an open letter to e

below is my comment to e's comment to my last post. 

e, this point, that pakistanis are the greatest victims of terrorism, is perhaps arguable, but there is a very compelling case to be made for it. first off, we have to define what "terrorism" means in this context. in my view it's composed of activities by state or non-state actors targeting civilians, or activities resulting in civilian deaths in far greater proportion to legitimate military / insurgent targets. of course, i'm declining to define what proportion is inoffensive enough to exempt said activity from my working definition, but suffice it to say that i believe the drone bombing campaigns over western pakistan, and yemen, and libya absolutely qualify as acts of state-sponsored terrorism. i know that that this statement alone will, for some people, nullify everything i say below, but i think it's important for us to divorce ourselves a bit from our creeds and flags, and think of these issues in terms of our principles and principles alone. i consider you, e, a fair mind and a very serious thinker, so you are not among the aforesaid people. you do what a friend does best -- challenge my convictions and make me think more clearly about them. i hope you do the same here.

according to wikipedia, last year alone there were 50 separate terrorist incidents in pakistan (excluding drone attacks). these were generally carried out by al-qaeda in pakistan, or a like-minded group like lashkar-e-taeba or jamaat-e-islami. these attacks were generally low-tech acts of violence (e.g., suicide bombs) carried out in public spaces. notably, in the last few years, these attacks have taken place in places like lahore, where my family is from, which is far from the badland west where the pasthun population resides and which is largely indistinguishable from afghanistan. while the sheer volume of deaths that has resulted from these acts does not compare to, say, a single act of terrorism like the september 11th attack on the world trade center, the effect of these attacks is palapable in everyday pakistan in a way that september 11th's is not  (except when it's evoked by brain-dead shitheads like giuliani and schumer -- he of the genius "no-ride" list proposal -- and other cynical exploiters of that event). that is to say, terrorism has disrupted pakistani society much more than it has any other society on the face of the planet -- unless you count iraq and afghanistan, which i don't because i think those two places are uniquely fucked up places in which terrorist activity targeting civilian populations and insurgent attacks on military targets are caught up in a whole incomprehensible morass. to put in another way, afghanistan and iraq are sites of war -- unlike pakistan, at least officially,  which is a site of non-militarily justifiable acts of terrorism.

now, it should be said that the wikipedia numbers are pure nonsense. they account only for high-profile events that have gotten press. i rely more on think tank numbers like the pakistan institute for peace studies, whose 2010 report states that there were 2113 terrorist acts in pakistan last year alone (again, not accounting for drone attacks) in which almost 3000 people were killed and almost 6000 injured. now, if drone attacks are counted, an additional 1000 people in pakistan were killed. this figure, 4000 people, is simply staggering, and i have not seen anything else anywhere in the world that compares to it -- again, with the exception of afghanistan and iraq, which are active theatres of war. more important, each year since 2001 has seen an uptick in terrorist acts in pakistan and deaths resulting therefrom. and with the killing of osama bin laden, it should be clear that any reprisal will be visited first and foremost on the pakistani people. such has been al-qaeda's (whatever that even is now, given its many diffuse forms across the world) modus operandi of late.

as for your other point, i appreciate it fully. human beings have no obligation to act in a principled manner or to put their emotions at bay. i get this. i totally do. know that, but know also i have a monumental problem with the notion that it's unobjectionable to celebrate the death of "someone who specifically targeted americans for being american." why is this relevant? seriously, why is it? if a person kills one person in a botched robbery, do we celebrate his execution? if a serial killer kills ten blonde women because he has some insane sexual fetish, do we celebrate his? if he kills ten black people because he's a white supremacist, same question. i have a huge problem with hate crimes legislation -- let me state that from the outset -- but the notion that a person's intentionality should affect my view of his bad acts is totally lost on me. this isn't about osama bin laden -- or it should not be. this is about us. our reaction to his death -- indeed, the way his killing was comissioned -- that speaks to our best or worst selves. i have a convert's zeal for this country and its bedrock principles. therefore, i cannot understand how it can be that we, collectively, have asked so few questions about the conflicting details of operation geronimo. it turns out bin laden wasn't armed. it turns out he wasn't using his wife as a human shield. it turns out that he attempted to surrender. brennan -- the deputy national security guy -- stated this was a kill operation. why was he not arrested? why was he not haled before a civilian court in the united states and given full due process rights and made to answer for the mountain of evidence compiled against him. why was he dumped in the sea? seriously, why? he was a piece of shit who couldn't give a fuck how his muslim victims were buried, and we're, well, we're denizens of a country that couldn't give a shit how the muslim victims of our drone attacks are buried. why afford this man a so-called islamic burial? what constituency does this satisfy?

i know there are still many details not known about geronimo. i know that. and it may turn out some of my questions have legitimate answers. i hope so. but putting aside protestations about america's egregious violation of pakistani sovereignty -- an irrelevant point, as far as i'm concerned given the pakistani army and intelligence services' incompetence in catching bin laden / duplicity in allowing him sanctuary -- and putting aside the basic human need, perhaps, to celebrate something, anything, after 10 years of confused, neo-imperial brutality in various parts of the muslim world, i put to you this: upon hearing news of bin laden's death, doesn't a mature population push aside its base instincts, and think about all that has been lost and can never be restored? doesn't it think about what we -- as a nation -- have lost, but also allowed ourselves to lose? when bin laden was shot dead in abbottabad and then dumped into the arabian sea, i couldn't help thinking we're now a nation that cannot stomach its own core values. we cannot put one of the world's greatest criminals on trial. as a fiercely proud, and thoroughly skeptical american, i wonder if america is now a shadow of itself. would tocqueville recognize this country? would tom paine be proud of it?

also, and i mean this question seriously, say you're a ten-year old pakistani boy whose entire family -- none of whom were involved in any kind of terrorist activity -- was killed in a drone strike. say you're face is half-charred and you lost an arm in the strike. say you did nothing -- clearly -- to deserve this. nothing at all. say "it's rather human to enjoy the elimination of one's enemy." who is your enemy in this situation? the guy in missouri manning the drone? leon panetta? barack obama? what measure of vengeance are you allowed? put aside creed and flag. put aside who-started-what, and tell me. what kind of world are we barreling towards? what have we wrought?

yours,
c4ts

Ted Kennedy, 1932 - 2009

I know there will be idle talk in the morning about the continuing brutality of Death's Grip this, the summer of 2009. I believe E. has made mention of it in these pages as well. But seriously, if we make it to the September Equinox with Rue McLanahan and Betty White walking among us in God's Dominion, then Death, I will know, has a soul, and we should all breathe a sigh of relief that He has claimed only Michael Jackson et al.

That said, the death of Ted Kennedy is notable and need be marked, not in the least because his death marks the death of mainstream, national Liberalism. I haven't really followed Sherrod Brown's record close enough to term him a liberal. Paul Wellstone has been dead for many years. Al Franken had hawkish tendencies during the buildup to and waging of the War on Iraq (and has declined taking on a serious and objective look at Middle East policy). And Russ Feingold, for all his anti-war tendencies and civil liberties street cred, was a whorish apologist for Israel's crimes against sanity in southern Lebanon in 2006.

Liberalism is a third-rail word in our electoral politics, As we know, despite occasional virtues, there is no real Liberal spirit among our elected officials. Watching our pragmatist, impotent President and the scatterbrained Democratic Congress he lets run wild, fail even to begin a dialogue on meaningful, universal health care coverage, without succumbing to the shrill masses, without stripping from their proposals health-care reform's central tenet, a public option, in some sort of pre-emptive compromise with the sullen and lame minority party -- watching this, we should know that the Liberal philosophy of equality, welfare, and social justice has no place in our Government. Ted Kennedy -- ever the parliamentarian, make no mistake -- did at least this: He wore Liberalism like a crest on his blazer. For that -- and not just that, of course -- he should be honored. And so I honor him.

But I am also a bastard. So, let me tell you my one Ted Kennedy story:

My childhood friend Paul, the eldest brother of three much younger boys, grew up in a stately manse near Embassy Row. One Halloween many years ago, he took his kid brothers out trick or treating. They got to Ted Kennedy's place, and rang the doorbell. The liberal lion answered the door, absolutely smashed, and with some fine Irish sloshing about in a tumbler in his hand. Bleary eyed, he sized up Paul's brothers, their arms outstretched for caloric bounty. In one graceless move Teddy reached for the bowl of Nestle Crunches, but in so doing knocked a lit candle into the dustbin. The contents of the dustbin immediately caught fire. Irish in hand, Irish in blood, Teddy let out a torrent of expletives and ran off for the fire extinguisher (or another drink, who really knows). Paul and the kids slowly retreated from his doorstep, sans Nestle Crunches. I'm not sure if they went back to casa Kennedy the next year.

the rising

with some vaguely urgent sense of purpose i went to northeast illadelphia to canvass for obama. of course, the fact that volunteers would receive priority tickets to a free springsteen concert helped. over 100 volunteers from nyc came. most of those i spoke with came from the BK and despite appearances, were surprisingly lacking in cynicism. i guess that's to be expected from a crowd that probably got up at 6am to drive or take the train down.

the neighborhood we canvassed was white (maybe there was one potentially hispanic person) and working class. many were senior citizens living on social security and several homes were multi-generational. most of the people we tried weren't home, but those with whom we spoke were largely well-informed and thoughtful.

well, let me correct myself. the day begain inauspiciously as one elderly couple told us they were undecided. the woman said outright, "we're christians and we don't trust that obama because he is a muslim." ask las latinas, but apparently i blanched at her comment. my brain froze for a moment and i tried to recover with a weak "well you know he and his family go to church every week--" "no no, that church, you saw that church. i don't believe it." so i tried an alternate angle, "well, you know senator biden is a churchgoing catholic and has been for a long time." she seemed to soften a little at the mention of biden. i pressed further, "i just don't think senator biden would trust someone he didn't think was honest and jeopardize his country if he really thought senator obama was dangerous." she also told me that she thought we were worse off than we were 8 years ago, but president clinton was horrible and ruined this country with his moral failures.

the undecided voters we spoke with vehemently agreed that bush was horrible for this country and things needed to change. some were unemployed, some were employed but didn't have health insurance, and all were very angry at the bailout. they didn't see how either candidate could fulfill any of their promises considering the government would fall deeper into debt. several of those we spoke with had voted for hillary in the primaries. the logic went something like this: 1) yes, i voted for hillary. 2) yes, i see that obama and hillary's policies are virtually identical. 3) yes, i like joe biden. 4) i just don't know if i can vote for obama.

i didn't follow the logic between 3 and 4, but the fact that mccain is a "maverick," whatever the hell that means at this point, and that they couldn't trust a black man and possible secret muslim meant they were left in a quandry. most everyone expressed deep cynicism at all of the presidents they had seen over the years who had promised them everything and delivered virtually nothing of direct impact. yet everyone adamantly told us that they vote in every election and they were certainly going to vote in this one.

one 19-year-old guy who lived with his parents (according to our spy sheet) answered the door holding his very young daughter. we asked him what he thought about the election and he said, "well, both candidates have their faults. i don't like that mccain doesn't want to give universal healthcare because, y'know, my daughter doesn't have any health insurance right now. but i don't want obama to take away people's guns."

as if the two were of equal merit! what do i know. i'm just a quasi-socialist and possibly elitist canadian. we told him that senator obama wants smarter regulations on guns so they won't be so readily available to everyone, but he had no interest in banning them. that seemed to placate him a little, but we left without any definitive conclusions.

thankfully, we asked one obama supporter (finally!) what contributed to his decision and he said "well, i don't think this country can go on with two wars in afghanistan and iraq. and you know, john mccain is quite old and has health problems and this palin just isn't smart enough." his answer was much more nuanced than that, but i just appreciated that a middle-aged person openly admitted his misgivings about mccain's age and at least one person was suspicious about palin's qualifications.

las latinas and i wanted to hug him.

the day ended on a high note. bruce springsteen gave a free concert in support of obama and voter registration. thanks to my superior tickets, i was probably closer to him than i ever will be. he played an acoustic set of about 8 or 9 songs, including "thunder road," "the ghost of tom joad," and of course, "the rising." he gave a heartfelt speech in the middle of the set about how we tried this four years ago and failed, but we were still going to try again because the country was on a dangerous course. there is something very unironic about my appreciation for bruce. he manages to exude authenticity with his aviator shades, flannel shirt and torn jeans despite his fame and wealth.

ed rendell and bob casey spoke before the concert and rendell issued an ominous but probably accurate warning that this campaign was going to get extremely ugly. sure enough, palin is accusing obama outright of cavorting with terrorists, albeit domestic ones.

so what now? i am pretty worried. the "othering" of obama is easy to do because his background is so exotic. i gave my dad a translated copy of "dreams of my father" and he said to me, "you know, i read the whole thing and i appreciated what he was saying, but i think he should have talked about his mother more. this is not going to help people relate to him much."

las latinas and i repeatedly emphasized to everyone that the democrats have always supported the middle class and these swing voters must not forget history. i just hope that this small handful of people who are going to decide all of our fates make the right choice.

PSA

if you are tv-less (or waiting for the price of tvs to drop) like me, you can catch the entire convention online. live! don't say howard dean hasn't done anything for you.

y'know, i intended the above video to be funny bc i just remember laughing my head off when i watched it back in 2000. now it makes my head hurt. or makes my head cry? oh gore-bot.

oh wait, this one is funny. whew.

sadness

well, this is depressing.

tim russert was more than the affable yet incisive host of meet the press. i was in such shock over this news that my officemate thought a friend of mine had died. i admired him for a host of reasons, like how he managed to draw great pride and comfort from his working-class roots, instead of abandoning them altogether or letting them fester into ruinous resentment and paranoia. he bridged the two worlds and made it look so easy. he also was on that coveted and elusive list of people with JDs who are not lawyers.

anyway...this is too sad. RIP, tim russert.

your party will self-destruct in 5...4...

during this interminable primary season(...s?) the democrats continue to wring their hands over which candidate will be able to withstand the republican attack machine. oh, i am not underestimating the republicans' formidable power and organization. nonetheless, there was so much hope among the democrats: the strength of the main dem candidates (yes c4ts, including edwards), the questionable viability of all of the republican frontrunners, not to mention the sad state of the bush presidency. how can the democrats possibly do wrong? but you know, it turns out that all the republicans had to do was to sit back and watch bc, surprise, the dems can't get themselves together to save their lives.

if i'm getting this straight, michigan and florida first decided to move their primaries to january in violation of party rules. the DNC stripped michigan and florida of their delegates as a result. the candidates also promised that they wouldn't campaign in either state. clinton won in both states, with obama not even appearing on the michigan primary ballot (unbeknownst to me. i kind of magically tuned all of this noise out before).

all through the primaries the clinton campaign grumbled about how they will eventually seat those hard-fought - not really - delegates. i kind of ignored this and this asinine statement from clinton herself. once a lawyer, always a lawyer. i've noticed this instinct to parse everything to death in myself, even at this very early stage in my career.

anyway, now the obama and clinton campaigns are at war over what to do about said michigan and florida delegates. the head of the DNC is flip-flopping himself. seat the michigan/florida delegates in accordance with their january vote? hold new primaries? spend even MORE money?

i kind of want everyone involved in this fiasco to all get on a really big bus, then drive themselves off a cliff. this is maddening.

Dear Heidi, Democracy Is a Failed Enterprise

In 1995, when I was 17, I procured some funds from my school to go to South Africa (then a newly minted democracy). Ostensibly, I was to study the roles of Asian and Muslim subgroups in the anti-Apartheid movement, but really, the expectations were pretty low: if I came back and showed some nice pictures in a slide show presentation at assembly I'd have satisfied my charge--which was fine by me, because, given my tender years and unshakable nature, I wasn't really one to labor over anything anyway.

Truthfully, I was going only because I wanted to be there in that improbable country in that astonishing moment--not because I wanted to write up a report for school. Mandela had been transformed from prisoner to statesman, and, I don't know--I guess I just wanted to live in the milieu, amidst all that gathering hope. For me, South Africa was rife with vague possibility, and I became fixated with it. In my grant proposal I think I said something to the effect of never having lived through the 1960's, I couldn't really know what it was for a democracy to be born, and so I could but only take it for granted.

More than twelve years later, Mandela's handpicked successor has shown the world what it is to take democracy for granted: he has bungled his way through a deepening race and class divide and has denied prevailing medical science as HIV ravages sub-Saharan Africa. He's become so unpopular that he was unseated by a notoriously corrupt bigamist whose achievements include resisting a rape conviction (and doing so only after asserting that a woman wearing a skirt invites sex, and that once sex has been purloined from such a woman, one need only shower in order to stave off HIV). This is modern democratic South Africa. This is the country that Mandela's efforts gave birth to, and that my youthful, exuberant feelings of hope were pinned to.

But I shouldn't pick on South Africa. Our own country is in a state of severe indifference about that which we have wrought in the decaying world: We de-Baathified Iraq and disbanded its army and squeezed the Iraqi people dry to the bone, and then reelected the President who perpetrated these acts and said of them, "Freedom is on the march"; we say now that he's led us into disgrace, but we do nothing to punish his unrepentant enablers; we call for men and women of ideas to lead us, yet we're spasmodic with joy when ideas are traded for watchwords and hollow platitudes; in fact we refuse wholesale to process ideas, and we punish those who dare run for office solely on the basis of them.

As the embers of the World Trade Center scatttered about New York City, we were driven to bloodlust, and Susan Sontag said, poignantly and most bravely, that we are not a mature democracy. She was excoriated for this, but the fact remains we don't care about our democratic institutions, and so we've stood watch as they've eroded.

And this brings me to the Presidential race. Although New Hampshire and Nevada have not gone his way (well, at least not the popular vote in Nevada), now comes Barack Obama with promises to end all this malarkey. South Carolina, a bellweather state in the primary season, aims to vault him to the nomination, if polls are to be trusted. (I'm being insincere--we know polls are not to be trusted, and we know his opponent is an intensely disciplined campaigner who will parry his every move.) And If my generation and its Ritalin-addled, Playstation- atrophied collective mind is to be trusted--and of course, we know it too is not to be--he's a symbol of hope, an agent of change, and on these wings he should glide into the White House, but I confess: he leaves me wanting and sad.

Firstly, it should be pointed out, that I don't care at all about character. Serious people are able to see that a man who has had an affair, or one who moronically provided receipts for pricey salon care, or one who has snorted cocaine as a teenager can govern this broken country. Serious people do not stand around with "Oh, no, he di'n't" placed firmly on the tips of their tongues should a hoarse candidate emote oddly into a microphone. And serious people don't base their vote on what they think their unserious colleagues think about a candidate's chances--that is, on the tyranny of electability. I don't object to Barack Obama because of nebulous ideas about his character; nor, conversely, do I care if nebulous ideas about his character make him appear like a man of consequence. In this regard, however, he does not sway me and I'm bewildered by those who are inspired by his speechifying. I care only about the substance of what he has to say, and to date he has said little that gives me hope for the future of our country.

He has declared open disdain for the sovereignty of Pakistan, a country that has been torn asunder by refugees and pro-Taliban forces, people who were driven out of Afghanistan in the first place by Bush's War on Terror, saying, "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will." The extent of the naivete of this statement is staggering: it is true that Musharraf has over-reached in myriad ways the last year or so, and hangs on by a thread, but there are no viable political parties left to contest elections, and the Pakistani electorate is seething in frustration--yet one of the Democratic front-runners thinks that it's in America's interest to further galvanize dispossessed Pakistanis by making reckless claims about how he'd proceed in a post-Bush world. Some have called this an extension of the Bush doctrine, but at least Bush understands now how dumb it is to assert your will on to countries that can bite you in the ass.

Now, I'm not naive. I understand that if Osama Bin Laden popped up on the grid in a hut outside of Peshawar, whoever's President's going to take him out, but announcing to the world--unprovoked--as Obama did, that he has no interest in preserving our tenuous ties to the Pakistani government shows that he misunderstands basic geopolitics--and he misunderstands what American interests are. Musharraf's an asshole, but if you alienate him, where exactly does he go to make alliances? Obama is willing to score the easy political points by running to the hawkish center, but as he promises to cowboy his way around dangerous and complex regions of the world, I'm left wondering--this, this, motherfucker, is the politics of hope?

I understand that this issue is simply irrelevant to the masses of Americans who want to resist Clinton-Bush imperial succession and that I'm uniquely interested in it; I understand also that many of us want to credit Obama for his early resistance to the War on Iraq, and we want to celebrate his progressive bona fides because he was a community organizer and led get-out-the-vote efforts, but shouldn't the Presidency require more? What does it mean to oppose the War from the beginning--like, by the way, I did and virtually everyone I know--and then to vote unwaveringly in financial support of it once you've arrived in the Senate (in a fashion identical almost to Hillary Clinton)? What does it mean to
stand for health-care reform but eschew a universal mandate , thereby excluding millions of Americans? What does it mean when your great healthcare triumph in Illinois was brokered through insurance companies? What does it mean that you've established yourself as a moderate in the Senate, voting to confirm three of Bush's judicial nominees? And what does it mean when you've declared Ronald Reagan as your political role model?

There can be wide-ranging debate about these questions, but I think if, like me, you see the Presidency as something more than just a repository for rhetorical hope, then you have trouble swallowing the notion that Barack Obama will lead a progressive renaissance in the Executive. I don't want the next President compromising out of the gates with lobbyists, and I don't want him or her continuing to promote the failed notion that carpet bombing is the best way to deal with beleaguered and humiliated Muslims. (Hint: the best way is to take a page out of Hezbollah's book and build hospitals.) And I don't want the next President selling me bipartisanship and calling it hope. I want the next President to be pissed off and brimming with hell-fury about the ways in which common Americans have been cheated, poisoned, and lied to by our government. And most important, with the fracturing of the Republican coalition, I want the next President to eviscerate the other side, to expose it as the haven for rank, moneyed hypocrites that it is. I want the next President to answer to no God but the people. Maybe like the Americans Susan Sontag saw in the wake of September 11th, I'm immature--I've been called it before--but that's what democracy looks like to me. And since I know it's not what's in store for us (or for South Africans or for Pakistanis), I can't help but think democracy is a failed enterprise.