Who said this:
"Good evening. Earlier today, I ordered America's Armed Forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological programs, and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors. Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States and, indeed, the interest of people throughout the Middle East and around the world. Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons."
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It's a brutal sense of loneliness that oppresses me right now. I want so badly to be held, and at the same time hold someone. This past year has been a trial that I've been largely unaware of. The judgement has yet to be delivered, and I'm not yet settled into the apathetic position of accepting whatever it may be.
My family, at least the Holmes side, has always been obsessed with trains. Locomotives I mean. As a kid I'd be subjected to long sessions of slide-shows showing various trains from around the country. My father loves them. My uncle loves them. My grandfather had a massive antique set of electric trains that as a child I could only dream about.
There is something about raw excitement that is contagious. In some ways, it's the very existance of passion that synergistically creates more of itself, and my feelings about the world conform to this notion closely. I would watch these endless shows and dialog about trains and be bored to tears, but at the same time I would find myself inexorably drawn into the excitement around me.
I discovered in time that my particular passion has been love. I love loving. Being loved in return is a perk, a side-effect, or on particular occasions the required response, but is never the point. For whatever reason, I'm particular about my desire to love others.
I've read more than I care to think about regarding the potential psychological causes for this. I've heard all about co-dependency and the perils of low self-esteem. Yet I find these rational constructs as useful as shoehorns or dental floss tools - functional, yet ultimately extraneous. There needs not be a reason to love, but rather love itself is fulfilling unto itself.
Even if I thought it were possible, I do not want to understand the machinations of love. Rather, I'm unwillingly comfortable with its command of my existence and hope without recourse that its passion is contagious.
The evening came and past like a single tear expending itself across my cheek, leaving only a taut sensation of its passage.
I woke up this morning from a dream of counting cash and hiding in my bed(room) back in New York, with my father complaining about my still being there and not having a job. It might have been a flashback. I've been there before.
I looked at my clock and it said 8:30 AM. It took me a little while to realize that it was set for alarm and it was actually 2 PM. I got up and the past two years punched me in the back of the head and I reeled through a score of past epiphanies, dazed and distorted but not afraid or agitated.
There is something coming soon. That's all I know. Something is coming and I'm not ready for it at all and I can't wait for it to get here.
Last night I went to go see Alice Donut, a band I was an enormous fan of when I was in my teen years. No big surprise, the band had a wide assortment of anti-establishment songs. I went largely out of an overwhelming dose of nostalgia, and found myself headbanging as if more than a decade hadn't passed.
Part of me stood there, rockin' out, thinking, "how the fuck did I become a republican?"
I watched the last episode of The Sopranos, where Tony talks about his depression in rage terminology. "It's all just fucking bullshit!" he says, and I reflexively agree. I understand completely.
I read an article about how the brain works, and how it's only the final stages of thought that eliminate the outright stupid decisions, and think to myself how I've deliberately rejected that framework. I know what's "right" and "wrong" and yet I find that those parameters are derived from flimsy or outright false premises. Mostly, the boundaries are designed from fear.
Bullshit. Endless bullshit.
I'm too drunk to go on. Reading this, you know all those things you will not share with anyone else. Your selfish desires, your miseries, your weaknesses. It only makes sense to hold them close and silent, but it's the very comfort you recieve from maintaining their secret nature that creates the environment of bullshit we're all faced with.
Myself included.
I had to link this article that made me laugh a number of times.
My hardest belly-laugh came from the caption under the Jack Nicholson picture near the bottom.
*** Advance Warning: This post is not political ***
I got my most recent issue of The Nation in the mail today. It's cover is "EXIT: How to get out of Iraq" and this feature piece is composed of open letters from leftist luminaries explaining this and that. I'll spoil it for you: Bush is a liar, Iraq is Vietnam. I supposed having Noam Chonsky listed as one of the participants should have given me plenty of advance warning on what to expect.
At any rate, I flipped through the rest of it while waiting for coffee at the local cafe, sporting my new Ronald Reagan / Che Guevara T-shirt, and skimmed through the Eric Alterman piece and some other stuff. While going through the ads in the back, I thought about what a terrible mistake I'd made in subscribing to this 'magazine'. The content has been one-note (guess what note) every issue I've gotten to date. Isn't there some point where the converted get sick of preaching? Oh wait... maybe not.
The worst thing about my subscription to The Nation is that they sold my address to countless leftist organizations, grass-roots I'm sure, who pack my mailbox with everything from Communist party applications to DNC donation surveys. Even if I was a leftist, I would be pissed that my mailbox had been whored out to some evil, capitalist, highest-bidder. I look at all this junk mail and think - what happened to worrying about the trees? I suppose that's why I don't get anything from the Green party.
Good for them. Maybe I'll send them a donation.
Dan Darling has written an article on Iraq and Al-Qaida that I heartily recommend. I strongly suggest reading the first two links, which provide the initial commentary he is responding to.
It's long, and is only part 1 apparently, so bring your bag of spare time and patience - I think it's worth it.
As the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prison scandal blossoms, I can only grip my reality handbar even tighter and try to stomach what is happening to my world. This is a long, meandering post - you've been warned.
I watched a fairly long, and disappointingly mediocre, amature political video by ProtestWarrior.com yesterday. Like the far better Brain Terminal videos, it has right-wing activists confronting the left-wing activists in an effort to expose their real beliefs through, well, exposure. It's a little like shooting fish in a small pond, since the activists organizing these protests are hard core ideologues, which is why they are organizing protests in the first place. They already know the answers (The name of one of the biggest is actually International A.N.S.W.E.R - Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), and so their goal is to make sure everyone else knows them too - so we can all stop being so rascist, unfair, greedy, violent and so on. In these protests, you'll always find the following: Free Mumia, Not in Our Name, Free Palestine, No Blood for Oil, Bush Lied People Died, End the Occupation, and possibly Bush is Not My President. I don't know why Mumia is in there, but it is.
These people are the left's lunatic fringe. They are no more credible than the 700 club or the health and environment-related press releases from your typical Fortune 500 corporation, yet they are far more representative and influential. We see them in the news, usually saying things that are heartfelt and noble, like, "We should not kill innocent civilians just to fill our SUVs!" and really, who can argue with that logic? Who wouldn't want to side with people who want to not kill innocent people (or in Mumia's case, even guilty people)?
Of course we see them in the news, since the ones reporting it are merely one or more steps to the right of them. Still left, but not crazy. Naturally, they are more interested in covering similar-minded material. Don't worry, I'm not going to dive into the media bias thing, I was just dipping a toe in it, just to show the connections. So they have a tendency to vote Democrat and cover Democratic-minded things, like the American soldiers killed in Iraq, or the latest Israeli attack and coresponding Palestinian bombing, or the lack of funding for education, or the occasional accidental firearm death, or any pro-choice/anti-war/ethnic(not white) protest or rally.
Democratic. The Democratic Party. The Democratic National Committee, or the DNC. They are the other party of the two political parties that vie for power over our country. They are offering the alternative, if you don't like how things are being run now. Kerry is their man, and he is certain to change things if he's elected.
Back to Abu Ghraib. A handful of our people, soldiers or otherwise, torture and abuse the prisoners under their supervision. They take pictures and videos of it. They pass them around like baseball cards. Naturally, these 'trophies' find their way to people who don't find them amusing. People like, say, the people who we are trying to help and their fascist leaders. You do not need to be a pundit, or an activist, or a politician to understand these photos - it is sufficient to be human to feel the revulsion and anger. I can only imagine what the people who have been listening to their leaders lie about American behaviour 24-7 for their whole lives must think when seeing these pictures.
Now I read the response to this ongoing horror, and it's the blame game 2004 - with the prize being Bush. Watch the news, read the paper, google it if you like, the story is no longer on Fallujah, now that it's cooled down there, but is completely focused on Abu Ghraib. Names will be gathered, hearings will be had, and justice will inexorably grind its way through this scandal. For me, that is not where the real story is.
This year we watched the Democratic Primaries and barring the spectacular ascension and implosion of Howard Dean, it was a me-too convention of robotic Anti-Bush's that inspired no one. We watched clips of the 9-11 commission, we saw it lampooned on SNL and talked about in the news. Conclusion? Who knows. The two sides went into it thinking what they thought and having found no smoking guns worthy of a newsbite, they both went home. We bit our nails when Iraq exploded back into war, and lost interest before we noticed we won. Now we have the Abu Ghraib scandal to watch, and when that's left behind we'll still be heading for November 2004 - where the real story is. Half a year from now, we'll be able to pick a new leader for our country, and if we do it will be a radical change indeed.
But a change to what? What is the alternative I can vote for? Kerry's plan is to hand over control of Iraq to the UN, backed up by NATO forces. His posted number of returning troops is 20,000, which still leaves over 110,000 troops in Iraq under whose control? Are the anti-war people going to stop protesting if we pull 20,000 troops out? Are International ANSWER, Not In Our Name, and MoveOn.org going to back these plans? No. They have no goal other than thwarting George W. Bush.
If Kerry wins and we go with his plan, we're still in Iraq with slightly less troops and a different command structure. Keep in mind the draft talk that's made its rounds on the news was started by Democrats. Also keep in mind that just about everyone agrees on there being a need for more troops if we are to maintain security there - including security at places like Abu Ghraib. So, if you're anti-war, you're anti-Kerry, because he ain't pulling out; or so he says.
If Kerry doesn't win, we're still in Iraq with Bush at the helm. The plan, shifting like the sands as it may seem, is to attempt to bring a liberal democracy to the Middle East while at the same time giving the region a warning shot. The goal is to salt the ideological earth of Islamic facism so it cannot grow large enough to be of any danger to us. This is an old diplomatic message that's clear to everyone in the region, "clean up your back yard, or I'll have to do it for you." So if you're anti-war, you're anti-Bush, because he ain't pulling out; we know because he said so.
If Kerry wins, and he doesn't do what he plans but rather pulls out relatively quickly and hands over administration to the UN, I fear Iraq and Afghanistan will become the latest UN failures, to go along with Bosnia, Rwanda, and Saddam's Iraq. Their failure will be second only to our failure, however, if we free them from their shackles and then leave them in the slave market undefended. I assume that the signs that read "US out of IRAQ" really mean what they say, and I wonder if those people holding them will be disturbed by the bloodbath that would likely occur in the power vacuum created by our abscence. The civil war in Iraq would make Somalia look like a backyard wrestling video in comparison. Will ANSWER and NION and MoveOn protest the war when we're not involved? I doubt it.
So why does something as relatively small as Abu Ghraib scare the shit out of me? Because it's the first time that I felt that we might lose not because the enemy was strong, but because we were weak. The enemy is counting on our lack of resolve, having learned from Vietnam and Somalia. They know we have no stomach for war and do their best to win the war the easiest way possible - in the voting booths. I expect the enemy to behave like the enemy, by torturing and killing and destroying with wanton abandon whoever and whatever he must to win. But I do not expect that from us. I expect the opposite. To see our own people behaving as the enemy does is a special kind of failure.
Worst of all, it makes the friends of our enemies even stronger. You will see those photos enlarged to obscene sizes at the next anti-war protest. You will see them on Indymedia and all over the web in a collective sigh of despair and vindication. It makes it even harder for right-of-center folks like myself to defend our positions, and even worse it makes me look to George W. Bush even more for resolve and strength. I may doubt what countries all over the world might do, or doubt whether or not Kerry can lead effectively, but I have no doubt at all about Bush. He said he's staying - and he does exactly what he says.
So these are my choices? Folks on the left that have no plan to avoid 9/11 Part 2, and one man on the right whom I only partially agree with and only because ironically he's seems to be the only one who gets what's going on. Yes, that's what I said.
Liz called me from her Cooze Bay college the other day, and expressed her exasperation with the environment there. It's like high school all over again, she said. I can't wait to get into the real world, she said. I laughed and put on my old person voice. Sweetheart, the only difference between high school and life is how much you have to pay for things.
I'm reading Ebert's review of "Mean Girls" and hit the point where he writes, "Will teenage audiences walk out of "Mean Girls" determined to break with the culture of cliques, gossip and rules for popularity? Not a chance. That's built into high school, I think." And I think that he's being too limiting. Cliques? Gossip? Rules for popularity? Sounds like my last job. Sounds like recent the Democratic Primaries, or any Presidential election. Sounds like Iraq. Sounds like my overall experience of people in the world. The culture of cliques? Look at a map.
I'm watching The Sopranos a few weeks ago, and the episode is about trust, social ties, and their related perspectives. In it, Tony's wife accuses him of having no friends, which he rejects, replying that he's surrounded by friends. She tells him what is likely the straight truth, that he is surrounded by cronies who pretend to be his friend out of fear. His response? "I'm not running a popularity contest." This is true, for him, and it's obvious that his existence relies heavily on ensuring everyone's loyalty through that fear. But you can also see in his face that he knows he has no friends and it's an excruciating burden for him, as it would be for any of us.
We are taught, and shown, and forced to accept in various degrees the size and contour of our social boundaries. It started when we started, and ends just as abruptly. It's the interaction between these bubbles that we see as culture, as society, and as ourselves.
Immediately, I thought of one of my favorite models - Indra's Net.
"The Hindu myth of Indra's Net provides an allegory of this interdependent organization. This net exists in Indra's palace in heaven and extends infinitely in all directions. At each node of the net where threads cross there is a perfectly clear gem that reflects all the other gems in the net. As each gem reflects every other one; so are you affected by every other system in the universe."*
Following that, I remembered a Thomas Carlyle quote that I live by, "No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence."
I hope Liz and Ebert will find comfort and vindication, respectively, in the knowledge that they are not alone in their observations, either in time or in space, since these ancient and old Eastern and Western philosophies describe high school pretty damn well. Perhaps that is what is to be learned there?
* Indra's Net quote taken from this site. Credit where it's due.