Category: Culture

Okay, a few quick thoughts about ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ before I do my next post.
I guess the first thing to say is that it has always been evident to me that, if film were newsprint, this movie would belong on the Op-ed page of the newspaper, not the news pages. And that’s just fine. Of course movies can be–are!–part of the broader public discourse… But people who have been criticizing Michael Moore for “not showing both sides of the story”, etc etc, have really been missing the point.
Lighten up, guys. It’s opinion. Get used to it.
What’s more, unlike much so-called ‘opinion’ from the rightist side of the aisle, this movie is based on (one reading of) some very solid facts. I don’t think anyone has raised any credible criticisms of the facts MM presented in the movie.
Interpretations, though–well, that’s another matter.
June 30, Bob Dreyfuss of TomPaine.com ran a strongly worded criticism of the the movie. In it, he asks:

am I the only one to notice that in one critically important way, it entirely misses the boat and gets nearly everything wrong? Maybe this has been said before? I’ve hardly read all of the criticism of Moore–but if so, I haven’t seen it. Moore totally avoids the question of Israel.

That’s a good point– though perhaps a little overstated. I don’t think MM got “everything” wrong. But yes, I did notice that after elaborately laying out all the plentiful information about the Bush family’s strong ties to the Saudi princes and the Bin Laden family, MM (1) notably did not say anything about the very close links between the Prez and the Likud (and their supporters), and (2) did not to my satisfaction explain –though this was certainly implied–how the Prez’s relationship with the Saudis helped propel him into launching a war against Iraq…

Continue reading “Da movie: F-9/11”

Tonight, no blogging because it was Bill ‘n Helena’s night out at the Michael Moore movie. (Also, three other friends.)
We have a great little independent (art-ish) movie theater in town, the Vinegar Hill Theater. It’s had F-9/11 since opening night last Friday. We tried to get tickets then. Hah! Silly us.
So we found out their ticket-sales policy: only selling tickets for the same day; sales booth for all three nightly showings opens at 3:30 p.m. I figured if I got there at 4:30 I could get 5 tickets for the 7 p.m. showing, then go to our weekly peace demonstration. It worked!
But the ticket agent also said that if we wanted to sit together we should join the line no later than 6:30. So I did that–leaving Bill and our friends finishing their dinner in a nearby eatery. I stood in line in torrential rain for 25 minutes till they let us in. What a great feeling of community on the line…
Oh, and then there was the movie. I’ll write more about that, later.

Today’s Supreme Court decisions on Padilla, Hamdi, and Rasul (the latter being the Gitmo case) are great news for all those of us who believe that women and men are better ruled by laws than by autocratic and idiosyncratic individuals.
Thank you, the Supremes!!!!
I found a great new blog today, SCOTUSblog, as in the Supreme Court of the US. It seems to be written by a group of close and well-informed SCOTUS watchers.
I’m not going to duplicate the great posts they’ve put up there today. I just wanted to highlight a few quotes they had picked out from the various opinions written by different Supremes on these cases.
First this, Justice Stevens writing for (sadly) a minority group of four justices who failed to persuade the majority that the Court should indeed take up Padilla’s case as brought:

At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society. . . . Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber.

As I said, that group didn’t win a majority in the case of Rumsfeld v. Padilla (a case that had been brought by Rumsfeld in response to an earlier case against His Rummyship by the poor, long-detained US citizen Jose Padilla.) But what the majority did say was merely that Rumsfeld had been the wrong address for Padilla’s original suit.
They said Padilla should have brought it instead against the commander of the navy brig in South Carolina where he has been held for 814 days now. Also, from what they had ruled in the case of the habeas petition brought by another US citizen, Yaser Hamdi, for which apparently His Rummyship was “the right address”, was that a US citizen–even one alleged to be an enemy combatant– does have the right to petition US courts against his detention.
(Thanks to George Paine of Warblogging.com for having kept a “Padilla watch” day counter on his site for many of those 814 days.)
In this SCOTUSblog post, Lyle Denniston writes:

The Supreme Court’s first review of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terrorism may force a fundamental reordering of constitutional priorities, especially in the way the government may deal with individuals caught up in that war. Amid all the writing by the Justices in today’s three historic rulings, no sentence stands out as vividly as this one, “A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.”

It’s not quite clear which of today’s decisions that quote was a part of.
Here is Denniston’s summary of the results of today’s three decisions:

Continue reading “Let’s hear it for the rule of law!!!”

Even though I’m a pacifist (and some day I might tell you why), I recognize the great human qualities often exhibited by people who go to war: courage, self-discipline, a desire to make the world a better place…
Of course, those qualities can also be exhibited by pacifists. But arguing that point is not my purpose here. I just want to note that, in my view, what made the World War 2 generation the “greatest generation” as it is called was the vision and real leadership shown by the decisionmakers at that time in the crucial project of fashioning the post-war peace: qualities that are notably absent from the decisionmakers in our own sad era.
There were two key aspects of that peace-building project that I want to note: (1) how seriously the British and their Allies took it, from the very early days of the war, and (2) how it was consciously designed to be unlike the highly punitive settlement of 1919, a settlement that had brought the world only Adolph Hitler and another, even more horrifying round of global war.
How seriously they took it.
My father, James Cobban, was not a high decisionmaker. He was a 29-year-old schoolmaster in London when the British were drawn into the war. He signed up almost immediately, and was assigned to an administrative branch of the Intelligence Corps. (M.I. 1-X, to be precise.) From the days of the blitz of London, people in the Intel Corps were already laying plans for their “future” occupation of Germany. That took courage and guts. It also took vision.
A little later, my father was involved in planning beach organization for D-Day. But once that was done, back they went to planning for the occupation of Germany. No-one would have dreamed of throwing their many meticulous plans into the trashcan.

Continue reading “The ‘greatest generation’– and W’s lot”

I had a quick read of the NYT and the WaPo today. NYT news coverage on Iraq seems ways better conceptualized and better organized than WaPo’s. The quality of NYT reporting from inside Iraq is also pretty good. And then, at the back, there’s a world-class column by Maureen Dowd:

Maybe after high-definition TV, they’ll invent high-dudgeon TV, a product so realistic you can just lunge through the screen and shake the Bush officials when they say something maddening about 9/11 or Iraq, or when they engage in some egregious bit of character assassination…
Even though the assumptions the Bush administration used to go to war have now proved to be astonishingly arrogant, na

Well, here we are again. All that nasty little current of isolationist, xenophobic hate-speech that we heard in the US in the run-up to Bush’s invasion of Iraq– remember the “Axis of Weasel”?–is now coming out again inside the country’s culture in response to the Spanish people’s anti-Aznar vote last Sunday.
And Tom Friedman is leading the charge.
I might have said Dennis Hastert, except I was talking about the national “culture”.
Tom’s piece today– the headline for which, Axis of Appeasement picks up on a concept he features prominently in the text– contrasts starkly with this other view expressed on the same page by Maureen Dowd. Maureen picked up on Hastert’s unbelievable mean-spirited diatribe against the Spanish voters for having chosen to, as he put it, “in a sense, appease terrorists.” She commented:

The Republicans prefer to paint our old ally as craven rather than accept the Spanish people’s judgment– which most had held since before the war– that the Iraq takeover had nothing to do with the war on terror.

Later, she describes Bush as having given a “Beavis and Butthead” snigger during a short media opportunity with the visiting Dutch Prime Minister. And she writes:

Now that he hasn’t found any weapons, Mr. Bush says the war was worth it so Iraqis could experience democracy. But when our allies engage in democracy, some Republicans mock them as lily-livered.

You have to admit, she has a point.
Meanwhile, back in Friedman-ville, that particular caped superhero writes:

Spain is planning to do something crazy: to try to appease radical evil by pulling Spain’s troops out of Iraq– even though those troops are now supporting the first democracy-building project ever in the Arab world.

Okay, Tom, take a deep breath and repeat after me:

Continue reading “Sad, isolationist harrumphing escalates…”

Samuel Huntington, Mr. “Clash of Civilizations”, has his knickers in a twist once again. This time, it’s over the alleged “threat” that Hispanic immigrants pose to “America’s identity, value, and way of life.”
Writing the lead piece in the latest issue of Foreign Policy mag, Huntington twitters on about the fact that this wave of Hispanic immigration is unlike any other earlier waves of immigration in that it threatens to swamp the existing culture of the country. (H’mm, wonder if the native Americans feel this is so unprecedented?)
“The use of both languages [English and Spanish] could become acceptable in congressional hearings and debates and in the general conduct of government business,” he harrumphs.
He writes of the possible or probable transformation of the U.S. into a bilingual country that it, “would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it.”
Whatever that means.
One of the few endearing things about this article is the great title that the FP team –led by Hispanic editor and publisher Moisés Naím–have put on it: “José, can you see?”
Anyway, let’s hope that Sam H either has a pre-school grandchild, or reads the Washington Post Style section as assiduously as I do. Because right there, in the lead article, is a great antidote to such fear-mongering. It’s a piece by Jennifer Frey about the enormous appeal to the pre-school and elementary-age crowd of a feisty young bilingual TV heroine called “Dora the Explorer”.
Well, I could fall for the name, for starters.
The piece is about the general Dora phenom, and it’s also about the palpable excitement at a live “Dora” show given in DC’s Warner Theater. (The “original”, Nickelodeon version of Dora is a cartoon character.) Here’s what Frey writes:

It’s Wednesday night at the Warner Theatre, the clock hovering around the normal bedtime hour for this preschool-and-up set, and the kids are on their feet. Screaming. “Vamos a la casa! Vamos a la casa!” From the balcony, it looks like a commercial for cultural diversity — or perhaps just an ad for Benetton Kids — the crowd so multiethnic that it seems possible to map your way through the hemispheres, excited face by excited face…

Continue reading “Sam, meet Dora”

I’ve had a great weekend in Boston with my son Tarek, who works here. I/we
had a number of interesting cultural experiences. Here are some I ended
up writing about:

Continue reading “Cultural notes, from Boston”

Marine’s Girl was eager to remind us that, regarding women and whistleblowing, Karen Kwiatkowski’s name definitely needs to be near the head of the list.
I agree!
Here is a good archive of KK’s recent writings. If you haven’t read anything by or about Karen, this is a good place to start. This is a great interview with her, too.
Karen was a USAF liutenant-colonel, working on intel analysis for the Middle East in what she now calls “the five-sided asylum” before sheer disgust at the way her civilian bosses were wilfully perverting the craft of intel analysis that she quit.
So yes, she definitely belongs in JWN’s emerging “Female Whistleblower Hall of Fame.”
Any other nominations?

Katherine Gun, Clare Short, Jane Turner,* Sherron Watkins,** hundreds of female service members now in the Gulf…
What do all these people have in common?
They are all female and they have all been whistleblowers on major abuses of the public trust that have been undertaken by supposedly responsible people in their own workplaces.
Is this a trend? How might we account for it?
I raised this question over our morning coffee today with Bill, the spouse.
“Maybe women are more honest?” he speculated. (What a sweetheart!)
“Or maybe,” I said, “many of these abuses are things that are done in some kind of a good-ol’-boys culture in the workplace, and the women have never been invited to become part of that? In fact, I’m sure a lot of women in all these organizations have had major battles of their own trying to deal with the good ol’ boys… So really, you wouldn’t expect them to have any investment in good-ol’-boy culture, would you?”
Anyway, it’s an interesting question. What do you JWN readers think?
—
* FBI agent, reported on a theft by another FBI agent from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. FBI responded by trying to dismiss her. (Today’s WaPo, p.A11. Hate their new registration system so not putting in link.)
** Revealed some of Ken Lay’s misdoings at Enron