I saw parts of the President’s speech at the University of Cairo this past week and I have to say that the symbolism of the event was striking. This man whose personal history embodies 
a kind of cultural crossroads and an international experience previously unknown in the White House – to see him make reference to historic wrongs so seldom acknowledged by Americans really puts the lie to that old “only Nixon could go to China” conventional wisdom. Sure, the rhetoric was, well, just rhetoric, and even as such carefully balanced and qualified, but just the same… what an odd impression it must have made on an Arab world so accustomed to the condescending ignorance and arrogance of Obama’s predecessor. I’ve got to think they think we’re goddamned weird, veering our little electoral pinewood racer from one side of the track to the other (and, doubtless, back again before long). Not hard to see why we’re hard to trust.
And yet, through all that swerving, cascading symbolism, the bombs keep falling, the drones keep striking, and the cash keeps flowing to no good ends. It is good to have a president appeal to reason and understanding instead of fear and intimidation, but to do this and not depart from the tactics of oppression will ultimately prove an empty gesture. We cannot proceed from the assumption that animosity towards the west in general and the United States in particular is based largely upon xenophobia and irrational hatred. Obama did touch on the U.S. backed overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, but that is only a fragment of our nation’s long and sordid involvement in that region. There are concrete reasons for that distrust that stretch back more than just the last eight years.
It’s silly to preach to Hamas about making concessions, for instance, when we’ve been spending billions of dollars a year for decades on the gradual Israeli takeover of that 22% of 
mandate Palestine that represents the only hope for a viable Palestinian state. And calling Iran out for threatening its neighbors is simply laughable – they are literally surrounded by the burned out ruins of our imperial overreach. It is this, more than a lack of openness, that breeds contempt towards us. That is much of what is being said by people in the Arab countries – good words, now let’s see some action. This doesn’t sit well with the likes of David Brooks, who describes the Arabs as ready to “sit back” and watch America force concessions out of Israel. But it is the people in Muslim countries in the middle east who have been bearing the brunt of these struggles for the past sixty years. They don’t expect anything to come easy. They just want us to stop actively working against them.
Can’t blame them, really. Obama’s speech was a good start. Now we as a global power have to follow through.
luv u,
jp
your gain? Roger. How ’bout this…. try turning down your lose. Ah… much better.
Well, not so right. Believe it or not, the tuber has run into some difficulties. For one thing, even though he jumped through the same wormhole as anti-Lincoln, he somehow didn’t land in the same geographical area as anti-Lincoln. Hell, he wasn’t even on the same continent. Tubey and his little cart rolled out of the time warp in Santiago, Chile. Now I know what you’re going to say. Yes, it is a capital. And yes, it is an American capital. But that’s where the similarity ends, my friends. And in any case, similar isn’t enough. We’re talking about the man-sized tuber on a cart a continent away from where he needed to be, in a century when the fastest mode of travel was probably a not-so-fast train. This was not a good beginning. And while tubey bumped around from one end of the Avenue Francisco Bilbao to the other, we set ourselves to the task of working out what to do. (Which involved scratching our heads for a few minutes, then running off to get Mitch Macaphee, who has some semblance of a functional brain.)
sized tuber thousands of miles across the 19th Century landscape to where he needed to be. Well, we tried it…. and when we next received word of the tuber (when I say “word”, I actually mean Morse code – we tied a clicker to one of tubey’s more dexterous roots) he did seem to be in a more congenial place vis-a-vis his mission. Which was a good thing… for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), because he has been sitting in the ready room for the last five hours anticipating some kind of back-up rescue mission… a prospect he has not been savoring, I can tell you. Hang in there, Marvin!
tends to focus the mind a bit, even if it isn’t a very sharp focus in the case of many of those reacting to the recent actions of North Korea. It’s as though we are born anew every six months or so, our past wiped clean, our journey set to begin again. Here we have the grim dividends of a craven policy towards northeast Asia that has become particularly nasty over the past 10 to 15 years (and especially so in the last eight). As it happens, we inched very close to a disastrous war back in 1994, then concluded a framework agreement with Pyongyang that would have provided them with a uranium reactor and ended their international isolation. Due to the vagaries of the Clinton administration and the maniac Gingrich Congress, neither of those provisions was honored. It was then left to the Bush II administration to do its usual job of pouring gasoline on a smoldering problem, placing North Korea squarely within the “Axis of Evil” and setting UN Ambassador John Bolton and others to further antagonize them.
change of leadership in the United States, I’m sure Pyongyang is testing Obama’s rhetoric of reconciliation. Seems to me like they’re skeptical that anything fundamental has changed, and frankly, so am I. Consider for a moment the world order we’re living under. Washington and the great powers live under one set of rules with respect to weapons of mass destruction, while developing nations must abide by another. The fact is, the non-proliferation regime requires the U.S., Russia, and other nuclear powers to move decisively towards disarmament, just as it seeks to prevent smaller players from joining the nuclear club. We conveniently ignore the former while waxing righteous about the latter, and while our hypocrisy may not be featured on the Nightly News, it is pretty obvious to the relatively powerless nations of the world.
still have Puffa Puffa Rice…
that scourge of all that is good and nice, antithetical to all that is Lincoln – he threw himself bodily into a worm-hole that sent him spinning back more than a century to… well, to the time of Lincoln. And hell, he being him, he couldn’t resist making a few changes while he was back there.
of events that made the invention of packaged Ramen noodles impossible. In our almost completely cashless state (something that has, sadly, survived intact), we, like many others, depended on the low-cost nutrition afforded by these little bits of cardboard. Now we are reduced to…. well…. little bits of cardboard. (Cardboard does exist. Halle-freaking-luia.) I know what you’re thinking: that one of us is going to be tempted to do something rash and irresponsible, like jump into the time warp and apprehend Anti-Lincoln before he causes all this havoc. Well, have no fear…. none of us is insane enough to attempt such a bonehead play. No, sir. That’s why they invented the man-sized tuber.
I have to admit to being a bit gob-smacked by their laser-like focus on Nancy Pelosi and the question of whether or not she has prevaricated over C.I.A. briefings about the use of torture in interrogations. They seem to be taking their lead not only from Republicans in Congress, but from retired G.O.P. leadership, like Newt Gingrich (a.k.a. the embodiment of all that is good and right). What the fuck, friends – this is like speculating over who listened in on the police scanner the night some arsonist burned an apartment house to the ground. Sure, even Pelosi’s explanation makes her seem hypocritical, but that’s a pretty minor matter next to the implementation of a broad policy of torture and prisoner abuse, in service to even more serious crimes.
the same fraudulent claims before the American Enterprise Institute. At least he’s keeping this heinous piece of history fresh in our minds… though why we should need any kind of mnemonic device is a bit beyond me. The war they started is, after all, still going on, still killing scores at a time. That is why waging an unprovoked war of aggression is considered the most egregious of crimes – because so many evils are contained within it. Cheney and his administration, the broad swath of congressional supporters, and ultimately every citizen of our nation bears responsibility for everything that proceeded from that fateful decision back in March of 2003. We are not a dictatorship; we are a democracy, and that is part of the price of democracy – taking ownership of your nation’s misdeeds.
Worst hangover I ever had. What happened to me last….. Whoa, hold on there. Must have been singing in my sleep. My apologies.
wormhole was rotating in a counter-clockwise direction.) Before you ask, the answer is no – no, none of us jumped in there after him. Quite frankly, Anti-Lincoln has a tendency to get on everyone’s nerves. Matt just threw a sandwich at him last week in frustration. (This may not seem all that serious, but let me tell you… it was one mean sandwich.) Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) doesn’t care for the man (or anti-man), and he never had the property of dislike programmed into him. Posi-Lincoln – the actual 16th president of the United States, plucked from the past by virtue of Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating machine (read all about it in our archives) – seems totally unconcerned over the disappearance of his evil doppelganger, even though this could lead to trouble for the great emancipator.
ambitions and become a North American apartheid South Africa, while the North might morph into a somewhat crispier version of Canada – Canadian bacon, if you will. Where would we be then, eh? I’ll tell you where…. right here in the Cheney Hammer Mill, that’s where. As I said, this would be bad news for Lincoln, since his reputation might be negatively affected…. but for the rest of us, well, it could be very much the same deal. Just weirder, if that can be imagined. So before you say it, yes, I should have stopped that fuzz-faced goon from leaping through the time warp towards eons and eras unknown. But I failed. I FAILED.
a number of kind of shaky (though no less comforting) assumptions. One was that Obama might somehow prove to be an exception to the usual political rule, inasmuch as he was an insurgent pitted against a strong establishment candidate, and was not expected to win the nomination. He is also a compelling speaker, a likeable media personality, and so on. So for that two months between Election Day and Inauguration Day, it was possible to suspend disbelief and enjoy a brief vacation from that somewhat oppressive national political reality we’ve lived with all of our lives. That, of course, is over, and I suppose it’s all to the good. Hey, it was the holiday season, right? What better time to feel all festive and delusionary. Now the work begins.
week’s changing of the guard in Afghanistan illustrates. Over at Treasury we’ve got Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. I would term these two as “minders,” as well. After Dubya crashed the economy (with help from friends in both parties), reform is politically inevitable, and these two are well-placed to keep said reform from taking on too populist a character. Just this week, Obama’s proposal for the regulation of derivatives has the mark of Summers/Geithner on it, in the form of a loophole you could sail a supertanker full of public money through. While it establishes a central clearing house for derivatives and seeks to standardize them, it does not restrict the creation of more customized (non-standardized) financial instruments, nor does it appear to regulate them. So it offers a kind of voluntary regulation…. easy to evade. On the other side of the street, Obama appears to have his mind changed for him on releasing detainee abuse photos. Again – doing so does not advance the interests of the empire, any more than would democratizing the financial system.
Can’t keep track, frankly. Give me a moment to page back through my previous utterances. Ah, yes. A day in the life.
As I move closer to the stairwell, however, I realize it’s just my comrades tuning up for another rehearsal. Why don’t they ever tell me about these rehearsals? (Perhaps they announce them at the band meetings that… I never… attend…. oh, yeah.)
been working on. Lot of racket, noxious fumes, and heavy vibrations coming from his makeshift lab, just lately. Must have landed himself a grant somewhere.
might… be one or two of you out there who think I go a little easy on the Obama administration. Yes, I know – I seemed a bit more eager to take a few swings at his predecessor’s administration (alongside millions of others), and most of them were richly deserved. And yes, I did vote for Obama and not (repeat, NOT) for George W. Bush. But hell, we’re just getting started here in Obama-time, and I’ve got more than a few bones to pick with what’s been happening thus far. Let’s start with the b’s….
Afghani-Pakistan. Okay, this worries me. After months of hearing both administrations complain that the Pakistanis were not doing enough to take the fight to the Taliban, they appear to be doing what “we” asked them to do… and killing lots of civilians in the process, as well as creating a massive outflow of refugees. Though rare as hen’s teeth, I did hear a good segment on NPR’s Morning Edition the other day – an interview with two Pakistani fiction writers, who pointed out that Pakistan’s larger cities are being choked with homeless young people displaced by the fighting. These young Pakistanis are often sought out by religious zealots, who provide them with some base comforts and – perhaps – build on their resentment against the government (and its U.S. paymasters) who rendered them homeless in the first place. Like the Iraqi refugee populations in Jordan and Syria, no good will come of this.
Bit rushed at the moment. Be with you in just a tick. One, mississippi. Two, mississippi. Okay… two ticks.
Band meeting. Only Marvin (my personal robot assistant) shows up. Which is fitting, because he schedules the meetings unbeknown to the rest of us. As we sleep in our various sections of the mill, Marvin sits at an empty wooden table in the old forge room, making whirring and clicking sounds for about 45 minutes before moving along to his next scheduled duty.
out to the store for Necco Wafers or the like. ‘Round the part we go, several times, until he tires. Now, this wouldn’t happen if they’d merely accept alternative currency in payment…. like, I don’t know…. Necco Wafers, perhaps? Would such a humble offering once again save the Cheney Hammer Mill from the wrecking ball? Can’t say. Out of breath.