I’ll pass on the Mother’s Day gift that my firstborn, Tarek, gave me today, as he had found it on Alternet…
Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother’s Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870:
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God…
Author: Helena
Not in Kansas any more
Well, I’m not in Kansas any more! (I’ve just been waiting till
I could write that. It’s not that I don’t like Kansas– actually,
my two-day visit there has been really wonderful. But still, I couldn’t
resist using a version of that iconic line from “The Wizard of Oz”. Phil
Schrodt, my co-host last night and a 16-year resident of Lawrence, Kansas, told
me that most Kansans actually have a very ambivalent relationship with that
work. “It’s such a tired cliché,” he said. “On the other
hand, often it’s the only thing outsiders even know about Kansas.” Ooops,
sorry Phil!)
Yeah, so anyway, I’m now in a plane flying somewhere over the heartland,
to Pittsburgh, on my way home for Mother’s Day. Will my son Tarek, who
arrived back at our place in Charlottesville from his home in Boston, have
the customary Mother’s Day burned-toast breakfast ready for me as I enter
the house? Let’s hope not. It’ll be about 2:45 p.m. by then…
Ways too late for the burned-toast breakfast.
So the rest of the University of Kansas conference that I was at was as
engaging as the earlier parts that I wrote about yesterday.
I guess in yesterday’s post I had reported on about the first two-thirds
of Saturday-morning sessions on “The Iraq war and the presidential election”
. Notable utterances in the rest of that session included the following:
From Kansas, contd.
So I’m still at this conference on Iraq at the University of Kansas. I
want to put down a few more notes about what’s been going on here. I’ll
start with a few notes from what I heard John Cary, the faculty member
from the Fort Leavenworth Army Command and General Staff College say here
yesterday, that I found interesting.
He said the current level of troop deployment in Iraq is quite unsustainable.
He dismissed the idea that NATO might have any role in augmenting the force
levels. He said that maintaining “credibility” alone is not a goal
worth fighting and dying. And, asked a question about possible liberal
bias in the media, he said that in his view “the truth” lies halfway between
“the US administration fact of the day” and “the sensationalism of the Washington
Post”.
(Well, I don’t agree with his evaluation of exactly where “the truth” lies.
But it was interesting to see the broad level of daylight between his
view and that of “the US administration fact of the day”.)
Today (Saturday) at the conference, the emphasis has been on the domestic
dimensions, here in the US, of the whole Iraq war issue. Notable firstly
about this session was the willingness of more than 80 good citizens of Kansas
to turn out at 8:30 on a beautiful Saturday morning to come and take part
in the discussion here. These people– maybe 60 percent of them looking
like retirees– have been really motivated to give up their time to come
and take part.
We started off with an address by George Mason University professor James
Pfiffner on W’s decision to go to war. Jim, who revealed that
he himself spent a year in the forces in Vietnam, started off reciting two
long lists of names of people in the Bush administration: the first, of officials
who have had no combat experience, but were all “gung-ho” for the
war, and the second, of officials who have had combat experience but
were much more cautious regarding the decision to move towards war.
News from Kansas
I’m here in Lawrence, Kansas at a conference on the situation in Iraq one year after the “victory”. It’s always good to get out into the heartland and listen to what’s on people’s minds in the US heartland, ways outside the Washington beltway. Three weeks ago, Bill and I were in Oxford, Ohio, where he was speaking at a similar gig at Miami University.
I only got into town in time for the tail end of the session before the one I was speaking on. It seemed really interesting. There was a retired military guy who now teaches at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, whom I heard voicing some interesting thoughts. I’ll tell you more about ’em later.
There was also a totaly asinine, silver-coaing type of guy from the State Dept, called Robert Silverman, who said things like “well the abuse allegations ware not our finest hour but the general trend-line is upward”, etc etc… He certainly didn’t look as though his heart was in it, though, and he slunk away from the conference soon after.
Xian, history, mass tourism
In the very center of the ancient Chinese city of Xian there is a sturdy
and imposing Bell Tower which today has traffic swirling all around it. The
base of the Bell Tower must be some 100 feet long. A little to its
northwest, there’s a slightly less high–though still impressive–Drum Tower.
On the evening that Bill and I arrived in the city, we made our way
through the dark, street-level tunnel that pierces the base of the Drum Tower.
It was May 1, and all parts of the city center were jam-packed with
revelers, so on occasion we had to almost push our way through the crowd
in the tunnel, and a couple of luckless drivers seemed quite stuck in the
midst of the pedestrian throng.
When we got emerged from the northern end of the tunnel, it was as though
we were in a different world. Nearly everywhere else in the city, the
culture seems very recognizably Chinese. The women are bareheaded,
with many of them wearing their hair in jaunty little pony tails. The
food stores and restaurants offer dumplings or noodles. All the signs
you can see are in Chinese characters. But in that neighborhood north
of the Drum Tower, the atmosphere seems much more “Central Asian”. Here–
and especially along that first long street leading out of the Drum Tower,
the main food item offered is kebabs. All the store-signs have Chinese
writing on them– but some also have some Arabic script, too. A number
of the women wear headscarves or veils. This street, here in the heart
of China, is Xian’s famous “Muslim Street”, a continuing symbol of the fact
that Xian is the city that anchors the eastern end of the trans-Asian Silk
Road.
Beijing: Summer Palace and Bei-Da
I’m back home in Virginia. I have two further “China travelogue”
posts I want to write as soon as I can, but things are pretty crazy in my
life right now.
The second of these posts will be about Xian, the amazing spot in central
China that anchored the eastern end of the “Silk Road”; the place that 2200
years ago was the first capital of a unified China; and a place that is a
very important location for the absorption and transmission of both Buddhism
and Islam across the Asian land-mass…
But here’s the other China post I wanted to write:
One delightful day last week, Bill, our friend Ann Womack, and I went to visit
the Summer Palace, situated in the northwest of today’s Beijing. The
visit would only be a short one because at 2 p.m. I was scheduled to talk
to Dr. Wang Suolao’s class on Middle East politics at Beijing University,
which is near the Summer Palace. Beijing is a huge city and the traffic
situation there a multi-laned morass of congestion, so we’d planned our itinerary
to combine the two trips, which worked out well.
Breakdown of U.S. Mideast policymaking
The abuse of prisoners that has started to be revealed in the U.S. detention center in Abu Ghraib is quite disgusting to contemplate. I have tried to imagine the broader context within which those half-dozen ill-supervised soldiers committed those foul acts– and in which, moreover, they felt quite “comfortable” taking those photos so they could brag and snicker about their actions later.
Clearly, what they did was not just a “one-off”, furtive set of abusive actions; but it must have been embedded in much broader patterns of systematic abuse and an expectation of the toleration or even encouragement of it.
I have been trying to imagine the dimension of the whole iceberg of which the disgusting acts recorded on those photographs were “just” the tip.
Is this iceberg as large as a systematic structure of abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere? There are growing indications–from the illegal holding center in Guantanamo Bay, whose commander had travelled to Abu Ghraib last fall to help set up the detention system there; and from Afghanistan, and elsewhere– that it is. And perhaps even larger than this?
Notes from Shanghai (and China, generally), part 2
We’ve been having an incredibly busy, informative, and fun time here in China. Just before I introduce the things I’ve been writing here so far, I want to apologize to any readers who found a rather perplexing post that was up here for a few hours, that should have gone onto a private family blog…
Anyway, here are the main things I’ve been intending to put up here.
Between Thursday April 29 and Saturday May 1 or so,
I managed to write the following notes about experiences I’d had during the
previous ten days or so:
Continue reading “Notes from Shanghai (and China, generally), part 2”
Notes from Shanghai, I
So what about China meanwhile, since I’ve now been here for five whole days…
We’ve been in Shanghai, hosted by East China Normal University, which has
a beautiful, large campus on the eastern edge of the city. We’ve been
staying in their “Academic Exchange Center”, which is also a place where
they lodge high-school principals who come there for short courses of in-service
training. (“Normal”, in the school’s name, signifies its original role
as a teacher-training institute.)
The hosting has been generous and wonderful. ECNU has made Bill an
“honorary professor”, and our friend Brantly Womack with whom we’re traveling
an “advisory professor”, so we had a short ceremony at which that happened,
on Thursday evening. Prior to that on Thursday, we all–Bill, Brantly,
his wife Ann Womack, and I–gave lectures at various parts of the unversity.
Bill and I gave ours in the Russian Studies Center, which is the core
of an international-studies center that they’re planning. I talked
about Israel/Palestine and Bill about Iraq. The audience was a group
of around two dozen faculty members and grad students. We gave our
talks in short bursts in English, and they were interpreted into Mandarin.
The discussion was good. People seemed very concerned about both
situations, and fairly well informed.
In the afternoon, I went along to Ann’s lecture…
No US de-escalation yet
Okay, it seems that the evaluation I wrote last Monday of the situation in
Fallujah and other parts of Iraq was overly optimistic– based on an overly
generous estimation of the strategic intelligence of the people running the
US occupation in Iraq.
Nothing wrong with a bit of optimism and a bit of generosity of spirit, I
reckon. Except that in this case both were misplaced and I ended up
being wrong.
How can the people making the big decisions regarding the running of the
occupation fail to see that it is totally in their interests to climb down
the ladder of escalation that they’d hoisted themselves up onto in both Fallujah
and Najaf? It is only a very short-sighted, immature strategic “thinker”
who could maintain that there would be anything to be gained over the long
haul from winning the military “victory” in Fallujah that everyone knows
in advance is–because of the US side’s access to weapons of truly massive
destructive power–quite within their power there.
So the purely military outcome of any such outcome would not be in doubt.
But if the US forces were to “win” in such a battle– a battle that
quite predictably would involve causing the deaths of tens of thousands of
Iraqis, most of them noncombatants– then what?
What would cocky little Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the head of the
1st Marines Expeditionary Force that is currently besieging Fallujah, do
the day after his forces achieved such a victory?