Mass Delusion

Francis Wheen has a new book out titled How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World.  He wrote a fascinating and entertaining biography of that great debunker and theoretician Karl Marx, so I'd be surprised if his new one isn't wonderful as well. Recently, the Guardian published his list of Top Ten Modern Delusions.

Julian Sanchez interviews Martha Nussbaum

oh well

For those keeping track, my relationship with "Generation Y gal" A. didn't work out. Must have been my mild case of Lackadasia.

Looking back, the past three months do seem like one of those too-good-to-be-true TV commercials, you know, where a couple is giddily running slo-mo through the green fields and it's a beautiful spring/summer day. Usually it's an ad for tampons or diamonds or some other non sequitur product. I believe Beck used this archetypal footage in one of his videos.

The Minor Fall, The Major Lift has been one of the things cheering me up, so keep him in mind if a relationship of yours abruptly ends. Who says blogs are overrated?! They do keep your mind fairly occupied, when it might otherwise be frantically romanticizing the recent past and raking you over the coals.

The passing of Marlon Brando causes Heather Havrilesky to do a little Rabbitblogging in her Salon column.

She's sort of a younger, less-political, whackier version of Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich is a guest columnist for the New York Times this month which caused Timothy Noah to start a "Draft Ehrenreich" movement amongst Times readers. She did once write for Time magazine.
 

This New York Times Magazine article on graphic novels includes a nice interactive feature.

Irony in Iraq
It's easy to forget the reptiles whose power allows them to be the cause of so much suffering and fear are merely flesh and blood like you and me, however chilly their blood is. Stripped of power, they inevitably come across as shrunken and pathetic.

Saddam Hussein and much of the former Baath leadership appeared before the Iraqi Special Tribune this past week.

During the long months that most of the defendants had been held, they appeared to have had little or no information about what was happening in Iraq. One man, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, 56, a former bodyguard and secretary to Mr. Hussein, named the Iraqi he would like as his lawyer, only to look puzzled at the chuckles about him in the court. The man in question, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, was named justice minister recently in Iraq's new interim government.

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."

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.

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."

Deadwood's representative

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

(via Wonkette)

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?

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.

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.

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."

"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.

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.

TMFTML says Roger Straus was a CIA covert operative.

Chalabi and Iraq, and then some
Newsday's take on Ahmad Chalabi, that he was (is?) working for part of the Axis of Evil, is a smear being spread by the CIA's George Tenet according to Chalabi and his supporters, like William Safire:

Since 1996, the C.I.A. has hated him with a passion. In that year, our spooks egged on Iraqi officers to overthrow Saddam. Chalabi claims to have warned that the plotters had been penetrated, and when the coup failed and a hundred heads rolled, he dared to blame the C.I.A. for bloody ineptitude. This is at the root of his detestation by Tenet & Company and the agency's subsequent rejection of most Iraqi sources of intelligence offered by Chalabi's group.

The wonderful journalist Ahmed Rashid has a great piece on the CIA's ineptitude in regards to the rise of bin Laden. However, he feels regime change in Iraq was a diversion from the project of nation-building in Afghanistan. (Rashid's two books, Taliban and Jihad are fascinating and well worth the read. Although, he tends to employ the archaic "whilst" a lot in his writing. Maybe he's just being cheeky.)

Rashid is based in Lahore, Pakistan, and must be encouraged by the recent election in neighboring India. India's stock market, though, took a dive on news that a less globalization-friendly government was taking power. (It's Thomas Friedman's "golden straightjacket" in action.) India's poor, rural voters mobilized and tossed out the Hindu nationalist, foreign investment friendly governing coalition. Another theory is that India's voters tend to vote out incumbents on a regular basis, but there is little doubt that the fruits of India's growing economy weren't trickling down to the lower classes. Back here in our own secular, multicultural, gigantic democracy, Thomas Geoghegan suggests ways to mobilize voters. Perhaps India's impressive election overseers can help out the Iraqis with their first election in years.

Not just another brick in the wall

Buried in his report earlier this year on Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba praised the actions of three men who tried to stop the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees. They are nowhere to be seen in the portraits of brutality that have touched off outrage around the world.

Although details of their actions are sketchy, it is known that one soldier, Lt. David O. Sutton, put an end to one incident and alerted his commanders. William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, "refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure" from military intelligence, according to the report. And Specialist Joseph M. Darby gave military police the evidence that sounded the alarm.
...

"It is sometimes the case that they themselves have been scapegoated or turned on by the crowd,"said Dr. John Darley, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton. "If you go back into the lives of these people you can often find some incident that has made very vivid to them the pressures of conformity working on the others in the group."

People who break from the crowd to blow the whistle, history shows, are often the most psychologically distanced from the situation. In 1968, Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot, was flying over Vietnam as G.I.'s were killing civilians. The soldiers on the ground had been told that the vilage, My Lai, was a Vietcong stronghold. But from above Mr. Thompson could see there was no enemy fire. He landed his helicopter, rescued some villagers, and told his commanders about the massacre.

Rum Sodomy & the Lash*

When Winston Churchill was at the Admiralty, he was reported to have said that "the traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash." The MPs who tortured Iraqi detainees in order to soften them up for the interrogators from MI and "OGA" were often drunk during the insanity. The Taguba Report found credible evidence of MPs "Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick." No doubt you've read or heard about or have seen photos of the other instances of torture, rape, humiliation and abuse. (Did you read that the prison was being hit constantly by mortar fire? I'd resort to drink too.)

I watched Major General Antonio Taguba testify in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning. You could tell he was a "straight shooter" and he spoke well of the team who helped him compile the report. I agree with the Times here:

Under the scope set by his superiors, the inquiry was limited to the conduct of a military police brigade. But General Taguba used it to deliver a much broader indictment.

Among the findings laid out in the report was what General Taguba described as his strong suspicion that military intelligence officers and private contractors "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses."

(General Fay's report on this will come out at end of this month or perhaps the first part of June.) The choice of General Taguba reflects well on General McKiernan, who assigned Taguba to the case.

Then there's Joseph Darby, the lower-class reservist who was working at Wendy's before being shipped off to Iraq. (Darby was an average student who started at tackle on the football team in high school and had done a stint in Bosnia.) The 24-year-old was the one who blew the whole thing open with the photos, first anonymously, then by testifying. Men like Taguba and Darby keep hope alive - to use a shopworn phrase - that America can help Iraq and hence the Middle East move in the direction of democracy and justice. (Darby still believes the cause in Iraq is a just one, even though he wasn't convinced at first.) Not surprisingly, Taguba received a shit reassignment and Darby and his wife are afraid of retaliation from other military families. Both knew what would happen, no doubt, but did what they felt was right no matter the consequences.

* Three Pogues albums became available again last month as imports. One is titled Rum Sodomy & the Lash and features Gericault's Le Radeau De La Medusa as its cover art. I recently saw the excellent documentary "If I Should Fall from Grace - The Shane MacGowan Story" which came out last year. It features Nick Cave and a Pogues video which stars a Johnny Depp during his drinking days, before he had kids.

Fucking Goddamn Cocksuckers
Heather Havrilesky finally writes about HBO's Deadwood:

What really sets "Deadwood" apart, though, is that unlike other dramas on TV, which introduce a few compelling figures or satisfying scenarios then repeat them episode after episode, "Deadwood" expands in every direction like a well-written novel. Somehow, even as the scope of the show widens with more characters and more complicated story lines, instead of losing us, the writers keep drawing us in deeper.

Here's a fun drinking game: take a swig each time someone cusses during the show.


Adam Michnik interview
(Via Norman Geras via Matt Welch)


Fulan Gong Show

Yet Chang supplies welcome detail about the religious roots of Falun Gong -- and this, in an indirect way, helps explain both the Bush administration's silence and the comparative indifference of the Western human-rights community. It is, as it turns out, an extraordinary belief system. Li Hongzhi, a one-time junior government official in a provincial grain bureau, began practicing Qigong when he was a park police officer in Jilin province in the 1980s. Within less than a decade, he had devised his own take on the universe -- including the belief that all matter is essentially water, that human beings trace their origins to "the highest levels of the universe" and that aliens came to Earth around 1900, some of whom look like humans and others -- "most frightening!" he says -- live inside our bodies. Li claims to have divine powers to cure the sick, to fly and to walk through walls. Chang's explanation of Li's teachings is a salvation of sorts, both sober and unsentimental. Her book is written with welcome detachment. More valuable still is her attempt to place Falun Gong in the long history of cults and sects in China. The comparisons with the Boxers, the Taiping rebellion and, in particular, the White Lotus Society -- each in its own way a messianic sect that was a harbinger of dynastic instability -- will prompt anyone interested in the future of China to take Falun Gong more seriously