Pittsburgh killer

Forgive me for not feeling much of anything over George Sodini’s sick fantasy of himself as the tough guy taking down The Enemy, in this case a roomful of young women doing exercises. It’s all so predictable that I guess I’ll leave the mourning to people who still think we aren’t actively fomenting such outcomes.

Not that there’s a direct line between an individual case of psychosis and the pandering dementia served up daily on cable or the criminally irresponsible social attitudes toward guns. No one is exactly to ‘blame’ for what happened in Pittsburgh, but all you have to do is turn on the TV to see people cheering the attitudes sustaining this sort of senseless slaughter. How tragic can things be that aren’t really accidental?

One hardly needs to read through Sodini’s now-public diary ravings to find out that the guy was upset because his weenie wasn’t getting the attention he thought it deserved. Therefore, all women are guilty and deserve to die. Nothing new there.

But as usual the standard reports are cherry-picking that narrative line from the guy’s screed and downplaying his enthusiastic membership in the lunatic fringe that somehow has become the "other side" in our national debate. Turns out Sodini posted to ‘militia’ websites in the 1990s, and in recent weeks as he tumbled over the edge, he associated Obama’s election to the take-over of white womanhood by black males.

Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good! In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama's plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl hoe to hone up on.

This repugnant horseshit sounds almost laughably antebellum, but isn’t the subtext a familiar and disturbingly current one? Sodini sounds like any one of the army of disgruntled guys who are being coached incessantly that they’re really special underneath, but somebody is cheating them out of their deservedly triumphant march through life. Hour after hour, the Glen Becks and the Rush Limbaughs are drilling into them the idea that they could be on top, but undeserving minorities and (the horror!) actual females are getting the prizes instead.

Add the hilariously lax regulation of armaments that we have agreed to as a nation, and you get the exactly the mayhem cooked up in his toxic stew of a brain. It’s as surprising as liver cirrhosis should be to an alcoholic.

Instead, we get assurances that nothing could be done, like the local police chief who told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Democrat that Sodini ‘just had a lot of hatred in him and (was) hell-bent on committing this act, and no one was going to stop him’. Yeah, just a lone wacko, so whocouldanode?

When we decide we don’t like this sort of behavior, we can do something about it, which would reflect true lamentation and regret instead of what we get—another chorus from the hired wailers at CNN.

I Fear for Everyone’s Sanity

When the history of the present period is written—if any bipeds are still around to actually write it—the ‘birther’ movement will take its place next to the mass suicide of the followers of Heaven’s Gate for sheer improbable wackiness. Still, you can’t deny it makes great cable TV for anyone bored with Jerry Springer reruns.

I’m still trying to get over watching MSNBC for the televised naked mud wrestling match between 'birther' Orly Taitz and host David Shuster on the new ‘proof’ that Obama was actually born in Kenya. It was more embarrassing than walking in on your grandparents having sex.

In a normal world Taitz would be institutionalized for her own safety. Instead, she is making herself a celebrity and probably attracting juicy donations to her website from people who still can’t get over last November.

Has anyone picked up on the irony that the spokesperson for the ‘birthers’ herself saw the light of day (however briefly) in the Soviet Union and was permitted to emigrate to Israel where she had privileges awarded her due to her religion, not her birthplace? If she were still there, no doubt she’d be an enthusiastic supporter of Avigdor Lieberman, the recently arrived Moldovan nightclub bouncer who is now the Israeli foreign minister and thinks the Arabs should pledge allegiance to Judaism or leave.

Then there’s the question of how she obtained permission to reside in the United States. One website says she had ‘anchor babies’, that nasty term referring to how foreign women get themselves established here by giving birth on U.S. soil. Now there’s something for Lou Dobbs to take up.

The whole circus says something about the debasement of public discourse engendered by macho cable-news screaming. Shuster and Taitz really looked like mirror images of each other as they railed away oblivious to what the other was saying. Given the way political thought is now produced here, the Taitz spectacle is predictable, and in fact she fits right in. Lunacy is so commonplace that it’s no wonder people are willing to believe that Obama’s health reforms would require you to euthanize Grandma.

Iran redux

The Iranian mass show trials which began Saturday suggest a floundering regime on the abyss without a clue about how to reawaken support among its shrinking base. Putting former ministers, high-ranking legislators and journalists on trial on the farcical charges of being agents of foreign powers is certain to backfire and leave the coup leaders like Khameini and Ahmadinejad in a cul-de-sac with few options.

I spent years living under a military dictatorship and find many of the accounts emerging from Iran entirely familiar, even predictable. The Iranian state appears to me to have about as much popular support as the collapsing Latin American dictatorships enjoyed in their waning years. Some lasted longer than others, but it was clear from the inside that their eventual disappearance was only a matter of time.

But these wounded beasts can do a lot of damage, and that is worrisome given the viciousness of the Iranian repressive apparatus to date. The Islamic revolution has a long tradition of torturing and disappearing its supposed enemies, so it’s not surprising to see the accused appear ashen-faced to recite the coached ‘confessions’ beaten out of them, which they will promptly disavow once out of the clutches of their thug jailers.

But it isn’t clear what the Ahmadinejad faction can do with the 100 defendants short of putting them all before firing squads. The more phony charges the leadership drums up, the more ridiculous it appears. The trials are made to order for the opposition, which now need do nothing but point out the glaring absurdity of the whole exercise. Day by day the ruling party loses credibility and authority.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the reports leaking out of Iran is the evident sympathy for the opposition among police and soldiers. Only the regime’s shock troops and Praetorian Guard, now turned into a huge corporate enterprise sucking dry the economy, can be counted upon to do the bosses’ bidding. This fact alone should shorten the regime’s survival by years.

When Ahmadinejad’s electoral coup first occurred, I wondered how long the momentum of his opponents would last. It was nice to think they would force the mullahs’ hand but more likely that the regime would crush the protests, and the whole cat-and-mouse game would continue indefinitely.

Now, I’m inclined to think that events may well accelerate toward a denouement much sooner.

When August Pinochet faced defeat in his 1988 plebiscite, he contemplated staging a coup similar to what occurred in Iran. He wanted to put out some fake results and intimidate the electoral officials. Instead, his military chiefs put a stop to his plan with the backing of the conservative parties because they decided that the 1981 constitution put in place by the military government was more important than the personal fate of its leading member.

So Pinochet was forced to accept that he had lost the vote. The result is that Chile’s democracy, run for nearly two decades by Pinochet’s sworn enemies, remains hamstrung by those structures.

In contrast, by jettisoning Iran’s electoral process and rigging the results, Ahmadinejad has undermined the political structures of 30 years’ standing and thereby raised the stakes by several orders of magnitude. Once he and his friends are finally ousted, there’s no telling what the country will do with its ‘Islamic republic’. The goofball religious fanatic may end up doing more to end the theocratic state than a whole generation of reformists.

Western Civilization--A Marvelous Idea

The Muhammed Jawad case is shaping up as the moment the Obama Administration—and by extension the rest of us—decides if it treasures the rule of law and due process or endorses the torture of children as practiced by the Bush clique.

‘Mr’ Jawad—who may have been 12 when he was first arrested in Afghanistan—has never been tried for a crime, but the Bush-Cheneyite faction that I thought lost the last election thinks we should continue to persecute a kid who has now spent one-third of his life in our dungeons, rather than cede his case to the authority of a judge or jury. This has to happen, they argue, because Jawad might be dangerous to someone at some indeterminate time in the future.

Talk about ‘judicial activism’ or deciding a case based on ‘empathy’. Imagine if Sonia Sotomayor made up the law this way during her career.

Obama’s lawyers already have conceded that there’s no case against Jawad but insist he be kept in prison anyway. I innocently thought that the American Way included NOT being locked up because powerful people think there’s something wrong with you. Wrong again.

Today’s New York Times story quotes the inevitable Heritage Foundation jackal, one Charles D. Stimson, to the effect that Obama will have to decide between a ‘habeas judge’ and their own opinion that Jawad can’t ‘in good conscience’ be freed.

What a classic statement of love for dictatorial rule! What a shining proof that the so-called conservatives have lost any lingering love for the United States of America and have succumbed to barbarism. There’s nothing ‘conservative’ about these people; they are the worst sort of marauding radicals, and our man Obama now has to decide if he’s with them or us.

Here’s the background on the Afghan teenager, by the way, for those readers still interested. As the Times relates:

A military judge found last year that much of the evidence against Mr. Jawad consisted of statements he gave after he was tortured by Afghan officials. In Judge Huvelle’s July 16 hearing, Department of Justice lawyers said the government would no longer rely on those statements to justify Mr. Jawad’s detention.

The military judge, Col. Stephen R. Henley, found that Afghan officials had threatened to kill Mr. Jawad and his family if he did not confess to the attack. Colonel Henley also said Mr. Jawad had been abused at Guantánamo, finding that he had been isolated, beaten, kicked and subject to sleep deprivation. . . He attempted suicide in Guantánamo in 2003.

So there you have the choices: on the one hand, a clamor for the continued destruction of a child’s life in the name of Security for Americans. On the other, the remnants of our tattered civil protections.

Mr. Obama, how do you vote?

Behind closed doors

I spent Sunday pedaling through the hilly terrain in the Harlem River valley 100 or so miles north of New York City and enjoying the great outdoors. Too bad hardly anyone who actually lives up there seemed to want anything to do with it—we rode for miles past manicured lawns without seeing a single soul poke his or her biped cranium out of its sealed environment.

You have to wonder what has made small-town and suburban Americans so disinclined to interact with their environment considering how much they put up with to live out there and stay clear of our mean, urban streets. I mean, who would choose to get in the car and drive five miles every time you want to buy an apple, look at a store or have a bit of random human interaction? Where do people in Millerton and Amenia go to work these days given that no one manufactures or grows anything to speak of? They must have commutes at least as disagreeable as most of us city folk.

In short, given the crude winters afflicting these northern parts, why don’t people burst out of their caves with joy and hop up and down on one leg as soon as the growing season is upon them?

After a long time in Latin America, the contrast is particularly stark given that in the Hispanic world people tend to adopt the Moorish-Iberian habit of enclosing the domicile behind fences, hedges and walls. You are not likely to pass by a Peruvian’s or Argentine’s home and observe their familial affairs through a ‘picture window’. At home, they are ostensibly much more closed to the prying, public eye, but—perhaps for that very reason—much more likely to set out into public spaces at specified moments.

One easy answer involves the comforting electronic bubble-worlds created by iPods, computerized alternative realities and 600 satellite TV channels, and no doubt they increase the creepy attraction of the hermetic life.

Another might be fear: after a few episodes of America’s Most Wanted, who can comfortably send their children out to play in backyards where child-snatching sex maniacs may lurk?

It is also curious to note the proliferation of American flags in these increasingly autarkous zones as if the idea of solidarity and interlinkage emerges with greater force as other social connections decline. That is hardly an original thought, but getting out and seeing how very peculiar heartland America is does partly explain the vaudevillian ravings of Glen Beck.

"A Man's Home is His Castle"--NOT [UPDATED]

I wonder if the Henry Louis Gates incident will mark a sort of ‘Anita Hill’ moment when white folks finally begin to grasp what it is like to live in The Other’s (non-white) skin. Gates is the Harvard professor who got dragged away from his home by the cops Monday because they couldn’t believe that he actually owned the place and wasn’t a burglar.

Anita Hill used to work for Clarence Thomas and told the Senate committee that eventually made him a Supreme Court justice (incidentally, probably the worst one in 100 years) that the man was a serial sexual harasser and a major creep. I recall that the whole incident looked peculiar and odd to most men while women’s reaction was, Doh! Of course that’s how it is in the workplace.

The early coverage of the Gates arrest was couched in the sort of police-blotter language that cops always use to paint the skeery, fearsome black guy as an obstreperous, unruly wild man that they were just forced to cuff and take downtown. Gates was reported to have said ‘This is how black men are treated in America!’ and very likely he did.

But the first reports didn’t mention that he voluntarily followed the cops outside after showing them his identification with the street address of the house on it. Any officer not racially-impaired would have accepted the evidence and let the man alone in his home. Instead, they have a major racial incident on their hands, and about time, too.

The other completely amazing element of the story is that Gates’ own neighbor was the person who phoned in the alert. What a sorry commentary on our society where people cannot even recognize the guy next door. If these suburbanites ever got out of their electronic caves and sat on their porches with each other, they’d be less likely to succumb to this pathological paranoia.

Access to and freedom in one’s own home is still completely racialized in America. While the demented Republicans insist on encouraging even more gun-owning and -packing with the crazed Thune Amendment, let no non-white males think the new rights contemplated might actually apply to them. John White found out the hard way when he used a weapon to scare off a white gang who chased his son into the front yard of their Long Island home screaming racist threats.

White, roused from his domestic peace by what he described as a ‘lynch mob’, got out his gun and fired at the white kids, killing one. He’s doing 25 years for second-degree murder.

[Update] In his news conference last night, Obama not only fielded the question on the Gates arrest, he gave an extended reply. That has to mean that he was prepared for it and wanted to make a point.

The morning-after coverage has picked up on Obama’s comment that the Cambridge police ‘acted stupidly’ in arresting Gates after he showed them proof that he was in his own home. Strong language and no off-the-cuff accident either. Obama chose to slam police abuses in a remarkably unvarnished way given his whole demeanor in office so far.

I take the smackdown as Obama’s response to the scurrilous race-baiting of his Supreme Court nominee by the Cro-Magnon faction in the Senate. Sotomayor couldn’t fight back because she had to act ladylike and garner 51 votes, and the White House couldn’t throw any punches for the same reason. But since those votes are now in the bag, it’s party time.

I don’t notice any howls of outrage from the usual suspects in cable-land or Fox News on Obama’s remarks because busting a college professor for being in his own living room is pretty hard to defend even if you’re a U.S. senator from Alabama. It suggests that the soft-sell, make-nice Obama that makes some of us pull our hair out may be a better strategist than we give him credit for.

The Cambridge police department’s goofball action gave Obama the opening to lay out a different scenario about race in America than the endless abused-white-firefighter version ladled up by the right-wing squawk machine over the last month. In using it, he showed a killer instinct that I’d like to see more of.

Whither Iran?

A fascinating article in the New York Times today suggests that Iran’s ruling elite’s decision to steal the election grows out of the new shape of the theocratic state now increasingly dominated by a sort of Praetorian guard.

In the piece a RAND expert terms Iran a ‘regular military security government with a façade of a Shiite clerical system’.

While the former Soviet Union or the current Chinese regime can be seen as one-party dictatorships, the military never took over or neutralized the ideologues. Even under the Stalinist terror, the main guy remained in charge and was hardly shy about whacking his top generals if he took a notion. Upon his demise power devolved onto the ruling party’s surviving commissars, not Beria’s secret police or the armed forces.

Times reporter Michael Slackman suggests that the Iranian theocracy is moving toward a model we know a lot about closer to home—Latin-style military dictatorships.

As often happens in military regimes, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has branched out into the economic sphere and has generated lucrative business opportunities for its members. Similarly, Latin American secret services quickly turned their spying and repressive activities into profit-making turns from travel agencies to drug-running operations. As the security apparatus always needs lots of money, the evolution into for-profit business is natural and inevitable, especially if you can muscle your corporate rivals out of the way with convincing threats.

The Guards, however, unlike a secret police force, are a full-fledged military entity, and their role in the economy goes far beyond small-scale free enterprise. Their affiliated companies scoop up oil and gas contracts and construction deals, which must bring them into direct conflict with legitimate businesses that, unlike theirs, must pay taxes and submit to some forms of state oversight. Strident, public opposition from wealthy businessmen like Rafsanjani over the election debacle thus makes a lot of sense.

The Times article says the Guards also make a killing in smuggling, not mentioning the most obvious component of that—control of the heroin trade. This is a little complicated if you are a religious fanatic although, as the Taliban have shown, perfectly manageable.

Considering the severe limitations on the Iranian president’s power in a system in which the leading mullahs can simply override his decisions, it is curious that the Ahmadinejad faction was so nervous that it felt compelled to rig the election in such a ham-handed way. A more confident ruling elite would simply have repeated the experience of the 1997-2005 Khatami presidency by letting the reform candidate win and then systematically blocking him from doing anything.

Instead, they bulldozed over any pretense of democratic expression, which suggests a much weaker consensus and a more desperate power struggle at the top.