The Numbers Game And A Bombing Shame
email: pjdillon@attglobal.net
They say you’ll lose it of you don’t use it but despite a two week hiatus the blog lives and I’ve still managed to remember the login codes. That alone is no small feat burdened as I am with all manner of personal and business codes locked away in my malaria enfeebled brain.
It’s pretty amazing how numeric life has become, even for someone who prides himself on keeping a pretty slim data shadow.
There’s logon names and password protection for both my outlook email and the yahoo address, for the three servers I use, the three internet back accounts I access as well as close to a dozen members websites of different shapes and sizes (most mercifully recognizing me when I dial up a page), which are password protected and have assigned random logon numbers, frequently alpha-numeric combinations running to 16 characters. Add to this the various POP questions and software queries I’m posed if I call for system support.
There’s several bank accounts in three different countries each with unique quick codes and account names and numbers, and two automated phone banking systems they require codes and PINs, not to mention the bank ATM cards themselves with their unique PINs.
Like most people, I’ve got a passport (unlike most, two of them) and a citizenship card all of which feature numbers, and of course there’s the granddaddy of ‘em all, my social insurance number, too. I know my lapsed Medicare card number and driver’s license and if pushed, I might cough up a B.C. video store membership number from five years ago.
I’ve got an address here in Jakarta, an occasional mailing address in Vancouver and a second in Quebec all of which are heavily memory dependant. There’s the birth dates of four other family members and countless friends to remember (though if you asked them they’d probably say that I’m not much for remembering those special dates), and of course perhaps 20 or thirty phone numbers rattling round my head at any one time.
So it is no small miracle that every year when I confront my locker at Yaletown Storage in downtown Vancouver I somehow manage to come up with the right three digits to pop the lock, though I couldn’t tell you what they are right this moment. I have to be there, standing in front of the white painted particleboard door on the third floor and I can just reach into thin air and pull it out.
I’ve go the number thing on my mind because I’ve just today replaced a lost cell phone (Nokia 6310 and all its saved numbers etc) with quite a smart new model, the Ericsson T-68i, which pretty much does everything you’d want a phone to do nowadays, part digital calendar, part phonebook but with Bluetooth and perpetual Internet access should you be so inclined (I’m not). I’ll play games, wake you up in the morning, remind you to wish Mom a happy birthday and pick up the dry cleaning (not one of my problems, living as I do in a world of cotton and lycra and more cotton), and with the right attachment, I’ll take wee tiny (3 cm x 2 cm) utterly useless digi-pix which you can (theoretically) send immediately via your wireless Web connection directly to the cell phones of family and friends who I suppose have been living their own lives of quiet desperation and will immediately send a picture back showing their shock and awe at what you’ve send them.
One cool thing it does offer if I can figure out how to make it work, is a synchronization function that’ll speak to my Outlook Express contact list and calendar and swap data both ways so that I should be able to load most of my PC contacts onto the phone’s address book without having to key every friggin one. Right now it’s all theory but I’ll be mucking about with it and will report faithfully on progress made.
It has been busy the past couple of weeks. Among the highlights, I’ve started a new writing gig with a UN agency. I’m going to be unnaturally coy about this job as it is shaping up to be quite interesting and I don’t want to blow it. Suffice to say at this time that I was in central Java for a coupla three days last week talking to child prostitutes and the street workers who deal with them. Unlike N America or W Europe this kind of outreach is quite new and not particularly sophisticated but if all they do is provide a safe space for the kids to hang out in for a few hours every day then that’s a heck of a lot more than what they’d otherwise have. I’ll write more about the project I’m involved with in coming weeks but for the moment I’ll leave it at that.
The trial began last week Wednesday of Abu Bakar Bashir, the guy US intelligence says is the head of JI, the group suspected of pulling off the Bali bombing last Oct. 12. That same day cops arrested more than a dozen more guys they suspect of planning terrorist hits in Indonesia, seizing weapons and ammo, chemicals and detonators. Two days later, a bomb went off outside the UN building in downtown Jakarta and Sunday morning a similar pipe bomb device detonated at the airport injuring 11 people. People are on edge at the moment and there’s fear in the streets for the first time in many months.
J and I traveled to Bandung, W Java, on Easter weekend for our friend and colleague Chris Brummit’s wedding. Simple Moslem service though there was nothing simple about the bride’s opulent kabaya, a very Javanese sarong, blouse and diaphanous vest combination topped with a pretty extraordinary gold headpiece. Several friends had flown in from Bangkok so it was a bit of a homecoming.
On the Thursday before the wedding I went to the groom’s wake, uuuuhhh, I mean, stag, which began at the city’s quasi foreign correspondent’s club, the sort of mauve-painted, dimly lit place that would have been trendy in New York. About 10 years ago.
Then we made for the dingy dangdut lane three minutes from my house for 90 minutes of heavily made-up women screeching to high amp Indian-influenced pop tunes. It’s an okay experience once in a while not something I’d do on a regular basis. Say, once a year or so. Later we booked out to 1001, which is sorta high-end entertainment center offering everything from live karaoke in a hall full of respectable Chinese businessmen and their wives, to skeletal Latvian whores on the backend of long careers, and hard-faced, 18-year-old Javanese hookers who line up kike cattle to be selected to act as ‘companions’ in the smaller karaoke rooms on the second floor. It’s all so predictable and dingy, everything depressing and cheap about Asia crammed into a space the size of my living room.
There’s another coming up, that of Linsay Murdoch, the Sydney Morning Herald’s guy in Jakarta, and the city’s poor version of Hunter Thompson. His excesses are legendary and that he is getting married at all came as a bit of a shock, frankly. It starts at 3 pm. I’m worried.
Finally, I'm going to sign off on a conflicted note. Apparently the five guys who killed my friend Harry Burton from Reuters on the dusty road to Sarobi back in Nov 2001 have been captured in southeastern Afghanistan. I guess I should be happy but really it leaves me cold. I've looked in the eyes of killers before, there's nothing new there. In many ways they're exactly like you and I. But I am curious what it feels like to be able to exact revenge. How would it feel to take one of those guys and cut his throat, to feel the tip of the blade as it pushed through the tightened muscles of the neck, how he'd bounce and struggle and what looks would be, captured on the faces of the four who remained. I'm sure they've seen that look themselves. They say it's a hard thing to do the first time but that it gets easier. I wonder.
Monday, April 28, 2003
Monday, April 14, 2003
Time For A Cut
I dispute the idea that things, time in particular, speed up as you get older.
Actually, what happens is that you slow down and everything else remains fairly constant – even in a so-called Information Age – so that relative to where you stand, the pace appears to quicken.
It’s an applied aspect of Newtonian physics. I remember a series of well-intentioned science teachers trying to explain Time in a similar manner, how things are perceived differently depending on where (or when?) you’re standing: at a fixed point in space (‘till the brighter bulbs at the front of the class sussed out the quandary that posed); from aboard a craft moving at variable velocities along a random path; or whilst sitting in a tavern with a cold pitcher of Molson watching Hockey Night In Canada on the CBC with your buddies on a planet spinning through the void on a predictable journey about a stellar body.
‘Course, my understanding of these things was troublesome at best. Despite attempts too numerous to mention to interest me in science and arithmetic, my mental mathematical development effectively ended with those bland tales of trains leaving stations in different cities at different speeds heading for the same destination.
These problems I solved, eagerly, by imaging the drunk, red-nosed CPR switcher asleep in his snow-bound shack, propane heater cranked to high, failing to change the tracks at the right hour, setting off a chain reaction that lead inevitably to the two trains colliding somewhere in the heart of the Big City killing all aboard – including characters who looked a lot like those math and science teachers, neighborhood goons and the fat Greek depanneur-owner with the hairy mole on the left side of her mouth and flesh-colored, ankle-high nylons who made life miserable for nimble-fingered, impecunious adolescents with a taste for Mars bars and chocolate chunks. We went to Blue Windows instead and repaid the gaunt, French-Canadian owner’s friendliness by robbing him blind, and pasting the pages of his selection of porn magazines together with the remnants of melted Caramilk bars… always wondered what the guys who bought those magazines thought when they got ‘em home to discover the pages around Miss October kinda glued together.
He was a great guy even though his teeth were pretty gross. Me and John Duggan used to go down there, age eight or nine, and buy a copy of Penthouse and a couple packs of smokes (Players, unfiltered if memory serves) for his Dad. The clerk looked at us kinda funny, but when John said they were for his father, and here’s five bucks, he’d pack ‘em up for the walk back up Rue Notre Dame de Grace.
I always worried that he’d catch me thieving and think I was a bad kid. We didn’t care about the ethics of shoplifting. We were kids. Every kid lifts stuff, its like a genetic thing. I just didn’t want him to tell me to stay out because Blue Windows (it had blue windows) was one of the places I could heat up (and read comics for free) while delivering the afternoon paper. That’ s no small attraction when it’s minus 20, 4:30 in the afternoon and you’ve gotta go back and deal with Radu, that vile, loud-mouthed depot manager, and pick-up the second half of a 60-paper run, a Wednesday maybe when the Montreal Star classifieds were fat, a dozen inserts had to be stuffed and the newsprint ran to 180 pages.
He never figured it out though and one day at Blue Windows there was another French guy behind the counter. A short time later the place was renovated, the chocolate bar stand was moved atop the cashier’s counter and the days of unlimited gob-stoppers came to an end.
All of which is a long way from the haircut I got today at the little salon down the lane from my house, but there’s a reason for the segue. ‘Cause my hair grows like a weed – if my hair were a mollusk it’d be a freakin’ Zebra Mussel – and there’s no real explanation for it because as we all now know, things only appear to speed up as we age.
It’s not like I feed it magic tonics or imbue it with special petroleum products or even work out, but for speed, 500cc world champ Valentino Rossi and ski-droid Herman (Da Herminator) Maier ain’t got nothing on my hair. We’re talking about sitting back and watching the hair grow. We’re talking freakin’ Rapunzella is definitely in the house.
And no, my head is not shrinking.
I’ve gotten in the habit of going for the ‘ol Number 1, the GI look, appropriate given my navy Seal training – I too like to snooze on flat rocks when I’m not checking out the tusks on babe in the corner of belly-bopping by concession stands.
Until recently I thought the whole No. I thing was a special code distributed to the International Brotherhood of Barbers or something. I figured they did the special head-shaving session at the same time the guys learned the secret barber’s handshake. I say this because it doesn’t matter where you go, what country your in, everyone knows what a No. 1 is.
In a sense, it’s the great equalizer, Utopian even. Whether it’s a guy with a pair of scissors, a lawn chair and a mirror nailed into a tree in a Central Jakarta park full of (not at all inviting) concrete children’s slides or a Chez Michel’s kinda-place where there’s a cover charge, a dress-code and an ATM, cutters have one thing in common: no matter what you want done, regardless of how much you pay or whether you bring a picture in to show the him/her/himher, the cutter/Hair Lifestyle Consultant will do exactly what they want to do and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.
And so, my affection for Number 1. Or, as was the case today, Number 2. It’s basically a head shave and how can you possibly mess up a head shave? Imagine my disappointment when I learned during my last visit that the number designation actually referred to the size of the universal attachments barbers slip onto their clippers.
Damn, another colorful conspiracy theory bites the dust. I do look fabulous, mind.
I dispute the idea that things, time in particular, speed up as you get older.
Actually, what happens is that you slow down and everything else remains fairly constant – even in a so-called Information Age – so that relative to where you stand, the pace appears to quicken.
It’s an applied aspect of Newtonian physics. I remember a series of well-intentioned science teachers trying to explain Time in a similar manner, how things are perceived differently depending on where (or when?) you’re standing: at a fixed point in space (‘till the brighter bulbs at the front of the class sussed out the quandary that posed); from aboard a craft moving at variable velocities along a random path; or whilst sitting in a tavern with a cold pitcher of Molson watching Hockey Night In Canada on the CBC with your buddies on a planet spinning through the void on a predictable journey about a stellar body.
‘Course, my understanding of these things was troublesome at best. Despite attempts too numerous to mention to interest me in science and arithmetic, my mental mathematical development effectively ended with those bland tales of trains leaving stations in different cities at different speeds heading for the same destination.
These problems I solved, eagerly, by imaging the drunk, red-nosed CPR switcher asleep in his snow-bound shack, propane heater cranked to high, failing to change the tracks at the right hour, setting off a chain reaction that lead inevitably to the two trains colliding somewhere in the heart of the Big City killing all aboard – including characters who looked a lot like those math and science teachers, neighborhood goons and the fat Greek depanneur-owner with the hairy mole on the left side of her mouth and flesh-colored, ankle-high nylons who made life miserable for nimble-fingered, impecunious adolescents with a taste for Mars bars and chocolate chunks. We went to Blue Windows instead and repaid the gaunt, French-Canadian owner’s friendliness by robbing him blind, and pasting the pages of his selection of porn magazines together with the remnants of melted Caramilk bars… always wondered what the guys who bought those magazines thought when they got ‘em home to discover the pages around Miss October kinda glued together.
He was a great guy even though his teeth were pretty gross. Me and John Duggan used to go down there, age eight or nine, and buy a copy of Penthouse and a couple packs of smokes (Players, unfiltered if memory serves) for his Dad. The clerk looked at us kinda funny, but when John said they were for his father, and here’s five bucks, he’d pack ‘em up for the walk back up Rue Notre Dame de Grace.
I always worried that he’d catch me thieving and think I was a bad kid. We didn’t care about the ethics of shoplifting. We were kids. Every kid lifts stuff, its like a genetic thing. I just didn’t want him to tell me to stay out because Blue Windows (it had blue windows) was one of the places I could heat up (and read comics for free) while delivering the afternoon paper. That’ s no small attraction when it’s minus 20, 4:30 in the afternoon and you’ve gotta go back and deal with Radu, that vile, loud-mouthed depot manager, and pick-up the second half of a 60-paper run, a Wednesday maybe when the Montreal Star classifieds were fat, a dozen inserts had to be stuffed and the newsprint ran to 180 pages.
He never figured it out though and one day at Blue Windows there was another French guy behind the counter. A short time later the place was renovated, the chocolate bar stand was moved atop the cashier’s counter and the days of unlimited gob-stoppers came to an end.
All of which is a long way from the haircut I got today at the little salon down the lane from my house, but there’s a reason for the segue. ‘Cause my hair grows like a weed – if my hair were a mollusk it’d be a freakin’ Zebra Mussel – and there’s no real explanation for it because as we all now know, things only appear to speed up as we age.
It’s not like I feed it magic tonics or imbue it with special petroleum products or even work out, but for speed, 500cc world champ Valentino Rossi and ski-droid Herman (Da Herminator) Maier ain’t got nothing on my hair. We’re talking about sitting back and watching the hair grow. We’re talking freakin’ Rapunzella is definitely in the house.
And no, my head is not shrinking.
I’ve gotten in the habit of going for the ‘ol Number 1, the GI look, appropriate given my navy Seal training – I too like to snooze on flat rocks when I’m not checking out the tusks on babe in the corner of belly-bopping by concession stands.
Until recently I thought the whole No. I thing was a special code distributed to the International Brotherhood of Barbers or something. I figured they did the special head-shaving session at the same time the guys learned the secret barber’s handshake. I say this because it doesn’t matter where you go, what country your in, everyone knows what a No. 1 is.
In a sense, it’s the great equalizer, Utopian even. Whether it’s a guy with a pair of scissors, a lawn chair and a mirror nailed into a tree in a Central Jakarta park full of (not at all inviting) concrete children’s slides or a Chez Michel’s kinda-place where there’s a cover charge, a dress-code and an ATM, cutters have one thing in common: no matter what you want done, regardless of how much you pay or whether you bring a picture in to show the him/her/himher, the cutter/Hair Lifestyle Consultant will do exactly what they want to do and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.
And so, my affection for Number 1. Or, as was the case today, Number 2. It’s basically a head shave and how can you possibly mess up a head shave? Imagine my disappointment when I learned during my last visit that the number designation actually referred to the size of the universal attachments barbers slip onto their clippers.
Damn, another colorful conspiracy theory bites the dust. I do look fabulous, mind.
Sunday, April 13, 2003
It's The Vision Thing, Stupid
The following are excerpts from speeches given by British and American military commanders to their troops on the eve of the war.
“if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory. We got to liberate, not to conquer. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own.
Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. If there are casualties of war, then remember when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
You will be shunned unless you conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there.”
Lt. Col. Tim Collins
OIC Irish Guards
“When the president says ‘Go’, look out – it’s hammer time.”
Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating
(followed by Queen song We Will Rock You, played at high volume.)
The following are excerpts from speeches given by British and American military commanders to their troops on the eve of the war.
“if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory. We got to liberate, not to conquer. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own.
Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. If there are casualties of war, then remember when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
You will be shunned unless you conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there.”
Lt. Col. Tim Collins
OIC Irish Guards
“When the president says ‘Go’, look out – it’s hammer time.”
Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating
(followed by Queen song We Will Rock You, played at high volume.)
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
New Trick For An Ol Dawg And Hounds At The Gate
It has been a long time since someone has come through town that I knew from the other life. The one that ended back in the spring of ‘99.
A function of distance I guess, of the fact that when one uninitiated contemplates Asia whist living somewhere beneath the fat grey nimbus in Vancouver, one’s mind does not turn immediately to Indonesia despite its physical size and robust population and tumultuous recent history.
Monkey, my best and longest, came last year for a X-country bike trip that took him and Wolf – who’d been here the year before and ended up marooned on the far side across Java with a collapsed ocean kayak and 100kms of snake-, panther- and croc-infested jungle between him and civilization – across 1,100 kms of Java, knocking off volcano climbs along the way.
Those hours together were slashed by the Afghan campaign and my sojourns to C Asia and so it has been 18 months since anyone somewhat close flung open the gates here on Jl. Rembang.
Marsh and I worked together at a Vancouver-area paper, The Surrey Leader, for three and half years. He’s an understated fellow who rarely rises to the bait and could be counted upon during editorial meetings to interject some semblance reality into proceedings whilst others, myself in particular, searched for the Grand Conspiracy Theory, or got caught up in some minor wrangle with the competition over issues that I’d be embarrassed to admit to now.
We shared many hastily hacked butts and putrid cups of coffee together with the enforcement guys from the Liquor Licensing Board, the shivering junkies visiting the third floor offices of Legal Aid and posses of pale teenage skells forced by court order to attend the youth outreach classes downstairs, all of whom loitered about the rear doors of our building on King George Highway. We had a few pub nights, watched a bit of hockey and even got it together towards the end, to play some tennis after work.
That was kinda where it began and ended, though. He lived single in the ‘burbs and I had a gal in the city and so we didn’t become what I would call close.
I am really pleased to say though that I was about the other morning – wee hours – when the call went out to my former boss with the word that, guess what, Marsh’s not coming back to work. Ever.
I remember the day I cut those ties. It was the final act in a painful, year-long peel, the extrication, the salvaging of soul and sanity from the smoldering ruins of one life and the beginning of a new one. If they experienced the agony, the act of shedding that skin would, through some evolutionary necessity, cause snakes to molt but once in their lives. Or not at all.
And of course that was the danger my friend faced until sometime around 4 am Jakarta, April 5, 2003: To fail to renew. To lack the imagination, the will or the courage to walk away from the familiar at a time in his life when it was still possible to do it. Like me at that time: no wife, no debt, no obligations and a toolbox containing the basic kit needed to survive in the real world.
I don’t know who was happier about finalizing his decision! And so if your business takes you to Hanoi, where he’ll be based, and you’ve need for competence and fluency then drop him a line at marshinasia@yahoo.com
And meantime, there’s the shitty Iraq thing. Watched a couple of Marines being interviewed this afternoon on FOX (All War, All The Time) on the driveway of Saddam’s main palace. The younger of the two, a Captain I believe, said he planned to step into one of Saddam’s bathrooms, crack up his “gold faucets and take my first hot shower in 20 or 30 days.”
After the predictable backslapping and slavering over the reliability and power of US armor, they whipped out a Georgia State University Bulldogs (football team) flag (mistaken by a FOX commentator for the Third Infantry’s colors) barked and pumped their fists in the air.
Thankfully (?) they said they didn’t plan to fly the Stars and Stripes over the palace – ‘because we’re here to liberate Iraq, not conquer it’ – but it was never established whether of not we can look forward to a NCAA College Football flag snapping in the wind a stone’s throw from the Euphrates River. Maybe the World Wrestling Federation would be more appropriate.
I’d laugh if the news this evening over beers hadn’t been that News Corp photographer John Feder, a friend from E. Timor days, and a print colleague from the same agency have been missing for several days, and two other journos are believed killed in an Iraqi counter-attack.
It has been a long time since someone has come through town that I knew from the other life. The one that ended back in the spring of ‘99.
A function of distance I guess, of the fact that when one uninitiated contemplates Asia whist living somewhere beneath the fat grey nimbus in Vancouver, one’s mind does not turn immediately to Indonesia despite its physical size and robust population and tumultuous recent history.
Monkey, my best and longest, came last year for a X-country bike trip that took him and Wolf – who’d been here the year before and ended up marooned on the far side across Java with a collapsed ocean kayak and 100kms of snake-, panther- and croc-infested jungle between him and civilization – across 1,100 kms of Java, knocking off volcano climbs along the way.
Those hours together were slashed by the Afghan campaign and my sojourns to C Asia and so it has been 18 months since anyone somewhat close flung open the gates here on Jl. Rembang.
Marsh and I worked together at a Vancouver-area paper, The Surrey Leader, for three and half years. He’s an understated fellow who rarely rises to the bait and could be counted upon during editorial meetings to interject some semblance reality into proceedings whilst others, myself in particular, searched for the Grand Conspiracy Theory, or got caught up in some minor wrangle with the competition over issues that I’d be embarrassed to admit to now.
We shared many hastily hacked butts and putrid cups of coffee together with the enforcement guys from the Liquor Licensing Board, the shivering junkies visiting the third floor offices of Legal Aid and posses of pale teenage skells forced by court order to attend the youth outreach classes downstairs, all of whom loitered about the rear doors of our building on King George Highway. We had a few pub nights, watched a bit of hockey and even got it together towards the end, to play some tennis after work.
That was kinda where it began and ended, though. He lived single in the ‘burbs and I had a gal in the city and so we didn’t become what I would call close.
I am really pleased to say though that I was about the other morning – wee hours – when the call went out to my former boss with the word that, guess what, Marsh’s not coming back to work. Ever.
I remember the day I cut those ties. It was the final act in a painful, year-long peel, the extrication, the salvaging of soul and sanity from the smoldering ruins of one life and the beginning of a new one. If they experienced the agony, the act of shedding that skin would, through some evolutionary necessity, cause snakes to molt but once in their lives. Or not at all.
And of course that was the danger my friend faced until sometime around 4 am Jakarta, April 5, 2003: To fail to renew. To lack the imagination, the will or the courage to walk away from the familiar at a time in his life when it was still possible to do it. Like me at that time: no wife, no debt, no obligations and a toolbox containing the basic kit needed to survive in the real world.
I don’t know who was happier about finalizing his decision! And so if your business takes you to Hanoi, where he’ll be based, and you’ve need for competence and fluency then drop him a line at marshinasia@yahoo.com
And meantime, there’s the shitty Iraq thing. Watched a couple of Marines being interviewed this afternoon on FOX (All War, All The Time) on the driveway of Saddam’s main palace. The younger of the two, a Captain I believe, said he planned to step into one of Saddam’s bathrooms, crack up his “gold faucets and take my first hot shower in 20 or 30 days.”
After the predictable backslapping and slavering over the reliability and power of US armor, they whipped out a Georgia State University Bulldogs (football team) flag (mistaken by a FOX commentator for the Third Infantry’s colors) barked and pumped their fists in the air.
Thankfully (?) they said they didn’t plan to fly the Stars and Stripes over the palace – ‘because we’re here to liberate Iraq, not conquer it’ – but it was never established whether of not we can look forward to a NCAA College Football flag snapping in the wind a stone’s throw from the Euphrates River. Maybe the World Wrestling Federation would be more appropriate.
I’d laugh if the news this evening over beers hadn’t been that News Corp photographer John Feder, a friend from E. Timor days, and a print colleague from the same agency have been missing for several days, and two other journos are believed killed in an Iraqi counter-attack.
The Reason Why
The Nation [US]
April 4, 2003
by George McGovern
>
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
(in the Crimean War)
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness.
Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly.
This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)
The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address.
War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.
Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others.
My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration.
For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to
be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.
During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider."
As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him."
In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not."
This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, he sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.
In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.
As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.
Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.
I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction
Now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional
American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me.
So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our
troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap—two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential
campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment
of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young
men do the dying."
That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by
Our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had
done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.
The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people.
We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?
It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass
destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it
be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United
States?
Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the
Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must
result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen."
Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated."
The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to
defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never
comtemplated."
> I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my
fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was
first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates,
the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian
Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city
of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have
stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear
of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of
civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.
>
The Nation [US]
April 4, 2003
by George McGovern
>
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
(in the Crimean War)
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness.
Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly.
This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)
The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address.
War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.
Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others.
My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration.
For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to
be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.
During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider."
As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him."
In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not."
This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, he sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.
In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.
As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.
Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.
I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction
Now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional
American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me.
So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our
troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap—two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential
campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment
of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young
men do the dying."
That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by
Our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had
done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.
The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people.
We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?
It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass
destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it
be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United
States?
Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the
Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must
result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen."
Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated."
The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to
defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never
comtemplated."
> I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my
fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was
first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates,
the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian
Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city
of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have
stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear
of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of
civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.
>
Wednesday, April 02, 2003
Bali nights and microb-bites
pjdillon@attlgobal.net
Marvelous to take a break from the war for a few days, kibitzing in the gardens of the Hyatt Sanur in Bali, a curriculum involving full-contact mid-afternoon naps, lounging poolside 4.0, and several advanced courses in stuffing one’s face with seafood under starry skies.
Barely left the manicured jungle with its swaying palms, wok-sized pink lotus blossoms, nimble sandpipers, and several curious species of obese, thong-wearing and amorous German tourists.
Did slip out after Sunday’s post-wedding reception plunge into a Java Sea warm as breast milk, to quaff a few beers and over-iced double Black Labels at a nearby and empty bar/resto. Just when Bali starts to climb back out of the pit dug by a couple hundreds keys of ammonium nitrate back in October, along comes a war (and this SARS) to empty out the planes from Sydney, Singapore and Amsterdam yet again.
Also got it together to hop a pre-packaged, air-conned magic bus for the hour’s drive up to the artist’s colony in Ubud, though I’m not sure it is still accurate to call it that as much of what you can see is more of the same, smiling wooden cats with black and white striped scarves, hairy Balinese masks and poor-quality cotton and silk dresses. Regardless, swanned about the shopping area oblivious to custom before collapsing in a heap at a little bistro for some rejuvenating chilly malt liquor rehydration products and a chat with Daniel and his formidable new, sloe-eyed beau Natalie, fresh from Canadian foreign affairs in TelAviv.
The morning of their wedding, Dian and Josh performed the cleansing ritual known as Siraman beneath festive red and yellow umbrellas inside one of the hotel’s open-air spa rooms. I understand Siraman is practiced throughout Java though each regency has a slightly different twist, in their case of the Sundanese variety as that is Dian’s heritage.
Josh sat bare-chested in a fine red batik sarong waiting for his bride who entered walking on a length of cloth scattered with flower petals, her father in front holding a five-part candelabra “lighting the way to the future” followed by Dian, who was held close by and bound by a length of batik cloth to her mother. Together mum and dad lead Dian in meet her husband. She was wearing a sarong and beaded blouse with a “vest” made of woven, aromatic melati (jasmine) flower buds.
Together Josh and Dian bowed at their parent’s feet to ask for their blessings and then washed their feet, which sounds kinda cheesy but in fact was quite touching, revealing or perhaps creating the closeness and bond that’s often only found in ritual, divorced from the crash and bang of the ‘real’ world.
Once their parent’s feet were toweled off, the couple took their seats and one-by-one, from the nuclear center outwards to aunts and cousins, members of both families ‘bathed’ the pair with a simple coconut shell ladle dipped into a water and flower-filled pot (seven blossoms by custom).
Once the families had bathed them, Josh and Dian were deemed ready for the wedding proper, a stripped down Catholic affair on the beach at sunset, presided over by a Indonesian Jesuit priest.
Very nice, gentle affair in keeping with the couple’s low-key way. We ate, danced a bit and once the newlyweds booked for the evening, headed for a moonlight dip in the Java Sea.
Monday, J and I hung poolside, played a bit of ping-pong and got ready to head back to the Big Durian.
Though greatly looking forward to hooking up with my former work colleague of three years, Dave, (see www.surreyleader.com) who has been doing some swanning of his own these past five months, traveling throughout Asia on an ever diminishing leave-of-absence, yesterday’s return trip was sobered by the realization ground-staff in Jakarta were wearing white paper masks against the SARS being transported in by wealthy Singaporeans on their weekend sex and sun holidays on the Island of the Gods.
No small irony in the fact that the fear here in Indonesia is that infected businessmen from the Matrix-esque city state (stare at the steel and glass highrises long enough and they’ll start to shimmer and bend, ultimately disappearing to reveal Singapore’s true nature, methinks) are going to spread a virus that this country is simply not equipped to deal with. Of course, the same Singaporean businessmen and their local cronies are principally responsible for raping this country’s natural resources over the past thirty years so that they’re bringing another blight upon Indonesia might have been anticipated.
True to form, the government won’t respond until it’s too late ('Emergency response plan is ready and… will be announced in a few days' to paraphrase the Health Minister’s recent announcement) possibly giving the disease all the time it’ll need tear a hole in the most populous island on the planet.
The warnings gained new urgency today with the news that the first SARS victim to manifest in Jakarta – a Singaporean teacher – has died in the past few hours. I don’t think I’m being melodramatic. The epidemiologists and bug-hunters at the Center for Disease Control said a while ago that without immediate and drastic action (the slaughter of millions of fowl) the chicken flu in Hong Kong (1996, 97?) would have mutated beyond recognition very rapidly, for the first time raising the whole spectre of a global epidemic similar to that of the pneumonia winters of 1917 and 1918 when literally hundreds of thousands died in the space of a few weeks as the disease broke like consecutive waves across Central and South Asia. We’ve seen those grainy b/w pix from Philadelphia and Boston: hundreds of blanketed bodies stacked like cordwood in parks.
Am I the only one who’s got that queasy feeling we might be looking at a similar thing here?
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