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
February 26, 2006 The long line for tickets was incrementally moving and our movie time was rapidly closing in. To the side of the long line was an ATM-like machine for purchasing tickets “off line.” Because no-one was using the machine I didn’t trust losing my place in the queue for what could prove a dead end but in desperation I bolted to the mechanical vendor and surprisingly it worked. My move assured a few fellow lemmings because several rapidly lined up behind me. I went through the familiar touch screen and credit card sequence and grabbed my tickets, rushing away, when a soft voice called from behind, “sir.” The voice was earnest but not loud yet it got my attention and I turned; behind me a young fellow was holding a slip of paper, handing it kindly: “your receipt” he said, eye to eye, with a bright brief smile. Fumbling and still in a hurry I thanked him and dashed off for the film, Syriana, a story about the violence done upon people in the rape of the world for oil, about greed, ignorance and sadism which are all accepted practices for the several cultures involved when wrapped in the correct flag. After the movie I left the theater in the shock of an unapologetic awareness, like returning from the farmyard slaughter prior to the candle lit holiday dinner; not numb, actually more alive, but mental gears stripped, the clutch of socialization torn and burning. I waited for my wife on the balcony of the theater’s atrium as the exiting crowd passed, mounting the descending escalator in one and twos, faced toward each other or downwards, conversing, perhaps about the film, mostly light hearted, which emboldened my observation. Then a pair of eyes met mine with a fierce and poignant questioning for three or four seemingly infinite seconds before our line of sight broke. I hadn’t noticed when he previously handed me my receipt that he was Middle Eastern, though several years work for a Lebanese and Saudi group were enough for that simple identification. Now the gaiety of our first encounter was replaced by the burning word “why.” Of all the people passing it seemed we held between us the question in all its implied mercy and violence. I had never seen him before this day but the vision of his dark eyes afire with the impossibility of what we faced in this modern day crusade for acquisition and power was seared into my soul’s memory, and likely his, for every call has its reply. Life had drawn an arc between us, twice, for the awareness of all this film implied, and that drawing together, that intentional line of force and the tension of opposites we held, moved me at a deeper depth than the circumstances of the film. Our unlikely communion on the edge of Jacob’s ladder, the stuff of angels and men that people seemed surer to notice in older times, reminded me of these poignant words of Teilhard de Chardin, the great Jesuit paleontologist, in 1927: “Since I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world.” Environment & Energy Arup Developing Green City in China Flooding feared as glaciers melt faster by Shankar Vedantam U.S. Has Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies Current Warming Period Is Longest in 1,200 Years, Study Says New Orleans Brownie's Kat-calls to Dubya "Mr. President, on at least a couple of occasions ... I raised the flag and told you that FEMA was being marginalized, and was not going to be able to respond and, in fact, was on a path to failure." White House Knew About Levees Early Washington Scandals Arab Company - White House Had Secret Agreement “The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.” White House Has Ties to Dubai Firm (Vantage Point: Subtext for every Bush administration problematic decision and/or failure, from Homeland Security to Hurricane Katrina is graft, cronyism and governmental corruption.) Why target Dubai port company? by Justin Raimondo "Abramoff also allegedly convinced Congressman Robert Ney, House Administrative Committee chairman, to award a contract worth $3 million to a startup Israeli telecommunications firm called Foxcom Wireless. The contract was for the installation of antennas in House of Representatives buildings to improve cell-phone reception. Not surprisingly, such equipment can be designed to have what is known as a 'back door' to enable a third party, in this case Mossad, to listen in. That an Israeli firm should be given such a contract through a selection process that was described as 'deeply flawed and unfair' is inexplicable, particularly as there were American suppliers of the same equipment, and it suggests that the private conversations of some of our congressmen might not be so private after all." Scandal of force-fed prisoners at Guantanamo (Vantage Point: The title is from a British newspaper. Why isn’t this a scandal in the United States?) Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say, by Larisa Alexandrovna Masters of Deception by Justin Raimondo (Vantage Point: Raimondo connects the dots in one plausible theory why Valerie Plame was outed and removed from effectiveness in a CIA wmd program focused on Iran.) Why do Diebold's Touch-Screen Voting Machines Have Built-In Wireless Infrared Data Transfer Ports? Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information By Murray Waas “Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.” Iraq Defeat is victory. Death is life by Robert Fisk “I’m reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we we’re pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.” Ongoing Cost of the War in Iraq based on approved Congressional appropriations The Cheapest Thing in Iraq is a Human Life by Anthony Loyd, Ali Hamdani, and Ali al Khafaji “The Sunni teacher’s son, Walid, had returned home to Iraq on Wednesday after nine months working in Syria. Hours after his return, as he sat talking with his family at his father’s house, gunfire and explosions erupted outside. A Shia militia unit was attacking the neighbourhood’s Sunni mosque, blasting it with rocketfire and bullets. Seconds later gunmen dressed in black burst into Mr Dulaimi’s house. They dragged Walid out to the street where two pick-up trucks were waiting. His father stumbled out into the street after them. “It was no use. I couldn’t do anything. They were so aggressive. They took my son away and dragged away a neighbour’s son too,” Mr Dulaimi told The Times yesterday.” Situation in Iraq Is Civil War by Rep. John Murtha The Raid... by Riverbend (Vantage Point: Operation Iraqi Freedom on the ground in Baghdad.) Vets' ills mounting fast “Nearly 120,000 veterans - more than one of every four who served in Iraq and Afghanistan - have already sought treatment at Veterans Health Administration hospitals for a wide range of illnesses, according to an internal study the VHA completed late last year. More than 30% of those sick veterans are afflicted with some type of mental disorder, mostly posttraumatic stress and depression.” Oil Graft Fuels the Insurgency, Iraq and U.S. Say Iran Iran nuclear chief says 'basic agreement' reached on Russian enrichment plan Israel Urged to Submit Nuclear Facilities to International Inspections “Israel is believed to have a significant stockpile of nuclear warheads. But the Jewish state neither admits nor denies having nuclear weapons. It also refuses to sign the NPT and rejects international inspections of its nuclear facilities.” The Bourse Conspiracy “Dealing oil securities, an Iranian bourse, according to Dr. Petrov, would provide serious competition for New York's NYMEX and London's International Petroleum Exchange (IPE). Its currency of choice, of course, would be the euro. Revisiting the recent past, prior to our invasion, was Iraq too going euro? Indeed, Saddam Hussein had decided to make euros the currency of choice for his Food for Oil program in November 2000." Iran, China Close to Signing Major Oil Deal International Israeli WMD - Israel's Weapons of Mass Destruction Relationship With U.S. Like Brokeback Mountain Story Taiwan's President Says National Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse? by Steven E. Jones, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University “In writing this paper, I call for a serious investigation of the hypothesis that WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by impact damage and fires, but through the use of pre-positioned cutter-charges. I consider the official FEMA, NIST, and 9-11 Commission reports that fires plus impact damage alone caused complete collapses of all three buildings. And I present evidence for the controlled-demolition hypothesis, which is suggested by the available data, testable and falsifiable, and yet has not been analyzed in any of the reports funded by the US government.” (Vantage Point: The above link to Steven Jones is the single most important story in the United States today.) Shooting victim apologizes to vice president - commentary by Josh Marshall (Vantage Point: Cheney shooting his weekend warrior hunting buddy was a non-issue. The corporate media used it to pretend they have teeth, which they don’t, and to pose as willing to ask the vice president tough questions, which they are not. How about inquiring about his hundreds of lies that resulted in thousands of American GIs dead and wounded and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead?) National security whistle-blowers allege retaliation International Peace Operations Association (Vantage Point: Latest entry for the 2006 Orwellian trophy.) Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs' Long Time Reagan Republican calls Bush "Imposter" Essays Consultations With Padre Kino by Fred Reed “I have decided to become a drunk and live under a bench, maybe in a radiation suit. It only makes sense. The times are dire. Dark shapes twist in the international fog. The US, in the hands of puzzled children of low moral character, flaps about like a damp rag in a high wind. Anything could happen. There is much to cause worry. The strange little man in the White House is leering at Iran in his customary state of martial priapism. Not good.. Anyway, wee Bush, not having enough army for his current wars, wants to start a bigger and shinier one. Somebody explain it to me. I have limited geostrategic grasp. Perhaps he believes that by spreading unwinnability over several wars, he will reduce it in each. Victory through distributed defeat.” Black Hip Hop History by Akweli Parker “No, friends, my boxers are all in a knot because of modern-day minstrels who are having the same effect as Pied Pipers, leading our children - particularly at-risk black kids - further into ignorance, poverty and self-destructive behavior. The evidence of this becomes personally apparent when I see my cousin's thugged-out chums, doing little with their lives but getting high, occasionally getting arrested, and encouraging him to stagnate along with their lifestyle of failure. And it's obvious at a distance, when I ride the commuter rail through Camden, N.J., "America's Most Dangerous City." There, I hear my socially and economically ill-equipped fellow young passengers speak a language best described as Ebonics, squared. Ebonics is fine, but when it's all a young person knows, and they see it sanctioned by pseudo-cool depictions of drugs and guns pumped out (pimped?) by MTV, BET and their advertisers, something's seriously wrong.” Bushwhacked in Bushworld "Beam Me Up, Scottie!" by Tom Englehardt Mark Danner on Bush's State of Exception “On empire, what's unusual about this administration isn't only its focus on power, but on unilateralism. It's the flip side of isolationism. The notion that alliances, economic or political, and international law inevitably hinder the most powerful nation. You know, the image of the strings around Gulliver. They said in the National Security Strategy of the United States, the 2005 version, that rivals will continue to challenge us using the strategies of the weak including "international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism." They're associating terror and asymmetric warfare with international law as similar ways to blunt the overwhelming power of the United States. That represents an attitude toward international law and institutions that, I think, is a real and dramatic break from past practice in the United States.” Why doesn't representative democracy work? by Richard Moore “What we actually end up with in representative democracies is a close collusion between top political leaders and wealthy elites. It is in those elite circles that policy agendas are debated and decisions are made about which policy packages will be presented to voters. If there is strong competition between different elite factions, then we typically see that expressed as parties with different programs, and the people then have the opportunity to choose among different elite agendas. More recently, with the advent of neoliberalism and globalization, we see a growing consensus among top elites, and voters are increasingly left with an empty choice between tweedly dee and tweedly dum candidates.” Restoring the Public Trust by Bill Moyers *** |
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