Category: General

The world is fortunate there are models other than our own.

SANTIAGO, Chile — It is a measure of how much this country has changed that Michelle Bachelet today works from an office that once belonged to Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the dictator whose forces tortured her father to death nearly 30 years ago.
When she was appointed Chile’s minister of defense a year ago this week, much was made of the fact that she was the first woman to hold that portfolio in Latin America. As if that were not novelty enough, she is also a Socialist, a physician and the daughter of Alberto Bachelet Martínez, an air force general who died in prison after he was arrested and convicted of treason by his own colleagues.

It’s an amazing story, perhaps especially for an American reader, since our own government facilitated the establishment of the Pinochet regime [to use a euphemism].

Not long after her father died, Dr. Bachelet and her mother, Ángela Jeria, were themselves jailed for several months and held in separate cells at two detention centers notorious for torture, Villa Grimaldi and Cuatro Álamos. Dr. Bachelet was beaten and blindfolded, though “there was nothing with electricity,” she says, as if to minimize the severity of the experience.
“I’m not an angel,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten. It left pain. But I have tried to channel the pain into a constructive realm. I insist on the idea that what happened here in Chile was so painful, so terrible, that I wouldn’t wish for anyone to live through our situation again.”

She became a well-known pediatrician and public health specialist in the eighties, and today many Chileans wonder how that earlier career can be reconciled with her position today.

“I studied medicine because I wanted to serve and help others,” she said, and in her mind, national defense and security are no different. “I am convinced that the duty of defense is to maintain peace and avoid war,” she said.

Bethlehem will go without Christmas this year.

BETHLEHEM – There’ll be no Christmas tree in Manger Square. No festive lights. And no singing.
Palestinian Christians decided yesterday to strip the traditional symbols of joy from the celebration of the birth of Christ in the Holy Land to protest Israel’s clampdown on Bethlehem.
The Bethlehem municipality will not put up lights or decorate the tree opposite the Church of the Nativity, said Mayor Hanna Nasser, a Palestinian Christian.
Israel said it is simply fighting terror – and has no choice but to stay put as long as militants living in Bethlehem are planning new murderous acts.

But to begin to understand what it means to live in an occupied city, it helps to hear from the inside. Paola Michael teaches English in Bethlehem. Here she writes about the momentary lifting of a 24-hour three-week long curfew. The Israelis had suddenly announced a lifting of the curfew from 10 am to 4 pm.

The school day was supposed to end at 3:30 p.m., since the curfew was going to be reimposed at 4.
Then, at 1:30, out of the blue, the Israelis changed their minds and announced the curfew again. They had jeeps patrolling the streets and soldiers throwing tear gas and fake noise bombs to scare people to go home.
Imagine the classrooms! Parents running to get their kids and make it home before an Israeli jeep caught them. Teachers running to a bank to get cash to buy food for the next few days for their families.
Except that the bank had run out of cash, so people were trying to find anyone who could give them money. The lines outside the banks were just outrageous.
On top of that, it was pouring, foggy, slippery and cold. It was pure hell.
I myself made it home safely through a back road, but I still only had crackers and water in my fridge to last me another four days until they lift the curfew again.
I had survived yet another day in Bethlehem.

The Guardian‘s series on AIDS has produced an excellent report on a great man.
The man is dying of AIDS, but he refuses to take the drugs that would keep him alive, until South Africa’s government makes them freely available to the poor.

Zackie Achmat is not hungry, but tucks into the chocolate cake just the same. South African Achmat is HIV positive, yet refuses to take the antiretroviral drugs that could prolong his life. But he does boost his immune system with protein – with chocolate cake.
Achmat is not a shanty dweller unable to afford the drugs; he is not a so-called “Aids dissident” who believes the drugs are poison; he is not mad, and he is not suicidal. Zackie Achmat, according to Nelson Mandela, is a national hero: an ordinary man whose extraordinary resolve could help save thousands of African lives, at the cost of his own.
At a reception in Johannesburg last week, South Africa’s former president turned to Achmat and asked him, with cameras rolling, to take the antiretrovirals. “Give me, as an old man, your promise that you will now take your medicine.” Not for the first time, the national hero, dressed as ever in T-shirt and jeans, said no.
A few days later, in a suburban Johannesburg garden, between mouthfuls of cake, he explains why. “It is a personal issue of conscience. I have become middle class but my brothers are working class, and if they were infected they could not afford the medicines.”
__________

For a closer and very personal look at AIDS and those living with AIDS, AIDS activism, South Africa, how the world works, and Zackie Achmat, head for the Gramercy Theatre tomorrow, saturday, for a 5:15 showing of Greg Bordowitz’s unforgetable film, “Habit.”

A great heart and a great mind is gone.

BALTIMORE – December 6 – Phil Berrigan died December 6, 2002 at about 9:30 PM, at Jonah House, a community he co-founded in 1973, surrounded by family and friends. He died two months after being diagnosed with liver and kidney cancer, and one month after deciding to discontinue chemotherapy. Approximately thirty close friends and fellow peace activists gathered for the ceremony of last rites on November 30, to celebrate his life and anoint him for the next part of his journey. Berrigan’s brother and co-felon, Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan officiated.
During his nearly 40 years of resistance to war and violence, Berrigan focused on living and working in community as a way to model the nonviolent, sustainable world he was working to create. Jonah House members live simply, pray together, share duties, and attempt to expose the violence of militarism and consumerism. The community was born out of resistance to the Vietnam War, including high-profile draft card burning actions; later the focus became ongoing resistance to U.S. nuclear policy, including Plowshares actions that aim to enact Isaiah’s biblical prophecy of a disarmed world. Because of these efforts Berrigan spent about 11 years in prison. He wrote, lectured, and taught extensively, publishing six books, including an autobiography, Fighting the Lamb’s War.

Unfortuantely I cannot find an image online, but there’s an incredible photograph on page B4 of today’s NYTimes which appears, I guess without any intended irony, and it says it all. The image is one of two which ostensibly only illustrate holiday tree lighting ceremonies, one at Lincoln Center the City’s official cultural capitol and the other on the corner of Wall Street which serves as the entire nation’s money capitol.
The front of the Stock Exchange is completely covered by an enormous American flag (there since September, 2001) and its columned porch also supports, somewhat redundantly, three smaller (twenty foot long?) versions, while standing in the middle and totally blocking what should be the ancient public thoroughfare known as Broad Street is the enormous cult symbol known as the Christmas tree.
MONEY + FLAG + CHRIST How can we miss the point?
In case anyone is worried, yes the Lincoln Center Plaza photograph shows that the American flag is prominently displayed there as well, if not with the total abandon shown further downtown.

I think, and I expect others to do the same. I have some control over the first part of that statement, but I am helpless in advancing, and am continually disappointed in the second. Still, I talk and I write, frustrating most of us, I suppose.
Why would I bother to post on my website a paean to apple pie, motherhood, patriotism, or the obvious virtues of not murdering your family, friends and neighbors? I post what neither I nor my readers would expect to see elsewhere. My enthusiasms are rarely directed toward the banal, and instead look for the challenging and the new.
If I take the effort to espress myself I try hard to avoid the obvious, or to add my thoughts to the chorus of a majority, whether the subject is opera, yiddish culture, General Motors, the pope or patriotism.
I don’t feel inspired, and should not be compelled or required, to first demonstrate my credentials as a right-thinking human being or to declaim the obvious in order then to address my subject, with what I hope would be a fresh perspecive, provocative in the best sense.
I will take not a loyalty oath and I will subscribe to no cathechism. I leave such silly but dangerous stuff to small frightened souls, and hope they will keep them away from decent folk.

–in the islamic world as much as anywhere else.
Salman Rushdie, at first disgusted with the usage of his name by islamic neanderthals as an epithet, now decides he should take pride in the label, but asks why there aren’t actually more “Rushdies” speaking out against a closed muslim world.

A couple of months ago I said that I detested the sloganization of my name by Islamists around the world. I’m beginning to rethink that position. Maybe it’s not so bad to be a Rushdie among other “Rushdies.” For the most part I’m comfortable with, and often even proud of, the company I’m in.
Where, after all, is the Muslim outrage at these events? As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical reflection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?

To Jeff Reilly, who did not leave an email address, and to everyone else who has commented on this post:

You should read what I actually wrote. Nowhere is there a reference to an evil person, but rather to evil that was done, yes by both parties.
“Diversity?” Eeegads! I’m living in the middle of Manhattan and there’s still not enough diversity to satisfy me! Barry and I thrive on it, but love of diversity does not require suffering fools patiently, as my neighbors know well. Moreover, living in New York certainly means you do not have time for such amusements.
I have never knowingly spoken or acted in a manner which restricted the freedom or belief of others, but I do not have to waste my time, or that of others, in discussion with individuals and groups displaying culpable ignorance, prejudice and their enjoyment of name-calling. I understand you yourself are not guilty of all of the previous, yet the “comments” posted are all off-target and do not suggest any interest in dialogue.
I’m not sure what you mean by “related actions,” but I suspect it involves importuning, if not actually assaulting, the “noses” of queers. (as in, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”) We don’t have missionaries ourselves, and our cultural memory means that proselytizers from the straight world, and especially the religious world, represent great injury unimaginable to those who are not homosexual. For many of us, like Nicholas Gutierrez, the reaction tragically does not always remain reasonable.

I have not yet discontinued the “comments” function of the log, although I have been sorely tempted and may still do so. So, those who have an interest in the descriptions [“sick,” “pervert,” “sick fuck,”] used of me and of Barry by those responding to our postings about the Chicago killing may still see there the evidence of their misreading, their ignorance and their fanaticisms.

–supplied by its own scientific agencies. This is to save us all from the evils of information relating to human sexuality. The winners? The AIDS virus, teenage pregnancy, cancer and other diseases, ignorance, distrust, a reactionalry religious and social agenda.

Over the last year, the [Department of Health and Human Services, currently headed by Tommy Thompson] has quietly expunged information on how using condoms protects against AIDS, how abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer and how to run programs proven to reduce teenage sexual activity.

There’s a history to such manipulation, but it’s not always been in the service of ideology.

The department has previously been accused of subverting science to politics by purging advisory committees and choosing scientific experts with views on occupational health favorable to industry.