the president, his tank, his guards, his people
Seems like we’re just spitting in the wind now, as an activist friend said the day before the republic’s formal obsequies. Still, it was good to see these noble souls lining the path of the funeral cortege yesterday.
Bless ’em. May we all live to fight another day.
[image from Reuters]
Category: War
Alberto Gonzales
I AM NOT A TORTURER!
Contact your senator now! We deserve a top law enforcement officer with a better resume.
For those who have a senator on the Judiciary Committee itself, which began hearings on the nomination this morning, here’s a link to the roster, with access links within it. To email the committee leaders, and for a message form, see this “Action Alert” site from The Nation.
[image from AP by Susan Walsh]]
the United States, tsunami relief no-show
Meulaboh, Sumatra, Indonesia, today
I have no status in and no experience of emergency relief operations, planning or administration, but anyone could have foreseen that the immediate challenge in responding to the tsunami disaster would be the logistics of accessing the people who need help.
Yet almost everything I’ve seen written about the scale and kind of the world’s response is being expressed in monetary terms. Meanwhile, beginning already several days ago there have been alarming stories about large stocks of water, food, fuel and other matierials assembled at airports or elsewhere which cannot be transported to those who need them most. Speed is incredibly important after disasters and this one is already almost a week old.
The U.S. used to offer to send elements of the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines or the Coast Guard when disaster struck and transportation and communications were disrupted anywhere in the world. I haven’t heard anything about our volunteering to any nation the men and women or the planes, ships, landing craft, helicopters (no equipment could be more important in southern Asia right now) or even trucks (they don’t have to be armored, so we should have a good supply already) which could best deliver help to remote villages and islands around the Indian Ocean basin. No one is better equipped to do this than the United States.
But sorry, world. Our people and equipment are just not available. Our resources are otherwise (and fully) engaged in wars, and if those engagements didn’t look good before, they certainly are not going to make us look any better now.
I think the world will find the money for relief and reconstruction, perhaps to a great extent because of the generosity of people more than the largesse of their governments, but lives are being lost right now because we’re not there. War has become such an addiction for the U.S. that I’m not sure we’re ever going to show up again.
UPDATE: Maybe there’s still hope for all earthlings. Immediately after finishing the post above I found this AP story. But it’s still too little and too late for too many.
[image from REUTERS/Dudi Anung-State Secretariat]
Susan Sontag
Peter Hujar Susan Sontag [1974-1975]
Susan Sontag died on Tuesday.
Beginning almost twenty years ago I had included her as a part of the homeland I had just adopted and which she had acquired at birth. Because of my profound general “otherness” and two nearly-profound early family dislocations, while it may not strictly fit the meaning of the German das Heimat, my New York City home had come to mean everything for me.
In this Manhattan Heimat Susan Sontag was my neighbor. Physically she really was my neighbor, since she owned an apartment just two blocks away from mine. For years I saw her everywhere in the city, although we never met. Her mind and what she was doing with it had already ensured that she would mean much more to me than an ordinary neighbor normally could. And then one evening I walked through the aura with which I had surrounded her.
I had already seen Edgar Reitz’s monumental first “Heimat,” (most sections twice) when I eagerly subscribed to the first American screening of the thirteen episodes of “Zweite Heimat” at the Public Theater almost twelve years ago.
After arranging myself in the first row for a double feature of two episodes, I noticed that she was only a few seats to my left. Only by coincidence, I had brought her new book, “The Volcano Lover,” with me to keep me occupied while waiting for the lights to go down. I think it was during the break that I gathered the courage to speak to her and ask if she might sign my copy.
I must have mumbled a few words, I hope not too gushing, about how much I admired both her writing and her bold social and political activism, and then we exchanged a few thoughts about the film, all of which escape me now, except that we discovered that we were both enormous fans of both epics. She signed the book, “for Barry and Jim – Susan Sontag ‘Heimat 6&7’ 7 July 1993.”
On every other day I spotted her in the audience she was totally absorbed in conversations with various companions. I was saved from embarassing myself, but I seriously regret the lost opportunities. Gosh, I wish I could have gone with her to Sarajevo, but Barry has written from the heart about how much she became a part of our New York experience, of our own shared Heimat.
She will certainly be greatly missed by many.
It’s late Tuesday night as I’m writing this. The death toll for all the shores around the Indian Ocean, the work of one wave over only a few hours, has now exceeded that of the U.S. military alone in Vietnam over a period of ten years. I’m already recalling Sontag’s unassailable morality, her creative curiosity and her courageous voice as I think about the individual and community tragedies millions of people in southern Asia are enduring at this moment. What would Sontag say about our government’s lame response? Colin Powell is absolutely wrong. We are stingy, very stingy, and we have been for decades.*
*The United States initially offered $15 million in relief to cover all of the nations affected (what we spend on the Iraq war every hour, and a fraction of the estimated cost of Bush’s January 20 Nuremberg rally). Oh sure, after being ridiculed by people in a number of other countries, we’ve now apparently upped our commitment by another $20 million, although that figure is marked as a loan.
Radically contrary to popular U.S. opinion, the amount of our foreign aid, in terms of percentage of gross national product (approximately one tenth of one percent), is the lowest of any industrialized nation in the world. Incidently, Norway’s contribution is proportionately almost ten times that of ours.
[image from Matthew Marks via artnet]
I guess this explains a lot
A lot has changed in 65 years. The country which built this great skyscraper now seems to have decided it can do so much better without wisdom or knowledge; we’re in for a very bumpy ride.
I took the photograph at dusk, while walking across town on Monday. The image is of Lee Lawrie’s sculpture relief above the front entrance of the RCA Building (today sometimes thoughtlessly referred to as the GE Building) on Rockefeller Plaza. According to the Rockefeller Center Visitor’s Guide, the William Blake-inspired figure represents Wisdom, who rules over man’s knowledge and interprets the laws of nature. The compass points to the light and sound waves of the cast glass screen below. The inscription is based on Isaiah 33:6
today’s “Europeans,” civilization’s imposters?
“To the whites, the lives of their black office boys or chauffeurs seem unimaginably separate and isolated from their own. . . . But to the urban Africans, the ‘Europeans’ are the ones who seem isolated, in their remote and hidden mansions in the superior suburbs. The Africans no longer feel themselves reliant on white patrons or promoters for their education and cultural development; they see themselves as the heirs of Western civilization, and the ‘Europeans’ as the impostors.”
Anthony Sampson, a British jouranalist and biographer of Nelson Mandela, was writing about the divide which separated whites from blacks in the cities of Apartheid-era South Africa, but today his last sentence seems prophetic on a scale he might not have imagined when it was published in the NYTimes Magazine in 1960: Try substituting the word “non-Europeans” for the word “Africans” and the world won’t look as simple as it might have a moment before.
Sampson loved Africa and Africans, as much as he loved civilization and liberty, human rights and social justice. He died on Saturday at the age of 78.
today’s MTA photo ban protest
my own rather lame sign, as seen somewhere in the system this afternoon
(the sign on the guy’s left reads, “I’m here on a research grant from Al Queda”)
this sign became a moving beacon for today’s odyssey (the stylized font reads, “TERRORISTS UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT”)
The second time around it had already seemed a little routine. Some of the wonder and energy which had accompanied the first MTA photo ban zap was missing this afternoon, but I have to admit there were a few sassy-sarcastic signs this time, and there was even something resembling an information handout.
We’re getting better at broadcasting the issue, but actually I’d be very happy if we never had to do this thing again. Will the MTA come to its senses?
Perhaps not, if some of the sentiments of subway users overheard today mean anything. One woman, although a little sympathetic to our argument, was seriously worried about the threat cameras pose to the privacy of riders. While she was speaking to me, standing on the subway platform, I snapped the picture below and pointed out what had attracted my attention. She had nothing more to say.
[image at the top of this post from jpreardon.com]
photographers’ ‘Flash Mob’ subway ride
REMINDER: Don’t miss being a part of the photographers’ ‘Flash Mob’ subway ride protest against the MTA proposal to ban all cameras from the entire transit system. The organizers’ plan is to meet tomorrow, Saturday, at 1 o’clock in the awesome Main Concourse inside Grand Central Terminal. Don’t forget your metro card and your camera. Bring a sign with a creative message, even a small one.
The magnificent Concourse is worth a picture even without the addition of hundreds of concerned young camera fanatics, and if the MTA has its way, this will be one of your last chances to record its spendors.
still no evidence of a Kerik nanny
But at least they’re finally looking around. The NYTimes may hope to redeem itself for sitting out the Bernard Kerik story in its first weeks. The paper’s news and editorial departments had totally ignored the developing stories about Kerik’s shady background until after he withdrew his name from consideration as Homeland Security secretary.
Maybe they’re trying to get up to speed now by cutting to the quick. This morning the Times devotes 40 column inches to the questions surrounding the mysterious nanny whose immigration and tax status was used as the reason for Kerik’s withdrawal.
Included among those questions is the fundamental one I posed early this past Sunday, whether in fact there ever was a nanny in the first place.
Last night, Mr. Kerik was told that skeptics in city government circles were questioning the very existence of the nanny, and he was pressed to provide any kind of evidence to document that she was real. But after taking time to consider the request, Mr. Kerik again decided to remain silent on the subject.
Why do I care so much about this story? It starts with the embarassment I feel for my city that Giuliani and Kerik have at least until recently been successful in conspiring with the opportunists in Washington to ensure that two locally-notorious goons came to represent or embody 9/11 and New York. The fire of my outrage about the choice of Kerik was stoked by the uninhibited enthusiasm for the nomination expressed by New York’s Democratic politicians Hillary Clinton and Charles Shumer – and the irresponsible, uncritical reporting of my hometown’s largest paper.
The lights are going out, the doors are all closing; where will we look for truth, honesty and integrity now?
Karl Rove gives it to us
Ward Sutton KARL ROVE SUMS IT UP FOR LIBERALS 2004 syndicated cartoon detail
See the entire 16-box Ward Sutton cartoon on The Village Voice site. My personal favorite/horror has got to be, “WE USED 9/11 AND NEW YORK CITY LIKE A CHEAP WHORE.”
[image from The Village Voice]