Thursday, March 27, 2003

Outa here

About to hit the road for the celebration in Pittsburgh.  There will be no postings from hereabouts until I return.

Sunday, March 23, 2003

Can they do that?

The TV was on in another room.  I heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” being played, so I popped my head into that room.  On the screen was a car commercial!?! While the Anthem was playing, some sort of voiceover shilled the dealership’s latest special offers.

Is it legal to use the National Anthem for commercial purposes?  Is it legal to do that sort of voiceover?

Reading and working (plus that bastard Ralph)

Haven’t been able to write anything here over the weekend, what with all the information crashing down all around.  Tough to make out what it all means or where it’s really going.  I’ve been thinking about a take-a-step-back sort of theme, but it hasn’t coalesced into words yet.

And it may never see the light of day at all.  Right now, I’m trying to put together a brief talk that I’m giving in Pittsburgh next weekend as part of a Festschrift honoring the chair of my grad school department as he steps aside after 30-plus years at the helm.  He was my dissertation advisor, so it’s a really special event for me. 

Which doesn’t mean that the PowerPoint slides are flowing easily.  Procrastinator that I am, I’m taking it right down to the wire.  Hey, there’s always the laptop during my plane trip…

In the meantime, just a short rant about that sadsack Ralph Nader.  As reported in Sunday’s Seattle Times, Ralph still refuses to take an iota of the blame for Dubya and the Bushmen, while simultaneously bemoaning the actions and operations of the current administration:

Instead, he said Friday, the war in Iraq developed from: “A messianic militaristic determination turned by a closed mind, facilitated by a cowering Congress and opposition Democrat Party and undeterred by a ‘probing’ press.”

President Bush is acting “in effect as a selected dictator,” Nader said. The president has not listened to any of the many retired admirals, generals and foreign-policy experts who have warned against the war, Nader said. And the stated reasons for going to war “have either been disproved or greatly distorted."

Ralph’s stupidest ploy this time around is to try to shift the blame onto someone else:

But it’s not his fault. In fact, Nader said, people just as easily could blame David McReynolds, the Socialist Party candidate in 2000, for giving the key state of Florida to Bush. McReynolds polled 622 votes, and Democratic Vice President Al Gore lost by 537 votes. Nader received 97,488 votes in the state.

Yeah, right.  “Doesn’t pass the laugh test” doesn’t come close to describing the self-aggrandizing, self-righteous, priggish smarminess of such a statement.  Hey Ralph, at least Michael Moore admits that he screwed up big-time by supporting you.

Saturday, March 22, 2003

Signs, signs, everywhere are signs

Over on his site The Gamer’s Nook, Scott talks about taking down a sign that had been displayed on his blog for awhile.

It’s interesting that he took down his sign at this time.  On Thursday morning, I walked into my office and discovered that the “Attack Iraq?  No!” bumpersticker I’d taped to my door—the same one that Scott just removed—had been taken down.  As I walked around the corner to get some coffee, my manager called me into his office and informed me that HR had received complaints about the display of my political statements (I’d also drawn a flag at half-mast and upside-down on the whiteboard outside my office, which had been erased early that morning).

I note that neither my manager nor the HR director personally disagrees with me about Dubya’s war.  And I also note that the company—which obtains the majority of its income as a federal contractor—does have policies which probably support the removal of my materials.  On the other hand, that bumpersticker had been on my door for months, and I’d drawn the flag on Monday morning after the Azores meeting.  BTW, that flag was more of an impressionistic US flag than a faithful copy.  For instance, my hand-drawn stars were blue dots on a white field, and there were fewer than 13 stripes.

What bugs me in this incident is that whoever it was who complained took it right to HR instead of saying something to me.  I probably would have taken down the (no longer really meaningful) bumpersticker and erased, or at least revised, the flag.  Maybe not half-mast, maybe right side up.  I would have asked the complaintant whether he/she knew that an inverted flag indicates distress.

One of the people I deal with at work quite often is a former intelligence operative with US forces in Europe.  He certainly disagrees with many of my opinions on the war and on politics in general.  We’ve talked and argued and agreed to disagree about current events while sitting in my office, with the bumpersticker and flag right there.  He has never uttered a word of objection to the existence of my displays.  Why couldn’t the anonymous complainers have shown me the same level of respect?

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

A fable for our time?

It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed.

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language—reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state—and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that some of the nation’s most prestigious buildings were ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.  He used the occasion to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Just weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Within six weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation’s now-popular leader had pushed through legislation—in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it—that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people’s homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.  Legislators would later say they hadn’t had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public—and there were many—quickly found themselves fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader’s public speeches.

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He began to refer to the nation as “The Homeland.” As hoped, people’s hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was the homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the “true people,” he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation’s concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it’s of little concern to us.  Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn’t act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation.

Soon after the terrorist attack, the nation’s leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist sympathizers.  He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.  He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation’s leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, soon faded from the public’s recollection as his central security office began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors.  Those denounced often included opposition politicians and celebrities who dared speak out—a favorite target of his regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporate allies.

To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn’t enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation’s largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow.

But voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him, and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, questions of his possibly illegitimate rise to power, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being held in detention without due process or access to attorneys or family.

With his number two man—a master at manipulating the media—he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation’s most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. In a speech broadcast around the world, he publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar’s Rome or Alexander’s Greece.

It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying with European nations, but after he personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, the leader noted that the invaders were marching into that nation not as tyrants, but as liberators.

To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn’t think they’d succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will. In times of war, they said, there could be only “one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief”, and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself.  It was suggested that domestic critics of the leader were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation’s valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the “intellectuals and liberals” who were critical of his policies.

Voices of opposition continued to be raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist cells wasn’t enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent.

Adapted (but not all that extensively) from Thom Hartmann’s essay on the
70th anniversary of the Reichstag fire.  Please know that I am in no way equating, or even comparing, George W. Bush with Adolf Hitler.  Similarity in circumstances does not in the slightest imply similarity in motivations.

As requested in Hartmann’s article, I include the following credit:

Thom Hartmann lived and worked in Germany during the 1980s, and is the author of over a dozen books, including “Unequal Protection” and “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.” This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.