Some Thoughts on Political Words

And their relationship to ideas (or lack of them).

1. Patriotism.  This is a word I have truly grown to hate.  It’s used as a bludgeon.  In recent memory, anyone in the U.S. who criticized George W. Bush was unpatriotic; now anyone who supports Barack Obama is unpatriotic (as is he himself, it is said.)  The Republicans criticize the Democrats, conservatives criticize liberals (note, Republicans and conservatives and Democrats and liberals are not always the same animals) for being “unpatriotic”.  Find me one example of Democrats and/or liberals who accuse Republicans/conservatives of a lack of patriotism when they disagree. 

I was pleased to find a Wiki article which provides a quote from Socrates (!) defining  patriotism.  Patriotism, he says, “does not require one to agree with everything that his country does and would actually promote analytical questioning in a quest to make the country the best it can possibly be.” My sentiments exactly. 

But the U.S. version of patriotism, for many years now, is merely nationalism.  We are the best, and can do no wrong.  We deserve to rule the world.  If you want to make specious comparisons to Hitler’s Germany, there you have it.  And now I’ve done it…proved the truth of  Godwin’s Law.

2.  National Security.  Okay, that’s two words.  But like patriotism, its meaning is open to debate.  Everyone agrees that we should take action, including military action, to protect our national security.  But what does that mean?  Should we take action only in retaliation for physical attacks against our country (e.g. Pearl Harbor, 9/ll)?  Our invasion of Vietnam was based on a remote interpretation of our “national security” being at stake; more accurately, it was based on a faulty philosophy–remember the Domino Theory?  Our invasion of Iraq was simply based on lies.  Our invasion of Afghanistan was justified by the above definition.  The question now before us is whether we have irreparably botched it (due in large part to our invasion of Iraq), and whether or not our continued presence is relevant.  My personal opinion:  as angry as it makes me for our country to have uselessly invaded Iraq, I do not believe we can say “Oops!  My bad!  We made a mistake!  See ya!”  You do not go in and blow up someone’s country, and then abandon them summarily. 

But to say that we should intervene only in retaliation is too simplistic, in my view. 

3.  Politician.  This term is now synonymous with “liar” in  the U.S.  “Compromise” is likewise a dirty word, equated with “compromising your principles”.  Apparently we expect our politicians to be models of purity and inflexibility.  But “compromise” is how we exist socially.  We do it at work.  We do it in marriage.  We do it with our friends and families.  We do it with other (imperfect) countries.  Standing firm and never giving an inch of ground may be workable in the movies, but it’s no more realistic or believable than Cinderella being picked by the prince because her foot is the only one that fits the glass slipper.

More Reading With Fakename: Ziegfeld, et al.

I’ve never been to New York City (Fakename will now pause for the collective gasp), unless you count changing planes in one of their three major airports, one of which is inexplicably in New Jersey.  I feel sort of like an ad for Pace Picante Sauce.  Remember them?  Some cowpoke types are examining their bottle (bottle?  how authentic is that?) of picante sauce, when one of them says, This picante sauce was made in NEW YORK CITY!  Oh Holy Mother of God–anywhere but there.  Real picante sauce has to be made outside of NYC.  Possibly New Jersey. 

Therefore, I’ve never seen a play on Broadway.  (Oh, quit your gasping.)  I have at least once, and possibly twice, seen a touring play.  The for-certain play was Evita, which, by the way, I thought was supremely awful.  The possible play was Zorba, which may or may not have been good.  The important thing was that Anthony Quinn was there in person and at some point threw a rose into the audience, directly to me.  I kept that rose until it reverted to sub-atomic particles. 

Therefore, I thought maybe I could learn something by reading the book Ziegfeld:  The Man Who Invented Show Business, by Ethan Mordden.  I can’t really explain why I finished it, other than a sort of obsessive-compulsive need to finish a book once I’ve started it.  I did sort of speed through it, hoping I would eventually get to the good part, which never materialized.  As a history of Broadway shows of the era, and if you’re fascinated by who did the lyrics, the set design, the costume design, the choreography, etc. , this book is for you.  Ziegfeld himself was apparently a very private man, so the author didn’t really know much about him.  I wish he had said so in the first sentence.  That way I could have turned the book back in to the library before I ever got out  the door.  I thought I was getting a biography.  Instead, I got the Encyclopedia of Broadway shows from, say, 1900 to 1940.  Actually, not even that.  I got the footnotes for the encylopedia article.  In other words:  don’t read this book.  Fakename considers that as much reading as she does, she has earned the right to be a book critic. 

Now I have gratefully returned to my fiction roots, reading a book by Jeffrey Deaver called Roadside Crosses.  Deaver is in my Top Five, sharing space with Robert B. Parker, John Sanford, James Lee Burke, and Nevada Barr (a nom de plume if I ever heard one).  I wish they would all put out a book a week.  In the scheme of things, I guess they are somewhat middlebrow.  Dostoyevsky, they are not.  But did you ever try to read Dostoyevsky for fun?  I don’t, at least, do lowbrow…like, say, Danielle Steele. 

Now take this journey with me:  on the inside flap of the book cover (I’m sure there’s a name for that) of Deaver’s book, it says:  “  The Monterey Peninsula is rocked when a killer begins to leave roadside crosses beside local highways–not in memoriam, but as announcements of his intentions to kill.  And to kill in particularly horrific and efficient ways:  using personal details about the victims that they’ve carelessly posted in blogs and on social networking websites”.

Oh shit.  I could say more, but I have to log off now.  Just forget you ever heard of me, okay?

Reading With Fakename: The Bin Ladens, Part 2

Since I last posted about this book by Steve Coll–October 16th, only 15 days and it seems like a lifetime ago–I finished it, read a novel by an Irish writer, read a sort-of biography of Florenz Ziegfeld, and am now halfway through Jeffrey Deaver’s latest novel. 

The question I posed last time is, How do you become the world’s most evil man?  Hitler still trumps Osama Bin Laden, but Osama is at least a close second.  I also stated that I don’t believe you get there by ideology alone, that there are serious psychological issues at play, and I stand by that contention. 

Apparently the Koran says that a man cannot have more than four wives at once.  But a man can divorce a woman for any reason at all (such as, I’ve got four wives, and one of you has to go because I want to have sex with someone else, which means I have to marry them.)  The man is still expected to take care of the woman if she has a child by him;  not sure what his obligations are if there are no children, or if the woman is free to remarry if there are no children.  The man is required by the Koran to give a woman thirty days’ notice before he divorces her, which is the Koran’s version of “fairness”.

So Osama’s father, Mohamed, married Osama’s mother when she was 14 years old (approximately, since as I mentioned earlier, births are not celebrated in Islam, or at least in its extreme form).  Osama was born a year later when she was 15, and Mohamed divorced her before she was 18.  She and Osama lived in a huge compound with all Mohamed’s other wives and children, but held a lowly status. 

Osama seems to have worshipped his mother.  I can picture a scenario where it was the two of them against the world, so to speak.  Isolated and out of favor.  There is a particularly spooky quote, where someone says that Osama used to sit at his mother’s feet and “caress” her. 

Many of Osama’s older half-brothers, and even some of his half-sisters, were sent away to boarding schools all over the world–the U.S., Britain, Lebanon (considered the most “liberal” of the Mideast countries).  Osama went to boarding school too, but it had to be in Saudi Arabia.  It’s there, at approximately 15, that he came under the influence of a teacher who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.  In my opinion, it’s then that his rage and resentment and feelings of neglect came together under the cover of an idea.  The ideology never comes first–the aptitude for it does.  He was ripe for the picking. 

He later said himself that from 15 to 21 is the best age from which to choose people to wage jihad. 

His ideology is not at all uncommon in the Middle East.  Blaming Jews and the U.S. for all ills is rampant.  The difference is the lengths to which Osama was willing to go.  The Koran specifically prohibits killing women and children, for example.  When he was questioned about 9/11, which did just that, he was forced to weasel.  On one hand, as the upholder of “pure” Islam as he fancies himself, he couldn’t say the Koran was wrong.  And he couldn’t say the killing of women and children was accidental.  He had to say, Well, they are killing our women and children, aren’t they?  He is not a great, nor logical, thinker. 

In the end here, what you have is a curious combination of insecurity and megalomania.

So I have revised my opinion as to what we should do about him.  Like many if not most Americans, I’ve held that we should hunt him down like a dog and kill him on the spot.  Now I think that with any luck, it will be the Pakistanis who catch him.  Or the Egyptians, or the Saudis.  Preferably the Saudis.  If we do it, he will only become a martyr, which is what he hopes for and expects. 

It’s the Arab nations who should repudiate and humiliate him.  So he needs to be captured. 

You know, I have a little dog, a Basenji.  Basenjis are African hunting dogs, and classically, they are used in packs to drive small game (e.g., rabbits) into a net, previously strung by the hunters.  That’s what the U.S. needs to be now:  the Basenji.

Death to the FDA! Or Maybe Not…

The occasion for this hysterical reaction on my part was the following headline in today’s local newspaper (an AP feed, of course) FDA to ban sale of raw oysters from Gulf of Mexico.  When did this happen?  Why was I not told? 

It turns out my hysteria, as so often happens, was premature.  What the FDA is saying is they plan to ban oysters harvested from the Gulf in the warmer months, unless they’ve been treated to kill the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus, which kills about 15 people a year. 

Okay, I still have so many problems with this issue.  It kills 15 people a year.  Usually people with compromised immune systems…who in my view should have better sense than to be eating raw oysters from the Gulf in the summer.  (Rebuttal:  as the advisor to the FDA said on NPR this afternoon, 15 deaths is too many if they can be prevented.  They can be…see my last statement.) To underscore, here is a quote from the article:  

“The FDA is promoting a ban because high-risk groups are not heeding warnings about raw oysters, and millions of other people may not know they are vulnerable.”  Well, whose problem is that? 

The problem is the treatment, which oyster people say destroys the taste and texture of the raw oyster.  The treatment, according to the article,  involves mild heat, freezing temperatures, high pressure, and low dose gamma radiation.  I’m picturing a raw oyster with nothing left but the pearl.  Well apparently they don’t do all these things at once to the oyster, they are individual alternatives. 

Now then, for the oyster people, in my opinion, oysters do not really have a “taste” except for whatever you might put on them…lemon juice, hot sauce, horseradish, etc.  Oysters are more of a sensation than a taste.  Mostly a sensation of coolness, rivaled only by the cucumber.  I object to the article calling them slimy.  They are smooth.  But if the treatment process interferes with that (which I consider a “texture” issue), that would be bad. 

But so…I don’t get to have big fat, perfectly delicately salty oysters from Appalachicola Bay year-round (except for the algae bloom periods, of course.)  I have to eat scrawny little oysters from like frigging Massachusetts? 

Is Fakename about to have her first revelation about “government interference”?.  This is truly ridiculous in my opinion.  Where was the FDA when it was about spinach?  I’m suspicious that the FDA has latched onto an industry think they can cower into submission in order to resurrect their tarnished image.  In order to have a worse reputation in the Gulf, you would have to be FEMA. 

The ban is not supposed to take place until 2011, and I’m hoping it will never happen.  I don’t actually think it will.  Oyster People, Unite!

Grocery Voyeurism Revisited

It’s been a while since I shared any grocery voyeurism.  To refresh your memory, this is a game wherein you guess what the person in front of you in the 10 Items or Fewer line plans to do with six cans of tomato sauce, a bunch of celery, and one can of Raid.

This however, is a new variety of grocery voyeurism, actually involving a conversation between the person in line behind me and his son, who appeared to be about 7 years old. 

Dad:  No you cannot have a Coke. 

Son:  (Whine.)

Dad:  Okay, you can have a Sprite. 

Son:  (is heard to be opening the door of the cooler before Dad changes his mind, but he was too late.)

Dad:  You know what, never mind.  Get a water.  There’s just too much sugar in soft drinks.

Son:  (Whine.)

Dad:  No, get a water.  Now go pick out a bag of M&M’s.   

I actually did not invent this game.  When I lived in Memphis, I knew a writer named John Ryan, who was constantly jotting down things he overheard to use in his books (the most famous of which is The Redneck Bride). 

He once told me that his favorite overheard line ever occurred in a grocery store, when the cashier complimented a woman in front of him on how cute her baby was.  “Well, thanks”, said the mother, “But do you know this baby is 8 months old and still won’t eat crowder peas?”  Now there is grocery voyeurism at its finest.

Simply Irresistable

On Facebook today, Nick (aka eehard, on wordpress) posted the video of Robert Palmers’s “Addicted to Love”.  What fun!  I had forgotten all about it.  Palmer followed that up with “Simply Irresistable” which in my opinion is even better.  One of the lines in “Simply Irresistable” is…”she’s ultimately kissable…”, except that in both videos, the women look like mannequins.  I’m thinking you might want to kiss one of them only if you were into necrophilia. 

Sadly I learned that Robert Palmer died in Paris at age 54 of a heart attack.  Ouch. 

The best line in the song  Simply Irresistable, however, is “She’s so fine, there’s no telling where the money went”.   That is too, too funny.  I personally have apparently never been fine enough. 

Fleas and the Existence of God

I’m completely aware of that circle of life thing.  How many times have we all watched the great wildebeest migration in Africa, where they eventually have to cross a river filled with crocodiles?  You’re like Go!  Swim faster!  Get away from the evil crocodiles!  Next episode:  Go crocs!  There’s a wildebeest who has become separated from the herd!  Get that one!

We all have to eat to live.  But in my opinon, certain forms of life should become extinct.  How is it that we have lost cuddly things like saber-toothed tigers and passenger pigeons, and possibly in our lifetime will lose Tasmanian Devils and pandas, and yet fleas, mosquitoes, and cockroaches are allowed to live? 

To me, this is the greatest argument against the existence of God.  If there is a god, and he is benevolent, then he should not have created fleas. 

One of the great questions that perturbs religous people is:  Why does God allow evil to exist?  Why would he allow someone like Hitler to thrive?  If God is omnipresent and omnipotent and all the other omnis, why would he not stop someone like Hitler in his tracks?  Religious people will tell you that it is A) a mystery, B) a test.

As a philosophy student in the ’70’s, I grappled with these questions.  I spent weeks trying to find the flaw in Spinoza’s logical argument for the existence of God.  I knew there was a flaw, I just couldn’t find it.  Because logically, it was correct.  If A=B, and B=C, then…I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had been smart enough to realize that the problem was A.  Then there was Pascal’s Wager.  God may or not exist, but just in case he does, you might as well choose to believe in Him.  Especially if the alternive is burning in hell for forever.  That seemed like a good idea to me except for this:

There were the philosophers who said that God has a plan.  Not one that you might grasp, but a plan.  I was like, I don’t see the plan.  So why would a god create creatures capable of understanding the plan, and not give it to them?

The anwer is:  there is no plan, and there is no God. 

Fortunately for me, scientists, as opposed to God, have created medications that kill fleas.

While We’re On the Subject…

..of interracial marriage…What?  You missed the part where we were on that subject?  Then you haven’t caught up with me yet on Facebook.  Yes, sadly, I have joined the legion of the socially networked, after resisting it for ages.  (Ages, in today’s terms, being weeks and weeks.)  I posted a link to the following article :  Man’s Halt of Interracial Marriage Sparks Outrage. 

A Justice of the Peace in Louisiana refuses to marry interracial couples, on the grounds that he is concerned about the fate of any children they may have.  He thinks they will not be accepted in either the black or the white community.  How traumatic.  One person quipped, “Perhaps he’s afraid one of the kids will grow up to be President.”  Having lived there for four years, I can truthfully say that Louisiana is always in the forefront of the rear guard.  Except for New Orleans, where I lived, which is not technically part of Louisiana, and may possibly still belong to France. 

Now let us move smoothly into the issue of gay marriage.  Okay, now that we’re past that, lets move on to the issue of interracial gay marriage.  Okay, first, let’s talk about marriage in general. 

I personally don’t grasp the desire of most people to be married, but I do realize that that is apparently a personal problem. 

The occasion for this post is that my old friends Jana and Sharon, whom I sadly have not seen in 12 years, got married two weeks ago today.  That’s because they live in Iowa, and they can.  I’ve mentioned my feelings about Iowa before.  When I moved there, I was expecting to find rubes.  Shows how ignorant I was, what pre-conceived notions I had about the Midwest.  (Kind of like theirs about people from the South.)  What I found was a very enlightened, educated, and live-and-let-live population.  If I could stand the weather, I would never have left. 

Iowa is now one of the few states which allow gay marriage.  Jana (who is white) and Sharon (who is black) decided to take that step.  They have been together now for 25 years.  Jana’s email to me announcing the marriage said that they attended a matinee of The Wiz, and then were married in the company of a few close friends and neighbors. 

Despite my misgvings about marriage in general, I could not be happier for them.  When you think about it, they were already “married” anyway.  Naturally I have to turn this into a political statement. 

Republicans say they are all about freedom of choice, and that Democrats are all about controlling your life.  In reality, Republicans are all about freedom of choice as long as your choice is one they approve of.  I increasingly hear from my conservative friends that they are more “Libertarian”.  I hear that from some “liberal” friends too.  Here’s what I hear a lot:  socially liberal, fiscally conservative.  I believe we are on the cusp of a new era in our politics.  I think the election of Barack Obama as President was the first warning shot over the bow of the Republican Party, and they still don’t get it.  My prediction is that the Republican Party will go the way of the Whigs, and the Libertarian Party will rise to prominence. 

If that happens, I could not be happier.  I believe we need viable opposition and intelligent debate to sustain our messy and imperfect but best-there-is democracy.  The Republicans can’t do that any more.

Reading with Fakename: The Bin Ladens

I’m going through one of my non-fiction phases here.  I did have to give up on Christopher Hitchens for a while, but it won’t be forever.  In search of lighter reading I found the library was bleak in terms of new fiction that sounded interesting or that I hadn’t already read.  So I drifted over to new non-fiction and found The Bin Ladens:  An Arabian Family in the American Century.  It’s by Steve Coll, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his previous book Ghost Wars:  The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.  His editor should be shot for allowing a subtitle of that length, Pulitzer notwithstanding.  For those of you who forget (like me) when the Soviet invasion began, it was 1979.  Two other momentous things happened that same year:  the Iranian revolution, and a siege of the Great Mosque at Mecca by Islamists opposed to the Saudi Arabian royal family.  (They were crushed, with much help from the Bin Ladens.)

For a person who has hated the study of history since birth, I can certainly get into it with a vengeance on occasion.  I think my problem in the past was twofold:  history is poorly taught, I think, and I often didn’t see the relevance of what I was supposed to be learning.  But I wanted to read this book for one reason, which is to answer the question, “How do you become the most evil man on the planet?”  I believe the answer is a psychological one rather than a political one, and after all, politics are merely an extension of psychology. 

That having been said, this book is a riveting look inside the Bin Laden family, life in Saudi Arabia and its royal family, and Middle East politics and Islam in general.  And how all of the above have intersected with the U.S.  I’ve learned an incredible amount, and I am mesmerized in the process. 

Let me just give you a brief snapshot:  Osama Bin Laden was one of 54 children by his father.  I lost count of the number of wives.  By his own estimation, he was probably born in January of 1958.  Births and birthdays are not recorded in Saudi Arabia nor celebrated in any way.  Deaths are followed by three days of mourning–that’s after they take the body of the deceased out to the desert and bury it in an unmarked grave.  The celebration of birthdays is considered a Christian habit, and therefore is haram (forbidden), like eating pork.  I’m astonished more than ever by the level of ignorance in Saudi Arabia.  In the absence of education–tradition, superstition, and conspiracy theories rule.  And the combination of ignorance and great wealth goes a long way toward explaining how you get an Osama Bin Laden. 

Someone has said that you can tell a lot about a country or a society by how it treats women, and nowhere is that more evident than in Saudi Arabia.  I’m not finished with the book–almost–but I’ll have more to say later. 

To close though, Osama’s father died in the crash of a small plane piloted by an employee of his, an American pilot who died too.  Osama was around 9 years old.  Osama’s oldest half-brother, Salem, who was only 21 at the time, became the head of the family.  He had to return to Saudi Arabia from England, where he was in college.  Salem became an international playboy and jet-setter, literally.  He owned an entire fleet of private planes ranging from ultralights to jets, which he piloted himself.    Twenty years or so after the death of their father, Salem piloted an ultralight directly into some power lines.  It was ruled an accident, but there is some suspicion that he did it deliberately.  It happened just outside Houston–in other words, in America.  Osama Bin Laden was long acquainted with planes and death, and with there being an American connection to it, at least in his head.  He wanted to get us back.

Reading With Fakename: Christopher Hitchens

On Monday of last week I arrived in my office after about a three hour absence of running work errands and having lunch, to find the book of essays that “Brian” had promised me the week before.  He’d said that since I so enjoyed the book of essays by E. B. White he loaned/gave me, he thought I might like this one.  I was sorry I’d missed Brian, I doubt I’ll ever see him again.  I would have liked to know if he came back to Tallahassee for business or if he made a special trip to bring me the book–which he said he would do if necessary.  I suspect it was the latter.  His work was finished in Tallahassee the Wednesday before.  In any case, I’ll miss him, at least his book loaning.  A mutual acquaintance of ours, David, to whom he also loaned and gave books refers to “Brian” as the Johnny Appleseed of literature. 

Hitchens is a writer who is no doubt more widely known outside literary and intellectual circles for his 2007 book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  But the book I have is a collection published in 2004, entitled Love, Poverty, and War:  Journeys and Essays.  In the first line of his introduction, he says there is an old saying that a man is not complete until he has tasted all three. 

In the first section (“Love”), I have yet to detect anything related to love.  There are 11 essays in this section and I’m on the 9th one.  It has to do with Marcel Proust.  The other eight I’ve read so far concern (in order), Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling, Leon Trotsky, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, and Lord Byron.

Let me just say with a hint of understatement that I am finding this slow going.  The difference between reading E.B. White and Christopher Hitchens, at least in the pleasure department, is like the difference between reading Alice In Wonderland and Beowulf.  This is just too much damn work. 

So I had to take a break.  I went to the library and picked up, among other things, a first novel called The Suicide Collectors, an allegedly futuristic novel.  Most people on Earth are afflicted with a condition or disease known as The Despair, which causes them to kill themselves, sometimes en masse.  By the time I finished the book, I knew exactly how they felt.  This is without a doubt the worst book I have ever read in my life. 

As I’ve said previously, I’m a fan of first novels.  It’s often a writer’s best and freshest work.  But there is always that exception.  I am at a loss for negative words.  It’s unoriginal, it’s poorly written, and the ending is so lame it’s bedridden.  If the book didn’t belong to the library, I would set fire to it and bury its ashes in the back yard.  So at the end, I found myself hanging onto Christopher Hitchens’ pants leg, begging him to take me back. 

Thanks to Fakesister for reminding me today how much it sucked to read Beowulf.