do not forget the real Giuliani

This blog is directed to the world outside of New York. Its message is hardly necessary for those who have lived in the Gotham City for the last ten years.
An opinion piece in Newsday today, from an author who once saw the former prosecutor as a hero, and who co-authored a book describing him as such, reminds us of the truth about the the man who later became an unpopular mayor. Giuliani had a 32 percent approval rating in 1999 and throughout his second term, until the destruction of the World Trade Center, he remained unable to claim any real popularity in the city itself.

It is an exhilarating experience to publish a book critical of a pop culture icon like Giuliani, who enjoys an 80-percent approval rating nationally, is routinely called “America’s Mayor,” and will be the subject of a made-for-television docu-drama in March. Friends think I am committing career suicide by deflating a political diety. TV talk-show bookers say Giuliani is too popular to dispute.
But there is a case against canonization. Something bogus is going on here. One day has become a career.

Jack Newfield hardly misses a beat in his account of Giuliani’s failings. Even crime reduction, for which he boasts credit, was hardly accomplished by the mayor in a vacuum. The list of Newfields’s indictments includes the mayor’s pervasive racist policy, education system disasters, union antagonisms, violations of major constitution rights, the undermining even of existing programs for the poor and, most damaging from the point of view of the constituency which most enthusiastically supported him, fiscal irresponsibility.

“I write in a night of shame”

John Berger, the Anglo-French writer and critic, recently wrote this, for a site which asks writers, artists and civic leaders for their words on what Bush has called “the first war of the twenty-first century:

SHAME, NOT INDIVIDUAL GUILT
I write in a night of shame.
Many fear that U.S. military forces will soon be launching its “preventive” war against Iraq. Others hope that this can be avoided. Between the announced decisions and the secret calculations, everything is kept unclear, since lies prepare the way for missiles.
By shame I do not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I’m coming to understand it, is a species feeling which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step.
The shame begins with the contestation (which we all acknowledge somewhere but, out of powerlessness, dismiss) that much of the present suffering could be alleviated or avoided if certain realistic and relatively simple decisions were taken.
To understand and take in what is happening, an inter-disciplinary vision is necessary in order to connect the “fields” which conventional arguments keep separate. The precondition for thinking on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. Any such vision is bound to be, in the original sense of the word, political.
I write in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were so, I would probably not have the courage to continue. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something whilst the rest of the family is asleep, in Baghdad and Chicago. (Yes, I see too the forever invincible Kurds, 4000 of whom were gassed – with US compliance – by Saddam Hussein.) I see pastry cooks working in Teheran and the shepherds, thought of as bandits, sleeping beside their sheep in Sardinia, I see a man in the Friedrichshain quarter of Berlin sitting in his pyjamas with a bottle of beer reading Heidegger and he has the hands of a proletarian, I see a small boat of illegal immigrants off the Spanish coast near Alicante, I see a mother in Mali, her name is Aya which means Born on Friday, swaying her baby to sleep.
Democracy is a proposal (rarely realised) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the “freedom” of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretense.
Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation.
The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends, to a large degree, on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny’s nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame.
This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.
©John Berger 2003. His most recent book of essays is THE SHAPE OF A POCKET (Bloomsbury, London and Pantheon, New York)

a world alien to reason and logic

Just now I made the mistake of turning on the television for the first time in months. I wanted to see if there were millions, shivering, standing in support of reason outside the United Nations Security Council, and I was properly feeling very guilty for not being there myself
I didn’t really find out anything, because all I saw and heard on each network were the usual, now iconic, talking shirts (and blouses), describing a world and representing a logic totally alien to me.
The world is the one created by this White House and the media which represents it, to the exclusion of any alternative. The logic, I believe, at the moment goes something like this: Ok, we just may give Iraq a tiny bit more time, but if then the inspectors still don’t find weapons of mass destruction, it will mean Hussein is hiding them. At that point the Europeans and any others who oppose a war won’t have a leg to stand on, and we can go in and nuke the people responsible for September 11, making us all feel both virtuous and safe.
I don’t have to comment any further right now. I’m just going to sign off and weep–for reason, logic, sanity, history, the present, for any future, but above all for the millions of people who will be caught up in this evil.
____________________
Not In Our Name has two full pages in today’s NYTimes. The statement is excellent, and it properly references more than just this war. Sign it.
For a visible image of resistance to this war and the new foreign and domestic order, see the Blue Button Project.

ACT UP in Berlin

James Wentzy’s film documentary, “Fight Back, Fight AIDS – 15 Years of ACT UP,” has been accepted for screening next month by the 53rd Berlin International Film Festival.
Fight Back, Fight AIDS – 15 Years of ACT UP von James Wentzy (USA)
From the Festival site [my translation from the German]:

Absent for years from the Berlinale, AIDS appears again as a topic of feature films in the Festival’s Competition and Panorama theaters. Two documentary films examine socio-political issues [the second, also an American film, is Louise Hogarth’s The Gift]: As gays began to die like flies in the 80’s, the world looked away. ACT UP became, for the media, the voice of AIDS: And the world was shocked that this the most easy-going of minorities was able to apply itself to deal with the crisis, to ACT UP, to shout back. This film shows how the media-savy actions of this loose organization came about and how AIDS politicized the gay world and moved it to assume real responsibility: Ashes are thrown onto the lawn of the White House of an ignorant President Bush senior, corpses are laid out in front of the two-faced Clinton–and the film historian Vito Russo (who was at the Panorama theatre in 1983 with his lecture, “The Celluloid Closet”) is shown delivering his last great speech.

In November I announced the screening of the film here in New York, and after seeing it, wrote:

The ACT UP documentary was beautiful, but for all the evidence of the success of the activism it records, the reminders of how little has changed in the world in fifteen years is a horrible concomitance. Bush, war in the middle east, health care, drug company profiteering, oil, greed and stupidity. There were also the images of so many activists whose lives were destroyed at the height of their beauty and their powers. I would not have missed this screening for anything, but it was a melancholy, if not terrifying, experience, and one which an intelligent and generous world could have prevented.

not the colds of yesteryear

So. I guess if we think it was cold in January, the globe really is warming.

As of late last week, January 2003 was only the 36th coldest January on record for New York City. Averaging 29 degrees, this January has been downright balmy compared with, say, January 1918, when the average was 21.7 degrees.
Not a single low temperature has set a record. The lowest temperature so far this month was an un-record-shattering 7 degrees on Jan. 18 in Central Park. That would not be a record for any day in Januaries past.

Bush planning to nuke Iraq

I hate to take the narrow view, to personalize the big issues, but as someone who lives in New York, and is absolutely mad about its people and its beauty, I see this news first as the death knell for the vulnerable, very open city I love. Still with my initial reaction, no, I don’t give a fuck for what happens to anyone elsewhere in the country who hasn’t been screaming at the top of their lungs all along about the insane regime which has highjacked the nation.

WASHINGTON — One year after President Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea the “axis of evil,” the United States is thinking about the unthinkable: It is preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iraq.
At the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Omaha and inside planning cells of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, target lists are being scrutinized, options are being pondered and procedures are being tested to give nuclear armaments a role in the new U.S. doctrine of “preemption.”

“radical nationalists”

Louis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, has come up with the phrase, “radical nationalists,” as a description of the party interests which currently control Washington, and thus the nation and already much of the world. Don’t call them “conservative.”
“Conservative” is hardly an accurate description of Bush, the Republicans, the corporatists and the religious fundamentalists whose agenda for change, well underway already, will clearly destroy the republic, and perhaps much more.

I don’t for a moment doubt the eager commitment to the great and noble project of “regime change,” but on the evidence ot the last eighteen months they’ve been doing their most effective work in the United States, not in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq. Better understood as radical nationalists than as principled conservatives, they deploy the logic endorsed by the American military commanders in Vietnam (who found it necessary to destroy a village in order to save it), and they offer the American people a choice similar to the one presented by the officers of the Spanish Inquisition to independent-minded heretics–give up your liberty, and we will set you free. [online text not available]

head for home!

[But first, a warning, home ain’t what it used to be.]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The State Department is sending a cable to embassies around the world telling Americans abroad to be ready to leave their resident country quickly if for any reason they have to, a U.S. official said on Friday.

Well, yes, the sky is almost certainly going to fall, but remember, they don’t hate us. Like us, they hate this government and lots of the things we do. Our best bet to begin turning things around: Impeach the miscreants–now! The administration is pretty free with the word “treason,”* but the charge could and should be directed toward themselves.
____________________
*How’s this?

“The President considers this nation to be at war,” a White House source says,” and, as such, considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason.”

hundreds of thousands, almost erased

Everybody out there knows I read the NYTimes, but that doesn’t mean I eat it up, and I don’t suggest such a narrow or uniform diet for anyone.
Today’s edition included on page A6 an image of the “Turmoil In Venezuela,” as the headline above the caption reads, but no news story, so it can’t be found online. Yes, there is a caption–five lines they give it–but no real story, no background or explanation. Other news sources (even our own government’s Voice of America News) featured the story prominently yesterday and today, but the Times must have decided it was too difficult to reconcile the story behind the image with the impression they have been giving for months that Venezuela is in the midst of a popular revolt against a mad dictator. The importance of the story, almost ignored by the Times, is suggested even in the few words of their own tiny item [my italics].

One of the hundreds of thousands of supporters of President Hugo Chávez who gathered yesterday in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. They denounced a strike by the opposition that has slashed oil production. Several blocks away, an explosion killed one person, a 45-year-old man, and wounded 14. No one claimed responsibility.