Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy Redux

This (via, via) is really depressing.



The clip comes from an alternative-media source, but it could just as easily be CNN. There's the same exclusion of historical context, of the past and present role of the US in Haiti's problems. I'm certainly not going to complain because US troops distributed food and water to hungry people, but it's primarily a photo op, like a politician kissing babies. American soldiers often distribute goodies to the locals in countries they occupy; it's a cliche, and while it's better than shooting people in the head or torturing them or running them over with tanks, they do those things too. (In comments at the original post, the reporter writes, "Like Captain Selmo says in the video, it’s not normally what they do. A telling statement." But not really news except to people who prefer to ignore the norm in favor of the photo op.)

Notice too that they ran out of supplies with long lines still waiting -- oh, too bad, go home now (and they were nervous, fingering their weapons, that the crowd would turn on them, but it didn't). "For me [the Americans] can take the whole country," says one woman. Oh, hadn't you noticed? We already have, several times, and then left it in the hands of military dictators, corrupt aristocrats and multinational corporations. As the current troop occupation shows, we'll take it again whenever we feel like it.

As for Aristide, there is no chance the US will ever let him come back. The US took him out of Haiti in 2004, and has kept Haiti on a tight rein since then, making sure that there's no danger democracy will break out again.

What Is To Be Done?

Alexander Cockburn has some important reminders in an article at Counterpunch today:

[Rosa] Parks was a trained organizer who, like King, attended sessions at the Highlander Folk School, founded by Christian Socialists, close to the Communist Party, one of whom, Don West, began his career as a high-school agitator organizing demonstrations in 1915 outside cinemas featuring Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a violently racist movie praising the Ku Klux Klan for protecting whites from black violence after the Civil War.

It's always a good idea to repeat that Rosa Parks was not just a solitary, isolated person. Just a few days ago, I heard her mentioned on the radio as someone who acted because "My feet were tired." Her feet were surely tired that day in 1955 when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, but she was already secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the NAACP, and had worked for the defense of a teenaged African-American woman, Claudine Colvin, who'd been arrested for the same offense. Oddly, the Wikipedia article on Parks claims early on that "Nonetheless, she took her action as a private citizen 'tired of giving in'", as though activists were not private citizens too. While activists surely have differing motives for getting involved, they usually start out as private citizens who've had enough, and they remain private citizens after they become activists. That would seem to be gripe that so many people have about activists: Who do they think they are!? They're not the professional politicians and managers and doctors and lawyers who are supposed to concern themselves with such things. An odd sentiment in a supposed democracy where citizens are supposed to concern and involve themselves with the public good. The same article later quotes Parks herself:

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

I suspect that so many people try to atomize and isolate Parks partly to force her into a mythic mold: the Gallant Little Tailor, say. Perhaps part of the idea is to encourage us ordinary workaday folks to get off our butts and do something, but I'm inclined to doubt it for a couple of reasons. One is the implication that all you have to do is Have Heart, and get Mad As Hell and Not Take It Anymore, and the world will change -- you don't have to hang out with Dirty Reds to make it happen. Even if this were true sometimes, the fact remains that Parks did hang out with Dirty Reds and change happened that way in that case. The net result of discouraging organization is that the few nails that stick up their individual heads get beaten swiftly and efficiently down.

Another is that people who organize in this country (and elsewhere) are generally derided. Even our dear Teabaggers are torn between presenting themselves as a movement and as a bunch of Mad As Hell Private Citizens who just happen to gather in the same place at the same time to express their dissatisfaction with the way this country is going. I've seen occasional admissions that they've decided to learn from the example of past movements for social justice, but since they usually seem to hate those past movements for being a bunch of Damned Communists and Dirty Surrender Monkeys who want to bring America to its knees, they tend to trip over their own rationales. And since Teabag Nation, while not entirely the creation of Fox News, has relied very much on its Fair and Balanced blessings from its inception, I think it's safe to say that most of the Tea Party Protesters wouldn't have gotten very far without exhortations from Fox and generous donations and other support from its corporate sponsors. As I've pointed out before, naming themselves after the Boston Tea Party allows them to pretend that they are doing civil disobedience without the risk of ever being herded into a holding cell.

Not that I mean to sneer at them too much. I'm not sure I'm ready to see the inside of a holding cell either, or face tear gas grenades or police clubs. Hwang Sok-yong's great novel The Old Garden, which I just finished reading, brought home very forcefully again the courage and determination of people who didn't have corporate subsidies for their resistance to power. But unlike Teabag Nation, I honor them, and continue to mull over what sort of work I could do.

But speaking of holding cells, tear gas and police clubs, I see that there will be another G20 summit in November, this time in Seoul, and while this Korea Herald story stresses all the nifty things that the city government is planning to welcome the corporate and political scum of the earth:

The city has decided to designate the fourth Wednesday of each month as a “Big Clean up Day” when citizens voluntarily participate in a city cleanup campaign. It also plans to clean up sewer pipes around the summit venue to prevent the spread of unpleasant aromas. Sewage disposal tanks in large buildings near the venue will also be checked to ensure they have been properly maintained....

Other plans include dispatching 1,000 foreign language speaking volunteers to 25 subway stations and 165 bus stops across the city, to help foreign visitors comfortably utilize the public transportation system.

In about 75 first class hotels, the city will run special support centers for G20 participants, which will offer services concerning interpretation, health care and visas. ..

About 10,000 citizens, including 3,000 for interpretation, are expected to participate in the summit as volunteers.

And my Korean friends have told me that Koreans aren't very civic minded! Ten thousand volunteers mobilized to make the G20 delegates feel welcome is quite a respectable number, and I'm sure they just came to City Hall on their own to offer their assistance.

Maybe because it goes without saying, though, there's not a word in the article about beefed-up security, or sweeping beggars and homeless and street vendors off the streets (this last was already in progress for other future events anyway), or about the protests and demonstrations that follow the G20 and other corporate/government events around the world. For once, poor Korean farmers won't have to travel overseas to confront the bigwigs -- the bigwigs are coming to them, though they may not realize it yet. I won't be there, unfortunately, because I haven't moved to Korea yet, but I'll be watching.

11,000 MPH, It's Not Just a Good Idea, It's the Law

Finally! I've been waiting for my ride to get here for, like, years. I'm outa here, bitchez.

(via)

Port au Prince of Peace

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The Baptist missionaries accused of kidnapping 33 children have been indicted in Haiti, and of course it's become a sideshow. The MSNBC clip above doesn't reassure me, considering its slant. According to this reporter (who can't pronounce "Port au Prince" correctly -- it's not "ow" but closer to "oh"), the children's parents are now saying they gave their children to the missionaries, with promises that they'd be able to see them later on. But the missionaries keep sticking their feet in it, claiming that they were looking for children who were orphaned or had been "abandoned" by living parents, and these children clearly don't fit those criteria. Even if the missionaries weren't "trafficking," they still appear to have been careless of legalities and ethical concerns, waving around flyers for their Dominican orphanage, with a color picture of a swimming pool, in front of desperate parents. Their lawyer is now trying to claim the missionaries were "duped" by their Haitian confederates into thinking they had the proper papers, though previous reports have them admitting that they had no papers and didn't think they needed any.

And I still can't help wondering if taking the kids across the border into another country, away from their families, is really the most cost-effective way of giving them the "help" the missionaries say they were trying, in their bumbling, well-intentioned way to provide. As I suggested before, it sounds like they just thought this was an easy way to get some free children they could indoctrinate into their particular cult, blithely ignoring the fact that they were already Christians.

Their leader babbles that they trust in God, the same God who killed over 150,000 Haitians with that earthquake. "Most of the Americans, who have been in jail since last Friday, were covered with severe mosquito bites," the MSNBC story reports. "The prosecutor asked them at one point if they wanted to see a doctor." That's not how Christian tales of martyrdom are supposed to go: God is supposed to protect his agents in prison from all harm, like Daniel in the lions' den. I don't think they should be convicted of kidnapping, and I doubt that the US government will allow them to languish in a Haitian jail for long anyway. Just kicking them out of the country with a warning, and letting them know that there are other ways to help the poor than taking away their children, should be enough. We'll see how it turns out.

Calling Dan Choi; or, Taking It Like a Man

(via)

On the Cusp of Bicuspidora

I'm in the middle of reading two or three books at once, and don't feel like writing much. So I'll just point to my old friend Ash Khalil's article on President Obama's evasive answer to a student's question about human rights in Gaza. Those who have exulted over Obama's superiority to Bush as a speaker should meditate on the opening sentence of his reply: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard." That's right down there with Bush fils and Bush pere when it comes to getting lost in the coils of grammar. The rest of his answer can be read here. No one could have predicted that he'd ever be asked such a question, I'm sure.

I also like this quotation from Stephen Walt in Ash's article:

“It’s not as if the dysfunctional condition of Israeli and Palestinian internal politics was a dark mystery when Obama took office,” wrote Harvard University professor Stephen Walt recently on the Foreign Policy Magazine website. “Did they ever ask themselves what they would do if Netanyahu dug in his heels, as anyone with a triple-digit IQ should have expected?”

It's a question that not only I but others have asked on numerous occasions before and since Obama took office. Did Obama and his Team of Rivals ever ask themselves how they would deal with the Republicans' hostility? Did they even imagine they'd have to deal with it? Did it ever occur to them that they should ask for more than they wanted in bargaining with opponents of their initiatives? Evidently not.

Yes, Virginia, There Is an Obama

I've often wondered if having right-wing politics makes people stupid, or if stupid people just tend to collect right-wing ideas. I know, I know, people of any political tendency can be stupid. And intelligence (whatever that is) isn't everything.

So Avedon at Sideshow linked to this blog post about Obama's recent confrontation with some Republicans. I hadn't even heard about it before, but apparently Barry mopped up the floor with 'em.

Faced with salivating opposition party members WITHOUT knives and forks, Barry not only managed to hold his own, but did so on LIVE TV! For some reason this has shocked people, in spite of knowing that all Republicans, no matter how otherwise intelligent they might be, have to sign a waiver against the use of their own brains and limit themselves to parroting "talking points" despite how nonsensical it sounds when you play back a montage of Sunday morning talking head bites. Or that Obama can actually think and talk on his feet without benefit of teleprompter. So much for mainstream media propunditry. Congratulations to Virginia Foxx (R-NC) for taking advantage of the situation and getting Barry’s autograph! Way to go, Virginia!

Eventually I suppose I'll have to track down this exciting encounter, it must be out there in Teh Intertoobz somewhere. But for the moment I find myself skeptical. If Obama is so tough, why has he let the Republicans block his supposed plans to save America? It's one thing to cow a bunch of Republicans on teevee, another to keep them from torpedoing your legislative agenda. Is this supposed to be, like, the part where mild-mannered Barry O rips off the mask and reveals himself as ... SuperObama? I'll be waiting to see if any more comes of it.

Still, if the Republicans are so stoopid, why are they able to block the Democrats so effectively? Intelligence is obviously not necessary. Or maybe the Democrats are even stoopider? The first commenter to that blog post writes:

Thanks, and as you point out, the requirement for being party of NOPE is brain death. Anyone with the I.Q. to notice that the party that is now insisting that the Dems gave us just horrible deficits, is the party that did just that, has no qualities that fit in with the prospective voter for the right wing.

When your hot new President and his legislative-dominant party have collaborated with the Republicans at almost every turn, when they have backed down on nearly everything they had promised the people who voted for them, complaining that those mean ol' Rethugs were standing in the way and calling them names, I suppose it is comforting to fantasize that the opposition party are brain dead. If the Democrats are so incompetent that a bunch of brain-dead Republicans can stymie them, though, what does that say about the Democrats? It's true, the Democrats are not solely responsible for the "just horrible deficits," but they did their share to produce them, and when Obama became President and the Democrats took over Congress, they apparently decided that no matter what anybody said about those deficits, they were going to keep them.

But why can't I get that second sentence to parse? Or the first one, for that matter? This person writes like a teabagger.