I was going to write a movie review (after all, this post is billed as “Saturday Night At The Movies”) but as a dedicated film buff I feel compelled to pay my respects to Robert Altman, who we lost on November 20. OK, he was 81 years old, so on one level I can’t say I was completely blindsided-but this was a “senior citizen” who was not planning his next golf outing, but in the midst of wrapping pre-production on his next film, for Christ’s sake. We lose great actors and directors all the time, but there are some whose loss precipitates something much deeper than just a momentary “Wow…bummer” reflection. Robert Altman wasn’t just a “maverick” or an “iconoclastic Hollywood outsider”-he was his own genre (“Altmanesque” has become part of the cinematic lexicon for good reason). Contemporary directors like John Sayles and PT Anderson owe their entire filmmaking approach to Altman’s pioneering groundwork. No American filmmaker before or since could Question Authority (on and off-screen) whilst flaunting cinematic conventions so….cinematically. Rather than boring you with more superlatives, I’ll let the Man’s work speak for itself. Here are some of my recommendations:
M*A*S*H The obvious place to start. Groundbreaking, ballsy (for its time) anti-Vietnam meditation cloaked in bawdy anti-authoritarian hijinx. Launched the careers of Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Bud Cort, Sally Kellerman, Tom Skerritt and more.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller -Brilliant, gritty, resonant “Northwestern” with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The creators of HBO’s “Deadwood” need to own up.
The Long Goodbye -Altman stands film noir on its head and coaxes a career best performance from Elliot Gould as he reinvents Phillip Marlowe for the Me Decade.
California Split Elliot Gould and George Segal are priceless in Altman’s existential Vegas pastiche. A close cousin to “The King Of Marvin Gardens” in its bittersweet examination of beautiful losers and the elusive American Dream.
Nashville Considered by many to be Altman’s masterwork; it certainly qualifies as “Altmanesque” -dozens of disparate vignettes eventually intersect at the scene of a (fictional) political assassination. (Emilio Estevez’s “Bobby” sounds suspiciously derivative- which I will be able to either confirm or retract once I screen it-stay tuned!)
Secret Honor In just under 90 minutes, Altman cinematically sums up the Shakespearean train wreck that was the Nixon administration. Unique in the Altman canon in that it features a cast of just one. Phillip Baker Hall’s fearless and profane invocation of the madness of King Richard has to be seen to be believed.
All of the above films are currently in print on DVD and easy to track down for purchase or rental. These are only a handful of the 40-odd films in the Altman canon; see ‘em all!
Here is a link to an excellent essay about Mayflower historians, including the original one, Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford, the man who also discovered capitalism. New Yorker writer Jill Lepore begins with a sketch of Samuel Eliot Morison, who entered Harvard and never left, and then does a smooth takedown on Bradford, followed by one of journalist neo-historian Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the current best-seller Mayflower – A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Philbrick’s book takes you from Bradford’s voyage across the “vast and furious” ocean to that seminal event, King Phillip’s War. The essay should be read in its entirety by those with an interest, but nonetheless, here is an excerpt:
THE NEW YORKER Critic at Large
PLYMOUTH ROCKED by JILL LEPORE Of Pilgrims, Puritans, and professors. Issue of 2006-04-24
Philbrick, a former all-American sailor and Sunfish-racing champion who lives on Nantucket, seems, at first glance, to be following in Morison’s wake. Waves slosh through all of his books, whose titles sound like the names of sea chanties: “Sea of Glory,” “Away Off Shore,” “Second Wind,” and “In the Heart of the Sea,” the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for nonfiction. Like Morison, he finds most history books written by professors a chore to read. Trained as a journalist, Philbrick once explained his decision to include a bibliographic essay instead of footnotes or references to works of scholarship in his text: “I wanted to remove the scholarly apparatus that so often gets in the way of the plot in academic history.” Sam Morison never met a footnote he didn’t like, but his relationship to academic history was a complicated one. At Harvard, he was neither a natural teacher nor a beloved one. He never held office hours, he made his students come to class in coat and tie, and he refused to teach Radcliffe girls (he considered them frivolous). He liked to lecture in riding breeches and, in later years, in his Navy uniform. “Even before he became an admiral, you felt as though he were one and you were a midshipman,” a former student, the eminent Yale historian Edmund Morgan, recalled. But Morison believed, ardently, that there was something about university life that mattered, that made people more honest, more accountable, and less likely to get things wrong. In a 1948 review in the Atlantic Monthly of a book by the historian Charles Beard, who had left Columbia thirty years earlier to live on a dairy farm, Morison suggested (pretty cruelly, since Beard was on his deathbed at the time) that Beard’s work had suffered from his isolation: “You get more back talk even from freshmen than from milch cows.” Maybe if Nathaniel Philbrick had had to answer to freshmen he might have learned to be a bit more skeptical of his sources. The first half of his book stars William Bradford, and relies, appropriately, on Bradford’s history, or, rather, on Samuel Eliot Morison’s invaluable edition of Bradford’s history. So much did Morison admire Bradford, so much did he despise the myth of the Puritans, so much did he want Americans to read better history, that he spent five years meticulously preparing an edition of Bradford’s history “that the ordinary reader might peruse with pleasure as well as profit.” Working closely with his faithful secretary, Antha Card, to whom he read Bradford’s every word aloud, Morison altered the original’s antiquated spelling and cleared the text of notes and scribbles made by everyone from Bradford’s biographers to his descendants, material that had been injudiciously included, and mistakenly attributed to Bradford himself, in earlier printed editions. Morison applied his magnifying glass to every trace of ink on the manuscript’s pages. Where earlier copyists had Bradford concluding that “the light here kindled hath shone to many,” Morison pointed out that the light actually shone “unto” many; a splotch that looked as though Bradford had crossed out the “un” turned out, on closer inspection, to be “merely an inadvertent blot from the Governor’s quill pen.” Published in 1952 as “Of Plymouth Plantation,” Morison’s definitive edition of Bradford is now in its twenty-third printing.
I very much related this next part to current times:
In proportion to population, King Philip’s War was one of the deadliest wars in American history. More than half of all English settlements in New England were either destroyed or abandoned. Hundreds of colonists were killed. Thousands of Indians died; those who survived, including Philip’s nine-year-old son, Massasoit’s grandson, were loaded on ships and sold into slavery. Because the conflict was, for both sides, a holy war, it was waged with staggering brutality. New England’s Indians fought to take their land back from the Christians, mocking their praying victims: “Where is Your O God?” One, having killed a colonist, stuffed a Bible into his victim’s gutted belly. Puritans interpreted such acts as a sign of God’s wrath, as punishment for their descent into sinfulness. Not only had they become, over the years, less pious than the first generation of settlers; they had also failed to convert the Indians to Christianity. The Boston minister Increase Mather asked, “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us, when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”
Reading those scarlet letters, Puritans concluded that God was commanding them to defeat their “heathen” enemies by any means necessary. For the English, all restraint in war, all notions of “just conduct,” applied only to secular warfare; in a holy war, anything goes. Ministers urged their congregations to “take, kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption, &C which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus, and not to pity or spare any of them.” Such a policy, then as now, breeds nothing if not merciless retaliation. As a Boston merchant reported to London, the Indians, in town after town, tortured and mutilated their victims, “either cutting off the Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head of Skin and Hair, and hanging them up as Trophies; wearing Men’s Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks, and Stripes of their Skins which they dresse for Belts.”
Several people commented that they wanted Digby to make a stronger point-by-point refutation of Retch’s The Real Story of Thanksgiving. But really, folks, is that the way radio guys work, by discussing details? C’mon. They paint pictures with words.
So, I had heard that one of R’s ancestors, someone called T’mush Graungerball, an ol’ bugger, had actually been executed in Plymouth Colony. But I never expected to actually find it documented in the original records.
From Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620-1691 (Stratton, 1986), p199 (original quotations from Bradford’s History and Plymouth Colony records):
Though fair-minded in determining guilt, the Plymouth leaders themselves acknowledged that their punishments were severe. Bradford wrote concerning the year 1642 that it was surprising to see how wickedness was growing in the colony, “wher the same was so much witnesed against, and so narrowly looked unto, and severly punished.” He admitted that they had been censured even by moderate and good men “for their severities in punishments.” And he noted, “Yet all this could not suppress the breaking out of sundrie notorious sins…espetially drunkennes and unclainnes; not only incontinencie betweene persons unmaried, for which many both men and women have been punished sharply enough, but some maried persons allso. But that which is worse, even sodomie and bugerie, (things fearfull to name,) have broak forth in this land, oftener then once.”
The event which apparently provoked these observations from the governor was mentioned very briefly in court records of 7 September 1642: “Thomas Graunger, late servant to Love Brewster of Duxborrow, was this Court indicted for buggery wth a mare, a cowe, two goats, divers sheepe, two calves, and a turkey, and was found guilty, and received sentence of death by hanging untill he was dead.” The executioner was Mr. John Holmes, the Messenger of the court, and in his account he claimed as due him £1 for ten weeks boarding of Granger, and £2/10 for executing Granger and eight beasts. Bradford described Granger as about sixteen or seventeen years of age. Someone saw him in the act with the mare, and he was examined and confessed. The animals were individually killed before his face, according to Leviticus 20:15, and were buried in a pit, no use being made of them. Bradford relates that on examination of both Granger and someone else who had made a sodomitical attempt on another, they were asked where they learned such practices, and one confessed he “had long used it in England,” while Granger said he had been taught it by another, and had heard of such things when he was in England.
Wow. Retch’s ancestor screwed a turkey.
I’m not too sure of the source of this next one, but it sounds about right:
“Wretch Flemball was deetayned for sundrie notorious sins upon returning from Quisqueya in Hispanolia wher hee had erectile-dysfunction with sum little boys, who hee disapointed very much.”
This is the real story of Thanksgiving, people. Sexual perversion set loose by Retch’s ancestors for its trek though American history. Read other entries on Sex and Morality in Plymouth Colony.
When nations decide whether to go to war — or whether to continue an existing war — everyone in a democracy is entitled to a view and everyone is entitled to be taken seriously. But if non-veterans, by virtue of having never served, are denied the moral authority to advocate in favor of war, their views will quite rightfully be entirely marginalized. After all, why should anyone care what they think if, as O’Donnell suggests, their non-serving status predetermines their only honorable opinion?
I’m not willing to leave decisions on the use of military force solely to combat veterans, but that’s where this sentiment leads us. It leads to a place where military veterans are put on a pedestal and anyone who hasn’t served is ipso facto less qualified to hold an opinion on isssues of war and peace than someone who has.
Sounds reasonable, but I think Kevin’s reasoning is out of context and flawed.
First of all, the objection is not to everyone who hasn’t served expressing an opinion about war, but only to those who haven’t served who also are advocating war. I do not believe that it is necessary to experience war in order to oppose it.
Furthermore, I don’t object in general to people who advocate war who haven’t served. I object to the specific situation we have in regards to Bush/Iraq. I strongly object to the chickenhawks for their warped attitude in regards to this particular war. It is not merely that they are advocating war without having suffered the consequences. It is their loopy, ungrounded-in-reality enthusiasm for this war that I find revolting, an attitude that minimizes war’s horrors rather than focusing on them, as any responsible person would.
Chickenhawks rarely if ever try to make the case that as awful as the sufferings of war are for everyone involved, reluctantly, this war is necessary. That is because there simply is no case to be made, never has been. Instead the chickenhawks are happy to go to war; rather than acknowledge that sometimes war is a solemn, unavoidable obligation, we hear about Grand Global Strategies or that Saddam was working with al Qaeda, or war is some kind of of post 9/11 therapy. And the chickenhawk discourse descends rapidly to the moral sewer, where a demented John Podhoretz will blithely talk about how the biggest mistake at the beginning of Bush/Iraq was that “we” didn’t kill enough young Iraqis. (The biggest mistake at the beginning of the war was starting it.)
But the chickenhawks go even further than just excitedly embracing the prospect of waging war against Iraq for no reason. They have the unmitigated gall to denounce everyone who opposed Bush/Iraq as naive, as traitorous, as third-rate minds, as not really comprehending the nature of the threat, and so on. They are perfectly willing to describe the tens of millions of people who marched in February ’03 in opposition to the war as “objectively pro-Saddam,” a remark as utterly ignorant as high-five enthusiasm to fight a war is.
In short, it is the lack of even the slightest comprehension of what war really is, combined with their belligerent, dismissive arrogance that makes the question of the chickenhawks’ own willingness to serve in the Bush/Iraq war a more than fair question.
Again, the question of happy-war advocates being willing to serve is specific to this war, a war which has never been a legitimate cause, either strategically or morally. In contrast, while I strongly opposed the invasion and conquest of Afghanistan in 2001,* I certainly understood that a legitimate case could be made for it (and that war was inevitable no matter what I, or anyone else, thought). The lack of experience of war advocates never entered the equation.
It is the hysterical, clueless, and reality-free warmongering over Iraq that makes the question, “Well, since you feel so strongly about it, why don’t you enlist and go fight? ” an inevitable one. The question is really another way of saying, “You don’t know a damn thing about what you’re talking about, or you wouldn’t talk about Bush/Iraq in such a foolish, callous way.”
For my own part, I strongly believe that those advocating this war must, in some meaningful sense, get involved in the war effort. That doesn’t mean staying in your pajamas and typing on a blog that your smarter countrymen are traitors. Nor does it mean that you have to volunteer for night patrols in Sadr City. But if you are as gung ho for bang bang as the National Review gang was, it behooves you to support the war in an active manner, by enlisting, by joining USO, by volunteering in hospitals, and so on. It is simply disgraceful how little responsibility or involvement the chickenhawks have. If the threat is that serious that you think your neighbor has to be willing to die to meet that threat, then the least you should feel obligated to do is to help confront that threat. That, my friends, strikes me as close to a moral absolute.
By focusing on what really is a non-existent issue, one that no one really disputes – who in general has the moral standing to advocate war rather than the obnoxious attitude of the Bush/Iraq chickenhawks – Kevin missed the important point of O’Donnell’s post, namely the enormous, unjustifiable distance between the people fighting the war and those empowered to figure out what to do about it now. O’Donnell, in defending Rangel’s call for a draft, gives us a very telling anecdote:
In my one conversation with Kissinger, which occurred on TV, I asked him if he knew anyone who got killed in Vietnam. He was completely thrown. He doesn’t go on TV to be asked such small-minded questions, he goes on TV to pontificate and TV interviewers are happy to let him do it. Kissinger sputtered and ran away from the question, leaving the distinct impression that he did not know anyone who was killed in the war he managed. His memoir of the period does not mention a single casualty. If you have ever stood at the Vietnam Memorial and run your hand over the name of a relative on the wall, as my mother and I did last month, you can get as angry as Charlie Rangel does about people like Kissinger deciding how long our soldiers should be exposed to enemy fire in a war we know we can’t win.
Of course, Rangel doesn’t want a draft. But somehow the reality of this war must be made palpable to the American people. It is not, and as a consequence, the drooling warlust on display by the chickenhawks attains a credibility it doesn’t deserve. It is a lot easier for a lunatic like Cheney to sound like he knows what he’s talking about when he lies that the war is going “remarkably well” when there are no photos of coffins of American soldiers, no tally of Iraqi deaths, and no images of what war really looks like to the people unfortunate enough to be caught up in it.
*My objections to Bush/Afghanistan were both tactical and moral. A few reasons. First of all, it was patently obvious that bin Laden, for a variety of reasons, was trying to provoke precisely the kind of invasion and slaughter that took place. One should never do what an enemy wants you to do but what is in your best interest. It was not in America’s best interest to get quagmired in Afghanistan. Related to this is the fact that no one in the American government knew enough about Afghanistan to wage an effective war, ie, one that would end with a positive outcome. In regards to the morality of Bush/Afghanistan, I simply didn’t understand how killing thousands of innocent Afghans “in revenge” for 9/11 could be justified. I still don’t. The 9/11 attacks were bin Laden’s doing, they were not even the Taliban’s doing, let alone the majority of Afghans.
While in a normal discourse the following would go without saying, we don’t have a normal discourse here in America in the 21st Century. Sooo…. the Taliban were, and still are, exhibit A for the obscenity of theocracy. I need no lecture from a rightwing apologist for James Dobson to know that. To oppose the Bush/Afghan war in no way implied an endorsement of Talibanism. Likewise and just as obviously, I strongly believe that bin Laden and his henchfolk must be brought to justice which, not being naive about such things, means he will be killed – no country would dare imprison him. As Afghanistan gets worse and worse, and bin Laden remains on the loose, I see no reason to revisit my initial opposition to the Bush/Afghan war. In 2001, I saw a moral and strategic disaster in the making and sadly, I was right.
Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before. A main Shiite political faction threatened to quit the government, a move that probably would cause its collapse and plunge the nation deeper into disarray.
Emphasis added.
Any questions why it is immoral to invade a country that is not an imminent threat? Any questions why it is the height of idiocy to claim you can impose democracy by force? Any questions why Richard Cohen should resign and get psychiatric help for opining America needed some therapeutic violence after 9/11?
Finally, any questions why anyone who gave five minutes of study to the situation – except rightwingers and others with third-rate minds – could see this coming long before American tanks rolled over the border and the deaths and atrocities started to mount?
PS. Special note to all the liberal hawks who supported the invasion: It’s gonna get a lot worse. Guaranteed. And your apologies and contrition mean nothing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
