Straining at the Seams

James Kuntsler, a man I love to quote even though his sentiments are seldom rosy, had this to say yesterday in his weekly piece:

I don't want to be party pooper, but is it possible that all the 9/11 remembrance hoopla was a kind of weekend refuge from reality for this psychologically spavined nation? Memorializing is easy; acting resolutely in the here-and-now is another matter. To me, the various 9/11 doings that radiated out over the media gave off an indecent odor of triumphalism - a correspondent of mine referred to it as "self-important histrionics." We seem to put on these shows because we don't know what else to do, and because the only truly effective homegrown industry left in the USA is public relations, the business of making your own reality.

He goes on to observe that the failure of Obama's jobs bill is a certainty because the Republicans are going to allow passage of only a fragment of his proposal. Not that it will make any difference even if the whole bill passed. The economy Obama is trying to restore is gone. And it's not coming back. And all this before you even consider the mess the European Union is in. Bank failures there are almost a certainty. Everything is coming apart at the seams.

9/11 Again . . . and No More

Chris Hedges has a powerful reflection on the anniversary of 9/11 that I am just encountering. Although it's not my practice to quote wholesale from sources, in this case I make an exception. His is a powerful voice for reason and sanity amidst the mayhem and cacophony of war, a war of revenge and cruelty that we have waged for the past ten years against enemies we have stereotyped into monsters. Hedges has the keenest eye for the distortions war causes in our thinking. And his writing style is direct, powerful, and uncompromising. Unfortunately he is just another voice out there crying in the wilderness. Madness has swept the field. We're all in its grip.

What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost. 

We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.

We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.

And this is a fitting conclusion to what I'm going to say about the 9/11 anniversary. It's been played to the hilt in the mindless media. Voices like this one above have been drowned out in the nationalistic hollering and whooping, the savage cries of hatred and bigotry. Will there ever be blessed quiet again?

Related articles

• Reflecting on 9/11 Through Song (dissenter.firedoglake.com)
• Chris Hedges: We drank deep from that very dark elixir of nationalism (dandelionsalad.wordpress.com)

10 Years Gone

Everybody in America--well, not literally everybody, but millions--are getting wrapped up in memorials today for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon that occurred on this date 10 years ago. Thousands of innocent people died. Some of them were Muslims who were not the terrorists in the planes. The victims were all colors, all ages, all religions. The pain of their passing still grips the hearts of us all. Prayers for all of their lives.

But that horrible event ten years ago also marked the beginning of this country's descent into a strange kind of madness. In the ensuing ten years, we Americans have willingly allowed a total transformation of our country. What used to be a place of liberty has become a place of fear, a place . Americans have given over fistfuls of their precious civil liberties; we have allowed creation of a massive, secret bureaucracy that not only gathers information on all of us, all the time, but operates out of oversight by anyone. (The Frontline program "Top Secret America" reports on this development. If it doesn't scare the crap out of you, it's simply a measure of how far you've bought into the government's rationale for depriving us of our liberties and establishing a fearsome, gargantuan police power that didn't exist ten years ago.) All in the name of protecting us from terrorists, which is ultimately a futile task. What powers are we going to hand over to the government when we're subjected to another attack? And guess what, brothers and sisters? This octopus isn't going to go away. It will never go away. Liberties once surrendered are gone forever.

We have willingly allowed our government to engage in torturing people, we have allowed American citizens to be held without charge for days, weeks, on end. We have, in the name fighting terrorism, launched two wars that still continue. They have ignited a conflagration in the Mid-East, they have snuffed out the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghani and Iraqi lives, wreaked untold destruction of property, cost us a trillion dollars, and thousands of American lives dead and wrecked from wounds of body and spirit.

This anniversary will be commemorated all over the country with flags, mournful music and speeches, black crepe . . . but there won't be any mourning for the country that we once were that has been buried under a mountain of fear. We may have killed bin Laden, but he is triumphant from his grave. We are in the grip of terror, we've lost our senses because of it. This is exactly what he wanted to accomplish. And he's succeeded beyond his wildest imagination.

Amazing!

I have to simply state the title again: Amazing! Enjoy!

What a Beautiful Poem

The Orchid Flower

by Sam Hamill

Just as I wonder
whether it's going to die,
the orchid blossoms

and I can't explain why it
moves my heart, why such pleasure
comes from one small bud
on a long spindly stem, one
blood red gold flower

opening at mid-summer,
tiny, perfect in its hour.

Even to a white-
haired craggy poet, it's
purely erotic,

pistil and stamen, pollen,
dew of the world, a spoonful

of earth, and water.
Erotic because there's death
at the heart of birth,

drama in those old sunrise
prisms in wet cedar boughs,

deepest mystery
in washing evening dishes
or teasing my wife,

who grows, yes, more beautiful
because one of us will die.

"The Orchid Flower" by Sam Hamill, from Almost Paradise. © Shambhala Publications, 2005.

On the Road Again

Like the old Willie Nelson song . . . we're off again on travels, this time down to Baton Rouge for the wedding of a niece. To tell the truth, although I'm looking forward to seeing all the relations on both sides while we're there, I'm weary of traveling, especially when the travel involves aircraft. I'm fast approaching the point where I am going to be very reluctant to fly anywhere that I can drive in a reasonable amount of time. We can work a rental car, a nice one, cheaper than we can fly to most places these days. I don't particularly care for driving either, but compared to flying . . . well, it's got the edge.

We'll be back on Monday. I intend to keep up with the blog while I'm down there. Maybe not real scintillating posts, but something. Meanwhile, here's Willie:

Neither Rain nor Sleet . . .

About to become relics?

Are you ready for this? The dark of night is about to descend on the US Postal Service. An article in the New York Times informs that unless drastic action to avert it happens, the USPS will be dead broke and forced into default by this winter. What's required is that Congress take immediate action to provide emergency funding, stress on immediate. Well, pardon me, but what do you think the odds are that Congress will do that? While the servants of the people were out of Washington on their summer break, the air waves have been mercifully free for several weeks of their unceasing nauseating blather. They have returned now, and we can expect nothing from here to the election but vicious partisan bickering. Meanwhile Rome is burning down.

The reasons for the decline of the USPS are not difficult to understand: the electronic age has driven a stake through the heart of the USPS's "old-fashioned" way of doing things. People don't mail letters any more. They use email, and although individual addresses are getting less mail, there are more of them to deliver to. Labor costs are monstrous, and the USPS is saddled with extremely costly contracts with its unions that prevent layoffs under any conditions. This graphic, which will not fit on this page, shows the picture better than words.

Can you imagine no US Postal Service? I certainly find it the prospect unimaginable . . . or I should amend that by adding "until now." Both you and I know that there are idiots in Congress who will see the bankruptcy of the USPS as a good thing. Under the insane rubric of "the best government is no government," Tea Party types and their cowed lackeys will not lift a finger to save an institution that has been around literally since 1776. You can depend on that. The Times article cited above has details on fighting among legislators who aren't Tea Party types. Indeed, people are worried that the bitter partisanship in the capital will prevent Congress from taking any action at all.

Sorry . . .

. . . for those of you who are not baseball fans. This is a post about baseball. Just back from watching the LSU Tigers tear up the Ducks of Oregon, a much trumpeted offensive power (supposedly), on Saturday, I settled in to watch the final game of the three-game series between my Texas Rangers and the Boston Red Sox, a team with a powerhouse lineup, who barring some kind of miracle, will make the American League playoffs.

It was a highly satisfying win. Not only did the Texas starter Matt Harrison pitch very well, but the Ranger bats continued to pound the ball. With this win, Texas also takes the 10-game season series from the Red Sox, 6 games to 4. You can find the box score and play-by-play here. Texas maintained a slim 2-0 lead going into the 6th inning. At that point the roof fell in on Boston. The Rangers sent hitters to the plate and scored 7 runs on 5 hits and 4 walks. The big blow was a three-run triple by Josh Hamilton.

It's highly likely that the Rangers and Red Sox will meet in the playoffs next month. If this is an indication of how Texas will fare, I'm more than ready. And this year I'll be in town to see all the games. Not like last year when I was out of the country in Europe and missed the division series altogether.

UPDATE I: A friend of mine pointed out this engaging NYT book review of the reissue of the one of the best baseball novels ever written, Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. I've never run into a true baseball fan who hasn't read this book.

Big D

I'm sitting here 12 stories up looking out upon the expanse of traffic and concrete that is Dallas, Texas, a place undistinguished by anything save its proximity to Arlington, a place of no distinction either save the presence of the Texas Rangers. I'm here to attend a football game, of all things. LSU-Oregon. In a monstrous stadium that cost a billion dollars to build. The Jerrydome, after the owner of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team. Jerry Jones.

I cannot remember the last time I saw a football game live either. In fact, from what I understand, most of the people in the stadium today will not really see the game live either, but will instead be watching events on the field on the ginormous HD TV screens that stretch almost the entire length of the field on both sides. Amazing.

 It's an amazing age we live in, period. I am typing this on a device upon which I watched a movie late last night and read the news this morning, upon which I will post this bit of writing to a network available to literally billions of people all over the world. Everything this device does, it does through the air. I have often thought how one would attempt to explain these things to say an Alexander Stephens, who died in 1883. Think of all the prior knowledge he would have to possess to even begin to try and grasp it.

 And yet a civilization that can produce such wonders cannot learn to exist without constant war, cannot manage to produce a reasonable standard of existence for millions of it's people, cannot conquer its raging fears of terrorists behind every tree, a society that feeds the rich and starves the hungry. Sorry. Maybe this multiple-storied glass colossus out the window and the Galleria shopping district nearby have momentarily distracted me from concentrating on what's really important: the commencement of college football and the race to be #1.

B-day minus one

It's the day before I turn 68 years old. I mention this for a couple of reasons. First, I probably won't mention it tomorrow because Susan and I are meeting four other family members in Dallas tomorrow to go to the LSU-Oregon football game in the gigantic eighth wonder of the world "Jerrydome" there. That stadium is literally only about two long blocks from The Ballpark in Arlington, where to tell the truth, I'd much rather be watching the Rangers play baseball, much as I love the Tigers of LSU.

The second reason I mention this is because I never imagined getting to this age in my life. I suppose this is a common occurrence. I mean not imagining it. You really aren't there till you're there. But still . . . it's passing strange to be sitting here, the same guy I've always been (except maybe a bit wiser, you'd have to consult others on that), and yet I'm only two years from being 70! Which really seems like some sort of Rubicon to me. My 90-year old Mom says I'm young. Proving once again that truth, as Isaac Newton put it, is a "great ocean."