schwelo's muse

Back in August 1993 a little movie called "The Panama Deception" was released by a group called the Empowerment Project. It detailed the story behind the US's invasion of Panama in December of 1989. If you recall, George Bush Sr. was the President at the time, and had a previously established relationship with General Manuel Noriega during his tenure as the head of the CIA prior to being elected as President. After training him in the notorious School of the Americas, and using him to shape the policies favorable to the US in his own country, he decided that he no longer wanted to cooperate with the US "interests", in what had become a covert operation to smuggle drugs out of his country in order smuggle weapons back in on their way to support the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

What followed was an unauthorized military strike that leveled full blocks of Panama City and killed at least 3000, six times more people than the US government would officially admit to at the time. There were also significant questions about the use of "experimental" weaponry during this attack, including rumors that these weapons were being tested for use in a yet to be determined war in the Middle East. Interestingly enough, Kuwait wouldn't be annexed by Iraq, providing justification for the invasion, until the following summer.

Following the invasion of Panama, new elections were held, with the victorious candidate receiving massive political contributions from US corporations, a practice that is unequivacolably illegal. One of his first acts as President was to dismantle Panama's standing army, which by default returned control of the Panama Canal to the US as stipulated by the 1977 treaty signed by President Jimmy Cater and Noriega's predecessor Gen. Omar Torrijos.

I think Riverbend is right to be suspicious of Chalabi. It is like the shadows in Plato's cave, and it seems that the puppet has suddenly changed hands. So I would be suspicious too. As they say around here, "the apple does not fall far from the tree."

When I first heard about what had happened at Abu Ghraib, my heart sank like a stone. My sense of sadness about the occupation peaked & I hit a mental wall. What have we done, I thought, we can't come back from this. I felt very sympathetic toward the prisoners. Whether they are terrorists, insurgents, or innocent, nothing justifies this kind of sadism. As human beings, we are all effected by this. The victims and the perpetrators receive the brunt of the damage, but as a human collective trying to co-exist, we are all degraded. That saddens me. It saddens me that the fallout from Abu Ghraib is going to result in more instability, insurgent attacks, civilian casualties, and less trust in the military & contracted personal there who are genuinely trying to help.

The hypocrisy of our military and government attempting to liberate the Iraqis while using these torture and humiliation techniques in our prisons is inexcusable to me. Iraqi children who are dead or missing limbs because of bullets or bombs fired by our troops or the insurgents is inexcusable. There is one law of war that no one ever talks about, & that is that when you cross the line & start killing women & children, the ante goes WAY up & it is MUCH more difficult to create peace. Mano a Mano is one thing. The slaughter of innocents is another.

Here, there are many different takes on what happened. There are those who think it was acceptable, because these individuals were terrorists, and the American public is naive to think that this kind of thing doesn't go on all the time, or that we could enjoy the freedom we have without it. Then, there are Iraqi ex-patriots who think that these men deserved it for their (presumed) involvement in the torture & murder that went on under Saddam's regime. There are those who think it was wrong, but don't feel sorry for the men because of the way that women are treated in Arab society. I've heard some different points of view, some surprising & disturbing, but I think the majority of the American people were horrified, and think that everyone involved all the way up the military hierarchy should be punished. Some Rumsfeld should resign, but most who believe that probably thought he should resign before the outrage out Abu Ghraib was discovered.

This whole war & liberation concept is just so pathetic & like a page out of a Philip K. Dick novel or something. America is not free, we are not preserving America's freedom, we are not liberating Iraq, we are not patriots. We are godless, murderers, rapists, torturers & idiot children of patriots who do what they are told even when it is morally reprehensible. The rest of us are helpless witnesses. We are ashamed, we are afraid, we are alienated. We have no sense of identity as a nation. We have no stake in our future, and there is not cohesive way to act to stop this administration in its tracks because as a society our dialogue on the subject is completely polarized & ineffectual.

There are those who truly believe, to the bottom of their hearts, that Saddam was like Hitler, enslaving & terrorizing his people. & that it was our duty, as a free nation, to liberate the Iraqi people. Their blood will flow in the streets & everyone who knew their brethen, will ever know their names. They will be honored for their sacrifice, without ever realizing that they were pawns. All of them, their families, the good souls who prayed for them on Sundays, who laid their hands on the Bible (or the Koran) & asked God to bring their children home safely. The little lambs...led like children out before the hungry mouths of winter. They really think they're doing good. But the oil is flowing & not into the future of the Iraqi nation.

The irony is that I'm the freak here in my country. My beliefs are practically treacherous. I'm the radical in my family & even among my "liberal" friends, there are attitudes so oblivious that you'd think we'd time traveled back to the times before Galileo & the USA was the center of the universe.

How anti-war can we really be in a town that is totally dependent on government contracts to build missiles, combat airplanes & other military equipment? It doesn't matter what we think we believe in, our local economies, our families, the families of our neighbors, are dependent on that income, on that oil & on that war. It would take a collective effort & vision that I just don't believe Americans are capable of. Our economy and the businesses that drive it are beyond our control as individuals, no matter how conscientious our political views are. No amount of boycotting or letter writing is going to change that, especially when the people who believe in these progressive values are marginalized.

But having said all of this, I struggle at times with the cultural gap I encounter when reading some Iraqi blogs. I don't want to have the argument about which is worse, the beheading of Nicholas Berg or the torture at Abu Ghraib. I abhor it all, but I also come from a culture where beheading someone, filming it, & putting it on the internet can only be conceived of in terms of sociopathic & psychopathic behavior. Whereas sexual humiliation is considered by some to be a socially acceptable passtime. I personally would have been equally horrified whether Berg had been an Iraqi, an Israeli, or an American. I'm down with Riverbend, and while I don't agree with the more ambivalent responses that I've come across, I can understand why Iraqis are feeling massively betrayed by the US government about now.

Then I have to turn around & listen to G.W. making more speechifications about our misunderestimations in Iraq & I just don't want to hear anymore. After the most recent civilian massacre of the musician's family in Western Iraq, I'm just toast. I can't absorb the degree of blood that the American military is spilling without any remorse or change of policy.

The only good that could have come out of Vietnam was the cultural promise that this kind of genocide would not happen again, but when you have the "idiot son of an asshole" in power, you'd be amazed at the extent to which the cloak & dagger types in this country are willing to exploit his naive fundamentalism.

So here I am out in no-man's land, where nothing makes sense & I'm sick of having no control over the things that are fueling the hatred of many against us. G.W. has poured gasoline on this fire & it's going to keep burning for a long, long time.

peace out.

WAITING FOR THE INTERURBAN (click)

There's a statue here in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood of a group of people waiting for the bus. This statue has a special history of being dressed up for different holidays or occasions. This is sometimes done in secret and in this way, the people seem to have a life of their own that is reflected back to us through this form of guerrilla art. Well yesterday, the people "waiting for the interurban" were discovered wearing black hoods, including the baby held in the arms of a woman, & even the dog. To me this symbolizes the shame most of us feel about what happened at Abu Ghraib, and it's a good thing to get people talking about the whole issue. I hope you find this interesting as I did. This is what the statue looks like normally, and this is a picture with the hoods. But you have to check out this view, taken by photographer Mike Urban. His photographs elevate the dimension of the subjects he is photographing, usually it's the other way around. But even more than that, he is not afraid to take any picture and stand behind his work.

peace out.

Where is the love, I ask, where is the courage, the hope?
dragging our heels in the dirt over his grave
so all will know we are righteous
how can we pray when the layers of shadows
point their fingers at the dead
how can we laugh
when we are turned
brother against brother
how can we free those we hold captive
how can we be free
when we clench these guns and iron bars so tightly
they cannot protect us
they cannot save us
they cannot free us

--in memory of nicholas berg, a prayer for peace

Woke up to this today.

It's representational people. Wait how does that saying go? No adulation without...no, that's not it...

I noticed that a few mendiken souls have found this page because of a post about Pablo Neruda that I wrote awhile back (September 11, 2003). This post is for the next one that comes along, it's an excerpt from Neruda's Memoirs that describes the state of his apartment when he returned to Spain following the civil war. Throughout the Memoirs he slips from the narrative into these poetic descriptions of particular events or elements that he wanted to emphasize. This one depicts the emotional inspiration for the poem "A Few Things Explained".

THE MASKS & THE WAR

...My house was caught between two fronts...On one side, Moors & Italians advanced...On the other, Madrid's defenders advanced, fell back, or were halted...The artillery had crashed through the walls...The windows were smashed to smithereens...On the floor, among my books, I found shrapnel...But my masks were gone...Masks collected in Siam, Bali, Sumatra, the Malay Archipelago, Bandung...Gilded, ashen, tomato-red, with silver eyebrows, blue, demonic eyebrows, lost in thought, my masks had been my sole keepsakes from the Orient I had gone to alone that first time, which had received me with its odor of tea, dung, opium, sweat, the intensest jasmine, frangipani, fruit rotting in the streets...Those masks, a reminder of the purest dances, of the dancing before the temple...Wooden drops colored by myth, the residue of a mythology of flowers that sketched dreams in the air, customs, demons, mysteries alien to my American nature...And then...Perhaps the militiamen had leaned out the windows of my house between shots with the masks on to strike terror into the Moors...Many masks had been left there smashed, spattered with blood...Others had rolled down from my fifth-floor apartments, wrenched off by a bullet...Franco's advance lines had taken up their positions in front of them...The horde of illiterate mercenaries had screeched past before them...Thirty masks of Asian gods rising from my house in their last dance, the dance of death...A moment of respite...The positions had reversed...I sat looking at the debris, the bloodstains on the mat...And through the new windows, the gaping holes left by the gunfire...I stared far off, beyond the campus, toward flatlands, toward ancient castles...Spain looked empty to me...It looked as if my last guests had gone off forever...With masks or without, in the middle of the shooting and the war chants, the mad rejoicing, the incredible defense, death or life, all that was over for me...It was the last silence after the feasting...After the last feasting...With the masks that had gone, with the masks that had fallen, with those soldiers I had not invited in, Spain had gone for me...

Earlier in the Memoirs Neruda talks about the creative power of language being something that can change the world. As an idealist, he felt that it was important that people continued to have faith in the potential of peaceful and humanitarian solutions to the international problems of poverty & war. The bloodshed in Madrid, particularly as it invaded his home & the sanctity of his artifacts, dealt a deep blow to Neruda's ideology of idealism and humanitarianism. It was a turning point only further accented by the grief of the personal losses he suffered.

What the hey'all is going on when expressing a desire for peace is considered hateful speech?

I must be in Wonderland because I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that line of thinking.