A Georgian diplomat blurted out inconveniently last Tuesday that it was his own country that started the August war with Russia, which it then lost ignominiously.
Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Tbilisi’s former ambassador to Moscow, not only blamed his own country for the fighting, he also said Georgia had received a green light from the U.S. to go ahead with it.
This bombshell buttresses speculation elsewhere that Condoleeza Rice’s visit to that country just before the debacle included prodding Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to pursue the harebrained scheme to recover the territories of South Ossetia and eventually Abkhazia.
Tony Wood mused in the Sept 11 London Review of Books that Rice might have egged Saakashvili on during her visit of July 9-10. The Georgian president miscalculated that the Russians wouldn’t intervene militarily or perhaps thought the U.S. would come to his aid if they did. Wrong on both counts.
So why would Rice/Cheney/Bush encourage such a foolhardy move? Wood reasons that the U.S. gained plenty from the incident: quick agreement from Poland on a long-delayed plan to site missiles there with which to threaten the Russians, possibly a long-term U.S. military presence in Georgia, a cranked-up cold war and not incidentally a shot in the arm to the faltering McCain campaign, whose foreign policy adviser Randy Schuenemann worked for the Georgians until May 2008. All without a single U.S. casualty and full deniability.
The whole sorry episode is reminiscent of another war the United States encouraged and then lived to regret: Brzezinski’s chortling glee over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. There’s plenty on the record about the Carter Administration’s game in luring the Soviet dinosaur into those tar pits, which weakened the enemy and also brought us Osama bin Laden and his merry band. I wonder what the successful provocation of ethnic warfare in the Caucasus will mean for us ten or twenty years down the road.
Sunday, 30 November 2008
Saturday, 29 November 2008
Blowback
Poor Peggy Noonan. Her party lost, and now they have to deal with Sarah, the Bride of Frankenstein.
Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter and now columnist for the Wall Street Journal, moaned this week on Morning Joe that ‘the media wants to make her subliminally the face of the Republican party.’
How about making her that openly and legally, like by nominating her for vice president, then whooping and cheering and applauding wildly at every snarky, ignorant wisecrack served up by her speechwriters?
Despite her supposed credentials in journalism, Noonan uses ‘the media’ as a singular noun, a sure sign of conspiracy-theory paranoia, not to mention illiteracy. She should put on sandals and a hairband and join the gang outside the nearest Pacifica radio outlet—maybe throw on a tinfoil hat, too.
‘They’—suddenly there are more than one ‘media’, but oh well—‘want to make [Palin] what Republicans are’, said Noonan, ‘the face of the party, the leader of the party, because it amuses them to do that’.
Hey, it amuses me too, but I didn’t sit in the White Citizens Council meeting up in Minneapolis and chant ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ along with her when it looked like a winning slogan. So I get to be amused by seeing her crash and burn and, we hope, take down the entire party. I’m laughing now, Peggy. Ha ha.
Noonan admits later in the interview that Palin is the star because the Republicans haven’t got anyone else of interest to compete with her. There remain ‘emanations and tendrils’ of Palin’s celebrity, she said, making her sound like a spidery creature from Transylvania. But remember what happens in Interview with a Vampire when you try to kill the ones who made you? It ain’t pretty.
Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter and now columnist for the Wall Street Journal, moaned this week on Morning Joe that ‘the media wants to make her subliminally the face of the Republican party.’
How about making her that openly and legally, like by nominating her for vice president, then whooping and cheering and applauding wildly at every snarky, ignorant wisecrack served up by her speechwriters?
Despite her supposed credentials in journalism, Noonan uses ‘the media’ as a singular noun, a sure sign of conspiracy-theory paranoia, not to mention illiteracy. She should put on sandals and a hairband and join the gang outside the nearest Pacifica radio outlet—maybe throw on a tinfoil hat, too.
‘They’—suddenly there are more than one ‘media’, but oh well—‘want to make [Palin] what Republicans are’, said Noonan, ‘the face of the party, the leader of the party, because it amuses them to do that’.
Hey, it amuses me too, but I didn’t sit in the White Citizens Council meeting up in Minneapolis and chant ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ along with her when it looked like a winning slogan. So I get to be amused by seeing her crash and burn and, we hope, take down the entire party. I’m laughing now, Peggy. Ha ha.
Noonan admits later in the interview that Palin is the star because the Republicans haven’t got anyone else of interest to compete with her. There remain ‘emanations and tendrils’ of Palin’s celebrity, she said, making her sound like a spidery creature from Transylvania. But remember what happens in Interview with a Vampire when you try to kill the ones who made you? It ain’t pretty.
Public Crimes
The film ‘Milk’ ends with gay martyr Harvey Milk’s assassination, and one climax is more than enough for this fine, subtle biopic, which treats sex, city politics, a social movement, adolescent psychology, romance and the closet with insight and grace albeit with a glancing superficiality. (Otherwise, the movie would have to last four hours instead of 2’06’’.) But the story was just beginning, and there’s a second film that could be made about the trial of assassin Dan White and its aftermath—Milk II: The Sequel.
Wackos will be with us always, but justice is never entirely blind and less so in political crimes; every notorious incident is a test of wills, strengths, social attitudes and public debate, which is why courtroom drama is such a perennial favorite. Cops understand that, and whenever one of their number is gunned down, they fill the courtrooms to intimidate juries into crushing the defendant or to support their guys when accused, such as in the notorious Sean Bell incident here last year.
Cops were also instrumental in defending White back in 1979 and helped to engineer the slap on the wrists he got for the premeditated double-homicide of the leaders of the city’s liberal establishment. Punishment/impunity is the public acknowledgment that you can/cannot expect the security apparatus of the state to protect you.
‘Milk’ has a lot about the fight over the 1978 Briggs initiative targeting gay teachers in public schools, and it’s eerily apt that the picture should be released just days after California passed Prop 8 to prohibit gay marriage. The defeat of Briggs was Harvey Milk’s great, final triumph, and the film pauses long enough to sympathize with his choppy love life carried on amidst the consuming social struggles. He would have appreciated the irony, but he wouldn’t have slowed down, nor doubted the ultimate victory.
Wackos will be with us always, but justice is never entirely blind and less so in political crimes; every notorious incident is a test of wills, strengths, social attitudes and public debate, which is why courtroom drama is such a perennial favorite. Cops understand that, and whenever one of their number is gunned down, they fill the courtrooms to intimidate juries into crushing the defendant or to support their guys when accused, such as in the notorious Sean Bell incident here last year.
Cops were also instrumental in defending White back in 1979 and helped to engineer the slap on the wrists he got for the premeditated double-homicide of the leaders of the city’s liberal establishment. Punishment/impunity is the public acknowledgment that you can/cannot expect the security apparatus of the state to protect you.
‘Milk’ has a lot about the fight over the 1978 Briggs initiative targeting gay teachers in public schools, and it’s eerily apt that the picture should be released just days after California passed Prop 8 to prohibit gay marriage. The defeat of Briggs was Harvey Milk’s great, final triumph, and the film pauses long enough to sympathize with his choppy love life carried on amidst the consuming social struggles. He would have appreciated the irony, but he wouldn’t have slowed down, nor doubted the ultimate victory.
Friday, 28 November 2008
AIDS panic from yesteryear
Chile has been awash in a faux AIDS scandal for weeks now, and the story even reached the New York papers, as in this Daily News headline over an AP account: ‘Hundreds in Chile not told of positive HIV tests’.
The first line of the report gives away the store: ‘Chile is scrambling to reach people who could be unknowingly spreading AIDS’.
The breathless tale is about how Chilean laboratories did not tell some 2,000 people that they had come up positive for the HIV infection.
The health minister had to resign over the revelation, and her replacement, one Alvaro Erazo, solemnly told Chile’s Congress: ‘There is no justification for that.’
Except that, um, there is, and it’s called a public health rationale. People go get tested for HIV under guarantees of privacy and autonomy, and in the old system still in use in Chile involving a blood sample, you have to go back for the results. No one could force you to because the anonymity of the test kept your data out of official hands.
If you later decided you didn’t really want to know, that was your right. Without it, most people wouldn’t go near the damn test in the first place given the wave of insensitive abuses that occurred in the early years.
Guess what? They’re back. The same article notes that a guy in southern Chile had two Nurse Ratchets show up at his job in an ambulance recently to tell him he was HIV-positive. Goodbye job, girlfriend and pretty much life as he knew it. That will certainly encourage more people to get tested.
The fact that an incident of this sort can happen two decades into the AIDS epidemic shows how fragile the gains of the early years still are. I was personally involved in those fights in which we patiently explained to providers that the best way to promote testing was to treat people with respect as sentient beings rather than as ‘vectors of infection’ as their epidemiology textbooks suggested.
The AP language is a throwback to the years of panic in which ‘those people’ were seen to be running around spreading HIV and needed to be grabbed and made to stop. ‘Those people’ being gays, drug users, Haitians and women in the sex trade—NOT you and me and our precious children, of course, and not AP reporters either, all of whom could also be ‘unknowingly spreading AIDS’.
I’ve got news for Minister Erazo and the Associated Press: a whole lot more than 2,000 people in Chile and every other country in the world are unaware of their HIV infection. The estimate in the U.S. alone is around 200,000. We try to encourage people to find out as a double benefit, to them and to their eventual partners, but not with media-driven Sex Panics.
The fact that someone in a laboratory got hold of an HIV+ blood sample changes nothing and means nothing, but in the Chilean case it has stimulated bad public policy and a lot of irresponsible news reporting, too.
If Chile wants to take the strong-arm approach, why not give everyone in the country an HIV test and force them into care? That’s the logic of this reactionary witchhunt, a policy that would last just long enough for the first government official, police captain or rich teenager to get caught up in the dragnet and have his business spilled into the neighborhood gossip circuit.
It says something, too, about the weakness of Chile’s nonprofit AIDS sector that, after wallowing in millions of Global AIDS Fund dollars for a decade, can’t mobilize a coherent response to this gigantic step backwards.
The first line of the report gives away the store: ‘Chile is scrambling to reach people who could be unknowingly spreading AIDS’.
The breathless tale is about how Chilean laboratories did not tell some 2,000 people that they had come up positive for the HIV infection.
The health minister had to resign over the revelation, and her replacement, one Alvaro Erazo, solemnly told Chile’s Congress: ‘There is no justification for that.’
Except that, um, there is, and it’s called a public health rationale. People go get tested for HIV under guarantees of privacy and autonomy, and in the old system still in use in Chile involving a blood sample, you have to go back for the results. No one could force you to because the anonymity of the test kept your data out of official hands.
If you later decided you didn’t really want to know, that was your right. Without it, most people wouldn’t go near the damn test in the first place given the wave of insensitive abuses that occurred in the early years.
Guess what? They’re back. The same article notes that a guy in southern Chile had two Nurse Ratchets show up at his job in an ambulance recently to tell him he was HIV-positive. Goodbye job, girlfriend and pretty much life as he knew it. That will certainly encourage more people to get tested.
The fact that an incident of this sort can happen two decades into the AIDS epidemic shows how fragile the gains of the early years still are. I was personally involved in those fights in which we patiently explained to providers that the best way to promote testing was to treat people with respect as sentient beings rather than as ‘vectors of infection’ as their epidemiology textbooks suggested.
The AP language is a throwback to the years of panic in which ‘those people’ were seen to be running around spreading HIV and needed to be grabbed and made to stop. ‘Those people’ being gays, drug users, Haitians and women in the sex trade—NOT you and me and our precious children, of course, and not AP reporters either, all of whom could also be ‘unknowingly spreading AIDS’.
I’ve got news for Minister Erazo and the Associated Press: a whole lot more than 2,000 people in Chile and every other country in the world are unaware of their HIV infection. The estimate in the U.S. alone is around 200,000. We try to encourage people to find out as a double benefit, to them and to their eventual partners, but not with media-driven Sex Panics.
The fact that someone in a laboratory got hold of an HIV+ blood sample changes nothing and means nothing, but in the Chilean case it has stimulated bad public policy and a lot of irresponsible news reporting, too.
If Chile wants to take the strong-arm approach, why not give everyone in the country an HIV test and force them into care? That’s the logic of this reactionary witchhunt, a policy that would last just long enough for the first government official, police captain or rich teenager to get caught up in the dragnet and have his business spilled into the neighborhood gossip circuit.
It says something, too, about the weakness of Chile’s nonprofit AIDS sector that, after wallowing in millions of Global AIDS Fund dollars for a decade, can’t mobilize a coherent response to this gigantic step backwards.
Glug-glug remedies
The name Shiller pops up often in news stories about the collapse of the housing market because Robert Shiller is the co-creator of the Case-Shiller Index for tracking house prices. He’s a thoughtful and amusing number-cruncher who in a recent speech floated the novel idea of creating ‘house price insurance’ to guard against the present-day phenomenon of negative equity, that is, holding a mortgage for more money than the house is worth.
This state of affairs, also charmingly termed ‘being underwater’, now affects 12 million U.S. households and is blamed for a lot of the weakness in our consumer-sensitive economy. Shiller says it would work like fire insurance—you take out a policy upon buying a house that ties your future payments to the surrounding market. If your house becomes less valuable, you pay a lower monthly note.
Innovations in the way we do business like these sound slightly wacko at first, but big upheavals lead to experimentation, and suddenly we can’t imagine doing things any other way. Federal deposit insurance, unemployment insurance, food stamps and Social Security all must have looked peculiar when first proposed, too. I’ll bet money that the Obama inauguration speech or one coming very soon after it will have some startling proposals like this one.
This state of affairs, also charmingly termed ‘being underwater’, now affects 12 million U.S. households and is blamed for a lot of the weakness in our consumer-sensitive economy. Shiller says it would work like fire insurance—you take out a policy upon buying a house that ties your future payments to the surrounding market. If your house becomes less valuable, you pay a lower monthly note.
Innovations in the way we do business like these sound slightly wacko at first, but big upheavals lead to experimentation, and suddenly we can’t imagine doing things any other way. Federal deposit insurance, unemployment insurance, food stamps and Social Security all must have looked peculiar when first proposed, too. I’ll bet money that the Obama inauguration speech or one coming very soon after it will have some startling proposals like this one.
Thursday, 27 November 2008
Under our skin
At the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum the exhibits begin with a short film, then the screen rises onto a stark installation: a double water fountain labeled for “white” and “colored” usage.
I find things like that more shocking than the videos images of Klan rallies or hateful white banshees chasing after the little girls who integrated Little Rock High.
How did we get to the profoundly sad state of moral abasement where people had to be cubby-holed based on race for the simple human act of drinking water? And how furious was the reaction to the common-sense campaign to stop the practice.
Al-Qaeda’s nasty rant the other day against Obama as some sort of Uncle Tom house Negro is a good reminder that this country has had the privilege of a painful confrontation with its own racism and has learned a couple of things that religious fanatics in caves could take a lesson from if they didn’t have their headdresses up their butts.
Just this morning Sesame Street featured a little tune illustrated with diversity-heavy images about how we’re all the same under the skin, we all get cold, hot, laugh, cry, etc. Normally that stuff feels treacly and even unnecessary, but the video included a quick shot of two girls drinking at a public fountain, one white and one black. That wasn’t accidental.
I wonder how many countries in the world are aware of the need to pound an ideology of equality and respect into the heads of its children to head off the kinds of nightmare scenarios that racism so easily can lead to.
Rwanda is one. There it’s considered extremely bad form to ask someone what tribal ethnicity they are from given that nearly a million people were slaughtered in the 1990s based on that sole datum. But it’s an unusual case.
No wonder the Iranians were disoriented by the Obama victory and at first had no idea how to respond. Apparently, it simply never occurred to them that a majority white country could elect someone not from their own identity group. They wouldn’t.
We are aware of the symbolic force of the Obama presidency on ourselves. But he also could end up being part of a few teachable moments in our foreign dealings as well. I look forward to it.
I find things like that more shocking than the videos images of Klan rallies or hateful white banshees chasing after the little girls who integrated Little Rock High.
How did we get to the profoundly sad state of moral abasement where people had to be cubby-holed based on race for the simple human act of drinking water? And how furious was the reaction to the common-sense campaign to stop the practice.
Al-Qaeda’s nasty rant the other day against Obama as some sort of Uncle Tom house Negro is a good reminder that this country has had the privilege of a painful confrontation with its own racism and has learned a couple of things that religious fanatics in caves could take a lesson from if they didn’t have their headdresses up their butts.
Just this morning Sesame Street featured a little tune illustrated with diversity-heavy images about how we’re all the same under the skin, we all get cold, hot, laugh, cry, etc. Normally that stuff feels treacly and even unnecessary, but the video included a quick shot of two girls drinking at a public fountain, one white and one black. That wasn’t accidental.
I wonder how many countries in the world are aware of the need to pound an ideology of equality and respect into the heads of its children to head off the kinds of nightmare scenarios that racism so easily can lead to.
Rwanda is one. There it’s considered extremely bad form to ask someone what tribal ethnicity they are from given that nearly a million people were slaughtered in the 1990s based on that sole datum. But it’s an unusual case.
No wonder the Iranians were disoriented by the Obama victory and at first had no idea how to respond. Apparently, it simply never occurred to them that a majority white country could elect someone not from their own identity group. They wouldn’t.
We are aware of the symbolic force of the Obama presidency on ourselves. But he also could end up being part of a few teachable moments in our foreign dealings as well. I look forward to it.
Wednesday, 26 November 2008
Of Courage and Valor in the Fourth Estate
I love it when someone has enough historical memory to dredge up what today’s star pundit said yesterday about the same topic. Thus does Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com take the peepee out of wankmaster Joe Klein, starting with his latest column in TIME magazine in which he kicks the now prone and pathetic GWB by referring to. . .
. . . his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the “Mission Accomplished” sign.
Klein calls the flight-suit image ‘one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure.’
Fair enough. But, asks Greenwald, what was the brave giant-slayer Klein saying when Bush was riding high? Greenwald reminds him with a transcript of his May 4, 2003, appearance on Face the Nation:
BOB SCHIEFFER: “How does [the Democratic presidential primary debate] play off against the pictures we saw this week of President Bush landing on the aircraft carrier and appearing before these screaming, adoring groups of military people? As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time. . . .”
JOE KLEIN: “Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. . . . And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are going to have to climb.”
Not nearly as high as the contradiction Klein will have to scale to explain this utter disconnect between his current opinion and the one he peddled back when it mattered.
What lessons can be drawn from this hilarious example?
First, ignore Joe Klein always.
More importantly, recall that the chattering classes are mouthpieces of the commonplace and that the task of punditry, almost by definition, is to package and transmit what people are comfortable with thinking and feeling at the moment and within a narrow band of approved possibilities. It is a bit like extracting a blood sample and reinjecting it into the originating veins.
Do not, however, expect to be cautioned about anything that escapes the cozy worldview on display. No commentators will headline their pieces, We Might Lose This War or Our Leaders Are Leading Us over the Precipice. That will only merit comment after the fact.
. . . his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the “Mission Accomplished” sign.
Klein calls the flight-suit image ‘one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure.’
Fair enough. But, asks Greenwald, what was the brave giant-slayer Klein saying when Bush was riding high? Greenwald reminds him with a transcript of his May 4, 2003, appearance on Face the Nation:
BOB SCHIEFFER: “How does [the Democratic presidential primary debate] play off against the pictures we saw this week of President Bush landing on the aircraft carrier and appearing before these screaming, adoring groups of military people? As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time. . . .”
JOE KLEIN: “Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. . . . And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are going to have to climb.”
Not nearly as high as the contradiction Klein will have to scale to explain this utter disconnect between his current opinion and the one he peddled back when it mattered.
What lessons can be drawn from this hilarious example?
First, ignore Joe Klein always.
More importantly, recall that the chattering classes are mouthpieces of the commonplace and that the task of punditry, almost by definition, is to package and transmit what people are comfortable with thinking and feeling at the moment and within a narrow band of approved possibilities. It is a bit like extracting a blood sample and reinjecting it into the originating veins.
Do not, however, expect to be cautioned about anything that escapes the cozy worldview on display. No commentators will headline their pieces, We Might Lose This War or Our Leaders Are Leading Us over the Precipice. That will only merit comment after the fact.
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