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Middle East policy: Start fire, just add gas!

By timmukyPosted on Posted in bombing, iran, iraq, militarism, warNo Comments on Middle East policy: Start fire, just add gas!

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Juan Cole’s Tom Friedman & funding ISIL: Israel/Iran Derangement Syndrome is a pretty compelling read.

I don’t agree with everything Cole says, and haven’t forgotten his support for Obama’s non-Constitutional “kinetic action” in Libya, nor his “letter to the left.” His position was not short on nuance, but Libya is a disaster today, though surely it’s cheering for those who like their middle eastern nations in flames.

Thomas Friedman’s more-puzzling-than-usual column from midweek, in which he wondered aloud whether the West should be arming ISIL, led to more than a few hot takes asserting Friedman had lost it, and was floating that balloon out of ignorance and/or dementia. I beg to differ: I think he knew exactly what he was saying.

Between Obama’s pending rapprochement with Iran and the cooperation between US and allied militaries in bombing ISIL combatants (and countless more collateral persons of no interest), there lurks the possibility of peace breaking out in the Middle East. Well, OK, peace is not really in the works, but there remains the chance the U.S. will stall out on its accidental/on purpose mission to take down every proper country in the region that doesn’t kowtow to U.S./Israeli domination.

Cole:

What accounts for [Friedman] being in this category of Daesh-supporters when he is not a conservative (in the American political sense of conservative)? It is his Zionism. For Israel, Daesh is just a manifestation of chaos and not threatening to Israel which has the best military in the Middle East. But for many Israelis and supporters of Israel, it is the big conventional rejectionist states and armies with their potential for nuclear weaponry that are the real danger. That is why Friedman supported Bush’s Iraq War, as well. Apparently, for this strain of Zionism, the Middle East has to be in flames and broken up by constant American military invasions and special ops covert actions and coups in order to keep Israel from having any peer militarily in the region. Daesh is just a set of gangs and aids in keeping Syria and Iraq in chaos, so from this point of view, it is a good thing and should be armed to cause more chaos.

It is a monstrous point of view that would come as a surprise to most Americans when put like this, but all Middle Easterners understand that it is exactly the kind of policy Israeli hawks pursue and urge the US to pursue.

Yesterday morning in the Post David Petraeus was not miles away from what Friedman was jokingly-but-not-really suggesting. Suddenly, the ISIL threat has been downgraded from Existential/Kill Them All to Maybe We Should Be Friends.

Watch the pundits go along with this 180-degree turn. Will the prospect of peace breaking out reclaim its rightful place as Public Enemy Number One? That’s been the safe bet for a while now.

Now with video! Matt Lee to Jen Psaki: “whoa, whoa, whoa”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in Foreign affairsTagged , , , , , No Comments on Now with video! Matt Lee to Jen Psaki: “whoa, whoa, whoa”

Democracy Now has an interview with Pomona College professor Miguel Tinker Salas on the latest events in Venuzuela, including the Obama administration’s recent designation of that South American nation as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to national security.” The broadcast features a clip from this precious exchange between State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki and AP reporter Matt Lee:

JEN PSAKI: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of long-standing policy, the United States does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful and legal. We’ve seen many times that the Venezuelan government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan government to deal with the grave situation it faces.

MATT LEE: Sorry. The U.S. has—whoa, whoa, whoa—the U.S. has a long-standing practice of not promoting—what did you say? How long-standing is that? I would—in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a long-standing practice.

It goes on and you should really read the whole thing, but I just had to share the “whoa whoa whoa” bit from Lee, who has quite a history with Psaki. If this were a mainstream Hollywood movie about Washington, the two of them would be having a secret affair…

Stiffening into the bog

By timmukyPosted on Posted in northern ireland, the troublesTagged , , , No Comments on Stiffening into the bog

jean-mcconvillesm

Where the bodies are buried, Patrick Radden Keefe’s long piece in this week’s New Yorker, is a grim read, but fascinating, and infinitely sad.

I’m not sure how I came to follow Gerry Adams on Twitter, but I do, and it’s hard to reconcile the accusations that he ordered murders with the slightly oafish, avuncular persona I read daily. To wit:

Having said that, I find the accusations credible. But it’s a tangled mess. Many of Adams’ accusers who spoke to the Boston College oral-history project were “former Republicans who have accused Sinn Fein of betrayal,” according to a representative speaking for Adams. Which is true, but doesn’t invalidate their testimony.

Similarly, Jean McConville, the woman murdered allegedly on Adams’ orders, was a widow and a mother of ten. It doesn’t beggar belief that a woman in her predicament would be vulnerable to the blandishments (or threats) of British spies looking for low-level informers.   Murdering a woman mired in such circumstances seems unusually cruel, whether she was a tout or not. The facts are murky there as well.

One of the creepiest aspects of this: the buggering holy men lurking in the background. After McConville disappeared, the state broke up the family; the younger children were “dispersed to different orphanages.” One son, Michael, “recalled an orphanage where monks walked through the dormitory at night with a roving flashlight, taking boys from their beds.” (It also came out in a 2013 trial that Adams’ own brother was a “pedophile who had molested his own daughter, and that Adams had known but done little to intervene.”)

Keefe notes that Northern Ireland has yet to see (and will probably never see) a “truth and reconciliation” process similar to South Africa’s, and evokes the great Seamus Heaney’s characterization of Ireland’s bogs as “a landscape that remembered everything”:

In Northern Ireland, where roughly thirty-six hundred people were murdered during the Troubles and some forty thousand wounded, there has been no comprehensive accounting. A recent report by Amnesty International criticizes the “piecemeal” investigations of historical abuses, and suggests that, “across the political spectrum, it is those in power who may fear that they have little politically to gain—and possibly much to lose—from any careful examination of Northern Ireland’s past.” In 1999, with the encouragement of Bill Clinton, the British and Irish governments established the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, and the I.R.A. agreed to identify the graves of nine people who had been murdered and secretly buried during the Troubles, but only after securing a promise that no criminal prosecutions would result. The I.R.A. declared that some of the disappeared had been informers, including Jean McConville. Michael and his siblings angrily rejected this characterization, yet they had little choice but to work with the I.R.A. to search for her remains.

Much of the Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs; the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland can be subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters occasionally churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies date as far back as the Bronze Age, and often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death. These victims, cast out of their communities and buried, have surfaced vividly intact, from their hair to their leathery skin. The poet Seamus Heaney, who harvested peat as a boy on his family’s farm, once described the bogs of Ireland as “a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it.”

Ah, here we are, back in the bogs. Which brings me round (again) to that last passage of O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,” which I’ve been obsessing over since I re-read it a month ago. Deaths, reprisals, repeat. It’s a story about the same civil war, only nearly a century earlier, and it ends with two captured English soldiers stiffening into a bog. The infinite sorrow of its final lines still seems apt:

Noble says he saw everything ten times the size, as though there were nothing in the whole world but that little patch of bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it, but with me it was as if the patch of bog where the Englishmen were was a million miles away, and even Noble and the old woman, mumbling behind me, and the birds and the bloody stars were all far away, and I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow. And anything that hap­pened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.

 

Evergreen post: Why we fight…

By timmukyPosted on Posted in batshit crazy politicians, militarism, plus ca change, warTagged , No Comments on Evergreen post: Why we fight…

David Swanson is always worth a read, especially when the drums of war are beating, which come to think of it is always….

From his latest, Putin Wants to Eat Your Children:

My point is not that bombs would be worse than the problem addressed and would make the problem itself worse as well, although that’s all true. Rather, my point is that most people who favor wars do so in order to blindly support a nation, and in blindly supporting that nation they allow it to dictate which wars they will favor. Although war supporters will give you reasons for the wars they favor, they actually favor whichever wars they are told to favor, and no others. And they’ll give you the reasons they are told to believe in as well.

More often than not, the U.S. public is advised to favor a war on a single individual of demonic nature, even though a war against an individual is completely nonsensical. According to nonsensical propaganda, you don’t bomb Iraqis; you bomb former-U.S.-ally Saddam Hussein. You don’t bomb Afghans; you bomb former-U.S.-ally Osama bin Laden. You don’t drone kill Pakistani and Yemeni and Somali children and women and men; you drone kill Al Qaeda Terrorist Number Three, over and over again. You don’t liberate Libya from what stability it had; you kill former-U.S.-ally Muammar Gadaffi. You don’t attack Panama; you attack former-U.S.-ally Manuel Noriega. Et cetera et cetera.

Well, it’s Vladimir Putin’s turn, which means Russia is at risk, which means the world is at risk, and yet the rough beast stumbling toward Bethlehem to be born is as oblivious to its conception as any unborn thing or television viewer.

Read the whole thing….

Summer is ready when you are….

By timmukyPosted on Posted in remembranceTagged No Comments on Summer is ready when you are….

A photo posted by Tim Ungs (@timungs) on

Ah, yes, son, the winter of ’15. Like everyone else in the eastern United States, we’ve been hammered by winter weather for three weeks. First, the blizzard, then the bitter cold, then a brief respite, and then the exact same thing happened 10 days later. Jesus.

I like to think we’ve seen the last of it. This forecast says mild and messy for the next couple of weeks. The white is melting. Outside the window I can hear the otherworldly murmur of a flock of sandhill cranes. The receding snow shows the mums poking out and ready to go.

A photo posted by Tim Ungs (@timungs) on

poor-mouthAs my dozen discerning regular readers know, my family’s Snopocalypse ’15 experience differed from the norm in that we’ve been hunkered down with an animal not usually housed in the living spaces of humans. We let the news trickle out via Facebook status updates and Instagram posts, and friends from our old lives in New York whispered with concern and anxiety the question: “do you really have a cow in your house?” A couple of my more literary chums mentioned Flann O’Brien’s great parodic novela An Béal Bocht, in which a wretchedly poor Irish family keeps the pig inside their humble home….

Well, it’s not like that, he says, not at all defensively, except that it is. The situation is–however and thank God–almost at an end. I’ve already written about how this calf came inside, if you need to be brought up to speed. There were many times in the first two weeks we resigned ourselves to the idea our calf was not going to make it. But, irony of ironies, it was Heather’s extraordinary efforts that finally got the calf to begin sucking milk from a bottle. Now she is on the feeding schedule of a normal bottle calf. A half gallon twice a day, the bottle sucked dry in two minutes. You can no longer count the calf’s ribs just by looking at her. She is ready to go outside, if still not quite to the point where she can go back with the herd.

During the dark days since February 16, when the first blizzard blew in, my mind has been pulled in a dozen different directions, aside from the expected noise of kids fighting, and the kids’ Kindles not working with the Wifi, and the thumping of two boys addicted to bouncing basketballs and practicing dunks on mini hoops.

In the kitchen I’ve been experimenting with pork braised in milk, a new thing (to me). A recipe in Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook matched almost exactly one from Simone Ortega’s 1080 Recipes. “Whenever I teach this dish, writes Hazan, “I am greeted by more or less polite skepticism, which usually turns to enthusiasm at first taste.” That was my experience, exactly, dear Marcella. Later I noticed a Mark Bittman variation using coconut milk and, well, I’ve got the theme for suppers until spring.

I watched basketball games, lots of them. Kentucky is exhausting sportswriters’ supplies of superlatives, and both Fighting Irish squads well positioned for the postseason, the ambitions of the men’s team of course more modest that those of the women’s.

For some reason the Breeders’ Last Splash has emerged in my mind as a masterpiece, and “Saints” has become my unofficial anthem. In the video (shown below), the band is playing in the snow and then suddenly wandering through a crowded midway at the height of summer, “sticky everywhere … hot metal in the sun … summer is ready when you are ….”  You can imagine why it appeals. Yes, I’m ready. Yes!!!!

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It’s warm and sunny today and it appears six of my seven beehives have made it through the worst of it. It’s a few weeks before they can forage in earnest, so I am not counting that as a victory just yet. But it’s close. The cowherd looks fat and robust and I have plenty of hay left.  I lost a chicken but that sometimes happens even in good weather. They are all a little worse for wear, but our house, farm, and marriage have survived the winter o’ ’15.

“Like the Latin for fingernails”: Remembering Hesburgh

By timmukyPosted on Posted in remembranceTagged , , No Comments on “Like the Latin for fingernails”: Remembering Hesburgh

Students walked out on Pence’s commencement speech today at Notre Dame. Good. I’m reposting this piece from a few years ago because readers might be interested in the other time ND students protested a commencement speaker, Ronald Reagan in 1981.

We, the class of ’81, didn’t walk out. This year’s students look to be braver than we were….

See below.

hescollage550

When it comes to the Catholic Church and the priesthood, to say that I am deeply conflicted does not begin to get at it. But reading this morning about the death, and the legacy, of Father Ted Hesburgh brought me to tears, and not for just a few seconds. I am still wiping them away.

There are two good appreciations at the Post and the Times, and I am sure hundreds more to come.

Hesburgh was outspokenly liberal and a man of ideas, who was at ease with the powerful but never a panderer to power. The Post piece ends with something of a shot at the current breed of academic CEOs:

In 2001, Father Hesburgh lamented that university presidents had become distant from public affairs.

“Once upon a time chief executives in higher education talked to the press about military policy in the same breath as the Constitutional amendment for the 18-year-old vote, but I wonder whether we’d hear them taking stands on similar topics now,” he wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Where we once had a fellowship of public intellectuals,” Father Hesburgh asked, “do we now have insulated chief executives intent on keeping the complicated machinery of American higher education running smoothly?”

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I loved the “fishing, steaks and martinis” story, also from the Post piece:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower named Father Hesburgh to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission at its inception in 1957, a position he held for 15 years, immersing him in confrontations over racial discrimination.

In one of its first actions, the commission held hearings in Southern states to investigate the suppression of the black vote. When it came time to write a report to Congress, Father Hesburgh brought the commission in 1959 to Notre Dame’s Land O’Lakes retreat in Wisconsin for a day of fishing, steaks and martinis — and votes on recommendations that later influenced civil rights legislation.

Eleven proposals won unanimous support from the six commissioners, and a 12th won approval from five. The degree of consensus shocked Eisenhower.

“I told Ike that he had not appointed just Republicans and Democrats or Northerners and Southerners, he had appointed six fishermen,” Father Hesburgh recounted in “God, Country, Notre Dame,” a 1999 memoir written with Jerry Reedy. Eisenhower replied that more federal commissions should be sent to Land O’Lakes to resolve disputes.

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What’s the difference between God and Father Hesburgh? God is everywhere. Father Hesburgh is everywhere but Notre Dame.

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Hesburgh was an almost mythic presence at ND when I was there. My memory of my four years Under the Golden Dome, from 1977 to 1981, are pretty hazy, but I’m fairly sure I only stood face to face with the great man on two occasions.

The first time was on the very last day of the 1980 spring term. A friend and I had to drop off our housing election forms for senior year. We were stoked about going off-campus and maybe a little panicked we would be forced to pay for on-campus housing if we missed the deadline, so we trudged over to the Administration Building with our forms. It was Saturday and the building was locked up tight. For some reason we banged on the basement door. Nothing. We turned to leave. Then, footsteps. And yes, Father Ted himself threw open the door.

We yammered something about our housing forms and he was all, “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll take them,” and he invited us to introduce ourselves. My friend Chris stuck out his hand and it turned out Hesburgh was on a first-name basis with Chris’ older brother and father, both alums. Chris and Father Ted shot the breeze for a few more minutes and then a lull came and it was my turn to say something.

I blurted out: “Uh, um, I’m Tim Ungs, from Minneapolis.”

He paused a beat, then gazed down at the back of his hand, and said pensively, “Ah, Ungs… like the Latin for fingernails….”

***

My second face-to-face was when Father Ted handed me my diploma at commencement.

Like maybe a couple hundred other students I had white tape on my graduation cap in tepid protest of Ronald Reagan’s being invited as the commencement speaker (also on hand were Pat O’Brien and Kurt Waldheim).

Reagan’s being chosen as speaker was, in retrospect, not at all unusual. If Hesburgh’s status as America’s preeminent Catholic gave him the sway to have every president come to campus  when he calls them, well, why not Reagan?

gippnolip

But I think people forget how polarizing Reagan was in his day, and his being guest of honor at commencement (his first public appearance since the attempted assassination) divided the campus. That polarization even made it into this history of commencement ceremonies from the Notre Dame alumni magazine.

 Vocal protests against Reagan’s presence at Notre Dame created an especially tense atmosphere. “Every liberal advocacy group, including many from the Catholic left, had been waiting for an opportunity to protest what they considered Reagan’s lack of concern for society’s marginalized members,” [Richard] Conklin [former University spokesman] recalls. More than 1,500 protesters marched outside the Joyce Center while Reagan spoke. Inside, a few students reportedly wore white arm bands and covered their mortar boards with white paper.

Reportedly? I was one of them and we were more than a few.

I remember fairly vividly one gathering at the end of April protesting the savagery of Reagan’s policies, many of which, sadly, have since become mainstream. What made the rally stand out in my memory was that a group of student counter-demonstrators came forward, shouted, and pelted the speakers with eggs. I remember one student was reading poetry in her father’s Notre Dame letter sweater when the eggs rained down. English professor Joseph Buttigieg (whose son is now mayor of South Bend) was treated especially badly as I remember. He contrasted the decorous manifesto of the Students Concerned about Commencement with the counter-protesters’ “Don’t Give the Gipp No Lipp” banner (“a poster made up of mono-syllabids”).

openletterreagan

protest-hilites

That’s a distillation of my memory of Notre Dame. A small core of passionate progressive people in a generally reactionary environment. That Hesburgh managed to make the university as open-minded as it has become is a testament largely to his energy and powerful personality. Hesburgh didn’t have to embrace civil rights, didn’t have to transfer university governance to a board of lay trustees, didn’t have to be first to admit women undergraduates, didn’t have to battle the Vatican and assert the “Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”

He didn’t have to. But he did. RIP Father Ted.

 

The book of laughter and forgetting

By timmukyPosted on Posted in american history, iran, plus ca change, politicsTagged , , , , , , , , , , No Comments on The book of laughter and forgetting

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At 7:31, I looked up and said, “It’s 7:31” at the same time Lila ran in from the kitchen, shouting, “It’s 7:31.” Heather popped her head out of the bedroom: “7:31, everybody.” It was 7:31.

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Call me shallow but I really enjoyed this. Christina’s impressions of Britney and Cher were spot-on. Jimmy Fallons’s Bowie wasn’t bad either. And the Roots are the Roots. I would totally watch a weekly series in which celeb singers mimic one another. I watch the Voice with the family most Mondays, and have to admit to enjoying the bickering among the judges more than the performances of the contestants. It brings up warm memories of watching the Match Game with my mom on a little black and white tv.
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I was writing yesterday about how the basic assumption of a U.S. official in a press conference is that there is no history. So, for example, any suggestion that the U.S. is involved, directly or indirectly, in trying to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela is outrageous on its face. The ability of reporters or the general public to search for Venezuela Coup 2002 — well, let’s pretend that’s impossible.

Another egregious example of this History Starts Now, or At Least When I Say was John Kerry yesterday baldly stating, without an iota of self-awareness, that Bibi Netanyahu can’t be trusted because of his support for the 2002 invasion of Iraq.

“The prime minister was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush,” Kerry replied. “We all know what happened with that decision.”

It was a peculiar decision on the part of TPM writer Catherine Thompson not to mention a fairly obvious bit of context:

Of course, Kerry voted for the war in Iraq in 2002 and said he was for the invasion during his presidential campaign against George W. Bush in 2004.

I’m beginning to think the war on AP History in Kansas is not an idea from the fringe. This hatred of history is simply a core part of what makes American thought American.

That “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in aerial warfare, militarism, the future, torture, war, war on terrorTagged No Comments on That “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards”

Yesterday’s pronouncement from the New York Times editorial board on “Conspiracy Claims in Venezuela”:

Listening to embattled President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela ramble for hours about an international right-wing conspiracy to oust him, it’s clear that he would use any fabricated pretext to jail opposition leaders and crack down on dissent.

The language is pretty remarkable. I find it amazing that, when it comes to officially designated enemies of the U.S., the usually measured tones of the editorial board give way to open contempt, more fitting for Hush Hush, the lurid tabloid published by the Danny DeVito character in L.A. Confidential. Or at any rate the New York Post.

Let’s just look at a few of the words the Times uses to describe Maduro’s government and recent actions.

  • government’s claims … outlandish repression of critics even more vicious
  • Delcy Rodríguez, the country’s foreign minister, weighed in with an absurd detail
  • Mr. Maduro’s fears of a coup appear to be a diversion strategy by a maniacal statesman
  • In contrast, Mr. “Ledezma, a democratically elected official [insinuating that Maduro isn’t!? what?] who has, so far, responded with remarkable stoicism“

In Counterpunch, Chris Gilbert, professor of political science at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, paints a rather different picture of Ledezma:

… regardless of how the question is resolved, the Venezuelan masses are highly satisfied with Ledezma’s arrest, as any reasonable person should be, since the mayor is responsible for huge human rights crimes in the past: most recently as a participant in the 2002 coup attempt that led to considerable bloodshed and earlier as the Federal District Governor who directed state troops which assassinated as many as 4000 civilians during the Caracazo uprising of 1989.

The Times editorial dutifully submits this incredulous statement from the State Department:

“We regret that the Venezuelan government continues to blame the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela…”

This takes disingenuousness to dizzying heights. It’s as if there is no such thing as history, as if the United States would never dream of intervening in a Latin American country, as if Operation Condor never happened… as if 9/11 never happened…. to Chile!

All states are coercive and thuggish, especially, as appears to be the case in Venezuela, when their very existence is threatened. I’m not defending what the Maduro government is doing, although it seems possible the repression is exaggerated. But I would be more impressed with the Times editorial board if once in a while it used some of those harsh pejorative words to describe the actions of U.S. allies, some of whom have even been known to misbehave from time to time. Say, an Egypt, an Israel, a Saudi Arabia, a Guatemala….

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Or, you may say, yes, we were brutal in Latin America back in the day, but … you know … ancient history. In Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card at Tomdispatch, Alfred W. McCoy offers a vivid and sweeping picture of the United States’ “do as I say, not as I do” approach to sovereignty and human rights, which is stronger today than it has ever been. And thanks to improvements in drone technology, lethal meddling in the affairs of previously sovereign nations is a major growth industry!

“The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond damaged his reputation for decades, today his ideas have achieved unimagined influence. They have, in fact, shaped the neo-conservative view of presidential power that has become broadly bipartisan since 9/11. Indeed, Schmitt has influenced American politics directly through his intellectual protégé Leo Strauss who, as an émigré professor at the University of Chicago, trained Bush administration architects of the Iraq war Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky.

All that should be impressive enough for a discredited, long dead authoritarian thinker. But Schmitt’s dictum also became a philosophical foundation for the exercise of American global power in the quarter century that followed the end of the Cold War. Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should, said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power.

Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the ever-expanding clandestine dimension of the American state. Created at the cost of more than a trillion dollars since 9/11, the purpose of this vast apparatus is to control a covert domain that is fast becoming the main arena for geopolitical contestation in the twenty-first century.

Read the whole thing. Really, it’s quite terrific.

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The title of this piece comes from the McCoy essay. I quite liked the phrase:

All of the exceptions [to its own rules] that really matter spring from America’s decision to join what former spy John Le Carré called that “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards,” and embrace espionage in a big way after World War II.

Winter and bovine burden blues

By timmukyPosted on Posted in farmingNo Comments on Winter and bovine burden blues

Was on a streak of virtuous activity there but my blogging ground to a halt when we got whacked by the weather the past couple of weeks. First, a blizzard, then bitter cold, then a slushy “wintry mix” from the nasty weather salad bar. Next, locusts, probably.

We live out in the country, and our driveway is nearly a quarter mile long. Getting in and out to the road is never a given. I have a herd of 35 cattle and I have no way to check on them with snow on the ground (and there is still quite a bit) other than trudging out there. But they seem fine, and I have an indispensable neighbor who has moved in my hay when needed, back scraped the driveway, and pulled my stuck 2-wheel drive station wagon out of snowbanks I’d driven into.

I’m not complaining too much. It COULD have been worse. Touch wood, we have not had any issues with pipes bursting. So there’s that.

During the coldest nights I thought it best to pack the wife and kids off to town, where the kids could hang out with their friends and Heather could get some quiet time. She is much more prone to stir-crazy than I. It was my job to keep firewood stacked and drying inside, and to monitor all the faucet dripping configurations.  I’m well stocked with food, beer and bourbon, and the Internet and satellite TV are operational, so this SHOULD be a good time for someone like me, but for the burden of a two-week old calf I’ve brought into the house.

Cow whispering at the Henson-Ungs.

A video posted by Heather Henson (@hensonbooks) on

The gentle big red cow with the horns–for it is from she this problem calf comes–has become a very troublesome animal. Twice in the past two years we had to trailer her in to the vet to fix (temporarily) her problematic hooves. I would have been happy just to sell her when she got lame the second time, but for the fact that she had a calf in her. My thinking was to let her have the calf, and sell the cow after it’s weaned. Finally, she calved nearly three weeks ago, but couldn’t or wouldn’t feed it.

We had just lost a calf to a similar situation. The mother had mastitis or poorly formed udders, or irritable udders, or something, but we found this calf a bit sooner, so were able to get it to the vet in time to save its life. On day one the vet fed the second calf electrolytes through an esophageal tube, and sent her home and told me to do the same, and to follow up the electrolytes with milk replacer, three times a day.

I had no experience with the tube and was terrified to use it myself. Among the things that can go wrong: 1. sticking the tube into the windpipe and killing the calf immediately and 2. killing it gradually via pneumonia. The first time I fed successfully I was pretty sure I had killed her, but she is still kicking after four days of thrice-daily tubings. On the fifth day, she started to lap up milk replacer from a bowl. She did this messily, something between splashing milk around randomly and actually ingesting it, but it became clear she is getting some down into her, and I could let up with the tube….

The problem is that she is feeding incredibly slowly. The first quart of the morning takes two hours or more for her to consume, and we’re lucky to get her to take another pint after that. She isn’t getting what she should but is strengthening, and becoming willful. Yesterday, I had the dubious notion that she needed exercise and a chance to keep contact with the herd, so I set her outside and she immediately ran to mama.

The calf went straight for the udders, and … mama continued to pull away. She was in other respects quite attentive and motherly to the calf, just failing in the crucial category of KEEPING HER CHILD ALIVE. After half an hour of re-bonding I gathered the calf up and brought her inside again but she was now determined to get back to her mother. I’m pretty sure her sleeping outside in 6-degree weather would kill her, so I’m just putting up with the incessant bawling for mama. Also, putting up with Heather’s slowly building simmer. (I had originally said we’d have the calf inside for a couple of nights. We are now on night 6)….

I don’t know where this ends. It’s by no means clear that this calf will survive. If she does, though, I don’t know when and how it will work. The ideal thing would be for her to join the herd and find a cow that lets her feed along with her own calf. If not, I’ll be having to feed the calf morning and night. Knowing now what kinds of labor saving this calf requires, I wonder if I would do it over again. But having started, it’s impossible to keep from doing everything in my power to keep the little monster alive.

Merle or Bob, Marcia or Laurie

By timmukyPosted on Posted in musicTagged , , No Comments on Merle or Bob, Marcia or Laurie

hag_brady_bunch

Apparently, Bob Dylan gave a speech the other night that was generally well received, but made headlines for a couple of digs Mr. Zimmerman directed at some of his musical peers. Dylan said some condescending things about Leiber & Stoller and Tom T. Hall and had this to say about Merle Haggard:

“[He] didn’t even think much of my songs. I know he didn’t. He didn’t say that to me, but I know way back when he didn’t. Buck Owens did, and he recorded some of my early songs,” Dylan said. “Together Again, that’s Buck Owens. And that trumps anything else out of Bakersfield. Buck Owens or Merle Haggard, if you had to have somebody’s blessing, you can figure it out.”

This is a pretty juvenile thing, if you ask me. But who doesn’t like a good manufactured controversy? Alas, Merle did not take the bait.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s I remember all the false binaries of the day. The great fault lines: Beatles or Stones, Lennon or McCartney, Ginger or Mary Anne, MARCIA BRADY or LAURIE PARTRIDGE!!!! Was this kind of thinking symptomatic of adolescence or did it have something to do with the era itself? Maybe it is something in Boomer DNA?

One can only speculate what went through Dylan’s mind when he chose to call out the only living songwriter whose body of work eclipses his (and hey, maybe that’s the reason right there).  Here’s my blinding glimpse of the obvious for everybody: You don’t have to choose one or the other.  You can have your Haggard and Dylan too! Still, it’s a little saddening to have any kind of harsh words between these two Giants of American Song.

Allow me to imagine this dream scenario: Dylan, seeing his words in print and realizing they were a bit harsh, reaches out to Haggard and they make a record together. I see an opportunity here.

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While we’re on the subject of the Merle, want to share this fascinating find from a 1972 documentary (terrible quality, alas) featuring Haggard wandering through an abandoned labor camp. What swagger the dude had back then!

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