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Will Communication [07 Jul 2009|07:31pm] [ mood | hopeful ] [ music | indistinguishable music muffled by the sound of baristas ] I did some more volunteer work for the Friends of the Pima County Public Library this morning. The most interesting news was that someone left a bunch of comic books to the organization in his will, so eventually they will have a sale especially for the comic books they now have. (They won't be included in their usual book sales.) The guy who left them in his will used to own a comic book shop, so the comic books are in great shape--still in plastic protectors (hopefully acid-free). I'll have to watch for their comic book sale. Maybe I should volunteer for it as well. I was told most of the comic books were from the 1980s, so they'd probably be titles I'd recognize from the days I was collecting and reading comic books. I have two job interviews, one tomorrow and one Thursday. Hopefully they go well. If not, it's encouraging that I've now received two calls for interviews within a week of my layoff date. (Of course, I also haven't been very picky about the places where I've applied; it's likely that I'm overqualified.) 2 comments|post comment

CHOKING HAZARD: SMALL FARTS [06 Jul 2009|12:44pm] [ mood | happy ] [ music | horrible light jazz at Bruegger's Bagels ] I guess an Internet connection is one of those things you don't realize how much you use until it's taken away from you. Having arrived at the end of the two grants I was supporting, I've been unemployed as of last Wednesday. My only Internet connection at home was an unsecured wireless connection, some anonymous neighbor's, that comes and goes. I contacted Cox to get cable Internet, but that's taking longer than I ever would have expected. I'm thus left with that task of either using the Internet when that unsecured connection is available, or patronizing places that offer free wireless Internet. I started reading Not One More Death last night, a book published in response to the war in Iraq. I decided to buy it while doing some of the bookstore browsing I now have so much time to do. (I always made time for that activity while I was working, but now it's increased.) I was thinking about a comment one of the book's contributors made about Bush and Blair's readiness "to act without the dithering qualms and nuances that liberal judges or teachers or civil servants or military officers...might be inclined to show," since "they both understood what Good and Evil meant." I thought it captured the internal logic of conservative ideology pretty well; you take one value and reduce it to its smallest, most basic conceptual unit--say, freedom from terrorism or access to gainful employment. Its unimpeachable goodness then becomes the basis for all decisions, and any attempt to reconcile its necessity with other things that might also be good is then considered a distraction (at best) from the mission of promoting and upholding it. These days it's more likely to be considered an attack on what's good--even the manifestation of evil itself. There's no middle way, just a good way and an evil way. It also doesn't matter if carrying out the mission of promoting and upholding it creates new forms of evil. How could the pursuit of what's good be evil? That's like saying that rectangles are triangles, that the sky is lime green. Thus, conservatives hear doublespeak in what liberals say, which probably explains why 1984 has resonated with people across the political spectrum. If you compound this conservative, binary view of the world with the conservative attitude about who does and does not matter, you get things like the war in Iraq. It's the pursuit of something good, so by definition it can't be bad. And even if you can make the case that it is, in fact, causing bad things to happen to some good people, you're wasting your time if they're people who don't matter (for all of the "Support Out Troops" signs, the truth is that troops don't matter; executives in the defense industry do--and it does without saying that people of other nations, especially the more non-white they are, matter less than Americans). The backlash against affirmative action is also a good thing, if you view affirmative action as a barrier to gainful employment. It's self-evident that gainful employment is a good thing. It's less evident, or not evident at all, that a lack of affirmative action is also a barrier to gainful employment. If you can make a case for that, you run into the same problem as you do with the case against the war in Iraq: you're talking about people who don't matter as much. If they mattered as much as white men, they wouldn't be making 64 to 74 cents for every dollar that a white man makes, they would serve the same sentences for the same crimes, and they wouldn't be harassed, beaten, or killed by police officers any more frequently than white people. Well, I can't write much longer. But the most exciting thing to report today is that I won free tickets to see De La Soul at the Rialto Theatre later this month. 6 comments|post comment

Rob Blow [29 Jun 2009|10:23am] [ mood | good ] [ music | Soul Coughing ] "There is always a Predator [drone] airborne around the world." --United States Air Force Major Russell Lee, quoted in Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives That sounds like an updated version of that old saying about how the sun never sets on Rome. 2 comments|post comment

Happy Día de San Juan! [24 Jun 2009|09:34am] [ mood | relaxed ] [ music | Propellerheads, Soul Coughing, and Hot Chip ] "You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that's precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can't, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn't any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn't any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That's the power structure he's part of, and knows how to use." --Bedap, in Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed post comment

air biscuit apparent [20 Jun 2009|07:39pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | Poe, Portishead, and Fatboy Slim ] Christina Page's book was full of examples of the so-called pro-life movement's wrongness, but this one was almost impressive in how many ways it managed to be wrong: Hanna Klaus, who runs an international abstinence-only group, also testified against EC. For her, contraception is a societal ill. In the past, she had managed to link contraception to black rage. In a 1997 essay titled "The Morning-After Pill: Another Step towards Depersonalization?" Klaus explained that she'd been overseas in the beginning of the sixties and returned to the United States shortly after the riots of the summer of 1968. She had a theory on the cause of that racial violence. "Until contraception became easily available, the black man could be told where he could live, where he could work, where he could be educated, but at least he could be a man; he could have children," she wrote. "With contraception, and five years later with abortion, anything a man could do could be made void by the woman. This may have been part of the driving anger of the summer of 1968." There's nothing quite like co-opting the concern people should feel about discrimination and directing it toward contraception--and at the same time belittling discrimination by making it seem minor and inconsequential compared to a couple's squabble over family planning. There's nothing like portraying Black people as being prone to rioting over such squabbles. There's nothing like ignoring the experience of Black women, who experienced all of the same discrimination--and then some, thanks to our patriarchal society. This is a completely ahistorical and racist account of the imaginary evils of contraception. And it goes without saying that virtually any account of the imaginary evils of contraception is sexist. 14 comments|post comment

Anne Teak's Roadshow [14 Jun 2009|08:02pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | Of Montreal, The Dandy Warhols, and Brian Jonestown Massacre ] I've been reading an edited volume by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, which means I've been reading various ruminations about the use of the word terrorism. The definition is simple enough--usually something about the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve a political or religious objective--but to be "ideologically serviceable" (as Chomsky puts it), it has to have unwritten and unspoken qualifier that terrorism is what they do, not what we do--"they" being Arabs, Muslims, or other inconvenient people. Israel, the United States, the UK, or any other First World power can kill as many inconvenient people as they need for their political objectives--civilians, of course, included--but that is never terrorism. It's retaliation or counterterrorism, or simply war. I have to wonder, after dealing earlier this year with the idiocy of a certain Bryan Smith, if the word racism has started to enter the same use--a word for something they do, not something we do. It would be a breathtaking denial of history and present-day fact to add that qualifier, to make racism another ideologically serviceable word meaning something that, by definition (albeit a partially unspoken definition), is something we can't possibly be faulted for. But to paraphrase an observation of Howard Zinn's, our ideals are the only reality we concern ourselves with; whether those ideals correlate in any way with actual circumstances, actual actions, is irrelevant. Here we believe all people are equal. (If we admit to racism, we admit to it as a fact of history--and even that admission is piecemeal and very incomplete.) Others, however, are to be judged by their actions. Racism is something that happens in Rwanda. To Bryan Smith, racism is something that happens in Mexico--and Mexican Americans bring racism with them when they immigrate here. That was something that popped into my head, and I wanted to write it down while it was still fresh in my head--even if waiting until the thought was better developed might have been better. The new definition of racism would certainly explain why, to so many people, so-called reverse racism is the only racism that really exists or really matters (at least on the home front; again, Rwanda, or any other place that can be judged by its actions, is a hotbed of racism). On my list of things to read eventually is The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature. I picked up a copy of it on Friday night. Sarah thought I'd like Foucault, so I thought this book would make a good introduction. Putting his ideas next to Chomsky's should be a good way of deciding whether or not I like him. 6 comments|post comment

Betty Gott-Eaton [09 Jun 2009|10:46am] [ mood | good ] [ music | Lily Allen, Liz Phair, and Jane Jensen ] I was browsing through the new Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller catalog last night when I became intrigued by a book with an obvious right-wing slant: War Crimes: The Left's Campaign to Destroy Our Military and Lose the War on Terror by Robert "Buzz" Patterson. I was scratching my head as I read the description: In this blistering indictment on the American Left, the author exposes the Left's well coordinated and well financed campaign to sabotage the U.S. military and the War on Terror: a campaign being prosecuted in Washington, the news media, our schools, popular culture, and beyond. I have yet to meet any anti-war activist who makes a good stipend...or any stipend. Where is this well financed campaign? I'd like to know how I can cash in on my anti-war beliefs and willingness to do a little activism. If the negative reviews on Amazon.com are worth anything, the author's idea of a "well financed campaign" might be nothing more than the opinions of a few wealthy celebrities. (Are these celebrities even putting their money where their mouths are?) But what really has me curious is a question that hasn't been answered for me, even after skimming through all of the Amazon reviews: ( Exactly what motivation does the author think his liberal enemies have? ) Then again, perhaps such explanations are superfluous. Perhaps I'm creating my own straw man here, but I wonder if the author and his (conservative, sympathetic) readers would even find the explanation of a motive necessary. Conservatives often use the Bible to explain things that can't be explained logically. The Bible removes any need to explain a motive. Evilness simply exists, and Satan easily tricks people into being evil. You don't have to benefit in any way from your "hate America first" attitude, your desire to see terrorists win. Your enjoyment of self-endangerment doesn't have to be rational. Maybe you just hang out with too many homosexuals and fetus-killers, so you have Satan in you. Maybe I'll read it, maybe not. I might decide it's too easy to pick apart and find flaws in. For something that easy to rebut, I might as well read conservative blogs. 2 comments|post comment

Willy B. Eaton [08 Jun 2009|03:29pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | Blue Scholars, Gomez, and Suzanne Vega ] Why aren't there any good books out there on military pollution? Maybe there are, and I'm just not using the right search terms to find my way to them. The topic has interested me ever since I read Howard Zinn's brief mention of the topic in A People's History of the United States. Against Empire, which I finished this weekend, discusses the topic in a little more detail, but I'd like to read a whole book on the topic. If I knew anything about investigative journalism, I'd consider writing my own book on the topic, since it seems to be an odd void in our published literature. Perhaps it's a topic that could persuade more people to be critical of the military. If an enormous body count and refugee count in a distant land (be it the Balkans, Iraq, Vietnam, or elsewhere) isn't enough to convince them that maybe--just maybe--there's something problematic about the U.S. military, I can only hope something that hits closer to home would work: You can thank the Pentagon, in large part, for your kid's asthma and the vacation home you lost to extreme weather. For analogy, I think of how tim_wise, the anti-racist author, activist, and lecturer, has to appeal to the self-interest of white people when he talks about racism and white privilege--id est, how challenging racism will benefit them, not just the victims of racism. (He doesn't spend a lot of time making those appeals, but I've read them a few times in his writings.) I'm always a bit baffled by some people's need to know there's something in it for them if they act ethically. There must have been a shortage of human decency when they were born. But I digress. 7 comments|post comment

private tooter [05 Jun 2009|10:18am] [ mood | good ] [ music | Portishead, Mr. Scruff, and Broken Social Scene ] We're supposed to believe the U.S. is a free society, in part because no one's dissent is silenced here. No one ends up in prison for dissent. No one is threatened. Actually, there are exceptions to this--plenty of them--but we conveniently ignore them. Forget about the infiltration of political groups (which has even happened somewhat recently here in Tucson). Forget about the old witch hunts for communists. Forget about the woman who got fired for having the wrong bumper sticker on her car in 2004. The list goes on. ( But even without these things we conveniently forget, the U.S. still achieves a kind of information control almost as good as a totalitarian state's. ) Anyway, I could go on and on, but what I wanted to get to was that for me, what really gets under my skin is the political censorship that has often been written into immigration policy. Michael Parenti summarizes it in Against Empire, a book I picked up at After-Words in Chicago: Refugees from Nicaragua...had relatively no trouble getting into the USA because they were considered to be fleeing a "communistic" Sandinista government. Refugees from Vietnam...have been granted entry...in large numbers, 35,000 in 1993 alone, because they too are fleeing an anticapitalist government. During the Cold War, emigrés from the USSR and Eastern Europe were granted entrance visas as a matter of course. Now that communism has been replaced by conservative free-market governments, the State Department has the program "under review." (Again, the list goes on. If you're fleeing from an ideology that U.S. elites oppose, then that saying that your enemy's enemy is your friend almost always applies.) It's one thing to propagandize people. Some people will see through it. Not everyone is an idiot. ( But to selectively let in people who have already internalized the desired beliefs adds another layer of slime to the slimy way the U.S. privileges certain beliefs. ) 3 comments|post comment

For more on bigotry, Google "California Supreme Court." [26 May 2009|01:24pm] [ mood | okay ] [ music | Beastie Boys, Lily Allen, and Liz Phair ] I started reading Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto: Poetry and Identity by David Mura this weekend. I've read his memoirs, his one novel, and his poetry collections. This book collects some essays on literary criticism and non-Western or non-Eurocentric literature. I was expecting it to be dry and dull compared to his other writing, but so far it's proven otherwise. Even though I enjoy reading, writing, and thinking about topics that, I suppose, could be material for theses, I've often felt that I really wouldn't fit in well in academia. Part of it is that the prejudices and bigotry of some academics bothers me more than the prejudices and bigotry of non-academics. People who make careers out of being intellectuals (actual or so-called) bother me even more with their ignorance; it adds and extra layer of hypocrisy. Some disciplines have more of that than others, and in some disciplines it's more innocuous than in others. I didn't expect a lot of it in the study of literature, especially when Edward Said, a challenger of colonial perspectives, is one of the first people who comes to mind when I think of university faculty who speak pretentiously and pedantically about literature. I can also vaguely remember something Howard Zinn wrote about the backlash against literature professors who now include books like I, Rigoberta Menchú in their syllabi. Even at my mediocre alma mater, in one of the whitest states in the union, I was assigned Mariano Azuela and Chinua Achebe (and probably others I'm forgetting right now) when I got my Bachelor of Arts. Sure, it's inevitable that there's going to be Anglocentrism when English-speaking people study literature, but I figured there was more sensitivity to other voices now, more interest in inclusion. But Mura's book has some telling accounts of the racism he's encountered among scholars of literature. Here's one: When a white friend of mine went to an almost all-white graduate program a few years ago, a black student poet won an NEA fellowship. Upon hearing this, a white poet-professor remarked to my friend, "You know, us white guys didn't have a chance. There were so many minority judges on the panel this year." Later, when this black poet gave his final-semester seminar on black aesthetics, another white poet-professor muttered in the back of the room, "That's not aesthetics, that's paranoia." (Such a remark was not surprising, since this same white professor had told the black poet, "Literature which drops the 'g' from 'ing' words doesn't last.") The next period, this same white poet introduced his seminar on the ode by saying, "Horace didn't write for special-interest groups" (tell that to the Roman slaves)....At the time there were no faculty of color among the sixteen professors. I guess I'd rather have a racist teaching literature than law, but still.... 8 comments|post comment

Manning Salon [22 May 2009|02:57pm] [ mood | sleepy ] [ music | Lemon Jelly, Moby, and Mr. Scruff ] I think I want to read The Communist Manifesto again--but preferably an annotated version. It's been ages since I read it, and I think I was too young to understand a lot of it (and to make matters worse, I remember wanting to read it just for the sake of being able to say I'd read it--without much regard for how much I actually comprehended it). Haymarket Books, the socialist press in Chicago, publishes an edition called The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document. Since I'll be in Chicago soon, I should see if I can find a copy to flip through and consider purchasing. I would assume (or hope) that bookstores there are good to their local publishers. I wonder if Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X is ever going to be published. I first heard about it on Democracy Now! four years ago. Reading How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America has made me more interested in Marable's writing--and also interested in what he says is missing from the autobiography Malcolm X and Alex Haley collaborated on. That Democracy Now! piece, as well as an endnote in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, mentioned that Malcolm's sexism (especially in his autobiography, where he opines on how untrustworthy women are--his wife only a partial exception) had largely disappeared prior to his assassination. He "began to advance and push forward women leadership" in the organization he founded after his return from Africa. He also spoke about the need to empower women in Africa. There were some other things missing, too, which Marable attributes to Alex Haley's biases, but his change in his views about women interests me the most. I'm looking forward to the three-day weekend, but I'll probably spend most of it cleaning. 5 comments|post comment

bits and pizzas [20 May 2009|10:18am] [ mood | okay ] [ music | Nightmares on Wax, Public Enemy, and Common Market ] I can't remember why, but a week or two ago I wanted to read up on Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. The lazy route, of course, is to just read the Wikipedia article about him, instead of reading article after article to get a sense of his political makeup. Under the heading "Immigration," I was happy to learn that despite his conservatism, he departs from other conservatives on the issue. But then I read the last sentence: "Brownback has said that he supports immigration reform because the Bible says to welcome the stranger." We need more advocates of fair and humane immigration policies, but that just scares me. It's not unique, of course; other politicians have said similar things. That just scares me more. Political decisions based on religious teachings are the reason we don't recognize same-sex marriage in most states. But it could be worse. As Manning Marable has pointed out (in the same book that I quoted from yesterday), "the Bible...sanctions capital punishment 'in cases of adultery' (Lev. 20:10), blasphemy (Lev. 24:15), working on the sabbath (Ex. 35:2), refusing to obey a priest or judge (Deut. 17:12), disobedient children (Deut. 21:18), fornication (Deut. 22:23) and sixteen other offenses." If I remember correctly, Michael Parenti also pointed out in one of his books that the book of Deuteronomy provides instructions on how to properly conduct genocide. (But make no mistake about it--Islam is the violent religion!) Now it's come out in the news that Donald Rumsfeld was giving George W. Bush "top-secret briefings adorned with Biblical quotes during the early days of the invasion of Iraq." It's nice that U.S. foreign policy can be influenced by a book that was written during a time when our ethics were so advanced that "spousal rape" was a contradiction in terms (to half of the population, at least). Now that we've caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq--and easily eclipsed that body count with the number of refugees of war--I do hope we can move on to executing those kids at Subway who are making sandwiches on Sunday. It's what the Bible says we should do. (I have no argument with people who take a mystical interpretation of the Bible--well advocated in Alan Watts' Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion--but a literal interpretation can lead down some very frightening roads.) 4 comments|post comment

apology excepted [19 May 2009|09:36am] [ mood | good ] [ music | Björk, Transglobal Underground, and The Dandy Warhols ] "The creator of lynching was a Quaker, Charles Lynch, a well-to-do political leader of what is today Lynchburg, Virginia, and a member of the House of Burgesses." --Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society "Countless cities, counties, streets, and businesses in the West bear names like Custer, Reno, and Sheridan. The dominant society would be outraged at the prospect of naming cities or streets after Nazi generals. Yet names of places such as Custer State Park, Sheridan in Wyoming, and Reno in Nevada are constant reminders of the dominant society's denial of the genocide that occurred within its own borders." --Brett Lee Shelton, "The Legal and Historical Basis of Indian Health Care," in Promises to Keep: Public Health Policy for American Indians and Alaska Natives in the 21st Century by Mim Dixon and Yvette Roubideaux (eds.) "It has been said that David Nichols in particular was, despite his active participation in the Buffalo Springs and Sand Creek atrocities, and his avid defense of these actions for the balance of much of his life, a 'good man' who accomplished much of 'socially redeeming value.' The latter may be conceded without argument. He did. And he is hardly unique in this regard. Adolph Hitler, after all, was instrumental in the creation of the autobahn and the Volkswagon, modern rocketry and the jet aircraft. He subsidized museums and the opera as no German leader before or since. Heinrich Himmler poured money into universities. Alfried Krupp was a virtually unrivaled industrialist in his day. Albert Speer was something of a genius as an architect. The list could certainly be continued at great length. Were the arguments now being mounted to 'defend the honor' of David Nichols applied equally to Hitler, Himmler, Krupp and Speer, we could only conclude that they too are deserving of remembrance as good and worthy individuals, men whose crimes against humanity were mere 'blemishes' on otherwise commendable records. Had Germany won the Second World War, they would surely be thus memorialized....But Germany lost, the crimes of its leaders--both military and civilian--brought out for what they were. Their names are now all but universally reviled; no buildings named to commemorate their positive contributions to civilization stand on German campuses. The difference here is that, unlike Germany, the United States won its war of conquest and extermination....That is why Nichols' name is affixed to a building at the University of Colorado, and the names of men like him are affixed to buildings, streets, and parks in thousands of other places around this country today." --Ward Churchill, quoted in M. Annette Jaimes, "Sand Creek: The Morning After," in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance by M. Annette Jaimes (ed.) 2 comments|post comment

Nero Tolerance [12 May 2009|11:12am] [ mood | good ] [ music | Brian Jonestown Massacre, Solex, and Nellie McKay ] I saw Star Trek on Sunday with clockworkalien, bryanhelm, speranzosa, Joe, and locakitty. I've never been a Star Trek fan, but for some reason I really wanted to see it. It was as good as I anticipated. Earlier in the day the six of us played a game of Super Scrabble at Rincon Market. I wish we would have had time for another game, one is better than nothing. I'm getting impatient with the Pima County Public Library. I've been wanting to read Vandana Shiva's new book, which has taken them a long time to order and process (its status for four weeks was that four copies had been ordered on April 2). Now the copy that's on hold for me is finally "IN TRANSIT," but I know from experience that books can be in transit for a strangely long time. The odd thing is that there's now a copy available at the location I picked for pick-up. I'm not sure why that one isn't being held for me, instead of the one in transit. I suppose I could be dickish about it and go check that one out (and cancel my hold on the other one), but then I'd feel bad that I made them transport the other copy for no reason. I guess I just get antsy about these little things before I travel (in today's case, two weeks and one day from now). I want to be returning books right before I travel--not checking them out. I have a low-level nervousness before I travel, which dissipates quickly as soon as I'm finally at my destination, enjoying my time. I suppose that's normal. I think I'll just pay for parking at the airport instead of getting picked up or dropped off by a friend (or two). I tend to be defeatist and assume that travel is always going to be expensive, so I often just accept expenses like airport parking--especially since it simplifies the process for me. 12 comments|post comment

the swine poo [09 May 2009|12:37pm] [ mood | okay ] [ music | Moby, Lemon Jelly, and Public Enemy ] "Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations morally unacceptable because of the 'crimes of communism.' Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic party [sic] in this country, either as voters or as members, apparently unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Social Workers Party and later leaders of the Communist party [sic] for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a 'national emergency'; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco's fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the 'democratic socialist' anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism." --Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism "We judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their actions. It is a great convenience." --Howard Zinn, Uncommon Sense from the Writings of Howard Zinn 2 comments|post comment

Sunni Tunes [06 May 2009|01:34pm] [ mood | lazy ] [ music | Common Market, Massive Attack, and Lemon Jelly ] ( It's nice to know Israel is getting a little bit of criticism from Joe Biden, no matter how little and how late it may be. ) I think it was back in 2005 or 2006 that I first started reading William Blum's Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, although I never finished the book until more recently. I don't remember if Blum ever summarized the body count from all of that killing, but I do remember that he dubbed it the "American Holocaust." If Blum didn't do it, I now have this from Michael Parenti for reference, although I don't know how comprehensive it is: In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 million [sic] in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; over 500,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq; over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the "dirty war" of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust. That was from Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, published in 1997, so the figures for Iraq and Afghanistan aren't current--and figures for the Kosovo conflict aren't included. I can't remember the timeline for all of the violence in East Timor--id est, whether any occurred after 1997. I've had mixed feelings about this book, Blackshirts and Reds. I've read about two-thirds of it so far. ( The book is Parenti's attempt to set the record straight about the post-Cold War rhetoric regarding communism. ) post comment

NYPD Flu [04 May 2009|09:27am] [ mood | good ] [ music | Lemon Jelly, Hot Chip, and The Mission Creeps ] I don't think I know enough about Arlen Specter to say anything conclusive about his defection from the Republican Party. But while many liberals were immediately elated, my first thought was that was that his defection says a lot about how miserable our two-party system is. The fact that nothing terribly cathartic, miraculous, or earth-shattering has to happen for someone to realize that she or he should be a Democrat instead of a Republican really indicates to me how little difference there is between the two major parties. Were you indignant about the large-scale, indiscriminate killing in Iraq under George W. Bush? Vote Democratic, so that you can be slightly less indignant about the smaller-scale, indiscriminate killing in Afghanistan under Obama! Often, instead of differences in policy, we just get differences in severity of policy. Instead of a two-party system, we get something closer to a one-party system with pretensions of democratic choice. To be fair, there are some significant differences, and I would much rather live under a Democratic president than a Republican president...but I also don't think those should be my only two choices. With this weekend's reading, I've finished another 20 books since the 20 I listed at the end of January. ( My latest reading is listed below. ) 35 comments|post comment

What to Expectorate When You're Expecting [28 Apr 2009|12:16pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | Blue Scholars, Liz Phair, and Hamsa Lila ] I just submitted my tucson_weekly Best of Tucson ballot. For best country music station, I put "whichever one has the weakest signal." This year the tucson_weekly was only accepting online ballots. I hope they get a lot of negative feedback about that. It's such a privileged, middle-class assumption that everyone can get on a computer and use the Internet. Maybe it's a sign of the economic times. I would imagine a lot less labor goes into tallying online votes. As hopelessly stupid as some people are, I'm often surprised by the things people don't have to have explained to them. Take liquid hand soap, for example. A lot of them have a dispenser pump that is locked in a down position until you unscrew it, so that they don't make a mess during shipment or while on store shelves. I was looking at some like this a couple of nights ago (at a Walgreens), and I was surprised that a lot of the packages didn't even have directions for unlocking the dispenser pump. Something else I've noticed, after many visits to Bookmans, is how everyone seems to understand that you need to look inside the books there to find their prices. The first page inside the front cover will have it pencilled in. I didn't moonlight at Borders for very long, but it was long enough to learn that even at bookstores, there are plenty of stupid customers. Well, that's enough musing for now. I need to eat lunch. 2 comments|post comment

Five Bidets That Shook the World [23 Apr 2009|09:47am] [ mood | good ] [ music | CSS, Eels, and The Mission Creeps ] I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies yesterday. For some reason, the first time I tried reading it (a few years ago), I found it really boring after 40 or so pages. This time it took more than 300 pages for me to start getting bored with it--but only mildly so, and only because it started to get redundant. I've read here and there that some critics have called it a Eurocentric history, even if many people, including the author, claim otherwise. I think it had something to do with what he wrote about Chinese society. I don't know enough about China to really evaluate the critique. But there was this gem, from page 210 of the paperback edition: "Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords." Maybe I shouldn't take the phrase "in bed" too seriously (especially when I'm adding it to the messages I find in fortune cookies); perhaps I should think of it not in literal terms, but as something loosely meaning "at home" or "at rest." Taken literally, though, I really have to question it--and laugh at it a bit. Not everyone sleeps in beds! I can remember visiting my Korean aunts and uncles when they first immigrated to the United States; the bedrooms in their apartments had both Western style beds as well as the floor mats that Koreans have traditionally slept on. They thought sleeping on the floor was better for their backs. (Even if that's true, I have to wonder how comfortable that is during sex.) I would imagine a lot of Native American cultures--like Korean culture--were slow to convert to sleeping in beds, if they didn't already have them before colonization. (Did any? If so, I'm not aware, but the history of how people have slept hasn't come up in my reading very much.) I did some volunteer work for the Friends of the Pima County Library yesterday morning. It was easy work--just pulling some of the books that didn't sell in their last sale. After my shift, I bought a few more books to read (eventually): The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News by Norman Solomon; Corporate Predators: The Hunt For Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock; and Al Gore: A User's Manual and Five Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond, both by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. 11 comments|post comment

sheep disorders [19 Apr 2009|08:00pm] [ mood | relaxed ] [ music | The Mission Creeps, Gomez, and The Dandy Warhols ] There was a weird print ad in Thursday's tucson_weekly. I wish I could remember the name of the organization that did the ad. (I don't have it in front of my right now.) It was for some sort of charitable organization that wants you to donate to them so that they can help people who are struggling in the economy right now, but the message they used to pull your heartstrings seemed really classist. Maybe I don't know enough about the organization, so I'm reading something into their ad that I shouldn't, but to me this struck me as incredibly insulting to people living at or below the poverty line: The ad pictured a woman and her son, behind them what looks like a relatively nice neighborhood. The caption reads something to this effect: "I work. I pay my bills. But I don't know where my next meal is coming from." Other wording in the ad makes it clear that the organization's aid is aimed specifically at the newly poor, people who were making it until the economy started slowing. The ad doesn't explain why anyone should care more about the newly poor than people who have been poor for a while. And to me the subtle implication of its message is that unlike this nice, well-dressed woman, other poor people haven't been keen on the idea of working and paying bills. Is that why we shouldn't care about them as much? Am I supposed to think that this woman who doesn't know where her next meal is coming from is somehow a greater victim of circumstance than people who were poor before the economy went into a slump? Maybe I'm misinterpreting the ad. Maybe I'm hypersensitive about the blame-the-victim attitude that people have toward the poor (or, for that matter, just about any other victim in this society: rape victims, victims of institutional racism, and so forth). It's been a good weekend--a much needed break after all of the overtime I worked the last couple of weeks. I won two games of Scrabble at Shot in the Dark Café this morning (with Joe, clockworkalien, and locakitty). Other than that, I've spent the weekend running errands, reading, cleaning, planting more things in my garden, and attending a screening at the Arizona International Film Festival (Weaving Worlds, a documentary about Navajo weavers and the people they trade with). 6 comments|post comment

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