, and then sat down to a repast the like of which we had never enjoyed before.” Before this bountiful meal, Don Juan de Oñate personally nailed a cross to a living tree and prayed, “Open the door to these heathens, establish the church altars where the body and blood of the Son of God may be offered, open to us the way to security and peace for their preservation and ours, and give to our king and to me in his royal name, peaceful possession of these kingdoms and provinces for His blessed glory. Amen.”

Next came some Frenchies:

[8.] In 1604, Samuel de Champlain, along with Sieur de Mont, established what is now known as the first Acadian settlement on the North American continent on the Isle-of-St.-Croix, at St. Croix River near Calais, Maine. After experiencing a harsh winter and extreme cold on this small island, they moved their settlement into the rich agricultural area of the Bay of Fundy, which subsequently became known as Acadia. The permanent French colony of Port Royal was established in 1605. [Link above]

[9.] The islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were colonized by France in 1604. The colony survived and still exists today on these tiny islands ten miles south of Newfoundland, Canada. The islands still belong to France. Many people today are unaware that France still has territory in North America. [Link above]

Some more English:

[10.] In 1607, some 100 men and boys sailed from England and landed in present-day Virginia and founded Jamestown. They found a hostile environment that probably would have destroyed the colony but for the resourcefulness of Captain John Smith, who managed to organize and motivate the settlers and save them from starvation. [Link above]

French:

[11.] In 1608 Samuel de Champlain established what is now known as Quebec City.

1. And finally you have “the first” to get here, the Mayflower pilgrims, who landed in Massachusetts in 1620 and later celebrated “the first” Thanksgiving.

The rest is history, as they say.

Customer Service

by digby

It looks like the big money boyz are starting to get nervous:

The United States ranks worst in welcoming foreign business travelers and tourists, due to bureaucratic headaches and rude immigration officials, a survey showed.

The survey by the Discover America Partnership, a business group from the travel and tourism industries, said the cold welcome for visitors could hurt the US economy.

“The US entry process has created a climate of fear and frustration that is turning away foreign business and leisure travelers from visiting the United States — and damaging America’s image abroad,” the group said in a statement.

The study was based on a survey of more than 2,000 travelers worldwide, asked to rate their experience in 16 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, in addition to the United States.

However, it also found that those with experience visiting America are 74 percent more likely to have an extremely favorable opinion of the country versus those who have not visited recently.

“This study should be a wake-up call for the US government,” said Geoff Freeman, Executive Director of the Discover America Partnership.

“Visiting the United States and interacting with the American people can have a powerful, positive effect on how non-US residents see our country. Unfortunately, perceptions of a ‘rude’ and ‘arrogant’ entry process are turning away travelers and harming America’s image.”

The survey found that the US entry process is considered the “world’s worst” by travelers, by more than a two-to-one margin over the next-worst destination area.

The US ranks with Africa and the Middle East when it comes to traveler-friendly paperwork and officials, the survey concluded, with 54 percent of international travelers saying that immigration officials are rude.

The survey found that two-thirds of travelers surveyed feared they would be detained at the border because of a simple mistake or misstatement.

“Foreign travelers are in agreement: the US entry process is unpredictable and unfriendly to foreign visitors, it is hurting America’s image abroad and deterring many from visiting the US,” said Thomas Riehle, partner, RT Strategies, which conducted the poll.

“These survey results help to explain the 17 percent decline in overseas travel to the US over the past five years and the 10 percent decline in business travel to the US over the past year.”

I heard recently that a lot of financial industry business is shifting to Europe because it’s just too much trouble to get into the country. The visa process is a nightmare even for people who come back and forth regularly. And treatment at the airports is downright frightening. I’m reminded of this story:

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.

After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. “What do you want?” he yelled. I said I didn’t feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist’s visa.

Since September 11 2001, any traveller to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after 9/11, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March 2003, under the jurisdiction of the new department of homeland security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.

[…]

The queue for passport control was short. I presented my British passport and the green visa waiver form I had signed on the plane. The immigration official began by asking the usual questions about where I was staying and why I was travelling to the US. It brought back memories of another trip there to write a series of articles about post 9/11 America for the German weekly Die Zeit. I had written about commuters who preferred the safety of train travel to flying, and about a wounded New York that had become a city of survivors. I had seen a traumatised, no longer cockily immortal America in a profound state of mourning. But it had seemed to me that its newly acknowledged vulnerability was becoming its strength: stunned by an act of war on its own soil, Americans had been shocked into a sudden hunger for information about the world beyond their borders.

“I’m here to do some interviews,” I said.

“With whom?” He wrote down the names, asked what the article was about and who had commissioned it. “So you’re a journalist,” he said, accusingly, and for the first time I sensed that, in his eyes, this was not a good thing to be. “I have to refer this to my supervisor,” he said ominously, and asked me to move to a separate, enclosed area, where I was to wait to be “processed”. Other travellers came, waited and went; I was beginning to feel my jetlag and some impatience. I asked how long I’d have to wait, but received no reply. Finally, an officer said, noncommittally, “It seems that we will probably have to deport you.”

I’m not sure, but I think I laughed. Deport? Me? “Why?” I asked, incredulously.

“You came here as a journalist, and you don’t have a journalist’s visa.” I had never heard of it. He swiftly produced the visa waiver (I-94W) I had signed on the plane, and pointed to what it said in tiny print: in addition to not being a drug smuggler, a Nazi or any other sort of criminal, I had inadvertently declared that I was not entering the US as a representative of foreign media (“You may not accept unauthorised employment or attend school or represent the foreign information media during your visit under this program”).

My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears. He grinned. “You don’t care, do you?” I said, with controlled anger. Then I backtracked, and assumed a begging, apologetic mode. In response, he told me I would have to be “interviewed”, and that a decision would then be taken by yet another superior. This sounded hopeful.

Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents’ names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue – I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, “You are Russian, yet you claim to be British”, an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, “Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I’d have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their “rules” demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: “How dare you touch my private things?”

“How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?” he shouted back, indignantly. “Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you’d see a big difference.” The irony is that it is only “countries like Iran” (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

I urge you to read the whole thing.

Nobody cares about foreign journalists, of course, and nobody in our current government is going to stand up for the principle of a free press.(They have reportedly streamlined the journalist visa process, at least.) These are people who are investigating the NY Times for publishing leaks, after all.

But now our terrible image and rude tactics are really starting to interfere with business — and that’s a problem that’s going to get some attention. I’m sure Karen Hughes is out there feverishly chatting up all the soccer moms on the planet telling them they shouldn’t hate us for our freedom, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to help. Being hated all over the world is not just bad for our physical security it’s bad for our economic security too.

I’m wondering if there’s any aspect of life in America (or the world, for that matter) that hasn’t been adversely affected by the Bush administration’s blunderbuss approach to governance. The American big money boyz were very short-sighted when they backed these people. But then, that’s one of their trademarks, isn’t it?

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Let Us Play

by digby

Look who’s going to be writing about religion for the Washington Post.

Of course, gossip, backbiting and social ruin are sacred rites in all royal courts, so I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense for the Mother Superior of the Order of Bored Trophy Wives to exploit some of that olde time religion. She will be joined in this venture by another member of the nfashionable, religious in-crowd, Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, who once wrote this in the magazine:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

I’m sure this new WaPo feature will be a fascinating trek through the minds of the bosses wife and a trendy mainstream religion peddler. Naturally, they enter the scene just as it passes from hip to kitch and have no idea that it’s happened. This is not unusual among the DC cognoscenti.

Remember this?

On the evening of Nov. 14, Quinn took her message to the grass roots, addressing approximately 70 folks at a meeting of the Citizens Association of Georgetown. Speaking from the pulpit of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Quinn said that she had gathered enough information to “scare you a lot.”

[…]

Your N95 Mask: The Building Block of Emergency Prep. At her talk, Quinn held this particle-filtering device to her mouth and said that she’s “never without it.” She also stuffs one into the briefcase of her husband, former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who she says “grouses” about the precaution.

Pick a Room and Stock It. You need water and food to last a week, a battery-powered radio and flashlight, planned emergency routes, contact numbers for the family, the antibiotics Cipro and doxycycline, a first-aid kit, and plastic sheeting and duct tape. Quinn herself keeps all these things in her home’s laundry room, because it’s “easy to seal off.” Also, her food supply is heavy on the beans, “because they’re nutritious.”

[…]

Two Words: Peanut Butter. Along with a supply of water, Quinn keeps a “large jar” of peanut butter in her car, primarily for the protein. Even a small amount of this staple, says Quinn, will sustain the terrorism victim for quite some time.

Keep the Kayak in the Garage. In a 2003 Post piece, Quinn advocated the use of inflatable kayaks as an evacuation mode for those who live near water. The mass hysteria following Hurricane Katrina, though, has apparently soured Quinn on riparian retreat. “Somebody would stick you up with a gun,” said Quinn of an evacuee headed to the river with a portable craft.

Don’t Bother Putting Masks on Your Dog. At the Georgetown speech, an audience member suggested placing masks on pets to keep them from spreading contagions. Quinn responded that she’d tried putting an N95 on Sparky, her now-deceased Shih Tzu, but it didn’t work.

In this new online feature, Meacham can be counted upon to continue to help us understand that the more implausible a thing is, the more likely it is to be true. And Quinn will hopefully put the same kind of serious thought into spirituality that she puts into risk management. Sounds like a winner.

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