Mr. Cheney

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One of the latest headlines, from UPI, on the Internet is "Strategists Stymied by Cheney's Stature."
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Mr. Cheney selects interviewers who won't press him on the most basic, insoluble contradictions. He cheerfully admits that the U.S. used water-boarding, and just as cheerfully asserts that the U.S. doesn't torture. How is water-boarding not torture? According to Cheney and the "legal" memos, it isn't torture because they said so. I think I'll rely on my eyes and ears, which have witnessed the videotape of water-boarding, and on someone like Jesse Ventura, who has been water-boarded. Interviewers shouldn't let Mr. Cheney even get to the question of whether torture "works." They should just keep asking how water-boarding isn't torture. And keep asking. And keep asking. Until and unless he walks off the set--or resolves the basic contradiction.
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Mr. Cheney
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How do you unplug a former Vice President
of the U.S.A.? You don't. He is like a large
refrigerator with nothing good to offer from
inside. He turns lies into ice-cubes:
We used "enhanced interrogation techniques"
like water-boarding, which isn't torture because
we don't torture, unless you count near-drowning
as torture, along with sleep-deprivation, beatings,
and other "enhanced techniques," which is the
language of those who order torture, which saved
us from being attacked, after-torture-because-of-
torture being the logic--the logic, I tell you, so
shut up! The refrigerator opens its doors. Words
come out. The former Vice President is
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an American appliance. He runs on American power.
Hear the ice-cubes tumble from his brain to his mouth?
An ice-cube melts into a lie. The interviewer laps it up
like a dog. The refrigerator watches the dog. People
watch the refrigerator and the dog. It is a TV show.
It is a former Vice President of the U.S.A. "Children,
can you say 'above the law'?"
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Auden After the News

(image: W.H. Auden)











I listened to and watched some news tonight on television. Staunch Republican Frank Gaffney is still claiming that Saddam Hussein consorted with those responsible for attacking the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and that, therefore, the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do. Then I learned that respected (if controversial) reporter Sy Hersh, speaking at a forum in the Midwest, explained that the Bush administration included an assassination-squad that reported directly to the Vice President and operated independently--traveling to other countries, not even bothering to communicate with the CIA, and killing people named on a list. The book containing Hersh's reporting is not due out for 18 months or so; we'll have to wait on the evidence for a while, but perhaps others will dig into the story now to see if it will hold up. Fortunately (or, in this case, unfortunately) Hersh almost always gets things right.

Having had enoughof the news, I turned to W.H. Auden's Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (New York: Vintage 1975) and read "A Walk After Dark," which ends this way:


For the present stalks abroad
Like the past, and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world.

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends
And these Unitd States.

(pp. 232-233)

What, Conservatives Worry?

When conservatives worry about McCain, then I get even more worried about McCain. Hawk-faced Pat Buchanan, noted isolationist and perfecter of the chop-motion while talking and giving speeches, said [on CNN] President McCain would make Cheney look like Ghandi--not physically, I assume, but by comparison. (Buchanan did not seem to intend the comparison as a compliment; with Buchanan, one feels one has to add that information.) Andrew Sullivan, one of those seemingly very bright people who nonetheless swallowed Bush's bait about WMD's and tried to cough it up long after the hook had been set, has posted quite an interesting anti-McCain video on his blog. Here is the link:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/taking-back-t-5.html

Probably the most compelling speaker on the video is Scott Ritter, one of innumerable people who seemed to know what they were talking about during the "run-up" to the war and who was therefore ignored, dismissed, and attacked by Bush and the Surrogates.

A mere poet, I do wonder what the military and the intelligence agencies think of Bush and what I deduce to be his compulsive recklessness and lifetime of being unaccountable. He has been reckless in going to war, in conducting the war and the occupation, in the unprecedented use of contractors, in the breaking (John Murtha's word) of the army and Marines, in forging documents (see Suskind's book, and apparently Suskind has the audio tapes to back up the findings), and in betraying spies. Mustn't even the professionals regard Bush as reckless and incompetent? I don't know.

A mere poet, I wouldn't mind if Obama and McCain would agree to read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" out loud and then comment briefly on it.

A mere poet, I wonder if Putin and McCain are some kind of international marriage made in Hell.

A mere poet, I do wonder what a mere citizen can do to prevent President Bush, President McCain, perhaps even President Obama, from attacking Iran.

What Do I Expect?

When I was growing up, I never did like it when, in response to something that went wrong (something with which I was concerned), an older person would say, "Well, what did you expect?" This sentiment was memorably rephrased in Robert Towne's script for Chinatown: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

I don't think Jake ever learned the lesson, the lesson being a blend of cynicism, nihilism, and fatalism, nor have I. I keep expecting cable-news and metropolitan newspapers to report in much greater detail on the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan (along with what looks like the impending exhaustion of American forces there); on the demi-monopolies of media-ownership (I think there are basically only 6 or 8 large owners now, such as G.E., Viacom, and Murdoch--mainly I'd like to see a mainstream report on this just to see how quickly the reporter would be fired); on the alleged fact that most of the oil from Alaska and Canada gets sold to . . . China; on what life is like for wage-earners in the U.S.; on the vastly disproportionate number of African American men and women in prison; and so on.

McClatchy, which owns a ton of newspapers and which bought Knight-Ridder (who did some of the best--only?--American reporting on Bush's "build-up" to the Iraq invasion), just fired a bunch of people from its papers, including the Tacoma News Tribune. One person I know who was fired may be one of the most community-service oriented citizens I've every met here. Another was heavily recruited from the Midwest just six months ago. The editor, of course, wrote a lachrymose column on the firings, said the paper still had 100 reporters in the South Sound, and said everyone was committed to hitting the "reset" button. Whatever the hell that means. I wish he'd write a column in which he tries to defend the benefits of media conglomerates and hostile take-overs, and how the story of media conglomeration is one "his" paper will not and cannot cover objectively. I also think that because of the proximity of the military bases (Air Force and Army), the paper has never been able to cover all aspects of the war, including protests, AWOL stories, the abandonment of veterans upon their return to the States, and torture. The paper has never analyzed its own complicity in taking the bait Bush threw it. (The News Tribune prints the newspaper at Fort Lewis. I think that represents a conflict of roles.) I found the reporting on the port-protests to be especially thin, biased, and incomplete. The paper flat-out missed some great stories within the story.

I know. What do I expect?

I expect Hollywood to make a good movie one of these days. I'd even settle for a movie based on a script that Robert Towne has lying around. Forget it, Jake. It's Hollywood. Maybe Adam Sandler will play the lead role in The David Hasselhoff Story. Maybe Pixar will do a documentary on veterans' affairs, war-protests, poverty, or torture. It can be narrated by a Pixar-lated, virtually stuffed animal.