Blood, Baath and Beyond

Blood, Baath and Beyond

This entry takes its title from a Nov. 29, 2003 Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times, in which he announced the winners of his Name That War contest, from the 4,000 of so people who sent in suggestions.
There were duplicates: Bubba’s War, Burning Bush, Bush League War, Bush’s Folly, Iraqgate, Iraqnam, Iraqmire, Operation Quicksand, Shrub’s War, and The Crawford Conflict apparently arrived by the hundreds. Bushkrieg and Operation Bushwhack Iraq were along the same lines.
Then the true jokesters, one of America’s enduring strengths, got to work. Kristof said he didn’t see why anyone would suggest that Operation Iraqi Liberation should replace the official Operation Iraqi Freedom, until he realized the three initial letters were O.I.L. Another wit suggested Mother of Oil Wars.
There were names that could have titled bestsellers: Bush’s Botch, The Iraq Preemption, The Big Uneasy, The Bush Incursion. One was Biblically literate: Visit Scenic Sodom and Gomorrah. Popular culture, that favorite topic of angry ayatollahs, irate imams and moralistic mullahs, suggested others: Apocalypse Right Now, Mission Implausible: A Job Well Spun, Operation Kick the Dog, Operation Oops, We Did It Again, The Empire Strikes Out, and Trek 2: Wrath of Neo-Khan. Someone familiar with The War of Jenkins’ Ear chimed in with The War of Bush’s Flight Suit, and another offered The War That Cried Wolfowitz.
King George’s New Colony, put in a history buff. Others tapped English history for The Charge of the Right Brigade and The War of the Roves. Vermont’s own Donn Blodgett put together a sophisticated French pun: Coup d’Etats Unis, that wrongheaded country’s name for us being Les Etats Unis (the states united).
Wrapping up the contest, awarded Honorable Mentions to A’bombin’nation, Desert Storm und Drang, Iraq: A Hard Place, Operation Unscramble Eggs, The ‘Raq, Tigris By the Tail, and War of Mass Deception.
The winners, who got 250 dinar notes with Saddam Hussein’s picture on them from Kristof’s last trip to Crisis and Cruel Fates (there’s my own entry, belatedly) were, in the order that he listed them,
--Dubya Dubya III
--Rolling Blunder
--Desert Slog
--Mess in Potamia (Vermonter Will Hutchinson)
and
--Blood, Baath and Beyond.

That was nearly four years ago. As someone who was draft age during the Vietnam War, here are four ways in which this conflict and that one resemble each other:
--We patrol, they ambush, and our soldiers come back crazed.
--They are willing to give their lives, but our allies aren’t (unless they’re fighting each other).
--It drags on and on and on, against all reason, burning up our resources and threatening to leave a legacy of problems as difficult to solve. (Did you know that to finance Vietnam we had to raise interest rates to attract foreign capital, thus increasing the burden of Third World debt payments, thus inspiring the Oil Producing and Exporting Cartel, whose price hikes devastated us in the 1970’s?)
--What would fill the streets with protesters, and possibly bring this wretched affair to an end, is an incursion into another country like Nixon’s crossing of the border into Cambodia (that and the Kent State killings inspired the “Kentbodia” mass demonstrations and other actions). The national consensus would be “Stop him. Stop him before he does something even worse.”
This administration has already brought us a Blood Baath (Saddam’s party was the Baathists); now it’s time to make sure they don’t go Beyond.

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Looks Like Trouble

LOOKS LIKE TROUBLE

Ed Barna

One of my journalistic duties, for the past 15 years or so, has been going to the U. S. Bankruptcy Court in Rutland to scan the information on filings and find any related to businesses. (Vermont Business Magazine publishes these monthly because it can be of importance to ongoing businesses if they are not going to be paid by debtor or they are no longer going to be able to count on that business for services or supplies.)
I’m glad of the chance to see downtown Rutland, usually, but going over the case reports never fails to hurt. Jimmie’s auto shop, Tammy’s day care—the courage to take risks, the hard work, now declared to the world to have not been enough. Bigger companies adding to the unemployment rolls. And the number of the filings that come from northern Vermont, from “the real Vermont.” One time I was combing through the cases when a lawyer came in and began working on something from his satchel. I said to him, “Can’t you fine legal minds devise a class action bankruptcy suit and put the whole Northeast Kingdom through at one time? It would save everyone a lot of trouble, and probably half the debts would cancel out.”
The only response was a sardonic smile. Working in bankruptcy court is like working in a hospital: no matter how many times you are reassured that certain conditions aren’t contagious, you can’t help but wonder. People I knew in high school have gone bankrupt, why not me, too? One current saying is that anyone in the middle class is only one serious illness away from bankruptcy (divorces and layoffs are two other main factors, and credit card debt makes almost all of the situations worse). Ring true for you?
Extracting the business bankruptcies took longer than usual this month. To do it, I need to give each case at least a cursory review, and from July 16 through August 15 there were 84 of them. I tried multiplying that by 12, to get the yearly total if things continued at that rate for another 11 months, and got the figure 1,008. Businesses? More filings last month than I’ve seen since the new bankruptcy law took effect.
That law was signed by President Bush in April of 2005 and went into effect in October of 2005. In between, the Rutland court saw the largest surge in filings ever, as people tried desperately to come under the provisions of the old law. Hailed by its promoters as “The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005,” and characterized by associations of judges, lawyers, elders and advocates for those of lower income as “punitive,” “mean-spirited,” and “written by the credit card industry,” the new provisions succeeded in choking off what had been a rising tide of bankruptcies. After October 17, it was like right after 9-11, for those of us familiar with the court—it felt like the emptiness of the sky when all commercial flights stopped.
To have filings coming in now at the 1,000-a-year level, despite the higher fees (debtor pays) and required credit counseling (debtor pays) and inflexible paperwork requirements (debtor pays more) and reduced exemptions (credit card companies get paid), was shocking. It tells me that America’s radical division of income between the wealthy and the woeful, now as severe as the disparities we used to criticize in Latin America, has become like those corroding bridge supports in Minnesota.
The idea behind the BAP+CPA was to push more filers out of Chapter 7, where most debt was being liquidated, and into Chapter 13, which emphasizes a five-year repayment plan for anyone capable of paying a portion of their debts. I have never heard a good explanation of what happens if someone can’t make their repayment plan payments. They can’t declare bankruptcy again, at least for seven years. We already have a greater proportion of our population behind bars than any other industrialized country. My guess is that a lot more people will give up trying to make something of their lives and drift, escaping when they can into alcoholic or drug-induced stupors, now that our bankruptcy system has deemphasized the old tradition of giving people “a fresh start.”
I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I’m afraid we’re about to find out.

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TORTUOUS EXPLANATIONS

TORTUOUS EXPLANATIONS

We have been told by our leaders that putting someone in a tiny, lightless cell for 40 days and nights is not torture. I know better, because I have seen what two weeks of such sensory deprivation will do to a healthy young Vermonter.
I hope he is well, and if by any remote chance he recognizes himself in what follows, I hope he will get in touch. Especially I hope this if he has led a troubled life, because he will always be one of my heroes.
The scene is Vermont’s annual State Science Fair, in the year 1964. I have made my presentation to the judges, and now I have time to walk around and see what others have done.
My father urges me to pay attention to one disheveled presenter who stands at a table with no posters, no equipment, no display except an opened notebook. Later I will realize that for years Mr. Barna had been teaching his Otter Valley English classes Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” set in a Communist prison during the Cold War, and probably that was behind the urgency with which he made his recommendation.
The “experiment” that the young man conducted was in the field of psychology, and the subject of the experimenter was himself—certainly not the traditional scientific method of verifiable objectivity, but very much in the spirit of many pioneering scientists. He had decided to spend two weeks in the space under his house’s stairwell, without any source of light, to see what effect the experience would have on his thoughts.
He came close to spending the next few weeks in a mental hospital. Hallucinations, often very disagreeable, were only part of the torment he forced himself to go through. When I spoke with him, he still seemed shaky.
But he came out of it bearing knowledge that our present-day leaders could learn from: a human being is not separable from the environment the senses re-create, and in particular is not separable from other people. When the science fair prizes were announced, I won a first in chemistry, and he got nothing. My father and I were both outraged. This and other frustrations with trying to do science at the high school level diverted me from an intended career as a researcher, ultimately into poetry. Literature, you can do anywhere, with minimal equipment—like the political prisoner who wrote her works on bars of soap, memorized them, then washed away another day.
This was the period of my life when I was enamored of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of radical individualism, expressed in such novels as “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” I can’t say that I made the connection then, but now I will say it: this young man’s investigation, and many others showing that the ecological principle of interdependence applies just as much to people as to other organisms, have made it clear to me that Rand’s views are toxic gibberish. “When I was younger, young in oh so many ways/ I never needed anybody’s help in any way./ But I am older now and not so self-assured./ Now I find I’ve changed my mind, I’ve opened up the door.”
To think that 40 days of such deprivation do not constitute torture reeks of the kind of extreme right-wing individualism that sees the person as the soul and as the personality, the one within the other inside the head, both changeless. It’s the same anti-psychological, anti-sociological view that sees education as clearly defined training, not a sometimes messy growth process, and thus sees the penalties of the No Child Left Behind Act as a way of making Schools (which exist independently of the people who constitute them) meet standards, so that students will be exposed to the right lessons and acquire the necessary skills, which will result in their giving the right answers on tests rather than flubbing the questions to get even with the system. It’s the same essentially punitive view that opposes any contact with countries that take stances vastly different than ours, such as Cuba and North Korea, then points to their deprived conditions as proof that their way of life is inferior to free (except for them) market capitalism. Always there is this nugget of indestructibility that can be pushed around, penalized, forced and deprived, then have the necessary magnitude and leverage to change—always in the way that the punisher wants, never by making a deeper commitment to a contrary view or by devising subterfuges and sabotages or by waiting for the right moment to exact a fearsome revenge, or by inspiring family or friends or allies or the next generation to do so.
In the case of extracting information from prisoners at Guantanamera—did I misspell that?—the soul-persona view assumes that after 40 days in the dark, the mind that is left will 1. be capable of remembering information accurately, 2. be willing to deliver it completely; and perhaps most importantly 3. be capable of putting one word in front of another. Playing Nixon’s tapes educated the nation as nothing else could have; how about playing us some of the interrogations?
If there is any question, let’s make the experiment. Let some stalwart subordinate in the current Administration come forward and volunteer, not for going in harm’s way in Iraq or Afghanistan, but for a month in some former basement coal bin. Let them report on their experience with no initial debriefing or counseling or advising or threatening, on national television.
Guantanamo, that’s it. Guantanamera was a song the Cubans adopted almost as a national anthem—“With the poor people of the earth/ 
I want to cast my lot” is one translation of one of the most popular versions—as well as a Sandpipers hit parade success in 1966 and a staple of folksingers thereafter. And the Sixties, as the right wing has been assuring us for the last over 30 years, never really happened.
--30—

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THE CHINESE NEED CHECKERS

THE CHINESE NEED CHECKERS

Lee Houston was right: the mess in China is our mess, too.

Brandonites may remember Lee as the manager brought in to begin the turnaround of the Vermont Tubbs Furniture plant and keep it competitive with lowball furniture from abroad, a task his successors have accomplished to an extraordinary degree. At a time when so many manufacturers have rolled over and died, Tubbs supplies big name stores with, rarity of rarities, something Made in America.

Lee got that job because he had a long record of working with companies in trouble, one that included several years helping companies in China—which gave him a broad view of the situation. He had lived with air pollution so bad you couldn’t see from one side of the city to another, had witnessed workers living in prison-like barracks under robotic conditions, and knew firsthand about dealing with corrupt officials.

Three years ago, he emailed me and told me that if I wanted a good book project, or a team of journalists wanted to do a news series, there was a big story to be told about the hazardous nature of many products the Chinese were sending our way. “It would take a great deal of work, but if a group of reporters were to do a story, a book, on all of the potential problems Chinese products may cause, the nation would be well served,” were his exact words.
I didn’t have the contacts and credibility in the publishing world to change my whole way of life and dive into these murky waters, but boy, was he ever spot on. Any such book would be old news now, because a far-flung “team” of reporters have made headlines with news about poisonous dogfood, contaminated toothpaste, sicko seafood, and lately toxic toys. Lee had been worried about the toys. “Our
daughter works in a pediatrician's office and they have noticed an upswing in lead poisoning symptoms and tested blood levels and are seeing high levels of lead in kids that they KNOW do not live in houses that have lead,” he wrote.

Lee had his own example of the true cost of cheap goods: mirrors. When he wrote about our toxic orientations, he was president of two companies in the South, one making particle board and one making mirrors. The particle board was safe from overseas competition, he said, because it would cost too much to ship such a heavy but relatively low-cost commodity. But at the mirror factory, the Chinese were “after us,” he said.

“It is the same old story,” he wrote. “We Americans work at a decent wage and produce products that meet or exceed all governmental standards. The Chinese are sending in mirrors made with near slave labor using aluminum coating backed-up with paint whose lead content is 2.4 to 2.6 times our country's maximum limit.

“The problem is that our laws only affect the guy that ultimately takes the broken mirror to the dump years in the future. So, they can flood our market with the cheap stuff, and we'll pay the environmental bill years from now.

“We use silver and low lead content paint. In fact, we are 60% below EPA standards. Washington doesn't give a damn – we do not want to upset the Chinese.”

And the Chinese, though our largest source of imports, do not have a monopoly on environmental degradation. “I have been in 21 countries, mostly on business.” Lee said. “Without thinking very hard, I have seen pollution in both China, Russia, Taiwan and Malaysia that would turn your stomach.”

Here’s one I’m going to look into: apple juice. Have you tried to buy juice lately? Look at the label and you will probably find apple juice listed high up, even if it’s supposedly cranberry juice or peach juice, for instance. Juicy Juice used to be a trusted source—100 percent juice, not water as the first ingredient or lots of high-fructose corn syrup (which I’ll talk about in a later posting). Now it’s been taken over by Nestle. They still don’t add corn syrup or sugar or artificial flavors or preservatives, but here’s the list of ingredients for “All Natural 100 percent Grape: “apple juice, grape juice and pear juice (water, juice concentrates), natural flavors, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), citric acid.”
It’s apple juice, flavored with grape juice, folks. Why? Presumably because apple juice is a lot cheaper. And is that because it’s coming from China, where the trees are sprayed with who knows what that may have been banned in this country decades ago?
There’s a number on the Juicy Juice can for “Questions?” which I’m going to call: 800-510-6763, Monday-Friday 8 a.m.-8 p.m. I would be DELIGHTED to learn that only domestic apple juice goes into those cans, and will report that here—or will report that the person didn’t know and couldn’t provide me with a way to find out. By all means call, too, if you want, and please let me know how it turns out. As it says on the Juicy Juice can, “IT’S GOOD TO KNOW.”

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HOUR OF THE WOLF

HOUR OF THE WOLF

The game lasted 89 moves. That’s long for chess, especially considering the opponent was that consummate international grandmaster Death.
Ingmar Bergman is dead. For those of us who grew up with him—went with eagerness to his new films when he was at the height of his powers—there is a bit of the feeling that comes when both one’s parents are dead. Now there is no one between. Now we are at the front. Now it is up to us, while we can.
Reading the obituaries, I kept thinking “BUT WHEN DID HE DIE?” Not just which date, but also, what time of day? That’s because one of the films I didn’t see mentioned, but which I did see when it came out in 1968, was “The Hour of the Wolf.”
“Vargtimmen,” it was titled in the original Swedish--“the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful,” the film itself explained as it began. (“It’s also the time when the most children are born,” said a woman whose judgment I trust on such matters, since she has had four of them.) A contemporary poet has called it “the hour when blues songs/ and beginner short stories again and again/ seem to begin.”
Thank you, International Movie Database (www.imdb.com, a site that all serious movielovers should know). It goes on to summarize the plot, as much as there can be said to be one: “An artist in crisis is haunted by nightmares from the past in Ingmar Bergman's only horror film, which takes place on a windy island.” The Associated Press obituary observed that he died on July 30, 2007 “on an island off the coast of Sweden.”
“The director said he had coped with the authoritarian environment of his childhood by living in a world of fantasy. When he first saw a movie, he was greatly moved,” the obituary said.
It concluded, “But he said the escape into another world went so far that it took him years to tell reality from fantasy, and Bergman repeatedly described his life as a constant fight against demons, also reflected in his work.”
There is no more iconic image from Bergman’s work than the Dance of Death at the end of the Seventh Seal—though the Knight’s chess game with Death includes memorable images as well. The Plague has taken almost all the film’s personae, their strivings to escape now seen clearly as momentary throes. Hand linked to hand, they are pulled along in the path of the Reaper, their silhouettes glimpsed as they cross the top of a hill.
But they are witnessed by the survivors: the Actor and his wife, who live among the lowest of the society’s lowest, mere itinerant performing fools--the wide-eyed and visionary ones. Bergman is not the only one to see those who have given themselves to a life’s work in the arts as moving through the turmoil around them in some sort of state of grace. Fellini, in “8½,” portrays another whose handlers and sycophants constantly mistake or misuse his essential childlike simplicity. Thomas Wolfe’s story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” describes what must have been his own wanderings through streets that anyone in their right mind would have shunned as perilous, the experience-hungry young writer protected only by the scarcely credible improbability of his being there at all.
The original Whole Earth Catalog’s closing words, as the Sixties turned to the Seventies, were “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Few did. Bergman tried.
For me, his best epitaph would be the line in the International Movie Database notes on “Hour of the Wolf.” Under “Plot Synopsis,” it says “This plot synopsis is empty.”
“Add a synopsis,” it prompts. But who could, and why should they try? We are now part of any synopsis, the story includes our own stories, and demons of our own making abound. Death has moved, and on a planet where there are in the truest sense no more islands, we have no margin left for error.

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