Years after 9/11, Bush/Cheney responds to the question, “what was the biggest mistake you ever made?”
But Barack “the buck, ultimately, stops here” has to hear crap from Cheney every day about the penis bomber? Isn’t there some island where Cheeney and Rash can live happily ever after in wedded bliss? They could share endearing heart disease stories.
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
One of these is really a "weapon of mass destruction."
There has been a grotesque dumbing down, recently, of the definition of “weapon of mass destruction.” Once reserved for chemical, nuclear and biological weapons capable of killing millions, it has been revised, in the years starting with the passing of the USA PATRIOT ACT in late 2001, to include just about any and all weapons used against an American citizen. To wit:
TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 113B > § 2332a
(2) the term “weapon of mass destruction” means—
(A) any destructive device as defined in section 921 of this title;
(B) any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors;
(C) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as those terms are defined in section 178 of this title); or
(D) any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life; …
(http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002332—a000-.html)
TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 44 > § 921
(4) The term “destructive device” means—
(A) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas—
(i) bomb,
(ii) grenade,
(iii) rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces,
(iv) missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce,
(v) mine, or
(vi) device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses;
(B) any type of weapon (other than a shotgun or a shotgun shell which the Attorney General finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes) by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter; and
(C) any combination of parts either designed or intended for use in converting any device into any destructive device described in subparagraph (A) or (B) and from which a destructive device may be readily assembled.
(http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00000921—-000-.html)
The “destructive device” language is the product of legislation since 2001.
Whatever else one might think of them — and personally, I think they should rot in jail for the rest of their lives — the penis bomber and the Ft. Hood shooter have both been charged with the use of “weapons of mass destruction.” This is ridiculous, and has the potential to leave us naked, legally, if and when, g*d forbid, someone actually uses, or tries to use, a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon against the United States and its citizens. Let alone, the fact that the “destructive devices” described in Section 921 are commonly used by U.S. military and police forces, and it would be quite easy to find the legal tables turned on us. Note, for instance, that Section 921(a)(iv) simply descibes a common type of explosive bullet.
This continued insistence on rhetoric over common sense — especially as it continues to be codified in our laws — has more potential to seriously threaten our society than all the Al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia.
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
William Butler Yeats, by John Singer Sargent
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
–The Second Coming (1919/1920), William Butler You-Know-Who
Recent days have heard a raft of criticism of Barack Obama for not responding with more passion to the threat posed by the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. This is a welcome sign, frankly. Compared to the supposedly heroic and “passionate” George W. Bush, Obama’s measured response is entirely appropriate to an incident that caused no casualties, and which doesn’t change a single fact about the scope or scale of the terrorist threat, or of the competencies (or lack thereof) of those who wish us harm. The simple fact of the matter is that Islamic extremist terrorism, as awful and bothersome as it is, poses no real day-to-day threat to the average American, and only in the most long-term and improbable circumstances — China or Russia becoming full-bodied allies of Al Qaeda, thus changing the global military equation — will they ever pose such a threat. Al Qaeda blew its wad on September 11th, and most everything that follows will be a mop-up operation. The existence of the Al Qaeda threat has not tangibly changed anything about the daily lives of Americans, except maybe to add a bit of humiliation, at the hands of our own government mind you, at the airport check-in counter, the blow to our mutual self-esteem inherent in our willingness to expose our children to military personnel and unsheathed M-16s on our streets and at the regional railroad station.
"and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"
For all the demagogic rhetoric of the Bush administration — for all the “bring it on’s” and “crusades” and “dead or alive’s” — Osama Bin Laden and his entourage are still at large; something that can’t be said of last week’s penis bomber. And buried by all the demagogic rhetoric and war-talk is the simple fact that throughout this era the Republicans have never stopped for one day quietly pursuing their Restoration reactionary agenda — eliminating the progressive income tax and the inheritance tax; substantially and permanently reducing the capital gains tax and effective corporate tax rates; guaranteeing that the President, the Vice President, their families and supporters would profit personally and maximally from our two-front “War on Terrorism”; stripping away the last vestiges of regulatory control of corporate entities; and making worker organization and unionization virtually illegal — all at a time when our spirits and our resources should supposedly have been mobilized to meet the great existential, military threat posed by six turbaned guys hiding in a tenement in Peshawar (or a cave, if you prefer; but that is so passé).
These domestic affronts to the liberty and livelihood of the vast majority of Americans, which proceeded unabated while Junior and Darth Vader held the mike and prattled endlessly on about war, are the real threats inherited by the American People of 2010 — the things that really affect our daily lives today, as we suffer through massive loss of real income and 10% unemployment. And so it is, in my view, infinitely appropriate that our new President ratchet down the hysteria, and concentrate on fixing our broken home. Thank heaven for a real leader at last!
And for those liberal hawks — I’m thinking of you Chris Matthews — who have their panties all twisted about Abdul the Panty Bomber: get over it, baby. This guy can’t hurt America. Seriously. And if not adding to the panic costs the Democrats some seats at the mid-terms — well, so it goes. Better to be lead by real men for a short time than to succomb to the lies and panic that have brought us, altogether, to this ugly present.
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
DEMINT: The president has downplayed the threat of terror since he took office, and he waited eight months to even nominate Mr. Southers for this position. And then he wanted him approved in secret with no debate and no recorded vote in the Senate.
And this is all in the context of the president promising the unions that he will submit our airport security to collective bargaining with union bosses.
Complete Fox interview here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,581499,00.html
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
Not my usual cup’a, but you’ll see for yourself why this video is going viral in both the cycling and x-sports worlds.
If some of this stuff doesn’t give you goosebumps, you must be dead.
Posted in Cycling
In the aftermath of 9/11, it was recognized that airline safety — and by extension, the safety of American civilians — was not being well-served by the private security services employed exclusively by airlines and airports in the years leading up to 9/11. As cut-throat as the third-party contractors who notoriously locked their employees in Walmart overnight, private security was maybe one step more dignified than outsourced janitorial services, just not as well paid.
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
[Launch the video below for your musical accompaniment to this post]
Joseph Turner, Westminster Abbey interior
What? You wanted Christmas without a little agita? You must have mistaken me for somebody else.
Three little Jewish choir boys. A Lutheran from Berlin named Mendelssohn; a Catholic from Vienna named Mahler; an Episcopalian from New York named Fleisig. Mendelssohn, who among other perhaps more important gifts of timeless sacred Christian music, is responsible for the seasonal earworm known as “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” Mahler, whose “Resurrection” and Eighth Symphonies manifest musically the tensions in his own life between the sacred and profane, the earthly and the ethereal, the flesh and the spirit; between mud and sky; who for all the world seemed to have renounced his disengaged Jewish identity in favor of Catholicism out of purely career motives, but who nevertheless discovered in this very act of renunciation a creative dialectic that drove his greatest works.
And me who, rescued, so to speak, at the age of nine, from the banalities of a lower-middle class upbringing in New York City’s most perpetually striving borough of Queens, to sing with what The New Yorker calls “the best Anglican choir in the country,” a commitment that involved leaving home and living instead at the church’s choir school, a world enwombed by a church in the first throes of the identity crisis that today threatens to tear it asunder. St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in 1968 was in many ways the same place it is today: a cathedral in all but name, the crowning accomplishment of the neo-gothic architect Ralph Adams Cram, the wealthiest Episcopal parish in the United States. It is a place, as the New York Times describes it, of:
But in other ways, the church in 1968 was in the midst of profound institutional crisis and change. The studied liberalism that has become synonymous with mainstream Protestant churches — including, now, St. Thomas itself — was little in evidence then, especially in contrast to the parish’s own diocesan cathedral, its notoriously liberal and social activist uptown brother, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. At St. Thomas in 1968, despite a constantly declining congregration, Jeans, facial hair and the poor, generally, were greatly discouraged. Negroes were tolerated up to the point that they manifested a more or less de rigeur middle class church-lady affect (or were the mothers or aunts of fellow choristers). St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue was such a well-known symbol of what remained of America’s East Coast WASP establishment, that as the late 60s progressed, evacuating under bomb threat during a service or concert became almost routine. (Today, ironically, African-American and gay congregants, warmly received now, are the new backbone and lifeblood of the parish.)
And in this milieu, in this place, a child, a curious little Jewish New Yorker from the wrong side of the Queensborough Bridge who, for four performances and six rehearsals a week, literally sang for his supper: I, made my spiritual and physical home. And no time of the year was more uplifting, yet fraught with hard work and spiritual and intellectual misgivings, than Christmas. The most daunting service and concert schedule, several performances a day sometimes, with little time for presents or even sleep. Shot through with my own religious conflicts, and a burgeoning awareness — and a longing to join in, of course — of the social disruptions racing around the nearby streets; Moondog and Janish Joplin talking on the corner of 6th Avenue; Sly Stone staying at the Warwick hotel, limousine liberalism ascendant, a mad dash to man some invisible barricade. Still, joyous too, with the hope of family and a week’s vacation to come at the end.
Quite divorced from any contemplation of the Christ child as either sacred object or historical artifact, to me the meaning not just of Christmas, but of spirit, faith, mystery — of very life itself — was then and still is today most magnificently expressed in the sacred choral music in the German and English traditions. The voices of boy choristers are, then, to me, like the voice of g*d herself. And that can come anytime, if I put myself in the place to receive it — a recent winter’s evensong at Westminster Abbey, notably, where a weak white winter sun shone on the famous chiaruscuro floor, and two boy sopranos sang a Mendelssohn duet, the spirit of that most-Jewish-and-yet-not composer once again giving voice to … what, exactly? And without being able to frame it intellectually there wells up in me what I can only describe as a living spirit — what for me stands for the true meaning of Christmas; neither sacred nor profane, but a nativity of both spirit and body without conflict or contour. And it has a purity — in the liturgical analogy, while the Christmas story carries a hint of tragedy, the coming passion of the Christ as the controlling metaphor for the human condition never completely out of sight — it brings, like every birth and rebirth, a hope that is the hope of Christians at Christmas, as it is the hope of the Jews on the New Year, as it is the hope of the world. That off chance that, just this one time, we won’t screw it all up.
And there it is — my wish for all this Christmas season — let’s try together, one more time, to not screw it up. To sing just the right notes. To get through the score. To hit all the high notes. To cheat tragedy and death together, or at least, if we cannot defeat them, to face them (as I said to a dear friend recently) with dignity and integrity.
One last note: this was going to be a post about the question of whether Mendelssohn’s, Mahler’s and my experiences of being, in effect, Jewish musicians in these dominantly Christian cultures was ultimately examples of an invidious and centuries-old processs of conversion and assimilation, opportunities for social mobility, or merely selfishness on the part of a couple of perfidious and ambitious “bad” Jews. I leave that for your contemplation — and perhaps a future post.
Meanwhile, Christmas breakfast is waiting on this tardy blogger, so off we must go.
Inspirations and Aspirations 