sword_of_orion

www.swordoforion.blogspot.com

     

"stand up tall, mrs. robinson.  god in heaven smiles on those who pray."

- suggested that any American who disagrees with his social security or energy policies do so only because they “balk at doing hard work.”
- said natural gas can only be transported by ship when “ you liquefy it…when you put it in solid form, liquefied gas.”
- I just heard like my third “nucular.”
- He just said, “I don’t know why they [the Iranians] need nucular energy, they’ve got all the oil.”
- He insists on calling Vladimir Putin, “Vladmur.”
- When asked about a lawsuit brought by a teachers union against No Child Left Behind, he said “I don’t know about the lawsuit, I’m not a lawyer.” (you would think he would be aware of challenges to such a supposedly important issue to him.)

So, after hearing about it for several months.  I have finally started reading Baghdad Burning.  Some people probably know this already, but it is a blog written by a mid-twenties Iraqi woman living in occupied Baghdad.  I have gone back to the beginning and am in the process of reading through it chronologically.  Many of the entries make me ashamed of the way America has represented itself, but this one actually makes me nauseous.  The full entry is copied below, but this one quote stuck out at me:

 

“… and that's what civilization is. It's not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers and McDonalds; It's having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity of theirs…”

 

That seems like a lesson many Americans (including myself) need to be reminded of, or need to learn for the first time.  Again, here is the full post:

 

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Civilization...
I heard some more details about the demonstration today… The whole situation was outrageous and people are still talking about it.

Ever since the occupation, employees of the Ministry of Oil are being searched by troops- and lately, dogs. The employees have been fed up… the ministry itself is a virtual fortress now with concrete, barbed wire and troops. The employees stand around for hours at a time, waiting to be checked and let inside. Iraqis have gotten accustomed to the 'security checks'. The checks are worse on the females than they are on the males because we have to watch our handbags rummaged through and sometimes personal items pulled out and examined while dozens of people stand by, watching.

Today, one of the women who work at the ministry, Amal, objected when the troops brought forward a dog to sniff her bag. She was carrying a Quran inside of it and to even handle a Quran, a Muslim has to be 'clean' or under 'widhu'. 'Widhu' is the process of cleansing oneself for prayer or to read from the Quran. We simply wash the face, neck, arms up to the elbows and feet with clean water and say a few brief 'prayers'. Muslims carry around small Qurans for protection and we've been doing it more often since the war- it gives many people a sense of security. It doesn't not mean the person is a 'fundamentalist' or 'extremist'.

As soon as Amal protested about letting the dog sniff her bag because of the Quran inside, the soldier grabbed the Quran, threw it out of the bag and proceeded to check it. The lady was horrified and the dozens of employees who were waiting to be checked moved forward in a rage at having the Quran thrown to the ground. Amal was put in hand-cuffs and taken away and the raging mob was greeted with the butts of rifles.

The Iraqi Police arrived to try to intervene, and found the mob had increased in number because it had turned from a security check into a demonstration. One of the stations showed police officers tearing off their "IP" badge- a black arm badge to identify them as Iraqi Police and shouting at the camera, "We don't want the badge- we signed up to help the people, not see our Quran thrown to the ground…"

Some journalists say that journalists' cameras were confiscated by the troops…

This is horrible. It made my blood boil just hearing about it- I can't imagine what the people who were witnessing it felt. You do not touch the Quran. Why is it so hard to understand that some things are sacred to people?!

How would the troops feel if Iraqis began flinging around Holy Bibles or Torahs and burning crosses?! They would be horrified and angry because you do not touch a person's faith…

But that's where the difference is: the majority of Iraqis have a deep respect for other cultures and religions… and that's what civilization is. It's not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers and McDonalds; It's having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity of theirs…

So not all french people hate America. But that doesn't mean they don't hate Bush. The following is an excerpt from an article written on the bicentennial of Tocqueville's birth. Another frenchman, Bernard-Henri Levy, with his take on America.

The Revenge of the Little Man

He can't manage to say "stem cells" without making a mistake. Stumbles over numbers and acronyms. He has in his expression, in his eyes that are too close together, that faint look of panic that dyslexic children have when they think they're going to make a mistake and will be scolded for it, but they can't stop once they've started. Takes on a fake tough-guy look when he broaches the subject of Iraq. When he utters the word "America" or "army," he stops short—or, rather, stiffens, as if at the sound of an invisible bugle. Now, in Detroit, where he has come to speak to the National Urban League, the black civil-rights organization that has invited him, he frowns with concern when he talks about the city's poor neighborhoods. I think about all that could be said about the ambivalence of his relationship with the earlier President Bush. I think of the discussion Alan Wolfe and I had the other evening about whether he started the war in Iraq in order to take revenge (Saddam humiliated my father, so I will humiliate Saddam), or in order to issue a huge Oedipal challenge (I'll do what he couldn't do—I'll obey another father, who is higher than my own, and who inspires me to actions he couldn't inspire in my father). The truth is that this man is something of a child. Whether he's dependent on his father, his mother, his wife, or God Almighty, he looks to me this morning like one of those humiliated children Georges Bernanos was so good at creating, showing that their hardness stemmed from their shyness and fear. That said, watch out. This shy man is shrewd, too. This child is a cunning child. He has the cleverness to call the president of the National Urban League, Marc Morial, by his first name, and to begin his speech, just after a prayer, with praise for the Detroit Pistons, the local basketball team. He has the talent to tell joke after joke and, like a good comedian warming up a difficult audience, to be the first to laugh, noisily, at his own jokes. He has the intelligence to call the two important black leaders who are sitting in the front row, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, by their first names too, to defuse their hostility. He does this also, after admitting that his party must earn the vote of African-Americans, by saying to Reverend Jackson, "You don't need to nod your head so hard at that, Jesse," and to Reverend Sharpton, "It's hard to run for office, isn't it, Al?"; everyone in the audience remembers the battle Sharpton has just lost for nomination by the Democratic Party. Detroit is a city where Bush has, as he knows, "a lot of work to do" to win the hearts of a community that four years ago voted 94 percent for Al Gore. He is in enemy territory. The 2,000 people present came to see the man but don't share his ideology. Yet the trick is working. His riffs on the "American dream" and on small business; his audacity in attacking the power of bureaucracy and Washington, as if he hadn't been in the White House for four years; his vision of America as a blue-chip corporation in which all people are shareholders, and which wants everyone to get only richer; his talk about Sudan, finally, and about the genocide (though he does not use the word, he says that he will do what he can, if he is elected, to see that the rulers of Khartoum bring an end to the slaughter)—all of that ends up working. Nerve and naiveté. Tactical cleverness along with a certain candor. A delegate, as we are leaving, in the crush of radio and television teams that are asking the opinions of the attendees: "The son of a bitch—he got us …" Another one: "That was good, the part about Sudan!" That's what strikes me, too, of course. But, even stranger, it's also that look of a resourceful little boy, a bit mischievous, who has to work hard to be a candidate and to be president. I picture him, in his native Texas, as a difficult youth, an average student, rowdy, worrying his parents no end. I imagine him at Phillips Academy, and then at Yale, trailed by a bad reputation as a string-puller and snubbed by the rich sons of East Coast families who find him useful but a little country-bumpkinish. I see him then, quite clearly, as a provincial narcissist and a frustrated dilettante, a bad businessman, an overgrown daddy's boy whom the family manages to save from each of his semi-failures. When was this pattern reversed? And how? Under whose influence, or under what influence, did the metamorphosis come about for the lover of backfiring cars and drinking bouts with his buddies, for the failure, the nice guy, the man no one for a long time would have thought had a chance of becoming anything at all? How did this man become a formidable machine capable of winning (now twice) the most difficult competition in America and, when it comes down to it, on the planet? There are men—Bill Clinton, for example—you feel were born to be president. Others—John Kennedy—who were formed, trained, for the office. He is the opposite: born to lose; raised above all not to win. And for this change of direction, this late-blooming grace that hasn't even had time to imprint itself on his face, no one has any real explanation—except him, when he talks about "grace," actually. And being born again.

So, I’ve been doing a little light reading lately, and I gotta tell you, I missed out on some choice morsels in my formative years.  While people were exhausting themselves plodding through the Brontes and Conrad and the like in high school, I was putting equal amounts of energy into avoiding them like they were Billy Ray Cyrus fans.  I just finished Wuthering Heights the other day, and I gotta tell you, I can’t remember the last time I read such a delicious catalogue of depravity. It was like a  how-to manual for screwing people with their pants on.  I also read Daisy Miller, and it was pretty good, but far too polite for my tastes.  But it did whet my appetite for more James, maybe something with a little more teeth though.  I also read A Wrinkle In Time for the first time, and it makes me wonder why no one physically sat me down and forced a copy of it into my hands before.  Right now I am working on Foucault’s Pendulum, and geez golly wow, it’s … I just….I mean….it’s so….wheewwwhw.  I am exhausted now.  Read it.  The proprietor of A Novel Idea in North Chattanooga described it to me as, “making fun of The Da Vinci Code before it was even written.”  I gotta say, as much as I am panting to start Law School just so I’ll have something to challenge me again, I am loving this boring job, no school combo because I am reading things that I thought I had permanently missed the window on.  “Do not go gentle into that good night.  Rage, Rage against the Clancys and the Dr. Phils.

You tell 'em D.T.

”

I just got Jack Gilbert's NEW book. Those who know me know what this means. I don't wanna infringe on copyrights and all that shit by splashing the whole book all over my journal, but just to give you a little taste....

"...If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sounds of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert
from "A Brief for the Defense"

Thank God TV sucks so hard. The scant worthy offerings on TV allow for so much time to enjoy other things. The fact that TV exists though, has relieved our writer’s of the responsibility of entertaining the masses. Don’t get me wrong, I obviously recognize that some of our fiction machines (Grisham, Clancy, D. Brown) are still targeting the masses, but they’re really just writing bound story treatments for studios that get published so that sales will tell the studio heads where to invest. The diversity of the novel form in the last fifty years is, in my opinion, directly attributable to the fact that with a smaller, more discerning audience, the novel writer is free try new things, since he’s not gonna sell that much anyway. So, thank you, Ray Romano, and Donald Trump, and the five thousand incarnations of CSI. Thank you, TV, for removing the audience from the world of literature.

Why the rant on TV sucking, I love Umberto Eco. I mean true love. I want to have his babies…or at least read his books…all of them.

Oh, and why didn’t someone strap me to a chair and force me to listen to the Postal Service sooner. I thought you guys were my friends.

I figured out what Bush needs to become an effective President who will work for positive change. Hollywood writers. Oh yeah, and a soul. But one of the two wouldn’t hurt. Maybe a brain too, but the writers can take care of that for him. Those writers on The West Wing are so good (even after the departure of Sorkin) they even make the conservatives sound compassionate and erudite occasionally. I swear to God if Jimmy Smitts were actually running for President, I might consider voting for him.

reading: "The Name of the Rose" (Umberto Eco rocks my face off)

Well, what do you know, once in a while they do stumble on their own self-aggrandizement and actually award those who are deserving…and long overdue. Congratulations to Charlie Kaufman and Brad Bird…and I guess all the other Oscar winners. I haven’t seen Million Dollar Baby or Ray, but I know Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman are deserving already,

I still have faith that Mr. Carey will get his eventually.