America transformed (is Mr. Hyde here to stay?)

There is, unfortunately, almost no precedent for the kind of attack this former President today directed against the current White House occupants.

Fundamental changes are taking place in the historical policies of the United States with regard to human rights, our role in the community of nations and the Middle East peace process — largely without definitive debates (except, at times, within the administration). [President Carter here describes “a core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.”]
….
Formerly admired almost universally as the preeminent champion of human rights, our country has become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life. We have ignored or condoned abuses in nations that support our anti-terrorism effort, while detaining American citizens as “enemy combatants,” incarcerating them secretly and indefinitely without their being charged with any crime or having the right to legal counsel.
….
While the president has reserved judgment, the American people are inundated almost daily with claims from the vice president and other top officials that we face a devastating threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and with pledges to remove Saddam Hussein from office, with or without support from any allies. As has been emphasized vigorously by foreign allies and by responsible leaders of former administrations and incumbent officeholders, there is no current danger to the United States from Baghdad.
….
We have thrown down counterproductive gauntlets to the rest of the world, disavowing U.S. commitments to laboriously negotiated international accords.
….
Tragically, our government is abandoning any sponsorship of substantive negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. Our apparent policy is to support almost every Israeli action in the occupied territories and to condemn and isolate the Palestinians as blanket targets of our war on terrorism, while Israeli settlements expand and Palestinian enclaves shrink.
….
Belligerent and divisive voices now seem to be dominant in Washington, but they do not yet reflect final decisions of the president, Congress or the courts. It is crucial that the historical and well-founded American commitments prevail: to peace, justice, human rights, the environment and international cooperation.
Former president Carter is chairman of the Carter Center in Atlanta.

“many Americans don’t have interest in free speech”

We don’t want to speak out and we don’t want to listen in.

Hlynur Hallsson arrived this summer in Marfa, Tex., with plans, as he put it, to stimulate discussion.
[The first exhibit which the artist assembled at the very respectable Chinati Foundation] — a compilation of other artists’ work — did not stir much reaction. His second, four graffiti-style sentences scrawled on a wall, created an uproar.
“The real axis of evil are Israel, USA and the UK,” Mr. Hallsson, an artist from Iceland, wrote in English and Spanish. “Ariel Sharon is the top terrorist. George W. Bush is an idiot. And Iceland is banana republic number one.”

Hallsson is an attractive young conceptual artist [too bad only the NYTimes hard copy includes pictures] with growing visibility in Iceland and elsewhere in Europe.

He said the first three statements did not reflect his opinions but were taken from comments he had heard in Europe or had seen in the European press. He said the fourth, about Iceland, came from a quotation in an article in The New York Times about plans to build a huge power plant in his home country.
Mr. Hallsson said that he realized the statements were provocative, but that he hoped they would lead to discussion about how the rest of the world sometimes views the United States.

The town went nuts! The Foundation’s survival instincts led to the covering of the windows and the artist’s proposal for a second part of the exhibit.

“The Axis of Evil is North Korea, Iraq and Iran,” he wrote this time, painting over the original statements. “Osama bin Laden is the top terrorist. George W. Bush is a good leader. And Iceland is not a banana republic.”
He said of the change, “I just wrote what people want to read.”

There was virtually no discussion this time; almost no one came. The Mayor said few locals went because they considered the change patronizing.

Mr. Hallsson left on Tuesday to return to Iceland. His departure was planned before the controversy, and he said he wished he could have stayed “for further discussion.”
He also said he was startled that people were so quick to try to clamp down on controversial speech.
“I think quite many Americans don’t have interest in free speech,” Mr. Hallsson said. “The majority, I don’t know. My experience was, quite many people would be happy to give that one away.”

gay racketeers just wanna have fun

We love Paul Rudnick! This week in The New Yorker he writes a helpful memo to the FBI which should assist them in an investigation of the putative Gay Mafia.

RE: The F.B.I.’s racketeering division recently infiltrated the nation’s alleged Gay Mafia, with operatives working under cover as vicious choreographers, neo-con columnists, and chatty houseboys. These moles have discovered many significant differences between this far-reaching criminal enterprise and its heterosexual counterpart.

Selections from his crimebusters-handy list:

3. High-ranking members of the Gay Mafia communicate almost exclusively by phone. Code phrases include “Stop it,” “So when I ran into him I was very so-fine-we-had-sex-so-what-I-still-hate-you,” and “Oh, she’s one to talk.”
7. The Gay Mafia’s links to the Catholic Church are extensive, and most often begin with the phrase “Jimmy, did you know that the Apostles liked to wrestle?”
10. The Gay Mafia has its origins in ancient Greece, when Don Plato first remarked to a group of graceful youths, “I am so over Carthage.” [he shoulda written, “Sparta”]
14. The Gay Mafia is assumed to have connections with dockworkers and longshoremen, because they’re just so damn hot.
17. The Transgendered Mafia is becoming a major player, mostly because they’re so tall.

AIDS threatens peoples everywhere,

but AIDS activism threatens governments, including China now.
The news item is now about a week old. A major Chinese AIDS activist, Dr. Wan Yanhai, “disappeared” sometime after August 24. Relatives and human rights groups believe he has been detained by the police.
I delayed posting anything last week, because I was expecting immediate follow-up news or, absent news, a large outcry in the world’s press. But nothing.

The activist, Wan Yanhai, is a former Chinese health official who was fired after he took up the causes of gay rights and AIDS in the mid-1990’s. He has been involved in various small but influential projects in the last few years, including a Web site about H.I.V. and the creation of small support groups for patients.
He has also been instrumental in exposing a devastating AIDS epidemic in central China that is centered on Henan Province, where as many as a million poor farmers were infected through unsanitary blood collection schemes.

We don’t know anything about his whereabouts, or the circumstances of his disapparance, but we do know a lot about him, and it’s awesome. This is just for starters:

A small, soft-spoken man who generally works behind the scenes, Dr. Wan nonetheless absorbed some of the confrontational style of American AIDS activists during a 1997 fellowship in Los Angeles.
At a regional AIDS meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malyasia, two years ago, Dr. Wan rose from the audience to confront China’s vice minister of health, who was at the podium.
More recently he has been involved in creating support and counseling groups for people with AIDS in rural China.
Last week, the Health Ministry received two petitions, which Dr. Wan’s group had helped prepare, from farmers suffering from AIDS.
“We demand that the government provide free medicine, or medicine we can afford, and we demand the government produce copies of Western medicines as quickly as possible,” read one petition, signed by 30 patients from Sui County in Henan.

wacky weekly review

Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a sort-of Reader’s Digest thing on this weblog, condensing other sources’ feelgood and feelbad items for easier accessibility. Well, Harper’s goes one step further with it’s “Weekly Review,” where in a few short minutes you can digest the events of the last seven days. The experience is frighteningly comic–or comically frightening.
For those who aren’t enthusiasts already, here is a link to one of the most dependably entertaining (and depressing) sort-of blogs around.
Most of its text reduces complicated stories to one sentence, so these lines pulled from the run-on paragraphs are not typical, only quite rewarding.

… Rumsfeld compared President Bush to Winston Churchill and said that Saddam Hussein was acting like Adolf Hitler. British historians begged to differ. “Churchill is the only Englishman any of them has ever heard of, with the possible exception of Shakespeare if they were hard-working at school,” said Ben Pimlott, warden of Goldsmiths College, London. “In fact, there is no comparison between Hitler and Saddam Hussein, who is not an expansionist within the region. Americans admire Churchill’s brilliance, his language and oratory, his feline style. But Bush is a Neanderthal with no knowledge of the world. Churchill had a great deal of knowledge.” …

Hey, if we really wanted a president with a brain instead of a cabbage, we probably could have found one!

He asked, “Is it O.K. if I smile?”

Sorry. Yeah, it’s sentimental I guess, but it’s really ok, because they’re tough, these guys, and at least one gal, who looks like she could handle anything–and probably has had to.
It’s a wonderful piece [with a slideshow]. Don’t miss Firefighter Augie Simoncini [unfortunately no photo].

But for all the ribbing, most firefighters took their portraits quite seriously. Andy Johnson, a first-year firefighter, or probie, at Engine Company 278 in Sunset Park, initially shrugged off the suggestion that he have his picture taken. But once he agreed, he quickly became engrossed in composing the photograph.
“I can’t see the tool in this shot,” he said, looking at the small digital screen on the back of Ms. Yanes’s camera. In the shot he is sitting on the fender of the engine with an ax slung over one shoulder. “Can we reshoot it?”
“Of course” is her reply. “Let’s do it again.”
The photos of firefighters who died on Sept. 11 that were released to the news media were official portraits in dress uniform or were “probie shots,” taken of young firefighters when they first join the department. Few firefighters have pictures of themselves in their working gear, the way they would like to be depicted.
“We have this picture they take of us in probie school,” said Lt. Bob Hartie, a firefighter in Brooklyn. “And they told us, `You never want to see this picture in the paper, because if you do, it means you are dead.’ So guys are kind of superstitious about that picture. It’s nice to have something else.”

“announcement”

Yup. It appears on the “Styles and Fashion” page of the paper’s site. It’s the first for the NYTimes and it’s a nice story, so here it is.

The couple met in October 1992 in Washington, where Mr. Goldstein was working as a television news producer and Mr. Gross as a consultant. Mr. Goldstein was one of 35 respondents to a personal ad that Mr. Gross had placed in Washington City Paper. It read: “Nice Jewish boy, 5 feet 8 inches, 22, funny, well-read, dilettantish, self-deprecating, Ivy League, the kind of boy Mom fantasized about.” They arranged to meet one evening at Kramerbooks & Afterwords, and had their second date the next night.
That Thanksgiving, Mr. Gross went home to visit his parents. “My mom said, `You seem like everything’s great,’ ” he recalled. ” `You seem like you’re in love.’ I said, `I am.’ They said, `That’s great.’ I said, `His name is Steven.’ My mother said, `Oy,’ and was silent for a while.”
Both sets of parents now support the relationship.
While Mr. Gross was in Thailand, Mr. Goldstein had a $1,500 telephone bill one month. They were apart again while Mr. Gross was in graduate school. Finally, in 1998, they moved to New York together.
They postponed a commitment ceremony until leaders of Reform Judaism had voted to support rabbis who perform same-sex unions and Vermont had given legal recognition to civil unions, both events in 2000.
“Sept. 11 accelerated the process,” Mr. Goldstein said. “We all began to think of our own mortality.”

[The print version on sunday included a double photo of the couple.]

bloggering on the town

We joined our handsome blog-fellows at The Abbey last night, but we missed the women this time!
The Driggs Street boite is way cool, but if we have a community as bloggers it’s all about the fact that we talk and listen so well. We might do better without so much competition from the music.
One humble suggestion, which should appeal to all genders, is The Excelsior in Park Slope.
See evidence for the gang’s loveliness in the images below.

Barry and Sparky

Dan’l and John

Sam and Brian

getting back to the basics on terrorists

[I’m excerpting sections from a contributing OP-ED piece by Zbigniew Brzezinski in yesterday’s NYTimes. The complete text fleshes out the skeletal, but succinct, argument posted here.]

Missing from much of the public debate is discussion of the simple fact that lurking behind every terroristic act is a specific political antecedent. That does not justify either the perpetrator or his political cause. Nonetheless, the fact is that almost all terrorist activity originates from some political conflict and is sustained by it as well. That is true of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Basques in Spain, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Muslims in Kashmir and so forth.
In the case of Sept. 11, it does not require deep analysis to note — given the identity of the perpetrators — that the Middle East’s political history has something to do with the hatred of Middle Eastern terrorists for America. The specifics of the region’s political history need not be dissected too closely because terrorists presumably do not delve deeply into archival research before embarking on a terrorist career. Rather, it is the emotional context of felt, observed or historically recounted political grievances that shapes the fanatical pathology of terrorists and eventually triggers their murderous actions.
….
Yet there has been a remarkable reluctance in America to confront the more complex historical dimensions of this hatred. The inclination instead has been to rely on abstract assertions like terrorists “hate freedom” or that their religious background makes them despise Western culture.
To win the war on terrorism, one must therefore set two goals: first to destroy the terrorists and, second, to begin a political effort that focuses on the conditions that brought about their emergence. That is what the British are doing in Ulster, the Spaniards are doing in Basque country and the Russians are being urged to do in Chechnya. To do so does not imply propitiation of the terrorists, but is a necessary component of a strategy designed to isolate and eliminate the terrorist underworld.
….
A victory in the war against terrorism can never be registered in a formal act of surrender. Instead, it will only be divined from the gradual waning of terrorist acts. Any further strikes against Americans will thus be a painful reminder that the war has not been won. Sadly, a main reason will be America’s reluctance to focus on the political roots of the terrorist atrocity of Sept. 11.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser in the Carter administration.

laboring just a little less

Maybe the biggest downer of this argument for giving Americans the down-time which Europeans, even the Japanese, enjoy in quantities denied us you here is the part about our greed for consumption being the engine of our own social destruction. You mean we can’t just blame it on the bosses, the ones who take as much time off as they please, emulating or being emulated by the august one in the White House, notorious for his commitment as a leisure enthusiast?
But four weeks off in one chunk? Real people have to really struggle to get more than one week at a time, always risking being charged with a different kind of lack of commitment. The French, and most Europeans, routinely claim eight weeks and are now talking about ten.

As long as we’re scrutinizing the relationship between companies and their shareholders and pensioners [this year], how about looking at the inflexible work norms imposed on workers?
During the last six months, a national “Take Back Your Time Day” movement has gained momentum, urging Americans to take the day off on Oct. 24, 2003. The date, coming nine weeks before the end of the year, symbolizes the additional nine weeks Americans work in comparison to Continental Western Europeans.
In the end, even more than work schedules, incomes and employment are at stake: our choices affect the rest of the world. For the last half century, America’s tendency has been to consume more, rather than work less. This propensity to work is central to why the United States is among the world’s wealthiest nations as well as the unrivaled leader in resource depletion, carbon-dioxide emissions and environmental impact. By next Labor Day, perhaps, the message will be that we’re slowing down, sharing the work and consuming a little less.