Dungeons and Beacons

The Statue of Liberty’s innards were reopened for July 4, and a few hardy patriots were allowed to climb up the iconic torch-bearing arm and view 20 miles of New Jersey for the first time in years. Lucky for them that the unsettled global climate has brought virtually nonstop rain and chill to the New York area and kept temperatures below triple digits inside the metallic dame as they performed the 160-stair assault on her digital summit.

We swell with pride at the sight and the symbolism of our audacious experiment in a free society, and I include myself without embarrassment. Grandpa Frasca sailed into port here along with 12 million other immigrants and glimpsed that promising sight as a penniless teenager. I don’t know if foreigners were more welcome then or just better absorbed and exploited. But the statue suggests at least begrudging respect for humanity in all its forms and reminds us of a guiding principle even if it’s honored in the breach all too frequently.

I got a good look at Lady Liberty Friday night on a shipboard dancing party in which I formed part of a distinctly minority ethnicity and couldn’t help thinking about how our various ancestors steamed into the Atlantic shores over the course of recent centuries, some escaping from oppression, others as chattel slaves hopelessly in the grips of it. Although we assume human rights are applicable to all these days, it was quite recently that a tenuous consensus on who might qualify as a ‘human’ has been achieved.

It’s easy to think that times have changed for the better and for good, but history suggests otherwise. How many accounts have we read in just our adult lifetimes of communities living peaceably side by side for centuries—in Rwanda or Bosnia or yes, even Iraq—only to find that external forces suddenly rip through the fabric of civility and turn once cordial neighbors into deranged genocides.

All of which makes the more repugnant our blithe pawning of the nation’s ever-fragile civil protections in exchange for the right to continue punishing the chained up accused enemies in Guantánamo. Hardly a day goes by without another revelation of the ongoing abuse of the defenseless detainees there, accompanied by continuing complicity with state policy by the major media, which, as the incomparable Glenn Greenwald points out, refuse to use the word torture when describing anything done by the Land of Liberty while simultaneously calling it precisely that when others do it. And given the lack of outcry over the scandal, not to mention the smooth adoption of some of the worst Bushite policies by President Obama, the abuses now depart from the category of ‘excesses’ or actions by ‘rogue agents’ or a political faction mercifully ousted. No, they are now crimes for which we bear collective responsibility and for which our descendants will pay a fearsome price.

I fear I am not old enough to avoid witnessing the eventual consequence of this massive national waffle on the principle of the physical integrity of the bound and helpless. I have no doubt that, sooner or later, others deemed enemies of society also will be subjected to torture by agents of the state. As a society we have endorsed, through our actions and through our silences, the torment of the few to guarantee the safety of the many, and the lesson will not be lost upon those wielding power over us.

Gay Pride and the Conquest of Gaul

Julius Caesar was quite a man. He was determined to make his way politically in Rome, and he decided to bring the fractious barbarian tribes of Gaul within the imperial system—along with their territories, of course. It took him less than a decade and roughly a million Gallic lives to achieve his ambitions.

Caesar’s own description of his steady elimination of rivals in the Gallic wars—which I just read for the first time—is hair-raising and yet somewhat bloodless. The wars and campaigns are related in terms of strategies, negotiations, alliances, battles, sieges of cities, and the technology of weapons and war-making.

But you never get a sense of axes cleaving shoulders, javelins piercing sides, or swords cutting into flesh and bone. Bodies pile up; prisoners are marched off; women and children sold into slavery—all as a matter of course. The overall logic is that superior force is its own end, that one’s group must triumph because it is one’s group. This underlying raison de guerre is so obvious to the author (and by implication to his audience) that it is never stated.

Caesar implies that living under Roman rule—he calls it civilization—is good for the subjugated tribes although he recognizes that they chafe at conquest. In all fairness, warfare and atrocity certainly didn’t arrive with the Romans, and the impression of the life of the Gauls prior to their Romanization looks just as nasty, brutish and short as it was afterward.

Of course, if Vercingetorix, the last defeated Gallic chieftain, had had some of Caesar’s literary skill, we’d undoubtedly have quite a different perspective on the first century BCE. But he didn’t, and we don’t.

Biped society hasn’t evolved much since then as evidenced by our attitudes toward warfare today, and the eagerness of men to prove themselves as soldiers. Last week’s hilarious Drag March from Tompkins Square Park over to New York’s West Village and the gay-historic Stonewall Inn was a reminder of just how anxious a lot of men still are, even in hip, free-wheeling New York City, at the idea of abandoning their assigned gender role. I thought I could read in their nervously amazed faces the question, How could a man in a dress defend his fortress and slaughter the enemy?

We assume the mechanization and professionalization of warfare has precluded us from needing the barbarian virtues of endurance, pride, honor, sacrifice and the thirst for blood. But hearing accounts of our ongoing wars of conquest and the unquestioning acceptance that American troops should be pacifying the countryside and laying waste to Afghan fields (of opium) sound eerily familiar after finishing The Conquest of Gaul.

On the airplane I just took from Mississippi, the crew nearly forced us to applaud the presence of uniformed soldiers on the flight for their heroic sacrifices ‘defending our freedom’. Both Caesar and the Gauls would have understood completely.

Latin America’s stinging reaction to Honduran coup

[Note: I have not had easy internet access in the last two weeks for various technological and scheduling reasons and so have not kept this blog current. I will be back more frequently now.]

It has been remarkable and even encouraging to see the swift and unambiguous reaction to the armed forces coup in Honduras earlier this week. Key figures in the Organization of American States condemned it in no uncertain terms, and ousted president Manuel Zelaya made a triumphant appearance at the United Nations yesterday where he was applauded by both the chavista Venezuelans and the obamanian Americans as the legitimate, elected representative of his country. Diplomats from nearly 200 other countries joined the ovation.

Years ago people would have hardly noticed a military seizure of power in Latin America, but the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s have left some historical memory. Not many people on the continent want to go back to the bad old days of dictatorship and instability, least of all the business owners who are doing better than ever throughout the region. And there is a level of universal consensus that democracy is worth preserving on the long-suffering continent.

The U.S. under Obama is also playing quite a different role than what we could have expected from Bush, Rice and Cheney, who might well have thought the removal of a Chávez ally by coup d’état was just dandy. Although Obama is keeping the U.S. ambassador in place, the huge sums (relatively speaking) that flow from Washington to Tegucigalpa will be on everyone’s mind in the next few days and will give O considerable leverage.

Zelaya sounds like a blowhard and an adventurer, and he should have known better than to try to ram Hugo-naut constitutional changes past his very considerable opposition via plebiscite. Anything that could pave the way for him to stick around for another term starts to sound like president-for-life Hugo’s approach to governance, and the Honduran ruling elite obviously didn’t like the idea.

But they’re also as dumb as their Venezuelan counterparts. They may have successfully generated the nightmare they feared by rousting Zelaya out of bed in his pajamas and expelling him to Costa Rica. No one is going to believe the army’s lame backpedaling about how it wasn’t really a ‘coup’ because no one got killed (yet).

Now, Zelaya may be reimposed on them and return as the triumphant, abused hero. This is exactly what strengthened the Chávez juggernaut a few years ago with the help of incompetent Condoleeza & Co., who fell face forwards into the whole mess. It ain’t so easy to pull the rug out from under elected, civilian leaders in Latin America any more, and that’s a wonderful thing, no matter who Zelaya is.

March of the Hypocrites

Yet another top-ranking Guardian of Morality has lined up to confess and acknowledge the peculiar potency of that little area of biped anatomy just below the equator. Yes, Disappearing Mark Sanford turns out to have one just like the rest of us but to be less well endowed in the North Pole region where the brains are located.

Why are these guys so predictable? How many of these hilarious but ultimately depressing episodes do we have to live through before getting a life as a country and bouncing the sexophobic religious fanatics out of serious public debate? Is it not ironic that we cheer loudly for the demise of the Iranian mullahs while simultaneously failing to notice that their approach to gender equity and sexual emancipation is not that far from that of Governor Sanford and his pious crew?

I have no doubt that, in private, the robed Robespierres of Teheran are as randy and self-indulgent as a half-ton of Republican anti-abortionists. And Doug Ireland has reported in Gay City News on the nightmare of persecution, arrest, torture and sometimes death faced by Iranian gays—who also relate with depressing consistency that the repressive apparatus is full of perverted closet cases, who can’t wait to force themselves on the detainees in the country’s jails and prisons.

But commentators who wonder how on earth the religious right can sustain their ongoing hypocritical positions about sex, such as Salon’s Glenallen Walken commenting on the last wandering weenie (Senator Ensign), continue to miss the point. We asked ourselves the same thing for years in Chile as the pinochetista parties fought the legalization of divorce year after year despite their own second and third marriages. (They could get annulments for a price.)

How can they shamelessly do one thing and preach another? we marveled. But that was exactly the point. Individual behavior, in their parallel universe, was not important, and in fact merely confirmed the fallen state of sinful (sexual) man (or less forgivingly, woman). As long as these politicians defended the idea and the strict legal fulfillment of traditional standards of chastity, fidelity and all the rest, it didn’t matter whether they slipped up personally now and then. They were almost expected to.

The National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez expresses this approach perfectly in her we-forgive-you column that I saw Tuesday in the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American. ‘A politician’s failings do not render all to which he subscribes morally null’, she writes and adds, ‘Preaching comes from sinners, too’. How convenient.

Of course, this approach would be laughed into scorn if the roles were reversed and we were back observing the foibles of an Edwards or a Clinton. In those cases the guilty are to chased by Furies into the bowels of hell and have red ‘A’s woven into their undershirts throughout eternity.

But there has to come a point where the ‘we’re-just-human-but-you-guys-are-evil’ routine wears itself out. I hope I live long enough to witness the triumph of Iranian women over the bearded skirts now in charge and to see the American right wing immediately side with the opposition and align itself with the ousted clerics. Then they can go back to chanting ‘Bomb-bomb-Iran’ with gusto.

Democracy & Dictatorship

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival premiered a documentary about Russia’s fake democracy last night that was really a paean to dissident Garry Kasparov, who was in attendance. The film is an amateurish muddle and provided no context about the situation in the country, but the images were gripping and fairly self-explanatory, the street protests eerily reminiscent of their Chilean counterparts that I witnessed during the 1980s.

The film does Kasparov, the world’s top chess player for 20 years, no favors by its uncritical fawning, but you gotta hand it to a guy who is rich enough to be stroking his thighs in Monte Carlo and instead fights for democracy back home surrounded by bodyguards to ward off the screaming Putinist thugs, including gaggles of pimply, adolescent mercenaries sneering at him as a turncoat for opposing Lord Vlad.

Kasparov’s allies highlighted in the film looked a little peculiar too, to my mind, but one can’t be choosy in politics, and Kasparov looked indulgently open-minded about them while doing his best to keep the fractious coalition in line.

In the Q&A period following the screening, Kasparov had interesting things to say. He compared the Russian process with Iran and Chile and assured us that though the demonstrations shown on screen (dating from 2006-07) were small, much bigger ones will surely follow. He asserted that the economic conditions faced by the Russian masses are so dire that they will be hitting the streets soon and that the Putin brigades in the streets could even turn against the regime. For example, he said that only a dozen of Russia’s 83 regions were solvent and meeting their salary and pension obligations.

Kasparov’s main criticism of U.S. policy is the tendency to swallow what he says is a completely phony political process. No one pretends that China is a parliamentary democracy, he said, why can’t they see through ours? ‘We’re not trying to win elections’, he equipped, ‘We’re trying to have elections’.

Our countrymen so eager to award wiretapping privileges to the federal government—such as presidents Bush and Obama—might have been sobered by Kasparov’s comments on the Russian way of doing things. Not only are all cell phone and email communications fair game, Russian consumers actually pay for the state’s privileges through a tax added on their mobile charges.

It was sad to hear this otherwise thoughtful and intelligent man wind up his remarks with an endorsement of the invasion of Iraq in the name of ‘action against dictatorship’. I can’t imagine that will win him many points among his countrymen. But in a normal state he would have the right to his opinions and not be hauled before a judge every time his party wants to march down a Moscow street. Meanwhile, I’ll be curious to see if the massive discontent he predicts for Russia in coming months or years comes to pass.

Seductions of a police state

Stalin, like Nero, took his poetry seriously, perhaps not for its aesthetic qualities but as an expression of independent thought and feeling, which are always dangerous to a dictator because they suggest the possibility of dissidence. (I’m sure Kim Jong-Il supervises its production very closely as well.)

What this meant for the writers and intelligentsia of the early Soviet period is hard to fathom from the outside, but an account by the widow of Osip Mandelstam entitled Hope against Hope is a window into that bizarre netherworld of Stalinist repression and later terror. It was published in the early 1970s, I believe, and a copy came into my hands through inheritance of some of my late uncle’s books. It is a remarkable gem.

Osip Mandelstam was sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution but later wrote a 16-line poem in which he calls Stalin a murderer of peasants. His ironic comment that ‘only in Russia is poetry respected—it gets people killed’, turned out to be prophetic. He died in a Siberian work camp shortly after his second arrest.

Nadezhda Mandelstam did not consider herself a writer, but her account is not only utterly gripping as a narrative but a stylistic marvel. Her erudition, insight and sheer toughness come through on every page.


I also recommend it highly to all those impatient to dismantle our civil liberties as quickly as possible in the name of ‘protecting the American people’ or ‘defending our way of life’ as similar phrases ring throughout her 500-page description of Stalinist discourse and its practical applications in a totalitarian state. It is much easier to scapegoat the weak and whip a frightened populace into complicity with abuse than it is to defend the rule of law and the rights of the accused to due process.

She outlines how the revolutionary ideals that sounded so attractive and obvious to her generation became clubs in the hands of the secret police and justifications—readily accepted by many—for waves of purges and human suffering on a staggering scale.

Here is Mrs Mandelstam on the insidious and permanent effect of the 1937 terror and its aftermath. Note how creepily recognizable are her descriptions of the leadership of one of the major crimes against humanity of our century:

In all their different incarnations, our guardians were always sure they were right and never knew what it was to doubt. They always boldly claimed to know just by looking at a seed what its fruit would be, and from this it was but a step to decreeing the destruction of any seedling they thought was useless.

She also revisits constantly the theme of a society’s moral bankruptcy as an outcome of repression and a stimulus to its further deepening:

Every grand idea eventually goes into a decline. Once this has happened, all that remains is inertia—with young people afraid of change, weary middle-aged ones craving for peace, a handful of old men horrified at what they have done, and countless petty myrmidons repeating by rote the phrases they were taught in their youth.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Amid the shattering crystal and collapsing deck chairs in Albany, there are faint glimpses of renovation, which is devoutly to be wished. Amazing as it may seem, the hilarious spectacle of a few elected pols doublecrossing their party colleagues for quick, personal advantage is opening a wedge for reform that the Democratic takeover of both legislative houses last November promised but did not deliver.

For any reader out of state, here is the background: New York’s state government has been for decades the preserve of three men: the governor and the two majority leaders of the Senate and the Assembly, Joseph Bruno (R) and Sheldon Silver (D). They made all the major decisions for so long that voters could be forgiven for hardly noticing that we sent other legislators to the state capital and even a governor now and then. Whoever won, Bruno and Silver were always in charge.

The statehouse rules were so stacked in favor of this solonic dictatorship that Silver and Bruno were like Roman consuls without the one-year term limit imposed by the ancients. They doled out legislative favors and slices of the budgetary pie so that any elected official who wanted a pothole fixed in the home district had to bow to their will.

Then last November Bruno retired amid a slew of legal difficulties related to the usual (by Albany standards) dubious business dealings. That set off a scramble to overturn the Republican edge in the upper house and make new things happen. Theoretically, anyway.

The Democrats did win the Senate by a two-vote majority, but what happened instead was not in the script. A trio of city-based Democratic senators promptly held out for major goodies, threatening to bolt and vote with the enemy party if they didn’t get them. Harlem Dem Malcolm Smith finally kept them in check and replaced Bruno, but at the cost of substantial concessions, including juicy posts for the blackmailers and effective backsliding on the same-sex marriage bill that a Democratic majority was supposed to assure. (One of these extortionists is an evangelical fanatic.) But Smith had the top job—until this week.

Now two completely different renegades have popped up to decide they are going to vote with the Republican minority and get themselves a cozy set-up, too. And while one of them is now wavering, a third player, Manhattan liberal Tom Duane, has sent out unmistakable signals that he might be open to doing a deal to get his legislative priorities on the agenda—starting with marriage equality.

Speculation is that the Republicans are so thirsty to get back into the game that they may be willing to drop their long-standing opposition to the gay marriage bill, especially given national trends and their own increasingly bleak electoral prospects. At this stage, anything can happen—and probably will.

Duane’s move may be opportunistic, but he is not a sleazebag, and his threat raises the current circus to a new level. A little-noticed element of the frantic negotiations now taking place is a possible rule change that would dismantle the autocratic rule of the Senate leader and empower our elected officials to get their bills and projects a hearing without having to kiss the big guy’s rump year after year. If so, the June chaos eventually could turn out to be a good thing, the opening salvo in the fight to dismantle the Albany Triumvirate once and for all.