IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Not following blogs lately, I was surprised to find how many have commented on the Ward Churchill controversy. Euro-American genocide of American Indians and questions of whether or not Churchill was a white guy masquerading as American Indian in his position as an ethnic-studies professor at the University of Colorado aren’t your everyday lunchable subjects. I expected some acknowledgement on the virtual streets but not as much as I observed. How did he suddenly blossom into the Jane Fonda of Afghanistan and Iraq? I’ve not heard anyone say it but next he’ll be addressed as “Ward Fonda!” The last I read of possible payola behind the Caplis attack was a number of days ago. My thoughts on the matter don’t gel. I would say my brain has been altered by the barrage of sound and image loops that H.o.p. immerses me in daily, brief bites rerunning concurrent that pave no here to there, dig deeper and deeper ruts in which I find my thoughts pooling, going nowhere. But in this case perhaps my thoughts on Churchill don’t gel because of the usual Montebank what pod is the pea hiding under now trick. So many “what is” balls in play but points of origin mostly hide from me behind “what appears to be”. I’ve a few thoughts on the issues, not on the people, but note that the Peltier Legal Defense Committee would appear to be supporting Churchill from the POV of the controversy being a deliberate smear campaign with falling dominos intent.

George Tinker (Osage, Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology) speaks up for Churchill.

We’ve been reading a lot of Tinker around here the past couple of months.

Then suddenly there’s this picture of Churchill with a rifle and beret on the web. Flashback to Patty Hearst. And Madonna posing as Patty Hearst in American Life. There’s an echo of a rifle in those bars behind Madonna and an American kiss on her forehead. Though I think (I do) that a rifle is suggested, the beret and national symbols (again, the flag only inferred through bars and stripes) alone are understood as all that’s needed to bring to mind militants, revolution. Funny, put on a beret, toss in a star and stripe, and the brain processes, “Revolution.”

Churchill says the photo was for a student art project in 1996. I believe it. It looks like something a student and professor would do together.

I wonder if Churchill would be game for a cameo in John Waters’ next film.

Churchill mentions in his “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens”, the severed heads of Raritans kicked for sport along the streets of 1643 New Amsterdam in the shadows of the future’s WTC. So-called Kieft’s War, a history given in John Fiske’s 1902 “Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America”. Kieft’s war is also covered in a book by Russell Shorto, “The Island at the Center of the World : The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America”. An individual on a news list I’m on relates that Shorto details how colonists protested the actions of Kieft (as does Mr. Fiske above mention), his slaughter of the Wappinger Indians, and how Shorto concludes the massacre was exaggerated and things weren’t as bad as all that.

Though the outcry is over Churchill and what he had to say on 9/11, it’s curious how a number have used it as a launchpad to revisit Churchill’s assertions of Euro-American genocide of American Indians, and condemn him for these remarks as well.

While reading up on Shorto’s book names mentioned in it keep pinging my brain. Oh, yeah, Dutch. We’re talking about the Dutch here, aren’t we. I always forget the Dutch have anything to do with me. Go down one branch of my family and you hit a point where that narrow branch blossoms out into lots o’ Dutch marrying Dutch, oh yeah, right, down New Amsterdam way, names like Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico for starters and Van Cleefs, Vanderbilts, Schenks, Covenhovens, Vanderbeeks. Rarified and exotic to my ears. Remained rarified and exotic until a friend of Marty’s, a year ago, gave him a box of mildewed books for a library fund raiser and in it was Heller’s “Picture This”. And from it I gained a bit of insight (small) into 17th century Dutch society and Dutch mercantilism, coinage and debt and profit.

I remember when, after 9/11, George Bush encouraged us all to get back out to the malls and shop again. Exercise our freedoms. Shop.

I wonder what Ward Churchill’s speaking schedule was over the past four years. Certainly he had many engagements. Why was it Hamilton College that got him busted for his views on 9/11? Why now?

5 down. The developers of this reading program H.o.p. is now doing sure knew what would grab H.o.p.. One-eyed and three-eyed Martians (creatures determined as being from outer space are always Martians to H.o.p.), robots and, tomorrow, dinosaurs! Today’s email (Lesson 5 review) informs me, that tomorrow’s reading world is in the land of the dinosaurs. “Yea!” says H.o.p. The print materials came in today and I was a little surprised with his enthusiasm over them. We’ve been using the print-out map from the website where you mark your progress through the reading worlds, and H.o.p. was all glee over the real version that was part of the package, “I have to mark my place on the map!” And ultra simple, ultra short readers for exercise in transferring skills from monitor to print.

I was going to start out with fun stuff, how H.o.p. and Marty went to see “The Adventures of Mighty Bug” at The Center for Puppetry Arts today, but on my way to get a link to the website I stopped in for some news and happened on this, a new old news story on Manadel al-Jamadi, a ghost detainee (ie. held secretly) of the CIA whose November 2003 obituary was a matter of photos showing Abu Ghraib guards giving a thumbs-up over his abused, ice-packed corpse. The new news is that he died in one of the prison shower rooms, during a half-hour of questioning, while being suspended by his wrists with his hands cuffed behind his back. He had already been roughed over by SEALS before turned over to the CIA interrogator and Abu Ghraib guards, his autopsy showing several broken ribs. It’s reported that when he was discovered to be dead, his shackles undone, lowered from his hanging position, that blood gushed from his mouth as if a faucet had been cut on.

I don’t know how the military pathologist who ruled the case a homicide phrased it, but the news article gives the pathologist as determining Manadel al-Jamadi had died from pressure to the chest and “difficulty breathing’. If I remember correctly, GW Bush’s daddy dignified his stint in office with the offer of a kinder, gentler world. This is the kinder, gentler world’s way of saying, “Asphyxiated.”

It’s called an “enhanced” intelligence gathering technique.

Sonny GW Bush insists he has always ordered questioning methods to remain within the law.

Today, GWB nominated for Director of National Intelligence, Ambassador John Negroponte.

GWB says,

“John will make sure that those whose duty it is to defend America have the information we need to make the right decisions. John understands America’s global intelligence needs because he spent the better part of his life in our foreign service, and is now serving with distinction in the sensitive post of our nation’s first Ambassador to a free Iraq. ”

GWB says,

“John’s nomination comes at an historic moment for our intelligence services. In the war against terrorists who target innocent civilians and continue to seek weapons of mass murder, intelligence is our first line of defense.”

GWB says,

“As DNI, John will lead a unified intelligence community, and will serve as the principle advisor to the President on intelligence matters. He will have the authority to order the collection of new intelligence, to ensure the sharing of information among agencies, and to establish common standards for the intelligence community’s personnel. “

Derechos Human Rights, a member of the World Organization Against Torture, says:

John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985. As such he supported and carried out a US-sponsored policy of violations to human rights and international law. Among other things he supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980’s. The base was used as a secret detention and torture center, in August 2001 excavations at the base discovered the first of the corpses of the 185 people, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at this base.

During his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic. The infamous Battalion 316, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnaped, tortured and killed hundreds of people. Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with them, while lying to Congress.

President George W. Bush has nominated Negroponte to be US ambassador before the UN. Human Rights organizations in the US and Latin America have joined their voices in asking the US Senate to not ratify his nomination. Please join us!

The shower room is a “common” CIA interrogation spot.

Hopefully in the next Random House Dictionary update “shower room” will be noted for its euphemisms.

Today’s notes from Godzillaland…“The Adventures of Mighty Bug” was said to be visually appealing but not much to it. The literature reads, “The evil arachnid Scorpiana, fresh from a prison stay in a nearby entomologist’s lab, has assembled a group of insect-eating animals to attack Bugville while she captures Mighty Bug and the lovely Morpha. Scorpiana, however, is no match for our insect heroes - the most successful animal species on earth, after all. With the help of Professor Rhinoceros beetle, the insects of Bugville join forces to save the town…” According to Marty however there wasn’t much adventure and plot was practically nonexistent. That’s all right with H.o.p. who’s always there for the puppets, in this case shadow puppets. He came home with a spider puppet that he’d made. Cute and simple design. Black construction and brown pipe cleaners.

H.o.p. also came home with pot stickers and a little robot. A trip to the puppetry center means now for him a visit to the store there to get another puppet, but this time he came away with “Roxy the Robot” who looks suspiciously like the robot maid in the Jetsons cartoon, Rosie. Rosie is purple-blue, a Hindu robot goddess, has a white cap, antennae ears, white frill collar, white apron, black skirt, and skates about on a peg leg. Roxy, also a maid, is about 5 inches tall, pink, springs for hair, antennae for ears and is blessed with two legs but unfortunately has flat red monster of Frankenstein feet. She has a grey torso, black skirt and white apron. Roxy has breasts, which Rosie did not. Two little black knobs. She is supposed to be able to walk but in this Rosie’s case she only air walks. Put her down and she stops. H.o.p. doesn’t like his robots to walk anyway. None of them. She has a key that winds her up. Marty asked H.o.p. what he wanted to do with it. H.o.p. said he didn’t want it. We put it up.

Tin Roxy came with a collector’s certificate. (Hah.) The box reads she’s for ages 8 and up, but not for “children”!, she is for collectors only as she has some vaguely sharp edges (none of them projecting, the bottom of her skirt and shoes are a bit edgy). So, H.o.p. had to become a collector in order to purchase Roxy.

The reading program was on hold a couple of days as my speakers went out. They’re working again as of now but need to be replaced. We may make it through another reading “world” tomorrow.

CNN executive, Jordan Eason, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland is said to have said that the U.S. military deliberately targeted journalists–he knew of about 12 who’d not only been killed but had been targeted as a matter of policy.

Jordan Eason, reportedly having said to have said the above, then resigned from CNN and said he hadn’t meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when they accidtantally killed journalists.

Today comes the news of another U.S. checkpoint slaughter in Iraq. This time the car taken aim at was one in which was Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, just released after being held hostage for a month. She was wounded. The Italian secret service agent, Nicola Calipari, who had facillitated her release “threw himself over her” and was killed. Two other agents were wounded.

It’s said that US forces thought they were under attack. The car is given as having approached the checkpoint at a high rate of speed. U.S. troops are said to have fired warning shots, waved arms, then “shot into the engine block” of the car after it failed to stop.

Where’s the engine block of a car? In the approximate area of the windshield?

Il Manifesto, the paper for which the journalist works, says they don’t believe that Sgrena was targeted by the US for her writing about abuses at Abu Ghraib (she was one of the first journalists to collect evidence of rape of women prisoners at Abu Ghraib).

Sheik Abdel Salam al Quobaisi, of the Association of Islamic Scholars, had denounced the abduction of the journalist. As to any Iraqi groups who had claimed responsibility, he said, “We still have our doubts. We don’t know if what they say is true. We believe that no Iraqi organization would organize a kidnapping of this kind, especially not of a journalist who intended to interview the refugees of Fallujah, victims of the American occupation.”

I just wonder at all these cars approaching U.S. checkpoints at high rates of speed and not heeding warnings to stop. You’d think everyone would be aware by now that U.S. checkpoints are bad news.

Why am I now thinking of the Cold War Iron Curtain and all those movies of people gunned down at checkpoints by faceless bad Russians or East Germans? Is that too out-of-line an association to pop up?

That engine block. Instead of saying the car was fired at they instead say the engine block was fired at in order to stop the car. Like the engine block was the target and the humans were just collateral damage. Seems kind of like saying you were aiming for the spider on someone’s shirt pocket and not them, so sorry.

The whole of Italy was anxious for Sgrena’s release. They’re not going to like this. When they are over celebrating her return, they’re going to be really pissed off.

Cominciano le prime ricostruzioni di quanto avvenuto ieri a Bagdad. «Non andavamo molto veloci, date le circostanze», ha detto Giuliana Sgrena, intervistata da Rai News 24. «Parlavo con Nicola, quando siamo stati colpiti da una pioggia di fuoco», ha aggiunto la giornalista.

300 to 400 bullets struck the car. Then before getting aid, the Americans took their cellphones and didn’t permit contact with Rome for another hour.

The story. Little information that there is, almost every press account manages to leave out one detail or another or three that another has. But the basics right now are Sgrena saying that they were not speeding, that it wasn’t a checkpoint, that as the spotlight hit them so did a rain of gunfire.

Fewer press accounts have Scolari, who accompanied Sgrena from Baghdad, reporting that the Italians had informed U.S. officials of their plans and had cleared at least one of several checkpoints. “But that could not be independently identified.”

Italy is a relatively small, close-knit and sentimental country, and when its citizens are killed in overseas conflicts, the national pain is especially evident. Homages and expressions of grief for Calipari were pouring in, from President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Pope John Paul II as well as people in the streets.

A Pakistan outlet gives a much more adamant version of what Pier Scolari had to say, including as direct quotes, “The Americans and Italians knew about (her) car coming…They were 700 meters (yards) from the airport, which means that they had passed all checkpoints…Then the US military silenced the cell phones…Guiliana had information, and the US military did not want her to survive.”

Sgerna reported that her captors had told her Americans might try to intervene.

Some reports question what I had also wondered about. If the bullets were stated by the americans to be aimed at the car’s engine block, how did that engine block become the occupants of the car?

A statement from the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division in Baghdad said that troops fired at a speeding car that “refused to stop at a checkpoint.”

The statement said soldiers with the 3rd Infantry “killed one civilian and wounded two others when their vehicle traveling at high speeds refused to stop at a checkpoint here today. About 9 p.m., a patrol in western Baghdad observed the vehicle speeding towards their checkpoint and attempted to warn the driver to stop by hand and arm signals, flashing white lights and firing warning shots in front of the car. When the driver didn’t stop, the soldiers shot into the engine block, which stopped the vehicle, killing one and wounding two others.”

The statement did not explain how bullets fired into the engine block hit the passengers. It said the surviving intelligence agent “was treated by Army medics on the scene but refused medical evacuation for further assistance.”

Finally, a State Department official in Washington said the Italians did not tell either the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or U.S. military commanders about Sgrena’s release, even though a U.S. hostage coordinator had been working closely with them on the case.

The above is unclear to me as I am still reading that the army was not commenting on the location of the checkpoint in question or whether the military had been informed Sgrena’s car was on its way to the airport.

Regardless, as Polo, Manifesto’s editor, says, “An Italian agent has been killed by an American bullet - a tragic demonstration that everything that’s happening in Iraq is completely senseless and mad.”

It is insane. War is used as an excuse. I don’t believe it was an accident of fate. Whether or not there were intentioned targets in the car, it is not an accident of fate. The occupents were fired upon. An Italian agent is dead and an Italian journalist only escaped with her life as the agent died.

I’m not holding my breath on what an investigation by the U.S. military and Bush administration will have to say on this. I would have to trust them. I don’t trust the Bush administration. I don’t believe what they say about why we are in the Middle East. If I don’t believe what they say about domestic policy and foreign policy and why we are in the Middle East, I have no reason to believe whatever they say about anything, including an investigation of this “incident”.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said, “We are coordinating closely with Italian authorities in Iraq to investigate the incident. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of the Italian citizen.”

The news is full of “incidents”. The administration and military and press are always referring to “incidents”. The real word is tragedy. “Incident” implies a hierarchy of importance and that the score is 99 percent short of meaning. “Incident” contrives to pull the emotional sparkplug. Those who allot only incidental importance to life would have us all so emotionally, ethically, morally, philosophically bankrupt that finance is the last character occupying the stage.

Giuliana Sgrena at Il Manifesto in English translation. Body and Soul continues blogging on the subject, today going into the idea of impromptu checkpoints. Google and there is news everywhere, but the administration is quiet. Scot McClellan said today,

It’s important that this investigation be full and complete. And so when that investigation is full and complete, then maybe we can talk more about it at that point in time, because there are differing accounts about exactly what happened. And I think the details of what occurred are still unclear at this point.

I like the “When that investigation is full and complete, then maybe we can talk more about it at that point in time.”

But not necessarily I suppose. Or at least not in full. Probably not. I’ve always been mystified by the notion that governments will do anything but damage control and release at most what they think they can afford to release. And that sometimes mistakes happen on the part of government and more comes to light than was intended because of bureaucracy and pack rats stashing information that may come into the hands of disgruntled or intrepid or stupid (as in through bureaucratic hindsight) or maybe even paid-off individuals or maybe even yet again individuals with a conscience. I’m cynical. Not that putting the pressure on doesn’t sometimes do good and sometimes yield results (if nothing else, is essential for our general health) but I still think what is yielded generally is a matter of what someone decides can be yielded and no more. And it’s not like the Bush Administration does anything but what it wants to do, throwing up this distraction and that when need be, making an occasional can-be-spared offering of heads.

If nothing else, is essential for our general health to pursue truth where disingenuousness and fiction are served. Perhaps one’s plate isn’t immediate complicity when one knows one ought to question and fails to do so–life isn’t so simple–but wisdom dictates that the denial of whispered oracular urgings of conscience means a death of some part of being, at least.

I am probably wrong about this but…

We all know the loss of life in the Middle East. The hows and ways and means and wheres are too many to go into. A daily occurrence where many particulars are lost and a general awareness is horror enough.

Greek and Roman theater presented the larger than life.which is what tends to be with drama. This doesn’t demean the particular, because in those “larger than life” broodings the truth of every man and woman is revealed, is honored, is encompassed. Now, what are the mechanics of what makes for “larger than life” I don’t know, a one and two and three that must be met in order to qualify. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the weekend and today.

When I was perhaps 15 I tuned the television to PBS and there was this dramatic set that was all gray, nothing to it but gray, the actors in mid 20th century gray and black clothing, and this woman, determined in solemn grief to do her duty and bury her brother who had been forbidden funeral rites. If he remained unburied his spirit was doomed to wander. But the individual who did bury him would be put to death by stoning. Antigone’s duty was clear.

Gladly will I meet death in my sacred duty to the dead. Longer time have I to spend with them than with those who live upon the earth. Seek not to argue with me; nothing so terrible can come to me but that an honored death remains.

Back in the days of only a handful of television stations and no VCRs, this was quite unlike anything I’d ever seen before, though of course the play was Sophocles’ ‘ “Antigone”. The translation was modern. The language was sharp, dialogue and self-reflection clear and not suffocated in similes or tediously embroidered with wasted imagery. I’d caught the play at the very beginning though I didn’t know it. The situation of a woman going to bury her brother, making such a critical decision as Antigone, as stories go would more usually be toward the end of a work rather than a first scene. It’s rare that a hero or heroine takes action in a first scene that concretizes the remainder of the play, so that all is anti-climax.

Refusing Antigone’s right to bury Polynices, leaving his body out to rot in public, his spirit to wander, is Creon’s doom, the death of his house. He rebuffs divine law and natural order.

Creon’s isolation from and disregard of opposing mortal voice was one thing. Another to defy the divine. I don’t mean the divine as defined by religion, its man-made laws and cultural fetishes. When Antigone submitted herself to certain death, burying her brother, it was for no less than to ensure her brother had rest, even if she may be then identified as a traitor. There is a certain respect and acknowledgment of life beyond the personal that is being demanded here. I don’t know whether the doom of Creon’s house was set in his law that went against the natural, if it was Antigone’s honoring of natural law over his own, or indeed that Creon had created a situation in which there had to be such a response, an individual who chose the natural law over his own, an Antigone who risked certain death as contrasted with her sister who said she hadn’t the strength to go against the state. As if natural law demands that it must be honored and will be, which puts Antigone’s action upon the same plane as the divine and she an agent of it. She submitted. Creon, in his hubris, would not. I reject that we understand the story in all its mystery, the struggle of Creon and Antigone as simple as a term paper’s declaration of divine law versus mortal. She is akin to a creature of physics, some natural law demanding her appearance and action, not even as in opposition to Creon but a must of interrelatedness.

Antigone’s and Creon’s story is one that is larger than life.

I could be wrong but the story of Nicola Calipari and Giuliana Sgrena has the same patina to it. Of course it is not isolated, not alone, it stands along many other stories, such as this one of the Hassan family at another checkpoint:

I saw the heads of my two little girls come off…

And this. Another checkpoint. Children covered in the blood of family members.

Creon’s action demanded Antigone’s response. They are interrelated. Antigone’s reminder of cause and consequence that reaches beyond the scope of Creon’s authority, his will and determination, his ego-centric view, I thought of it this weekend. The darkness surrounding the marines who fired upon Calipari’s and Sgrena’s vehicle seems swollen, turgid with Creon’s hubris. I have thought about it long and hard, why this reminds me so much of Antigone, and have wondered if Sgrena is Antigone here. Sgrena’s reporting on atrocities in Iraq is not dissimilar from Antigone’s putting her brother’s spirit to rest through her burial of him, for she didn’t literally bury him, she sprinkled earth three times over his body, wailing for him, grieving for him in public, which is respect and recognition. Sgrena, as with other reporters, is Antigone sprinkling such a symbolic dust on the dead, acknowledging them in public. She “is” because of the atrocities and the defiance of those responsible of respect and interrelatedness. Creon’s leaving a body exposed and demanding no funeral is the same as dead that are kept secret, who aren’t permitted mourning and truth. The psychological ramifications of the hail of gunfire upon the vehicle carrying Sgrena toward the airport are no different from Creon walling Antigone in a crypt. In both, Creon would be a passive agent of Antigone’s death, intending her to seem the responsible party. Indeed, Antigone buried her brother but Creon made the human law which obstructed her from doing so and which she had to defy. Sgrena’s automobile, like the cars of so many others, is said to be speeding. They are given as the responsible party, putting themselves at risk, in the wrong place, even speeding.

Some say it was Calipari who was intentioned to die. Like a message written in blood as was early on suggested at Body and Soul in the comments area. And I have read the notion in the press since then. Even if this is so, the psychological ramifications are the same as the story of Antigone and Creon. Calipari can’t be dissociated from Sgrena through the manner of his death. He flung himself over her, protecting her. The emotional and psychological ramifications are the same as if Sgrena had died. Plus there is the emotional weight of an interceding individual ultimately paying in full, with his life.

I think the firing upon vehicle carrying Sgrena and Calipari was no accident. And even if it was an “accident”, then the hubris that has disdained, cavalier, so much loss of life as a natural consequence of this war, is still responsible. And I’m hoping that this does it for the Bush Administration and its war. I’m hoping that it’s like a trickle of water in a huge dam that becomes a huge crack.

Or maybe it will blow over. Maybe Bush and corp will be able to arrange that. So far nothing seems to have daunted this administration. It rolls along like a terrible huge nightmare and the Democrats mostly standing up right along the Republicans to help.

Still, I would like to think that Bush has pushed the self-topple button. That his statue is on its way to coming down. Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini called Calipari’s death ‘‘a tragedy of destiny”. I don’t believe it. If it’s referred to as a “tragedy of destiny” I would hope it’s the kind exhibited in the lesson of Creon and his hubris, self-willed.

I wonder if Bush studied “Antigone” in high school or college, or read only a part of it and misunderstood it, like the following part:

CREON: Does not the state belong to him who rules it?

HAEMON: No doubt in an uninhabited desert you could rule alone.

Will Pitt of Truthout today weighs in on Calipari and Sgrena and makes the determination that the shooting was accidental. I understand his reasoning but I think it’s flawed.

He states:

If the military or civilian command had wanted Sgrena dead, why did they not use the .20mm cannon that was on the scene? The rounds from that thing are as big as Frisbees and would have done the job.

If the military or civilian command wanted Sgrena or Calipari dead and it was determined an accidental checkpoint end was the way to go, seems that I’ve read frequently about gunfire used to “stop” a car but I’ve not read about cannon being used. I could be wrong but a cannon assault would have spelled m-u-r-d-e-r, an atypical use of force in checkpoint slaughters.

Will Pitt writes:

If the military or civilian command had wanted Sgrena dead, why did military medics tend to her after the attack?

One just as well may have asked, when Sgrena was found to still be alive, why not just plant another bullet?

Not an accident. I’d wondered the same myself and decided that an autopsy would have revealed if anyone was killed at point-blank range. If she had not been eventually tended to by military medics, if care had been withheld, then again, not an accident.

Will Pitt asks himself the question that I’d asked myself.

In a war that has killed 1,685 Coalition soldiers including 1,510 Americans, in a war that has killed 14 soldiers so far this month, in a war that has wounded tens of thousands of American soldiers, in a war that has killed an estimated 198,000 Iraqi citizens, it seems gross and unfair to single out one person. What is it about Calipari that makes him special amid all the carnage, amid all the other families who are mourning their dead?

The moment I heard about Sgrena and Calipari, the image of Antigone in the play I saw on television in the 70s came to mind. I began asking myself that question as well, what is it about Sgrena and Calipari that so captures the imagination. I thought I should perhaps revisit Antigone, which resulted in my “Antigone in Baghdad” post.

Will Pitt writes that he chooses to single out Calipari because, in his opinion, “Calipari has been a walking dead man from the moment Bush and his people chose to invade Iraq come hell or high water.” The few paragraphs he writes on this are a beautiful consideration on all that is wrong with the war, but I think he is wrong that, the soldier whose bullet killed Calipari “was fated to shoot Calipari…from the moment Bush and his people chose to invade Iraq come hell or high water”. As I said in my post “Antigone in Baghdad”, I can’t accept Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini’s calling Calipari’s death “a tragedy of destiny”, nor can I accept Pitt’s decision that it was fated. At least not in the way they intend. Calipari’s death needn’t have happened. Those bullets needn’t have been fired on that automobile.

Sgrena has said they weren’t speeding. The military says they were.

The military says they gave fair warning to the car, flashing lights, shooting rounds into the air, hand signals. Sgrena says that as soon as the spotlight hit them the bullets did as well.

The military says gunfire was aimed at the engine block, in order to halt the car. So one questions why 300 to 400 bullets and how the engine block was determined to be situated on the level of the windows of the car.

Scolari says that the Italians had informed U.S. officials of their plans and the car had already passed several checkpoints.

I could very well be wrong but I don’t think Calipari’s tragic destiny was to die in the way that he did. Now, will we ever know if I’m wrong, if the others who believe that Calipari or Sgrena were targeted are wrong? As the situation stands, even if “accident” is the determination of an investigation, those who believe the shooting was orchestrated are, like me, probably going to believe that an investigation’s finding of “accidental” is orchestrated as well. I’d say that in the end it doesn’t matter if one’s opinion of the war is that it is wrong, is unjustified and therefore all deaths as a result of it are tantamount to calculated crimes. But I imagine it matters very much to Calipari’s wife and friends, to Sgerna, and to journalists whose work places them in a position of revealing facts the Bush Administration and military would prefer to remain hidden.

In the comment area of Washington Monthly’s this article which states Italian Foreign minister Fini has rejected the U.S. account.

Is it any wonder? At dailykos is a summary of Gianfranco Fimi’s testimony to the Italian House of Representatives. Paper Tigress listened to the testimony at La RepubblicaRadio.It and prepared the summary which is also up on her website.

Thank you, Paper Tigress for doing the summary. I’ve included it here but should anyone visit and read please skip on over and visit her website. She has other info as well and does a good rundown of daily events

The Carabiniere major at wheel knew Baghdad very well. He looked for outline of the building known as Saddam Tower, the landmark for the turnoff for the airport.

Once on the airport highway, the driver observed a safe driving speed of 30 mph, a speed appropriate rainslick road conditions. The interior car lights were kept on for ease of identification should the group be stopped at some checkpoint (they did not come across any) as well as for making phone calls to Rome to Calpari’s superior, General Polo, and to US military authorities to inform them of the imminent arrival of their car at the airport in order to facilitate a direct and unhindered approach to the airport.

As the group entered a darkened area on the highway, the car slowed down. They then had to drive through an underpass, which was partially flooded by rainwater. The driver reduced speed again, knowing that he would be approaching a sharp turn at an approximate right angle. (During the journey on the airport highway, the Carabiniere major at the wheel drove in left lane of the highway because the right lane was not only flooded but was obstructed by two concrete blocks well known to regular motorists).

The car was now traveling at a speed of less than 17 mph. In the middle of the turn, a floodlight was illuminated from a rise adjacent to the highway on the right side of the road. The driver immediately braked. The car then came under fire from the right side of the road for 15 seconds from several automatic weapons. The driver noted from tracer rounds that fire was being directed at the occupants’ legs and chest.

When firing ceased, they were ordered out of the car and instructed to kneel approximately 10 meters away from the car. [Calipari was dead]. Despite the fact that he spoke in English, the Carabiniere major was not permitted to show his documents or safe conduct pass to US troops. The major informed the soldiers that he was escorting the released hostage, Mrs. Sgrena, to the airport. At this point, two young soldiers came forward and apologized. The major then realized that Mrs. Sgrena had been wounded. The US military then transported Ms. Sgrena to a hospital inside the Green Zone, followed fifteen minutes later by the Italian major, who had been wounded in the right arm.

I can’t imagine how anyone can possibly hope to justify this account with that of the U.S. Military. It can’t be done. Plus Paper Tigress mentions that the checkpoint was one that had been erected specifically (it’s said) for the purpose of protecting Sgrena. That from Il Corriere della quoting the Washington Post (I’d not read this).

Just doesn’t add up. Slow car on muddy road, lights on in the car, Americans know they’re coming and had set up this hasty checkpoint to supposedly protect Sgrena….no possible way to reconcile this with the U.S. account which immediately planted the ideas of “speeding” and didnt’ stop and this is how suicide bombers operate, speeding and don’t stop, thus the individuals in the car were guilty guilty guilty, guilty as all the others slaughtered at checkpoints.

Oh, that’s right, and I hope we don’t fail to notice that the military said the speeding car didn’t stop, thus gunfire to stop it. But the Italian testimony is that as soon as the car was hit with the floodlight, it stopped. After the car was stopped the gunfire commenced.

Thanks again to Paper Tigress for llistening to the broadcast and composing her summary. I’m not sure how one can listen to it and say, as Fini is saying, that contrary to what Sgrena believes his assessment is it was not an ambush, was accidental, but that the U.S. account doesn’t coincide with the Italian and he hopes for clarity and truth and justice. I feel like the problem with listening to Fini is one’s hearing two languages, the testimony he gives from the driver being one, and diplomacy being the other, between Italy and the U.S., the two of which, Fini pointed out, “antique and often repeated friendship…”

Over at Rox Populi she asks what’s an alternative to Blogosphere? I call it the bog. Short, direct. Inspired with this wondering what people would call (blank), I was wondering this evening, if Bush was a wine, how would you describe him? Me? I’d say, “Bombastic yet insipid”. There are a number of wits out there and I wish I knew what others would conjure, descriptive.

I start out to do one thing and end up doing another and another and following the Sgrena/Calipari story from here to there to there around the internet. An interesting thread that’s been carried on at dailykos today has links to pics of the automobile in which Sgrena and Calipari were riding. At Corrierre della Sera. The front end looks surprisingly unscathed for a car of which the engine block was said to be the target of the gunfire. I was also surprised to see that it wasn’t the car which I’d initially seen elsewhere given as Sgrena and Calipari’s car and doing a search found that the first car I saw wasn’t the Sgrena and Calipari car at all. Story here at Wagnews on how it came to be given as the car. Oddly enough, the stand-in car was said to look too little damaged. But the Toyata that Calipari and Sgrena were traveling in looks in a lot better shape than that other auto. However, appearances are apparently deceiving. The Italian foreign minister said that photos of the car show the right side riddled with bullet holes. The pics only show what I would have called the left side (driver’s side) of the auto but it is I guess instead called the right side, one facing it. (I can’t give a link to the foreign minister’s quote as it is an excerpt of an audio from NPR. Anyway, one doesn’t see the bullet holes. Blown out glass yes, but not the holes.

Brigadier General Peter Vangiel has been appointed to lead the investigation. He is with the 18th Airborne Corps Artillery from Fort Bragg, fresh in to Iraq in January. I find at Daily Kos a Jan 10th posting mentioning the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. “Soldiers given ‘talking points’ to repeat to any newsreporters they meet on the field” .

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) — Paratroopers from the 18th Airborne Corps are preparing to head to Iraq for a year of duty and among the lessons they’re getting is one in dealing with the news media they will encounter.
Soldiers will pack a plastic wallet card that lists talking points for interviews along with their rifles and body armor because the chances are good that they’ll meet a reporter in the field.

Continues with this…

Last week, about 60 members of the 18th Corps’ artillery headquarters battery sat for a refresher course in a classroom at Fort Bragg for a presentation from Master Sgt. Pam Smith of the Corps public affairs office.

“If you don’t tell your story, they will tell their own, and all they will have to go on is their own thoughts and opinions,” Smith said. “If we don’t share with them what we do, the good things we do, they can’t report it.”

Military public affairs officers say the idea isn’t to “spin” reporters. Rather, the goal is to familiarize troops with a duty that has become almost routine.

One of the main messages is that talking to journalists is smart, not just because it paints an accurate picture of the military but also because it’s an opportunity.

There also was a subtext to the course — that soldiers should dwell on the positive.

The slide show’s first talking point was, “We are not an occupying force. Goal is to help Iraqis secure their country.”

And ends up with…

Public affairs officers from all the branches of service learn the basics of training troops in dealing with the media at the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, Md.

Interesting. I was wondering what Peter Vangiel’s special qualifications were for dealing with this investigation. Maybe he has a particular way of currying the press and making positive presentations.

Continuing, the special talking points include the following (from an article by Joe Strupp at Iraq Occupation Watch):

* The Marine Corps is trained, resourced, and ready to accomplish its missions. We are committed to the cause and will remain in Iraq as long as we are needed.

* The fight in Iraq is tough, but we will remain steadfast and not lose heart.

* We are moving forward together with the Iraqi government as partners in building a future for the sons and daughters of Iraq.

* Coalition forces will help our Iraqi partners as they build their new and independent country and take their rightful place in the world community.

* Our troopers and their families are our greatest and most treasured resource.

* The Corps is a national institution it has never failed to do the will of the American people.

Not much room for freedom of thought and speech in the Marines, is there.

I don’t know how Vangjiel’s (I’ve seen spelled Vangjel and Vangiel) experience as a deputy commander of the Army Recruiting Command will help the investigation but he was deputy commander of Army Recruiting Command.

In interviews with recruiting officials, as well as in internal memos and e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times, this pressure to meet recruiting goals is evident.

“Guys the mission is at risk!” Col. Peter M. Vangjel, a deputy commander of the Army Recruiting Command, wrote to battalion commanders and top enlisted soldiers in an April 21 e-mail message. “We can NOT miss this mission. I need your full support.”

Colonel Vangjel continued, “The CG is the next guy to talk to you about this,” referring to the commanding general of the recruiting command, Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle. “Don’t let it happen.”

Ha. We are not an occupying force. Which brings me to Bush’s “Freedom will prevail in Lebanon!” speech.

In his speech, Mr. Bush won enthusiastic applause from the audience when he vowed that the United States will not rest until countries under authoritarian rule are freed and said he had no doubt that will happen.

“Those who place their hope in freedom may be attacked and challenged, but they will not ultimately be disappointed, because freedom is the design of humanity, and freedom is the direction of history,” Mr. Bush said. “The trumpet of freedom has been sounded, and that trumpet never calls retreat.”

What imagery. A bit more stately, though, than freedom ringing doorbells in the Middle East. That was in there too. Democracy is going to be ringing every door in the Middle East. Bush going door to door like the Jehovah’s Witnesses–imagine.

He said the spread of freedom has been stymied by repressive regimes in Syria and Iran and warned them the United States will adhere to its demand that they stop.

“The time has come for Syria and Iran to stop using murder as a tool of policy and to end all support for terrorism,” he said.

That’s right, when you tell people to stop using murder as a policy tool, people just have to assume that you wouldn’t use it as a policy tool, would you.

Mr. Bush said Iran “should listen to the concerns of the world and listen to the voice of the Iranian people, who long for their liberty and want their country to be a respected member of the international community.”

The United States believes Syria, which has just under 15,000 soldiers in Lebanon, was involved in the bomb plot that killed the anti-Syria former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri, three weeks ago.

Mr. Bush said, “We meet at a time of great consequence for the security of our nation, a time when the defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom, a time with echoes in our history. Twice in six decades a sudden attack on the United States launched our country into a global conflict and began a period of serious reflection on America’s place in the world.

Global police. (“US Push for global police force” ).

I caught a sound bite of the speech on television. Just heard, didn’t see. I have this visceral gut response to Bush every time I hear or see him. Nausea. And cringing disbelief that he is…President. Discombobulating. A bombastic yet insipid presence and voice. He just begs one to turn one’s back and walk away.

Scott McClellan, on Tuesday, fielded questions on Bush’s call for Syria to get out of Lebanon.

Q Scott, how does the President square his calls again today for Syria to get out of Lebanon, with the enormous outpouring of support for Syria on the streets of Lebanon today and calls for the international community to stay out of the internal affairs of Lebanon?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, first of all, we are glad to see people peacefully express their views in the town square, as they have done for days now. We hope the Lebanese people will be able to express their view at the ballot box, through free elections, without outside interference and outside intimidation.

That’s right, no outside interference, no outside intimidation.

Syria’s continued presence in Lebanon undermines the aspirations of the Lebanese people to live in freedom. I also noticed today that the flag that was being waved was the Lebanese flag.

Q Right, but it’s another side of the story, it would seem, that there is one segment of the Lebanese population who wants Syria to get out, another segment of the population that wants them to stay in; and that the call is for people like the President, for Germany, France, Saudi Arabia to stay out of the process, that it’s not their place to be involved in.

MR. McCLELLAN: We want the Lebanese people to be able to determine their own future without any outside interference or outside influence.

Right. Again, no outside interference or outside influence. We couldn’t possibly be accused of outside interference or influence. We couldn’t possibly be thinking of being an influencing force.

Meanwhile. Well, I gotta git. I’m being told that Aku is out to get the future where all his evil is coming. Aku is also trying to trick Elmo into Elmo thinking he is one of his pals.

Heretik yesterday remembers the tragedy of Kent State in a highly personal way, and points also to Bushmerika as a place of information for those who weren’t here yet or too young to remember or who want memories refreshed or who don’t know the surrounding details.

Check the page out. There are photos. Faces.

The photos mean something. They have identity. They are the record of the moment. History is engraved in them.

Several weeks ago I began a posting on how with Afghanistan and Iraq, the practice of concealing from the public the faces of prisoners became common. A legion of the faceless destined for Guantanamo Bay or housed in Iraqi prisons, one of the excuses was protection of the identity of the individual.

This WWII poster by Ben Sahn (1942, NARA Still Picture Branch, NWDNS-44-PA-245)referenced Lidice, a Czech mining village obliterated by the Nazis in 1942 in retaliation for the shooting of a Nazi official by two Czechs. The men were killed during a 10 hour massacre and the women and children sent to concentration camps. But, in a sense, that is the small print, which it literally is on the poster. The bigger picture is the hood and the handcuffs. The hood imparts more than a simple concealment of identity. It rightly associates with it the obliteration of the individual.

I look at it and reminded of what such a hood meant to me in my youth. One thought of the firing squad. Execution. The story one usually read was that the hood was to make the execution somehow easier for the one to be executed, as if not having to face that bullet. Another version was that the hood eased the pains of execution for the executioner, not having to see the face, shooting a target rather than a human. This was communicated as act of sympathy for the executioner.

Pictures of death row prisoners being executed often showed the individual wearing a hood.

173 males are given as executed at Lidice. This is a small number compared to other atrocities, so it is an event that became symbolic of the atrocities.

The message of the WWII poster is that reprisal which takes the lives of innocent civilians is not acceptable.

On Feb 13 1991 an unknown number of Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children, were killed with an Allied attack on an air raid shelter. The bunker was said to be able to hold up to 155. Perhaps 700 were killed.

In Oct of 2004 a Johns Hopkins study reported that in excess of 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died.

Findings indicated 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected to die, with 84% of the deaths caused by coalition forces, and 95% of the deaths due to air strikes and artillery. These figures do not include information from the city of Falluja. The researchers felt the totals would be distorted if the Falluja deaths were included in the total…

The report is indicating an estimated total of 100,000 deaths in Iraq, that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred, mostly women and children, but does not include the number of wounded Iraqi civilians.

The U.S. Department of Defense is listing 1,107 Americans as being killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom with 8,150 Americans wounded, a ratio of roughly 7:1. For every one soldier killed, another 7 are wounded. Note: The eight Americans killed, and nine wounded in Anbar province, on October 30, are not included in the above totals.

Using the same 7:1 ratio for civilians in Iraq could indicate a minimum of 700,000 wounded, mostly women and children.

Source: 100,000 Civilian Women And Children Killed In Iraq By Coalition Forces, at Scoop

Also to be considered are the deaths that occurred during the time of UN sanctions.

Next you will discover that there were UN sanctions on Iraq, at US urging, from August 1990 until May 2003, during which time Iraq could not import or export anything without our approval. For a period during 2001 the Bush administration even embargoed infant vaccines and medical equipment from being sent to Iraq.

UNICEF estimated that the sanctions against Iraq resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5. In May 1996 “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the UN: “We have heard that half a million children have died [as a result of sanctions]. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright responded: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

Subsequent estimates have reduced the number of child deaths to between 227,000 and 350,000. The sanctions interfered with food and medical supplies, and were modified with an “oil-for-food” program. On September 30, 1998, the BBC reported that Denis Halliday, coordinator of the program, resigned in disgust (after 30 years as an UN employee). The sanctions, he said, were killing 4,000–5,000 children a month. Halliday said the sanctions were strengthening Saddam Hussein by damaging “the innocent people of the country.”

Paul Craig Roberts, A Country Destroyed

When I began this posting a month or so ago, maybe longer, I was thinking of the identity-removing features of hooding, of the nameless. I was thinking of Lidice and the message of the WWII poster being that reprisal which takes the lives of innocent civilians is not acceptable. I was thinking of how the WWII poster itself was a condemnation of hooding, that it condemned as heinous the severing of identity from the individual. That is what I was thinking of then.

It has been a couple of weeks since the Pentagon released photos of “The Return of the Fallen” in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Professor Ralph Begleiter of the University of Delaware, and a lawsuit. The Pentagon officially refers to them as “images of the memorial and arrival ceremonies for deceased military personnel arriving from overseas.”

A lot has been written on the photos.

Begleiter and Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, note that in consequence of the dispute the Pentagon seems to have ceased maintaining a photo record at all now, the released images that contain date information all appearing to have been taken prior to June 2004. And indeed military officials tell Begleiter and the news photos that since the FOIA request in April 2004, photos have ceased to be taken.

The images are censored. The Pentagon calls it “redaction”, as in making ready by editing etc. for publication. Faces and insignia are blacked out.

The intentional unknown soldier carried by intentional unknown soldiers.

The intentional unknown soldier carried by intentional unknown soldiers.

The conveyor belt of unknown soldiers.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was intended as a communal expression of grief and respect. It admits an essential human need to account for all Fallen.

The identities of the soldiers in the caskets are known to the Pentagon. Still, the photos are antithetical the humanity expressed in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It may sound harsh, but not a one of those flag-draped boxes honors a fallen individual. Identity has been stripped. Context is removed. Humanity is eviscerated. Emotion is banned. Knowledge is banned. All that remains are symbols of Nationalism.

The “War on Terrorism”, or whatever one wants to call it, demands nothing less than dehumanization with the advancement of the National Machine. It admits no error. Evidence is as much a casualty as individuals. Accountability and reason is shuffled off to be the responsibility of future historians who will have to sort and weigh the scripted facts against the casualty of evidence.

Deceased are property of the State ID’d with a flag, the only ID necessary in the language of Nationalism, and quietly communicated home to be interred and forgotten.

Confronting again the photos of Kent State, these many years distant, one is forced to be reacquainted with the grief and rage of the time, the story behind each and every photo.

The photos of those stripped of humanity, identifiable then as only a part of the machine, seek to allow only the rote response scripted by the machine. If grief or anger are experienced, they belong not to the particular but to National Identity.

The rage of the WWII poster understood this. The image of the victim, stripped of humanity, was used to insist, “This murder of the individual is not acceptable!” Yes, it was propaganda. And the US denied its own propaganda with its own slaying of thousands and thousands of innocent civilians. But there is still truth in that image, in that poster. The hooded individual struggling under a dark and distant sky, shackled, bricked-in, confined.

Faceless, nameless.

“Images of the memorial and arrival ceremonies for deceased military personnel arriving from overseas.”

The shadow of this brand of cynical vagueness which demands no substantiation, are stories which can never be substantiated as they are entirely fabricated. They walk hand-in-hand with such policy makers.

The theater of war, politics and national policy, in which the media is made a player, permits no witness, is a state-approved, national entertainment.

Kansas, Kansas. Why Kansas, I ask? I was born in Kansas. Lawrence. They have a University in Kansas. More than one! They have a really big one. KU! Home of the Jayhawks. Beat poets read there. You didn’t get Beat poets reading at Bible Belt southern universities in the 50s and 60s. But they were at KU. They have science at KU. Really, they do. They had science there in the 50s.

The last home of William Burroughs was Lawrence, Kansas. Beat poet Michael McClure, born in Kansas, wrote “The Mad Club”, which chronicled the Beat scene in Wichita, though the novel was set in Tulsa (I’ve not read it). Many in the Wichita scene met through a youth group at the UU church and were involved in segregation protests. LRY? Liberal Religious Youth? I was in LRY LSD (Lower Southern District) when I was 16 to 17 years of age, in Augusta. It had a knack for attracting uhm some different kinds of people. I had nothing to do with UU’s. I think it was about the last day of my junior year in high school someone said, “Hey, I bet you’d like LRY.” LRY? Liberal Religious Youth??? I was leary because of the Christian “Young Life”. But “Young Life” and LRY were nothing at all alike. Too bad that in 1974-1975 we were kind of left holding an empty bag, or so it seemed to a fringe person such as myself, which is what I was, one of the tassels. Plus too much tragedy. There was a lot of tragedy in the group. Way too many ghosts to leave much room for anything but mourning. Yet it was the one unique spot in Augusta at that time for teens of a certain mindset to gather together. It attracted artists and poets. Attracted, LRY as a whole, eventually too much controversy which is why it was, as an organization, ultimately dissolved and a new youth group instituted.

Ginsberg wrote the “Wichita Vortex Sutra” after a visit to Wichita in 1966. Of course, the Wichita Vortex idea, begun by the Beats when they were pre-Beat teens, was they were outlaws from Mars being held prisoner in Wichita, that at the time of the WU Homecoming game they were endowed with fabricated memories, and that nothing existed outside of Wichita which wasn’t an illusion of the Vortex. So, no, Kansas wasn’t exactly a friendly place. I’m not saying it was. But the Beat scene thrived there. Got some room there. Was at work there.

Why Kansas?

Maybe Kansas just wants a circus and the best one for the dollar is the one courtesy of the Institute for Intelligent Design, arguing Darwin in Kansas.

In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.’s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science’s explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design, which posits that life’s complexity cannot be explained without a supernatural creator.

…If the board adopts the new standards, as expected, in June, Kansas would join Ohio, which took a similar step in 2002, in mandating students be taught that there is controversy over evolution. Legislators in Alabama and Georgia have introduced bills this season to allow teachers to challenge Darwin in class, and the battle over evolution is simmering on the local level in 20 states.

The reason for all this? Make no mistake. It’s to make science=atheism=antiChristian or nonChristian which=enemies of a nation founded on Christian principles=liberals=Not a Member of God’s Kingdom.

“These people are going to obfuscate about these definitions,” complained Jack Krebs, vice president of the pro-evolution Kansas Citizens for Science, whose members filled many of the 180 auditorium seats not taken by journalists, who came from as far away as France. “They have created a straw man. They are trying to make science stand for atheism, so they can fight atheism.”

Why Kansas?

What’s the matter with Kansas?

The same thing that’s been the matter with America for so many years: the culture wars. The cloud of inexhaustible right-wing outrage that hovers over so much of the country. Kansas, like many places in America, once had a tradition of progressivism and outright radicalism. Today, though, like many other places, the state’s political center just seems to move farther to the right in response to events. During the Nineties the state erupted in a sort of right-wing populist revolt, tossing out its old-school pragmatic leaders and replacing them with the most conservative Republicans available. It made national headlines when anti-abortion activists descended in massive numbers on Wichita in 1991, and it made world headlines when its State Board of Education took up the battle against evolution in 1999. Today Kansas is the sort of place where the angry, suspicious worldview typified by Fox News or the books of Ann Coulter is a common part of everyday life. So I went there to study the indignant conservative mindset up close.

The reason I say there’s something “the matter” with all this is that, in becoming more and more conservative, Kansas is voting against its own economic interests. Large parts of the state are in deep economic crisis—in many cases a crisis either brought on or worsened by the free-market policies of the Republican party—and yet the state’s voters insist on re-electing the very people who are screwing them, running up colossal majorities for George Bush, lowering taxes and privatizing and deregulating, even when these things are manifestly unhealthy for the state.

Source: Questions and Answers with Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas”

Thomas Frank, who was a Reagan youth, calls it “The Great Backlash”:

By “backlash” I mean populist conservatism of the kind pioneered in the Sixties by George Wallace and Richard Nixon, perfected by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and crafted into an entertainment form by Fox News. Instead of selling conservative politics on economic grounds, it imagines conservatism as a revolt of the little people against a high and mighty liberal elite. Its object is to fight back against artists who dip crosses in urine, Hollywood stars who wear outrageous clothes, Ivy League journalists who slant the news, and snob judges who remove Ten Commandments monuments from the parks, and so on. The “Great Backlash” refers to the long ascendancy of this style of conservatism, ever since 1968. The “backlash mentality” refers to the culture of the movement, to the way its members view the world we live in.

Yeah, well, ok, maybe, and so Kansas hates the pre-Beat, Beat and post-Beat Generation. Ok. Big gripes there I imagine.

Great Backlash, certainly.

Bless her itsy-bitsy-teeny-tiny heart, Phyllis Schaffly wrote back in 2001,

Liberals have long realized that, if they can win the battle over what is taught in schools, they will win elections. While they claim to believe in free speech, they often have little tolerance for alternate points of view in the schools. In 1999, a popularly elected Kansas Board of Education changed its science teaching standards to allow students to make factual scientific criticisms of evolution. This created a national uproar in intellectual circles and the media and, last November, the pro-evolution forces elected their allies to the state School Board…If you are baffled as to why the liberals pursue the dogmatic teaching of evolution, a clue might be found in the recent election. Of the 13 states that allow dissent over evolution, George W. Bush won all but one and, of the 10 states that impose the strictest pro-evolution requirements, Gore won all but three.

The Kansas Board of Education battleground.

Still? Why Kansas? I keep thinking back earlier. Maybe rightly or wrongly. Maybe totally wrongly. But I do. As in maybe too it’s some weird “battleground” legacy, as in Kansas, Bloody Kansas. The state that got away from the pro-slavers and went free. Who knows? Sure, John Brown, pro-abolition, gave the state its Bloody nick-name, executing five men at Pottawatomie Creek in retaliation for the pro-slavers’ raid on Lawrence Kansas; you hear a lot about John Brown but there was the Maria des Cygne Massacre as well, when pro-slavers from Missouri went over, took 11 free state Kansans, lined them up by a ditch and shot them down, including two brothers, one of whom survived and married one of my ancestor’s sisters.

Kansas is soldily Red. Still, it’s a battleground state. It was pre Civil War and I wonder if part of the problem with Kansas is that bloody battleground itch.

The Institute for Intelligent Design of Shawnee Mission, Kansas says they’re fighting for nothing less than free speech. Y’know, that’s because Christians have been beaten down hard. Forced into hiding in the sewers of Topeka.

Now, let me ask you? What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of…a bird? Y’know, what’s the beauty of a bird? When you see a bird, what do you, as a creature of intelligent design want to go out and do, guided, in a sense, by the intelligent design of birds?

I posted before on the “Institute for Intelligent Design”. I even read through part of one of their Intelligent Design plays. I couldn’t read the whole thing. Maybe I should have. But the writings was oh so bad.

I went back today to take another look at the Institute for Intelligent Design website. And this time for some reason I took note of the illustrator they highlight on their links page, whose “art provides a conceptual illustration of a design inference based on her Maching-Living System Analogy.”

Here’s what Jody sees in the Intelligent Design of birds:

When I look around at the amazing world of birds and animals that God has created I see the creatures that have inspired many of man’s greatest achievements. The relationship between creature (life) and machine (non-life) holds many interesting similarities and differences, and much of my inspiration has come from this study. Throughout my life I have been fascinated with flight, so my works of art are an expression of the wonder and curiosity I have for both the birds and the flying machines.”

Ok, for Jody, bird beauty has inspired what great achievements worth illustrating?

The raven becomes a black avian knight, SR-71! “No more perfect partners could be found for this vision of art. From the winged creature put here by God to the miracle plane of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Metamorphosis VI: Blackbird pays tribute to two big, black, highly intelligent birds.”

The Bald Eagle becomes an F-15!, Jody says, ” For example, my artwork here shows a symbolic relationship between the F-15 fighter jet and a bald eagle. There is no question that the F-15 was designed. To suggest that an infinitely more complex living system like the bald eagle was not designed, but was the product of undirected random processes, is to suggest that those processes had more sophisticated design capabilities than did the engineers at McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation.”

A flacon becomes a Falconfyre!. “‘Falconfyre’ expresses that irresistible association between a flying creature and a flying machine, suggesting what is logically obvious to all: they are both the products of intelligence and design.”

And finally, a good Crusade!

Metamorphosis II: A Mighty Fortress Cold War meets George Washington’s “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace,” meets the B52 as a mighty Medieval fortress of the sky, referring to “times when kings ruled and knights defended the liberties of their kingdom.”

The Crusades! What did the Crusaders do? Right. Wahoo, and now the knights are back defending the liberties of their kingdom first in Afghanistan and then Iraq! And no doubt the same association is made with fighting the Good Fight here at home.

Which brings me back down to this. When I started writing I was thinking mainly of Jody and how Jody delights in those things of the kingdom which she sees as associated with, well, war. Undeniably, war. No pigeon-feet Orville Wright airplanes. It’s war for Jody. And then as I began writing I thought about the Beat Generation and Kansas.

There’s a very interesting paragraph at “Against the Grain”. Jody is not from Kansas. Her bio for the US Air Force Art Collection gives her as born in Ohio and places her at no time in Kansas. Still, the quote from David Quick on Wichita and the Beat Movement is an interesting one and kind of says something about the difference between Intelligent Design booster Jody, and the Beats.

David Quick, a photographer, filmmaker and WSU lecturer, stresses, “The fact that one of Wichita’s primary industries, aviation, was related to death wasn’t lost on at least some of the city’s youth. They knew they were living, symbolically, in a pit of death…Against that backdrop, McClure met another eighth-grader, Lee Streiff, at Robinson Junior High. It was Streiff who passed on the science-fiction tale of The Epic of the Martian Empire, written circa 1937 by his older brother, James. No one knew it yet, but within the epic’s cycle of stories was the germ of the Wichita Vortex, a concept that would shift shape and meaning and grow into, as Johnson puts it, ‘the story that became both a description of dire circumstances and the name of a place.’”

Evolution? Yeah, right. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about war. The big C Crusade. The Rapturous battle. It’s about “times when kings ruled and knights defended the liberties of their kingdom”.

When you look at birds and grease spots and see everything in the language of war, and it’s a happy, positive thing, then I think you’re kind of forcing the issue there, but then that’s what it’s about. Forcing the issue.

War. That’s the bottom line. Damn war.

I search for the language
that is also yours –
almost all our language has been taxed by war

Allen Ginsberg, Wichita Vortex Sutra

This week The Sun and The New York Post, both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., ran “leaked” photos of Saddam in his briefs.

“It’s troubling and unfortunate that these pictures were made public, and it’s certainly contrary to what our policies and procedures are,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon official. “That’s why we’re taking a hard look at what happened, and we’ll look to hold someone accountable.”

The New York Post and The Sun. Far right Rupert Murdoch. Champion of the Bush Crusade, Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch, the media manipulator.

I’m beginning to find it interesting that what Americans are most exposed to are the recurrent images of the candid camera type which are intended to be sexually humiliating or capture sexually humiliating, degrading practices to which Iraqi captives were subjected.

And, yes, I know that an outraged Joseph Darby broke the Abu Gharib story by slipping a CD of photos under an officer’s door.

But with the release of the Saddam photos, what makes it into the public eye and what does not seems to become more thematic and in some ways even more disturbing (at least to me).

Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, said Friday that the mere appearance of Saddam in his underwear may be an affront to many Muslims who believe that the body is sacred.

“To show someone partially or almost naked is a kind of insult to Muslim sensibilities,” Masmoudi said. “Arabs will feel it is an insult, ihana in Arabic, which means degrading, to all Arabs. Why are they treating him this way?”…

The Sun said it had obtained the photographs from an unidentified member of the U.S. military who was quoted as saying the pictures were intended to show insurgents that he is no longer a legendary dictator and is instead “just an aging and humble old man.”

Masmoudi said that because much of the insurgency in Iraq is made up of Baathists and former members of Saddam’s government, the photos of their leader in a humiliating scene could encourage their attacks against Americans and the Iraqis working with them.

Contradictory. There are a lot of contradictions. One is accustomed to attempting rectification of the contradictory. If one imagines that the purpose of humiliation is to intimidate, to deconstruct culture and leave it meaningless, to debase morally, then what one might expect and hope the intimidated individuals may do is give in, give up, and there have been statements that the practices in Abu Gharib were a matter of PSYOPS and their intent was to intimidation and control. Though the investigations were confined only to a few underlings who are condemned as having gotten independently out of control, I don’t think it’s prudent to not assume a much broader theater.

The military argued that the leaked Abu Gharib photos were a danger to the troops because of their inflammatory nature. Similar to the Newsweek article and “Newsweek lied, people died.”

Now Bush says that he doesn’t believe photos inspire payback.

I don’t think a photo inspires murderers. I think they’re inspired by an ideology that is so barbaric and backwards that it’s hard for many in the Western world to comprehend how they think.”

Contradictory. The military says that the photos should not have been released, that it goes against policy. The media says the military released the photos with the intention of demoralizing supporters of Saddam.

I don’t expect the right hand to always know what the left is doing.

I also don’t think we’re ruled by complete idiots. I don’t think everyone, from top to bottom, over in Iraq or in D.C. hasn’t a clue about what they’re doing and they’ve managed to get where they are, to have grasped the control that they have, by pure dumb luck.

I don’t think conflicting messages and contradictions may be necessarily unintentional.

I also don’t think photos of Saddam, if intentionally leaked, are directed only as a part of PSYOPS against Iraqis supportive of Saddam. The news is also directed at Americans.

And when I look at the photos of Saddam, I think less of the war in Iraq than I do of the surveillance society we have become and are becoming. And I think of ways of viewing others to which we are becoming perhaps desensitized. Had we been shown photos of Saddam fully clothed for the media in his jail cell or outside it, then one may think of Iraq. Instead we are shown surveillance camera photos. If we accept a photo of Saddam in his underwear as customary and usual, as a natural byproduct of captive vulnerability, then we are very close to accepting the same standards applied to ourselves, excused by our living in a Patriot Act, post 9/11 surveillance-imprisoned world justifying loss of personal sovereignty, a collapse of boundaries, a forgotten understanding that what is inhumane treatment need not be appalling in the extreme.

Indeed, there are those who viewed Abu Gharib as little more humiliating that a frat or military hazing.

No, the photos are unacceptable. At least to me they are, and are less about Saddam than about what we’re expected to tolerate as a society.

Ezra (left) went to war and returned from Stalag IIB

I tend to be a day late on subject-of-the-day posts because i’m not a quick one, I have to ponder. And also the server this blog is on is iffy and sometimes I’ll write a post and punch publish and the post disappears, the blog going down for five seconds, as happened with this one. I was also thinking of a different kind of memorial this weekend. But would now like to try to reconstruct my memorial day post that is now a post memorial day post.

Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” fictionalizes some of the confusion of Europe uprooted and wandering as WWII came apart and the order and organization of Death Camps and POW camps turned into a chaos of those with no other nation than limbo, picking through trash for food, drinking bad water, brains too stunned to consider much beyond walking, resembling more the many homeless that every morning emerge out of the concrete gray and the shadows of parks and begin their trek to the food line of one of the city’s main church soup kitchens a couple of blocks from our apartment, many days the streets seeming to empty of all pedestrian traffic but those whose lives have been reduced to the portable. Like epileptic Bill who several years ago went out of work when a fancy restaurant, also a couple of blocks away, closed and its gate and stoop became a line for homeless drying their clothes on early sunny mornings. Epileptic Bill, who did get meds from the State and our landlord couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t take them until I explained to him that perhaps it’s because it takes a while to find a cocktail of meds that will work and how an epileptic friend of ours was almost killed by State meds carelessly prescribed, who spent years barely able to do much but have seizures and sit in a daze, until she met a State doctor who cared and said your meds are killing you and worked to find the right cocktail. Bill, who our landlord gave a perpetual loan to of four big plastic trash bins in the decaying narrow dirt and broken concrete courtyard in the back of our 80 or 90 year old building, and Bill would daily come at 7 am and climb the gate outside our bedroom window and tend his cache of Coke and Pepsi cans and sit in a chair outside our decaying kitchen window, shadow ghost having a few isolated smokes. As it is with most ghosts he was the kind you see out the corner of your eye, who as you turned to look straight on at him would disappear, poof. I’d open the kitchen blind and there he was. I’d turn and turn back and during that interval he would usually disappear.

At winter’s end Bill would leave out back the jacket given him by the landlord and the landlord would put it away then would pull it out with fall’s chill and put it in the back for Bill to pick up. For Easter last year the landlord bought Bill new clothes and put them out for him on the cyclone fence next to the trash bins, where he would put Bill’s clothes that he would take home to wash when Bill would have a seizure and soil himself. The clean clothes would hang on the fence with spic-and-span healthful goodness, so lively they were nearly wearing themselves, and Bill would come and go daily but not pick them up. The clothes would be rained on, air polluted upon and still he’d not touch them. When they were again stiff and the color of coffee and concrete then they’d disappear from the fence and appear on Bill. Bill treated his new Easter finery the same way. He has since apparently disappeared for good. Months have gone by and Bill hasn’t made an appearance, which is probably bad news for Bill. After three months the landlord emptied the trash bins of Bill’s cans.

Bill once found a wallet in the street still fat with credit cards and twenty dollars. Bill had the landlord get in touch with the owner. The owner came and got his wallet which was as plump as it was when he’d lost it and he gave Bill the twenty dollars. The next day the wallet’s owner returned and gave Bill a couple hundred dollars and if I remember correctly he rented for him a room for a night at the motel near here. The same motel from which, last year, went a husband and wife and some children who had been living there for several months, walked down the street, past our own, inexplicably nude, leaving behind in their motel room the dead body of another one of their children, exorcised of life which they had mistaken for a demon and tortured out of her.

Bill confused the landlord, showing off the couple of hundred dollars worth of cigarettes he’d purchased, which he stowed in the trash bins, used mainly for trading.

I once found online the account of a Concentration camp survivor, wrote at length what it was like with the approach of the US and USSR troops and the fleeing of the Nazis, who shed their uniforms and went a few miles back home, put the civilian life camouflage on over the military, hid in the wide open air and waited with the rest, all welcoming smiles. The survivor was wandering with other survivors, weakened by captivity and rare and bad food, confused by the sudden change, at their resurrection from the dead, survivors who were as disinterested in him as he was in them, and during their initial wandering they were invited for a farm house meal by a man and his wife. As he and the others sat eating he realized the host was one of the officials at the Death Camp, jovial now, serving them, piling food on them when a couple of days before he’d still been killing them. And the survivors, realizing who he was, instead of attacking the officer, eating the good food at his table, laughed at the jokes and said thanks for the potatoes and meat, not knowing what in the hell else to do. Shocked by a world going topsy-turvy. When the meal was done they shook the fake civilian’s hand and returned to the road. The survivor outlined his weeks of wandering, walking himself back to life, and I gained a better picture of the chaos, the people looking for an old home that no longer was, after a while remembered relatives and started to look for them, lost seeking the lost in a Europe that seemed less like nations than houses blasted and jumbled together by a several year long hurricane.

In school we were taught that the US troops rode in. There was liberation. We were shown pictures of townsfolk celebrating the arrival of US troops, of prisoners lined up behind fences waiting release, lying on bunks. One imagined an immediate translation of liberated prisoners to hospital wards with three meals a day, clean sheets, warm baths, the Andrews Sisters in nursing caps bouncing their curls off their shoulders, breaking into impromptu song while taking temps.

My husband had a great Uncle. One of the Black Sheep Uncles. Who my husband liked best. An alligator trapper in the bayou who was missing several fingers. Whispers of his being a morphine addict. There were the church-going, Assembly of God, in good stead with Christ members of the family. And there were the tubercular alcoholics who joked and told stories and purchased and gave candy to the nieces and nephews rather than church judgments. And then the whispers of the morphine addict Uncle.

I knew he had served in WWII. Had been a POW as well, but not much was said about this.

It bothered me that I knew Ezra was in the war and had been a POW but no one could tell me anything else about it.

I did a little research and found out that Ezra was in the 509th Parachute Infantry Batallion, which was the first American Unit to parachute into combat in November of 1942.

Ezra grew up in Louisiana. I could be wrong but I doubt he had traveled much before going off to war.

On Feb 29 1944 he was taken prisoner and was a POW at the infamous Stalag 2B, well known for being the worst of the German POW camps. Towards the end of the war the camp was evacuated and the POWs spent the next two months marching.

From http://darbysrangers.tripod.com/id64.htm

EVACUATION & LIBERATION: On 28 January 1945, POW received German instructions to be ready to evacuate camp at 0800 hours the following morning. Upon receipt of these instructions, the MOC set up a plan of organization based on 25-man groups and 200 man companies with NCOs in charge. On the day of the evacuation, however, POW were moved out of camp in such a manner that the original plan was (of) little assistance. German guards ordered POW to fall out of the barracks. When 1200 men had assembled on the road, the remaining 500 were allowed to stay in the barracks. A disorganized column of 1200 marched out into the cold and snow. The guards were considerate, and Red Cross food was available. After the first day, the column was broken down into three groups of 400 men each, with NCOs in charge of each group.

For the next three months, the column was on the move, marching an average of 22 kilometers a day 6 days a week. German rations were neither regular nor adequate. At almost every stop Sgt McMahan bartered coffee, cigarettes or chocolate for potatoes which he issued to the men. Bread the most important item, was not issued regularly. When it was needed most it was never available. The soup was, as a rule, typical, watery German soup, but several times POW got a good, thick dried-pea soup. Through the activity of some of the key NCO’s, Red Cross food was obtained from POW camps passed; by the column on the march. Without it, it is doubtful that the majority of men could have finished the march. The ability of the men to steal helped a lot. The weather was atrocious. It always seemed to be either bitter cold or raining or snowing. Quarters were usually unheated barns and stables. Sometimes they slept unsheltered o the ground; and sometimes they were fortunate enough to find a heated barn.

Except for one period when Red Cross food was exhausted and guards became surly, morale of the men remained at a high level. Practically all the men shaved at every opportunity and kept their appearance as neat as possible under the circumstances.

From time to time weak POW would drop out of the column and wait to be picked up by other columns which were on the move. Thus at Dahlen on 6 & 7 March, the column dwindled to some 900 American POW. On 19 March at Tramm, 800 men were sent to work on Kommandos, leaving only 133 POW who were joined a week later by the Large Kommando Company from Lauenberg. On 13 April the column was strafed by 4 Spitfires near Dannenberg. Ten POW were killed. The rest of the column proceeded to Marlag 10C, Westertimke, where they met the men they had left behind at Stalag IIB who had left on 18 February, reached Stalag 10B after an easy 3 day trip, and then moved adjacent Marlag 10C on 16 April. Westertimke was liberated by the British on 28 April 1945.

There is a report that July 11 1945 Ezra was reported as living. I don’t know what happened to him in the final days of the war, and in the couple of months between liberation and when he was reported as living. I have seen the report of another individual also part of the 98 North African Theater in Italy who was also in Stalag 2B who was reported as living over a month before Ezra was. Where Ezra was between liberation and when he was reported alive, I don’t know. Was he a Pynchon character journeying back from the underworld, walking until he found his name again. Was he lying in a hospital, unidentified. Where was he? I don’t know, only that the war left him in bad shape.

Ezra didn’t talk about his experiences. All my husband knew was that he’d been a POW and his mother mentioned he’d gotten a Purple Heart. I sent her what I’d found on Ezra and she wrote back this maybe explained his being in and out of the hospital for years following WWII. Psychiatric problems. Ezra was 31 when he was taken prisoner so he had gone into the war probably as a man who’d had some idea of a life he’d wanted to lead and had been pursuing. Or maybe not. He returned home and I get the idea he was viewed as kind of a puzzle, people not getting the connection between the ward and the war, it seems, Uncle Ezra just not able to get with the game. And then the morphine addiction thing. He had married one of the nurses he met. They had one son about a year or two after the war ended. “Pride and joy”. Y’know. And one can well imagine, I think. Ezra taking to the bayou to fish and trap alligators, spending his time out in the boat, away from people, married to a nurse who perhaps he found was able to listen, their having a child, and the cliched “pride and joy” of a son being not so cliched.

When he was 19, young son, on his job for the telephone company, was hit by a car and killed.

I don’t want to imagine.

Ezra’s wife died about 12 years later. Ezra lived a year and a half longer and died at age 65.

I don’t know if Ezra was brave. I don’t know what kind of soldier he was. I don’t know anything about him really, other than the fact he was my husband’s favorite uncle, that he and his wife were funny and nice, and that my husband enjoyed visiting him as a child, at their house “way way out” in the bayou.

Before I learned about Ezra and the war, my husband and I used to joke about Ezra, who I’d never met, having lost his fingers trapping alligators. We didn’t know if he’d lost his fingers while trapping alligators but had assumed it. Learning about the war, I’m not so sure now. I have two photos of Ezra just after he’d entered the military, in uniform, the image where he’s standing military straight for the memory book ruined with what looks like a light leak in the camera. I have also two photos taken in the early 70s. He was a skinny man at 60, tanned about as dark as the light brown polyester shirt he was wearing, looking less like his lighter-skinned siblings who were still living and more like his Cherokee-Chahta great-grandmother whose father never got with the program either, wanted to fish and hunt rather than farm and so his white relations called him “Lazy Ward” and for a time every descendant who took after him was nick-named after him.

In the photos, Ezra’s whole hand rests at his side, his left hand conspiculously jammed deep in his dark brown polyester pants pocket, hiding the missing fingers from view.