James Wagner

Because of an experience of my own, Pinter’s introductory analogy reads as particularly genuine, but the main text of this address should read as genuine to all.

By Earlier this year, I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its after effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive.
However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare – the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world.

Can we all agree on one thing? If there realy were a god, he wouldn’t be working with a Cardinal Law.
Law’s outrageous assaults upon those who trusted him, and those who never would, did not begin or end with the messy issue of sexual abuse currently in headlines around the world.
He represented, with an energy and enthusiasm uncommon even among his colleagues, the Roman Catholic Church’s disastrous, authoritarian and evangelical global policies on AIDS, abortion, same-sex marriages, women’s health care, public education and public health policy.
Preaching from Church pulpits soon afer his appointment in Boston, he told Catholics to vote against the Democratic White House candidates in 1984, Walter Mondale-Geraldine Ferraro, because of Mrs Ferraro’s support for abortion, and he never relented in his political partisanship, if it could mean advancing the narrow obsesssive agenda and the economic, social and political power of the Catholic fanaticism he and his office embodied so well.
Good riddance, but Law’s lone departure is not likely to change a thing, for while the people of the Boston area are being delivered of one miserable wretch, the damage remains, and the mischief continues there and throughout this nation and across the planet, nasty stuff worthy neither of gods nor men.

Awwww. That’s so sweet. It’s nice to know that Christian tourists may not be too discomfited by the repeated brutal Israeli invasions of Palestinian Bethlehem during this joyful Christmas season. Resident Palestinian muslims however, including especially the elected Palestinian leader, need not apply.

VATICAN CITY – Israel’s president promised the pope during a meeting yesterday that the army will redeploy outside the pilgrim city of Bethlehem during Christmas if there are no warnings of terrorist attacks, the Israeli Embassy said.

I say, Please, please, please don’t get rid of Trent Lott!
After Bush himself, Lott is the most spectacular evidence we have for the stupidity, disconnectedness and pure malevolence that has descended upon Washington.
For those who might worry about his continued presence as the second-highest ranking of the elected and almost-elected officials in the land, I can’t imagine how Lott can create any more mischief than his Republican colleagues would eagerly without his coaching, so keeping him visible could actually do less harm than good.

Jonathan Capehart may only be pretty, dumb and clueless, but his popularity with the media as a safe right-wing gay spokesperson, exceeded only by another establishment lacky, Andrew Sullivan, is more than just an embarassment to thinking and caring queers everywhere; it’s a very real threat to our survival, especially the survival of those who are most vulnerable.
In a column appearing today in the NY Daily News, he tells us that Tom Duane is “potentially standing in the way of gay rights.” Capehart simply cannot understand why Duane, a privileged young urban professional like himself, someone who is already protected where he lives by New York City’s human rights law, would be so interested in protecting people supposedly very unlike himself, the transgendered, by insisting that they be included in New York State’s own incredibly-long-overdue Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA).

And let’s be honest: Transgender issues are difficult for most people to understand. Even in Albany – where they have no problem passing complex budget bills with only a few minutes’ review – the notion of extending protection to men and women who feel they were born the wrong gender would be hard to grasp.

Could the answer be that the honorable Mr. Duane can actually see, and smell, beyond his nose, that he knows and understands the people who most need the protection which would be provided by SONDA, and that they are not newspaper columnists and state senators? Could it also be that he understands that he serves an entire community, and that he believes that such service demands courage and not merely professional calculation? Unless he realy believes the stuff he writes, Mr. Capehart should be asking himself about courage and calculation.
Employing the wisdom he reveals in his columns some forty years later, would Mr. Capehart have suggested to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the sixties that the stuggle for civil rights could collapse if King did not limit his initial objective to securing protections for those blacks who were most white?

The UN is dead!
The organization operates as an arm of our de facto executive in Washington or not at all, and this week it physically, if not formally, handed over its responsibilities to the White House when it gave its occupants the only copy of Iraq’s response to the Security Council declaration. Huh? The world will never see that full text again, especially since much of what it contains is obviously such an embarassment, and not just to the U.S.
The League of Nations was done in by the fascists in the twenties and thirties, its successor by American corporate imperialists in the aughts. I’m actually surprised we took so long.
Long live the EU!
Is it impossible to imagine replacing the concept of a League of, or a United, Nations with a world society formed voluntarily by emulation of, if not a real lust for physical intimacy with, the mature, very attractive and successful culture, polity and economy represented by the European Union? I can imagine that, as an alternative to the U.S. alone, we might eventually see the concept of “Europe” erase its association with geography and history and become a model, if not a magnet, for diverse peoples around the world. It’s not perfect, but the European federal approach currently has no real competition in a world which resists American imperialism.
As a nation, if not as a society, the U.S. doesn’t seem to be able to anything very well just now (except weaponry and the commercial marketing of popular culture), and this isn’t hard to see if you take a serious look around. We’re living off capital at the moment. But regardless of how good or bad we may think we look to ourselves, we just don’t look that good any more to people on the outside, and we’re looking worse every day. Most alarming is the fact that even Americans who see this clearly, just don’t give a damn, or they are convinced that nothing can change it. I think the world sees this.
Damn! It should have worked. We had it all, and it looks like we really fucked it up. It’s all very sad.

(the American radicals, that is)

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

–Seamus Heaney

A son of the Weathermen, son of four of them, as it turned out, has been named as one of 32 American winners of this year’s Rhodes scholarships.
He is now 22, and since his birth parents have been in prison since he was fourteen months old, he was raised by two other weathermen leaders [one of whom had a memoir published, fatefully, on September 11, 2001].

As with the other triumphs of his young life, Chesa Boudin was unable to celebrate with his parents on Saturday afternoon when he was named a Rhodes scholar. He could not even share the good news.
As maximum-security inmates in the New York State prison system, Katherine Boudin and David Gilbert are barred from receiving telephone calls or e-mail messages. Though Mr. Boudin has rigged his dorm room at Yale University to override the block on collect calls, neither parent was able to connect with him today. They will read of their son’s accomplishment in the newspaper, instead, and it may be days before they can congratulate him.

While he has spoken widely and intelligently about all four of his parents’ experiences, Chesa Boudin prefers to talk about his own world right now.

“We have a different name for the war we’re fighting now — now we call it the war on terrorism, then they called it the war on communism,” Mr. Boudin said. “My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I’m dedicated to the same thing.”
“I don’t know that much about my parents’ tactics; I’ll talk about my tactics,” he added. “The historical moment we find ourselves in determines what is most appropriate for social change.”

Incidently, does anyone else reading this NYTimes account find the terms of Boudin’s birth-parents incarceration, restricting communication with their only child, worthy of a culture which pretends to worship family values and which denies it has political prisoners?