Fight

Now Fight!

[Re-posted from earlier today]

The seismic events of the last few days ends, in some respects, the phony war of the first year of Obama's presidency. As is the case in truly fracturing democracies, the opposition simply does not and cannot accept the fact that it is out of power. The incoherence of the opposition to Obama - that he is both Jimmy Carter and Adolf Hitler, as Stephen Colbert pointed out last night - reveals the irrationality of the hate. It began immediately on the FNC/RNC right. And the ferocity of the campaign against Obama, the sheer dickishness of the GOP and its acolytes, the total oppositionism to everything he has done and indeed anything he might do... suggests that any hope for some kind of cooperation from this rump is impossible.

But the truth is that these forces have also been so passionate, so extreme, and so energized that in a country reeling from a recession, the narrative - a false, paranoid, nutty narrative - has taken root in the minds of some independents. Obama, under-estimating the extremism of his opponents, has focused on actually addressing the problems we face. And the rest of us, crucially, have sat back and watched and complained and carped when we didn't get everything we want. We can keep on carping if we want to. But it seems to me that continuing that - as HuffPo et al. appear to be doing - is objectively siding with the forces of profound reaction right now.

Don't get me wrong. Criticism is still vital. I'm not going to give up on advocating marriage equality or a carbon tax, rather than cap and trade, or for an independent investigation of Bush era war crimes. I think pushing Obama to a more populist position on banks is well and good. But given the alternative, I am going to step up my support of this president in the face of what he is confronting, even when he is not exactly doing everything I want. In my view, you should too.

Look at what we are facing right now: a take-no-prisoners right, empowered by a massive new wave of corporate money unleashed by the Supreme Court, able to wield a 41 seat minority to oppose anything Obama wants, setting up a cycle of failure for a president whom they can then pillory at the polls, and unrepentant about near-dictatorial powers for the presidency, and the routinization of torture in the American government. These forces cannot be appeased. They simply have to be confronted.

I do not believe in some massive turn left or faux-populism that Obama cannot characterologically embody. I do not think ramming the healthcare reform bill through before Brown is seated is good politics. I still believe that Obama should embrace a major assault on long-term debt and make that a center-piece of his SOTU next week.

But I have come around to thinking that the one huge mistake right now would be to surrender the Senate health reform bill.

The dust should indeed settle. But it is absurd that one special election should upend a clear campaign promise, a year of work, and a necessary start on a critical reform without which we hurtle toward bankruptcy even more quickly.

More to the point, politics is also about morale and will as well as reason and moderation. I believe Obama has been both reasoned and moderate and civil in navigating between the Democratic Congress and the embittered, mutinous GOP. I don't think his tone should change. But I do think that any surrender on health now would be a betrayal of his entire campaign. I don't think the Senate bill is perfect; but it's far far better than nothing. And not passing it means not passing anything and surrendering to forces that are as proto-fascist as any we have seen in recent times.

This is about more than health reform and we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote. It is an attempt to destroy a majority's morale, to break a president's foreign policy autonomy, to prevent engagement in the Middle East peace process, to stop action on climate change, to restore torture, to increase tensions with the Muslim world, to launch a war on Iran. We cannot delude ourselves that if Obama fails, this is not the alternative. It is.

And we have to re-engage as powerfully as we did in the campaign to fight back against these now emboldened forces of reaction. I think this is true not just for the sake of the country but also for the sake of the GOP. The nihilist obstructionism and rhetoric they have embraced makes constitutional democracy close to impossible. Their total lack of any workable alternatives to dire problems is a form of degeneracy we have to avoid empowering.

So fight, Mr President. And to the House Democrats who won't go along with the only way to salvage health reform: this is the only sure-fire way you will lose in November. If you pass this bill, you may also go down in this climate. But you will have done something you can be proud of. Politics cannot always be about narrow self-interest. If it always is, nothing important can get done.

Do your duty. And grow some. Fight back. Explain why you're right. Tell the liberals they can always come back later to reform the bill. Just get this passed.

(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty.)

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A Start Point

Suicides Or Homicides In Gitmo?

Those three simultaneous suicides at Gitmo in 2006? Maybe not-so-suicides. A remarkable new set of witnesses came forward in the torture story today - in a must-read report by Scott Horton published by Harper's Magazine. Dish summary here, here and here.

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Weekly Review
 
An earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter scale hit
Haiti, with an epicenter about 10 miles from
Port-au-Prince. Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive
said that 70,000 bodies had been found so far, and
Lt. Gen. P. K. Keen, a top commander of the U.S. military
effort to bring aid and maintain order on the island, said
that estimates of 150,000 to 200,000 dead were "a start
point"; those estimates would make the toll four to five
times that of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that inspired
Voltaire's Candide. The body of Monsignor Joseph Serge
Miot, archbishop of Haiti, was discovered in the ruins of
the archdiocesan offices. Pat Robertson blamed the
earthquake on a pact that Haitians allegedly made with
Satan during their 1791 revolt against "you know, Napoleon
the Third and whatever"; David Brooks cited poverty as the
deeper problem, linking it to voodoo. Miami's Royal
Caribbean cruise line, which had been "optimistic" about
2010 profits, continued service to its beach resort at
Labadee, on the island's unaffected north shore. "We
welcome the continuation of the positive economic benefits
that the cruise ship calls to Labadee contribute to our
country," said Haiti's special envoy to the United
Nations, Leslie Voltaire.
 
Congress's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission began
hearing testimony from leaders of surviving American
banks. "The irony here is that it's as if there was an
earthquake," said commission chair Phil Angelides, "and
the only buildings standing today are the buildings that
were at the epicenter of the earthquake." Angelides
compared the hearings with the Pecora hearings of the
1930s, at which J. P. Morgan, Jr., appeared with a female
midget in his lap. "Not to be funny about it," JPMorgan
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the FCIC, "but my daughter
asked me... 'What's the financial crisis,' and I said,
'Well, it's something that happens every five to seven
years.'" The deputy finance minister of Yemen announced
plans to open a stock market; it was unclear how the
failing state would enforce investment laws. "Before you
build a state," observed one Yemeni analyst, "you cannot
organize a regulator." Yemeni officials claimed to have
killed six suspected Al Qaeda militants in airstrikes near
the Saudi Arabian border; Al Qaeda said that the victims
were "brothers" rather than "holy warriors" and were only
injured in the attack. A motorcycle bomb killed Iranian
physicist Masoud Ali Mohammadi in Tehran; an opposition
group blamed Hezbollah, but Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad described the method used as "Zionist." Scott
Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, was charged
with masturbating in front of a webcam for a police
officer posing as a 15-year-old girl.
 
One-hundred-four-year-old former Coney Island strongman
Joseph Rollino, who reportedly bent a quarter with his
fingers on his last birthday, was hit by a minivan with a
defective horn in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and died. An
airplane flying a banner to celebrate the one-year
anniversary of US Airways Flight 1549's successful
emergency landing on the Hudson River made an emergency
landing on Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill. A sheep
in Turkey gave birth to a lamb with a human face, and the
remains of five Native Americans from Tierra del Fuego,
Chile, kidnapped in 1881 by a German animal trader and
exhibited in zoos as "Savages from the Land of Fire," were
returned to Chile. Austrian scientists stopped burying
live pigs in snow and monitoring their deaths. French New
Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer died, and scientists found that
watching four hours of television a day raises the risk of
fatal heart disease by 80 percent. Art Clokey, the creator
of Gumby, died. "Gumby is a symbol of the spark of
divinity in each of us," wrote Clokey, a seminary dropout
who studied with Serbian avant-garde filmmaker Slavko
Vorkapic. "Eddie Murphy instinctively picked up on this
when he asserted, 'I'm Gumby, dammit.'"
 
-- Sam Stark
 
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Guantanamo - Camp "No"

“The truth is what matters,” he said. “They practiced every form of torture on my son and on many others as well. What was the result? What facts did they find? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing.”

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

By Scott Horton

The Sound of One Hand Clapping ?

From the Daily Dish

Another Kennedy Tragedy? Ctd

A reader writes:

Funny to read your take on the MA scare because three minutes ago I had the opposite thought, which was: will someone someday (okay, maybe me in a few hours..) step back and conclude that the Democrats performed brilliantly this past year?

For all the bites taken out of HCR legislation by myriad constituencies, it remains a remarkably well-crafted bill -- and so many of the fights over things that could have devolved into gross interest group giveaways have played out in public (like the excise tax) and been negotiated sanely, with many features of what was originally the Baucus bill improving through negotiation (though it's not over). Instead of 'moralizing' the difficulties -- they are failures of Democratic strategy and character -- look at the structural impediments that those with a decent and public-minded take on the core architecture of the bill have faced down.

First among them is no help from the Republicans. The stonewalling of 40 Senate Republicans on this bill is nothing short of disgusting. As Paul Starr has pointed out, the bill represents an essentially Republican approach to HCR - its chief tenets were proposed by Republicans in the Eisenhower, Nixon and even Gingrich-Dole eras. As Ezra Klein has pointed out repeatedly and in multiple ways, Republicans could have got major concessions, e.g., tort reform, if they'd negotiated in good faith.

Working down from Republican intransigence: Democrats won their majorities in large part by coopting what passes for the center in this government- and tax-phobic electorate. Blue Dog Dems are fulfilling the natural role of Republicans. But the Democratic party is starting the process down forty votes. The same dynamic held for the stimulus package. On climate control, there is no way to reasonably expect action from Democrats without some cooperation from Republicans. When one party is completely dysfunctional, that distorts the functioning of the competent party. There is no center because the center is the sound of one hand clapping.

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Not Atheism Keeping People At Home

When the Truth Is Found to Be Lies

"The great Institutions of American higher ed are not designed to produce intelligence, after all, nor even to reward it. They are designed to produce and perpetuate an Establishment. Intelligence is irrascible, iconoclastic, prickly, argumentative, and reactionary. It resembles a gaggle of Frenchmen at a dinner party, not a Cabinet meeting. It rankles; it doesn't conciliate. It certainly doesn't become the President of the United States. Good Lord, here is Bill Clinton, Rhodes scholar, surely the most . . . supple-minded of recent presidents, calling Tom Friedman "our most gifted journalist at actually looking at what is happening in the world and figuring out its relevance to tomorrow" and praising Malcolm Fucking Gladwell as one of our most "penetrating" thinkers. Which is to say, a smart guy by the lights of the Times book review, but not exactly a mind for the ages, eh?"

**

Is the Fermented Tea Kombucha Really the Healing Wonder Drink It's Cracked Up to Be?

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet.

**
Just Like Heaven

Raised in the liberal Protestant youth-group tradition I understood hell as absence from God and heaven as a kind of communion. After death, I believed, you just would hang there in space, connected to everything else, wired into a reticulation of phosphorescent splines. No wings, no ghosts, nothing to resurrect.

*
My mother lives in the panhandle of Maryland, near West Virginia. I visited her not long ago and we went to her small hilltop Methodist church. The service was halfway between evangelical (PowerPoint) and mainstream (hands clasped, not raised, in prayer). The minister spoke against internet pornography and warned of the unchecked rise of godlessness. Darwin was not in fashion there. The pews were half-full. When they passed the plate I put in $5. It’s not atheism keeping people at home.

*
In their graceless state the godless are supposed to be allergic to places of terror and emptiness. Foxholes, Ground Zero, outer space—all locations, I’ve been told, where you won’t find atheists. “Clay is fashioned into vessels,” reads the 11th chapter of the Tao Te Ching (written 2,500 years after Noah’s flood carved out the Grand Canyon), “but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends.”
*
“Therefore,” concludes the 11th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, “what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has not that for (actual) usefulness.” Such as the space between letters, words, and paragraphs.

--Paul Ford

Is America Going To Hell ?

arsvitaest:

The renowned ballroom dancing team Antonio and Renée de Marco, 1935.
Photo by Edward Steichen
(via torontoist)

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Weekly Review

President Barack Obama addressed the nation with the
results of a security review he ordered after the failed
Christmas Day underwear bombing. "We are at war against Al
Qaeda," he said, noting also that when it comes to
security matters the buck stops with him. Rudy Giuliani,
who was mayor of New York during the September 11 attacks,
said that Obama's response to terrorism was
inadequate. "We had no domestic attacks under Bush," said
Giuliani. The White House sought to reassure Americans
that it had no intention of invading Yemen or Somalia, and
also that the State of the Union address would not
conflict with the season premiere of "Lost." "I don't
foresee a scenario in which the millions of people that
hope to finally get some conclusion in 'Lost' are
preempted by the president," said Press Secretary Robert
Gibbs. Senator Harry Reid apologized for saying, during
the 2008 presidential campaign, that Obama was a viable
candidate because he was "light-skinned" and had "no Negro
dialect, unless he wanted to have one." G.O.P. Chairman
Michael Steele called on Reid to step down as Senate
majority leader over his "anachronistic language"; Steele
also called the current Republican platform "one of the
best political documents that's been written in the last
25 years," adding, "honest Injun on that." An effigy of
Obama was hanged over a sign that celebrates Jimmy Carter
in Carter's hometown of Plains, Georgia.

Seven coalition soldiers and one embedded British
journalist were killed in attacks in Afghanistan. A
military spokesman said that an increasing number of such
deaths were likely in the future. "We are making more
contact with insurgents in places where they had sanctuary
before," he said, "and there will be more of that kind of
activity." North Korea announced that it would not give up
nuclear weapons until the United States signed a peace
treaty bringing a formal end to the Korean War after 60
years, and Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only confirmed survivor
of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks, died at
the age of 93. Muslims in Malaysia firebombed at least
half a dozen churches in the wake of a court ruling that
allows the nation's Christians to refer to God as "Allah,"
and Brit Hume encouraged Tiger Woods to convert to
Christianity. A Massachusetts man was convicted of animal
cruelty for raping his roommate's pet rabbit.

A parliamentary panel in Iran blamed Tehran's prosecutor,
Saeed Mortazavi, for the beating deaths of three
protesters in a detention center last summer, but called
charges that protesters were raped by guards "illusions of
a mother." The website of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad was hacked. "Dear God, In 2009 you took my
favorite singer--Michael Jackson; my favorite
actress--Farrah Fawcett; my favorite actor--Patrick
Swayze," read a message on the site. "Please, please,
don't forget my favorite politician--Ahmadinejad; and my
favorite dictator--Khamenei in the year 2010." The Supreme
Court ruled that a federal judge in California could not
broadcast over YouTube a trial challenging the
constitutionality of Prop 8, the California ballot
initiative that banned gay marriage. Democratic Senators
Christopher Dodd and Byron Dorgan and Governor Bill Ritter
announced that they would not seek re-election in 2010. It
was revealed that Iris Robinson, the 60-year-old wife of
Northern Ireland's First Minister, Peter Robinson, had a
months-long affair with a 19-year-old man, acquired
$80,000 in loans for him, and called him "the other son I
would have loved to have been a mother to." British
researchers said that the G-spot does not exist.

-- Christopher R. Beha
 
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**
JUST LIKE HEAVEN
By Paul Ford

**

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

by James Fallows

How America Can Rise Again

*

What We Choose To See and Know

The Full Gitmo List

If you need a factual account of who was seized and imprisoned at Gitmo, Andy Worthington has compiled the definitive one. It's particularly apposite when you hear the current debate in which Cheneyites still use as a premise the notion that everyone in Gitmo was and is "the worst of the worst." Since the Bush administration released hundreds even they realized were innocent of anything, they had already conceded this, but won't, of course, publicly admit it (that would require admitting error which Cheney and Bush are incapable of doing). But this staggering fact is worth reiterating again and again and again as the disgraceful legacy of Cheney and Bush gets burnished by the pro-torture right:

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

If you want another highly credible source for the same conclusion, read National Journal's exhaustive study, summarized by Stu Taylor here. Of 132 cases examined by NJ's Corine Hegland, more than half were not even accused of fighting the US at all.These people were those whom National Review's Cliff May wanted assassinated en masse by a missile.

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**
Why Are We So Blind to the True Horrors of War?

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on January 5, 2010, Printed on January 5, 2010

This article first appeared on TruthDig.

War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human rights is a farce.

In Peter van Agtmael’s "2nd Tour Hope I don’t Die" and Lori Grinker’s "Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict," two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery.

"Over ninety percent of this soldier’s body was burned when a roadside bomb hit his vehicle, igniting the fuel tank and burning two other soldiers to death," reads the caption in Agtmael’s book next to a photograph of the bloodied body of a soldier in an operating room. "His camouflage uniform dangled over the bed, ripped open by the medics who had treated him on the helicopter. Clumps of his skin had peeled away, and what was left of it was translucent. He was in and out of consciousness, his eyes stabbing open for a few seconds. As he was lifted from the stretcher to the ER bed, he screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ then ‘Put me to sleep, please put me to sleep.’ There was another photographer in the ER, and he leaned his camera over the heads of the medical staff to get an overhead shot. The soldier yelled, ‘Get that fucking camera out of my face.’ Those were his last words. I visited his grave one winter afternoon six months later,” Agtmael writes, “and the scene of his death is never far from my thoughts."

"There were three of us inside, and the jeep caught fire," Israeli soldier Yossi Arditi, quoted in Grinker’s book, says of the moment when a Molotov cocktail exploded in his vehicle. “The fuel tank was full and it was about to explode, my skin was hanging from my arms and face -- but I didn’t lose my head. I knew nobody could get inside to help me, that my only way out was through the fire to the doors. I wanted to take my gun, but I couldn’t touch it because my hands were burning." [To see long excerpts from “Afterwar” and to read an introduction written by Chris Hedges, click here.]

Arditi spent six months in the hospital. He had surgery every two or three months, about 20 operations, over the next three years.

"People who see me, see what war really does," he says.

Filmic and most photographic images of war are shorn of the heart-pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise and exhaustion of the battlefield. Such images turn confusion and chaos, the chief element of combat, into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn. Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy cases of beer and watch movies like "Platoon," movies meant to denounce war, and as they do so revel in the despicable power of the weapons shown. The reality of violence is different. Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief and destruction.

Chronicles of war, such as these two books, that eschew images and scenes of combat begin to capture war’s reality. War’s effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan a week ago and listen to the wails of their parents we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war’s perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war’s consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining. And the press is as guilty as Hollywood. During the start of the Iraq war, television reports gave us the visceral thrill of force and hid from us the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron fragmentation bombs and artillery rounds. We tasted a bit of war’s exhilaration, but were protected from seeing what war actually does.

The wounded, the crippled and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted off stage. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myth of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless. And those whom fate has decreed must face war’s effects often turn and flee.

Saul Alfaro, who lost his legs in the war in El Salvador, speaks in Grinker’s book about the first and final visit from his girlfriend as he lay in an army hospital bed.

"She had been my girlfriend in the military and we had planned to be married," he says. "But when she saw me in the hospital -- I don’t know exactly what happened, but later they told me when she saw me she began to cry. Afterwards, she ran away and never came back."

The public manifestations of gratitude are reserved for veterans who dutifully read from the script handed to them by the state. The veterans trotted out for viewing are those who are compliant and palatable, those we can stand to look at without horror, those who are willing to go along with the lie that war is about patriotism and is the highest good. “Thank you for your service,” we are supposed to say. They are used to perpetuate the myth. We are used to honor it.

Gary Zuspann, who lives in a special enclosed environment in his parent’s home in Waco, Texas, suffering from Gulf War syndrome, speaks in Grinker’s book of feeling like "a prisoner of war" even after the war had ended.

"Basically they put me on the curb and said, okay, fend for yourself," he says in the book. "I was living in a fantasy world where I thought our government cared about us and they take care of their own. I believed it was in my contract, that if you’re maimed or wounded during your service in war, you should be taken care of. Now I’m angry."

I went back to Sarajevo after covering the 1990s war for The New York Times and found hundreds of cripples trapped in rooms in apartment blocks with no elevators and no wheelchairs. Most were young men, many without limbs, being cared for by their elderly parents, the glorious war heroes left to rot.

Despair and suicide grip survivors. More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than were killed during it. The inhuman qualities drilled into soldiers and Marines in wartime defeat them in peacetime. This is what Homer taught us in "The Iliad," the great book on war, and "The Odyssey," the great book on the long journey to recovery by professional killers. Many never readjust. They cannot connect again with wives, children, parents or friends, retreating into personal hells of self-destructive anguish and rage.

"They program you to have no emotion -- like if somebody sitting next to you gets killed you just have to carry on doing your job and shut up," Steve Annabell, a British veteran of the Falklands War, says to Grinker. “When you leave the service, when you come back from a situation like that, there’s no button they can press to switch your emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie. They don’t deprogram you. If you become a problem they just sweep you under the carpet.”

"To get you to join up they do all these advertisements -- they show people skiing down mountains and doing great things -- but they don’t show you getting shot at and people with their legs blown off or burning to death," he says. "They don’t show you what really happens. It’s just bullshit. And they never prepare you for it. They can give you all the training in the world, but it’s never the same as the real thing."

Those with whom veterans have most in common when the war is over are often those they fought.

"Nobody comes back from war the same," says Horacio Javier Benitez, who fought the British in the Falklands and is quoted in Grinker’s book. "The person, Horacio, who was sent to war, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about normal life; too much seems inconsequential. You contend with craziness and depression."

"Many who served in the Malvinas," he says, using the Argentine name of the islands, "committed suicide, many of my friends."

"I miss my family," reads a wall graffito captured in one of Agtmael’s photographs. "Please God forgive the lives I took and let my family be happy if I don’t go home again."

Next to the plea someone had drawn an arrow toward the words and written in thick, black marker "Fag!!!"

Look beyond the nationalist cant used to justify war. Look beyond the seduction of the weapons and the pornography of violence. Look beyond Barack Obama’s ridiculous rhetoric about finishing the job or fighting terror. Focus on the evil of war. War begins by calling for the annihilation of the others but ends ultimately in self-annihilation. It corrupts souls and mutilates bodies. It destroys homes and villages and murders children on their way to school. It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It empowers human deformities -- warlords, Shiite death squads, Sunni insurgents, the Taliban, al-Qaida and our own killers—who can speak only in the despicable language of force. War is a scourge. It is a plague. It is industrial murder. And before you support war, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women and children who know it.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

© 2010 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144929/

We WIN ??

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Weekly Review

Senate Democrats succeeded in producing an "historic"
health-care reform bill that will force millions of people
to buy insurance and will tax existing benefits if they
are too generous, but will not include a public option or
force the pharmaceutical industry to lower its
prices. Liberal Democrats were upset with Senator Joe
Lieberman for playing bad cop in the Senate negotiation
process, thus ensuring that both the public option and the
Medicare "buy-in" options were scuttled. An amendment that
would have allowed Americans to buy their medication
abroad failed in the Senate, in large part because of
resistance from the White House, and Republican senators
tried to slow debate on health care by demanding a
700-page amendment be read out loud, thus delaying the
passing of a bill that provides funding for
U.S. troops. Neither President Obama nor the Senate
leadership seemed particularly upset or surprised by the
final bill, which Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader,
was planning to pass by Christmas Eve. Health insurer
stocks closed on a 52-year high. "We WIN," emailed one
insurance industry insider. "Administered by private
insurance companies. No government funding. No government
insurance competitor." Scientists discovered that a
species of bee mummifies its enemies alive, wrapping
predators in resin, wax, and mud until they can no longer
move, then lets them starve. Sean Diddy Combs said that he
wished President Obama could be his father. "I'd want to
be Sean Combs Obama," he said. "I hope he reads this
interview and adopts me." A new species of warbler was
discovered.

The UN climate summit in Copenhagen, described by one
participant as "the most chaotic show on Earth," concluded
and was almost immediately decried as a failure. Nobel
Peace laureate Barack Obama ordered the bombing of
suspected Al Qaeda camps in Yemen, killing 49 civilians,
including 23 children. The United States was planning to
purchase an empty super-maximum security prison in
Illinois to house the Guantanamo detainees, and a group of
Chinese martial-arts monkeys landed kung fu kicks, several
punches, and a strike with a stick on the man who makes
them perform at the mall. A day after German officials
reached an agreement to pay $90 million to maintain
Auschwitz, thieves stole the iron "arbeit macht frei" sign
that hung over its gate, and several dozen hipsters
attempted to stage a naked bike ride through a Brooklyn
Hasidic neighborhood to protest the removal of a bike
lane; after a snow storm forced them to wear clothes some
of the hipsters pinned fake breasts to their clothes. A
Canadian professor analyzed 23 episodes of "Thomas the
Tank Engine" and found the show sexist. Croatian parents
were complaining that the large-breasted fox in "Hedgehog
House," a children's puppet show, is "too sexy," and that
her dreams about a hedgehog's "sharp spines" had sexual
connotations. Fifty sewing needles were found inside a
two-year-old Brazilian. "We think it could have only been
by penetration," said Dr. Luiz Cesar Soltoski, "because we
found needles in the lung, the left leg and in different
parts of the thorax."

Katie Spotz, a 22-year-old American, announced that she
would soon attempt a solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean
in a rowboat. Walt Disney's nephew Roy died, as did Oral
Roberts and reformist Iranian cleric Grand Ayatollah
Hoseyn Ali Montazeri. Chinese doctors were preparing to
remove a 55-pound tumor from the back of Sun Fengqin,
known as "Tortoise Woman," and staff at a British
aquarium, worried about the flatulence of George the
turtle after feeding him Brussels sprouts, lowered the
water level in his tank so that escaping gas wouldn't
trigger overflow sensors. A British law firm was selling
divorce vouchers--good for one hour of legal advice--as a
gift for the holidays; Italians were angry over a nativity
displayed in a Verona courthouse that features a black
Jesus; and Wisconsin police arrested a drunken Santa Claus
after he interrupted two sisters playing in their front
yard to say that he was looking for his reindeer. "I knew
it wasn't the real Santa," said 9-year-old Katie, "because
Santa doesn't drink alcohol." A Frenchman spent nearly
$37,000 on a bottle of two-hundred-year-old Cognac, and
the Stooges were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame. "Am I still cool," asked Iggy Pop at the induction
ceremony, "or is that over now?"

-- Claire Gutierrez
 
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