Complete Journal
At 80
October 19, 2001
Next month I'll be 80. I don't know whether that accounts for my reflective mood, or whether it's just the depression I can't shake on most days since September 11. Anyway, I feel like sitting down at the computer and putting down sundry thoughts for my own contemplation. I suppose this will be a diary of sorts, something I never was drawn to when I was younger and part of the "action".
I'm in very good health and physical shape for my age. Any ailments are minor and hardly remind me that I'm about to be an octogenarian. Age has been much more unfair to Roz. It has bent and tortured her, from her severely arthritic back to her tangled toes. The week that I turn 80, we will celebrate our 59th anniversary. We love each other and do well together. Much as I feel for Roz's unending battle with pain, she never makes me feel personally depressed. I actually experience physical warmth in helping her. There is some enjoyment, no sense of burden, in finding that I can do well as a homemaker — as Roz did for so many years.
October 28, 2001
My mood reflects how I see the world. I think globally, politically, but my reactions are personal, emotional, close to home. As never before, what I think and what I say about the course of events dominates how I behave, how I relate to others, and how people I've been close to react to me. I know this sense is not unique to me. For others as well, the September 11th horror and Bush's "global war on terrorism" evoke an inexorable linkage between personal and political. Among people on the left, as we try to sort out views on very difficult problems, frustration and animosity are a destructive presence. I want to explore some painful experiences that have shaken me in the last couple of weeks, but I probably won't get to that in this installment.
First, I want to put down some thoughts on 9/11/01 and what follows in its wake. For a long time now there has been general alarm about deep seated problems that imperil humankind. Doing anything effective to save the future is blocked by immense obstacles revealed by the recent fearful turn of events. Terrorism has come to center stage with the full force of religious fanaticism and nationalist hatreds. In turn, anti-terrorism can be a prescription for even greater terror if it is conducted as a global war relying on our superpower military might.
It was inevitable that the United States would strike back after the September 11th attack. No government could fail to react strongly to the horror, anger, and fear that gripped the nation. The question is what kind of response fits the crime, or even more, will the way that we respond make us safer or more vulnerable in the years to come? The Bush team has projected a long "global war against terrorism", dividing the world starkly: for us, or for the terrorists! The war has begun with the devastation of Afghanistan, and the United Nations has been informed that other nations who defy our ultimatum will come into our line of fire. However, a more ambiguous pattern is emerging: most countries are willing to join efforts against terrorism; few risk antagonizing the United States, but few favor the massive bombing assault on Afghanistan and the prospect of unrestricted military action against countries Washington chooses to target.
There are no certain answers for these treacherous times. Even if we can visualize long term prescriptions for a better life in a decent world, the gap between what is needed and what is possible will be enormous for years to come. That perception doesn't minimize the historic import and urgency of what we are going through now. An effective international and domestic response to terrorism is impossible as long as it is submerged in a torrent of bombs and Bush's declaration of unlimited "global war" (World War III?).
The struggle for better answers is surfacing as the inadequacy of brute force solutions begins to register. This process is not confined to the left, whose "disorientation" is contrasted by the media to its image of a country united for war. For the left, there are several points of analysis which I hope most of us will put in focus: 1) the nature and dangerous potential of Bush's "global war on terrorism"; 2)the possibilities for limiting and blocking plans to keep the United States and the world on a war footing; 3)support for effective domestic and international measures to protect people against terrorism.
1) the nature and dangerous potential of Bush's "global war on terrorism":
Quite a few people who were anti-war in the 60s agree with the present majority view that military measures are justified in the overall effort to capture and bring to justice those responsible for the Sept. 11 attack and for the ongoing terrorist war proclaimed by bin Laden. But it is tragic and unjust to translate that principal into support for the war that Bush has projected and has begun in Afghanistan. Humanitarian considerations alone make it impossible to countenance the mass terror and destruction inflicted on Afghanistan, not only on civilians killed by not-so-smart bombs, but millions uprooted and driven further into hunger and destitution. There is need for a hard look at the direction of this war and what it portends. Bush's war aims include possible capture of bin Laden, break-up of Al Qaeda bases, and removal of the Taliban government. However, much more is involved in the massive scale of the assault, the incantation that this is only the beginning of a long war with multiple targets, the determination that the United States will accept no limits on its unilateral use of military force, and the aggressive enactment of war powers on the home front. If this process goes forward over the next few years, as Bush and Rumsfeld have promised, this country will evolve into a garrison state in a world of alienation, enmity and perpetual fear. Since war is an extension of politics, the terrorist attacks have strengthened the hold on our government by rightists who have long sought to curb democratic rights, invest in a huge military, serve big business, and obstruct international cooperation.
2) the possibilities for limiting and blocking plans to keep the United States and the world on a war footing:
It's not at all clear that the Bush-Rumsfeld agenda for global war can be carried out as intended. The image of "America United" for war and Bush's supporting "international coalition" is already faltering. Much of the world is horrified by the terror and destruction raining down on Afghanistan; fury against the United States is raging among the vast majority of Muslims all over the world; uncertainty and fear is growing within our country. Most Americans are not yet able to extend to the victims of our bombs the same deep compassion we feel for our own victims of the September 11th nightmare and of anthrax missives. What can blunt the ambitious Bush war agenda is a sense that the US "global war against terrorism" can't work, that it can only make matters worse at home and abroad. A few designated culprits may be corralled, but events are producing doubters that the blunderbuss war strategy can defeat terrorism and make us safe.
Whatever measures can and should be taken to increase public safety and to develop effective international cooperation against terrorism, "global war" is the opposite of a remedy. Before the quagmire becomes too deep for escape, the imperatives are halting the bombing, aborting plans to commit US soldiers to a land war in Afghanistan, and flatly rejecting the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz pressure for opening additional war fronts. Potential for curbing the Bush war strategy is present also in the resentment beginning to be voiced on "home front" concerns: the opportunistic rush by Congress to deliver tax bonanzas to the wealthiest corporations; its equally speedy overriding of civil liberties protections; nationwide evidence of racial and ethnic antagonisms fed by war fever; and the inadequate response by government and the public health system to the anthrax attack.
3) support for effective domestic and international measures to protect people against terrorism:
We in the United States are now the direct, even prime target for terrorist actions. We have a right to expect the government to try to protect us in our daily lives, and to try to change the conditions that make us vulnerable. The Bush administration has exploited outrage and patriotism to convey the notion that there is no alternative to its "global war".
What we do right now is very important, but the fact is that a fundamental change in our condition of vulnerability is a long term project. It would require a sea change in the relation of the United States to the rest of the world: to Muslims, to the United Nations, to international efforts to reduce poverty and inequality and to save the environment. That isn't about to materialize soon.
Meanwhile, there are alternatives to a war that makes everything worse. Planning and carrying out acts of terror should be treated as crimes, not acts of war. Finding those responsible and bringing them to justice requires worldwide cooperation based on international law. Measures to strengthen public safety should be consistent with constitutionally protected rights and should exclude racial and ethnic profiling. Instead of exploiting public anxiety for selfish interests, Congress should be held accountable for major upgrading of the public health system and assuring safe working conditions for public service workers.
In putting down these thoughts, I have not tried to analyze the political, economic and cultural roots of the dangers we now experience. Despite media propaganda and blackouts, there is already a wealth of basic analysis and information available in the discussion and debate on the left. What I wish to do is to indicate areas of engagement with the majority of people who can be encouraged to doubt and challenge the disastrous course we're on. I think the starting point for such engagement has to be the actual fears and concerns of the people around us. In spite of the current atmosphere of jingoism and military bravado, the impetus to questioning and dissent runs deep in democratic experience. Washington's failed policies and promises may produce considerable awakening before the advent of many body bags.
October 29, 2001
The little essay I've written in the past week departs from usual notions of a diary. I'm afraid such back and forth excursions between "personal" and "political" will be usual for me.
I am somewhat uneasy about the tone and approach I tend toward in talking about the 9/11 response and about political issues in general. Compared to what is written by some of my friends - with whose analysis I largely agree—my discussion is clearly less militant, less radical. Is it that I've changed? Am I doing wishful thinking about being able to influence left-leaning liberals? Am I reacting to my memory of a past period of crisis and danger, when a too apocalyptic view of events led the left to lose sight of complexities and democratic undercurrents that eventually toppled McCarthy? Whatever the explanation, I keep reaching for connection with people I meet who go along with prevailing propaganda, but who are clearly very troubled.
My uneasiness is partly due to a change in my environment during the last few years. Age and circumstance have caused me to pull back from organized political activity for the first time since childhood. On the other hand, some of my younger (middle-aged) friends are surrounded and actively working with a new generation of radical youth. These young people are militant, of different colors and ethnicity, eager to organize and challenge injustice and lies. They are part of the new wave of grass-roots action that made Seattle resonate with the call for worldwide solidarity to confront the institutions of capitalist globalization. I admire these new radicals and see in them hope for the future. So if my friends and I sometimes talk in different accents, it may be more a difference of vantagepoints than viewpoints. I hope they can benefit somewhat from past experience, but I'm actually glad that no new generation takes too kindly to "sage" and moralizing advice.
November 1, 2001
I just finished reading Nadine Gordimer's latest book, "The Pickup". For me, this wasn't Gordimer at her best. Still, what makes her so great is probably more striking in this book even than in others. She is so incredibly perceptive about the intimate lives of the people she writes about. You wonder: how does she know the innermost emotions and thoughts of a young Arab man, deeply attached to his desert home and family, yet seeking entry anywhere that will provide some escape into "opportunity"? I don't know how she knows, but you feel she is probing her own deepest experience even if she never set foot on the desert. I remember reading in an earlier book the description of a love scene as experienced by a male character. Of the millions of literary descriptions of making love, this one of Gordimer's had a subtle authenticity that seemed beyond imagining. Gordimer's writing style is never simple or easy, and in "The Pickup" it seemed to me to be strained. Yet when it comes to reaching inside characters, male or female, she's as good as it gets (actually even better). This is true, too, in her short stories, some of which I like better than the novels.
Now I'm starting Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things". The book has been in the house (Roz read it), but it didn't attract me—that is, until I read Roy's recent remarkable articles on terrorism/war.
November 2, 2001
Titles of two op-ed pieces in this morning's papers: one, by Salman Rushdie, "Yes, This Is About Islam"; the other, by Ted Rall, "It's About Oil". They seem to exclude each other, but I think each is right as far as it goes. This elephant of terrorism and war has many dimensions. In fact, you could add many more "It's Abouts".
Rushdie indicts "Islamists" who terrorize and oppress in the name of fundamentalist religious dogma, something with which he has frightening personal experience. At present, this is certainly the largest, but not the only threat emanating from militant religious fundamentalism. Expansionist ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers have done as much as Islamic suicide bombers to poison the chances for peace between Israel and Palestine. Christian fundamentalists in our own country, although rebuffed in the political arena, have created a climate in which doctors and nurses must be heroes if they serve a woman's right to choose. With the help of Bush and Lieberman, our fundamentalists make headway in eroding the constitutional separation of church and state. These things are not all equal in their impact or urgency, but they belie the simplified and harmful notion of a war between Islam and Western Civilization.
Yes, it is also (not only) about oil, as Rall makes clear: about a possible pipeline through Afghanistan between oil- rich Kazakhstan and the Caspian Sea.
So, it's about responding to awful terrorist attacks, it's about a terrible war that makes things worse, it's about religious fanaticism and ignorance, it's about enormous wealth vs. massive poverty, it's about superpower arrogance and contempt for international law, it's about hatreds passed to every new generation, it's about oil. It's about an Administration and Congress that seize the day to reward the wealthiest corporations, curb constitutional liberties, and entrench reactionary control of government (they hope) for years to come. It's about common people who rise to challenges with heroism and humanity, even if mixed with jingoistic emotions. It's about the safety of public service workers and drastic improvement in the public health system.
It's about and about and about…… What it isn't about is simple answers or faith in our "leaders".
Just got this e-mail comment from my son on the two miracle victories by the NY Yankees over the Arizona Diamondbacks:
Dear Dad,
Finally we have definitive proof that God could not be on George Bush's side or on Osama Bin Laden's side, because he is obviously devoting all of his time to helping Joe Torre.
Love,
David
November 3, 2001
The phone rang last night at bedtime, collect call from Namibia. It was Susan, our youngest (23 year old) granddaughter. She's been in Africa since March, co-head through September of a program to train guides for eco-tourism in South Africa's national parks. She got a rare look at television yesterday, heard Gov. Gray sound the alarm, and called to urge us to stay off Bay bridges this week. At the time we were focused less on terrorism and more on Roz's unremitting back pain. We were so happy to get her call that I think her worries were deflected — wish we could say the same about the back pain.
November 8, 2001
A few days have gone by while I've been absorbing some responses to the first installment of my journal (10/19/01—11/03/01). I hoped this exercise would be cathartic. I suppose it is, but it's also disturbing. Writing what's on my mind helps me, and I'm boosted by e-mail evidence that quite a few friends are interested. But mulling over a couple of responding comments has made for nights of tossing instead of sleeping. My e-mail registers passionate cries of pain, issuing from different, sometimes contrasting, interpretations of where we are. I have to go back to my college days, during the short-lived Stalin-Hitler pact, to remember such sudden and sharp confrontation between friends. Case in point is how two of my dearest UC faculty friends see the world after 9/11. Their outrage is equal and opposite, one against the terrorists responsible for mass murders on US soil, the other against superpower arrogance and the war Bush has launched abroad and at home. My problem, which I suspect is shared by others, is that each expresses my own feelings.
November 21, 2001
More than a few days have now passed since I put this journal aside. Personal and political news during this interval has not been uplifting, and my desire to share thoughts and feelings sagged as well. Nevertheless, I have corresponded back and forth with friends, one in particular who argued that 9/11 changed everything and that total mobilization against terrorism supersedes all other considerations.
The 9/11 terrorist assault was obviously a watershed event for the United States with huge global and domestic consequences. But to view everything as changed would be just as myopic as to consider that nothing substantial has changed. This is not a hypothetical question, since there are people on the left who fervently propound each viewpoint (cf. Hitchens vs. Chomsky).
The context in which 9/11 erupted is a world already changed dramatically at the turn of the century. I think the heart of the matter that complicates opinion on the left is that two highly significant long-term threats to world peace and progress have taken over since the end of the Cold War.
First is the emergence of the greatest imbalance of world power in longer than a millennium. The sole superpower feels free to use overwhelming military force and assert its imperial political and economic dominance, unrestrained by international law. Not the United Nations, but the destructive power of US bombs acts as the ultimate arbiter and enforcer of "world order".
Second is the eruption of violent nationalisms and aggressive religious fundamentalist movements-"militant Islam" foremost, but Christian and Judaic variants as well. These movements cultivate mass hate, terrorism and tyrannical codes of barbarism, against women most of all.
These threats feed on each other in a deeply troubled world system, where "globalization" is managed by agencies of international corporate and finance capital. The distance between rich and poor, the well fed and the starving, is more obscene than ever. This picture is all the more alarming since only an entirely new approach to international cooperation and community could cope with problems of human survival now at crisis stage.
It feels embarrassingly inadequate to offer this sketch of our times in just a few broadly general strokes. Yet it's this composite picture that takes over for me when strong opinions focus starkly on one element and seem to justify blinking away the rest.
The horrendous events of 9/11 made the continuing threat of terrorism a huge concern demanding a new level of effective international response. However, after an uncertain lag period, the Bush Administration has transformed the crisis of terrorism into an even greater crisis of war. Strong as is its resolve to kill bin Laden and punish his supporters, stronger still is its determination to advance ambitious objectives of control at home and abroad through a prolonged state of war.
B-2 bombers and 1500 pound "daisy-cutters" wrecked Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and few will mourn that government of absolute religious tyranny and barbarism. It remains to be seen how that will balance against escalating resentment of the Bush-Rumsfeld message to the world and its method of delivery via airborne devastation. While the media awaits the next terrorist attack, the Administration is impatient to move on to the next war theater. Meanwhile, Ashcroft does tangible damage to civil liberties; Congress seizes on the emergency to pass more fat cat give-aways and further undermine an economy in recession.
Are we safer now? Will our children be safer? I can only imagine what our lives, our country, and the world will be like if we're in for years of Bush's global war.
The Nov. 26 issue of The Nation arrived. In it Richard Falk, who in The Nation of Oct. 29 wrote a lead article defining the Bush response to 9/ll as a "Just War", changes his mind. He says: "With each passing day, my assessment shifts to reach the conclusion that the United States is waging an unjust war in Afghanistan, and it is doing so in a manner that is likely to have severe blowback consequences." I have a feeling that all my friends, regardless of differences, must be sharing some of Falk's dismay as the war design unfolds.
November 22, 2001
Break for Thanksgiving. It was small since only David and Hilary are in town. But I did the cooking, so it seemed quite big to me. No turkey, but lots of good food. (Or so I was told-the family knows I need encouragement.)
Before the meal, David indulged a whim of mine. We went outside with an old tennis ball and played "catch" for a little while. Hadn't done that in years, and it felt good. I even had the illusion that I wasn't as graceless as the fellow old codgers who retrieve foul balls along the base lines at Pac Bell.
Thankfully, no one has asked me to list all the things for which I'm thankful. Mostly the list would come down to family and friends, and millions of unknown dreamers and doers who think something better is possible.
This is a special week. At last my 80th birthday is behind me. On Sunday, November 25, Roz and I will take proper note of our 59th Anniversary.
November 24, 2001
Within the past couple of weeks, I've heard Charlie Rose interview several writers for The Nation. Eric Alterman and Christopher Hitchens (unlike Jonathan Schell) spoke with embarrassment about the new anti-war movement that has sprung up rapidly, especially on college campuses. The complaint, echoed by several more anti-war activists of the 60s, is that a segment of the left has a knee-jerk reaction condemning any government action as US imperialism; that these people are fighting a war that's over (Viet Nam, Central America); that they refuse to recognize that "everything changed on September 11".
What struck me first was that Charlie's guests totally ignored the widespread doubts and warnings about the Bush war, or various aspects of it, from many other sources generally considered quite respectable: major writers and commentators, some of whom like Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and Bill Moyers even accused the Administration and Congress of using the emergency as cover for pushing their selfish foreign and domestic agendas. The impression given, which the host did not discourage, was that dissent is confined to a few unreconstructed leftists who are naïve and anti-American. That bothered me. Hitchens and Alterman could be more sensitive to how hard dissent is in this climate and will become under Ashcroft's powers of war. Not everyone has the courage of Barbara Lee, and students who organize against this war deserve respect whether or not one agrees with their opinions.
There are problems of attitude toward patriotism, how we view our government, our country, and the way the United States relates to the rest of the world. This has always been complex for serious people. It never reduces to choosing between flag wavers and flag burners.
A critical friend asked me: "Is everything the United States does bad?" Certainly not. It's one thing to recognize and resist its imperial dominance, the abuse of super power to enforce a "world order" that serves mega wealth. That doesn't cancel out what is positive in our experience and our enormous potential for contributing to the collective enrichment of humanity. Given our preeminent status, there is no problem of great importance in the world that can be approached successfully without a significant US contribution. Sometimes US cooperation does help reduce tension in critical regional disputes; often US assistance helps alleviate suffering when natural disasters strike; at times, although methods and results are usually objectionable, US involvement helps curb extreme manifestations of ethnic and racial conflict.
Unfortunately, the thrust of US policy is to assert its imperial power and subordinate the United Nations. We maintain effective veto power over international efforts to reach agreement on water and environmental standards, on germ warfare, on arms trade, on international law and courts, on patents and the manufacture of generic drugs. Even on terrorism, we call the shots and demand that others pledge us allegiance. Above all the US government brooks no restriction on its unilateral use of force, whether by bombs or embargo. For US policy to come down on the side of justice usually demands forceful world opinion and political struggle here at home (examples: apartheid in South Africa, segregation in the USA). On domestic issues, the need to battle the powers that be holds true-especially now that the economy and civil liberties are in recession.
There is a lot to be very proud of in the American experience, and a lot to regret and undo. To one degree or another, that sort of measure defines patriotism for all people in every country.
November 26, 2001
Our 59th Anniversary was not yesterday's big news. It may be remembered rather as the day of the first cloned human embryo, at least as claimed by scientist-entrepreneurs. Seems the experiments were actually a failure-the operation (cloning) was a success, but the patient (clones) died. That's something to talk about in this journal before long.
Anyway, we had a good day. Managed to make it to our favorite restaurant for a celebratory dinner. Have a date to do it again next year at 60.
November 27, 2001
Yesterday's announcement of the Massachusetts cloning experiments has set off a clamor for the Senate to pass the same banning legislation that the House passed last July, 265-162. This seems to be the main consequence of the report, although the publicity may also bring large sums of investment capital to the company despite its essentially negative results.
I'm against the banning legislation. A group of progressives supported the ban as passed by the House and they sharply criticized the 162 who voted "No". This group is properly concerned with the misuse of "new human genetic technologies" to pursue eugenics through germ line genetic engineering. However, a ban will not resolve such issues. What the House and proposed Senate action does is curb stem cell research and grant something that anti-choice fundamentalists have wanted desperately: to establish by legislative fiat that a fertilized egg is a living human being.
George W. Bush weighed in again today with the demand that the Senate join the House to protect life. He also forcefully reaffirmed his plan for military tribunals and repeated that Afghanistan is only the beginning in the "global war".
What follows is a comment written at the time of the House action:
"A STRONG ETHICAL STATEMENT" BY THE HOUSE?
Leon Wofsy
George W. Bush, July 30, 2001: "Today's overwhelming and bipartisan House action to prohibit human cloning is a strong ethical statement, which I commend. We must advance the promise and cause of science, but must do so in a way that honors and respects life."
Progressives who organized to sound the alarm about the dangers of "techno-eugenics" have made the campaign for a ban on human cloning the centerpiece of their effort. Bulletin #3 of the Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic Technologies (available from teel@adax.com) sees the House vote to ban human cloning and clonal embryo research as "a clouded victory." The Bulletin offers no objection to the House's action. The "cloud" is simply that most liberals in Congress showed "little understanding of the issues" and voted the "wrong" way against the GOP bill.
In my view, a "cloud" hangs over deeper problems and dilemmas that deserve serious thought and debate.
First, an obvious fact should be acknowledged. Those who voted in the minority are as opposed to cloning human beings as the pious Republican majority. Very few people could be found anywhere who would regard that prospect as anything but an abomination. So why are we not all joining George W. in celebration of the House vote?
There are several questions to ask about the proposed Congressional ban on cloning. If the ban becomes law, what is accomplished? Why does the issue of human cloning loom so large? How does it relate to the critical ethical problems affecting public health and medical research? How should society deal with the new genetic technologies?
It's an illusion to think that the House's action, and Bush's support for it, will do anything to mitigate problems associated with "techno-eugenics". Huge profits drive the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Anointing test tube embryos and stem cells with a symbolic "right-to-life" does not disturb that reality. The gospel of George W. Bush and most of Congress remains unchanged: "What's good for big business is good for the country." The race to patent genes and cell lines will be unabated, the fleecing of the public through exorbitant prices for drugs and medical care will continue, the health needs of the poor at home and abroad will be rejected in favor of market considerations.
For politicians of the Christian Right, the public's revulsion at the idea of cloning humans is an opportunity to advance the idea that the overriding moral issue of modern times is the sanctity of the fertilized egg. For progressives who have focused on human cloning, it symbolizes the danger of a new eugenics spawned by the unrestrained merger of molecular genetics and biotechnology.
There are sound reasons for condemning attempts to clone humans and experiments that involve germ line genetic engineering (i.e. altering genes that are passed on by reproduction to succeeding generations). Such experiments on humans are unconscionable, not least of all because they are terribly unsafe and unpredictable. This is not simply a matter of technique, but of the enormous uncertainty about how inserted genes will interact with other genes, how they will alter a highly complex biological environment, and what the consequences may be for subsequent generations. A few charlatans will ignore any restraints and pursue their demonic gamble somewhere in the world. That sorry prospect does not justify exaggerated alarms that "techno-eugenics" has the potential to change the course of human evolution. In fact when progressives speak in such terms, they give credence to the extreme hype by advocates of eugenics, including a few famous scientists, who tout a mythical future run by genetically engineered super humans.
The House majority —and the Pope— deliberately link human cloning and embryonic stem cell research in furtherance of a religious monopoly over all matters related to human reproduction. There is no good reason to prohibit research on stem cells, the cells that have the potential for differentiating into a variety of cell and organ types. From the study of stem cells, science may learn more about developmental processes, how they are influenced by environmental factors, and whether ultimately they can be directed to serve medically useful purposes.
It is important not to be taken in by the false promise of a cascade of miraculous cures stemming from detailed knowledge of gene sequences. It is just as important not to be in denial about the real progress and powerful potential of biological science and medical research. The need is to make public interest the main dynamic in health science and technology instead of the greed of the biomedical complex. That is a tall order. Among other things, the tone and substance of the debate on medical ethics and morality needs to be changed. Concerns about experiments on humans, and differing views on embryo research should and will continue. But the greatest ethical issue concerns whether health care is a universal human right, or whether medical science is governed primarily by the giants of biotechnology, insurance, and the "health" industry.
Left to its own and the lobbyists' devices, most of Congress would prefer to pontificate about the ethics of stem cell research while it guts Medicare, subverts demands for patients' rights, and defends global patent "rights" that deprive the poor of essential medicines. Nor are bioethicists or most of the scientific community likely to rise above their own interlocking associations with the biotech market. That leaves everything up to political action and education. After all, there was a time when Medicare was won, when scientists with no conflicting commercial interests guided the government's investment in biological science. Even in present conditions of globalization, it has been possible to force pharmaceutical conglomerates to retreat somewhat from blocking generic anti-AIDS drugs.
Meanwhile, George W.'s praise of the House Bill's "strong ethical statement" is as credible as his "compassionate conservatism". ………(PostScript 11/27/01: or his concern for human life lost in bombing assaults abroad or in execution chambers at home.)
December 3, 2001
The past weekend's news from Israel and Palestine tears viciously at a horribly open wound. There is the same desperately sick 9/11 feeling that has not even begun to subside. Terrorism and war, war and terrorism—the toll of innocents mounts, dead and mutilated New Yorkers, Afghanis, Israelis, Palestinians.
There are contrasting views of the new mayhem in the Middle East. One is that the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy is the clearest proof that terror unleashed by a powerful military force cannot prevent the terror of suicide bombings, and vice versa. The other is that the answer must indeed be escalation to all out war.
Terrorist acts and war are in direct opposition to efforts to cope with underlying problems that make terrorism chronic: the occupation and settlements, poverty and economic inequality, racist hatred between Jews and Arabs, fanatic religious fundamentalism. Colin Powell's recent speech seemed to encourage new peace efforts and recognized the existence of Palestine as well as Israel. But a great contradiction became obvious. Powell hoped to calm the Middle East to reduce complications for the big war undertaken by the United States. Now, of course, Sharon says if war is OK for Bush, that logic holds for me. And Bush says 'right on'. Actually the failure to eliminate terror by war is the lesson Bush should have learned, rather than the other way around.
When does escalation become a war of mutual extermination?
Measures against terrorism must not be a self-defeating excuse for avoiding genuine international cooperation to negotiate and tackle problems, including the problem of terrorism itself. The Bush war and a Sharon war can only delay the day that sanity replaces futility. Meanwhile the unbearable casualty list is every day's news and tears flow all over the world.
December 5, 2001
Even in bad times, someone or something can reach into the corner of the psyche that makes smiling irresistible. That happened in our house over the last few days. The main perpetrator of the smiles was a frequent smiler herself, Dana, the four-month-old daughter of Beth and nephew Fred. About Fred, it's time for me to 'fess up. He's the one who designed this website. He'll keep it running and updated until he can teach me to use the tools.
Our daughter Carla was also here for a short visit. I could say so much about our children and grandchildren. Their worlds become bigger and bigger for us as our own becomes more limited. But there's a problem with writing a diary whose pages are always open to any that chance to pass. We mustn't bother the casual visitor with the personal love, pride and heartache that would fill the pages of a private diary. I'll just say all the kids are quite wonderful.
December 7, 2001
Yesterday, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, John Ashcroft gave the domestic version of George W. Bush's ultimatum to all nations: "you're for us or you're for the terrorists".
Ashcroft: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies."
He was talking directly to United States Senators who questioned military tribunals and illegal detentions. He was telling everyone who may question: dissent in Bush's wartime is aid and comfort to the enemy.
You've heard those words before if you were alive during the Korean War in McCarthy's hay day. Then they were words that translated to deeds-hundreds jailed, thousands harassed and driven out of jobs, many beaten by thugs, some killed in prison by "patriotic" inmates. Justice Department actions targeted W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. Hysteria and hate sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, the star witness being Ethyl's brother, who now admits that FBI threats led him to lie about his sister to save his wife.
Every day now, the law according to George W. Bush is being laid out to the media by Ashcroft (home front) and Rumsfeld (military front). Watch out!
No matter how tough Ashcroft talks and acts, our history also shows that civil liberties and the Bill of Rights are resilient. Senator Russ Feingold said at yesterday's hearing: "We are not going to be intimidated by anyone into not asking questions about civil liberties, the structure of our system and the Bill of Rights." There are bound to be more and more questions about the futility of pushing our country and the world into an endless state of war.
December 11, 2001
For the last few years I've been walking around Lake Merritt a couple of times a week with a group from the Oakland YMCA. We've become very fond of each other and we socialize together, especially in the holiday season. The three miles we cover on our walks are short compared to the distance we travel in conversation and friendship. We generally walk in twosomes or threesomes, shifting companions quite often. We talk politics and current events, music, religion, and lots about what's going on in each of our lives. Our backgrounds are very different. Some are religious; others (like me) are not. Political inclinations range from Republican at one end to socialist independent (me) at the other, with most inclined to vote Democratic.
What I like is that our personal and political exchanges have made a difference in the group as a whole. We find we really share values and usually come to somewhat similar views on big issues and events.
About a year ago, one of the walkers heard about my memoir, Looking for the Future, and everyone in the group wanted to read it. I was a little nervous about what the reaction might be, since the book describes my childhood in a Communist family, my own experiences as Chair of the Labor Youth League during the McCarthy period in the 1950s, and my lifelong socialist outlook. Maybe by that time we were already close enough so that no one wanted to hurt the author's feelings. Anyway, the reviews from my fellow walkers made me very happy.
December 12, 2001
A NY Times/CBS poll reported today that 91% of the US public supports the "war against terrorism" and 86% thinks President Bush is doing a good job. That makes those of us who disagree appear far "outside the main stream". But currents of worry and doubt are already disturbing the main stream, especially, as the poll found, concerning the Administration's broad moves to substitute war measures for basic civil liberties.
The Times reports: "65 percent said they were concerned about losing some of their rights. Thirty-six percent said they were worried that some of these law enforcement changes might end up applying to them. Blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites to have that fear."
We have only just begun to sense the toll that a prolonged "global war" will take on Bush's "home front". For the powers that dominate the Administration and Congress, war is not only license for bypassing the Bill of Rights; it provides the cover for corporate greed, neglect of growing joblessness, postponement of needed health and education measures. The Enron scandal, which lights up the main connections of George W. Bush, may prove much too big and outrageous to escape attention even in the noise of war.
The real challenge to public support will come as the purposes and effectiveness of the war itself come into question. Will war against a succession of countries on a hit list make us and the rest of the world safe from terrorism?
If international cooperation is the cornerstone of effective measures to curb violence and terrorism, is war the way to achieve it? As a matter of fact, Bush actively rejects any kind of joint international action other than US directed wars and "free trade". Today he repeated his intention unilaterally to abandon the ABM treaty, along with just about every other international agreement. Most striking is the renewed rejection of international cooperation to ban biological warfare. And what a day he chose for that announcement!
Today the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times reported: "As the investigation into the anthrax attacks widens to include federal laboratories and contractors, government officials have acknowledged that Army scientists in recent years have made anthrax in a powdered form that could be used as a weapon. Experts said this appeared to be the first disclosure of government production of anthrax in its most lethal form since the United States renounced biological weapons in 1969 and began destroying its germ arsenal."
As long as the bombs keep falling and US casualties are rare, polls and illusions may remain in synch. Our anger over the 9/11 horror is deep and lasting, as is our determination to apprehend its architects. But war, greed, and antagonism to international collaboration are more likely to catalyze hostility than to reduce our vulnerability to terrorism.
December 13, 2001
Is there anything left for now but to cry and cry for the children of Israel and Palestine? Hamas and Sharon have accomplished something in common. They have made the case that Arafat is powerless and "irrelevant". They have replaced lost hopes for peace with a terrible war that leaves the people on both sides trapped in blood and despair.
In the past, some hopeless regional tragedies have been alleviated eventually with the help of international initiatives, usually brokered by the United Nations. Without some such involvement, it's hard to imagine any change for the better in the Middle East. Yet that prospect is undermined by the climate of global war, the one-sided bias of US policy, and deliberate actions by extremists to destroy any chance for a peaceful two-state solution.
This was another bad day. The ghastly bin Laden tape , which I just heard, makes it worse. Is it possible that hope will reappear in the days to come? I've been an optimist for most of my years, but not recently.
December 17, 2001
E-mail responses after my last journal entry included two that chided me for turning away from optimism. On Israel/Palestine, one friend differed sharply with me because I failed to put blame for the recent tragic turn of events on Arafat; another felt that Israel alone bares the full responsibility, and I was wrong to condemn Hamas along with Sharon.
I think I'll take a pass on the matter of optimism, or lack thereof. For an old optimist, "hope springs eternal", so I guess the window should be left open for unforeseen good tidings.
As for Israel/Palestine, I don't go along with putting the main onus for the bloody impasse on Arafat, which is the position of Israel and the US. Whatever the mistakes and betrayals on either side, the extremely one-sided focus by Sharon and Bush on Arafat as the villain responsible for all the failures has the practical effect of 1) justifying Sharon's war against the Palestinian people, which can't end terrorism and will only produce more mutual hatred and destroy more lives; 2) diverting responsibility for the unholy mess away from its most fundamental causes: the occupation, the settlements, and the curse of religious fundamentalism that promulgates barbarism and terror; and 3) holding off any constructive international initiative to reverse the escalating insanity.
The whole argument back and forth with my friends leaves me disturbed and unsatisfied. Sometimes passion on one side trumps compassion for victims on the other side. One can refuse to equate the occupier and the occupied-one can see clearly where the burden of suffering and injustice is heaviest-and still grieve and condemn the senseless murder of civilians whether they be Palestinians or Israelis. Given bitter experience, who can deny that resort to deadly military force and state assassinations only multiplies the number of suicide bombers? And who can deny that religious fanaticism, which sacrifices Palestinian lives in order to murder Jews, is a curse on its own people? Movement for peace and a just two-state solution, which at times had majority support on both sides, is now overwhelmed by terrible anger and hopelessness. Any return of hope depends on a revival of will to renounce leaders committed to war and terror. If I were still an optimist, I'd say that it's hard to imagine that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians won't say STOP before the religious zealots on both sides trigger the final plunge. Maybe Arafat's stance in the last couple of days signals a break in the storm, a new opportunity to turn things around.
December 21, 2001
This was bargain video week at our house. We got four for the price of two, $7.99 in toto. Of course that meant we had to watch one-a-night to meet the due date for return. The reward for our indulgence was that two of the videos were worth watching, better than our usual batting average.
The best was "Bread and Roses", the story of janitors, mostly Mexican immigrants, battling for union recognition in a large corporate office building in Los Angeles. The relationship of two sisters, and what happened to each of them, was especially poignant. What really made me think was that winning the fight for the union took so much courage and militancy, imagination too. They won not just because of solidarity, but because they were willing to break rules and conventions, to be daring and disruptive. Without such action they would remain powerless before their bosses and completely invisible to the men and women of privilege whose offices they maintained.
We liked "Song Catcher" also, especially the songs and the singers. It was a fresh experience for us, for our usual musical fare is classical and opera. "Amores Perros" was too much blood and guts, both canine and human. "All the Pretty Horses" didn't make it for us either.
I referred to "we" and "us". Roz wasn't as bored as I with the "pretty horses", and she had less tolerance for bloody "amor".
December 22, 2001
I'm thinking again about people who are committed progressives, but who support the Administration's war on terrorism. They surely have not transferred their loyalties to big business and their anathema list still includes Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, Perl, the Enron CEOs and, most likely, George W. Bush. The war has divided us despite all that we share, including our recognition that organized acts of terrorism demand powerful and effective counter measures.
Now, well into the first round of what Bush promises will be a protracted war, it's worth looking anew at what divides us. In fact, it's absolutely necessary, because even before Afghanistan is behind us, what's next is upon us. Will more and ever wider war continue to be the core response to terrorism?
To support the war, a progressive has to conclude that war is central to the defeat of organized terrorism, and that the events of 9/11 confer historic responsibility on the United States and the President for waging that war. Other considerations and corollary consequences are, therefore, necessarily subordinate.
So it's fair to ask: What is the war achieving and how likely is it to deter terrorism? And just what are the corollary consequences, now and looking ahead? Then, we can reconsider what progressives should try to do about the war and terrorism.
Supporters of the war point to the termination of the Taliban regime and the disruption of bin Laden's headquarters and Al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan. Those consequences indeed resulted from the overwhelming US military campaign. For the moment we won't try to calculate the collateral cost in civilian lives and devastation. Whatever the aftermath, no regime can be more barbarous, benighted and viciously anti-woman than the Taliban.
It remains to be seen what the impact will be on terrorism. Whether or not bin Laden is eliminated, whether or not the Al Quaeda leaders who escaped are eventually captured, the Bush Administration says the "global war on terrorism" will have to go on for years. In other words, we are not to expect that war will substantially reduce the terrorist threat any time soon.
The list of upcoming targets is long. Today's SF Chronicle maps "potential terrorist threats": Somalia, Philippines, Sudan, Yemen, Indonesia, Algeria, Kosovo and Bosnia, South America ("a lawless area in the region where the borders of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay converge"), and, of course, Iraq. (The Chron overlooks North Korea, although Bush has made it clear that he doesn't. And what about Palestine?) The map of terrorist threats is certainly global, but should we agree with Bush that global war is the solution?
If one supports the unfolding war agenda of the Bush Administration as obligatory for opponents of terrorism, what are the corollaries that get subordinated? One has to downplay the dangers of trying to impose a "new world order" by way of overwhelming US military force. One accepts that any US Administration, even the one now in place, is the world's best hope as the guarantor of human rights and justice. One accepts that the US is privileged as no other country to wage war, override international law and ignore the United Nations whenever it wishes. Above all, one has to put aside fears that the immense power seized in the "global war on terrorism" will be turned into the right to confront any government or popular movement that withholds allegiance to "our" interests.
Is this a case of "Cheerful Carrie", crying about unlikely accidents that might befall us in the future? Hardly. The "war emergency" is already the excuse for a domestic grab bag of prizes long the object of reactionary ambitions. Isn't the assault on civil liberties and dissent already alarming? Aren't big business lobbies scrambling to get war bonanzas from Congress? Aren't the recession, the critical needs of the jobless, and the Enron scandal getting much too little attention in the noise of war?
Is it raising a false alarm to picture a similar grab bag of reactionary ambitions on a global scale served by the war on terrorism? Can one doubt that the Bush's advisers see a country at war at least through 2004 as an investment in "four more years"?
Some will no doubt say that supporting the war in Afghanistan doesn't mean accepting all the corollaries. No progressive will buy into the Ashcroft program or the greed of big business so favored by the Bush Administration. Nor will progressives fail to object to contempt for international agreements on ABM, germ warfare, arms control, global warming, and on and on. As for the corollary dangers involved in expanding the war itself, it is no longer possible to say "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it". The time is now. Colin Powell may oppose expanding the war to Iraq, but for Rumsfeld and his shadow war cabinet, it's not whether but when. Easier targets are imminent.
When all is considered, the negatives of the "global war on terrorism" are not just corollaries. They are central. Keeping the country and the world on a war footing with no end in sight won't end terrorism, but it will surely make a sick world sicker and life in the USA uglier.
Does opposing the expanding war mean giving in to terrorists? Does it mean ignoring the acquisition of more terrible weapons by terrorists? The assumption here is twofold: 1) war can defeat or effectively contain terrorism, and 2) there is no viable alternative.
While war can eliminate or make things hard on some terrorists, the phenomenon of terrorism is no more likely to be expunged by war than is traffic in drugs and international crime. On the contrary, short-term military victories over particular culprits are subject to being offset elsewhere by worsening conditions and increased hatred. The world is full of lessons along that line: Israel/Palestine, Ireland, France/Algeria, and many, many more. A succession of devastating bombings around the world won't insulate us from that reality.
Given the state of the world, there is no good and quick remedy. That, however, is a poor excuse for making things worse by sticking to the illusion that war can succeed. There are alternatives that can improve public safety substantially while building active international cooperation against organized terrorism. There is a lot we can learn from the people of other countries, almost all of whom have long experienced such problems of public safety. If we made an effort to foster collaboration based on international law and the United Nations, there could be a much stronger coalition than can ever be built around a US imposed global war. The climate could begin to be more favorable for justice and peace than for recruiting new generations addicted to hate-based religious extremism.
By whatever route, there is a long way to go. The hope is that support for the Bush war agenda will fade as the futility, damage and costs become hard to ignore. That return to sanity is beginning to appear on domestic issues. Progressives should do everything possible to convince people to oppose the looming next war adventure, whether in Yemen, Somalia or Iraq. What's done is done. Let's not be silent while Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz drive the world further into the deep muddy.
December 28, 2001
There is an e-mail discussion site called Portside which facilitates exchange of views among people "on the left". Portside posted my journal entry of December 24 on progressives and the war. In response, Steve Max feels that the bombing in Afghanistan has to be accepted since no one seems to have a better idea about dealing with terrorism. In turn, I added this comment:
The Portside discussion shows that some people on the left agree with the large majority of Americans that the US war on Afghanistan was a necessary response to 9/ll and the threat of future terrorist attacks. From the beginning, others of us opposed the war, which was projected by Bush as the first step in a protracted "global war on terrorism" that would target any country that withholds compliance.
That argument has not ceased to be important, but more important is whether we can agree essentially on: 1) opposition to continuation of the war and perpetuation of the "state of war" at home and abroad, and 2) developing effective measures against organized acts of terrorism. It's clear that the extended Bush war agenda is itself a menacing prospect, and there has to be a better course.
The dilemma is that the United States assumes such exceptional status and privilege in world affairs that the alternative of collaboration based on international law and the United Nations is dismissed as unrealistic. So the argument becomes circular: the US takes unilateral action ostensibly because the United Nations is ineffectual; the United Nations is weak because the US makes it subservient or irrelevant. If we accept that as inevitable, then there really is no alternative to following Bush and company around the world with bombs and missiles.
I think that plans for following up from Tora Bora with a series of wars in pursuit of terrorists will rapidly lose international favor. The dangers to world peace from India and Pakistan to Israel and Palestine, the erupting problems in the world economy, the AIDS crisis, and other deep concerns-including the menace of terrorism itself-demand effective international action. That is in the interests of our own people, because without it there is no safety, only growing sacrifices and atrocities in unending wars. I believe progressives should counter the pressure from the right for expanding the war with the demand for affirming the crucial role of the United Nations in all aspects of the effort to curb terrorism. We surely also support rational domestic and international measures to prevent acts of terrorism and improve public safety. Here, too, we are with those who guard against panic and resist exploitation of the "war emergency" to undermine civil liberties.
In the world as it is today, there simply are no quick fixes. Steve Max asks, "does anyone have a better idea " than the bombing at Tora Bora. There certainly are better ideas, but they have to be made realistic by struggling for the kind of thinking, action and collaboration that overcame imminent threats of nuclear war and that helped bring down South Africa's apartheid regime. There certainly is no worse idea than Richard Perle's op-ed piece in today's NY Times, which calls for reproducing the Afghan war formula against Iraq as the next step in Mr. Bush's "grand strategy for the war on terrorism".
There are difficult mountains to climb for everyone who hopes for a better world, but I don't think progressives will prefer to tag along helplessly after Bush's 'grand strategists'.
P.S. Just heard George W.'s ranch meeting with the press , more blatant than ever in his ultimatum to the world. As long as he sees himself as global commander-in-chief, accountable nowhere in the exercise of war, the United States will be the magnet for all the rage that festers anywhere on earth.
January 1, 2002
The New Year started with a wake-up call before 6am. It was unsolicited, very much unwanted, and, I guess, a wrong number. I have to "guess" because I knocked over the phone in the dark, cursed, and finally picked-up to find nobody there. I don't believe in omens. I tell myself this year is going to get better from here on-better, I hope, than my year-end expectations.
The holidays were a bit of a relief, a lot of family warmth and a few things to celebrate. Xmas was in grandson Kevin's first home. He was the happiest he's been since the Xmases when Connie was "in charge" before breast cancer took her five years ago. Except for the retirees, Roz and me, ours is a family on-the-run, and it was especially sweet to have David and Hilary, Kevin and Susan just telling stories and chatting for one full day. Our youngest granddaughter, Susan, was just back from nine months in South Africa, where she was co-responsible for training local guides for eco-tourism in several national parks. She did the same thing last year in Honduras, and it's marvelous to see her taking in new cultures, making precious friendships, and becoming a most insightful and sensitive "grown-up".
My gift highlight was a baseball autographed (authenticated!) by Bobby Thomson, whom I saw in 1951 hit the famous home run for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers. My friend Lester Rodney, who was also at the game as a sports writer, says he'd rather have a ball signed by pitcher Ralph Branca, who became the famous "victim" to Thomson's historic homer. The fact is that around that time, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campenella were turning me into a Dodger fan, like my son David (or at least a Giant fan with mixed loyalties).
Daughter Carla and Byron weren't with us but will be here for a short visit in a few days. Granddaughter Danielle is now civil liberties-lawyering in Alabama, so we shared greetings of the season by e-mail and phone.
So, there. I took advantage of the holidays to sneak in a small introduction to my loved ones.
Yesterday, friend Max dropped by with his almost 11 year-old son, James, for a French toast brunch. James is as bright as he is fun to be with. He pointed out that 2002 is a palindrome year and informed us that the last one was 1991, and the one before that was 1881. Seems we have a better chance of sticking around for the next eclipse of the sun than for the next palindrome year.
Wishes for 2002? I hope we begin to turn things away from hysteria and bombast, back to serious and humane attention to urgent needs at home and to a more peaceful and just world community. I'm not utopian; notice I said "begin". Our deepest personal wish-Roz's and mine-is a year of good tidings in the battle against breast cancer.
January 3, 2002
Thomas Friedman's latest column in the New York Times is—well, peculiar. He praises Bush to the skies as commander-in-chief of the war on terrorism, than says, "I wish Al Gore were president."
His complaint about Bush is: "He has tried to use the tremendous upsurge in patriotism, bipartisanship and volunteerism triggered by the tragedy of Sept. 11 to drive a narrow, right-wing agenda into a Sept. 12 world." Spelled out, the argument is that "we've made the world safer for Saudi Arabia and OPEC to raise oil prices again", instead of developing "a program for energy independence" ...."weaning America off its dependence on Middle East oil."
This raises a couple of interesting questions. First, how do you make such a sweeping indictment of Bush's exploitation of 9/11 for right-wing purposes, and fizzle it all down to a single issue? As important as is the energy problem, catering to Saudi Arabia is only one reflection of the "narrow, right-wing agenda" that distorts the Bush Administration's long-term response to the September terrorist attack. Opportunist ambitions and actions dominate the "home front": violation of civil liberties, bail outs and tax cuts for big business, refusal to deal with rising unemployment. The biggest distortion is the whole concept of parlaying anti-terrorist measures into a US-run "global war" with no limit in years or in potential targets, and with no realistic promise of a safer world or a safer country. But if one indicts the pursuit of the right-wing agenda in the "Sept. 12 world", how do you then declare: 'Thanks, and hail to the Chief'?
The other question is Friedman's strange wish for Al Gore as President. As one who fervently wished for Bush's defeat in 2000, I don't find inspiration in Friedman's nostalgia for what might have been. My guess is that in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, Gore would have chosen to be the toughest Commander-in-Chief, carried along by the same pressures and logic as George W. Bush. Policy differences would be largely submerged in bipartisan war fever. (Incidentally, the Saudi Arabian moguls haven't done too badly no matter who's in the White House.) Differences of significance would appear only when and if events persuaded a large chunk of the American public to opt for and demand a sounder agenda. But, of course, any alteration in Bush's course depends on a similar turn of events and public opinion.
Rather than dream Al Gore dreams, it will be great if all those democrats and independents who were cheated into a Bush presidency, begin again to fight Bush's "narrow, right-wing agenda"—especially now that it has, in his words, "global reach."
January 16, 2002
My journal and I are off to a slow start in the New Year. I guess we needed a break from each other after an intense December. It's not that anything in the outside world has eased off; just that I chose to slow down some for a while.
Concentrating my thoughts on humanity's problems and pain leaves me feeling at times that my computer is a high speed treadmill testing my limits for stress. In fact, nowadays I often have a funny physical feeling as my pulse skips from six to ten beats a minute, something doctors assure me is common and not worrisome. I am told this may happen more often among the elderly (I qualify), but is frequently observed with college students around exam time. I suppose it's as trivial as fainting on a pretzel.
Another reason for the temporary silence is computer-technical. I had hoped to be able to manage the website tools for myself, instead of imposing on Fred to post the updates. My computer didn't cooperate, freezing at every attempt to connect with the I-disk. I tried and tried over several days, but I have had to go back to bothering Fred. Fred says it's my computer, not me. That's important for my self-esteem, as suggested in the abortive Journal update I failed to post on my own. If I had succeeded, it would have read:
"January 9, 2002: This entry is made with fingers crossed. Up till now, Fred has managed this website. Now he has set me up to be on my own. It didn't help my confidence when he told me stories of how "old professors" become helpless when the computer does surprising things. Well, here goes. This is it. Look out for surprises!"
Soon I'll have something to say. A few days ago I worried that the Enron atrocity would escape proper attention in the noise of the "war on terrorism". Now I hope that the public outrage on Enron doesn't allow the media to soft-pedal the Bush Administration's maneuvers to extend its war to new theatres around the world. I hope there is enough outrage to begin to get to the heart of matters: the systemic arrogance and greed that define the Administration's morality (what Paul Krugman labels "crony capitalism, USA", NY Times, Jan. 15, 2002). How long will the Demcratic Party leadership, itself beholden to Enron-style largesse, get away with the nonsense that the reactionary values of the Bush Administration apply only domestically, and not to its gospel of "global war"?
January 21, 2002
I've tried to use this slow-down in the frequency of my postings to come up with some topics that might lighten things up a bit, for my sake and for anyone else who may look this way. I've come up with some, and I'll get to them one of these days. But it's still hard to change the subject from the heaviness of the times. So, once more ——-
A discussion is going on again by e-mail at portside. This follows an article in Mother Jones (January/February) by Todd Gitlin, "Blaming America First". Carl Davidson, like Gitlin a past leader of Students for Democratic Action, takes the same view in support of the war and criticism of those on the left who oppose it. Below is another comment I sent to Portside. (Like historian Stephen Ambrose, I've quoted a couple of lines from other articles without using quotation marks, but the quotes in question are not someone else's.):
Todd Gitlin and Carl Davidson make valid, though exaggerated, criticisms of some attitudes on the left that seem to minimize concern over terrorist threats and that focus almost exclusively on the responsibilities of the United States. However, by making a caricature of the nascent anti-war movement, they make it appear that there can be no serious grounds for opposition, that all opposition is simply leftist prejudice and is really anti-American.
If some who oppose the war oversimplify issues, Gitlin and Davidson have to overlook a great deal more to continue supporting the war. Their support for the "war against terrorism" is based on the proposition that the September 11th attack and the continuing terrorist threat justify a military response. But our justified outrage after 9/11 doesn't automatically justify the actual "global war on terrorism" that the Bush Administration has embarked on. Gitlin, in one paragraph, implies a few criticisms around the edges of US policy, but he doesn't ask, let alone answer, questions that go to the heart of what is unfolding. From the outset, Bush has projected the war as open-ended in duration and in possible targets, based on an ultimatum to all nations that "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists". The US government accepts no limits on its right to make war and on its use of weapons of mass destruction. It is accountable to no one for civilian casualties and devastation, or for the treatment of prisoners of war. While the war in Afghanistan is still going on, the Bush doctrine has already dispatched military forces to the Philippines and more interventions are clearly in the works. A few days ago, Rumsfeld declared the readiness to go after as many as fifteen nations "if necessary".
Shouldn't we (and Gitlin and Davidson) question whether this war will deepen problems rather than solve anything substantial? Will terrorism succumb to global war any more than it was ended by military force in Israel/Palestine, Algeria, Ireland, and so many other countries? Shouldn't one ask whether the flaws in US policy that Gitlin mentions in passing are actually central to a strategy of putting the country and the world on a protracted war footing? Is there no danger (to us as well as to others) in trying to impose a "new world order" by way of overwhelming US military force? Is it our patriotic duty to agree that the US is privileged as no other country to wage war, override international law and ignore the United Nations whenever expedient? Is it paranoid to fear that the immense power seized in the "global war on terrorism" will be turned into confrontation with any government or popular movement that withholds allegiance to "our" interests? Ditto with regard to prospects on the "home front"? If that seems a flight of imagination, think Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, and history.
Gitlin and Davidson argue that those who oppose the war separate themselves from virtually all Americans. However, it is possible (and necessary) to identify with the concerns of most Americans and still contribute to a serious discussion of terrorism, the war and the consequences of what we do or don't do. It's no contribution to public discourse to demand, as a precondition, loyalty to the war. Patriotism would be given a deeper meaning if instead of joining the war chorus, a growing number of Americans dared to question and dissent from a destructive and self-destructive course.
It may be easier in the present atmosphere to ridicule some on the left, but how about asking the tough questions that challenge public acceptance of the Bush doctrine? How about challenging illusions about what a "global war on terrorism" can reap? Among other things, that might help all of us engage in more fruitful consideration of effective ways to strengthen public safety and reduce the threat of organized terrorism. It would also contribute to a healthier outlook on how we relate to the rest of the world, which will be a huge influence on the shape of things to come.
January 23, 2002
Heard Amos Oz, the Israeli writer, interviewed by Elizabeth Farnsworth on today's Lehrer News Hour. If his book, "The Same Sea", comes close to what he conceived for it, it's a remarkable contribution to humanity. I want to read it. He described a book about everyday people, written with the intent to defy all conceivable boundaries in substance and style. This goes along with his idea that the will of people on all "sides" to live their lives is what holds promise for getting beyond the seemingly intractable tragedies of our times. His "beyond" tragedy is visualized a la Chekhov, with no one feeling cheerful about the conclusion, but without a stage full of corpses a la Shakespeare. What's exciting — and what I have to see — is that the spirit of his novel leads him to surmount distinctions between poetry and prose, music and dance. My imagination can't capture the picture he painted in the interview, but if it did, reading the book would be no challenge. By the way, Elizabeth Farnsworth is my favorite on the News Hour. Pity, some of my very unfavorites are on much more often than she.
January 24, 2002
I've looked back in my Journal from the beginning to see how my reactions to 9/11 and subsequent developments have evolved. Clearly my emphasis has shifted more and more to the war rather than terrorism. But I really should try to keep both in focus. The big questions that confront us now are: Will ever-wider war continue to be the core response of our government to terrorism? Are there better ways of dealing with the terrorist phenomenon? Will the Bush Administration be permitted to exploit the "global war on terrorism" to justify military adventurism and to duck responsibility for debacles like Enron and ruinous economic policies?
I've said, probably with much too much repetitiveness, what I think is wrong and terribly dangerous about the whole concept of "global war against terrorism". If the war is expanded rather than ended, I believe that any so-called victories against terrorism will prove to be Pyrrhic. What I'd like to attempt soon is to reexamine my thinking about coping with terrorism: what should be done, what can be done, what objectives and expectations might make sense.
January 29, 2002
Yesterday the suicide bomber was a 20-year-old Palestinian woman. It was bound to happen. So much for simplistic generalizations about what motivates a person to commit suicide and murder in an act of terror. This tragic feminist defiance of fundamentalist orthodoxy was not inspired by images of young virgins awaiting the martyr in paradise. Nor does George W. Bush's favorite off-the-cuff response, that terrorists are "cowards", seem to fit.
Neither causes of terrorism nor "cures" are uncomplicated. The most simplistic view of a "cure" is the Bush Administration's promise to demolish terrorism by means of overwhelming force, by "global war". (The "simple" can be convoluted when expedient: Bush and Rumsfeld declare we're waging war, but insist that our captives are not prisoners of war.)
The Bush answer to terrorism prevails as national policy because, after the September 11th attack, most Americans believe there are no honorable or effective alternatives. The collapse of the barbarous Taliban regime has fanned hopes that war will conquer terrorism. I won't reargue here why the war strategy will itself turn out to be neither an honorable or effective remedy. The point is there have been few questions asked and no serious discussion of how to understand and cope with the extremely difficult problem of terrorism. Perhaps more questions will be asked only with sorrowful evidence that the phenomenon outlasts and grows in "global war".
What is terrorism? I think it is the conscious aim to kill and terrorize civilians. By conscious, I mean either deliberately targeting civilian populations or knowingly engaging in actions that will bring them great harm. The sources and rationales of terrorism are many, but whatever the cause, such acts deserve to be condemned and opposed universally.
Terrorism is as old as humanity. Why has it become so huge an issue now, internationally and in particular among Americans? For some, the answer doesn't go beyond the shock of September 11, 2001, when we learned in horror that our country was now vulnerable and that we are the prime target of a world-wide network headed by Osama bin Laden.
Terrorism has taken center stage as the Cold War became history. Now the world is in the grip of several transforming developments whose influence remained largely beneath the surface of US-USSR confrontation. There is the worldwide rise of militant religious fundamentalism and intolerance; there is the triumph of US dominance, a monopoly of world power surpassing any since the Roman Empire. There is also the much heralded sweep of "globalization", which encompasses the supremacy of "market forces", via commanding multinational institutions of finance and trade, over the fate of nations and the lives of people everywhere.
The world is brought together by the incredible advance of the "information age". One consequence of that is to put into bold relief the inequalities and resentments that grow, and the injustices that become unbearable for much of humanity. Outside such a context, none of the conflicts and collisions that rock our world can be approached with any optimism. That goes for any realistic hope of containing and curbing the phenomenon of organized terrorism. Nations can and must take concerted action against acts of terrorism, but brute force will not change reality—not for the better anyway.
Today's comment for my journal stops here. In days to come, I want to continue thinking about a number of questions, including: Are there different kinds of terrorism? What does terrorism produce? Can the underlying sources of support for terrorism be confronted? To what extent can the threat of terrorism be overcome? Is effective international cooperation possible? Above all, how should the Unites States use its power and influence?
* * *
Having paused here to listen to the State of the Union as seen by George W. Bush, the question returns to the war. The President extended the threat of US war power most extravagantly and simultaneously to all corners of the earth. Never has "global reach" been so ambitious. Where will that take us?
January 31, 2002
With the State of the Union oration, the Bush Doctrine is now official. The "war against terrorism" is indeed global. Proceeding from the famous ultimatum, 'you're either with us or you're with the terrorists', we now have a global hit list. George W. Bush claims the absolute right to strike preemptively, as he alone decides, wherever he and his advisers perceive a potential threat.
There is an alarming absence of serious criticism of the "global war on terrorism". Two disconnects are glaring in the response of top Democrats. First, muted complaints about the right-wing thrust evident in Bush's domestic policy are expunged altogether in total support of his war policies, as if his reactionary essence disappears when he exercises "global reach". Second, the pre-September 11th indictment of Bush's unilateralism has been dropped, as if Bush is now a true believer in international cooperation. The fact is that Bush has taken unilateralism to a new extreme. Now added to all the treaties and agreements he scrapped in his first year, he is the first US president to proclaim the doctrine of preemptive strike. "Coalition" now means all who are willing to obey or cooperate with our military operations. The United Nations, not even mentioned in the State of the Union rhetoric, seems to be tossed on the same heap as the Kyoto, germ warfare, and ABM agreements.
Even in the darkest times of the Cold War, both sides rejected the preemptive strike philosophy. What's changed, of course, is that there is no longer even the semblance of a balance of military power among the world's nations. Our expand-the-war hawks see this as history's golden opportunity, from the culmination of one American Century to nothing less than an American New Millennium. The United States clearly has very much to contribute in all spheres, but not as unilateral enforcer. Great danger lurks in a world order in which no government dares to refuse allegiance, or at least acquiescence, to the sole superpower; great danger in a country where politicians don't dare to demur from a temporarily popular war chief; great danger in a world where, despite the diplomatic dance between governments, poverty and desperation dominate the lives of most populations. That is not a world from which terrorism will shrink.
I wondered if some might think I was making artificial connections when I coupled two "transforming events" that contribute heavily to the crisis over terrorism: "the worldwide rise of militant religious fundamentalism" and the US " monopoly of world power surpassing any since the Roman Empire ". Wherever there is gross injustice, movements of resistance will grow and find ways to impact events. Still, when power is so concentrated and overbearing that political alternatives seem drastically limited, opportunists and true-believers will find support for acts of terrorism. In turn, the murderous targeting of civilians strengthens the powers of reactionary reprisal, furthers massive state terrorism, and is itself the enemy of popular movements of resistance. This tragedy is enacted and reenacted in virtually every part of the world, the prime focus currently being Israel and Palestine. What's happening in the Middle East is not encouraging to the notion that supreme military force is the way to insure public safety.
There is justified sentiment, here and around the world, for strong action against organizers of terrorism. No doubt US war power can remove some of them and disrupt their operations, as in Afghanistan. But global war and Bush's unilateral version of "the rule of law" is the antithesis of effective international cooperation to preserve peace and diminish threats from weapons of mass destruction.
Our Don Quixote promises to take on and defeat all the windmills of evil. To believe that war can end terrorism is to dream the impossible dream. The world will not soon be able to rid itself of great dangers of many kinds. Yet hope is only in absolute commitment to cooperation among all peoples, the opposite of George W. Bush's unilateralist vision.
February 4, 2002
We made it to a concert yesterday, the Takacs Quartet at Hertz Hall on campus. Music and sports have always been my treasure islands. Politics is my other passion, but never as entertainment or respite.
There was nothing like basketball to grab me away from troubles and everyday routine. I played till 50, when I felt so banged up from week to week that I had to surrender. Music, on the other hand, is always there for Roz and me, since we are constant listeners, not performers who must one day also face being over-the-hill. Still, there is some luck in being able to respond to music as deeply at 80 as at 20. My mother, who imparted her love for music to all in the family, was not so fortunate. I remember when Roz and I first "discovered" Mozart's 24th piano concerto and excitedly played a record for my mother. It turned out to be a disturbing letdown, because mother was just too sick to share our thrill.
Yesterday's concert was superb. I hadn't looked at the program in advance and didn't realize they were playing the Schubert Quintet in C major, a favorite in our CD collection that we happened to be playing over and over during the previous week. I have always been overcome by great second movements and there is no more moving movement than this quintet's second. This "slow movement" passion began in adolescence, as it did for many of our generation: Beethoven's Eroica and Seventh Symphonies, Tchaikovsky's Fifth and the Pathetique, and so on. I remember drowning myself in Brahms' Second Symphony when the first girl I thought I was in love with said 'no way'.
In later years, it's Schubert, more than anyone, whose second movements evoke that almost unfathomably deep response—the "Death and the Maiden" quartet as well as the String Quintet. Of course, despite my immovable atheist conviction, I am very susceptible to great religious music, most of all to Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
This predilection for the minor, or melancholic, in music never contradicted the optimism that I harbored for most of my years. Far from being depressing, this musical sadness is somehow wedded to feelings of empathy and compassion, and to sheer joy over the wonder and beauty that genius can create.
We came home from the concert in time for me to lose myself in a different sort of magic, the last quarter of the Superbowl game. After that, we were tired. I was irritable, and found it hard to say 'sorry' when I should have. Few days are perfect.
February 7, 2002
I have to try again to deal with two critical questions that keep coming back:
- If you oppose the war, what other answer is there to the terrorist threat?
- Since a large majority of Americans support Bush on the "war against terrorism", shouldn't progressives focus instead on other issues where the right-wing agenda is vulnerable?
On the first, it isn't enough to argue that war won't end terrorism anymore than war can conquer drugs or poverty. Nor is it enough to argue that if "global war" remains the essence of the approach to the problem, the roots of terrorism will penetrate even more deeply. It isn't even enough, though imperative, to evoke the consequences that protracted war spells for populations targeted by our military might, as well as for the freedom and quality of life of our own people (look at the Bush budget for starters!).
All right, relying on war is a terrible answer, really no answer at all. Still, if we accept the way today's world is run, no one can come up with a real answer. That has to be acknowledged.
There are pragmatic answers in the realm of prevention, public safety, and law enforcement that only a fool would gainsay, but these are clearly inadequate to the magnitude of the problem. That applies also to international intelligence sharing and cooperation to disrupt plans for further terrorist attacks and to pursue the perpetrators. These necessary approaches are further complicated by the real danger of abuse, since anti-terrorism is often a cover for ulterior objectives directed against popular movements that resist reaction or foreign exploitation.
To get beyond limited, essentially defensive measures, there is no way to avoid challenging and trying to change the basic direction of our interaction with the rest of the world. Changing the climate that fans terrorism and violence actually requires rejecting Bush's strategy of endless global war. It requires a sharp turn away from unilateral superpower threats and massive force, especially from the Bush-Rumsfeld embrace of the doctrine of preemptive strike. It calls instead for the growth of worldwide movements to counter gross injustices and poverty fostered by institutions of capitalist globalization. It means coupling the great power and influence of the United States to a renewal of focus on the United Nations to facilitate serious international cooperation on the enormous problems of our times. It requires proving that open wounds in the Middle East can be healed by ending the occupation of Palestine and ensuring peace for both Israel and Palestine.
Such a reversal of our current king-of-the-hill posture defies the imagination. It certainly won't happen by way of a change of heart in Washington or even by some desirable shift in electoral fortunes. But anything and everything that moves us a step further toward a saner attitude is worth a great and persistent effort.
There is, of course, the argument that if the world's ills were all remedied, including a peace settlement agreed to by Israel and Palestine, there would still be terrorists driven by fanatic religious fundamentalism and undying hatreds. True. But the wellsprings of possible support and tolerance of terrorism would be quenched. At least then education and enlightenment might prevail with new generations.
That brings me to the other question. Why pound away at the "war against terrorism" in the face of Bush's popular support? Why not spend the energy instead on domestic issues where the right-wing agenda can be defeated?
Far from minimizing domestic issues like Enron, joblessness, the health system, civil rights, and so on, the awakening struggle on these issues is vital to any chance for positive change. Yet the wall that top Democrats claim separates domestic and war policies is a sham. There are times when an issue is so overwhelming that a minority must speak up whatever the difficulty in being heard. Such circumstances, when propaganda and hysteria fill the TV screens, demand patience and persistence to help open minds. This is such a time, no less than when Eugene V. Debs went to prison rather than bow to the propaganda of the First World War.
Our country has a tradition of turning away from extreme demagoguery before it's too late. We have not been and will not be a country that can be pushed into fascism. Our strutting "leadership" axis of Bush, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft makes it time to sound the alarm again.
February 10, 2002
I sent an op-ed piece to the San Francisco Chronicle after Bush's State of the Union speech. Of course, they didn't use it. It's just one of a dozen or so I've submitted over the years with the same result. Actually, I don't feel badly about it today. It's OK as long as the Chron prints opinion pieces like David Harris' on the front page of today's (Sunday) Insight section. Stephanie Salter also had the same take as mine (and Harris') in a column right after the "Axis of Evil" speech. I also like what Paul Krugman has been writing in the NY Times about Enron, the war, and the Bush budget.
I guess I'll just keep writing to myself and my website friends. Sometimes I feel like Johnny-One-Note on the war and terrorism. But my experience in science tells me that if you have an idea that is worth pursuing, others get to it independently. Bush's "axis of evil" line may get more than a few Americans taking a second look at where we're being led. Maybe Colin Powell, whom some have depended on for moderation, may also have opened a few eyes with his testimony that we are prepared to go after Iraq alone.
February 17, 2002
Some weeks ago, a friend said to me he would oppose going to war against Iraq. He also said his opposition would be more credible than mine because, unlike me, he supported the war in Afghanistan. He meant that my credibility was weakened by the fact that I opposed the resort to war by the United States in virtually every case in my lifetime, the notable exception being World War II. I don't want to rekindle arguments that have passed into history. I agree with him that his opposition to the apparent next war on the "global war" schedule may carry more weight than mine with others who are beginning to worry about the course we're on.
As David Harris pointed out in the San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday, February 10), George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech marks a "moral tipping point" for those who justified the war in Afghanistan as a necessary response to the September 11th outrage. Now the unavoidable question is how to respond to the expanded Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes in a global war against "evil". Will flaunting our unlimited commitment to war compel the world to behave on our terms, or will it breed more suspicion, enmity and future disasters?
We may be seeing the tentative beginning of a real debate. The State of the Union speech and the unconcealed mobilization for war against Iraq have alarmed much of the world. Now a few voices in the press (still far too few) have stopped cheering for George W. and are doing a double-take at the Emperor's new clothes. In today's SF Chronicle, Chris Matthews cries out that the war he supported enthusiastically after September 11th has been "hijacked" by right-wing ideologues led by William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz. He says they "have found what they long wanted: an American government heading toward war in the Middle East". He quotes Michael Kinsley of Slate warning that the Bush Administration "has nudged us down the slippery slope from destroying al Qaeda headquarters ….. to military action against countries that do other bad things…" In the same Insight section of today's Chronicle, Franz Schurmann points to a more fundamental proposition: "The United States, now the world's solo superpower, is fast becoming a world empire."
Debate is urgent, but the logic of arguments won't determine winners and losers. Debate is important in contributing ultimately to a public awakening and broad defection from the false "unity" demanded in the name of the "global war on terrorism". The reality is that overwhelming US power commanded by right-wing ideologues is hugely intimidating. No matter how disturbed by the "axis of evil" crusade, governments will avoid antagonizing the "empire", whose aid and complicity many count on to bolster their own regimes. With our own politicians of the "loyal opposition", intimidation is compounded by their shared commitment to superpower dominance. Tom Daschle finally took timid exception to Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric, but not to the policy it propounds. The Democratic leadership sticks to the absurd distinction between Bush's right-wing domestic agenda and his "patriotic" war program. Whereas they once criticized his unilateral arrogance on a host of problems of international import, they bow now to the extreme unilateralism of his doctrine of US-dictated preventive war. They won't begin to break ranks until Bush's inflated popular consensus starts to crack. That could happen under the impact of Enron scandals and the economy, but not without some public sense that Bush's reckless bombast and wildly expanded war budget are actually diminishing our security and safety.
The next few weeks and months may determine whether the war hawks can be restrained. The crowd around Bush is resourceful, not stupid. They plan a course of action leading up to military action against Iraq that will erode the potential for opposition and carry along the doubters. While Bush never even mentioned the United Nations in his "axis of evil" pronouncement, his team clearly plans to try to use the UN to neutralize critics and pave the way for aggressive US-dictated military action. Meanwhile Cheney is lining up reluctant partners for another Gulf war. I hope those who share Chris Matthews' dismay don't find themselves carried along step-by-step to support for a war they are now against.
Change for the better depends more and more on popular movements that challenge a vision of "world order" based on unilateralist military and economic dominance. That is the necessary counter both to eternal war and to extremist religious fundamentalism. There are some good omens. There is rising disgust with corporate corruption and greed within our country, and a significant international movement is gathering around the conviction expressed at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil that " a better world is possible". In my concentration on war and terrorism, I know that I pay too little attention to a host of corollary issues and developments that may well alter the odds for the better.
February 22, 2002
I don't know why it took me so long to get into "The God of Small Things". I had difficulty seeing the picture for quite a while, but when the story line finally revealed itself to me, I was swept up in the universal admiration for Arundhati Roy's art. Her style is unique and my ignorance of many allusions from a distant culture obscured for a time my understanding of what she was weaving. Realism and profound humanism merge in the story of the two-egg twins, the mother and the Paravan whom they love. Knowing them, and the other little people who contribute to and are part of their tragedy, is to know much about society—the ancient legacies and modern corruptions that crush beauty and destroy lives.
Of course, Roy is no longer the object of universal admiration. No one has written more powerful critiques of the superpower posture and war policies of the Bush Administration. Not only does she have trouble getting her articles published in the United States, she is even "diss'd" by Todd Gitlin in his Mother Jones article, "Blaming America First". Todd doesn't buy her assertion that her indictment is directed at Bush, not the American people. But Roy is still the same person, the one who wrote "The God of Small Things". Seems to me she has a deeper insight into the human condition, and a more universal sense of humanity, than her detractors — whether Todd agrees with her or not.
Other "small things" (of an entirely different order). Our checking account got raided. Someone made a phone call and succeeded in getting a check authorized on our account for $280 paid to Sprint. How do they do that? The bank doesn't know. Anyway, like a lot of other "victims", we spent two days changing accounts and rerouting autopays. Now we're ready for another trifling exercise: tax returns. Hate to think where most of the tax money is going—over more dead bodies, not George W.'s.
February 23, 2002
Sometimes (actually often) the sheer cruelty that one human being can inflict on another (others) is beyond analysis, beyond understanding. The bestiality of the videotaped murder of Daniel Pearl is almost impossible to fathom in human terms. The scale of the act, whether against one person or millions, makes it no easier to "explain". Analysis of political and economic context still leaves disbelief. How it is possible to behead a person, to exterminate millions in gas chambers, to drop a nuclear bomb on a city, to rape and slaughter, to lynch, to bulldoze homes and starve a population, to take satisfaction in lives lost when the twin towers came down, to joke at a press briefing about what "daisy cutter" and cluster bombs do? When I was very young, I found it impossible to take in the very idea of how people adapt themselves to fighting wars. The Nazis convinced me that there are exceptional times when there is no alternative. But, as much as I think I have learned in my long life, I still wonder about the phenomenon of war—especially about people who embrace either war or terrorism as the "solution".
February 27, 2002
For the first few months of this Journal, I was surprised and pleased with more feedback than I expected—lots of comment and argument. That's tapered off somewhat. One reason, I think, is that there is now so much material that exposes and opposes the Bush war program. From the beginning, I have not attempted to dig up hidden facts, which many analysts are a lot better at than I. Rather than concentrate specifically on the war in Afghanistan, I have focused more on how the "global war on terrorism" was projected, where it is intended to take us, and why it is not an answer to the phenomenon of terrorism. With George W.'s "axis of evil" speech, and the unfolding plan for war against Iraq, there is much wider concern about where we are and where we're heading. One highlight is the recent speech by Congressman Kucinich, "How Can We Justify This? ". We're far from deflating Bush's support, especially his hold over the media, but challenging the war no longer seems like whistling in the wind.
Anyway, I still like company. So, if you come by this way again soon, drop me an e-mail.
February 28, 2002
On January 23rd, I heard Elizabeth Farnsworth interview Amos Oz about his new book, "The Same Sea". I was excited by the vision he projected in talking about the book and I had to read it. Now I have.
I like Amoz Oz. Over the years, his articles on the Israeli/Palestinian struggles are among the most sane and humane. He has called for an end to Israel's occupation and has been scathing in his denunciation of prevailing leadership on both sides. About this new book, Elizabeth Farnsworth asked him why its stories about the connected lives of a few Israelis are so removed from the ongoing political crisis. He answered that it was deliberate, that he felt the most potent hope for the future was the common thrust of ordinary people to get on with their lives. He wanted to submerge all boundaries between people in "The Same Sea". To symbolize that in his novel, he crossed literary boundaries by intermixing poetry and prose. (He also spoke of incorporating music and dance, all art forms, but if he did that in the book, it didn't register with me.)
I thought the mix of poetry and prose would make reading a challenge, but it was easy to read. In fact, I could hardly put it down. The central character is an aging man and I became quite fond of him. But Oz's vision, that so captured me in his interview, seems to be lost in the book. The book is indeed a reaction from the terrible political convulsions, the unending violence, the noise and rhetoric of "leaders" who only make things worse. Oz didn't intend to inspire, but he did hope to offer another way of looking toward a livable future. The future he projected to Farnsworth would be Chekovian, far from satisfying, but not resembling a Shakespearean tragedy. But if there is a message in the book (and Oz clearly hoped he would transcend the current catastrophic impasse), it is quite subtle. Oz expresses a weariness, a longing for quiet and normalcy that seems beyond reach. I think that in spite of himself, Oz reflects the mood of hopelessness that has engulfed so many Israelis and Palestinians in the last year. That mood is beginning to give way to signs of renewal in the peace movement, and Amoz Oz will always be one of its finest voices. Hope does rest with ordinary Israelis and ordinary Palestinians of "The Same Sea", not just in their elemental sameness, but in their ultimate political power to end the unbearable nightmare.
Sex is the strongest current in "The Same Sea". Old age does not escape (or want to) its undertow. That theme appears in an entirely different story told in the recent film, "Innocence". Oz's novel is deeper, troubling and melancholy, but I liked the movie more.
March 4, 2002
None too soon, a public discussion has begun on the policies and relationship of the United States to the rest of the world. So far comment is more intense elsewhere, but it is stirring in the USA as well. Uncomfortable questions have emerged from the "axis of evil" speech, the dispatching of US military forces to additional far-flung theatres, the active preparations for a new Gulf War, and Bush's gargantuan military budget.
Paul Kennedy, Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale University, asks in an article in the Observer of London (3/3/02): "Has the US lost its way?" Also in the Observer (2/10/02}, writers Beaumont and Vulliamy ask: "Is Bush's awesome increase in military spending a reasonable response to the aftermath of September 11, or is he creating a force almost too powerful for its own good?" They go on to repeat a French reaction: "Gigantisme militaire they call it, in a phrase that describes both the scale of America's ambitions and also a pathological condition: an organism grown so large, it is sick." External affairs commissioner Patten of the European Union protests that the Bush Administration is shifting into "unilateral overdrive".
The first feeble questioning by Daschle and other Democratic Party higher-ups was enough to evoke "how dare they…." from Trent Lott and "disgusting" from Tom Delay.
It is easy now for Americans to see the necessity of confronting terrorism. It is harder to come to grips with the issue of how our powerful country relates to the world and to the problems that connect all of humanity. For Bush, "coalition" is the willingness of other countries to be led by the US military in war without limits and without end. It does not pertain to the environment, or poverty, or exploitation and globalization, or nuclear disarmament and arms control, or ignorance and religious extremism, or racial and ethnic oppression, or gender discrimination. While terrorism is a serious phenomenon in its own right, it is far from the only problem that demands international cooperation. In fact, separating it from the basic areas of human concern is to guarantee that it spreads and remains immune to all the terrible weapons of war.
What is the place of the United States in the world at the start of the 21st Century? What, if anything, is preordained by a monopoly of power that dwarfs anything the world has seen in the last millennium and a half? How will that power be used? To what extent can it influence or be influenced by international developments? How may it be affected by political and economic battles within the United States? I know these questions are beyond anyone's predictive capacities at this stage, but they are too important to ignore. I have been thinking about them a lot and want to take a few nibbles in several journal entries over the next week or two. Meanwhile, any willing readers may help me out with some e-mail thoughts.
March 6, 2002
I may be the only one who never fails to remember and observe March 6th as "Unemployment Insurance Day". It goes back to March 6, 1930 when I was 8 years old. That was the day my father was arrested in Stamford, Connecticut for leading a demonstration of thousands in a nationwide day of campaigning for unemployment insurance, which was not yet the law. The demonstration was peaceful, but "illegal", because Stamford, like cities throughout the country, refused to issue a permit. The same thing happened again on May 1, 1930, only this time my father and twelve others (one a woman) were taken out of their cells one by one and beaten methodically and savagely by teams of police. The whole story is told in Looking for the Future. I suppose that childhood experience is why March 6th became one of my days of remembrance, one of my "national holidays". Anyway, March 6th and May 1st are days that bring back to me my parents and a "great generation " of comrades who braved hard times, jails and beatings to open the way for some of our country's most important social, labor and civil rights gains. Among the thirteen arrested and assaulted in Stamford on May 1, 1930, were two African-Americans, two Italian immigrants, one Irish-American, and the usual Jewish suspects. That kind of diversity in comradeship was virtually unheard of, outside the left, in a country where association between blacks and whites was still largely forbidden by Jim Crow laws (South) and unwritten bans (North and South).
While I'm at it, March 8th, International Women's Day, is also Mother's Day for me. I remember the person who made my childhood awakening to the world in 1930 one of strength and humanity rather than fear and despair. Her courage and resourcefulness pushed past the town police and bureaucrats and forced them to open the blood-spattered cells to our family doctor to tend the raw wounds and broken bones. In my child's eyes, and still today, she towered over the town bullies.
March 8, 2002
A couple of thoughts to begin the promised nibbles on the subject of the United States in the early 21st Century world.
First, there is a problem of self-awareness, something missing in our perception of our own United States. We know we're the world's only superpower, that no country can match us militarily or isolate itself from our vast economic and cultural influence. But we don't think of our country as imperial, as the world's greatest empire. After all, the age of colonial empires is over. Inhabitants of any of the world's great empires of the past — British, Dutch, Spanish and on down the long list—knew that theirs was an empire. Most citizens of the imperial homeland rationalized their great power over others as a civilizing mission, even in many cases as shouldering the "white man's burden".
Our "global reach" is more informal, but more expansive than that of any of the previous modern empires. Our military, economic, media and cultural penetration is ubiquitous — pressuring governments, altering lives, often determining which political and economic choices are "permissible".
Why should we acknowledge this imperial aspect of our place in the world? Why not dismiss it under the label of "world leadership", commitment to "good over evil", to democracy and human rights? One reason is that, despite good intentions and the fabulous achievements of our people, the extensive US interests abroad are largely defined by big capital and multinational corporations. They are not subject to the will of the people or to the control of democratic institutions. Their law is profit. And since protection of "American interests" motivates our foreign policy, private and selfish interests will usually count more than popular and humanitarian interests. Never was this more pronounced than it is now with the corporation-dominated White House of Bush and Cheney. This has played out over the years in numerous military interventions and coups, in covert joint operations with fascistic warlords and their death squads.
A reason to recognize this reality is that otherwise we could never get the full answer to the oft-asked question: Why, alongside widespread admiration for the USA, are so many people deeply hostile? We would not understand why people whose lives are unbearable often see the USA as a formidable obstacle to social change rather than as champion and friend. Too often we dismiss this antagonism simply as resentment of our style or accomplishments rather than as a matter of substance. (This is not an analysis, much less a justification, of what drives the cabal of extreme religious fundamentalists who have made us the target of relentless hatred and terrorism. That's a whole other story, related only obliquely to any rational view of US society and the problems of the world.}
In a journal entry to come, I want to consider the extent to which the world role of the United States can be shifted, more toward public interest and common problems and less toward obsession with unilateral imperial control. But first, a brief reflection on what helped define (and still influences) the character of our superpower monopoly: namely, the outcome and legacy of the Cold War.
The rise of the USA to superpower economic and military status became undeniable as a result of our role in two world wars. Our emergence as the sole superpower was the outcome of the Cold War and the demise of the USSR. In the process we became the military colossus of the world, ultimately with more and increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction than any conceivable combination of powers on earth and in space. This inevitably fueled the ambitions of our right-wing hawks—if we use our power advantage boldly, we have a historic window of opportunity for a new American Century (indeed, an American Eternity). Among the most strident voices are William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, with Henry Kissinger's basso as continuum. But it was George Bush senior, the man who disdained the intellectual "vision thing", who ordained the "New World Order" that his son and political heirs are aggressively seeking to shape in their image.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was widely hailed as the triumph of capitalism, almost as its Second Coming. By now, though, it's clear that the situation we're left with is decidedly unhealthy. A unipolar warring world, one that encompasses enormous inequalities, is no triumph. A world without democratic checks and balances is no more viable or desirable than a country without same.
I'm afflicted with the impulse to apply a "what if…" imagination to history. I know that such indulgence only ends up with cynical dismissal: "If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a trolley car." Nevertheless…. If the USSR had achieved democratic reform instead of self-destructing (with a strong push from father Bush), the United Nations would be more meaningful, there would be a better chance to limit and sharply reduce weapons of mass destruction, terrorism could be dealt with more effectively than by "global war", there would be greater incentive for negotiated progress on the great challenges confronting humankind. There would be more elbowroom for countries which choose not to conform to any ultimatum, such as George W.'s "you're with us or you're for the terrorists."
A lively generation of young people in all countries told us not long ago that big is not necessarily better. Being King-of-the-Hill has its downside. While it may last for a long time, nothing is forever. Better grace and sharing than arrogance and unilateralism. But that can only come from a popular awakening to our common humanity, not from those who dream up diabolical weapons and dispatch Dr. Strangeloves to an underground shadow government.
March 9, 2002
Roz says I don't have to write today—everyone will have seen the story about the Bush Administration's directive to the Pentagon on "nuclear strategy", and will have jumped out of their skins.
Now we don't just have to worry that a terrorist might somehow, somewhere get hold of a nuclear bomb. We have a head of state who has lots of nuclear weapons, wants to have new ones designed, and is clearly willing to use them.
March 11, 2002
Woke up to the six-month anniversary of 9/11. The memorials and reminiscences are heart breaking. Sorry the first voice I heard was George W. Bush intoning his first-person-singular pledge of more war and intervention everywhere.
Today I was going to start the second part of my look at the place of our country in the early 21st Century world. But my mood isn't right. It's hard to be objective today. The relived sadness of lives lost and other lives deeply wounded takes over. And six months later, carnage in the Middle East and India is every hour's news. Then there is the horror of the Bush Administration's plunge toward making nuclear war practical and legitimate—so long as we are the doers.. Don't get excited, say Cheney, Powell, and Rice—George W. is just being "prudent".
Maybe tomorrow or the day after, I'll try again…
March 13, 2002
Is it reasonable to hold out the possibility that our country can play a more positive, less aggressive and militaristic, role on the world scene? Can the one and only superpower relate to the nations and people of the world on a basis of common interest and respect?
I know the answer I would like to believe, but does it square with reality? I do think the answer to the first question is yes, especially if "positive role" is relative to the ominous trajectory of the Bush Administration. A sharp departure from the "global war" agenda is absolutely necessary and had better prove possible; likewise, a shift from the unilateralist, total rejection of cooperative agreements on the environment and all other critical international problems. However, to justify the "yes" requires serious argument, since Bush is still riding sky high on the determination of the American people to unite against terrorism.
Before that, though, there is the second question. An unambiguous yes answer to that question would hinge on systemic changes that may be a long way off in an unforeseeable future. As long as the monumental military and economic imbalance in global power prevails, and as long as US interests abroad are largely identified with mega capital, it will be a constant uphill struggle to put people and democracy ahead of imperial ambitions.
Nevertheless, while fundamental change seems beyond reach at this stage, what is possible is enormously important. It makes a very big difference to our country and the world if the Bush Administration's program for unending war and galloping intervention goes forward or runs into effective opposition. It makes an incalculable difference if the effort to legitimate the use of nuclear weapons is defeated (as it was when contemplated by McArthur during the Korean War and Nixon during the Vietnam War). The growing movement to advance labor and democratic interests against unfettered capitalist globalization makes a difference. It can make a difference if there is strong pressure to refocus international cooperation on all problems through the United Nations. In that context, there is reason to hope that the great influence of the United States, and the democratic inclination of our people, can more often be coordinated with efforts to promote peaceful and just resolution of bitter conflicts. Despite the selfish dynamic of entrenched corporate privilege, the real and powerful interest of all people in peace, greater equality, saving the environment, combating poverty, terrorism and disease, can have a favorable impact on what we do and how we relate to the world.
I can't and won't try to speculate convincingly on how the tide may turn. But I've been thinking about a talk that Roz and I heard last Saturday night. It was Estelle Freedman discussing her book, "No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women". Her main point was that the cause of equality for women has entered the culture and developed a momentum worldwide that no reactionary backlash or political setback can turn around. I think the same thing can be said about momentum against racism. Racist oppression, inequality of women, and homophobia remain deeply rooted, but a long-term forward movement has taken hold as a result of determined struggle. Why shouldn't the struggles of past decades and the immediate future produce the same momentum for peace, civil liberties and social justice?
(When I was anticipating this little piece, part 2 of what I began on March 8th, I was pretty ambitious. But I scaled back in the writing because I found I was repeating thoughts expressed in earlier entries. Also, the more I elaborated, the more abstract it seemed. So I cut bait. Chalk up what's left to a bit of chronic optimism and a lot of hope.)
March 14, 2002
Today's SF Chronicle carried a blast from the Pentagon. It ripped an editorial that appeared in the Chron following an exchange between Paul Wolfowitz and the paper's editorial board. I wrote a letter to the editor. Will they print it?
Dear Editor,
Please, please, SF Chronicle, don't roll over for Paul Wolfowitz (Editor's note, 3/14). The minor liberties taken in paraphrasing Wolfowitz's exchange with the Chron in the March 1st editorial did not distort his well-publicized hawkishness. There is plenty of corroborative evidence that appears regularly in all media coverage: Paul Wolfowitz has been identified from the beginning as the leader of the hawks who project military action against Iraq and widespread intervention, including nuclear threats, against a laundry list of countries around the world. What's more, semantics aside, nothing compares to the gross distortion (big lie!) in the Pentagon's statement of the Chron's editorial position: "…we should wait until tens of thousands of Americans have been killed and then gather what amounts to a legal chain of evidence before acting to prevent an attack by weapons of mass destruction." That just follows the John Ashcroft and Trent Lott pattern of intimidation against any who dare to question or dissent.
I don't look to the Chronicle to agree with me or anyone else, and I often disagree. But I respect the courage it takes to differ with the war hawks and not to be bullied into conformity or silence. Please don't lose it.
Sincerely,
Leon Wofsy
March 19, 2002
The Chron did print my March 14th letter yesterday—not quite as is, but almost.
Change of pace: the Oscars, coming up Sunday night. We insist we really don't care who "wins", and certainly wish we could escape the hours of accompanying garbage. But we'll be at the TV, complaining about boredom all through the night. Of course we didn't see all the nominated pictures. We saw and liked a couple of them, but didn't see anything great. "A Beautiful Mind" was somewhat spoiled for me because I got fooled and felt foolish. I kept waiting for Russell Crowe (Nash) to crash without realizing that he was hallucinating from the word go. As a result, I thought for a while that I was watching a badly dated and wildly exaggerated Cold War story. (Why am I confessing this?) Anyway, when I adjusted, I was very impressed with Crowe's acting. He hadn't won me over in "Insider", and I can't for the life of me figure what he did that was special in "Gladiator". But I'm convinced now. Nevertheless, I thought that Tom Wilkinson, "In the Bedroom", was even better. I'm told that if we had gotten to "Ali", we might give our invisible vote to Will Smith.
Back to "A Beautiful Mind". During the Cold War, especially the McCarthy years, people with serious mental illness often sorted out into two "camps"—those terrified that they were targeted and tortured by "reds", others with virtually the same hallucinations about the FBI. I would guess that psychiatric wards are today receiving patients who are the personal targets of bin Laden, and others who are in the sights of John Ashcroft. Hallucinations reflect reality in weird ways in weird times.
March 25, 2002
In my anticipation of Oscar night, I sure missed the impending highlight. Among the few movies that Roz and I got to see, missing were Monster's Ball, Training Day, and Ali. I didn't sense that the Academy, after so many years of purposeful myopia, was about to let another bar come down. The resistance to recognizing leading actors of color in other than "supporting roles" was similar to the story of football quarterbacks — the bar remained there for years after African-American athletes starred at all other positions. Plenty of rusty bars remain to be broken down.
March 27, 2002
Chris Matthews is still going strong against the war-on-Iraq hawks (Sunday Chronicle, March 24, 2002) I had worried that the Bush Administration's build-up could erode opposition and "carry along the doubters" (Journal entry, February 17, 2002). My hope was that "those who share Chris Matthews' dismay don't find themselves carried along step-by-step to support for a war they are now against." If anything, Matthews is even more determined and convincing now.
Post Script on Oscar night: Bringing up the long saga of the movie industry's shame, and the obstacles remaining, is not to rain on the parade. It only punctuates the thrill and sheer joy shared that night with Sidney Portier, Halle Berry, and Denzel Washington.
Late addition:
From my momentary mood of celebration to the lowest depths of desperation. Just this minute heard the news: at least 15 killed and a hundred wounded in Netanya for Passover. The news of each day allows no respite, let alone escape. A sane world would be focused on the earthquake toll in Afghanistan. Instead the body counts of war mount—Arabs, Jews, Muslims, and who's next? Will the movement to end the occupation of Palestine and to secure peace in the Middle East ever overtake the latest terrifying event? Or will still greater escalation to war and destruction be the "response"?
March 31, 2002
This is a strange day for me. I finally have the tools in hand to post what I write into my website journal. Before I had to go the indirect route, sending each item to Fred who had the keys to the website (and the necessary expertise). It's like getting my first driver's license.
But what does one write today? What's to say of a Passover and Easter season so outrageous, tragic and portentous of worse to come? One almost wants to put words aside, just to scream, to cry out in disbelief and anger.
I read Tom Friedman in today's Sunday New York Times. He can't afford to be at a loss for words. He has become the chief pundit of the print medium, and it seems that princes, diplomats, Charlie Rose and many ordinary people hang on his words. His answer? Foremost. a crushing military blow by Israel against the Palestinians, with full backing by America, to show that "terror will not pay"; then "Israel must tell the Palestinian people that it is ready to resume talks.." This remedy is prefaced by the argument that the Palestinians are not really desperate "stemming from the Israeli occupation", that they willfully "are testing out a whole new method of warfare, using suicide bombers", and that Israel's war against the Palestinians is vital to "all of civilization". Friedman will get no demurrer from Sharon (or Bush). The problem is there's nothing new there. That's exactly the menu that with every further escalation is destroying more lives and all hope. The mentality is all too familiar. It becomes the catechism of every occupying or colonial power. Sooner or later every occupied people resists the occupiers, and every occupying force exploits any resort to guerilla warfare or terrorist actions to justify massive state terrorism against an entire population. And the occupied population is always too backward and "stupid" to accept the occupier's reality, to accept the responsibility for its miserable condition.
A germ of doubt creeps into Friedman's "solution". Of suicide bombing, he says: "This kind of terrorism can be curbed only by self-restraint and repudiation by the community itself. No foreign army can stop small groups ready to kill themselves." Under what circumstances could such "self-restraint and repudiation" take hold? According to Colin Powell, a speech by Arafat in Arabic might help. Calling off Sharon's dogs of war, and a clear commitment to ending the occupation, is a more reasonable way to generate a civic will powerful enough to restrain and sharply reverse the frequency of murderous suicides.
For Friedman, like Bush, one worry eclipses all others: some day a suicide "bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations." No sane person can forget that nuclear weapons are the ultimate man-made threat to humanity. The threat takes many forms, none of which, however, can be eliminated by more and wider wars. The most deadly notion is that tragedy can be forestalled by Bush's order to "adapt" nuclear weapons for "tactical" warfare. Equally scary is the notion that Bush can decide unilaterally which countries can be trusted with weapons of mass destruction and which will be threatened with war since they are "evil". What happens if Bush or a future president disapproves of a government that already has nuclear weapons, e.g. India, France, Pakistan, Great Britain, Russia, China, Israel? Or are these countries inherently and permanently "good"? Who's to say what's a more likely scenario for the use of a nuclear weapon—a lone bomber, or Rumsfeld still looking for bin Laden in a cave too deep to be dug out by "conventional" blockbusters?
As long as we help make a sick world sicker, the danger grows. All the bombs at the Pentagon's command won't bring security. With things as they are, every country needs serious measures to combat terrorism and maximize protection of its civilian population. But that task is not compatible with war and support for armies of occupation. There is no way out, no way forward, without a positive program for world cooperation that deals with basic problems and promotes peace.
April 4, 2002
The world of "1984" has come and gone, but it has nothing on the world of 2002.
The man who came to the Rose Garden this morning as indispensable "peace-maker" is the world's most "resolved" and engaged war-maker. Much is being made in the media of Bush's message to Sharon to "halt incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas and begin the withdrawal from those cities it has recently occupied." World outrage was growing not only against Sharon's blitz, but also against the strong support it received from Bush until today. Bush's reference to Iraq, and Rumsfeld's identical comment yesterday, reveal the worry that the ramifications of the Israeli-Palestinian bloodbath are interfering with priorities of the "global war on terrorism."
What's to expect? The reiterated pro-Sharon bias and collusion makes it highly unlikely that the Bush Administration will broker a just peace process. Having allowed Sharon to change the equation by brute force, the focus for some time will be on reversing the damage caused by the current military invasion rather than on ending the 35 year occupation that is so destructive to both occupied and occupier.
The lesson here is that even the Bush Administration had to take stock of the massive demonstrations and widespread outrage evoked by Sharon's military aggression. No balance is possible in today's badly unbalanced "world order" without the exercise of "people power". Sharon will never voluntarily pull back the settlements and end the occupation. It's really up to the people of Israel to recreate a majority that will seek peace and security by ending the shameful occupation. In that context, there could be a majority of Palestinians and Israelis living in peace and isolating those in either state who thrive on terror and mutual hatred. But if that kind of people power is still just a wish for the Middle East, when can we expect our own people to weigh in against our super-Sharon? Maybe, with some help from the rest of the world, that can begin to happen before the "second phase" war against Iraq.
April 6, 2002
Roz and a couple of our close friends just completed a ten-session program at Kaiser Permanente on coping with chronic pain. It was impressive and quite worthwhile. The pain remains chronic, but you learn various methods of suppressing its place in your consciousness for periods of time. One way is to transport yourself on occasion to a pleasant place in memory or imagination. Such intervals contribute to a more general effect, bolstering morale and avoiding depression.
I tried to apply that this morning to the intolerable pain emanating from the Middle East. I tried to put myself back into times when hope burst forth through the defeat of McCarthy, or hard-won victories over Jim Crow, or the movements that finally turned the tide against our war in Vietnam—not to speak of great moments in world history such as victory over Hitler and the Axis (the real one) or the subsequent collapse of colonial regimes. It didn't work for me. So I tried to close my eyes and reconstitute the occasion when Roz and I heard Kiri Te Kanawa in The Marriage of Figaro. That hypnosis didn't work either. Nor did the image of Barry Bond's 10th inning homerun game winner of yesterday. Soon I was listening to the radio and heard excerpts of George W.'s Saturday talk, followed by the news of the day: Sharon's offensive spreads, atrocities against civilians in city after city, and Bush has forbidden a meeting of Powell with Arafat.
Sharon is doing exactly what he planned from the beginning, long before his provocation at the mosque in Jerusalem. The awful suicide bombings, especially the Passover massacre at Netanya, became the signal for the military collective punishment of the Palestinian population—the fascist method of "retaliation" commonly employed to terrorize and subdue conquered territories. The frequency of suicide bombings may diminish for now, but the seeds of hatred are spewed far and wide to germinate and yield fruits of terror for tomorrow and tomorrow. Bush, whose support has made it possible for Sharon to carry on as he is, is now trying to gain some control over his behavior. That's a far cry from the effort needed to move toward a solution: ending the occupation and a mutual commitment to coexistence of two equal and independent states.
The idea that the United States, via the Bush Administration, is the one and only answer to securing peace in the Middle East is a recipe for chronic pain. The whole world has to be let in to the process if there is to be even-handedness, justice and peace. The persistent Palestinian demand for an international presence is absolutely reasonable. I heard George Mitchell say that this provision was not included in the Mitchell Plan only because one side (Israel) objected. Most of the world is outraged by Sharon's "solution", which is why he is comfortable only with a US presence and is not deterred by Bush's one-sided pronouncements.
I'm afraid the response to chronic pain of the political type is not to block it out, but to attack it. Some Israelis are doing that, among them army reservists who have exposed the real character of the occupation. We, whose government is implicated in the unjust and tragic impasse, try to act likewise. As for pain, familiar as it is to us old folks, it's so much worse for the children of Palestine and Israel. Then again, the hope is that most of them will live to see better times.
April 9, 2002
A friend questions what I said a couple of days ago: "The idea that the United States, via the Bush Administration, is the one and only answer to securing peace in the Middle East is a recipe for chronic pain. The whole world has to be let in to the process if there is to be even-handedness, justice and peace." He says that in the short run, Sharon and Israel will listen to no one but the United States, "if for no other reason than the large amount of aid this country sends them (both governmental and private). If the immediate need is to stanch the bleeding, I very much fear that the USA is the only outside agency that can have any effect right now. Brrr."
The dilemma he points up is, of course, real. Unless the Bush Administration confronts Sharon strongly, he will surely plunge ahead with his war crusade. But it's also clear that the degree to which Bush challenges Sharon is dependent on pressure from the outrage engulfing the Arab populations and much of the rest of the world. Our touted "straight-talker" has been talking the words, while, as I heard Cokie Roberts say on NPR, Sharon gets "a wink and a nod" to keep going at least until Powell finally arrives on the scene. For that matter, the whole world knows that Powell's circuitous route and timetable are part of Sharon's calculation.
It is certainly in the interest of the Bush Administration to get the crisis in the Middle East under control. Nevertheless, bowing to the superpower formula is an inherently sick and unsatisfactory way to deal with regional and international issues that effect the peace and well-being of the whole world. Just as there is an international clamor of protest against Sharon's assault on the Palestinians (and Bush's part as well), there has to be a growing demand for the world community to play its rightful role. Nothing in the short run is going to cancel the disproportionate influence of the superpower, but without the power of world opinion there will be no solution that yields peace and justice to Israel and Palestine. For that matter, strong popular intervention and protest is the way ultimately to alter the behavior not only of Sharon, but also of our own war hawks before they commit additional outrages in the Middle East and elsewhere.
April 10, 2002
Today, a suicide bombing in Haifa. The relentless devastation by the IDF in Palestinian territories goes on.
One of the things that Sharon has accomplished with his brutal military assault is to generate so much outrage that there is less attention than before to the deep concerns of Israeli citizens—about the horrendous suicide bombings, the long-term peril to Israel's existence, the fragile state of its security. Contrary to his purpose, he has also generated an inexorable recognition, including among many Israelis, that there can be no peace and security as long as Israel continues as an occupying power.
Support for an independent and equal Palestinian state and an end to the 35-year occupation is paramount. That doesn't alter the fact that the mix of extreme nationalism and fundamentalist religion is a terrible poison that brutalizes and destroys lives wherever it takes hold, whether among Arabs or Jews. Sharon has made it clear to the world that the magnitude of suffering is greatest for the victims of occupation, but the tragedy is real and horrible for both populations. Hope for a workable solution demands overcoming those whose goal is either the elimination of the Palestinians or the destruction of Israel. It's one thing to recognize that state terrorism is far more devastating than individual acts of terror, but it is criminal to permit racism or nationalism to numb people to the murder of civilians in either form.
April 13, 2002
I think I'll sign off for a while. My mind is full of the Middle East, but I have no new thoughts. On the other hand, I can't free myself enough to change the subject.
April 19, 2002
The Op-Ed page of the SF Chronicle (April 17) carried a debate on the US Senate's consideration of legislation on human cloning. On one side is Richard Hayes of the Center for Genetics and Society; on the other are Nobel laureates Paul Berg and Michael Bishop and Andrew Grove, Chairman of Intel Corporation. Both sides favor a ban on "reproductive cloning" to create humans. They disagree on whether cloning for embryonic stem cell research should be blocked by a Congressional moratorium (Hayes) or permitted (Berg et al.).
There is a real danger that the Brownback Bill will pass in the Senate, matching the earlier House legislation that would outlaw both human cloning and embryonic stem cell research. I agree with Berg that Brownback should be defeated. My reasons for opposing such legislation are outlined in my Journal entry on "Cloning and Ethics", November 27, 2001.
Both the Hayes and Berg positions are clearly presented and make important points. Both, in my opinion, avoid questions that are at least equally important.
Hayes' group of mainly progressives is concerned about the misuse of techniques of genetic engineering for eugenic purposes. That should be a real concern for society. It isn't accomplished, however, by ignoring the fact that Bush and the Christian (anti-choice) Coalition have seized on the issue of embryonic stem cell research to sanctify by law their religious dogma that the earliest activated egg is actually a human being. It is foolhardy to dismiss the significance of this issue in the determined crusade to criminalize abortion.
It's also folly to give Congress the power to ban areas of intellectual and scientific research that it deems unethical. Leaving aside the matter of Congress' credentials in science and ethics, I don't think it's a stretch to invoke First Amendment considerations. Hayes' group actually supported the House legislation (identical to Brownback) and castigated those who voted in the minority. The new idea of a moratorium seems to me to be a gimmick very similar to the approach that George W. took at the outset in severely limiting research on embryonic cell lines. There are very good reasons to do embryonic stem cell research. It should not be put on probation pending what "miracles" do or do not show up in related areas.
As with everything else these days, it isn't easy to see how the public interest will be served as science and technology march on. The scientists and the "ethicists" are dominated by the priorities of the biotechnology corporations. The public is deluged with exaggerations and commercial hype rather than gaining knowledge of the actual advances, unsolved problems and real potential of health-related research. Moreover, there are indeed several famous biological scientists who embrace eugenic ideas as the wave of the scientific future — shades of the late racist Nobel laureate, William Shockley! More on that on another day.
Still, looking to secure ethics and integrity in science by way of Bush's "born-again" morality and a Congressional ban on research is like expecting the Pope and John Ashcroft to champion reproductive rights.
April 23, 2002
One rational reaction to the Le Pen shockwave in France is to recoil in alarm at the fascist similarity of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hatred. France's chief anti-Semite is its chief anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim racist.
But the world gets stranger and stranger. With both anti-Semitic and anti-Arab violence emerging as dangerous currents in much of Europe, reviving horrible memories, one might think that the respective constituencies would be separate and distinct. Not so simple, as an editorial in the Israeli paper HA'ARETZ remarks (April 23, 2002):
"Against this background, the expressions of satisfaction and even ideological support for Le Pen, expressed by some French Jews and even in Israel, is particularly disturbing. French Jewry, as a minority that suffered from anti-Semitism and blood feuds, needs to worry about the phenomenon of anti-Muslim hatred gaining significant political expression. Hatred of the other is bad news for Jews."
Of course, this confusion of constituent loyalties shows up in the United States as well. Our worst traditional anti-Semites, from Jerry Falwell to the real Billy Graham, are the strongest champions of Sharon and the ultra-orthodox settlers.
Against this background, there is a common bond connecting Jews who oppose the brutal occupation of Palestine with Arabs (and French) who reject hatred of Jews.
Family time is almost here. Our two children, their spouses, and our three grandchildren will gather round us this coming weekend for a long planned "in-between" celebration. What's in-between is my 80th birthday, last November, and our 60th Anniversary, this coming November. We improvised this condensed plan since it isn't easy to get us all together at one time. Also, as our family knows, Roz and I have already spent 60 years together without waiting for the official date.
We're very happy and excited. I hope I don't spoil it with this stanza from a Berthold Brecht poem, To Posterity. I heard it yesterday at a memorial for a wonderful person, Margo Sercarz, who died too young.
"They tell me eat and drink; be glad you have it! But how can I eat and drink When my food is snatched from the hungry And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty? But yet I eat and drink."
Don't worry. We'll be full of good cheer when they get here: Carla and Byron, David and Hilary, Danielle, Kevin and Susan.
May 1, 2002
May Day! May Day!
Most of the May Days that I remember were days of inspiration, unity, celebration and pride in an American workers' holiday that became international. The only other day honored so universally is the New Year.
So it's almost sacrilege to realize that this year May Day connects with me first of all as the international signal of distress. What bothers me is not only that desperate alarms are raised in so many places, but that so much of the world looks to George W. Bush and company as the indispensable arbiter of conflict and crisis. It's not that our strident leaders are wise men in the eyes of the world—far from it—but that's the logic of subservience to exclusive superpower.
I can't take comfort in the fact that a phone call from Condeleezza Rice caused Sharon to back down a bit on the siege of Arafat. Nor do I see in the alliance between the American President and the Saudi Prince the promise of a just and peaceful two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Whatever deals are brokered, what looms largest is the US Administration's determination to get on with its "global war" and its next big military conquest in Iraq.
One hopes that worldwide revulsion over the murderous violence in Palestine and Israel, and demands for an end to the occupation, can influence events. That has already had some consequence with respect to US policy considerations. The question is whether reaction to the horror unleashed in recent weeks can become powerful enough to yield meaningful progress for the people of Palestine and Israel—and whether the ostensible prime "peacemaker" in that conflict will be allowed to inflict on the world an even more disastrous war in the Middle East.
If the movement to stop the violence in the Middle East expands to thwart the war hawks that dominate the Bush Administration—if plans for a new Gulf War prove too unpalatable—next May Day may feel more like a holiday again.
May 4, 2002
In the past year or so, four of my deepest friendships have been strained and probably weakened beyond hope of full restoration. Two were my very close friends for years at different crucial stages in my life, and another shared ideas, experiences and mutual caring over my entire lifetime. In no case has the personal breech been formalized in words. It's something I've slowly and reluctantly come to realize. In one case, I simply stopped getting any response to calls and letters. With the others, communication remains, but with low frequency, little substance and without the old warmth. It hurts, and I try to think, "Why?"
Surely these emotional casualties are related to the times we live in. There is unrelieved tension and a sense of desperation. The less we feel we can make a difference, the more relentless our differences become. Opinions may influence little, but it seems that few arguments are trivial in their affect on relationships. The falling out with one friend is apparently due to divergent views over whether genetics determines the state of society. The cooling off with another is directly related to my Left views on the US role in the world and the "war on terrorism." I can only guess that the other two think I'm too soft, too "balanced" and not sufficiently radical. Of course, we have often in the past differed and argued about one thing or another, but friendship and mutual affection were never at stake.
I know there's more to this unhappy development than the political atmosphere after 9/11, or the rise of George W. Bush from illegitimate President to top international potentate. Once harmony is broken, no doubt we see in each other things we don't like, although the same things were readily accommodated in an easier time of fond and friendly compatibility. With two of the friends who are my age or older, illness, unrewarding lives of retirement, and depression are big factors. I love them and wish I could find a way to change things, to bring back some of the old joy.
Wisdom is supposed to be a blessing of old age (although everyone over sixty seems to worry about Alzheimer's). What old age seems to be short of, at least these days, is patience and tolerance of perceived foibles in others.
I know everyone's story is different. Still I wonder how many other friendships have been strained, over Israel/Palestine or Afghanistan or electoral politics or just due to the temper of the times. Strangely, I remember that the very difficult McCarthy years made my closest friendships closer. Is it just that then we were young?
May 6, 2002
We saw Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at the Berkeley Rep last night.
Few of us took much interest in Afghanistan before the build-up for war after September 11, 2001. Tony Kushner plunged into the subject when Clinton ordered the bombing of Afghanistan after finding bin Laden to blame for explosions at US embassies in East Africa in August 1998. Probably no one on earth could master a complex subject with as much intelligence and imagination as Kushner and put it all into a three-and-a-half hour play. From seeing his plays, and listening to a taped monologue of his on socialism, I suspect that Kushner has one of the most brilliant and creative minds now functioning. And he has a heart, a wonderful passion for humanity in all its aspects.
Kushner's art is overwhelming, cerebral and clever in its expansive treatment of vital problems of our times. His style of telling a story, whether set in Kabul or in the world of AIDS, is about as far away from minimalism as it's possible to get. A Kushner play is a "tour de force"….. As often happens to me these days, my eyes closed for several brief spells, especially in the first act — such lapses may be beneficial in that I am often somewhat refreshed and more alert at later stages when the tale unfolds. Still I feel a bit like the foolish Emperor Franz Josef in Amadeus, who's response to Mozart's music is: "too many notes!" Kushner is no Mozart, but I felt uncomfortable as I left the theater and heard myself saying: "too many words!"
May 8, 2002
I tried to change the subject for a few days, but the horror blasts its way back in. The lives of young people are obliterated, and tales told by idiots grow louder and more furious. Hamas continues to rely on murderous suicides and Sharon's answer is to ratchet up the devastation. Can anyone believe that the key to ending the tragedy is to exile Arafat, or to "neutralize" him with the help of Bush? Tragic futility resounds in Sharon's response: "The battle continues and will continue until all those who believe that they can make gains through the use of terror will cease to exist - cease to exist."
It may well be that a solution to the bloody Israeli/Palestinian impasse will only come with changes in leadership and policy on both sides. Some use the analogy of Nixon and China to speculate that Sharon is the one who can end the occupation. I don't believe it. Getting Arafat to condemn the suicide bombings has proven more realistic than getting Sharon to give up on the aggressive settlements and on massive force.
On another subject, not unrelated, Tom Friedman has an interesting column about Indonesia in today's NY Times. He quotes the Indonesian writer Andreas Harsono: "Since Sept. 11 there have been so many free riders on this American antiterrorism campaign, countries that want to use it to suppress their media and press freedom and turn back the clock. Indonesia, instead of being seen as a weak democracy that needs support, gets looked at as a weak country that protects terrorists, and Malaysia is seen as superior because it arrests more terrorists than we do." Friedman goes on to say: "Nevertheless, some top Pentagon officials are definitely pushing to let the Indonesian military make a comeback and to restore ties with the Indonesian military that were suspended after the army ran amok in East Timor in 1999."
May 10, 2002
There are some minuses to writing frequent Journal entries. Sometimes a mood on a given day gets magnified to a point that may be regretted the day after posting. What I wrote about friendship on May 4 brought the biggest e-mail response yet. There were many different insights for me to ponder, but my original comments made things seem too bleak and didn't help with respect to some friendships that I value. The letters I got put things in a better perspective. What I can't undo, I can try to learn from.
May 17, 2002
I've passed a week of journal silence. A lot happened every day, but nothing changed very much. Maybe things have gotten a bit clearer. Sharon could not prevent Likud from telling it as it is: absolute opposition by the present Israeli government to a Palestinian State and to pulling out of the settlements. What a tragic charade goes on. The Palestinian authority is pressured to reform and have new elections, but can anyone expect progress to a peaceful solution without a change in Israel's government?
Positive developments? There are some, but they suggest a tactical easing of the most violent measures Sharon has undertaken or threatened, not movement toward ending the occupation. It is a good sign that Peace Now's voice is heard again, and that the majority of Israelis, unlike Sharon and Netanyahu, favor giving up the occupation and the settlements in exchange for secure peace. Despite mutual hostility and fear, the common sense and humanity of most Israelis and Palestinians may yet override the powerful influence of their fanatic religious minorities.
The Bush Administration keeps its eye on the prize: Iraq. Don't allow the Israeli/Palestinian ruckus to distract from a bigger and better war in the Middle East. The biggest prize remains projecting our military power everywhere under the rubric of the "global war on terrorism" (the war without end).
There is a glimmer that some Americans may be edging toward a new insight into the essential character of the Bush Administration. Its absolute identification with big business has been rather widely noted, but somehow that has not been connected in public perception to its military and war pursuits. What's new is a growing disturbance over the way this administration handles, controls and hides information. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Ashcroft, and Bush himself not only arrogantly stiff the public, but everyone outside their inner circle. There is a suspicious smell here. We've had some pretty awful gangs in the White House at various times, but none more willing and equipped to run things without letting the Constitution get in the way. I'm leery of raising the specter of American style fascism; there is so much in our traditions and in political reality that is antithetic to the emergence of an overt police state. But with Bush in the saddle, we'd better get a firm grip on our checks and balances.
May 21, 2002
We watched the HBO drama on Lyndon Johnson. It was very gripping, well done, very well acted. The story itself was badly flawed. Poor Lyndon became a tragic figure because Ho Chi Min's refusal to give up prevented him from fashioning the "Great Society". Johnson keeps swearing and praying that Ho Chi Min will finally come to his senses about the futility of opposing superior US power. Johnson's steady escalation of the war is attributed to bad advice from McNamara and pressure from General Westmoreland. Their sin was that it took them too long to learn that the war could not be won (a lesson Westmoreland actually never did assimilate). In this dramatization, only George Ball raised basic issues about the immoral, colonial character of the war, its massive decimation of Viet Nam and Vietnamese lives, its waste of American lives—and Ball was portrayed as terribly unattractive in physiognomy and boorish in behavior.
Let's hope a future generation doesn't have to watch a similar "documentary" on how victory over the world evaded a compassionate George W. Bush, who was humiliated because he believed the delusions of Cheney and Rumsfeld.
I voted for Johnson against Goldwater. My father, who was on his hospital deathbed, insisted on getting his vote in against Goldwater. No doubt there was a major difference on civil rights and approach to domestic issues that distinguished Johnson from the GOP's right wing that later came to dominate national politics during the Reagan years. That distinction was indeed trumped by investment in a brutal and unjust war.
Edward Said has an article on Crisis for American Jews that I wish all of us might take in. He takes off on the booing of superhawk Paul Wolfowitz at a large pro-Israel demonstration in Washington, D.C. because of his mere mention of "the sufferings of Palestinians". Said says that among American Jews there is a degree of intolerance and absolute rejection of the very existence of an "actual Palestinian people" that "far exceeds" anti-Arab hostility among most Israelis.
Said is an outstanding American intellectual, and a Palestinian. He describes the perception and attitude toward Palestinians by most American Jews as "de-humanization on a vast scale"; "it is made even worse", he says, "by the suicide bombings that have so disfigured and debased the Palestinian struggle." Why can't we be similarly objective? After all, American Jews bear heavy responsibility for financing the orthodox settlements and the military aggression that have debased Israel and subverted all peace efforts.
I am crazy about sifacas. They are lemurs found in Madagascar. Since the first time I got a glimpse of them on a TV nature program, I've been wanting to see more. No animal moves with such astonishingly long and graceful leaps. Now I've happened on another wild life feature film on PBS in which sifacas star. It's going to be repeated on Channel 9 in the Bay Area on Thursday, May 23rd at 1am. This time I'll tape it.
Sad to see Stephan Jay Gould leave us. Probably no one bridged the gap as he did between science and the people. And so young.
May 23, 2002
I hoped to provide a link here to a story in the New York Observer of May 15, 2002. It was about 108 US rabbinical students who went to the now famous pro-Sharon demonstration on April 15th in Washington D.C. to express a different point of view. I couldn't make the link work; all I could bring up was a May 23rd front-page story about "multi-orgasmic" sex for men.
Anyway, the young rabbis-to-be needed to be, and were, very brave to oppose the occupation and sympathize with Palestinian and Israeli victims. Some in the crowd, who booed hawk Wolfowitz for even mentioning "Palestinian suffering", surrounded, hysterically reviled and abused the young rabbinical students.
A friend questioned what he felt was the implication in Edward Said's article, Crisis for American Jews, that the April 15th Washington demonstration expressed the attitude of almost all American Jews: more hostile than most Israelis toward the Palestinian people. He may be right that there are far more doubts about Israeli policies and more compassion for Arab and Jewish victims than one might gather from the intimidating uniformity of the major religious and secular organizations and their hawkish advocates in Congress.
In the present turmoil, criticism of Israel's occupation is a matter of conscience and common sense, not a matter of disloyalty or self-hatred among Jews, or anti-Semitism among others. It would be foolish, however, to deny that the present conflict opens doors to poisonous and even violent racism. It is dangerous to tolerate race hatred under cover of loyalty to a cause. There is, as Said points out, a destructive process of dehumanization directed toward Palestinians and Arabs in general. Nor can anti-Semitism be relegated to a very long and tragic history, no longer relevant. It is alive and as virulent as ever, co-existing with other racist afflictions that tear the world to pieces.
May 25, 2002
We had a strange experience yesterday as we were driving to nowhere in particular. I suddenly became aware of a car rolling up to my (driver's) side from across the road divider. I honked in alarm but it just came on the additional couple of feet till it collided with our car. Only then did I realize that there was no one in the other car. A weird feeling! No injury, no big damage (that means probably two thousand dollars for repair). I couldn't open my door with the red Hyundai resting against it. Finally a guy came running from across the street: "How did my car get over here?" I wonder too. Both cars were drivable and he was insured. Of course Roz and I kept rethinking why and how we happened to be at a place we never set out for at just the right moment to meet the run-away car. Leave that to the chaos theorists. We just wish we had stayed home.
May 27, 2002
My journal has been going on for over seven months now. It's been less of a diary than I first had in mind, more pitched toward airing political views and engaging others who visit me here. It has given me the opportunity to think in public. The journal reminds me how my views have evolved in the difficult time since September 11, 2001. By now, I imagine that no one who looks in on this website is left guessing about how I think about the world and our country's place in it. So I'm likely to avoid repeating the general overviews on terrorism, war and empire of my earlier entries: e.g. Oct. 28, Nov. 21, Dec. 17 and 22, March 8 and 13. My emphasis has fluctuated, but I don't feel the need to revise my basic concerns and point of view.
The Internet is loaded with information and I don't try to make this journal an independent source of fact-finding, investigative reporting, or organizing activities. What's left is musing about events and my own experiences, moods and curiosities, past and present—and the responses and ideas of those who join me here. I'll just let the journal perk along.
Amid all the revelations about the FBI's performance pre-9/11, I received a personal flashback to the past. A reporter from the SF Chronicle phoned me about a story from the 60s that he's been working on for years (decades actually). It's taken him all this time, with help from the courts, to get substantial FBI files on UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. I figure in the files, with exaggerated importance, as described in my memoir, Looking for the Future (Chapter 3). I haven't seen what he's unearthed, but I had earlier received a personal Freedom of Information Act file, since lost with everything else when our house burned to the ground in the 1991 Oakland firestorm.
My file, like most others I assume, is a primer in incompetence, irrelevance, and misdirected undercover intimidation. We'll see what comes of the recycled story. I don't look forward to this reprise because it's annoying to have to deal with it once more. Still I guess it's a good time to remind people how abusive and contemptuous of civil liberties the FBI has always been.
One thing that stands out is that the FBI wasted an awful lot of time investigating where no investigation was warranted. That was true in tens of thousands of "cases" of ordinary people, not to mention extraordinary ones like Martin Luther King, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and Albert Einstein. In my case, they snooped and badgered from 1941 on. They hunted for "secrets" when nothing about me was hidden. The first "subversive" thing they came up with, by secretly opening my mail when I was in the Army, is that my correspondent objected to segregation of the Armed Forces during World War II. Of course the stupidity wasn't all benign. They pedaled their cache of so-called secrets to Governor Pat Brown and the UC Regents during the 60s. My file revealed that they had me barred from service on scientific panels of the National Institutes of Health. The same NIH blacklist was applied by the FBI against some famous scientific colleagues of mine, some of whom were among the few academic supporters of the Vietnam War. It seems they had sympathized with the Spanish Loyalists during the anti-fascist civil war of the late 1930s. So much for the mentality and values that have guided the FBI, and, I fear, still do.
May 28, 2002
I just heard Christoph von Dohnanyi talk about Beethoven on NPR. It's a bit of a coincidence because we had just watched (on DVD) and marveled over Beethoven's opera, Fidelio, performed at Covent Garden and conducted by Dohnanyi. (My late dear sister, Clare, always delighted in "coincidences" however trivial.)
Dohnanyi told of a conversation shortly after September 11th in which members of his Cleveland Orchestra suggested getting back to "normal". He said this is "normal", unlike the previous fifty years, more like earlier periods of stress, such as Beethoven's time. Be that as it may, perhaps the most distinctive feature of Beethoven's genius is the inspiration he drew from the struggle for freedom and the incredible nobility he gave to it in his music. He had every reason in his afflictions and misfortunes to give way to depression, but out came the Eroica, and the Ninth Symphony, and Fidelio.
Roz and I had seen Fidelio years ago at the San Francisco Opera. But watching this great production on DVD, at home with a couple of good friends, was as inspiring an opera night as we've ever experienced. (Besides, getting out to the opera house has become impractical physically and financially.) I can't stop whistling the theme of the first act quartet even though my "performance" is beginning to drive Roz nuts.
May 30, 2002
What kept the world from catastrophe in the second half of the Twentieth Century? Is there anything now that can prevent catastrophe ahead?
The bizarre formula of "mutually assured destruction" is often credited with keeping the USA and the USSR from taking the world over the brink. But there was something deeper than the nuclear standoff. Neither superpower wanted or needed global war. Worldwide opposition to a possible World War III was a powerful and, as it turned out, successful safeguard against hawks willing to risk the ultimate. The political risk of defying humanity, as some generals were ready to do at crucial moments, was more insurmountable even than the projected military risks.
Today risk takers and war makers are emboldened: our own by the absence of any other superpower, our adversaries by the conviction that the Great Satan can be brought to its knees. The Bush Administration embraces unending war with no limit; blowing up civilians is the prime weapon of several fundamentalist religious formations. The two new poles are not remotely equal in the power they command, and the Bush Administration shamelessly exploits fear of terrorism to extend its global dominance, to confront movements against oppression, and to stifle civil liberties.
Though the power equation has changed dramatically since the Cold War years, the political equation is not cancelled out. The political costs to those who gamble on war and terror may yet be the decisive barriers to disaster. That remains to be proved in this strange and uncertain world, as it had to be proved over and over again in a more familiar past.
Some recent news shows the continuing relevance of political factors and anti-war resistance. Though far from a settled matter, the Administration admits to hesitation over its heralded goal of war against Iraq. Fear of the political and military consequences of "going-it-alone" seems to have aggravated a rift in the Administration, with most of the Military Chiefs and the State Department separating themselves for the present from the most eager hawks. With regard to Israel/Palestine and now Pakistan/India, the political response of the outside world can have a major impact, including on US policy.
Two asides (they are not non-sequitors):
1) The biggest nuclear threat seems to come not from Bush's "axis of evil", but from his strongest ally, the ruler of Pakistan. When Colin Powell correctly said today that the use of nuclear weapons is absolutely unthinkable, did anyone remember that Bush recently ordered the Pentagon to adapt nuclear weapons for use in modern war?
2) The Administration is using the wave of criticism of its failures with regard to 9/11 to "unshackle" the FBI. As Rumsfeld likes to say, the best defense is the offensive. Shackles are for critics, dissenters and the Constitution, just as in the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy.
May 30, 2002
What kept the world from catastrophe in the second half of the Twentieth Century? Is there anything now that can prevent catastrophe ahead?
The bizarre formula of "mutually assured destruction" is often credited with keeping the USA and the USSR from taking the world over the brink. But there was something deeper than the nuclear standoff. Neither superpower wanted or needed global war. Worldwide opposition to a possible World War III was a powerful and, as it turned out, successful safeguard against hawks willing to risk the ultimate. The political risk of defying humanity, as some generals were ready to do at crucial moments, was more insurmountable even than the projected military risks.
Today risk takers and war makers are emboldened: our own by the absence of any other superpower, our adversaries by the conviction that the Great Satan can be brought to its knees. The Bush Administration embraces unending war with no limit; blowing up civilians is the prime weapon of several fundamentalist religious formations. The two new poles are not remotely equal in the power they command, and the Bush Administration shamelessly exploits fear of terrorism to extend its global dominance, to confront movements against oppression, and to stifle civil liberties.
Though the power equation has changed dramatically since the Cold War years, the political equation is not cancelled out. The political costs to those who gamble on war and terror may yet be the decisive barriers to disaster. That remains to be proved in this strange and uncertain world, as it had to be proved over and over again in a more familiar past.
Some recent news shows the continuing relevance of political factors and anti-war resistance. Though far from a settled matter, the Administration admits to hesitation over its heralded goal of war against Iraq. Fear of the political and military consequences of "going-it-alone" seems to have aggravated a rift in the Administration, with most of the Military Chiefs and the State Department separating themselves for the present from the most eager hawks. With regard to Israel/Palestine and now Pakistan/India, the political response of the outside world can have a major impact, including on US policy.
Two asides (they are not non-sequitors):
1) The biggest nuclear threat seems to come not from Bush's "axis of evil", but from his strongest ally, the ruler of Pakistan. When Colin Powell correctly said today that the use of nuclear weapons is absolutely unthinkable, did anyone remember that Bush recently ordered the Pentagon to adapt nuclear weapons for use in modern war?
2) The Administration is using the wave of criticism of its failures with regard to 9/11 to "unshackle" the FBI. As Rumsfeld likes to say, the best defense is the offensive. Shackles are for critics, dissenters and the Constitution, just as in the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy.
May 30, 2002
What kept the world from catastrophe in the second half of the Twentieth Century? Is there anything now that can prevent catastrophe ahead?
The bizarre formula of "mutually assured destruction" is often credited with keeping the USA and the USSR from taking the world over the brink. But there was something deeper than the nuclear standoff. Neither superpower wanted or needed global war. Worldwide opposition to a possible World War III was a powerful and, as it turned out, successful safeguard against hawks willing to risk the ultimate. The political risk of defying humanity, as some generals were ready to do at crucial moments, was more insurmountable even than the projected military risks.
Today risk takers and war makers are emboldened: our own by the absence of any other superpower, our adversaries by the conviction that the Great Satan can be brought to its knees. The Bush Administration embraces unending war with no limit; blowing up civilians is the prime weapon of several fundamentalist religious formations. The two new poles are not remotely equal in the power they command, and the Bush Administration shamelessly exploits fear of terrorism to extend its global dominance, to confront movements against oppression, and to stifle civil liberties.
Though the power equation has changed dramatically since the Cold War years, the political equation is not cancelled out. The political costs to those who gamble on war and terror may yet be the decisive barriers to disaster. That remains to be proved in this strange and uncertain world, as it had to be proved over and over again in a more familiar past.
Some recent news shows the continuing relevance of political factors and anti-war resistance. Though far from a settled matter, the Administration admits to hesitation over its heralded goal of war against Iraq. Fear of the political and military consequences of "going-it-alone" seems to have aggravated a rift in the Administration, with most of the Military Chiefs and the State Department separating themselves for the present from the most eager hawks. With regard to Israel/Palestine and now Pakistan/India, the political response of the outside world can have a major impact, including on US policy.
Two asides (they are not non-sequitors):
1) The biggest nuclear threat seems to come not from Bush's "axis of evil", but from his strongest ally, the ruler of Pakistan. When Colin Powell correctly said today that the use of nuclear weapons is absolutely unthinkable, did anyone remember that Bush recently ordered the Pentagon to adapt nuclear weapons for use in modern war?
2) The Administration is using the wave of criticism of its failures with regard to 9/11 to "unshackle" the FBI. As Rumsfeld likes to say, the best defense is the offensive. Shackles are for critics, dissenters and the Constitution, just as in the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy.
May 30, 2002
What kept the world from catastrophe in the second half of the Twentieth Century? Is there anything now that can prevent catastrophe ahead?
The bizarre formula of "mutually assured destruction" is often credited with keeping the USA and the USSR from taking the world over the brink. But there was something deeper than the nuclear standoff. Neither superpower wanted or needed global war. Worldwide opposition to a possible World War III was a powerful and, as it turned out, successful safeguard against hawks willing to risk the ultimate. The political risk of defying humanity, as some generals were ready to do at crucial moments, was more insurmountable even than the projected military risks.
Today risk takers and war makers are emboldened: our own by the absence of any other superpower, our adversaries by the conviction that the Great Satan can be brought to its knees. The Bush Administration embraces unending war with no limit; blowing up civilians is the prime weapon of several fundamentalist religious formations. The two new poles are not remotely equal in the power they command, and the Bush Administration shamelessly exploits fear of terrorism to extend its global dominance, to confront movements against oppression, and to stifle civil liberties.
Though the power equation has changed dramatically since the Cold War years, the political equation is not cancelled out. The political costs to those who gamble on war and terror may yet be the decisive barriers to disaster. That remains to be proved in this strange and uncertain world, as it had to be proved over and over again in a more familiar past.
Some recent news shows the continuing relevance of political factors and anti-war resistance. Though far from a settled matter, the Administration admits to hesitation over its heralded goal of war against Iraq. Fear of the political and military consequences of "going-it-alone" seems to have aggravated a rift in the Administration, with most of the Military Chiefs and the State Department separating themselves for the present from the most eager hawks. With regard to Israel/Palestine and now Pakistan/India, the political response of the outside world can have a major impact, including on US policy.
Two asides (they are not non-sequitors):
1) The biggest nuclear threat seems to come not from Bush's "axis of evil", but from his strongest ally, the ruler of Pakistan. When Colin Powell correctly said today that the use of nuclear weapons is absolutely unthinkable, did anyone remember that Bush recently ordered the Pentagon to adapt nuclear weapons for use in modern war?
2) The Administration is using the wave of criticism of its failures with regard to 9/11 to "unshackle" the FBI. As Rumsfeld likes to say, the best defense is the offensive. Shackles are for critics, dissenters and the Constitution, just as in the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy.
June 2, 2002
I try to convince myself, as I did in the May 30th entry, that there is a reasonable basis for hope—more substantial than simply a hope for reason. I still think there's more to go on than just wishful thinking, but what not to expect is an epiphany that changes the heart and mind of George W. Bush. His speech at the West Point Commencement ignored apparent doubts and hesitation even among some of his own generals and diplomats. More than that, he set forth the most aggressively militaristic philosophy ever voiced by an American president.
"Deterrence" and "containment" are in the past, replaced by the preemptive "strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world." As for approach to coalition partners and "competition between great nations", "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms race of other eras pointless…"
Newspapers did not print the text of the West Point speech. But, if one can bear it, the text released by the White House offers the clearest view of the mentality and intentions of our supreme warrior-in-chief.
June 2, 2002
I try to convince myself, as I did in the May 30th entry, that there is a reasonable basis for hope—more substantial than simply a hope for reason. I still think there's more to go on than just wishful thinking, but what not to expect is an epiphany that changes the heart and mind of George W. Bush. His speech at the West Point Commencement ignored apparent doubts and hesitation even among some of his own generals and diplomats. More than that, he set forth the most aggressively militaristic philosophy ever voiced by an American president.
"Deterrence" and "containment" are in the past, replaced by the preemptive "strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world." As for approach to coalition partners and "competition between great nations", "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms race of other eras pointless…"
Newspapers did not print the text of the West Point speech. But, if one can bear it, the text released by the White House offers the clearest view of the mentality and intentions of our supreme warrior-in-chief.
June 3, 2002
It's six years today since Connie, our daughter-in-law, died of breast cancer. She is well remembered for the compassion and energy she devoted as co-founder of the pioneering AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital. Her work with AIDS patients, and the research she did with women infected with HIV, began at the earliest stage of the epidemic. She kept at it until a few days before her death. Love for Connie, from family and countless friends, is fresh and lasting.
June 5, 2002
News of the day: like most other days, more horror in Israel and Palestine. This isn't escalation; it's the norm of abomination. Neither the military "incursions", that were superimposed on the occupation, nor the suicide bombings ever came to a halt. One fuels the other; neither can negate the other.
When will the fever abate? Reason will not flow from the top. It will have to rise from the people, hard as that may be. The same holds for India/Pakistan, as Arundhati Roy has pointed out. These are world issues, and that requires worldwide demand to stop these and future wars, and to insure just solutions to the problems that breed violence.
I got some advice today that ties me even more to continuing this Journal ("weblog" seems to be the new word). If I want to voice opinions and receive some in return, I won't be able to rely on my vocal chords. They feel they deserve a rest after 80 years, my first obvious "old age" impairment. My voice still works, but in a subdued and creaky manner. According to the doc, who kept me waiting an hour for a five-minute examination, I should neither raise my voice nor whisper, avoid overuse and abuse. I won't miss lecturing or speech making; nowadays there's little call for that. Conversation is harder to surrender, so I'll try to get accustomed to talking less, in a soft voice, without too much passion (sic). That may be harder than it was to quit smoking many long years ago—but it's nowhere near as serious.
June 9, 2002
As promised, today's SF Chronicle carried the lead front-page story and a special eight-page feature section on the FBI's covert activities regarding the University of California and the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. The author of the investigative report, Seth Rosenfeld, spent 17 years, finally with help from the courts, to obtain the FBI files.
I'm glad Rosenfeld didn't focus on the FBI's harassment of individual student and faculty activists. That's sort of old hat, important as it is to expose the FBI's tactics of intimidation. Rather he focused on the deep connection between the FBI and the political objectives of the hard-right during the 50s and 60s. The files showed that the FBI had a direct hand in the political rise of Ronald Reagan. They showed that the FBI played a major covert role in influencing who would be Governor of California and who should, and who should not, run the University of California.
As we learned during the Nixon Administration, and as we are learning again with Bush and Ashcroft, there is nothing more dangerous to democracy than the direct political marriage of a reactionary administration and a powerful "security" apparatus. Add to that the government's insistent claim to "war" powers, and the danger may become greater than our country has ever faced. Since the files show that the FBI and CIA were trying to dictate the politics of California and the operation of the University of California, is it far fetched to wonder whether today's covert agenda may include how to effect the election of a Governor of Florida—or how to sustain a "war emergency" at least through the elections of 2004?
I'll bet the Chronicle will now make Ashcroft's hit list, if it hasn't already. It took courage to run this story with the prominence the Chron gave it. Kudos to Seth Rosenfeld!
June 11, 2002
The biggest item in the FBI files that Seth Rosenfeld unveiled was the active conspiracy of J. Edgar Hoover and his cohorts to dump UC chief Clark Kerr . As Kerr commented, that was "despicable". It put Kerr on the list of famous individuals targeted by the FBI: Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, Charlie Chaplin, W.E.B. DuBois and innumerable others—not to speak of literally millions of "ordinary" Americans.
I don't lack sympathy for Clark Kerr, but memory brings back another aspect of the Chronicle's "cautionary tale" about the FBI. When I got my FBI files some years ago, I was surprised to find a "report" of a conversation I had with Professor Lincoln Constance in early December 1964 . Constance, than serving as Acting Chancellor at Berkeley, had been asked by Kerr to talk to me about the confrontation with the Free Speech Movement. The full story of that episode is told in my memoir, Looking for the Future, so I won't repeat it. The point here is that the FBI was privy to that conversation. This is only one of several indications that Kerr and the UC Administration saw nothing wrong in routine cooperation with the FBI regarding faculty and student matters at the very time that the FBI was secretly working to undermine and oust Kerr. Recently, at a 50-year commemoration of the UC Loyalty Oath battle, Kerr still supported the Regent's "Communist ban". He said he had come to the opinion in hindsight that the Regent's Loyalty Oath was a tactical mistake because it targeted (and antagonized) the faculty in general.
Unfortunately, this part of the story is old and familiar. Secret police operations cast a wide and ever wider net. Eventually they trap and persecute all who deviate from absolute conformity, including bystanders and even helpers who see only "others" as the target until too late.
June 14, 2002
I've never felt strong on economics—embarrassing for someone with socialist views and a lifelong involvement with Marxist ideas. I've rationalized my lack of a scholarly approach to ongoing economic analysis by observing that nobody, in the last 50 years or so, seems very good at anticipating major economic developments. So I try to keep in touch with the "big picture" without getting caught up in speculation and lost in a maze of confusing jargon.
Lately, columns by Paul Krugman in the NY Times challenge my laziness and rekindle my interest in economics. He, too, always seems concerned with the "big picture", but he brings to it an informed economic intelligence and the ability to puncture the "conventional wisdoms" and hype of establishment economists. Today he comments on stunning information that appears in a new book by Kevin Phillips, "Wealth and Democracy", about the "compensation of America's 10 most highly paid C.E.O.'s in 1981, 1988 and 2000." The data, as summarized by Krugman: "In 1981 those captains of industry were paid an average of $3.5 million, which seemed like a lot at the time. By 1988 the average had soared to $19.3 million, which seemed outrageous. But by 2000 the average annual pay of the top 10 was $154 million. It's true that wages of ordinary workers roughly doubled over the same period, though the bulk of that gain was eaten up by inflation. But earnings of top executives rose 4,300 percent."
Krugman goes on, as he often does, to analyze and debunk the long-standing "concerted effort by think tanks, politicians and intellectuals to deny that inequality was increasing in this country."
June 15, 2002
I just read online tomorrow's NY Times editorial, "The Bad Old Days at the FBI". I thought I was beyond surprise on this subject, but one line in the editorial sure got my attention. Commenting on what the FBI files revealed about its interest in UC during the 1960s, the Times reported something not mentioned in Seth Rosenfeld's report in last Sunday's SF Chronicle:
"It [FBI] also prepared a 60-page report on the school's political makeup, including a list of faculty whose politics the bureau found questionable, who were to be detained in case of a national emergency, without a judicial warrant."
I guess that was J. Edgar Hoover's understanding of "homeland security". Is Ashcroft's different? Some investigative reporting now might uncover such things before they can be implemented. Why wait 35 years for an enterprising reporter to shine a light on the way things were in today's "bad old days"?
I hope people who were targeted back in the 50s and 60s at UC will have access to the full file that Rosenfeld pried loose. I'd especially like to see that 60-page report.
June 17, 2002
Look at today's headlines.
New York Times: Bush to Formalize a Defense Policy of Hitting First.
The Guardian (UK): Bush gives CIA green light to kill Saddam.
Washington Post: Hill Leaders Back Bush Order on Hussein
Much could be asked about the stories, explicit and implicit, under each of the headlines. I am moved to take off on the first story, summarized in NY Times reporter Sanger's lead:
"President Bush has directed his top security aides to make a doctrine of pre-emptive action against states trying to develop weapons of mass destruction."
Is this doctrine uniquely American? It certainly isn't universal. Can other countries copy the "Bush doctrine"? Can our "coalition partners"? Can China, Pakistan, Russia, Israel? On what grounds is eligibility decided? Can any country qualify if it feels threatened by another country that possesses weapons of mass destruction?
One and only one thing makes it possible to proclaim the "Bush doctrine". What counts is not any objective standard of behavior, morality or logic — just that "we" have far more weapons of mass destruction than does the entire rest of the world. The exclusive "right" of pre-emptive strike (for the US and perhaps others whom Bush may bestow it upon) may be much harder to implement than to proclaim. There may be a limit to what can be imposed by the sole superpower while all other nations look on in awe and humiliation.
Talk about humiliation…. How about the top Democrats who ran around to the Sunday morning news shows to endorse the "Bush doctrine" and urge a free hand for the CIA's covert actions and assassination plots? Biden and Lieberman are no surprise. Gephardt is a disappointment. Only Daschle voiced some doubt.
June 19, 2002
After yesterday's suicide bombing in Jerusalem, I sat down to write, but soon gave up. Today there is another bombing atrocity and a renewed IDF invasion. Repetitive horror doesn't induce numbness to mindless slaughter, especially of school children and youth all over Israel and Palestine. But reactions, too, become repetitive. Who can look with fresh eyes and new ideas when every thought you can muster has been dredged up before by tragedy upon sequential tragedy?
No one with a heart and a brain can expect that expanding the military occupation will end the slaughter. Likewise, no one can expect that mass murder of civilians will gain anything but universal condemnation and intolerable suffering for both populations.
The argument of those who escalate military force and those who are committed to more acts of terror is the same: each has "no alternative". The alternative, which may not be soon in coming, is for both populations to damn leaders and policies that prevent a solution based on two cooperative states with full independence and dignity.
While the occupation itself is the overriding barrier to peace and justice, I want to look at the argument that the Palestinian resistance has no choice but to counter Israeli military supremacy with "suicide bombings" that bring the war "home" to Israeli civilians. That simply relegates the Palestinian people to helplessness, with no collective voice and strategy, turning their fate over to the religious fanatics of Hamas and Islamic Jihad while the population only reaps collective punishment. As Edward Said points out, there is a powerful potential for democratic struggle by a majority of Palestinians. The occupation and the settlements are bankrupt in the eyes of the world and, in fact, in the opinion of most Israelis. The power of the people, with international support, has achieved some remarkable victories in recent decades against superior force. Said's article in Al Ahram (June 13-19), an Arab online journal, is the kind of thinking that could break new ground and end the impasse of repetitive horror. That would have to be complemented by renewal in Israel of similar thinking and values, as expressed by Amos Oz and Peace Now.
According to the Israeli government, there is "no alternative" to expanding military power over the West Bank and Gaza. Sharon pledges to keep the tanks and bulldozers rolling in Palestinian territory until all terror is ended. He also promises not to give up a single settlement of Israel's religious fanatics and not to allow a Palestinian state. His vision is the peace of the grave. This approach has failed miserably and will never stanch the flow of blood. How much more proof is needed? But nothing will change until the cry "Enough!" becomes the voice of the majority of Israelis and Palestinians.
June 25, 2002
The Bush vision: a three-year process toward a US/Israeli protectorate called "Palestine". The subservient future "state" would have features that have eluded its patrons—it would be a state without terror, based on "market economics" without corruption.
Meanwhile reality persists. The occupation expands, the tanks destroy, and death exacts it daily toll.
June 26, 2002
Got a second opinion following a thorough exam of my throat and vocal chords. Guess it's now official: "senile vocal chords." There is no way to rejuvenate them, so I'll just have to use my voice softly and sparingly and hope deterioration from here on is gradual.
There may be a moral here. My hearing is still good. Should I have talked less and listened more? Maybe, but I'd rather be chronically hoarse than deaf. Still, I wish I could take back the many times I raised my voice for no good reason. Nature is funny. How come Castro still has no trouble being vocal? Of course, I don't begrudge him.
Is there such a thing as premature senility of vocal chords? Maybe there were signs of that in Clinton. The nation—and the world—might gain a little respite if the vocal chords of some current "leaders" would atrophy in parallel with their thought processes.
June 27, 2002
What a bizarre, incredible — and absolutely ordinary American day!
Two words, "under God", galvanized every media outlet and every politician and turned the country inside out. Overtaken by a country mile were WorldCom and the Middle East. And the familiar 5-4 Supreme Court had a perfect stage for announcing a shotgun wedding between church and state over the badly bruised bodies of the public school system and the US Constitution. We may now get a Constitutional Amendment making religion the defining standard of patriotism. After all, George W. informs us, our rights come from God. He will appoint "common-sense" judges, not liberals like the Nixon appointee who wrote the opinion that caused the greatest threat to the nation since 9/11.
What a strange time. What astonishing priorities. Corporate thievery assaults the conscience and well being of the country on a scale more colossal than anyone could have imagined. But what counts is forcing "under God' into the mouths of school children and turning "God Bless America" into a de facto national anthem.
July 6, 2002
For perhaps the first time, putting some thoughts together for this journal feels like a burden. Some things in the news, though much on my mind, resist comment because they were so predictable. In that category is yesterday's leak to the NY Times of the horrendous military plan for war on Iraq. So is the shamefully arrogant assault on the world court. So is Sharon's claim, as his own, of the "Bush plan" for deferring a just resolution of the tragic Israeli-Palestinian impasse. So, too, is Bush's "outrage" over corporate improprieties, as the Enron "one bad apple" burgeons to rotten-barrelsful.
All of this, and more, make public response and protest more to the point than words that repeat the obvious. Of course, there's the rub. There are clear signs of doubt and dissent around the country, some of them highlighted recently by David Broder in the Washington Post, "A New Questioning of the War". Still, the political arena is paralyzed by the strategy of most leading Democrats to tag along after Bush as he moves toward a bigger Gulf War. Once again, these politicians may be behind the curve of an incipient public awakening. Beyond the left, beyond Nader, is there a challenge in the making such as have arisen to stem past reactionary tides? This is the time, not just to wait, but to demand courage and initiative for a genuine political opposition, not one that is "loyal" to Bush's path to disaster.
July 7, 2002
I've been mulling over two articles on Israel/Palestine. One is by Bishop Desmond Tutu , "A Moral Campaign to End the Occupation", that appeared in the Jordan Times, June 18, 2002. The other is an article in the New York Times, July 3, 2002, "Gingerly, Arabs Question Suicide Bombings ".
If there is such a thing as "moral authority", no one can make a stronger case than Tutu for the similarities between Israel's occupation regime and South African apartheid. That analogy is a very bitter one for Jews whose earlier generations suffered oppression and genocide, and contributed in large numbers to numerous struggles for freedom everywhere. Still there is no rebuttal to the bill of particulars that Tutu draws from the experience of his people. That's what moves many Jews, including in Israel and the United States, to say to Sharon and his government: "Not in my name!"
As long as one people participates in holding down another by brute force, it will inevitably be corrupted by the mentality and methods of apartheid. There is no humane way to occupy, to punish, to destroy, to rule over a captive population.
The Times article reviews an appeal by 55 Palestinian politicians and intellectuals in the Arabic-language newspaper, Al Quds, June 19, 2002. I couldn't read the original, but according to the Times:
"it called for a reassessment of 'military operations that target civilians in Israel' and urged those behind them to 'stop pushing our youth to carry out these operations.' The letter said the attacks were not 'producing any results except confirming the hatred, malice and loathing between the two peoples' and endangering 'the possibility that the two peoples will live side by side in peace in two neighboring states.'"
While challenging the targeting of civilians, the appeal was in no way a rejection of militant resistance to the occupation.
Reading this report alongside the Tutu article, as well as further comments in the Times by Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, I thought about an aspect of the apartheid analogy that does not apply. The object of the struggle against South African apartheid was the overthrow of the criminal regime and the accession to power of a new government representing the previously oppressed majority. The struggle against the Israeli occupation aims, in the words of the Palestinian appeal, at "the possibility that the two peoples will live side by side in peace in two neighboring states." Ultimately "reconciliation" became part of the climate of post-apartheid South Africa. In Israel and Palestine, racism in the form of humiliation of the Arab population and religious hatred between Arabs and Jews is a terrible barrier to a just peace and a livable future for both populations in two independent states.
So while apartheid should be labeled for what it is, and relentlessly opposed, active rejection of racial and religious hatred is the absolute imperative for the survival of both Israel and Palestine.
July 10, 2002
A heat wave in our Bay Area is unlike those in most of the country.. We took a ten minute trip to the Emeryville Pier and shivered without the sweaters left at home.
Nothing to add after reading some terrific columns in response to Bush's Wall Street speech. Maureen Dowd and Robert Scheer were among the best, and Mark Morford really said it all. I liked Dowd's line on George W.: "born on third base but thinking he hit a triple."
Nothing beats the Bush speech writer's oxymoron-couplet that the SF Chronicle headlined: "No capitalism without conscience, no wealth without character." Apply that literally and Wall Street collapses; capitalism is history. Are we ready for that?
July 21, 2002
The range and character of public discourse is changing.
In the first few months after September 11, 2001, discourse was narrowly channeled and defined by George W. Bush and his mentors. There was only one issue, global war against terrorism; our enemies were attacking us because they envied our democracy and our great success; anyone who didn't rally to our banner was on the side of terrorism and therefore our enemy. Doubters were few and largely unheard amid the shock and anger over the massacre on US soil.
The most striking breach in that "consensus" is public outrage over the explosion of corporate corruption and fear over what's happening to the stock market. Things really aren't so good after all, even if we could be free of new terrorist threats! Questions are surfacing about the Bush Administration's futility in foreign affairs and its exploitation of the "war on terrorism" to curb civil liberties and mask domestic failures. There is widespread concern, especially internationally, over the Bush doctrine of preemptive war and the apparent determination of his hawks to launch a new Gulf War. Questions abound over the failure to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian nightmare, an endlessly tragic lesson in the inability of military force to end terrorism.
Suddenly there is talk about problems of capitalism and some exploration of the limits of US power. Kevin Phillips' book, Wealth and Democracy, has renewed attention to the enormous and escalating inequality in US wealth distribution. An article I have been thinking about is "The Eagle Has Crash Landed ", by Immanuel Wallerstein, in Foreign Policy, July/August 2002.
Wallerstein writes that "the United States has been fading as a global power since the 1970s, and the US response to the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated the decline." Taken literally, that assessment is misleading. US power has grown since the 1970s and it has become preeminent on the world stage, clearly now as the sole superpower. What has "faded" is the capacity even of this superpower to control events and dictate "world order". There is a real distinction between predicting a rapid decline in US supremacy as a world power and in recognizing growing limits and obstacles to what imperial power can command.
Wallerstein argues that Washington's hawks are wrong in thinking that the rest of the world will acquiesce "when the U.S. military actually invades Iraq and after that, when the United States exercises its authority elsewhere in the world, be it in Iran, North Korea, Columbia, or perhaps Indonesia." He goes on: "Ironically, the hawk reading has largely become the reading of the international left, which has been screaming about U.S. policies—mainly because they fear that the chances of U.S. success are high. But hawk interpretations are wrong and will only contribute to the United States' decline, transforming a gradual descent into a much more turbulent fall."
I agree that the hawk agenda would likely fail and backfire on its designers, but with tragic consequences for its victims and for the American people. I think screaming about these policies is absolutely necessary, and alarm is spreading beyond the left. The point is not to predict outcomes, but to prevent the hawks from expanding their war.
The growing mood of doubt, especially anger over pro-corporate government, raises the possibilities of turning back the hawks in the next couple of years. Awakening to the need for fundamental social change may barely be beginning, but changing the course of the country away from unending war and extreme domestic reaction can before long become the will of the majority. That's a better bet than it seemed a few months ago.
Maybe it's premature to worry about premature speculation on the rate of decline of empire. I'm inclined to think about political climate changes in the context of past experiences of the left in interpreting such "turning points". When things look bleak, there is an impulse to anticipate the worst: e.g. that McCarthyism was the inexorable forerunner of fascism. Each recession is the harbinger of another 1929 crash and great depression. The other side of the coin is that each evidence of crisis in capitalism suggests that a revolutionary upsurge is about to follow. We weren't wrong in seeing and resisting attacks on democracy or in foreseeing another capitalist crisis, but predictions were often faulty with negative consequences for political direction and action. Marxist analysis was more prescient than triumphalist claims for capitalism; it's just that those who kept predicting an imminent great crash may have been off by a few generations. It's rather tricky.
July 24, 2002
Of late, I've been updating this journal less frequently. It's not because it's summer. It's not because I've run out of opinions, and certainly not of outrage. How could I, given the daily news from the White House, Wall Street, and the Middle East? Never has outrage and urgency had greater cause: children are massacred in Gaza and Jerusalem; George W. persists in preparing a new Gulf War and bull headedly affirms that the stock market is a better investment than social security… and there is so much more!
I write less, simply because my reactions to events are shared by so many others and are expressed amply on the Internet. Increasingly these views find their way even into newspapers where dissent has been systematically excluded. Despite the sorry role of the media, columns appear that express my sentiments, often far more effectively than I might. The loneliness that many of us "dissenters" have felt is subsiding. Hope is alive and mingles with our fears.
When I began this diary/journal soon after September 11, most of us were trying to find our bearings. Thinking things through in these essays helped me, and, as considerable feedback suggests, also stimulated others. The complete journal remains on this website as a chronicle of one old man's effort to navigate through a unique and difficult year.
I'm sure the impulse to react and write will overtake me occasionally in days and weeks to come. The best part of doing my journal has been keeping in touch with friends and new visitors to this site. So, please look in on me here every once in a while.
July 31, 2002
That's no debate, Mr. Biden and Mr. Lugar (today's New York Times). Not a "debate" and not a "hearing"— what you have programmed is a sham. It's a shady accounting exercise, with terms set by the Bush Administration, on the "cost-effectiveness" of various schemes for launching a new Gulf War.
It is deliberately near-sighted to put a microscope on Iraq while ruling out examination of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strike. Whatever the immediate disaster of war againt Iraq — the cost in human life most of all—the historic calamity is greater still. What kind of a world will we live in if the one superpower claims the right to bring preemptive death and destruction to any enemy designated by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, or, for that matter, any future President? If the Bush Doctrine is allowed to stand, kiss any general standard of morality goodbye. As long as it lasts, kiss goodbye also to any hope of world peace.
The world is beseiged by problems, mostly old, some new. Have we reached a stage where the only answer is in Rumsfeld's war room? Is there enough human decency in the world, including in the USA, to fashion a saner future?
Open your eyes to see around and beyond Iraq. Look no further than this week's bloody sight from Jerusalem and Gaza to glimpse the only future that the Bush Doctrine can offer.
Yes we need a debate, and only loud voices of dissent can make it real. Otherwise the political accountants in Washington will come up with the sort of skewed ledger that George Bush's corporate cronies live by. Only the fraud here is measured in countless lives to be lost, along with the ideals and dignity of the nation.
August 9, 2002
Go figure Dick Armey, the House Majority Leader! Since announcing that he won't run again, he's had more to say than at any time since before the presidential selection of George W. Bush.
We're used to his outlandishly reactionary statements, most recently that the Arabs should be driven out of Palestine because they don't belong there. But in the last couple of weeks, he has hit the Bush Administration hard, opposing the TIPS plan for neighborhood spying, the embargo on Cuba, and now, pre-emptive war against Iraq. Today's eye-opener: "I don't believe that America will justifiably make an unprovoked attack on another nation. It would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation." And further, on Saddam: "As long as he behaves himself within his own borders, we should not be addressing any attack or resources against him."
Of course all of Armey's comments include the reactionary bon mots at which he surpasses anyone since Spiro Agnew. But if Armey catches us by surprise, Henry Kissinger maintains perfect consistency as Dr. Strangelove. Today he gives his pupils in Washington a lesson in "revolutionary strategy", how to rationalize pre-emptive war as a US entitlement. "But", he emphasizes, "it is not in America's national interest to establish pre-emption as a principle available to every nation."
Dick's logic is much more simplistic than Henry's. On inspections in Iraq, he says: "In my estimation it is not enough reason to go in, that he does not allow weapons inspections. What if the French decided they wanted to inspect American military facilities?"
August 16, 2002
The best suggestion today came from GOP Senator Chuck Hagel , a Vietnam war veteran, addressed to loudest hawk, Richard E. Perle: "Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad."
The turn the debate has taken casts a light on the state of politics in the country. Why is it that growing doubt about a new Gulf War is finding expression among important Republicans, while top Democrats are strangely silent or, in the case of Joe Lieberman, incendiary in support of pre-emptive war?
The rumbling dissension in the GOP is understandable. The hawks who surround Bush see war on Iraq and the doctrine of pre-emptive war as manifest destiny, establishing US power beyond all challenge now and forever: use our military supremacy decisively, with or without significant support, lest we expose critical weakness leading to gradual decline. Others fear the consequences of overreaching, of antagonizing and alienating the world at large. No doubt the division in GOP ranks also has a cynical leit motif (not so light) of electoral politics. With the economy in deep trouble, the Karl Roves count on a war climate to herd the electorate into sticking with Bush through the 2002 and 2004 elections. Others hesitate to gamble that war and war mongering won't kick the opposite way, especially if US casualties become part of the equation. However limited the ideological divide may be, these are real and important differences.
Top Democrats, who probably share the fears of the GOP's reluctant "dissidents", are even more calculating and politically intimidated. Their silence continues the nonsense that Bush's war agenda has to be supported in the name of patriotism, and that only domestic policies can be opposed legitimately. They think they can count on outrage over economic developments alone to boost their fortunes. Such cowardice may backfire. Given the mounting reaction against the war direction of the Bush Administration, and the lack of trust in the man who presumes to order the rest of the world around, this is a time for courageous leadership. I think the unease in the GOP is the forerunner of a break in Bush's artificial "national consensus". While that depends on public opinion and action beyond the confines of political maneuvering, some political figures may soon see the wisdom and the moral imperative of speaking up as Ralph Nader does. It's certainly not too soon for the kind of initiative shown in critical times by George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, Jesse Jackson and their supporters. It's not yet too late either.
August 23, 2002
I'm submitting an op-ed piece to several newspapers. Will it be published?
WILL CONGRESS DEBATE THE BUSH DOCTRINE?
Congress is gingerly "debating" war against Iraq. There are sharp differences over whether the timing is proper and about the balance between costs and benefits. However, the accounting is so narrow that the biggest questions are mostly off limits.
It's not only a matter of whether a US war for "regime change" in Iraq makes sense. What ought to be debated is the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, a historic shift in international policy and philosophy. Do the times demand so fundamental a reversal? Where does it lead?
If a real debate shapes up, here are just a few matters of logic that Congress might weigh:
- The primary argument for the Bush doctrine and its implementation against Iraq is that terrorists would be able to obtain weapons of mass destruction from Saddam. If a terrorist group is bent on getting such weapons, is Iraq likely to be the source? With all the attention on Iraq, there are unfortunately many more convenient places to do nefarious business. Many countries have developed weapons of mass destruction vastly more formidable than Saddam could achieve. It is not rare for corruption to penetrate military and corporate circles, and organized crime networks are global. A terrorist might do better in Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan, and India. For that matter, the terrorist who mailed deadly anthrax presumably found his source in the bowels of the US biological weapons program. A cautionary tale about what money may buy is the recent arrest of Israeli settlers and soldiers for selling arms to Palestinian groups. A new Gulf War, with all its tragic consequences, doesn't answer the problem.
- Beyond Iraq, the Bush Doctrine sets up a terrible dilemma for the future. What if other countries, which (unlike Iraq) have established biological and nuclear military capacities, undergo political changes antagonistic to supposed US interests? We have never been short of designated "enemies" and "evil-doers", and that is hardly contingent on the fate of Saddam Hussein. Are we prepared to handle disputes that may arise with other nuclear powers on the basis of the doctrine of pre-emptive strike? For that matter, can we entrust every future American chief-of-state (not to speak of the current hawkish Administration) with the power of unilateral military pre-emption?
- Can the doctrine of pre-emptive war be a strictly American privilege? Henry Kissinger has argued, "it is not in America's national interest to establish pre-emption as a principle available to every nation" (Los Angeles Times Syndicate International, August 9, 2002). How do we get ourselves a copyright on pre-emption? The almost universal opposition outside the United States to war against Iraq is only a forerunner of the international distrust that the Bush Doctrine will create. If pre-emptive military strike is OK for the USA, will it be acceptable for China or Russia or Pakistan or any other nation? No wonder the world is leery. As much as the power of the United States is recognized by all, the rest of the world is not ready to have its fate determined in Secretary Rumsfeld's war room.
The tragedy we're heading toward is all the worse because hope for a better future is exactly in the opposite direction. Only serious international cooperation can cope with the daunting problems of our times. The Bush Doctrine succumbs to unprecedented alienation in a hostile world. It is the antithesis of a solution to the horrors of terrorism and war.
Never was a thorough national discussion more needed. Congress should drop the restraints and open the doors to real debate.
August 29, 2002
We're sitting our son's family's dog until the day after Labor Day. That puts me in a more informal mode and mood, less focused for the moment on the Bush Administration's solitary crusade for war against Iraq.
Cassie is our canine guest, a 13-year old healthy female Corgi. I must confess this is the first time we've had Cassie (or any other dog) overnight. She's easy, and it's gone well, except when I had to untangle her leash from an impossible knot in thick hedges.
Since this note is small talk, I might as well update a minor item of personal news. My "senile vocal chords" serve me better than the dire diagnosis of two physician specialists and a speech pathologist suggested. Initially, I could barely speak at all, but that proved temporary. If I resist loud obscenities over the daily news, and don't sound off over trivia, conversation is generally not too strained.
My op-ed piece of August 23rd has taken strike one: rejection by the San Francisco Chronicle. I'm anticipating the other two strikes, but haven't heard yet from the NY Times and Pacific News Service. Common Dreams posted it, http://www.commondreams.org/, and there have been dozens of e-mail responses. I also sent it to Senators Feinstein and Boxer and Rep. Pete Stark.
Today's Chronicle had a strong editorial against the Bush war campaign.
September 3, 2002
There's no denying disarray in the Administration and among GOP politicians over war against Iraq. Public discussion is intense, but the parameters of the debate in the United States are in contrast to what's worrying the rest of the world. Here the argument is over whether Saddam Hussein is an urgent threat, one big enough to require the United States to launch a unilateral pre-emptive war for "regime change". The rest of the world seems worried most about the sole superpower itself, what it might do to impose war(s) in contempt of international law and world opinion.
Listen to Nelson Mandela (Associated Press, 9/02/02): "We are really appalled by any country, whether a super power or a small country, that goes outside the U.N. and attacks independent countries," Mandela said before going into a meeting with French President Jacques Chirac at his Johannesburg home. "The message they are sending is that if you're afraid of the veto in the Security Council, then you're entitled to ... ignore the Security Council…..What they are saying is introducing chaos in international affairs, and we condemn that in the strongest terms."
What we ought to be debating is the whole idea of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war. Unless the debate turns on that fundamental issue, all the talk will wind up in gross deception. The airing of tactical differences at the top will be the pretext for claiming that a true national debate took place before Congressional authorization of whatever treacherous course Bush chooses to pursue.
September 9, 2002:
Disarray at the top has been squelched. The Bush Administration has gone into its full court press for war. The hawks rule the action, while incorporating the advice they got from Kissinger and Baker for calculated gestures to Congress and the United Nations. As long as the level of Congressional debate is to ask the Administration to give convincing evidence of the evils of Saddam Hussein, the Bush team will divert the public from seriously questioning its basic doctrine of pre-emptive war. The hallowed national memory of September 11 is now subjected to a new wave of shameless exploitation, and a crescendo will be reached when Bush confronts the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.
With the propaganda mills in full cry, I can't help thinking of a long history of contrived provocations that turned up at just the right time to make a war happen: from the sinking of the Maine as pretext for the Spanish-American War to the falsified Gulf of Tonkin incident that plunged us fully into the Vietnam War. Are Cheney and company more trustworthy than William Randolph Hearst?
Still, the smoke blowing from Washington shouldn't blind out reality. The opposition to Bush's predilection for unending war is real, large and worldwide. Many Americans are uncomfortable with Bush's program for our country as well as with how he projects America to the world. If voices of dissent speak boldly to these concerns, a real debate can penetrate the fog, even in Congress. The misgivings of the people of California surely have much to do with the recent comments of Senator Feinstein (San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 2002):
"America has never been an aggressor nation unless attacked, as we were at Pearl Harbor and on Sept. 11, or our interests and our allies were attacked," Feinstein said. "We have never initiated a major invasion against another nation-state, which leads to the question of whether a pre-emptive war is the morally right, legally right, or the politically right way for the United States to proceed."
However incomplete Feinstein's portrayal of some history, she certainly asked the right questions this time. It's up to everyone who sees the menace of the hawks to make these questions resonate in Congress and around the country. The last word cannot be left to George W. Bush.
September 11, 2002
We live in a court that has twelve family units, two of which fly the flag on most days since last year's attack. The same ratio holds today, although there is no doubt that all our neighbors treat this as a unique day of remembrance and contemplation.
When we opened our door this morning, there was an invitation from one of the families to join them in a 9/11 church service this evening. We are not able to attend. We've had occasion to exchange views over the past year with some of our neighbors, but not with those who sent us the invitation. With some uncertainty, and wary of sounding a sour note, we decided to reply by briefly expressing our thoughts about this day:
Dear M and K,
We can't join you this evening, but our hearts will be with you in loving memory of the victims of the 9/11 massacre. The emotion Americans share today embraces the innocent victims of terrorism and war around the world.
This is a time when we share so much, though not all of us agree on the path to follow. In candor, we feel that the sorrowful memories and solemn reflection on last year's horrible events have been misused in the Administration's concerted campaign for war. We believe pre-emptive war would compound the tragedy, violate our best traditions, and hurt America in the not-so-long run.
There's a lot to think and talk about in the weeks ahead. Today, we mourn together and look to a better year, one with fewer victims and more hope.
Fondly,
Roz and Leon
September 13, 2002
Many years ago, Roz and I went to a recital by Daniel Barenboim. It was a fiasco. A piano string snapped while he was playing a Beethoven sonata (number 7, I think). When he resumed, after repairs were made, there was the intermittent sound of hammering from somewhere in the wings. Barenboim was livid, his playing again interrupted. The SF Chronicle reviewer added insult to injury: 'the hammering was Beethoven turning over in his grave'. For a long time afterward, any reference to Daniel Barenboim brought Roz and me back to that ridiculous evening.
How wrong the first impression! Now when we think "Daniel Barenboim", we view him as the closest thing to Leonard Bernstein in today's world. He's not only a great musician but a true humanist with uncommon courage and integrity. An Israeli citizen, he has been abused for refusing to bow to the ban on performing Wagner, and for his insistence on sharing his friendship and his art with Arabs and Jews alike. The image of Bernstein was vivid in the concert he gave for young people recently in occupied Ramallah.
What a fine world this would be if the humanitarian values of Barenboim and his close friend, Edward Said, prevailed in Israel and Palestine—and the USA. The music would be glorious too.
_____________________
If I could choose one article to be printed in every newspaper in the country, and made required reading for everyone in Congress, it would be Susan Sontag's op-ed piece in the New York Times, September 10, 2002: "Real Battles and Empty Metaphors".
September 16, 2002
Two good friends are enjoying the fruits of several hard years of historical research and literary effort. Each has a book just out. Max Elbaum wrote about radical movements that sprang up in the 1970s, Revolution in the Air (Verso, 2002). Reginald Zelnik, together with Robert Cohen, edited The Free Speech Movement (University of California Press, 2002).
Max's book is already in a second printing and has been reviewed very favorably in The Los Angeles Times and Village Voice. It recounts and analyzes fragmented efforts by some radicals out of the Sixties to form a "new communist movement". My attitude at the time to those endeavors was decidedly negative. I haven't changed my view of the most "far out" groups that were cults rather than movements, but this book opens my mind to the idealism and commitment of many who responded in the 70s to an illusory promise of "revolution in the air". There was a high degree of racial and ethnic solidarity, and some very capable young people contributed a lot to broader struggles against racism at home and militarist intervention abroad. Max takes a critical look at "what went wrong", concluding that the main misconception was an underestimation of the resources of American capitalism and the gathering strength of the right. He also refers to sectarian interpretations of Marxist theory, especially the focus on building a "vanguard party". I think more could be said about faulty understanding of the United States, our people and our history,
Like Max, his book is honest and thoughtful. I hope his readership continues to grow.
While I didn't breathe revolution in the air in the 70s, the Free Speech Movement was all around me at UC in the 60s. The Zelnik-Cohen book is far and away the most serious treatment of that history. I haven't read it all yet, but Reggie's play-by-play historical reconstruction of the faculty's involvement is fascinating. Mario Savio comes back to life in this book, his wisdom, humanity and courage viewed from a multitude of perspectives by all of us who loved him. More when I've read more.
September 17, 2002
Well, George W. has gone to the United Nations, as Baker and Kissinger advised, and as Nelson Mandela and most of the world insisted.
He went not as the representative of one member state with an issue to present and a problem to be resolved. Rather he delivered an imperial ultimatum: endorse our decision for pre-emptive war or we declare you "irrelevant" and go ahead with our war as planned.
Under the circumstances, was it worth insisting that the United Nations be involved? I think so. Despite the enormous pressure exerted by US power, it is even clearer now that almost no one outside the circles of Bush and Blair wants war. That includes the government of Iraq, which has informed UN Secretary Annan that it will accept arms inspectors without conditions. Bush wants to have it both ways with respect to the UN's efforts. He wants credit for Hussein's retreat, while entirely dismissing its significance. It remains to be seen whether anything can reverse the Administration's decision for war. It is clearly willing to coerce and degrade the UN in the process, but there are obstacles — which is why the hawks wanted to avoid the UN altogether.
The UN has all the resolutions it needs to deal with Iraq without initiating a new Gulf War. Too bad that the imbalance of world power is such that no nation will introduce the resolution most urgently needed: one reaffirming the UN Charter in condemnation of pre-emptive war.
September 18, 2002
About the urgent push for war against Iraq: Why? and Why NOW?
The "why" involves strategic global objectives that may be analyzed and debated. But there is only one plausible answer to "why NOW" — why not six months earlier or six months later? That answer is the desperate need of the Bush Administration, on the eve of Congressional elections, to shift domestic attention. If the screen of imminent crisis over Iraq were lifted, is there any doubt what would come into public focus? 'The economy, stupid', and the inherent Bush-Cheney links to corporate greed and corruption.
September 20, 2002
Germany's Justice Minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, has been castigated for saying that Bush's war drive diverts attention from domestic economic troubles, a formula that Hitler once practiced. "Outrageous", says the White House.
More outrageous is today's document from the Bush Administration, "The National Security Strategy of the United States", which is accurately summed up in the SF Chronicle's headline: "first strikes, unrivaled power". Americans, including me, recoil from odious comparisons with Nazi Germany. (Of course, our President and the media find it OK to label each and every designated enemy as "Hitler".) In all sobriety, I feel compelled to make a comparison: there has been no more audacious claim to world supremacy since "Deutschland uber alles".
Hopefully, the differences are overriding in any comparison between the United States and 1930s Germany. But beware the similarity in the world ambition of our current leaders. Their answer to "national security" is total control of "world order" by virtue of a military might that will overwhelm any and all competitors down through the ages. No one can conjure up a more insanely dangerous course in this complex and troubled world.
No, unfortunately, the real difference between our country and the Third Reich is not to be found in contrasting "leaders". It's that we still have a powerful democratic capacity to stop and remove leaders who choose to rule by war, arrogance and intimidation. We'd better use it before we lose it to a perpetual state of war.
September 24, 2002
Representatives Barbara Lee, Dennis Kucinich and a handful of brave colleagues are no longer the only voices of dissent among Democrats. At last, two top Dems, Al Gore and Senator Robert Byrd, have forcefully challenged the Bush Administration's push for war against Iraq. Just as directly, they have opposed the basic Bush doctrine of pre-emption and "dominance".
Gore's talk before the Commonwealth Club of California and Byrd's comments have received only sketchy coverage in the press, but both should be read in full. They are in contrast to the weak-kneed maneuvering and timid tactical questions of the official Democratic Party leadership in Congress.
Whatever made Gore and Byrd decide to speak out now, I think it's a safe bet that they are responding to deep misgivings of a large majority of Democrats and a lot of Republicans to boot. Will the Congressional Democrats surrender to Bush's strongmen? Will another election be stolen because Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are allowed to dictate the terms of encounter?
The way to get the huge economic issues into the Congressional campaign is not to give Bush his blank check for war. The only way is to confront the Administration on two fronts, the recklessly irresponsible war drive and the ulterior effort to avoid public outrage over the economic debacle. The connection between war objectives and domestic policy (that Gephardt and Daschle try so hard not to see) is usually at the center of the excellent columns that Paul Krugman writes—today's, "White Man's Burden", is case in point.
September 26, 2002
I'm told the links to Gore and Byrd in my last entry don't work. Try the direct URLs:
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-09gore-speech.html
http://byrd.senate.gov/byrd_newsroom/byrd_news_sept2002/rls_sept2002/rls_sept2002_12.html
A quote from Gore:
"What this (Bush) doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States."
A quote from Byrd:
"I cannot believe the gall and the arrogance of the White House in requesting such a broad grant of war powers. This is the worst kind of election-year politics."
Meanwhile, my e-mail is flooded with appeals to act now to tell Congress not to surrender to Bush's demand for unlimited power to wage "pre-emptive" war.
September 28, 2002
Herb Nalibow died yesterday.
Over a lifetime, he was one of those special friends you count on the fingers of one hand. When I met him, he had just returned to civilian life after World War II. Over the next ten years, especially after we helped form the Labor Youth League in 1949, we were always together. We and our young comrades shared dreams and worries, our lives intertwined in everyday resistance to racism and McCarthyism. Roz and I were very fond of Herb's family — his wife, Ruth, who died too young of breast cancer, and the children, Alice and Betty. That fondness extends to Jean, the wife whom he leaves behind after years in which they both dealt bravely with an incredible barrage of serious illness.
On Herb's 75th birthday, I had a chance to tell him how I feel about him. Here is a bit of the letter our family sent to his family in June, 1993:
"You never looked for attention, but people came to you, opened up to you, trusted and loved you. They knew that you cared about them, personally, not just because they were part of a movement…. I always marveled at the fact that you knew first hand what was going on with everyone, even though you never pushed yourself on people and never reached for gossip. Children always took to you in a special way — you could be reserved and self-effacing in any crowd, but the kids found you….
"Life brought us all big surprises. Many things we swore by turned out unbelievably badly. In a way, it took more courage to find new expression for our values and ideals than to battle McCarthyism when we were still in our thirties. No matter how confusing things became, you faced reality without becoming a cynic. You kept your commitment to people, and were able to make yourself effective, respected, and loved in new communities. You gave the community of aging people every bit of what you gave to the youth movement."
Herb became a major civic leader in Long Beach, California, where he built a uniquely successful program of services and activities for "seniors".
October 3, 2002
In recent days, I have been tempted to revisit the first weeks and months after September 11, 2001. It would not be to recreate the arguments, the shock and confusion experienced as we all tried to get our bearings. Still, it is now possible to put into better perspective the dilemma that some of us tried to grapple with early on: on one hand, the dread realization that the world community, and now our own country, are confronted with international networks of murderous theocratic terrorists; on the other, the fear that the Bush Administration projects its "global war on terrorism" as the springboard to unlimited use of US military force and the goal of unchallenged world domination.
It is the latter half of the dilemma that was obscured by the overwhelming grief and anger that swept over the nation and most of the world. At best, the matter of who happened to be in charge of the US response was irrelevant; at worst, any skepticism about Washington's course was unpatriotic or "anti-American." The evidence is now overwhelming that both sides of the equation add up to the awful prospect of a world chronically at war.
Two recent articles make it impossible to overlook the enormous impact of the Bush Administration's open embrace of a doctrine of pre-emptive strike, permanent US military supremacy and imperial world control. Not long ago, such a definition of US policy would have been dismissed as leftist exaggeration and paranoia. The first article, "The President's Real Goal in Iraq", appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution under the byline of Jay Bookman, deputy editorial page editor. It lays out the content of two strategic planning documents, prepared in 1992 and 2000, by Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton and other associates of Rumsfeld and Cheney. These documents are not secret, as were the Pentagon Papers, but they are no less important. They are actually the drafts that became the Bush doctrine as presented in his National Security Strategy, released September 20, 2002.
The second article, which deals with the same material in a broader historical context, is by Anatol Lieven, "The Push for War", London Review of Books, October 3, 2002. Like Bookman, Lieven says that the Administration's reckless determination to go to war in Iraq is astonishing unless one factors in its global strategic aims:
"To understand the Administration's motivation, it is necessary to appreciate the breathtaking scope of the domestic and global ambitions which the dominant neo-conservative nationalists hope to further by means of war, and which go way beyond their publicly stated goals. There are of course different groups within this camp…. not all would support the most radical aspects of the programme. However, the basic and generally agreed plan is unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority, and this has been consistently advocated and worked on by the group of intellectuals close to Dick Cheney and Richard Perle since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s."
Some who are sharply critical of the Bush Administration insist that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are so evil and dangerous that everything else is subordinate. Christopher Hitchens, quitting his column in The Nation because it opposes the rush to war, scorns those whom he says "truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden". What a sorry comment! One need not minimize the menace of organized terrorism to recoil at the fruitlessness and evil of using unilateral force and wars to order the world according to the specifications of a Wolfowitz-Perle "Pax Americana". As to levels of evil, such measurements are historically treacherous when comparing "civilized" leaders and "barbarians". Both are capable of crimes against humanity. How do you weigh relative power to do damage alongside relative contempt for human life?
Surely humanity can find a better way to deal with its problems than bestowing supreme war powers on George W. Bush. Lieven comments:
"As things stand, the American people would never knowingly support such a programme - nor for that matter would the US military. Even after 11 September, this is not by historical standards a militarist country; and whatever the increasingly open imperialism of the nationalist think-tank class, neither the military nor the mass of the population wishes to see itself as imperialist."
Our dilemma will be with us for a long time to come. It is inherent in our place in the world as the only superpower and in the nature of global capitalism. What can make a difference in the way these troubled times play out is the pressure that can be exerted by people, worldwide and ultimately in the USA. It certainly must be possible to reject and remove the hawks short of disaster.
Lieven speaks wishfully of "a strategy in which this (US) dominance would be softened and legitimised by economic and ecological generosity and responsibility, by geopolitical restraint, and by 'a decent respect to the opinion of mankind', as the US Declaration of Independence has it. … What we see now is the tragedy of a great country, with noble impulses, successful institutions, magnificent historical achievements and immense energies, which has become a menace to itself and to mankind."
NOTE: The Lievin article can't be opened by my link. However, I have a copy of the article and will be happy to Email it on request. I think it is very much worth a critical reading.
October 11, 2002
Congress voted and Bush got what he wants. He also got something he doesn't want: evidence of deep misgivings about going to war against Iraq and growing opposition to his doctrine of pre-emptive war.
Bush's bellicose campaign did intimidate the official Democratic Party leadership in Congress and bullied Republican objectors Dick Armey and Chuck Hagel into compliance. Still, 60% of Dems in the House and 40% in the Senate voted "No". Clearly Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt did not reflect the will even of most Democrats in Congress. How much further are they removed from the constituencies that sent tons of messages demanding that Congress not endorse the rush to war? One can't gauge how many Republicans resonate to the doubts voiced by Armey and Hagel last week versus this week's loyalty to the chief.
Internationally, there is increased opposition to the pre-emptive war doctrine and its implementation against Iraq. That was symbolized by today's Nobel Peace Prize for Jimmy Carter. Nothing was left to the imagination in the announcement, an unprecedented direct rebuke to the Bush Administration.
Another Southern politician stood out above all others in the Senate debate. Who would have guessed that Robert Byrd would be the clarion of truth, the one who has dared to ask and answer the most basic questions? I must admit to some surprise and puzzlement, along with my delight. I'll have to ask one of my Southern historian friends what I'm missing about Byrd—for that matter, about Carter as well. (Charlie: Can you help me?)
Anyway, it's not over. Far from it. The congressional "debate" spurred an anti-war movement into action around the country. The world can declaw Saddam Hussein without turning over to George W. Bush the supreme authority to make war.
October 13, 2002
Up early this morning to salute my brother's birthday. Malcolm is 85 today. Lots of memories, the early ones as strong as ever: our parents, now 38 years gone; keeping each other warm in the cold Connecticut winters of the Great Depression; the two exciting student years when we overlapped at CCNY. Here's to a lifetime invested in determination that a better world in possible!
Too many days of your 85th year have been downers for all good people. Make this an exception. Happy Birthday!
October 14, 2002
Bali…. We live in a time of sudden horrendous, deadly crimes—no warning, any time, anywhere, no safe place or sanctuary, no exemptions for age or gender.
What do we do?
It depends on what we learn from tragic episodes like the Bali and September 11th massacres, as well as from the Washington sniper, the anthrax attack, the Oklahoma City disaster, the suicide bombings in Israel and elsewhere. The list seems unending.
There is at least one year's evidence that the overwhelming military strength of a superpower and the doctrine of preventive war are absurdly counterproductive responses to the phenomenon of organized terrorism. Will a US war against Iraq be the antidote to al Qaeda or similar groups in Indonesia, or to terrorist actions that afflict most of the world? These are crimes, terrible crimes, and they have to be dealt with by all countries and the world community. Criminals have to be caught and punished. That needs the fullest international cooperation and all reasonable measures to protect public safety. Bombs, tanks and bulldozers kill lots of people, but they fertilize terrorism.
The most basic necessity is exactly the opposite of the frenzied unilateral militarism of the Bush Administration. A favorable change of climate in world affairs is impossible without a revitalized United Nations, receiving support rather than marching orders and scorn from the United States. Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle want to conquer Iraq, so they say, to keep Saddam Hussein from putting weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists (and coincidentally to establish a US protectorate over the oil-rich Middle East). As things stand, there are so many countries with weapons of mass destruction that the potential for misuse, mistakes, and leaks is absolutely frightening. There is no way to keep such weapons away from criminals without a heightened United Nations program to uphold and enforce international law, to stop nuclear proliferation, to ban the use of nuclear weapons and ultimately to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.
Will our Washington strategists somehow convert the horror in faraway Indonesia into another argument for war on Iraq? How many countries will you have to invade if US military force is the "remedy" for terrorism? How many wars will you have to wage to impose "regime change" on "evil" governments?
It is crazy to think that things will get any better if the false promise and hysteria of war prevent urgent attention to huge worldwide problems — or to an American election at a time of economic turmoil, when there is an urgent need for our own (peaceful) regime change.
October 17, 2002
During the Cold War, it was gospel on both sides that the only deterrent to a pre-emptive strike was possession of a retaliatory nuclear weapons' arsenal. That gospel was not laid to rest with the Cold War. It is now taken up by numerous countries, big and small.
By far the biggest boost to that logic comes from the Bush Administration's proclamation of its doctrine of preventive war and overwhelming military power. All that bluster convinces any country that fears the United States, or is wary of a lesser nuclear-armed neighbor, that its security rests with creation of weapons that can inflict devastating damage against a more powerful foe. Addiction to such weapons, like the phenomenon of terrorism, is so widespread that unilateral flexing of our power (and of our exclusive "right" to pre-emptive war) fans more fires than it can possibly stamp out. The latest developments in North Korea and in Indonesia destroy any illusion that answers are to be found in bringing war to Baghdad.
There will be no easy remedies, even if the United Nations is permitted to exercise the collective will and energies of the majority of nations that dissent from the Bush war ultimatum. But defeating his preventive war strategy will keep the fires from spreading completely out of control. Then there may be a chance to unite an effective world community to confront anew the need for multilateral disarmament of weapons of mass destruction. That direction also would improve chances for undermining the networks that organize terrorism.
October 19, 2002
This is an anniversary day. My first posting in this journal was dated October 19, 2001. More than once, I thought about giving it up. "Genug"…. I've had my say several times over. But the urge is too strong, at least so far. I appreciate the sense of connection with events, and especially with friends and strangers who look in and send me e-mail comments from time to time. There are countless websites that offer valuable information, and many that organize effective social action. Mine is just a place where I can think aloud and air out my feelings and opinions. So, thanks for visiting and please keep in touch.
October 21, 2002
I went to a book reading Saturday evening. Two of the three book presentations were by friends, Reggie Zelnik and Max Elbaum. Too bad we missed most of the first game of the World Series, but it was a lively alternative—well attended, spirited and thought-provoking.
Surprisingly, my voice held up when I joined the discussion. I said one thing that I wish I hadn't, that the Bush Administration includes in top positions people well suited to running a fascist regime. I added a modifier, that the US is certainly not fascist and I don't believe it will be. Still, the fascist epithet seemed extreme to some and was an unnecessary diversion from the main point I tried to make. I wanted to stress the dilemma of how to respond to two dominant perils to the world community: 1) terrorist attacks mounted by messianic religious and ultra-reactionary movements and 2) the exploitation of that peril by the hawks committed to war and empire in a US-enforced "new world order".
Since Saturday, I've been thinking over whether it makes sense to consider people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Perle, Wolfowitz and a few others in Bush's entourage as "fascist" prototypes. It may not be advisable to focus on that since it raises hackles and oversimplifies the meaning of "fascist". We have no trouble in applying the term to Saddam Hussein, since the absolute oppressive and murderous character of his rule is undeniable. So, also, the former Taliban regime. In contrast, democracy is the reality and the tradition of the United States, whatever its inherent contradictions and delusions.
Still, in afterthought, I'm inclined to be stubborn. To identify fascist prototypes on George W.'s team is not simply rhetorical hyperbole. There is too long a history of periodic subversions of democracy (ultimately thwarted) by ambitious demagogues of fascist mentality. Was it a stretch to identify the stench of fascism with Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and Bull Connor? Or with Father Coughlin in the past, or presently with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell? The difference today is that just such types are in charge at the departments of Justice and of Defense, and they dominate the Bush Administration.
Fortunately, the restraints imposed on our fascist prototypes by democratic institutions and dissenting opinion, at home and worldwide, are formidable. That is evident ever since Bush proclaimed the doctrine of pre-emptive strike and his intent to wage war against Iraq.
One can't tell yet how great a price will be paid, how great the toll on democracy and world peace, before the American people accomplish our own democratic regime change. Of course, getting the worst hawks out of the seats of power won't by itself resolve the problem of how US superpower relates to the rest of the world and to the interests of most Americans. Yet it will surely be welcomed by a world that wants to counter terrorism, but rejects war under the command of George W. Bush
October 23, 2002
Listened to Ketzel Levine on NPR today, describing the wild flower marvels of Namagualand in South Africa. I lit up on two counts: I love Ketzel's name and her style; our youngest granddaughter, Susan, spent nine months based in Namagualand, training nature guides for South Africa's national parks. These days it's almost a spiritual necessity (secular for me) to turn for a while to nature. Susan brought back pictures even more striking than Ketzel's, not only of flowers and fields, but of beautiful young South Africans who became her treasured friends. Sadly, reality in a struggling society intrudes: along with Susan's beautiful memories is a deep frustration, for the enthusiastic, newly trained "eco-tourism" guides are without jobs.
October 23, 2002
Listened to Ketzel Levine on NPR today, describing the wild flower marvels of Namagualand in South Africa. I lit up on two counts: I love Ketzel's name and her style; our youngest granddaughter, Susan, spent nine months based in Namagualand, training nature guides for South Africa's national parks. These days it's almost a spiritual necessity (secular for me) to turn for a while to nature. Susan brought back pictures even more striking than Ketzel's, not only of flowers and fields, but of beautiful young South Africans who became her treasured friends. Sadly, reality in a struggling society intrudes: along with Susan's beautiful memories is a deep frustration, for the enthusiastic, newly trained "eco-tourism" guides are without jobs.
October 23, 2002
Listened to Ketzel Levine on NPR today, describing the wild flower marvels of Namagualand in South Africa. I lit up on two counts: I love Ketzel's name and her style; our youngest granddaughter, Susan, spent nine months based in Namagualand, training nature guides for South Africa's national parks. These days it's almost a spiritual necessity (secular for me) to turn for a while to nature. Susan brought back pictures even more striking than Ketzel's, not only of flowers and fields, but of beautiful young South Africans who became her treasured friends. Sadly, reality in a struggling society intrudes: along with Susan's beautiful memories is a deep frustration, for the enthusiastic, newly trained "eco-tourism" guides are without jobs.
October 27, 2002
Being part of yesterday's demonstration in San Francisco was a real tonic, sorely needed. It was huge; over 40,000 was the police estimate. Most of the signs were homemade, singling out reactions of an individual, a family or a group of friends. Thousands of black arm bands were in memory and tribute to the Wellstones. The turn-out was more than a message to Bush. It was an outcry of urgency and confidence to others in public life who ought to take up Wellstone's crusade.
October 28, 2002
Who says there is no good news these days?
On Sunday, Lula of the Workers' Party won Brazil's Presidential election by a landslide. On the day before, huge demonstrations took place in the United States and abroad against Bush's planned war on Iraq.
Of course, nothing in the weekend news "balances" the absolute horror staged in a Moscow theater. Most post-mortem analyses stay within the narrow box that confines much of the rationale for war as the means of countering terrorism: "What else could Putin do? True, it was a grossly inhumane and incompetent use of poison gas. Still, even if a more efficient and less deadly operation could have taken place, the terrorist action left no good options for rescue of the hostages."
Outside that Putin-Bush box, however, there is another logic. What if over the last several years Russia had ceased the war against Chechnya's independence? That would not have eliminated the influence of reactionary religious fundamentalism in the region, but Russia's brutal war against the Chechnyan people has only inflamed that menace. The bodies piled up in the Moscow theater are more than an unimaginable nightmare. They are today's extreme indictment of war and terrorism, and of the mentality that keeps them locked in fatal embrace.
October 30, 2002
With all the big news, I haven't spent much time ruminating about the world series. I confess to suffering over the Giants' loss, though not as I would have earlier in my 70 (!) years as a Giant fan. As a child, I went to one Giant-Yankee world series game. Carl Hubbell, who pitched for the Giants, won a record 24 consecutive games over two regular seasons sandwiched around that world series. Final score of the game I saw: 5-2, Yankees over Giants; losing pitcher, Hubbell; winning pitcher, Pearson. That was a lot harder to take than watching on TV as the 2002 Giants lost game seven.
While I'm at it, something about Barry Bonds. After the past two regular seasons and this post-season, he is regarded as possibly the greatest hitter ever—certainly by the Major League managers, none of whom are willing to allow their pitchers to challenge him. Still, as I heard from a commentator on NPR today, he is vastly unpopular as compared to the "humble" Cal Ripkin and Hank Aaron. The mention of Hank Aaron is supposed to remove any hint of racism in the assessment. He just doesn't display the required "humility", especially to reporters—in contrast (?) to good-old Pete Rose, whom the commentator also cited as a much bigger fan favorite than Bonds. Didn't the "humility" requirement go into discard after Jackie Robinson's second season?
October 31, 2002
George W. Bush has projected "regime change" as if it's a bright new idea brought to mind by his exasperation with Saddam Hussein. It certainly isn't a new departure in foreign policy. It raises issues that go far beyond the Administration's fixation with war on Iraq.
No government has had a hand in more regime changes than ours over the last half century. Some were achieved by direct military action (e.g. Grenada, Panama); some by clandestine sponsorship of coups, accompanied by economic sabotage of elected governments (e.g. the Arbenz regime in Guatemala, Allende in Chile); some by proxy wars and extensive assistance to insurgencies (e.g. Nicaragua). We have also acted together with allied states, by military and economic force, to oust governments accused of gross violations of human rights (Yugoslavia, Haiti, Afghanistan).
These examples are only a few of the most obvious. In many cases, the methods used and the actual objectives have been shameful, often in blatant violation of international law. In a few cases, an argument could be made for the urgency of collective action through the United Nations, with US participation.
The other side of the coin of "regime change" is intervention to sustain regimes "on our side" (including, at various times, Apartheid South Africa, Indonesia of the killing fields, even Saddam's Iraq, and many more).
I suppose if you listed the countries whose people might want and benefit from "regime change", it might actually be a majority of all nations. Understandably (though not to George W.), the people of most countries don't want "regime change" delivered via coercive intervention by a foreign power.
There is a role for international solidarity, for aid and support to people endeavoring to cast off the yoke of tyrannical, sometimes genocidal rule. The most striking example was support for the African National Congress in bringing down the Apartheid regime. That support came from people everywhere who abhorred racism, ultimately finding expression in pressure from the United Nations and major world powers. The victory resulted first and foremost from the struggle of oppressed South Africans, and the power was theirs. There are other examples of regime change via people power with varying degrees of solidarity from the world community: e.g. the overthrow of Marcos in the Philippines, the smashing of tyrannical rule in Romania and the ouster of deeply unpopular satellite regimes in other countries of Eastern Europe.
Are there reasonable criteria for collective action by the world community in support of people confronting murderous regimes or foreign occupiers? There are standards in international law and in the Charter of the United Nations. They depend on striving for a high degree of international unity, not on strong-arm ultimata from the most powerful country or group. They depend on a commitment to world peace and peaceful measures, with unified military action taken only as a last resort to stop mass murder or genocide. They depend not alone on the will of governments, but on widespread support and participation of people everywhere through non-governmental organizations and popular movements.
Nothing violates those standards more completely than George W.'s doctrine of "regime change" via pre-emptive war. No doubt the Administration has many lower level targets for "regime change", not by war as first option, but by methods that are old, tested and foul. You can bet that Brazil and Venezuela are in their sights.
The greatest collective need of the international community, including us, is to stop Bush, Let's hope the process of changing our own regime begins on November 5th.
November 4, 2002
The menace from weapons of mass destruction continues to grow. Carried over as a horrendous legacy from the last century, it hangs over the future as humanity's own suicidal creation. Moreover, the present day approach to the problem is a distinct retreat from the worldwide response that grew out of the consciousness of our frightful entry into the atomic age at the end of World War II.
As framed by the Bush Administration, the problem reduces to disarming designated "rogue nations"—by any means necessary, including waging war with weapons of mass destruction. That's a far cry from the outlook of Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King and E.P. Thompson, who saw this as a universal problem of human survival, not just as a necessary concern for "homeland security" against terrorist attacks.
Early on, the notion that maintaining a monopoly of possession by the United States could contain the danger from nuclear, biological, and other weapons of mass destruction proved bankrupt. As the scientists predicted, it proved impossible to preserve a monopoly over such weapons and the knowledge needed to make them.
Nuclear weapons have proliferated in the arsenals of perhaps a dozen countries, as far as we know. You would have to count by scores to estimate the number of countries with secret stocks of biological and chemical weapons. And that doesn't take into account the increasingly sophisticated and devastating "conventional" weapons of mass destruction. It's hardly cause for comfort that our military is far and away number one in all the categories conveniently abbreviated as "WMD". Yet arms reduction, the goal of mutual steps to disarmament, has disappeared from our lexicon since Gorbachev and Reagan highlighted it in the twilight of the Cold War.
The WMD menace will accelerate the race to oblivion as long as all nations, including the United States, refuse to consider themselves as part of the problem requiring mutual responsibility through the United Nations. Outside that framework, measures to prevent proliferation will fail. Why should we expect all countries to adjust to a "world order" that mandates limits for everyone except for the most powerful. That's a formula for fear, conspiracy, and revenge — a permanently spiraling competition for extermination.
November 6, 2002
Bad news, disheartening, but not surprising.
Already there is an overflow of expert opinion citing Bush's popularity and coat tails, the Democratic Party with no message, Republican voters galvanized by the war atmosphere, Democratic voters demobilized by the absence of focus on the economy, and so on. This time the observations are not necessarily wrong, however limited.
The Republican rightwing has a grip on the country's political machinery and on the media—not a monopoly, but a strong controlling interest, which gives it a clear advantage in electoral contests, in shaping the courts and other significant institutions, in manipulating the agenda and the tone of public life. Despite the fact that voters are quite evenly divided between Republican and Democrat, the Bush Administration has effectively paralyzed the Democratic Party, accomplishing this with the subservience of the Democratic Party's official leadership. Mounting numbers of potential voters feel voiceless, turned off by corruption, seeing nothing in politics that represents and benefits them.
The elections offered no clear way to articulate deep divisions and unease over the Bush Administration's war plans and its "handling" of the economy. It is also undeniable that the general atmosphere in the country reflects a changed world and the unique place of the United States in it. The culture we inhabit is permeated with violence and fear, concern for personal security and the safety of loved ones. Many blessings go with living in the USA, but our country's new role as sole superpower and military goliath has its consequences for our lives and our values. Especially under Bush, a new warlike version of America First doesn't make for a kinder, gentler popular spirit, much less a culture of generosity toward others.
The "vision thing" that frustrated George I is an even more fundamental issue under George II. Can the attention of the country be refocused on human needs, local and global issues of survival and a decent future? It is impossible now to be sure of how and when. Clearly progressives should fight to challenge and change the failed "leadership" of the Democratic Party, and so should energy go into making the Greens more effective. One can guess that present military and economic policies will impact our lives badly enough to provoke changes in political reality. If the past has lessons of hope, when the opposition grows big enough and angry enough not to be ignored, it calls forth new leaders and advocates and the forms necessary to upend the political status quo.
This is not a day for hiding disappointment. Still, the seeds of change are in stubborn, broadly based and swelling movements to counter the Bush Administration's unlimited war ambitions and corporate economic programs. With changing circumstances, the political equation may also change by 2004. That will be a realistic hope only if people respond to experience, and if the voice of the people gains a new quality and intensity.
November 8, 2002
Some days the "little" uniquely local problems take up more space than the big global ones. I'm sitting here helpless while rain from a huge storm comes into our living room from our upstairs neighbor's failed deck. I can't keep enough towels down to make much difference. We're waiting for a blower to try to keep the carpet from ruin. We're told we can't expect any help until the rain stops, and not right away at that. While Roz and I are focused on this, the rest of the world knows that today's big news is at the UN.
***
Later, same day. The blower is here and blowing; a temporary seal has stopped the leaking.
Meanwhile, we read another excellent column by Krugman in today's NY Times. It gives his view on the post-election battle over the direction of the Democratic Party. Coincidentally, Ze'ev Sternhell , writing today in Israel's Ha'aretz, has a strikingly similar take on the debate in Israel's Labor Party. Both believe the focus should be "where do we stand", not "how do we win". For years now, the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC) has succeeded in standing things on their head, arguing that to "win" means adapting to the climate and agenda set by the GOP. Of course, they haven't won. But that's not their crime. It's that they have gutted the Party, left it without meaning or appeal, tailing along helplessly with the GOP's bold parade to power.
It's not that winning isn't important. It's that starting with that as an end in itself is a dead-end. There is a need of historic magnitude to challenge the overtly pro-plutocratic and warlike regime that is grabbing unprecedented power. There surely will be more and less effective electoral strategies to consider, but winning has to be about decisively changing course. While the emergence of a clear progressive alternative will vitalize many voters and attract non-voters, it would be foolish to expect easy victories. Divisions and confusion run deep in the body politic and no one can overlook the advantages that Bush exploits in today's world. It is the combination of a strong progressive challenge and increasingly negative consequences of the rightwing program that can add up to a turnaround.
The parallel in Israel is unmistakable. The Labor Party's joining hands with Sharon was a disaster, for the party and for the country. Leaving the government won't by itself reverse the shift to the right of recent years. Still a real alternative, if it develops, coupled with bitter experiences of life under Sharon and Netanyahu, might rekindle hope for change.
Rightwing Democrats will try to hold control by arguing more than ever that surrender is the only way to "win". Significantly, they have the full support of the GOP and most of the media in arguing that Nancy Pelosi's appointment as Minority Leader in the House is a mistake. Even though her appointment would hardly make over the Democratic Party, the GOP's harmony with the conservative Dems suggests that the Bush team isn't too worried that the DLC has the "winning" formula. As Krugman says of the Democratic Party, with a clear stand "against the plutocracy, it may still lose. But if it doesn't stand for anything, it— and the country— will surely lose."
November 18, 2002
Since November 5th, the Administration is unrestrained and unabashed in its open war preparations, incredible expansion of surveillance programs, removal of constitutional protections in the courts, and privatization of the federal work force.
The Bush team—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and the ultra-right/Christian Front entourage — is not unlike its Nixon and Reagan predecessors. But the context is different. There is the extreme imbalance in world power, with the US as sole superpower. The challenge mounted by bin Laden and organized terrorist attacks, especially since September 11/01, has enabled them to gain an almost unprecedented grip on domestic power. And this gang believes that power is there to be used, with unlimited ambition and ruthlessness. The traditional political clock that runs from election to election is quite inadequate to their aims. What they are after are changes in the structure and content of political power, nullifying democratic checks and balances, and cementing their control long-term.
*****
I don't expect to post anything new for a while, though that's not a promise. Another project needs attention, but I'll be back here before too long. Since my last entry described a storm-soaked living room, I should say we didn't drown and the carpet dried up without damage.