Dec. 2 to Dec. 26, 2002

Dispatches

Dec. 26
   Read this week’s Dispatches online. It is an exploration of the possible consequences of war with Iraq.
Merry Christmas

Dec. 25
   Merry Christmas to everyone.
Gone, but not forgotten

Dec. 24
   Racism is more than an image problem for the national Republican Party.
   As columnist Bob Herbert argues in Monday’s New York Times, the party’s problems with race go much deeper than the racist nonsense Sen. Lott offered up at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party earlier this month. The problem is endemic to the party and is a central reason for its success at the national level.
   "Americans have made tremendous progress on matters of racial and ethnic tolerance over the past three or four decades," he writes. "But those gains were made in spite of the ugly, backward, divisive and destructive behavior of many, many politicians in the Republican Party, including those at the very top."
   He says the G.O.P. is a "party that will smile in the face of a Colin Powell while waving Confederate flags behind his back."
   "The G.O.P. has spent more than 30 years demonizing Democrats for trying to help racial and ethnic minorities," he writes. "It has spent more than 30 years stomping on the voting rights of blacks. And it has gone out of its way to pack the federal courts with judges who are hostile to the interests and the rights of minorities."
   And there will be no change, cannot be change, because the party refuses to acknowledge its racist past — something he says is not likely to happen anytime soon.
   "Mr. Lott may be gone as Senate Republican leader, but the G.O.P. is still hot for the racist vote," he writes. "It’s a vile addiction that’s guaranteed to bring a great deal of additional grief — for the party, and for the rest of us."
Remembering a pioneer

Dec. 23
   I was listening to the radio this morning when I heard the news, Joe Strummer is dead.
   The D.J. called him a late-70s punk-rock pioneer and then played "Should I Stay or Should I Go."
   And that was all, just a passing reference. Joe Strummer never really belonged on pop radio anyway.
   I think the first Clash song I remember hearing was the band’s cover of Bobby Fuller’s "I Fought the Law."
   It was an in-your-face bit of snarling guitars and rebellion that seemed to light up my stereo speakers, a cover version that did something that few covers do — it out charged the original, remade it, claimed it for the Clash as their own, Joe Strummer spitting out the lyrics with a level of disdain of which Bobby Fuller couldn’t even dream.
   I was probably 18 at the time, in college. Man, that seems so long ago. I bought my first Clash record — the remarkable E.P. "Black Market Clash," which features a nastly version of the reggae staple "Pressure Drop," a version every bit as good as Bob Marley’s — shortly after. And then "The Clash" and "Sandanista!" and "Give ‘Em Enough Rope" and "London Calling" and "Combat Rock."
   I learned much of what I know of politics, of the impact that the political world has on the lives of average working stiffs, from Joe Strummer and the Clash, from songs like "Career Opportunities" and "The Magnificent Seven," songs critical of corporate capitalism and the war industry, songs that explode from the speakers with raging guitars or sharp ska beats. They mixed in punk and ska and, in the end, hip-hop and electronica, bringing an eclectic approach to the music that matched the universality of their lyrics.
   The Clash – like Bob Dylan before them, like John Lennon in his best solo work, like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg and so many others — prove that politics and pop music mix (pop music in the sense of popular, the music of the day). I rate "London Calling" and "The Clash" among the greatest albums of all time and so many of their songs remain important musical staples for me, nearly 20 years after the band disbanded. (His work with his latest band, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, deserved a greater audience than it received.)
   We will miss you, Joe.
   For more on Joe Strummer go to: CNN
   The BBC
   NME
Happy New Year

Dec. 23
   I hate resolutions. I never keep them and I never remember them — which, I guess, keeps me from feeling guilty about not keeping them.
   But I thought I’d put them in writing this year as a prod:
   1. Be more careful with my money. I’m not promising not to spend, I’d just like to have a better idea where my money goes. Then again, I think I do know: To my mortgage and taxes, to my car payment, to PSE&G, to the insurance company. Maybe, I’m better off not knowing.
   2. Finish "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville. I started it for the hundredth time recently and I’ve never finished it — even in lit class at Rutgers. I’m going to do it this time. Yes, I am. Yes.
   3. Watch less television. This should be relatively easy. There’s nothing on right now worth watching — unless you’re into dopey trash like "The Bachelor."
Happy Xmas — A top 10 for the season

Dec. 23
   I’d like to offer my 10 favorite Christmas season songs:
   1. The Kinks, "Father Christmas" — "Father Christmas, give us your money/We don’t want no stinking toys." Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?
   2. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" — I wish President Bush and the warhawks in Washington would take a listen.
   3. The Waitresses, "Christmas Wrapping" — just a fund little Christmas tune to get you in the season.
   4. Bruce Springsteen, "Santa Claus (Is Coming to Town)" — No Christmas season is complete without it.
   5. Chuck Berry, "Run, Rudolph Run" — That ringing guitar and Rudolph as the mastermind.
   6. Louis Prima, "Shake Hands With Santa Claus" — Quite a lot of fun.
   7. "You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" from the original television show — "I wouldn’t touch you with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole."
   8. "Merry Christmas, Baby" — there are several versions, all of which are pretty cool, but the top ones are Chuck Berry’s original blues, Bruce Springsteen’s R’n’B take and the soulful duet between Bonnie Raitt and Charles Brown.
   9. Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton, "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" — the interplay between these two is both sexy and hysterical.
   10. Billie Holiday, "I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" — ah, Billie, yes.
Racism and politics

Dec. 19
   Three good pieces on racism and politics in the wake of Trent Lott’s disturbing (to say the least) comments at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday celebration — one in Salon by Robert Scheer, a columnist for the L.A. Times and regular contributor to The Nation, and two by Howard Kurtz in the Dec. 18 and Dec. 19 issues of The Washington Post.
   You remember the comments, when Sen. Lott told the retiring senator that the nation would have been better off if he had won his 1948 presidential run, a race in which he ran as a hard-core segregationist.
   Sen. Lott has spent the better part of the last two weeks trying to extricate his foot from his mouth, trying to show that his repeated endorsements of men and organizations that espouse racist and segregationist policies do not mean that he is, himself, a racist or segregationist.
   It would be a rather amusing spectacle — watching a politician who has grown so fat with his own power get skewered with his own words — if it did not have real ramifications for our political culture and did not shed light on the behind-the-scenes racism that plagues society.
   Mr. Scheer questions why Sen. Lott is being allowed to blame his comments on the culture in which he was raised — given that other southerners Sen. Lott’s age and older, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, were able to overcome these supposedly regional prejudices rather early on.
   And Mr. Kurtz asks why Strom Thurmond, the aging segregationist, has managed to get a free ride in all of this, given that it was his presidential run that was at the center of the storm in the first place.
   In the second story, he asks whether this episode will finally force us to talk reasonably and openly about race.
   My sense is that it won’t.
   The fact is, race is a central part of our national narrative and is turned to constantly as political shorthand. Remember Willie Horton in 1988? And Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens? And what about Bill Clinton’s attack on the relatively obscure rapper Sista Souljah?
   What Trent Lott has managed is to drag this secret subtext out into the open, to bust the disgusting consensus among the political elite that keeps matters of race from being discussed in polite political society.
Dispatches

Dec. 19
   Read this week’s Dispatches online. I review a recent Bruce Springsteen concert in Albany — yes, I drove three-plus hours into freezing central New York to see him.
Do they care it’s Christmas?

Dec. 18
   On my way into work this morning, I heard Band Aid’s "Do They Know It’s Christmas?" The song, which since its release in 1984 has become a seasonal staple, was written and recorded by an all-star collection of English rockers to raise awareness of and money for victims of famine in Ethiopia.
   It is a passable song with a Christmas carol feel, big harmony-drenched chorus and sweeping instrumentation. It sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million copies and raised a load of cash, which was used for food shipments to Ethiopia.
   It also spurred a series of benefit projects and all-stars sing-alongs, most notably the obnoxious "We Are the World," a song that professes unity with the entire planet but ends up sounding like a whole bunch of famous rich folk patting themselves on the back ("We are the world / We are the children / We are the ones who make a brighter day").
   "Do They Know It’s Christmas?" is less self-congratulatory, and does seem to recognize the universal plight that the African famine victims face.
   At the same time, the song relies on the kind of Eurocentric blather that mars too many of our efforts to aid people elsewhere in the world. In this case, the song’s basic trope — the repeated chorus, "Feed the world / Let them know it’s Christmas time / Feed the world / Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?" — ignores that Ethiopia is a majority Muslim nation and that about 60 percent of its citizens do not celebrate Christmas (about 40 percent of Ethiopia is Coptic Christian) and that the other nations affected, such as Senegal and Somalia, also were unlikely to celebrate Christmas.
   I don’t mean to demean the impulse of the folks who did such good work raising money and feeding the starving in Africa (Bob Geldorf, the former leader of the Boomtown Rats who wrote the song, was knighted by the queen for his efforts). And I don’t mean to impugn their connection to the Christmas holiday.
   But what stands out, ultimately, about the song is the same kind of cultural snobbery that informs the worst of Rudyard Kipling, though to the performers’ credit their Eurocentrism did feed a lot of people who desperately needed to be fed.
A false shield

Dec. 18
   President George Bush announced Tuesday that his administration is moving ahead with plans to build a version of missile defense system and deploy it by 2004 — despite there being no evidence that such a system will work.
   According to the announcement, the program would be limited in capability at first and designed to knock down North Korean missiles. The administration said that a broader system would require years of development and testing — and that the Defense Department would need an extra $1.5 billion over the next two years (on top of the $16 billion previously projected in that period for this and other missile defense projects), according to the Washington Post.
   The folly in this should be apparent. The administration is talking about spending significant cash — money that we just don’t have at the moment — to implement a missile shield that is not likely to work anytime soon, and maybe never. And it is diverting cash and attention from other, better approaches to protecting Americans from missiles — such as arms control treaties and negotiations.
   As Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Washington Post, "They’re in the middle of research and development and still lack many of the elements needed for the system. The danger also is that they’re not going to do the other things they should be doing to deal with emerging threats, like negotiate with North Korea and get a handle on the spread of fissile material."
   So why do this now? Payback for the money he has received and that his fellow Republican hawks have received from the various war industries. According to Common Cause, a campaign finance reform organization, the aerospace and defense industries gave $8 million to Republican candidates and $6.8 million to Democratic candidates during the 2000 and 2002 election cycles. — and this does not include money given by the industry directly to candidates.
   That’s a major investment and that kind of investment generally demands a return.
   (For a good piece on the folly of missile defense, check out Fred Kaplan in Slate.)
Gore is gone

Dec. 18
   Al Gore will not be running for president in 2004 and that’s a shame — sort of.
   I am no fan of the former vice president, did not vote for him in 2000, found his 2000 platform weak and too focused on the pap the Democrats had been pushing for too long. Basically, I found him to be the poster boy for everything that is wrong with the party — its corporate tilt, its unwillingness to engage the voters or rely on its populist base, its push to the right and its attempt to remake itself in the "GOP-Lite."
   But this time out, Al Gore was the only Democrat talking like the populists the party needs if it hopes to retain any relevancy in the 21st century. Al Gore has been one of the few national leaders willing to challenge the president on his plans for Iraq, one of the few willing to denounce the president’s tax cut or talk about health care or Social Security in any meaningful way.
   We can only hope someone steps up and puts these issues on the table for 2004, or we will be looking at a repeat of this year’s nasty bit of electoral business.
Random thoughts on patriotism

Dec.17
   A quote from George McGovern’s piece, "The Case for Liberalism," in the December issue of Harper’s magazine that I think sums up why we need public intellectuals and critics — especially in times of war:
   "The way of a public critic is uncertain and difficult, especially when flags are flying and drums are rolling, but patriotism includes the responsibility, when the nation is following an unwise course, to call it to a higher standard."
Dispatches

Dec. 12
   Read this week’s Dispatches online. It takes a look at the year in music.
The real Trent

Dec. 11
   Trent Lott has shown his true colors.
   At a 100th birthday bash for retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond, Sen. Lott told the audience that the country would have been better off if the South Carolina Republican had won the White House back in 1948.
   "I want to say this about my state," Sen. Lott said. "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either."
   Sen. Lott, who is expected to be the Senate majority leader in January, said the comment was innocuous, that it was meant to honor a man for his service and his life. If so, why point specifically to Sen. Thurmond’s presidential run, which was tied to a defense of segregation and racial separation?
   As Dave Zweibel, columnist for the Madison Capital Times, pointed out Monday, Sen. Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, "was the guy who walked out of the 1948 Democratic convention because the Dems had the audacity to demand equal rights for black people. He then ran for president himself, pledging that ‘no Ne-gir-ahs’ would ever swim in the same pools as whites, or drink from the same fountains or eat in the same restaurants."
   So what was Sen. Lott advocating?
   According to his apologists, his comments were taken out of context — it was a birthday party, after all, so he had no expectation that what he said would be taken seriously. But this wasn’t some random private party. It was at the Dirksen Senate Office Building and attended by the president, the vice president, much of the Senate and the press — and was broadcast by C-SPAN.
   Sen. Lott has a history of these kinds of comments. As the Washington Post pointed out Friday: "In 1998 and 1999, Lott was criticized after disclosures that he had been a speaker at meetings of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization formed to succeed the segregationist white Citizens’ Councils of the 1960s. In a 1992 speech in Greenwood, Miss., Lott told CCC members: ‘The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let’s take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries.’"
   Enough is enough. Mississippi may not have a problem with Sen. Lott’s apparent racism, but the rest of us have a right to question whether he should be in such a high-profile leadership post in the Senate. Sen. Lott should pass on the job of Senate majority leader — and if he won’t, the Senate Republicans should take it away from him.
   (A good piece in Salon on the lack of public response to the Lott gaffe by Anthony York.)
Dispatches

Dec. 5
   Read this week’s Dispatches online. It asks government to do its part helping the needy.
It should be Carter’s time

Dec. 4
   Major League Baseball has announced its list of Hall of Fame nominees, a list that does not feature the usual obvious suspects.
   But there are several candidates who deserve plaques in Cooperstown, including the relief pitchers Rich Gossage and Bruce Sutter and catcher Gary Carter. All three have been on the ballot before and have been passed over and all three deserve their day.
   But Carter, for my money, is the most deserving.
   The former Mets catcher, who missed out by 11 votes on his fifth try last year, was the best offensive catcher and one of the best defensive catchers of his era.
   He drove in 100 runs in a season four times in an era when driving 100 runs meant something. He hit 30 home runs twice and 20 homers another seven times — at a time when the league leader may have only hit 35 dingers. And hit 324 in his career. Only a few catchers can say that, and they are in the Hall of Fame.
   The fact is, Gary Carter was the best catcher of his generation, a three-time Gold Glove winner who called a great game. He is the link between Johnny Bench, perhaps the greatest all-around catcher of all time, and Ivan Rodriguez and Mike Piazza, today’s best.
   Jayson Stark, a columnist for ESPN.com, put it this way last year, comparing him to Hall-of-Famer Carlton Fisk:
   "There were only two differences between Carter’s career and Carlton Fisk’s: 1) Fisk’s career lasted longer, and 2) Carter’s career was better in every other way.
   "Carter won more Gold Gloves than Fisk (3-1), had more 100-RBI seasons (4-2), had more 20-homer seasons (9-8) and started more All-Star games (8-7). So how Fisk is in the Hall and Carter isn’t remains the biggest mystery since Who Shot Kennedy."
Ideas, not bombs

Dec. 2
   The war on terror is not going quite as well as we’d hoped.
   Yes, we managed to rout the Taliban in Afghanistan and disrupt the Al Quaeda network there, but we have watched, almost hopelessly as bombs have blown elsewhere. And we wait, in fear, for the next major attack on U.S. soil.
   At the same time, we’ve allowed our federal representatives to gut our bill of rights with the noxious U.S. Patriot Act, thinking it will make us safer when all it is doing is making us less free.
   And it’s all because we do not understand the threat we are facing.
   Writing Dec. 1 in the wake of the terror attacks in Kenya, Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor for The Observer of London, says the Western powers have failed to grasp the central issue governing the attacks. He says we are fighting a "lethal idea rather than a tangible enemy."
   "Strip away the millenarian agenda and its language of apocalyptic struggle — the Great Satans, the enemies of God, references to the Crusaders," he writes. "Strip away, just for a moment, its extreme religious aspects and what you are left with is a non-negotiable political agenda. That aim is to remove — or neutralise — American and Western influence from large areas of the globe, including states that are not exclusively Islamist."
   It is a rebellion against Western ideas and "the spread of homogenizing American culture," he says, an insurrection first predicted by Benjamin Barber in 1992 in his essay "Jihad versus McWorld."
   For this reason, Mr. Beuamont writes, we are losing the war: "even a year after 9/11 America and its allies still have little idea of the roots of the discontent that has made Jihad International so attractive to so many young Islamist men, or the etiology of the hatred of America."
   "Not only is the message not getting across, but there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of where the real sophistication of Jihad International comes from," he writes. "It is not in its ingenious and despicable skill in butchering innocent civilians, or even in its apparently formidable organisational skills, which in reality may be far less formidable than assumed, but in syndicating and marketing its brand of terror. This is not the old terrorism of the IRA or ETA, with structures, doctrines and pseudo-military organisation. What Bush and Blair and all their allies do not understand is that it is the idea of al-Qaeda, not its physical reality, that is the key, an idea which has taken deep root in countries from Afghanistan to South East Asia and Africa."
   That the Western powers continue to insist "that it is an organisation, not an idea, that they are fighting" is "terrifying," he said. "With each new arrest, each new targeted killing, we congratulate ourselves that we are winning — until the next atrocity takes place. All the while, we fail to tackle the ideas that replace each arrested or dead terrorist with a new recruit."
The Kissinger question

Dec. 2
   So, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger will be heading an investigation into American intelligence failures leading up to Sept. 11.
   So, tell me why this isn’t letting the fox guard the chicken coop.
   The case against Dr. Kissinger is pretty strong, as outlined by Christopher Hitchens in his book "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," by Seymour Hirsch "The Price of Power" and elsewhere. I offer this recap of the various accusations and charges:
   In 1968, while working for the Democrats, he tipped off Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign that a peace settlement in Vietnam was in the making. The tip resulted in the Nixon camp reaching out to South Vietnam and scuttling the settlement. This resulted in a prolonged war and thousands of American and Vietnamese deaths.
   He was the chief backer of the plan to extend the Vietnam War to Laos and Cambodia, which led to the destablization of Cambodia and the coming to power of the mass-murderer, Pol Pot.
   He has been implicated in the 1973 military coup in Chile, which ousted the democratically elected Salvador Allende. "The evidence includes Kissinger’s foreknowledge and approval of the assassination of the Chilean Commander in Chief, General Rene Schneider, who opposed a military coup, and the actual assassination, by right-wing military forces, of President Allende," writes Marty Jezer on Common Dreams News Center. "After the coup, Kissinger was an ardent supporter of the Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and killed tens of thousands."
   He also has been tied to Operation Condor, a U.S.-backed network of South American dictators that terrorized opposition forces in Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina.
   For more on the Kissinger record, go to:
   "Kissinger Investigates? Investigate Kissinger" by Marty Jezer, Common Dreams News Center
   "Kissinger’s Back…As 9/11 Truth-Seeker" by David Corn, The Nation
   "9/11 Victims Deserve Better Than Kissinger" by Les Payne, "New York Newsday