Category: Politics

One month ago at John F. Kennedy Airport the U.S arrested and deported to Syria a Canadian citizen who was returning from a vacation with his wife and young children. He was at JFK only to switch planes on his way to Montreal. He now languishes in prison, probably somewhere in Damascus. The story has been everywhere in the non-commercial media, but the NYTimes, the putative paper of record and boastful bastion of liberalism, reports it in its entirety only today for the first time. [Why not tell us before this, and why now?]

American officials claim that Mr. Arar is a member of Al Qaeda, but the Canadians say they have no such information. The Syrians are questioning Mr. Arar closely, Western diplomats say, but officially the Syrian government has expressed outrage that he was deported to Syria instead of Canada.

Imagine the outrage had the situation been reversed, and an American deported while returning to the U.S., and imprisoned abroad in an unknown location!
No, forget that thought–for a moment I had forgotten that the deported Canadian citizen was of arab descent and birth, so of course his status as an American is at best provisional these days.
Of course we have every right to stride the earth unhindered, like a mindless, blind terrified colossus, since we have been so injured by the supposedly unique disaster of September 11. Yes, September 11 did damage us all, but the damage is of quite a different nature than that usually described. It has destroyed our courage and our wits.

But of course we already knew this.

UNITED NATIONS – Friday’s unanimous vote in the U.N. Security Council supporting the U.S. resolution on weapons inspections in Iraq was a demonstration of Washington’s ability to wield its vast political and economic power, say observers.
”Only a superpower like the United States could have pulled off a coup like this,” an Asian diplomat told IPS.
The unanimous 15-0 vote, he said, was obtained through considerable political and diplomatic pressure. The lobbying, he added, was not done at the United Nations, but in various capitals.

We can also imagine how much we promised the pesky permanent members, Russia, China and France (not discussed in this piece, but all of whom opposed the Bush war until last week), in money, silence, oil concessions, military goodies or whatever is currently dearest to their own hearts or pocketbooks.

So spake James Carville, just after the election, as we learn from Mark Morford’s scary but entiely plausible alarum.

…Congress will now have almost zero struggle or balanced counterargument when the GOP chooses to ram through more generally invidious resolutions and white-power laws.
Laws that further its famously mean-spirited schema of war, oil, corporate cronyism, CEO inbreeding, heartlessness, artlessness, cultural molestation, giddy homophobia and really awful fashion sense.
Let us not also forget anti-choice misogyny, racism, gluttony, support for Big Agribiz and Big Tobacco and a general antipathy toward anyone who makes less than six figures or who really cares about the environment or enjoys true religious freedom or alternative viewpoints or authentic orgasms or honest laughter.
….
As noted crusty and ruthless and largely unpleasant former Clinton adviser James Carville observed just after the election, “The American people just don’t have a clue as to what’s coming.”
If you are female, gay, bisexual, atheist, black, immigrant, poor, progressive, intellectual, open minded, open hearted, if you hold alternative views, dress funny, dance, enjoy sex, read seditious literature, believe in peace and funky spirituality and don’t particularly care for a sneering angry self-righteous well-armed anti-everything deity, you are about to find out. The hard way. And so is everyone else.
The gods can only shake their heads, and sigh.

A view from London, and also pretty much the view, I must admit, from this desk in New York City.

Europeans do not understand the curious civilization that the current America is becoming, and the grip that a visceral and idiosyncratic conservatism has on its national discourse. They especially do not understand the undercurrents of an increasingly self-confident and subtle racism that is its own variant of the forces that in Europe gave us Le Pen and Pim Fortuyn. George Bush Jr is a chip off the old multilateralist, transatlantic establishment, runs the European argument. He may seem hawkishly conservative but, in the end, he seeks UN resolutions like other American Presidents. Even at home, his bark is worse than his bite.
Wrong, wrong and wrong again. Anyone who thinks the Tory party is ‘nasty’ has not encountered contemporary American republicanism.

How did we end up supporting a man and a government whose interests and policies are so patently offensive and contrary to the welfare of at least ninety-five percent of the nation?
One statement keeps coming back to me as I repeatedly run through in my mind the extraordinary events of the past fourteen months. On the day after the election last week, Douglas, the sweet guy who works at the pet supply store across the street, admired my (slash war) button and was delighted I had an extra on me. When I told him how shocked I was at the number of people who supported the war and the war-mongers, he said, “They’re afraid. I think it’s a power trip.”
Is this how democracies die, in fear and chest-pounding?

–before he was canonized by September 11.
Some of us will not forget the man who essentially presided over a regime of terrorism against the poor and the weak, and who encouraged its most visible instrument, the New York Police Department.
“Justifiable Homicide,” a documentary about the police shooting deaths of two young Puerto Rican residents of the Bronx, Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega, opened November 6 at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village.

The filmmakers characterize the Rosario-Vega case as part of an epidemic of police shootings during the Giuliani administration, climaxing with the killing of Amadou Diallo in 1999. “Justifiable Homicide” is a sobering reminder that there was more to Mr. Giuliani’s mayoralty than Sept. 11.

Reuters headline today: “Democrats Pledge Cooperation After Defeat”

–and no one anywhere is doing much to change that, since the people involved are not men.
In Amsterdam, with a huge significant immigrant population dominated by those who share her religious heritage, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been trying to turn the lights on.

What Mr. Fortuyn did on the right, Ms. Hirsi Ali has done on the left. Many in the Labor Party, where she worked on immigration issues, were shocked when she told reporters that Mr. Fortuyn was right in calling Islam “backward.”
“At the very least Islam is facing backward and it has failed to provide a moral framework for our time,” she said in one conversation. “If the West wants to help modernize Islam, it should invest in women because they educate the children.”

Her life is now in danger.

[She has been] receiving hate mail, anonymous messages calling her a traitor to Islam and a slut. On several Web sites, other Muslims said she deserved to be knifed and shot. Explicit death threats by telephone soon followed. The police told her to change homes and the mayor of Amsterdam sent bodyguards. She tried living in hiding. Finally, last month, she became a refugee again, fleeing the Netherlands.

She’s planning to go back now, to stand for the Dutch Parliament. She’s going to need a lot of help, but even if it comes, it may not be enough to ensure her own survival.

Jane Smiley, not without a certain perverse delight, says, in a letter to the NYTimes editor, that she’s now rather pleased with the election outcome.

To the Editor:
Re “Into the Wilderness,” by Paul Krugman (column, Nov. 8):
The Republican Party now gets to create the world it has been saying for a generation that it wants.
The Republican world looks to many of us like a Hobbesian jungle, where the poor and the unlucky have to play by harsh rules, but the rich and lucky have no rules at all.
It will be a world of mistrust, especially at the international level.
It will be a world where every square inch of America will be up for grabs, where there is no sense of common property, common heritage or common good, where the only American dream is greed.
The voters have indicated that this is a world they want, and the liberals have been told to shut up.
After the 2000 election, when it looked as if this world was going to be imposed upon the country in spite of the popular will, I was upset and outraged, but this time, when the voters seem to have freely chosen it, or chosen not to care, I am rather glad.
If this is the world they want, this is the world they deserve. At least there’s clarity in that, and guess what? They can’t say they weren’t warned.
JANE SMILEY
Carmel Valley, Calif., Nov. 8, 2002

Quote of the day, found in the last sentence of the following excerpt from Frank Rich’s column:

As the reigning cliché had it, 2002 was the “Seinfeld” election — an election about nothing. But how could an election in the midst of one war and on the eve of another be about nothing? How could an election at a time of economic torpor be about nothing? Even Jeb Bush, in an arguably Freudian episode of one-upmanship after his victory, said flatly on TV that while Florida was doing well, “the national economy is weak.” This election was not about nothing; it’s the Democrats who were about nothing. That is hardly the ideal stance from which to fight someone like George W. Bush.