by Don Hynes
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| Vantage Point | Culture and Politics by Don Hynes |
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"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong.
He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so,
the prejudice will be gone." - Tom Paine
May 19, 2003 The Clothes Have No Emperor The emperor’s tailor was a champion debater in his Texas High School. His technique of intimidation was patented and highly effective. Index cards represent the amount of research a debater brings to the debate and the tailor would come to his events with double and treble the cards of his opponents. In his senior year, demoralizing opponent after opponent, he’d carry his cards into the debate on a small cart, a mass of alphabetized and indexed information. During one event he was called out of the room and a teammate looked into the tailor’s index, just to touch Excalibur. He found the cards were blank. And the story continues, with the cards still blank: no weapons of mass destruction, cooked books on tax cuts, shell game budget tricks pretend increased aid to the third world and AIDS, environmental research for the air and water like the “science” bought by tobacco companies to “prove” no link between smoking and lung cancer. One day the country will wake up and realize that the tailor made clothes have no emperor. Acts of Hope Many who opposed the invasion of Iraq felt defeated by the war and the aftermath of public support for the American policy and president. However, I’m convinced that the movement that arose internationally during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq was in fact an unprecedented global peace movement far more than an anti-war effort. The uniting around the globe for peace planted many seeds for the future, and achieved many short term victories, not least of which was deterring a much more horrific scale of “shock and awe” that military planners had scheduled for Iraq. Rebecca Solnit beautifully captures this theme in her essay Act of Hope from Orion Online. She writes “We need a progressive activism that is not one of reaction but of initiation, one in which people of good will everywhere set the agenda. We need a movement that doesn't just respond to the evils of the present but calls forth the possibilities of the future. We need a revolution of hope. And for that we need to understand how change works and how to count our victories.” Card Tricks One of the feints in a stack of blank cards is to keep the debate centered on the opposing force rather than setting out a vision and agenda of one’s own. Clearly articulating a humanistic future, Theodore Sorenson offered this commencement address to American University’s School of Public Affairs/School of International Service, in which Sorenson renews John F. Kennedy’s promise “for the United States to lead by the force of example, not force of our weaponry, by the multilateral use of our diplomacy, not the unilateral use of our weaponry, by sending abroad American food, not American guns, by relying on smart diplomats more than smart bombs. To convey American values of peace and justice, the best instincts of the American people -- a peaceful, not war-like, people -- thereby increasing the respect and admiration with which we were held around the world, thereby making us more secure, a less likely target for resentment and attack.” Essential to a clear progressive vision is a detailed understanding of where we are now, and this essay by Richard Behan describes “a stealthy but cumulatively violent attack on public life in America. The things we hold and share in common -- our culture and public knowledge; public services; public spaces; public lands -- are the things that define us as the American people. Slowly, silently, but deliberately, they are becoming private assets and services, private spaces, and proprietary knowledge, to be turned not to public benefit but to corporate profit. ” Deflation Immanuel Wallerstein writes of the short saving American economy and the “near bankruptcy of the state governments across the United States are a foreshadowing of what is to come.” The Euro is on the rise at 1.15 to the dollar, a key indicator of the sharp increase in U.S. deficit spending and with the sagging stock market demonstrate the lack of international faith in investing in America. Last week the president provided photo opportunities for United Defense Industries a holding of the Carlyle Group which supports his father and family, while Representative Henry Waxman, one of the few Congressman with integrity and teeth questions Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about evidence that Halliburton has profited from business with countries that sponsor terrorism. One World It’s not only the American commons that are being eroded. The recent Ashcroft push for supposed tort reform is being condemned internationally for what it really is, a scheme to deny third world and indigent peoples the right to sue claims against U.S. industries that do serious harm to their people and lands beyond the boundaries of the United States. In Iraq over 242 civilians have been killed since the president declared the war over while “victory” is showing serious signs of unraveling in the aftermath. Not the least of these signs was L. Paul Bremer declaring marshal law in his first day in office, advising the military would be authorized to shoot looters on sight. Thankfully the top brass weren’t about to follow his direction for Boot Hill style justice, but Bremer’s marching orders were clear. The cancellation of plans for Iraqi self-rule quickly followed and compromised the already flagging expectations of democracy. Reports are coming out of Iraq identifying what had been previously called isolated looting and arson as coordinated attacks by Iraqi Baath party nationalists which are putting Iraqi citizens, the U.S. military and hopes for peace in harm’s way. The recent violence in Palestine, Casablanca and Riyadh have countered the reports of terrorism’s defeat, and has the Saudis' rethinking their home grown fanatics. Largely overlooked in press reports were that the suicide bombings in Riyadh were specifically aimed at defense contractors who were providing U.S. military technology for the Saudis. The vast wealth of our world could create the cultural climate for an enlightenment. However, the aggrandizement of wealth in the hands of a few with an accompanying lack of vision and hope for many is portrayed in this poignant BBC photo essay entitled the Parking Boys of Nairobi. Wagging the Dog Hollywood portrays the ultimate spin doctor in this recent film classic, a movie I saw in a crowd of 20 & 30 somethings in an alt theater in Portland, where my wife and I were among a few laughing aloud. The younger folks seemed to find the movie deadly serious. The facts of these political times aren’t more unusual than the film version, as the NYT’s reports on the Hollywood professionals who cast the president in the most palatable image and likeness for daily mass consumption. On the down side of this rubric, the government of France is protesting the disinformation on their nation disseminating from Washington. The drive for image is beyond humor in this Atlantic Feature by James Fallows, Who Shot Mohammed Al Dura . He writes “The image of a boy shot dead in his helpless father's arms during an Israeli confrontation with Palestinians has become the Pietà of the Arab world. Now a number of Israeli researchers are presenting persuasive evidence that the fatal shots could not have come from the Israeli soldiers known to have been involved in the confrontation. The evidence will not change Arab minds—but the episode offers an object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon.” My guitar buddy George says there’s an undeclared civil war going on in America, with character assassination the tool of the day and substitute for intellect. Here’s Paul Krugman’s column China Syndrome and the jugular retort by John Cavuto of Fox News. I can watch WWF Smackdown and detach through humor, but there is something about Cavuto’s attack on Krugman that I found very disturbing, an underlying violence that the current militarism and we-are-number-one politics feeds upon. A Way to Help Nicholas Krisof wrote Alone and Ashamed for the NYT, portraying “a saint for our age. Dr. Catherine Hamlin, 79, is an Australian gynecologist who has spent the last 44 years in Addis Ababa, quietly toiling in impossible conditions to achieve the unimaginable. She has helped 24,000 women overcome obstetric fistulas, a condition almost unknown in the West but indescribably hideous for millions of sufferers in the poorest countries in the world.” You can learn more at the website for Dr. Hamlin’s Fistula Hospital and make on-line donations through Network for Good. Coming Brightness The morning only asks that we turn to it to the unformed but surely lit something we’ve never set eyes upon though the coming brightness quiets our fear and comforts with a softness we long to remember. Peace. *** |
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