In Flight

Artichoke Circus

2007-10-03T00:04:00.000+01:00

(and unresolved dilemmas)

Before Ductape died (for my part I think he is dead and I miss him greatly) he and I were writing something together. For this last year, I’ve been unsure what to do with it. On the one hand, it was part of a correspondence which is clearly private. On the other, it was also a collaboration within that correspondence which both of us had intended to be read by others when it was eventually completed. It wasn’t complete last September. But nor did it break off abruptly: we had got stuck a while before that.

We had encountered changes that needed making and some basic questions that needed answering before we could keep on writing. And events intervened. The Lebanon was being bombed. In retrospect, I think Ductape's health was failing. Also I was not writing much: La belle dame had dropped by and words had become dangerous creatures.

But I think that perhaps had circumstances been otherwise, we might eventually have found a way out of our narrative difficulties. Counterfactuals. As it was, they weren't, we didn’t and I don’t want to change what was written now, since I think some parts of it may be among the last things he wrote. Though not the last.

It’s hard (at least I've found it hard) to know what to do with words that have, if only by default, been entrusted to your keeping, but which – at least at some point – were intended to be read by more than one pair of eyes. I thought about what to do about this over the last year, but have reached no conclusion: I still don’t know whether this is a betrayal of trust or not. We didn’t -- and in particular Ductape didn’t – think that it was finished. But I cannot fix or finish it by myself and some of you were his friends, the people for whom he wrote.

So.

If parts seem clumsy or inept, they are almost certainly mine since Ductape didn't do clumsy or inept.

Artichoke Circus.

Where did I find this place? In a memory. Look see? Over here.
A dubious pause and a raised eyebrow.
"Well it's a good enough place to meet isn't it? A place that is no place at all. One can come and go, traceless. Singularly apropos."

You follow the voice over to a rather distressed looking picnic table, there in what passes for a park for the kids to run around during the day, letting off steam. It's darker here, away from the floodlit carpark, from the loglo of McDs and Burger King. The air smells of oil and fumes. Beneath that, the smell of stale cooking fat and old fries. Yet catch that midsummer breeze in just the right way and there's a hint of something not yet vanquished, not yet destroyed utterly.

"Like Ithilien" she mutters beneath her breath, "Yes. This is my memory of it."

Her companion does not hear. He is preoccupied with the discovery of a fire fly, and its periodic hopefully-green glowing.

"What's it's name?" he says, looking up.
"It doesn't have one. But we called it the United States of Generica. "

Out on the highway a military convoy trundles through the night.

"So." she says, "What shall we discuss on this shortest night? Manifest Destiny? The End of Empire?

"Is there a difference?" the old man asks, smiling down at the firefly, with whom he has made friends. It perches comfortably on his finger, blinking companionably in the gathering dusk.

"In their ends, I mean," he eyes his DoodleBurger skeptically. "They have always been symbiotic, like conjoined twins that cannot be separated, that live only a short time, though to their parents, it seems an eternity. The fact is, we are all just people. There is no Master Race, no Manifest Destiny, no Empire. These are more truly fairy tales than fairies and goblins and enchanted forests. Although unlike the fairies and the enchanted forests, they call forth the worst that is in us, worse even than the mischievous goblins."

He nods farewell to the firefly, who makes its blinking way off into the sky, and takes a hesitantbite of the DoodleBurger, nods approvingly. "Good. They remembered the extra pickles."

"I suspect I'd need more pickles still," she replies grinning, picking lazily at a strawberry parfait. Lifting her spoon, She raises an eyebrow towards her companion.

“We are all just people?There is no Master Race, no Manifest Destiny, no Empire?” These things, then, are mere chimeras. Figments of a feverish brain, of paranoid imagining? Will-o-wisps we have been chasing through a forest to our boggy doom.” She smiles. “Windmills. Not giants after all.”

She pushes the half-finished parfait aside, not before having extracted, with care, one last strawberry, though not the last. And looks at her companion seriously.

“In that case, all of our rejections and denials (flawed though they doubtless have been), all our disruptions, disputations and dissolutions (morally compromised to their core though they may be) – all have been truly full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Harsh words hurled at an imagined foe.”

“I wish that were so. I would like to die happy. But it is not. We are not just people.“

She pauses for a moment as a security guard makes her round of the car park.

“We are people, yes,” she continues quietly, once the guard is out of earshot,
“but we are also the things that people make. And to our great misfortune, Master Races, Manifest Destinies and Empires have been among these made things.”

“And are we not so neatly caught between truth and falsehood? For if these things are to be unmade again, we must deny them existence, we must reject them utterly and steadily. Yet if we simply deny their existence – if we say all innocent and unawares, “Oh but there is no such thing as Empire! The Master Race? Who are they? I never heard of them before!” then whether our innocence is sincere or feigned, we cannot help but make invisible its consequences, its damage done.”

She looks around the carpark again. The security guard has resumed her post outside Burger King, on the other side of the lot. A worn, sharp vegetable knife has materialised on the table between them. She shakes her head. “Another memory.” She picks it up and rests it carefully in her left hand flat across her palm, fingers folding up and closely over the blade.

“It is tempting to imagine that they do not exist, that these things that people make are in some sense not real because they are made and can therefore be unmade. The knife is relatively simple to regard as real, it is material. We can see it, touch it, guess what its effects might be. From here in Generica? Though no less material, perhaps it is true that Empire is not so visible here as elsewhere. But that – as you observed to Alex – is only because in the eye of the hurricane, there is no wind.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, she puts the knife down between them. “So. What is to be done?” she asks. "How may we escape this snare?"

"Well, yes, they exist in the same way that fat exists on the butt of an insecure and slender young girl, gazing into her mirror."

The old man decides not to tell his companion that those are not strawberries, but chunked and formed vegetable protein, not unlike the DoodleBurger itself, only the extrusion settings are different.

"And so I suppose we make arguments against them for the same reasons we try to reason with the young girl."

The firefly has returned. It seems to like the old man. Or maybe it is hoping for a crumb of DoodleBurger. If so, its hopes are beyond rewarded, as his benefactor decides he has more than achieved his textured vegetable protein requirement for the day,and lays the dubious sandwich down, only a few bites eaten."It is our destiny to fight phantoms," he muses. "All those things that don't exist, with which we seek to destroy ourselves."

He pulls a pair of glasses from a pocket in his garment. His distance lenses. He puts them on and gazes out across the parking lot, and is caught by a billboard "WORLD'S BIGGEST ARTICHOKES KIDS AND SENIORS FREE.""Do you like artichokes?" he asks, pointing at the billboard. "I am a senior." He looks around for a few more seconds, and apparently decides he has had enough distance vision, replaces the glasses.

"The girl, you see, will starve herself. She will pretend nothing is wrong, and eat her meals, but vomit them up in secret. She will do this until one day her mother catches her unawares, in her underclothes, and sees the bony shoulders, the ribs like a concentrationcamp photo, and then, if it is not too late, the whole family will live around the cause of saving her life. But even in the hospital, hooked to her IV pole, when she looks in the mirror, she will see a fat butt.

So it is with Empire, so it is with Manifest Destiny.Just a bunch of white people who think their butts are fat. At least in this particular century, it's white people. A while back it was Persians."He looks quite old enough to have been witness, possibly participant, in events "a while back," but it is with remarkable agility that he springs up from the plastic table, after murmuring his farewell to the firefly in some ancient (or not) language."Let's go see those artichokes!" He rubs his hands together in anticipation, licks his lips. "I hope they will have lemon butter!"

She too gets up, casting a brief surreptitious glance at her backside, choosing a moment when her companion’s attention appears to be fully fixed upon the possibility of artichokes. “But it is fat, there’s just no getting around it.” she thinks ruefully. She shakes herself. After all, there are worse things. She’s not hooked up to an IV. The trick is to try and see clearly what is there, fat or no fat, ghosts or no ghosts. Or both, even, depending on which of one’s mismatched eyes one peers through.

"Looks like it’s still open” she says, staring out across the car park in the late twilight. “See, there’s lights on and they’ve got seats out on the verandah. This wasn’t here last time.”

She picks up the knife – “In case we have to cut the prickly ends off the leaves. Or that pithy stuff” she explains, tucking it out of sight. “I love artichokes. Especially with garlic, but lemon would be good too.”

As they amble across the car park, she regales him with a tale of the time she learned to distinguish between anchovies, artichokes and garbage disposal units and why the remnants of the second should never, ever, be put into the third.

“Green. Stringy. Stuff. Everywhere. ” she concludes, grimacing. “Who’d have thought one artichoke could have so much of it? .”

Taking a seat at a wooden table on the verandah, they take turns looking at a menu and discover a broad assortment of artichoke-devouring options, several of which require thoughtful and detailed investigation, consumption and comparison.

“So it is with Manifest Destiny so it is with Empire – yes, I think that we agree. But listen,” she thinks aloud, as they sit there, replete with artichoke in many delicious forms, contemplating the deep blue evening sky, “The girl on the IV, surrounded by her loving family – she will not recover, I think. She may linger but she will not live, until she sees what is there, the delusion, that it is a delusion, and the harm she does by acting on it. Until she sees that, she will not see a need to end it. And where will she learn to see? And how?

“We may reason with her – as you said – tell her that she is, in fact, not only slender but dangerously emaciated. We may place the mirror before her face. We may drag her from her bed to measure her height, weigh her body and show her the BMI index, but what she will hear is that we, being fat, lazy and undisciplined are jealous of her determination, her self-control, her wholehearted desire to be thin, her willingness to do whatever it takes to reach that goal. Her single-mindedness. And if we acknowledge this as well – if we say to her that this – our fat, lazy and undisciplined jealousy of your determination – is what she will hear when we say this and it this is a predictable symptom of this illness? Well, sophistry can be added to that list easily enough.”

“I remember sitting in a room with someone who had once been a friend, holding my hands tightly together so that I would not hit her with them and realising for the first time that although I had the strength to bodily pick her up and hurl her to the other end of the room – and for that matter, the necessary rage to make such a choice seem attractive – it was not in my power to move her conscience one single inch.”

And so beloved ancestor, with the irritating persistence of an uncooperative and childish descendant sitting in the back seat of a car, asking every two minutes “Are we there yet?” I shall repeat my question: what is to be done?

He gestures to indicate that he cannot answer just yet, he is still finishing up his Artichokes Rockefeller, wondering whether there really is a difference between anchovies and garbage disposals, he is not fond of either. He smiles to himself as best he can, under the artichoke-stuffed circumstances, at the array of empty dishes at the girl's place, waiting to be collected.

Woman, he corrects himself, but he cannot help but think of her as a child, when they cross busy streets, he takes her hand protectively in his own, careful to let her think she is assisting his aged self make the journey safely.

He is glad to see her eat. She is too thin. "How to move a conscience," he finally mumbles, almost to himself. "There really should be a pamphlet orsomething. A website. With easy steps and a diagram." "I think it is like teaching," he continues, pushing back his dish, reluctantly acknowledging that he has reached his personal limit of artichoke consumption, and a bit concerned that his astonishing capacity for same may cause the restaurant's management to revise their "SENIORS FREE" policy, at least on the All-U-Can-Eat buffet.

"No one ever teaches anyone anything, really. You just make the resources available and sit back and watch them learn."

"Where y'all from?" asks the cashier as the girl - the woman - hands her a plastic card. "Y'all ain't from round here," she pops her bubblegum to emphasize her remarkable perceptive powers. "Yourn's free, youknow," she shouts at the old man, unaware that at this moment, he can hear the slurp as a child over at the BurgerDoodle finishes his WildBerryFreeze. "Seniors is free," she explains to the woman, voice lowered to a normal decibel level, swiping the plastic card through a machine, waiting for another machine, somewhere, to respond, and agree that the impressively low sum of $7.99 US may be safely deducted from or charged to, yet another machine somewhere else.

"You know who he looks like?" she asks conversationally, as they all wait for the hiss and clicks that will indicate that the electronic question and answer session has concluded,

"He looks like the feller they got on the television set, th'terst, you know, that blew up the nine-a-leven? With all them people in it? Oh I know he ain't, he's way too old, plus he's one o' th' nice ones. I c'n tell th' nice ones." She leans toward the old man, grins. "You ain't fixin t' blow up nothin', is ya?" she shouts.

"Could we have some bubble gum like yours?" the old man places a coin on the counter, takes the little squares from her astonished hand. It jumps at his touch, as if from an electric shock.

"He speaks English real good." The cashier is, after all, a professional, who must be able to recover quickly from shocks to the system. "You speak English real good," she shouts in the direction of the old man's ear. He inclines his head to her graciously. "You will permit me to return the compliment."

Sometimes we must lie to be kind, he thinks to himself, as they settle into the car, leaving the cashier to stare at her hand where the ancient fingers brushed it as they took the gum, as if looking for some kind of mark.

"Pay-gy," she calls to a waitress, " You got smora them pills like you gimme that night Misty got th' po-leesecalled on Dwayne?" Peggy nods obligingly and goes off to get her purse. The cashier looks as if she might burst into tears.

"So it is with moving consciences. We cannot do it, they must move themselves. At best, we can make vehicles available." The old man blows a bubble and pops it, quite pleased with himself, undisturbed by the fact that he is no match for his companion's skills in this department.

"The Americans like to say, you know, that Uncle Tom's Cabin changed peoples' hearts, and was the real catalyst for the re-framing of slavery. Even Abraham Lincoln himself is alleged to have indicated as much to Ms. Stowe. But I think this is a myth. The real reasons were economic, as they always are. But the public is always encouraged to attribute such things to something less mundane, more emotionally uplifting, a book, Gandhiji, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. King, Nelson Mandela. Not to take away from any of them. All were the vehicles for moving many consciences, and this is a good thing. But we must not deceive ourselves, and if we look about Soweto today, or the projects a few miles from Dr. King's tomb, if we leave the big city and observe the plight of Dalits in almost any village, we must acknowledge that on the whole, only a small percentage of consciences have been moved."

An open thread!

2007-03-09T22:58:00.000Z

"Choking on the ashes of our enemies" is a phrase I've had in my head for a while, perhaps because I do bear grudges.

There was a Yoko Ono piece -- it was part of a book of performance pieces that I read a long time ago: a little book of instructions though not of the saccharine type.

It said something along the lines of, "Go sit by a river and wait. Sooner or later, the heads of your enemies will floating by." Some rivers even have comfortable benches along their banks where one can sit and eat sandwiches while one waits.

I suppose I've been thinking of that phrase "Choking on the ashes of our enemies" in the context of the empire and its inversions: the colonies. Certainly it is true that imperialism begets resistance: that those of us who try to find a place in resistance are in a sense Empire's estranged offspring, its changlings, its cuckoos in the next. But I've been thinking of Said too and his firm conviction that despite the pen much in its hand, despite its efforts to persuade us that it has defined every inch of us, that we are not creatures to be explained solely in terms of our oppositional relationship to empire (to the extent we manage one). That we don't necessarily have to be rebellious offspring, but could be cuckoos and changlings instead. That we are something else beside -- not simply creatures of imperial make.

And I guess I've been thinking about that whole macrocosm/microcosm thing.

Not coming to many conclusions. Just thinking. And looking forward to hearing Nanette's thoughts on absolute freedom of speech.

How to break a silence

2007-02-05T22:32:00.000Z

How to break a silence?
Shatter it like glass?
Crunch it underfoot like a snail trodden on by mistake?
Pretend it didn’t exist, like a cat sidling back after a week (months?) spent tomming about the neighbourhood?

The last is tempting, but doesn’t seem quite right. So.
Silence? Yes.
Meaningful silence? No.
Sometimes things acquire their own momentum.
I didn’t mean to be away this long.

La belle dame dropped by for a few months. That’s not such a big deal, but it is among the reasons I’ve not been around much except in an very occasional ‘Hi. I’m still alive.” kind of way. She started packing her bags back around the end of October, and I think she may be finally out the door again for now.

Hard to tell. That’s what I thought a while ago, but she ended up staying a while longer. She’s a tedious houseguest and I don’t much enjoy her company.

Outwaiting her requires three things: memory, indifference and distraction.

Memory is the hardest. When she has her hooks in you, it can be difficult to recollect that she has loosed her hold before and may do so again. Memory and a touchingly irrational faith in induction.

Indifference is by far the easiest, though there’s little to be said about it. Or rather, there’s too much to be said about it and sometimes less is more.

Distraction is the most interesting. Absorbing, anyway. Some decent work gets done when la belle dame comes by, but little of it involves writing. Language, or at least producing language, becomes something best avoided. Reading is safe enough. That’s a kind of burying oneself in other people’s thoughts and lives, but writing is different.

When I was a musician, I used to spend lots of time practicing and doing technical exercises when she came by. Spatial things also work. Complex and addictive games which (though trivial in themselves) require concentration and attention to detail and possess their own internal logic that bears little resemblance to the external. Immersing oneself in datasets (or in voluminous masses of qualitative data, for that matter) – also works and is quite a good guilt-free alternative. Anything that involves obsessively looking for patterns in a massy morass of information that is messy, complicated and enough to absorb all of one’s attention.

(It is a little disconcerting just how much of my life – even when la belle dame is not about – is organised around having such things readily to hand, just in case. Other, more well-adjusted individuals have security blankets or teddy bears.)

How to describe that wordless world? It’s not like much of anything. One does not inhabit it as a person, but rather as a kind of machine. Cartesian dualism is out of fashion (for good reasons even), but it does accord so very neatly with experience. For there are no experiences to be had there. That world does not lend itself to discrete memories or to emotion. It is not a place where life happens, though sometimes it is a place where certain kinds of knowledge are produced.

If it reminds me of anything, it is of swimming in the ocean on a choppy day, in the wind and rain. When one swims underwater, the chop, the rain, the wind are all happening somewhere up there, but not to you. Not while you’re immersed, though, certainly there are consequences to remaining beneath the surface forever. Seachanges and whatnot.

Anyway. Enough. Tedious topics for troubled times.

I haven’t been writing, but I have been – well lurking and reading both. In latter days the former has been providing moments of unintended comedy (well, bitter farce, anyway - I never was too good at telling the difference), and moments (hours even!!) of déjà vu. And sympathy for those who have been dragged around this particular merry-go-round once more.

The latter means that I am in the fortunate position of having read some really good books, though I’m only going to mention two here.

Go read The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. In terms of form, it’s the most elegant thing I’ve seen since Black Orchid . Sheer brilliance. Parables of the Cold War played out in a down-at-heel seamy post-Soviet Moscow. Sparse, austere and terse. Go. Read.

At least over here, The Day Watch is now out as well.

Bonnie Honig has a book out (and has had for a while) called Democracy and the Foreigner . It’s a clever book which suggests that relations between democracy and foreignness can be read as gothic romance. Definitely worth a look – it’s an intriguing book and she’s a fine writer.

I miss DTF a great deal. At first I had thought he might just be on hiatus, but it’s a while ago now since I stopped thinking that. Which should really be a whole post of its own. And will be. Except.

Transmutations

2006-10-31T23:36:00.000Z

Tonight will be a dangerously in-between time. The leaves are still green on the trees but the evenings are cold and it is dark by five. Tonight will be a night for making sure no lights are visible to the street and leaving knocks at the door unanswered. Tonight the cat will stay inside no matter what.

There are the dead and then there are the living, but how can they be told apart? Well yes, the dead ones are supposed to be ashes, under the ground, or carefully labelled parts in crypts. Occasionally suffering a sea change is also acceptable. But that’s what is supposed to happen. It doesn’t always.

I mean look at me. Am I the woman I once was?
No.
I don’t think so either.

Even the memories are those of a stranger: a remote assemblage of things that happened some place else a long time ago to a casual acquaintance who subsequently drifted out of touch as such acquaintances do. When did she move out? And who or what moved in instead?

No. Those questions are too disingenuously innocent. When did I kill her off? Why? And how did I end up inheriting the body? Why isn’t it safely underground or decently scattered ashes?

None of which I say to the woman sitting opposite me. I fear I made a mistake when I let her inside. But when we were children we were good friends. So what else could I do?

“It’s all so shamelessly self-indulgent” she continues smoothly without pause (and I must confess that I have lost all track of what she is saying or how long she has been saying it), “Just like recounting dreams. That too is fascinating to the dreamer (and why shouldn’t it be?) but so interminably tedious for those forced to listen to endless recitations of “and then suddenly I realised that I wasn’t naked in my old high school auditorium at all, but stuck in Euston Station with the train just pulling out. What do you think it all means? Do you think it was about S-E-X?” She pulls a quizzical face, exaggeratedly wide-eyed.

“No,” she replies sharply to her imagined interlocutor, “It’s about being an unutterable B-O-R-E!” She sighs. “I’m probably not really cut out for this whole dream analysis schtick,” she says, “but the money is good.”

I shift in my seat wondering if I should try for a word in edgewise. I think she should leave now. I thought she was leaving already. The taxi to the airport has been called but it seems to be taking forever to arrive. Me? I just want my life back.

“Anyway” I think irritably to myself, “I never dreamed things like that. All my life – and hers too – I dreamed of two things: journeys and deaths. Both of them my own.”

There is no describing the country of those journeys: it is beautiful and it is terrible and it is home. To describe the deaths that find me there would miss the point. Yes. They are nightmares but I hated to wake. Though it is perhaps amusing that the means by which I sometimes met death never once coincided with those which I used, from time to time, to seek it out.

Oh yes. That’s what she was saying was self-indulgent. Talk about full circle. Her sister and the saga of finding the right doctor and the right medication and the right dosage and the right talking treatment and why doesn't she just get over herself already and stop being so interminably B-O-R-I-N-G and it was just like her clients and they were just as bad.

But there are no bottles of pills in my kitchen cupboard: there have not been for some years now. And I do not drive. Were my arms bare today (though why would they be on such a clammy chill evening?) there would be no scars or scratches at which to be alarmed, though the particularly observant might note bruises that looked recent. And these last few years it is true that I have developed a seemingly unquenchable thirst for solitude.

She, on the other hand, is infinitely more garrulous and more brittle. Her expressions, so vivid on the face, never once reach the eyes. She speaks words spun out of glass at shattering point.

Outside the taxi pulls up. Finally.

“Anyway – so lovely to see you again! When are you coming out next? I know. I know. It’s a long flight. But when you do go home, do come and stay with me!” she says as the taxi pulls up. “I didn’t really mean that about my sister. I do love her really. She just doesn’t seem herself any more. And I shouldn’t bitch about about my clients – hope I didn’t bore you – but there’s something so liberating about just cutting loose and letting it all hang out. It’s such a release, you know? Cathartic!”

“That’s fine. Take care. Have a safe journey.”” But some unknown impulse makes me add at the last second,“I don’t know about catharsis – I was never much good at that. Repression on the other hand." I shrug. "Turning that pressure upwards and inwards notch by notch until it crushes you into something else.” I shrug again. It is as close to an admission as I have ever come. “Anyway, take care.” I say again and smile. But I don’t know if the expression reached my eyes or not.

She looks puzzled for a second, then heads for the taxi. I watch her carefully as she goes and politely wave goodbye. Did her feet quite touch the ground? Did she look a little transparent as she got into the cab? Translucent? Does that brilliant lipstick hide cold pale blue lips? How did she come to inherit the body? Perhaps I should have asked her.

No matter. It is not a question I know how to answer properly. Why should she?

The taxi pulls away. I herd the cat back inside. Lock the front door and secure the chain. This door will not be opened again tonight, no matter who comes knocking. I turn off all the lights visible to the street and retire to one of the back rooms with a book. To do otherwise on this night is to invite lit fireworks through the mail slot and smashed eggs on the windows.

But the kids roving about in the supermarket vampire costumes are okay, really. And if the ghostly dead get out and about once a year, what of it? When push comes to shove, it’s the ghosts of the living that spell trouble. And we're so much harder to spot.

Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures

2006-10-18T01:31:00.000+01:00

Alabanza

2006-09-11T14:53:00.000+01:00

Alabanza

by Martin Espada

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.

Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread.

Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning, where the gas burned blue on every stove and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers, hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.

Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher who worked that morning because another dishwasher could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen and sang to herself about a man gone.

Alabanza. After the thunder wilder than thunder, after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows, after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs, after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen, for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo, like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face, soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations across the night sky of this city and cities to come.

Alabanza. I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:

Teach me to dance. We have no music here.

and the other said with a Spanish tongue:

I will teach you. Music is all we have.

Open Thread - Question Everything Edition

2006-09-09T00:38:00.000+01:00

I don't actually have any questions, and it's not necessary that you have any either - I just thought we might as well have a place where we can throw "conventional wisdom" out the window, if we want.

Or, jabber about whatever anyone wants! I, as they say, have got nothin' .

Caution! Fairie Crossing

2006-09-06T03:02:00.000+01:00

US developers think they have it bad, having to plan around spotted owls and other endangered species. Little do they know what other wee creatures could be in the way...

Fairies stop developers' bulldozers in their tracks

VILLAGERS who protested that a new housing estate would "harm the fairies" living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again.

Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, estimates that the small colony of fairies believed to live beneath a rock in St Fillans, Perthshire, has cost him £15,000. His first notice of the residential sensibilities of the netherworld came as his diggers moved on to a site on the outskirts of the village, which crowns the easterly shore of Loch Earn.
He said: "A neighbour came over shouting, `Don't move that rock. You'll kill the fairies'." The rock protruded from the centre of a gently shelving field, edged by the steep slopes of Dundurn mountain, where in the sixth century the Celtic missionary St Fillan set up camp and attempted to convert the Picts from the pagan darkness of superstition.
"Then we got a series of phone calls, saying we were disturbing the fairies. I thought they were joking. It didn't go down very well," Mr Salter said.
In fact, even as his firm attempted to work around the rock, they received complaints that the fairies would be "upset". Mr Salter still believed he was dealing with a vocal minority, but the gears of Perthshire's planning process were about to be clogged by something that looked suspiciously like fairy dust.
[...]
"A lot of people think the rock had some Pictish meaning," Mrs Fox said. "It would be extremely unlucky to move it."
Mr Salter did not just want to move the rock. He wanted to dig it up, cart it to the roadside and brand it with the name of his new neighbourhood.
The Planning Inspectorate has no specific guidelines on fairies but a spokesman said: "Planning guidance states that local customs and beliefs must be taken into account when a developer applies for planning permission." Mr Salter said: "We had to redesign the entire thing from scratch."
The new estate will now centre on a small park, in the middle of which stands a curious rock. Work begins next month, if the fairies allow.

This is even better than the Garden Gnome Liberation Front!

I showed this story to a British friend, mainly because I wasn't sure if it was something real or a spoof (British humor is sometimes difficult to get... there you are, laughing away and then you finally figure out that the joke was on you). Anyway, he said that it seemed real to him... in many rural societies in Britain pixies and elves and fairies are still very much believed in. Or, at least such a part of the thousands of years old (pre-Christianity) traditions that actual belief or disbelief is immaterial.

That makes sense and considering that a number of cultures have `little people' traditions, although by different names, well... who knows?

[This is a news article from the beginning of the year I am just posting as filler, cuz everyone seems to be on writer's block break. Besides... in my opinion, it's just the best story ever. ]

We're here today, you die tomorrow. A little token for remembrance.

2006-08-31T16:36:00.000+01:00

The targets are the children, of course.

The initial blasts may be for whoever is in the vicinity of the dropped bombs, but the little unexploded, sometimes brightly colored bomblets, that mimic food packages? Or are dropped 72 hours before a planned cease-fire?? Those are for the children, so that they can keep dying or being maimed long after a war is over.

Who else runs heedlessly across the grass, looking over their shoulder at the kite they are propelling, laughing and leaping with joy until the moment they seem to leap higher than ever, only to come down in pieces. What others, no matter how many times you warn them, reach out their small hands to investigate what is this new thing in their now very short world.

Remember me, the wee bomblets are saying, sending a message from a people to a people long after their representatives are gone. Remember what I can do to you - my power is such that I can snatch your children from you anywhere. Your garden, their playgrounds, their schools, the road to the market, any little place at all - that's the beauty of it. And it can all be done while we are sitting at home in our easy chairs, watching our own children play outside in the pool, having nothing to remember.

Remember that you can't do anything at all about it... except bury your dead. You can rage and cry and shake your fist, talk about morality and mercy, about proportionality and accountability, about justice and non-combatants - but no law will touch me, because I am within the law. In fact, I am the law - my power deems it so. If I want to space out the killing of you for two days, two weeks or two decades, the law has said it is perfectly okay. A child, a stranger, a grandmother, a groundskeeper - a leg, a hand, an eye or a life, it's all in memory of me.

Remember what I can do to you - my power is such that, with nary a footstep set on your patch of earth, I can dig your grave and put you or your children in it in the same blink of time, and never break a sweat.

Remember me as you lead the blind, steady the halt, bind the wounds of the maimed and feed the motherless with the milk of despair.

Remember me from generation to generation, our little giftlets demand...

...yet we are always so surprised when they do.

Thinking out loud - Human Nature

2006-08-23T23:45:00.000+01:00

I have to confess that I am not an anthropologist. That subject actually interests me, but I've not done any study of that field and so my question probably already has been answered by those who have, but it's fun to ask anyway. (As this is not a real post and is just a thinking out loud thing, grammar and spelling don't count)!

Anyway, every once in a while I'll read of some really reprehensible behaviour by a person or a group of people ... mobs screaming at marching Latinos or people calmly discussing the benefits of torture or any number of other things, and if you express disgust or dismay sooner or later someone will come along as say, "Well, what can you do? That's just human nature".

This is the answer whether the question is about racism, oppression, mobs, income inequality, and many other things.

So, of course my question is... is it? If there are humans around the world whose behaviour doesn't fall into these sorts of patterns, does that negate the "it's human nature" thing, or does that mean that these humans are maybe not progressed enough to have this particular nature of humans?

It seems to me to be yet one more type of thing, such as "you can't judge things that happened years ago by the morals of today" or whatever, that is brought up when discussing the past actions of say, Empire or slavery or something. This might wash, if there were not also people during those times that protested, said this or that was wrong, that they would not participate and so on. Which group was displaying human nature? The "everybody" that "does it" or the few that don't? Who decides which nature if human and which is not?

If you consider the fact that in 100 or so years, people will perhaps (hopefully!) be past the point of warmaking... possibly because things are so messed up everyone needs each other to survive, will they look back on us and say that you can't judge things by their time and morals, even though there are those of us who recognize that war is not a productive or right thing?

Counting Cherry Stones: the White Feather Wielder and the Down-trodden Woman

2006-08-21T13:09:00.000+01:00

I tried writing about them separately. They wouldn’t have it. No sooner did I get to describing one of them and there was the other, beating the door down, getting her feet under the table, shaking her head, rolling her eyes and saying “You think you’re going to write about her and leave me out of it?”.
I looked at them – unreal though they are – and they looked alike. Are you one and the same then? I thought. Through one eye they are almost impossible to tell apart; through the other one would never have thought them related. Not identical then, but not easily separable.

They are the two heads to the same coin. Mirror images. Inversions. When one’s down the other’s up. Janus looking forward and back. Two-faced.

Like Rosie, the white-feather wielder casts her echoes before her, flowers strewn before the troops departing for battle. Once she was a Spartan mother sternly instructing her son, “Come home with your shield or on it.”

Ninety years ago or thereabouts, she strolled through these streets, cool and slim in long Edwardian skirts, white feather held jauntily between thumb and forefinger seeking out unmilitary men. Men to chastise for their ununiformed unmanliness, for above all she is a womanly woman.

The white-feather wielder is man-made and in that she is the same as many womanly women. Rosie also sprang fully-formed from the forehead of J. Howard Miller, a latter-day Athena for an industrial age. She too had her avatars and her priestesses to officiate at her altar poised precariously on the fuselage. Is the white-feather wielder also a goddess then? Or is she a demon, this womanly woman? Lamia. Seductress. Despatching young men to drown in mud, just as the sirens sang them down beneath the swell. Her creator described her and her gift as “far more terrible than anything they [men] can meet in battle.” Perhaps to those who believed in ideas of manliness and womanliness she was more terrible at that.

Unlike Rosie, the white-feather wielder has not gathered a stable iconography about herself. She has not become a symbol of women’s liberation or power. She did exercise a particular kind of power though, using her words to persuade men to go and slaughter or be slaughtered. Perhaps the War Poets caught her off-guard: some of them took a dim view of drowning in mud and a dimmer view still of the particular form of manliness which she upheld. In any case revival efforts in World War II failed dismally. She had come to be seen as a woman who used her feminine wiles to send young men to their deaths. A Lorelei repeating endlessly the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Like the leopard, she had to change her spots. Scatter her feathers to the four winds. Feathers? What feathers. No feathers here. These days, she’s a ‘security mom.’ For a while before that she was a soccer mom: she still is. Clad in jeans and sneakers, slightly harried, ferrying the kids to practice in the SUV with the the red-white-and-blue festooned bumper and the yellow ribbon (faded now from a couple of years of sun, rain and snow) drooping from the antenna. She’s all for staying the course: after all the troops are protecting her children from terrorism. And if that means recruiters in schools – well that’s what it means and that’s all there is to it. It’s like the man on the T.V. said “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

“And after all, look how they treat the women!” she says. “Just barbaric.”
The coin spins on its edge and comes down heads.

Sometimes she’s Belgian. Perhaps she’s a nun in a torn habit. More recently she’s been spotted in a chador. But she has worn many different kinds of clothing in her myriad lifetimes, she has lived in many different places. Once she may have been a kidnapped bride. Did she stand atop Troy’s towers? Perhaps so, but now she has been safely reduced and diminished so that the one central fact of her life, the sine qua non of her existence is her oppression. She is dust beneath the enemy’s heel, foreign or domestic: bereft of agency or resistance. She has no avatars, only involuntary sacrifices. What woman would choose to embody her?

Like the others – the Grocer’s Daughters, the Rosies, the White-Feather Wielders, the Down-Trodden woman is a type, a figure, used in service of war-making. Which is not to say women are not often oppressed, or even to debate which forms of oppression are to be considered culturally superior. That is not the point. The point is that the Down-trodden Woman, whoever she is and whereever she comes from, needs liberating and we know just the folks for the job. Results guaranteed.

She is a strange creature, this Down-trodden Woman. So clearly visible in the Enemy’s citadels, yet when the citadel is stormed she evaporates like a puddle on a hot day. Her liberation is so instantaneous it leaves no trace. Practical indicators of her presence– the number of women being raped, for example – may increase quite dramatically. And certainly it is true that after liberation, actual women may also have far less in the way of practical opportunities to keep themselves from such things as starvation. All of which might suggest that the Down-trodden Woman should still be there, that she had no business leaving yet, but no. She has gone her ways. She vanished the moment the first ‘liberator’ passed through the gate.

To complain about such practical indicators – to gripe and moan, to whine and wail, to bitch – is simply to mistake the nature of the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation. It is symbolic. Or perhaps more accurately, it is nominal, pertaining to names. The Down-trodden Woman is Liberated because certain generous gestures have been made. Certain phrases have been pronounced correctly. Incantations recited over just the right bubbling stew.

The lives and living conditions of actual women have absolutely nothing to do with the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation: they never did.

Smoke and Mirrors

2006-08-15T23:03:00.000+01:00

Illusions and sleight-of-hand on a mid-summer’s morning.
I first about heard it on the radio when the alarm clock went off.

‘Evil terrorist plot foiled.’ ‘Terrorist attack imminent.’ Critical Alert. Agitation. Excitement. News anchors sounding solemn. Abandoning civil liberties to save them. Mass detentions. Men with guns at airports. WMD in the tampax. Saving the West from the deadly twin spectres of spectacle cases and baby food. And all that jazz.

Performance theatre at its finest, deserving of awards all round, followed by an extravagant cream tea at the parish hall with lashings of strawberry jam and generous helpings of Auntie Marjorie’s Victoria sponge.

Smoke and mirrors

Then again, one cannot know that for sure?

Wouldn’t a propagandist have managed to come up with something a little more inspired? Inventive? Original?

Given the situation, such things, such grandiose plans are not utterly remarkable. After all, any number of grandiose plans involving planes, bombs and civilians as ingredients are not only made but also implemented with monotonous regularity. And by thoroughly respectable members of society no less: certain heads of state routinely order such plans implemented by the truckload and who could be more respectable than they? It’s true that their well-refined recipe calls for a slightly different combination of the ingredients – they prefer to fill the planes up with bombs, take them up reasonably high and then drop the bombs on the civilians from a height, rather than just combining all three at once. And currently they express a preference for seasonings like white phosphorus, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and such. It must be a style thing. Why the one is deemed so acceptable and the other so appalling.

But where such recipes exist, so too will innovation. Regrettably, therefore, it would be naïve to say that the whole thing is prima facie impossible. Invented from whole-cloth. The fervid nightmare of a fevered brain. The sort of thing that nobody would ever do. It isn’t. Things just like it happen every day.

Smoke and mirrors.

Then there are the intermediate options, the dim and murky possibilities that lie between those two. There may have been some people who did have grandiose plans (along with a lack of discretion) whose ‘discovery’ was saved for an opportune moment and who knows? Perhaps for public consumption, their plans were made a little more grandiose. Elaborated on some. They provided the outline: others fleshed it out.

There was Reid – seemed like it was just the day before that he was describing various human rights as ‘made for another age.’

Another age. Presumably not this age of
smoke and mirrors.

Or perhaps it was just the U.S. dog wagging the U.K. tail.

I’ve had my doubts about that one, I must confess. Some of the colonies – like this one in fact – do have a kind of limited Home Rule and it did seem very well-timed, not to mention well-tailored for indigeneous consumption. There’s nothing like long queues for bringing out a kind of enculturated compliant stoicism. But perhaps my doubts are ill-founded.

Q: What does theoretical parsimony look like in the absence of credibility?

A: Smoke and mirrors

Perhaps (Probably? Certainly? I suspect the latter) there was someone who was tortured. The U.K. is a part of that extensive spiderweb of rendition and torture: presumably it’s good for something. And there are a lot of names there. Someone (some ones?) hurt beyond the edge of endurance, saying anything at all to make the pain stop? (It’s true that evidence based on torture is now supposed to be inadmissable, but how would one know whether or not it was used?)

Smoke and mirrors

And doubtless a whole myriad more of intermediate possibilities, blurrings, smudges, shades all of which strongly resemble
smoke and mirrors.

Of this I am told we may all be sure: that it has nothing at all to do with foreign policy whatsoever. Which comes as a huge relief, because if it did have anything to do with foreign policy then there really might be widespread scepticism. After all as Max Hastings has observed, “one could nowadays fit into an old-fashioned telephone box those who believe anything Bush or Tony Blair says about foreign policy.” He was writing about the U.K. but he seems to have confused an ‘old-fashioned telephone box’ for the Tardis. It’s an easily made mistake in this place of
smoke and mirrors.

We Are All Hezbollah

2006-08-13T23:47:00.000+01:00

Today, on another blog which I will not name, in order to spare the poor tired fingers of the operatives of GIYUS et al, I was privileged to see what is to my knowledge, the first instance of an American even hesitantly approaching the momentous and terrible utterance of the Forbidden Phrase:

Lebanon has a right to defend itself

Hezbollah, like "Al Qaeda," has "morphed;" as a Lebanese lady said the other day to a western reporter, asking some predictable question probably on the order of "but of course you don't support the people who dare to defend you against the Sacred Israel?," to which the lady replied, "We are all Hezbollah."

And all over the Majority World, in the same spirit that so many there, as well as in the more affluent 15% world said on one day in September not so long ago, "We are all New Yorkers," many, many people are saying "We are all Hezbollah."

Hezbollah, having "morphed," is no longer a struggling little band of guerilla fighters, no longer a political party in Lebanon, no longer even the only entity in Lebanon that has provided the nation what infrastructure and services it has had for the past far too many years.

Today Hezbollah has, and not by its own hand, but by the hand of the Enemy, undergone a magical transmorgification into that most powerful, yet ephemeral and yes, dangerous thing an entity can be.

Today Hezbollah is a symbol.

And not just any symbol. It is a noble symbol, a symbol of something very laudable, at least in the minds of the Majority World, namely Resistance against the tyranny of the US and its fat little pitbull there in the Levant, it is now a symbol that trumps and transcends the luxury concepts of politics or theology, it is now a symbol of the most primal and basic instinct we have: protecting our children, our future, preservation of our species from the fearsome beast, protecting our babies from the predator's talons, from the hungry tiger of the night, the horde of brutes from the tribe across the river, across the Blue Line.

When someone, somegang, anyone, anygang, rushes snarling into our cave, gaping maw set to devour our young, We are all Hezbollah.

And frankly, the Majority World has been in sore need of a little Hezbollah for quite some time.

Considering the Situation, we need all the Hezbollah we can get.

(Crossposted from Enemy of the State )

Looking at Kings

2006-08-09T18:30:00.000+01:00

Forewar(ne)d

Another old re-post from BT and dKos: I've said it before, but this one probably is the last or close to the last in any case. At present I'm once again looking at glass and wrestling with writer's block, which from memory was what was going on when I wrote this. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose and all that. And 'supporting the troops' continues to be the last thing on my mind. So it's sort of apropos, even though in the interim I have drawn the conclusion that allusions, anecdotes and vignettes are no more nor less, but exactly and precisely as effective as blunt words in terms of their general audibility to imperialists. Took my sweet time about it, but there's little that can be done about that now.

Looking at Kings

I've not been writing much lately. That's for a couple of reasons. One is that I've been looking at glass and canals with an over-interested eye lately. The other rather more serious reason is that I've been trying to think about what a colonial subject might say to her imperial masters. Even a cat can look at a King.

DuctapeFatwa recently wrote of colonialism as a religion

"You can no more convince a colonialist that the world is not the property of the west, specifically the US, than you can convince a Christian that Jesus was not crucified or a Muslim that the Angel Gabriel did not visit Mohammed."

Which got me thinking. Never a good sign.

And a few days ago, I saw a diary over at dKos about sending presents to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and what a wonderful idea it was. Which got me thinking some more.

One of the things it got me thinking about was the difficulty of having honest conversations with colonialists - on whom, I might add, the Republican Party has no monopoly. Imperialism is a thoroughly bi-partisan policy: its flavour may change, but not its substance. Though from where I stand, it always tastes bitter. The difficulty proceeds, I think, not so much from the desire to keep the peace by keeping one's peace, but from a gap where words fail. Oh - the words can be spoken plainly enough, but their utterance would render my imperial masters deaf to the speaker.

Hence my silence.

When I was in New Zealand, one of my lecturers was a recent Russian émigré. He was far from my favourite person, but I remember one of the things he said well enough to paraphrase it. "You will no longer find," he said, "great composers in Russia. Now that anything can be said freely, nothing will be said of substance." What he meant, I think, was that political constraint can result in the production of a musical language that is subtle, rich in allusion and veiled political meaning. I suspect his fears for Russian music were misplaced: evidently he did not foresee Putin.

So let me try to accomplish with allusion, anecdote and vignette what I fear blunt words will not convey.

*

If you're a U.S. citizen, your military used the first city I lived in as a supply base for the land it occupied in the frozen South - though it's not so frozen now, is it? Your nuclear ships (though your military coyly declined to confirm or deny whether they carried nuclear weapons) moored in the great volcano crater that is Diamond Harbour. Sometimes I'd see your soldiers on the bus. Indeed, my brother married the daughter of one of your ex-soldiers, formerly stationed there in that wild and woolly colony at the end of the earth, until he grew too accustomed to Southern skies to return to the homeland. As colonists from more than one empire had done before him.

*

In a world where geography so often defines destiny, my brother and I both made what used to be termed `good marriages' by the cynical - or perhaps they were just intensely practical. But the dowries and settlements we brought to our nuptials concerned the currency of citizenship.

*

In the 1980s, the colony where I grew up staged something akin to a populist, non-violent revolt against its imperial masters. I wouldn't say it managed to get out of the imperial bedchamber, but it certainly threw the bedcovers about a bit and complained vigorously about having a terrible headache. It got off pretty lightly. Frankly, I put that down to most of the inhabitants having white skin. Had the country had the same demographics as Grenada, I suspect the fallout may have been rather different. But my imperial masters graciously confined themselves to threatening to assassinate the then Prime Minister David Lange (admittedly your Vice-President's threats were perceived at the time as having about the same level of credibility as the subsequent denials that they were ever made). Various imperial officials announced in peeved tones: "We're not talking to you any more." N.Z. was suspended from ANZUS - though this was hardly a punishment -- everyone I knew considered it proof positive that every silver lining has a silver lining. From the sidelines, Bob Dole twittered about imposing economic sanctions -- but unlike Iraq, N.Z. has no new graveyards filled with infants' bodies. More recently, a refusal to creep back under the imperial duvet scuppered a free trade agreement between the U.S. and New Zealand. Like I said, the colony I grew up in got off pretty lightly. It's still just a colony though, with limited Home Rule.

*

I moved to the heart of the empire.

I went out with a bunch of (U.S.) grad students to celebrate my flatmate's birthday.
Being politically inclined, we started talking about U.S. foreign policy and bashing Bush. I contributed some uncharitable remarks about Clinton and the bombing of Sudan's pharmaceutical factory. (Apparently Christopher Hitchens was experiencing a welcome remission of popinjayitis when he wrote this back in '98). Most likely, I also waxed lyrical about Madeleine Albright. In a fairly stunning non sequitur, I was told that, "You're just jealous because New Zealand didn't fight in World War II."

The woman who said that was kind and intelligent and would certainly consider herself liberal - possibly even leftist. She hated Bush and I wouldn't be at all surprised if she was been out there campaigning for Kerry last November. But imperialism is a power relation that promotes asymmetric information.

*

A friend of mine is at a union meeting. In his first and only language, he explains, patiently and painstakingly to an uncomprehending room, that since the British colonised the country that he came from, he has as much claim on the English language as anybody else. He passes around a copy of his immigration documentation, which is marked "Subject does not speak English. Instruction will be provided upon arrival." He explains how he was required to attend 'English language instruction' classes before being permitted to teach. "But __" someone says, "we don't mean you. You speak English fine - hell, you speak English better than me! But you've got to understand that we've got a duty to protect our students."

Words failed.

*

Well - if you've made it this far through my self-indulgent rant, let me close by telling you something about me. I took the nickname dove some years ago now - it's one I've used in a few different contexts. It's kind of a reminder. I wouldn't describe myself as a naturally peaceful, or non-violent, or particularly compassionate person. I tend to favour a cold fury over sorrow. But growing up red (or at least, deeply pink) in a post-Stalin world provided a fairly compelling reason to think carefully about the proper relationship between means and ends. And that led me to non-violence.

So I oppose the war and I'm committed to non-violence.

And here's another place where I think words often fail. For many, opposing the war and being non-violent means `supporting the troops by bringing them home.' That's not what it means for me. `Supporting the troops' is the last thing on my mind.

Counting Cherry Stones: Rosie the Riveter

2006-08-06T13:42:00.000+01:00

All the day long, whether rain or shine,
She's a part of the assembly line.
She's making history, working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.

Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage,
Sitting up there on the fuselage.
That little frail can do more than a male can do.

Rosie's got a boyfriend, Charlie.
Charlie, he's a Marine.
Rosie is protecting Charlie,
Working overtime on the riveting machine.

Is this what liberation looks like?

These days she's her own icon. A minor American Goddess for a major American Century, emblazoned on posters, key-rings, T-shirts, badges and other spaces dedicated to devotional display. Fridges, for example. She's a feminist icon too, at least for a particular strand of feminism.

"We Can Do It!" she proclaims boldly, displaying the muscular strength in her good right arm. Her stare is level: the arc of plucked eyebrows, the mascara artfully-thick on those lashes, the red luciousness of her lipstick diminishes the seriousness of her gaze not one little iota. "We Can Do It!" Jaunty but nevertheless determined in the polka-dotted headscarf covering her hair.

Rosie is feisty and feminine. Strong and (hetero)sexy. Binaries fall before her gaze like so much wool from the shears, like scales from the eyes. Hence her divinity, hence her iconography.

But who are the "We"? And what is the "It" that "We" can do?
And just what was the history that Rosie was making?

Like all goddesses, Rosie predates herself. At least some of her foremothers lie over the Pond, entangled in the tall tale of 'How The Vote Was Won.' When World War I broke out the Pankhursts, 'First Family' of U.K. feminism fractured: Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst suspended hostilities, ceased calling for suffage and urged women to enter the munitions factories. Which many did: it was good pay and what pay wouldn't do, loyalty to Empire would.

But my affections lie with Emmeline's awkward and contrarian daughter Sylvia, who was having none of it. A pacifist, expelled by her family from the Women's Social and Political Union in 1914; she later got chucked out of the Communist Party of Great Britain for good measure. She endured forced feeding, was imprisoned for sedition and argued with Lenin. Her life began in Manchester and ended in Ethiopia: she was an emigrant. She never did master the art of going along to get along. Anything that could be done an easy way, she inevitably found the hard way. Stubborn and obdurate. People like that should be loved (though they seldom are) for their lack of expediency and their mulish honesty. Their beliefs might shift with time, but their truthfulness does not.

I digress.

Rosie had her forerunners: they built the shells with which much of World War I was fought and in their day they too were seen as 'liberated.' Breaking new ground. Proving themselves worthy. New Women, not like those Old Women. According to the Official Historical Narrative, their willingness to be militarised was rewarded with the Vote. But isn't that the way with new godesses? Don't they always eat the memory of their mothers? How else could they be so brand-spanking-shiny new? So iconic, so stripped of the messiness of life. And contrarian Sylvia? Relegated to the margins, to the footnotes: she too is history. Perhaps there are worse fates -- at least on the sidelines one is less likely to be chomped upon.

Who are the 'We'? And what is the 'It' that 'we' do?

'We' are the women who consent to be militarised believing that militarisation leads to liberation. 'We' believe that consenting to militarisation will give us the power to protect those whom we love; that it is a means by which women will finally be treated as men's equals; that it is a means to economic freedom; that it is a means of political equality; that it is how 'we' women can gain the respect which 'we' have for so long wanted. And because 'we' have hungered for respect, because 'we' have hungered for liberation, 'we' grasp the proffered militarising hand that promises those things without asking too many awkward questions.

This is an old delusion; a long-standing hysteria.

As for the 'It?' Well, it's not just riveting any more: it never was. We nurse. We weld. We manufacture. We crack codes. We buy war bonds. We invest. We sell arms. We go out and buy, buy, buy to keep confidence high. We enlist. We fly planes. We cook. We shoot guns. We break down barriers. We challenge sexism. We're strong and (hetero)sexy, just like Rosie. We do what we're asked. We do what we're told. We even tell people how we could do it better given half a chance. And we believe that this will be our independence, our liberation, that this time, proving that 'We Can Do It!' will make us free. And above all we believe that this is feminism and that we are feminists. Look at Rosie -- how feisty she is, how feminine: is she not the image of feminism? Isn't she divine!

Looking for power in the wrong places.

61 years ago today, the U.S dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was dropped from a B-29 built at the Martin Bomber Plant in Omaha, Nebraska. 40% of the workers there were women: most likely Rosie riveted bits of that plane together. That bomb (I was about to say Hiroshima, but the city was not the bomb despite the way in which they have become synonymous with each other) still claims about 5000 lives a year: about half of those are presumably women and the other half are those whom some woman, somewhere, loved, whether as mother, sister, wife, lover, daughter, niece or last but not least, friend. Three days later, they dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. And Rosie's rivets held again.

So. What does Rosie have to say to those women's corpses and the corpses of those whom they loved? What does "We Can Do It!" mean to them?

Is this what liberation looks like?

Two Coastlines

2006-08-03T21:03:00.000+01:00

I.

A peninsula near the city, encircling a deep-blue-sea harbour. Red rock that crumbles under the fingers. That harbour is a caldera: the peninsula a crater. This is a place where the earth’s patience is thin. An early map, drawn before imperialism was yet a foregone conclusion there showed it as an island, but it is not. (It was a delicately coloured map, not yet the bloody hue it assumed in old, battered school atlases remembered from primary school.)

Whether it through possession of one of those early pre-imperial maps, through not being good at map-reading, or simply because those are treacherous waters, at least one ship’s captain missed the entrance to that deep sea harbour, sailed into the bay neighbouring and lost his life giving it a name. Taylor’s Mistake. It already had a name of course. It didn’t need a new one.

I used to go walking out onto the steep hills and along the tops of the cliffs around there on that peninsula. It’s beautiful. I’d give it that. Even bereft of its forest, even open to that bone-bleaching sun. Sheep-skulls in long grass, sometimes with remnants of flesh still clinging to them and a cloudy buzz of blowflies. In summer the grass has the colour of gold: in that part of the country, winter was the green season. That’s changing now. Macrocarpa outlined against a deep blue-gold skyline. There, one could look away from the smog lying on the city. But all of it, bones, tussock, macrocarpa, smog is profoundly unnatural to that place which was forest before empire burned it.

Vestiges remain. In some places there are still stands of kahikatea. Matagouri – which I had always imagined as the inspiration for barbed wire – still grows like a snare on the hillside to bloody the hands of the unwary. Certainly it cut mine on occasion. Now there’s a metaphor for those who like such things: te whenua still resisting the hand of the colonist’s descendents.

Apparently there’s a network of disused tunnels out there: occasionally one would meet someone who claimed to know someone who used to go role-playing out there, clambering about in the cold roots of those hills pretending to be someone else. But as I never met anyone who had done so themselves, I have more than half consigned that tale to legend.

But this I have seen for myself.

A concrete emplacement, set concealed in the hillside, invisible from just a few feet away. It is an ugly thing, long abandoned. The steps one descends to enter it long ago began to crack: its interior stinks of piss and wretchedness. Barely clearing the grass, unable to be skylined, a wall-less stretch surveys a reach of harbour. This emplacement is from World War II, but some date back to 1900 and paranoid fears of Russian invaders.

A few come in pairs, the remnants of a narrow trench running between them. There is the red metal-rusted place where the gun was mounted once. It was removed eventually but they couldn’t be bothered removing the emplacements so they left them, cracking piss-stinking concrete on a marred headland.

It’s been over sixty years now: they are practically historical architecture. And no, this has not been a peaceful place for a long time and even now it lies beneath a shadow. Or so it is rumoured.

Would I even want them removed for that matter? What is better? That the scar, that sordid ugliness should remain – a visible reminder that militaries never do clean up their messes? Or that kahikatea and other trees belonging to that long-since burned forest should put their roots down in place of those emplacements? Could they even live there now on those bare wind-battered headlands?

II.

A coastline on the South-West peninsula of another island.
A path winds around the coast for hundreds of miles, across the cliff-tops, down steep winding ways onto beaches rocky and sandy. Through holiday towns throbbing with a fevered gaiety in summer: quietly desperate in winter. A few years ago I walked on that path for a few days.

It is beautiful. I’d give it that. In summer wildflowers cling to the rock faces and all manner of moths and butterflies are on the move. There is the long curve of the horizon. Closer to hand, perhaps heard rather than seen is the roar of breakers on rocks.

It used to be tin country, until the tin ran out.
Mine shafts dissect these hills: those near the paths are sometimes surrounded by wire fencing. Others, which have become home to bats, have strange-looking chimney-like hats: bat-doors to the bat-caves.

It used to be pilchard country, until the shoals were fished out. Now huge sunfish bask off those coasts, far from what were their usual haunts before the climate changed.

This was wrecking country. Perhaps on this headland bonfires were lit to lure ships onto the rocks. Gotcha. The ultimate practical joke.

Now it is tourist country and perhaps there is an element of the trickster in that too – in the endless pasties, the clotted cream, the boat trips to see seals.

It is a peninsular, but in some of the inland villages there are still people who have never in their lives seen salt water.

There was a steep bare hillside, that day, stripped of everything but grass. The path was grassy, hard to distinguish, and the hillside dropped away steeply: just out of sight began the cliffs.

I had been expecting it: I had looked at the map. But then again, it was not what I was expecting. There was the sign as advertised, warning that the hillside ahead might have unexploded ammunition, mines and things that go bang. It even had little icons of exploding people flying through the air, for extra added emphasis. All the obvious stuff: Don’t pick anything up. Don’t step on anything protruding from the ground.

It also said ‘Keep on the path.’ I looked down: presumably I was now on the path. Of course I had thought I was on the path before, but I’d had to leave it and walk uphill a bit to be able to read the sign. It didn’t seem terribly pathlike but then neither had what I had previously thought was the path. The sign (and the guidebook no less!) also said keep the white markers to landward. I looked around. The only white marker I saw was a painted white pole attached to the end of a fence further down the hillside, nearer to the cliff face, though I could not see where that began. ‘Perhaps’ I thought, ‘the path goes on the other side of that fence, because that’s the only way for there to be any white markers to landward here. And it would sort of make sense to have a fenced off path if there were things that explode. In which case where I am standing is not the path. That's fine: it certainly doesn't look like one.’

So I edged my way slowly down the hillside to the fence and when I got there, I realised that I was actually quite close to the cliff and that such land as was on the seaward side of the fence was undercut enough that nobody was going to walk along that. At least not for long. Realising as I looked along that sweep of cliff that there was every reason to assume I was standing on land that was just as tenuous, I went back up the hill and considered my options. Eventually I picked my way across the hillside.

The sign, the white pole on the fence, and the absence of white markers (and a path for that matter) are things I’ve wondered about occasionally since.

Was it a practical joke to paint that pole white and stick it there? Had the actual markers been removed? Was it one of the ‘gotcha’ moments of that wreckers’ coast? Instead of being luring ships onto the rocks, luring walkers over the cliff? For what were the bonfires but false markers?

Or was it the opposite of falsehood: a truth albeit twisty? After all, imperialism (and certainly imperialism is something which that military has a particularly deep investment in) is about establishing rules that people cannot follow if they want to live and then using their disobedience as the excuse to kill them. How simple and elegant an illustration for domestic consumption then: a sign instructing one to keep to the path with the white markers to landward or risk being exploded, coupled with no path and a white marker placed on the very edge of a cliff.

Follow the impossible rule or else . . .

Moral Equivalency Permit

2006-08-01T15:14:00.000+01:00

While I respect Dove's wish that this blog be an International space, I think the struggle taking form now between the anti-war left and the military left in the U.S. is one that has great international consequences.

Cross posted with minor deletions and additions from Even Flow

Where can I get mine, and what are the requirements?
Judging by recent arguments among supposed left leaning supporters of the military, unless you are active duty and are willing to disobey your orders to fight in Iraq you have no real right to ask any soldier to stand down and disobey illegal orders, let alone have an opinion about it. Excuse me but the last time I checked every citizen of America has the right to their opinion and there is no military test that you are required to pass in order to voice it. In fact, any honest military person will tell you that that's exactly what they're supposed to be serving for. That some who I previously considered allies are now basically telling anyone who holds a soldier to his duty to defend the Constitution of the United States to shut the &$!* up unless they're laying their own life on the line in an illegal war is a pretty good sign of some pretty stark lines beginning to be drawn in the sand, or circling of wagons as DTF would say, between the military left and the anti-war left, including those on the anti-war left who still support the troops by fighting to bring them home alive and now. Those in the anti-war community who aren't anti-military, and I would argue that they are the majority of the modern anti-war movement, are very different from the historical anti-war movements of the past, particularly the mass movement of the 1960's and 1970's who were definetily more anti-military, though I've been told by some Vietnam Veterans, and read Veteran testimonies that the stories of Vets being spit on by anti-war activists were fabrications of the pro-war right.

The story of Vietnam era soldiers who revolted against what was clearly an immoral and unwinnable war is largely unknown in this country. It's assumed that the civilian anti-war movement of that era was the most influential group attributed with bringing an end to that war. They were a part of it, but I don't think they were the biggest force behind the end of the war. According to the new documentary, Sir!, No Sir!,

"In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War has been the subject of hundreds of films, both fiction and non-fiction, but this story–the story of the rebellion of thousands of American soldiers against the war–has never been told in film.This is certainly not for lack of evidence. By the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; officers were being “fragged”(killed with fragmentation grenades by their own troops) at an alarming rate; and by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. In the course of a few short years, over 100 underground newspapers were published by soldiers around the world; local and national antiwar GI organizations were joined by thousands; thousands more demonstrated against the war at every major base in the world in 1970 and 1971, including in Vietnam itself; stockades and federal prisons were filling up with soldiers jailed for their opposition to the war and the military.

Yet few today know of these history-changing events.

Sir! No Sir! will change all that. The film does four things: 1) Brings to life the history of the GI movement through the stories of those who were part of it; 2) Reveals the explosion of defiance that the movement gave birth to with never-before-seen archival material; 3) Explores the profound impact that movement had on the military and the war itself; and 4) The feature, 90 minute version, also tells the story of how and why the GI Movement has been erased from the public memory.

Sir! No Sir! reveals how, thirty years later, the poem by Bertolt Brecht that became an anthem of the GI Movement still resonates".,

"General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect: He can think".

Brecht's poem can be found in full at the beginning of the book Soldiers In Revolt, written by David Cortright, an exhaustive and statistical analysis of the anti-war movement and revolt by GI's during the Vietnam War, how they impacted the ability of the U.S. to continue the war, and they're contribution to it's ultimate end.

From the introduction to the book, written by Howard Zinn:

"Soldiers in Revolt documents one of the least known and most
important aspects of the Vietnam War: the rebellion among U.S.
soldiers opposed to the war. From the front lines to stateside military
bases, the U.S. armed forces were wracked by widespread
resistance, including combat refusals and mutinies. GIs produced
more than 250 antiwar committees and underground newspapers
to voice their discontent. A new chapter looks at the enduring
imprint of this period on the U.S. military and the lessons that this
era holds for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
David Cortright, in this remarkable book, reminds us, as the war in Iraq continues,
that a point can be reached where men and women in uniform can
no longer tolerate what they begin to see as an unjust war. It is encouraging
to be reminded of the basic desire of human beings to live at peace
with other human beings, once they have divested themselves of the dceptions,
the nationalism, and the racism that is provoked by war".
—from the introduction by Howard Zinn

The question is, do civilians have the right to encourage active duty soldiers to disobey orders? Well sure, they have the right. But on a moral level should it be required or demanded, as some are now doing, that civilians first risk their own freedom, lives, and the livelihood of their own families before they ask soldiers to do the same. No, I don't think it's right to demand it. But in fairness, I think some sort of shared sacrifice should be seriously considered by anyone doing the asking. It's easy to understand and empathize with the frustration and the fear that active duty soldiers and their families are facing in the Iraq war. But their lashing out at those in the anti-war movement who are fighting to bring about the end of the war through different means, including expecting soldiers to uphold their oath to the Constitution, and the efforts to remove those soldiers from an unwinnable, dangerous, and most probably illegal war, can't be tolerated. It seeks to stifle dissent. It seeks to make illegitimate any argument put forth by those who haven't served in the military. And that is a dangerous thing to a democracy. It's dangerous because it seeks to reverse the democracy's bedrock tenet that the the government be civilian led, not military led, and that the freedom to dissent in this country not be predicated on one's willingness or not, to serve in it's military. Soldiers have a duty to their country and it's stated and ratified principles and are obligated to refuse illegal orders. Citizens have a duty and an obligation to hold their government accountable for it's actions and it's abuse of it's military. Both of these groups have an obligation to each other to not only stand up for each other, but to also hold each to it's obligations.

Why Armies Target Civilians

2006-07-28T23:49:00.000+01:00

From Targeting Civilians, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

"Perhaps the most hideous precedent established by Lincoln’s war, however, was the intentional targeting of defenseless civilians. Human beings did not always engage in such barbaric acts as we have all watched in horror in recent days. Targeting civilians has been a common practice ever since World War II, but its roots lie in Lincoln’s war.

In 1863 there was an international convention in Geneva, Switzerland, that sought to codify international law with regard to the conduct of war. What the convention sought to do was to take the principles of "civilized" warfare that had evolved over the previous century, and declare them to be a part of international law that should be obeyed by all civilized societies. Essentially, the convention concluded that it should be considered to be a war crime, punishable by imprisonment or death, for armies to attack defenseless citizens and towns; plunder civilian property; or take from the civilian population more than what was necessary to feed and sustain an occupying army".

I think it can be safely said that the deliberate killing of civilians by armies engaged in warfare was used tactically, if not strategically, long before the American Civil War. What I want to get at is the continuing practice of it by so called modern armies, operating under, or in non compliance with international law. In recent weeks we've seen the most stark examples of this practice as Israel has launched a massive and sustained bombardment of southern Lebanon. I'm not interested so much in discussing Israel's justification for the attack, but rather what it's military objective is, and how it is allowed, under international law, to continue it's brutal targeting of civilian infrastructure, housing, hospitals, and even convoys of fleeing civilians.

Israel's official stance is that anyone remaining in southern Lebanon is a terrorist. This must also include U.N. Peacekeepers as it appears now that they were also intentionally targeted.

There are many examples of civilian infrastructure and cities being targeted in recent history. In WWII British and American commanders justified the razing of Dresden , Germany because they claimed it was a rail hub for transporting German reinforcements to the Eastern Front. And so, in an effort to aid Soviet forces advancing into Germany from the east they justified the obliteration of an entire city, with the deaths of civilians and refugees reaching into the tens of thousands. Why obliterate an entire city when bombing the railroad centers would likely have been sufficient to to their goal of slowing or stopping German reinforcements?

From Wikipedia, Chuchill's response,

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the TERROR , though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."

There's that word, TERROR. Could that be the reasoning behind such attacks? Convenient though that Churchill thought it wise to give closer consideration to those tactics, but only insofar as not to lay waste to the spoils of war that the victors would claim for themselves.

Others however, considered it a war crime,

The absence of a direct military presence in the centre of the city, and the devastation known to be caused by firebombing, is regarded by supporters of the war crime position as establishing their case on a prima facie basis. They contend that these points are sufficient in themselves, without considering the absence of military necessity, the civilian death toll, and Dresden's cultural significance.

Why then was the attack not prosecuted as a war crime? Especially in light of this. From The Hague Conventions,

Aerial area bombardment and international law
International law up to 1945

Article 25: The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended, is prohibited.

Article 26: The Commander of an attacking force, before commencing a bombardment, except in the case of an assault, should do all he can to warn the authorities.

Article 27: In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps should be taken to spare as far as possible edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not used at the same time for military purposes.
The besieged should indicate these buildings or places by some particular and visible signs, which should previously be notified to the assailants.

I suspect the answer might have something to do with the exceptionalism of the allies.

As I've said, there are countless examples throughout history and more recently.
U.S. targeting of civilians in Fallujah in 2004. Civilians who were trapped within the city by American forces that ringed that city. And not content to just commit that crime, the U.S. used a banned weapon, white phosphorus to attack them, at first claiming that the weapon was used only for illuminating those they wished to liberate from the terrorists. Only later was the U.S. forced to admit that it used the munition as a weapon, which is not permitted.

Shake and Bake

"WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes where we could not get effects on them with HE [High Explosive]. We fired "shake and bake" missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out," the article said.

A word about the term "shake and bake." Anyone with a family to feed in the US knows what this term, properly "Shake 'n Bake, means. Made by Kraft, it is a seasoning which is put into a plastic bag with chicken and shaken before before baking. Its use gives the article the smack of reality. It's the kind of thing US soldiers would say.

War terminology...Operation Shake and Bake. What I would like to say about this isn't fit to print here.

Further examples from other wars, Rwanda, Myanmar, Nepal, and Kosovo.

But in my opinion, the worst case of targeting civilians was carried out by the one nation that holds itself above all others as a beacon of human rights, the U.S., and it's total annihilation of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end or WWII.

It's true that there were legitimate military targets within these cities, but that's not why they were wiped off the map. Truman claimed to be saving lives by taking lives. But the lives he sought to save were U.S. military, not Japanese civilians. Of course minimizing your own casualties is only prudent when engaged in war. But to commit the murder of 200,000 people can only be called what it truly is, and what it's purpose truly was, TERROR.

It's not a very wide leap to make from Truman's thinking of 60 years ago to George Bush's and his puppet, Ohlmert's thinking of today. Where Bush and Ohlmert are going a step beyond is in their opposition to a cease fire in Lebanon. Think about that for a moment. The international community and the U.N. are officially calling for an immediate cessastion of hostilities by Israel because of the overwhelming casualties being inflicted on Lebanese civilians. And yet Bush refuses to back a ceasefire. He has his own reasons for prolonging the conflict there, because it's a stepping off point for his long wished for attack against Iran. Widening the so called War On Terror. What the whole world now sees and knows is that it is his actions and his complicity in the targeting of innocent civilians that are the biggest cause of world wide terror and the continuing use of terroristic tactics.

Counting Cherry Stones: The Grocer's Daughter

2006-07-28T07:28:00.000+01:00

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man, Beggarman, Thief.”

It’s a rhyme for counting cherry stones. A kind of game.

You count the stones and they tell you who will be your husband. Or rather his occupation, which amounted to the same thing for those of an age to play it. It’s from a time before mine, when girls – or at least the particular girls likely to have leisure for such games – were expected to take husbands (not partners, not girlfriends, nor to live in glorious solitude). And from a time too, when the equivalent rhyme for those particular girls didn’t let them count too many cherries.

It’s cherry season here in a dangerously over-heated summer. I’m counting stones, but the types turning over in my head don’t come from the rhyme.

Grocer’s Daughter, Rosie the Riveter, White-Feather Wielder, Downtrodden Woman.

My typology is no more exhaustive than that of the original rhyme. The world of the cherry stone is contracted. Compressed. In each case, however, something is going on with women (and maybe, ‘womanhood’) and something is going on with war (and perhaps also with the institutions that organise it). So let us take a closer look at these types, these tropes, these cherry stones. Although real women inhabit them from time to time they are not real. Do not let that deter you: it is their irreality which might illuminate. War is also a fiction: it requires the suspension of disbelief. Pretences must be made and accepted; lies told and acquiescence given. Let’s begin with the Grocer’s Daughter.

The Grocer’s Daughter

She has her historical antecedants, usually of nobler birth. But these are liberated, democratic times, no? And in these modern liberated democratic times, up she popped from humble stock: the grocer’s daughter.

“A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us,” she said straightfaced. Or possibly with an wry smile, over a cup of tea in a bone china service. With lemon.

The Iron Lady not for turning, the woman on top, making the hard-hitting decisions with the hardest of them. Playing with the boys’ toys. She owes nothing to ‘Women’s Lib’ (though her existence will be used to dismiss persistent inequalities – ‘Look at the Grocer’s Daughter! She made it, didn’t she?’).

She’ll drink deep at the well of domesticity when it suits though: what was that she said? Oh yes. “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.” The deployment of domesticity here is no accident: it allows the female ‘leader’ to position herself / be positioned as a ‘proper woman’ – a wife, a mother. Her construction as spousal helpmeet or mother relies more on her femaleness than the presence or absence of actual spouse and children. Indeed, sometimes this construction can work better in their absence, since that strengthens the idealised familial bond between the grocer’s daughter and the state. She has no husband: she is wedded to the nation. She has no children: she is mother to the state. The personal subsumed utterly in the political. Her status as exception more obviously evident.

When she supports, orders or advocates the killing of other people’s children, however, this is seldom taken to reflect on her own construction as maternal. Rather it is evidence of her toughness, her firm grasp on Realpolitik. She is able to transcend women’s sentimental weaknesses: she is worth taking seriously. Alone of all her sex.

Yes, its essentialist – it’s the undiluted essence of essentialism, the real deal – but that’s the whole point. What toughness won’t cover, this brand of maternalism will and vice versa. They reinforce each other, they lend each other credibility.

Grocer’s daughters are rare, it’s true, but Maggie was not an only child.

Here comes Madeleine Albright, Clintonian champion of the indispensible nation, making her own “very hard choices” about Iraqi children because the price is right, “the price is worth it.”

If it doesn’t look worth it to me – if indeed it strikes me as perverse to apply such a calculus of thrift at all – doubtless the Grocer’s Daughter would find that perfectly explicable. I’m simply not tall enough. As a foreigner, I do not see far enough into the future. And those Americans, alas too few in number, who also lack sufficient stature? Child-like. Sentimental. Well-meaning but in need of (maternal) protection from the harsh reality of life. And the harsh reality of life is that the price is worth it: it’s a steal at the price.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

(Madeleine Albright 19/2/1998)

If we have to use force, it is because we are America.
Let the words melt sweetly on your tongue like honey. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America.” Roll them around your mouth and spit them out like poison. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America.”

(Do you see? Beyond those borders – within them, yes, possibly it would make some differences – November may not matter terribly much after all if it comes to that. Because the price is right, the price is worth it.” Even if it is a ”“very hard choice.” Straight from the donkey’s mouth.)

Anyway, Maddy is so yesterday. Which is when the Rome Summit failed

“Fighting escalated on both sides as the much-vaunted peace conference in Rome broke up after failing to reach agreement to call for an immediate ceasefire. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, backed by Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, resisted calls from 13 other countries, as well as the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, for such a ceasefire. Ms Rice said: "We have to have a plan that will actually create conditions in which we can have a ceasefire that will be sustainable." Mrs Beckett said: "Even if you could get a ceasefire half an hour ago, you would probably be back in hostilities in a few days."

Everyone knows it: a ceasefire – even a temporary, fleeting one that broke down in a few days – would have given some people a chance to find what refuge they could. It would have saved some lives. And even life for a day is still life. Even the Grocer’s Daughters know that. But they are tough. They make hard-hitting choices. They are serious. They understand Realpolitik. It was a ‘very hard choice’ but in the end a ceasefire was not worth the price.

To the Grocer’s Daughters:

Stay your hands.

“I want not to ask you but to tell you not to participate in the oppression of your sisters. Mothers who abuse their children are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to be willing to stay their hands. Mothers who set fire to school buses are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to tell them to stay their hands . . .”

Toni Morrison, Commencement Address, Barnard College, 1979.

Stay your hands.

Arms and the Poodle

2006-07-25T22:34:00.000+01:00

It’s true. He has stood up on his hind legs, widdled on His Masters Trousers and bitten the hand that feeds him. Bravo. Perhaps that crack about sweaters was the last dog biscuit, and after carefully considering the bowl (which says Fido) and the collar (which says Fido) and the flea-infested kennel (which says Fido) he decided the time had finally come to use those back legs of his to get that collar over his ears and skip the light fantastic.

Don’t hold your breath. This is spinnery on speed: Hargreaves would down tools and stop tinkering with that Spinning Jenny to look on in dumbstruck awe. Business as usual: an attempt to position the U.K. as the conciliatory, humane ones whose soldiers take their sunglasses off and wear berets all the better to reassure a fearful populace. Certainly not the kind of folks who would take photos of themselves sexually abusing and torturing Iraqi civilians for their personal gratification. Thumbs up, anyone?

Yes. Tony made a phone call to Olmert to voice his deep concern. And he has urged the U.S. to ‘understand.’ Apparently this constitutes “dramatic criticism” and is a startling and unprecedented display of independent foreign policy making.

Kim Howells, a British Foreign Office Minister (ie not very high up the tree) has also been speaking out, calling for Israel to show “proportionality and restraint”

I’d planned on having a bit of a field day at Howell’s expense. I thought I’d ask that awkward question “So, Mr Howell, what would have been “proportionate?” One of those photographs? Two? One fifth of them? A half? Inquiring minds need to know. If something is disproportionate, there must have been some another portion that would have been proportionate no?

And – I was going to wonder – has he simply been misinterpreted in his calls for ‘restraint?’ After all, according to Clare Short (admittedly She Who Is Known For The Foundation of the ‘I’m Going – I’m Going – Really Any Minute Now I’m Going. Honest’ School of Resignation -- but still it’s true that in the end she did go) and as documented by Mark Thomas in As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela; Underground Adventures in the Arms and Torture Trade ,

“. . .every minister who makes a foreign trip has three briefings: one from their department detailing the purpose of their trip, a second from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office explaining the political situation in the country the minister is to visit, and a third briefing, talking points, from Downing Street, things to mention and plug, like Arms Deals. Every time there is an arms deal in the air it is a minister’s duty to talk it up, no matter what the purpose of the trip. They could be visiting victims of the tsunami or having a meeting about carbon emissions, and somewhere on their to-do list scrawled in biro are the words – ‘Big up the guns.” (123)

‘Was this what that phrase ‘restraint’ was about?’ I was going to muse. After all, various U.K. companies do an excellent line in handcuffs and other assorted accoutrements of the torture trade. And they’ve got good contracts in high places: the handcuffs used in Guantanamo have “Made in England” stamped on them. (Thomas, 212). Perhaps Howell was taken out of context, I was going to speculate – perhaps there’s a big deal in hand-cuffs going down and he’d been told to ‘big up the cuffs and tell them BOGOF on the netting.’

According to the Guardian , an anonymous ‘senior Israeli diplomat’ described that ‘Poodle To The Poodle Phone’ moment thus: “'The tone was very positive. We agree on all major aspects of this crisis and are greatly appreciative of Britain's position.”

Well may they be, since the U.K.’s sales of arms to Israel almost doubled to a not insignificant £25m.

The Foreign Office claims that “ that all exports were considered under the government's official criteria. "The bottom line is that no piece of kit is used for external aggression or internal repression."

Children’s parties. That’s what they’re for. An alternative to Bonzo the Happy Clown and purple dinosaurs.

So yes. Field day. Planned excusion to the sunny uplands.

But looking at Howell’s words again and doing a bit of reading between the lines, I think that perhaps (just perhaps, I wouldn’t venture anything stronger than that) there may be a bit of a cri de coeur going on there. Albeit expressed unfortunately not in its vehemence but in its moderation. And yes, in its argumentation too: the reason to refrain from killing children is not that

“Every person who has got a mobile phone, every person who can take a photograph of somebody being blown to bits, or a child with a limb missing, is a reporter now.”

But such errors in argument are not uncommon when one is desperately trying to persuade. Who can say for sure what is in his heart or where it might eventually lead him?

Enough.
What is to be done.
Opposing the arms trade is a piece in this jigsaw puzzle I think.

It’s late in the day, but here are three things you can do (depending of course on what you already are doing -- you may already be running at full tilt – whether on this or any of a myriad of connected issues).

1) Knowledge is the beginning of power. Inform yourself and inform us. Places to start reading include Control Arms and also the Amnesty International USA pages on arms control. And there’s this for some recent (sad) history. And as in all things, google is your friend.

I must admit – digressions, diversions, excursions and expeditions are always very welcome - but I’d kind of like it if one of the things people used this thread for was ‘here’s what I found out.’ That could be ‘here’s what I found out about who is selling what to whom.’ It could also be about ‘what can be done to stop it?’ Or ‘What have people done? What worked? What didn’t?’

2) These folks Campaign Against the Arms Trade could probably use some support. If you know of other similar organisations – whereever they may be based – that could do with any of the various kinds of support and involvement that such organisations can generally use, tell us about them.

3) Do you have stocks? A portfolio? (Unlikely, I know) But on that slim off-chance, take a look at who you’re investing with: maybe do some rethinking and reorganising if it strikes you as necessary. Do you have a pension? (Unlikely, I know) But again, on that offchance, take a look at who they invest in. Do you need to do something about that?

War Without Borders

2006-07-23T08:40:00.000+01:00

It seems that almost everything I write recently drifts into the area of gaps, of divides, disconnects, and which have a measure of bridgeableness and which do not, of wagons circling and doors closing, and others opening.

There is something in the nature of some of us, I think, that naturally rebels at the suggestion that a gap is unbridgeable, a divide so deep that no compromise, no negotiation is possible. And so we hammer away, ignoring smashed fingers, because that something in us does not want to "give up."

There is such a fine line between giving up and recognizing that our energies are sorely needed somewhere else that many of us often miss it. In our zeal to bridge that gap, we often lose sight of the one thing any compromise or negotiation needs most: a recognition and comprehension of the other party's point of view.

Even as we cajole and wheedle and try to choose the best words to make them see ours, the temptation to wishfully craft theirs into what we long for it to be is sometimes just too strong.

Extricating ourselves from such a predicament can be a painful process, as it challenges our stubbornness, and forces us to acknowledge things that we wish were not so.

But as painful as it may be to confront and accept the fact that someone else's point of view is indeed one that our own moral absolutes will simply not allow us to meet halfway, that there are some drawing rooms into which we should not enter, and in which, if we have entered, we should not remain.

People in gated communities put those gates there for a reason, and rather than crashing those gates, even if our gesture is tolerated for whatever reason, our efforts will be better spent in working toward our goals outside of that "closed space," and if we are also obliged by circumstances to circle our wagons, we can make the circle a large one.

The Situation that is now upon us does not recognize national borders, nor ethnic or religious divides. It is universal, it is basic, and it is absolute.

How ironic that the words of a man disliked by so many both in and outside of so many spaces so aptly and so tragically correctly define the plight of us all: "You are with us (US policies) or you are with the terrorists."

It is this sorry rag of truth that we all share. We are on either one side or another. We are either for invasion, occupation, kidnapping, torture, etc etc etc, or we are against it.

It does not matter whether one side calls the other "terrorists," or "extremists," or "radicals," "obstructionists," "rejectionist," "anti-business," and calls itself "patriotic," "pragmatic," "centrist," electable."

It does not matter whether the other side calls its opponents "the real terrorists," "nationalist," "racist," "colonialist," "imperialist," "exceptionalist," and calls itself "the real patriots" or "pro-peacce," or whatever term each side wishes to apply to the other, whatever term each wishes to apply to itself.

Just as the Situation knows no national borders, neither does it bow to nomenclature. It is a divide that cannot be bridged by euphemisms or presentation strategies or even the current favorite "nuances."

The only path to a solution, if there is one, begins with acceptance of these painful truths, with meeting the reality of the Situation head-on, despite our very natural fear, and very natural desire to take refuge in the comfort of semantics and platitudes.

Two recent comments on my blog, as well as an article pointed out to me by catnip brought this home to me with a terrible and inescapable starkness.

One, from a tireless peace activist, stunned by the fact that she is now at risk, not from some shadowy foreign "terst" entity, but from her own countrymen. The Situation, remember, is knows no national borders. It is the Ultimate and Extreme non-national space.

The other, from a very courageous man who has not only the bravery and nobility of soul to make a journey so agonizing, so difficult, that those of us who have not had to make it can only imagine the wrenching pain of the process, but a man who also has the grace and pure-hearted generosity to have shared every step of his passage with earth residents, that we might all be edified, inspired, and educated by his heroism. He pointed out a hard and universal truth: Aggressors put their fate in the hands of their victims.

These two, both Americans, might take some small measure of comfort to know that they are not alone, that while the Situation knows no borders, at least
one of their countrymen has moved his wagon next to theirs, and I suspect we may be hearing from more.

As events unfold (are you as tired of reading that phrase as I am of typing it?), we will all go through some painful and unpleasant experiences, offline, we will watch helplessly as families divide, as office water coolers ring with angry words, we will be witness to all the various ways in which human beings make manifest the grim and unbending horror of the Situation.

Online, the "kerfluffles" and textual hysterics we may have seen are nothing to what we will see. We will receive emails verging on, even descending into, "hate mail" from internet friends we have for years called "brother." With eyes still wet from those inbox tears, the online phenomena we see will, like its offline homologue, involve irrevocable dissolution of longstanding friendships, as individuals come to grips with the totality, the vastness, the all-encompassing and unbridegable gap of the Situation.

We will variously bid farewell to innocence, or "put away childish things," as the Christian bible says, and with that unglorious weight of sadness and fear in our hearts, reluctantly move our wagons into one circle or another, and forsake the relatively irrelevant and picayune battles that have of necessity and by definition failed to stave off the inevitable, and prepare ourselves for the War without Borders into which we are all, every one of us, without exceptions, thrust into by the universality of the Situation.

NOTE: This will probably be cross-posted elsewhere, but not on any "gated communities for white Americans." ;=>

Ringing the Changes

2006-07-17T23:41:00.000+01:00

“I shall not keep you long, he cried. Cheers from all the assembly. I have called you all together for a Purpose. Something in the way that he said this made an impression. There was almost silence, and one or two of the Tooks pricked up their ears.
Indeed for Three Purposes!

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

Alas, it's not my eleventy-first birthday party, but like Bilbo, I shall not keep you long. I do however have Three Purposes. And purposes well worthy of their italics I think. If I’m really lucky, I might even manage an Announcement.

Actually the Announcement should come first.

InFlight is changing.
No, that's not quite true. InFlight has changed.
And now it's about to change some more.
InFlight is becoming a group blog.

Which brings me to those Three Purposes. Or Three Graces perhaps, because certainly I consider all three of them to have grace in abundance.

I've asked Nanette, supersoling and DuctapeFatwa to become -- well I'm actually not sure what the right term should be. FPers? That's a bit arrogant for what is a very little blog. Contributors? But everyone who posts makes a contribution, often far more of a contribution than the 'post' per se as one can plainly see by looking back through the archives.

Hmm. People who post articles and/or facilitate other people posting articles on occasion and/or generally keep things ticking over. That's what I've asked them to be. All of them were doing that already, but I've asked them to do it here as well, as they see fit. And to my delight (and immense relief!) Nanette, supersoling and DuctapeFatwa have all agreed. Logistics are still being sorted out (what a wonderful euphemism that is for 'dove is still figuring out how blogger works!')

And while I'm at it there are a couple of other things I wanted to say as well. (If brevity is the soul of wit then alas. . .)

There is something about InFlight that I'd like not to change. Doesn't mean it won't of course.

I'd like it to be non-national space. I think it has, for the most part, been non-national space so far and I'd like it to continue to be.

I guess I've also been thinking about homes and coalitions and how these things are not like each other.

And I've been reading and thinking a bit about Bernice Johnson Reagon's speech, Coalition Politics:Turning the Century

I'd like to discuss her speech: I'm not quite sure where to begin. The century she spoke of turning has of course turned in the interim. But twenty-five years on (more or less) since she spoke it seems to me that her words could have been said for the first time this morning. Anyway, every time I think I've got the beginnings of a coherent sentence, I find myself turning my head this way and that, saying 'hmmm. Do I really mean that?' and going back to her words.

So I'd like to invite someone to start. And someone else to join in. And when I find some words, so shall I.

Typing (and Thinking) out Loud Part II

2006-07-17T20:42:00.000+01:00

In the last Typing (and Thinking) out Loud thread, Nanette observed something 'weird' while writing about bell hooks's conclusion that "This means that the world we have most intimately known, the world in which we feel "safe" (even if such feelings are based on illusions), must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone must change, not just those who we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far served to check our revolutionary impulses." ( bell hooks, From Margin to Centre 166).

Nanette said:

You know how sometimes you hear a word or a phrase that you've probably heard thousands of times in your life, but at that particular point in time it just sounds... weird? Like it's a new thing, and maybe doesn't belong there. This happened to me yesterday when reading an article and having it say "human rights organizations say... ".

Human rights organizations. Care for the children charities. Anti poverty/feed the poor organizations.

Don't those just seem... well, weird? Why, at this point in time... or really, at any point in time, should we need huge, international organizations that have to lobby for human rights? Or beg for food to feed people? It doesn't usually seem weird though, it seems like well... that's how things are supposed to be. After all, someone has to do it. Right? But it all seems backwards.

Yes. I think it does seem backwards. I think we've come to take some things that we shouldn't have as 'natural', 'inevitable', 'that's just how it is.' Human nature.

When one is told 'but that's just naturally how it is,' I think it can be useful to take a long hard look at who benefits and who does not benefit from that particular natural state. And how? Because asking those questions might lead us to wonder whether 'it' -- whatever the 'it' may be -- is in fact an intractable 'state of nature' or whether it is instead no more than a 'state of affairs' that just happens to be wearing a convincing disguise.

So. What are the 'it's' you would like to make unnatural? Why? And where would you begin?

---
As a postscript, I just wanted to say 'welcome' to everyone who has come here to write over this last week. It's good to see you here, albeit not always under the easiest of circumstances and certainly in far from the happiest of times.

Words fail

2006-07-16T18:29:00.000+01:00

It looks like where my grandparents lived
when they were still alive.

Bushfire country.
The forest burned and given to gorse,
parched scrub, sharp stones and dusty heat
that burns again each summer.

These tinder-dry days olive groves are grown there
and olives but not infants.
I mean there are no infants hanging in the olive branches,
no tiny legs, no little limbs.
The infants are alive not in the olive tree.

Don't cry. She has no use for your tears.
She had a water bottle.
If that will no longer serve, your tears will not revive her.
Light no candle. This is bushfire country.
A candle is the last thing anyone in their right mind needs.
You comfort no-one but yourself
with tears, candles, poetry.

Typing (and thinking) Out Loud Thread

2006-07-14T08:45:00.000+01:00

Alas, I'm not going to be able to do anything but sporadic typing and thinking until tomorrow. However, the last thread may be getting a bit big and unwieldy so I thought I'd provide a brand new comment thread for people to keep talking here as well if they wish. (Obviously people should feel free to keep posting to the previous discussion though, especially if they are replying to comments there -- this is 'another' space, rather than an 'instead of' space)

People might want to post questions too for people to discuss -- I've heard from at least one person who would like to do that, and this would be a good place for that.

In the interim, because I see (in inchoate ways thus far) this issue as being so closely linked with and to feminism, I thought I'd quote something bell hooks said at the conclusion of Feminist Theory; from Margin to Centre

The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist
struggle. This means that the world that we have most intimately known,
the world in which we feel 'safe' (even if such feelings are
illusions) must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone
must change, not just those we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far
served to check our revolutionary impulses. Those revolutionary
impulses must freely inform our theory and practice if feminist movement to
end existing oppression is to progress, if we are to transform our present reality.

Anyway, I think there are things to muse on here. Just very briefly in terms of contextualising her conclusion. I don't think bell hooks is saying that oppression doesn't exist, that it shouldn't be called what it is, or that those engaged in oppresion shouldn't be called on that (or that doing that calling is itself an act of oppression). I do think she's saying that it's a rare person who isn't or hasn't been complicit in oppression themselves in one way or another. Certainly, that's one I'd have to put my hand up to.