Author: jameswagner

“it will not be Broadway”

New York is prett much the nation’s capital, if not the capital of the world, in many ways, but until 212 years ago it was in actual fact the political capital of the new nation.
Now they’re all coming back, but thankfully, only for a day.

Congress [remember Congress?] will be meeting in New York on Friday for the first time since 1790, when George Washington was president and New York was the capital of the young United States.
Appropriately enough, the session will be held in Federal Hall, located on the site of the original Federal Hall, which served as the temporary home of the House and Senate for two years in the 18th century. The building had been New York’s City Hall, but was on temporary loan to Congress. It was also the site where Washington was inaugurated on April 30, 1789.
All the major players lived nearby: Washington on Cherry Street and later at 39 Broadway; Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton on Wall Street and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson on Maiden Lane. John and Abigail Adams were up in SoHo, on an estate called Richmond Hill.
New York didn’t have a very long run as the capital, however. There was a lot of resentment toward New York as a money-grubbing, immoral and “too British” city [sorry, chaps]. Jefferson called it “a cloacina of all the depravities of human nature.”

In the end, such sentiments were not the reason our fair city was abandoned for a healthier home in a Maryland swamp. The move turned on issues of big money and regional rivalries.
John Adams’ wife, bless her heart, although not a New Yorker herself, seems to have understood this city better than some of her contemporaries.

It was Abigail Adams who said it best though: She loved Richmond Hill and while she was fine with moving to Philadelphia, [temporary capital while the D.C. was being built] she understood that “when all is done, it will not be Broadway.”

the real meaning of Labor Day

It’s not the barbeque, and it’s certainly not the traffic. It was born as an attempt to appease the working people of America. [Remember the Pullman strike in history class?] Unfortunately it seems to have worked too well.

The observance of Labor Day began over 100 years ago. Conceived by America’s labor unions as a testament to their cause, the legislation sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through Congress amid labor unrest and signed by President Grover Cleveland as a reluctant elction-year compromise.

Soon after, when the entire nation became thoroughly frightened by the bugbear of socialism and communism, the movement was de-radicalized. The real Left was gradually marginalized and almost totally eliminated from American culture and society. The workers’ movement itself became middle class, before it acquired the material benefits and political power which that adjustment should have delivered. And there it languishes.

In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it “the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”
Almost a century since Gompers spoke those words, though, Labor Day is seen as the last long weekend of summer rather than a day for political organizing. In 1995, less than 15 percent of American workers belonged to unions, down from a high in the 1950’s of nearly 50 percent, though nearly all have benefited from the victories of the Labor movement.

Happy Labor Day, but don’t forget.

duh.

Are we better off knowing that they don’t know what they are doing, or does that make them more dangerous?

Already under fire from abroad, the Bush administration was criticized across the political spectrum at home on Sunday for an Iraq policy in disarray, with top advisers seemingly at odds.

Some of the evidence includes:

Twice last week, Cheney took the lead in making the case for a pre-emptive military strike, arguing that the return of weapons inspectors should not be the key objective.
[On the other hand de facto secretary of state Colin] Powell said in a BBC interview released on Sunday that getting U.N. inspectors into Iraq “as a first step” was a priority, stating, “The president has been clear that he believes weapons inspectors should return.”

Once more on top of things, their party chief explains everything.

Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot said differing views were the result of open debate.
“There’s no mystery here,” Racicot said. “It’s just exactly what it appears to be.”

Live shell loose on deck!

nothing doing–not if you’re going to fry him!

The other, little-guy countries on the planet may still make a difference after all!

Germany has told the United States it will withhold evidence against Sept. 11 conspiracy defendant Zacarias Moussaoui unless it receives assurances that the material won’t be used to secure a death penalty against him, Germany’s justice minister said in remarks released Saturday.
….
A spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department said he had no immediate comment.
Outlawing the death penalty is a requirement for membership of the 15-member European Union.

Courage, mes amis! [ok, almost nobody knows the German equivalent]

I’m scared, but it’s not what you think

A pretty real piece, “Victims of Realtime…on the bizarre memorialization of 911,” currently appears on the first page of the refreshingly-irreverent site, HOLY FUCKING SHIT DAY.
I posted my own comment there, but I’m including it below as well, to bring more forward my feelings about what’s planned for next week in New York and elsewhere in the country. We’re out of here.

We’ll be in Europe most of September, where I expect to appreciate people acting like grown-ups about this thing, allowing us to do the same.
Just serendipity. We had planned the trip last spring, without even thinking about what we would be missing at home here in New York. It just hadn’t occurred to me that the anniversary would end up looking like such a monster.

What is being planned is not a memorial. It’s an obsessive orgy of victimhood. I know of history, and it is my passion. It is not history we are recording, but a self-serving and dangerous myth which will forever conceal the truth which we absolutely need in order to move forward.

does this mean we can wipe out Israel too?

Tony Blair says that the world cannot stand by while Iraq is in “flagrant breach” of United Nations resolutions.

“Doing nothing about Iraq’s breach of these UN resolutions is not an option.
“That’s the only decision that’s been taken so far. What we do about that is an open question.”

If the issue is that of the violation of UN resolutions, we should have attacked Israel and removed the current regime a long time ago.
Obviously the real issue is not the one presented to us, by London or Washington.
We’re still waiting them to stop lying.

not safe anywhere

It is not necessary to have illusions about the liberality of the Palestinian Authority, or Palestinian society as a whole in order to oppose what is being done to the Palestinian people by Israel, a government and a society fundamentally so much more liberal. Still, some people are clearly impacted far more than others by the violence of a society–any society.
The agony of gay Palestinians is a part of the current horror in the middle east, but it did not begin in 1948, nor even with the Occupation or the Intifada, and it won’t end when the fighting ends.

With bombs once again exploding all over Israel, and the Palestinian territories under seemingly permanent curfew, the woes of Palestinian homosexuals haven’t exactly grabbed international attention. But after spending two days with gay Palestinian refugees in Israel, I began to wonder why the liberal world has never taken interest in their plight.
Perhaps it’s because that might mean acknowledging that the pathology of the nascent Palestinian polity extends well beyond Yasir Arafat and won’t be uprooted by one free election. Indeed, the torment of gays is very nearly official Palestinian policy. “The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority [P.A.] doesn’t just come from the families or the Islamic groups but from the P.A. itself,” says Shaul Ganon of the Tel Aviv-based Agudah-Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgender in Israel. “The P.A.’s usual excuse for persecuting gays is to label them collaborators–though I know of two cases in the last three years where people were tried explicitly for being homosexuals.” Since the intifada, Ganon tells me, Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic law: “It’s now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A.”
[Descriptions of what should be unspeakable tortures follow in the text.]

Life is only marginally better as a refugee in Israel, subsisting on the margins.

[In Tel Aviv, a group of teenage prostitutes,] refugees from the West Bank, live in an abandoned building. They tell me that sometimes a client will offer them a meal and a shower instead of payment; sometimes a client will simply refuse to pay in any form, taunting them to complain to police. And sometimes police will beat them before releasing them back to the streets.
A 17-year-old refugee from Nablus named Salah (a pseudonym), who spent months in a P.A. prison where interrogators cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds, tells Ganon that he has been stopped by Israeli police no fewer than four times that day. He recites the names of the different police units who stopped him by their acronyms. “Try not to do anything stupid,” Ganon says.
“I’ve tried to kill myself six times already,” says Salah. “Each time the ambulance came too quickly. But now I think I know how to do it. Next time, with God’s help, it will work before the ambulance comes.”

worshiping hungry gods–by ourselves

More on the American car vs. public transit thing.
The rest of the world is becoming more and more aware of our special cult and addiction, and they clearly aren’t going to be indifferent to its planetary impact going forward.

… Beaufort county [South Carolin] planners have been meeting to discuss a regional transportation system.
The [county’s daily] paper explains what this is – it would link the county to outlying areas including the nearby city of Savannah, Georgia and the holiday resort of Hilton Head.
People wouldn’t have to use their cars. But outraged residents want to use their cars – and they fear the kind of people who use public transport just would not fit in these parts.
“We’re not that kind of community”, one of them is quoted as saying – and that is the rub.
America is not that kind of community. It is a car-driving society – not in an easy going, take-it-or-leave-it “oh we’ll try something else” sense, but in a profound, almost religious way.
The right to drive is a deeply valued blessing – and one that will not be given up lightly, in fact will not be given up at all.

The BBC correspondent realizes that we worship our own gods here.

In the hotel in Mobile I saw on American television a mention of the development summit and a discussion about the plight of the Maldives – that gorgeous island archipelago which we are told is threatened with inundation as sea levels rise.
When I say a discussion – well it wasn’t quite that – by the time they had worked out where they were and marvelled at how small they were there was no time to talk about saving the islands.
Do Americans know that the rest of the world is ganging up on them again and accusing them of polluting the planet? – yes vaguely.
Do they care? Not much.

Yet.

you can’t hide, America!

I’ve finally realized where I’ve been for almost the last two years. I’m in the midst of a really stupid comic book, but it’s not made of paper, and it’s not comic, and it’s not ending!
If you still have to be convinced you’re in it with me, but only if you can stand the pain, go back over the past quotes of any of the current gang in the White House. Bush’s best can be found here. He has not monopolized the class by any means, but his seem to be the only ones with something like their own website–and a book.
Barry has already posted this rather fresh Dubya doozy tonight, but it’s just so comically horrible I feel compelled to do what I can to broadcast it farther.

“There’s no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide.”—George W. Bush, Oklahoma City, Okla., Aug. 29, 2002

One can only weep.