They thought they had it in the bag, too

Ides of ’48 Down and Up With Democrats Pierre Tristam / May 12 What a transformation, though. Since March 4, Clinton and Obama have become uninteresting. They’ve abandoned issues for triggers. Their pandering to voters who cling to guns, gods and prejudice as badges of virtue reminds you of Republican primary contests or country music acts. Their greater purpose is lost to the egomaniacal compulsion to annihilate each other, and with them the party they presume to represent. Still, this is the Democrats' race to lose. The GOP ’s religious and reactionary puppeteers have so disgusted the nation that the only candidate even GOP voters could stomach is a man who several times mulled a switch to the Democratic party and considered being John Kerry’s vice president four years ago. The Democrats have every reason to be overconfident. That, and whatever assassinations the GOP electoral machine has in store for them, is the only thing they have to worry about.

Olympic Boycott Fantasies
How To Deal With China
Pierre Tristam / April 29
China wants to use the games to pretend it's an equal among civilized nations. Instead of playing into China's wishes, NBC, which plunked $900 million to broadcast these games, should use its platform to give China a two-week version of "60 Minutes." Not that the network would go for something like this. Its programming aims to deliver exploitable stupor to advertisers, not moral stimulants to lawmakers. But imagine. Instead of wasting our time with those rosewater features about athletes' personal survival tales, all of which sound the same, all of which would sound insultingly narcissistic in China's context, tell us about the plushless repressions 1.3 billion Chinese live with every day.

 

“The Second Plane”
Martin Amis Against Islamists
Pierre Tristam / April 15
The British writer Martin Amis’ collection of 9/11 essays and stories, “The Second Plane,” was published in the United States last week. The response was vicious: “chuckleheaded,” “pretentious,” “preening,” “undeniable hubris,” “potty,” “the embarrassing uncle screaming at the television,” and “riddled with basic misunderstandings,” were just three reviewers’ responses. They’re right to some extent. The book is mostly 9/11-inspired rubble (reviews, columns, a few essays, two-and-a-half short stories). And there is a lot of shouting and preening. But there’s also something else: The angry admission that as things have been since the attacks six years ago, the attackers have been made victorious by the world’s insistence on giving them more credit and power than dull, death-obsessed and only rarely successful Islamists are due. Maybe what critics don’t like is to be told so bluntly and glibly how easily the West is being had.

 

“Surge” Shills
Dog and Petraeus Show
Pierre Tristam / April 8
The apologists of perpetual war in Iraq got lucky last week. The latest catastrophic fiasco over there — the Iraqi government’s face-saving surrender to a truce offered by resurgent Shiite militias — was overshadowed over here by meltdowns in the economy and sectarian battles inside the Democratic Party. From luck to spin. Today, the Bush administration gets to do what it does best: translate defeat at Arabs’ hands into victory with an American accent. For all the wishful talk you’ll hear this week from the Petraeus show and the war apologists, and even from those, like Clinton and Obama, who pretend to be looking for solutions, little will change until they concede that there will be no peace except on Arabs’ terms. To save himself, the occupier has a choice: submit to reality, or keep suffering its defeats while pretending back home that not losing is somehow success enough. The full story...

• Spinning Failure Into Success One "Surge" at a Time

 

The GOPs Must Be Crazy
Just What Economy Are They On?
Linda Sexauer / April 4
Question: Is it possible to be having “a pretty good economic run” while food stamp recipients are rising to their highest levels in four decades? Answer: Depends on who you’re talking about. Back in mid-December, just 3 1/2 months ago, President Bush delivered another one of his absurd speeches about the U.S. economy. He told us that “we’ve had a pretty good economic run” and that “the underpinning [of the economy] is good.” On March 31, 2008, we read this:

Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.

What is going on here? Is Bush lying about the economy, too? Or could it be that he simply does not know that all is not well for those Americans in our working middle-class? Or something else altogether?

 

Chasing Colors
When America Can’t Handle the Truth
Pierre Tristam / March 25
The word, attributed to the late writer Saul Bellow, is “angelization” — willfully putting someone beyond blame. Angelizing America is the common tongue of all national politicians, the oath candidates implicitly take when running for president. It’s what the most sentimental people on earth expect. It’s what enables a country that committed its share of atrocities in the past and is committing more than its share of moral degradations today to look itself in the mirror and see something exceptional looking back, rather than just another empire trampling down its march of folly, as the great historian Barbara Tuchman called it. Angelizing America is the unspoken, self-evident pledge of allegiance. Someone didn’t tell the Obamas.

 

Speaking Truth to Poison
E Pluribus Obama
Linda Sexauer / March 19
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” From “we,” with our myriad differences and difficulties getting along with one another, to our struggle to come to grips with others who share our citizenship rights but who just don’t see eye-to-eye with our perspectives. This is how Sen. Barack Obama began his March 18 speech, a speech inspired by the overwrought hooplah over his relationship with his former pastor, the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. This is a speech that succeeds at transcending that ridiculous, media-induced hysteria to describe to us how racism impedes our progress as a society, and how we can and must be better than that. It is a speech that reinforces one of his campaign themes: “Out of many, One.”

 

Building Backlash
Homeschool Confidential
Pierre Tristam / March 18
A California court decision almost banning homeschooling was disturbing for a couple of reasons. It’s the first time in legal memory that a court made home-schooling so conditional. And California court decisions are a bellwether of national legal trends. The decision is a warning to the home-school movement, suggesting state regulations and intrusions may be next. The movement has been growing exponentially (30 percent between 1999 and 2003, to 1.1 million students nationwide), not always for the right reasons. Disassociating from one’s community or fearing a secular environment is not, in my view, as good a reason to home school as seeking higher academic standards. But that’s irrelevant so long as parental choice isn’t trumped by government presumption, overbearing enough as it is, on how to educate children.

 

Western Know-how
Terrorism Less Deceptively Defined
Pierre Tristam / March 11
Quick test. Which of the following were acts of terrorism: a) Al-Qaida’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors; b) Hezbollah’s raid on an Israeli military patrol in July 2006, killing three soldiers and capturing two, and triggering a 34-day war; c) The Hamas ambush last week of an Israeli patrol on the Gaza border, killing one Israeli soldier d) Attacks on American troops in Iraq, which have killed about 3,500 soldiers (not including some 800 non-hostile deaths); e) None of the above. The answer, of course, is (e) — none of the above. The full essay...

• Terrorism, Theirs and Ours (Jerusalem Post)

 

Veto of the Anti-Torture Bill
Bush: Torturer, Tyrant, Disgrace
Pierre Tristam / March 8
On Saturday, Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the CIA's use of torture in interrogations (a bill, it should be noted, John McCain, alleged opponent of torture, voted against). He had the temerity, our Dear Leader, to begin his official endorsement of torture in his radio address this morning with these words: “Good morning.” Good for him and his kind of delusional sadists, maybe. Not so good for this country, whose reputation today takes one more plunk toward the abyss of rogue and less than ordinary nations. Not so good for the rest of the world, either, whose nations have been disbelievingly howling, in Babels of translations, that most American of plaints: “Say it ain’t so.” This spring training for terrorist-interrogators (for torture is terrorism at its distilled worst), it very much is so. The United States is officially, proudly, the land of torturers. It’s true that the United States has been at this for years. But the difference here is not only that the president is endorsing torture, but that he’s doing it so openly and willfully. It isn’t arrogance anymore. It isn’t even hubris. Arrogance and hubris suggest that at least some awareness that public perceptions still matter. In Bush’s mind, perceptions are for the birds. This is pure tyranny. His statement embracing torture, a study in mendacity, is worth a line-by-line look.

 

Unfriendly Fires
How Democrats Self-Destruct
Pierre Tristam / March 4
By day’s end Hillary Clinton’s campaign will be over. If she chooses to keep it on life support seven more weeks, it’ll end on April 22 in Pennsylvania , where Barack Obama’s numbers are surging faster than John McCain’s born-again conservatism (the same John McCain who considered switching to the Democrats in 2001 and discussed joining the Democratic ticket over six meetings with John Kerry in 2004). Either way, Democrats are poised to do what they do best come November: lose.

 

The Original Limbaugh
William F. Buckley’s Rich Veneers
Pierre Tristam / March 2
Had William F. Buckley Jr. not long ago become a has-been—and intellectual dandy who overstayed his uses by about 25 years, which coincides roughly with Ronald Reagan’s first symptoms of Alzheimer’s—the tributes he’s been receiving from the right and the left would have been revolting, as opposed to merely nauseating. You expect the self-deluded right to revel in an elegiac orgy for the founder of grand delusions as ideology. You expect it less from liberals, who’ve nevertheless been swallowing whole the conventional ruse that while Buckley was a conservative, his intelligence, his wit, his probity, his stylistic elegance, kept him many cuts above the bullying Hannity-OReilly-Limbaugh sort. What crock. Buckley’s grace, when he displayed it, was his Trojan horse. His ideas, his politics, his insinuation of religion in politics, his obsession with liberalism as subversion and his dressing up of rank bigotry as some sort of moral redress are among the reasons the United States is the bulging sham it’s become.

 

Arabian Blights
Lynching Obama, the Arab
Pierre Tristam / February 27
Why dress up Arabs as the bad guys? For the same reason that Ann Coulter and like-minded racists have started referring to Barack Obama as B. Hussein Obama. The middle name’s Arab origin is supposed to provoke self-evident revulsion. It works, pushing all sorts of bigoted little buttons in the mind of the American voter whose ethnic tolerance for things Arab draws a line at humus. That voter will never go for the combination Arab-Muslim-Saddam cocktail that “Hussein,” with a little help from the Coulters of the world, evokes, because anti-Arab chauvinism is still accepted currency in most political circles, especially when it appeals to that other deranged strain in the national psyche — that the most powerful country on earth is somehow besieged, alone and vulnerable to sleeper cells snoring in Arabic. In this calorific stew-pot of paranoia, “B. Hussein Obama” is a bait made to order.

 

Shoah Chez Soi
Sarkozy’s Holocaust Fantasy
Ohdave / February 22
I’m fascinated by the proposal — directive — from French President Nicolas Sarkozy that every French 5th grader will learn the history of one of France’s 11,000 children murdered in the Holocaust. This ambitious proposal has met with a mixed reaction, including severe criticism from Simone Veil: “You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child.” But Veil is baffling. We can, and do, in this country, ask young children to identify all the time with a dead child, or at least with children in difficult and trying circumstances. This is what art asks of us: to identify with others, to learn from their despair, their bravery, their ingenuity, their curiosity. It’s what literature asks of us, good literature anyway, when it makes us uncomfortable and challenges our assumptions.

• Ohdave's Into My Own

 

Rovosophy
It’s Alive!
Karl Rove / March 6
A long Democratic battle doesn’t automatically help the Republicans. In fact, it hurts the Republicans in certain ways. Mr. McCain becomes less interesting to the media. Stories about him move off page one and grow smaller. TV coverage becomes spotty and short. There are not yet big and deep and unbridgeable differences between the two Democrats and there is plenty of time to heal most wounds (except, perhaps among the young if Mrs. Clinton were to win). Continuing to build a profile and lay the predicate for the short fall campaign against either Democrat becomes the challenge for Mr. McCain while the Democrats battle it out.

 

Neo-Hawk Distortions
When Liberals Love War
Pierre Tristam / February 13
One of the most persuasive arguments for war in Iraq -- the only argument that still powers the blood-and-bucks guzzler that Iraq and Afghanistan have become -- was put forward by liberals turned neocon apologists. Members of the "I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club," as New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller called them (Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman), saw Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden as a new breed of fascists. Whether one had WMDs or not, whether the two conspired over 9/11 or not, whether American interests were threatened or not wasn't ultimately the reason to go after them. Destroying their totalitarian cult and replacing it with liberal democracy was. Say what you will about the neo-hawks, they can make liberals seem pretty dishonest for chanting democracy over here while tolerating repression over there. They can -- if you buy into their distortions.

 

Up from Bores and Assassins
The Democrats’ Return
Pierre Tristam / February 5
It’s fair to say that less than a quarter of the population today can remember the last time the words “Democrats” and “leadership” could go together without triggering laughter or embarrassment. That’s what’s made the past few months of primary campaigns and elections seem so foreign to many of us who’d gotten used to Democrats as shoot-me-now bores (Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis), impotents (Jimmy Carter, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid), suicidal smug-bombs (Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Al Gore) and, in every case, political cowards frightened of their own liberal shadow. Compared to that, John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton look like liberalism’s Holy Trinity resurrected.

 

$150 Billion Fix
Stimulus Bunk
Pierre Tristam / January 30
There’s something embarrassing — economically, politically, morally — about government bansheeing to give voters cash handouts disguised as economic stimulus. Does a couple with two kids, making $160,000, really deserve the same $900 as a single mother of one living on tips from her roadside diner job? Does a childless, single lawyer making $74,000 a year really need $600 from a federal government with a $163 billion deficit? As Kevin Phillips put it in “Wealth and Democracy” a few years ago, “the Jacksonian notion that government should not interfere on the side of the rich was reworked into the theorem that government had no business interfering on the side of the downtrodden.”

 

Missionary Position
Leadership the World Craves Not
Pierre Tristam / January 24
Presidents have been assuming that America is God’s gift to the planet since the founding of the republic, occasionally, let’s admit it, for good reason: Compared to the sectarian, imperial, genocidal and totalitarian Europe of the last 500 years, the American experiment had its relieving contrasts. American presidents more or less have had the good sense to invite others to unwrap the American gift if they wished, but of their own free will. The impulse to invade or clear-cut cultures was limited to this continent and the one south of the border, which is more impressive restraint than can be said of other civilizations with chips for shoulders. The operative word of the 2008 presidential election is “change.” But not in how candidates see America’s role in the world. They all begin from the same Bushy presumption: America isn’t just exemplary to the world (is it even that anymore?), but its only possible leader, its only hope. The world begs to differ.

 

Huckabee and the Assault on Reason
Deuteronomy Nation
Pierre Tristam / January 21
Mike Huckabee, finally, is getting desperate. “You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” he told South Carolinians before the vote Saturday, trying to dig two corpses from the same grave: that of the Confederate flag issue, and that of his candidacy. “In fact,” he said, “if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.” Kind of what America is telling Huckabee what to do with his candidacy. Not that anyone would want to tell Arkansas what to do with its supremely dull, belt-buckle of a flag (they’re so insecure about themselves in Arkansas that they have to stick a name plate on their state symbol). But that’s what elections are designed to do: bring out the best, but especially the worst, from candidates and the electorate that makes their candidacy possible. Still, that people like Huckabee, Romney and McCain are in the running at all should send shivers down the back of the collective polity. What's left of American Enlightenment is in trouble.

 

2008 Marathon for Music
She Did It!
Pierre Tristam / January 15
Long absence, yes, so I should explain where we’ve been: Cheryl finished her second Disney marathon Sunday—and her first Annual Marathon for Music: she was doing it to raise money for her youth orchestra: you can still make donations here. In the Women 35-39 category she came in 1,088 th, with a time of 6:41:14, and survived it far better than the first time: no crippling aches this time, not even any tears, just a post-marathon hobble and a vast appetite for beer, which, darling lush wife of mine, she more than quenched at Epcot later between the Carlsberg stand and Germany’s Biergarten Restaurant. Chivalrously, I sacrificed and helped. (Meanwhile I see the world went to piss in a horn brisket in the six days we were gone, although nothing too surprising: the usual barbarities in Beirut, Kabul and between Arabs and Jews in Gaza, crashing Wall Street, Bush continuing to fulfill scriptures—“Thou shalt make an ass of thyself in the Promised Land”—and the Supremes continuing our slog back to 1920s corporatism. Take me back to Disney.)

 

Immigration Solution
Not Guests. Not Illegals. Citizens.
Pierre Tristam / January 9
The United States has generally done an admirable job accepting and integrating its immigrants. Europe hasn’t. Understanding that difference offers useful perspective on this matter of undocumented immigrants in the United States, if we’re to resolve it honorably. It helps to realize that, compared to Europe, this country doesn’t have an immigration problem, documented or undocumented. Rather, the United States has a choice. It can expand on an opportunity it’s been extending to immigrants and benefiting from throughout its history. Or it can give in to nativist feelings against immigrants and go Europe’s way of two-tiered societies: natives on one side, immigrants on the other. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants is artificial and means nothing.

 

Super Bowl of Publishing
Bible vs. Koran
Pierre Tristam / January 3
The Economist’s Christmas issue features “The Battle of the Books,” a wonderful piece about “the business of marketing the Bible and the Koran” and what it says about the state of modern Christianity and Islam. The piece also poses these questions: “Why are today’s Christians and Muslims proving so successful at getting the Word out? And who is winning the battle of the books? Is either of the world’s two great missionary religions gaining an edge when it comes to getting their Holy Books into people's hands and hearts?” Here are a few answers.

 

Channel Surfing
The Other Iowa Caucus
Pierre Tristam / January 3
I have very good memories of Iowa, and not just because, as Kerouac said, “the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.” I’ve never been to Des Moines, but I have been to the Iowa State Fair, where all of Iowa—as opposed to a measly 6 percent of it—caucuses for ten days every August, including all the girls in Des Moines and the mother of all girls: the Butter Cow Lady. That’s Norma Duffy Lyon, who built massive, 600-pound cows out of butter, along with Last Suppers and other mammary snapshots of Christian sex symbolism and drew more people to her artery lapping displays at the fair than Thursday’s political caucuses will statewide, for good reason: she was more interesting. So sometime Thursday night I’ll tune in for a minute or two to see which of the Republicans—the two brutes, the two mullahs and the two bores—and which of the Democrats—the hawk, the harpy and the hair guy—will have won the other caucus, but I’m more curious to see how Leno and Stewart will manage without writers. We can only dream of ever seeing our political candidates go unscripted for 48 minutes.

 

The Pakis Are Coming, The Pakis Are Coming!
Huckabee’s Racist Hysterics
Pierre Tristam / December 29, 2007

Republicans are on a hysteric search for a candidate they can seriously call their own amid a field of bores (Thompson), stay-the-course warmongers (McCain, Giuliani) flip-flopping liars (Romney, Giuliani), 9/11 necrophiliacs (McCain, Giuliani) and reconstructed thugs (Giuliani, Giuliani). So they have seized on Mike Huckabee, who himself seized on a kind of manufactured oh-shucks sincerity as the most opportune seduction routine since Ronald Reagan’s genial head-cock (and look where that got us). The current narrative has it that Huckabee’s neotaliban view of the world (“My faith doesn’t influence my decisions, it drives them…. I don't separate my faith from my personal and professional lives,” “I support and have always supported passage of a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman,” “I consistently opposed banning assault weapons and opposed the Brady Bill”) doesn’t matter because at least he’s sincere. He wears his faith on his sleeve, as if that somehow absolves him of nurturing a theocratic corporatism up his sleeve. Sooner or later the reality of Huckabee as a kind of reactionary that would make even Antonin Scalia think twice about voting for him will, one hopes, emerge. It’s beginning to. More...

• See also: Mike Huckabee's Imaginary Middle East

 

 

Saturnalian Wishes
Merry Christmas All
December 25, 2007
Back in Lebanon, before the years of war and Fox News, I remember that Christians and Muslims mutually wished each other Merry Christmas and Eid Mubarak as each occasion came in turn, never worrying about the kind of trashy disclaimers that attach to so many of our greetings these days (“in case you celebrate Christmas”) or the even worse detergent-water greetings that now dull so much of the season’s colors (“Happy Holidays”). The vapidity of “Happy Holidays” misses the very point of the greeting: we wish each other Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah or Eid Mubarak not because we’re necessarily Christian or Jewish or Muslim, but even more so because we may be none of those things, and because others are: the wish primarily celebrates the other person, and only secondarily, if at all, the religion itself.

 

Health Hazard
Insurers’ Axis of Evil
Pierre Tristam / December 18, 2007
When I look at the major presidential candidates’ proposals on health care — Republican or Democratic, it makes no difference — what I see is fear and mendacity. The fear to take on the insurance industry’s lock on a preferential, inefficient, and often ruinous system even for the insured; and the mendacity to suggest that feeding into that system by forcing more Americans into it will improve matters.

 

Trials in Error
Unlyrical Repressions
Pierre Tristam / December 15, 2007
We in the West are quick to jump all over Islam’s rear-facing fanaticisms, branding the whole kit and caboodle “Islamofascist” and other such anachronisms when, say, some Muslims get upset over Muhammad cartoons, or others get upset over a teacher letting her seven-year-old students name a teddy bear Muhammad, or still others murder filmmakers who thrive on exposing Islam’s triple-X perversions. But it pays to look in the mirror once in a while. No need to make tit-for-tat equivalencies. The West isn’t nearly that far gone. But it’s going far enough to shame liberalism into submission to something increasingly, and not-so anachronistically, fascism-scented here, too. Three recent cases — in France, England and the United States — make the point.

 

Jessica Lynch’s Children
Fake Calm in Iraq
Pierre Tristam / December 11, 2007
There’s been no need, as there is in more discriminating Iraq, to plant positive stories in the domestic press. For the most part the mainstream news media here seem as willing as they were in 2003 to buy the Bush administration’s latest recasting of the Iraqi catastrophe as a country on the mend. But caveats grow as lush as date palm in Iraq. Peace isn’t breaking out in Iraq. A colder, longer war is. It’s further miring the United States in the shards of the Sunni-Shiite divide. And it’s confirming once again in Arab eyes that America’s end game is control of the Middle East’s authoritarian houses of cards. If Enron was an emirate, Bush would be its principal shareholder right now, with America’s foreign policy as collateral.

 

L'Exil et le Royaume
Book of Exodus
Pierre Tristam / December 6, 2007
Geraldine Brooks is my E.F. Hutton. When she writes, I listen. At least when she writes non-fiction. She’s the author of Nine Parts of Desire, which apparently made it onto George W. Bush’s supposed reading list. She was the Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s and early 90s. More recently, she was the winner (in 2006) of a Pulitzer for March, a novel written from the perspective of the absent father in Alcott’s Little Women. In the December 3 issue of the New Yorker, she writes “The Book of Exodus,” an incredible piece of reporting on the crisscrossing lives of two families, one Jewish, one Muslim, from Sarajevo to Tel Aviv: who says Muslims and Jews weren't made to be each other's salvation?

 

Madrassa Man
The Obama Smear
Pierre Tristam / December 4, 2007
To Obama’s detractors, whose ranks grow in proportion with his popularity, Barack's middle name, “Hussein,” is a gift, the bait that keeps snagging on just the right smears that, Obama’s race being off limits, can always attach to his Arab-sounding past. Arabs (along with gays) are the last remaining groups Americans feel comfortable stereotyping and presuming guilty of whatever. It doesn’t have to be terrorism. It doesn’t have to be anything at all. It’s guilt by ethnicity, a vague, unspoken coloring that just hangs there, like an unmovable obsidian cloud over an otherwise sunny stretch of Norman Rockwell canvass.

 

Weekend Review
Gandhi, Terrorism, Bush & Afghanistan
Pierre Tristam / December 3, 2007
No one has time to read books, magazines, journals, newspapers and the Notebooks. So we read a few noteworthy pieces from periodical universe and summarize them for you. In the earliest days of the Notebooks, when the site could count its readers on the fingers of a Saudi Arabian caught stealing, this used to be a regular and half-way favored featured. It may be revived periodically, as printed matter accumulates in toto with the guilt of not eulogizing it. Here then are this week's eulogies (each link takes you to its virtual plot):

• “Gandhi vs. Terrorism,” by Mark Juergensmeyer, Daedalus, Winter 2007.
• “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush,” by Joseph Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, December 2007.
• “Buying time in Afghanistan,” by Carl Robichaud. World Policy Journal, Summer 2007.
• “The Protestant Deformation,” by James Kurth; The American Interest, Winter 2005.

 

Canterbury Tales
Metaphysics in Hardcover
Pierre Tristam / November 28, 2007
An essentially metaphysical experience with books in England three decades ago comes to mind every time I hear that books, as Newsweek’s current cover has it, are “going digital.” Many books will, but I think it’s a mistake to think of digital books as merely electronic versions of their hard-copy equivalents. They’re entirely different creatures that yield different experiences, even if the words are identical in both formats. I don’t think I’d have experienced nearly the sense of salvation that I did that oppressive fall in Canterbury had my grandmother zapped me a gigabyte of books from her computer to mine, as opposed to sending me a box-full of my cherished Jules Verne collection. A book is also its cover, its place on one’s shelves in the same way that it has a place in one’s history, like a memory’s limbs.

 

Annapolis Inanity
O Bethlehem
Pierre Tristam / November 26, 2007
Before the men of Annapolis lay claim to breakthroughs, before they pretend to know what their people want and how best to break seven or eight decades’ worth of barbaric enmity, they’d have to start with honestly dispensing with the Holy Land’s worst mine field. They’d have to agree, once and for all, that peace is made on secular grounds, that the gods only muck things up, and men’s religions even more so. They’d have to agree that the bigotry of an Israeli lieutenant colonel, the zealotry of a rabbi, the murderous glee of a Palestinian shopkeeper and the cat-fighting priests of the Church of the Nativity are all the very mad and maddening examples of what Israelis and Palestinians both cannot accept, must not accept, if they’re ever to make peace.

 

Hypocritic Oafs
Who Are We To Say No To Iran’s Bomb?
Pierre Tristam / November 21, 2007
We are constantly reminded—or told or warned or yelled at—that Iran should not get The Bomb. “The world,” even the fashionably reactionary New York Times wrote on Oct. 29, “should not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Why not? In countries like Pakistan and Iran, the nuclear pageantry is fanatical and mad, but it differs from its Western equivalent only idiomatically, not substantially. In these young nuclear powers’ minds—the warped minds of the nuclear age birthed in the United States—it restores the dignity and respect the whitish West still denies the browner East. The bomb is an insurgent symbol of redress, a late flowering of colonial blowback.

 

Immemorial
Manhattan Transfers
Pierre Tristam / November 19, 2007
“One thing you can still do is circumnavigate Manhattan island on the hundred-and-twenty-five foot S.S. Manhattan, leaving Pier 1, Battery Park, twice daily, at 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.—forty-five miles, three hours, $1.75, special rates to servicemen.” So wrote Philip Hamburger in a Talk of the Town piece for the New Yorker in November 1943. One thing I never did in almost a decade of living in New York and two more of subsequently visiting it often enough that, all told, I have no excuse not to have done it, is circumnavigate the island in the city I love most at least once. It’s one of my rare regrets, especially now that Manhattan has been so disfiguringly, because not figuratively at all, diminished by the scarfacing of 9/11.

 

Grandstanding Bigot
Giuliani’s Arab Problem
Pierre Tristam / November 16, 2007
Shortly after 9/11, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, the world’s 13th wealthiest man, wrote a $10 million check for the 9/11 families fund. Giuliani’s administration cashed it. Then returned it. Giuliani didn’t like what Alwaleed said—that “the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause.” This incident illustrates Giuliani’s autocratic side, his purposefully narrow world view, his parochialism. Sounds familiar? But that posture speaks loads about the American establishment’s attitude towards Arabs in general, and powerful Arabs in particular.

 

Middle Class Sharecropping
Why Most Families Aren’t Getting By
Pierre Tristam / November 14, 2007
Judging from the Bush administration’s numbers—50 consecutive month of job growth, six years of uninterrupted economic growth, after-tax per capita income rising an average of $3,800 per person since Bush took office—we should be dancing in the streets. Then why, on average for all seven years of Bush’s presidency, have just 12 percent of Americans rated the economy as getting better (compared with a 52 percent average during Clinton ’s last five years)? The gulf between real incomes and the typical middle class household budget, calculated for you inside, answers the question.

 

Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy
Nothing Wagered, Nothing Learned
Pierre Tristam / November 12, 2007
Hillary Clinton is not the most hawkish foreign policy Democrat among 2008 hopefuls. Barack Obama, who suffers from that Kennedy inferiority complex, is. At least that’s the conclusion one is forced to draw after reading their respective white papers in Foreign Affairs. Obama’s preceded Clinton’s by several months. Maybe Clinton is softening her image. She is all about adaptation, triangulation, obfuscation. And she gives few specifics. That said, her Foreign Affairs piece projects a more human, less bombastic Clinton foreign policy than we’re generally led to believe. But it also projects an astonishing reverence for the status quo and a fatal misunderstanding of how American power is perceived abroad: she makes no distinction between the way Americans want it perceived, and the way it actually is perceived. The question is not whether she can be trusted. It is whether she considers her education complete. If yes, we—the United States and the world—have not seen the end of their American-enabled troubles.

 

Tricolor Liberal
Sarkozy for (U.S.) President
Pierre Tristam / November 8, 2007
The truth is that if Nicolas Sarkozy was running for president of the United States, he’d be further left than Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards put together. His closest kin, in domestic policy anyway, if not on all matters Iraqi, would be Dennis Kucinich. His environmental kin would be Ralph Nader. His muscular secularism makes Democratic and Republican Bible-thumpers — which is to say, every leading candidate for the presidency, including craven converts like John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani — look like religious zealots. Which brings up two questions: Why do American liberals dislike him so much? The answer lays in Sarkozy’s weird pandering to the Bush administration and most things American. It’s time for both liberals and Sarkozy to grow up.

 

WMD Man
The Madness of Paul Tibbets
Pierre Tristam / November 6, 2007
What did Paul Tibbets, commander of the Enola Gay (the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) do in his old age? He peddled replicas of the bomb over the Internet—WMD memorabilia, as repugnant a trade as the kind that specializes in the trinkets of Nazism or the gold teeth of Pol-Pot’s harvests. People bought in. That’s what happens when atrocity is not only overlooked but transformed into something essential and heroic. Harry Truman did it politically when he declared the dropping of the bomb “the greatest thing in history.” Tibbets did it folklorically. And a war crime became a whoop. Is it any wonder we find it so easy to be the world’s nuclear judges and juries?

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Giuliani’s Foreign Policy
War Today, War Tomorrow, War Forever
Pierre Tristam / November 3, 2007
Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy paper in Foreign Affairs—part of the journal’s series inviting every presidential candidate (well, every candidate they consider appropriately submissive to the establishment game) to write an oath to the 9/11 and Iraq War status quo—begins with this pompous sentence: “We are all members of the 9/11 generation.” It’s a pretentious reference to World War II’s supposed “greatest generation,” mixing nostalgia with aspiration: Giuliani wants his own war. He has it. He calls it, even more pompously, “the Terrorists’ War on Us.” (His capitals, our bane.) It gets worse from there.

 

Rush Hush Affair
Tase Him, Bro
Pierre Tristam / November 1, 2007
There it is. Andrew Mayer, the University of Florida student tased by campus police during a town hall appearance by John Kerry last month, is no longer a victim of police brutality. Now he’s just an apologetic 21-year-old looking to publicly atone in a vat of whitewash. Press, police and his university (what to expect from grifters, goons and graters?) have ganged up on him worse than when those Blackwater-type cops slammed him down and electrocuted him on Sept. 17 (incidentally, one day after Blackwater’s authentic madmen murdered 17 Iraqis in cool blood). One more example of this country’s obedience to police-state diktat.

 

Our Supreme Soviet, II
Show Trials, Sham Press
Pierre Tristam / October 30, 2007
Show trials wouldn’t be possible without a ready public, without judges primed to let the travesties smear courtrooms and juries gullible to buy into the scam. Just as the press fuels fears and prejudices disproportionately more despicable than the hysterias in question — “illegal” immigrants, the drug war, child abductions, sex offenders, whatever Nancy Grace is talking about — the press is doing so consistently with what writer Susan Faludi so aptly calls “the terror dream.” The closer to home, the more sensational — and the most phony the fears. On that score, The New York Times is no more discriminating that Lou Dobbs or Nancy Grace.

 

Quiz Show
Are You a Phony Liberal?
Pierre Tristam / October 29, 2007
A week ago Sarah Baxter, the Washington correspondent for the London Times, wrote a piece asking: “Where do you stand in the new culture wars?” She included a test designed to gauge the test-taker’s liberalism—phony or authentic, as the case may be. It’s a tendentious test: Sixteen questions closer to prompting required answers than testing the varied limits of progressive liberalism: By definition, liberalism is not dogmatic. The test almost forces you to be. But it’s worth taking, if only as a trigger to debate. I “passed” the test, answering 15 of 16 questions, making me “a true progressive” according to Baxter’s criteria, as I suspect most people here would be. Still, the one question I failed revealed why the test is a neocon’s idea of liberalism. First, here are the questions…

 

Candide’s Middle East
Come See Me at About.com
Pierre Tristam / October 26, 2007
Yes, I’ve been a bit of a slacker for the past couple of months here, but for a good reason. I was competing for — and was hired to be — the Middle East Guide at About.com, the New York Times-owned information site that tells you everything you wanted to know from the ideal brewing temperature of white tea to the itch inside Taliban militants’ beards. That’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of months, starting a new blog and tying it to full-length content. Come see me there. (And a few more notes about what’s next here.)

 

Our Supreme Soviet
Spies Who Shagged the 4th Amendment
Pierre Tristam / October 23, 2007
“We are currently in the throes of another national seizure of paranoia, resembling the hysteria which surrounded the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, and the McCarthy era,” the judge wrote. “Those who register dissent or who petition their governments for redress are subjected to scrutiny by grand juries, by the FBI, or even by the military. Their associates are interrogated. Their homes are bugged and their telephones are wiretapped. They are befriended by secret government informers. Their patriotism and loyalty are questioned…. More than our privacy is implicated. Also at stake is the reach of the Government’s power to intimidate its critics.” Where's William O. Douglas when we need him?

 

Fear Factoid
Homeland Security’s IED Fantasies
Pierre Tristam / October 20, 2007
The Washington Post leads with a seemingly frightening story Saturday (it appears in the top left column on the front page, above the fold): “IEDs Seen as Rising Threat in the U.S.” That should make commuting on I-95 interesting. But this isn’t a news story. It’s a budget story, the sort of fearmongering common to American government agencies since the Cold War: Panic the masses about a terrifying possibility, however preposterous, then make a pitch to Congress for more funding.

 

Herod in D.C.
GOP to SCHIP Kids: Screw Off
Pierre Tristam / October 19, 2007
The House failed by 13 votes to override Mr. Bush’s veto of the renewal of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. As unconscionable acts, and this administration has an encyclopedia’s worth, this one ranks in the first circle. The 154 House Republicans and two Democrats voting to prevent a veto override were just doing their collaborating worst to go along with the administration’s betrayal. They did so based on a disinformation campaign as cynical, and I think criminal considering the consequences, as the lies marshaled to drum-beat for war on Iraq in 2003. Let’s look at a few facts.

 

Misfire Night
When There Was Smoke
Pierre Tristam / October 18, 2007
Not the good-night kiss I was looking for: I was done with the evening’s work, I was settling down for an hour’s worth of TV-induced stupor with Cheryl (our reliable method of decompressing from the previous fifteen hours’ bull-racing without bulls) when the scene, pictured above, interrupted the evening’s plans. Our neighbors’ house, some eight or nine feet beside ours, was smoking up a storm.

 

Green Zone Confidential
Imperial Pork
Pierre Tristam / October 17, 2007
It’s not that the Americans never understood what they were doing in Iraq. They knew what they were doing. They just weren’t doing it for Iraqis’ sake. How the Americans run the Green Zone in Baghdad is a small detail. But it speaks loads about the lie at the heart of the neocons’ designs for Iraq in 2003, and the impossibility of making Iraq work under American guidance today no matter how many surges the Bush administration or the next president throws at the country: There never was any intention to help Iraq. Only a plan to wrest it from Saddam’s control and subdue it by different means, and for different ends.

 

Islamophobic Salem
Judging Muslim-Americans
Pierre Tristam / October 15, 2007
Stories about mainstream Muslims living “normal” suburban lives educate Americans away from their silly prejudices less than tabloid hysterics and their talk-radio and blog drones bait those prejudices. Oct.22-26 has been designated “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on university campuses by David Horowitz, the Marxist-turned reactionary mullah of university conservatives. It’s a stunt. But then, so was 9/11: Never underestimate the ability of a few fanatics to wreck a society.