Watch who gets dogged.
Will it be the functionally illiterate single mother, whose family has a high incidence of illiteracy, who was raped when she was 15 and then became wild, she says, because of a loss of self esteem because she was raped?
Or, will it be the drug addict mother, whose family took her child away from her because she was an addict, who, when placed in a dire situation, offered meth to a criminal?
Who? Me a cynic?
Philanthropist Smith Retires from League. I remember when he donated the loot for the student center. The next step for the big money makers is philanthropy.
After the criticism of his disastrous handling the Katrina disaster, President George Bush promises a reconstruction programme of $200bn for areas destroyed by the hurricane. But the first and biggest beneficiaries will be businesses that specialise in profiting from disaster, and have already had lucrative contracts in Iraq; they will gentrify New Orleans at the expense of its poor, black citizens.
THE tempest that destroyed New Orleans was conjured out of tropical seas and an angry atmosphere 250km offshore of the Bahamas. Labelled initially as “tropical depression 12” on 23 August, it quickly intensified into “tropical storm Katrina”, the eleventh named storm in one of the busiest hurricane seasons in history. Making landfall near Miami on 24 August, Katrina had grown into a small hurricane, category one on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, with 125 km/h winds that killed nine people and knocked out power to one million residents.
Crossing over Florida to the Gulf of Mexico where it wandered for four days, Katrina underwent a monstrous and largely unexpected transformation. Siphoning vast quantities of energy from the Gulf’s abnormally warm waters, 3°C above their usual August temperature, Katrina mushroomed into an awesome, top-of-the-scale, class five hurricane with 290 km/h winds that propelled tsunami-like storm surges nearly 10m in height. The journal Nature later reported that Katrina absorbed so much heat from the Gulf that “water temperatures dropped dramatically after it had passed, in some regions from 30°C to 26°C” (1). Horrified meteorologists had rarely seen a Caribbean hurricane replenish its power so dramatically, and researchers debated whether or not Katrina’s explosive growth was a portent of global warming’s impact on hurricane intensity.
Although Katrina had dropped to category four, with 210-249 km/h winds, by the time it careened ashore in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, near the mouth of the Mississippi river on early 29 August, it was small consolation to the doomed oil ports, fishing camps and Cajun villages in its direct path. In Plaquemines, and again on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Alabama, it churned the bayous with relentless wrath, leaving behind a devastated landscape that looked like a watery Hiroshima.
Metropolitan New Orleans, with 1.3 million inhabitants, was originally dead centre in Katrina’s way, but the storm veered to the right after landfall and its eye passed 55km to the east of the metropolis. The Big Easy, largely under sea-level and bordered by the salt-water embayments known as Lake Pontchartrain (on the north) and Lake Borgne (on the east), was spared the worst of Katrina’s winds but not its waters.
Hurricane-driven storm surges from both lakes broke through the notoriously inadequate levees, not as high as in more affluent areas, which guard black-majority eastern New Orleans as well as adjacent white blue-collar suburbs in St Bernard Parish. There was no warning and the rapidly rising waters trapped and killed hundreds of unevacuated people in their bedrooms, including 34 elderly residents of a nursing home. Later, probably around midday, a more formidable floodwall gave way at the 17th Street Canal, allowing Lake Pontchartrain to pour into low-lying central districts.
Although New Orleans’s most famous tourist assets, including the French Quarter and the Garden District, and its most patrician neighbourhoods, such as Audubon Park, are built on high ground and survived the inundation, the rest of the city was flooded to its rooftops or higher, damaging or destroying more than 150,000 housing units. Locals promptly called it “Lake George” after the president who failed to build new levees or come to their aid after the old ones had burst.
Inequalities of class and race
Bush initially said that “the storm didn’t discriminate”, a claim he was later forced to retract: every aspect of the catastrophe was shaped by inequalities of class and race. Besides unmasking the fraudulent claims of the Department of Homeland Security to make Americans safer, the shock and awe of Katrina also exposed the devastating consequences of federal neglect of majority black and Latino big cities and their vital infrastructures. The incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) demonstrated the folly of entrusting life-and-death public mandates to clueless political appointees and ideological foes of “big government”. The speed with which Washington suspended the prevailing wage standards of the Davis-Bacon Act (2) and swung open the doors of New Orleans to corporate looters such as Halliburton, the Shaw Group and Blackwater Security, already fat from the spoils of the Tigris, contrasted obscenely with Fema’s deadly procrastination over sending water, food and buses to the multitudes trapped in the stinking hell of the Louisiana Superdome.
But if New Orleans, as many bitter exiles now believe, was allowed to die as a result of governmental incompetence and neglect, blame also squarely falls on the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, and especially on City Hall on Perdido Street. Mayor C Ray Nagin is a wealthy African-American cable television executive and a Democrat, who was elected in 2002 with 87% of the white vote (3).
He was ultimately responsible for the safety of the estimated quarter of the population that was too poor or infirm to own a car. His stunning failure to mobilise resources to evacuate car-less residents and hospital patients, despite warning signals from the city’s botched response to the threat of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004, reflected more than personal ineptitude: it was also a symbol of the callous attitude among the city’s elites, both white and black, toward their poor neighbours in backswamp districts and rundown housing projects. Indeed, the ultimate revelation of Katrina was how comprehensively the promise of equal rights for poor African-Americans has been dishonoured and betrayed by every level of government.
A death foretold
The death of New Orleans had been forewarned; indeed no disaster in American history had been so accurately predicted in advance. Although the Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, would later claim that “the size of the storm was beyond anything his department could have anticipated,” this was flatly untrue. If scientists were surprised by Katrina’s sudden burgeoning to super-storm dimensions, they had grim confidence in exactly what New Orleans could expect from the landfall of a great hurricane.
Since the nasty experience of Hurricane Betsy in September 1965 (a category three storm that inundated many eastern parts of Orleans Parish that were drowned by Katrina), the vulnerability of the city to wind-driven storm surges has been intensively studied and widely publicised. In 1998, after a close call with Hurricane Georges, research increased and a sophisticated computer study by Louisiana State University warned of the “virtual destruction” of the city by a category four storm approaching from the southwest (4).
The city’s levees and stormwalls are only designed to withstand a category three hurricane, but even that threshold of protection was revealed as illusory in computer simulations last year by the Army Corps of Engineers. The continuous erosion of southern Louisiana’s barrier islands and bayou wetlands (an estimated annual shoreline loss of 60-100 sq km) increases the height of surges as they arrive at New Orleans, while the city, along with its levees, is slowly sinking. As a result even a category three, if slow moving, would flood most of it (5). Global warming and sea-level rise will only make the “Big One”, as folks in New Orleans, like their counterparts in Los Angeles, call the local apocalypse, even bigger.
Lest politicians have difficulty understanding the implications of such predictions, other studies modelled the exact extent of flooding as well as the expected casualties of a direct hit. Supercomputers repeatedly cranked out the same horrifying numbers: 160 sq km or more of the city under water with 80-100,000 dead, the worst disaster in United States history. In the light of these studies, Fema warned in 2001 that a hurricane flood in New Orleans was one of the three mega-catastrophes most likely to strike the US in the near future, along with a California earthquake and a terrorist attack on Manhattan.
Shortly afterwards, the magazine Scientific American published an account of the flood danger (“Drowning New Orleans”, October 2001) which, like an award-winning series (“The Big One’) in the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, in 2002, was chillingly accurate in its warnings. Last year, after meteorologists predicted a strong upsurge in hurricane activity, federal officials carried out an elaborate disaster drill (“Hurricane Pam”) that re-confirmed that casualties would be likely to be in the tens of thousands.
The Bush administration’s response to these frightening forecasts was to rebuff Louisiana’s urgent requests for more flood protection: the crucial Coast 2050 project to revive protective wetlands, the culmination of a decade of research and negotiation, was shelved and levee appropriations, including the completion of defences around Lake Pontchartrain, were repeatedly slashed.
Washington at work
In part, this was a consequence of new priorities in Washington that squeezed the budget of the Army Corps: a huge tax cut for the rich, the financing of the war in Iraq, and the costs of “Homeland Security”. Yet there was undoubtedly a brazen political motive as well: New Orleans is a black-majority, solidly Democratic city whose voters frequently wield the balance of power in state elections. Why would an administration so relentlessly focused on partisan warfare seek to reward this thorn in Karl Rove’s side by authorising the $2.5bn that senior Corps officials estimated would be required to build a category five protection system around the city? (6).
Indeed when the head of the Corps, a former Republican congressman, protested in 2002 against the way that flood-control projects were being short-changed, Bush removed him from office. Last year the administration also pressured Congress to cut $71m from the budget of the Corps’s New Orleans district despite warnings of epic hurricane seasons close at hand.
To be fair, Washington has spent a lot of money on Louisiana, but it has been largely on non-hurricane-related public works that benefit shipping interests and hardcore Republican districts (7). Besides underfunding coastline restoration and levee construction, the White House mindlessly vandalised Fema. Under director James Lee Witt (who enjoyed Cabinet rank), Fema had been the showpiece of the Clinton administration, winning bipartisan praise for its efficient dispatch of search and rescue teams and prompt provision of federal aid after the 1993 Mississippi River floods and the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake.
When Republicans took over the agency in 2001, it was treated as enemy terrain: the new director, former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh, decried disaster assistance as “an oversized entitlement programme” and urged Americans to rely more upon the Salvation Army and other faith-based groups. Allbaugh cut back many key flood and storm mitigation programmes, before resigning in 2003 to become a highly-paid consultant to firms seeking contracts in Iraq. (An inveterate ambulance-chaser, he recently reappeared in Louisiana as an insider broker for firms looking for lucrative reconstruction work in the wake of Katrina.)
Since its absorption into the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003 (with the loss of its representation in the cabinet), Fema has been repeatedly downsized, and also ensnared in new layers of bureaucracy and patronage. Last year Fema employees wrote to Congress: “Emergency managers at Fema have been supplanted on the job by politically connected contractors and by novice employees with little background or knowledge” (8).
A new Maginot Line
A prime example was Allbaugh’s successor and protégé, Michael Brown, a Republican lawyer with no emergency management experience, whose previous job was representing the wealthy owners of Arabian horses. Under Brown, Fema continued its metamorphosis from an “all hazards” approach to a monomaniacal emphasis on terrorism. Three-quarters of the federal disaster preparedness grants that Fema formerly used to support local earthquake, storm and flood prevention has been diverted to counter-terrorism scenarios. The Bush administration has built a Maginot Line against al-Qaida while neglecting levees, storm walls and pumps.
There was every reason for anxiety, if not panic, when the director of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Max Mayfield, warned Bush (still vacationing in Texas) and Homeland Security officials in a video-conference on 28 August that Katrina was poised to devastate New Orleans. Yet Brown, faced with the possible death of 100,000 locals,-exuded breathless, arrogant bravado: “We were so ready for this. We planned for this kind of disaster for many years because we’ve always known about New Orleans.” For months Brown, and his boss Chertoff, had trumpeted the new National Response Plan that would ensure unprecedented coordination amongst government agencies during a major disaster.
But as floodwaters swallowed New Orleans and its suburbs, it was difficult to find anyone to answer a phone, much less take charge of the relief operation. “A mayor in my district,” an angry Republican congressman told the Wall Street Journal, “tried to get supplies for his constituents, who were hit directly by the hurricane. He called for help and was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually, a bureaucrat promised to write a memo to his supervisor” (9). Although state-of-the-art communications were supposedly the backbone of the new plan, frantic rescue workers and city officials were plagued by the breakdown of phone systems and the lack of a common bandwidth.
At the same time they faced immediate shortages of the critical food rations, potable water, sandbags, generator fuel, satellite phones, portable toilets, buses, boats, and helicopters, Fema should have pre-positioned in New Orleans. Most fatefully, Chertoff inexplicably waited 24 hours after the city had been flooded to upgrade the disaster to an “incident of national significance”, the legal precondition for moving federal response into high gear.
Far more than the reluctance of the president to return to work, or the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to interrupt a mansion-hunting trip, or the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to end a shoe-buying expedition in Manhattan, it was the dinosaur-like slowness of the brain of Homeland Security to register the magnitude of the disaster that doomed so many to die clinging to their roofs or hospital beds. Lathered in premature, embarrassing praise from Bush for their heroic exertions, Chertoff and Brown were more like sleepwalkers.
As late as 2 September, Chertoff astonished an interviewer on National Public Radio by claiming that the scenes of death and desperation inside the Superdome, which the world was watching on television, were just “rumours and anecdotes”. Brown blamed the victims, claiming that most deaths were the fault of “people who did not heed evacuation warnings”, although he knew that “heeding” had nothing to do with the lack of an automobile or confinement in a wheelchair.
Despite claims by the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, that the tragedy had nothing to do with Iraq, the absence of more than a third of the Louisiana National Guard and much of its heavy equipment crippled rescue and relief operations from the outset. Fema often obstructed rather than facilitated relief: preventing civilian aircraft from evacuating hospital patients and delaying authorisations for out-of-state National Guard and rescue teams to enter the area. As an embittered representative from devastated St Bernard Parish told the Times-Picayune: “Canadian help arrived before the US Army did” (10).
A conservative New Jerusalem
New Orleans City Hall could have used Canadian help: the emergency command centre on its ninth floor was put out of operation early in the emergency by a shortage of diesel to run its backup generator. For two days Nagin and his aides were cut off from the outside world by the failure of both their landlines and cellular phones. This collapse of the city’s command-and-control apparatus is puzzling in view of the $18m in federal grants that the city had spent since 2002 in training exercises to deal with such contingencies. Even more mysterious was the relationship between Nagin and his state and federal counterparts. As the mayor later summarised it, the city’s disaster plan was: “Get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state -airlift supplies to them.” Yet Nagin’s Director of Homeland Security, Colonel Terry Ebbert, astonished journalists with the admission that “he never spoke with Fema about the state disaster blueprint” (11).
Nagin later ranted with justification about Fema’s failure to pre-position supplies or to rush buses and medical supplies promptly to the Superdome. But evacuation planning was, above all, a city responsibility; and earlier planning exercises and surveys had shown that at least a fifth of the population would be unable to leave without assistance (12). In September 2004 Nagin had been roundly criticised for making no effort to evacuate poor residents as their better-off neighbours drove off before category-three Hurricane Ivan (which fortunately veered away from the city at the last moment).
In response, the city produced, but never distributed, 30,000 videos targeted at poor neighbourhoods that urged residents “Don’t wait for the city, don’t wait for the state, don’t wait for the Red Cross, leave.” In the absence of official planning to provide buses or better, trains, such advice seem to imply that poor people had to start walking. But when, after the breakdown of sanitation and order in the Superdome, hundreds did attempt to escape the city by walking across a bridge into the white suburb of Gretna, they were turned back by panicky local police who fired over their heads.
It is inevitable that many of those left behind in drowning neighbourhoods will interpret City Hall’s unconscionable negligence in the context of the bitter economic and racial schisms that have long made New Orleans the most tragic city in the US. It is no secret that its business elites and their allies in City Hall would like to push the poorest segment of the population, blamed for high crime rates, out of the city. Historic public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offences as trivial as their children’s curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans, Las Vegas on the Mississippi, with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.
Not surprisingly, some advocates of a whiter, safer city see a divine plan in Katrina. “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” a leading Louisiana Republican confined to Washington lobbyists. “We couldn’t do it, but God did” (13). Nagin boasted of his empty streets and ruined neighbourhoods: “This city is for the first time free of drugs and violence, and we intend to keep it that way.”
A partial ethnic cleansing of New Orleans will be a fait accompli without massive local and federal efforts to provide affordable housing for tens of thousands of poor renters now dispersed across the country in refugee shelters. Already there is intense debate about transforming some of poorest, low-lying neighbourhoods, such the Lower Ninth Ward (flooded again by Hurricane Rita), into water retention ponds to protect wealthier parts. As the Wall Street Journal has rightly emphasised, “That would mean preventing some of New Orleans’s poorest residents from ever returning to their neighbourhoods” (14).
Epic political dogfight
As everyone recognises, the rebuilding of New Orleans and the rest of afflicted Gulf region will be an epic political dogfight. Already Nagin has staked out the claims of the local gentrifying class by announcing that he will appoint a 16-member reconstruction commission evenly split between whites and blacks, although the city is more than 75% African-American. Its “white-flight” suburbs (social springboards for neo-Nazi David Duke’s frightening electoral successes in the early 1990s) will fiercely lobby for their cause, while Mississippi’s powerful Republican establishment has already warned that it will not play second fiddle to Big Easy Democrats. In this inevitable clash of interest groups, it is unlikely that the city’s traditional black neighbourhoods, the true hearths of its joyous sensibility and jazz culture, will be able to exercise much clout.
The Bush administration hopes to find its own resurrection in a combination of rampant fiscal Keynesianism and fundamentalist social engineering. Katrina’s immediate impact on the Potomac was such a steep fall in Bush’s popularity, and, collaterally, in approval for the US occupation of Iraq, that Republican hegemony seemed suddenly under threat. For the first time since the Los Angeles riots of 1992, “old Democrat” issues such as poverty, racial injustice and public investment temporarily commanded public discourse, and the Wall Street Journal warned that Republicans had “to get back on the political and intellectual offensive” before liberals like Ted Kennedy could revive New Deal nostrums, such as a massive federal agency for flood -control and shoreline restoration along the Gulf coast (15).
The Heritage Foundation hosted meetings late into the night at which conservative ideologues, congressional cadres and the ghosts of Republicans past (such as Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan’s former Attorney General) hashed a strategy to rescue Bush from the toxic aftermath of Fema’s disgrace. New Orleans’s floodlit but empty Jackson Square was the eerie backdrop for Bush’s 15 September speech on reconstruction. It was an extraordinary performance. He sunnily reassured two million victims that the White House would pick up most of the tab for the estimated $200bn flood damage: deficit spending on a scale that would have given Keynes vertigo. (It has not deterred him from proposing another huge tax cut for the super-rich.)
Bush wooed his political base with a dream list of long-sought-after conservative social reforms: school and housing vouchers (16), a central role for churches, an urban homestead lottery (17), extensive tax breaks to businesses, the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone (18), and the suspension of annoying government regulations (in the fine print these include prevailing wages in construction and environmental regulations on offshore drilling).
For connoisseurs of Bush-speak, the speech was a moment of exquisite déjà vu. Had not similar promises been made on the banks of the Euphrates? As Paul Krugman cruelly pointed out, the White House, having tried and failed to turn Iraq “into a laboratory for conservative economic policies”, would now experiment on traumatised inhabitants of Biloxi and the Ninth Ward (19). Congressman Mike Pence, a leader of the powerful Republican Study Group which helped draft Bush’s reconstruction agenda, emphasised that Republicans would turn the rubble into a capitalist utopia: “We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was” (20).
Symptomatically, the Army Corps in New Orleans is now led by the official who formerly oversaw contracts in Iraq (21). The Lower Ninth Ward may never exist again, but already the barroom and strip-joint owners in the French Quarter are relishing the fat days ahead, as the Halliburton workers, Blackwater mercenaries, and Bechtel engineers leave their federal paychecks behind on Bourbon Street. As they say in Cajun, — and no doubt now in the White House too — “laissez les bons temps rouler!”
Mike Davis is the author of ‘The Monster at Our Door. The Global Threat of Avian Flu’ (New Press, New York, 2005), ‘Dead cities, and other tales’ (New Press, 2002), ‘Late Victorian holocausts : El Nino famines and the making of the third world’ (Verso, London and New York, 2001), ‘Ecology of fear : Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster’ (Picador, London, 2000) and many other works.
(1) Quirin Schiermeier, “The Power of Katrina,” Nature, no 437, London, 8 September 2005.
(2) Editorial note: legislation dating from the New Deal obliging public employers to respect the minimum local wage.
(3) Though Louisiana voted for Bush in 2004 (56.7%), New Orleans is traditionally Democrat.
(4) Study by engineering professor Joseph Suhayda described in Richard Campanella, Time and Place in New Orleans, Gretna, Los Angeles, 2002.
(5) John Travis, “Scientists’ Fears Come True as Hurricane Floods New Orleans”, Science, no 309, New York, 9 September 2005.
(6) Andrew Revkin and Christopher Drew, “Intricate Flood Protection Long a Focus of Dispute,” New York Times, 1 September 2005.
(7) “Katrina’s Message on the Corps,” New York Times, 13 September 2005.
(8) “Top Fema Jobs: No Experience Required,” Los Angeles Times, 9 September 2005.
(9) Congressman Bobby Jindal, “When Red Tape Trumped Common Sense,” Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005.
(10) Melinda Deslatte, “St Bernard Parish residents overflow the Capital,” Times-Picayune, 12 September 2005.
(11) New York Times, 7 and 11 September 2005.
(12) Tony Reichhardt, Erika Check and Emma Morris, “After the flood,” Nature, no 437, 8 September 2005.
(13) Congressman Richard Baker (Baton Rouge) quoted in “Washington Wire,” Wall Street Journal, 9 September 2005.
(14) “As Gulf Prepares to Rebuild, Tensions Mount Over Control,” Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005.
(15) “Hurricane Bush,” Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005.
(16) Editor’s note: rental vouchers were issued, backed by Congress-approved funds, to 20,000 homeless after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake to pay for rent anywhere in the state.
(17) Editor’s note: a plan to distribute federal land to those who would pledge to erect a house on it and could afford to do so. It is estimated that this would provide about 4,000 sites for 250,000 displaced people, 125,000 of whom were renting.
(18) Editor’s note: a zone in which relief is related to private financial initiatives.
(19) “Not the New Deal,” New York Times, 16 September 2005.
(20) John Wilke and Brody Mullins, “After Katrina, Republicans Back a Sea of Conservative Ideas,” Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005.
(21) Editorial, “Mr Bush in New Orleans,” New York Times, 16 September 2005.
Allegedly an AP news item, but it had no links and I couldn't verify it (the Kanye and Pepsi around the world promotion is still playing at pepsi.com) but hey, like the MSM's coverage of black folks in New Orleans, sometimes you gotta break some eggs in order to make up some news;
Kanye West, former spokesperson for Pepsi, has since lost his endorsement deal with the soft drink giant due to his publicized remarks regarding the mishandling of the Katrina evacuees/victims.
The rest of the note enclosed calls for a boycott of Pepsi products. Other than the Quaker Oats, I don't see any non-expendable health food items being peddled by Pepsi.
I mean if you're like me...just SICK and TIRED of being black in America and being mishandled, then do something. Our parents and their parent's SHUT DOWN an entire bus system during the Civil Rights era by CHOOSING to do something.
Here is your opportunity.
We're calling a boycott on ALL Pepsi products. If they want to drop
Kanye, how about we DROP them! And as much as we love a good Pepsi and
a bag of Fritos, we should NOT buy another Pepsi including any of
their family products (see link below) until a formal apology is given
and a donation is rendered to the Red Cross (or a similar organization) in the sum of the amount of Kanye's contract with Pepsi.
If you're committed to doing something to tell not just Pepsi but the
world (including the Associated Press for that racist caption) that
there is power in the Black community, then pass this along. Because
there's POWER in numbers.
Ethiopian Proverb:
"When the webs of the spider UNITE, they can trap a LION."
We Can Do This!
Pepsi Products:
Pepsi/Frito Lay/Gatorade/Tropicana/Quaker/Brisk Ice Tea See a list of
products by clicking here:
Black-Partisan Republicans, to distinguish them from Black Republicans and despised Black Conservatives, sometimes have to take one for the Republican team. Though they know better, both morally and intellectually, because of the fact that black folk remain hyperdependant on middle-eastern petroleum too, somebody has to suck it up and act hard in support of the republic's incredibly imaginative just-so-stories spun in support of the discretionary quagmire that thuggery has wrought.
One wonders to what lengths the republic will have to go in order to hold together the fragile jingoistic fig leaf covering over the terror of the situation? In light of yesterday's revelation by Reuter's Chief in the Guardian;
Reuters has told the US government that American forces' conduct towards journalists in Iraq is "spiralling out of control" and preventing full coverage of the war reaching the public.
The detention and accidental shootings of journalists is limiting how journalists can operate, wrote David Schlesinger, the Reuters global managing editor, in a letter to Senator John Warner, head of the armed services committee.
The Reuters news service chief referred to "a long parade of disturbing incidents whereby professional journalists have been killed, wrongfully detained, and/or illegally abused by US forces in Iraq".
Mr Schlesinger urged the senator to raise the concerns with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who is due to testify to the committee this Thursday.
He asked Mr Warner to demand that Mr Rumsfeld resolve these issues "in a way that best balances the legitimate security interests of the US forces in Iraq and the equally legitimate rights of journalists in conflict zones under international law".
At least 66 journalists and media workers, most of them Iraqis, have been killed in the country since March 2003.
US forces admitted killing three Reuters journalists, most recently soundman Waleed Khaled, who was shot by American soldiers on August 28 while on assignment in Baghdad. But the military said the soldiers were justified in opening fire. Reuters believes a fourth journalist working for the agency, who died in Ramadi last year, was killed by a US sniper.
'A serious chilling effect on the media'
"The worsening situation for professional journalists in Iraq directly limits journalists' abilities to do their jobs and, more importantly, creates a serious chilling effect on the media overall," Mr Schlesinger wrote.
"By limiting the ability of the media to fully and independently cover the events in Iraq, the US forces are unduly preventing US citizens from receiving information ... and undermining the very freedoms the US says it is seeking to foster every day that it commits US lives and US dollars."
Mr Schlesinger said the US military had refused to conduct independent and transparent investigations into the deaths of the Reuters journalists, relying instead on inquiries by officers from the units responsible, who had exonerated their soldiers.
He noted that the US military had failed to implement recommendations by its own inquiry into the death of award-winning Palestinian cameraman Mazen Dana, who was shot dead while filming outside Abu Ghraib prison in August 2003.
He said that Reuters and other reputable international news organisations were concerned by the "sizeable and rapidly increasing number of journalists detained by US forces".
He said detentions were prompted by legitimate journalistic activity such as possessing photographs and video of insurgents, which US soldiers assumed showed sympathy with the insurgency.
Earlier this week Reuters demanded the release of a freelance Iraqi cameraman after a secret tribunal ordered that he be detained indefinitely.
Samir Mohammed Noor, a freelance cameraman working for Reuters, was arrested by Iraqi troops at his home in the northern town of Tal Afar four months ago.
A US military spokesman has told the agency that a secret hearing held last week had found him to be "an imperative threat to the coalition forces and the security of Iraq".
The news agency has demanded that he be released or given a chance to defend himself in open court.
The US network CBS has raised concerns over the arrest of its cameraman, Abdul Amir Younes, who was arrested in hospital in April after he was shot by US troops.
CBS said it is concerned that he had no legal representation at the hearing and has had no chance to see the evidence against him.
· To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857
· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".
Journalists in danger
30.08.2005: Press groups demand release of Iraqi cameraman
26.08.2005: No special treatment for journalists in Iraq, says US
20.05.2005: I never said US tried to kill reporters, says ex-CNN boss
03.05.2005: Journalist death toll worst since 1955
28.04.2005: Captive journalists may still be alive
27.04.2005: Kidnappers threaten to execute Romanians
08.04.2005: CBS cameraman shot by US troops
29.03.2005: Romanian journalists kidnapped in Iraq
07.03.2005: Italian hostage accuses US
18.02.2005: Journalist group calls US to account over Iraq
16.02.2005: Kidnapped journalist makes video plea for freedom
04.02.2005: Italian reporter kidnapped in Iraq
09.02.2005: Journalist killed with son in Iraq
04.05.2004: Media death toll highest for a decade
27.08.2004: Media war toll rises
18.01.2005: Do more to protect journalists, governments told
18.01.2005: Journalists' killers 'not being brought to justice'
International News Safety Institute
Julia Day
Wednesday September 28, 2005
Ashley Smith frank about her flaws in new book
She gave Brian Nichols meth to put alleged killer at ease
By JENNIFER BRETT
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/27/05
Ashley Smith, the woman held hostage for hours after the March 11 Fulton County Courthouse shootings, reveals in a book released today that she gave alleged gunman Brian Nichols drugs on the night he held her captive.
Smith, 27, was thrust into a national media spotlight after talking her way out of Nichols' captivity and then calling police. In "Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage Hero," Smith shares details of her seven-hour ordeal as a hostage in her Duluth apartment, and for the first time tells of giving Nichols drugs.
Nichols asked her for marijuana, she writes, but she had only a small amount of crystal methamphetamine. She thought offering him the drug might curry favor, but she says she refused to take the drug with him.
"I was not going to die tonight and stand before God, having done a bunch of ice up my nose," she writes.
OK, someone smack her!
Hat tip: P6
Will Bush-Backing Black Ministers Get Him to Keep His Katrina Promises?
The religious leaders that have Bush’s ear must hold him to his word. If he reneges, they should publicly disassociate themselves from him. Katrina’s victims need an authentic unity, one that will deliver sustainable results so they can reconstruct their lives.
What. Ever.
Mathis is on the inside of Democratic politics. Why not ask about holding the CBC members accountable?
Subtitle: The Media Dropped a Big, Warm, Steaming Load in America's Living Room When Covering Katrina
When he media reported on the "violence" that happened in New Orleans after Katrina, the levee breaks, and the resulting floods, they reported a lot of things that were "sensational".
Now that things have calmed down a bit, the reality of some of those "sensational" reports is starting to come out.
(I received this link in e-mail).
Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated
Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated
6 bodies found at Dome; 4 at Convention Center
By Brian Thevenot
and Gordon Russell
Staff writers
After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.
The real total was six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.
...
"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."
...
"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."
Earlier on, I started to question what was being reported.
The first questioning of reporting that I saw, was done from the The Guardian.
Murder and rape - fact or fiction?
Gary Younge in Baton Rouge
Tuesday September 6, 2005
The Guardian
There were two babies who had their throats slit. The seven-year-old
girl who was raped and murdered in the Superdome. And the corpses laid
out amid the excrement in the convention centre.
In a week filled with dreadful scenes of desperation and anger from
New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina some stories stood out.
But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated and may yet prove to
be apocryphal.
New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped
child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and
convention centre.
Adding to that, you have some conservative pundits saying that Katrina exposed "the failure of the welfare state." Meanwhile, what seemed to get lost in the events were some very basic facts:
Addressing the "learned helplessness" because of "the failure of the welfare state", let me quote from the first article again:
"We're not prisoners of war - y'all are treating us like evacuees and
detainees!" he recalled one of them shouting.
But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the
Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon
themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.
"Everybody needs to help the soldiers," Baldwin recalled one of them
saying. "We're all family here."
About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.
"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around
their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off,
grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena"
next door, which housed the medical operation.
And, to close this out, for now, re-read this first hand account.
What I hope to have done was to show how the media was irresponsible in the coverage of Katrina. The 24 hour news cycle did a large disservice to the people of New Orleans, Mississippi, and other affected Gulf States.
The media gave a portrait of people that was wrong, and I must say, racist. They showed the "poor Blacks" but didn't show the "poor whites". This story became a "poor Black" story instead of an affected people story.
Yet again, the media chose to portray the Blacks in the area as poor, lawless, and out of control. And it wasn't just the "liberal" media who did it. It was the "conservative" media as well.
When I have time, I'm going to do more on the media and Katrina, addressing it more from the race angle.
Do you remember seeing news film coverage of the Civil Rights battles where a white man is telling a reporter that they wouldn't have any race problems if the media weren't involved?
Well, after viewing the media irresponsibility at work during Katrina, I think I have some understanding of that point of view.
More later.
Lynne continues structural meditations on being the media. The angle of approach is waaaay steep for my preferences, see, I believe all the enabling technology required has been around for a while but that the bottleneck is the rate of grass roots adoption. Seems etherially interwoven with the notion of a community systems group.., necessity being the inflection point for essential communal adoption and repurposing of existing technology.
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Enclosed is CEO of Black Energy, Dr. Sonja Ebron's prescient and profoundly insightful 2.5 year old article On Why African Americans Should Oppose the War in the Black Commentator. This article is suitable for framing and gifting to republicans formerly known as black. It is particularly apropos for those deeply conflicted few - who mendaciously cheerlead the loony, losing, and incompetent neocon buccaneers in their catastrophic away game defeat at the hands of Iraqi irregulars to the incongruous strains of odd turettish noises about nationalism, morality, philosophy and spirituality.
"... the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," April 4, 1967 at New York City's Riverside Church
"If we don't have boots in the Iraqi desert by spring, we have to wait till winter because of the heat," says conventional wisdom. Don't believe the hype: our soldiers can handle the heat, but gas and oil prices can't stand the cold. Heavy demand makes winter fuel prices the highest of the year, and prices spike when an oil producer like Iraq is attacked. Best to fight in the spring and summer when prices are low. That's just the first lesson in the nexus between oil, money, time and the taking of other people's property by force. As the U.S. government rushes to invade and occupy Iraq, people around the globe ask Why, Why now, and Why so alone?
Look all around you. Plastics, carpets, asphalt, paint, fertilized soil. Look how electrified our lifestyles. All of it based in oil and gas. Transportation systems, the glue of our economy, needed for centralized workplaces and the economic cohesion of our nation, dependent on oil. Agriculture, pharmaceuticals, a host of other industries all critically dependent on oil. Globally, one's personal income is more closely related to the amount of energy one consumes than to any other factor. Oil is the most liquid energy, the form most easily transformed to others. The more oil you use, directly or indirectly, the richer you are. As the richest country on the planet, U.S. oil consumption is more than 20 million barrels a day and rising. We produce less than half those barrels, importing the rest largely from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iraq. Within 20 years, we will import 6.5 barrels out of every 10 we consume.
U.S. oil production peaked in 1971, enabling OPEC's 1973 oil embargo and the deep economic recession that resulted. Jimmy Carter changed our country's policy toward Arab nations in 1980 by designating the supply of cheap oil from southwest Asia (the "Middle East") vital to national security. Our policy in the region quickly evolved to prevent the rise of a hegemonic power, like Iraq was becoming in 1990, able to influence use of the region's oil. The world's oil production will peak this decade, bringing with it a permanent change in oil market control from those who consume to those who produce. This change will occur at a time when our economy is far more dependent on imported oil than it was in the 1970s. With deep roots in the oil industry, the Bush administration rightly seeks to diversify our sources of imported oil. Large oil and gas deposits in the Caspian Sea (circumscribed by Iran, Russia, and the -stans in central Asia), South America (including Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil), the South China Sea (circumscribed by Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia), and West Africa (primarily Nigeria, Angola and Gabon) are consequently drawing sober U.S. interest.
Black Americans have historic and cultural ties to Africa, as illustrated by our concern with the continent's poverty and HIV/AIDS rates, its terms of international trade, and its continuing struggles against colonialism. Many of us cheered last year when all 53 African states vowed to increase trade and to cross national boundaries as necessary to implement the mandates of a new African Union. Few of us know that Africa produces one-seventh of the oil consumed in the U.S., a figure that will rise to one-quarter over the next decade. Even fewer know that oil discoveries in Africa have outpaced those of every other region for several years. "West Africa's oil has become of national strategic interest to us," Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner declared early last year. "African oil should be treated as a priority for U.S. post-September 11th security," added Congressman Edward Royce, chair of the Africa subcommittee in the House of Representatives. Discussions are ongoing at the highest levels of our government to formally designate west Africa a region vital to national security. Those of us with interests in Africa - African Americans, in particular - must understand the implications of this. With the size of Africa's oil exports growing to rival Saudi Arabia's, we must assess our government's war plans against the U.S. need for oil.
Our country is the largest consumer of the world's oil, but our economy is tied to oil in more ways than one. Since the 1940s, oil has been denominated in U.S. dollars only, making our dollar the world's preeminent reserve currency. Nations buy and hold dollars like they buy and hold gold because they can't purchase oil without dollars. With this support for our currency, U.S. foreign debt has grown to $2.8 trillion, or $10,000 owed to foreigners by every man, woman and child in our country. Last year's trade deficit alone was more than $500 billion and shows no sign of slowing. Any other country with our lack of fiscal discipline would see its currency and stock market crash hard. But the dollar's value is essentially backed by oil, which allows our Treasury to simply print money as needed to finance our debt. Since accounting makes no allowance for fiat money, the General Accounting Office has been unwilling to certify our nation's financial statements for several years. We can operate this way only while our dollar is the world's preeminent reserve currency; without dollar preeminence, there is hell to pay.
Enter the real "weapon of mass destruction," the euro. Eleven European countries formed a monetary union around this currency on January 1, 1999; Britain and Norway, the major European oil producers, were conspicuously absent. Due to the strength of European economies, the euro now presents a serious challenge to the dollar in its role as key reserve currency. The rise of the euro also threatens to hobble the British pound's eventual entry into Europe's monetary union. Britain and the U.S. have mutual interests in oil to match their interests in the euro. Of the five largest oil companies in the world, two (ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco) are U.S.-based, two (Royal Dutch/Shell and BP) are based in Britain, and one (TotalFinaElf) is French. U.S. and British oil companies are all but banned from exploration in Iraq, while French, Russian and Chinese companies have contracts waiting for the lifting of sanctions. France and Germany, the largest economies in the Euro-zone, can diminish U.S. credibility and keep the euro on track to become the key reserve currency by preventing war with Iraq.
Under U.S. and British military attack for the last decade, Iraq has had its exports restricted to oil through a United Nations oil-for-food program that deducts war reparations from the receipts. Iraq has used smugglers to trade its oil for goods and services, minimizing official oil sales as a way to influence prices and punish its attackers. Labeling the dollar "the currency of an enemy state," Iraq switched its oil denomination to the euro in late 2000, risking the loss of $270 million to the dollar's strength at that time vis-à-vis the euro. But the dollar lost 15% of its value against the euro last year. Iraq's move to the euro - and Iran's expected move - are placing tremendous pressure on OPEC countries and other oil producers to drop our dollar as the main transaction currency for oil. With a looming global peak in production, consuming nations must switch currencies when oil-producing states do so. For instance, Jordan began using euros to buy oil as soon as its major supplier, Iraq, began using them to sell, and North Korea switched to the euro late last year to protest the U.S.' halt in fuel aid. Given the highly leveraged and fragile state of our economy, an OPEC switch from the dollar to the euro would bring a quick and devastating dollar and Wall Street crash that would make 1929 look like a $50 casino bet. Iraq's currency action adds urgency to the coming oil price and supply crisis, so our leaders have moved to control both the flow and the currency denomination of oil.
The U.S. strategy to destroy OPEC is twofold: pressure non-OPEC producers to flood the oil market and retain denomination in dollars in an effort to weaken OPEC's market control, and change the leadership of any country switching oil denomination from the dollar to the euro (hence, the "axis of evil"). The strategy requires that the U.S. military assert our interests in oil and gas deposits worldwide. U.S. interests in the Caspian Sea have been secured through regime change in Afghanistan and a deal for a new pipeline through that country. U.S. interests in South America, despite the failure of the coup in Venezuela (an OPEC member), are being secured via military aid to neighboring Colombia. U.S. interests in southwest Asia are being secured through the planned invasion of Iraq, then Iran (both OPEC members) if it switches oil denomination. U.S. interests in the South China Sea are being secured through military deployments in the Philippines and off the Korean coast (near OPEC member Indonesia). But what of West Africa?
While most African countries import oil from outside the continent, Africa is a net oil exporter. That's because nearly all African oil is produced for export to Europe and North America. The vast majority of foreign direct investment in Africa is in the energy sector. In the largest project to date, ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco have invested $3 billion in a pipeline project to bring Chad's oil through Cameroon to the west African coast for export; the oil could flow by the end of this year. Yet the primary goal of the African Union is economic, political and military integration. In a nod to the continent's internal needs, ChevronTexaco is building a gas pipeline from Nigeria to ports in Ghana, Benin and Togo. Until OPEC lowered production quotas last year, Nigeria was selling large blocks of oil to South Africa and Kenya. As the African Union succeeds in integrating the continent's economies, Africa's oil exports will be turned increasingly to internal use. Does U.S. policy in Africa mirror our policy in the Persian Gulf, a policy designed to prevent the rise of a hegemonic power with influence on the use and denomination of the region's oil?
Sao Tome and Principe, an island nation 150 miles off the West African coast (triangulating Nigeria and Angola), agreed last year to host a U.S. naval base in exchange for protection of oil in its territorial waters. Nigeria has claimed exclusive licensing rights to an oil block in these waters for many years. The U.S. base could also be used to protect Cameroon's claims to Bakassi, the oil-rich island off its coast long claimed by Nigeria. A new deployment of U.S. Special Forces to Djibouti, a tiny country bordering Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, could likewise check national autonomy in the Horn of Africa. This troop deployment, designed to catch terrorists in east Africa, adds to the 3,000 French and German troops already present in the area. Our State Department has openly threatened Zimbabwe as that country puts its land back into Black hands. Like accusations levied against Somali "warlords" a decade ago, President Mugabe is charged with exacerbating Zimbabwe's famine by distributing food aid only to government supporters. Our country has numerous opportunities - and perhaps an incentive - to violate African sovereignty. The upshot is that African Americans could soon experience repression of the sort felt lately by our Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters.
What are we to do? Recognize that Black well being in the U.S. and around the world will be adversely impacted by our government's war for oil. Recognize that an oil war, by increasing the costs of energy, threatens oil-importing developing economies everywhere, especially those in Africa and South America, as well as Black America's. Recognize that the war to control the world's oil is in the late planning stages but is early in its implementation and can be stopped. Recognize that Martin was killed because of the moral authority he brought to the Vietnam anti-war movement, drawn from his use of the "race card," and that the African American community retains that authority. Recognize that our ability to drive domestic response to an immoral foreign policy is what keeps the warmongers up at night. Recognize that thoughtful Black people, from Nelson Mandela to your next-door neighbor, are against this war for two reasons: because it is against Black interests - in the U.S., in central and South America, in Africa - and because it is so very terribly wrong. Talk to your friends and family about your opposition to the war. Stick an anti-war poster in your yard and a bumper sticker on your car. Join or help organize a local or national protest. Call, write, email and visit your congressional representatives. Take a few "sick days" from work, and don't buy anything you don't absolutely need. Get behind the anti-war movement now, before it's too late.
We must also work on root causes with those in other communities. It may already be too late for a smooth transition from oil dependence to sustainable energy use, but we must begin now. If we are sensible, we'll invest in solar and wind technologies, human-powered and public transportation (bikes and buses), public agriculture, and other requirements of sustainable communities. We must get our economic house in order and rebuild our manufacturing base. "Made in the USA" means we'll have more jobs, even though they may be difficult and may not pay very well. Our lifestyles will change dramatically. Our standards of living will decrease, but the quality of our lives will improve. We'll be forced to depend more on each other, to communicate more with each other, to build stronger families and communities. And just maybe we won't have to kill people to maintain our economy. We can only suspect that, had the people's will prevailed in 2000, our president-in-exile would have begun this transition.
On September 20, 2001, President Bush declared, "The war will be fought not just by soldiers, but by police and intelligence forces, as well as in financial institutions." Hmmm. War is not the answer. It's a shortsighted desperation play that is doomed to failure. Our military forces may take but cannot hold Iraq's oil, as they have failed to tame Afghanistan's land. Far from staving off disaster, our arrogance may instead compel OPEC to "go euro" en masse, taking many oil-consuming nations with them by force of economics. And a trade war with Europe will lend the coup de grace to our economy. In the meantime, many people will be hurt and killed, research and development on fuel efficiency and renewable energy will be slowed, the necessary policy and tax initiatives on energy consumption will be delayed, and our country will be far worse off when intelligent leadership finally prevails.
Sonja Ebron is the chief executive of blackEnergy, the place to practice Black cooperative economics. blackEnergy brings the benefits of deregulated energy to Black communities everywhere.
Do you and yours have the wherewithal to respond effectively in the event of a natural or man-made disaster?
Do you and yours have the wherewithal to systematically and progressively alter the extent of your dependance on proven unreliable infrastructures?
Do you and yours the weirdos you know who actually trouble themselves to consider what Iraq, Katrina, and Rita signify in terms of reduced net energy and its consequences belong to a community with the adaptive mechanisms necessary to cope with what's in store?
Talk among yourselves..., after making your lists and checking them twice - you will find it necessary to organize a local community systems group. Be sure to be inclusive. It is imperative that you think and act outside your ritual habitual comfort zone.
Gretna.
Disaster strikes. You decide to evacuate. When you hit the border of the city, you are met by police. "If you attempt to cross, you will be shot."
At this point there are only two entities that can legitimately intervene. State government, and federal government. You take matters into your own hands, and most likely if you are black you are out of luck.
Kunstler keeps it severely real...,
There are two things that the newspapers and TV Cable News outfits are not covering very well. One is that the Port of New Orleans is not functioning, with poor prospects for a quick recovery, and with it will go much of the Midwestern grain harvest. Another thing that has fallen off the radar screen is the damage done to the oil and gas infrastructure around the Gulf Coast, especially the onshore facilities for storing and transporting stuff, and for marshaling the crews and equipment to fix stuff. The US is going to run short of its customary supplies for a long time. The idea that these things will not affect an economy of ceaseless mobility is not realistic.
Take a good look at America around you now, because when we emerge from the winter of 2005 - 6, we're going to be another country. The reality-oblivious nation of mall hounds, bargain shoppers, happy motorists, Nascar fans, Red State war hawks, and born-again Krispy Kremers is headed into a werewolf-like transformation that will reveal to all the tragic monster we have become.
What we will leave behind is the certainty that we have made the right choices. Was it a good thing to buy a 3,600 square foot house 32 miles outside Minneapolis with an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage -- with natural gas for home heating running at $12 a unit and gasoline over $3 a gallon? Was it the right choice to run three credit cards up to their $5000 limit? Was I chump to think my pension from Acme Airlines would really be there for me? Do I really owe the Middletown Hospital $17,678 for a gall bladder operation that took forty-five minutes? And why did they charge me $238 for a plastic catheter?
All kinds of assumptions about the okay-ness of our recent collective behavior are headed out the window. This naturally beats a straight path to politics, since that is the theater in which our collective choices are dramatized. It really won't take another jolting event like a major hurricane or a terror incident or an H4N5 flu outbreak to take things over the edge -- though it is very likely that something else will happen. George W. Bush, and the party he represents, are headed into full Hooverization mode. After Katrina, nobody will take claims of governmental competence seriously.
The new assumption will be that when shit happens you are on your own. In this remarkable three weeks since New Orleans was shredded, no Democrat has stepped into the vacuum of leadership, either, with a different vision of what we might do now, and who we might become. This is the kind of medium that political maniacs spawn in. Something is out there right now, feeding on the astonishment and grievance of a whipsawed middle class, and it will have a lot more nourishment in the months ahead.
There are two things that the newspapers and TV Cable News outfits are not covering very well. One is that the Port of New Orleans is not functioning, with poor prospects for a quick recovery, and with it will go much of the Midwestern grain harvest. Another thing that has fallen off the radar screen is the damage done to the oil and gas infrastructure around the Gulf Coast, especially the onshore facilities for storing and transporting stuff, and for marshaling the crews and equipment to fix stuff. The US is going to run short of its customary supplies for a long time. The idea that these things will not affect an economy of ceaseless mobility is not realistic.
These serious problems on-the-ground are going to affect the more ephemeral elements floating around in the financial ether: the value of the dollar, the hazard in hedge funds, the credibility of institutions. By October, the hurricane season will be ending and the stock market crash season will be underway. It is hard to imagine that companies like WalMart really believe they will keep their profits up when their customers are paying twice as much as they did a year ago to heat their houses and fill their gas tanks.
Meanwhile, does anybody remember a place called Iraq? A bomb that killed thirty people was reported on page 12 of the Sunday New York Times. That's how important Iraq has become. But, I guess, a nation can hardly pay attention to a bullet in the foot when it has a sucking chest wound.
Sooner than you imagine, peak oil will evolve a test of mankind's humanity to our less fortunate fellows. Will some sort of oil depletion protocol come to pass allowing at least of modicum of oil to support every country's essential services? Or will peak oil be marked by survival of the richest?
This will soon be seen as the heart of the peak oil moral dilemma.
When the historians come to write the history of the 21st Century, they may well record that the African nation of Zimbabwe was the first to succumb to peak oil.
For students of African economies, the current Zimbabwean meltdown comes as no surprise. During the last decade, Zimbabwe 's dysfunctional government got itself involved in war that drained the treasury and then implemented a land redistribution program that drove out the white farmers. These actions devastated exports and led to runaway inflation. The Mugabe government finally got into so much trouble with the International Monetary Fund for failure to make meaningful reforms and repayments, that it is constantly on the verge of being thrown out of the IMF and in turn, can no longer avail itself of the Fund's services
When the price of oil started climbing into the $65+ range, official oil imports simply stopped. The country currently does not have the foreign exchange to purchase oil and it seems nobody is willing to extend credit on acceptable terms. Rigged elections and expropriated land have left the country at odds with the usual foreign aid donors so that only humanitarian food shipments are currently arriving in the country.
A few years ago, the government turned much of the oil import business over to the private sector while retaining price caps on retail gasoline. Obviously, when the cost of oil got higher than the permissible sales price, gas stations went dry. This has resulted in a black market where gasoline is selling for ten times the controlled price.
While Zimbabwe 's multiple economic problems make it an atypical case, it is the first country to run almost completely out of oil. This, in turn, gives us a look at what will happen as the consequences of expensive and scarce oil spreads around the globe.
By last week, nearly all buses and commuter taxis in the capitol, Harare , had stopped running, forcing tens of thousands to walk to work. While there are still a lot of private cars on the road, they are being fueled with $36 a gallon black market gasoline. Municipal services have stopped. There are no trash collections, no ambulances, or operating public works vehicles.
Only one fire truck has any fuel left. The police immediately commandeer any fuel they come across. Clean water and electricity are available sporadically. Hospitals are out of supplies and the staff is fleeing. What was once one of the cleanest, most modern cities in Africa is nearly finished.
The long-term effects on the Zimbabwean economy are equally dire. The only sugar refinery is shut due to a lack of coal caused by a lack of fuel for the coal-transporting railroad. Production of tobacco, a major export crop, is already down to 30 percent of pre-land reform levels. It now appears that only about five percent of the normal crop will be planted this year.
Large numbers of Zimbabweans are fleeing the county in the midst of what is clearly an economic death spiral. Famine, mass movements of peoples, and political turmoil cannot be far behind.
In the case of Zimbabwe, all this human misery is not completely attributable to peak oil and unaffordable gasoline; an abysmally incompetent government is playing a major part in the country's economic demise well in advance of better governed nations. It is, however, representative of what we will see again and again as oil depletion sets in. In the US, we are discussing whether tax cuts are the proper remedy for expensive gasoline. In Africa, people are starting to starve.
Somewhere in the future, peak oil will evolve a test of mankind's humanity to our less fortunate fellows. Will some sort of oil depletion protocol come to pass allowing at least of modicum of oil to support every country's essential services? Or will peak oil be marked by survival of the richest?
This will soon be seen as the heart of the peak oil moral dilemma.
In sense, the hunter had to “become” his prey in order to hunt at all. The hunter had to know what the animal ate, the terrain it favored in different seasons, when it migrated and where, when it mated and gave birth, and a hundred other details. But most important of all, he has to know how to look.This “looking” encouraged the development of a certain kind of attention. The hunter “does not believe that he knows where the critical moment is going to occur,” as hunter and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset noted in Meditations on Hunting.
He does not look tranquilly in one determined direction, sure beforehand that the game will pass in front of him. The hunter knows that he does not know what is going to happen, and this is one of the greatest attractions of his occupation. Thus he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a “universal” attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man.
“The Code of the Warrior: in History, Myth, and Everyday Life”
Was hunting, then, the key to human evolution? By the 1960s, many anthropologists seemed to think so. At a well-attended conference on the subject of Man the Hunter held at the University of Chicago in 1966, anthropologist William Laughlin claimed that “hunting is the master behavior patter of the human species.” Hunting, he said, involved much more than simply killing animals for food. It meant mastering a complex curriculum that included an intimate knowledge of land, plants, animal behavior, animal anatomy, strategy, and the skillful use of weapons. Hunting, as Laughlin said, “placed a premium upon inventiveness, upon problem solving.” In addition, it provided strong evolutionary incentives for learning, since it was dangerous and risky – it “imposed,” as Laughlin put, “a real penalty for failure to solve the problem.”
In sense, the hunter had to “become” his prey in order to hunt at all. The hunter had to know what the animal ate, the terrain it favored in different seasons, when it migrated and where, when it mated and gave birth, and a hundred other details. But most important of all, he has to know how to look.
This “looking” encouraged the development of a certain kind of attention. The hunter “does not believe that he knows where the critical moment is going to occur,” as hunter and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset noted in Meditations on Hunting.
He does not look tranquilly in one determined direction, sure beforehand that the game will pass in front of him. The hunter knows that he does not know what is going to happen, and this is one of the greatest attractions of his occupation. Thus he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a “universal” attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man.
Hunting was a game of chance. The hunter might throw and miss, or the spear might hit but not kill, and the animal might escape, taking the spear and the hours or days of stalking with it. Or, cornered and fighting for its life, the quarry might turn and strike out with rage and fury. It was at this moment, when life faced life, that the hunter’s courage or bravery – his willingness to risk all on a throw of a spear – was called into play.
Having learned to identify with the lives of animals, and given the nearly eye-to-eye closeness necessary for killing, it is likely that hunters would also identify with the deaths of animals. The mammals killed, butchered, and eaten by human hunters were in most ways similar to human beings – indeed the red blood animals shed was indistinguishable from human blood.
Though man had become the most dangerous of predators, he was a predator who knew what he was doing. He knew, to begin with, what death was, or at the very least he knew that death was, at least since the arrival of the Neanderthals forty thousand or so years ago. An excavation at the cave of La-Chappelle-aux-Saints in France revealed tools – all of which suggest the familiar practice of supplying the dead with provisions for a journey. At Shanidar, a later Neanderthal site in a cave in what is now Turkey, pollen analysis of the soil revealed that at least eight species of brightly colored wild flowers had been laid over the body which lay on a bed of branches.
For death was, and is, the great mystery. In its simplest and most direct form, death asks, Where has the life that was present before death gone? What has become of life?
The answer, again in its simplest and most direct form, is that life has gone away; it has gone somewhere else. This held for any being with life, including the hunter’s quarry.
“Every good hunter,” says Ortega y Gasset, “is uneasy in the depth of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanted animal. He does not have the final and firm conviction that his conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite.”
It is this uneasiness that is sung by the Akoa Pygmies while placing a garland around the tusks of a freshly killed elephant:
Our spear strayed from its course.
O Father Elephant!
We didn’t mean to kill you,
We didn’t mean to hurt you,
O Father Elephant!
It wasn’t the warrior who took your life,
Your hour had come,
Don’t come back to trample down our huts…
Don’t be angry with us.
From now on your life will be better,
You live in the land of the Spirits,
Our fathers will go with you to renew their bond,
You live in the land of the Spirits.
Good Morning Iran. You're the next contestant in the American geo-political game of gettin' dumasses in the heartland to hate the enemy of the month. The first salvo - you're a nation of drug addicts!! Said the cocaine dealer to the opium smoker.
I'm working on an experimental project involving black attitudes towards HIV/AIDS. OF course a significant part of the project deals with black attitudes towards "down-low" behavior. While putting the finishing touches on the proposal I come across this article. I am not familiar with NYC suburbs at all...but I assume that if the interviewees were black, the journalist would've said so.
So we're talking about suburban men, often married, cruising playground parking lots for quick sex.
With men.
I'm still in the process of reading, but I see no catchy label (no "down-low") to describe the process. Once the entire "down-low" meme caught fire, folks in the know argued that it was never just a 'black' thing. But I'm thinking a google search will report very differently.
I suspect there's going to be much retrospective weeping and gnashing of teeth when it finally dawns on Cobb that filial devotion to the rich is precisely analogous to the misplaced trust that piglets have for the seemingly kindly Farmer Brown.
While our beloved knowers/providers are instigating civil war and chaos in Iraq, using the calamity of Katrina to inflame white hysteria in the U.S. to heights unseen for decades - possibly in an effort to keep up with their UK confederates who're on quite the ripsnort.
It seems to me that inquiring minds would at least consider the terrible alternative possibility suggested by mounting current evidence - in the light of abundant historical precedent - that the hand that feeds you can and will turn around and harvest you - when it becomes expedient to do so.
I have an urge to say I told you so and link this to every related article posted over the past year here at Vision Circle. In the interest of brevity, I'll instead simply put it up with a set of keywords, social democracy, corporatism, dominionism, military energy complex, black gold, romanity...,
Something has happened in our country since the time of Franklin Roosevelt that we haven't directly reckoned with. The book I've just written has as its subtitle, "The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power." That polemical phrase "disastrous rise" comes from Eisenhower's famous military-industrial-complex speech where he explicitly warned against "the disastrous rise of misplaced power" in America – exactly the kind that has since come into being...…the power was empty. That's the irony, of course. We've created for ourselves the disaster an enemy might have liked to create for us. That was the essence of the Eisenhower warning. We've sacrificed democratic values. What accounts for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo? What accounts for the abandonment of basic American principles of how you treat accused people? We've abandoned this fundamental tenet of American democracy ourselves! We didn't need an invading force to take away this one chief pillar of the Constitution. We took it down ourselves.
Tom Englehardt reads America in the entrails of the U.S. Army over at LewRockwell.com. His analysis encompasses multiple simultaneous levels down to our foundational dependance on slavery.
The Destruction of the US Army in Iraq An Interview With James Carroll
We pull into the parking lot at the same moment in separate cars, both of us slightly vacation-disheveled. He wears a baseball-style cap and a half-length purple raincoat in anticipation of the downpour which begins soon after we huddle safely in a local coffee shop. As I fumble with my two tape recorders, he immediately demurs about the interview. He may have nothing new to say, he assures me, and then absolves me, now and forever, of the need to make any use whatsoever of anything we produce through our conversation.
The son of a lieutenant-general who was the founding director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, a former Catholic priest and antiwar activist in the Vietnam era (the subject of his book, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us), Carroll has long pursued his interest in the ways in which faith and force can coalesce into historically fatal brews. From this came, for instance, his bestselling book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews.
Within days of the attacks of September 11, 2001, he became perhaps our most passionate – and prophetic – columnist in the mainstream media. His columns continue to appear, now every Monday, in the Boston Globe. The Bush administration, with its fundamentalist religious base, its Manichaean worldview, its urge toward a civilizational conflict against Islam, and its deeply held fascination with and belief in the all-encompassing powers of military force, was, in a sense, made for him. And he grasped the consequences of its actions with uncanny accuracy from the first moments after our President announced his "war on terror," just days after 9/11. A remarkable collection of his Globe columns that begins with the fall of the World Trade Center towers and the damaging of the Pentagon and ends on the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, will certainly prove one of the best running records of that crucial period we have.
He speaks quietly and straightforwardly. You can almost see him thinking as he talks. As he reenters the world we've passed through these last years, his speech speeds up and gains a certain emphatic cadence. You can feel in his voice the same impressive combination of passion and intelligence, engagement and thoughtfulness that is a hallmark of his weekly column. I turn on the tape recorders and we begin to consider the world since September 11, 2001.
Tom Engelhardt: In September 2003, only five months after the invasion of Iraq, you wrote in a column, "The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?" Here we are two years later. What has it taken, what will it take, to face that truth?
James Carroll: It's interesting to me that the tribunes of the truth right now are the people who have felt the loss of the war most intensely, the parents of the dead American soldiers. I find it astounding that facing the truth in the month of August has been the business almost solely of these parents, pro and con. Cindy Sheehan on the one side, clearly saying that, whatever its imagined values, this war's not worth what it's costing us and it's got to end immediately; on the other side, parents, desperately trying to make some sense of the loss of their child, who want the war to continue so that he or she will not have died in vain. Both are facing a basic truth of parental grief and, I'd also say, responding to the same larger phenomenon: the war being lost. I'm not certain we'd hear from any parents if the war were being won. Given the great tragedy of losing your child to a war that's being lost, nobody gets to the question of whether it's just or not.
It's heartbreaking to me that, in American political discourse, what discussion there is of the larger human and political questions has fallen to these heartbroken parents. Where are the Democrats? Where, for that matter, are the Republicans? On the floor of Congress, has there been a discussion of this war? I mean in the Vietnam years you did have the astounding Fulbright hearings. [Democratic Senator William] Fulbright was in defiance of [Democratic President] Lyndon Johnson when those hearings were initiated, that's for sure. Where are the hearings today? We have a political system that is supposed to engage the great questions and they obviously aren't being engaged. How long will it take us to face the truth? It's just terrible that the truth has to be faced by these heartbroken parents, because even if they're opposed to the war – as I am – they're not the ones to whom we should look for political wisdom on how to resolve the terrible dilemma we're in.
TD: In March 2003, on the first anniversary of the invasion – and this was the piece with which you ended your book, Crusade – you wrote again, "Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq, the main outcome of the war for the United States is clear, we have defeated ourselves."
Carroll: I was already instructed by the history of the twentieth century, summarized so well by Jonathan Schell in his book The Unconquerable World. He cites numerous instances in which broad-based, national resistance movements couldn't be defeated even by massively superior military power. It was his insight that the last century was rife with examples – the most obvious for Americans being Vietnam – where a huge superiority in firepower was irrelevant against even a minority resistance movement based in an indigenous population; and it's clear that this so-called insurgency in Iraq is a minority resistance movement, largely Sunni, and that it doesn't matter if it's a minority. There's an indigenous population within which it resides and which fuels it. And all of that was quickly evident. In fact, I think it was evident to George H.W. Bush in 1991. It wasn't Vietnam we needed to learn from first in this case; it really was the first Gulf War and Bush's realpolitik decision to stop it based on the sure knowledge that there was no way of defeating an indigenous popular religious movement prepared to fight to the death.
Presiding Over the Destruction of the U.S. Army
TD: So where are we now as you see it?
Carroll: It's already become clear to people that we can't win this. Who knows what being defeated means? I said we had lost because there's no imposing our will on the people of Iraq. That's what this constitutional imbroglio demonstrates. A month ago, Donald Rumsfeld was insisting that there had to be a three-party agreement. In August, it became clear that there would be none. So now there's a two-party agreement and the Sunnis are out of it. Basically, this political development has endorsed the Sunni resistance movement, because they've been cut out of the future of Iraq. They have no share of the oil. They have no access to real political power in Baghdad. They have nothing to lose and that's a formula for endless fighting.
TD: I was struck by recent statements by top American generals in Iraq about draw-downs and withdrawals, all of them clearly unauthorized by Washington. At the bottom, you have angry military families, lowering morale, and the difficulties of signing people on to the all-volunteer army; at the top, generals who didn't want to be in Iraq in the first place and don't want to be there now.
Carroll: Well, they've been forced to preside over the destruction of the United States Army, including the civilian system of support for the Army – the National Guard and the active Reserves. This is the most important outcome of the war and, as with Vietnam, we'll be paying the price for it for a generation.
TD: Knowing the Pentagon as you do, what kind of a price do you think that will be?
Carroll: I would say, alas, that one of the things we're going to resume is an overweening dependence on air power and strikes from afar. It's clear, for instance, that the United States under the present administration is not going to allow Iran to get anywhere near a nuclear weapon. The only way they could try to impede that is with air power. They have no army left to exert influence. If the destruction of the United States Army is frightening, so is the immunity from the present disaster of the Navy and the Air Force, which are both far-distance striking forces. That's what they exist for and they're intact. Their Tomahawk and Cruise missiles have basically been sidelined. We have this massive high-firepower force that's sitting offshore and we're surely going to resume our use of such power from afar.
One of the things the United States of America claims to have learned from the '90s is that we're not going to let genocidal movements like the one in Rwanda unfold. Well, we've basically destroyed the only military tool we have to respond to genocidal movements, which is a ground force. You can't use air power against a machete-wielding movement. And if you think that kind of conflict won't happen in places where poverty is overwhelming and ecological disaster is looming ever more terrifyingly, think again. What kind of response to such catastrophe will a United States without a functional army be capable of?
You know, in this way, we're now like the Soviet Union once it collapsed into Russia. When it could no longer pay the salaries of its soldiers, Russia fell back on its nuclear arsenal as its only source of power. In a way the Soviet Union never was, Russia is now a radically nuclear-dependent military power. The Red Army doesn't really count for much any more. And we've done that to ourselves in Iraq. This is what it means to have lost the war already. We didn't need an enemy to do it for us. We've done it to ourselves.
TD: "We" being the Bush administration?
Carroll: Yes, the Bush administration, but "we" also being John Kerry and the Democrats who refused to make the war an issue in the presidential election campaign last year. I fault them every bit as much as I fault the Republicans. At least Bush is being consistent and driven ideologically by his unbelievably callow worldview. The Democrats were radical cynics about it. They didn't buy the preventive war doctrine. They didn't buy the weapons of mass destruction justification for this war. They didn't buy any of it and yet they didn't oppose it! The cynicism of the Democrats is one of the most stunning outcomes of this war. And even now, as the political conversation for next year's congressional election begins, where's the discussion from the Democrats about this, the second self-inflicted military catastrophe since World War II. At least the first time, the Democrats were there. In the election of 1972, when they lost badly, George McGovern and company really did engage this question.
We're desperately in need of a Eugene McCarthy, someone who will speak the truth in a really clear and powerful way and in a political context so that we can respond to it as a people. Eugene McCarthy is putting it positively. I'd say negatively what we could use is a Newt Gingrich, someone who could marshal political resistance going into this next election period in a way that would make the war a lively issue in every senatorial and congressional election. We really need someone. In America, our system requires someone of the political culture to invoke this discussion.
A Civilizational War against Islam
TD: In the first column you wrote after September 11, 2001, you said, "How we respond to this catastrophe will define our patriotism, shape the century, and memorialize our beloved dead." Four years later, how do you assess our response to each?
Carroll: Patriotism has become a hollow, partisan notion in our country. It's been in the name of patriotism that we've turned our young soldiers into scapegoats and fodder. The betrayal of the young in the name of patriotism is a staggering fact of our post-9/11 response. The old men have carried the young men up the mountain and put them on the altar. It's Abraham and Isaac all over again. It's the oldest story, a kind of human sacrifice, and that's what's made those cries of parents so poignant this August. But those cries also have to include an element of self-accusation, because parents have done it to their children. We've done it to our children. That's what it means to destroy the United States Army. Night after night, we see that the actual casualties of that destruction are young men, and occasionally women, between the ages of 18 and 30. And this in the name of patriotism.
On the second point, the shape of the world for the century to come, look what the United States of America has given us – civilizational war against Islam! Osama bin Laden hoped to ignite a war between radically fundamentalist Islam and the secular West. And he succeeded. We played right into his hands. Now, we see that war being played out not just in Iraq and the Arab world generally, but quite dramatically in Europe.
TD: You picked up on this in the first few days after 9/11 when you caught Bush in a little slip of the tongue. He spoke of us entering a "crusade"…
Carroll: …"This war on terrorism, this crusade."
TD: Yes, which, you said, "came to him as naturally as a baseball reference." Are we now, with the protesting military families, seeing a retreat from this kind of sacralizing of violence?
Carroll: No! I think the warnings signs are all around us for what has happened – the politicization of fundamentalist Christianity. I mean, we've had that since the early days of the Cold War when Billy Graham became a tribune of anticommunism. But what's new is the way in which this marginal fundamentalist Christianity has entered the political mainstream and taken hold on Capitol Hill. Dozens and dozens of congressmen and senators are now overt Christian fundamentalists who apply their theology – including religious categories like Armageddon and end-of-the-world justifications for violence – to their political decisions. The kind of apocalyptic political thinking that Robert Jay Lifton has written about has now become so mainstream that we even see it in the United States military. For the first time, at least in my lifetime, overt religiosity has emerged as a military virtue and I'm not just talking about General [William] Boykin, the wacko who deliberately and explicitly insulted the Islamic religion…
TD: …and who was promoted.
Carroll: And is still in power. Not just him but this most alarming and insufficiently noted phenomenon of the rise of fundamentalist Christianity at the Air Force Academy, conveniently located in the neighborhood of the two most politicized fundamentalist religious congregations in the country, Focus on the Family and the New Life Ministries. A significant proportion of the cadet population is reliably understood to be overt, born-again Christians and the commandant has been explicit in his support of religious conformity in the cadet corps. These are the people we are empowering with custodianship over our most powerful weapons in a war increasingly defined in religious terms by the President of the United States. All of this is our side of a religious war against an increasingly mobilized jihadist Islam.
Meanwhile in Europe, Great Britain had, until recently, been a far more tolerant culture than the United States (as indicated by the British welcome to large populations of Muslim immigrants over the last generation). All of that is now being firmly and explicitly repudiated by British lawmakers. You see it in the great cities of Europe everywhere. When people in the Netherlands and France vote against the European Constitution in some measure because it represents to them an opening to Turkey and the world of Islam, something quite large is happening.
Lighting the Dry Tinder of History
TD: Doesn't this take us back to a period you've studied deeply – the Middle Ages?
Carroll: It's true. We don't sufficiently appreciate how the paradigm of the crusades never ended for Europe. Europe came into being in response to the threat of Islam. The European structure of government, the royal families of Europe, they're all descended from Charlemagne, grandson of the man who defeated the Islamic armies at Tours. More than a thousand years ago, a system of identity first took hold in Europe that defined itself against Islam. This is the ultimate political Manichaeism in the European mind.
We're the children of this. Of course, Islam had been forgotten in our time. Never mind that there were more than a billion Muslims in the world. All through the Cold War, we thought that the other, the stranger, the enemy was the Communist. But the Muslim world never forgot about us. The crusades are yesterday to them. They've understood better than we have that the West has somehow defined itself against them.
It's in this context that we have to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A thousand years ago, as now, the political fate of Jerusalem was the military spark for the marshaling of a holy war. The crusaders, after all, were going to Jerusalem to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel, and the infidel was defined as a twin-set, Muslims and Jews. The attack on Muslims happened simultaneously with the first real attacks against Jews inside Europe. The ease with which, in the Middle East, the conflict in Israel has come to be subsumed as the defining conflict with the West is part of this phenomenon.
In Cologne [Germany] last week, I met with the head of the Jewish congregation and also the imam who heads the Muslim community, and they both reported the same experience. They both feel they're on the table – the table of sacrifice – in Europe. They're both feeling vulnerable to attack and they're right to feel that way. It's a very curious turn.
Anyway, the United States of America didn't understand the tinder it was playing with and George Bush, in his naïve reference to the crusades, demonstrated his profound ignorance of how deep in the history of our culture these conflicts go. Osama bin Laden understood this much better than Bush. It's no accident that the two epithets of choice the jihadists use for the American enemy are "crusaders" and "Jews," and they're mobilizing epithets for vast numbers of Muslim Arabs.
TD: Do you think that, in dancing with Osama bin Laden, Bush has somehow turned him into something like a superpower? You know, a word you used early on caught my eye. You said, "Mr. Bush's hubristic foreign policy has been officially exposed as based on nothing more than hallucination." However clever bin Laden has been, isn't there also something hallucinatory about all this?
Carroll: It's true that if you begin to treat an imagined enemy as transcendent, at a certain point he becomes transcendent.
The Mosquito and the Hammer
TD: You said we "forgot" Islam. A theme of your writings and maybe your life – if you'll excuse my saying so – is an American-style willed forgetfulness. Two key concerns of yours that seem "forgotten" in American life are the militarization of our society and nuclear weapons. Your father was a general. Your next book is about the Pentagon. What's the place of the Pentagon in our life that we don't see?
Carroll: When George W. Bush responded to the crisis of 9/11, two things came into play: his own temperament – his ideological impulses which were naïve, callow, dangerous, Manichaean, triumphalist – and the structure of the American government, which was sixty years in the making. What's not sufficiently appreciated is that Bush had few options in the way he might have responded to 9/11.
What was called fo