Vonnegut envies Twain’s wit and Lincoln’s tongue

Included in a Clemens Lecture presented in April for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, by Kurt Vonnegut:

What other American landmark is as sacred to me as the Mark Twain House? The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln were country boys from Middle America, and both of them made the American people laugh at themselves and appreciate really important, really moral jokes.
I note that construction has stopped of a Mark Twain Museum here in Hartford —behind the carriage house of the Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue. Work persons have been sent home from that site because American “conservatives,” as they call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations, have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy.
Shock and awe.
And now, having installed themselves as our federal government, or taken control of it from outside, they have squandered our public treasury and then some. They have created a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church mice.
Shock and awe.
What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?
Smile, America. You’re on Candid Camera.
And they have turned loose a myriad of our high-tech weapons, each one costing more than a hundred high schools, on a Third World country, in order to shock and awe human beings like us, like Adam and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
. . . .
What has happened to us? We have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form of government [my italics].

Further mocking our current regime in Washington, Vonnegut recalls the man who became the first president of a Republican Party which would reject him today. The words of Congressman Abraham Lincoln, describing President Polk’s 1848 War on Mexico:

“Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood —that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.”

Vonnegut jumps up:

Holy smokes! I almost said, “Holy shit!” And I thought I was a writer!

on fascism, er, totalitarianaism

A sober reading of the contemporary American political scene, from Sheldon Wolin in The Nation this week.

The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The party system is a notorious example. The Republicans have emerged as a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority. As Republicans have become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism and footnote the end of ideology. In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home. Bear in mind that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking total power.
Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security. Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media’s reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.

Fascism
From Britannica Concise:
Fascism: Philosophy of government that stresses the primacy and glory of the state, unquestioning obedience to its leader, subordination of the individual will to the state’s authority, and harsh suppression of dissent. Martial virtues are celebrated, while liberal democratic values are denigrated. 20th-cent. fascism arose partly out of fear of the rising power of the lower classes and differed from contemporary communism (as practiced under J. Stalin) by its protection of the corporate and landowning powers and preservation of a class system.

the most subtle form of censorship

Today [actually it was yesterday] our intrepid columnist asks the question: Why is the BBC generally regarded here, in Britain and around the world as a critical and impartial source of news, while the American media is considered a flag-waving cheering section for a regime?

A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view — something they couldn’t find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC’s director general, “wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality.”
Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government’s policies. In fact, however, it tried hard — too hard, its critics say — to stay impartial. America’s TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.

After discussing the paradox, Paul Krugman concludes his column with a warning.

We don’t have censorship in this country; it’s still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.

White House September 11 coverup?

Now that we’ve started three wars, destroyed any hope for our own security or that of any part of the planet, can we please listen to a question first asked September 11, 2001? And that is, “how did this happen?”
The White House has never been interested in the question, and to this day it has done all that it could to silence any person or institution which was.

In fact, NEWSWEEK has learned, President Bush’s chief lawyer has privately signaled that the White House may seek to invoke executive privilege over key documents relating to the attacks in order to keep them out of the hands of investigators for the National Commission on Terror Attacks Upon the United States—the independent panel created by Congress to probe all aspects of 9-11.

What may be a coverup with enormous political and national security consequences might finally be about to unravel.

Sen. Bob Graham on Sunday accused the Bush administration of engaging in a “coverup” of intelligence failures before and after the Sept. 11 attacks to shield it from embarrassment, and said the war with Iraq has allowed Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to become a greater threat to Americans than ever before.

[Cursor, in its “Media Patrol” column today, assembled the two links included in this post.]

a nation of cowards

cow·ard (kou’ erd)
n. One who shows ignoble fear in the face of danger or pain.
I’ve argued for a year and a half that the only explanation for what has become of America since September 11 is its fear. Maybe we need this kind of kick to snap out of it.

For a brief moment after 9/11, we recognized some genuine heroes in our midst, those who put their lives on the line to rescue strangers and those who put their own needs in back of the needs of others in the middle of tragedy. The celebration of this heroism may have become a little gaudy, but it was sincere.
Since then we seem to have become a nation of cowards celebrating illusions.
There is a president, who, in reaction to the devastation of 9/11, does not act with forbearance, curiosity to understand the root cause, and as a world leader. Instead he lashes out at blurry targets with more force than we were met with. This is not the act of a brave man. This is the act of a coward.
There is a senator who sees his country yawing dangerously off course and, for the first time in its history abusing its power openly and shamelessly. The senator says nothing, though he knows better, because he is afraid of an emotional backlash if he engages in rational discussion. He is afraid he will lose the next election. This is the act of a coward.
There is a citizen who is unable to think. He succumbs to fear, believes every scary story he hears, buys duct tape for his doors and windows, when a bit of thinking would tell him he is in more danger from getting into his car. This is the act of a coward.
There is a journalist who knows there are young children dying in hospitals in Iraq, with their bodies horribly disfigured as the result of our country’s doings, yet he will not show pictures of these children so that people can weigh the consequences of war for themselves. He shows pictures of massively-armed Americans and reports every “coalition” news release as gospel truth. This is the act of a coward.
. . . .

It’s also that we’ve simply become very stupid – a choice we’ve made ourselves, one which relates to an addiction to television and a general flight from reason, but I’ll stop the crankiness right there for now.

update on Reza, now on foot

Reza Baluchi has now left Los Angeles, and this time he’s travelling on foot on his long journey to New York City.

So this morning, Mr. Baluchi began the fulfillment of that jailhouse promise. Wearing new shorts, new running shoes and a bad haircut, he said he carried no hard feelings, no chips on his shoulder, only a knapsack filled with a tent and reflective vest, nylon leggings, a sleeping bag, food, water and an A.T.M. card.
“I go by I self,” he said in self-taught English. “New York. Everybody wait me there. Soon. Soon. I come. Peace. No war. American people very good.”

anywhere, anytime, and for any reason he chooses

I logged the post which appears below this one before I had read this piece by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation. I might have saved myself the outrage.
It seems that there can no longer be any argument about the legitimacy of our occupying army. The president in fact now has sufficient legal authority to use the military anywhere inside the country whenever he determines that doing so is appropriate, just as he can anywhere outside the U.S.
Gene Healy of the libertarian Cato Institute is concerned.

It does weird things to our political culture when we start getting used to armed troops on the streets, that we find that comforting. It makes the United States start looking like we’re not a democracy.
. . . .
The specter of the military patrolling streets, making arrests and conducting house-to-house searches is exactly what civil libertarians fear. [Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU’s Washington office] cites the case of José Padilla, an alleged would-be terrorist who is an American citizen, who was seized by the military and held incommunicado. “The notion that the US military could march into your home and cart you off to the brig is a frightening one,” Edgar says. “Before the incarceration of Padilla, it was inconceivable.” According to the ACLU, the Posse Comitatus law is so weakened now that there is very little to prevent the armed forces from carrying out arrests, setting up roadblocks and performing search-and-seizure sweeps. And the Pentagon agrees. “Whether military personnel will have the authority to detain individuals or be given arrest authority depends upon the specific facts of each case,” says [Pentagon spokesman Maj. Ted] Wadsworth.

What this means is that while Americans now have the remarkable freedom to destroy their own world and that of the rest of humanity, they have lost the freedom to govern themselves.

the A train as troop train

We went through several mid-size hells on the way to and from Brooklyn last night.
Surely, if there were a hell, the anteroom would be the car of an MTA A train locked at both ends during the trip under the East River tunnel, while a large evangelist screams at its occupants, among whom were at least two atheists.
Later this same festive Saturday spring night, on our return to Manhattan at 11 pm, hell returned in another guise when our car was suddenly taken over during its pause at the Broadway-Nassau station by a dozen camouflaged soldiers carrying automatic rifles. A troop train. We had already planned to leave at the next stop to go to dinner, and we did so, or I might have done more than merely mutter, to no one in particular, the few words that first came to mind, “this is the new world order.”
Washington is saying that its wars have now made us all safe, Code Orange is a thing of past political utility, at least outside of New York City, and even here they are already reducing the airport security they had so highly vaunted just yesterday. Then why is New York still under military occupation?
A nightmare evening between the bookends of mindless theocracy and martial law. Is this the new America?
____________________
Oh yes, in spite of the unpleasantness, the play was very fine, said Mrs. Lincoln. We had a wonderful, and in fact, something of a rollicking good time with an amazing puppetry production of Rossini’s “Marriage of Figaro.”

Early reviews suggest that the production is not about precision or concern for authentic Rossini style. Indeed, [The Absolute Ensemble] has thoroughly modernized the score with touches of flamenco and synthesizer-accompanied recitatives. But the sheer skill and inventiveness of the staging–-the puppets range from tiny to life-size–-gives this age-old opera a much-welcomed revival.

Absolute-ly, delightfully imperfect!

huh?

New York City has spent $1 billion on antiterrorism efforts since the Sept. 11 attacks. But the city says it has yet to receive a dollar of antiterrorism money from the federal government. Washington has provided millions to help clean up the damage. But an estimated $44 million in antiterrorism money now in the pipeline has apparently not reached New York, the city that bore the brunt of the most disastrous terrorism strike in American history.

So begins an editorial in the NYTimes today. The remainder of the argument is basically an indictment of the cynical political calculations which continue to determine the disbursal of antiterrorism funds.

It is a flawed formula, which seems to focus less on places directly threatened by terrorism than on areas that are of importance in next year’s election. City officials figure that compared with New York City’s $44 million, North Carolina will get $51 million, Ohio $64 million and Florida over $86 million. On a per capita basis, the latest allocation gives New York State residents about $3 per person, while Iowa gets $6 and Wyoming $22. Certainly these states need resources to combat terrorism, but it is hard to argue that they stand as high as New York, Washington or Los Angeles on Al Qaeda’s potential hit list.

See an earlier post for more on the heavy defense responsibilities of the federal government as spelled out in the Constitution.