Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
I sent out the following email to a ton of people. Basically a status report on the situation:
******
For your identification pleasure...
Hey all, I trust everyone's had a nice summer. It was kind of a weird one for me. The legal case has still not been resolved and the police have still not released my photographs (yes, that's illegal). As you probably heard, I got arrested by the St. Paul/Mpls/Airport police in a peculiar incident of unwarranted Law Enforcement Aggression against Macalester's graduating Senior class on May 11. I can't really talk about the details (there is a story at www.themacweekly.com right now with the basics) but at least I was arrested photographing the situation, producing some kind of evidence rather than just a written report of what transpired.
One of our classmates (an international student) was savagely assaulted by Ramsey County jail personnel within the county jail - and another pepper sprayed in the back of the squad car. We also saw Ramsey County jailers spontaneously assault a helpless black man in the processing room. It was an experience I will never forget - the State does terrible things behind concrete walls and steel doors. We saw that especially if you are not a white citizen, you have *very* good reason to fear the Authorities.
It is very weird to have Conditional Release. Instead of Posting Bail, I still have to call this woman at Project Remand every week. In theory, I could be tossed in jail for jaywalking or speeding. We are having a Florence Hearing on September 27, which is a type of hearing with witnesses. If the judge finds that there was not Probable Cause to believe that we committed crimes, she can toss the case. Otherwise we have to try to wheedle out a plea bargain - some have been offered already.
Other than that, well, I am still productively employed with Computer Zone Consulting and Politics in Minnesota. At the end of August I moved back to Hudson with the parents for a while, giving me a well leveraged position in cheap cigarettes, fireworks and Sunday Booze. The likely plan is that I will move to an apartment in Minneapolis with Dan Schned by October 1, but that is not quite certain (Schned himself just got a job yesterday at the liquor store by the Hennepin freeway exit).
If anyone has family down South, I hope they are doing all right. This was some crazy shit we've seen over the last few weeks. I am thinking that maybe I should go down sometime - there would surely be a thousand stories to tell the world. My website is actually dependent right now on a corporate Data Center perched high in a New Orleans skyscraper. The company called DirectNIC (http://www.directnic.com ) is staffed by these strung-out people holed up in the skyscraper, running a diesel generator. If their computers go down, then the link between http://www.hongpong.com and its current IP address might stop working. Very strange. DirectNIC's website has a lot of stunning photos of the situation, even a live webcam perched above the depopulated city.
So my present contact info is
Dan Feidt
802 6th Street
Hudson, WI 54016
Cell: 651-338-7661
Family house: 715-386-5565 or TOLL FREE (yes!) 888-346-5565 .
email: dan.feidt@gmail.com
web: http://www.hongpong.com
AIM: hongpong2000
Much love to everyone - stay in touch. I hope everyone has a fine fall season at college or Real Life. I am often very flaky about staying in touch with people. It's nothing personal - I'd really like to hear from everyone! Take care!
Dan
Right now I'm listening to the new Murs & Slug album, Felt 2: A Tribute to Lisa Bonet. Not bad.
I finally got around to changing the email address on this page to my new email address, dan.feidt AT gmail.com.
Also I'll note that I had a few glasses of Diet Dr. Pepper the other night in honor of Elizabeth Severance's six-month trip to London. Have fun Sev!!!
In other news I am working on a bit for the Politics in Minnesota newsletter based on the piece I put in the Mac Weekly about interviewing the Minnesota Legislature.
Then I really really really need to have this damn Job thing sort itself out. Augh.
It is nearly time to relocate into 1630 Selby. Kennedy is gone for the week, visiting family, and Alison has already moved out, so it is eerily quiet at both ends. My stuff is more than half-packed up. I bid an ambivalent farewell to dowdy plaid shirts that stuck with me far longer than they should have, and threw away old notes and bits of paper, signifying elements of the trail over the last four years.
The server may go down for a while here, and may take some time to come back. Hopefully quickly.
Many objects found in the room, a mapbook of Paris, cards and CDs, photos from the war protests and London. The Hongpong.com Gentoo Linux server, a Pentium 4 Dell Dimension that has performed admirably since I got it from Dan Schned's brother Alex last summer, has faced the challenge of websurfers from the CIA and thousands of virus attacks with great stamina and more importantly, almost unshakeable stability. The server will go down after 42 days in operation. Not bad, but not as good as its all-time record of 111 days.
The electrical problems in my room (bet you didn't know the Uninterruptible Power Supply was grounded by a wire I installed) never blew up the computers, and the dust from all the shit in here didn't quite kill me.
The room was sort of an overgrown projection of my personality, hodgepodge with sprinklings of conspiracy, David's crazy art, wires and components, Rhymesayers stickers, burnt matches, post-its and printouts, critical theory readings and Poli Sci books scooped from the free table, a bookcase topped by Marx, half the Illuminatus trilogy, scribblings and bizarre charts taped to the walls. Many a long night hunched over the computer, following hyperlinks into arcane trivia until three or four in the morning. I tried real hard to "Get it" even though all too often I felt totally disconnected, hostile to the America outside.
Those days are over now... there were fun times, strange times. Someone once claimed that the center of the universe passed through the corner where the TV used to be. For some reason, I tended to believe it.
Hey all,
I have a radio show in twenty minutes. I have a big story in the Mac Weekly today about How to Interview the Minnesota Legislature.
Listen to the radio show online. Special guest today: DJAngryNihilistRoommate and The Bobs! Studio request line 651 696 6312. Hell ya
It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.
It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.
So anyhows, I'm trying not to get down about this whole mess, because the world is a messy place and we all end up muddling along no matter what. Of course, things are going weirdly in other places. By the end of January we'll have a sense of whether or not the situation in Iraq is going to screech off and out of control, or else fizzle down. Meanwhile in Washington they are getting hunkered down for another round of the Amazing Bush Administration and its Circus of Follies.
So it's a season of change for everyone now. I'm looking back at the things I have done and seen this year, and I think overall I did pretty well, but I still don't know what I ought to do when I graduate. It's kind of amazing that it's already time to get out of college. I have enjoyed the experience, but I do regret not studying abroad somewhere, as I think it would have given me a clean slate and fresh approach instead of those pointless months here... specifically the difficult experience of the Dupre Single days.
This year was a good one, though. I learned a lot of things about how the world worked, I talked with a lot of strange people. When I look back, I think that this was very much a breakthrough year in terms of just being willing to go out in the world and see what happens, for an often skittish person like myself.
January 2004 was pointless, so I guess we should skip to February. Back then, I advanced the story of the war, as I see it, in a worthwhile way, when I asked John Kerry during his visit to Macalester if the intelligence distortions (meaning the fake WMD and al Qaeda stories, mainly) should be considered a criminal matter akin to Iran-Contra. Kerry gave me one of those classic two-paragraph answers, but I would say, looking back almost a year on it, that he probably gave me the wrong answer.
My view of the matter is that Ahmed Chalabi and the neo-cons consciously knew they were providing bad information about Iraq, and hence deceived everyone in the government, and in particular our elected representatives in Congress. Kerry said that he had 'no evidence' that it was illegal, but he never really pursued the issue as a campaign matter, I suppose in particular because his campaign acted self-consciously 'tainted' by his position on the war early on.
But that's the key thing about it: Kerry could have weaseled out of responsibility for the war vote by saying that 'we wuz lied to!!' and provided the American public an entertaining tale about Chalabi and the rest of them, which would have drawn more attention to the malevolent incompetents running the Pentagon, forcing the frame of debate back to Bush's systematic deception and the war's managerial disasters. By the end of the campaign, Kerry was alleging that they were 'playing games' with intelligence, but that doesn't really mean anything to Joe Sixpack. They should have given us the spy story. It would have been cool.
Afterwards, in March I went to London for a week and stayed on the floor of Nick Petersen's flat. This came just a couple days after the Madrid bombings, and I thought that security would be escalated all over the place. It was my first trip to Europe and I made the most of it. I didn't obsess with seeing tourist attractions, and instead tried to wander all through town, a project assisted by Nick's encyclopedic knowledge of London architecture. On the first night, Victoria came back from her apparently horrible school in Wales. Vic's mom and siblings had also come to London for break, and they had a fabulous suite at the County Hall (Hotel?). The room had a little balcony high above the river Thames, and from there I could look right across the river at Parliament and the clock tower, as that huge Ferris wheel thing turned overhead. I saw the House of Commons meet, I went to the Prime Meridian and some museums...
Then I hopped the Eurostar (?) train to Paris, and wandered around there for a day, eating a Royale with Cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I even went in and saw the Mona Lisa and other places in the Louvre. Emi showed me all over town, and it was just a damn awesome place to be, like something out of a movie of someone else's life (this sense was helped along when I watched that recent Jack Nicholson movie, which ends in Paris, on the flight back to Chicago).
The summer was an interesting venture. I took an electronic art and journalism law classes at the University of Minnesota. Made some friends, picked up some useful information and put together a sweet DVD of many of my better photographs and videos.
After that stuff ended, I went to the site of the Republican National Convention with Dan Schned and Peter Gartrell. It was at times the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. When the police officer pulled his hat off to show us the photos of his friend who died at the WTC, or when the girl from Iowa showed us a video of anarchists setting the dragon on fire right next to her, or when we stood on a corner as AIPAC delegates to the convention streamed past, happily celebrating the renewal of the Likud-Republican political alliance that I so loathe. Or when we tracked down the bar where Dick Cheney was drinking, or when we chanted in the streets in an unlicensed march....
So, then, was it worth it? Was it worth the hassle, the arrests, the gasoline expended, just to go out there and watch people wave some signs around? You know, I think it was. I think that it helped me to ground some of the symbols that they manipulate in our minds—the WTC site, for one. These things become easier to understand once you see them, stripped of the media frames, the pretexts and moral arguments. Just to stand there and smoke a cigarette, then another cigarette, in the great important Negative Space in south Manhattan, helps to assert some control over the symbols they wield. It helped me settle the issue somehow.
After that we went down into the WTC subway stop. I walked over to one of the support beams and rubbed my finger on a bolt encrusted with sparkling reddish-brown dust. I rubbed the dust between my fingers and smelled it, a certain, dusty, burned smell, the torched synthetic substances from the offices, mixed with window and beam particles, had plunged down, and puffed into the tunnels under the city where no amount of cleaning could ever eradicate the traces.
I saw Bush himself a few days before the trip, as he made a campaign appearance in Hudson, Wisconsin. I saw him get off the bus and shake people's hands, and I could finally see what is so difficult to discern from home: that man is just the front face for a whole vast system of domination and control. It's a much larger problem than just that man. It's the administrative deception, the suppression of agencies like the EPA. We make the mistake of projecting perceived personality traits into understanding the political problems we have, without understanding how much of the issue is organizational.
School went pretty well this semester. I actually did something that I thought might not happen: I had a conversation with a really quite devious neoconservative that came to Macalester. For quite a while I wondered what might happened if I encountered Michael Ledeen at the Roundtable, but when I suddenly did, it was a surprise because he hadn't even given his speech yet. I ended up talking with the odd character over lunch, a bizarre twist. I gamely tried to suggest to him that the Iranians weren't determined to nuke Jerusalem the moment they developed the Bomb, but Ledeen would have none of it. A quixotic sort of notion to try convincing this guy that we shouldn't lose our cool about Iran, but of course he would never change his mind.
I learned a key thing about the people that run things from this encounter: They are very moody people. They are not well-adjusted low-key technocratic sorts of people. They are grim and weird. Ledeen himself admitted a manic depressive condition, and I think that whole kind of thing is what drives them to make their crazy decisions as much as any kind of Evil Agenda we might try to fathom from their actions.
And then the election. In some ways I barely want to hear about it, to hear about how such a vast section of the American public wholeheartedly embraced absurd lies about the situation, and how despite a sense that we were careening out of control, we were still destined to end up with these ridiculous cats for another four years.
I guess a sense of needing to refute that 'destiny' led me to place a shred of hope in the election-challenge folks, although of course it offends my sense of what it means to live in a democracy when I hear of a single vote damaged, lost, vanished or even potentially manipulated by our crappy system. At this point, we are hearing some interesting stuff out of Florida about Congressman Feeney and the usual Florida corruption, but it seems like we will never hear much of an articulation of how evil it was in Ohio when election supervisors implemented a strategy to direct voting machines away from heavily Democratic precincts into the suburbs. Is that really what we can accept as an element of a 'legitimate' election?
To round out this year end ramble, I would say that I am still much the same sort of person as when I began this year, but I think that I managed to advance my view of the world by talking straight to some of the important people, going into hazardous places like New York, and trying to express my own views of the world via this website, the campus paper, and just talking with people. I think I've tried to criss-cross some interesting slices of Americana this year and listen to what people have told me. As time has gone past, it seems more clear to me than ever that I still have a very long ways to go before things make sense to me.
The good thing is that right now I feel less like giving up than before. I don't have a sense that my energy is evaporating, but with the end of school coming around I have to try to pull together a new plan. Not easy for anyone... There is still a world of opportunities out there. I will have to spend a while poking around...
So here's to 2004. A year I got through by taking some chances and going new places. As for 2005, that's the year when things really better start clicking.
Well, today (if luck holds) the Mac Weekly comes out and I have a nice column, "Cracking the Black Box Election," which describes some of the voting irregularities that the mainstream media generally refuses to talk about. In a move that has already sparked widespread rumors that I'm a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, I have a reference to this site in the piece. For that, all I can say is that I'm a shameless Internet whore living in the age of self-made celebrity.
After press time, I discovered I made a couple mistakes in the column which I should correct here. In both cases, I understated the extent of examples of voting problems. First, I said that Volusia County double-counted hundreds of ballots in the 2000 election. In fact, they counted an extra 4000 votes fot Bush, and a Diebold optical scanner added a negative 16,000 votes for Gore... that is, subtracted about 30 times Bush's margin of victory, before a staffer caught the mistake. Another low-ball mistake on my part was saying that one machine in Broward County started counting a ballot initiative backwards at 32,767. In fact, a whole set of machines started counting backwards. I knew these things before I wrote the piece, but I slipped up and I'm sorry.
I was under a lot of time pressure when writing the piece, and quite hungry as well. My biggest complaint about the Mac Weekly this semester has been the irregular distribution of pizza, and I must call for equality and more grease from week to week as a solution.
Anyhow, I need to give some links. This week, Bev Harris at Black Box Voting stormed a farewell party for a Palm Beach County elections director, serving her with a lawsuit. Provisional ballot counting in Cuyahoga County, Ohio provided Kerry with 9,242 more votes, and there has been some legal wrangling about the qualification of these votes.
There will be hearings starting next Wednesday in Congress about voting irregularities, a source has told Brad Blog. I highly recommend checking out Bob Fitrakis' work in the Columbia Free Press (OH), who has been investigating the strange tales of Nov. 2. A public hearing he held provided the crazy quote about electronic votes jumping from Kerry to Bush that I started my piece with. Read this piece for stunning reports of administrative incompetence and very suspicious poll behavior from Fitrakis.
This PDF file sent as a complaint to Ohio's insanely partisan Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell (via Bradblog) has all kinds of interesting stuff in it, including reports of odd irregularities, conservative judicial candidates awash in money, and the mysterious Warren County lockdown.
Well, sadly that's all I've got time for before lunch & class. Keep on rockin' in the free world.
Election day is tomorrow. (Ok, it's actually today and I changed the time of the post a couple hours back for dramatic effect. Yay.)
On what will hopefully be the last day of this strange government’s political domination of our country, I thought that I should share something about the last four years. Where to begin… where to begin…
I wonder how much of this time has been wasted and whether the energy we spent in resisting served no purpose.
Then I think back to the times that we came together to declare with one voice that the war was wrong, the policies were wrong and the leaders were mad. Even in those dark hours, those symbolic gestures in the street assured me that there was some kind of link between people that even Bush couldn’t crush.
All the way back to the fall of high school’s senior year (2001), on that distant planet we once lived on, I felt that the good times couldn’t last. I thought the economy was cruising on a bubble. I thought that things would make less sense before they made more.
That bizarre election four years minus one day ago launched the country into the sea of uncertainty. Little did we know that the political strategy of this president was to burn away the basis of facts themselves, and substitute spin for reality.
After looking at Macalester College in the Clinton days, I found coming here in the calm, almost flippant season before 9/11. Somewhere I still have that summer’s Time magazine all about shark attacks.
We had ten glorious, blazing days at Macalester, partying on Turck Three, Turck Two, up and down Doty and Dupre. The social universe had no barriers. It was just as well that I didn’t yet have the computer my parents had ordered for school.
One Tuesday morning, I hadn’t yet done my work for Griffin’s film analysis class that afternoon. My crappy old clock radio clicked on, disjointed ramblings about some crash on MPR. Hit the snooze button. The second time I listened for a while, buildings on fire. Went to the bathroom and a floormate told me something crazy was going on.
We went into my room and fiddled around with Adam’s shitty old TV. Then the fuzzy image came up: the towers burning in a haze of static. Campus ground to a halt, everyone stopped to watch, agape.
In the days that followed, I looked again and again at the American flag outside the chapel. Anything was possible now. In a way that was a sort of freedom, the idea that from such a chasm something better might be fashioned. But I also feared that they would take this disaster and run away with it.
At least we would have the chance to start afresh in college, at least this epoch would let us cleanly break from the old days.
Unexpectedly, something weird happened to our class, and I think our class alone. The famed Macalester bubble hardened into a Macalester shell through the rest of that semester. We reoriented towards our friends and our studies. Generally, we rarely got far off campus. I think that somewhere among those crucial weeks, when the country wept and the flags flew out of stores, we missed some indoctrination session that everyone else got. We didn’t get saturated by the media—we barely saw cable. We were not formed into believers.
I still remember someone telling me that they could hardly believe that these flags were all over the place. It felt alien—more American than America.
Then came those slogans. “United We Stand” was the best because it was consonant with “United States.” Later the war brought “Support Our Troops.” One night in Mickey’s Diner with some of my Indian friends, I realized that among this group, the slogans became meaningless. If you were among foreigners, the ‘We’ and ‘Our’ become false, and suddenly you escaped from the mental box.
What, then, to say about the war? What to say about where God has gotten placed these last few years? There’s really nowhere to begin but with my persistent atheist beliefs. For me, the most threatening, doom-laden quality of this government has been the way its supporters have attached an eschatological, apocalyptic meaning to September 11. They believe (or purport to believe) that September 11 was not a ‘mundane’ event. Instead, the disaster is elevated to a spiritual or eschatological plane, as it becomes an element of God’s plan for the world. The crashes are not just plane crashes, they are a projection of supernaturally pure moral evil into reality, and a revelatory moment for the believers.
Such heretical thinking has a great political advantage. Over fall break, I saw a few minutes of a Congressional campaign debate from gerrymandered Texas that when the Republican related the dangerous idea. He said that God had allowed this disaster to happen, but God’s grace was revealed in the American reaction to it. The disaster opened a path of redemption, and Bush, as God’s agent, had moved down this path. The War on Terror became spiritually licensed.
No, I say to these people, No a million times. God was not involved. God does not exist, and everyone who says that there was Grace in what followed is fabricating a ghastly deity of convenient vengeance. The Republicans have exploited this unholy narrative and its profoundly evil nature should alarm any student of politics or history. Aggressive nationalists have run this kind of line throughout human civilization, because people fear the uncertainty of not placing faith in the story.
A professor of journalism, David Domke, visited my rhetoric of campaigns and elections class this fall to talk about Bush’s religiously colored language, as part of a tour for his fascinating new book, “God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the “War on Terror” and the Echoing Press.”
He describes how the Bush administration fabricated the “good vs. evil” and “security vs. peril” binaries, and applied them to make it seem as if Bush was carrying out God’s will.
Cynical atheistic political theorists like Leo Strauss have said that a political leadership’s appeal to God serves the purpose of lending cohesion to the society, and claiming to speak on behalf of the Invisible One effectively silences the doubters. Some leaders, like Bush, claim to act as prophetic agents or portals of insight into God. These are the dangerous ones; once followers buy into this, there is no stopping them.
Over the course of this government, I’ll say that the most profoundly frightening and disturbing moment of the whole adventure came during my attendance at a rally supporting the war in its first days, on March 22, 2003, where I took pictures.
There, our governor, Tim Pawlenty, uttered something I knew to be racist and totally false. I heard the grief of 9/11 cynically redirected to support the war, an abuse of power that literally made me shake. Pawlenty was speaking on the steps of the state Capitol building. He said that we were going to strike back at those who struck us on 9/11. I instantly knew this to be a lie, a horrible lie. The crowd cheered, and I shuddered.
Early in 2002, I started looking around at the points of conflict between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Without too much trouble, I found the Intifada. Here was a concrete case of Muslims getting crushed by outsiders with military aid from the United States. If we were to patch this War on Terror up, it would have to involve peace in the West Bank and Gaza. There was no other way.
My lifelong fascination with maps took a turn for the surreal when I first looked at the complex diagrams of settlements and Israeli roads on the West Bank. What the hell was this program? Why are these things expanding? Did someone say that God authorized this? Was there some kind of moral fiction being generated to sustain the process? And what does democracy become in a country that generates racially exclusive colonial suburbs?
In the fall of my sophomore year, October 2002, two men from this place came to Macalester. (I wrote an editorial about it a couple weeks before they came) I co-wrote the news story about their visit here, but of course someone failed to put that issue of the Weekly (Vol. 5, Issue 4) online.
I talked briefly with Ami Ayalon, Sari Nusseibeh and George Mitchell. Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s FBI-like security forces, the Shin Bet, and Nusseibeh, the then-president of Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University, came to the U.S. to talk about their sensible peace plan, which entailed removing virtually all the settlements, sharing Jerusalem and bringing the Palestinian refugees into the territories, not Israel. They hoped to promote the plan by getting ordinary folks on both sides to sign their statement.
For me, this encounter forever destroyed the idea that to be ‘pro-Israel’ or ‘a friend of Israel’ means supporting the self-destructive policies of the Likud. Ami Ayalon is as much of a hard-nosed Israeli security expert as you will ever find. He could have probably killed me with his ballpoint pen in a dozen different ways. Yet this tough man was acutely afraid of the settlers and the threat they posed to Israel’s stability. His years at the Shin Bet actually were among the safest and most hopeful that the people of that poor, beleaguered country ever had. It was Ayalon’s Shin Bet that cooperated with the Oslo Accord’s new Palestinian security services to prevent the Islamic fundamentalists from bombing and shooting Israelis. There were virtually no suicide bombings under Ayalon’s watch, because he determined how to coordinate Israel with willing Palestinian security forces. I learned it could be done again, because it had been done before. If only the constant process of the settlers’ territorial aggression—which increased dramatically during Ayalon’s tenure—had been checked, things might not have spun out of control.
At this same time, we began to hear rhetoric of plans to invade Iraq. I dismissed these rumors for a while, believing that the U.S. would have to intervene with Israel before breaking out into Iraq. I saw a couple patterns emerge as the deed went down. The first was the source of stories about weapons of mass destruction and lurid tales of terror training within Iraq. These stories tended to depend on the statements of defectors, who in fact turned out to be liars pimped out by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. It was difficult, if not impossible, to hear of the really threatening yarns from more objective sources.
The other key pattern was a sense that the government itself was divided about the war, because, as we found out later, there was a dramatic factional battle, roughly between the neoconservatives in Cheney’s office and the top of the Pentagon, versus the State Department, CIA, and some of the uniformed military staff.
Reading one of my weirder “news” sources, I found references to a 1996 policy document called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” This doc, widely available on the Internet, prompted me to rethink what exactly these neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith were gunning for. I have rambled extensively about the significance of the Clean Break, and probably will continue to do so for the rest of my days. Near the beginning of the war in Iraq, I posted my analysis of it on Everything2.com. As the war started during spring break, I remember reading one of the key passages to my family:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
So before I get into the wretched nature of the war, I should explain a politically hazardous, yet profoundly important idea about our present situation. At this moment, we are deeply wrapped within something I call the ‘Israeli-American Hegemony,’ (a.k.a. ‘the Republican-Likud merger’) a crucial, misunderstood component of the ‘War on Terror’ campaign. In some ways this hegemony is a continuation of the old ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ we’ve heard so much about, but it is in fact a new, evolving political form that both the Bush and Sharon administrations have done their utmost to market to their countries.
This hegemony signifies that the national identities of Israel and the United States should merge together, on the basis of perceived political, moral, military and religious congruities between the countries. There is a specific moral calculus fabricated into the hegemony: namely, that Israel and the United States exist on a moral plane apart from the rest of the world, and their decisions are effectively guided by God’s higher moral purpose.
The Clean Break document states that Israel needs to match America’s language. In an institutional fashion, this is what hegemony and integration really means: the Pentagon starts to think and function like the IDF and the American messianic Christians move closer to the messianic Jewish groups in the West Bank.
The Clean Break document said that
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values…
To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.
To synchronize the language between our governments is precisely the objective.
Yet the success of this hegemon is based on insane, shaky foundations. For one thing, it defies a fundamental premise of international politics: different states have different interests. I’m sorry, but I do not have the same policy interests as a handful of messianic settlers on a West Bank hilltop, and my government should reflect that. The whole enterprise of the Israeli occupation itself is horrible: only our own Christian fundamentalists who see the construction of settlements as a means to fulfill the return of Jesus and bring about the apocalypse favor this undertaking.
This hegemony idea also is rather racist: it suggests that the Israelis themselves are incapable of charting their own destiny. Instead, they are expected to play out the end-of-the-world script that Christian fundamentalists believe they ought to play.
I’ve found that this hegemon has been quite easy to spot lately. We can pick apart political discourse just from the last few weeks of the campaign. We saw it when Sharon and Bush agreed that “Israeli population centers” in the West Bank could be annexed, as if Bush could somehow speak on behalf of the Palestinians.
Thomas Friedman says that Iraqis refer to American troops as “Jews,” while Arab TV networks show split-screens of Israeli aggression in the territories and American lunacy in Iraq. This, Friedman says, is harmful because it merges these identities into a larger complex, but not because it’s an objective fact of the current situation. As he says, now it is hard to know where American policy ends and Sharon’s begins.
Osama Bin Laden’s latest video references the crimes he claims were committed by this same ‘alliance,’ a charge probably not literally true (I doubt he cared that much in 1982) but with much more resonance after the U.S. has tried to kill vast numbers of Iraqis over this year.
I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers.
But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a difficult way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that.
And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.
In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
Right-wing Israeli hawks crow about how the U.S. is finally absorbing the lesson it learned in Lebanon from the Marine barracks bombing. Our future wars, they say, will more resemble Israel’s campaigns in the West Bank and Lebanon. Hence, we need the Israeli operational methods to succeed (ignoring the fact that the Israeli ventures have been bloody, pointless failures). Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:
…there is no doubt that the American military's view of Israel's strategic posture today bears little resemblance to its perception of Israel's strategic posture 21 years ago. Particularly since September 11, and as the situation in Iraq continues to evolve and mutate, the US military has increasingly come to see Israel's war fighting experience both against the Palestinians and in Lebanon from 1982-2000 as a composite of how America's wars will look in the future. Everything from Israel's need to have armed guards at the entrances to shopping malls and cafes to our tactics for land-air-sea combat operations and intelligence-gathering techniques informs the US military as its commanders prepare for battles of the present and the future.
Back in Beirut in 1983, US Marines greeted Israeli soldiers with hostility as they, like the rest of America, lived in denial of the reality that our nations' enemies are common ones. So perhaps the fact that as the US builds conceptual models for its wars of the future it asks Israelis to participate in its war games as "subject matter experts" is the best indication that in the final analysis, the Americans have drawn the proper lessons from their Beirut catastrophe.
Hawks also constantly assert that Hezbollah is an enemy of the United States, and its television station, Al Manar, even more so.
I argued in a paper this spring that as the U.S. military depends more and more on private corporations for doctrine, training and logistics, privatized military firms are an ideal transmission belt to strengthen this hegemon, as ‘Israeli security experts’ come in to provide the goods on how to manage these Arabs. In the other direction, the U.S. provides military hardware like Apache helicopters to Israel. If you think that national identity has nothing to do with helicopters, tell me if the images of Apaches blazing missiles that the Arabs constantly see .
Consider that al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia killed an American working on Apache helicopters there. Al-Qaeda is zeroed in on attacking highly visible elements of the hegemon like the Apache.
Perhaps, too, the same informational tools that the Israelis use to target individual ‘terrorists’ are being implemented throughout the U.S. military. In particular, CACI International has been lauded by Israel as providing informational tools to fight the war on terror, and CACI interrogators in Iraq construct matrices that tell the military which Iraqis to go after. What if these very tools are part of the political problem that has obliterated all goodwill between the U.S. and the Iraqis? What if the tools have gotten out of control, instructing the military to lock up the wrong Iraqis in places like Abu Ghraib indefinitely? For that matter, what about the rumors of Israeli interrogators within Abu Ghraib?
Seymour Hersh has reported that one book in particular, “The Arab Mind,” has been instrumental in shaping how the neocons developed their strategies in Iraq. “The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour'. In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged - 'one, that Arabs only understand force, and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation'."
Now, Iraq. More than a thousand U.S. soldiers dead, many thousands more wounded and crippled. The war has reached out and killed folks in harmless backwater places like Ellsworth, Wisconsin. And now we hear estimates that one hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed by the war and civil disorder.
There has always been something strange and unreal about the invasion and the way our occupation policies have been carried out. There’s been a certain feel or metaphor to their approach that I would describe as the ‘Babylon complex.’
The Babylon complex was a result of the asphyxiated, closed decisionmaking process in the Pentagon, combined with the foolish, racist assumptions of horrible people like Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The image of a Free Iraq that they painted in our heads was one of great power, good for us and a friend of Israel. The operation would finance itself through Iraq’s vast oil revenues, an globally unmatched mountain of wealth under the sand.
The vision of this wealth overwhelmed the planners of the war, really. They bet everything on subduing the Iraqis and implementing their economic-political shock therapy plan. The Bush administration believed that any serious acknowledgement of their horrible planning would harm their political leverage in the U.S., so they did not fire the incompetent people in the belief that somehow Good Faith could carry them through the situation.
The continuity of the operation trumped its stability. Providing the spin or appearance of stability precluded actually working for stability. As the great CPA spokesman Dan Senor (who entered Washington as an aide for the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC) put it when talking about the al-Qaqaa munitions disaster:
(Image composited from the 'Metropolis')
How suitable, then, that in the very site of historical Babylon itself was the stage for this flight of fancy. It reminds me of the 1925 Fritz Lang classic, “Metropolis,” and the story of Babel contained therein.
Maria: Today I will tell you the story of the Tower of Babel.
Let us build a tower whose summit will touch the skies—
and on it we will inscribe: ‘Great is the world and its Creator. And great is Man.’
Those who had conceived the idea of this tower could not build it themselves, so they hired thousands of others to build it for them.
But these toilers knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned the tower.
While those who had conceived the tower did not concern themselves with the workers who built it.
The hymns of praise of the few became the curses of the many.
[Title:] BABEL
[A crowd rushes the tower, and destroys it.]
Between the brain that plans and the hands that build, there must be a mediator.
It is the heart that must bring about an understanding between them.
Worker: But where is our mediator, Maria?
Maria: Be patient, he will surely come.
Worker: We will wait, but not for long.
So now the hands are fighting the planners, surprise surprise. They are only fighting for the greatest material prize of world history, and they’re just settling in to fight to the death.
The spooky feeling stepped up when I heard that the U.S. military was finding mountains of arms all over the country, but lacked the manpower to capture and secure them. All these arms—of all the things you need to capture and secure in an occupied country, for the sake of ordinary folks and your own soldiers, you have to secure the arms. And they didn’t. Al Qaqaa is only the latest example.
The disastrous planning has quickly undermined our moral stature in Iraq, as small tactical victories are actually strategic failures. We play word games about terrorism then airstrike the hell out of Sunni city after Sunni city. As the conservative William Lind put it:
The point here is not merely that in using terrorism ourselves, we are doing something bad. The point is that, by using the word "terrorism" as a synonym for anything our enemies do, while defining anything we do as legitimate acts of war, we undermine ourselves at the moral level — which, again, is the decisive level in Fourth Generation war.
The incredibly astute Professor Juan Cole described how the Bush administration operates by representing, rather than reflecting reality.
The Bush administration will ask for another $70 billion for Iraq in another month or two if re-elected. Remember in the debates when Kerry said Iraq had cost $200 billion, and Bush corrected him that it was only $120 billion? Well, it turns out that Kerry was right, but Bush was being dishonest in postponing the further request until after the election. Another example of how the Bush administration is government by "representation" in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term rather than in the civics sense. Foucault said that people have a tendency to represent reality, and then to refer to the representation rather than to the reality. (This is also the way stereotypes and bigotry work.) So Bush represented the Iraq war as a $120 billion effort, and actually corrected Kerry with reference to this representation. But the representation was a falsehood, hidden by a clever fiscal delaying tactic. So Kerry is made to seem imprecise or as exaggerating, when in fact he was referring to the reality. Bush made representation trump reality.
Edward Said in his Orientalism shows the ways in which Western travelers and writers have often invented a representation of the Middle East that then gets substituted for Middle Eastern realities so powerfully that the realities can no longer even be seen by Westerners. Said cites travel accounts by eyewitnesses who report falsehoods that had already entered the literature. So these travelers let the representations over-rule what their own eyes saw.
Ok, Dan, you think, that’s great but can you prove it? Can you prove anything? And when does this ridiculously long post end?
I’ll be done soon. It’s been four horrible years, for God’s sake! Fortunately, I have collected some useful evidence. Dr. Rashid Khalidi visited Macalester in the fall of 2003, and I managed to snag him for an interview for the Mac Weekly. This interview, for me, answered many of the key questions. Did Iraq have to go so wrong? Did the neocons fabricate intelligence data to justify the war? Is there a connection between Douglas Feith and the settlers? It’s all there…
DF: You said in your talk regarding Iraq that “there are much worse days to come.” What leads you to this?
RK: Several things. The first is that the Administration purposely had too few soldiers for the post-war, leading directly to a chaotic situation which resulted in the destruction of the organs of state. The occupation thereafter took a number of decisions which alienated the entirety of the armed forces, and the Baathist technocrats, without whom it would be almost impossible to run a modern state in Iraq….
DF: What do you believe are the central principles of neo-conservativism? Do you believe it carries an outer moral ideology for mass consumption, and an elite truth for the few?
RK: Yeah, Seymour Hersh in his articles in the New Yorker about these people has argued that these are people who studied under Leo Strauss or under disciples of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, people like Wolfowitz himself, [Pentagon policymaker] Abram Shulsky and others, and that they came away with a sort of neo-Platonic view of a higher truth which they themselves had access, as distinguished from whatever it is you tell the masses to get them to go along.
There is a certain element of contempt in their attitude towards people, in the way in which they shamelessly manipulated falsehoods about Iraq, through Chalabi….
DF: A Frontline interview with Richard Perle was published with the documentary “Truth, War and Consequences.” He talked about the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which reviewed intelligence on Iraq prior to the war. Perle said the office was staffed by David Wurmser, another author of the Clean Break document. Perle says that the office “began to find links that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way.” Were the neo-cons turning their ideology into intelligence data, and putting that into the government?
RK: I can give you a short answer to that which is yes. Insofar as at least two of the key arguments that they adduced, the one having to do the connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and the one having to do with unconventional weapons programs in Iraq, it is clear that the links or the things they had claimed to have found were non-existent. The wish was fathered to the reality. What they wanted was what they found.
It was not just the Office of Special Plans, or whatever. There are a lot of institutions in Washington that were devoted to putting this view forward. Among them, other parts of the bureaucracy, and the vice president’s national security staff….
We now know this stuff, with a few exceptions, to be completely and utterly false, just manufactured disinformation designed to direct the United States in a certain direction. Whether the neo-cons knew this or not is another question, but I believe Chalabi’s people knew it. I would be surprised if some of them didn’t know it.
And now, the presidential campaign. Early on, I was all over the place, distrustful of the candidates. I felt that the ‘Washington candidates’ like Kerry were compromised by the war. I wanted someone to wake this slumbering country, and somehow Howard Dean succeeded brilliantly in getting attention and articulating opposition to the war. I went to Iowa to check out the process there. I wrote a story about going to the unofficial kickoff of the Iowa caucus race, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. Outside the hall, Howard Dean shook my hand, but didn’t look me in the eye. Most of the candidates spoke there, and I found Dean’s readiness to holler “You have the power,” amping up his huge section of the crowd, to be somewhat distasteful if not outright demagoguery.
In Iowa, all the candidates met a friendly audience, because they all spoke to the better side of America, and they each went for one of Bush’s exposed quarters. Such a spectacle as this veered into heights of drama so that for those moments, these folks under hardship and war could let each other know they still had friends in Washington, and they were part of a project bigger than themselves.
My admiration for the Dean campaign became a confidence in a stable new coalition, but Dean’s theatrics fit poorly at key moments. My perceptions of Edwards and Kerry as trustworthy and experienced leaders was boosted by Peter’s and Andrew’s thoughtful support. The basic trust of our southern neighbors gave me hope in these bleak days that America isn’t totally in disarray. Their support of each other led me to believe that the majority of the country—which never voted for Bush, or anyone—might still be reached in the wilderness.
I shied away from thinking about the Democratic race after that, but of course the process heated up and Dean faded after the summer. John Kerry, the frontrunner, found himself hamstrung by his Iraq position, so how could he find a way out of the bind and discredit the Bush administration?
Finally, when Kerry came to Macalester and I helped cover it for the Weekly, I had the opportunity to ask him a question as he was shaking hands on the way out. I asked, “Senator Kerry, do you believe that the intelligence distortions on Iraq should be treated as a criminal matter akin to the Iran-Contra affair? Do you believe that the investigation should be a criminal matter?”
Kerry said to me, “I have no evidence yet that it should be, but I think that we need a much more rapid and thorough investigation than the administration is currently pursuing. I think that this idea of doing it by 2005 is a complete election gimmick. It ought to be done in a matter of months, and that will determine what ought to be done.”
A classically hedged answer from Kerry, which wasn’t a surprise. However, I would say it was the wrong answer. His campaign could have challenged the “flip-flopper on the war” idea by telling the American people how the administration fabricated the WMD and terror intelligence on Iraq, and tricked well-meaning legislators like Edwards and himself into supporting the war with it. But Kerry’s people never concretely made it a part of the campaign, although late in the game Kerry finally said that Bush had “played games with intelligence.” People love a spy thriller: Kerry should have laid out how Chalabi and the gang faked it. Bush and the whole administration would have been better discredited. A real pity, a pity. But you can’t say I didn’t try.
Ok, well this has become more a ramble on the usual political topics than a digestion of what the subjective experience of living under this government has been like. Looking back on it, I have some regrets. I have a serious problem with trusting people and even being willing to spend time with them. Most days it was just chickenshit reluctance, but sometimes my political obsessions and paranoia got the better of me, even before I found out that all these military and government guys were looking at my website.
With regards to running this website, it has been an interesting experience. It has brought the CIA and Department of Homeland Security straight into my bedroom, but its also showed me how profoundly interconnected the Internet makes us. How else, besides lunch at Macalester, can you run into so many random people from so many different countries?
I can’t say that every decision I’ve made has been worth it. I know I didn’t do the most I could to challenge the war; I spent a lot of time in a muted, black and fearful moods. Not like the soft weight of clinical depression, this was a kind of burning flame I could see when I closed my eyes. I knew that the bastards were smashing the heritage of all human civilization when they invaded Iraq without protecting our first Artifacts.
As someone who refuses to believe in God, I have only the continuous stream of history to supply a foundation of meaning in our lives. That’s why I’ve found it so difficult to come to terms with the idea that these guys just didn’t give a damn. I am still terrified of the political forces they’ve unleashed.
One last thing that I haven't yet written about online: what it meant for me to visit the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. I will say that it simply makes it easier to think about once the icons become fixed in your concrete reality, instead of the fluid, alternately fixated and amnesiac media sea that we float in. Once the place is tied down in your own experience, it is much easier to understand. Power became easier to understand from we saw later: a young guy reading the Bill of Rights in a park got arrested right in front of us.
(This is the third-to-last picture I took in New York, during the protests outside Bush's speech. Click for larger version)
I remember standing on the stoop outside Wallace a few days before spring break in 2003. They had just clipped the fences between Kuwait and Iraq. This was a time of sociological anomie, I said to Alison and Dan Schned. There are no social norms here. In a way, it was a kind of freedom, and we treated it as such. We are still stuck in that anomie, even when Kerry wins tomorrow, as I’ve guaranteed myself he will.
Fortunately, I still have some glimmering bits of optimism left. When the sun rises on November Third, it will be a whole new world. I feel that I’ve gotten through the worst times now, and maybe, just maybe, the four-year malaise will finally be crushed by the evidence that my people have not yet abandoned hope.
The International Roundtable at Macalester is one of the biggest annual events on campus. This year, (Sir) Ahmed Samatar of the International Studies department managed to corral three leading intellectuals into speaking: super-leftie Tariq Ali, historian of the British empire Niall Ferguson and mega-neoconservative Michael Ledeen. (Right now the Mac Weekly site is not showing my story that was published on Friday. I emailed the webmaster about it, so that should be cleared up.)
As a senior, I was invited to the Roundtable lunch. Things just went from there. The following was my editorial on what happened:
With the election scorching our brains, the future has seldom looked less certain. A small network of ideologues, analysts and bureaucratic adventurers known as neoconservatives have shaped our strange generation in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. As Washington reporter Josh Marshall put it, the war in Iraq will forever be known as the war that neocons agitated for, framed, planned (poorly), and finally carried out, by persuading a trusting American public with fake intelligence, over the resistance of the vast majority of the world. Thomas Friedman stated that this war could never have happened without a couple dozen in the capital leaning on the levers of power.
At this precipitous, binary moment in our nation’s history, either we are about to reach the High Noon of an eight-year Bush presidency, or we are tripping through its final days. If Bush is finished, the psychopathology of individuals like Michael Ledeen will be digested for decades. If the smirk-in-chief is just settling in, we’d better figure out these people’s motives, and quickly.
After Tariq Ali’s Friday morning session, where Ledeen perused a book for long stretches, the speakers, and some seniors and professors retreated to the Weyerhauser Boardroom. I asked Dhruva Jaishankar to save me a seat at some table. I built a croissant sandwich, and I suddenly discovered that Dhruva had landed at Ledeen’s table. He saved me the chair on Ledeen’s left. I thought, “What the hell? Let’s do it,” and sat down with the grim scholar of war.
How do I converse with a genuinely diabolical person, especially one about to speak before the whole campus? I thought, chewing my sandwich, can I just bitch at the man holding the American Enterprise Institute’s ‘Freedom Chair?’
Parsing my words, I asked him if the Middle East was a fundamentally inscrutable “wasteland of mirrors,” a phrase I erroneously thought he’d used. No, the Middle East was pretty easy to figure out, he said.
Ledeen has staked everything on the belief that the fundamentalist Iranian leadership will nuke Israel or the U.S. once they have the bomb. Thus, for him, their downfall is among the highest of priorities. He has fought within what he deemed Washington’s “chaos” of policymaking to go after Iran. But the neocons tend to get carried away with rhetoric for its own sake: witness how State Department Undersecretary John Bolton has threatened the sensitive North Koreans right before negotiations just for the hell of it. So I asked him, if the regime in Iran is highly unpopular, how can he be sure that they aren’t exaggerating their intentions, hoping to goad the United States into overreacting and threatening them, so that they can turn around and tell the Iranian opposition that they must unite to fight the external threat?
Ledeen, a Machiavellian to the core, said that this was much too convoluted for him. He said that he was a historian of the twentieth century who’d read a great deal of fascist rhetoric, and those people were very serious about killing the Jews. Likewise, he said that former President Rafsanjani stated he would nuke Jerusalem despite the losses from a counterattack, because it would benefit Islam to take out a huge proportion of the Jews while only a small proportion of Muslims would get killed in return.
I asked why the Iranians would bomb Jerusalem if it would kill so many Muslims. He said that the Iranians murderously hate Arabs and kill them all the time. In fact, he said, the Iranians are killing “hundreds” of Arabs in Iraq today, sending in money and munitions.
His scheme to free Iran was to supply the opposition with the tools to destabilize the regime, “but not a single bullet.” I have a hard time believing he could resist arming the Iranian opposition. In fact, many say that the Pentagon, administered by Ledeen’s allies, has courted a weird, cultish anti-regime Iranian guerilla group based in eastern Iraq called the Mujahideen al-Khalq. If Bush wins, it’s quite unlikely that the neo-cons will be able to resist using forces like these to harass Tehran, but we have no idea what sort of reaction this would provoke from the highly mobilized, nationalist Iranians.
Trying to avoid provoking more mobilization, I asked Ledeen what sorts of places he got his information. “Never watch television,” he told the students at the table. He’d also given up on The New York Times. He surprised us when he said that he really likes reading online blogs, in particular Iranian and Iraqi blogs. Iranian blogging has snowballed into a serious trend, providing a sizeable young population with the means to skirt government censorship. Ledeen said that once you’d been reading a source for a while, you can get a feeling for their perspective and veracity, something I agree with.
He kept muttering little statements, preparing himself for the dramatic speech to follow. In particular, at both the lunch and his speech, he referenced sliding over the “border between manic depression and genius,” while he later admitted that writing about Iran was his therapy.
More than anything else, this explains the neoconservative agenda in a way that has eluded me during this bizarre presidency. Ledeen’s power in Washington has shaped not just their unresolved debate over Iran. More importantly, his militant myopia has fed the government’s racist, irrational and self-destructive tendencies. Yet Ledeen admits he has an anarchic streak inherited from his Russian anarchist Uncle Izzy. He also admits to a Trotskyist belief in perpetual global revolution. He said that America’s government was a “chaos,” but a better, more productive chaos than others. America is a revolutionary power, he argues, that crushes ideas before it makes a new order. Strip out Trotsky’s stuff about proletarians, swap bourgeoise for ‘terror master,’ and you’ve got a recipe for everlasting wars.
After I got away from that table, my little moral universe was bent. I hadn’t confronted the man like I would have a year ago; I hadn’t hacked the bristly defenses raised so harshly in the talk that followed. I didn’t get to the bottom of their motives. Did I, of all people, make a good impression on a man who wants to crush everything I stand for? Was that the wrong thing to do?
I'm don't have the details about this, but it sounds like an amazing movie: "The Fourth World War" is a documentary out of the various movements against wars all over the world, or rather, the 'thousand civil wars' the trailer speaks of. Suheir Hammad is narrating, and she was really impressive when she spoke at Macalester last year.
The movie is touring the U.S., and playing at the Campus Center Sunday night at 7:30. It will be screened in Minneapolis later tomorrow night, at the Soap Factory at 10 PM (2nd St. SE and 5th Ave.).
Additionally, this is an example of how our Macalester internet setups aren't working. There is nothing about a MOVIE in the CAMPUS CENTER on Macalester's event calendar website. What is the point of having a site like that? If we started doing more dynamic things online at Mac, then such events could be better publicized, as I argued in a Mac Weekly editorial a couple weeks ago.
'The Corporation' also screened on campus recently, and I'm sad I missed that, although I saw it at Lagoon a while ago.
I had a piece in the Mac Weekly on Friday about the technological gap at school and getting some new stuff going on the Internet. People seem to like the idea. I'll post the link when the story becomes available.
The town hall debate went real well for Kerry, and I think he's building a good foundation here. This weekend Alison and I volunteered for Paul Gardner, who's running against Phil Krinkie in the north suburbs. I think it's going really well up there. We put out flyers across Lino Lakes today. The weather was really excellent.
There is a lot of hectic news about the need-blind admissions, and it's all gotten intense on campus. I don't want to even talk about it, save to say that this issue of the Weekly also spells out some of the stuff that has been going on. William Sentell '02, one of the alumni speaking out on the policy conflict, has a site needblind.com, also at http://ilovemacalester.blogs.com/.
Right now I don't want to take a swing at this. I hope you all understand. Trying to enjoy the weekend. Too much work on Sunday!
Right now I am sitting in the Mac Weekly office in the basement of 30 Mac as the first issue of the semester slowly comes together.
This semester I am the co-editor of the Opinion section, which is a nice break from scurrying about and covering campus events. Instead, editing other people's screeds and contributing to the paper's editorials fills my time.
I am getting pissed off rapidly by our page layout software, the excrement-based Quark Xpress 6, which seems to have stalled its evolution in about 1996. It does not anti-alias text very much and its object manipulation is incredibly awkward, especially when compared with the new version of Adobe InDesign. I suggested that we switch to InDesign a few times, but these kids fear the learning curve. I would say that InDesign works like you think that Quark should work, but doesn't.
But then again, I've been partial to InDesign since it evolved out of Adobe PageMaker, which used to be Aldus PageMaker. Ah, for the long-lost days of yore when I would visit my dad's little office on Cleveland Ave. & I-94, and he'd lay out pages of the Disc Golfer newsletter on a Radius full-page display. So in other words, I was exposed to page layout when I was about 5, and hence always favored the much superior PageMaker lineage of software. Really, Pagemaker circa 1988 probably would get our stuff done, minus the color, better than Quark 6.
I will say that I think Quark hates its customers and takes them for granted. For example, look at the user comments on VersionTracker about this new version of Quark. NO ONE likes it.
Ok, ok, this is a boring, you say. And you are correct. But don't underestimate what a pain in the ass it is to get text to wrap around a little box in an aesthetically pleasing fashion, nor how incredibly long it takes to actually finish anything.
MOVING ON. I am settling into my classes, but I'm sad that I think I lost my Spanish textbook sometime in the last year and a half, which is going to cost me some exorbitant sum like $80. So I have to finish my foreign-language requirement this semester.
Other than that, I am taking Global Political Economy, which is one of those world systems/globalization gigs with Prof. Blaney. Also taking Rhetoric of Campaigns and Elections with Adrienne Christiansen, and there will be a lot of guest speakers. In that class we are supposed to either do 30 hours of volunteer work on a campaign, or take a final exam. I opt for the volunteering, especially now that I'm no longer a staff writer at the Weekly. However, that whole thing has not started yet.
I'm also taking American History since 1945 with Norm Rosenberg, and words fail me when trying to encapsulate how brilliant and weird that one is going so far.
On Sunday, the Minnesota College Democrats had a kickoff event here at Macalester, featuring Congresswoman Betty McCollum, State Representative and Mac alum Matt Entenza, but the headliners were Dennis Kucinich and Garrison Keillor, who both offered top-notch speeches to fire us up. It's really a treat to hear Garrison give a true partisan talk, definitely aural chicken soup to the Minnesotan soul. My favorite line was when he described himself as a "museum-quality Minnesota liberal."
In the room adjacent to the Mac Weekly office, right now they are laying out the schedule for Macalester's radio station, 91.7 WMCN. I applied for a radio show, and right now it looks like it will be on Sunday evenings. Very exciting! I haven't had a radio show since sophomore year, which was "As the Tables Turn" on Wednesday at noon. That was a good time, and this one should be even better. Cheers to that.
The word is that Richard Perle got tossed on his butt from the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, supposedly for calling for the firing of the Pentagon's in-house spy agency's chief. The agency, the DIA or Defense Intelligence Agency, is somewhat more towards the "rational" side of intelligence gathering. That is, they were not the ones principally responsible for silly WMD intelligence. Yet Perle blames them for messing it up.
Too much for Rummy, finally at long last.
Pat Buchanan predicted on the McLaughlin group on Sunday morning that he would not be the last kicked out before the election. Ahh Pat.
Aside from that I should explain why I often miss posting Wednesdays on the site. The problem is that I have creative writing from 7 to 10, and of course last week I had to cover the Kerry rally and write the story, which took hours.
Midterms are right in my face here. It's going to be a hella lot of work. I covered the caucus story this week. it was altogether messy but interesting, as Kucinich overwhelmingly won our precinct, and we found out Edwards was dropping out while filling out ballots.
I am going to visit NickP in London in a week!! This is so damn cool, I've never been across the big ocean. Really. (Cheng has just gone the other way to Tokyo. He may make contact one of these days)
Thats about all I have the energy left about right now. Night.
Andy sent me an instant message at about 12:45 this morning saying that I appeared on the policy wonk's lifepartner C-SPAN during the Vote 2004 segment on Kerry's visit to Macalester.
Fortunately C-SPAN has put up a RealPlayer video stream of Kerry's event. It is quite blurry at 128K, but the sound is much more clear than I got with my voice recorder. Kerry and I can be heard really well, actually. I appear at about 1 hour 8 minutes into the clip.
While reporting for the Mac Weekly, I located myself in the audience near the "stage entrance" of the campaign rally. Senator Kerry moved down the line, shaking hands and signing things. With a huge crush of people and cameras all around, I asked Kerry if the investigation into intelligence distortions on Iraq should be a criminal matter. We reported his answer in the Mac Weekly story. (not yet online).
Kerry responded: "I have no evidence yet that it should be, but I think that we need a much more rapid and thorough investigation than the administration is currently pursuing. I think that this idea of doing it by 2005 is a complete election gimmick. It ought to be done in a matter of months, and that will determine what ought to be done."
The campaign story was a very tough one for us to write, and the session well into the early morning left me tired for days afterward. It is damn hard to write the Weekly and look sane the next day, as the editors know all too well.
The newspaper is in sweet sweet color on the cover. I'm really happy I snagged a candidate's quote, but I wish that more of what other people said at the rally could have been put in. Unfortunately, the paper a huge crush for space this week.
(Fri. Dec. 12)
In the last week, right in the middle of finals, I submitted an opinion about the Middle East (Who? Me?!) to this year's final Mac Weekly.
The United States finds itself at an ultimate nadir. We occupy hundreds of thousands of square miles of central Asiaís most historically fractious territory. The nearly-forgotten Taliban has sprung back from Pakistani strongholds, and Saddam is finally free to join the audiotape-jihadist club.Mesopotamia, the valley where the party started, is a smoldering, fourth-world ruin, flooded with a mixture of suspicious military-industrial corporations and mujahideen. The armyís mass arrests, its deployment of armor in urban areas, the razing of homes, and encircling towns with razor wire echo the terrible confrontation around Jerusalem that Bush has defiantly refused to confront. America grows inured to the daily violence and tragedies facing both Iraqis and American troops as young as first-years.
Nothing can shake this eerie sense that it is not just that Bush has failed us; rather, it is the whole underpinning of civilization itself, past and present, which has been shaken from its foundations.
It is not merely the museums of early history plundered, but the sites of our very genesis that lie destroyed. In those looted ruins, what was once knowable about our original nature has been smashed into darkness. We can never recover this loss.
The anarchy that transpired was not just an obscenity to todayís Iraqis; it was an attack on every ancient people there, and all their descendants. It destroyed our link with history, a knife in our collective soul more damaging than any crime humanity has yet witnessed. America still struggles to control a land it barely understands.
A stunning report by Seymour Hersh in this weekís New Yorker spells out the path America now seeks. The Pentagon will escalate their operations against Iraqi militants, using Special Forces hit squads to assassinate those whom our new reconstituted Baathist security forces point fingers at, Vietnamís Phoenix Program for the 21st century.
Who better to train U.S. troops than their Israeli counterparts? Happy to build their occupation assassins into our expanding War on Terror, Israeli ìconsultantsî have already visited Baghdad. But which American general is putting the project together? None other than William Boykin, who publicly equates the Muslim world with the devil. According to reports, speaking before fundamentalist church audiences that ìSatan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.î
Bush, insensitive to Boykinís hate, is a special kind of leader. He is afraid of newspapers. He told Fox a little while ago, ìI glance at the headlines. I rarely read the stories. I understand that a lot of times thereís opinions mixed in with news. And I appreciate peopleís opinions, but Iím more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me whatís happening in the world.î
Yet his objective sources keep ducking the important questions. They didnít send enough troops to Iraq. Why? Why was there no peacekeeping plan for the Iraqi cities? Why didnít the Pentagon plan to defend the Iraqi government ministries? Why do they forbid Iraqis from unionizing? Why canít they control the enormous caches of captured arms around the country?
Is their goal chaos in the name of order? Pain and death in the service of defending our freedoms? Democracy, or Michael Ledeenís ìcreative destruction?î
Their special plans have unfolded. Now the abyss between America and the Arabs has busted wide open. It is well past time to get rid of Rumsfeld and the incompetents who have botched the occupation. We must go hat in hand to the UN and ask the world to repair the political catastrophe weíve sown at its root. If we quietly accept this path, we will never know peace again.
[link]
I went to a huge Democratic event in Iowa and witnessed the Democratic race up close, and the Dean phenomenon from the inside. There's a lot more I could add about this experience, but it was amazing. This was a contributed feature for the Mac Weekly.
Last weekend, Iowa Democrats hosted the kickoff of their 2004 presidential campaign, the Jefferson Jackson Dinner at Vets’ Auditorium in Des Moines. Six candidates, a collection of Iowa pols and Hillary Clinton took the stage at an event which raised money for the Iowa party while energizing Democrats to unseat George Bush and fight for Congress.
I attended this event as a wavering Dean supporter. Here, a few shades from Minnesota, I wanted to explore how Iowa Dems felt about the candidates and whether or not the other candidates were, as Kerry claimed he was, the “Real Deal.” Was Dean “unelectable?” Was his campaign composed of “West Wing” liberals and ignorant Internet kids? Or was it a collection of typical liberal causes uniting around someone more forthright than the Washington “centrists?” Did anyone’s partisan enthusiasm translate to support of the whole party?
What I found in Iowa supported few caricatures. Instead, I discovered that Dean is hardly the messianic anger case seen on CNN, and at least here his supporters don’t come from insulated, surreal clusters like the Nader or Perot people, nor the city liberals held in such low regard these days.
He’s attracted throngs of fiercely committed people, but their values weren’t exclusive to him. Out here, groups of people are always looking for someone who seems likely to give them a seat at the table and won’t play games. That sentiment has always existed in this continental nation of 260 million individuals, most of whom choose not to vote and support no party. Dean’s support reflects this, but hardly swallows it up. Democrats participate in Iowa’s process not with zealous faith in an individual, but after pondering things in the dark winter, always keeping in mind the ultimate goal: ousting Bush.
There are about 60 days left until the Iowa caucus. Iowa supposedly measures the 94 percent white “nice folks” vote and the farm vote via the community caucus process in January 19. Dean, ostensibly the front-runner, has seized political attention, unpredictably blurting awkward statements and entrancing a weird array of groups. Dick Gephardt polls a point ahead of Dean here. His steadfast support for labor and farms from Missouri makes him a friendly, trusted leader. Kerry’s support, including that of many many Mac Dems, is well-earned from years of excellent legislation and shining light on Iran-Contra. Edwards—always the mill worker’s son—honestly represents the liberal south. His strong support here surprised me. Even the maligned “bottom-feeders” provide an enlivening texture to the field. The wildly idealistic, butterfly-like speeches from the small, kinetic man, Dennis Kucinich, gesticulating and asking us to believe in the creation of a Department of Peace, reminded Dems of our own best people. For that fleeting moment, two percent support didn’t matter because he sincerely believed in bringing us something about our dreams. Carol Moseley Braun breaks barriers and it’s clear that she won’t stop when the campaign ends.
At Vets’ Auditorium, the ground throbbed with thousands of Democrats, chanting and waving signs, as entrepreneurs hawked pins and bumper stickers. Dean, pol in action, came through a column of supporters. I leaned over and he grabbed my hand. Mobs of partisans hollered in the lobby. Gep’s people collided with Dean’s at the door. Steelworkers for Gephardt and Cyclones for Dean screamed “Go Dick go! We want Dean! Gep! Dean! Win! Win!” The raucous, inscrutable essence of democracy could almost be glimpsed in this maelstrom. Moseley Braun walked by.
The dark auditorium covered with posters filled in with supporters, bringing signs, shirts, chants and noisemakers. For 40 minutes, spotlights punched through the darkness, prompting the crowd to make a ruckus. The lights switched between groups, prompting each one to outdo the other. “Real Deal” Kerry’s and Dean’s people each made an impressive, well-organized showing, as did the smaller Gep and Edwards contingents.
The evening’s speakers, including Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and Senator Harkin, were well-received, but the audience electrified when Hillary Clinton started running the show. After addressing the situation of America’s soldiers, she passionately called out for unity among Democrats. The candidates mainly delivered from their stump speeches, while adding concerns relevant to Iowans. Gephardt suggested an international minimum wage and Edwards talked of getting rid of mass feedlots. Kerry along with his people, said everyone knew Bush was giving us a “RAW DEAL!” The candidates avoided negativity and alienated few. For his passionate and idealistic speech, Kucinich received a standing ovation.
Peter Gartrell ’05 and Andrew Riely ’05 volunteered to usher on the floor, and they enjoyed the up-close experience. Riely said that he “dated Dean and married Kerry,” while Peter likes his home senator, Edwards, with whom he got to talk for a minute on an escalator.
Before the big event, our small group of Dean supporters arrived at a downtown high school, whose gymnasium was filled with 2,000 Dean boosters waving signs and sporting pins. The crowd was older than I expected: many seniors, gays and lesbians with rainbow pins, burly union dudes, red-shirted Grinnell students, middle-aged moms and the young Alex Doonesbury segment. Dean’s state campaign coordinators proclaimed they’d never seen anything like “the organization and commitment to a movement growing across this state and the country.” They reiterated one of Dean’s key talking points, that this was “making history,” a truism attractive to any political group.
Dean’s campaign plays off sentiments that exist as so many loose ends out here: taking care of the elderly, Wellstone-Harkin style grassroots support, unions scared as hell of Bush, family farmers. I found Democratic veterans outraged with Bush’s vet policies, gays and lesbians who point to serious progress, law enforcement types waiting for a Democrat who wasn’t ensconced with anti-gun organizations and those excited by online meet-ups. Among this whole set might be those who believe the DLC-type groups have gone too far right, but they still fervently love Bill and Hillary. Dean’s wallet issue, health care, attracts medical professionals and seniors alike.
Recently, Dean has received endorsements from key unions, though Gephardt draws much on labor as well. The Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) all endorsed Dean, and other unions will be influenced by this. SEIU, mostly made of healthcare workers, is The United States’ fastest-growing union and one of the most democratically run. The grassroots structure of these unions might threaten Washington-dominated organizations which make up the AFL-CIO.
Was Dean a demagogue, as my conservative friends complain, when he opened his speech talking about his own Internet fundraising and closed by pointing at the crowd and shouting over and over, “You have the power”? Yes, and it seemed arrogant to lord fundraising over the others when so much more important issues needed to be addressed. Yet we live in this time of unparalleled theatrics, aircraft carriers and awes and shocks. It always was part circus.
The dinner brought a sense that there might be differences, but Dems don’t give a damn, because at this point the prize—the White House and Congress—have to be roundly sought like no time in the party’s history. Iowans are too nice to support an “angry Dean” and too smart to give up on the Democrats, no matter who gets the nomination.
In Iowa, all the candidates met a friendly audience, because they all spoke to the better side of America, and they each went for one of Bush’s exposed quarters. Such a spectacle as this veered into heights of drama so that for those moments, these folks under hardship and war could let each other know they still had friends in Washington, and they were part of a project bigger than themselves.
My admiration for the Dean campaign became a confidence in a stable new coalition, but Dean’s theatrics fit poorly at key moments. My perceptions of Edwards and Kerry as trustworthy and experienced leaders was boosted by Peter’s and Andrew’s thoughtful support. The basic trust of our southern neighbors gave me hope in these bleak days that America isn’t totally in disarray. Their support of each other led me to believe that the majority of the country—which never voted for Bush, or anyone—might still be reached in the wilderness.
Right now I've just sat down to write this major midterm paper for International Politics class, but I thought I ought to update the site quickly before I dive in. Fall break is coming right up, fortunately, and we are going to see Atmosphere at First Ave. this Friday, which should be excellent.
A significant event: Atmosphere makes a music video! You can see it here on Quicktime or via links on their site.
The big deal for me this week has been my Mac Weekly interview with Middle East expert, Columbia history professor and occasional Palestinian diplomat Rashid Khalidi, who presented his paper "The Past and Future of Democracy in the Middle East" at this year's Macalester Roundtable. I thought that he was an excellent and informed speaker, and it rather made my day when he spoke at length about the significance of that neo-con document, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," and how for him, it described a "template" for American-Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. This is decidedly a minority viewpoint today but I strongly believe it. When the history of the neo-con parlor game which produced the Iraq war is written, Khalidi's angle will be profoundly valuable. He also told me that Ahmed Chalabi is trying to purge Sunnis in Iraq and provoke a civil war. Also he told me that the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky provides much of the philosophical basis of neoconservatism. Want more?
Please look at my interview with Khalidi and the Roundtable story, which due to space had to be too short to provide details on his talk.
Also look at this collection of Iraqi children's drawings, which I found profoundly moving. (link Schwartz :)
Additionally there is Josh Marshall's review of "America Unbound," with an extensive critique of the neoconservative foreign policy experience, online now.
Soo now it's back to work. Damn midterms.