Being conspicuously nice to some Iraqis

Sophia Niarchos, a colleague in the New York chapter of the National Writers Union, writes:
This morning in one of my rare viewings of network TV, NBC's Today Show news reported about a very young Iraqi child with a major tumor in the neck area who was brought to the U.S. so that her life might be saved by American doctors in, I think, Ohio (hmmm, isn't that a "battleground" state?). There was video of her being put on a helicopter, of her mother in an interview, of the child herself, of doctors discussing their hopes for a happy ending.

In a country where HIPAA compliance (protecting patient privacy) is required of medical professionals and where photos of flag-draped caskets of unidentified soldiers are (or were) not permitted, how is it that this Iraqi family can have their privacy invaded? Could it have anything to do with the military's need for a "goodwill" story to keep this war looking like a benefit for the Iraqi people? To keep Americans looking like heroes? They haven't shown us the people we murdered, have they?

Kerry, just do it!

Forward from our friends at MoveOn:

Dear friend,

As George Bush's poll numbers drop quickly, John Kerry is facing an important choice -- perhaps the most important choice he'll make in his campaign. He has to decide whether, as some consultants will urge, he should be cautious and run toward the center, or whether he should present a bold agenda for change and rally Americans around a vision for our future.

Through his history, Kerry has made a practice of standing up for bold initiatives to provide health care, protect the environment, and safeguard the right to reproductive choice. Together, we need to let him know that we want him to be his best, boldest self -- to go big, ask more of us, and power his campaign on the politics of hope.

Please join me in calling on John Kerry to "go big" at: www.moveonpac.org

Thank you.

"Condi's a jerk"

You knew that already, of course, but look who's saying it! Read Casualty of War by Wil S. Hylton, in the forthcoming June issue of GQ. "Four years into an embattled Bush administration, Colin Powell is hard at work at something he's never had to worry about before: salvaging his legacy."

Our national embarrassment

I've been pondering a remark by Sen. McCain the other day. When a reporter asked him if he saw some comparison between the tortures of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib with the torture he had experienced (very severe, causing among other things a broken arm) at the hands of the Vietnamese when he was a P.O.W., he dismissed the idea. "I was never sexually humiliated," he said.

Right. There are many ways to be beastly and cruel, to inflict as severe pain as can be imagined on a despised foe. Ottoman Turks used to favor the bastinado, beating people on the souls of their feet. The Romans chained galley slaves to the oars and, when they really wanted to hurt you, resorted to crucifixion. The Chinese had ingenious things they could do involving fingernails, and something called "Chinese water torture." The word "torture" itself comes from twisting, which was one of the things Spanish inquisitors might do to your body if they wanted to force the demons out of you. There must be 50 ways to hurt your brother, if Paul Simon wants to set that to music.

But none of these methods involves sex, kinky or otherwise. The Americans who gleefully posed for those photos with naked Iraqis were not merely depraved, they were/are weird. The only thing like it I've ever heard of -- apart from fantasy novels like Sade's Justine -- were the tortures in the secret prisons of Argentina during the "dirty war" (1976-1983) and in Chile during the reign of Pinochet. But even those twisted twisters didn't grin for the camera. Our Republic is in deep danger -- something is driving people, especially but not only men, to associate sex with violence. I wonder if it doesn't have to do with the great fear of sex, the notion that sexual organs and sexual acts are somehow "dirty," that comes from our evangelical preachers and our evangelical Attorney General. If sex is nasty, then the nastiest thing you can do to someone is force him to give a sexual display. Whereas, if sex is considered more or less normal and pleasurable but the human body is sacred, then the nastiest thing you can do might be to crucify him, i.e., tear his body apart. Different strokes for different sadists.

For a reasoned British view on the Iraq débâcle (though not specifically Abu Ghraib) and what to do about it, see America and Arabia after Saddam by Fred Halliday, 13 - 5 - 2004.

The unknown knowns

A friend just sent me, once again, Donald Rumsfeld's famous soliloquy from his Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing:

As we know, there are known knowns.
There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

I've read that many times, but what has always bothered me about Rumsfeld and his partners is their unknown knowns, that is, all the things that were perfectly knowable but that Rumsfeld refused to inform himself about, like:

the inevitability of resistance in Iraq, the stupidity of making untrained clerks and service workers into prison guards, the principles of honor and shame in Arab and other cultures, and how to enrage people you claim to be liberating.

We can't be foreigners. We're Americans!

Mr. Bush observed with no irony to Al Arabiya TV: "Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country, and we will help them rid Iraq of these killers."
(courtesy of Maureen Dowd)

Recommended reading

A Cronkite Moment? by Jonathan Tasini, on signs that the conservative middle class is turning against Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld's war.

Downward spiral of depression?

A colleague in the National Writers Union asks if others, like her, suffer periods of tremendous doubt of their writing and enter a downward spiral of paralyzing depression. But she wasn't just looking for company for her misery; she wanted solutions. This is what I told her:

Yep. I'll bet we all do, sometimes. What I do about it is dose myself with virtual Prozac ©. In my case this comes in the form of a shelf of poetry. Howard Nemerov is very good for this ailment, at least in my case. And Antonio Machado helps me remember that you just have to keep going on. (That's what Samuel Beckett said, too.)

The funny paper

Kudos to Deborah Solomon. The NYT Magazine is sometimes amusing, but rarely so laugh-out-loud hysterical. Check out her pursuit of the wizened Harvard prof of withered brain, Samuel Huntington. He's the old coot who's sounding the alarm that the Mexicans (of all people) are stealing our country away from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, to whom, Huntington assures us, it rightfully belongs. Solomon is skeptical, and finds it too, too easy to work up old Huntington to a froth. Having established his WASPishness ("The Huntingtons arrived in Boston in 1633"), she asks him:

Do you think that there is any truth to the stereotypical view of WASP's as emotionally cold people?

Wait a minute. You're talking about people. I am not talking about people. I am talking about ideas and practices.

What do you say to the fact that about 10 percent of the U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq are Hispanic?

Again you are talking about people.

What else is there besides people?

What indeed? Thank you, Ms. Solomon, for shedding such a strong light on such a murky old waspnest encrusted mind. How could anyone take him seriously enough to bother to put together a whole panel debunking him? (See blog for 4/22, below.) The man is a self-parody. See the whole silly interview: Three Cheers for Assimilation

"Dogville" is America

"Before I go to prison, the America that I know is a beautiful country and Americans are such beautiful, kind, humble people. When I go to prison, I see there is a different face of the United States of America." This is what Javaid Iqbal, on the telephone from Faisalabad, Pakistan, told Nina Bernstein of the NYT. Bernstein's article this morning, 2 Men Charge Abuse in Arrests After 9/11 Terror Attack, is another tale of horrible abuses -- degrading, painful and life-harming -- by American officials. Iqbal and Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian, were both living and working in New York legally and happily when their lives were interrupted by "federal agents in an anti-terror sweep." Other federal officials ultimately deported them even though they were cleared of the original charges-- deemed guilty because of their national origins and religions, that is, because they were outsiders.

In the powerful fable "Dogville," which we saw last night, Nicole Kidman plays an outsider who comes to the remote mountain hamlet of Dogville while on the run from gangsters. The Dogvilleans at first protect her grudgingly, then come to like her and even begin to depend on her services. But when outside events ("Wanted" posters tacked up by the sheriff on a rare visit to the town) make them think their generosity might entail some risk, they begin exploiting and punishing her horribly, including regular rapes, all the while regarding themselves as righteous. The violent ending comes as an immense relief to the entire audience, but mixed with the relief must be a disturbing recognition: this must be the kind of relief that so many in the Muslim world felt when the Twin Towers fell.

Don't see "Dogville" if you want to sleep peacefully snuggled in a Dogvillean cocoon of righteousness. The acting is too good, and the bare-bones stagecraft never lets your mind drift from horror of the story to the scenery. Dogville official website