Negative Outlook?

Kinky Republicans
I for one would have voted for him. Jack Ryan, the Republican candidate for Illinois's open Senate seat, has dropped out of the race. The Republican establishment withdrew support after a judge granted the request of both the Chicago Tribune and a Chicago TV station that the court documents pertaining to his divorce be unsealed. They revealed he had a penchant for "sex clubs" and that he repeatedly tried to get his wife at the time to engage in exhibitionist behavior at said clubs even though she wasn't into that sort of thing. The last straw for her occurred when he brought her to a Paris sex club (those French!) without telling her ahead of time exactly where they were going. ("Surprise!") She was reduced to tears according to the court documents. Apparently Ryan wasn't forthcoming with the Republican leadership either, or else - unlikely - they knew and doubted his divorce papers would ever be released.

Ryan defended himself in Clintonian and legalistic terms by first saying he didn't want to release the court documents in order to protect his 9-year-old son. (From what? No wonder the press took the time and energy to find out what his son needed protection from.) His peccadilloes on display, Ryan argued that, hey, he hadn't broken any laws or marriage vows. Furthermore he hadn't broken any of the Ten Commandments. Yes there is no Commandment that Thou Shalt Not Engage in Coitus in Front of Strangers, but no doubt it would encourage others to covet his attractive wife. And encouraging others to break Commandments is frowned upon amongst the faithful, so he had to go. (Painful admission: Ryan's highly covetable former wife, Jeri Ryan, played a humorless, skin-tight uniform-wearing cybernetic "Borg" named "Seven of Nine" on the TV show Star Trek. I used to affectionately refer to her as "Two by Four" when discussing with friends and family members her character's quest to find out what it means to be human.)

Ryan's real sin was that he's a paid member of the Upright Citizen's Brigade and valuing sex in front of strangers at Le Club de Sade isn't "Family Values" to your average Republican voter. Part of his campaign stump speech was a charge that his opponent didn't represent the mainstream values of Illinois voters. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

It's been a great week for Illinois politicos. The mainstream media picked up on a story Salon broke that Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill., gave Rev. Sun Myung Moon - fruitcake extraordinaire and owner of the Washington Times and UPI wire service - a bejeweled crown at a March 23rd "coronation ceremony" held at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Also in attendance were many politicians from both parties who quickly resorted to Ryan-like excuses for participating in the bizarre event.

Afterward, Moon told his bipartisan audience of Washington power players he would save everyone on Earth as he had saved the souls of Hitler and Stalin -- the murderous dictators had been born again through him, he said. In a vision, Moon said the reformed Hitler and Stalin vouched for him, calling him "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

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Persepolis 2
Entertainment Weekly reports:

Artist-writer Marjane Satrapi, 34, follows her debut about growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution - heraled as the most relevant comic-book memoir since Holocaust masterpiece Maus - with an equally witty graphic novel (out Aug. 31) about her stoner school years in Europe and feisty return to her homeland. HER MAUS PROBLEM "I called [author Art Spiegelman] to apologize - to tell him that's it's not me who is comparing myself to him. I said, 'If I were you, I would hate me.' That's the way we became friends." NEXT Embroideries, in which a group of women sip tea and talk about sex; directing an animated Persepolis for early '07.

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Icepick to the back of the head
One concept I've struggled with is that of human rights organizations and NGOs as the medieval "mendicants" of our globalizing age. It's a charge that they really don't solve fundamental problems or get at the root of things. They just ease the pain. But is that all they do? By easing the pain, do they also keep a chaotic, Hobbesian world from fully emerging? Over forty years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in Out of Apathy:

Two images have been with me throughout the writing of this essay. Between them they seem to show the alternative paths for the intellectual. The one is of J. M. Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky. Both were obviously men of attractive personality and great natural gifts. The one the intellectual guardian of the established order, providing new policies and theories of manipulation to keep our society in what he took to be economic trim, and making a personal fortune in the process. The other, outcast as a revolutionary from Russia both under the Tsar and under Stalin, providing throughout his life a defense of human activity, of the powers of conscious and rational human effort. I think of them at the end, Keynes with his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull. They are the twin lives between which intellectual choice in our society lies.

In St. Petersburg, Russia the other day, a 64-year-old anti-fascist received an icepick to the head, so to speak. Unlike Trotsky, Nikolai M. Girenko might have been considered an informant for the state, but like Trotsky he was a foe of Russia's "White" xenophobic, anti-Semitic tradition.

A year and a half ago, Nikolai M. Girenko wrote a booklet to guide prosecutors and police officers investigating the explosion of ethnically motivated crimes by skinheads, neo-Nazis and other hate groups. It may be needed to solve his killing.

On June 19, two young men came to his apartment here and rang the doorbell. When his daughter Katerina asked from the other side of the door what they wanted, they asked for him by name. When he approached, they shot him through the wooden door. He slumped to the floor of the apartment's small foyer and died within minutes. He was 64.

Through the peephole, Katerina saw only the shadowy silhouettes of her father's killers, but she had little doubt who they were.

"It could only be these fascists," she said.
[...]
"When I tried to talk him out of getting involved in politics, he said, `If not me, who else?' " Mr. Girenko's wife, Valentina, said in an interview in their apartment, where he was born and lived most his life.
[...]
"Nikolai," she said, "was one of the last of the Mohicans."

She said Mr. Girenko had received threats in the past, so many that he no longer bothered to report them to the police, who ignored them anyway. His other daughter, Sophia, pregnant with Mr. Girenko's fifth grandchild, said her father was always calm and understanding, rarely speaking with anger. "Even if there were threats," she said, "Father would never have told us."

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Deadwood's representative

South Dakota's lone representative in the House is a 33-year-old
cutie.

(via Wonkette)

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Superhuman agents of Evil
(or the Ubermensch)

It's amazing that Ahmad Chalabi, tough as he is, could have bested George "Slam Dunk" Tenet and his $400 Billion per year CIA in the recent Great Games in the Middle East. Sure he had friends in high places, but still. Chalabi and the neocons have superhuman powers according to the fevered imaginations of some conspiracy theorists.

Lyndon LaRouche and his cult followers have done nothing but given me more sympathy for Israel's cause. Osama bin Laden and his serial beheaders have had a similar effect.

This is why the New York Times's recent coverage of the final 911 Commission hearings and a Michiko Kakutani review gave me pause. The Wall Street Journal made no mention of the following, which filled me with unease:

In Afghanistan, Mr. Atta quickly achieved high status, pledging "bayat" or allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, who made him the operation's leader. The two men discussed targets for the attack. One commission report, based on the interrogation of Mr. bin al-Shibh, said the two men identified "the World Trade Center, which represented the U.S. economy; the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel."

and

For instance, Mr. bin Laden, Al Qaeda's top leader, initially pushed for a date of May 12, 2001, exactly seven months after terrorists attacked the American destroyer Cole in Yemen. Then, when he learned that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel would visit the White House in June or July, Mr. bin Laden pressed to amend the timetable.

And Kakutani writes:

What he does focus on is the role that Israel has played in shaping American policy. Mr. Bamford contends that "the blueprint for the new Bush policy" on the Middle East "had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisers" (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) for the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu (who rejected the plan), and that when they entered office in January 2001, all these hawks needed was "a pretext" for war against Iraq. Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Mr. Feith, "forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel," which "was designed to go around the country's own intelligence organization, Mossad."

Why did Netanyahu, a leader of the Greater Israel movement, reject the plan I wonder?

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Realists (i.e. "Pragmatists" or running dogs
of the Status Quo) versus Dreamers (i.e. "agents of
change" or troublemakers)
or the Years of Living Dangerously

In our evolving post-Cold War world, where that mixed bag of Capitalism and globalization appears beyond challenge, oppressive regimes often face women leaders as perpetual thorns in their sides. Myanmar (Burma) is still contending with Aung San Suu Kyi. Turkey finally bent to international pressure last week and released Kurdish leader Leyla Zana from prison.

Iran's Shirin Ebadi recently gained international stature by winning the 2003 Noble Peace Prize. For years she was known as one of the "Three Musketeers." Her two other female comrades were Mehrangiz Kar, a more secular human rights and family lawyer, and Shahla Lahidji, an outspoken publisher specializing in books about women. (The Iranian regime managed to intimidate Lahidji into silence and Kar into immigrating to the US.)

Ebadi just did a tour of North America and granted an interview to a friend of mine. Along with University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, she penned an Op-Ed for the New York Times. The gist of their argument is that the World Bank should take loans away from antidemocratic countries and give them to democratic countries.

Thus the bank's "pragmatic" justification to lend money to oppressive governments is absurd. It amounts to giving secretive, frequently kleptocratic dictatorships priority — before the democracies have their fill. This handicaps both the citizens and leaders who together shoulder the hard work of sustaining democracies.

Instead, the bank should devise a kind of human rights scorecard. At a minimum, it should include the civil freedoms (of expression, of the press, of women) and the social and economic freedoms (access to health, education and property). The bank should monitor these freedoms and refuse to aid any country that violates them.

The kleptocratic dictatorship of Indonesia's Suharto finally gave way when the US withdrew its support during the Asian financial crisis. Currently, the former opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri is President.

Sukarnoputri recently reverted to Suharto-like tactics by expelling Sidney Jones, an American expert on Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesia's chief terrorist group. During the 1980s Jones was an Amnesty International activist and worked for Human Right Watch for 14 years subsequently. She developed numerous contacts with the radical Islamic opposition which was being hounded into submission by Suharto at the time.

Just goes to show, pace the hard Chomkyean left, that the successors to Cold War-era, anti-communist, Western-backed regimes aren't necessarily American puppet states. In a some ways blindly naive column critical of candidate Kerry's foreign policy "realism," David Brooks writes about Cuba dissident Oswaldo Payá:

Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole in the Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose legislation if they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They began a petition drive to call for a national plebiscite on five basic human rights: free speech, free elections, freedom to worship, freedom to start businesses, and the freeing of political prisoners.

This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures, and more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The European Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights.

Brooks writes that Kerry said he believed the Varela Project was "counterproductive" and a provocation.

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The Worse, the Better ... the Worse

Sean Rocha writes about Isarel's impending withdrawal from Gaza:

More than that, the Palestinian left fears chaos in Gaza. Where the Israelis look to Lebanon for their precedents, the Palestinians look to South Africa: To them, the Israeli policy of laying siege to the PA, on the one hand, and assassinating Hamas leaders, on the other, seems designed to ensure that no effective Palestinian administration of any type can emerge, much as the South African apartheid government covertly fuelled civil wars in Mozambique and Angola and then told scared South African whites that that was the brutal chaos they would get if they opted for black rule.

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Magic Asterisk

The budgets prepared by David A. Stockman, Mr. Reagan's first budget director, adopted what was called a "rosy scenario" - impossibly optimistic predictions about future growth, inflation and interest rates. They also included what was called the "magic asterisk" - a gimmick that allowed for the budgeting of unspecified, and never intended, spending cuts.

Cousin to Business's favorite gimmick, "the fine print."

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"You have over $40,000," she said, "in bar charges."

Did I? "Let me see those again," I said. Her expression softened to pity. I glanced again at the documents. Sure enough. This chick had a good eye.

"You need help," she said.

"I know," I replied. "That's why I'm here."

"You need help with your drinking," she said.

"Oh, that!" I said, finally understanding. ''No, I'm O.K. in that department. I mean, I drink a lot. But I'm in advertising, you know? And it's not like I black out -- it's more like a brownout. Besides, I never get hung over."

She became tender, which shocked me because I was unaccustomed to tenderness in any form besides sirloin steak. "Sweetie, you are hung over. Can't you see that?"

And truthfully, I just couldn't.

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Bonzo goes to heaven (and is playing with your pet dog that died last year. Dave Dellinger is strumming an acoustic guitar on a nearby cloud.)

I'm writing while extremely hungover, no doubt a mistake, but I had such a doozy of a day yesterday, I had to write.

The Printer's Row Book Fair is this weekend and yesterday started at 10:00 a.m. with an Augusten Burroughs reading. (Very funny and moving). Then a few beers. At Noon, there was Aleksandar Hemon & David Bezmozgis (very moving and funny). After leaving that I ran into a favorite coworker (very beautiful and funny). A few more beers. At 1:30, Thomas Frank & Laura Kipnis tag-teamed the reigning, pompous conventional wisdom at the nearby Harold Washington library. At 4:00 I caught the charming Elizabeth Berg, whom Burroughs had recommended. Then more drinking.

I drink so much I think it might be a good idea to head out to Oak Park to try to catch Dave Sedaris, but I arrived late to discover the bookstore overflowing with people and headed to the nearest bar instead where a 40-year-old woman generously offered me some of her calamari and told me about the wonders of Deepak Choprah. (Where upon I learned Ronald Reagan had slipped this mortal coil.) Then home sweet home.

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TMFTML says Roger Straus was a CIA covert operative.

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