War with Iraq is inevitable-almost certainly within the next three weeks. Not because of anything Saddam Hussein has done, has not done, or might do, but because the Bush administration is hell-bent on having a war.
It was disheartening, after Colin Powell’s 90-minute speech laying out the administration’s case for attacking Iraq, that the few columnists who had raised some objections to the war—Richard Cohen and Mary McGrory being the most prominent—immediately announced their conversion to the pro-war cause. Their columns appeared the day after the speech, and would have had to have been written almost before Powell’s image faded from the screen. One might have hoped that, in a matter of such import, they would have taken time to investigate the claims made by Powell, and to reflect on the consequences. One would have hoped for greater clarity on their part, and more steadfastness. What their conversion demonstrates, however, is that the major media—like the administration—are now at almost total disconnect from the ordinary citizens of the United States.
Examples of that disconnect are everywhere. Congressional offices have been inundated with calls, letters, and e-mails—in many cases, we’re told, running upwards of 90% against the war. But where are the Congressional voices opposing the war? Robert Byrd, West Virginia’s little giant, made one of the great speeches in Senate history on Wednesday, and one of his bitter themes was the deadening silence in Congress. Polls show repeatedly that the public has not been persuaded that this war is justified. We are seeing some of the largest demonstrations for peace in U.S. history—not in the balmy stirrings of spring, but in the bitter cold of January and February—and they have gone almost unreported.
This isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. Tony Blair’s eagerness to enter the fray is played up, while the British public’s skepticism is largely ignored. In country after country, opinion runs overwhelmingly against a U.S. attack, sometimes in the 80% to 90% disapproval range. Predictably, in both the U.S. and Britain, the governments are trumpeting new terrorist threats and trying to frighten people into believing that somehow this war is intended to protect them—a cover story for an unprecedented invasion of another nation.
The huge coverage of Powell’s address, and the failure to balance it with a response, typifies the administration’s effort to propagandize its own people. It is as if a prosecutor were given an hour and a half to lay out the case against a defendant, and then, with no opportunity for the defense to present its version of the situation, the case was sent straight to the jury. Is that fair? No. Is the system rigged? Yes. For whatever it is worth, it is in venues not under the control of the powerful—the Internet and the streets—that Colin Powell must be answered.
As a general, Powell was always an astute politician. As a politician, he is very much a general. He selected the most favorable terrain for this battle for support. Powell’s case was built principally around an attempt to persuade the U.N. that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, has concealed them, and has not cooperated with U.N. weapons inspectors. That is why the U.S. is going to attack him, he said, and the U.N. had best get behind the U.S., or risk being irrelevant.
But we need not, and should not, fight this battle on Powell’s chosen ground. First, we need to be clear on the only legitimate basis for a war: to defend oneself against the aggressor when one is attacked. That is the criterion in moral law as well as in international law. Iraq has not attacked the United States, and it is difficult to imagine a set of circumstances where it would be foolhardy enough to do so. The United States is the aggressor here, and the administration’s talk of “preemptive war” is simply a public relations ploy to mask the fact that they intend to launch a terrible war against a country that has done nothing—I repeat, nothing—to us.
In fact, the church to which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney both claim allegiance, the United Methodist Church, has condemned plans for an attack on Iraq on just these grounds, saying that they are “without any justification according to the teachings of Christ.” The general secretary of the Board of Church and Society said, “The Methodist Church is not pacifist, but rejects war as a ‘usual means of national policy.’” He goes on to say that Methodist scriptural doctrine specifies that war is to be “a last resort, primarily a defensive thing. And so far as I know, Saddam Hussein has not mobilized military forces along the borders of the United States, nor along his own border to invade a neighboring country, nor have any of these countries pleaded for our assistance, nor does he have weapons of mass destruction targeted at the United States.” The church says that all attempts to discuss this matter with the White House have been ignored.
The attacks of September 11 were carried out by 19 men. Fourteen of them were from Saudi Arabia. None of them were from Iraq. Despite insinuations by the Bush administration, no link-I repeat, no link-has ever been found between Iraq and the September 11 attack.
That in itself should be enough of an answer to Mr. Powell: the war is unjustified and immoral. The United States has become the very things it accuses Iraq of being—a rogue nation, an aggressor, and an international menace.
This is the most basic and irrefutable objection to the administration’s war. But there are powerful secondary objections as well. One is that our own intelligence assessments say that Saddam Hussein is not a serious threat to the U.S., but that, if attacked, he may use any means at his disposal to strike back. So the administration is making assertions counter to our own intelligence assessments, and then deliberately choosing the most provocative and dangerous course.
Another is that the consequences of the invasion, in a volatile area of the globe, are so unpredictable. It’s like tossing a firecracker into a dynamite factory, and pretending you have everything under control. Will Israel become involved? Will nuclear arms be used by someone? Will the European powers sit on their hands while we take over control of a large share of the world’s oil production? Will the Iraqi people, with their water supply destroyed, their medical system destroyed, their housing destroyed, and their food distribution system destroyed, become an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe? Nobody knows. The one certainty is that we will have further enflamed the hatred of Muslims all over the globe, and made the world a more dangerous place for Americans.
Yet another objection is that we are simply asked to take on faith that the photographs and recordings Powell introduced are what he claims they are. And, given what is at stake-a war and occupation that may take the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis, most of them women and children, and that will, over the long haul, drain as much as $2 trillion from the U.S. economy-that is staking far too much on Powell’s credibility. As one foreign editor put it, you could not, in a court of law, convict a chicken thief on the kind of evidence Powell produced; and yet we have 150,000 U.S. troops in and around Iraq, ready to create an unthinkable nightmare, justified on just that basis.
It is worth remembering that back in 1990, the first Gulf War was spurred on by two dramatic stories-one, that Iraq had 265,000 soldiers and 1,500 tanks poised on its border with Saudi Arabia, ready to launch an attack; and two, that Iraqi soldiers had pulled babies out of their incubators in a hospital in Kuwait, and thrown them on the floor to die. Both stories were lies. The “incubator babies” story was created by a U.S. advertising firm, Hill & Knowlton, under contract to drum up war fever. The satellite photographs showing the Iraqi buildup on the Saudi border were fakes, a ruse discovered by a St. Petersburg, Florida, reporter, who ordered satellite photos of the same area taken at the same time by a commercial satellite, and found the area was devoid of Iraqi troops and tanks. The fake government satellite photos can’t be examined; they are still classified for “security reasons.” Did our government-in the person of Colin Powell, as it happens, and George W. Bush’s father-spread lies to justify a war? Yes. Would they do it again? They just did.
Almost the entire body of evidence and photos that Powell laid out in his U.N. speech has fallen apart under scrutiny. There is no Iraqi “poison factory and explosives training camp,” and no European terrorist network linked to Baghdad, despite Powell’s assertions. The location of the camp, as given by Powell, is inaccurate. The buildings in the photograph are located at Sargat, not Khurmal. Western journalists were given a tour of the camp on Saturday, after first being taken to Khurmal to show them that no such camp existed there. The New York Times reported: “They found a wholly unimpressive place-a small and largely undeveloped cluster of buildings…; the structures did not have plumbing and had only the limited electricity supplied by a generator.” Some “poison factory”: no chemicals, no equipment, not even running water.
The terrorist mastermind, who is alleged to have set up the factory and the network, is not even in Iraq. French intelligence and leaked British intelligence reports say that the man Powell referred to is “independent” of Al Qaeda and is “not under the control” of Saddam Hussein.
Powell also referred listeners to a British intelligence dossier released on February 3, Iraq-its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation. The material was presented as the culmination of an intensive intelligence effort. Powell praised the dossier as reinforcing American intelligence. It turns out, however, that the bulk of the dossier is material plagiarized from three articles, one written by an American graduate student, and that some of the material is years old, actually describing the buildup to the last Gulf War, more than ten years ago. Some of the material seems to have been copied straight from the Internet. Such changes as were made were clearly intended to present the Iraqi regime as more menacing and sinister than had appeared in the original.
Finally, with reference to the “weapons of mass destruction” Powell and Mr. Bush have constantly tried to terrify us with, one need only go back to the Pentagon’s own Persian Gulf War Illnesses Task Force Report of April, 2002, in which our government pooh-poohed the idea that Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare stocks could have caused any health damage to Gulf War veterans because Iraqi manufacturing techniques were so poor and the resulting toxins so ineffective. In the words of the report: “We believe Iraq was largely cooperative in its latest declarations because many of its residual munitions were of little use-other than bolstering the credibility of Iraq’s declaration-because of chemical agent degradation and leakage problems.”
As for Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability, the head of the International Atomic Energy, Mohammed ElBaradei of Egypt, in his recent report to the UN Security Council, said they had found no evidence of Iraqi concealment or restarting of the nuclear program that was under way before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and heaped praise on Iraq’s cooperation with nuclear inspectors. The claim that Saddam Hussein “recently” tried to get uranium from Africa appears to refer to an unfulfilled request from Iraq to Niger back in 1981-82!
So that convincing presentation by the distinguished graying Secretary of State turns out to be-mostly lies, half-lies, and damned lies. Nothing more than a propaganda effort to justify war, performed by one of the few administration figures who had any credibility remaining. He just lost it.
© Tony Russell, 2003
Friday, February 14, 2003
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
“An Execution Buff”
Chief sent me to interview Jack Underville, the eastern panhandle senator who has just introduced a death penalty bill in the state legislature for the seventeenth straight year. I was eager to get a fix on a man so fixated. What follows is a transcript of our conversation:
Q. Seventeen years. That’s real devotion. You must be really passionate about this issue.
A. Oh, I am. I’ve been an execution buff since I was a boy.
Q. The President seems determined to have a war, no matter what anyone else wants, and you seem equally determined to execute people. Is this interest in killing people particularly deep in Republicans?
A. I want to make it clear that we are only interested in killing people legally; we are on record, in the strongest terms, against the illegal taking of human life. To be fair to the other party, they really deserve all the credit for getting us into Vietnam. And Democrats, for the most part, have given the President a blank check on Iraq.
Q. Let me go back to the distinction you were making between killing someone legally and illegally. Is it fair to compare it with killing a deer during hunting season, as opposed to poaching out of season?
A. Oh, I think that works fairly well. It’s the framework of law that makes us a civilized society.
Q. You have introduced a death penalty bill seventeen times. Has it always been the same bill, or have there been variations?
A. The basic bill has been the same, but the details have changed occasionally. For the past seven or eight years, I’ve been calling for public executions. The public pays for them, and I think they deserve a show for their money. The people really need to see that they get good value for their tax dollars.
Q. What execution method do you favor?
A. I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy. A lot of people nowadays want lethal injections and such fancy, New Age stuff. I’d like to see us go back to the old drawn-and-quartered method. Hitch each of the prisoner’s limbs to a horse, point the four horses in four different directions, away from the prisoner, and give them all a slap on the rump. Just jerk the prisoner apart, with body parts flying every whichaway. Simple. Cheap. Effective.
Q. Does it bother you that the death penalty has absolutely no deterrent value, that numerous prisoners on death row have been found innocent of all charges by college students who investigated their cases, and that it’s almost always the poor who end up on death row?
A. No system is perfect. You have to take the good with the bad. At least eighty or ninety percent of those executed were guilty as charged.
Q. That seems easy enough to say if you happen to be white and well off. Do you have trouble identifying with the low-income occupants of the death house?
A. I don’t identify with them at all. You don’t see Republicans in the death house. Not our kind of neighborhood at all. I think you’ll find, if you check the statistics, that the vast majority of the condemned have no party affiliation at all.
Q. So politically this is a no-brainer?
A. Absolutely. It’s a win-win situation for both parties. You can slaughter prisoners left and right, and lose nary a vote.
© Tony Russell, 2003
Q. Seventeen years. That’s real devotion. You must be really passionate about this issue.
A. Oh, I am. I’ve been an execution buff since I was a boy.
Q. The President seems determined to have a war, no matter what anyone else wants, and you seem equally determined to execute people. Is this interest in killing people particularly deep in Republicans?
A. I want to make it clear that we are only interested in killing people legally; we are on record, in the strongest terms, against the illegal taking of human life. To be fair to the other party, they really deserve all the credit for getting us into Vietnam. And Democrats, for the most part, have given the President a blank check on Iraq.
Q. Let me go back to the distinction you were making between killing someone legally and illegally. Is it fair to compare it with killing a deer during hunting season, as opposed to poaching out of season?
A. Oh, I think that works fairly well. It’s the framework of law that makes us a civilized society.
Q. You have introduced a death penalty bill seventeen times. Has it always been the same bill, or have there been variations?
A. The basic bill has been the same, but the details have changed occasionally. For the past seven or eight years, I’ve been calling for public executions. The public pays for them, and I think they deserve a show for their money. The people really need to see that they get good value for their tax dollars.
Q. What execution method do you favor?
A. I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy. A lot of people nowadays want lethal injections and such fancy, New Age stuff. I’d like to see us go back to the old drawn-and-quartered method. Hitch each of the prisoner’s limbs to a horse, point the four horses in four different directions, away from the prisoner, and give them all a slap on the rump. Just jerk the prisoner apart, with body parts flying every whichaway. Simple. Cheap. Effective.
Q. Does it bother you that the death penalty has absolutely no deterrent value, that numerous prisoners on death row have been found innocent of all charges by college students who investigated their cases, and that it’s almost always the poor who end up on death row?
A. No system is perfect. You have to take the good with the bad. At least eighty or ninety percent of those executed were guilty as charged.
Q. That seems easy enough to say if you happen to be white and well off. Do you have trouble identifying with the low-income occupants of the death house?
A. I don’t identify with them at all. You don’t see Republicans in the death house. Not our kind of neighborhood at all. I think you’ll find, if you check the statistics, that the vast majority of the condemned have no party affiliation at all.
Q. So politically this is a no-brainer?
A. Absolutely. It’s a win-win situation for both parties. You can slaughter prisoners left and right, and lose nary a vote.
© Tony Russell, 2003
Sunday, February 02, 2003
“Patty’s Stimulus Package”
Patty has been following the debate over the President’s economic stimulus package closely, and this morning she announced that we needed to make some changes in our household.
“Ace,” she said, “our budget is pretty tight. The credit card bill is in four figures, the bill for car insurance just came yesterday, and I’ve got a wisdom tooth that has to come out.”
“Ouch!” I said. “I don’t know how we’re going to swing all that right now.”
“No problem,” she said. “I’ve been watching how the administration thinks, and we should be okay if we just follow their lead.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “What’s first?”
“The first thing is to cut your income. They want to reduce government income by slicing taxes, so we need to reduce money coming into the house. Can you see if they’ll cut your wages back about 20%? That should help.”
“I think the boss would be willing to do that. What next?”
“We need to take 42% of that money we’re not getting anymore, and arrange for it to go to my Uncle George.”
“Your Uncle George! That old coot! He already owns a third of Calhoun County, and he’s a greedy, money-grabbing so-and-so. I know plenty of people who could use the money, but he’s not one of them! Why the devil would we give him a red cent?”
“Will you stop being difficult, Ace? That 42% break needs to go to the richest one per cent, and Uncle George is the only person we know in that category.”
“Patty, once you get into the details, this doesn’t sound so great.”
“Ace, if we’re going to do this right, we need to follow the administration’s lead. Are you in or out?”
“I guess I’m in. But are you sure you know what you’re doing, Patty?” I said grudgingly.
“I listened to the President’s State of the Union address, and I’ve been following all the White House press releases. I’m sure I’ve got the gist of it,” she said.
“You’re a heck of a lot better with figures than I am. Is there anything else?”
“One more thing. We need to increase spending. The government spent a ton of money on arms and security. Would you like any more rifles or shotguns to add to your collection?”
“Hot damn!” I said excitedly. “You mean I can buy that turkey gun I’ve been wanting?”
“Sure,” she said, “but that doesn’t cost nearly enough. What about that antique Ithaca single gauge of Tom’s you wanted to buy? And that laser pistol sight?”
“I’m out of here!” I shouted, racing for the door. Then I skidded to a stop. “I only have twenty bucks in my pocket,” I protested. “How am I supposed to pay for all that? ”
“No problem,” said Patty. “Borrow it from the kids.”
© Tony Russell, 2003
“Ace,” she said, “our budget is pretty tight. The credit card bill is in four figures, the bill for car insurance just came yesterday, and I’ve got a wisdom tooth that has to come out.”
“Ouch!” I said. “I don’t know how we’re going to swing all that right now.”
“No problem,” she said. “I’ve been watching how the administration thinks, and we should be okay if we just follow their lead.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “What’s first?”
“The first thing is to cut your income. They want to reduce government income by slicing taxes, so we need to reduce money coming into the house. Can you see if they’ll cut your wages back about 20%? That should help.”
“I think the boss would be willing to do that. What next?”
“We need to take 42% of that money we’re not getting anymore, and arrange for it to go to my Uncle George.”
“Your Uncle George! That old coot! He already owns a third of Calhoun County, and he’s a greedy, money-grabbing so-and-so. I know plenty of people who could use the money, but he’s not one of them! Why the devil would we give him a red cent?”
“Will you stop being difficult, Ace? That 42% break needs to go to the richest one per cent, and Uncle George is the only person we know in that category.”
“Patty, once you get into the details, this doesn’t sound so great.”
“Ace, if we’re going to do this right, we need to follow the administration’s lead. Are you in or out?”
“I guess I’m in. But are you sure you know what you’re doing, Patty?” I said grudgingly.
“I listened to the President’s State of the Union address, and I’ve been following all the White House press releases. I’m sure I’ve got the gist of it,” she said.
“You’re a heck of a lot better with figures than I am. Is there anything else?”
“One more thing. We need to increase spending. The government spent a ton of money on arms and security. Would you like any more rifles or shotguns to add to your collection?”
“Hot damn!” I said excitedly. “You mean I can buy that turkey gun I’ve been wanting?”
“Sure,” she said, “but that doesn’t cost nearly enough. What about that antique Ithaca single gauge of Tom’s you wanted to buy? And that laser pistol sight?”
“I’m out of here!” I shouted, racing for the door. Then I skidded to a stop. “I only have twenty bucks in my pocket,” I protested. “How am I supposed to pay for all that? ”
“No problem,” said Patty. “Borrow it from the kids.”
© Tony Russell, 2003
Thursday, January 16, 2003
“Genesis and Dinosaurs”
My neighbor Lester was over in Burlington, Kentucky, this weekend, volunteering at Answers in Genesis’s creation museum and education center. I was eager to hear what progress they’re making. They believe that God created the universe in six days only 6,000 years ago, that pairs of dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark, and that dinosaurs were probably around at the time of Jesus. According to a 1997 Gallup Poll, 47% of Americans believe in a literal reading of Genesis, so there’s a choir out there waiting to hear them preach.
“How’s the project coming along, Lester?” I asked.
“Just super!” he reported. “The 54-foot-long model of a sea bass that visitors will be able to walk through is all set up. And so is the 14-by-26-foot model of a human cell. And the seventy or so dinosaur models are all in place.”
“Help me out here, Lester,” I said. “What exactly do dinosaurs have to do with the Bible?”
“Everything,” he said. If God created all animals on the sixth day, then dinosaurs existed at the same time as every other creature. They were walking the earth the same time as all the Old Testament figures, probably up through the time of Jesus himself.”
“Gee,” I mused. “You’d think that if a 10,000 pound Tyrannosaurus rex were rambling around at the same time as King David, say, or Abraham, or Isaac, or Jeremiah, or any of those guys, somebody would have mentioned it.”
“The Bible isn’t exhaustive in the way it treats anything,” he said with exasperation. “There are obviously thousands of species—animals, trees, birds, insects—that didn’t happen to be included in the Biblical narratives.”
“Well, I can see how you could leave out a wood duck or a pintail, say, or maybe a chipmunk or a spittlebug, but some things are just hard to ignore. Don’t you think that a giant flesh-eating reptile twenty feet tall, with a four-foot skull, armed with daggerlike teeth half a foot long, would catch your attention? And maybe complicate your life a little? Or even a vegetarian like Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus? I mean, Diplodocus grew to be almost ninety feet long. Of course, it only weighed about twenty-five tons, which is light compared with Brachiosaurus’s fifty tons, but still, if one crossed your path, you’d think you might get excited enough to mention it.”
“They may have been so common that they weren’t worth mentioning,” he suggested.
“I can see how that could happen,” I agreed. “But sheep and goats and lambs and lions get mentioned frequently, and they were probably more common than dinosaurs. Although I wouldn’t think sheep and goats would stay all that common if there were many carnivorous dinosaurs around.”
“It may have been a matter of geography,” he suggested. “Dinosaurs may not have been in that particular region at that time.”
“I can see that,” I reflected. “It would be like polar bears. Or kangaroos. They weren’t in the Middle East, so they’re not mentioned in the Bible. So how did Noah gather all those species? Did he go to Australia for the dingoes and kangaroos and kiwis, to the Arctic for polar bears and seals and Arctic wolves, to North America for bison, to South America for anacondas, and to Asia for snow leopards? How long would you say it would take to gather a pair of every species that ever lived, haul them back home, and load them on a boat? Suppose my three sons and I set out to do that—and our job would be easier because a lot of species are extinct now. How long would that take? I mean, realistically, how many species could you travel with and feed at one time?”
Lester flushed. “ It probably went faster in those days,” he mumbled.
“That’s what I can’t figure. They did everything on foot. No trucks, no trains, no planes to speed up the gathering. Can you imagine being the son who gets the job of bringing in a pair of Allosaurus or Triceratops?”
“It was no doubt a difficult task,” he admitted.
“And how big was that ark?” I went on. “When you consider that some of these individuals weighed 100,000 pounds apiece, and then figure the food you’d have to lay in for them, it’d take a heck of a vessel to accommodate the lot. Plus they all ate different kinds of food, so you’d have to gather that from everywhere too.”
“The dimensions are given in cubits,” he said. “I’m not sure how long a cubit is.”
“Well, it varied,” I said, “depending on how long it was from somebody’s elbow to the tip of his middle finger, but eighteen inches is a good ballpark figure.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “However big it was, it was big enough.”
“Say, did you read in the Parkersburg paper about that Marietta College professor who found those dinosaur droppings at a dig in Utah?” I asked. “The first specimen was about ten feet long! The main mass was five feet long, and then there was another five feet of ‘dribble.’”
“What’s your point?” he asked.
“Nothing, really. I was just thinking how much work it was to take care of a few dairy cattle when we had a farm over in Gilmer County. Not just the feeding and milking, but mucking out the barn. Can you imagine cleaning up after a hundred thousand or so species on a boat?”
“You seem inclined to linger over details.”
“Somebody once said, ‘God is in the details,’ Lester,” I remarked. “By the way, Dr. Stone figured that the coprolite he found was shat about 150 million years ago.”
“Evidently he’s not a biblical scientist,” said Lester. “He appears to be unaware of the reliable, absolutely authoritative history that Genesis presents.”
“There does seem to be a bit of a gap between your version of dinosaurs and his, doesn’t there? You believe the oldest dinosaurs lived no more than 6,000 years ago, and he says his specimen came from a dinosaur 150 million years ago.”
“Ace,” he said, “if you can’t trust the Bible on biology and paleontology, how can you trust it on morality and salvation?”
Lester is not only a neighbor, but a friend and a thoroughly decent human being. His question came from the foundation of his faith, and I wanted to treat it carefully. For him, every word in the Bible is literal, historical, God-given truth, and thus cannot be wrong.
“Lester,” I began, “you read the Bible a lot more than I do, and you know that it contains passages that are self-contradictory and genealogies that vary from one place to another. If the Bible were literally, word-for-word true, those kinds of things couldn’t happen.”
He just looked at me, evidently concerned that my eternal soul was sliding down a greased pole to perdition.
“Think of all the ways people try to convey truths so profound that they are ultimately inexpressible,” I continued. “Through myth, through symbols, through visions. The imagination isn’t a lesser creature than the cold historical eye. You’re taking a work that combines a variety of literary forms—myth, song, chronicle, prayer, and vision literature—and assuming that it’s all historical narrative. That’s absurd! You can have your moral and religious truth while being open to whatever science learns about the universe!”
He turned a cold historical eye on me. “Ace,” he said, “I’ll pray for you. You read a myth for me.”
© Tony Russell, 2003
“How’s the project coming along, Lester?” I asked.
“Just super!” he reported. “The 54-foot-long model of a sea bass that visitors will be able to walk through is all set up. And so is the 14-by-26-foot model of a human cell. And the seventy or so dinosaur models are all in place.”
“Help me out here, Lester,” I said. “What exactly do dinosaurs have to do with the Bible?”
“Everything,” he said. If God created all animals on the sixth day, then dinosaurs existed at the same time as every other creature. They were walking the earth the same time as all the Old Testament figures, probably up through the time of Jesus himself.”
“Gee,” I mused. “You’d think that if a 10,000 pound Tyrannosaurus rex were rambling around at the same time as King David, say, or Abraham, or Isaac, or Jeremiah, or any of those guys, somebody would have mentioned it.”
“The Bible isn’t exhaustive in the way it treats anything,” he said with exasperation. “There are obviously thousands of species—animals, trees, birds, insects—that didn’t happen to be included in the Biblical narratives.”
“Well, I can see how you could leave out a wood duck or a pintail, say, or maybe a chipmunk or a spittlebug, but some things are just hard to ignore. Don’t you think that a giant flesh-eating reptile twenty feet tall, with a four-foot skull, armed with daggerlike teeth half a foot long, would catch your attention? And maybe complicate your life a little? Or even a vegetarian like Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus? I mean, Diplodocus grew to be almost ninety feet long. Of course, it only weighed about twenty-five tons, which is light compared with Brachiosaurus’s fifty tons, but still, if one crossed your path, you’d think you might get excited enough to mention it.”
“They may have been so common that they weren’t worth mentioning,” he suggested.
“I can see how that could happen,” I agreed. “But sheep and goats and lambs and lions get mentioned frequently, and they were probably more common than dinosaurs. Although I wouldn’t think sheep and goats would stay all that common if there were many carnivorous dinosaurs around.”
“It may have been a matter of geography,” he suggested. “Dinosaurs may not have been in that particular region at that time.”
“I can see that,” I reflected. “It would be like polar bears. Or kangaroos. They weren’t in the Middle East, so they’re not mentioned in the Bible. So how did Noah gather all those species? Did he go to Australia for the dingoes and kangaroos and kiwis, to the Arctic for polar bears and seals and Arctic wolves, to North America for bison, to South America for anacondas, and to Asia for snow leopards? How long would you say it would take to gather a pair of every species that ever lived, haul them back home, and load them on a boat? Suppose my three sons and I set out to do that—and our job would be easier because a lot of species are extinct now. How long would that take? I mean, realistically, how many species could you travel with and feed at one time?”
Lester flushed. “ It probably went faster in those days,” he mumbled.
“That’s what I can’t figure. They did everything on foot. No trucks, no trains, no planes to speed up the gathering. Can you imagine being the son who gets the job of bringing in a pair of Allosaurus or Triceratops?”
“It was no doubt a difficult task,” he admitted.
“And how big was that ark?” I went on. “When you consider that some of these individuals weighed 100,000 pounds apiece, and then figure the food you’d have to lay in for them, it’d take a heck of a vessel to accommodate the lot. Plus they all ate different kinds of food, so you’d have to gather that from everywhere too.”
“The dimensions are given in cubits,” he said. “I’m not sure how long a cubit is.”
“Well, it varied,” I said, “depending on how long it was from somebody’s elbow to the tip of his middle finger, but eighteen inches is a good ballpark figure.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “However big it was, it was big enough.”
“Say, did you read in the Parkersburg paper about that Marietta College professor who found those dinosaur droppings at a dig in Utah?” I asked. “The first specimen was about ten feet long! The main mass was five feet long, and then there was another five feet of ‘dribble.’”
“What’s your point?” he asked.
“Nothing, really. I was just thinking how much work it was to take care of a few dairy cattle when we had a farm over in Gilmer County. Not just the feeding and milking, but mucking out the barn. Can you imagine cleaning up after a hundred thousand or so species on a boat?”
“You seem inclined to linger over details.”
“Somebody once said, ‘God is in the details,’ Lester,” I remarked. “By the way, Dr. Stone figured that the coprolite he found was shat about 150 million years ago.”
“Evidently he’s not a biblical scientist,” said Lester. “He appears to be unaware of the reliable, absolutely authoritative history that Genesis presents.”
“There does seem to be a bit of a gap between your version of dinosaurs and his, doesn’t there? You believe the oldest dinosaurs lived no more than 6,000 years ago, and he says his specimen came from a dinosaur 150 million years ago.”
“Ace,” he said, “if you can’t trust the Bible on biology and paleontology, how can you trust it on morality and salvation?”
Lester is not only a neighbor, but a friend and a thoroughly decent human being. His question came from the foundation of his faith, and I wanted to treat it carefully. For him, every word in the Bible is literal, historical, God-given truth, and thus cannot be wrong.
“Lester,” I began, “you read the Bible a lot more than I do, and you know that it contains passages that are self-contradictory and genealogies that vary from one place to another. If the Bible were literally, word-for-word true, those kinds of things couldn’t happen.”
He just looked at me, evidently concerned that my eternal soul was sliding down a greased pole to perdition.
“Think of all the ways people try to convey truths so profound that they are ultimately inexpressible,” I continued. “Through myth, through symbols, through visions. The imagination isn’t a lesser creature than the cold historical eye. You’re taking a work that combines a variety of literary forms—myth, song, chronicle, prayer, and vision literature—and assuming that it’s all historical narrative. That’s absurd! You can have your moral and religious truth while being open to whatever science learns about the universe!”
He turned a cold historical eye on me. “Ace,” he said, “I’ll pray for you. You read a myth for me.”
© Tony Russell, 2003
Saturday, January 11, 2003
“What Would Jesus Do?”
The great religious revivals of the Anglo-American past have focused on the downtrodden and despised. Out of each revival came a new emphasis on prison reform, as a reaction against the brutality and inhumanity of the penal system of the time. If you were a Quaker, for example, believing that “there is that of God in everyone” and that everyone has access to the Inner Light, then you actually believed that this thief, this drunkard, this drug addict, was—no less than you—a child of God, worthy of respect and love. If you were a follower of John and Charles Wesley, a “Methodist,” you believed that we were all sinners, and that no human being was beyond redemption.
All of which leads me to marvel at the “religious revival” of the last twenty years, which has been a willing partner of the most hateful and vindictive political ideologues in America’s conservative boom. Fundamentalist churches are the core supporters of the right wing agenda, including its emphasis on expanding the death penalty to cover more and more offenses, imprisoning as many people as possible, imprisoning them for longer and longer terms, and eliminating programs designed to educate them or help them in any way to improve their lot. It doesn’t seem to bother these Christians at all that prisoners, in massive numbers and on a routine basis, are being treated worse than dogs.
“What would Jesus do?” they frequently intone. I have to assume it’s strictly a rhetorical question rather than a felt demand on their lives. Do they honestly believe Christ is a cheerleader for the gas chamber and lethal injections? For life sentences for drug possession? For stun guns? For the Bush administration’s treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay?
At Guantanamo the administration has thrown prisoners into a jail built from international shipping containers. Three sides of each cell are steel mesh. The cells are less than 7 foot by 8 foot, and more than half of each cell is taken up by a metal bed welded to the wall. Prisoners are kept in that space, in metal containers, in broiling tropical heat, for one hundred sixty seven and a half hours per week. Each week, a prisoner gets to leave that metal oven for two fifteen-minute periods. That’s his time to shower and exercise. Do you suppose that’s the kind of prison Jesus would have designed, given the chance?
January 15 will mark the first anniversary of their imprisonment, with no end in sight. They have never been charged with anything. They have never been allowed to see a lawyer. They have never been allowed contact with their families. Their imprisonment violates, among other things, the Geneva Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the U.S. Constitution. That’s not the America I grew up in. It’s not the America of Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson or Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth or …. But I forget myself; we’re talking religion here, not our American heritage. Jesus didn’t sign the Geneva Convention or the Constitution, so let’s dismiss them as irrelevant here, and get back to the key question: What would Jesus do? Apparently their Jesus says, “Fry the sons-of-bitches,” or “Cage ‘em and throw away the key.”
© Tony Russell, 2003
All of which leads me to marvel at the “religious revival” of the last twenty years, which has been a willing partner of the most hateful and vindictive political ideologues in America’s conservative boom. Fundamentalist churches are the core supporters of the right wing agenda, including its emphasis on expanding the death penalty to cover more and more offenses, imprisoning as many people as possible, imprisoning them for longer and longer terms, and eliminating programs designed to educate them or help them in any way to improve their lot. It doesn’t seem to bother these Christians at all that prisoners, in massive numbers and on a routine basis, are being treated worse than dogs.
“What would Jesus do?” they frequently intone. I have to assume it’s strictly a rhetorical question rather than a felt demand on their lives. Do they honestly believe Christ is a cheerleader for the gas chamber and lethal injections? For life sentences for drug possession? For stun guns? For the Bush administration’s treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay?
At Guantanamo the administration has thrown prisoners into a jail built from international shipping containers. Three sides of each cell are steel mesh. The cells are less than 7 foot by 8 foot, and more than half of each cell is taken up by a metal bed welded to the wall. Prisoners are kept in that space, in metal containers, in broiling tropical heat, for one hundred sixty seven and a half hours per week. Each week, a prisoner gets to leave that metal oven for two fifteen-minute periods. That’s his time to shower and exercise. Do you suppose that’s the kind of prison Jesus would have designed, given the chance?
January 15 will mark the first anniversary of their imprisonment, with no end in sight. They have never been charged with anything. They have never been allowed to see a lawyer. They have never been allowed contact with their families. Their imprisonment violates, among other things, the Geneva Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the U.S. Constitution. That’s not the America I grew up in. It’s not the America of Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson or Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth or …. But I forget myself; we’re talking religion here, not our American heritage. Jesus didn’t sign the Geneva Convention or the Constitution, so let’s dismiss them as irrelevant here, and get back to the key question: What would Jesus do? Apparently their Jesus says, “Fry the sons-of-bitches,” or “Cage ‘em and throw away the key.”
© Tony Russell, 2003
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
“Wet My Dipstick”
“Are you coming to the rally on Sunday?” asked my co-worker, Mort Walker.
“I didn’t know anything about a rally, Mort,” I said. “What’s it about?”
“It’s a pro-war rally,” he said. “We’re tired of the administration’s pussyfooting around. Let’s get in there, grab ‘em by the gonads, and squeeze ‘til the oil runs out.”
“I don’t know, Mort,” I said. “The inspectors keep looking, and they can’t find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. It seems kind of hard to justify invading another country just because we want their oil.”
“What kind of wimp are you?” he scoffed. “Have you looked at the price on the pump in the last few weeks? It’s $1.55 per gallon and still climbing.”
“Mort,” I said hesitantly, “there are other things to consider. International law, for example. The immorality of an invasion. The deaths of thousands of people.”
“Oh sure,” he said. “Talk abstractions. You don’t have to pump gas into my SUV every evening. Then you’d know what real pain is.”
“Mort,” I said, “I share your pain. But it just seems cynical and wrong to pretend we’re trying to make the world a safer place when we’re willing to bribe, buy, bomb, or betray anything that keeps big oil companies from writing their own ticket.”
He looked at me angrily. “Ace,” he said, “I’m beginning to wonder about your loyalty.”
“What do you mean?” I said, taken aback.
“You know what I mean,” he said accusingly. “United we stand. The colors in this flag don’t run.”
He was starting to tick me off. “Will you stop talking like a bumper sticker,” I said. “According to the most recent polls, only 29% of the American people support a unilateral American invasion, while 63% favor a diplomatic solution. So if there’s anybody standing united, it’s the majority of the American people, and they’re united against the administration’s determination to start a war.”
“Bury your head in the sand,” he said. “Those people are a real threat to the U.S., and they need to be taken care of before it’s too late.”
“Mort,” I said, “answer me this. Why is it that North Korea gets the kid-gloves treatment, when they make no bones about their intentions to develop weapons of mass destruction, but 160,000 troops are on the way to bomb, invade, and militarily occupy Iraq, when there’s no evidence at all that they have such weapons?”
“Ace,” he said, “there’s not enough oil in Korea to wet my dipstick.”
© Tony Russell, 2003
“I didn’t know anything about a rally, Mort,” I said. “What’s it about?”
“It’s a pro-war rally,” he said. “We’re tired of the administration’s pussyfooting around. Let’s get in there, grab ‘em by the gonads, and squeeze ‘til the oil runs out.”
“I don’t know, Mort,” I said. “The inspectors keep looking, and they can’t find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. It seems kind of hard to justify invading another country just because we want their oil.”
“What kind of wimp are you?” he scoffed. “Have you looked at the price on the pump in the last few weeks? It’s $1.55 per gallon and still climbing.”
“Mort,” I said hesitantly, “there are other things to consider. International law, for example. The immorality of an invasion. The deaths of thousands of people.”
“Oh sure,” he said. “Talk abstractions. You don’t have to pump gas into my SUV every evening. Then you’d know what real pain is.”
“Mort,” I said, “I share your pain. But it just seems cynical and wrong to pretend we’re trying to make the world a safer place when we’re willing to bribe, buy, bomb, or betray anything that keeps big oil companies from writing their own ticket.”
He looked at me angrily. “Ace,” he said, “I’m beginning to wonder about your loyalty.”
“What do you mean?” I said, taken aback.
“You know what I mean,” he said accusingly. “United we stand. The colors in this flag don’t run.”
He was starting to tick me off. “Will you stop talking like a bumper sticker,” I said. “According to the most recent polls, only 29% of the American people support a unilateral American invasion, while 63% favor a diplomatic solution. So if there’s anybody standing united, it’s the majority of the American people, and they’re united against the administration’s determination to start a war.”
“Bury your head in the sand,” he said. “Those people are a real threat to the U.S., and they need to be taken care of before it’s too late.”
“Mort,” I said, “answer me this. Why is it that North Korea gets the kid-gloves treatment, when they make no bones about their intentions to develop weapons of mass destruction, but 160,000 troops are on the way to bomb, invade, and militarily occupy Iraq, when there’s no evidence at all that they have such weapons?”
“Ace,” he said, “there’s not enough oil in Korea to wet my dipstick.”
© Tony Russell, 2003
Wednesday, January 01, 2003
“A Chinese Christmas”
A quick inventory of the presents under the tree is probably as good as any statistical analysis for telling us who’s the current leader in the global economy’s race to the bottom. This year it’s not even close. The clear winner: China! Come on down!
Our big-ticket item was the new Sylvania™ DVD player, a present for the whole family from Santa. It had “Made in China” stamped in bold letters on the carton. But the DVD player was just the start. My granddaughter’s teddy bear was also made in China. So too was her cute little Dirt Devil™ Junior Upright vacuum cleaner. And her “Alphabet Art Puzzle”™ with its scripted message from Melissa and Doug: “We care about your comments, please call us!” (To be scrupulously fair, the puzzle is marked “Made in Taiwan.”) And our new Rival™ toaster. And that pretty new dress for my daughter. And my new toothbrush. And the bag clips we used to close the snack mix.
So China was this year’s winner, hands down. According to a report just released, China’s exports were up a whopping 22 per cent for the first eleven months of 2002! The big loser seems to be Mexico. Two years ago, we were all humming “Feliz Navidad!” Many of the items under the tree then were made in Tijuana, Juarez, Mexicali, and Nogales. Literally thousands of U.S. manufacturers, over the past two decades, had closed down their U.S. plants and moved just across the border, where they could not only pay much lower wages and lower taxes, but they didn’t have to worry about unions, health and safety regulations, or environmental damage. Now, however, those same corporations are pulling up stakes in Mexico and moving to China. A starting machine operator in China makes less than $2 a day, while that Mexican operator made almost $8 a day. As a consequence, more than a quarter of a million Mexican factory workers have lost their jobs in the past two years. (Jobs originally lost, of course, by workers in the U.S. and Canada; it’s a slow-motion case of musical chairs.)
All of this has come about through the push for “free trade.” The worthless lot we call political leaders are owned by multinational corporations and investors. And the “New Democrats” are as bad as the Republicans. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were first-team cheerleaders for the globalization of trade.
“Free markets” is a pretty-sounding way of saying “capitalism with no holds barred.” The motives of the “free traders” are greed and power; their real agenda is tax cuts, union-busting, deregulation, and “tort reform” (since law suits are one of the few remaining means for holding them accountable). As long as they can keep us bamboozled with phony issues like gun control and military escapades like the invasions of Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq, they can continue to play cowboy and ride tall in the saddle.
That “giant sucking sound” you hear? It’s not just my granddaughter’s vacuum cleaner.
© Tony Russell, 2003
Our big-ticket item was the new Sylvania™ DVD player, a present for the whole family from Santa. It had “Made in China” stamped in bold letters on the carton. But the DVD player was just the start. My granddaughter’s teddy bear was also made in China. So too was her cute little Dirt Devil™ Junior Upright vacuum cleaner. And her “Alphabet Art Puzzle”™ with its scripted message from Melissa and Doug: “We care about your comments, please call us!” (To be scrupulously fair, the puzzle is marked “Made in Taiwan.”) And our new Rival™ toaster. And that pretty new dress for my daughter. And my new toothbrush. And the bag clips we used to close the snack mix.
So China was this year’s winner, hands down. According to a report just released, China’s exports were up a whopping 22 per cent for the first eleven months of 2002! The big loser seems to be Mexico. Two years ago, we were all humming “Feliz Navidad!” Many of the items under the tree then were made in Tijuana, Juarez, Mexicali, and Nogales. Literally thousands of U.S. manufacturers, over the past two decades, had closed down their U.S. plants and moved just across the border, where they could not only pay much lower wages and lower taxes, but they didn’t have to worry about unions, health and safety regulations, or environmental damage. Now, however, those same corporations are pulling up stakes in Mexico and moving to China. A starting machine operator in China makes less than $2 a day, while that Mexican operator made almost $8 a day. As a consequence, more than a quarter of a million Mexican factory workers have lost their jobs in the past two years. (Jobs originally lost, of course, by workers in the U.S. and Canada; it’s a slow-motion case of musical chairs.)
All of this has come about through the push for “free trade.” The worthless lot we call political leaders are owned by multinational corporations and investors. And the “New Democrats” are as bad as the Republicans. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were first-team cheerleaders for the globalization of trade.
“Free markets” is a pretty-sounding way of saying “capitalism with no holds barred.” The motives of the “free traders” are greed and power; their real agenda is tax cuts, union-busting, deregulation, and “tort reform” (since law suits are one of the few remaining means for holding them accountable). As long as they can keep us bamboozled with phony issues like gun control and military escapades like the invasions of Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq, they can continue to play cowboy and ride tall in the saddle.
That “giant sucking sound” you hear? It’s not just my granddaughter’s vacuum cleaner.
© Tony Russell, 2003
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
“Worming the Cat”
Election after election, Democrats take a thumping. The latest debacle may have been the most humiliating. And the talking heads offer the same analysis: Democrats need to abandon their far-out liberal views and move to the center—i.e., become more like Republicans. The Democratic Leadership Council was formed with just that intent—to jerk the party to the right, making it more business-friendly and acceptable to corporate fat cats.
So what has that shift to the right done for the party? Let’s see…. It has lost the Presidency. It has lost control of the Senate. It has lost the House of Representatives. In practical terms, it has lost the Supreme Court. Most importantly, however, it has lost its voters. We now have a turnout of only about one-third of eligible voters. Republican participation is up; Democratic turnout is way down. What do the pundits suggest? Move even farther to the right. They’re like the friends who tell you to worm your cat with arsenic. “He’s still not looking too good,” you say. “In fact, he looks worse than he did before.” “You just need to increase the dose,” they say.
Where are the Democrats who care about the bottom 75% of the population? Who will fight for more spending on education and health care? Who will demand a higher minimum wage? Who will oppose tax cuts that benefit the rich and shift the burden to the middle class and poor? Who will strengthen the regulation of Wall Street, and enforce the tougher regulations? Who will oppose unilateral military adventures? Who will campaign for an intelligent peace rather than a stupid war? Who will support Constitutional rights? Who will support human rights rather than dictators? Who not only take those positions, but are passionate about them? Who have a little courage to go with their convictions?
Julian Bond said that “when the shameless compete against the spineless, the shameless always win.” “Always” is an exaggeration. A shameless panderer like Joe Lieberman lost his bid for Vice President, and may have cost Gore the Presidency, but he still has his Senate seat, as well as ambitions to be the 2004 Democratic nominee. Dick Gephardt helped Bush pass the Iraqi resolution in the House, thereby undermining the attempt by Senator Byrd and a few others to delay or limit the war authority it contained. For having thus hamstrung his party, and having led House Democrats to inglorious defeat in the midterm election, Gephardt sees himself as another potential President. Courage is such a rare commodity in the Democratic party that a few of its members have hoped John McCain could be talked into switching parties and running against George Bush.
“How’s your cat?”
“He’s free of worms. Unfortunately, he died.”
© Tony Russell, 2002
So what has that shift to the right done for the party? Let’s see…. It has lost the Presidency. It has lost control of the Senate. It has lost the House of Representatives. In practical terms, it has lost the Supreme Court. Most importantly, however, it has lost its voters. We now have a turnout of only about one-third of eligible voters. Republican participation is up; Democratic turnout is way down. What do the pundits suggest? Move even farther to the right. They’re like the friends who tell you to worm your cat with arsenic. “He’s still not looking too good,” you say. “In fact, he looks worse than he did before.” “You just need to increase the dose,” they say.
Where are the Democrats who care about the bottom 75% of the population? Who will fight for more spending on education and health care? Who will demand a higher minimum wage? Who will oppose tax cuts that benefit the rich and shift the burden to the middle class and poor? Who will strengthen the regulation of Wall Street, and enforce the tougher regulations? Who will oppose unilateral military adventures? Who will campaign for an intelligent peace rather than a stupid war? Who will support Constitutional rights? Who will support human rights rather than dictators? Who not only take those positions, but are passionate about them? Who have a little courage to go with their convictions?
Julian Bond said that “when the shameless compete against the spineless, the shameless always win.” “Always” is an exaggeration. A shameless panderer like Joe Lieberman lost his bid for Vice President, and may have cost Gore the Presidency, but he still has his Senate seat, as well as ambitions to be the 2004 Democratic nominee. Dick Gephardt helped Bush pass the Iraqi resolution in the House, thereby undermining the attempt by Senator Byrd and a few others to delay or limit the war authority it contained. For having thus hamstrung his party, and having led House Democrats to inglorious defeat in the midterm election, Gephardt sees himself as another potential President. Courage is such a rare commodity in the Democratic party that a few of its members have hoped John McCain could be talked into switching parties and running against George Bush.
“How’s your cat?”
“He’s free of worms. Unfortunately, he died.”
© Tony Russell, 2002
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
“Shell Game”
“Hey, Ace!” called my buddy, Bob Spinner, as I was strolling around the Molasses Festival. “Come take a look at this guy. He’s great!”
I pushed my way through the crowd gathered in front of a small stage set up behind the Community Building. The stage was draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and on both sides of the stage were huge American flags, the flagpoles topped with vicious-looking eagles with their talons clutching missiles and bombs. In the center of the stage was a man wearing cowboy garb, standing behind a counter and making his pitch as he whipped three large shells around on the countertop.
“It’s easy,” he shouted. “Everybody’s a winner! Just keep your eye on the pea and tell me where it ended up! You there, sir,” he said, looking right at me, “you have a confident look to you. Come on up here and give it a try. Just plunk down 30% of your income for the next ten years! It’s no gamble at all; you just have to watch this little pea. Nothing to it!”
Bob had shoved his way up behind me, puffing slightly from the exertion. “This is goofy,” I told him. “I don’t want to get up in front of all these people and make a fool of myself. Besides, I might lose. And if I lost 30% of our income, Patty would pitch a fit.”
Bob scoffed. “The guy’s an idiot,” he said. “It’s almost a shame to go up there and take his money. You’ve got a quick eye, and he’s got a slow hand. Go for it!” He grabbed my arm and tugged me toward the stage. “He’ll do it,” he yelled.
I found myself standing in front of the counter, while people in the audience hooted and shouted encouragement. The cowboy smiled at me, but the skin around his eyes never wrinkled. I’d seen the same look on our housecat’s face as it sat immobile, its eyes on a chickadee.
He launched into his patter, starting to slowly shift the shells around. “Just keep your eye on the pea,” he reminded me. “We’re attacking Iraq because a bunch of Saudi Arabians headquartered in Afghanistan flew planes into buildings in the United States.”
“Huh?” I said, bewildered. “Can you go back and make that move again? I lost sight of the pea for a minute.”
“Sorry,” he smirked. “Gotta keep moving on. Maybe you’ll see it again in a minute.” He began to move the shells a little faster. “Saddam Hussein is a vicious dictator, cruel to his own people. He possesses weapons of mass destruction. He’s part of an axis of evil, and good is always at war with evil.”
“Oh come on, get real,” I protested. “There are lousy dictators all over the globe, too many of them allied with and bankrolled by the United States government. In fact, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were both our guys, and we’re the people who supplied Saddam with the materials for his chemical and biological weapons! That’s how we know what he had; we sold it to him!”
The cowboy slapped my hand aside. “Don’t touch those peas,” he warned me.
“But it’s not right to invade another country that isn’t at war with us, hasn’t attacked us, poses no real threat to us, and hasn’t even made a threatening gesture toward us,” I argued. “How in the world can you justify that? That’s the same kind of thing Hitler did with Poland and Czechoslovakia!”
“You just compared me with Hitler,” he said. “Big mistake. Unpatriotic. Overwrought. You’re discredited.” His hands moved faster.
“But I wasn’t talking about you as a person,” I objected. “I just said that invading other countries without justification was the same thing Hitler did. It’s true. How can you argue with that? You compared Saddam to Hitler, and your father compared Noriega to Hitler. In fact, for the past twenty years, every time an administration wants to attack somebody, they begin by demonizing the leader and comparing him with Hitler. It’s part of the public relations campaign to prepare the U.S. public for war!”
He ignored me, continuing to shuffle the shells.
“What about international law? What about the U.N. Charter? What about religious and ethical teaching? What about Congress and the U.S. Constitution? Invading Iraq violates everything we’re supposed to believe and stand for!”
“Glad you mentioned Congress,” he said. “Elections are coming up. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting a resolution from that spineless bunch. As for a U.N. resolution, we’ll push one through. But to tell the truth, who cares? They’re irrelevant. We’re still going to attack Iraq.” With that, he lifted one of the shells to reveal the pea; then his hands speeded up again.
“What about the weapons inspectors? What if they don’t find any weapons of mass destruction?”
“Those don’t really matter. We KNOW he has them. If he says he doesn’t, he’s lying and the weapons inspectors are incompetent.”
“If you know he’s lying, why don’t you give your evidence to the weapons inspectors?”
“We’d like to, but that would tip the Iraqis off to our intelligence sources. You’ll have to take our word for it.”
“Not meaning any disrespect,” I said, “but before we launch a war that will probably kill over 10,000 human beings, most of them poor Iraqi civilians, and further burden the U.S. economy with a war bill for over 190 billion dollars, when we say we don’t have enough money for health care and prescription drugs, I think we need something better than your word for it that something’s rotten in Iraq.”
Suddenly he stopped shuffling the shells. “Okay,” he said, “where’s the pea?”
He had taken me by surprise. I just stared at the shells. I didn’t have the slightest idea. Hesitating, I pointed to the one in the middle. Lifting it slowly to stretch out the suspense, he pointed to… nothing. “Sorry,” he said, grinning triumphantly. He lifted the shell on the right; there lay the pea. “You lose,” he said. “It’s war!”
The audience roared with laughter as I stumbled back down the steps. Bob met me at the bottom. “Boy, did he get you,” he chortled. “All the time the pea was whether it was right to go to war, and he got you to talking about one damned thing after another! Congressional resolutions. U.N. resolutions. Regime change. Inspection teams. He got you to where you didn’t know whether you were coming or going!”
“It’s just hard,” I said, “when he’s the one who’s always moving the shells.”
Bob grinned at me. “It’s a carnival,” he said. “What did you expect?”
© Tony Russell, 2002
I pushed my way through the crowd gathered in front of a small stage set up behind the Community Building. The stage was draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and on both sides of the stage were huge American flags, the flagpoles topped with vicious-looking eagles with their talons clutching missiles and bombs. In the center of the stage was a man wearing cowboy garb, standing behind a counter and making his pitch as he whipped three large shells around on the countertop.
“It’s easy,” he shouted. “Everybody’s a winner! Just keep your eye on the pea and tell me where it ended up! You there, sir,” he said, looking right at me, “you have a confident look to you. Come on up here and give it a try. Just plunk down 30% of your income for the next ten years! It’s no gamble at all; you just have to watch this little pea. Nothing to it!”
Bob had shoved his way up behind me, puffing slightly from the exertion. “This is goofy,” I told him. “I don’t want to get up in front of all these people and make a fool of myself. Besides, I might lose. And if I lost 30% of our income, Patty would pitch a fit.”
Bob scoffed. “The guy’s an idiot,” he said. “It’s almost a shame to go up there and take his money. You’ve got a quick eye, and he’s got a slow hand. Go for it!” He grabbed my arm and tugged me toward the stage. “He’ll do it,” he yelled.
I found myself standing in front of the counter, while people in the audience hooted and shouted encouragement. The cowboy smiled at me, but the skin around his eyes never wrinkled. I’d seen the same look on our housecat’s face as it sat immobile, its eyes on a chickadee.
He launched into his patter, starting to slowly shift the shells around. “Just keep your eye on the pea,” he reminded me. “We’re attacking Iraq because a bunch of Saudi Arabians headquartered in Afghanistan flew planes into buildings in the United States.”
“Huh?” I said, bewildered. “Can you go back and make that move again? I lost sight of the pea for a minute.”
“Sorry,” he smirked. “Gotta keep moving on. Maybe you’ll see it again in a minute.” He began to move the shells a little faster. “Saddam Hussein is a vicious dictator, cruel to his own people. He possesses weapons of mass destruction. He’s part of an axis of evil, and good is always at war with evil.”
“Oh come on, get real,” I protested. “There are lousy dictators all over the globe, too many of them allied with and bankrolled by the United States government. In fact, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were both our guys, and we’re the people who supplied Saddam with the materials for his chemical and biological weapons! That’s how we know what he had; we sold it to him!”
The cowboy slapped my hand aside. “Don’t touch those peas,” he warned me.
“But it’s not right to invade another country that isn’t at war with us, hasn’t attacked us, poses no real threat to us, and hasn’t even made a threatening gesture toward us,” I argued. “How in the world can you justify that? That’s the same kind of thing Hitler did with Poland and Czechoslovakia!”
“You just compared me with Hitler,” he said. “Big mistake. Unpatriotic. Overwrought. You’re discredited.” His hands moved faster.
“But I wasn’t talking about you as a person,” I objected. “I just said that invading other countries without justification was the same thing Hitler did. It’s true. How can you argue with that? You compared Saddam to Hitler, and your father compared Noriega to Hitler. In fact, for the past twenty years, every time an administration wants to attack somebody, they begin by demonizing the leader and comparing him with Hitler. It’s part of the public relations campaign to prepare the U.S. public for war!”
He ignored me, continuing to shuffle the shells.
“What about international law? What about the U.N. Charter? What about religious and ethical teaching? What about Congress and the U.S. Constitution? Invading Iraq violates everything we’re supposed to believe and stand for!”
“Glad you mentioned Congress,” he said. “Elections are coming up. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting a resolution from that spineless bunch. As for a U.N. resolution, we’ll push one through. But to tell the truth, who cares? They’re irrelevant. We’re still going to attack Iraq.” With that, he lifted one of the shells to reveal the pea; then his hands speeded up again.
“What about the weapons inspectors? What if they don’t find any weapons of mass destruction?”
“Those don’t really matter. We KNOW he has them. If he says he doesn’t, he’s lying and the weapons inspectors are incompetent.”
“If you know he’s lying, why don’t you give your evidence to the weapons inspectors?”
“We’d like to, but that would tip the Iraqis off to our intelligence sources. You’ll have to take our word for it.”
“Not meaning any disrespect,” I said, “but before we launch a war that will probably kill over 10,000 human beings, most of them poor Iraqi civilians, and further burden the U.S. economy with a war bill for over 190 billion dollars, when we say we don’t have enough money for health care and prescription drugs, I think we need something better than your word for it that something’s rotten in Iraq.”
Suddenly he stopped shuffling the shells. “Okay,” he said, “where’s the pea?”
He had taken me by surprise. I just stared at the shells. I didn’t have the slightest idea. Hesitating, I pointed to the one in the middle. Lifting it slowly to stretch out the suspense, he pointed to… nothing. “Sorry,” he said, grinning triumphantly. He lifted the shell on the right; there lay the pea. “You lose,” he said. “It’s war!”
The audience roared with laughter as I stumbled back down the steps. Bob met me at the bottom. “Boy, did he get you,” he chortled. “All the time the pea was whether it was right to go to war, and he got you to talking about one damned thing after another! Congressional resolutions. U.N. resolutions. Regime change. Inspection teams. He got you to where you didn’t know whether you were coming or going!”
“It’s just hard,” I said, “when he’s the one who’s always moving the shells.”
Bob grinned at me. “It’s a carnival,” he said. “What did you expect?”
© Tony Russell, 2002
Thursday, December 12, 2002
“Man Overboard!”
I’ve stuck my foot in my mouth so many times over the years that my wife thinks that’s how I polish my shoes. So I have a strange sympathy for Trent Lott, who, in a rare moment of unguarded honesty, spoke straight from his crooked little heart, and now finds himself a political pariah.
It’s too bad that reaction to Mr. Lott’s remarks honoring Strom Thurmond will focus on Mr. Lott himself, and ignore the whole class of Southern politicians who rode the racist bandwagon throughout their careers, jumping off only when it was clear that segregation was a losing position, and often jumping parties as well. When overt racism lost its respectability, the Republican Party built its southern strategy on covert racism, capitalizing on southern reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act. The party has succeeded, in the past three decades, in translating what was a solid Democratic bloc into a solid Republican bloc. The political abandonment of open segregation was a mass conversion unparalleled since Constantine’s vision at the Tiber. Like Constantine, they saw what it took to win.
The depth of their conversion has always been an open question. It’s hard not to think back to Jesse Helms’ campaign against Harvey Gant in North Carolina. Trailing in the final weeks, Helms didn’t hesitate to play his old race card. It worked; Helms won going away. Latent racism is an important asset, something this whole class of politicians counts on. The bubba vote knows in its heart that these men are still with them, even if they have to mouth moderate sentiments to maintain respectability. Mr. Lott simply forgot himself, speaking among friends.
My guess as to Lott’s future? I doubt he’ll become the new Majority Leader in January. The Bush team views government as a matter of manipulating public opinion about policy, and four-apologies-and-still-counting into the aftermath of Lott’s remarks, Lott looks less salvageable every day. Bush is trying to enlarge the Republican voter base by attracting suburban white women and Hispanic voters, and the last thing he needs is a reminder that the southern base of the party is still racist at its core. He and his supporters in the Senate will toss Lott overboard faster than an undersized bass when the game warden is walking down the dock.
© Tony Russell, 2002
It’s too bad that reaction to Mr. Lott’s remarks honoring Strom Thurmond will focus on Mr. Lott himself, and ignore the whole class of Southern politicians who rode the racist bandwagon throughout their careers, jumping off only when it was clear that segregation was a losing position, and often jumping parties as well. When overt racism lost its respectability, the Republican Party built its southern strategy on covert racism, capitalizing on southern reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act. The party has succeeded, in the past three decades, in translating what was a solid Democratic bloc into a solid Republican bloc. The political abandonment of open segregation was a mass conversion unparalleled since Constantine’s vision at the Tiber. Like Constantine, they saw what it took to win.
The depth of their conversion has always been an open question. It’s hard not to think back to Jesse Helms’ campaign against Harvey Gant in North Carolina. Trailing in the final weeks, Helms didn’t hesitate to play his old race card. It worked; Helms won going away. Latent racism is an important asset, something this whole class of politicians counts on. The bubba vote knows in its heart that these men are still with them, even if they have to mouth moderate sentiments to maintain respectability. Mr. Lott simply forgot himself, speaking among friends.
My guess as to Lott’s future? I doubt he’ll become the new Majority Leader in January. The Bush team views government as a matter of manipulating public opinion about policy, and four-apologies-and-still-counting into the aftermath of Lott’s remarks, Lott looks less salvageable every day. Bush is trying to enlarge the Republican voter base by attracting suburban white women and Hispanic voters, and the last thing he needs is a reminder that the southern base of the party is still racist at its core. He and his supporters in the Senate will toss Lott overboard faster than an undersized bass when the game warden is walking down the dock.
© Tony Russell, 2002
Thursday, September 26, 2002
“Why We’re Going to War with Iraq”
Sometimes I can’t think my way out of a revolving door. Yesterday was a prime example. I just haven’t been able to understand why we’re hell-bent on attacking Iraq, so I finally asked my buddy Joe Ragland, who’s a pretty good barbershop political scientist. “Joe,” I said, “I just don’t get it. Where’s the justification for invading Iraq?”
“What is it you don’t understand, good buddy?”
“The World Trade Center was destroyed by nineteen guys. Most of them were from Saudi Arabia, right?”
“Right.”
“So we blamed Osama bin Laden and attacked Afghanistan, right?”
“Right again.”
“But we don’t know what happened to bin Laden, whether he’s alive or dead, right?”
“Right.”
“So we have unfinished business with bin Laden. But Iraq didn’t have anything to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, right?”
“Right.”
“Iraq didn’t attack us, has no plans to attack us, and hasn’t threatened us, right?”
“Right.”
“So Bush wants to invade a country that didn’t attack us, has no plans to attack us, and hasn’t threatened us, right?”
“I suppose you could put it that way.”
“Joe,” I said, “does that seem right to you? I mean, isn’t it against the law or something? Hitting back when somebody hits you, sure, anybody would do that. And Saddam Hussein may be a rotten excuse for a human being. But we’ve sent money and guns and CIA agents to prop up the governments of some really despicable characters over the last fifty years. So what gives us the right to just decide we’re going to overthrow the government of another country?”
“Well, Ace,” he said, “I’ll give you this much. It’s true that a unilateral, unprovoked attack on Iraq would violate international law and the United Nations Charter, and be indefensible from a moral and religious standpoint.”
“But I don’t get it! If it’s illegal and immoral, and most of the rest of the civilized world is condemning it, and Congress is getting an overwhelming amount of mail opposing it, why does it sound like a done deal? Like it’s going to happen no matter what anybody says or does?”
“Ace,” he said, “grow up. Look at the facts of life. You can play psychologist and claim Bush wants to do it because his daddy didn’t finish the job. But the real story is that an administration bought, paid for, and staffed by giant energy corporations is slobbering all over itself to storm into Iraq and install a puppet government. Iraq has the second largest known oil reserves on the planet. The big oil companies would do anything to privatize that oil. Plus we’ll build permanent bases there that will allow us to intimidate the whole region. Britain will suck up to us and go along with anything we say because we’ll cut them in on the deal. We’ll buy, bribe, bully, or bulldoze anybody else who objects. You can do that when you’re the five hundred pound gorilla in the house. We’re the world’s only superpower, and if we want to take a walk on the wrong side of the street, who’s going to stop us?”
“But why would Congress and the public go along with something like that? I don’t think most Americans want our country to be the world’s biggest bully, or for our soldiers to die so big oil can get even richer.”
“Of course not,” he said. “So if you’re the administration, that’s not how you play it. You never mention oil. Perish the thought that something as lowdown as greed might be the motive for an invasion. You claim we’re at war, even though we’re not. You keep warning people of attacks that never take place. You keep ranting about “weapons of mass destruction,” as if we didn’t have any. You drape the flag over everything you do, and make it look unpatriotic to oppose the President. You get Congress to roll over and authorize a resolution that lets you do anything you want, and then tell them to fluff off. The Democrats, with the exception of Byrd, couldn’t muster a full backbone between them. It’s a done deal.”
“Joe,” I said, “I can’t believe it’s really that bad. You have to be cynical or sick to think things like that about the leaders of the free world.”
“Ace,” he said, “when they make you think that the only way to be a patriot is to be a sucker and like it, democracy is a memory.”
© Tony Russell, 2002
“What is it you don’t understand, good buddy?”
“The World Trade Center was destroyed by nineteen guys. Most of them were from Saudi Arabia, right?”
“Right.”
“So we blamed Osama bin Laden and attacked Afghanistan, right?”
“Right again.”
“But we don’t know what happened to bin Laden, whether he’s alive or dead, right?”
“Right.”
“So we have unfinished business with bin Laden. But Iraq didn’t have anything to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, right?”
“Right.”
“Iraq didn’t attack us, has no plans to attack us, and hasn’t threatened us, right?”
“Right.”
“So Bush wants to invade a country that didn’t attack us, has no plans to attack us, and hasn’t threatened us, right?”
“I suppose you could put it that way.”
“Joe,” I said, “does that seem right to you? I mean, isn’t it against the law or something? Hitting back when somebody hits you, sure, anybody would do that. And Saddam Hussein may be a rotten excuse for a human being. But we’ve sent money and guns and CIA agents to prop up the governments of some really despicable characters over the last fifty years. So what gives us the right to just decide we’re going to overthrow the government of another country?”
“Well, Ace,” he said, “I’ll give you this much. It’s true that a unilateral, unprovoked attack on Iraq would violate international law and the United Nations Charter, and be indefensible from a moral and religious standpoint.”
“But I don’t get it! If it’s illegal and immoral, and most of the rest of the civilized world is condemning it, and Congress is getting an overwhelming amount of mail opposing it, why does it sound like a done deal? Like it’s going to happen no matter what anybody says or does?”
“Ace,” he said, “grow up. Look at the facts of life. You can play psychologist and claim Bush wants to do it because his daddy didn’t finish the job. But the real story is that an administration bought, paid for, and staffed by giant energy corporations is slobbering all over itself to storm into Iraq and install a puppet government. Iraq has the second largest known oil reserves on the planet. The big oil companies would do anything to privatize that oil. Plus we’ll build permanent bases there that will allow us to intimidate the whole region. Britain will suck up to us and go along with anything we say because we’ll cut them in on the deal. We’ll buy, bribe, bully, or bulldoze anybody else who objects. You can do that when you’re the five hundred pound gorilla in the house. We’re the world’s only superpower, and if we want to take a walk on the wrong side of the street, who’s going to stop us?”
“But why would Congress and the public go along with something like that? I don’t think most Americans want our country to be the world’s biggest bully, or for our soldiers to die so big oil can get even richer.”
“Of course not,” he said. “So if you’re the administration, that’s not how you play it. You never mention oil. Perish the thought that something as lowdown as greed might be the motive for an invasion. You claim we’re at war, even though we’re not. You keep warning people of attacks that never take place. You keep ranting about “weapons of mass destruction,” as if we didn’t have any. You drape the flag over everything you do, and make it look unpatriotic to oppose the President. You get Congress to roll over and authorize a resolution that lets you do anything you want, and then tell them to fluff off. The Democrats, with the exception of Byrd, couldn’t muster a full backbone between them. It’s a done deal.”
“Joe,” I said, “I can’t believe it’s really that bad. You have to be cynical or sick to think things like that about the leaders of the free world.”
“Ace,” he said, “when they make you think that the only way to be a patriot is to be a sucker and like it, democracy is a memory.”
© Tony Russell, 2002
Monday, August 19, 2002
“Greed and Lead”
It had been a month or so since I’d been in Darrell’s health food store, and I’d been itching to see how his business was doing.
“Howdy, Darrell,” I said. “Got any sesame tahini hidden around here?”
“I’m fresh out,” he declared. “Had a big run on it. But I should be getting some more in on the truck tomorrow.”
“I guess I can wait. So how’s business?” I asked. “Still following the Enron model? All those ‘round trip’ sales to Wendell? Stock options to your auditing firm?”
“Those pikers!” he scoffed. “All they did was get filthy rich. I’ve got my sights set higher than that.”
That took me by surprise. “Just how high do you have in mind, Darrell?”
“The Big Cabin in Washington,” he announced proudly.
“The White House!” I said incredulously. “How in the world do you think you can pull that off?”
“The same way I’ve built this business,” he said. “Study the techniques of the masters, and then put the pedal to the metal.”
“So you’ve been studying …?”
“George W. Bush’s rise in the world.”
“I see. So you’re combining corporate business dealings and politics.”
“You’ve got it. ‘Greed and lead’.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I’m negotiating with a giant food distribution firm to buy me out at three times what this store is worth; they’re also giving me a seat on their Board of Directors and their auditing committee.”
“No offense, Darrell, but why would they want to buy a piddlin’ little outfit like this?”
“Because of my name and my connections, of course!”
“I know folks around here think a lot of your family, Darrell, but once you get beyond Leatherbark and Broomstick, I’m not sure a whole lot of people know who they are.”
“You’d be surprised. Daddy was president of the Back Fork Coonhunters Club for years, and when your daddy is president, it tends to open doors for you.”
“Say that’s true, for argument’s sake. What happens next?”
“Then I get a bargain-basement ‘loan’ from the company that I’ll never repay.
I use that to buy company stock. I sign an agreement that I won’t sell the stock for at least six months, but two months later, knowing that the stock is going to take a nosedive, I sell it at a huge profit, and use that money to buy into the Charleston Alley Cats. Then I get my buddies to maneuver the city into using $150,000,000 of taxpayers’ money to build me a new stadium. Then we sell the Alley Cats for three times what we paid for them to a guy I coincidentally just steered $9,000,000,000 of public assets to. My partners, who are all hardheaded businessmen, insist that, even though my share of the sale should only be $2.3 million, I just have to take $14.9 million. I’ll protest, but what can I do? So I start with nothing, really, and end up a multi-millionaire. Is this a great country or what?”
“That’s really inspiring, Darrell. It just goes to show what someone can do if they’re willing to work hard and play by the rules.”
© Tony Russell, 2002
“Howdy, Darrell,” I said. “Got any sesame tahini hidden around here?”
“I’m fresh out,” he declared. “Had a big run on it. But I should be getting some more in on the truck tomorrow.”
“I guess I can wait. So how’s business?” I asked. “Still following the Enron model? All those ‘round trip’ sales to Wendell? Stock options to your auditing firm?”
“Those pikers!” he scoffed. “All they did was get filthy rich. I’ve got my sights set higher than that.”
That took me by surprise. “Just how high do you have in mind, Darrell?”
“The Big Cabin in Washington,” he announced proudly.
“The White House!” I said incredulously. “How in the world do you think you can pull that off?”
“The same way I’ve built this business,” he said. “Study the techniques of the masters, and then put the pedal to the metal.”
“So you’ve been studying …?”
“George W. Bush’s rise in the world.”
“I see. So you’re combining corporate business dealings and politics.”
“You’ve got it. ‘Greed and lead’.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I’m negotiating with a giant food distribution firm to buy me out at three times what this store is worth; they’re also giving me a seat on their Board of Directors and their auditing committee.”
“No offense, Darrell, but why would they want to buy a piddlin’ little outfit like this?”
“Because of my name and my connections, of course!”
“I know folks around here think a lot of your family, Darrell, but once you get beyond Leatherbark and Broomstick, I’m not sure a whole lot of people know who they are.”
“You’d be surprised. Daddy was president of the Back Fork Coonhunters Club for years, and when your daddy is president, it tends to open doors for you.”
“Say that’s true, for argument’s sake. What happens next?”
“Then I get a bargain-basement ‘loan’ from the company that I’ll never repay.
I use that to buy company stock. I sign an agreement that I won’t sell the stock for at least six months, but two months later, knowing that the stock is going to take a nosedive, I sell it at a huge profit, and use that money to buy into the Charleston Alley Cats. Then I get my buddies to maneuver the city into using $150,000,000 of taxpayers’ money to build me a new stadium. Then we sell the Alley Cats for three times what we paid for them to a guy I coincidentally just steered $9,000,000,000 of public assets to. My partners, who are all hardheaded businessmen, insist that, even though my share of the sale should only be $2.3 million, I just have to take $14.9 million. I’ll protest, but what can I do? So I start with nothing, really, and end up a multi-millionaire. Is this a great country or what?”
“That’s really inspiring, Darrell. It just goes to show what someone can do if they’re willing to work hard and play by the rules.”
© Tony Russell, 2002
Saturday, August 17, 2002
“Stormin’ German”
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said today that war with the United States is “inevitable.” “We have undeniable proof that American ruler George Bush possesses weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear and biological weapons, as well as the means to deliver them,” he declared. Schroeder pointed to the belligerent nature of the Bush regime, calling it “a rogue state which poses an immediate threat to its neighbors and the region,” and repeatedly called for “a regime change.”
Germany has long suspected the U.S. of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction in facilities carefully masked from public and international view. Schroeder demanded that the U.S. allow teams of “weapons inspectors” unlimited access at once to sites anywhere in the country where weapons of mass destruction might be manufactured, stored, or concealed. American ruler George Bush denounced this as an intolerable infringement of U.S. sovereignty.
Schroeder went on to accuse the U.S. of long supporting terrorism on a global scale, citing its invasions of Panama, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and numerous other “incursions,” as well as attempts to overthrow democratically elected governments throughout the world, most notably in Chile and Nicaragua, and most recently in Venezuela. A notorious arm of the U.S. secret police, known as the CIA, has conducted clandestine operations involving disinformation, torture, and political assassination on a continent-wide scale. Schroeder also cited Bush’s contempt for and mistreatment of his own people, including Native American minorities concentrated on so-called “reservations” in the western part of the country, and immigrant groups settled in many large cities.
As evidence of the regime’s “rogue status,” he pointed to America’s attempt to scuttle an anti-torture protocol in the United Nations Economic and Social Council because of Bush administration interest in torturing captives it suspects of terrorism. The Bush administration is also attempting to derail an international treaty on the rights of women, and has “unsigned” the treaty creating the International Criminal Court, announcing it has no intention of ever honoring the treaty. Schroeder noted that nearly every other government on the planet has denounced the American action, including not only America’s former allies in Europe, but Canada, Mexico, and Costa Rica, speaking on behalf of most of Latin America.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in another widely reported speech, declared that “Doing nothing is not an option.” “It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ there will be a war with the U.S.,” he said, “but ‘when.’”
In an attempt to demonstrate that an overthrow of Bush would be welcomed by his own citizens, Germany recently hosted a gathering of representatives from American opposition groups. The meeting was rebuffed by a number of opposition leaders, but included Joseph Lieberman from the Democratic Party, Ralph Nader from the Green Party, Ross Perot from the Reform Party, and other figures such as Jesse Ventura and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Infighting broke out among the group, and it is unclear if any of them commands enough of a following within the U.S. to be installed as leader of the interim government should Germany succeed in deposing Bush.
There is virtually no international support for the German attempt to manufacture a war with the U.S., and Germany would have to both man and fund an invasion of American territory entirely on its own. Even members of the Chancellor’s own Social Democratic Party (SPD) have voiced hesitation over Schroeder’s seeming determination to have a war. They point out that launching an attack against a country that has not committed any aggressive act toward Germany puts Germany in the untenable position of an international bully. They question what the ultimate cost will be for a sustained military offensive and military presence (i.e., occupation) in the U.S., at a time when the German budget is already running heavily in the red. They also question how the Chancellor can drag the country into war when the German constitution details that right to the Bundestag.
© Tony Russell, 2002
Germany has long suspected the U.S. of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction in facilities carefully masked from public and international view. Schroeder demanded that the U.S. allow teams of “weapons inspectors” unlimited access at once to sites anywhere in the country where weapons of mass destruction might be manufactured, stored, or concealed. American ruler George Bush denounced this as an intolerable infringement of U.S. sovereignty.
Schroeder went on to accuse the U.S. of long supporting terrorism on a global scale, citing its invasions of Panama, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and numerous other “incursions,” as well as attempts to overthrow democratically elected governments throughout the world, most notably in Chile and Nicaragua, and most recently in Venezuela. A notorious arm of the U.S. secret police, known as the CIA, has conducted clandestine operations involving disinformation, torture, and political assassination on a continent-wide scale. Schroeder also cited Bush’s contempt for and mistreatment of his own people, including Native American minorities concentrated on so-called “reservations” in the western part of the country, and immigrant groups settled in many large cities.
As evidence of the regime’s “rogue status,” he pointed to America’s attempt to scuttle an anti-torture protocol in the United Nations Economic and Social Council because of Bush administration interest in torturing captives it suspects of terrorism. The Bush administration is also attempting to derail an international treaty on the rights of women, and has “unsigned” the treaty creating the International Criminal Court, announcing it has no intention of ever honoring the treaty. Schroeder noted that nearly every other government on the planet has denounced the American action, including not only America’s former allies in Europe, but Canada, Mexico, and Costa Rica, speaking on behalf of most of Latin America.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in another widely reported speech, declared that “Doing nothing is not an option.” “It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ there will be a war with the U.S.,” he said, “but ‘when.’”
In an attempt to demonstrate that an overthrow of Bush would be welcomed by his own citizens, Germany recently hosted a gathering of representatives from American opposition groups. The meeting was rebuffed by a number of opposition leaders, but included Joseph Lieberman from the Democratic Party, Ralph Nader from the Green Party, Ross Perot from the Reform Party, and other figures such as Jesse Ventura and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Infighting broke out among the group, and it is unclear if any of them commands enough of a following within the U.S. to be installed as leader of the interim government should Germany succeed in deposing Bush.
There is virtually no international support for the German attempt to manufacture a war with the U.S., and Germany would have to both man and fund an invasion of American territory entirely on its own. Even members of the Chancellor’s own Social Democratic Party (SPD) have voiced hesitation over Schroeder’s seeming determination to have a war. They point out that launching an attack against a country that has not committed any aggressive act toward Germany puts Germany in the untenable position of an international bully. They question what the ultimate cost will be for a sustained military offensive and military presence (i.e., occupation) in the U.S., at a time when the German budget is already running heavily in the red. They also question how the Chancellor can drag the country into war when the German constitution details that right to the Bundestag.
© Tony Russell, 2002
Sunday, July 21, 2002
“Me Overweight?”
My annual physical was yesterday. Doc Ramsey just looked at me and shook his head. “Scoop,” he said, “you’re carrying at least double the weight recommended for your height and frame. You should be at 160, and you’re packing almost 350 pounds around. It’s hard on you, and it’s hard on anybody you might run into, too.”
“Doc,” I said, “what’s the problem? I’ve been running the roads with 350, sometimes even 400 pounds, depending on what kind of bedtime snacks I’ve been munching lately. I need the extra weight. My body’s adapted to it; it’s a comfortable weight for me.”
“Don’t try to shit a shitter, Scoop,” he said. “You’ve got cholesterol and triglyceride levels higher than Tiny Tim’s falsetto. Has anybody tried putting you on a diet before?”
I laughed. “Doc, dozens of doctors have given me handouts with diets on them, but I just wadded them up and threw them in the trash. Nobody ever checked back to see how I was doing on their diet; I just figured they weren’t serious about it.”
“Well I’m serious about it,” he said. “Your wife has called at least a dozen times to tell me I need to get on you to cut your weight. I’m tired of picking up the phone and having Patty scream in my ear.”
“You think you’re tired of listening to her,” I said. “Listen, Doc, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we have a weight-control team evaluate my case and make a recommendation to you?”
“Where are you coming from, Scoop? What good would that do?”
“Just hear me out, Doc,” I said. “It’ll solve everything. I’ve got some buddies at the health care center. You name them to the weight-control team. They take six months to review my medical records; then they recommend a compromise. No more 400 pounds for me; it’s 350 tops. I weigh in once a month at your office. If I go over 350, you take me off beer and potato chips until I’m back under the wire. I’m happy. Patty can’t call and complain, because it’s all official, so you’re happy. It’s a win-win situation.”
He just looked at me. “Are you completely bonkers?” he said. “No honest medical professional could go along with a scheme like that! Do you know what your life expectancy is at 350 pounds?”
“It may be short, but it sure is sweet,” I said. “In fact, I’ve got friends from Kentucky waiting to see if I can pull this off. They can’t wait to get in on the scam!”
© Tony Russell, 2002
“Doc,” I said, “what’s the problem? I’ve been running the roads with 350, sometimes even 400 pounds, depending on what kind of bedtime snacks I’ve been munching lately. I need the extra weight. My body’s adapted to it; it’s a comfortable weight for me.”
“Don’t try to shit a shitter, Scoop,” he said. “You’ve got cholesterol and triglyceride levels higher than Tiny Tim’s falsetto. Has anybody tried putting you on a diet before?”
I laughed. “Doc, dozens of doctors have given me handouts with diets on them, but I just wadded them up and threw them in the trash. Nobody ever checked back to see how I was doing on their diet; I just figured they weren’t serious about it.”
“Well I’m serious about it,” he said. “Your wife has called at least a dozen times to tell me I need to get on you to cut your weight. I’m tired of picking up the phone and having Patty scream in my ear.”
“You think you’re tired of listening to her,” I said. “Listen, Doc, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we have a weight-control team evaluate my case and make a recommendation to you?”
“Where are you coming from, Scoop? What good would that do?”
“Just hear me out, Doc,” I said. “It’ll solve everything. I’ve got some buddies at the health care center. You name them to the weight-control team. They take six months to review my medical records; then they recommend a compromise. No more 400 pounds for me; it’s 350 tops. I weigh in once a month at your office. If I go over 350, you take me off beer and potato chips until I’m back under the wire. I’m happy. Patty can’t call and complain, because it’s all official, so you’re happy. It’s a win-win situation.”
He just looked at me. “Are you completely bonkers?” he said. “No honest medical professional could go along with a scheme like that! Do you know what your life expectancy is at 350 pounds?”
“It may be short, but it sure is sweet,” I said. “In fact, I’ve got friends from Kentucky waiting to see if I can pull this off. They can’t wait to get in on the scam!”
© Tony Russell, 2002
Monday, July 15, 2002
“No Mistake”
An Army spokesman today angrily denied claims by Mountain State residents that as many as 48 innocent civilians were killed, and 117 injured, in a July incident. “Our aircraft have repeatedly come under fire from anti-aircraft weapons in and around Ripley,” said Maj. Gary A. Pologist. “This was a precise military action against a carefully-selected military target.”
Residents of Ripley claim that they were celebrating the country’s birthday, and that fireworks, both formal displays and random informal displays, were the only rockets being fired from the ground. The town was crowded for an Independence Day visit from President Bush, and the attack by a helicopter gunship sent thousands scurrying for cover. The President himself was not injured, and is reported to have thought that the explosions were part of the elaborate welcome celebration local dignitaries had planned.
Maj. Pologist said that the Army had sent a team of investigators to the site of the alleged incident, and they could find no credible evidence that innocent victims had perished in the attack. “We sent in a team of highly-trained forensic experts for three days,” he said, “and they found nothing that would substantiate these rumors.” However, an Associated Press reporter wandering around town yesterday says that a dozen people he met on the street conducted him to a local cemetery and showed him numerous mounds of freshly-disturbed dirt which, in his words, “certainly had the appearance of newly-dug graves.”
Gov. Wise has demanded that Army officials clear any future strikes with his office, a demand rejected by the Army. “Such a policy would severely restrict our ability to respond to terrorism with the swiftness and flexibility that anti-terrorism action requires,” said the spokesman.
© Tony Russell, 2002
Residents of Ripley claim that they were celebrating the country’s birthday, and that fireworks, both formal displays and random informal displays, were the only rockets being fired from the ground. The town was crowded for an Independence Day visit from President Bush, and the attack by a helicopter gunship sent thousands scurrying for cover. The President himself was not injured, and is reported to have thought that the explosions were part of the elaborate welcome celebration local dignitaries had planned.
Maj. Pologist said that the Army had sent a team of investigators to the site of the alleged incident, and they could find no credible evidence that innocent victims had perished in the attack. “We sent in a team of highly-trained forensic experts for three days,” he said, “and they found nothing that would substantiate these rumors.” However, an Associated Press reporter wandering around town yesterday says that a dozen people he met on the street conducted him to a local cemetery and showed him numerous mounds of freshly-disturbed dirt which, in his words, “certainly had the appearance of newly-dug graves.”
Gov. Wise has demanded that Army officials clear any future strikes with his office, a demand rejected by the Army. “Such a policy would severely restrict our ability to respond to terrorism with the swiftness and flexibility that anti-terrorism action requires,” said the spokesman.
© Tony Russell, 2002
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