Looking Within

When I posted my piece last week about Ron the Deranged and the American military, I didn’t yet know that some of the photographs of torture in prisons in Iraq that have now been spread around the world featured women. Women doing shocking things—things that are shocking for any human to do but especially shocking because they’re women.

DocRoc at WriteOutLoud has wondered about this in an open letter to Tim O’Brian. Of the many people I’ve spoken with and written to this week, nobody has been able to come up with any kind of explanation at all. We’re all dumbstruck.

Not one normally to find myself without an opinion, I am going to dare to do something challenged by Burningbird (thanks Alembic): I’m going to express UNCERTAINTY.

Here’s the most frightening thing I think I’ve ever said.

I’m not sure-I’m not sure that, given the same circumstances, the same boredom, the same bitterness, the same mix of factors-I would categorically not have been that woman with that leash in her hand.

Which is, I’ve decided, the most compelling reason we shouldn’t go to war. People don’t want to go to war because they don’t want to get killed; others don’t want to kill. But what I think we should be most afraid of is becoming Lynndie England.

As Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, puts it: “the line that divides us, who would like to see ourselves as civilized and compassionate, from such communal barbarity is razor-thin.”

Davis On The Air

David Neiwert of Orcinus has written a long and excellent post confronting the demeaning of the national discourse by the mass media (the inevitable outcome of the past two decades of media conglomeration) to arrive at a ten-point manifesto for reclaiming the media.

Well enough, but I’m not a journalist, how do I help with this revolt against mass media? A possible answer occurred while we wandered around the Whole Earth Festival today. The town of Davis is getting its own little 100-watt radio station which is going on the air in September. This is a new community radio station that has been licensed under the FCC’s Low Power FM radio rules. They had a table set up at Whole Earth and are recruiting volunteers for all aspects of their operations, from programming to fundraising. This is definitely something I’m interested in becoming involved with, being a bit of a radio geek after all, and community radio is a fine avenue for reclaiming the local. And if I ever want to become a DJ, there’s my chance.

A Pink Evening

The Whole Earth Festival is back: 20,000 hippies are now in Davis and will be here all weekend. The quad on campus is looking (and smelling) like a different place.

Medea Benjamin, founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink, was in town to talk to the crowd. Washington Code Pink activists seriously disrupted Rumsfeld’s testimony before the House this morning. Her talk focused a lot on this, on the need to get people engaged with the political process (a huge number of non-voters in this country include unmarried women, who also tend to be more progressive: what’s going on?), and on making a personal commitment to change.

How this woman keeps her energy up in the face of all that she knows-she’s been to Iraq several times since winter 2001, and what’s she’s been seeing is a lot worse than we know from the press-is beyond me, but I’ll take it. In pink.

Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond

Unlike American college students, it was considered unusual for British university students to get summer jobs, and almost unheard of for us to get jobs while we were in session. Nevertheless, I landed, in the summer of my second year at the University of Birmingham, a killer lucrative summer job.

I was interpreting for a company that had contracted with the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture on a project of hail suppression in Albacete, about 250 kilometers southeast of Madrid. The Spanish company retained the services of an American outfit. These guys were supposed to fly planes into towering, unstable cumulonimbus clouds and seed them with silver iodide, which supposedly turned the threatening hail into harmless rain.

The “guys” were a motley crew of mostly ex-military, pleasant enough, though their marriages seemed to be in none good shape, those of them who had marriages. They were led by Larry, a jovial Colorado businessman with a drinking problem. And in the middle of them all was “Ron.”

Ron wasn’t American, he was Rhodesian. (He certainly wasn’t married.) Not, you understand, Zimbabwean. Rhodesian. He knew his way around combat helicopters, around sub-machine guns. He had, according to him, killed HUNDREDS of “blecks.” With him, “killing blecks” was a refrain; he trotted it out at EVERY available opportunity. Only, the Rhodesians had lost, and here he was fetched up in the least desirable part of the least desirable country in Europe (the Spanish say “Albacete, caga y vete”—hardly a strong selling point to tourists). There were no “blecks” to kill, just black clouds. Hardly a compensation.

I was nineteen. I had grown up in Franco’s Spain, mostly shielded from its excesses as a foreigner and as a child; I had never heard muffled screams in provincial “cuarteles” where police interrogated dissidents. Ron terrified me. He was utterly deranged; it was clear he should be in an institution, but everyone just smiled benignly-oh that’s just Ron-and got on with the tedious business of waiting for the next thunderstorm to roll in.

The American military had an air base near Madrid, the source of American candy, Thanksgiving dinners, and lots of kids my age who never, ever interacted with anyone Spanish. The Cold War happened within the confines of that base. We were oblivious.

I grew up believing the American military to be the strongest in the world; to have the worst haircuts; to contain recruits who didn’t really know any better, for whom two years of service meant a paid-for college degree, which I managed to get because my father could afford it. I didn’t really know much about what was happening in Vietnam-we heard a lot more about the rioting in the U.S. than about the specifics of the war, through the BBCbut on the whole the American military seemed overstrong, a bit clueless, and generally a bit misguided-yet not really EVIL. There was certainly no place for the likes of Ron the Deranged in the American military.

Well, it turns out there is. We’ve seen it. It’s here. I suspect it’s been there all along. And I wince at my failure to have seen it earlier. You see, I’ve been secretly hoping-against hope, against reasonthat someone would prove beyond all doubt that this war with Iraq was somehownot good, war’s never good-but at least somehow not utterly bonkers.

Wake up and smell the coffee, Pica. It smells of burned flesh and cinders. It sizzles with electrodes. Welcome to the World At War.

Out There

I’ve been seething again. This time it’s because our local rag is angry about the Spanish pullout from Iraq, “leaving us in the lurch.” Lurch? What lurch? The lurch created exactly by WHOM? And how are the few departing Spanish troops—1% of the total foreign forces in Iraq—going to constitute leaving anyone in any lurch?

Anyway, part of what has been getting me all fired up is that I’ve just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.

Talk about the connection between religion and violence. I know, the Mormons are now almost mainstream America, almost lost in the welter of ordinary fundamentalism; they are pleasant, agreeable, and orderly, they officially ditched their less palatable doctrines a long time ago. And… they are spawning numerous ultra-fundamentalist offspring, many of whom are polygamists, all of whom regard the general state of affairs in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (let alone the United States) as rank evil, and most of whom are prepared to die for their faith if not kill for it. Instructed by their faith to listen to God, many of them have, and God seems to tell them all different things.

What EXACTLY is the Department of Homeland Security doing about homegrown terrorism? Is there anyone monitoring the likes of Timothy McVeigh? It’s so easy to blame everything on the outside. On the others. I wonder how history will judge this time: will we be seen to have been as blind as all this?

Religion and Non-Violence

I finished my religion and non-violence class here at UC Davis back in mid-March in a mixture of stress (I was just starting a new job) and depression, because it really does seem, when you consider all the evidence from all different cultures, that the case that religions are inherently non-violent is not tenable. Certainly, it’s easy to find references throughout the New Testament to support the non-violent position, but basically people will find what they want to find in religious texts.

George W. Bush and his family, on vacation at his ranch in Texas, will no doubt go to church tomorrow morning, a church full of flowers and beauty and hope and soothing words. I’m almost certain that Bush sees no moral inconsistencies in his position.

American forces bombed a mosque this week where people were praying.

They were PRAYING.

When you have the most powerful country in the world-where the number of religious believers is growing and becoming more conservative-bombing mosques, many of us wonder when the madness is going to end. Where is the outrage?

Maybe with women getting more involved in public life (though with women like Margaret Thatcher and Condi Rice, who needs men?) there’s a chance. Maybe so through secular humanism. Maybe just through more hard thinking.

Good luck. The world isn’t looking like this tonight.

The Prevarication Boxscore

In a comment in this thread on Eschaton, Jonathan laments that the following story is not getting enough play in the blogosphere, so here I’ll do my part.

A couple of days ago, the minority Committee on Government Reform in the U.S. House of Representatives released a report, entitled Iraq on the Record, that documents misleading statements made by the Bush Administration between March 2002 and January 2004 concerning the threat posed by Iraq. The investigators examined 125 public appearances made by Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice and identified 237 misleading statements therein.

Bush had the highest number of misleading statements, with 55 (including 11 in a single appearance!), with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell close behind (51, 52, and 50 respectively). Rice had the fewest public appearances (16) and thus the fewest number of misleading statements (29) but she had the highest number of statements that were false outright—8. The greatest number of misleading statements were made about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities, and the highest number over any thirty-day period occurred in the month prior to the October 2002 vote in Congress authorizing military action.

On the web page, the committee even provides a handy search interface to the database of misleading statements. “Nuclear” pulls up 84 statements.

Democracy in Action

There is no shortage of opinions about what the results of the Spanish elections mean, but roughly, the right claims that Spain has capitulated to terrorism, while the left holds that there is no connection between Iraq and Al Qaida. One of the most interesting pieces on this I’ve read is Juan Cole’s, who wonders why there has been such a disproportionate level of U.S. military spending on Iraq versus Afghanistan.

Much of the commentary in the Western press which accuses the Spanish of cowardice at the polls strikes me as patronizing at best. The exercise of the vote over the weekend was, exactly, just that: democracy. Democracy means you get to have a choice. The Spanish chose to dump the Partido Popular and a Prime Minister who led them to war against at least 85% of public opinion, probably higher. And those who might otherwise have stayed at home, resigned to the fact that their vote would mean little, were moved to vote.

Code Pink, Once More With Saucepans

Today’s warm weather brought lots of people in pink into the Central Park of Davis, where we banged saucepans, sang songs, and presented George W. Bush with a pink slip (more like a pink neglige). Organized by Code Pink Davis along with the student chapter of NOW and the newly-reformed Davis chapter of Amnesty International, it had all the makings of the outrageousness that has been a hallmark of Code Pink since its inception last year.

Such silliness masks the fact that there is a far more serious, and urgent, side to this kind of gathering. One student said she was scared Bush was going to blow up the world. She’s not the only one…

Doubleplusgood Activism

For several weeks now there have been flyers on bulletin boards in buildings on campus reading things like “AMERICAN VALUES. Invading Iraq: $185,000,000,000. Funeral Costs for 543 American Soldiers: $581,000. Capturing Saddam: priceless. Some things money can’t buy. That’s why we use bombs.” This is the work of some students who are setting a sterling example of paying heed to Big Brother by forming the UC Davis chapter of the Students for an Orwellian Society. The motto of this society is “Because 2004 is twenty years too late.”

Along these lines, a few people are encouraging public readings of 1984 on April 4, 2004, which is the 20th anniversary of the opening date of the novel. When asked Why read 1984? they answer Because we still can.