September 11 Memorial

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I should say something about that. I have not posted anything about it since 2013 - this is strange, but I suppose I haven't posted much of anything here since 2013. I used to post every year about it - at least since 2006, fifth anniversary - but over time, there seemed to be less and less point. I said what I had to say - back in 2006, in fact, a long rant that, well - sounds right to this day... I could repeat it every year or - remember it, and let it go. Which is about what happened.

But 20 years: I have to say something. What? The event itself was horrifying, created a sense of fear and dread that lingered for quite a while. (A more concrete version of what it was like to grow up in the 70s and 80s under the fear of nuclear annihilation.) As for the day itself - I don't think I have written about my memories fo the day, here. Reading articles about false memories of 9/11 makes you think - how much do I remember wrong? The truth is, most of what I remember of the experience was banal. I was at work - I went to a meeting at 9AM. I think I remember someone saying that a plane hit the Trade Center tower before the meeting, but I don't think anyone seemed all that concerned. When I came out of the meeting, everything was different. Two planes hit - there was no doubt it was an attack - no one knew what was going to happen. I remember people watching news on their computers, a new trick in those days. And that's how we saw the towers fall: on a tiny QuickTime window.

They sent us home. I think I went into AOL when I got home and checked on a couple people I knew in NYC and the DC area - they were all right - so I turned off the news and watched Beavis and Butthead Do America. It seemed like a good time to watch it.

The next day I went back to work, though everyone was on edge. Sometime in the morning, the cops raided the Westin Hotel in Boston, a couple blocks from where I worked. People got paranoid and wanted to leave and I thought, where are we supposed to go? But I think later, most of the office just packed up and went home, not waiting for the company to close or the city to close or anything - we just weren't going to hang around. 

Not very interesting, in the end. But the day lived on in my head. Though I think it was the anthrax scare later that September that really set me off. But that might be a false memory. Walking home one day, beautiful perfect blue sky, thinking, holy shit we're all going to die! 

After that? Nostalgia about 9/12 doesn't impress me - partly because of the way we all abandoned our posts the next day, on a rumor; partly because it didn't take very long for everything to go to shit. Arguing over who was to blame, then what to do about it, ignorant things like "Freedom Fries", attacks on Moslems and anyone who looked like they might be middle eastern, increased surveillance across the board, the Patriot Act. We were divided immediately by 9/11, aAll right. Here we are, 20 years along. We have finally gotten out of Afghanistan - that's amazing ed the divisions were deeper and more aggressive, and are still there. 

We got into wars, which we could not win. We have just gotten out of Afghanistan after 20 years - a war that, at the time, made some sense (getting Al Qaeda and all) - but we didn't get Bin Laden, then we gimped that war to fight a very wrong war in Iraq and - well, we aren't the first Empire to fall apart over Afghanistan. 

And 9/11 has ruined us, politically. I mean, imagine a world where someone could say (however stupidly) that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties - imagine that! It sounded shallowed and spoiled then - now, it's flat out mad. (Or flat out a lie; people still say it, but they are mad liars.) Whatever side you're on now, the political scene is much more fractured and dangerous than it was then. Conflicts are open and explicit, and more likely to be violent. Fascism is open and explicit and dreams of violence. We are disintegrating. And the world as a whole is just as bad: far less stable than in 2000 (when things were not ideal, don't get me wrong), but open fascism is on the rise all around the world, conflict and disintegration are taking place in areas that were basically stable in 2000. It has been a logn disaster for the world.

Which brings me to something strange to say about those times: the weird sense (but maybe not so weird) that that time - 2000-2001 - might have been the high point of human existence. How strange! But remember life as you lived it in 2000: there were bookstores! Records stores! video stores! more movie theaters! There were records to buy, movies to watch! It's easy to think that technology has been on an endless upward climb in those years - but wonderful as it can be, losing book stores, record stores, even video rental joints, is a cost. They make life more pleasant - there is no replacement for the joy of going into a bookstore or record store, browsing the shelves, looking at the objects as you decide what to buy.

But more than that - the technology was there in 2000. This choice between book stores and Amazon - in 2000, you had both. Amazon existed; Netflix existed. You could have everything - you could buy things cheap online if you wanted; you could rent movies through the mail, on a fantastic new medium, the DVD. At the same time, mind you, as you could go into a bookstore or record store or a video store and root through their stock. You could even watch movies and listen to music on your computer, even watch TV on your computer - even if the quality was not great, you could do it. All those things existed at the same time for a while. Could they have lasted forever? Is there a way to have Amazon and lots of bookstores? Streaming movies and Blockbusters? iPods and their descendents and HMV and TOwer records? I don't know. But we had them all in 2000-2001.

It's weird to think about, but that might have been it - as good as it was going to get. Maybe the end was coming one way or the other - even without 9/11, climate change was already well on its way, and that might end up swallowing all these other considerations - but things were still better than. For a middle class urban white guy, maybe - but go back to politics - it was better for a lot of people who weren't watching QuickTime videos and renting foreign DVDs and spending hundreds of dollars at a pop at Tower or HMV or Newbury Comix. 

And now? Every two days, as many people die in this country of COVID as died in the 9/11 attacks. This is months after a free, safe and effective vaccine was distributed, which stops most of those deaths. I wonder if we would have been smarter before 9/11 about something like that. We wouldn't have had people like Donald Trump who threw his political capital behind making the pandemic worse. I don't know.

We live in a very bad time.

Allan Fish Online Film Festival

I have been very absent from this blog for quite a while now. At least in the last few weeks I have had a viable excuse - I've just moved, to a different state, a very irksome process. The last week or so particularly have been very busy, lots of work, disruption, and, since I am an old man and did the move myself (with various friends and relations), lingering aches and pains. And a cold. And a lovely stretch of weather more suitable to March than May....

All this, particularly the timing of the move, meant I am not contributing directly to the latest project at Wonders in the Dark - but it is a good one, and I am certainly taking advantage of it.

The first annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival is being held, starting yesterday, May 11, Allan's birthday, and running - quite some time. The concept is that each day, someone wil host and post a link to a film that can be found online, and host a discussion. Details here, in Sam's introduction. This festival is being held in memory of Allan Fish, the fine writer who co-ran Wonders in the Dark with Sam Juliano all those years, who died absurdly young last fall. He was an insatiably curious cinephile, who used the internet to track down obscure and undistributed films - this is a fine tribute to his passion.

So click on over, take a peek, watch some films, and talk about them.

Ozu Memorial

Today is Yasujiro Ozu's birthday. It is also, as it happens, the 50th anniversary of his death. I jumped the gun - I should have held up my great big Film Countdown for this date - what can you do? I suppose I can repost my top 32, for the enjoyment of anyone who missed the first...



1. Early Summer
2. Late Spring
3. Tokyo Story
4. I Was Born But...
5. The Only Son
6. Good Morning
7. Passing Fancy
8. An Inn in Tokyo
9. Tokyo Chorus
10. Autumn Afternoon
11. What did the Lady Forget?
12. Early Spring
13. Story of Floating Weeds
14. Woman of Tokyo
15. Tokyo Twilight
16. That Night's Wife
17. Floating Weeds
18. Record of a Tenement Gentleman
19. Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
20. There Was A Father
21. Equinox Flower
22. Days of Youth
23. Brother and Sisters of the Toda Clan
24. Late Autumn
25. Where Now are the Dreams of Youth
26. Hen in the Wind
27. Walk Cheerfully
28. Dragnet Girl
29. I Flunked But...
30. The Lady and the Beard
31. End of Summer
32. Munekata Sisters

And point to another fine appreciation from David Bordwell.

9-11 Again

Another September 11.

We have not gotten over it - we still seem incapable of undoing the damage we did to ourselves after the attacks. It's depressing - I look back at things I wrote in 2010 or 2006, and they are depressingly familiar. Very little has happened in those 12 years to move back from our initial overreactions. Looking at the rather insane overreaction to the Boston Bombing (shutting down the metro area because of a kid with a gun (maybe) and a homemade bomb (maybe)? Really? Yes; we did that), it's hard not to see a lot of hope for us. We have become very willing to turn over power to the government, police, military - not just in the first panic of the event (that's understandable, and frankly, that's what the police are there for) - but afterwards, onwards. It's hard to look at Edward Snowden's revelations, or the treatment of Snowden, or the people reporting on Snowden, or Bradley Manning, for that matter, and not despair a little. (Hopefully we can do better by Chelsea Manning at some point; I'm not optimistic.)

That's enough. I imagine I will get to do this all again next year. All I have to counter it is the thought that there are people like Manning and Snowden who are willing to act anyway; that this stuff gets aired out more than it did in the 00's; that people might start thinking about it. You never know. And, sometimes, things happen that do start to show some cracks - like the Syrian Situation. The fact that Obama put it to the vote is important - highly gratifying, too. Whatever his reasons - to avoid taking full responsibility, to buy time, to avoid the war (knowing the idiots in the house would never give him anything, even a war), or just because he's the first president in half a century or so to read the constitution - it's gratifying. And seems to have done some good in avoiding getting involved in the war.

I remarked on Facebook that everyone I knew who had expressed an opinion of the war had been against it - from the nuttiest teabagger (Obama wants to start WWIII!) to the Hippiest lefty. The polls tell the same story. So - the notion that democracy and legality might prevail (and diplomacy, internationally - though since that involves the Russians, one can't get too optimistic) is a cause for some hope. Maybe we will learn from it.

September 11, 2011

I don't know what to write for the 10th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I have written quite a bit about it in the past - most of the posts under the Memorial tag are about September 11. I've seen a lot of pieces this week about the legacy of 9/11 - I won't add another, since most of what I've written in the past was about the political fallout. The political legacy has not been a good one - we are a weaker nation now than we were before - though I admit in the last couple years, it seems the sins of Reagan (systematic destruction of the American economy) have overtaken the sins of Bush (systematic destruction of civil liberties, the rule of law, democracy itself.) So it's true, if I were to rant, I would be more likely to rant about the continued need for a trillion or so dollars of infrastructure spending to put people to work....

So no, I'll skip the politics. Though I don't know quite what else to say - I wish to mark the day - and mourn the dead and maybe look back at what was lost. I was in New York in the summer of 2000, and like every tourist, shot the length of Manhattan from the top of the Empire State Building. An iconic view, as filmmakers certainly knew - how better to show the promise of America? It may be coincidence that the image I found first was from Stroscek - but it's hard to think of a better encapsulation of the promise and threat of America. So I'll start with Herzog and end with me, looking out across the great city, at those two towers anchoring the composition, and hope we can find more of the promise of America as we go forward...

30 Years

...since John Lennon's death. It was a fairly incomprehensible shock to me when it happened - more than I expected it to be. I was a Beatles fan before, but not terribly passionate - that came afterwards. I think - who can trust their memories?

There are many ways to memorialize Mr. Lennon - in today's political climate, though, I think this is necessary. We're still fucking peasants as far as I can see. He could have written this in 1980 - he could have written it today - and it would ring perfectly true. More true - this country, at least, does not seem to be moving forward - the class system is becoming more obvious, the divisions between rich and poor, those with power and without it, more extreme. We seem very willing to give up our freedom. We may or may not be getting better at smiling when we kill, but we sure seem eager to let the ones who can run the country. A working class hero is something to be...

Antietam Remembered

Though my mind is on vampires, and making fun of crazy republicans (craziER republicans, since it's hard to find any sane ones), I and though the day is almost over, I wanted to write a word or two about the date, September 17, the 148th anniversary of the battle of Antietam. Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing about Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention - a book about the experiences of Southern White women during the Civil War. He notes, more than once, the ways Southern ideas handicapped them - their racism, of course, their commitment to slavery, which quickly became a major source of weakness; their ideas of femininity kept them from employing women in home front positions (like nursing) the North did; their inability, as a country, to operate en effective infrastructure - to get the mail delivered, to keep their trains running. It's a point that came up more than once in the Civil War books I read this summer as well, Grant's Memoirs and McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom - all the inefficiencies of Confederate politics, all the ways their ideology undermined the war effort. You might wonder how they survived four years - the Southern view, I suppose, is that they were just much better fighters, something like that. But that doesn't hold up very well as an argument. Northern armies fought as well as Southern armies, consistently. What difference there was came down to generalship - though even there, not to the quality of the generals each side had - but to the coincidence of where those generals were, and when they took their places. The truth is, in the west, the North outgeneraled and outfought their enemies pretty consistently - the big delay there was logistic - finding ways to move armies into an enemies territory. Once the Union got itself going, it made fairly short work of the Confederacy, in the west.

But the East... And here we're back to Antietam. Because when you read about Antietam, you soon realize just how astonishingly lucky the South was in the Union's generals. It is hard to imagine a more incompetent leader of a large army than George McClellan. When I was young, I was a Civil War buff, steeped, particularly, in Bruce Catton's books - back then, I picked up the traditional idea of McClellan as a charismatic, popular, skillful general, with a fatal streak of coution and self-doubt. But now, rereading Catton, along with McPherson and Grant, I can't help marvel at what a complete idiot McClellan seems to have been. There might have been worse generals in charge of the Army of the Potomac, but it is hard to imagine any of its other commanders botching Antietam as badly as he did. And what's worse than that - it might not even be his most incompetent campaign! The Battle of the Seven Days might have been worse, as Lee beat up pieces of the Union army (at great cost to the Confederates), while McClellan did nothing to counter him, and promptly retreated, without ever being beaten.

But Antietam was different - because Lee put all he had into the fight, and the Army of the Potomac basically beat him completely. But exhausted itself in the process - partly because McClellan committed his troops one corps at a time, never getting anywhere near the bulk of his army into action at once. And then - left almost 2 complete army corps completely out of the fight. One of his officers remarked somewhere that at the end of the fight, 10,000 fresh soldiers could have ended the war - 20 or 25,000 fresh troops were in reserve - but McClellan didn't use them. He was convinced all along that Lee outnumbered him - an amazing fact itself - but here, it is astonishing, and it is directly damning of him. It is crucial that in none of his battles did he ever actually take the field himself - he was able to maintain his delusions about Lee's strength by staying in his headquarters, never venturing out to check the lines himself, never even sending trusted staff officers out to see how things really were. I believe this was consistent - he was an absentee general on the peninsular as well. Compared to the later commanders of the Army of the Potomac, some of whom (Burnside and Hooker especially) were quite overmatched by the job - he didn't suffer so much from loss of nerve or imagination, as from an inability of really imagine war as something that is actually happening.

It's never fair to compare other generals to Grant - he was in another class from most of them - but still... you can't help it - everything McClellan got wrong, Grant consistently got right during the war. Committing all his strength; refusing to stop when he still had a chance to win; making sure he had at least a working knowledge of the real situation. Thinking, in short, that he would win this battle, no matter what was happening - at least, never thinking he was going to lose. It's a quality you see with Lee, too, of course - sometimes to a fault - if the union generals before Meade and Grant had been half as good as Grant, it's not likely he'd have gotten away with many of his battles. If he'd faced Grant at the Seven Days or Antietam or Chancellorsville, he'd have been defending the Carolina's in 1864, not Richmond...

Still. What did happen at Antietam forced the Confederacy back, put it on its heels. Gave the north breathing room, and emboldened them to start the revolutionary parts of the civil war. And - ought to remind you just what an insane, horrifying thing warfare was in the 1860s. The sheer standup brutality of the battle - pretty much a straight, toe to toe, battle lines drawn shootout between some 80-90,000 people armed with rifles - is mind boggling. There was almost nothing in the way of tactics in the fight - just sending union soldiers forward to fight whatever confederates they found, with the confederates basically there for the finding... It was something. A bloodbath, mainly... but something.

September 11

It is good to remember disasters such as this. It would be better to remember them with dignity, mourning the dead, reaffirming our community - that would be nice. But that gets harder all the time. I am increasingly depressed by the commemoration of the September 11th attacks - the current "controversy" about the "ground zero" "mosque" and the jerk in Florida promising to burn Korans brings cynical exploitation of the attacks to a new level of awfulness. (Though I suppose even that can't really compete with the government's use of the attacks to justify the invasion of Iraq...) A significant portion of the country seems determined almost to celebrate the attacks - what is that cretin Sarah Palin and her snake oil salesman pal Glen Beck up to today? Though it's not the noise and flag-waving that bothers me so much - it is the attempts to turn the memory of the attacks into an excuse for bigotry. Racism, xenophobia, bigotry have become more and more open and explicit through this decade - especially since the GOP got ousted from government - they don't have anything to run on except racism and bigotry...

Though even that pales beside stories like this, of a court upholding the government - well: I have to quote:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information.

This is not good. Basically the government claims that people who claim to have been arrested and extradited to other countries where they were tortured cannot sue (anyone?), because the lawsuit would expose state secrets. This is a very bad thing - it is another step in the normalization of the use of torture by the United States - in all the illegal and immoral behavior we have engaged in during the "war on terror." I am losing hope - it may be too much to expect American politiciams to actually hold someone in government responsible for their wrong doing, but it would be nice to see President Obama and the Democrats take some tangible steps to repudiate the worst policies of the Bush years. The use of torture - but also, the limitless executive. The latter maybe more than the former - as the claims of the government being beyond the law justifies the former as well.

Ah, Civil Liberties.... what a quaint idea. It is strange - even now, I sometimes see cops on the subway, searching people - for now reason except that they can. It's depressing - the impression I get sometimes is that since 9/11, we as a country have been completely discombobulated because we couldn't find anyone to surrender to. Bin Laden is off in a cave somewhere (still is, as far as anyone knows - post 9/11 wars both turning into complete failures), we can't surrender to him. AT home, it looks like the Republicans finally surrendered tot heir usual masters, Citibank and the CIA. The Democrats seem to have surrendered to the Republicans, though now, being back in power, that doesn't work so well. Though I guess they can surrender to citibank and the CIA just as well... And - for all the wickedness of the Koran burners and Park51 protesters, there is something that sits wrong in the idea that we in the USA are supposed to decide which of our constitutional rights we exercise depending on what might offend some son of a bitch off in Afghanistan. Now - this stuff, the koran burning and all - is evil - racist, bigoted, and - Godwin's law be damned - almost definitively fascist - and should be condemned for those reasons. But there are undoubtedly a lot of things that might piss off some SOB in Afghanistan or Tehran- you know, Salman Rushdie back in the day, and plenty more like him - and there is no reason we should set our behavior according to what terrorists might think or do. I don't like those arguments at all (except as pure tactics: Petraeus weighing in on the Koran burning definitely seems to have tipped even the racists against the Florida guy - that's worth something...)

Oh well. This is my political rant for the year. I don't have much more to say - frankly, I have little hope for the country. We've proven our weakness and irresponsibility over and over, and nothing seems to be changing. All this is a bit ironic, as socially, we seem to continue to grow up (Don't Ask, Don't Tell, struck down by a court...) - but we seem to be economically paralyzed, unable and unwilling to address our problems... and politically, we seem determined to slide into either tyranny or anarchy, or maybe a mix of the worst of both.

Another Anniversary

I don't write as much about politics these days, largely because I don't have any patience for the current "debate" - which makes it hard to talk about the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks from 8 years ago. There's no dissociating the event from its political ramifications. It is odd, though, to notice how the memory is evolving - the pain and fear of the day itself is fading; I've found myself talking about the day with that odd kind of nostalgia people get - where were you when... Where was I when - I was in a meeting - as I went in, someone said something about a plane hitting the WTC, but they weren't too concerned - it sounded like a small plane, no one seemed worried. I came out of the meeting and everyone was glued to their computers watching CNN on the internet, or listening to the radio, or on the phone to people at home with televisions.... And the buildings came down and everyone went home, like a herd of zombies. I checked the news and the internet, looking for people I knew, and then I watched Beavis and Butthead Do America, figuring nothing I could do would change a thing. It was a very difficult time, that fall - it did not help then to know that the confusion and fear would not last, that someday I would be looking back on it like this. But we adjust to beams falling, then we adjust to beams not falling - the key is to try not to break anything while the beams are falling. I don't think the USA did a very good job with that. But that's politics, and that way lies madness, or endless screeds against the hypocrites, thieves, liars and dupes in the Republican party.

D Day

65 years ago today, the Allies landed on the beaches at Normandy. A day to remember...

Sam Fuller remembered, and gets it down in two shots....

Memorial

It seems like a good idea today to spare a thought for your local
skyscraper. And all the people they house and employ.

September

I don't really fee like writing anything about the Republican Convention. It's bound to be clown show - McCain's campaign has been a clown show so far - picking Palin as VP? it's hard to believe. Skim through the Sarah Palin posts at Lawyers, Guns and Money: we've got pork barrel politics and lies about government pork; we've got the secessionist party; we've got the abuse of power to settle old grudges and personal feuds; the book banning; the ignorance about history (the founding fathers and the pledge of allegiance); the inexperience and incompetence and hilarious attempts to cover for it (Commander in Chief of the Alaska National Guard!); the fact that she's never been to Canada - and oh yeah, the kid... Well, it's not fair to pick on the kid - lots of kids mess around, and it's not as though the GOP and their supporters would ever criticize the choice sand misfortunes of others. Right?

Those fuckers. Its endless - the things they - the right, at least the public face of the right - do to prove, one more time, that they are utterly without shame. Shameless moralizing hypocrites - they have no values, no morals, nothing, but sheer naked self-interest. There's no reason to be surprised any more - one reason I haven't bothered writing much about politics in a long while. There's nothing left to say. The modern republican party is a party of hypocrisy and power -there is nothing to say or do but vote as many of them out of power as is necessary to convince the rest to grow up and act like human beings again. I imagine most republicans are decent human beings - the ones I know are, they just don't agree with me. But they make common cause with scum, and reap the benefits of the viciousness of the bad ones, so they - the decent republicans - need to lose some elections and fast. Though who knows - there's no sign that the public is much better...

I don't know. You can see the results of of Republican governance on display - Tucker at Pilgrim Akimbo has a post up about protests in Minnesota, and police over-reaction; Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings comments; Glenn Greenwald reports and summarizes.

This is nothing new. Police have been ramping up their response to demonstrations since at least Seattle 1999. September 11, of course, provided an excuse or even more "security", especially around big events like political conventions - though lot of this occurs at a more day to day level. 9/11 put the fear in us - with cause - but we allowed the fear to linger, and it has become paranoia and cowardice. The republicans, in particular, have been the party of paranoia and cowardice - which translates into shows of toughness - attacking the weak, from Iraq, to torturing POWs, to sending cops out in riot gear against radio personalities. (And lite brites! don't forget lite brites!) And what I said then - at some point, it's hard not to see all of this, the petty crap, the bag searches at ball games, the riot cops in subways, the absurdities at airports, the illegal phone tapping and retroactive immunities, the shows of force at conventions and the like, as being meant to teach us to take a police state for granted. Keep pretending they're protecting us, so that when they need to act to genuinely control us, they can - and we can't do anything about it.

I'm not inclined to paranoia, though - I doubt anyone is planning all this. I don't expect a coup, by anyone. But things happen. And habits form. And we form the habit of having everything supervised by men with guns and bullet proof vests and we form the habit of keeping quiet about it. And - if anything happens - our government is in the habit of using those security forces to control it. So... we should not be so willing to accept it. None of it.

So anyway. This stuff won't go away when the republicans lose power - Obama voted wrong on the telecom immunity act - democrats will use it - they encouraged it in the 90s..... But they haven't made a career of it - they seem to have values other than just their own power, and they appeal to emotions besides fear and the desire to find someone else to blame and hurt. So there is hope there.

Oh well. I don't want to write much about politics - too depressing by half. Septembers do it though. The anniversaries of September 11, of Hurricane Katrina - and of my friend's death in Iraq - push this stuff to the front of my mind. And the insult of McCain's choice of Palin for VP (insult to everyone - the American people, women, Palin herself, competent republican women politicians, HIllary Clinton, etc.) plus the usual thuggery in the name of security gives me ample material to rave about....

Iraq Invasion Anniversary

5 years ago now the United States invaded Iraq. In a month or so we can celebrate the end of major combat operations in Iraq. After that, 5 years of disaster. Trillions of dollars wasted. God knows how many dead. Only 4000 Americans dead! Most of them after "major combat operations" ended of course. None of the excuses for the war proved true - no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to Al Qaeda; none of the promised benefits have come about - the middle east is as unstable as ever, we lost a lot of leverage in dealing with other countries, Iraq itself remains a disaster, repressive, dangerous, not likely to improve on our watch. The US is weaker than it was before the invasion, we've undermined our economy fighting this useless and evil war, we've undermined (to the point of breaking) the constitution, we've debased the discourse beyond the awfulness of the 90s. It's been a bad stretch.

It stands as a testament to George W. Bush - the worst president this country has had, surrounded by incompetent villains, who take pleasure in their villainy (look at clips of Dick Cheney talking about going to the "dark side" to fight terrorism: his smug supervillain act) - but can't do anything right. They brag about their villainy, but it never gets them anywhere, they try to keep it secret but it all comes out, they fail fail fail at everything they touch. Except staying out of jail, most of the time. And finding ways to make money. They posture and preen as if all this badness makes them tough - but attacking Iraq was a pointless and cowardly act of bullying - almost certainly undertaken because they knew that Iraq had no WMD or anything else that could harm us. I don't know if they even care what a disaster it has been since - after all that trillion plus dollars in government money is going somewhere... Ah, what socialists capitalists have become!

Anyway: it's a rotten decade to be an American. Just hope things like that don't last, and get as many republicans as far from power as possible...

September 11 Again

I suppose something should be said. The war party is still trying to play it for all they can. I see they are still calling it "Patriot Day" - not sure why. Patriots' Day - that's a holiday - and a holiday celebrating, well - patriotism - starting a war to run the bastards out! close enough! 9/11 is more like innocent victim day. Not sure what patriotism has to do with it.

It has long since become hard to say anything about the day. The government used it as a pretext to fuck the country up good, and do a pretty good job on the rest of the world. Bin Laden is still on the loose! Iraq is still fucked up! we're still grinding away there, and no sign of stopping soon! Great. The only possible comfort is that the GOP has so disgraced itself in the last 6 years that they will, eventually, be put out to pasture for a good long time - at least until some few of them start acting like adults again. Hell, we might get universal health care out of it!

Enough. I got a couple more WC Fields films from Netflix, so I'm off.

9/12 Rant

Writing about the 9/11 anniversary is very difficult - I do not want to politicize it. Yet - it is well and truly politicized already. Nothing gets gained by unilateral disarmament here. So I held off a day - but now, you get the rant.

The attacks themselves were devastating - they put the fear of god into me, personally, and into most of us. But I have to bring out that Hammett quote again: we adjust to beams falling - and we adjust to beams not falling. Even the day of the attacks, I remember thinking, in the back of my mind, I will not always feel this way. The fear will pass. We get over devastation; we deal with consequences and move on.

Or not. The problem is that this attack happened while we were governed by a fool, who is surrounded by villains, who saw the attacks as an opportunity for a series of power grabs, at home and abroad. In doing so, they have seriously undermined our position in the world - and seriously undermined the strength and stability of our political system. And this villainy has warped what happened on 9/11/2001 - there is no way to talk about the attacks without talking about what they were used to justify, and how badly things have gone since. Most of the villainy - the war in Iraq, the attacks on the constitution, on international law - has nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks themselves. 9/11 led directly to the invasion of Afghanistan (which seems inevitable and right, though it has turned into a failure, almost as much as Iraq); it led to some pretty unwholesome laws (the Patriot Act, notably.) Otherwise though, most of what has happened - Iraq, our use of torture, secret prisons, Bush's claims of unlimited executive powers - had no direct relationship to 9/11 - it was used as an excuse, as emotional blackmail.

Politically - we have entered a dark period in our history, and one that is completely unnecessary. Terrorism, hitting us, is a bad thing - but it is a small thing, that can be controlled, if we take it seriously. Terrorists can't do anything to undermine our "way of life" (a thing that get bandied about quite a bit in these times.) They can kill us, cost us money, but they can't challenge the foundations of our society. (Unlike, say, Germany and Japan in WWII; or the USSR during the cold war.) If we are going to undermine our freedom, we have to do it ourselves. To our shame, we have. And undermined our international prestige, our reputation for being good guys, not to mention our reputation for invincibility. Our policies over the last five years have revealed our weakness, lack of seriousness, unwillingness to take risks or accept consequences for anything we consider valuable. The invasion of Iraq stands as a crowning example - the only explanation anyone can come up with that makes sense is that we wanted, simply, to make an example of them: we wanted to hurt someone real bad, so everyone else would cower before us. And to do that, we picked someone no one liked, someone who could not threaten us in any way - Iraq. And yep, we beat the shit out of them (their army at least): but then what? Once in there we couldn't walk away - and what has happened since - increasing violence, chaos, the whole thing hanging on the edge from civil war with god knows what consequences - was pretty damned predictable.

All of it, furthermore, not just unrelated to the "war on terror" (an idiotic phrase: christ, it's embarrassing to have to type it), but significantly counterproductive to the war on terror. Taking men and material out of Afghanistan (where Al Qaeda was still lurking, even after our invasion) to go after Iraq - and create more ill will than we could dream of, as well as killing thousands of Americans and Iraqis. It is vile.

And going back to 9/11: there was never much to be said about the attacks. They were an act of raw cruelty, for nothing - our mistake was probably to take the political pretensions of the terrorists seriously. It wasn't a meaningful attack - it said nothing about us as a country, other than that we're big. (Which makes calling the day "Patriot Day" doubly annoying - it wasn't about the US as a country. It was about the US as a target.) It had no meaning - what meaning it had (political or otherwise) came later. What we did about it, and how we explained it.... The right likes to make fun of the left for worrying about "why they hate us so" - but they are just as eager to explain it, to make the attackers seem coherent and serious. All that talk about how they hate our freedoms, all the dire warnings against radical Islam, or Islamism, or Islamic fascism - or just plain Islam, Arabs, whatever - is blather, self-inflation, making our enemy seem important, Important - World Historically Important. We had to make it meaningful: to find political motivations for the attacks, whether by wringing our hands about how awfully we’ve treated the world, or by imagining Bin Laden as a Supervillain in his Secret Bin Laden Cave, secretly infiltrating Your Neighborhood in the person of Mexicans and the Arabs who own the Red Apple on the corner. Rather than accept that a gang of thugs attacked us in the hopes of provoking a response they could use to enhance their own political ambitions, the right insists on inventing an enemy that will make them feel stronger for fighting. But by not treating them as the gangsters they are, by treating their political claims as if they had some validity - as if Bin Laden represented someone other than himself - we've done more harm, in the political* sense, than the attacks could.

And a big part of this is keeping the pain of 9/11 raw. We have to live in fear: they thrive on it. They need it - the GOP has made hash of the country - they need 9/11 and fear of terrorism (You thought Snakes on a Plane was scary - imagine the sequel! Shampoo on a Plane! Arghhhh!) as an emotional excuse to stay in power. It's all they have left. They are bound to ride it hard.

* In the literal sense too: Invading Iraq has killed a lot more people - none of whom on either side bear any responsibility for the 9/11 attacks - than the attacks did.

Anniversary

I feel as if I should write something about the 5th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It is not easy - the problem is that I cannot separate the attacks from the things that have happened because of the attacks. But it is important to separate them. What happened, in all its evil immediacy, deserves to be remembered, the dead mourned, the survivors celebrated. It is important to keep politics out of it - at least at a distance from it. The infamy should not be erased, and politics tends to do that.

I still don't have much to say about the attacks. We probably don't need to say much. The anniversary should be marked - lower flags, take that moment of silence (as suggested in the otherwise rather embarrassing proclamation of today as "Patriot Day" [there's so much wrong with this - the name - can't they even come up with a name that's not taken?]) - mourn the dead, celebrate the survivors. And then get back to whatever we were doing. The attacks were devastating - but humans get over devastation. We adjust to beams falling; we adjust to beams not falling. That's less comfort than it should be while things are bad - but it is important to remember it. We - human beings, as individuals, communities, as all of us - absorb damage and move on.

Unfortunately, we also make political hay out of suffering. But I'll wait until tomorrow to get too far into that...

Naked political grandstanding? Us?

Bob Harris has a post on Tom Tomorrow's blog about "National Preparedness Month" - September, you'll be surprised to hear. Though perhaps not all of September, as the announcement will be made September 9th. To get into the Friday papers before the 9/11 memorials, Harris suspects. He is not impressed:

This is transparently a continuation of the Bush campaign by other means, financed with everyone's tax dollars, out of funds that could be used, say, to hire more actual first-responders, Pushtun translators, or troops to replace the exhausted guardsmen.

That sounds about right.